A Puff of Smoke in the Imagination

In what I consider to be Camus’ greatest novel, the Plague, the doctor reflects, “And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” If this is in any way true, then it should come as little surprise that news anchors speak of death and suffering without so much as a tear. They speak of tragedy without apparent remorse – it seems that this runs in accord with a long-standing tradition of reporting a neutral history (but that is another matter). For the moment, I would like to draw attention to the fact that we are a society saturated with simulated corpses, and we are blurring the boundaries of fiction and reality. There seems to be little difference between reality TV and the recent “high profile” court case. Though there is a large degree of difference between war in the Middle East and war in our local cinema, the two seem contiguous in American consciousness. We see corpses. We see lots of them, piles of them, and yet we do not cry out for a stop. We race to the cinemas for more. When we get home from the cinemas, we turn on our TVs and hear of more disaster. The transition from cinema to the evening news on TV, from fiction to reality seems slight. We have made life a stage and blurred the difference between fiction and reality, and consequently we have thickened our skin toward the wrong things, namely people. Our hearts seemed to have grown callous to the sight of corpses and familial deterioration. It is, after all, for our entertainment.

Without a doubt, social media has revolutionized cultures and societies. This is scary and exhilarating. There is such a great potential! However, “With social media we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same social media comes praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be” (James 3:9-10). There are living bodies on the receiving side of our messages. There are living bodies on the receiving side of our comments, pictures, and video posts. How long ago was it that a person was encouraged to commit suicide while on the Internet? And I’ll wager a guess that there are many other stories like it. “My brothers and sisters, this should not be.” Social media has a seemingly infinite capacity for good and evil. If never before has the human tongue been tamed, how might we tame the ever evolving world of social media?

I have never given Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath much credit. I often consider it an average novel, written for a few high schoolers who will hate reading it. However, it records the methodical deterioration of a Midwest family’s dignity as they seek merely to survive. With each step, they stoop lower; they are forced to stoop lower and lower. By the end, a reader must ask, “Is there any dignity left? And if there is not, when was the line crossed, when was dignity relinquished?” These are important questions, and I might add, “At what point do we murder other people’s dignity through social media?”

With the proliferation of technology, with the fast paced evolution of technological capability, the church needs to consider its profound situation. For now the value of both dead and living bodies seems to be losing their worth in the American consciousness, whether or not this is consciously realized. This is vitally important. The church must not miss the train on this issue; the church must not let this go unchallenged, unqualified. To this, to the rise of social media, the church must recover its prophetic voice more than ever, for even the sight of corpses and the knowledge of other living bodies are merely puffs of smoke in our imaginations.

Perhaps, a proactive start might be to hesitate and weigh carefully each word, picture, and video before posting. Perhaps, a proactive start would be to counteract the brutality with a few kind words and simple gestures of grace. This is surely possible. Just as the tongue may be used for good and evil, social media may be used for both good and evil. Let it be for good, and let us remember the value of other human persons.

Community: Plumbing the Depths of a Mud Puddle

It would seem that we are each individuals each responsible for our own peccadilloes and other perhaps more severe though private sins. It would seem that we are each unrelated atoms floating about casting dice for our own destinies. I am responsible for me and for no other, and no other is responsible for me.

Since the so-called foundations of “modernism” have begun to crumble or have crumbled (whichever flavor of vague description you prefer), a few things have come to light, namely: I am not an unrelated individual; I am not a manufacturer of my own destiny. The sad though potentially exciting twist is that I share complicity with society’s sins, and society shares complicity with my sins. I do not mean to suggest that each person may evade responsibility by contending that it is the society’s fault for personal sins, but it seems that we do need a more robust understanding of the larger society’s role in relation to particular persons. It would seem then that we need to reevaluate a person’s place in community and the community’s relation to persons. For too long we have treated persons as individual islands, yet no person is an island, no person is an atom unrelated to fellow atoms.

If respective communities share a responsibility for persons in the community and persons in the community share responsibility for the community, then the community needs to make its priority the building of character, lest the community crumble and with it any hope of recourse. The community is indeed responsible for the building of character within the community – a novel thought!

The church then cannot say, “oh look at that terrible sinner!” The church must say instead, “we have failed this person, and now we must come to the aid of this person!” There is no room for the church to evade responsibility for sins, and there is no room for particular persons to evade responsibility for sins. Responsibility goes both ways, and the responsibility to build character then goes both ways – it might be said as a side note, though no less important, that character is both public and “private,” and it is not limited to behaviors in the prayer closet or other "private" spheres of existence.

The Gospel calls people together and in so doing binds them together by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Gospel does not give room for persons to be unrelated to one another, for the Gospel creates community, a community that is not to let its eyelids grow heavy at the crucial moment, a community that is not to deny its partnership with persons from the community. The Gospel creates community that is to be of integrity and cohesion. In the narrative world of the Gospel there is neither space nor time to let individuals be individuals unrelated.

Muddle puddles often seem shallow, but every now and then you might come across a mud puddle that keeps getting deeper and deeper. To plumb the depths of the church’s responsibility to particular persons is similar to plumbing the depths of a mud puddle that at first seemed only a few inches deep but keeps getting deeper and deeper. The church’s responsibility to particular persons runs deep, and the sooner churches acknowledge their responsibility and invest in particular persons the sooner they will be on the road to a Gospel community. The sooner churches make the building of character a priority, the sooner churches will begin clearing the murkiness of the muddle puddle.