Monday, July 6, 2009

Narrative and Defragmentation

At the end of the first week of my sabbatical, I attended the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, the biennial gathering of delegates and visitors from the whole of the denomination, as well as guests from others. There were plenary sessions, amazing worship, as well as speakers and workshops and, of course, cookies.

Barbara Brown Taylor, one of our nation's most notable preachers and an Episcopal priest who now teaches at a small college in Georgia, spoke on "The Fate of Narrative in the Age of Twitter." No surprise, it was engaging, evocative, and thought-provoking. She listed three basic rules (from among a much longer list) regarding what stories she will allow to shape or influence her story, her narrative, her life.

1. Any story which she would allow to influence her story must honor and defend people not like her.

2. Any story which she will take to help make her story must allow her to argue with it. Those with prepackaged answers allowing for no deviation are unworthy of the task.

3. Any story worth being a part of her own story must level with her about the cost of love. It is not allowed to lie to her about the messiness of life.

As she related her take on narrative and the life-changing, life-giving and life-saving potential of narrative, including and especially Biblical narratives, she also related her forays into the world of e-mail, text, social networking and other new technologies. Through discussions with her students, she discovered the powerful connections they maintained with friends and loved ones through their cellphones. She soon discovered, whether a product of such technologies or her own "adult ADD," that so many technologies resulted in feeling personally fragmented, in addition to whatever benefit the connections provided.

As I was listening and taking notes, I jotted down in the margin of my paper, "Sabbath = defragmenting." If you are reading a blog, then you probably need no definition for defragmentation. It has come into our vocabulary through the ubiquitousness of the computer. We store our little bits of data, little parts of our programs, little pieces of our stories and our selves all over the place, and fairly soon we cannot retrieve all of them easily. Defragmenting is the computer's way of rightly ordering all of those bits, putting together those things which ought to be together, and gathering up the scattered.

Sabbath, resting, taking time apart from production and consumption, focusing on God, "sitting at the feet of the Lord like a cabbage" (as Julien of Norwich is credited as saying), playing, re-creating, these are ways of drawing the scattered and fragmented parts of ourselves back into who we are, so that we might be once again whole, and wholy present.

I then wrote the letters, "WCS" and an arrow to the words "Sabbath = Defragmenting." WCS is my own shorthand for "World Communion Sunday." Not that we need to, or can afford to, wait until the first Sunday in October to defrag ourselves, or even that communion is necessary for it to happen. But I will be back in the pulpit then, and one can never start too soon on a sermon idea.

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