Faith Works 3-26-22

Faith Works 3-26-22
Jeff Gill

Lent and a world of glass and sand
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Fragile and robust, or cracked yet whole.

Our smartphones (irony alert) are, for many, expensive appliances we treat casually, and broken tools which still work until they don't.

I'm noticing how for more and more people the tablet is more a device the better-off use, and phones are the go-to computer for everyday use. Younger adults can go days, weeks without working on a traditional keyboard or using a desktop, let alone laptop computer. Phones are getting bigger, and use of online materials, whether documents or applications or websites, is mostly handled in one hand, not on a screen.

Maybe this is just the folks I'm working with these days, but I talk and assist large numbers of parents of school age children now, and telling them on the phone (a device on my desk with a handset I can crunch into my shoulder while typing on a computer workstation) to check a certain website will often get me "okay, I'm looking at it on my phone."

Not to tell the digital age something it already knows better than me, but a web page on a 15 inch screen (or paired screens) is a very different interaction than a smartphone browser's rendition. So I've learned when I need to walk someone through a registration or updating or revising of online information, I look at it on my phone first.

It's a function of age and long-ailing eyesight, but this lesson took me a while because a complex form online of any sort would normally cause me, if say I learned I needed to use it by an email on my phone (hold that thought) I'd still wait until I got home, for a larger view and more fingers on the keyboard — maybe not ten, but definitely not all with one finger or two thumbs. Not so most people I'm learning. The internet is becoming a landscape viewed more through the porthole of a phone screen than a wider window as I prefer.

And just to further belabor the obvious, all kinds of former viewscapes are clamping down to three or four inches by five or six: movie theaters are celebrating a return to seats that are clearly fewer in number than we once had, and that's not all due to COVID times, and even home theater large TV screens may be secondary to what people are looking at in their lap, cradled in one hand.

There are people I think very well of indeed who have said, without irony, that they believe we should ban all social media until people hit age 18 or so. I can understand where they're coming from without entirely agreeing with them. And in a separate but somewhat parallel line of thinking, some wise heads have voiced a belief that faith communities should quit providing online worship, to promote attendance and fellowship and engagement with one another. I can only agree with the goal, the ends, while I'm skeptical of the means.

Now we have a factory complex coming our way which takes silicon, sand in essence, and fabricates from it a vast house of data. I'll save 500 words and let you mull over that sermon illustration right there (house, sand, build, hmmm). The ironies get richer when you think of how a century and a half ago we had glass factories to the east of Newark, today a brilliant Heisey Glass Museum in the heart of the city, and a silicon transmutation complex going up to our west.

The chips more and more go into devices, we still call them phones, which are as the interface a pane of glass, both window and mirror for us. Honestly, for anyone, let alone a Christian preacher, it sets us up for an embarrassment of homiletic riches.

Looking into our world of glass and sand, reading about the radical, transformative changes that are coming to our area, are we seeing our reflection, a distorted window, or are we getting a clear view of what's to come? I hear fear, I hear joy, I see excitement, and I see dread as I've talked to various community leaders and local residents these last few weeks.

What we should remember is that we're getting most of our impressions through accidentally cracked glass, artfully fused sand, semiconductors which can only transmit semi truths, if that's what's put into them.

Or from the earliest days of computers: garbage in, garbage out. That's a phrase worth contemplating, over halfway through this Lent of 2022.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his screen is cracked, too. Tell him how you keep your perceptions clear at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.