I grew up in Salem, Oregon, Salem being a shortened form of Jerusalem. It is a mid-sized capital city with a downtown and suburbs, many immigrants – Mexican immigrants, settlers from all over the country who came West to seek their fortune. Many came to Salem just to escape where they were – some came to escape hardship, for some simple tedium. For many years, our class would play the Oregon Trail, a game that taught children about Oregon’s history. I never knew that kids across the United States also played this game, and for many, this was the one thing they knew about my home. It was a game about preparation, facing hardships, and dealing with losses. At the beginning of the game you needed to buy supplies: food, blankets, medical supplies without knowing what you may encounter on the trail. The beginning of the game started in Missouri, near the mouth of the Missouri and Mississippi River in St. Louis, and took you on a trail westward where nobody could tell you for certain what awaited you. I’ve wondered for years how being born in the West, at the end of the trail, has influenced my idea of searching. I’ve wondered what it meant to be born in a place where people sacrificed to get to, even to this day.
Like the settlers who came from the East, I experienced hardship. experienced simple tedium and boredom. I have felt it was time to either go to a new continent or backtrack where all these settlers wished to escape from – to go back to the place where they imagined a New Jerusalem, and experienced it in a valley about 1 hour from the Pacific Ocean, and hour from mountains, 3 hours from desert. I’ve wanted to retrace their steps, and perhaps see if there is still ash from the burning house they ran out of.
I first heard the story of the burning house in the Lotus Sutra very recently, and it immediately made me think of technology. We now have the whole world in our hands, and that world is our phone. It is a tool, it’s a toy, it’s an office, it’s entertainment, it’s an agitator, for some it’s a lover, an appendage to their person. I consider myself fortunate to be alive during the birth and boom of the technological age. I was born before the internet, and saw it come into existence while still a child. We can thank Al Gore for that (joke). I was born in that transition where CD tracks became MP3”s, and it became possible in a matter of months to put over 1,000 songs on a device smaller than a pack of gum. I remember fondly now the frustration of dial up internet, and my mother being angry that I was taking up the phone line. I remember the awe and joy of Cable and DSL, which allowed nearly instant, seeming light speed gratification. It literally felt as if the world was at my fingertips, and in a sense it was.
I was born during that transition from land line phones to common usage of cell phones. I went from the use of cell phones only for emergencies, to the current day where I no longer even have a landline. I have seen how a hashtag on social media can start a movement. I have seen in some ways a greater accountability thanks to the ability of so many people having access to capturing video. I remember the day Jennifer showed me a video on Facebook by an individual who was filming armed guards with machine guns at an oil pipeline set to be built in North Dakota. I remember Jennifer telling me that she could not find this being covered on any news feed, but it here it was, an individual’s video which others confirmed was real. It was a cry for help through technology using wireless connection.
Martin Luther King Jr. said we belong to a network of mutuality. The word network always resonated with me, and now because of technology, this term has an added meaning. We see on a never before scale this network of mutuality. We now experience viscerally the truth of how one person, one post, one video can literally transform our world. It is an enormous power that perhaps has always existed, but now we see enacted each and every day. And the network gets tangled. We see all sides of our humanity, including the sides we wish would disappear. We see the reality for some of putting limits on how they use technology, if they use technology, and who they allow to view and impact their network.
We have created mini-networks in order to find support and sanity in a scary and confusing time. We are witnessing how these wireless networks can be manipulated by both domestic and foreign powers, by business, by a single or small set of individuals. We see a concern about our privacy, about the validity of our vote, about whether our inner life is being tracked, and bought and sold based on whom and what we communicate about through this network.
I still have a flip phone. Some people have interpreted this a reaction against technology, of even a moral judgement on our modern era. The truth is more simple than that. It’s not based on a moral principle or because I’m trying to make a statement. It’s simply because it feels that everything is moving so fast, and I’m not sure I’m ready to give myself to the current of that river completely. We’ve let the river run for decades now, and it’s moving faster than my spirit. It’s moving faster than my attention. I don’t think this is a positive attribute of myself. I’m just telling you the truth. Jennifer keeps asking me when I’m ready to fully enter the year 2019, approaching 2020. Even as I say 2020, I feel like I’m talking about the future. On one hand, I feel we should have cars that fly, and I should have a hoverboard, and maybe a pulpit with rockets attached, so we can all have worship in the sky. In a strange way, I feel like if I imagined the year 2020, I feel we would be more advanced. Yet even with the current advancements, I’m not sure I’m completely ready.
I’m not against technology on principle. You may see me someday with a phone that by that time is 2 years old, but new for me, tweeting about my day, and offering status updates every time I drink a cup of coffee, or go for a walk, or sit down, or have dinner, or simply think about having dinner. I would not see this as a problem. I’m just not quite there yet. I’ve followed the premise that I will quickly learn about what I need to know by those who are more connected to technology than I am. Perhaps I still like the illusion of feeling like I’m only listening to my own thoughts. I like to look at the birds when I walk, not at a phone. Did you notice no one looks at the sky anymore?
We have the whole world in our hands now. Even the sky is now is our hands. We can see pictures of the sky. We can see the Arctic Lights. We can type in “clouds that look like bunnies” and we will see a sky with bunnies. In a way, we have a sense of control over our attention unlike we’ve ever seen before. We can order and direct our attention toward whatever we like. Except, not really. We are inundated now with advertisements, marketing companies who track our cookies, not just the edible ones. We get news we don’t want to see, and yet we also don’t want to miss. We see status updates of our second grade teacher who is now battling cancer, right next to a video of our niece in her first school play.
Our attention is being trained to move adeptly and quickly from one thing to the next. Some are concerned this is having a numbing effect, making us numb by seeing distressing things with such frequency, vacillating between images that lift us up and fill us with distress. We are beginning to experiment with the age old question of human consciousness, and testing if our consciousness like the universe expands without limit or if our attention like our brain has a finite percentage that it is capable of using. I don’t have an answer to this question. I also, as some may know already, not much of a help in regard to fixing or understanding technology. I’m not the most technically adept, and I admire those who understand its intricacies and uses in ways I can barely comprehend. But one thing seems to be true to me: we are living in a burning house. Don’t be too concerned. You can stay in your seats, at least for the time being. The house has been burning for a long time. As Billy Joel said: “We didn’t start the fire.” The toys have changed over the decades, and over different lifetimes, but it seems to be the case that as a species we are especially skilled at focusing our attention on what we want while avoiding to some extent what we don’t want. It’s not completely successful, but enough to keep us occupied, to keep us busy, to make us feel normal.
I’ve always found it very wise that in the Lotus Sutra, the father is very careful not to cause the children to panic. He doesn’t try to scare them out of their predicament. He doesn’t shame them. He doesn’t say: Why are you so distracted with your toys? You should notice this, and you should be like this, and you shouldn’t be so preoccupied with your toys. In this scenario, I feel all of us are both the father and the children. We have the things in our life that give us a sense of normalcy and comfort, and we have realities waiting to consume us if we don’t notice them. But we shouldn’t panic. Panicking won’t get us out of the house. It might just further confuse us, or cause us to obsess with our toys even more. There is a basic premise in this story that we are the way we are, and we need to learn to be kind and work with that.
There are many things happening currently that are giving people a reason to panic, including the environmental crisis, as one example. I know there are many others. But panicking will not get all of us out of the burning house. In the story’ the father does something kind of ingenious and sneaky. He lies to his children. He tells them a lie that he has fancier, shinier objects for them to play with. At the end of the story, it doesn’t say how the children respond to being lied to. It doesn’t say whether they’re disappointed or just grateful to be alive now that they see the flames, and they’re able to stand outside of it long enough to notice. It doesn’t say because that’s not the point of the story. The point is that they’re out of the house, and they’re safe, they’re alive..
I think more than ever, we need to remind people that there is something more than a burning house. There is a place of sanctuary, a place within us and around us that is good, and that holds us close in love. It doesn’t say in the story that they called the fire department, and the flames were put out. Maybe the fire continued to rage on for eternity. Maybe it finally was put out and became ashes, a symbol, like our chalice. Maybe nobody really knows what happened, because the children became so busy playing, they lost track of it again. But it doesn’t matter. The children are safe and loved, whether the fire is burning or not. We need that message in our world. We need that reminder. We need to experience there is more to this life than flames and loss. Which is why like the father, we’re experimenting with our most addictive and powerful toy: technology. It is why we have started recording and live-streaming our services thanks to our videographer Brian who records, edits, and post our services online. Whether it’s the flow of rivers, the flow of complicated networks of mutuality, or the simple flow of time, it is good to listen to that flow for the good of all of us. We have always existed in a world of wireless connection, before the invention of wires, and now after and beyond, the New Jerusalem awaits. It points us back to where we started.
