A. David Markham
“The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity, but we discover an old unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are.”
–––Thomas Merton
The tolls of the pandemic have been multiform, and no one has been untouched by the deep changes it has wrought on our ways of interacting with each other. My daughter lives in Ireland, and since the start of lock down we have had but a few short days together. Video phone technology has been a great blessing during this time, without which I surely would have missed out on even more of her transition into her teenage years.
Nevertheless, the influence of so-called communication technology remains deeply unsettling to me. Most of our actions and utterances are digitally monitored and recorded in some degree. Perhaps most troubling is the level to which this has been accepted and even embraced by our culture. The dangers of communication technology are more than merely about surveillance; to paraphrase Heidegger, we are entering a new age of technologized subjectivity – even a speciation – transitioning into a very different way of existing, enmeshed and altered at a deep level.
Fear, then, reigns in my mind, and has motivated some of my comments in meeting – comments about the introduction of blended meetings, and about the presence of the TV and the camera. But fear is not of the divine, and where it takes the lead division and resentment can often follow. Discussing the blended meeting with some Friends recently, one commented that he doesn’t see the screen, but the people. To those who have been a part of the Meeting for many years, and for whom it represents a centre of social and well as spiritual life, the separation from other Friends – from being able to speak with them or hear their ministry – must feel like a severing, a great loss.
I am a solitary bee, and thus somewhat less prone to such severings. Talk is tiring for me, and in my work as a lecturer – which has continued in an ever more technologized way throughout lockdown – I am forced to talk into machines most days. For the few years I’ve been attending meeting it has represented a blissful sanctuary from these demands. But for many others lockdown has meant solitude and loneliness. The screen has been a saviour, of sorts.
Where, then, does this leave us? How do we find a way through? The first step must be to name the fracture, and to come to know it, that we may navigate it with compassion. The fracture, it seems to me, lies in a difference of focus: some see the screen, others see the people. Perhaps we can each try to see it the other way.
Communication technology can facilitate certain kinds of communication that might otherwise not be possible, and in this it can truly be a blessing. But as Quakers we must not fall into the modern belief that such technologies are necessary in order to be connected. We were already connected. Once we believe that technology facilitates our togetherness, we forget the togetherness that spans time and place, that we uphold in our worshipful practice wherever and whenever we are.
Let us then try to tread carefully. I certainly will. I hope that my comments here and elsewhere have not caused suffering. I feel blessed by the community, in its differences and divergences. Thank you to the Elders who have worked so hard to meet everyone’s needs, and to all the Friends who contribute to the compassion that holds us together.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 510 • October 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW