The Facebook Insult

The following is a brief reflection written about a lecture given by Professor Michael Bruner, (expected) Doctor of Theology. I sum up highlights of his argument and pose my own thoughts about them. This reflection begins with the response to Facebook as a Christ-follower but ultimately regards the general interest of humanity, no matter what religion. I hope to encourage some dialogue about this daily matter of our culture. 

In Professor Bruner’s lecture “Effacebook: Would Jesus Friend You?” he spoke about the messages that Facebook and social media send us and the implications of them—and why they are damaging our culture. Relationships and community is an important property of the Christian life, as well as self-reflection and identity. Facebook, though it assumes to promote these things, actually turns the opposite direction. Reflecting on the truths revealed in Bruner’s lecture, it is no wonder that Jesus would neither “friend” anyone on Facebook, nor even sign on to Facebook.

Professor Bruner’s first pointed out that Jesus came to the world in the flesh, not in a virtual sense. This simple statement develops an idea that for interactions of importance and value to take place, a living and breathing element is essential. True relationships cannot be virtual; they must be literally fleshed out. In contrast, Facebook and social networking serves to disembody the individual; interactions can become completely anonymous and are one-dimensional reductions of words and images. Examining my own relationships, I noticed that none of my close friendships have been built by social media, and they will not thrive without personal encounters. In a face-to-face conversation, there are more than words being exchanged between people. In addition, there is an intense flow of non-verbal communication in tone, body language, facial cues, interactions with the present environment, etc. Because of the expedience of Facebook as a social network, it becomes a dangerously easy to accept this form of communication that lacks the nuances that actually bond people.

Partner to this hollow communication is the essence of the Facebook profile. Professor Bruner also built a main portion of his argument demonstrating the way the Facebook profile strips us of our humanity. “Sufficient complexity,” he said, is the definition of a human; to understand who we are, we have to accept we are complex beings that are more than the sum of our parts. This is a profound statement that is not reflected much in our culture (especially with mindsets deeply rooted in dualism). Even in our language we reduce ourselves, content to categorical statements such as, “I am ugly,” or “She is an accountant,” or “He is a punk,” or “I am insane.” I wonder if our self-images would change if we began to rephrase ourselves by saying instead, “She works as an accountant,” or “He acts like a punk,” or “My mind is making me feel disoriented,” or even “I think my body looks ugly”—at least the attribute is going only to the body and not to the entirety of one’s being. However, our culture is extremely comfortable in our self-simplifications, shown by our gleeful compliance in filling out our social network profiles. Bruner stated that there is not a social network that attempts to define humans and our needs. The Facebook profile tells that we only consist of a birthplace, birthday, gender, family ties, significant other, “friends,” occupation, current setting, activities, personal “likes,” opinions, and a thousand images of yours truly. This profile ultimately contains a few facts and a load of self-promotion. For example, by viewing my profile, one might learn that I am a female that likes outdoor activities and went rock-climbing in Sawtooth Canyon last October to prove it. But what my profile lacks is the expression of the utter joy I felt by spending a day with close friends exploring the gritty desert rocks in the mild fall sunshine. It lacks the way I smelled, or how dirty I looked after the day was done. It lacks how my muscles burned and knees bled on a particularly difficult route that I was determined to conquer. It lacks the way the trail mix tasted, the sound of laughter and struggle, or my awe of the quiet boy who could climb despite the uselessness of his left thumb and index finger. The representation via Facebook is at best un-poetic. At worst, it offensively diminishes the human being, and we click “Post” without blinking.

However, people (I) will continue to use Facebook because it is not completely evil and does provide beneficial resources. Because our world is fast-paced, we have adapted by creating fast methods of communication, and Facebook triumphs as one of the best forms of quick mass communication. Events can be configured and spread quickly to a lot of people, a productive venue for social coordination (an extreme example being a revolution that caught fire via Facebook). But the Facebook insult still remains. Perhaps a place to start is to refuse let a virtual profile tell us who we are. Then, maybe we will start realizing that status-updating and picture-posting for every activity is not an important part of our lives. Finally, I suppose I could get off the instant messenger and call my friend on the phone to ask him if he wants to go on a hike this weekend and catch up.

Backpacking: a different paradigm

There’s a big difference between backpacking and hiking.

Hiking–dayhiking–is essentially sightseeing that gives you a sweat. Great fun, refreshing and perhaps challenging at times–and you go home at the end of the day and have a nice meal and sleep in your bed.

Backpacking, on the other hand, is hiking and camping all rolled into one and then some. You put everything you are going to live on for the next few days or weeks on your back and start trodding a landscape where there is no one.

So as you are in the environment you are walking through, you become a part of it. When you roll out your sleeping bag under the sky, that patch of ground and wild brush becomes your temporary home. All you have is the most essential provisions to live in this place. And you begin to realize that this nature you have stepped into is not under your control, and all it will give you is brutal honesty–the honesty that what you see in this wilderness is what you get, and you must make the best of it in the way you know how.

When you’re backpacking, you realize that mother nature, as beautiful as she is, could kill you whenever she well pleased.

So you let the humility of your situation sink in–because as often as not, the animals and sky and trees are going to let you live (though you still might have freezing feet at night), and we have invented portable water purifying systems. Because you are permitted to live and adventure as you have hoped, gratitude and awe and perhaps respect begins to well up a subtle fondness, and then love, for the place you are in. This is when you begin to understand how something can be beautiful and terrible at the same time.

Hiking is a good way to find adventure. Backpacking will change your life.

Note to self: Time heals.

I want you to know this: time heals. If you’re in a situation of a tough life transition, dealing with something like a messy breakup or mourning a death, I want you to know that this is true—or can be true. When I felt like life kept spitting me in the face, I didn’t like to hear that the passage of time was going to be the best healer. In the society we live in, time takes a long time when we’re used to instant gratification.

But today, I found something that made me realize it was (maybe painfully) true. I found a bunch of post-it notes near the back of the clutter on my desk—I had known they were there, but I just hadn’t looked at them in a couple weeks. And so I read through about 30-something sticky notes scrawled with royal blue permanent marker every uncensored thought that had come into my head when I had sat in my dimly lit room feeling more lonely and empty than I had ever felt in my life. What I held in my hands was a pile of curses, fears, lies, and desperations. I read through them all and I found myself breathing a sigh of relief; although those feelings were very real at the time I had written them, I could sense that those curses, fears, lies, and desperations had—for the most part—left me since then. To know that my soul had begun to lift the shroud of darkness gave me hope.

If you are in the same sort of place I was in—do this. Get a pad of sticky notes and a marker, find a quiet place, and write like nothing else matters. Write everything out—no filters allowed. If you’re a person that is cautious to use profanity, (as I was), just let go and use it; if it’s already in your mind, it might as well be written on paper. You have to get everything out there so you can release it.

What you write might scare you; it scared me to see what my emotions looked like written down. But after you’ve exhausted your mind and your hand, take the notes and put them away somewhere—in a box, a drawer, whatever. Then leave the room you were in; physically making yourself walk away from your thoughts will distance them from your mind. Go do something—go exercise, go to a store, start some homework—but what I’d say is the best approach is to meet up with someone you trust and talk to them about how you’re feeling or just do something with them.

And the next day, go do something again. You have to fight by making yourself do things and connecting yourself to the people you love if you are going to survive. And also search for answers—find out how to heal, read about how other people have found healing, too. Lay in the middle of a field and stare up at the night sky. Talk to God or something. You may believe he’s checked out of your life for now, but if you pay attention, you might find him in more places than you’ve been aware (even if it’s in a friend or in sunshine).

A couple weeks, a couple months later, take out the notes and read them—all of them. See for yourself the ways you have changed since then, the ways you feel or view things differently—and for the things that maybe haven’t changed, know you still have time to figure these out. But my hope is that you’ll find, as I did, that time—paired with the willingness to keep walking every day and keep seeking counsel and love from friends and keep looking for answers—heals. Take heart.

A broken truth

“Dear God, why should I think you’re good in a world that’s falling apart?” –Showbread, The Fear of God

Suffering.

Babies starve, the helpless are raped, and hearts break. And where does our good God stand?

It is a broken truth. I refuse to believe that God is not good, but that also means I must accept his hand in suffering. Whether or not God ordains suffering or simply allows it for his manipulation, I do not know. I do know these few things, though: that the goal of my life is not to be happy, it is to flourish–to live my life with strength and potency as I proclaim the love of Christ. And though I would never wish suffering into being, if my desires get in the way of this true flourishing, and suffering is the only way to drive me away from them, I cannot curse God. I know without doubt that the small sufferings I have experienced in my life have shaped me into a stronger person.

Last of all, I know this: I would much rather have God, the one that went through the ultimate suffering for the good of saving me, be in control of my suffering than an evil force. I want to be able to look up in my weeping and see my Lord’s hand stretched out to me, to see in his eyes that he knows the way to guide me through the darkness, and trust that his end is the good.

Wisdom from Baba-Yaga

I read a lot of fables, Greek mythology, and folktales when I was young, and as of recent I’ve been thinking about a Russian folktale that has a bit of wisdom to ponder. It’s from the story of Vasilisa the Beautiful, who has been sent by her jealous stepsisters to retrieve a light from the strange domain of (even stranger) Baba-Yaga:

“Why don’t you say anything?” said Baba-Yaga. “Anyone would think you were dumb.”

“I didn’t dare,” answered Vasilisa, “but if you don’t mind, there are a few things I’d like to ask about.”

“Ask away!” said Baba-Yaga. “But take care. Not every question has a good answer. The more one knows, the sooner one grows old.”

You can read the full story here.

“God’s love for Osama” post by Josh Dies

In response to the varying standpoints on the death of Osama bin Laden, I felt the need to repost this blog written by Josh Dies. He poses some very interesting thoughts, and I strongly encourage everyone to read it. There’s also a pretty decent thread of discussion in the comments section.

Here’s a snippet of the post:

I was on tour a few weeks back when word got out that Osama Bin Laden had, supposedly, been shot and killed by US troops. Immediately, we were bombarded by a country in dark celebration.  Our (Showbread’s) immediate thought was that
someone whom Jesus had cherished (a human being) had been killed and that his loved ones were in need of prayer. But when you make an effort to lift the heavy cross of enemy-love that Jesus commands his followers to lift, it seems there are still many prepared to throw a few stones…

…This is one of the reasons I have decided to forsake all others and follow Jesus: his ways, 2,000 years later, are still too radical for the world to accept… even the ones who claim to be his followers.

You can read the rest of the blog here.

A day without mirrors

What if we were unable to see ourselves in the mirror? What if there were no such thing as a “reflection”?

What would our lives look like?

Just a thought.

The fallacy of independence

Where do we humans get such notions in our heads like “I don’t need anyone, I can do it on my own…I am an independent person!”? And I know people think like this, whether they know it or not, because I often have this mindset.

While I know that humans are “interdependent” and whatnot, I find avoiding an independent mindset a difficult task for me. Yesterday, though, I decided that the notion of independence is rather silly.

As I was riding my longboard back to my dorm, I began to fancy it was my “modern-day” horse, since longboarding is this car-less college kid’s method of travel these days. Anyhow, that thought turned into the realization of how dependent I was on this piece of wood with wheels under it. See, I’m the type of person who looks at the clock and says, “25 minutes until my next class on West Campus? Sweet, I’ve got time,” and then says 15 minutes later, “Oh, I better get movin’!” Therefore, the expedience of the longboard is rather important to me.

Everyone is dependent on something, especially in this age of technology. Just stop and think about the fact that when we flip a switch we expect a light to instantly destroy the surrounding darkness, or that we don’t even think twice about drinking water from the tap. Think about what your life would look like if your car broke down, if your cell phone fell into a deep body of water, if your refrigerator stopped working, if your house burned down, if your laptop got stolen, if the internet everywhere crashed, if you lost your key to your dorm room (for some of us, that’s a constant reality), if the microwave stopped working, if the local supermarkets closed down, if you lost all of your prescription eye-wear, if your roommate ate all of your pencils and pens, if cows ceased to exist, if every printer in your vicinity ran out of ink, if all of our purses and handbags were raptured, if someone sang so high that mirrors everywhere shattered…and the list goes on.

And, of course, those are just material entities. What about people? Say everyone you were even slightly acquainted with died, then see if you can tell me you don’t need help from anyone.

What about what is intangible? Like justice? Or hope? Or kindness? I don’t even want to think about what the world would be like without the human instinct that drives us to try to love.

The truth is, the average human is a dependent mess. So why is it so hard to admit that we need a God to depend on, too? “I don’t need God as a crutch”–why, because you can’t fit one more crutch under your arm?

I have few words to describe

This past Thursday, a Jewish woman came to my Freshman Beginnings class to give her Holocaust survival story.

While I, like most American people, have a fair knowledge about the Holocaust and its horrifying details, I found it particularly fascinating to sit in the presence of an actual victim and hear the live words of her experience.

But that day I heard something I never heard before, and I saw a new level of the human capacity for evil.

The Day of Atonement is one of the most sacred days in Jewish culture, a day of fasting and purification. Respectable, religious Jews would practice this day, whether at a concentration camp or not. And on the Day of Atonement, this woman watched Nazis take pork sandwiches and shove them into the mouths of some of the older Jews.

Spiritual rape.

On the bright side

It’s cliche to say, “Look on the bright side.” It’s cliche to say “Everything’s going to be all right. “It’s cliche to say, “God has a plan for this situation.”

And yet, we had to look on the bright side, because it would have been worse if someone wasn’t wearing a seatbelt or if the driver was too wasted to react to the car stopped in front of us.

And yet, while not “everything” was going to “be all right,” all of us still had our lives, our hands, our senses. Nothing was broken beyond repair. We made it safely to our beds last night. And thank God for loving parents.

And yet, while we did not make it to the concert or do anything we planned on doing that day, we still knew God had not left us. Including the blessings listed above, we also walked away with not a spirit of fear, nor despair, but a spirit of strength found in each other, as friendships were forged in fire that day.

Four college kids stuck on the side of a highway in Santa Barbara while on their way to a concert in Avila couldn’t have been more fortunate.