Spiritual Lessons From an Archbishop’s iPhone
Trevor Williams
Atlanta – 07.19.10
But the device that commands the worship of gadget lovers is helping the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America point to faith in something beyond the tactile world.
Archbishop Demetrios, spiritual leader of the church’s 5 million American adherents, hasn’t yet upgraded to the iPhone 4. He says the older version keeps him connected just fine.
It also serves as a teaching tool. During a recent interview with GlobalAtlanta, the Harvard-educated 82-year-old pulled his iPhone from the recesses of his black clerical robe to drive home a theological point.
“This little item could give me access at this point to any part of the globe. It offers me thousands of musical pieces. It connects me with thousands of people,” he said, holding the phone upright, pinched between his thumb and index finger. “How can we explain that this is stored in this kind of item here? I say, if you cannot explain absolutely natural phenomena, how can you explain the presence of God?”
CNN’s technology presents a similar enigma. We can’t see sound and light waves, but cameras and monitors capture and translate them into news broadcasts that reach to the farthest corners of the globe, the archbishop said.
Like cameras, humans must be conduits for the unseen God. “You have to have the human being to become this catcher of the divine waves and presence,” he said.
For the past three months, CNN’s cameras have been trained on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, which the archbishop views as a real example of human frailty. If we can’t mitigate such natural disasters, we have to question the trend toward secularization, the dependence on human resources without regard for God.
“We are very vulnerable as human beings, no matter what we say, so now you develop the idea: what is the real source you can depend on for sure? Here comes God,” he said.
Archbishop Demetrios visited Atlanta for the 40th Clergy-Laity Congress of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Some 800 priests and lay members from all 540 parishes around the country converged on the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, where their spiritual father presided over the biennial conference that set the church’s agenda for the next two years.
The archdiocese is ramping up its use of technology to reach out to the younger generation. The church has a Facebook page and is in the process of building a blog, the archbishop said.
This is the first installment of a wide-ranging filmed interview that will be released in parts over the coming weeks.
Perhaps His Eminence would prefer waiting to upgrade to the iPhone4 until multiple glitches have been corrected. NB: a flurry of press conferences held by Mr. Jobs of Apple just this past week over the issues raised and disappointment voiced by initial customers of the new device. Alternatively, he might move to Sprint as carrier and use the comparable device marketed by Sprint, the Evo.
How does the author, Trevor Williams, arrive at an inflated number of “American adherents” in GOAA of 5 million? The best leading indicators of membership seldom reach higher than 2.2 milllion, and even this figure may well turn out to be exaggerated. The second largest Orthodox jurisdiction’s membership is that of the OCA, at slightly less than one million.