divine liturgy through a mediatic lens: the renewal of attention & embodiment
new blog post, who dis? dis-incarnation... haha
Perennialist metaphysician Frithjof Schuon reportedly once said, to a private audience,
The Orthodox are right about everything… except [he added, with a characteristic gesture for emphasis] for their interminable liturgies!1
In the midst of ‘thesis writing’ season (i.e., staring at too many tabs, half-reading, doom-scrolling until my university library login times out, and convincing myself that YouTube videos tangentially related to my topic count as ‘research’), my screen time reached a whopping, impossible-sounding 29 hours a day across two devices. Talk about interminable. I deserve a Guinness world record at the very least.
Anyway, I think Schuon was right about Orthodoxy, except interminable liturgies are exactly what people like me desperately need. It’s often said that the Church is a hospital for those who are seeking to be healed from a spiritual malaise. If I can survive 29 hours a day in the digital world, maybe I can survive eternity in church.
This post began as an attempt to reimagine liturgics a under a media-ecological framework and explore how it restructures time, space, and balances our perceptions of the sensorium: the effects of certain media manipulating the ratio of our senses. But because one can’t reduce Divine Liturgy to dry, impersonal analysis, it’s since become part theory, part memoir with sprinkles of cheesiness.
Unlike some of our modern media, you can't put liturgy on 1.5x speed (though sometimes I’ve heard people say 'Lord have mercy' so fast that I almost think that is indeed the goal) and that's part of the beauty. There is no Subway Surfers in the background, only the iconostasis to keep you reminded of why you’re here. You can't skip and fast forward to the part where you can receive antidoron or chat with your beloved friends, because we're participating in Christ’s eternal story. It requires a continual, linear stream of attention and thoughtfulness (which I must confess, I often lack), since it’s an un-manipulable, unchanging medium2 that does not centre around our desires, which almost paradoxically gives us more mastery over them. Such is the way of the disciplined, ascetic lifestyle!
Attention. Whenever our priest says “let us attend”, “let us be attentive”, or “let us stand with fear of the Lord” etc., I wonder if the first one to utter those words knew just how important attention (also maintaining a proper posture) would become in the twenty-first century. Or, maybe the early church had their own problems with inattentiveness in their congregations too. ADHD was apparently only first described in the 1700s, interestingly… but I digress.
Most media are biased towards a certain mode of sense perception, like sight (books) or orality (music). But one of the remarkable things about Orthodox liturgy is its highly multisensorial and active nature. Kissing gold-tinted, candlelit paintings of the saints, tasting the blessed antidoron (or the body and blood of Christ, if you’re lucky), breathing in the sweet scent of incense, allowing the sound of bells to awaken you gently, harmonizing with the choir, bowing back to your fellow parishioners after they finish venerating, are all examples of the Orthodox invitation to worship with your whole body, mind, and heart. I think it’s a part of why more people have been converting (especially around or after the covid-era, when Zoom subjected us to a miserable existence, flattening the human to a talking head) as an antidote3 to disincarnate, abstracted ways of living through screens or books or ear plugs.
McLuhan had the idea that media are extra-corporeal, prosthetic extensions (and amputations) of ourselves: the wheel an extension of the foot, clothing an extension of the skin, writing and photography as an extension of memory etc. He wrote of the myth of Narcissus (etymologically related to ‘narcotic’), that the point of it wasn’t that he was a narcissist, but that Narcissus fell in love with something he failed to recognize as his own reflection. Now, we’re all (or at least some of us) numbed by the screen-dominated world. The liturgical experience could thus be construed as an anti-medium, or antidote which undoes the narcosis of technologies that numb us to extensions of ourselves, by reminding us that our bodies and presence are enough. There are no instruments but the human voice, surrounded by the handcrafted art of Jesus and His body, the church.
Despite his Catholicism4, McLuhan once remarked that it “would be a good time to be Russian Orthodox: they split off from Rome because it was too literate”. Make no mistake, he’s not slyly insinuating that the Orthodox are illiterate here—in his media ecology, to be overly ‘literate’ is derogatory (a reaction against the modern bias towards the written word5). I am inclined to agree with him. He had already noticed the appeal of Eastern mysticism in an electric age and foresaw that the West would be going East as the East goes West, perhaps hinting at the possibility of re-unification6.
It makes sense for liturgy, as an embodied experience, to parallel incarnational theology: a marriage of scholasticism and praxis. There’s no coincidence that the Eucharist is a remembrance of Christ’s body and blood, not His mind or nous or pineal gland or whatever esoteric third eye chakra that’s supposed to awaken you to the Truth. It’s a declaration that God came to us in flesh and blood, and that the body was created to be ontologically GOOD, to the dismay of gnostics (boo hoo!).
The gravity of the incarnation only hit me when a philosophy student from my former Anglican parish nonchalantly dropped an insight that really clicked in my mind: the incarnation renders Christianity the most radically unitive, almost scandalous faith. For instance, in Neoplatonism, one can only ascend into unity with the divine through henosis. In theosis, however, Christ descends so we can ascend—there is a two-way intersection, which happens to be in the shape of a cross. He reconciles dialectics between time and eternity, matter and spirit, mercy and justice.
Matter is often prejudiced, pit against its seemingly holier counterpart of ‘spirit’, though there never should have been a division. It had been totally unthinkable, under the assumption of God’s absolute ineffability, that He could ever stoop to the temporal, profane realm of the material world. But wouldn’t that be limiting to a God that could do anything? Ergo, he must be wholly ineffable and wholly man. Anything else would be to confine Him—Christ beautifully unites transcendence & immanence through the mystery of the incarnation. How amazing is it that we, as incarnate souls, get to partake in it with Him?
[A]t the instant of Incarnation, the structure of the universe was changed. All of creation was remade. There was a new physics, a new matter, a new world. The doctrine would enable modern man to take the Church more seriously. The moment God touched matter its structure was altered, its potency was enormously enhanced. So was man's. — Marshall McLuhan
You’ve likely heard of ‘Protestant work ethic’ and ‘Catholic guilt’.
There doesn’t yet seem to be an equivalent, slightly backhanded stereotype for the Orthodox (at least in the West). Perhaps we can reclaim ‘interminable liturgies’.
an epilogue, or the ‘memoir’ part:
I’ve been boasting of the faith as if it were mine, but I’m still a catechumen (and one who’s been undertaking a very slow process to conversion). I’d been afraid that I was trying to ‘larp’ or intrude my way into a place I felt I didn’t fully belong—a sentiment I wonder if other converts have felt. Voices that said: sure, this might be the closest tradition to ancient Christianity, with rich, mystical theology, but it’s usually more of a cultural practice, right? And don’t zoomer converts carry the reputation of being some the cringiest people imaginable? I may be an unholy fool…
Whenever I have lingering doubts about converting, I try to remember the joy I felt this Pascha, way past midnight, when my convictions about Orthodoxy became more than a propositional, creedal affirmation that this must be the one holy, catholic and apostolic church. I hope to never forget the ecstasy of my heart; for the first time, the act of veneration became transformative inwardly. It was no longer merely a dutiful ritual done out of reverence; something deep inside me was aching to greet our beloved saviour and saints. All else pales in comparison.
Coming into Orthodoxy was like entering Narnia—a magical land where saints befriend bears and teach frogs to chant and make prostrations7. Like Edmund’s journey, the trajectory has been wild and off-beat—full of spiritual warfare, failed attempts at the harsh asceticism and fasting rules, and forceful confrontations with my sinful self. It revealed too much truth that it was scary. On the bright side, every year I get to look forward to the greatest celebrations and preparations, like Forgiveness Sunday, Holy Week, and the Theophany cross dive—some of the most heavily participatory traditions that make the Church even more communal, intimate, and meaningful. If more people knew how sublime the experience could be, how it’s completely different from any digital simulacrum8, or a “reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ”, as McLuhan put it, they might realize it’s what their soul has been yearning for.
See: https://www.cutsinger.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/three_lines_of_work.pdf
Other such examples that fall into this category of un-skippable, uneditable media that often require deeper attention: prayer ropes, vinyl players, slow cinema, live theatre, opera, orchestra, oral storytelling, long conversations etc. I’ve made a promise to myself to try harder to use more of these instead of consuming digital slop all the time. #Auffline August.
Note the (likely accidental, but still symbolically cool) wordplay connection between ‘antidoron’ and ‘antidote’!
An anecdote about McLuhan: “Often other intellectuals and artists would ask him incredulously, "Are you really a Catholic?" He would answer, "Yes, I am a Catholic, the worst kind — a convert," leaving them more baffled than before.” (The Medium and the Light). I follow in his sheepishness: yes, I am Orthodox, the worst kind — a convert.
Derrida and others have shown through logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, that the West has historically privileged the spoken word over the written, but it seems that the pendulum has swung as evidenced by academia’s essay-based structure, with the exception of presentations where people read off a script, leaving little room for natural speech.
I must admit I’m unapologetically as hopeful for re-unification as I am for apokatastasis.
See: https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2019/10/saint-paisios-athonite-and-his-obedient.html
And yet, I still struggle with online-ness. Pray for me!