Leaving Facebook

So Rima Staines finally joins Facebook ...

... and I leave it.

Again.

I've done this before.  I know how it feels - the familiar jittery, "What the hell am I doing?" feeling.  The awful thought that you have removed yourself from the entire front loungeroom of the global house.  That you will probably lose touch with a whole bunch of people who if you never get on Facebook again you'll probably never talk to again.


The "What the hell am I doing?" feeling is like when you quit smoking.  It's a panic.  It's a wondering what you're going to do to fill up the space where you used to look at Facebook 30 times a day.

Which is exactly why I'm doing it.  I want more space.

I partially blame Rima's post.  Because this:

I have a theory that using the internet occupies a very particular place in us. I think it takes the place of dreaming. Not night-dreaming, but that very shamanic soul-travelling that we all do to a greater or lesser extent when our mind wanders, when we create art, when we day-dream, imagine, journey in our minds and spirits to elsewhere, elsewhen. Internet-travelling uses the same metaphorical muscle I think, but is utterly hollow in comparison because it is not creative in that same sense. It is not magical. And worst of all it replaces the dreaming.

This really speaks to me.  I haven't been writing much in recent weeks, after the latest sinus bout.  It fills up my head and makes it feel like there is not room enough both for sinus and for words.  And so I've fallen off the writing habit again for the moment.  But even if my head is relatively clear, it still feels full up with the internet.  With the mass amount of information I've taken in over one day that the majority of people in the entire history of the world would not take in over their entire lifetimes, I feel completely full, and often very overwhelmed, even when I'm rolling around inside the house all day all by myself with no work to do.  It's not very conducive to characterisation, to essay-writing, to thrumming.  And so while I can't get rid of the entire internet, I can at least get rid of Facebook.  Because it frees up space, and I know it does because it has done so before.  And I wish to fill that extra space with real-time interaction with breathing, living people, and real-time interaction with clay, with pens, and with the keyboard where I am writing stuff that sits in a document waiting to be added to tomorrow, instead of being pasted as a Facebook status update.

Rima is speaking about the internet as a whole, and I agree fulsomely that even if I quit Facebook, I still have to try to manage my internet info intake each day.  But Facebook is like the methamphetamine of the internet for me.  Even more so than Twitter, strangely.  Twitter annoys me too much for it to ever be a meth addiction.  Twitter is like a once a week bong-on sesh with your mates.  Facebook is like mainlining.  I need the space. 

I went outside before, after getting home from my Aged Care class, and sat, with my feet bare in the grass, and read a wonderful novel, and felt blissed out from the sun that had poked through the clouds on my way home and which was now heading his way in a slant over to the west.  And I made pictures out of the clouds, and thrummed in my dreaming space, and read a story set in the future generations and generations after a giant meteorite has hit the moon and flung it off its trajectory so that every seventh night it looms scarily close to the earth before moving away again in its new spheric orbit.  A story most certainly set elsewhen, further off into the future around a church of women, the Sisters of Selene, whose influence has already risen in their small periphery and, over several generations, now begins to wane.  It is a book captivating my attention, and hence I was incredibly rich sitting there, more than you could ever guess, out out on the grass, feet buried in grass, reading the words of an author who sounds like he's writing in some Icelandic country - his name is Torsten Krol, if he is indeed a he - but who apparently lives in Queensland.  There is apparently some mystery surrounding Torsten Krol, about whether he is a famous author writing under a pseudonym.  I think in some ways I like it like that - an anonymous writer.  There is sometimes something nice about not knowing who the author is, of the story just wafting to you all on its own.

But I also really like it when a piece of writing is attached to an author.  It's why I will always prefer blogs over Facebook, even as Facebook has stolen many bloggers away.  I prefer being able to go to read someone's extended thoughtfulness, where my reading is a little more longform, even if it means that I can read less, because it's more fun to spend time inside one person's mind for five minutes rather than flicking my attention between 13 different people in two.

And so my love-hate relationship with this online space, and my haggling with it over how much of an effect it gets to have on my attention span and mindspace continues.  Rima says it better:

But do you not also share my frustration and loathing for the way the internet has squirmed into our every minute, addicting us to updates, and overloading us with eons more information each second than we are naturally made to process in a lifetime? Even if we ignore the endless shite and horror that the internet contains, it is still spilling over with wonder. There are so many beautiful things out there, genuine heartfelt pieces of writing, ideas and images - too many - so we have learnt to skim, to take in only the bubbles from the top of every slowly crafted brew. And I for one feel this is not a true and considered honouring of these beautiful works, not to mention of the eyes and hearts and souls and bodies of the people who are consuming these streams of information every millisecond, utterly removed from the place and land where they sit, out in the ether somewhere, following a trail whilst their extremities get gradually colder and they forget to eat lunch.

... I speak from a concerned and somewhat frightened yet simultaneously grateful and amazed viewpoint. If we use this thing, we still need to remember the land on which we stand, remember our bodies and the faces of those we love. I think we should be frightened that all intercity trains these days are filled with blue-faced passengers, every one of them swiping their fingers across a tiny screen, oblivious of the people around them acting identically. If we use this thing, then we should use it to find other faces in the throng and go and really touch them, in real life. Arrange it so that you can look into their real eyes and hear their real stories. This amazing network can be used for proliferating inane fluff or it can be used to organize and gather for good and real reasons, and to stir souls.

Sometimes the soul you need to stir is your own.  To make more space for the daydreaming.  To not let connecting on Facebook replace connecting with people in real time.  To go cold turkey once again.  To disconnect to reconnect.  A mighty challenge for us all ~ internet newbies all as we are ~ to navigate.

The poor in spirit

“How blessed are the poor in spirit: the kingdom of Heaven is theirs”
(Matthew 5:3)

What an opening line! I always say it’s the opener of Jesus’ inaugural address. “How happy are the poor in spirit.” It’s crucial, a key to everything Jesus is teaching.

Poor in spirit means to live without a need for your own righteousness. It’s inner emptiness; no outer need for your own reputation. If you’re poor in spirit it won’t be long before you’re poor. In other words, you won’t waste the rest of your life trying to get rich because you’ll know better.

Richard Rohr

Humility and Humiliation

You rescue the humble, but you humiliate the proud.
Psalm 18:27

Urbanmonk was talking yesternight about how mopping the floor in the nurses station at his new hospital job was flexing his humility muscle, with the nurse unit manager and head/hot nurses - the professionals doing the important stuff - looking on while he was performing his rather less sexy role :)

I guess sometimes it feels humiliating when our humility puts us as it does behind decidedly unsexy mops and gross human behaviour. But humility is so terribly sexy that it compels us to stand there nevertheless, shaky though we be :)

I began thinking off on a tangent (as I am apt constantly to do), about humility versus humiliation. They are so closely linked in our minds that sometimes they are mistaken for each other. But the more you think about them the more they occupy such completely different headspaces as to almost seem the opposite to each other. And yet, despite that, when you begin rolling around in the sweet scents of humility, even humiliation can become something of a complementary bedmate, heady spiritual territory though that be. Even humiliation can be redeemed. Is there no limit? :)

Some people think that someone with humility gets about feeling humiliated all the time. Of course, sometimes they will because everyone feels humiliated sometimes. But it seems to me that the first is an understanding and experience of the true spaciousness and radical okayness of things (of God), so that you have room to breathe, and you don't need to be putting yourself out there all the time, proving yourself, proving that you deserve to occupy the small space of earth that you do. Humiliation, however, seems to me to come so often from places of woundedness, and unhealing, or at the very least pain. I walk in both of these spaces. I am learning to sit in the midst of the second space, though I hate it, only because of the first, and only because I hate the second and the first will eventually overcome the second.

I remember years ago when I read the words of Jesus, I would be bewildered at times at the lengths he would not go to to defend himself. Wasn't he taking it just a little bit far? He so often allowed himself to be misunderstood, misappropriated, used, slandered and despised, and sometimes I would get worked up about it. I was thinking out of my own woundedness, which so often in those days (and still now, in certain cases, unfortunately) manifested itself as defensiveness, as a tough girl exterior that would brook no harassment. I pitied those women who allowed themselves to be browbeaten and pushed around by men. It took many years for me to separate the differences between some women I saw. Some allowed themselves to be humiliated because the voices of previous perpetration had made ruts in their souls, and they allowed people to just roll on down the same numb tracks with very little resistance. Now, that's humiliation. Other women, in certain situations, would allow certain humiliating things to be done to them but somehow it was different, like water off oil. People would do bad things to them, but the distinction and the dignity somehow remained. I envied them because I didn't understand it. I couldn't stand in a position like that and allow myself to be treated that way because I was wounded and humiliated and unhealed. (In some ways I still am). The first type of woman operated out of broken cisterns, the second operated out of something much fuller, and the taunts and bad behaviour of others did not detract from their dignity because the bad behaviour was about the other person.

I think it is true you become like the God you worship. It's why some expressions of Christianity in the past who have had the giant heavy handed schoolteacher view of God, they will see nothing wrong with caning children and locking them up in darkened rooms and humiliating and shaming them into performance. But that is not the way that God uses humiliation to teach humility. In fact, I don't think he uses humiliation as such, as in from first instances, at all. There is enough humiliation in the world that he doesn't need to. She will take what is there, and causing pain, and wield it all properly. It will still cause pain. That is the purpose at times. It is necessary, to stop us from going on into becoming something so horrid that we wouldn't recognise ourselves. He must delight in such things - the ultimate recycler - but I think he will allow humiliation to come upon us when our pride and deceit and hardness has become out of control. And it is not until you know a taste of Love that what first seems so abhorrent to you, this hard lesson, becomes a most amazing thing. Love will not let those things go on living in you forever and ever. She loves you far too much for that.

Yesterday I was listening to a woman speak who was a carer of a profoundly disabled adult child in her house. She was talking about how foster carers are accorded a great range of helps from the government, whereas family carers are given nothing. As I listened to her, I began thinking about how many families must be out there with children who require some sort of respite. I began thinking, wondering, whether it would be possible to find a family who could do with a few hours of help each week, maybe? Today on the train trip to work I glanced out of the window into the street of Footscray to see the building of Carers Victoria slap bang in my line of sight. Was this one of those funny little synchronous things that happens and makes your heart beat faster? I am humble enough to believe that God will speak to me. He does all the time. Those thins make my heart beat faster. I think they are worth listening to because I think they have inherent meaning. And so I am thinking further about maybe calling this place and seeing if maybe I could volunteer a few hours a week somewhere helping a family.

How humiliated I feel to acknowledge that my number one concern is worrying about how I would perform in such a situation, rather than focussing outward on helping other people. And I wonder if doing such a small thing would have any point to it at all. I think love can also do wonders with this sort of self-absorbed narcissism too. It's done wonders with other crusty parts of me. There are no limits :)

Interesting that the semantic root of both humility and humiliation is humus - earth. Humility grounds us in the truest sense, like trees planted beside water. In that place things get very simple. Sometimes I am there :) Humiliation makes you feel literally like dirt. But Love will use even humiliation to draw us to Herself, and He will tie up and heal and bless those wounded places, but we must first enter in.

The person who is able to be misunderstood and rejected and slandered and looked down upon and does not fight to maintain their status is considered a coward in this world but they are in fact of the strongest stuff, and standing in a position of the strongest rock. Humility is always learned, and always comes through pain. It is not a place that you can stand until you have learned to wear the yoke, I don't think, which is why some people should not be standing in certain places of humility until they are ready. Timing is everything. Somehow I think the places that we learn to stand in, though still uncomfortable and scary but not humiliating, are places that Love has reached through and loved (or healed), in some small way, to some extent. I don't think you can be truly humble until you are truly loved, in some kind of crazy cosmic God way because contrary to popular opinion, humility doesn't come out of weakness, it is just strong enough to display it. Humility comes from the most potent force that ever lived ~ Love.

Poverty and simplicity

Wise and interesting words from Mike over at The Mercy Blog today on the difference between the two.