I remember the first time I was sitting at dinner with friends when a progressive friend of mine picked up her gigantic cell phone. I didn’t yet have one, not being an early technology adopter, but I did have an opinion about what happened next. My friend answered her phone and proceeded to speak with the person on the other end of the line, rather than forgo the interruption and face the 6 people currently sitting in a restaurant having dinner with her. What?! How rude!!! It struck me then, and often has in the years to come, that we need to establish some new etiquette for our new (at the time) cell-phone reality.
Well, here we are again. We’re 6 months into transferring most of our professional and personal lives onto video calls … a safeguard in the midst of this Covid-19 environment in which we now live. We weren’t prepared, and (chalk it up to the maturity of my now 50 years on the planet), etiquette is actually the least of our worries. We don’t have time for such niceties. Now we are dealing with life and death matters, and substance is where it is at. Forget considering whether we are being thoughtful; let’s move on to our communication effectiveness and the resulting impact of our words and actions.
But, maybe etiquette is designed not only to be polite, but also to address deep seated human needs. Like the courtesy of being seen for example, or establishing and nurturing interpersonal trust. Forgive me, but I’m a preacher, and as a result, pulpits appear at all times and in all places (like this article, for example).
Let’s talk a bit about some of the pitfalls of living almost entirely in an online world. For one, we’re starving for authentic human connection. Zoom, as miraculous as it is, does not replace real-time eye contact, a momentary element of touch (a hug, a slap on the back), or even catch those faint inflections of voice that acknowledge someone is tracking with us (‘um’ or maybe even a muttered ‘Amen!’). No, even if we’ve remembered to log on in the first place, even if connections are easily made and technology doesn’t glitch, online video presence is not the same as real-time human interaction. For one, it’s exhausting for our brains. God might correct me on this, but I don’t think we were created to move as fast as life has been asking us to … and this goes back to the 1990’s and that first insulting cell phone call during dinner, if not significantly before then.
Here’s the thing. Our new Covid-19 world, if you haven’t noticed, is asking us to rethink everything from how we show up at work and family gatherings to how we buy groceries and vote in the most significant election of our lifetimes. Everything is up for grabs. It’s exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. For those of us not deterred by change, we’re in our element, but for most of us (even if we fall in the afore mentioned category) our new environment utterly hijacks our repetitively traumatized brains. It’s too much. We’re quickly reaching our breaking point, collectively.
Which is where my sermon reaches it’s climactic close. Praise be to God, religion matters again!! Wait, you don’t follow? Well, like etiquette, religious dogma isn’t necessarily ‘dogma’ at all. It’s meant, at least in the right context and from the ‘right’ people (by which I mean people intending to bring love to the foreground rather than judgment), to protect us from the brokenness of our world. We are each just small pieces of a huge pie. We’re tiny snowflakes in the midst of a snow storm. We’re that one wave in the midst of the continuous ones that hit our shore each moment and along every body of water we can possibly find (unless it’s a puddle on the front sidewalk, and if the neighborhood 5-year-old is splashing around, even there). And, no matter what metaphor we use, we are here! We are a contributor in this vast beautiful world. And we need to be seen. Let’s do that for each other. Now.