What purpose do all those wall posts and status updates serve? On the first beautiful weekend of spring this year, a friend posted this update from Central Park: "[So-and-so] is in the Park with the rest of the City." The first question that comes to mind is, if you're enjoying a beautiful day in the park, why don't you give your iPhone a rest? But the more important one is, why did you need to tell us that? We have always shared our little private observations and moments of feeling—it's part of what friendship's about, part of the way we remain present in one another's lives—but things are different now. Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time (on the phone, say), or maybe with a small group, later, in person. And when you did, you were talking to specific people, and you tailored what you said, and how you said it, to who they were—their interests, their personalities, most of all, your degree of mutual intimacy. "Reach out and touch someone" meant someone in particular, someone you were actually thinking about. It meant having a conversation. Now we're just broadcasting our stream of consciousness, live from Central Park, to all 500 of our friends at once, hoping that someone, anyone, will confirm our existence by answering back. We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud."
"The new group friendship, already vitiated itself, is cannibalizing our individual friendships as the boundaries between the two blur. The most disturbing thing about Facebook is the extent to which people are willing—are eager—to conduct their private lives in public. "hola cutie-pie! i'm in town on wednesday. lunch?" "Julie, I'm so glad we're back in touch. xoxox." "Sorry for not calling, am going through a tough time right now." Have these people forgotten how to use e-mail, or do they actually prefer to stage the emotional equivalent of a public grope? I can understand "[So-and-so] is in the Park with the rest of the City," but I am incapable of comprehending this kind of exhibitionism. Perhaps I need to surrender the idea that the value of friendship lies precisely in the space of privacy it creates: not the secrets that two people exchange so much as the unique and inviolate world they build up between them, the spider web of shared discovery they spin out, slowly and carefully, together. There's something faintly obscene about performing that intimacy in front of everyone you know, as if its real purpose were to show what a deep person you are. Are we really so hungry for validation? So desperate to prove we have friends?
But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-flung ones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. Having recently moved across the country, I thought that Facebook would help me feel connected to the friends I'd left behind. But now I find the opposite is true. Reading about the mundane details of their lives, a steady stream of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling both empty and unpleasantly full, as if I had just binged on junk food, and precisely because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we exchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face. And the whole theatrical quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know."
Thank you for the food for thought, William Deresiewicz.
This past Sunday was the first Sunday in Advent. We've been so busy lately with various things that we kind of missed it, and didn't start lighting our Advent Candle until yesterday.
That said, I've done some reading about Advent lately (in the book I recommended a couple of days ago--A Circle of Seasons). Ireton explains that each of the four Sundays in Advent has a watchword with a Biblical context associated therewith (p. 21). The word for the first Sunday is wait.
How are we waiting and preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ?
How are we awaiting and preparing for His second coming?
These are the questions Ireton asks. She suggests doing something active in our Advent waiting. In Lent, when we wait the Lord's return, we often "give something up." She suggests that we also fast in some way during Advent to consciously choose to await Christ's birth.
How will we spend the month of December? Overwhelmed by the many many activities and the food and the consumerism? Or can we somehow stop and ponder how we are preparing ourselves to celebrate the arrival of the One who saved the world?
Somehow this month I want to prepare and anticipate. It's hard not to get caught up in the excitement--but often materialistic--activity of December. But today, for better or for worse, we were forced to stop. The sudden arrival of a winter storm slowed us down. It was beautiful but also caused an unfortunate change in our weekend plans. It would be easy to feel like we are waiting, just inside our front door, for the storm to end and we can DO again.
But, Ireton quotes Henri Nouwen with a very thought-provoking idea:
"Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present in it. A waiting person is someone who is present in the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment" (p. 23).
How can I be present in the moment and actively anticipate Christ's arrival--at this Christmas but also for all of my days?
The boys in their kilts.
Us with my parents' grain truck.
The unity candles (it was too windy outside to light them there, so we had to wait til later in the tent).
Yesterday a friend dropped by with a tomato plant. What better gift for aspiring vegetable gardeners? We spent some time discussing the pros and cons of fertilizer, how to build a coldframe with a thermostat and the probability of Calgary remaining frost free for the rest of the season (I would say chances are not great). Nevertheless, we're going to plant the tomato out and take our chances.
