The Apocalypse Begins Here

When we are no longer present to our most immediate world, as when we enter a ‘text-space’ that casts aside the ‘human-space’ of human encounters, we have chosen anti-communion. We have broken with ‘now’ and placed our conscious selves into a false transcendence. We have become “remote” — both verb and noun, a living gerund. People living as if we were living.

I wonder aloud in a moment of escatological whimsy — has the smartphone become a horse of the Apocalypse as in Huawei’s sculpture above, made from thousands of discarded broken conversations?

Do these mobile devices help our mobility, by definition helping us move with purpose? Do they help us commune? Or rather, do they tend to foster “anti-communion” and anti-eucharist?

There is no true sharing when people (and the natural world), phonebooth 4aclosest to us have been forced into the background of noise. The primary discarded in lieu of a more abstract and distant secondary encounter. The outstretched hand shrivels. The thumbs grow. The order of being and ourselves in it becomes distorted. An inordinacy reins as normative. And still our heart pines for the divine transcendence that only Christ can give. We feel incomplete, unable to find true fulfillment, and we feel sick before the growing chasm.

The Apocalypse begins here — in the disorder of our creation.