God, Mob & Liturgy
Photo by sasan rashtipour on Unsplash
Below is a reflection of the period of lockdown that Sydney underwent in the first half of this year, which was published in the May newsletter of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion.
I have written reflections on the time of lockdown from the perspective of one doing research in digital theology, which I have shared as part of an ebook project edited by Texa A&M’s Heidi Campbell, which was also released earlier this year.
In the reflection below however, I suggested that Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire could help give some insight into the behaviours that have been generated by this Coronatide.
In the greater scheme of things, four weeks does not sound like a lot of time. However, this month spent in lockdown, combined with the almost-eternal barrage of coronavirus news coverage, social media commentary and memes have made this short time seem like an aeon. This sense of a saturated time is further reinforced by how such a short span of time has served up to us a petri dish of cultures made up of behaviors as diverse as balcony concerts, panic-buying and its accompanying violence, the ever-shifting locus of responsibility for the outbreak and, most viscerally, the experience of an enforced secular monasticism as our high streets resemble cloisters entering the great silence. Calling this time of lockdown “monastic” is poignant since, as a Christian, I have also been stricken from access to our churches. Public liturgies have become a banned activity, confined only to the digital versions one can see on livestream. As someone for whom “worship” and “gathered” go together, this is one of the most confronting aspects of lockdown, even if I am cognitively aware that this is not the first time this has happened.
As liturgical gatherings disappear, I have witnessed another type of gathering emerge. It is manifested in digitally organized mass behavior which, ironically, is born out of the drive to restore lives of individualized convenience. At the time of writing, there is a show of massive public enthusiasm for downloading a government-sponsored app that could trace the steps and contact points of any person should he or she become infected. This app reached a million downloads within five hours of its release, as concerns over privacy protections are marginalized or muted. The irony that this exercise in mass data collection will be managed by an online for-profit retail giant based in the US should not be lost here.
There are other subtler manifestations of this mob, such as the “rona-racism”—ranging from snide remarks to spitting or physical assault—meted out to anyone of Asian appearance as a source of the coronavirus. What has been most striking is where the mob has also begun to turn on medical workers as a source of the coronavirus, with stories emerging of attacks on and denial of retail service to nurses and paramedics. For me, this represented the most remarkable breakdown of external mediation, as the heroes that protect us from the virus have become reframed as its very carriers, sacrificed on an altar of digitally-mediated democratized rage.
If the rage is facilitated by the abstracting effects of conventional and social media, then my hope is for a return to the complexity of encountering the other in real space and time. In particular, I long for a return to an embodied gathering around the table of the Lord so that I can be retrained in my desires, since my desires are as prone as the next person to distortion, subject as they are to this digital bombardment while cooped up in my apartment. As with all those for whom the screen of my laptop is the privileged window to the world, I need to relearn turning away from a cycle of revenge by a victim against its rivals to a sacramental encounter with the One for whom no rivals exist.
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