As our world continues to drive ahead technologically, we’re constantly being asked—perhaps by our employers, the people around us, or more generally, the dictatorship of productivity—to decide “Which tasks in my life are not worthy of me?” This is the question underlying the outsourcing of tasks to someone else or some unthinking thing. Beyond encouraging us to separate ourselves from small tasks, technology seems to impel us to delegate great ones as well; we adopt innovations that enable this because they make life faster, cleaner, comfortable, and convenient. I would like to suggest that we should not so easily divorce our personal presence and toil from the world around us. Both the small and the great tasks we are given, significant or seemingly insignificant, are those which play some part in molding us. It is intimate engagement with the world, the inefficient, uncomfortable, inconvenient mess of life where we live most fully as Christians.
It can be difficult for us as Americans, living in such material prosperity, to imagine life without the various conventions and technologies we have used to distance ourselves from reality; in this way Christians living in places with little technological progress can witness to us, challenging those practices we would take for granted.
Deep in the heart of Yunnan Province in China, there is a rural village isolated by mountains and wilderness. I have not been there, but I recently spent some time talking to one of my Chinese friends who had been living there as a missionary. She showed me a series of videos she took chronicling the funeral of an elderly man.
The entire village is crowded around an empty wooden casket in what appears to be the courtyard of some family homes. The priest swings the thurible, and incense billows, curling around the casket as some men and women line it with quilts and blankets. A group of people come out of one of the houses carrying the body of the man who died, wrapped in a quilt, and place him in the casket. They take care to arrange the body amongst the quilts, placing a white cloth over it, and finally the casket lid, while the priest says the prayers of the funeral rite. The people drive in procession in mostly open vehicles, a man in the vehicle with the casket holding up a wooden cross as they drive. As they turn a bend in the road, a red-and-white calf peeks around a short wall and briefly joins the procession, trotting alongside. Once the procession gets to the cemetery, having wound its way at the base of the forested hills, a group of men carry it up a hill over a narrow path. The cemetery is dug into the side of a hill and the villagers pack in around the higher graves while the priest prays and a group of men throw ropes around the coffin and position themselves to lower it into the grave, with some of them even entering into the pit. With some scrambling, they lower it in, pulling two men out of the grave right before the coffin hits the earth.
It is intimate engagement with the world, the inefficient, uncomfortable, inconvenient mess of life where we live most fully as Christians.
The word “artificial” takes its etymology from Latin and can be broken down into two root words: facere, to make, and ars, art understood as technical skill. Thus, the word means to be made by art, or technical skill, and denotes something made by man rather than that which comes about naturally; in other words, to be made by man rather than by God. In contrast to its etymology, according to which anything from a handcrafted chest of drawers to a painting can be accurately described as artificial, the word “artificial” has taken on a negative connotation in its modern usage; people seem to use it as a synonym for “fake,” using it, for example, to describe highly processed foods. I mention this to suggest that the concept of “the artificial” covers a great deal of semantic ground: Artifice can be good, since in giving man the power to create, God ordained us co-creators, but it can also stretch too far from the way God created things to be, from the natural, and building upon it, the supernatural.
In the late English philosopher Roger Scruton’s documentary Why Beauty Matters, he takes the primary example of the artificial, art itself, and suggests that what makes art beautiful is truth—saying that which is truly creative, that which truly represents our human nature and our existential situation, is beautiful. Thus, when he considers the example of architecture, he lauds more traditional styles for the way they incorporate symmetry, carved details, and curved and decorative lines. These elements make a building beautiful not merely because they imitate nature, as opposed to the starkness of a steel and concrete skyscraper, but because they speak to our nature as beings who inhabit these buildings. Buildings of this sort—that required time, attention, and craftsmanship to make and have details that exist not solely for the sake of efficiency—speak to our nature as contemplative creatures who have a purpose higher than and not reducible to the utilitarian.
Sometimes this beauty that confirms or reveals our nature to ourselves is messy—and it is beautiful in its messiness. When the artificial attempts too much to overcome the messiness of the human, it becomes antihuman, both sterile and antiseptic. The funeral in Yunnan Province was messy and informal. It involved dirt and sweat, household goods, and rogue farm animals. When my grandfather died, I remember my dad saying that he wished that we could bury him ourselves. The idea that we would leave his body unburied at the cemetery with people other than our own family was abhorrent. My father wanted to be the one to honor his father’s body by laying him to rest; he didn’t want merely to be a spectator to it. Our experience at funerals involves exporting the body to the care of a funeral home to disinfect, embalm, cosmetically enhance. Once we get to the cemetery, we leave the body with others who employ mechanical lowering devices and backhoes. In this case, it seems to me, we’ve allowed the artificial to drive us farther from the beautiful messiness of being human. The funeral in Yunnan was beautiful because it didn’t attempt to construct a barrier between the living and the dead. Those who knew and loved the person who died prepared his body, adorned the casket, lowered him into it, and accompanied it through its burial in the last physical act of charity it was possible to do for him. What is real about being human—their love for him, the physicality of that love, the reminder of their own deaths when they are literally standing in the grave, and the reminder of the finality of death when they are shoveling dirt on top of it—is more important than the cleanliness and efficiency we prioritize in the people we hire and the machines we’ve constructed to take care of this job for us.
In my own experience as a missionary, teaching philosophy at a program for young adult Chinese women, there were many experiences that exemplified this messy humanness—that’s what happens when you pack a group of people into close quarters for long hours over months on end. During my first year running the program, there was a lot of turmoil among the students. On one occasion, one of my struggling students said during class that sometimes she wanted to kill herself but that she couldn’t because she is Catholic. In response, one of my students who, up until that point, had firmly disavowed the universality of truth, immediately replied, “It’s not because you’re Catholic. It’s because God loves you.” After that class, a third student, whom I especially loved for her sense of humor, pulled me aside, closed the door to the room, and asked me if I wanted to hear a secret. She said, “I think we live in a mental hospital.” And then she urged me not to tell anyone, especially the priest who was with us because, she explained, being a man, and different from a woman, he would be unlikely to accept this secret.
I share this because, similarly to the Yunnan funeral, it is a story that exemplifies the human experience: tragedy, comedy, faith. There are many ways that we can live so as to distance ourselves from those realities. We may feel more comfortable keeping the messiness at arm’s length or confined to the business end of a backhoe. But I don’t see the point of being on this earth if we are trying to get through our lives with as little trouble as possible. Much of Scripture testifies that trouble and messiness are inherent to the Christian life, perhaps the Triduum—what the Church takes to be “the summit of the liturgical year”—most prominently: Christ enduring a brutal death to win us salvation, Simon of Cyrene being hurtled into the terrifying chaos to help carry his cross, Joseph of Arimathea risking trouble with the Romans and the Sanhedrin to retrieve his body, the women who loved him anointing his body with oil.
We want to ensure that anything artificial, anything we create, be it technology, ritual, or innovation, will support and facilitate human action rather than usurp its place. Evangelization is an encounter between human persons and Jesus Christ. While there can be artful ways of entering into that dialogue, the encounter cannot be mechanized, lest we empty the cross of its power (cf. 1 Cor 1:17), that most essential power which calls men out of their graves into new life.