Distracted by Counterfeit
Understanding the Lifestyle Mix-Up of Aesthetic Ideals vs. a Wholistic Pursuit of Beauty
The evolution of self-disclosure and focal points of "relatability" on technological social mediums has led to a worship of counterfeit or "aesthetic" rhythms, leaving church-goers in position for a critical re-posturing in order to be relieved and transformed by the wholistic nature of a holy pursuit of Beauty.
COUNTERFEIT “BEAUTY”: THE CULT OF AESTHETIC
As the years go on, people are tending towards all kinds of social media attempts at “self disclosure”. The problem, is these attempts are surfacing as visual trends. Photos of back alleys, dense fog, cigarette butts, and half consumed bottles of beer are emerging on the Instagram profiles of some of the most popular photographers in our circles. How often do you scroll through your instagram feed and see something that looks like this? Seems trendy, right? If it isn’t the minimalist black and white, or the window light grazing on the wall— it’s the guy in the corner smoking.
We didn’t even know he smoked in the first place. Cool.
Perhaps people are arriving here, at this aesthetic, because of a noticed disconnect in their art and expression (or communication in general) within their inter-web community. After all, as researcher Keith Hampton argues, "The constant feed from our online social circles is the modern front porch."
An average of 60% of the world spending an average 25-30 minutes per day (every day) almost religiously, on social media. Taking this portion of the entire population, and considering the non-avoidable rising levels of dopamine, craving, consent to quick fix, and the resulting addiction. No wonder our emotional (and therefore social) health experience seems to be fed by the illusion of social media "communing". This means of finding commonality is entrancing (addicting) in the most mental, physical, and arguably "incarnational" sense. The technicality of the web attempts to meed people in their fully composed humanity-- and fails every time. These groups of belonging-- the photos that look like our own: coffee-cup laden, with flowers, light dancing on eggshell walls, expensive black tea-pot on hardwood floors, white bedspreads and mirrors. Or the fog, the one friend that smokes, the flash-photo in the bar, and the aesthetically "grungy" looking guy on the CTA who possibly did not want his photo taken in the first place. Whatever grouping draws your intrigue, or awakens your senses in a way that says, "that's desirable"-- whatever prompts you to take a similar photo: that is a culture, or even a cult of, aesthetic. A community telling you who you are, and what you should become by technique. A community that will let you know by sensation, when you've gotten it right.
Social media as an outlet to share the “good moments,” or the select few “best experiences” is still a current reality. These types of posts continue to emerge as an example of an aesthetic trend, and do associate themselves with a minimalist type attitude. When it comes to photograph composure, and message-- this aesthetic reveals the mindset. As a user shared under #minimalist on May 3rd, it's "the best or nothing".
Amidst the fun of it all, we discover that the place we go to be together with others, and the ritual conversations on the front porch of our techno-saturated lives, is missing something of the real. It’s about time that has been noted. While this overarching theme of positive self disclosure is still a driving force of platforms like this, there is a gradual shift as people share with people. Seeking to share in commonality and, by default, the competitive nature of social media (as a place where one must vie for the attention they crave) if they want to achieve that intimacy.
This leaves a community of individuals marketing themselves to be seen among the masses, which becomes almost synonymous with intimacy.
Social media drifting from a need to share the "good moments" has become a place where people are anxious to fill in the gaps. Why? Because, all of a sudden, the connection is not complete. A desire to be known has overtaken in a deep way, because they cannot possibly just be known fully by posts (icons) of their goodness. On social media platforms, such as Instagram, a liturgical hourly scroll down a news feed, and a tithe-like post contribution to the masses is just enough unlike a face to face communal form of living, to cause dissatisfaction. If one wants to be known to the core of even the gritty parts of their lives, they have to choose to share it, and commune over it, following people who will see, and identify, so that they can be seen and identified with in their humanness. While in face to face forms of relationship, and life on life living where experiences and choices are obvious and communicated through non verbals, and are literally worn on the sleeve— Facebook and Instagram only show the moments people choose to share.
Suddenly, street-life, or more suppressed, niche, and grungy “art” and “beauty” is the real stuff to be celebrated. By "grunge" type aesthetic, I am thinking of the confusion and blurred lines, the mysticism, the uncertainty, and the half-smoked cigarette that we see popular and trending in some social media circles. These trends are revealing the "uglier"(more taboo), "raw", and more "down to earth" areas of life. The #authenticity movement is a clickable, viewable, example of people's efforts to be known more deeply, each post itself a subconscious, escapee-statement saying a loud, "this is who I am".
This is a chosen aesthetic too. This is a problem because, by posting the grit to our back porch techno-community, we are looking to fill out the missing pieces of our images that are being seen on social media. In other words, we are looking for fuller exposure, deeper intimacy, and to be known by more than just our "good moments".
SOCIAL MEDIA: LITURGY OF THE WORLD
Subconsciously, it could be argued that what is sought after here is an experience of redemption in these areas-- for them to be touched by the light, and seen by this community. Social media as confession, as the masses take their place on the kneeling bench to have their wild sides exposed, and to know they are not alone. Here, these aesthetic communities become identity.
However, if instagram or other forms of social media act as our medium for confession, or revelation-- this is to our demise. Why?
Because these lifestyle confessions only become the very sacraments we’re consuming, as they become part of the aesthetic world.
While on one hand, these things sound honest, or at least relatable— tempting to us under the indoctrination of social media as our community. On the other hand, it is possible that this should be really frustrating-- enraging, even, as this theme in social media is an attempt at making profiles more “human” by allowing us to swim in a pool of aesthetically organized human life choices. Unfortunately the only discernible meaning and root of them to be an aesthetic, or trend in graphic arts.
Quickly, this attempt at exposure of one’s self becomes culture making, rather than transformational or dialogued confession.
Because social media only allows selective images and captions, dependent on the user’s choice, it alludes to a utopian world rather than a day to day living. Ironically enough, most of our learning, growing, and experiencing happens when we are not being the ones choosing to share— having real time experiences, enduring the quiet, or browsing the very news feeds that give us the steam of conscious “sharing” without the non-verbals, and all the elements of choices that have already been made by the posters.
By living lives saturated by influence of social media, we no longer consume people as people. We consume one another as data, by joining the worldly liturgy of social media.
This has quite possibly caused us to feed ourselves until we are gorged on facts about God rather than His real substance— which might be why we’ve settled in our evangelical churches for a plastic cup of grape juice and an oyster cracker (pre-packaged communion anyone?). In conversation about this topic, and what our own Church liturgies tell us about what we believe, we hear it argued or reasoned, “well, it does the job.”
Does it?
With no opportunity to kneel in confession, or approach the alter and be ministered to— no opportunity to get up, proceed on our feet, and be humbled by the administration of the sacraments as a feast from the fountain of life— we are doing our larger Church family a dishonor by withholding the real food and provision that has been made available.
It is plausible, then, that this has even reduced our understanding of our salvation to a fact, or a 5 point gospel rather than a life of accepting daily new mercy, approaching the gathering of the Body as not just a luxury, or a “when we feel like it," but a place of necessary safety, and a place to be saved by the real living of our salvation in Incarnate Christ, triune God.
Instead, we’ve forced God into our definition of relationship, built around secrecy, privacy, lurking in dark corners, stalking, assuming, and taking for granted. This is the world, and they’ve handed us a “relationship ready” outline: ready for us to fit people into our lives as facts and pieces of data, processed, as to be available when we need them-- just a click away.
MADE TO BE CONSUMERS
We were made to be consumers, through Christ’s invitation to feed on His very body and blood, as articulated in 1 Corinthians 10. In our composition as consumers, there are also things we are warned to not partake in because of the determent and deterioration those substances would (do) have on our ability to perceive and see rightly, what is good and evil.
"but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."- Genesis 2.17, ESV
But, when our consumption of real food of communion turns to the empty carbs, the sugar, and the poison of consuming relational facts, and additive-laiden photos of people we don’t even know: our secrecy and binging on substances less holy leaves us dissatisfied with identity, discouraged, and gorged: ruining our appetite for the real communion feast, in the form of real relationships with real people, and the communion feast of Christ’s body and blood.
Rather, we find ourselves craving the filtered and processed information and visuals online: endless men or women now at the liberty of our typing thumbs, and no filter except for our personal self control in private (which has neither been guided nor preserved— we haven’t allowed it to be, our phones or computer screens are where we tend to go when we’re alone).
We’ve now gorged on too many “made up,” or at the very least “processed” personalities, scantily clad figures, preparing in us a distaste for the communion feast, and all that it means.
We become like the people and practices we surround ourselves with. When we are at all active on social mediums— one click on that Facebook icon, and up comes our “news feed”. Now present are those photos of old high school peers that we haven’t spoken to in 4 years share with us, a photo of their wild Saturday night, provocatively and all, without our request.
But, of the visual, we partake. Of the things pleasing to the eye and senses, we call beautiful.
This quick invitation to intake— rather, a forceful overtaking of our minds— necessitates us to process quickly, without hesitation. It also gives us the ability to choose our definition of "desirable" or "beautiful".
As our senses intake hourly in this way, we are not only trained to process this quickly all the time, but it fills us to the brim with visuals and semi-meaningful data: no wonder we are left without patience to digest something as rich as God. Especially without stopping to grumble that the sermon is too long, or to resort to our mental complaints about the quality of the music, being sung honestly.
Our friends talk about “redeeming” these social mediums, as believers. A real question: is it redeemable? Or does our very presence on the platform put us in posture of compromise? A susceptibility to a place that makes it nearly impossible to take every thought captive, with intake into our senses faster than we can proactively respond?
Our senses should be beholding God. We were given these bodies as tools to learn, to participate, to be saved by following Christ’s example. Christ was incarnated into a body of senses too. However, if we are diluting our attention span, and our desires, and our hunger for community and communion with God by the fake thing, that “instantly gratifies”— how are we at all seeking to preserve the rawness of our senses for the excitement and joy of intimate relationship, and more importantly, communion with the Body of Christ Himself?
“It is a fundamental truth of Scripture that we become like whatever or whomever we worship. When Israel worshipped the gods of the nations, she became like the nations-bloodthirsty, oppressive, full of deceit and violence (Jer 7). Romans 1 confirms this principle by showing how idolaters are delivered over to sexual deviations and eventually to social and moral chaos. The same dynamic is at work today. Muslims worship Allah, a power rather than a person and their politics reflect this commitment. Western humanists worship man, with the result that every degrading whim of the human heart is honoured and exalted and disseminated through the organs of mass media…the psalmist writes, ‘those who make them will become like them, everyone who trusts in them.’”
- Peter Leithart, president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical, & Cultural Studies on the topic of worship.
What we surround ourselves with is important. If we stepped into the real Body of Christ like we step into the Instagram “room,” and allowed ourselves to have as much intrigue about the person sitting next to us on a Sunday morning as we would have stumbling onto their personal profile, ready to explore in secret… Maybe the human-wide statistics of loneliness wouldn’t be so low if we paid attention to the people in the same room as us.
Maybe then we would actually be capable of real relationships, undistracted. We’d then enter into the possibility of being delighted by pure and meaningful human interaction centered in current reality.
Maybe then the Body of Christ would taste rich to us, and luxurious, and relieving to our watering mouths because we would actually feel the hunger pains of our need for relationship and physical consumption of the Triune God— rather than allowing our thoughts and sentimentality to suppress our hunger, in anticipation of the search bar buffet line of fake foods, and connection that is only made alone, and in secret.
Many Sunday services simply reinforce our media-driven culture’s lullaby, rather than offering the real invitation of the Incarnation: to feed on Christ wholeheartedly. If not so indoctrinated by the ritual of media, maybe communion would be a real moment of transcendence, and could be experienced as it is: our livelihood, and our requirement for living— which would, in response, prompt real and un-manipulated worship of God.
Engagement in the Church's formal liturgy matters. The moments in the Church service that make us grumble the most, cannot be expected to be defined or foretold by the aesthetics social media has told us are important. If we've lost our hunger for the sacrificial beauty of God, in all places-- all the more reason for us to eat. Perhaps slowly, to savor our bodies into new conditioning. Salvation requires that we have the patience, and the attentive ears to hear as God re-defines goodness to His people as they eat. We might be right to realize that, it may take thorough discomfort for us to see Christ as He is: the truest possible beauty, without conditions. John Donne, Holy SonnetsXIV.Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for youAs yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bendYour force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,But am betroth'd unto your enemy;Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,Take me to you, imprison me, for I,Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.