We are made to be with others because that is God’s very nature. The image in which we are made.
It’s what God is and how
He does His work. In fact, Charles Williams, one of Lewis’ Inkling friends, once said, in an interesting and completely orthodox turn of Scripture, “It is not good for God to be alone.”
Jonathan Edwards, the great puritan divine and the third president of Princeton University understood this in saying “God is within Himself a holy society.” Humanity is created by Others in interpersonal and localized cooperation to
be creative in localized cooperation with others. That happens via physical incarnation, not electronic mediation.
How has a year of wearing masks in public demonstrated to us how important, and even holy, the human visage is? Yes, our masks fog up our glasses and make us breathe funny. But that is a mere nuisance. The really frustrating thing that all of us have learned daily is how masks literally “distance” us psychologically and emotionally from the other person. We want to see their eyes light up in unison with their mouths as they smile. Easy jokes and chit-chat with the clerk at the store are just not as pleasant when we can’t see what their mouth is doing in unison with their cheeks, eyes and brows.
A year of masks has shown us how much we “listen” with our eyes as much as our ears. Masks have demonstrated to us that human communication and communion are much more than mere words enunciated well. Our faces, our eyes, our lips communicate just as fully and powerfully as our words and diction do. Mask certainly do hide more than just our face. They hide a significant part of our personality and souls, do they not?
Post-COVID life must become incarnational again. Christians have known theoretically that humanity is incarnational and not gnostic. That physicality and presence matter in supernatural ways. It took one year of locking-down and masking-up to remind us just how true this is in so many expected and unanticipated ways. Others are realizing it too, of course. They just don’t appreciate the divine origins of the importance and blessing of being present. Christianity does. It is what initiated our faith in the first place.
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