Bethlehem… or a Fake Town in the Metaverse?

“Once in Royal David’s City” is one of my favorite Christmas carols. When I was eight, my class sang it in the school Christmas concert… and I’ve loved it ever since.

David’s City is, of course, a reference to Bethlehem, the town were Jesus was famously born. His family traveled there from the town where they lived, Nazareth - another oft-referenced town in the Bible.

These are real places.

You live in a real place too, and so do I.

But have you heard about a trend that’s happening now? The creating and purchasing of *fake* places. By fake places, I mean fictional places that exist only in virtual worlds… on screens. Evidently, there’s a real estate boom happening in the Metaverse. (You’ve likely already heard about the Metaverse, but if you haven’t… it’s the combination of various technologies “including virtual reality, augmented reality and video where users live’ within a digital universe.”)

It feels ironic to me that Jesus entered this real-deal, gritty, hard-knocks world - hay and blood and the smell of manure - and yet this Christmas, we’re looking to get out of it. We’re looking to replace, or at least substantially augment, the physical world with an imagined one.

It’s pricey, too.

Last month an estate of more than 100 parcels within Decentraland’s Fashion Street district sold for the equivalent of about $2.5 million - a record.

It begs the question: why are we spending (sometimes large amounts of) money in pretend worlds, when we have a beautiful real world right here?

The answer, I think, comes with Decentraland’s tagline: “Lose yourself in an amazing, evolving world.”

Lose yourself. It’s first of all about escape. People have always had the impulse to escape the tough aspects of our lives; there’s nothing new about that. For centuries we have gone to many outlets to eject from our lives: alcohol, drugs, over-eating, even hard-to-fault things like books and music. But in the past two decades, the possibilities of escape have exploded exponentially because of screens in their many forms…. and this makes the landscape trickier.

And secondly, it’s about the drive we feel to become our own gods. We love the power we feel in shaping and interacting with worlds of our own imaginings. (We do something similar, only less intense, when we immerse ourselves in our phones.)

There’s nothing wrong with imagination - in fact, it’s a gift from God. And there’s nothing wrong with creativity; it’s also a gift. But we need to be careful here. We don’t actually want to “lose ourselves” - anymore than we’re already lost. In fact, what we want and need is to be found.

And that’s what Christmas 🌲 is actually about.

Our embodied God entering this world (in a real country, in a real town, amidst flesh-and-blood people) to find us… and love us, and bring us to our true home, which is Himself.

Let’s ditch the screens and keep our eyes wide open for that.

---

If you like this post, please share it! For more content like it, take my free, fun QUIZ, “What’s Your Cell Phone Virtue?”

Or join us at the the susanbarico.com subscriber community, and I’ll send you my quick start guide: “5 steps to less CELL, more SOUL.” Sign up here.

---

You May Also Enjoy: