Virtual Reality

Recently I had my first experience of virtual reality (that is, if you don’t count watching the news on the CBC, our Canadian equivalent of CNN).  My grandson had graduated from high school and my youngest daughter wanted to treat her nephew to a virtual reality “escape room”, the kind where everyone wears headsets so that one sees and hears only what is programmed into it.  Our grandson wanted grandma and grandpa to join them in this adventure so we did, promptly becoming four ninjas wielding swords and hurling throwing stars—a more comical transformation than which can hardly be imagined.  I was nothing like a ninja when I was young and the notion that my seventy-something geriatric self could aspire to ninja warriordom is the stuff of stand-up comedy.  But we love our grandson and so we joined in.

       Those familiar with virtual headsets will know the routine.  At the (merciful) end of the 45 minutes it turned out that I had won the prize for getting killed the most times and (probably) for doing the least amount of damage with swords and throwing stars.  What interested me is that the person running the show said that the whole debacle had been filmed and that if we wanted to we could see ourselves crouching, ducking, gesticulating (i.e. wielding our virtual weapons) and generally looking like idiots.  It was an intriguing thought.

       Intriguing because it occurred to me that we are actually engaged in something like this all our lives.  That is, our lives are plagued with the discontinuity we see in such virtual reality games.  It seems to us in our virtual reality world that we are wielding swords, attacking foes, defending ourselves from supernatural weaponry, standing on a precipice, staring at dragons, dodging flames and arrows, whereas in actual fact none of this is true.  If we could see ourselves as others see us (as the man running the game saw us) we would see that we were just jumping about wildly and waving our arms.  There was an almost total discontinuity between what we seemed to experience (i.e. dragons and swords) and what was actually happening.

       Analogously our life is plagued by the same kind of thing.  Not all the time, of course, but a lot of the time.  Let me give some examples.

       Sometimes one sees posts on Facebook or other social media in which an angry individual rants, denounces, judges, rages and generally behaves badly and in a way they never would in person.  In their mind they are doing this because they are striking a blow for truth, cutting down forests of error, bringing illumination to the benighted and deluded, cleansing the Church of deadly taint, and generally make the world a better and safer place.  They are acting as God’s paladins, His co-workers, His martyric heroes, keeping the Faith and treading in the paths of the saints, standing up for Truth in the midst of compromise and cowardice.  That is how they see themselves, their virtual headsets being firmly in place.  In actual fact they are often just being opinionated, proud, unteachable and rude.

       Or to take another (and opposite example):  sometimes one encounters Orthodox who are keen to promote such secular values as pro-choice abortion, homosexuality, transgender, and a radical ecumenism which sees all faiths as equally valid paths.  In their minds they are saving the Church from obscurantism, from fundamentalism, from being imprisoned in the past and fearful of the future.  To survive and do its divinely-given job in the world the Church must change, modernize, fearlessly embrace new ideas and be open to new insights.  Otherwise it will stagnate and fade away.  In their minds they are bravely following where God is leading and blazing a path into a bright future.  In actual fact they are giving in to the perennial temptation to ideological worldliness and falling away from the Faith.

       Another less controversial example:  it is possible to become depressed about our sinfulness and imagine we are not progressing spiritually at all, that we are useless, condemned, rejected by God.  Or, at the other extreme, we can become puffed up and imagine that we are spiritual athletes, becoming holier every day, one of the saintly elite.  In actual fact we cannot know any of this and are utterly unqualified to make such self-evaluations.  We may be better than we think we are or worse than we think we are.  Or, more probably, both:  better is some ways and worse in other ways.  We can no more know our true score and our spiritual state than we can take out our eyes and look at them.

       That is doubtless why St. Paul said, “To me it is a very small thing that I should be examined by you or by any human court; in fact, I do not even examine myself.  I am not conscious of anything against myself, yet I am not by this acquitted, but the one who examines me is the Lord” (1 Corinthians 4:3-4). 

Don’t misunderstand me (or St. Paul)—we should indeed make an examination of conscience and repent when our conscience smites us for a particular sin.  (That said, the true magnitude of the sin or its effect upon our total spiritual “score” remains hidden from us.)  But examining ourselves when our conscience accuses us of something specific is very different from imagining that we can determine our overall spiritual state and progress.  Our guesses about such things are one thing, like a kind of virtual reality.   Our actual state remains hidden from us in this age.

Here in this world “we see in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12).  We know only in part, like children wearing virtual reality headsets as they interact with the world around them.  But “when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away”.  Until that time when our headsets will be finally removed, we can only do our best, pray for wisdom, and trust in the Lord.  The Last Day will reveal to us how things really stood in our lives.  And that might offer some surprises.  Until that day, we tread the path of humility.