The flattening of space and time is the
defining action of our age.
I remember clearly my first “remote”
event. My beloved Kansas home was several hundred miles away from the
little Oklahoma Church where my friends were wed on a non-descript
evening. Some months later a small box went in a larger box connected
to a still larger box and I watched a fuzzy screen and heard a
preacher's voice.
Years later, also in a church, I
watched a man with a large machine on tripod video-record the
preacher and I wondered how this makes any sense. It is enough to
hear a good speech or sermon once, to savor the moment and hopefully
gain lasting help. And it is valuable to have things for posterity.
But who has time to listen more than
once?
The old cassette tapes bring the same
question. I listened to some of them repeatedly as a young man, to
much benefit. But most of the time when I thought I should get a tape
I never did, and never would have listened again.
Yes, modern digital media has changed
all of this and we can find most whatever we want whenever we want
and we are better for it.
Better?
This is not the carmudgeon extreme,
casting all new things as negative. New things are new and we adjust.
Walking to horses to cars to airplanes: talking to telegraph to radio
to television to sat-phones. Like all of us I love it. Like all of us
I feel the loss and the grief.
I absorb my mind and fingers and eyes
in a box putting shapes on screen, soon to be words of meaning,
likely to be short-lived and barely noticed, certain to be a mere
breath in a colossal storm of similar digital musings. What does it
all mean?
I was trying to say the flattening –
the death – of time and space is the defining reality of this era.
I doubt I have the wisdom to understand this claim, much less prove
it. I will only say it is real and I am sad for it.
Because I can always do it later, I often don't. Because no Sabbath is set, there never is one. Because I
can always call Mom, I value it less, and because I can always fly to
wherever my loved-ones live I have less – of seeing them and of
loved-ones.
For love means more than seeing or
talking. Face time or zoom or cell or text are all good and happy. I
am thankful for them. But they never replace being-with, hearing the
voice and knowing the person breathing, laughing, speaking is really
there, right in the room. But because we don't have to be-with to
have what we call relationship, we do it less and we lose.
It is the painful crux of life, the
two-edged sword of relating, the loving and loathing we cannot escape
and by which we are often bewildered. We want belonging with our
independence; we want someone to care but leave us alone; we want
control but despair for the wisdom only others can give us. It means
in the end we choose death, for nothing is more real to life than the
reality and necessity of relationships. Modern tech is just another
way we cheapen or escape them.
Trying to explain it plays into the
problem as much as anything I suppose, though awareness seems a good
thing. The journey wearies us, the effort to evade the gnawing pain
is exhausting. So we pick up the phone, but dare not call. Text will
do. But it never does.
I find the answer in part when I invite
my friend over and we chat about nothing, coffee and toast, chairs
near, and life what it is: embodied, earthy, personal, present.
Later, my wife comes home and the day
is real again if I will let it. A grandson visits and the pictures I
love become nothing compared to his laugh. And I plan to write a poem
for my sons and daughter-in-law, knowing that's as close as I can get
for awhile.
Yes, time and space is flattened and we
think we control it. But we are controlled in the end. Our need for
closeness can never be undone by the fear that makes us run. And time
is contrived master that only dies when we surrender to the moment
and know it is bigger than the seconds that try to define it.
Perhaps the brilliant line from
Scripture ties this together: “It is in God we live and move and
have our being.” (Acts 17:28) That's time and space all wrapped up
in an infinite, personal God who made the world, showed us how to
live by giving Himself for it, and will some day make all things new.
It ties time to the eternal, space to a Creator, and life itself to a
God I dare to believe is good.
That's enough to give hope to the most
entrenched carmudgeon, and make this child of God rejoice for the
gift of another day!
