The Dis-Embodiment of Community

One of the effects of individualism has been that introversion has just about become a lauded personality type. All too often, introverts get billed as sensitive, deep, and a positive sort of quirky, but extroverts are shallow and judgy, with all the nuance of a knuckle-dragging early hominid. It's unfair – and I write this as someone who is deeply introverted.

COVID has brought us to a place where introverts everywhere – myself included! – are joking things like, “I've been training for this my whole life.” And yet I also see the struggle of others around me, others whose God-given wiring is very different from mine. I see my extroverted friends who have very instantly felt isolated. I saw the crushing saddness that my Dad worked through when a long-awaited trip was kiboshed at the last minute. While it hasn't yet bothered me at all, I have noticed a distinct emptiness to my calendar. And I do think before this is over that I will wish that I could sit with a friend in a different set of four walls and drink coffee.

The rise of technology, social media, and individualism has also brought about another reality: the concept of participating in community by online means. More and more, education and business and church is done remotely, and whether for reasons of comfort or convenience or finances, this seems to be the wave of the future. It's a different world from the world of the Spanish Flu, when churches were simply closed for months on end and there was nothing to be done. Now we have the means by which to meet “together,” from our own homes.

It's a wonderful gift for a time such as this. And I hate it.

Every experience I've had with online community and every article I've read about its effectiveness says that it's just not the same. It can never be the same. Even where people login with full sound and webcams to a live meeting, it's just not the same. No one seems quite sure why. And I'm no psychologist or sociologist, but my theory is that it has to do with being human. The quotation from Scottish minister George MacDonald, “Never tell a child, 'you have a soul.' Teach him, 'you are a soul; you have a body.'” is often quoted as Christian truth, but is deeply questionable theology. For our bodies are an original part of God's perfect design. He could have created bodyless souls, to be spirit as he himself is spirit. But he didn't. He made humans of the humus. He made earthlings of the earth. He made Adam from the adamah. Our bodies matter. What happens to our bodies matters. The physical actions we take matter. Our physical location in time and space matters.

Something changes when we touch a person, make real eye contact with a person, sit beside a person, laugh at a joke made with a real voice, and feel the real warmth of another's body. I don't know what it is, but I know it matters, and I believe it has on it the “fingerprints” of God. Maybe COVID will remind us of that, will teach us that. Maybe as we use this good gift of online connection we will see its profound limitations to provide genuine embodied community. Maybe once we’ve drunk deeply at the well of online connection because we’ve had no choice, we will see its inability to provide for us the real refreshment of true, in-person fellowship.