They stand just up the street, a cluster of teens, all of them awaiting the arrival of the big yellow bus that will take them to the nearby high school. I pass them on the other side of the street on my morning walk with the dog, every once in a while making sure to be out of the way when a teen comes hurtling down the street, having gotten out of the house at precisely the moment the bus passed it.
This year, it’s a group of four teenage girls that seems to have been selected by a casting director’s diversity and representation consultant. A Latina, an African immigrant, an Asian American, and a White girl, and they’re all lined up in a row, in precisely that order, morning after morning.
This would, were one to be making some slightly unsubtle teen film about the joys and blessings of our multiethnic melting-pot republic, be a perfect setup. Each of their lives and backgrounds, different, coming together and finding friendship and common humanity as they got to know one another. That’d be great, but that’s not the reality.
All year long when I’ve passed them, they’re always standing in what apparently is their assigned spot, each a perfect COVID era six feet away from the other, Latina first, two meters, then the African girl, then two meters, then the Asian girl, and two meters beyond that, the white girl sitting separate in the passenger seat of her dad’s idling car.
And never, not once all year long, have I seen any of them interacting with one another. Not once.
Every day I pass them, they’re all in The Position. Hands together, head down, thumbs typing or swiping.
The pastor in me wishes that some morning, the Apostle Paul could join me on my walk, and I could point to that foursome hermetically sealed away from one another, and ask:
The pastor in me wishes that some morning, the Apostle Paul could join me on my walk, and I could point to that foursome hermetically sealed away from one another, and ask:
Paul? When you talk about the importance of not being in the flesh, how does that relate to what we’re seeing happen all around us? Could you break that down for me? This culture-wide discomfort around face to face connection, our seemingly inexorable separation from one another? How does that play out against what you taught about Spirit and flesh?
What does that have to say to us, in a time when we struggle with the realization that the society-wide experiment with inescapably present media is depriving us of an essential component of our humanity? How, I want to ask Paul, does that speak to the peculiar character of our distracted lives and disembodied attentions? When passing a group of teen girls doesn’t sound like the delightful chattering spring vibrance of a murmuration of starlings, but is day by day as silent as a sarcophagus?
Like the clinical psychologists who designed the software that drives the dark glass shards that consume our attention, we know that the reason we aren’t present is because of a weakness of the flesh, a vulnerability that can be hacked. When we can be shown exactly what our brains desire, all the time, without ceasing, why would we get to know or care about the person standing right next to us? Or, equally and to be fair to the teens, the person sitting right next to us on the couch every evening, as we both scroll mindlessly through nothing.
We cannot be compassionate or love our neighbor if we don’t even notice the human beings around us, if we’re oblivious to the place in which we are standing.
Resisting this, I think, is a necessary thing, if our every action and every deed of our body is to be a part of what Christ is working in the world.
What does that have to say to us, in a time when we struggle with the realization that the society-wide experiment with inescapably present media is depriving us of an essential component of our humanity? How, I want to ask Paul, does that speak to the peculiar character of our distracted lives and disembodied attentions? When passing a group of teen girls doesn’t sound like the delightful chattering spring vibrance of a murmuration of starlings, but is day by day as silent as a sarcophagus?
Like the clinical psychologists who designed the software that drives the dark glass shards that consume our attention, we know that the reason we aren’t present is because of a weakness of the flesh, a vulnerability that can be hacked. When we can be shown exactly what our brains desire, all the time, without ceasing, why would we get to know or care about the person standing right next to us? Or, equally and to be fair to the teens, the person sitting right next to us on the couch every evening, as we both scroll mindlessly through nothing.
We cannot be compassionate or love our neighbor if we don’t even notice the human beings around us, if we’re oblivious to the place in which we are standing.
Resisting this, I think, is a necessary thing, if our every action and every deed of our body is to be a part of what Christ is working in the world.
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