Over the weekend, my church (Numinous Inc) took time away from our normal lives to retreat into a time of focused community and life intertwined. This marks the 17th year that I have led this body into the wilderness for an extended conversation about God. It’s always good, and this weekend was no different. We shared life. We ate meals together (remember, my encouraging you to build the practice of hospitality, which is centered around shared meals…breaking bread together….among the world’s most ancient traditions). We experienced the beauty of nature. We laughed. We cried. And ultimately, we cared for one another.
This idea of caring is something that is an idea that finds itself at a unique moment in our culture. On the one hand, through social media and hand-held computing power, we are now awake at a unique time in history when activism is very high. Or, at least, you constantly see one story after another of someone being recorded by a hand-held phone. Whether is someone doing good to another or a person behaving badly, we now live in a time when you have to consider that your every action could be recorded….and then broadcast widely (and wildly) across the social media universe. Along with the constant video and pictures, the lowly number sign has been transformed into a weapon of power in the formidable HASHTAG (should I put in a #hashtagpower thingy…is that even the right way to do that??). It doesn’t take much for something to be “trending” and then, well, on to the next thing.
And therein lies the challenge of our days. There is a sense, at least to me, that few people really care any more. Or, maybe a better word or idea is that most people seem so very bored with the world. This idea isn’t necessarily something only for the time of mobile computing; the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, writing towards the end of his life in the 1960s and 1970s, expressed an idea that “boredom is the mood of our age.”
Don’t read in that, though, the old idea of being bored as in there is nothing to do. Rather, modern boredom is almost a sense of being so mentally detached that the world cannot captivate. We don’t care and nothing can make us care…a version, really, of nihilism. Nothing matters.
I think we are here now because of the level of our freedom in our society…that sense of our great wealth of both possessions and in our time. We are richer than the nobility of 100s of years ago. And yet we mentally, if not actually, have no appreciation of that wealth. Technology has so transformed the world in which we live that find ourselves at a version of the world of Wal-e in which we don’t care because we don’t have to care. But, since we don’t have to care, then we forget how to care. In our non-caring, then we become numb to one another. In fact, in some respects, a lot of our modern day activism is really the response of the bored. We will casually pull out our phone, shoot whatever we see that bugs us, and then put a hashtag on it. And, then we move on…..looking perhaps for more interesting things in an age when nothing interests us, or impresses us.
What we need today is not more leisure, but more of an awareness of our need to care–our need to be present now. So, that brings me back to my church retreat. We aren’t a perfect group of people…who is, though? Still, for now almost 20 years, a group of unique individuals have chosen to personally be involved in the life of another human. Resources have been shared. Tears, laughter, anger, compassion and disagreement all have been a part of our life…like a good family invested in one another.
We care for each other.
We have to care.
I pray for you that you find such a place where you can care and where you can be cared for. If you live in Central Florida, come join me and my friends. If you don’t, then take the first step by caring for another.