From the Pastor

November 2008

There are days, many days, when I wish that there was no such thing as the internet. I long for the days before email, blogs, youtube, and websites. What did I do with all the time that I must have had on my hands when I wasn’t websurfing? How did I get from point A to point B without first checking the directions on Googlemaps? How leisurely it was in the old days to look up phone numbers in a phone book and let my fingers do the walking in the Yellow Pages. 

I wonder if Katie Luther ever complained that Martin was spending too much time writing treatises that would be published on Gutenberg’s printing press, or reading another darned book everyday now that Gutenberg had made books so plentiful. 

However, I have learned that what the internet can and does do better than any technology I’ve ever encountered is make connections. In cyberspace, these connections are called links. How odd it is that, while humanity is losing the ability to link, to make connections, the digital technology of the internet is getting better and better at it all the time. 

Here’s an example. 

Rosie O’Donnell has created for herself a post-television life online. She’s not censored there. She can say what she thinks and feels, and nobody can threaten to take her “off the air.” And she’s formed a community there. A sharing of ideas and experiences that she initiates, but that she allows to thrive and grow however it will. Sometimes early in the morning or late at night I will hear sounds coming from Barbara’s tiny laptop speakers. It might be voices or music. “What ya watchin’,” I’ll ask her. “Rosie,” she’ll reply, sometimes inviting me to come and watch, sometimes not. 

One day Barbara showed me a link on Rosie’s website; a link to another website called TED. “It’s speakers and lectures. I think you’d like it.” Indeed I did. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Since 1984 TED has been bringing together “thinkers and doers” at a yearly conference and challenging them to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED is about ideas, and there are few things I appreciate more in this world than ideas. As early as 2001 TED began sharing these ideas of some of the greatest minds on earth for free online in audio and video formats. I’m surprised I hadn’t come across it sooner. Before long, I was hooked. 

One evening I found I was bored with some of the ideas I was hearing on TED (which is like getting bored of the world’s most beautiful art, music or architecture!) and realized all I was longing for that night was stories. This led me to the “master storytellers” theme on the site where I randomly clicked on a picture labelled “Carmen Agra Deedy spins stories.” I was entranced. The old expression “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry…” could have been created for this storyteller. After hearing her tell one story, I just had to hear more. 

So I clicked on the link to the homepage of Ms. Agra Deedy where I found another link: Ms. Agra Deedy speaking at the 2002 National Book Festival in Washington D.C. Here was a video of her spinning an amazing tale about books – especially one book in particular: “A Prayer For Owen Meany” by John Irving; a book I had read and loved as I was preparing to enter seminary; a book that begins: “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God…” Ms. Agra Deedy talked about how every minor character and every scene in that book had mattered and culminated in the events of the final page. Then, reflecting on her own life, her own “caustic scepticism,” and 2001 as “the year from hell,” she ended her talk with these words: “If I could read the last page of the book of my life, I might see that every moment had been essential… even 2001.” 

Just the message I needed to hear at just the right time brought to me by a random series of links and connections on the internet. The internet - who would have thought?

Peace,
Pastor Brian