“Afterthoughts” is a new Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is by host Reed Lackey and is a follow-up to this week’s Channel Zero: Candle Cove episode. Enjoy, then, this latest entry in the new chapter of The Fear of God…

Candle Cove is the first season of SYFY channel’s terrifying anthology series called Channel Zero. Based on a Creepypasta – the unique variety of modern urban legends that only the internet can provide – Candle Cove uses the conclusion of its source material as the germ for a broader idea. In the original tale, the adults recall chilling memories about a childhood television show and its hypnotic hold on them, which finishes by revealing that the children had only ever been watching static on the screen.

This same element is revealed at the end of the first episode of Candle Cove, leaving 5 more episodes to flesh out the implications. Those implications within the series eventually unveil that the children who watch this static – while believing they’re really watching a children’s marionette adventure about pirates and a malevolent skeletal being known as Jawbone – develop violent and deadly behaviors. These children terrorize and slaughter an adult victim in one scene with such emotionless efficiency it’s chilling in its callous disregard for life or the normally innocent ones taking it.

And while the series is filled with such subtle metaphors, it was this deadening of the senses displayed in those children driven to madness and murder that frightened me the most. The infectious television show, invisible to anyone it wasn’t actively pursuing, had numbed these innocent spirits to the most disturbing and grotesque atrocities.

It is hard not to be haunted by a comparable numbing in our own real-world sensibilities. As we become normalized to the habitual, sensory bombardment that is social media (and even broader media in forms such as advertisements and an endless parade of entertainment hooks that demand your immediate and undivided attention), a chilling erosion has begun in our collective hearts and minds.

As I observe my own reactions to pervasively repeated political propaganda, divisive thought management, and the frightening recurrence of violence both related to individuals and systems, the most upsetting reaction I feel is when I experience apathy. It is dreadfully difficult not to grow cynical, passive, and numb when I watch or hear the ongoing stream of more lies sold, more lives lost, and more profits made on the backs of both. The more my thoughts normalize around the word “another” (there’s been another “this”, we’ve had another “that”…) the more my spirit cries out to feel a sense of hope that we haven’t all been swept away by the static and the noise into a hypnotized cave by a monster who feeds on teeth and skin and bones.

In Candle Cove, there was something insidious hiding in the static: the illusion of an invitation to adventure that was really the bait of a predatory and consumption force. We would do well to beware of the static in our own lives: the compulsion to kill time by endless scrolling, endless streaming, endless attention. The static lies to us telling us that to turn things off would be to miss out, to not participate in the adventure. But we must remember that the static is monotonous, and it is a liar.

This is not to say that we should embrace willful ignorance, shutting ourselves off to the plights of the underprivileged and overtly oppressed. In fact, our engagement towards seeking justice and igniting compassion for those people should be fueled, not dampened. But the sensory assault through which we most easily and cheaply engage those issues (social media arguments, viral click-bait, etc.) is sucking the stamina out of our efforts, not aiding them.

When we feel this numbing of our senses, this erosion of any reaction except apathy or outrage, we must find the courage to resist the attraction of time-killers. The monster in Candle Cove is known as the “Skin Taker”; our own real-world surrogate might rightly be called the “Soul Sucker.” And we must not be so foolish as to mistake expression for sensation, because a quiet and still soul may be filled to abundance with joy and ache and gratitude and longing… while an erratic and tempestuous spirit may be sourced from little more than brittle and thorny pride.

2 Corinthians 10:5 says “we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” It brings to mind the image towards the end of Candle Cove of Mike Painter, who had now been forever lost by his own willing sacrifice in the shell of whatever realm provoked these horrors, stepping forward from another room to turn off the TV once it began to try to entice his daughter Lily.

Would that we all could have such a brave and protective mental guardian, who would stand at the gate of our imaginations, not to enslave our hearts and minds, but to make sure we knew not to search for the living among the dead.

So the next time the static calls you to come back to the Cove, take a second to pause. It’s not a call to utter annihilation of all technological inputs, though I find it hard to make a case in this moment for that being a bad thing. It’s more a calling to resist the noise – to stand against the static – and open our eyes and our hearts to more intentional presence and intentional relationship and intentional action.

The static is an illusion, not an adventure. And the fear we should listen to is not of missing out, but of losing ourselves in the midst of a hollow and empty cave of endless noise.