There’s been a great deal of conversation in the media lately about the horrendous privacy policies of Facebook. Whether or not this is a worthy subject for so much consideration, it is true that more and more people are connecting through social networking sites, creating virtual versions of themselves through which to access the world. This raises serious questions for Christians who believe in the power of the Incarnation. What does it mean to say that God took on flesh in a world in which flesh doesn’t really matter anymore? And even more basically, how do we understand what it means to be human in a world in which so many of our interactions have become disembodied?

One of the more aggravating stereotypes about Christians is that we are people who believe that the body doesn’t matter, that it’s just a carrying case for the soul and that upon our death this carrying case will simply be thrown away like the plastic wrapper on a candy bar. This sort of thought has existed throughout the history of the Church, but it has always been located in the heretical sects rather than in the teachings of orthodoxy. In fact, the Bible teaches just the opposite view. In John 1, we learn that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Word,  who is God, who had no body and needed no body, nevertheless took on a body and sanctified all of our bodies in the process. The Bible teaches that our bodies are made good, despite whatever evil may seek to disfigure us or tempt us. What the Incarnation of the Word shows us is that God made humanity to be both spiritual and physical and that God intends to redeem both the body and the soul. In the Apostle’s Creed, we say that we believe in the “resurrection of the body.” It’s not an accident that we have bodies. It’s a vital part of who we are.

The ramifications of this teaching can be felt throughout the experience of the Christian life, from the way we view sex and marriage to the way we understand proper care for the elderly and the disabled, from the attitude we take towards our bodies after death to the way in which we receive grace through our bodies in the receiving of the sacraments. The very nature of the way that Christians have traditionally related to one another is a testament to this strong conviction that our bodies matter, that our bodies are to be redeemed every bit as much as our souls. And so we make a strong point of trying to connect with one another physically. We encourage worship together in community. In the catholic traditions that still follow the ancient pattern of geographical dioceses and parishes, we find an embodied connection between the Church in one place and the Church in another, an embodied connection that takes concrete form in the communion of the local bishop with bishops around the world and throughout time. We eat and drink together, sharing in the common food that makes us one in body. We even talk of ourselves as the “Body of Christ,” as a living and breathing organic reality of Christ’s continued presence in the world.

Like many modern churches, Holy Comforter has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. I’m as much a product of my generation as anybody else. I love my iPod and my wifi laptop. All of these things are useful and can be made tools for building community. But more and more it seems that these things aren’t just facilitating community but becoming replacements for genuine community.

The act of creating a user profile for something like Facebook is a disembodied act. We create a virtual self. Sometimes that virtual self is a whole different person, a fictitious character who bears no resemblance to the person behind the curtain who is typing in likes and interests. But more often, the virtual self is an extension of the real person. When most of us set up our Facebook accounts, we type in our real names. We use real pictures of ourselves and our families. We talk about things that we actually like and dislike. So in a way, this is a picture of who we really are. And yet the virtual self isn’t exactly the same as the real self. The virtual self has a kind of flexibility that real people don’t have. We can create a persona for ourselves that’s different from who we are naturally, saying things in our witty status messages that we’d never have the courage to say if we had to say it out loud to a room full of people. We can choose how we present ourselves, picking only certain pictures, telling only certain truths, arranging things so that we appear to be a certain kind of person, the kind of person we wish we were, or perhaps the kind of person we would like others to see us as.

What happens to us when the majority of our interactions with friends and relatives are filtered through this disembodied stream of carefully constructed personas? Even if the only “friends” we have on our social networking sites are people we actually know, there can be a kind of narrowing down in which we come to look at each other first and foremost as avatars rather than as complicated individuals. We don’t have to encounter each other’s brokenness or weakness in the virtual world. As a colleague of mine noted recently, the invention of the status message is just one more way in which our culture has come to value being clever over being deep. And, in fact, depth in these kinds of encounters can scare the heck out of people. What do you say when your friend announces his impending divorce or the death of her mother over Facebook? How are we to react to that information when there’s no flesh and blood person sitting across from us to cry or scream or even sit there in stony silence?

All of which brings us back to the Incarnation. God becomes flesh. And it’s through flesh that God communicates to the world both who He is and who we are meant to be. In Luke 24:39, the Lord Jesus who has just risen from the dead confronts the disciples with the reality of His embodiedness, saying to them “See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself ; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” This is how He goes about showing them not just that He’s alive but that He’s a real person, that He isn’t just a shadow of Himself but that He is truly there, wounds and all, whole and complete. This is a message that can’t be communicated by words alone. It has to be experienced. And that is why the Holy Eucharist is so important, because it gives Jesus the chance to say anew to each generation and to each individual, “See that it is I Myself, touch Me and see.”

There are whole communities of Christians that meet online now, creating virtual spaces where avatars can join together to share in faithful fellowship. And that’s all well and good, so far as it goes. The web has many great uses, and social networking can be an excellent tool for building Christian community. I’ve done pastoral care online before, particularly with young people who are away at college or other places. I’ve also had the fond experience of having friendships renewed with old friends from high school, all through association on Facebook that lead to later meetings in real life. Additionally, the world of blogs is a great generator of conversation and ideas in the Church. For all the negative sniping in the Anglican blogosphere, I’ve found that I’ve been able to forge new and meaningful connections with some of the people I’ve interacted with online in recent years, and those connections have served to change and shape me in many splendid ways. Naturally, these tools also help us to connect with people we’d never otherwise meet, people in other nations, people from our own communities who have moved far away who in generations past would’ve simply been forgotten. All of this is good. The Church should celebrate it. The Church should not be afraid to engage with the culture through these resources.
 
But all of these communal interactions that are strengthened through social networking have one thing in common: They all evolve out of or inevitably lead to in person embodied communication. They don’t stop at the edge of the status message. The danger for Christians, as for the rest of us, is that we get so wrapped up in our online personas that we forget what it means to be real persons, that real humanity requires embodiedness. Jesus cannot instant message you proof of His Incarnation. In order to know Him, you have to be able to meet Him, to touch Him, to see Him, to eat His Body and drink His Blood, to be one with Him by being one with His Body, the Church. Those of us who have come to know this Jesus, in the flesh, have a responsibility to cultivate communities that exist as much or more off of the net as they do online. We have a responsibility to be embodied, and to remember that it’s in and through the marriage of flesh and spirit that we truly learn to love one another, body and soul.