Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse guides us

In stark opposition to all this is the equally ancient and relentlessly physical Christmas story that, as philosopher Christopher Watkin quips, has God descending to us while today, “the modern world passes him on the way up, scrambling and straining to leave our own miserable bodies behind as we enter Zuckerberg’s proprietary paradise”.

An obvious further irony is that the Christian church across history has at times been deeply uncomfortable with the material realities of life: squeamish about the human body, nervous about art, food, pleasure. But it shouldn’t be. The Bible from the beginning is radically positive about physical creation and, in a direct and conspicuous challenge to other creation stories of surrounding cultures and philosophies, declares it to be “very good”.

When you get to the Gospels, the events of the first Christmas entail the embodiment of a God who finds a way to engage humanity in the most earthy, physical, intimate way imaginable. God himself becomes a living, breathing, sweating person who gets tired and hungry and laughs and cries real tears; a truly human body that’s fragile and gets puffed walking up hills and bleeds when cut or pierced. It’s the most astonishing identification with human fallibility.

Fourth-century philosopher St Augustine recognised the profound significance of this incarnation and what it tells us about ourselves. According to him, our bodies are “not an ornament, or employed as an external aid” but rather are essential to our very natures.

In other words, we don’t just have bodies, we are bodies, with all the wonder and fragility that entails. If that is so, instead of seeking to escape our fleshly realities, we might recognise the miracle of embodied existence, and work hard to find ways for our technology to make us more, rather than less, human.

Perhaps it’s a kind of restlessness and dissatisfaction with ordinary lived reality that drives us towards something like the metaverse, signalling, as writer Andy Crouch suggests, that “our capacity for wonder and delight, contemplation and attention, real play and fruitful work, has been dangerously depleted”.

But the notion of the baby in the manger, as not merely a messenger from God but God himself, offers an insight into who we are that embraces and dizzyingly elevates ordinary human existence. It’s a surprisingly orientating alternative for those feeling a nagging sense of unease as we rush towards a virtual reality. A flicker of light and hope wrapped in human vulnerability, physicality, and a blanket.

Simon Smart is executive director of the Centre for Public Christianity.