The winds of cultural evolution have brought us the “blog” (for the uninitiated, that’s short for “web log”—an internet space that acts as a journal for publishing your thoughts to the world). It’s not at all hard to understand how such a phenomenon is fast becoming infused into our culture. DSL, Cable, T1—we utilize faster and faster modes of connecting with each other in cyber-space, but all the while living in a flesh-space where many have lost their connection or at best are working through the emotional equivalent of a painfully slow and unreliable dial-up modem. Do you remember 14-40? I remember the absolute purgatory of waiting for a single page to load. I remember often giving up on connecting all-together. How true this still is of me in flesh-space relationships. Give me what I want, let me read you quickly, make your site easy to navigate and interesting to look at, or I’m out of here.

A world that has trouble connecting through flesh-space looks more and more to cyber-space to fill the void.

In this way the internet is becoming a kind of proto-spiritual portal, an electronic out-of-body experience in which we compose and project a digital self-image into an ethereal plane where we encounter other digital self-images in the hope of communing (community) for just a bit. At the same time that reality is shutting us down, virtual reality is beginning to enable us to open up once again. And so we Blog, Email, IM, and surf—broadcasting our otherwise silent cries for connection into the ether—in the hope that out there, somewhere, someone is listening and will respond.

Are you reading with the expectation that I’m about to make a negative assessment of the internet and our involvement in it? Sorry to disappoint. I absolutely love the idea of connecting with all of you at the speed of light. I’m a child of an electronic age and as such would probably not have named it “virtual reality” if it were up to me. I see little reason to call any form of potential interaction “virtual” as if it is less potentially real. Nevertheless, we are a fusion of spirit/flesh and therefore there exists a distance between us on-line that our web technology cannot bridge—a yearning for connection that it will not satisfy.

So these thoughts are really just a reminder … to use the cyber-space journeys of our digital self-images for drawing connections back into flesh-space whenever possible. In my cyber-space I’ve been given an allotment of empty kilobytes to fill with connection. But I must never forget that I’ve been given an allotment of flesh-space as well—the 10,000 cubic inches between my outstretched arms that only fills with connection when I invite some into “my space”. It is still most often this “word-becomes-flesh” space where God touches, connects, and begins to heal the world.

Well that’s it for me today. Feel free to reply in the cyber, or if you’re looking for one, come on by sometime and get a hug.

Love,

Dean