Dis-Appointment in Second Life

It was in the irony of Second Life that the youth minister, armed with a Fuller degree, thought of despair.

He found himself (or his avatar, rather) climbing a black staircase in a dark tower. The walls pulsed with the dim shades of Andy Warhol’s offerings. Though he hardly recognized them, a dim memo from his 8th grade art class reminded him that these pictures must be backwards.

But it didn’t matter. He had just seen the MySpace pages of his membership, even his staff, even the kids who signed the celibacy pledge and had gone to Mexico with him the summer before. He could picture them, just like the pop shots of Warhol, waving raised arms on Saturday night, praying with the orphan kids, but in cyberspace, other pieties reigned supreme. “I’m not gay but I love my gay friends” shouted out a community collegian, who had thought of seminary once upon a time, “and I don’t give a f___ who doesn’t like it,” he continued in perfectly acceptable MySpace dreckish. The words brokeback mountain, bitch and whore dribbled off in a litany from the pages. A nice girl who usually won the Bible Quizzes, on a popup YouTube window, pranced and doused her t-shirt to Prince, and also speckled her bio with f this and that.

He had spoken of his concerns to the denominational brass. He was, he found out, too insensitive for one thing, perhaps even phobic. He was also, he was told, too moralistic, and needed to grow "in faith formation" a more biblical narrative "ethic." "Kids will be kids, boys will be boys, we all have our hangups from way back," on went the headquarterian elitist drone. "Don't take it so seriously. Don't make such a big deal."

He was almost to the top step now. He had been trained to exploit all technology for the Gospel of Christ. Even the Internet. Even virtual reality. That’s what Warfield and Moody did (with the new electric lights on Sunday night). That’s what Finney preached, and Schuller, Wagner, Schaller, Warren, Wimber, George, Sunday, McPherson, Robertson, Bakker all, in their seminars, urged. Use everything. Exploit everything for Christ. Show movies, play laser tag. Build a virtual chapel. Invite anonymous sex questions. There is no right or wrong in the medium.

“Maybe,” he thought, “Benedict the XVIth is right. Maybe we are deficient.” And it seemed true, and in Second Life, "seeming" is about as close to truth as you can get (although commerce is quite real here, and if that is the only real thing in this fog of Tartarus, then capitalism truly is forever). Calvin and the Reformers, and their diminishing successors, were silent here in Second Life, palled by that ubiquitous gray dull bass hum, the inimitable groan of black flame, punctuated by the grind music of solipsistic erotica, of avatars prancing to other aroused monologues, pixelated up, shall we say?, with exaggerated appeal.

This is the end of the Reformation, right “here,” on Warhol Tower, in the second life of virtual reality.

He thought these dejected thoughts as he stepped out, onto the precipice. Looking down, he saw right then why Marilyn Monroe was looking left instead of right while he was climbing the stairs. He was seeing the backside of the painting. Now, for all to see in the dim horizon (is Second Life flat or round? does it matter? is it matter?), flashed the Tower a succession of Marilyn, of knives, of soup cans, of (of course) John Lennon, Mickey Mouse and bananas. On the outside of the Tower, Marilyn was looking right as she always did in virtuality.

Then, there was a prophetic, pathetic murmur from the Tower: Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see ... So the fantasy corners of America ... you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.

“I have cooperated with this program,” the Fuller youth minister thought, “and I have no Virgil to shield my eyes. Suicide is impossible here: I can not fall in a land already dead.”

O you whose intellects see clear and whole, gaze on the doctrine that is hidden here beneath the unfamiliar verses veil (Inferno, ix, 61-63, Esolen).

Then one came dry shod over the waters of Styx. He swept his arm out in front of him, clearing the gross virtuality from before his face. Despite his lack of training in Pasadena, the youth minister saw that this unprogrammed visitor must be a herald sent from Heaven.

“O cacciati del ciel, gente dispetta,” upon the horrible threshold of the Warhol Tower the Angel began, “ond’esta oltracotanza in voi s’alletta?”

Since he had the gift of interpretation (from Sayers, Hollander and Esolen), the young man understood: “O you despicable race cast out from Heaven, whence do you fetch this pride that feeds on you!”

And, freeing him from the Furies and the curly lock of the Gorgon, the Angel conversed with me.

“There are things you must know.

"There is only one moment and one reality.

"There are no shortcuts. Any expansion into a higher dimension involves a magnification of distance. There are no wrinkles in time. There are no wormholes. There is only infinite expansion. No one flies. There is only the motion of Love and movement by Grace.

"Physics and biology are continuous with morality and belief. The reliability of materialistic science is due mainly to dynamics of self-validation. But he who prays well, knows well and sees well. He who does not pray, sees what he wants to. He who does not pray well, does not because he does not believe enough: and he too, outside the Church, ends up seeing only what he wants to see.

"There are no parallel universes, only retrograde. You see the beginnings of it around you now.

"All of creation can carry grace. Fantasia, not imagination, is the rejection of grace. This ‘place’ is the rejection of grace. It is the rehearsal of Inferno, the rupture of Hades into the world.

"Created reality saves from passion -- which is always the necromantic evocation of perdition. Virtuality can produce only despair, the gift of the Gorgons. This nether world rejection of substance, this virtuality, will become less and less the invention of technology, and more and more haunted by souls destroyed, and the dissolution of time.

"Time is not space nor is it a dimension. Time is grace: death is grace rejected, heaven is grace expected and received.”

With that, he took the boy's wrist, and wrenched him from the Warhol Tower, and set his wandering attention back to prayer and the sun.

Comments

[bruce johnson]

I loved this quote:

"Time is not space nor is it a dimension. Time is grace: death is grace rejected, heaven is grace expected and received.”