My sleep last night was filled with anxiety dreams about technological fails... Attempting to do various things online but failing... and the failure was not due to the technology each time but me...
This was clearly my (not far below the surface) sub-conscious, trying to process a major gaff yesterday, where we were launching a new online midday prayer based on the Methodist Daily Office, and I (as the host) managed to click on the wrong link and effectively shut everyone else out of the event.
I didn't realise this until I had spent 5 minutes feeling somewhat dejected that no-one had taken us up on this offer, and a further 15 minutes going through the liturgy on my own... Getting a certain level of spiritual sustenance from it, but wrestling with a level of resentment that I had given up my "day off" to start this and no-one else could be bothered... Were we offering a "product" no-one was asking for?
Then I came offline, picked up my phone and noticed a stream of messages on various platforms suggesting that, whilst it wasn't an enormous crowd, there were a significant number of people outside the "electronic door" wanting to get in... But I was off somewhere else on my own oblivious...
So today at 12 noon, I tried again, and thankfully everything worked fine this time.
But this whole episode has given me a particular perception on the question being asked by many of my friends, colleagues and others, as to what have we learnt in this lockdown and what will we retain into the new normal.
Well, I have been forced to learn all sorts of technological work-arounds to help me and others do remotely what we would "normally" do in the same room. I had studiously avoided most of these previously because I know what I am like and can easily bee sucked into technological rabbit-holes and spend an inordinate amount of time tinkering and perfecting ways of doing things... Even in this lockdown I have deliberately done only what I have had to and delegated certain tasks to others (even though my perfectionism balks at that).
I trust that some of those skills and tools will continue to prove useful after lockdown, and indeed I may be even more resentful of having my time taken up by travelling to inconsequential meetings that could have been more cheaply and swiftly concluded by Zoom/Teams/WhatsApp/Hang-Outs - take your pick.
However, the use of technology in some scenarios, especially worship has also made me more wary of the dangers of the same as well as its benefits. The performative nature of worship services, over and against the participative have been emphasized in some of the online offerings. Those who were already streaming and tech-savvy, had a head start on most of us in what they were able to offer their scattered congregation/audience, whether they were more contemporary or high church (or strange amalgams of both). But I have been more taken by those who have used this strange period to explore new ways of expressing and prompting the corporate nature of worship. If you want worship as performance, watch the offerings on mainstream TV, because the shoddy things put together using laptops propped up on ironing boards and garden tables (letting you in to technical secrets here) will be poor by comparison... yet properly crafted and shared they may be much better acts of "worship" especially where our technological inadequacies are fully on display in the "worship" and not retained for a "blooper reel", because such "deliberate mistakes" (as made by Islamic artists, as I often remind my congregations) only serve as a reminder that only God is perfect!
But now catholic Bishops and DUP politicians (an unlikely alliance) seem to be pushing for some form of resumption of public worship, or at least the opening of church buildings for private prayer. Personally I wish they would just pipe down and let the scientists set the pace on this (though neither the church nor the DUP have been great advocates of science at times), as private prayer can take place anywhere and corporate worship as we have previously known it would not be helpful at present. We do need to think, however, whether we will we continue to offer our humble offerings of worship for internet consumption after the lockdown, whenever that may be? I personally will resist it, as I did before the lockdown, as I still think that worship should be properly contextualised and incarnated in a time, space and body of people to be authentic. We will need to think about how to maintain an online presence, not as an "add on" but as an expression of who we are in the contemporary world... Because whatever that contemporary world looks like post-lockdown, the online will be here to stay (complete dystopian apocalypse permitting).
But for members of my congregations, who are not necessarily tech-savvy, with many of them possessing neither laptops nor smart phones, such acts of worship, even those carefully crafted to encourage participation, are beyond their reach. And if, as may be the case, many of them will continue in isolation for shielding long after general lockdown, we should actually be thinking more carefully about how to sustain them spiritually, rather than those who already have access to a hypermarket of spiritual resources online regardless of whether we put our services out there for public consumption.
And actually that points out for me the fact that, on the whole, we have been appalling at inculcating a daily discipline of worship and devotion in our congregations. On the evangelical side of the church we may have grown up with the discipline of a daily "quiet time" but for many that was little more than a hasty reading of you Bible study notes of choice, sometimes in the case of "Word for Today" reduced to a single verse of scripture often taken totally out of context, followed by a swift trot through a haphazard prayer list... or maybe that was just me. So it was a spiritually life-giving experience to encounter, relatively late in my spiritual journey, the discipline of the daily office: that consistent pattern of prayer and devotion at fixed points of the day that take me through the scriptures and guides my prayers day by day. I've used different forms over the years, especially those from the Northumbrian and Iona Communities. I have occasionally used the resources in the Methodist Worship Book, and other resources shared by the Methodist Church in Ireland of which I am a part, but it wasn't until recently when I was thinking of how you sustain spirituality, not specifically during lockdown, but within the city, from a Wesleyan perspective, that I came across the daily resources produced by the United Methodist Church on https://www.methodistprayer.org. Again, this resource is inaccessible to those who do not have the internet, but it at least offers a pointer to a possible framework for the future.
And it is with that in mind that we have started our online Methodist Midday Prayers. If anyone would like to join me you can hopefully do so Monday to Friday by clicking the link
The liturgy from https://www.methodistprayer.org/midday will be shared on screen and those who attend will be invited to read different parts of it. There will also be the opportunity to share in intercession.
That's the theory, of course, it depends on me clicking the right link... I fear that last night will not be the last night when my dreams are invaded by memories of my technological incompetence...
Shalom
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