Facebook Publication Date: 2/23/2018 21:02
Lace on Race; Lace on Faith; Lace on Grace
My article for another publication. Had this space in mind as I wrote it.
Query: how effective are we, here in this community, in taking the work outside this space? This is a laboratory, not a day spa.
Would love commentary.
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In the Digital Age
Faith, a new and different flavor of relational ethics; grace, and God—all are encompassed and confronted as Anabaptist women participate in and consume digital media.
I have had a computer in my home as early as 1994; I was both fascinated and wary. I thought of it as more toy than tool. I would write bible studies and talks on it, but words in pixels seemed less weighty than words on paper.
Unlike a noisy electric typewriter, my silent words seemed ephemeral and transitory.
Even in those days, I could find scripture with my dialup; no more poring over tiny print in a printed bible. With the weak search engines of the day, I could find commentary, and commentators, I had never before encountered. I could find like minds huddled in chat rooms.
Slowly, I found myself less wary and more in thrall. Those days, there was our cable-free television, and this big white box hidden in the guest room. With few channels, while it was certainly possible to watch for hours, it was actually a self-limiting activity; just how many reruns of MASH could one watch in one sitting? (Remember, this was before binge watching.)
The internet was different. Back then, with one computer, and no ubiquitous smartphones, the computer was adjunctive to life, not life itself. Because of that initial wariness, the internet, at first anyway, was self-limiting too. Of the friends I had, only some had computers and email addresses; if one desired communion, one did it on the landline phone stationed on a side table, or one actually (gasp!) saw them in person.
As years went by, and I joined organizations whose participants were far flung, email became a necessity. The limitations were apparent even then. Feathers could be easily ruffled by a thoughtless remark, without the helpers of eye contact and body language.
As with 3D encounters, it was easy for some to dominate, while others held back. It was (and is) also easy to leave conversations, and thusly, community and communion.
Facebook and other social media applications have brought into sharp relief both the advantages and the real challenges of creating, maintaining, and leveraging this tool, and this way of participating in the world. As Anabaptists, this is crucial.
Noteworthy: while writing the paragraph just above, I almost said ‘participating in the world outside our walls’. That is a real perception, but an incomplete one.
Writing this, I am most emphatically within my walls—on more levels than one.
Whether for publications, or for the two online spaces I manage, ‘Lace on Race’, which I service alone, and ‘Real Talk’, which is a collective, I write in solitude. And I write for people I do not know, but who are ‘friends’ or ‘followers’. It is different than when I have written for print audiences, who are both more concrete and more abstract.
This dynamic, where I have what I call ‘F&F’, most of whom I will never meet, whose eyes I will never see, whose voices I will never hear, is still sometimes disconcerting. In the last few years, because of the two platforms, I have gone from less than 80 friends/followers, to almost 3000, encompassing my personal page, RT and Lace on Race. I am grateful for all of them.
I hope I serve them well, yet I still sometimes cringe at how broad the term ‘friends’ has become in this digital age. I once knew, in a real way, every Facebook friend I had. I insisted upon it. No more.
Since these platforms launched, I committed myself to what was a fool’s errand; the getting to know, however glancingly, all of the women who walk with me. At the end of 2016, with about 200 followers, most from my writing in online forums, I publicly pledged to visit each timeline and write a personal note; a sad impossibility.
Does it then make their connection to and with me less ‘real’, more tenuous? As someone who has discipled and been discipled over countless cups of coffee and tea on porches, living rooms and coffee houses, is the mentoring still valid if is over PM’s and texts?
It calls to mind a question I have asked as a person who has written for and spoken to various large groups—large to me anyway.
I have never served a mega church of tens of thousands; have never written to an audience of millions, and I have often wondered just what I could possibly say that would resonate with, challenge, and call to action those kinds of numbers. Does the message have to change?
I have found it challenging to go from speaking to 20 families to speaking at conference with 500 people; how much harder to speak to what is essentially a small town? The internet forces still more of these kinds of questions.
And hand in hand with these queries is the question of accountability. I have long said who you are in various spaces is who you are—including online; congruence being a hallmark of a faithful life. In my arena, anti-racism work, I have found that, years in, we have a cohort of women who now know the lingo; who know how to ‘make space’, and ‘center marginalized’.
But if the lessons learned online are not generalized to the day to day lives of these women, if their praxis doesn’t match their prose, it has been a failed experiment.
It’s true for me too. When in 3D community, it is easy (or at least easier) to discern who does or doesn’t model right practice for right reason in right way. It is almost impossible to do so online. Unless accountability to readers/viewers is an integral component of the work, again, we have failed both our audiences and our God.
As we straddle the Third Way of neither eschewing technology nor being subsumed by it, how we acknowledge, confront, and live, with, in, and through these questions will bring to sharp relief how we do or do not bake in our values and ethos as Mennonite women to what is, essentially for us, a tool to further work, praxis and conviction.
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