At Saint Johns we have been able to take our security feeds and use them as source for live-streaming our Mass and Communion services. This means that though you have not been able to be in the building during Mass, you have at least been able to see familiar sights and hear familiar voices. As you have watched, you may have created a sacred space or done your own preparation rituals (see my pandemering called exploring virtuality)
Does this virtual attendance replace your physical presence? No. But during this time when you are unable to attend to the building itself, you can at least connect into elements of the liturgy that bring you comfort and facilitate prayer.
Is live-streaming here to stay? I would suggest yes – particularly in more advanced countries that have the data infrastructure. For it allows persons who otherwise could not be there (incapacitated, ill, distant and unable to travel) to feel as if they are there. It becomes a way of ministering to shut-ins, to people in long-term care facilities, or to parents with an ill child who don’t want to risk bringing them out into the community.
Some churches have used multiple cameras to allow a varied visual experience. Others use portable cameras to allow you to be very close to the altar. When we are experiencing a liturgy in the virtual world, then the usual barriers of time and space don’t apply. It is a new way of being in community that is not likely to be going away, once in-person worship is again possible. Because of the pandemic, we now have more ways to connect, and I suspect that the church will keep using them.
So, what would be the next logical step? One that is already available – not some science-fiction version of future church.
I would suggest that we already have the ability to easily turn that “two-dimensional” encounter of watching a “moving picture” into a three-dimensional experience using the VR (virtual reality) technology already available and in use. At its most simplistic (two dimensional) implementation, it is there in tools like Google maps ‘street view’, or in looking at doing virtual visits to houses for sale, or sitting in a new car and looking around the inside and walking around the outside. Ikea can put their furniture in your living room so you can see how it looks. All to scale. In the world of gaming, VR headsets actually immerse you into the scene, so as you turn your head to look around, you see the others who are also in that space. While you don’t actually see “them”, but a computer generated image of their virtual self — an avatar — you become quickly immersed in the experience. All of this technology is already available – already being used in education. This is not “digital special effects”. The technology is available at your local Best Buy.
Don’t get me wrong – I am not suggesting that the only way we get together in the future in virtually. But, it seems to me that we have only just begun to explore how using these technologies can help our community reach out to others who otherwise couldn’t be there. Would it replace human contact? No. But in the times between human contact, in the times between our safe reception of Eucharist and gathering as community, it can enhance and nourish our prayer life.
And I for one wouldn’t mind using George Clooney as the model for my Avatar. Some Tuesday ponderings on the next normal.