Confronted by weakness; social media monastics (Across the Sundering Seas, #13)
I had promised news of this project I’m working on, hopefully in the form of a way to get recurring news of it. Alas, ’twas not to be: I made the terrible, terrible mistake of departing from my regular (and beloved) domain registrar, Hover, because Name.com had a discount on the domain I wanted. Pro tip #1: if you have a registrar you like and they’re giving you good service… stick with them. Pro tip #2: don’t use Name.com.
At this point, I’m pretty well resigned to the fact that my best bet is to wait till the 60-day transfer restriction on new domain registrations is up and just transfer the domain over to Hover. Lesson learned. And so you can expect another update… in mid-June. But a little preview: the domain I registered is writing.tools.
This week, just two links, one published this month, one published a little over a year ago. (I’m going to see if I can find more things from longer-ago to include here, including—where possible—quotes from books!)
-
“The Weak Lead us to Reality” (Leah Libresco at First Things, April 2019) – Libresco’s not-exatcly-a-review of the documentary Summer in the Forest is a beautiful meditation on what we might all learn from the old, the frail, the mentally ill… the weak.
The filmmakers follow several residents of L’Arche in the French village of Trosly-Breuil, as well as another L’Arche community in Jerusalem. Each resident is introduced by name and age, but there is no discussion in their chyrons of exact diagnoses or deficits. For Vanier, and for the filmmakers, the task is to encounter these men and women as individuals.
It is easy, I think, for us to find ourselves judging weakness as a kind of lesser humanity, limited or frustrated. And there is probably a way in which that recognizes the brokenness of our world for what it is. But when we stare into the face of the Other and let ourselves (or, are by a piece of good art, find ourselves forced) to see them in their full, beautiful humanity, we may be surprised by what we see:
Near the end, one sequence at the Jerusalem L’Arche helped me catch a glimpse of that reality. Maha, 24, struggles to wrap her fingers around a teacup. The camera zooms in, filling the frame with her fingers as they fumble, tipping the cup. The shot is still, like Vanier, simply staying present for what feels like a painfully long time.
I want to reach through the screen to help her, but as Maha finally lifts the glass, I realize I’m not sure that she was suffering, despite her setbacks. To me, always thinking about efficiency, her movements seemed burdensome. But the patience of Vanier, the rich expressiveness of the L’Arche residents, had cleared just enough space for me to imagine seeing differently.
Seeing this way requires something more of us that we are usually willing to give: quiet, and attentiveness, and waiting, and humility.
-
Vows of Digital Poverty (L. M. Sacasas, March 2018) – this is perhaps the single most influential of Sacasas’ blog posts for me: it is a thought to which I return often (as indeed I did on Winning Slowly 7.02). He opens with this:
Maybe deleting Facebook is something akin to taking monastic vows in medieval society.
Stay with me.
Besides the irony (which should have been, but rarely was, obvious) of self-righteous posturing about deleting one’s social media account on other social media for the plaudits of one’s social media audience, #DeleteFacebook was inherently complicated by the fact that some people cannot do so—their jobs require it, their children’s schools coordinate through it, etc. And given that many people “do not, for a variety of reasons, have the luxury of abandoning Facebook,” what can abstention or rejection mean? Perhaps, Sacasas posited, it could be a sign to the rest of the world, as the monastic life was in an earlier age:
The monastic life was not for everyone. For one thing, executed faithfully it required a great deal of sacrifice. For another, society could not function if everyone decided to take vows and join a religious order. Rather, those who took vows lived a life of self-denial for their own sake and for the sake of the social order. Because the ordinary man and woman, the ruler, the solider, the artisan, etc. could not take vows and so devote themselves to the religious ideal, those who could take vows prayed on their behalf. They also, for a time, nurtured the intellectual life and preserved the materials upon which it depended. And they embodied an ideal in their communities knowing that this ideal could not be realized or pursued by most people. But their embodiment of the ideal benefited the whole. They withdrew from society in order to do their part for society.
This is the point I keep coming back to. Our choices around social media should not serve as all-or-nothing requirements of each other, but considered as ways of serving each other. One small and partial antidote to the many problems of social media is for some people to stand outside its pulls: not merely as experiment but as ongoing way of life. That kind of abandonment will be painful, will entail sacrificing some real goods. But it is precisely that self-abnegation which makes the move powerful and helpful to others. (And you won’t be getting those social media plaudits if you take up such a burden!)