Dear Innkeeper,

You didn’t even get a name. In the Bible, that is. Actually, there is only your implied presence at the doorway that night in Bethlehem. Still, in churches all over the world, someone always takes up your cause, dresses the part and delivers the single crucial line: There is no room at the inn. No respectable nativity pageant would be worth its salt (or myrrh) without an innkeeper. A bit part, but a necessary part nonetheless.

Actually, I’m a big fan of bit parts. Consider the world without those who play bit parts for most–if not all–of their lives. Behind every leading role–say a cancer researcher or a legislator or a New York Times best-selling author or a Savior–there has always been the presence of some nameless individual: a family member, a friend, a teacher, a mentor. These are bit part people at their truest and finest, those who inauspiciously go about the necessary work of guiding, redirecting, encouraging, criticizing, and loving, always loving.

Innkeeper, I know what you’re thinking: But I wasn’t a supporter or mentor or friend. I’m just a guy who opened the door and told a desperate young couple that there was no room for the night. Then–and this is the really sad part–I waved them off with a lousy consolation prize: shelter in a stable. I gestured toward my animal barn and closed the door on a woman in the throes of labor!

Honestly, there are also bit parts which are insignificant at best and harsh at worst. Cast into one of these parts, you guaranteed that Jesus would be born in the lowliest of places. This birth would turn the world on its head and usher in a kingdom with a wholly unexpected king: one born to common parents, one who would live, love, suffer and die among ordinary people, one who would conquer death, Immanuel, God with us always. And you were there at the very beginning to play the bit part we needed you to play.

So, when the curtain call comes, you should take your bow. Generations of fellow bit players are waiting offstage to give you a long and overdue ovation.

Humbly, from one bit player to another,

Shannon

Dear Joseph,

There is no one quite like you. It’s true that if you lived today, Jimmy Kimmel would not be knocking your door down for an appearance, and Anderson Cooper would not be scheduling you for an interview. What was scandalous in Nazareth just would not play well today. The sheer goodness of a man like you simply would not result in ratings.

An angel of God who visits a common carpenter to verify that his betrothed was chosen by God to carry His son? Even this would not be newsworthy, I’m afraid. Finding no means of corroborating such an angelic visit, reporters would chalk this up to a lunatic’s ravings and set their sights on stories they could confirm.

But still, there is no one quite like you. And I mean this in the best possible way. As your life spilled out before you, days of wood and dust and prayer, could you have imagined yourself as father? Parenting is hard enough, but to parent the son of God? I can’t begin to imagine this. But you held that baby boy in your arms, and you gave your heart to him. Not flesh of your flesh, nor bone of your bone, but yours all the same.

Joseph, how we need men like you today. Our land is parched for lack of them. So many of our men are mere sperm donors who turn away from their sons and daughters, choosing other, easier pursuits. So many of our men lack heart and soul, and lacking these, they bluster their way bullishly through the world. It’s tragic, you see, for their women and children are left wanting and waiting for men who will show up. Every day in every way.

In the streets of Nazareth, on the road to Bethlehem, in that dank stable, and all the days of your life, you showed up, Joseph. And because of your great love, I know the greatest love of all.

So gratefully,

Shannon

Dear Women of Nazareth:

How quickly you turned your backs on one of your own. This unwed mother, this girl gone wrong, you presumed her guilty and wrapped her in shame.

In the marketplace, you bartered for the best cloth and grain, you spoke of family and friends, and you didn’t give Mary a second thought. You sent her into the shadows as you gave yourselves up to sunnier things, pulling cloaks of respectability around you and counting your blessings.

Even as she stood in the shadows, how could you not see the Light of the World piercing the city, piercing the world? But then, you had no eyes to see that the greatest blessing was right there in your midst. God chose the very woman whom you cast off to carry His son. That’s how He works–with the least, the unexpected, the shamed and shameless.

And you missed it. You might have fallen to your knees in adoration, humbled by the presence of the living God growing inside this hometown girl, but you busied yourselves with such trivial things: what you would wear, what you would eat, when you would sleep.

We have women like you today, and they send their accusations and presumptions into cyberspace with the touch of one finger. Unfiltered and unexamined, their words shred the reputations of others and leave their victims mere shells of their former selves. Like you, they have no eyes to see and miss the greater light that shines inside each of those they accuse. They miss the miracles–blooms discernible to only the faithful–that unfold around them. In truth, they miss it all.

Like you, they delight in playing God, believing their throne rooms to be impenetrable and their judgment to be unimpeachable. I suppose they find it easier this way, believing themselves charged with the work of sorting the sheep from the goats. But do they ever stop to think that all this sorting and judging was never their business?

It’s easy for me to say that I would have befriended Mary, perhaps even defended her publicly. Sadly, I’m really not sure. I may have walked the dusty streets, smugly and wholly unaware of the miracle in my midst. I, too, may have missed it all.

With both scorn and empathy,

Shannon

A friend requested that I repost a series of advent letters that I wrote several years ago. Advent is a time of expectation and preparation, a time of hopeful waiting. Over several Advent seasons, I’ve tried to imagine what this time would have been like for all those who played a role in the nativity. For a time, I knew the pain of infertility, but when I consider Elizabeth, I see that my struggles pale in comparison to hers. Most importantly, I’ve come to understand how Elizabeth’s hope and trust in God’s love exemplify what Advent is all about.

Dear Elizabeth:

Recently, I was standing before an Advent calendar with my grandson, and he said, “Grandma, look at all the days until Christmas! 24 long days!” Twenty-four days, indeed. For most adults, this is a blink, a blip on time’s radar screen, a proverbial drop in life’s bucket.

But Elizabeth, not so with us. I waited for years, you for decades–our arms childless and our hearts expectant. In season after season of fruit cake and divinity, I waited for God, for anyone to ring my door bell and place an exquisitely wrapped plate in my hands. On it, the frankicense of family, the fragrant assurance that two would become three would become four. . .

But you! Your expectation spooled out before you, skeins of your heart’s finest fibers in piles at your feet. You were an expecting mother far beyond what is expected. When a child called Mother, you stopped, turned, and watched as your arms left your sides, reaching, yearning, and stretching into the space that spanned the years between child-bearing and old age. Not a day–or night–went by when you did not see the child of your dreams in the faces of other mothers’ children. And not a moment passed when you did not feel the absence of the sweet weight of a sleeping child on your chest.

Day after day, you sent your prayers heavenward like eager doves, their wings beating the darkness around you. You baked the bread to feed your empty womb. And finally, when skin loosened from your bones, thin and mottled with sun and age, you settled into that singular space of childless women.

And then! God spoke: Behold Elizabeth, wife of Zecahriah and mother of John, a righteous and faithful man who will make ready a people prepared for the Lord. And in that barren space, your child grew and leapt for joy.

Oh Elizabeth, I have been an impatient woman. I have worked and worried through most of my days, believing that my will alone might bring me the blessings I so desired. I have stood before my life like a child before an Advent calendar. Twenty-four long days! As if my urgency were God’s. As if counting the days might make the answers to my prayers come more quickly.

Now, as skin loosens from my bones, I pray that my will might loosen, too. Unbound, I pray that I might faithfully wait, might know that neither worry nor work will bring God’s blessings. Unbound, I might join you, a sister-in-waiting. And here, we might prepare our hearts for the Grace and Peace from whom all blessings flow.

With hope and expectancy,

Shannon

The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest. –William Blake

In southeast Iowa, the corn and soybeans have been harvested. The fields are shorn with only the broken stalks rising from earth that was once green and growing. And we are thankful for the bounty.

Days before Thanksgiving, I am thankful for all sorts of harvests: the ones that give us food for our bodies and for our souls. I recall a late night conversation with my father, days before he died. And I give particular thanks for his vision, which increases in bounty each day.

Christ in the Field                                                                               
    --for my father
	 
He is always here
among the chaff, the broken stalks.
The last gleaner
who plumbs the rough edges
and all the deep corners.

This was my vision,
he said.

From his death bed, my father confessed
how as a 13-year-old boy who had yet to grow into his feet,
who dreamt of half-court shots
and had once set an empty lot ablaze roasting weenies,
how this boy saw all:
   the Christ who holds our hearts 
   in hands strafed with dirt;
   the workers who stand before him,
   the light soiled, their day dissolved 
   into the memory of barley;
   the Christ who opens his arms and says,
   Come to me.

I’ve never told anyone this,
my father said,
but I wanted you to know.

Now years after this confession,
here is my offering:
   the sediment of my sin,
   the sheafs of sorrow I would lay at Christ’s feet.

And this is my prayer:
   Behold, your harvest,
   all the world ablaze with longing.
   And your laborers—father and daughter—
   who commit to you 
   their dust. 

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

As humans, we’ve always been master wailers, raising our fists and sending our cries into the swaddling band of darkness. And it goes without saying that we’ve always had much to wail about. The human condition pits us against forces that seem indifferent at best and hostile at worst. We’re hungry, we’re cold, we’re frightened, we’re unhappy, we’re alone, we’re unable to control our own destinies. At best, our wailings have fueled–and continue to fuel–some of the greatest writing, speech, and art the world has known. As readers, listeners, and viewers, we take solace in others’ wailing and find comfort in the awareness that we’re not entirely alone.

Yet, Dillard suggests that we must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it. To consider only our wailings is myopic. Best known as a nature writer, she, like American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, takes to the woods to write. In The Atlantic article, “Where Have You Gone, Annie Dillard?” William Deresiewicz writes that Dillard scrutinizes nature with monastic patience and a microscopic eye. Along the banks of Tinker Creek, she writes about the flora and fauna, about her experiences and revelations there. And she writes brilliantly, wisely, and always reverently. As I read her work, I want to be her, to give magnificent voice to the flora and fauna in my own part of the world.

Deresiewicz contends, however, that for all Dillard’s brilliance as a nature writer, nature isn’t finally her subject. He believes that she is always looking for God and offers his insights into how she takes a wider view:

She is not a naturalist, not an environmentalist; she’s a theologian—a pilgrim. Her field notes on the physical world are recorded as researches toward the fundamental metaphysical conundra: Why is there something rather than nothing, and what on Earth are we doing here? What, in other words—with crayfish and copperheads and giant biting bugs, with creeks and stars and human beings with their sense of beauty—does God have in mind?

For Dillard, to wail the right questions and to choir the proper praise requires a look at the whole landscape–the natural and the spiritual landscape–with keen eyes and minds. Those who really see, then, are pilgrims, like Dillard, devoted to the spiritual quest. This type of seeing, she explains, is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. Deresiewicz elaborates on this:

You do not seek, you wait. It isn’t prayer; it is grace. The visions come to you, and they come from out of the blue.

Dillard’s seeing–the letting go and the waiting–is intensely spiritual. It’s directed toward God, the creator and giver of grace. God, she suggests, should direct the wider view.

I think most of us believe that we see, wail, and praise just fine. We justify our wailings because the world looks as though it’s going to hell in a handbasket: people are tearing each other apart at school board meetings and in the halls of Congress, the supply chain has stalled, and gas prices are going up. If we’re not looking into the swaddling band of darkness these days, what would you call it?

And we do offer praise as we celebrate the good and the beautiful in our midst: the generosity and heroism of others, the gifts of music and art, the sunrises and sunsets that give us pause. To peer into the darkness and to celebrate the light–isn’t this taking the wider view into the whole landscape?

I think Dillard would respond with some serious questions: To whom or what are you directing your sorrow and your joy? When you look to the hills, from where does your help come? The wider view, she’d say, is a world view. That is, it’s the way you explain why there is something rather than nothing and what on Earth are we doing here. Wailing to nothing is much different than wailing to a suffering God. Facing the swaddling band of darkness utterly alone isn’t the same as walking through the valley of the shadow of death with the God who will one day wipe every tear away. And lifting our praise to nothing is a far cry from lifting our praise to God, the creator.

Of course, these are questions and differences in worldviews that theologians and philosphers have long explored. We expect no less from them, for this is their job. But most of us in the cheap seats struggle with the scholarship and wisdom of such individuals. So, when a naturalist, like Annie Dillard, or a poet, like Mary Oliver, helps us see from the wider view, we’re grateful. We’re familiar with their crayfish and creeks, fawns and flowers. When Dillard and Oliver reverently offer this familiar natural world, they give us eyes to see the supernatural, if we will but use them, and a leg-up into the sacred.

The world would be a much poorer place without Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau, Mary Oliver, Aldo Leopold, Marianne Williamson, Bono, Roma Downey, Kurt Warner, and so many other non-theologians whose worldview is founded on God. Through nonfiction, poetry, music, political and social activism, movies, and athletics, they keep the wider view alive–inside and outside of church walls. They call our attention to a sacred audience of One.

The Gift
Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.

So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful.
That the gift has been given.
       --Mary Oliver, Felicity, 2015

What we have is a system driven to create the illusion of education without the inconvenience of learning. –Shane Trotter, Setting the Bar

Most would agree that the illusion of anything is obviously a poor substitute for the real thing. High school teacher and author, Shane Trotter, makes a bold claim that our current educational system is driven to create the illusion of education. And bolder still? He argues that we believe we can educate students without the inconvenience of learning. For Trotter–and many others–American education is a far cry from the real thing.

Recently, I was struck by the title of an essay written by California high school civics teacher, Jeremy S. Adams: “My Late Father Was a Great Teacher. He Wouldn’t Last a Week in the Modern Classroom.” Like Trotter, Adams bemoans the current state of education, insisting that one of the greatest teachers he’d known–his own father–wouldn’t be able to navigate classrooms in which he was expected to educate without the inconvenience of learning. In the midst of nationwide calls for retired teachers to fill desperately-needed teaching positions, Adams’ essay suggests that, like his father, many of these retired teachers would struggle to last a week in classrooms today. Clearly, some with strong constitutions might be able to muscle their way through five school days, keeping students physically in their desks and maintaining some sort of order. But would they be able to teach?

Adams lovingly paints a portrait of his father as belonging to an elite group of teacher-celebrities who hear superlatives like, “You made a real difference in my life” or “I wouldn’t be where I am today without you.” These teacher-celebrities, he explains, are localized versions of Jaime Escalante or non-fiction avatars of John Keating. After his father died, he writes that he was overwhelmed by the number of letters he received from former students, letters that testified to his father’s unwavering sense of purpose and ubiquitous passion. As not only his son but one of his father’s students, Adams agreed with others who admitted that his father was tough and demanding but that he inspired them to be better than they were.

His father never let his students wear hats or chew gum in class because classrooms were serious places that demanded respectful behavior. He believed that his students could learn and used the Socratic method to discipline them to think more deeply and critically. He did this, as Adams writes, because a good teacher doesn’t tolerate student ignorance or indifference. And to his knowledge, Adams claims that his father never had to apologize for his high standards.

As a literature teacher, his father taught novels, short stories, poems and plays if they were instructive about the human condition. Adams explains:

He never judged literature through a postmodern kaleidoscope of race, gender, or class. He simply asked if the reading was instructive about love or hope or death or dreams. Did it touch on vital and timeless human concerns? Did it connect a young mind to a mature aspiration or did it slightly transform the delicate fiber of youth into something resembling wisdom or fortitude?

But Adams goes on to speculate about what his father would do in today’s classrooms when students cursed at him, and when his adminstrators insisted that he perform a classroom intervention rather than giving them detention or kicking them out. He wonders how his father would handle the incessant disruption of cell phones vibrating and blinking as he tried to hold class. And he suspects that his father wouldn’t take kindly to those who call Shakespeare problematic and grammar unnecessary. In short, he’s painfully aware that the father he knew and admired wouldn’t last a week in a classroom today.

As I read this essay, I couldn’t help but think of the best English teachers I’ve known: my dad, my best friend, my daughter, and a handful of colleagues over my 40-year career. My dad, the single best lecturer I’ve ever known, would probably be put on some kind of evaluative plan today and required to work with an instructional coach. He’s a sage on the stage, they’d proclaim, all talk and no student interaction. And they’d be right that there was a lot of talk in his classrooms, but they would’ve failed to identify the quality of this talk in their shortsighted dismissal of his methods. They would’ve failed to recognize that each class period was a extraordinary invitation for students to interact with the best ideas from the best thinkers of all times. They would’ve failed to understand that student interaction doesn’t always require groups clustered together in beanbag chairs throughout the room with designated learning tasks, but that it may be minds-on interaction–often intensely independent–that occurs when students wrestle with challenging ideas. Most students today genuinely struggle to listen to their teachers for any amount of time. Undoubtedly, they’d tune my dad out after a few minutes or when they encountered the first big word they didn’t understand, whichever came first.

I’ve watched my best friend, my daughter and some of my English teacher colleagues attempt to make the best literary works–and the invaluable ideas in them–accessible for all of their students. I’ve watched them use powerful anecdotes and make excellent allusions. I’ve watched them offer their best, day after day. And, sadly, I know that there are more and more of their students who are, in essence, saying no thank you. No thank you to their attempts to bend over backwards so that students might really understand. No thank you to their offers to meet students before or after class for extra help. No thank you to the comments they’ve painstakingly written on student work and the hours they’ve invested on students’ behalf. No thank you, in short, to almost anything they’re offering because, as students, they’d rather not be inconvenienced to learn.

Is their response exceptional? Blurting out comments–often unrelated and sometimes vulgar–refusing to make eye contact with teachers or peers who are speaking, blatantly using cellphones, coming to class late, leaving for extended periods of time for bathroom breaks, turning in work late or not at all, asking to redo assignments that were, in all truth, thrown together in the first place as drafts–all of this and more are increasingly characteristic in classrooms today. This isn’t the exception but rather the norm. Those like Trotter and Adams who argue that what we’ve created is an illusion of education understand this all too well.

Adams concludes that the greatest educational illusion is that teacher compassion is tantamount to an endless softening of standards, of letting things slide, and of ultimately excusing poor student behavior and performance. This compassion, he argues, is producing a generation of students who want the trophy without the excellence and the “A” without the effort, who insist that high achievement can be accomplished on the cheap. This, he laments, is an illusion his father would not have suffered–for all the right reasons.

In the past few years, I’ve held too many conversations with good teachers who’ve admitted–regrettably–that they don’t know if they’ll be able to last in the classroom much longer, that if they could secure another job with a similar salary and benefits, they’d consider taking it. I’ve talked to too many administrations who complain that they can’t recruit or retain quality teachers and that they’ve had to take what they can get (and hope they can keep them). We have many beautiful educational buildings, more educational initiatives and regulations than you can imagine, and in the end, I’m afraid that the emperor has no clothes.

Let me go on record as saying that our best eductors are knocking themselves out to make a difference to their students, educationally and personally. They always have, and they always will. But theirs is a lonely struggle, and their efforts alone are not enough. As a nation, we’ve paid much lip service to the fact that our educational system needs help. Many insist that we need a system overhaul that begins with honest conversations about what is working and what isn’t. They argue that we must examine why the best teachers of our pasts couldn’t make it in classrooms today and whether or not this is acceptable. And they’re truly frightened by today’s desperate shortage of quality teachers and by the inevitable costs of what it would take to recruit and keep more of them. In the end, many concede that, in spite of our best efforts, we’re creating an illusion of education, one that grows less and less like the real thing with each passing day.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is the fact that no matter what educational initiative or reform we throw out there, most educators will simply smile and mutter, This, too, shall pass. For they know that initiatives and reforms come and go, and historically, few have had real sticking power. And they’d be right. But our current situation is a watershed moment, I think. We have the opportunity–and the responsibility–to do something different, something better for students, for educators, and for our nation. Only time will tell if we rise to the occasion or continue to settle for an illusion.

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding the capacities which the outside didn’t indicate or promise, and which the other kind couldn’t detect. –Mark Twain

He burst through the front door, charged up the steps, skidded to a halt and said, “Grandma, you got a new candle!” My grandson, Griffin, has truly uncommon eyes. For an eight-year-old boy, he doesn’t miss a thing–including a new Yankee candle on a side table in the corner. He and his sister have always had these eyes, eyes like heat-seeking missiles that lock onto their targets. Their targets may be small and ordinary, the very things that just don’t show up on others’ radars. They may be objects, or, more importantly, they may be the nearly imperceptible looks that cross one’s face and give brief, yet valuable, insights in the heart and soul. In a world of common eyes, Griffin and Gracyn have truly uncommon ones; they have seeing eyes that Mark Twain describes as those that pierce through and read the heart and soul.

Undoubtedly, they’ve inherited them from their mother, and, I’d like to think, from me. When their mother was a girl, she once stopped me as I was weeding the garden to ask if I was alright. I can still recall how her concern momentarily took me aback. What could have led her to believe I might not be o.k.? Busily weeding, I was flinging dandelions over my shoulder into a pile on the sidewalk. What could she possibly have seen? When I pressed her, she said, I saw your eyes doing funny things, like they were pressed together. And then I understood that she’d misinterpreted my squinting for trouble. After I’d explained that I was just squinting because I’d left my sunglasses in the car, she gave me a serious once-over to confirm that I was truly o.k. before returning to her sisters.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how and what we see. I don’t think it comes as any surprise that most of the seeing we do is with common eyes that skim and scan. We beg forgiveness as we offer up all sorts of excuses for not really seeing something or someone: too busy; too difficult; too labor-intensive. In a world in which many of us struggle to see where we’ve left our phones or car keys, it may seem an overreach to expect us to have seeing eyes.

In the late 19th century, English archeologist, banker, and philanthropist, John Lubbock wrote:

What we do see depends mainly on what we look for…. In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the coloring, sportsmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.

Most of us are probably familiar with Lubbock’s claim that even when we’re all looking at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them in the same way. But perhaps we’re not as familiar with his claim that what we look for determines how and what we actually see. Here’s the rub: what we look for matters and matters deeply. Today, many argue that our nation is divided and divisive. In this climate, then, what are we looking for? Are we looking to see in others what we already believe, what will confirm the biases we hold and sharply define the lines we’ve drawn? Do our eyes, then, brush over the surfaces of others, confident that we’ve seen all we need to see? And do we count the costs of living with common eyes?

Years ago, my son, Quinn, was recruited by a Division II football program but became wholly invisible the moment he reported to camp his freshman year. For months, the head coach had wooed him. And for the previous two summers, he’d proven his talent and work ethic at this university’s summer camps where he earned the title of Most Valuable Player. He’d optimistically moved 400 miles away from home to pursue his dream of playing collegiate football. What prompted this coach to unsee what he’d previously seen? I can only guess that he was no longer looking for what he once had. Once visible, Quinn had become invisible. To make the team, neither talent nor work ethic mattered if no one would see him. After Quinn graduated and accepted his first teaching and coaching position, I reminded him of the lessons he’d learned from his athletic career and said: If you ever fail to see–I mean really see–your students and players, you’ll have to answer to me. I wasn’t messing around. I’d seen the painful fallout that occurrs when teachers and coaches aren’t willing to see. More than anything, I didn’t want my son to join their ranks; I wanted him to have seeing eyes.

Throughout the New Testament, Jesus speaks repeatedly about seeing and failing to see. In Luke 11:34, he instructs his disciples and the crowds that had gathered to hear him:

The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness.

Many of us have unhealthy eyes, and we desperately need eye exams to diagnose our maladies. Too often, we don’t see, and, sadly, we don’t want to see. Clearly, Jesus understood that only healthy, seeing eyes make for a healthy souls, and healthy souls are uncommonly compassionate. I’m afraid we’re all too content to look through the glass darkly, for if we clean the glass through which we look out upon our world, we might occasionally glimpse the hearts and souls of those we’ve been quick to dismiss. And then what? How would we proceed after we’d read their inner thoughts and feelings? In the end, would we choose to see or unsee?

Theologian and writer C. S. Lewis explains that [w]hat you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are. Could it be that we frequently stand too far away to see anything other than surfaces, our eyes conditioned to scan simple forms? And when it comes to how we see others, could it be that we’re hesistant–if not unwilling–to first consider the sort of people we truly are? That is, are we willing and able to see the logs in our own eyes before we search out the specks in others’?

I value the great gift that seeing eyes have given my children and grandchildren. As well as the gift they’ve given the rest of us who are–and will continue to be–touched by their sight. With children, it starts small: a coin-shaped rock in a driveway, a tear that pools in the corner of a mother’s eye, a lap that holds a pair of trembling hands. But small is good. Small is necessary when it comes to seeing eyes. For eyes trained on the small stuff will be far more likely to see the big stuff, far more likely to be full of light in a world too frequently full of darkness.

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Recently, I was working with a former colleague who asked if I’d ever read Sherry Turkle’s essay, “Growing Up Tethered.” I hadn’t, but my interest was piqued, so I read it. Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, has written much about the effects of technology on how we relate to one another. I can’t say that I was surprised by the discoveries and claims she makes in this essay. But I was troubled by them, particularly by the notion that technology purports to be the architect of our intimacies.

We’ve all seen, and undoubtedly lamented, the types of scenes that frequently unfold at restaurants and family dinners, in classrooms and waiting rooms: people glued to their devices, fingers and thumbing pecking, eyes riveted to screens, heads bent attentively. Eerily quiet except for the rapid tapping on keys, these scenes are peopled by those who may be communicating with distant others or with those sitting right next to them. They may be using their devices to close a gap of miles or inches. Either way, they’re using these devices as conduits. And are these technological conduits building intimacy? Turkle and others continue to weigh in on this.

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines intimacy as:

an interpersonal state of extreme emotional closeness such that each party’s personal space can be entered by any of the other parties without causing discomfort to that person. Intimacy characterizes close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationships and requires the parties to have a detailed knowledge or deep understanding of each other.

Most of us would agree that intimacy involves a detailed knowledge and deep understanding of another. To have an intimate conversation requires time, proximity, full attention, and intense desire to really know someone. Whether in friendship, parenthood, or marriage, this type of intimacy characterizes the relationships that most of us seek and treasure. Is it reasonable to suggest that technology can play a legitimate role in fostering intimacy?

In her book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Turkle cites what she calls the Goldilocks Effect:

We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference.

If just right means establishing the correct digital distance and cleaning ourselves up with the technological tools at hand, what does this say about intimacy? Like Turkle, I fear that it reveals much. It reveals that if we’re reliant on technology to build intimacy into our lives, we’re building our emotional foundations on the sinking sand of mere connection. And it reveals that we increasingly rely more on these technologies than on face-to-face conversations and relationships.

Turkle argues that these technologies facilitate connections in sips, for gathering discrete bits of information. She goes on to explain, however, that they neither have the power nor means to faciliate genuine understanding and intimacy. I confess that an I love you (followed by an exclamation point and a heart emoji) is always a weak substitute for looking deeply into another’s eyes and speaking these words with clear intent. Understandably, most of us use our cell phones and computers to send words of love and encouragement to loved ones who live too far away to frequently visit. We rely upon social media to see pictures of our families and friends, our former classmates and their families, etc. And we’re grateful for the technologies that make these connections possible. But to confuse these connections with intimacy is quite another thing.

For me, Turkle’s most troubling claim is that as we lose the ability to converse intimately with others, she fears that we also lose the ability to converse authentically with ourselves. And as we lose the ability to converse with ourselves, she argues that we also lose our capacity to self-reflect. I’ve thought a lot about this recently. I can painfully recall how many times I was frustrated by my students’ inability and unwillingness to be self-reflective. This frustration only grew throughout my 40-year teaching career. More than anything, I dreaded teaching the narrative essay, for increasingly students responded with comments and questions like these: I don’t have anything to write. What do you mean “write about a time or incident that mattered to me”? And what do you mean by “mattered”? Do I just write about what I did last summer? No matter how many examples I provided, how much I modeled reflective thinking, most of my students still looked at me with expectant faces–as if I could do more, as if I could just think reflectively for them.

In her essay “Growing Up Tethered,” Turkle also writes about how technology may be seriously delaying the rite of passage from adolescent to adult. If you can’t be self-reflective, if you’re tethered to your phone, if you’re reliant on how others see and respond to you digitally, if you’ve never experienced genuine solitude, how can you mature into a self-reflective, independent adult capable of intimate relationships? And worse yet, will you even want to?

I agree with Turkle when she writes that [o]ur networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. What an incredible paradox: the desire to be hidden and yet to be connected. It’s no wonder that this tension manifests itself in the types of depression, anxiety, and loneliness that we read about and experience now. A year of Covid-induced Zoom schooling, working, and communicating has only exacerbated a problem that had already grown deep roots in our society.

To a certain extent, we’ll always rely on technology. That barn door is open and won’t likely be closed. Still, I’m grateful for and encouraged by frank discussions about how technology is affecting our relationships, positively and negatively. And because, like Turkle, I’m convinced there are no cheap substitutes for intimacy, I’m hoping that we continue an honest investigation into the notion that technology can be the architect of our intimacies.

I do the splits perfectly in PE. I lose half a pound in two days. I get the spinach and pig-meat frittata from the lo-carb section for lunch. And no-one else knows. I mentally construct a MyFace status, polishing the memories carefully until they shine. The need to record my life is as fundamental as my need to breathe. Without MyFace, I’m floating. I have nothing to anchor me down, to prove I exist.
― Louise O’Neill, Only Ever Yours

I remember the secret (who were we kidding?) notes we passed through the rows of our elementary classrooms, notes carefully folded into shapes so small that even 10-year old hands could palm them. On these notes were written the all-important words: Do you like me? Check yes or no. With baited breath, we waited until our intended opened the note, checked one of the boxes, and sent it back through the same rows of classmates who ferried it surely along its return route. Before social media, we had notebook paper, gracious and practiced peer accomplices, and the occasional teachers who had more important things to attend to than student notes.

To be liked may, indeed, be a sanctuary. That is, while we feel liked, our moods improve and our dopamine levels increase. Today, for better or worse, being liked is a primary contributor to social media’s success. According to the Addiction Center, neuroscientists have compared social media interaction to a syringe of dopamine being injected straight into the system. Like other addictions–drugs, alcohol, gambling–social media offers the same physical and pyschological “high”:

. . .when an individual gets a notification, such as a like or mention, the brain receives a rush of dopamine and sends it along reward pathways, causing the individual to feel pleasure. Social media provides an endless amount of immediate rewards in the form of attention from others for relatively minimal effort. The brain rewires itself through this positive reinforcement, making people desire likes, retweets, and emoticon reactions. [The Addiction Center]

To bask in the warmth and excitement of a dopamine rush can be a wonderful thing. It goes without saying, however, that a dopamine rush is like any other rush: an immediate, but fleeting, pleasure. And when it goes? When you don’t receive as many likes as you did the day–or hour–before? When you find your social media following slipping away? Or, worst of all, when you discover that you’re receiving as many or more dislikes–perhaps even hate–than likes?

Recently, I’ve begun thinking more about this whole notion of being liked through social media. Over the weekend, my granddaughter and I watched several episodes of a new Hulu series, The D’Amelio Show. The show profiles TikTok sensations, Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, who, according to Adrian Horton of The Guardian, are two of the most recognizable faces among Gen Z, superstars on the most culturally influential social media platform in the country right now. Horton reports that 17-year-old Charli currently has 123.6 million viewers on the social app, TikTok. At age 66, it’s not suprising that I’ve never heard of Charli or Dixie D’Amelio, though I admit to being current enough to recognize the wildly popular app called TikTok. As a grandma, I thought it wise to watch The D’Amelio Show with my granddaughter, to see what all the fuss is about.

In his article, “The D’Amelio Show: what do you do with TikTok fame?” Horton describes the intent of the series:

The D’Amelio Show, in both its very existence and primary storylines (Dixie’s nascent singing career, Charli’s business deals, mental health), is primarily concerned with the question of professional likability. What does it do to someone, especially young women, and what do you do with it?

Midway into the first episode, I realized that the emerging theme (one that persists throughout the entire series) was primarily the mental health of the young women, Charli and Dixie. Both young women speak candidly and repeatedly about haters who often respond with vitriol to their social media posts. They cry, they seek solace from other social media influencers and their family, they question their worth and the worth of their work. To say that it’s painful to watch is an understatement. It’s grueling, at best, and wholly defeating, at worst. On a positive note, however, as my granddaughter and I watched, it did offer us valuable opportunities to talk about the effects of social media fame and the compulsion to be liked on social media platforms.

This series and recent research into the addictive nature of social media also raise disturbing questions: Do social media users increasingly need these platforms to feel anchored, to prove that they exist? Can users successfully manage their fluctuating dopamine levels? Are we creating behavioral addictions that seriously damage users’ mental health and drain energy and attention from life in general? Should we shape ourselves (and how we present ourselves) and our interests based on how many likes and dislikes we receive?

Pete Cashmore, founder of mashable.com, claims that [w]e’re living in a time when attention is the new currency. Some may argue that even being disliked is preferable to being invisible. Commanding attention is gold, they may insist, being noticed–even negatively–is marketable. Clearly, the D’Amelio sisters’ fame is a testament to this argument. Still, it makes me wonder whether the relative invisibility characteristic to most of our lives is always and necessarily a bad thing. Most of us live without huge social media followings and have little time or inclination to check our likes on social media platforms. We’re simply too busy with the stuff of ordinary living where dopamine rushes come occasionally as pleasures to enjoy rather than highs to sustain. Of course we’re human and, by nature, we want to be liked. But wanting to be liked and living to be liked are clearly different things. I fear that those who live to be liked will invariably lead less healthy, rewarding lives than those who simply want to be liked. And talking about this difference and why it matters is truly important.

Perhaps The D’Amelio Show will prompt these types of conversations. Or perhaps–tragically–it will give birth to a new generation of social media users eager to supercede the popularity of Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, driven to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records for most social media likes. I’m really, really hoping for the former.

P.S. If you like this post, check yes ________ or no __________ (Just kidding!)