I wrote a post some once that asked the question: “Why do we need social media?” And mostly people have said, “So that we can keep in touch with old friends.” This artwork seemed to get that half of it right, but I found the other side interesting.

Without the whole world being one wall post away, it would probably be clearer to us who our actual friends were. We would be having conversations with four or five people. But instead we have 25 conversations with people from all over the country, which might be more than we could handle if we didn’t have the supermedium to help us out.

Friendship on Facebook takes an investment of time. So maybe we lose our shot at everyday friendships by giving the time that they need to the Internet. Of course, we give our time away to lots of things, like reading novels or baking cupcakes with cream-cheese frosting on top.

But isn’t relational energy unique in a way? You can only make so many cupcakes, and you can only have so many conversations in a day before they start to all feel like noise. Friendships are the last thing that should feel like noise. (Novels are the next thing, and cupcakes come after that.)

Let the noise be devoted to useless things, like doing the dishes after you bake, or cleaning the bookshelf. But why make your friendships noisy? They’re no longer friendships at that point. That’s what makes friends different than people you see on the bus. Friends are the ones you make time for, and filter the rest of the world out to listen to.

Noisy friendship, cluttered time: two dangers of having too many friends, which Facebook users are prone to having.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

- Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”

Image shared by bobortify on Designspiration

A Valentine’s Day Prayer for the Wounded:

For all the days of celebration,
Mothers Day to commend their long years of nurture,
Fathers Day for the rare dads who did their job well,
Today some of us will celebrate the purity of Love.

We thank you for them and their stories.

But others have known love as only hurtful to us,
And a source of shame.
For we have mistakes in the past that have left us with voids.
(And we often fill voids with more mistakes,
Like scrambling today to pretend we have more love than we really do.)

Lead us not into such a temptation.

Instead, we pray for a day of redemption, and reminders of your image in man.
Let us trust who do not often trust,
Let us allow close who most push away,
Let us move in who are too often afraid to let ourselves move.

For the world will know who your disciples are
By their appropriate love for each other,
Not only in romance, but in friendship, family and faith.
So give us appropriate, healing love, we pray,
So we can have something so celebrate.

Amen.

Image by 13marzo on Designspiration

For a theology class, I just read an article about whether or not God suffers, and the old Greek ideal of the apatheia of God (think of the English word “apathy,” “no-feeling”). The basic question: When Jesus was crucified, even though the heavens were rended and curtains were torn and people were grieving, did God feel any pain?

Theologians in the first and second centuries would have said, “No, God did not and can never suffer.” Some took a No-Feeling God for granted, in part because they read a lot of Greek literature, and because their friends were suffering as martyrs; in a world of constant threat—of constant chaos and instability—it is reassuring to know that God alone is truly stable. So stable, in fact, that nothing outside himself can affect him. He is perfectly happy, complete and altogether needless. So nothing outside of himself, no mater how dramatic, can affect his state of perfection. The long-accepted doctrine of the impassibility of God described this position, that God is stable and “does not move.”

This thought quickly decides that “God does not suffer,” because to suffer is to be affected by something outside oneself, which also means that to suffer is to change. It wasn’t until recent centuries that theologians talked about a changing, wounded God. And now we say things like, “I want my heart to break like the heart of God does,” or “God loves that grieving mother and weeps with her, because he knows what it’s like to grieve for a Son.”

These words of comfort, which I hold fast to, assume that God suffers on behalf of his creation. The article ended with this application:

The anthropological corollary is, as always, important. The man or woman who lives within the pathos of the crucified God becomes capable of real love, which is concerned for others, sensitive to their suffering, ready for the pain of loving the unlovable, vulnerable to sorrow and hurt as well as open to joy and pleasure. If a cold and invulnerable self-sufficiency is not the divine idea, it is a foolish idolatry to make it the human ideal.

Response: If theology has been so affected by cultural assumptions, like the Greek idea that it’s better to be stable then to suffer, do you think our view of emotions is affected by these same assumptions? What are your culture’s assumptions, about how you are “supposed” to feel?

Yesterday’s post introduced a new story, about a girl who thought about suicide for a long time. She sent me this after our interview; it’s an excerpt from a song she’s written about all the platitudes she’s been given since being depressed (“Just have faith!” “Stop being depressed!”). It starts with “Oh, not another promise, Lord / I don’t want to receive / Another death-blow to my heart / Though I want to believe.”

No wonder charged with “Hypocrite!”
Our churches are today,
When we preach healing happiness
While of our hurts we say:

“God loves, God sees, God lives in us”
To which we can resign.
Except we only say out loud,
“He’ll make your life so fine.”

My life’s not fine! It hurts like hell!
Don’t tell me that He will
“Work ev’rything out for my good”
When I am right here still.

Go back to yesterday’s post to add to the discussion on why we read painful stories.

Image from eggsandlogs on Designspiration