Dec 06 | Thought For the Day

I decided to dive into the vault and pull out some old stuff I wrote for school! I promise I will try and come up with some new new material very shortly.

This piece was written for my “integration and formation class.” We were introduced to the BBC’s intriguing podcast Thought for the Day, and told to write our own. I didn’t get a chance to record mine, but here’s the text.

 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

“Let anyone with ears to hear, listen!” This doesn’t seem to fit our world as it used to – perhaps now it would be more common to hear, “Let anyone with fingers, click!” It is all too easy to be caught in a cycle of learning new things online, and as I click through site after site I sometimes find myself intrigued beyond measure by the Internet’s many answers to Dear Abby in the form of endless blogs dedicated to reader-submitted questions, or indeed by one of the truly perplexing oddities of the Internet, searchoftheday.com, which chronicles the bizarre questions asked daily of our newest sage, Google. Some are just weird or silly: “Is it okay to drink boiling tap water?” or “Recipe calls for vanilla pudding mix I don’t have it Can I just leave it out?” Some, though, are unsettling, even distressing: “It’s been three years and I still don’t love my adopted son,” and “What are some ways to stop yourself being gay.” What was once solely the domain of trusted friends, relatives, the library, or (God forbid) professionals has now become largely the domain of the information superhighway, with all of its breathtaking scenery, all of its potholes, and all of its roadkill. The sheer wealth of choices and variety in information may seem like an unqualified blessing, but of course it isn’t, for our choices cannot be sorted into worthwhile and useless or even harmful information.

How we react to the presence of these many voices in our cultural fabric is up to us. Celebrations or pearl-clutching will not change the fact that people who want to learn are more and more often going to the Internet before they go to anyone else. If people are consulting less with physical living human documents like friends and relations – particularly elders – and consulting more with the manufactured information presented online, what does this mean for the Church? We largely still meet in what kids these days call “meatspace,” and many of us are repelled by the notion of switching entirely to worship and communion online. Furthermore, how are we to navigate in a world that is post-Christendom, where we are forced to compete with many other meaning-makers, and on a global level unprecedented in human history? Those of us who affirm the majesty of God should not hope to claim that God cannot or chooses not to ever move through systems outside the Church. Perhaps, then, we can greet this with some sense of relief…and purpose. If Jesus had truly been striving for univocality, he would never have told parables, never have engaged with the rulers of the day, and would have had no disciples. We people of faith now have the same platform as everyone else, unable to go unquestioned ever again – and what a gift. Now that we are forced into the increasing capitalism of our world, we can plunder the Egyptians by refining our product, just like everyone else. In refining, we must offer something that both meets a need and is different enough from everything else to avoid redundancy. We already have the core of a brilliant product, which meets a universal need: a need that is not only the answer to but the reason for every other need we have, and a need before need itself. Let us borrow but not absorb, cultivate but not colonize, and let us shout, “Let anyone with ears to hear, listen.”