The Radicality of Unplugging

No one has ever accused me of being a maverick. Well, except for that business of quitting my job post-middle age, buying a farmstead and commencing to learn how to grow food.  But that exception granted, my life has otherwise been notable for its predictability - reliability, I hope, and integrity; a willingness to help, I pray, and a quiet pursuit of excellence.  I’ve been a team player, serving on more boards and committees and task-forces than was good for me, but was, I hope, helpful to those organizations.  I’ve been agreeable, congenial, a bridge-builder if I’ve contributed anything at all, and a thought provoker.  I have at least sought to encourage purposefulness and principled intentionality.  I value cruise control in my car, but decry it in every other aspect of life.  I’ve rarely been a contrarian; never been a radical flame-thrower, and as my co-workers often lamented, only reluctantly become confrontational.  In recent years, studying the enneagram, I’ve learned that I’m a nine - one of those “peacemakers” who just wants everyone to be happy and play nice.

I play nice.  Even if I don’t much care for you or the moment.  If that makes me dishonest, at least I’m a congenial fake.

Recently, however, I made the decision to close my Facebook account, and I’m both surprised at and a little embarrassed by how radical that feels.

Let me quickly add that, in the grand scheme of things, it is not very significant at all.  The reciprocal killings in the Middle East?  That is significant.  The corruption and disintegration of American democracy?  That’s a tectonic shift with global implications.  Climate change?  I haven’t the words to characterize the future repercussions.  Tim Diebel leaving Facebook?  No, that doesn’t even ripple the water collected in my clogged sink.

For some reason, however, it feels big; consequential even.  Bold. Why is that?  

It might have something to do with how routinized and reflexive our collective use of Facebook has become.  Posting on Facebook has become almost autonomic - like breathing and blinking.  That’s true, at least, for some.  Ever since I went public with my intention to unplug from Facebook, I’ve been surprised to discover how many of my friends did so long ago - or never jumped into Facebook to begin with.  I’ve been equally moved by the number of respondents confessing that they “wished they could” or “wished they would” take the same action.

Which is simply, albeit anecdotally, to muse that Facebook may not be as ubiquitous as I supposed.

Much has been written about the societal impact of the social media phenomenon.  Social scientists will no doubt be analyzing such questions for years to come.  Has it changed us?  Has it harmed us?  Has it helped, informed, broadened and connected us?  Maybe - to all those questions.

I cannot speak for anyone else, and I have no moral authority from which to advise others about what they should or should not be doing with their time and their social media feeds.

Reflecting on my own experience and decision, however, I can make a few observations  by way of accounting for my own choice.  There is much positive to say about reconnecting with friends and acquaintances, and sharing one another’s ebbs and flows.  In truth, I’ll miss that.  It will be incumbent on me to exercise new  strategies for keeping in touch.  Perhaps we “over share” the miscellaneous flora and fauna of our lives, but there are worse mistakes we could make in our life.

I will not miss, however, the misinformation, the disinformation, and the constant, almost irresistible airing of our worst selves.  This happens most often within the “groups” of which I am a member, where oxygen seems to come from complaining about the bananas at the local grocery store or the temperature of the pizza at the new eatery in town, and the voluble retorts from those who disagree.  I have nothing to add to the sports commentary that regularly fills the feeds.  I don’t really have time for the political harangues that vent and offend but never inform, enrich or persuade.  For some reason on Facebook we feel a kind of permission to be offensive, abusive, insulting and dismissive toward each other in ways not typically true face to face.

The simple fact is that too much of the time, I just don’t care about what pops up in my feed.  Threaded along, to be sure, is inspiration and humor and wisdom and joy, but finding such threads takes persistence and work in the face of Facebook’s algorithmic tyranny and our own vulgar depravity.  And I’ve become convinced that my time can be better spent.  I don’t leave angry or hurt or alienated or frustrated.  I simply leave in search of something more.

Which might suggest that cutting ties to Facebook is a radical act, after all.  Etymologically, the word “radical” is all about going to the root, and Facebook seems to me to be all about the leaves.  There is nothing wrong with leaves or course - especially this time of year.  But in this season of my life, roots seem more compelling - more anchoring and nourishing, and ultimately more connected with the world surrounding them.   

And so I pull the plug on this great social experiment of social media.  To borrow a phrase, "It's been fun, but it hasn't been that much fun."  I wish you well on Facebook if you remain there.  I hope we can stay in touch through other channels. Maybe even face to face.  

Now that would be radical, indeed.

Different is not Deficient

 

I understand the appeal of John Lennon’s anthemic paean to the ultimate campfire:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

What’s not to love about the idea of the world living as one - especially in these days of horrific killing in the Middle East, a seemingly intractable war in Ukraine, and the noxious childcare center that is the U.S. House of Representatives.  No wonder the idea of everyone dissolving their differences and holding beatific hands has such powerful appeal.

But include me in the circle convened by the poet and activist Audre Lorde, in the pictured quotation above, who relocates the root of our troubles away from our differences, themselves, and positions it squarely on the egocentric and bigoted view we have of them.

It’s mystifying to me how, in this day and age, anyone can view their particular country or their political party or their religious practice or their economic system to be “the best.”  It takes me back to Bill Murray's memorable claim in the movie, Meatballs, that the humble Camp North Star offered the best summer camping experience "in this price range".  But this isn't a summer camp, and this isn’t a football league, and we are more than fans sporting our favorite jerseys.  Surely by this point in history every heretofore envisioned option for organizing life and meaning has amply exposed its ugly underbelly.  

We can claim, for example, that the United States of America is the best, but according to what measure do we assert or defend that claim?  Happiness?  No, the U.S. doesn’t even break into the top 10 in that category where Finland tops the list.  Education?  According to some assessments, the U.S. has the best educational system, but Americans are not the most educated.  Those would be the Germans.  Interesting.  Access to health care?  No, we are 23rd, behind #1 Sweden.  Safety?  No, there we rank 129th, a long way behind #1 Iceland.  Standard of living?  No, that’s Sweden, again.

According to U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of the “Best Countries in the World,” again, the U.S. fails to make it into the top 10.  Apparently our #1 position in the list of gun possession - over twice as many guns per capita as #2 Yemen - didn’t count for as much as we might like to think.  

None of which should be construed as suggesting that this isn’t a good place to live, or that “American” is a bad thing to be.  It’s just a hint that we have a lot of work yet to do.  Along with every other country in the world.  

I have spent my life within the orbit of Christianity - it has and continues to shape me and give my life and my living both direction and definition of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.  I’m not one of those who lumps all religions into the same basket with the dismissive aggregation, “They are pretty much all the same.”  No, that’s not the way I see it.  There are big differences.  But does the language of “best” really apply here?  I can articulate how I find meaning within Christianity - how it compels me and claims me - but I suspect that a good Buddhist or Hindu or Jew or Muslim could do the same.  But whatever value our religious traditions certainly have in the world, our religious expression - across the board - is a mixed bag.  We have done much good.  We have caused much pain.  I’m not looking forward to answering for my own flawed expression of the Christian faith, let alone for the church through history.  

Communists and Socialists, I’m willing to say, had some good ideas, but they quickly got off track and doubled down on their flaws.  As, of course, has Capitalism.  These are hardly perfect systems.  Surely we can continue to refine and improve and evolve them into something better.

But would the absence of all religion, the absence of all countries, the absence of political parties, the absence of capital make us better?

I doubt it, which is where I think Lennon’s winsome anthem gets it wrong.   But even if, by chance, he turns out to be right, what I do know is that it would make us blander, duller, and intrinsically, pathologically boring.  I once heard a preacher proclaim that “different is not deficient”.  Indeed.  Would that we could grasp that.  It is our differences that make us interesting, colorful in literal and metaphorical ways, and stimulating.  

Now, if only it were our curiosity and wonder that were stimulated instead of our aggression.  

Imagine that, for a change.

The Warmth Between

It was quiet with their departure.  Four generations had gathered - from 93 years to 10 months - to visit, to feed, to be fed; to reminisce, to imagine; to experience new things, to walk in wonderment through the woods; to simply be in one another’s company.  And then the car was loaded and backed down the driveway, and it was quiet again.  

We straightened a few things, paused for a moment, and then settled in the cool of the waning afternoon by the fire outside; its flames making visible the affective mood.

An intermezzo of sorts - a harmonic sequence between the joyful  “firsts” of today with an infant’s fresh awakenings, and yet another “first” in our own progression of grief with my dad’s birthday tomorrow.  There are more such firsts to come in a quick progression - this birthday, and Thanksgiving and Christmas - but it’s the birthday that is upon us just now in its poignant immensity.  It’s a poignant juxtaposition, what with the echoing memory of a life well-lived, and the experiential joy of a life just beginning.

In the sunset, then, between these glows - the gratitude and the grief, the anticipation and the memory, the joy and the melancholy, the embers center us.  They are the warmth between.  And in their light, Louise Erdrich’s sensible wisdom offers a satisfying fullness.  

“You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”  (From The Painted Drum)

There are, to be sure, things I have overlooked.  Important things I have missed.  Tasks I have neglected.  There are blossoms I have ignored and sunrises I have taken for granted.  There have been rain-filled puddles I walked around instead of splashed through; rain showers I sought shelter from instead of tilting my face upward, into the falling drops, with mouth open wide. There are stories the details of which I have forgotten or found, in the moment of their telling, uninteresting.  There have been silences I spoke into too quickly.  There have been tender evenings in the midst of which I simply went to bed.  

Apples, in other words, have fallen all around me and I have missed out on their sweetness.  

But in days like today, and in years like these treasured ones, I am grateful for the ones I have tasted.  

Every sweet bite.

Every juicy dribble down the chin of my days.

Despite the cool of the day, it’s warm tonight in the glow of these logs - the glow of these loves,

And I’m full.

Not the Way To Extend A Vacation

After rushing from our E arrival gate to our C departure gate at the Charlotte airport for our connecting flight home, only to discover that our breathtakingly short layover time would be extended by a short delay, we took a deep breath and smiled at the likelihood that our luggage would now actually join us back in Des Moines.  The reason for the delay was that there was as yet no aircraft at our gate.  As the delay deepened into the night, we were assured - repeatedly over the next hour and more, that the plane was on its way from the hanger.  It wasn’t a complete fiction because we eventually did board the tardy aircraft, only to wait for more fuel.  After backing away from the gate we waited yet longer, finally learning that there was still a mechanical problem - one that would eventually topple our flight home into the next morning.  “No problem,” they assured us.  We were presented with 3 fine airport motel options for a brief overnight, along with meal vouchers - never mind that at that hour nothing was open.  

Once delivered by the shuttle, whose dashboard control panel signaled in large letters that "Vehicle Service Overdue", to our selected lodging, piloted by our flatulent but jovial driver, we checked into our assigned room sometime after midnight, deprived of luggage toothbrush, or, well, much of anything but the clothes on our back.  But it was an educational stay.  I don’t think I had ever been in a “smoking preferred” motel, well-stocked with 3 single-serve packages of decaffeinated coffee, and a powerful search light focused on our window throughout the night.  

After a luxuriant and restful moment of sleep, we caught the 4:30 am shuttle back to the airport - an “express” van, as it turned out, driving 75 mph through the posted 15 mph speed limits of the airport driveways.  Dizzy, but nonetheless and gratefully unharmed, we made our way inside, through security, and somehow, after some trial and effort, found our gate which was mis-posted on the airport departure computers.  At least by this time, Starbucks was open with options that included caffeine.  They accepted our vouchers, and with coffee and breakfast sandwiches in hand, settled into the seating area to pass the time through yet another delay. This one, however, did resolve into boarding and actual takeoff.  

And at this point, from the vantage point of 30,000 feet and the dubious assurances of the flight attendant who hasn’t learned that the “S’s” in “Des Moines” are silent, it appears that we are likely to actually make it home.

Which will look mighty good.

Especially the shower.

Even more especially the toothbrush and toothpaste.

Meanwhile, Maine was a restorative joy.  Every, sight, every hike, every bite.  Unfortunately, I won’t be including in those fond memories the leftover crab and lobster meat that spent an extra night unrefrigerated in my suitcase.  Or the olfactory greeting that will almost surely shout a pungent “good morning” when I unzip it.

Ah, American Airlines. I gotta love you…

…especially when there are no other options.  

At least you eventually got us home, safely.  And for that, I’m grateful. 

Where would you like me to send the lobster and crab?  

P.S.  The hero in all this, of course, is our rock star Housesitter who, having already buttoned up our abode and headed home to her family in anticipation of our return, returned to Taproot Garden after midnight to spend a bonus night with two cranky corgis and three coops full of chickens.  Just think:  you make all this possible.  

You are the best!  

The Thorns Within

Many years ago, a wise friend noted our tendency to compare the inside of ourselves with the outside of others.  “It’s not a fair comparison,” he insisted.  Through the ensuing years I’ve come to appreciate his insight. Most of us do a reasonably effective job of sanding smooth our rough exteriors and sharp edges so that what others see is glossy and urbane.  Even when we know it to be a highly curated presentation, it still looks better than the unvarnished splinters that snag and bloody our internal self-assessment.  “Everybody around me is so ‘together’; why am I such a mess?”

It is, as my friend, pointed out, an unfair and dishonest comparison.  

So far as it goes. 

It turns out that it only goes half way, as the hollowed out tree helped me to understand. 

We haven’t really a clue as to what is going on inside those around us - what daggers and thorns are piercing their inner mind and soul. What griefs and disappointments, what slights and disillusionments, what fears and stunted aspirations. We really don’t know what makes those near us tick - or hurt, or ache, or vote the way they do, or react the way they do, or hope for what they do, or recede into silence the way they do.

I haven’t a clue what is jabbing their insides.

Prodding.

Embittering.

Wounding.

Frightening.

But I can ask. And patiently listen. And wait for the timid animal of authentic truth to emerge. 

And wonder what kind of a balm Gilead - or I - might have to offer.  

A Chilly Morning, an Evergreen Tree, and Twenty-Six Years of Grace

I remember well the day we wed

 I can see that picture in my head

I still believe the words we said

Forever will ring true

Love is certain, love is kind

Love is yours and love is mine

But it isn't something that we find

It's something that we do

It's holding tight, lettin' go

It's flying high and laying low

Let your strongest feelings show

And your weakness, too

It's a little and a lot to ask

An endless and a welcome task

Love isn't something that we have

It's something that we do

We help to make each other all that we can be

Though we can find our strength and inspiration independently

The way we work together is what sets our love apart
So closely that you can't tell where I end and where you start
~Clint Black/Donald Ewing

 

It was chilly that September morning as we gathered in our friends’ perfectly manicured backyard garden.  The appointed hour was 10:45 a.m. but of course we and the close circle of family and friends had been drifting in for an hour or more.  Nieces and nephews explored the bushes and trees and flower beds; friends huddled in conversational circles.  We had planned a simple ceremony; there had been no rehearsal.  Eventually the guests were shooed into chairs and Lori and I and Daddy convened before a large evergreen tree for the words, in the promises, the admonitions, the prayers, the readings, and finally the kiss.  Suddenly, it wasn’t only the cool morning air that caused the shivers.  And then the pictures, the greetings, the hugs and more kisses. 

And there we were:  husband and wife. 

Twenty-six years later as of today, I’m smiling.  Some years the smiling has been easier than others; some years fatter and others leaner; some years puzzling and others crystal clear.  But every evening we get to offer a cleansing, grateful kiss; every morning we wake to each other’s smile freckled by the prospect of a fresh day with new possibilities.

We don’t take such graces for granted.  And so we celebrate a lot and often this time of year.  On July 4 we celebrate the night we got engaged.  On August 31 we celebrate the anniversary of our first date which had occurred not quite a year prior to that engagement.  On September 11 we celebrate my birthday, and on the 12th my parents' anniversary of a marriage that extended 70 years - a pretty good example.  On September 20 we celebrate not only the anniversary of our wedding, but also the anniversary of our 2nd date during which both of us felt a subtle shift in the axis of the universe.  We hold them all as sacred days.  

We have been assaulted in recent months by enough evidence of mortality to know that these moments have a shelf life.  Days are intrinsically ephemeral.  There will come a day when one of us reaches across the table to take a hand no longer there.  Which is why in the meantime, these days are set apart...

...reverenced...

savored.   

As holy as they are euphoric.   

As filled with imagination as they are with memory. 

Interwoven so interdependently that, as the song observed, we can’t tell where I end and where you start.  It is a happy sanctum.

And for 26 years now, I have been the luckiest guy in the world.  

Smiling, then, at the memory of that evergreen tree, and shivering all over again, I can’t imagine what the next 26 years might hold.  We recall Daddy observing to us, just before we exchanged our vows and having heard those familiar words from 1 Corinthians 13, "We won't always be patient; we won't always be kind.  But when we are, God is working through us."

We are still, after all, figuring out how to help that happen, but let’s go, into how ever many of the next decades we can squeeze forward.  “I still believe the words we said forever will ring true.”

 

 

 

My Grief Observed

I really don’t sit around grieving all the time.  Only some of the time.  I rather feel permission to spend some of my waking - and no doubt some of my sleeping - hours indulging this grim quietude, given the fact that I have suffered the loss of both parents in the last 12 months - my mother, at 90 years of age, and ten months later my dad at almost 97.  One can hardly feel short-changed by those lifespans.  But it isn’t injustice I feel in the wake of their deaths; it is grief.  It is the ache of loss; it is the deafening silence of the absence that has replaced a lifetime of presence.  It is a truism, I recognize, that I have never known life without these two in it.  They have variously been everything, the anchoring center, and like the stars in my orbit, in turn proximate and peripheral.  But always there, in the room or on the other side of the house, across town or on the other end of a telephone call.  

And now they aren’t. And I haven’t found the blueprints for constructing a new world absent those raw materials.

In the forward to C.S. Lewis’ book, A Grief Observed, Lewis’ step-son notes:

“In referring to this book in conversation, one often tends to leave out, either inadvertently or from laziness, the indefinite article at the beginning of the title. This we must not do, for the title completely and thoroughly describes what this book is, and thus expresses very accurately its real value. Anything entitled “Grief Observed” would have to be so general and nonspecific as to be academic in its approach and thus of little use to anyone approaching or experiencing bereavement.

This book, on the other hand, is a stark recounting of one man’s studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life.”

I assert here that same particularity.  I can’t speak for anybody else.  I don’t know what their grief is like, clumsily amateurish as I am just now feeling out the contours of my own.  It is, after all, new to me.  It is, come to think of it, new to most of us in this culture so averse to discomfort and fixated on prosperous pleasure that we cloister the ugliness of death in the mortuary, under the capable hands of the funeral director, and after the requisite “celebration of life”, “move on” as quickly as possible.  If once we bathed the corpse of our loved ones and laid them out in our living room for a time of relational support and introspective comprehension, we moderns happily leave all that to the trained professionals behind their closed doors.  And so it is that we are much more practiced at moving on than we are at grieving.  As uncomfortable with our own morosity as are our family and friends, we quickly return to the more socially acceptable business of getting happy.

The rush to bliss is especially conspicuous in the faith community - the very environment which has nourished and shaped me from infancy, and ultimately employed me in adulthood. Christians have been talking about eternity since the time of Jesus, and death and dying have inevitably been topics in the conversation.  

In the abstract.  Precisely as “topics.”  Rarely as experiences.  We don’t talk much about grieving.  We don’t linger over Jesus weeping at the death of his friend, skipping past to quickly arrive at Lazarus’ subsequent resuscitation.  Similarly the disciples’ traumatization following the execution of Jesus.  Portrayed nowhere in the gospels as spiritual luminaries, their grief has the odor of one more disappointing ineptitude.  Let’s get on with Easter.  Grieving in the church has come to seem implicitly untoward - a spiritual immaturity if not an outright deficiency.  

I say, then, somewhat confessionally how empty all the theological affirmations I have espoused in funerals throughout my ministry land with me just now.  I don’t eschew them; I am not experiencing any loss of faith.  I still hold fast to the assurance of eternal life in the complete fulfillment of the Creator’s intention.  I am simply, quietly acknowledging that, in this season of loss, I don’t find it comforting.  More than one devout soul in recent months has assumed celebration with the rhetorical question, “Isn’t it a joy that your mother, your father are with Jesus face to face?”  And of course I smile and reply with a slight nod of my head, but the real answer is, “No, ‘joy’ is not at all what I am feeling right now.  I am hurting.  I am grieving.  Trusting in their eternal well-being does not take away the pain of their loss.”

Lewis, in observing his own grief over the death of his wife, noted something of the same realization.

“Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.  But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief...

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

Yes, I believe.  I also hurt, and just now that pain occupies the foremost ground.  If that is selfishness, so be it.  It is, after all, MY grief.  If others process their peculiar losses differently I bless them.  I can only own my particular experience.  I am not suggesting that the death of my parents is an evil or an affront.  They lived beautiful and beautifully long lives. Their deaths were perfectly natural.  I give thanks that, unlike so many who endure a slow and painful decline accompanied by all the mechanical accessories that extend our breathing but not our living, my parents’ respective deaths were quiet and mercifully swift.  They died as they had lived, with dignity and grace.  And they have now, I trust, received the life for which they had prepared.

And I, while affirming the goodness of that consummation, hold my sadness where I once held them.  Let me just say that it’s not an even trade.

It isn’t anger I feel, or violation; just sadness.  Neither disability nor deficiency, merely a powerfully new -to me - natural and inevitable experience.  

This, I trust, is a passage not a pit.  I don’t know what time will do with my grief, but though I have every expectation that it will do something, it won’t involve eliminating it.  Life - at least the life I have experienced - is bent toward living.  And I do continue to live, even as I continue to grieve.  I want to attend to this latter precisely because I believe it to be a nourishment to the former.  If the garden has taught me anything it is that flourishing and dying are not opposites, but inseparably intertwined - something like the relationship between notes and rests in music.  Hardly enemies, the silence and the sounds are partners.

“How long will it take,” I am newly realizing, is the wrong and misguided question.  Grieving and flourishing move hand in hand.  And so grieving, I also lean toward the fruiting, unable to imagine what it will look like; toward the music, even if I can’t imagine the sound.