Love, I have been saying for thirty years, is respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement.
Involvement. Relationship with
something or someone outside yourself.
Question: can we humans love totally
online, totally without physical contact with other human beings?
Can we be involved with other people
respectfully online, vulnerably online, faithfully online?
Elon Musk is said to be determined to
prove that human beings can live on Mars. Maybe he thinks that life on earth is
doomed, and that Mars is the only place where humanity could survive. But human
life there would be so impoverished as to be not life at all.
We live on a big beautiful planet
(or, in the universe as we know it, a tiny beautiful planet). We are
surrounded, even inside our bodies, with other life forms. We live in a world
of plants, and other animals.
Students on my campus here at Quincy
University are now allowed to have pet animals in their rooms on campus. Our
recently retired State’s Attorney here in Quincy kept a well-trained dog in his
office, because he found that the presence of the dog could help calm people for
whom contact with the law was terribly stressful.
Being outside in nature has always
been central to my experience of life.
Mars would have none of that. Everything
would have to be hermetically sealed against the outside environment, because
the human body could not survive otherwise on the surface of a planet so far
from the sun.
Is life online a foretaste of life on
Mars?
It may not be as bad as that.
People used to write letters.
Relationships could flourish with that greatly impoverished form of
involvement. But letters weren’t good enough. We want physical presence,
physical involvement, if we are to have life and have it more abundantly.
That is a phrase used by Jesus, “have
life and have it more abundantly.” When we live a life of physical involvement
that is respectful, vulnerable, and faithful, we do live abundantly.
Maybe that is what “eternal life” is.
I fall asleep several times a day
(feature of my age, I guess). I imagine that death is just another form of
falling asleep. Each time I fall asleep, I may not ever awake again. I am at
peace with that. I have had life, and abundant life, most days of my life.
Each time I wake up, I face the
possibility of experiencing love once again, and that is life for me. I have
been given the gift—and it is a gift—of experiencing what it is to be involved,
even in tiny moments, with other people, and even with the plants and animals
of my world, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully.
The community of Roman Catholics I
live in tells me that God has “eternal life” in store for me. My reason for
accepting that belief is that a God who has given me so much life right here on
this earth is not likely to stop just because my body gives out.
I face the fact that there are a lot
of people for whom life has not been as abundant as the life I have
experienced. All I can say is that I am not God, and God will have to take care
of that. The story of Jesus tells me that God can create abundance in tiny
moments of time, even in the experience of death.
Back to the basic question: will
online involvement replace face-to-face involvement in our human experience? No,
I say, online is much too impoverished. Compared to involvement with flesh and
blood human beings, life online, I speculate, is little better than life on
Mars.
Respectful, vulnerable, faithful
involvement with other people, in person, with all the power of our five senses
in play, is a form of more abundant life.
I think people will come to see that.
They say that the Roman Empire fell
partly because the Romans were drinking too much out of earthenware lined with
lead, and the lead poisoned their brains. I sometimes wonder if our “civilization”
will disappear because online devices can be as poisonous as lead.
The Roman Empire fell, but humanity
went on. Maybe humanity went on because those people who believed that faithful,
respectful, vulnerable involvement was more important than circuses and wine had
an evolutionary advantage.
