If during the pandemic you’ve shared a Zoom meeting, it will be of interest that the company’s share price has rocketed from $66 to $ 200, and that its market value has risen from $19 bn to nearly $60 bn this year. The figures are immense; but then so is the utility of the product.
Zoom has created the possibility of the ‘virtual’ meeting. And it’s certainly a huge improvement on the older technology of the telephone. A couple of weeks ago I took part in a charity trustees’ meeting by telephone conference call and it was an odd business: though we certainly romped through the agenda. And it’s arguable that Zoom and other comparable – and competing - technologies are saving us time and travel, helping us towards a greener world. But when is a meeting truly a meeting?
The passage from St Paul I quoted yesterday offers a clue. ‘Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.’ Paul envisages the possibility of our spiritual vision, our ‘seeing', being full and complete. Until then, it is as if we get only dim reflections of reality and truth. Three cheers for the Zoom ‘meeting’. But how inadequate it is as a substitute for real, person-to-person meeting; when another can know us as we truly are; and when we can know that person too. That’s what we are missing right now.
Fr John
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