|
Whatever Happened To The Water Cooler?
Although I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink; Instead I hope to come to you and talk with you face to face, So that our joy may be complete. (1 John 12, with a reading of Psalm 133) We are in the Information Age, which would seem to imply that we share more, that we talk to each other more than ever before. If, as our text says, it is “good and pleasant for brothers to dwell together in unity,” then things could surely never have been so good and so pleasant as they are now. However, that seems clearly not to be the case. It’s an Information Age phenomenon that some people chat several times a day, often to strangers living in faraway places like Singapore or Jerusalem or Berlin, while not speaking to their own neighbors for years! Let me tell you about Adele Gaboury’s neighbors. Their neighborly ways were featured in The Boston Globe, which reported that every time Adele’s lawn grew hip-high, the neighbors had a local boy mow it down. They knew she couldn’t mow it herself. When her pipes froze and burst, her neighbors took the initiative to have the water turned off. When mail accumulated in her house so that it jammed the front door mail slot, they called the police. Seems the only thing the neighbors didn’t do was to talk with her, face-to-face, to see if she was alive. She wasn’t. Responding to a neighbor’s call, police broke into the side door of Adele’s little blue house and found the 73 year old woman’s skeletal remains right where she had apparently died, an estimated four years earlier! PBS reported on the guilt felt by Adele’s neighbors when their neighborhood was featured on world news in this most unflattering way. “It’s not a very friendly neighborhood,” said 70 year old Eileen Dugan, once a close friend of Adele’s whose house sits less than twenty feet from the dead woman’s home. “I’m as much to blame as anyone. She was alone and needed someone to talk to, but I was working two jobs and was sick of her coming over at all hours. Eventually I stopped answering the door.” Evidently Adele, described as a loner, got the message. Now, to be sure, this is an extreme example. When the death of a neighbor goes unnoticed for four years, it makes World News Tonight. But not knowing one’s neighbor is not unusual at all. Western society is defined to a considerable extent by its individualism, its concern to safeguard personal rights and privacy. However, one wonders if this positive feature of Western society may have contributed to a slide toward isolation. Is Western society losing its community cohesion? The vertical string of locks and bolts on many American doors has become sort of a modern poetry of paranoia. So let’s ask this morning -- what cultural trends are responsible for reducing our perceived need for social contact and making a story such as Adele’s possible? Two Harvard professors have published studies exploring this cultural shift. In 1997, John Locke, a neurolinguist, wrote a most insightful book titled, The De-Voicing of Society: Why We Don’t Talk To Each Other Any More. It was a report on that book which was the original inspiration for the development of this sermon. A second article published in 1995 by Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor of public policy, bears a less scholarly, down-home title: “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” “The De-voicing of Society” asks a very piercing question, “Why don’t we talk to each other any more?” Sure, we communicate, our nimble fingers tapping the “send” button multiple times daily to e-mail the latest factoid. We share tons of information, but does the sharing of information mean that we are talking? Dr. Locke suggests it does not, and the Apostle John seems to agree. “Although I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink – instead I hope to come to you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete.” As Dr. Putnam puts it, “face time is never wasted time.” Dr. Locke suggests that, by under-exercising humanity’s faculties for social communication, we’ve brought about a de-voicing of society through an insufficient diet of face time, of simply talking. A wonderful symbol of this cultural shift, pointed out by Dr. Len Sweet, is the Water Cooler. The Water Cooler once held a special place in the hallowed halls of business folklore. The Water Cooler was the inter-office gathering point, sacred ground for free assembly. It was once the shrine to office gab where people could tell their weekend golf or fishing story or complain about the latest directives from the boss. In Navy terms (I am reminded by some of our veterans) the Water Cooler was the Scuttlebutt, a term that evolved into a description of rumors, since the Water Cooler was where the sailors gathered to share information. You don’t hear much about Water Coolers these days, and it’s not that we’re drinking less. We’re drinking differently. What’s happened at the Water Cooler parallels what has happened in our culture – a shift from the community to the individual. In our day we drink, not from the community cooler, but from individually packaged bottles that impersonally bang their way down the labyrinth path of a vending machine. Rather than a free sip from the cooler, we prefer to spend a buck or two for premium imported seltzer in raspberry or orange flavor. What we don’t realize is that if we lose the water cooler, we pull the plug on a critical component of human relationships. Small talk. Little, refreshing, free sips of human fellowship. Now, let me pause to say that you may not feel that this sermon much relates much to your life. We in Mountain Home and in this church have two things going for us. While Mountain Home has exciting growth, it largely retains its small town flavor, clinging to the values of a day gone by when the city was smaller and relationships more intimate. The second is that you are actively involved in a church, which seems to attract those who hunger for relationships. So, it’s true, perhaps this sermon would have greater relevance in Boston or the inner city of New York, Chicago or L. A.. You see, what we have in Mountain Home is a treasure. While small town rootedness and community values are gradually slipping away from an increasingly urbanized culture, we in Mountain Home still enjoy the remnants of the community-oriented existence which our great-grandparents experienced. There is a certain quality to small town life, elusive of definition, which renders the simplest moments so full -- simple moments at the gathering places of our town – coffee shops and restaurants, the high school football stadium and summer softball leagues, bowling alleys, worship settings and service groups. Other cities have all these places, of course. The difference seems to be in the number of recognizable faces one encounters, the ability, face-to-face, to know others and to speak meaningfully. Our great-grandparents lived with the same 1,000 or so people of their acquaintance their entire lives. Face-to-face they engaged in commerce, recreation, amusement, and worship. Dr. Putnam mentions that in 1900 you couldn’t listen to music unless you did it in the company of other people. We can now listen to the finest music in the world in the privacy of our earphones and never see another person, a technological wonder for which we are thankful, but he wonders if we aren’t being made to grapple in society with the repercussions, the negative effect on societal and community-oriented life. Moreover, this technology doesn’t just disengage us from community, but tends as well to foster disengagement from one another within our families. How many times have parents heard the teenagers contest mom and dad’s plan for an evening or a meal together -- “I’ll just stay in my room and listen to my music,” or “watch television.” With respect to technology, we have too much of what is not enough, and our society is yet sorting through the psychological impact, which at times is notoriously traumatic. Our television dramas now, such as CSI and Criminal Minds, focus on crime and often feature the abnormalities of individuals who, lacking a community bond, used technology to privatize their addictions to certain perversions which in turn gave birth to a legion of mental and emotional abnormalities. This is possible because of a culture of privatization enhanced by technology. Make no mistake, technological changes have had the net effect of privatizing our leisure time – radio, television, CDs, DVDs, internet. All of this has made face-to-face interaction virtually unnecessary. Yes, we have plenty of information outlets, but to quote Orthodox theologian Lambros Kamperidis, one wonders if we aren’t “surrounded by water and dying of thirst.” Edward Hallowell, a noted psychiatrist, comments on this phenomenon by saying that we are in danger of losing what he calls, The Human Moment, that authentic encounter that happens, not on a computer screen with virtual pen and ink, but only when two people are brought face-to-face to say “Bon jour,” or “Gutten Morgen, wie gehts” or “Shalom, boqer tov, mah nishmah” or “Good morning, how are you?” Small talk. Ours is a culture fully individualized, de-centralized, privatized and sterilized. There seems no longer a need for the human moment. But we need the human moment to maintain emotional and spiritual wholeness. Our culture, with vocal intimacy on the wane in many aspects of our community living, is even now discovering the damage done by the absence of the human moment. Yes, tons and tons of information are being shared, but sharing information and talking are not synonymous. Talking is a richer, deeper experience. Talking is not merely about a transfer of information. Talking is about relationship, interfacing with another human being which utilizes not only the vocabulary of language, but relies on visual cues -- subtle glances, raised eyebrows, a strategic wink. In talking, information agendas become secondary. For example, I’m going to sit now behind the pulpit and intentionally not make eye contact with any of you. After all, why is it important to make eye contact with you? Modern technology has no problem amplifying my voice from a seated position. You can hear me, can’t you, even without the face-to-face exchange of pulpit and pew? People listening on the radio may have noted no difference, since they can’t SEE that I’m now seated and out of the sight of most of you. Or, perhaps they can. Perhaps they, too, could hear a shift, a subtle change in my voice. Let’s call it, disembodied interaction. I do this to emphasize a point – that the Information Age has arrived, but not IN PERSON. Technology has overwhelmed us with information, much of it unnecessary and unwanted. Many now spend their days exchanging factoids, but it’s ordinary social talking, face-to-face small talk, that enriches us with one another. Now I’ll stand up again. My guess is that my being hidden behind the pulpit made you immediately experience discomfort. The reason for your discomfort is that transmitting information is a secondary purpose of communication. God knew this when he decided to visit us. “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us!” Amazing News! God dwelling with us. I said earlier that the Information Age has arrived, but it didn’t arrive IN PERSON. God arrived IN PERSON! For God, it seems, face time is never wasted time. The information Jesus brought is important, to be sure. But vastly more important is the lesson we learn through the fact of the Incarnation itself, God with us, Emmanuel. That speaks of community, not isolation. That speaks of involvement, not disinterest. That speaks of closeness, not distance. In Jesus, God talked to us, not with disembodied interaction, but in the flesh. The trend toward isolation is clear. By almost every measure, Americans are less connected today than they were forty years ago. Societal gathering places are on the endangered species list. Civic participation through organizations such as Lions and Rotary Clubs struggle to interest younger generations. We seem to be losing the incentive to gather. If we want the church to be the community mooring for a culture set adrift, we must make certain that the church doesn’t content itself with mere association, that it understands that small talk is vital. While the most sacred place in the church may be the sanctuary, the fellowship hall is vital for the development of social capital, and that goes, too, for our Sunday School rooms and other ministries providing a forum for small talk in small groups. I hold the Galilee as a very special place. In Jerusalem one recalls the world-changing events in which Christ participated – the Last Supper, the garden, the arrest, the trial, the cross. But in the Galilee, boating in the peaceful water or walking along the shore, one thinks of Jesus, not as a player in world-shaking events, but in the simple small talk with his fishermen disciples, enjoying those refreshing sips of human fellowship through which Jesus and his disciples shared the Human Moment. I can hear now Jesus singing now, with his disciples, the song of David which was already a thousand years old when Jesus walked the shoreline of Galilee – Hine mah tov umah na’im shevet ahim gam yahad! This morning we conclude our worship by singing, “Lord, you have come to the Lakeshore.” It’s a beautiful song. Imagine yourself walking and talking, laughing and singing with Jesus. That shouldn’t be so difficult to imagine. That is, in fact, the Good News! God participated in the Human Moment! Baruch ha-Shem Adonai. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.
Sources and notes: A review of The De-Voicing of Society taken from www.amazon.com. “Let’s Meet: Rebuilding Community,” an interview with author Robert Putnam by Rev. David J. Wood, Christian Century, February 10, 2004. |
| Click here to return to the Sermon Index page. |