Technology has reshaped the way we see the world. We wear computers on our wrists, place them in our back pockets, set them on our desks, and depend upon them in our modes of transportation. Computers run on a binary language of ones and zeros. Everything is coded according to these two numbers. Computers are counting machines, and when counting machines surround us, inform us, and guide us, we start to “think” like them. Man may not eat technology, but it is the air that he breathes. Counting—quantitative evaluation—replaces and overshadows qualitative contemplation. Calculative thinking bleeds into all areas of our lives, including the Church. Priests and parishioners alike fall prey to this mode of “thinking”; as a result, we are given calculative means for fixing human problems: synods, surveys, bureaucratic systems, and closely monitored programs. However, ones and zeros will not fix our problems. Eastern Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann notes: “It is not reform, adjustments and modernization that are needed so much as a return to that vision and experience that from the beginning constituted the very life of the Church.”¹ Technique will not save the world, not even liturgical technique. One of the problems with technique—a word closely related to technology—is that it atomizes and particularizes. The big picture is lost, or it is squeezed and enframed by the particular. Faith stands athwart this minimizing view. It concerns the cosmos, from the biggest star to the smallest hummingbird and the nectar it feeds on. Schmemann offers us the big picture, a eucharistically formed image of the universe: “Every time the priest celebrates the Eucharist, he holds in his hands the whole world, like an apple.”²

We need an all-encompassing sacramental vision. We need to recognize, with Schmemann, that man is what he eats. But how, in the age of technology, do we return to this vision that constituted the life of the Church? While participation in the liturgy should help us to see aright and to overcome the fragmentation, we often start at a deficit, seeing liturgy as a spiritual “doing” that has little, if any, connection to the world outside the sanctuary. There are two responses that I want to give to this question. The first response is not found explicitly in Schmemann’s work, although I think he would appreciate it; the second is found in his work.

Reality of Symbols

The first response concerns the importance of symbol and learning how to read symbols. Symbolism is not calculative but literary. Someone at this point may object and ask, “Isn’t computer coding symbolic?” To some degree, this is true. Ones and zeros are put together in various ways that represent, for example, an image of the sun. However, they are representations twice removed. The numbers represent the image, and the image represents the sun in its actuality. Sacramentally speaking, there is one more level of representation: the burning ball of gas that we call the sun is symbolic of God. I purposely used the language of representation because any number or script could be chosen arbitrarily to represent the sun. However, there is no real relation between the number or the script and that which it represents. By contrast, symbols in the deepest sense have a relation to what they symbolize. They participate in the reality that they point to. In the experience of a beautiful sunrise, there is a real encounter with the glory of God. Furthermore, the sun images forth something unique about God that nothing else in creation does.

Returning to the literary character of symbolism, words are genuinely related to reality because the Word is at the heart of all things: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1-3). Our words are an echo of the Word. As a word-based medium, literature is deeply symbolic. By attentively reading good literature, we learn to see and appreciate symbols. It is very difficult to be a good theologian without reading fiction. Novels help the reader to think symbolically and thus sacramentally, because, as Schmemann argues, sacraments are symbols fulfilled. To think symbolically is to think sacramentally, and this is essential for doing theology and for doing something as simple and profound as participating in the Mass.

The Order of Love

The second response involves asceticism. There are two visions of the world. On the one hand, the world is good. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). William Wordsworth captures this while waxing eloquent about golden daffodils:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.³

On the other hand, the world is broken; it imprisons; it is a rival to God, “deceptively claiming our love with its pride and its lust.”⁴ On its own, each approach leads to heresy. The first approach, taken too far, kills a sacramental vision by overemphasizing the good of creation, overlooking the fact that the goodness of the world stems from God. The second approach, taken too far, also blinds us to the sacramental, for it seeks to see the invisible without the mediation of the visible. Thus, the two visions of the world must be synthesized.

The two visions are reconciled, and the sacramentality of the world is preserved, by dying to the world. If the world is an idol—the object of misplaced love and worship—then it becomes a god, and we will slavishly serve it. Disordered loves always lead to slavery. An alcoholic, for example, is controlled by the bottle. He must drink every day, and yet he no longer enjoys the alcoholic beverage that he copiously consumes. When alcohol is placed within the proper order of love, however, it can be a great delight; it can gladden the heart (Psalm 104:15). First things must come first: “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33). Like Christ, we are called to be priests, prophets, and kings. One becomes a king of this world only if he is not enslaved to it. Dying to the world, the king can truly enjoy the world and recognize its goodness.

Full of God

We exist within a technological paradigm that blinds us to the sacramentality of reality. By its limiting vision of quantifiable ones and zeros, technological thinking turns the world into an idol (transcendence cannot be quantified and thus the world becomes an end in itself). As a result, technological thinking degrades the goodness of the world and simultaneously denigrates the human person. To counter this, the simple act of reading novels can focus our vision to see the symbolic and sacramental nature of reality. Similarly, by dying to the world and all its enticements, man is transformed in his royal office and can see and appreciate the sacramentality of the world. “Some say that we should concentrate upon this world as though God did not exist. We say rather that we should concentrate upon this world lovingly because it is full of God, because by way of the Eucharist we find Him everywhere—in hideous disasters as well as in little flowers.”⁵

1. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 10.
2. Alexander Schmemann, “The World as Sacrament,” in Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979), 222.
3. William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” lines 19–24.
4. Schmemann, “The World as Sacrament,” 219.
5. Schmemann, “The World as Sacrament,” 226-227.