The Reflection

 "It's like when you're the youngest and weakest kid on the playground. And when the biggest kid smacks you, that's all right because he noticed you. That means you're alive. It's better than when they ignore you... When you're really alive, other people know it".

"What's that got to do with having the enemy in your hands?"

"He's alive - he's got the same kind of aliveness as me. Each of us is the enemy, to the other and to himself. I'm the enemy within myself".

Frank Herbert - The Dragon in the Sea.

"For now we see through a mirror, darkly".  The Apostle Paul.

It's that telling moment in the Disney version of Snow White. The Queen, filled with vanity, thinks she's about to be re-affirmed in her presumption that she's the radiance of the kingdom, when all her illusions are crushed by a single statement of fact - there's someone far more fair. The resulting rage brings to the fore all the true malice of her nature in her attempt to murder what she cannot attain - to expel any virtue that reveals the true misery of her evil.

Fairy Tales, like any good story, tell us huge amounts of truth about ourselves.

Through the continual refining of numerous algorithms, vast numbers of us now spend inordinate amounts of our small time here looking into our own dark mirror, wishing and hoping it will bring some narcotic rush through another like or friending or some other necessary bonus that keeps us coming back for more, but woe betide the person(s) who seek to query or publicly counter what our virtual persona says about us - the nightmare of Stephen King's 'Carrie' doesn't hold a candle to what we can become in such circumstances in our dismantling not only of their view, but the assassination of their persona in revenge.

The tragedy in all of this is the extortionate amount of investment we continually give to something so delusional, yet so possessive of us. Never before have we lived at a moment when it is so easy to genuinely take control of an individual and feed them into becoming a part of a manipulate collective to the point where what is truly free thought and action is entirely circumvented, and any necessary criticism is entirely quashed as disinformation.

The horror at the core of this misery is that we buy the lie about ourselves - that we in fact "are" what these manipulations sell to us.

The analysis of documentaries like The Trap (Adam Curtis) or The Great Hack (Netflix) reveal to us something truly sinister. Macbeth's fate was sealed once he followed the words of witches. Ours are likewise knitted into a web of self beguiling and ascendance the moment we 'view' what we are through the mirage of social media.

It isn't a case of theory concerning a conspiracy that owns us, the reality is in our faces, 24/7 - so pervasive that we merely accept its requirements and judgements as entirely correct and normative in respect to our status.

Our definitions of the sacred are reduced to these algorithms. We can no longer see a 'god' beyond our own reflections because to do so would rob us of the presumed security and 'must have' nurture of the womb of our SM sites. The fact that these places own and define what we are, continually harming us in a manner which rarely jolts our karma is deemed beyond what counts to most users. The 'fix' is all, and it is such "levelling" of our society as a whole that will conclude our entire undoing before a terrible malevolence.

Faith calls us to stand outside these gates. To pursue a deeper beauty, a richer truth, which most certainly values the vital image we are meant to bear and seeks, often through endurance, to fashion something eternally striking in these tents of flesh.

The hammer and anvil that holds and shapes such fire is the body and blood of the one who made Himself of no reputation to heal us through death and resurrection - and the call is to such pressure that genuine joy and splendour is moulded into us.

Genuine and lasting good is something beyond the virtual.

May we have a relish to seek and satisfy in such a treasure!