One
evening last week I looked in on my daughter’s room, and found her lying on her
bed, watching a YouTube video on Meg’s tablet.
She’d finished her homework, and you might not be surprised to hear
that, from her point of view, there was nothing wrong with what she was doing. But obviously I saw it somewhat differently,
because I went over to grab the device out of her hand. She put up just the briefest moment’s worth
of resistance before letting it go, and I took it out and put it in the living
room. Now to my mind, I was simply
setting a limit, not meting out punishment, and I went back as if nothing
unusual had happened and asked if she’d like to play a game, or maybe have me
read a book aloud. But she was upset
with me, and, once the heat of the moment had passed I could understand
why.
Because,
while grabbing away the iPad was hardly a blip on the scale of harm people do
to each other, it was violent. I didn’t ask; I didn’t explain; I just went
and took it from her because I’m stronger than her and I could. Of course I had my reasons, but violence always
does. And it is true that, as a father,
I do have a responsibility for setting and maintaining appropriate boundaries
around my child’s consumption of digital media.
Meg and I have standards around that stuff that are more restrictive
than some parents we know, and less so than others. Those standards have changed as our daughter
has gotten older, and have become more complicated as internet-enabled devices
have slowly but inexorably accumulated in our house. Which explains how Risa and I had different
interpretations of the rules the other night, and whether she was breaking them,
or not.
But
it doesn’t explain why my frustration boiled over the way it did. Because it wasn’t really about her, and
whether she was being disobedient. As I
thought about it later, tossing and turning at 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning,
I could see that underneath my impatience and anger was a sense of helplessness. It was a reaction to my feeling that digital
information devices and the form of culture they represent and communicate, has
become a power beyond my control. It has
invaded the most intimate spaces of my life: my home and my family relationships. It has become a defining influence on my
daughter’s development, imprinting the way she understands and interacts with
the world, even to the point of shaping the physiology of her brain.
And it
feels like this is something I did not choose.
At the beginning of the sixth grade her school gave her an iPad and began
requiring her to do most of her homework on it.
That same year her friends—and she has lots of those, who are very
important to her—all started getting their own smart phones or internet-enabled
mp3 players, on which they communicate outside of school by text message or
video chat, and we knuckled under to the pressure and got her one, too. And it’s not like her mother and I are Amish
or something. We have a land-line as an emergency
backup and for the fax machine, but if it rings we know it’s a telemarketer,
because no one we know has the number. I
myself would have to look it up on my mobile phone to tell you what it is.
I
access the internet from my laptop, or Meg’s infamous tablet, and I have to
say, I find it a great convenience. I
like being able to instantaneously access the surf report, and the menu from
Hector’s Pizza; or to renew my library books from the kitchen table. I enjoy watching highlights on YouTube of the
basketball game I heard parts of on the radio last night, and streaming my telenovelas (for Spanish-language
learning purposes only, of course). But
on the nights when I look around my house at each one of us in a separate room,
alone, on a different device, I don’t see entertainment and convenience. I see erosion at the very foundations of what
it means to be a society, and have a living culture. I see death.
It’s
strange how the forces we harness and devices we employ to secure and enlarge our
sphere of life become instruments of death.
The technological revolutions of the industrial age furnish no end of
examples. To take just one more, the
automobile freed us from the crowded confines of the city, from the
inconvenience of traveling on someone else’s schedule and rubbing elbows with
strangers, only to exile us to sprawling cultural deserts devoid of common
spaces, where nothing is within walking distance, or to trap us on freeways
choked with traffic, pollution, and rage.
And now we come to find that the waste products of burning the fossil
fuel that makes this way of life possible have so disrupted the world’s climate
that we face the real prospect of extinction.
But
this experience, of seeing what we intended for our benefit rebound to our
destruction, is not limited to the sphere of technological “progress.” This are just illustrations of what the Bible
reveals as the universal tragedy of our existence. The world is beautiful and good, and we were made
to be sovereign in it, for our blessing and our joy; and yet somehow in taking
hold of it and subjecting it to our control, it has twisted in our grasp. The letters of St. Paul, and especially
Romans, bear witness to a shattering realization: even the religious law, God’s
gift to the Hebrew people, the seal of their covenant, the path of
righteousness and peace to which Paul had zealously devoted his entire life, had
become in human hands a hostile alien power of condemnation and of death.
Death,
in the sense that Paul speaks of it, is not the end or the opposite of
life. It is the shadow clinging close to
every aspect of life itself, staining everything we create, all the good we do,
all our best intentions and self-improvement projects, continually threatening
to cancel them out, or turn them to unforeseen baneful consequences. We were made for sharing the infinite life of
God, and yet we continually try to grasp hold of and carve out a little piece
of life to possess entirely on our own terms.
And to seek life that is not offered back to the giver of life, or to take
power, without consecrating it to the source of all power, or to do work, even
for the sake of the good, the true, or the beautiful, that is not conceived and
carried out in the Spirit who is goodness, and truth, and beauty itself, is
what Paul calls “setting one’s mind on the flesh.”
And
this fundamentally-flawed orientation to life, leads, sooner or later, into a
trap—into being bound and gagged and imprisoned in the airless darkness of
futility. It is into the depths of this
prison that Jesus cried, in a loud voice, “Come out!” But before he did that, Jesus wept. He wept for love of his friend Lazarus. He wept with Mary and Martha, whom he also loved,
and with the Judeans who had come down from Jerusalem to console them, some of
whom were spies of the men who wanted him killed. He wept with outrage and compassion at the
whole sad, anguished mess that is human life under the tyranny of death. And
maybe he wept for himself, for he knew he would soon take Lazarus’ place in the
tomb.
Because
calling one man back from the grave, even after four days, would not be enough
to break death’s hold on the rest of us.
That was something Jesus could only do by meeting the powers of death
head on. Only he could reveal their sway
over the world, at such cost to our hopes for wisdom and love, for justice,
peace, and fulfillment. It was up to him
to pay that cost in full, in his own divine human person, and so to unmask the
lies of the powers of death, and reveal their impotence. But also to reveal, to the people who
believed in him, the salvation that is coming into the world—a life so full of
grace and truth that death cannot touch it, on either side of the grave.
