Connection

On Fish, Time Travel, and the Longing for Something More

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“I am encouraged when I see a dozen villagers drawn to Walden Pond to spend a day in fishing through the ice, and suspect that I have more fellows than I knew, but I am disappointed and surprised to find that they lay so much stress on the fish which they catch or fail to catch, and on nothing else, as if there were nothing else to be caught.”
–Thoreau

I read that unfamiliar quote from Henry David Thoreau while searching for a different pithy saying, and I have not been able to shake it.

The fish alone. Nothing else to be caught.

In pondering the meaning behind what the poet/abolitionist/philosopher/naturalist wrote, it got me thinking in several seemingly disconnected directions. But that’s how I am, so bear with me.

Which is why I’m switching writing about fish ponds to time travel.

Caspar David Friedrich - "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog"

Caspar David Friedrich – “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”

A supposed Gallup poll cited by the podcast Mysterious Universe noted that when people were asked what piece of technology not yet invented would they most want and for what reason, “time machine” was cited by just over 80% of respondents. Why? To go back in time and change their broken past.

Thoreau’s 19th century statement about men and fish and a 21st century poll that had people desiring to go back in time, though seemingly unlinked, share an underlying desperation.

What so troubled Thoreau was that the act of fishing on a frozen body of water went beyond just catching the fish. The transcendent qualities of the experiencethe camaraderie shared by the fishermen, the rapture of nature, the participation in the blessings of the Creator, the innumerable numinous aspects of the “mere” act of fishing–were lost on the men who huddled around a dark blue hole in the white canvas that was Walden Pond.

The fish alone. And nothing more.

What are the great questions that form the backbone of all human inquiry? Who? What? Where? When? How?

And why?

When more than 80% of respondents in a poll about desired technology want a time machine to go back and undo whatever it was that went wrong in their lives, the underlying question that has troubled them is the one of why. Why did things turn out the way they did?

For most of human history, people have struggled more with the other questions. Who is God? What has He done? Where can He be found? When can I know Him? And how?

But despite the why of the Book of Job, why is more of a modern question. It is a step beyond the more basic questions. That Job asked them may make him the first “modern” man.

Today, in 2015, the other questions of life pale in light of the question of why. Science has told us much, but why still eludes us. By its very nature, why is a transcendent question.

And this brings us to the American Church.

If I could categorize 2014’s chatter about the Church, one of the top three topics would be, Where have all the churchgoers gone? This lament is everywhere and everyone has an observation and an answer. (Though some good detective work will show that the actual number of supposedly “former” attendees is not so much avoiding church altogether. Instead, they still attend, only not every week as they once did, which makes the attendance numbers on any given Sunday lower, making it seem as if those people have dropped out entirely, which is not the case. Lies, damned lies, and statistics, right?)

What I see almost none of the handwringers noting is what I think is behind much of the drop–or the more sporadic attendance. And it goes back to fish and time machines.

When today’s church tries to answer the cry of why, the common response is to point to God’s sovereignty. And this proves problematic, because the Church is mistakenly assuming something.

For the mass of men, there is only the fish. When these men go to church, they get a bad rock concert atmosphere that stands in for transcendence. They get a message delivered by someone who experienced something transcendent a long time ago and has been running on the fumes of it for years now.

Most men go to church, experience nothing transcendent, fail to use amid the assembly the gifts God has given them to any appreciable measure, barely interact with their fellows, and then stumble off to a fishing hole on a bleak, frozen pond to get some fish. Because there is nothing else but the fish.

These men go to church on Sunday with the question of why eating holes in their guts, and the church tries to answer that transcendent question with a supposedly transcendent answer, yet nothing of those men’s experience in church from week to week ever takes them anywhere into the genuine transcendent light of God. You can’t meet transcendent needs of people who are stuck thinking only of fish, if all you can talk about is the fish itself. And churches today are absolutely mired in talking about the fish.

You can blame the leaders, but the fact is, most of them are generations removed from the last transcendent moves of God in this country. A lot of them are struggling themselves with the blandness of their spiritual lives.

Most people experience nothing of the transcendent moves of the Holy Spirit on any given Sunday, and we do next to nothing to empower men and women to serve each other in the midst of the assembly, so their spiritual gifts–one very real connection to transcendence–go unused.

Every day it seems I hear of another Evangelical who has “swum the Tiber,” looking for transcendence in the Roman Catholic Church, but I’m not sure the Catholics have got the transcendence thing down any better than the Protestants do, especially in America.

Or else you see once solid Christians incorporating Eastern spirituality into their beliefs, a surefire way to dash themselves on the rocks of heresy.

And it’s all because we have a serious lack transcendence in our churches today. Coincidentally, all my thinking on this started with Thoreau, and only as I sat down to write it did I recall that he was labeled a Transcendentalist. How fitting.

When human beings ask why, they will only be satisfied with the kind of answer the Church gives today if that same Church is taking those people to a place–and person–of transcendence week after week. People who experience no genuine transcendence in the day to day will simply shrug off our answers, especially if for all our talk of transcendence, we don’t deliver or experience it either.

We live in a world of the mundane, largely of our own making. For most, there is only the fish and nothing else. To solve the problems of mankind, the Church in America has got to rediscover transcendence.

The Church knows there is something more than the fish. If we’re not reinforcing this in everything we say and do, both on Sunday and during the rest of the week, then we will not be offering the one thing that people desperately need, even if they are unaware of that need.

God help us if our own experience of transcendence is as empty as the people we’re attempting to save.

‘Tis a Gift to Communicate Simple: When Facts, Opinions, and Dismal News on the Internet Overwhelm the Soul

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Two friends of mine died recently, one a college friend and the other a high school friend and neighbor.

I last spoke to the high school friend at a reunion, and she blessed me immeasurably with comments she made about her conversion to Christ and what helped empower it. The college friend I knew from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and he was part of a special time in my own personal spiritual growth. I can’t recall whether it was through Facebook or LinkedIn that we reconnected, but we did drop a couple lines to each other over the last couple years.

The high school friend died of cancer, seemingly a victim of genetics, as her entire family is gone now, most claimed by that disease. The college friend, despite his close involvement with international students and his devotion to the Lord, took his own life and left a wife and teenage sons behind.

In the aftermath of those deaths, I was surprised by my own sadness for people I was once closer to, even though our connection had faded over the years like many do.

Something is happening to us as people. A malaise has swallowed so many. I go back to that “powerful delusion” referred to in Scripture, and I wonder if we are in the grip of it.

It may have something to do with how we communicate.

For many, Facebook has become the primary means of connecting to people. I would not have it that way by choice, but the majority have elected to live vicariously through the social media giant, and it is nearly impossible NOT to be on it if one wants any regular connection to others at all.

Internet, Facebook, sadness, and depressionBut in being on Facebook or LinkedIn or some other public Internet connection space, one hears nonstop from others of the demise of a dear pet, a mother’s progressively losing battle against dementia, a broken marriage, motorcycle accidents, sudden lack from financial misfortune, the latest horrific decision by the people who govern us, and the little personal doubts that plague human existence.

With all due respect to my two recently deceased friends, in an earlier age it is likely I would not have heard of their passing. Dare I say this? A mercy exists in that ignorance. I wonder if it is a mercy once given by God but now gone missing thanks to social media and Internet technology.

It’s not that I don’t want to know. We all want to know. We all want to feel a part of the human network. We all want to express our sympathies and get our chance to console, pray, and support.

But I wonder if it’s too much communication delivered by too sterile a means for us to incorporate into our being in a healthy way.

Women tend to be more connected than men are. In a given day, my Facebook wall consists more of female commentary than male, even though I probably know more men than I do women. I don’t think it is any coincidence then that women over 35 seem to be increasingly despondent or willing to act out. The number of people on psychoactive meds is skyrocketing, and women mostly are driving up those numbers. I wonder if the burden of personal communication delivered so impersonally through the Internet is proving too much for their psyches to bear.

This does not NOT affect men, though. I wonder if my college friend, who fought depression most of his life, found the waves of bad news assailing him so often and so easily to be fuel for his inner sadness.

As I have thought about this topic (which many readers will note I have explored in one way or another before), a study came in right as I decided to write this post. NPR commented: “Facebook Makes Us Sadder And Less Satisfied, Study Finds.”

While the gist of the study says Facebook creates an illusion that other people’s lives are better than ours, which leads to despondency, I think there is much more to it than that. I believe that for any good news we receive through the Internet, some people respond more powerfully to the bad news. When combined with the instant national and international news access we “enjoy” in an Internet age, all the trouble in the world comes right to our doorstep. Once it was merely CNN on the Internet telling us about mudslides in Peru, but now it’s that guy we lost track of in junior high school but who is now a Facebook friend telling us his wife was just diagnosed with MS. And that gal we met at a friend’s party Facebooking to tell us her home is being repossessed. And that guy who reads our blog posting the latest bad news out of D.C. Or that woman who is a friend of a Facebook friend who is compelled to send the latest proof that we are in the Last Days and we better watch out because it’s going to get worse and worse and worse and worse and…

The cure, says the NPR article, is to return to face-to-face communication.

I wonder if that’s a “stuff the genie back into the bottle” sort of pipedream, though. If anything, scheduling time for a face-to-face seems impossible, especially for anyone with children who have piano lessons, soccer games, 4H, Scouts, and a bazillion other activities to attend so they can be found worthy of acceptance into the best colleges and our efforts as parents will be vindicated.

I wonder if we have reached a time in human history where there is too much communication, and that in the wrong form, one which we were never meant to handle.

All the trouble in the world. And right there before us. 24/7/365.

I keep wondering how we pull back.

I don’t carry a cell phone. People are aghast when I say that. I get chucked into that “anachronistic weirdo” category people now have.

But now that no phone is NOT a smartphone plugged into an endless stream of human misery, when is there a time when we are free of bad/sad news? With a constant connection to other people’s heartbreak always within reach, to where do we flee?

The Catch-22 is that if we are not plugged into modern means of communication, how do we even arrange that rare face-to-face connection? You have to be in that social media loop if you want to connect at all.

Dropping out is its own little death. It’s consenting to social irrelevance, as if you once existed but no longer do. To opt out of social media is to become a face on a milk carton, relegated to the world of the mysteriously vanished.

The old Quaker/Shaker hymn is “‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple.” The follow-up line is “’tis a gift to be free.”

If we are to find a place of mental health as a society, I think that at some point we have to go back to simple. That NPR article claims that face-to-face is the only medicine for what ails us. Freedom from the digital communication onslaught is only found with communication of the old, old kind. The new kind seems only to be damaging us as people. We have to go back to the old ways.

But the cost of dropping out is that no one else may follow.

Now who will go first?

Tech, the Church, and the Death of Community

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Everybody’s talking at me.
I don’t hear a word they’re saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.
— Harry Nilsson, “Everybody’s Talking At Me”

I now sit behind a Plexiglas wall.

It’s about five feet high and surrounds most of my drum kit. To drown out the deafening wall of sound reflected off the barrier from my drumming, I wear in-ear monitors that seal off everything but the mix (which I’m not in).

When the rest of the worship team talks to each other, I don’t hear them. Or I get a strange, far away echo picked up from the stage mics. Disembodied voices that seem to come from nowhere, yet everywhere, the words mingling into murk.

There’s a vibe you get as a musician playing in a band. When everyone’s doing their thing right, you gain a sixth sense of where the music is going. You can riff off what others do. You feel a part of something bigger than yourself and your contribution to the music. It’s almost a rapturous thing.

Unless you sit cut off in your own little room.

As of the start of the year, I now sit behind a Plexiglas wall. And jammed in my head are tiny, sophisticated speakers supposedly keeping me connected to the outer world.

It’s a perfect metaphor.

I’ve been on Facebook about a year. I think it has replaced my normal community, not because I wanted it to, but because it’s what others I know have rushed to embrace.

I think everyone is rushing. Not a single small group I’m a part of meets regularly anymore. No one can find a place on the schedule. Which is why Facebook is appealing. You and I can maintain the semblance of a relationship to other humans by texting from a Blackberry all the fun things we’re doing by ourselves.

I long ago gave up scheduling parties. Trying get three couples together face-to-face to do anything is akin to mounting an expedition to Everest.

So we text. And the Facebook walls fill up with graffiti.

I read fewer blogs anymore. It’s a lot of text from people who increasingly seem like the imaginary friends of my childhood. I find it a bit disturbing. That line in Ecclelsiastes that reads that the making of books has no end was long before the profusion of text bombarding us from every direction, most of it utterly throwaway.

We have all these high tech devices to help us communicate, but as I see it, there’s never been less genuine, lasting communication than there is today.

Below is just a sampling of news stories I’ve seen recently (and yes, I understand the circular nature of that statement):


‘Internet Addiction’ Linked to Depression, Says Study
Could it be that something about our society today causes depression, and those most affected by it are the ones seeking a respite in the “approved” source of modern comfort, the Internet?

Computers Can’t Replace Us
Tech pundit Jaron Lanier laments the dumbing down of interaction and the lost sense of identity that the Internet fosters.

The Teens Who Can Barely Talk
What happens when a person’s vocabulary reflects only words found in the most commonly texted phrases?

In Praise of Online Obscurity
When Wired magazine wonders if all this social media is only robbing our relational bank accounts and diluting effective communication, well…

The Facebook Myth
Plenty of cause-joining, quiz-taking, and online activity, but does it amount to so much self-pleasuring and sloth?

I look at what is happening to communication and connection and wonder why we need this tech middleman to work as a go-between that links you and me to real life. I wonder if the depressed person is the one caught in the move away from the kind of face-to-face community cachet that used to fill our relational bank accounts. I read the above articles and I’m chilled by them.

And now I want to make one of the most bold statements I think I’ve ever made on Cerulean Sanctum:

In all my years of watching the Church, I’ve never seen an individual church improved by technology, only diminished by it.

I want to add that there is a difference between lifeblood and convenience. Tech can make things more convenient. Having a computer and color laserpinter to design and print the church bulletins is great for convenience. But no computer or laserprinter can build the core functions of the Church. And when we confuse convenience with lifeblood, look out.

Yet how is it that churches are spending collective billions to become more tech savvy? How is it that upgrading the sound system in the church can become more important than helping a member fix her car or pay a bill he cannot pay due to job loss?

And how is it that we think we can insert tech into the basics of the faith and make them better? We had hymnals, then overhead projectors, then Powerpoint slide shows, and now we have the words of the music we sing to God backed by a full-blown media presentation complete with a 24-fps YouTube video of other people worshiping and capped by a Blue Angels flyover.

How can we not understand what we’re losing?

We can plaster our church lobbies with costly flat-panel displays showing stock photo slideshows of smiling, fair-haired people with nice teeth telling visitors to our church just how much we love them, Monkey in a cageyet those very same visitors can walk out without a handshake and a genuine human being who says, “Hey! Come join my wife and me for lunch after the service.”

We can pour line after line of text into Facebook and still not understand that our “friends” are desperate to truly connect with other people, yet no longer know how.

We can grow jealous of the person who has the tech device we don’t, which allows him or her to communicate in a way we can’t afford.

We can continue to buy into the marketing that we must surround ourselves with yet one more tech gizmo we didn’t know we truly needed—and then miss the reality that none of us seem to get together anymore.

And we can fill our churches with millions of bucks worth of tech, only to find each of us behind a Plexiglas wall, our in-the-ear monitors failing to pick up the full conversation, as we wonder what happened to that freeing vibe we used to feel in the music of real community.

I can’t help but think that technology is turning our human conversations into white noise, even as it isolates us and leads us to a place of asking if anyone really, truly cares.