Last week I wrote a Christmas song. The song is about angels, about Mary grappling to believe good news that stands in stark contrast to what her senses tell her.
She has to close her eyes in order to see it.
She has to ponder the words of an angel—the promises of God—in her heart. She keeps what she’s heard there, hidden away, lest she say them aloud too soon. Lest they float away on the breeze, not yet ready to be held up to the brutal light of reality, filtered through the lens of doubt and scrutiny.
(Closing your eyes in order to see; this is not our first impulse.)
There is a monologue that has captured my attention since the moment I first heard it years ago. It’s from The Fantasticks, a musical that opened off Broadway in 1960 and ran for 55 years straight (guess I wasn’t the only one enthralled by this monologue!). Listen to this imagery, this invitation to see beyond what our eyes tell us:
“…Try to see it.
Not with your eyes, for they are wise,
But see it with your ears:
The cool green breathing of the leaves.
And hear it with the inside of your hand…”
(The Fantasticks)
(If we can see with our ears, perhaps we can also see with our heart?)
How did Mary know to ponder? What was the instinct that kept her from immediately letting everyone know the very good news she was told? I can tell you with certainty that being 2,000+ years away from smartphones and instant access to other humans only helped her accomplish this disciplined act of pondering something in her heart.
Mary with a phone is kind of a terrible thought.
Imagine the angel Gabriel appearing before Mary in Nazareth, and Mary interrupting Gabriel right as he starts to speak.
“Hold on for a second,” she says, fumbling in her bag for her phone. “Let me just get this…” Mary presses record, then continues, “Okay, you can go now—do you mind just starting from the beginning? The “do not be afraid thing?”…yeah, that’s pretty good…” And suddenly Mary is no longer fully embodying the moment; rather she is thinking about selling the moment. She is thinking presentationally, rather than wholeheartedly investing in her life, her body, her mind, her spirit, her connection with someone else—in this case, a being from another realm who has now broken through to tell her something important.
(Perhaps any of us with a phone is an equally terrible thought?)
Jess, you may be thinking, We’ve read Jonathan Haidt’s research. We know phones are rewiring our brains, making our attention spans lesser than that of a goldfish (this is not hyperbole; the goldfish has now surpassed the average human’s attention span. According to the BBC, ours has dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000—which to me, doesn’t exactly feel like a robust number anyway—to 8 seconds now. Woof. The goldfish, at 9 seconds strong (which is the motto on the yellow rubber wristbands they all wear; the fact that they don’t actually have wrists doesn’t keep them from their swag), will now finish a book before a human (providing a goldfish can read, of course). Anyway, Jessica, you do not also need to be on us about phones!
Dear Reader, this is not another essay about the tragedy of humanity and our smartphones. I will prove this by writing only a *little* more about it before moving on.
It is not so much the phone, it is the way we can now fire off our thoughts with immediacy. One hundred years ago, if you were very angry, you’d slam a piece of stationary down on the table. Grab a quill (lol, was it quills, still, a hundred years ago?), dip it aggressively in ink, think very hard about what you’re going to write because it’s laborious to dip the quill and write a single letter and dip it again and writer another. So you are intentional about every word, as if you are composing angry poetry. Then you have to wait for it to dry, fold it up, seal it (lol was it wax seals a hundred years ago?), mail it. Imagine how many texts would have been sent in the time it took to write an ancient missive. In the same time it takes to write just the salutation alone, let alone the main idea—we could plant the seed for divorce, an affair, quit jobs, buy everything we can on Amazon, leverage a family home by placing a bet. Having immediate access to each other is a bomb that we now keep in our pockets while we blithely walk around the planet, ignorantly happy, like lemmings on an upbeat march en route to a nearby cliff.
Again, it is not so much the phone, per se; it is the way that we don’t remember the absolute jet fuel that boredom is, propelling us to figure out what to do, accomplish, write, discover, solve. Now when we feel the slightest lull, we simply reach for the pacifier that is our phone, and numb out our feelings as we scroll. We infantilize ourselves with this device instead of growing all the way up and facing our feelings or solving a problem. I am not fully against phones; I am against the addictive thing that happens to the majority of people with smartphones (myself included). I am against the haze of distraction that has become the air we breathe, so ubiquitous that we have lost the ability to see it at all.
Here are my questions: how do we see beyond our senses? Does hope help us see? Does nurturing a hypothesis that God is the Giver of good gifts allow us to see, find, and create more good—because inevitably, our days become one experiment after another in an effort to prove this hypothesis true.
And is there something worthwhile in pondering? Mary did this after the angel Gabriel told her that she was carrying the hope of the world, the long-awaited Messiah. But should we also ponder when we’re sitting on fiery feelings? Should our first impulse to just about everything—save a speeding car coming our way—be to wait, to see what the right course of action is after our feelings are no longer a neon sign within that make us blind to all else (perhaps all else is something worth paying attention to, as well as our feelings)?
My guess is that Mary, being fully human and, as a young, engaged woman in a world and culture in which she did not hold much power, had complicated feelings at the news that she was pregnant. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she only felt joy and wonder. But the book of Matthew tells us that Joseph, being a just man, was “going to divorce her quietly” (in this case, engagement was as binding a pact as marriage; thus, to end an engagement was tantamount to divorce). Maybe Mary suspected this would be the result of her incredible news. Maybe Mary wondered how many people would believe her, given every other case of pregnancy throughout history was the result of only one thing. Maybe she needed to shore up her heart with an innate knowledge of what is true, despite what she sees. Maybe she needed to cradle the angel’s words within, rocking them back and forth, the same way she would tenderly rock the infant Messiah once He was in her arms.
When I was working at a studio in Boston, the manager sent out the newly revised schedule, and, after seeing some changes not in my favor, I felt a grave injustice had been done. Right away, I poured all my wounded feelings into a long email and pressed send. Except I made the rookie mistake of pressing SEND ALL (Mary would NEVER). It was humiliating, knowing that the entire company was reading about my hurt feelings. And I alone was to blame. Had I waited, gotten counsel, maybe even written the email but saved it before impulsively sending it, I would have spared myself some profound embarrassment. And we all know that none of our ancestors were accidentally sending their laboriously written scrolls to thirty people instead of the one for whom it was intended. Nobody could do that by accident and nobody could do it quickly. Immediacy is not always our friend, and it would be wise to handle it like the weapon it can be.
Here’s to seeing with our eyes closed, learning how to hold things in our heart until the right time, and practicing restraint when it comes to hitting send.
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