:: desmerizing ::words sometimes have meaning

Many people know that I fill most of the hours of my day in front of various computers.  As a web guy, I spend a lot of time designing, coding, testing, and (once every scattered guilty moment) browsing.  During much of that time, I am subconsciously aware that this path chose me.  While I can say that I actively sought out my current position, the path that led to it was one architected of primarily passive approaches to life.

I’ve often rationalized that my passivity is born out of a “laid-back” attitude.  Even better, it  is from such an abundance of blessings that the universe routinely had thrown at me that I simply chose a card from my hand and played it.

As every good card player knows, though, there are only so many aces that you can pull.  After that, it’s all about the bluff.

I’ve written about this before.  The notion that I had been relying on a passive existence was first introduced to me by a wonderful therapist in my Asheville days.  It was a milestone moment for me.  I will (quite literally) always cite that day as a moment when my life drastically shifted direction.  There was (and perhaps still is) plenty of ground to recover.

One of the struggles continues to revolve around a sense of security in my self : self-confidence, if I’m honest.  Whether it’s volunteering to sing harmonies in a band (something I’ve been doing practically my entire life) or recovering from the disappointment of being rejected for a new position, my “self” suffers a disproportionately large  and long-lasting blow.

Oddly, it’s neither a matter of a fear of failure nor a fear of embarrassment.

I used to think it was a timidness – a “Who me? Put myself out there and do that? I couldn’t do that?”  but I’m no longer convinced that this goes far enough in describing the situation.

Instead, it feels like I have a need to be pursued.  For some strange reason, I seem to ask people to prove to me that I’m at all important to them.  I don’t know where this comes from.

More importantly, this approach doesn’t seem to make that much sense in my adult life.  I wonder if this comes from my background in church communities where you often had to beg and/or plead with people to get them to volunteer.  Now, of course, this seems dysfunctional.  In a thriving community, people readily, willingly, and confidently step up to fill the needs.  In this scenario, you aren’t defined by a functionality that you can provide but by the leadership that you’re able to show – by the personality that you bring to the table.

My communal past (not just my church community past) more resembles the story line in which my friend only calls when a computer needs fixing.  I get frustrated with these “functional friendships” (as I call them) and yet and I give in and fix the computer.  Without fail.  Every time.

It’s not because I’m being pursued – but it provides the illusion of pursuit.  Instead, what is really happening is that my skills are being pursued, my knowledge, some small, compartmentalized component of myself.  Here, my self is the vehicle that delivers the technical knowledge; my personality and being are simply along for the ride.

Now, as I begin to emerge from my cocoon of self-doubt, I’m learning that pursuit requires reciprocation: I’m only going to take so many steps towards you; if you don’t take a step or two in my direction, I’m assuming that you’re not ready, you want nothing to do with me, or you think I’m a creep.

Therefore, consider this an apology.

(To most of you,) I don’t think you’re creeps – and I want to learn more about you, enjoy dinner with you, and help you fix your computer.  It’s just that I’m so used to living my life in such a way that I waited for people and things to come to me that I’m not used to having to step forward myself in return.  It’s the classic, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

And so, to quote, Stuart Smalley:

I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!

But, does any of that really matter?

Maybe they ARE already gone.

I don’t want to belabour this rapture fiasco, but maybe it happened it we just absolutely missed it.  Maybe everything happend just as Camping predicted but no one even noticed.

Consider this: Camping said that only two hundred million people were set to be raptured.  That’s less than three percent of the earth’s population.  Some would argue,  ”Hardly even a blip.” in the grand scheme of things.

Maybe these Christians were so holy, so far removed from everyday life, that no body will even miss them.  Maybe they had such little effect on the trajectory of human kind that when Jesus swept them away on Saturday no one even noticed.

I hope that’s not the case.

Maybe the only thing worse than being accused of fundamentalism and intolerance for people who are trying to live like Jesus  is to be proven inconsequential.  If they’re gone and we don’t notice staggering drops in generosity, love, reduction of poverty, and happiness, then what I think God wants and what he must really want are completely off base and it’s just as well that he leaves me behind.

Dear Lord, I hope we don’t let our existence be inconsequential.  And we’ve got to ask.. who are you and I mattering too, right now, right here?  It’s not, if I were gone who would miss me…. it’s who relies on me, loves me, needs me, wants me, serves me, inspires me now, today, on planet earth.

I had reason to continue thinking about pursuit – something I’ve posted about before.  In particular, I’ve been thinking about what it means to pursue the “abundant life.”  Lots of people talk about it.  Jesus talked about it.  Everyone seems to have a different interpretation of exactly what it means.

I tend to think about it in terms of life as it was meant to be lived.  This assumes a lot of things.  It doesn’t assume that there is a “right” way to live – at least in terms of rules that ought to be followed.  Instead, it assumes that there is a trajectory that we should try to find ourselves on and that we should try to get ourselves on in the event that we find ourselves not on it.  It also assumes that there is a god or some higher power that has outlined this idea.

We often process this idea as achieving prosperity in some combination of realms.  The obvious here is financial prosperity – believing that living on a trajectory towards some right way of living will be rewarded by God with monetary rewards.  But there are others – intellectual prosperity, relational prosperity, prosperity of status or recognition.  There are many others.

Some would also consider the promise of getting to heaven someday as promise of prosperity.

All of these are hard for me to process.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s a very prominent part of my psyche that craves financial riches, fruitful relationships, deep meaning, and even public renown.  I understand the desire for these things.

My problem is that I believe that we all have a grand (even if undefined) purpose and that none of these things really help us fulfill that.  Yes, there are those of us who will do our best to attempt to rationalize that mo’ money means mo’ solutions to the world’s problems.  But how often is this the case?  Only recently have we heard of the mega-rich committing to give away their vast fortunes once they die.  Relationships and status really have no bearing if your heart is not willing to give it all up for something greater.

What is counter-intuitive about this whole process is that the pursuit of the abundant life is actually the most selfless activity that we can undertake – that purpose is most often found when we are ready and willing to move ourselves as much out fo the picture as possible.

Instead, what seems to happen is that we’re willing to speak highly of honoring others first until it becomes uncomfortable , or (more likely) a threat to the riches we have accumulated.

We’re willing to help a family in poverty in whatever ways we can until it begins to strain on our own back accounts.

We’re willing to go out of our way to meet with someone that we’re mentoring until it conflicts with our appointment books.

We’re wiling to welcome those with different beliefs and lifestyles until it starts to threaten our ticket to heaven.

Everything that holds us back from really living is rooted deeply in selfishness.  How ironic that the only thing holding us back from really living are the things that we’re selfishly holding on to?

Our pursuit, then is not about accumulation, knowledge, finances, status, riches, relationships, or notoriety.  Our pursuit is not avoiding sin, or determining right from wrong, gaining heaven over hell – all of these things are rooted in a deep and dangerous self-interest.  Our pursuit is towards less of ourselves.  Less me getting in the way of loving, caring for, honoring another human being with no self-concerned preconditions.

Less of me competing against you for things that don’t matter.

Less of me sabotaging your pursuits.

Less of me.

This weekend at a youth event, I was asked to give a talk about protecting your spiritual life online.  Unsurprisingly, the first places that my mind went were to the Amsterdam-shaming back alleys of the web – the porn sites that we’ve all heard of and know of and some of us have become addicted to.  Granted, this does not qualify me as über-observant – it’s rampant, dangerous, and personal.

Naturally, I thought through this and into the world of objectification of people/women and how we often remove people’s humanity when it comes to things like pornography and lust.  It’s easy to treat people like inanimate things when we see them as things.  This has been at the center of these discussions for a long, long time.

As I got to thinking a little more about this, though, I realized that there are objects that I value and that have worth to me.  To say that we’re objectifying something doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re removing it’s value.  My computer, for example, is a very valuable object that is very important to me.  It let’s me work and make a living.  It provides entertainment and information.  My life is somehow richer because I have access to it.

Then, it’s not just the objectification of people that is at issue.

I remember playing a game on my phone called “Pocket God.”  It’s not so much a game really as a virtual world where you get to manipulate the environment of a bunch of crazy tropical islanders… and manipulate the islanders themselves.  You can throw them to the sharks, toss them in a volcano, or just poke them with the pointy finger of the god that you’re pretending to be.  When you kill enough of them off, the handy-dandy plus sign in the sky allows you to whimsically create more islanders to torture and/or love toughly.

These islanders are bits.  Simple, invaluable, plentiful bits.  Figures on a screen.

And they have no value.  They are virtual people that most people would say don’t exist or at least cease to exist when the screen is turned off.

It was this that struck me.

The danger to humanity in the internet age is not objectification but virtualization.  Of everything.  We have virtual relationships and virtual friendships.  We are far more willing to rip a virtual friend a new corn chute when we don’t have to look them square in the eyes.  We are far more willing to explore someone else’s body when it’s just a picture on a computer screen that could as easily have been drawn by a computer as photographed in real life.  Crime becomes inconsequential . . . maybe like a white lie, we commit white fraud or white defamation.

I have far more compassion for the friends I see every day (or the ones that I know are real even if I on see evidence of them online) then for the ones that flame my Facebook wall with disagreeing comments.

Sometimes, things matter. Before this gets passed over as overdramatic or an exaggeration, think about the fact that TV changed the way that families relate to each other and how we oriented our lives.  Every advance has had some effect.   Now we’re living in the reality where this generation will not know what it is like to live without the internet, and constant connections, and virtual friends.

So, the challenge is to find a face-to-face, heart-to-heart, relationship with another human being and to lose interest in how high the total of your friends list can go.  I believe that humans are most alive when they’re connected to the universe spiritually and to each other.  Some things weren’t meant to be reduced to bits and bytes.