Simplicity

Of Godblogs & Gobbledygook

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As of this last month, I’m convinced that information overload is hurting our souls.

A common factoid spread around the blogosphere tells us that a single edition of the New York Times contains more information on its pages than the average person in the 17th century accumulated in a lifetime. Whether true or not, it doesn’t take a sociology degree to know that we’re bombarded with increasing amounts of data we must process daily. I think about the sheer amount of medical knowledge today and wonder how any doctor can possibly do his job without becoming irrelevant in only a couple years. Or consider how high-tech spawns and kills off new technology almost every day.

We don’t have to be doctors or IT specialists to know that the average person today must not only process local events, but happenings on the other side of the world. It’s not enough that a local teacher was killed in a car accident over the weekend, but a bus full of nuns holding babies in their arms went off a cliff in Outer Pradesh. It’s difficult enough to know the pain of our neighbors, but now the whole world is our neighborhood, and the newspaper screams the entire planet’s misery. Add in the Web, e-mail, TV, radio, and some new media yet to be produced, and you’ve created a litany of laments few rational adults can process.

Estimates vary widely, but some claim that publishers put out as many as 300,000 book titles last year alone, up from the year before, which was an increase over the year previous—and so it goes. Each book comes packed with information we must process, facts we must consider and digest. Data, data, data.

Many of those titles come from Christian publishing houses. Into that mix we add Christian magazines, music, curricula, television and even Bibles. And now we have the new phenomenon of the blogosphere, complete with its own Christianized blogs.

I used to skim through about 100 Christian blogs via Bloglines. I dropped that to about fifty. Now I’m down to about the same dozen. And I might need to trim even those.

I can’t speak for you, but I look at my own soul and see confusion. I can no longer process all the information hitting me daily. I cut my blog diet down simply because I’d come away from reading with an itchy scalp that required constant scratching. Too many opinions. Too many contrary facts. Too many discussions of esoteric theological minutia. Too many book reviews of too many “must-read” books guaranteed to make me a better servant of Christ.

But what I’m discovering, contrary to the pervasive wisdom of educating oneself, makes me wonder if this information deluge might be hindering the discipleship process God created rather than boosting it. One book tells me how to pray, but another claims that other book has it wrong. This blog here discusses the finer points of infralapsiarianism, with several blog participants yelling at each other. After a while, everyone is simultaneously right and wrong. I can’t possibly give any of it much deep thought. What I tend to do instead is build a wall around myself to keep the facts from demanding too much of me.

The restlessness many people feel in their souls may be due to an inability to handle this data deluge. I consider myself a fairly competent processor of info, but I can’t do it all anymore. When Paul tells Timothy to study in order to show himself to be an approved workman, I highly doubt he wrote of what you or I contend with daily. As the foremost book says:

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
—Ecclesiastes 12:12b

Consider how many books the average person in Solomon’s day might encounter. There’s not a person reading this now who doesn’t own more books than a hundred households even a hundred years ago. Did Paul advise Timothy to sit down with a stack of systematic theologies? Was he advocating collecting the complete works of this rabbi or that and poring over them until their wisdom filled every nook and cranny of Tim’s noggin?

We know about Pavlov’s dog, but do we know about Seligman’s? That dog, placed in a wire pen, received an electric shock whenever a tone sounded. After a while, the dog sat helplessly whimpering in the corner of its cage on hearing the tone, even without the shock.

I believe that one reason the Christian Church in America continues to struggle with meeting the demands of the Kingdom comes from an overload of data, a sort of constant mental electroshock. Every time someone dumps another factoid on us, we run cowering to the corner, afraid of whatever inevitable damage must afflict us for the knowing. We live in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance that sends us begging for it all to stop.

People beg for it to stop in different ways. Some throw themselves into one source that they hope might stem the noise from other sources. Information overloadOthers go searching for even more info, without knowing they’re using more to keep from dealing with the consequences of truths they already grasp. Others simply go into a self-imposed shell. Some avoid anything that smacks of more information, but they don’t know how to ultimately turn off the noise, growing frustrated.

And it has become noise, hasn’t it? Even the genuine signal gets lost when it’s pumped up to ear-splitting volumes. In a world hellbent on getting this message or that through the noise, life’s volume knob comes preset at eleven.

Who can blame people for failing to respond? With all that shouting, even from Christian sources, who can tell what’s right? Better to not risk doing the wrong thing based on conflicting info than to look stupid. And who knows what’s right and what’s wrong with everyone shouting?

It seems unbelievable to think that buying one more Christian book to read might be the wrong thing to do, or that perusing a respected Godblog might be a hindrance to growth. Or consider that Sunday’s sermon might be yet one more set of commands we can’t possibly live up to simply because it must contend with all the other data we don’t have time for. Lately, when I look at all the input, I don’t have any other way to think of it.

Listening to too many voices, even when those voices are good, is still the sign of a schizophrenic life.

I don’t know that that means for Cerulean Sanctum. I don’t want to add to the turmoil. I don’t want this blog to join others in numbing people to the Gospel. Whenever life gets reduced to a anesthetized blur, all meaning is lost. God never intended for us to dwell in a perpetual state of information overload.

I’m thinking. What are you thinking?

Wonderland

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I maxed out last week. Every day filled with activity and left me scurrying from place to place like a squirrel on amphetamines. I swore at one point I heard a hummingbird yell, “Dude, slow down! You’re like wearin’ me out.”

Around dusk last night and late this afternoon, I took a break in my favorite place, the outdoors. My halcyon time of the year is that holy month of days between mid-May and mid-June. The late spring grows pregnant with possibility for the upcoming summer. Hallowed days swell with life. The sky pulses cerulean. The trees fluoresce with green.

I picked up my binoculars, hoping to catch some stragglers on the spring warbler migration. The gorgeous Cape May WarblerWhile showing my son a Red-winged Blackbird atop one of our sycamores, I happened to spot a Cape May Warbler. On my own property! My neighbor across the street, an Audubon Society local president, blew my mind when he said he saw one of these uncommon birds in his stand of pines last year. Not having a Cape May on my life list, I thought I’d lost my opportunity forever. But it showed up when I least expected it.

Saw a Wild Turkey, too. It’s nice to know America’s bird is coming back. I’ve seen more in the last three years than in the previous twenty-five.

A Rose-breasted Grosbeak surprised me, since I hadn’t seen any on our property before. You tend to see more of them in winter in Ohio, but this one happily flitted through the canopy blissfully unaware of his being out-of-place in May.

An Eastern Wood Pewee hunkered on a spare limb by our pond…patience, patience. Then, zip! Snared a moth mid-flight. Back to the branch. Waiting….

Two Flickers tended their nest in a hole in an ash tree. Yellow Warblers, a Myrtle Warbler, a Yellow-breasted Chat, then pow—the eye-socking sight of the setting sun catching a Baltimore Oriole’s tangerine feathers. Two happy Chipping Sparrows watched me as they hopped around our gravel driveway, scouting for food, chipping as they searched.

Later, I left our forest, walked back to our porch, and pulled up a chair to watch the half acre of trees nearest our house, looking for tiny flashes of movement in the increasingly dense canopy. Here, the locust trees come late to the spring show, fighting with the walnuts to be the last to leaf. I hear the “drink your tea” of a Towhee, spot a Red-bellied Woodpecker as it digs for bugs wedged in tree bark, and hear a tiny Chickadee—its weight not more than a nickel, dime, and quarter together—scolding all 215 lbs. of me. And I’d probably lose that fight, too.

I saw a Cerulean Warbler a couple weeks ago, and I guess the reference to that color should bring me out of my reverie and back to the blog. People don’t want to read about a bunch of birds, do they? No time. People come here to skim some hard-hitting commentary on the latest ecclesiastical buzz, right?

A wise man once wrote,

Four things on earth are small, but they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer; the rock badgers are a people not mighty, yet they make their homes in the cliffs; the locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; the lizard you can take in your hands, yet it is in kings’ palaces.
—Proverbs 30:24-28

I don’t know what happened to wonder. It seems to be in short supply today. In a disposable world where people toss cigarettes and half-eaten bags of fast food out their car windows while on their way to their next appointment, I suppose there’s not much place for wonder.

Wonder goes missing in busyness. Spring warbler migration? What? When? Oh, I’ll pencil that in my calendar for next year, I promise.

Entertainment tramples wonder, since wonder may not be as flashy, not as trendy, not as immediate. Wonder takes a little work. Just a little.

We might not see wonder, but we do see truckloads of pragmatism in our churches. We can teach and preach and prophesy on how to have a great marriage, but most people will leave without any sense of wonder at the person sitting next to them on the drive home. We can spend an hour in worship, yet the second the last note dies out in the sanctuary rafters, we’re scanning our bulletins to see what’s next, hoping that the sermon won’t be too dry or lengthy.

Because we don’t wonder, we don’t pray. We already know what God’s like. Jesus won once and He’ll win again. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Hope He comes back soon—but not too soon. Amen.

When wonder goes missing in our churches, answers replace it. Not questions, just answers. Questions accompany the first signs of wonder, especially when the answers for those questions don’t come easily. And where wonder reigns, sometimes neither answers nor questions matter, only the wonder.

I wish I saw more wonder in American Christians. I suspect that many of us are too caught up in living our best life now to wonder at the way the Wood Pewee pirouettes in space to outmaneuver a zigzagging moth. Or how the craters on the moon form patterns. Or how the brook teems with tadpoles, mayflies, and tiny fish. What are the names of those fish? Does it matter?

I think it matters. I think we’ve lost something in the last hundred years in this country. Our wonder’s fled. I think it’s one reason why so many people take psychoactive drugs. Strip away the wonder and the world turns frightening, cold, and distant. It becomes the enemy. Life takes on a winner-take-all mentality where some win and others lose, and God help us if we’re not one of the winners. Now pass the damned Zoloft, thank you very much.

I think a loss of wonder means it’s far easier to take a gun and shoot at cars passing by. I believe a loss of wonder makes it that much easier for an angry husband to take a fist to his wife’s face. I know that a loss of wonder makes us shallower people.

Loss of wonder is a sin.

We won’t hear that sermon on Sunday, though. Because if we did, it would mean we’d have to start dealing with our culture, a culture that successfully murdered wonder and got away with it. Nothing pains me more than to hear some five-year-old say, “Ah, it’s just a stupid old bird.” Because I know that any child who says that will one day grow up to say, “God? What do I need God for?”

Something to wonder about.

Better Than You

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This last week proved exceptionally busy, as it seemed I had to be in about eight different places at once every day. With no time to do grocery shopping, I put things off until the last second. On Saturday, I finally hit Kroger for replacement sundries.

Standing in the coffee and tea aisle, I heard a commotion, looked left, and witnessed a red-faced mother yelling to her child, “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to smack you in the mouth!”

On hearing this, I looked over at my son and thought, Thank God I’m a better parent than….

Then it hit me.

It doesn’t take much for us to compare, does it? The senses take in data and the judgmental wheels start grinding. Too often, they grind up others Jesus said are my neighbors.

I see an out-of-control parent fighting an out-of-control child and I think of that parent in terms of “I’m better than you.” 'Giving Alms to a Beggar' by AnonymousI talk with a baby Christian who doesn’t have his doctrine down right and “I’m better than you” rattles around in my head, bouncing off every slightly off statement that newbie pronounces. I consider all the things I own, then look to some poverty-stricken soul in Africa, and I start singing the “I’m better than you” song.

Only that tune grates on the ears. Maybe not mine, but the Lord’s.

It’s easy to call it pride, but it’s more than pride. Even someone who considers herself a loser can still find someone to be better than. The poverty-stricken guy in Africa looks at the poverty-stricken child who lost a leg to a landmine and thinks, Well, at least I’m better than he is.

Isn’t this “Better than you” mantra the source of many of our problems in our churches? Get to the root of any church split and “Better than you” grows like a fungus. I wonder if the Godblogosphere promotes a lot of this poisonous “Better than you” smack that gets talked up on this blog and that. All it does is ruin people in their souls, though.

The Bible says this:

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus…
—Philippians 2:3-5

When I considered that yelling mother in Kroger, did I have the mind of Christ when I trotted out the comparison? Not at all. Did I look to her interests in any way? Hardly. What I looked to was my own need to feel better about myself by judging another human being.

What is the mind of Christ in this regard? Humility—plain, unadulterated humility.

It pains me to say that I don’t know many truly humble people. Seems to me that the ones that overflow with this most godly of traits sport plenty of gray hair, as if being around long enough qualifies one to grasp humility. Perhaps it’s the fading of the flesh’s power that renders us more humble. All I know is that I could learn a few things from those senior saints.

What would a truly humble church look like? I would suppose that most persecuted churches know humility. Kind of hard to swagger with a boot heel on your neck. If that’s what it’s going to take to make for a humble Church in America, then perhaps we should be joining in prayer with our Chinese brothers who are praying that persecution comes to this country so that the Church here wakes up.

As for me, I would hope instead that our humility comes by another means, that the Spirit might change us from the inside. For all this talk of “Better than you” starts on the inside in the natural man, a straggler unwilling to budge save that Christ budges him for us.

This “Better Than You” talk kills us in the long run, makes us impervious to grace, blackening our souls. I suspect if we truly did esteem others better than ourselves, someone outside the Church might sit up and take notice.

I pray that’s sooner rather than later.