Letter #79: Light of the World
Why I'm so sick of being online.
So, I went out walking and thought about your sense of double vision—the feeling that “the closer I draw to Christ, the darker my vision of the world becomes and the more my joy increases.” Perfectly put. And it suddenly hit me how weirdly related that is to something else we’ve been talking about in another context lately: how much we both hate being online.
Twitter especially. But all of it. And I’m trying really, really hard here not to turn into one of those grumpy conservative techno-pessimists before I even hit 35. I read recently that millennials are having a mid-life crisis, which is bad news for our life expectancy! Even worse if I start to sound like Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets at this tender young age. But I can’t help it: all these new-fangled gadgets are making me sick. Harrumph.
And the thing is, I love new-fangled gadgets! You and I used to be the first on the block to get the latest video game consoles when they came out. But I was reflecting on the fact that I always go on walks before I write anything, and I realized it’s because I need to reset my mind so I’m living in God’s world again instead of Twitter-world. It’s not so much that “Twitter isn’t real life” as that we’re all now living two lives, layered onto each other. There’s the life in space and time, that God made. And there’s the life in my phone, that we as a species seem to have made from the noxious fumes we belch up out of our hearts.
Which world you live in seems to depend on your state of mind. Maybe it always does. We imagine “parallel universes” as separate locations. But maybe they can occupy the same location, seen through different eyes. Just as light glowing through stained glass illuminates the image of a human face, the frame of mind we’re in can light up the world.
We train ourselves to see and highlight different things, so that the universe is transformed by how we see it. When I’m deep into online-brain, the face of the world looks gnarled and demented, greasy with the worst kinds of pleasures and twisted with the worst kinds of rage. Put the phone down and that same face, warts and all, starts to look human again, and beloved of God. It seems joy is a way of seeing things in that light.
“The eye is the light of the body…but if the light within you is darkened, how great is that darkness!” Are we training ourselves to go blind? Or is it possible to bring the light of joy into even the late hours of this tech-sick world?
Love,
Spencer
Image: Joschi71, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
 | A guest post by
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Hey! So you don’t like being online…here…with all of us! I see how you are. Harumph! 😂
Even though I'm a millennial, I have embraced my inner curmudgeon. For instance, I never got what my late father in law called a twit-book, which is what he called all social media, account...except for Facebook, but I never use it. This has kept me from falling off the cliff of insanity with the rest of the world. The problem is, the entire world fell into insanity and I didn't get it, at all, until hearing about the "echo chamber" of social media.
Now, I keep wondering when everyone, including me, but especially we Christians, will wake up to the failed experiment of social media and the smart phone. They're just bad for us. Anything that distorts the beauty of the world around us and love of our fellow Man, is obviously bad for us.
I am a cranky conservative but I remember sitting at my grandma's table and having all my aunts rail against the patriarchy. When they left to go smoke, leaving my grandma and me alone, I heard my grandma let out a little sigh and say quietly to herself, "I miss the patriarchy." I feel that way about a lot of things. I miss the world before the smart phone.
We can't go back now but recognizing and reaching towards some good that that "old world" had isn't a bad thing either. The healthy question has to be, how do we recover the good that we lost and integrate it into a world that has changed? And the answer is always through prayer, Christ, and the love of our neighbor. The golden rule is the answer to everything. It's how we realize it in our lives that troubles the healthy soul.