Facebook

Last week I joined the world of Facebook, an internet social networking site. I was moved to do this by meeting a 29 year-old minister who, like most of his age group, is very much tuned in to electronic media—blog, twitter, e-mail, Blackberry, as well as Facebook. I Googled his church website and found a link to Facebook. So now, for better or for worse, I’m in.

I say “for better or for worse” because Facebook exerts a strong pull to get more and more involved. It is what web analysts call “sticky.” You start by joining as a friend of one person. Then you see others you know on their “Wall,” and you link up with them. Then other people see you there and they link up with you, if you grant them permission. Facebook also suggests potential friends based on those you already have. And you can search for people you know by various means and add them to your list if they are already on Facebook. (175,000,000 people are.) It tends to mushroom. I now have thirty-two friends, but some of them have as many as 700. The typical Facebook user spends 169 minutes a week on the site—almost three hours. (See the article “How Facebook Is Taking Over Our Lives,” Fortune, March 2, 2009, p. 49, at http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/16/technology/hempel_facebook.fortune/index.htm )

Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zukerberg, a Harvard student who dropped out and spent his college money to build the site. He is now 24 and CEO of a company that is valued at between 3 billion and 15 billion dollars. The site was originally aimed at his friends in the 18 to 24 age group, but today the fastest growing group of users is women 55 and up. I have found a dozen of my high-school classmates from the class of ’56. The site is also very popular with teenagers. When my sixteen-year-old granddaughter saw I was on Facebook she wrote on my wall, “Now you are a hip and happenin’ grandpa.” Seventy percent of users are outside the U.S. and many use the site in languages other than English.

All of this can be very valuable. It can keep you in touch with people you might otherwise neglect or lose from awareness. It provides contact and information about them, including photos and videos, though most Facebook postings are brief and tend to be trivial. It can have a spiritual dimension, if you are moved to pray for your friends and give thanks for them as you come across their postings. On the other hand, it is hard to control—where do you stop? It can be addictive. A TV feature this week told of people who have had to kick the Facebook habit because it was damaging their lives. I have also heard of people giving it up for Lent as a spiritual discipline.

Regardless of the dangers, I'm in. I think it’s great, and it will be especially valuable when I go to the old folks home. If you don’t come to visit me, I’ll see you on Facebook.

The Family at Christmas

On Christmas Day, after we opened our gifts, we sat down to eat. All ten of us gathered around our dining room table. Our daughter and son-in-law came from Texas with their two teenage daughters. Our two sons, who live near us in Nashville were here. One of them is married, and his wife and two-year-old son were with him.

The two-year-old was the center of attention, of course, drawing us together and warming the emotional atmosphere. It was a very happy time.

I sat in my chair at one end of the table, my wife at the other end. As I looked at my family on Christmas Day my heart was full. This kind of fullness or completeness is a religious experience. In fact religion can be defined as that which enables us to experience fullness in life (See the Introduction and first chapter of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age). Jesus said, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 14:10, NRSV).

This fullness is also, for a man of seventy, the hoped-for goal of the late adult stage of life. Erik Erikson characterizes it as integrity, the sense that our life has has meaning and we have made a contribution. It enables us, at the latter stage of life, to look over all of life with happiness and contentment and see that it holds together and is good. The alternatives to this are despair or dogmatic insistence that we were right in spite of our apparent failures.

One of my thoughts that day was of the nature of marriage. Before I married, I tried to imagine what it would be like. I could not visualize what it would be like to be a married person. I certainly could not imagine what it would be like to be a parent. If you had given me a list at that time of all the things we would do through the years, I would have been overwhelmed. But now I look back and review all that has happened and am amazed. I looked at my two-year-old grandson and my teenage granddaughters and recalled the infancy and childhood of our three children. They grew up healthy, finished college with no debts, married, in the case of two of them, and began their own families. They are all employed in useful occupations. I am proud of all of them.

I am aware that some people do not marry, or, if they do, they do not have children. Some marry, and the marriage does not work or is interrupted by illness or death. Marriage and parenthood are not the only ways of experiencing completeness and fullness. Jesus proved that you do not have to have spouse or children to be fully included in the family of God, but you do have to recognize and embrace your inclusion in God's family.

I am also aware that I cannot take credit for all that has happened these seventy years of life or these forty-eight years of marriage. Many others--parents, spouse, friends, teachers, church, school, and community, have all contributed. Above all, God has given us life and the ability to live. Some people in our secular world live full and meaningful lives with no reference to God, but for me there cannot be fullness or completion without transcendence.

As I look at my family and at my life, I find myself thanking God who is the source of it all. I find myself seeking God, who redeems us and forgives our many sins and failures (there are no perfect families or perfect parents or perfect children). I find myself relying on God to support me and my family in the face of all the uncertainties and contingencies of life and death. I find myself trusting God to preserve this great treasure of life and love that we enjoy.

The meaning of Christmas is that God has shown himself trustworthy and faithful by sending his Son, entrusting him in infancy to a human family and creating through him God's family on earth.

The Difficulty of Preaching About Christmas

Recently I sat with a group of preachers who meet to discuss preaching. We spoke of our efforts during Advent and noted, as preachers often do, that it is hard to preach about Christmas.

How do you say something new about such an old, much-used theme? How do you say something that will be heard in this noisiest of all seasons? How do you say something profound about the events Christians find most deeply meaningful in all of human history. To what do you compare that which is incomparable? (The same difficulty attends our efforts to preach about Easter.)

Part of the difficulty lies in the unique character of the Christ event. It is so exceptional, so profound, that you cannot illustrate it by some other similar event. You can't explain in in terms of other things we know. You simply have to keep coming back to the story of the baby born at Bethlehem.

Part of the difficulty comes from being adults. Christmas, at least our idealized expectation of Christmas, belongs to children. The joy we seek each December is tied to a more simple, carefree time when we were very young. With the passing of the years we have lost much of the fantasy and imagination that thrilled us in those days. It is harder for us to get excited about Christmas, unless our understanding of Christmas has deepened and matured as as the more childish elements dropped away.

Of course, the child's appreciation of Christmas is not all childish. There is profound truth in the childlike sense of wonder and trust. Struggling preachers would do well to reach back and recover the spirit of the child even as they continue to mature as adults.

The answer to the problem lies in going deeper. Theologically, we have a lot to learn about what it means for the Word to become flesh. Personally, we have to face the question, How real is Christ in our own experience? Existentially, we need to understand better the human condition that Jesus came to redeem and the possibilities of a life lived by his grace. Homiletically, we need to admit that our creativity needs renewing and we need to pay more attention to story, drama, poetry, and music as we approach Christmas.

Unless we do these things as preachers and as listeners to sermons, we will grow stale and flat. Doing the same thing over and over again without new resources will become boring. The preachers in my group have all been at it for twenty years or more--in my case, much more. This is also true of many of our hearers. Life has taken its toll on all of us. We grow tired. We run out of ideas and energy. The good news is that Christmas is about salvation from sin, about new beginnings, about God's faithfulness, about the miraculous power of the Spirit, about life. If that is not exciting to us, we have missed the point.

Acedia and Me

Sometimes I encounter a book that speaks to me so forcefully that I want to urge others to read it. Such urging is not always effective. People need to choose what they read, not have others choose it. The present time may not be the right time for you to read this book. But if you think it might be, read Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, Penguin, 2008).

Norris is author of several previous must reads, including The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. She is a poet who writes a lot of prose. She was married to a poet, the late David J. Dwyer. She is a protestant who hangs out in Benedictine monasteries. She is a thoughtful, honest Christian.

Acedia and Me seems to have been a long-term project for her, completed during and after the death of her husband in 2003. It tells you more than you might want to know about the deadly sin of acedia, sloth, uncaring, depression, despair, etc. But it is not just a negative book. It is really a book about life under the rubric of the difficulty of living life fully. Norris draws on Scripture, especially the Psalms, the writings of the desert fathers, especially Evagrius and Cassian, Kierkegaard, modern day Benedictines and Cistercians, psychology, poetry, and most of all, her own experience, especially her marriage to a brilliant agnostic Catholic poet who struggled with serious mental and physical illness.

As I read the book I often thought of particular people I know who struggle with depression, physical illness, or the burden of caring for those who are ill. I hope some of them will be encouraged to read it. It certainly encouraged me.

Words in Search of Wisdom

Blogs seem to need names. I have named this one "Words in Search of Wisdom." Why? Wouldn't "Wise Words" be better? Maybe, but it would also be presumptuous and inaccurate.

Another question: Can words search for wisdom? Isn't that what writers are supposed to do before they write? And are words capable of searching for, much less, finding, wisdom? Do they have the power of action independent of a human agent? No, not really. But in my experience of writing, words do have a life of their own even as they come from the mind and the hand of the writer. At least the process of writing brings into being insights that would not have existed had the writer not put forth some words.

That's what I hear in Joan Didion's declaration: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.” Or in Rebecca West's explanation, "I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something."

A website on academic writing suggests, “Write to find out what you think. Your thoughts will be somewhat muddled until you get them in writing. Don't go around and around in circles internally until you know what to write. Write before you know what you're going to say.”

Robert Kellogg in The Psychology of Writing suggests that the act of writing can even be therapeutic. "Psychotherapists have also looked to writing as a means of personal restoration. . . People seek meaning in their lives. Not all must write in order to find meaning, but the mindfulness required by writing could well serve as a tool for therapy."

That has been my experience, so I write in order that I may understand (to paraphrase Anselm, who said, "I believe in order that I may understand"). Or, to bring it into the digital age, I blog in order that I may understand.