The Ghosts of Communion

Stepping away from social media is like stepping out of a dimly lit room filled with a hundred whispering voices. There is an ambient warmth there, a sense of nearness, a subtle intoxication. You feel surrounded. You feel accompanied. You feel woven into something larger than yourself. But the moment you walk away, the illusion thins like smoke. You realize that most of those voices do not follow you into the silence. They remain behind, attached not to your life but to your presence in a place of endless noise. And suddenly you see it with startling clarity: you were not surrounded by a community, but by shadows. The spell breaks. The crowd was never a crowd. It was a projection, a mirage of communion.

There is something profoundly revealing about this. The heart, left alone, begins to feel its own weight again. The quiet becomes honest. You begin to recognize that outside of the screen, only a very small number of people remain actually present. Their presence is not dependent on your posts, your updates, your digital footprints. They simply remain, not because they are pulled in by the algorithmic vortex of attention, but because they are genuinely tied to your life. This is real communion, sparse but solid, fragile yet enduring. And like gold found in a riverbed, you appreciate its rarity only when all the sediment has been washed away.

Social media mimics connection. That is its seduction. It creates the sensation of belonging without any of communion’s demands. No presence. No sacrifice. No shared prayer. No bearing of the other in silence. It offers the emotional echo of friendship without the embodied gift of it. Our hearts respond to the illusion because we are made for communion, and a starving heart will eat shadows if it has nothing else. Elder Aimilianos once wrote that man is ecstasy, always going out of himself toward the other. Remove true communion, and the soul will still try to go out, reaching even toward silhouettes.

But the desert does not tolerate illusions. When you step away, even briefly, you enter the cell of your own heart. Abba Moses said, “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” The first lesson is almost always disillusionment. The noise is gone. The ambient warmth disappears. You feel the weight of a strange solitude. But it is not a punishment: it is revelation. Most of what you thought was communion was nothing more than the mind’s restless hunger wearing a mask. It is a moment of grace when the mask falls. What remains, though small, is real. The few who stay. The ones whose presence is not mediated by a screen. The friends who think of you without needing to see you online. The ones who pray. The ones who carry your name in their silence.

And here is the paradox the fathers understood: the stripping away of false communion is the beginning of true communion. Only when the heart stops feeding on noise does it begin to crave the quiet presence of God. Only when the digital echoes fade do we hear the one voice that does not vanish when we withdraw. Christ speaks strongest in the silence that frightens us, the silence that exposes what is real and what is not. The Kingdom is not built upon crowds but upon hearts that remain faithful in the absence of an audience.

This revelation is humbling, even painful, because it confronts us with the truth that much of our “connectedness” was emotional vapor. But it also frees us. You have not lost communion; you have lost the hallucination of communion. And in that loss, something far more precious emerges: the possibility of real contact, real presence, real love, even if it comes from only a few. The fathers would say that a single friend who remains in silence is worth more than a thousand who vanish the moment you stop speaking.

Stepping away exposes the ghosts. But it also shows you the living: those who remain, those who pray, those who love. And in the clear light of that truth, your heart begins to turn again toward the only Communion that does not evaporate when the world goes silent: the abiding presence of God, who meets you in the desert where all illusions die and the soul learns to live again.