Coming August 2010

THE THREAD

FINDING A SACRED PLACE IN CYBERSPACE

CATHLEEN FALSANI

Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.

U2, “Grace”

It began with something wholly unthinkable.

Shortly after 7:00 a.m. one Friday in early April 2008, my husband went upstairs to make us coffee, and I propped myself up in bed, grabbed my laptop, and logged on to Facebook.

There, on the right-hand rail where my friends’ status updates pop up randomly, I saw a short sentence that changed my life forever:

“David is really sad that Mark died today.”

David Vanderveen is a friend of mine from Wheaton College who lives in Laguna Beach, California. I checked the time, realizing it was only 5:00 a.m. on the West Coast, and thought, “Please, God, let him not be talking about Metherell.”

Mark Metherell, Dave’s best friend, next-door neighbor in Laguna, and all-around partner in crime, was one of my favorite people. A former Navy Seal, Mark was working in the private sector in Iraq helping to train Iraqi forces.

Mark and Dave have notoriously wicked senses of humor, and for a few minutes I thought this must surely be one of their bizarre inside jokes. I sent Dave an email asking — pleading really — for him to tell me he wasn’t serious. When I didn’t hear back from him immediately, I emailed Mark’s other best friend, Dave Burchi, who also lives in Laguna.

“It’s not a joke, Cath,” Dave wrote back. “Mark was killed by a roadside bomb this morning.”

My heart gained fifty pounds and sank in my chest, a painful boulder. By the time my husband returned with our cups of coffee, I was a puddle of tears, sobbing inconsolably as I tried to explain what I’d just learned.

I still can’t believe it. Mark, 39, was one of the most alive people I’ve ever known. He was a year ahead of me at Wheaton, but he stayed for a fifth year to finish a degree in literature (and biology), and we graduated together in 1992. While Mark wasn’t one of my best friends, he was certainly one of my favorite friends — ever.

Mark was so many marvelous things. A lanky John Cleese-ian figure swathed in khaki and flannel, he was wryly and riotously funny.

Mark could convey more humor with the quiver of one wonky eyebrow than most people can manage with their whole bodies. He was deeply intelligent and wonderfully wacky. An adventurous, sea-loving surfer (even in Lake Michigan), he was literate, faithful, and kind.

And he was a hero to me long before he proudly served his country in the armed forces and beyond. Mark died on April 11, 2008, when the vehicle he was riding in — the lead vehicle in a convoy — struck a roadside bomb outside Sadr City. He was killed instantly, leaving behind his beloved wife, Sarah, their infant daughter, Cora, and a devastated community of friends and family all over the world.

I ached to throw my arms around the heartbroken Daves and the rest of those who knew and loved Mark best. I wanted to tell them what Mark surely would have: that they are loved and treasured for who they are, for the strength and beauty of their spirits, for their wit and friendship, for being the vessels of grace for us that they are.

In those first hours and days after Mark’s untimely death, many of us took to the Internet to share stories about our dearly departed friend. It started right there on Facebook, with the dozen or so of us who were already members and the more than fifty who joined to reconnect with old friends so we could grieve together.

One of his former Wheaton roommates told the story I’d long forgotten about the time Mark presided over a particularly raucous off-campus party, seated regally in a thronelike orange chair, completely nude. I shared a few stories of my own, like the time he told me he might join the military so he’d have material for the novel he was writing.

My fondest memory of Mark took place in a dive bar called Punky’s not long after we graduated. He didn’t engage me in conversation very often (actually I didn’t think he liked me very much), but he took me aside in a brotherly fashion to tell me something important. I was about to embark on a new romance, and I don’t think he approved of the suitor. Mark said he wanted me to know he thought I too often sold myself short and that I was special. He said I deserved to be cherished by someone who would appreciate all that I am without wanting to change me. Years later, when I met the man who did just that, I had Mark to thank for helping me recognize it.

When I shared that story online, I heard almost immediately from two women I knew at Wheaton. One, Margaret, a distant acquaintance, told me she had a similar conversation with Mark when they were studying in England one summer nearly twenty years earlier. The other was my dear old friend from the college theatre company, Amy, now a massage therapist in Hawaii, whom I hadn’t talked to in more than a decade. She posted a note on Facebook saying she remembered the night I came home from Punky’s after having that transforming conversation with Mark. She remembered it exactly as I had. That was such a comfort — memory can be a tricky thing — and reconnecting with her after all those years was an enormous blessing.

As we mourned and remembered together in virtual community, one of the words that came up most often in describing Mark was godly. By that I think we meant that he embodied all the qualities we like to believe God possesses. Loving. Wise. Patient. Strong. Tender. Surprising. A friend who is listening and watching even when we’re not aware of it.

A few days after Mark’s death, the Daves set up a memorial web-site for him where they could catalog all of the stories we were sharing on Facebook for the rest of the world. With Mark’s family, they planned a memorial service for him on the beach in Laguna where he spent so many hours atop his board in the surf. They instructed those who were able to attend to please wear flip-flops — Mark’s sartorial mainstay that he always called “flippity-floppities.”

For those who couldn’t make the trip to California, the Daves posted dozens of photographs from the beach service online, accompanied by one of Mark’s favorite Grateful Dead songs, “Brokedown Palace,” so we could share in the experience from a distance. I wasn’t able to travel to Laguna, and the virtual memorial ser vice online was an enormous grace. I must have watched the online slide show a hundred times, crying and laughing at the images, some of them the smiling faces of friends from college I hadn’t seen in more than fifteen years.

As the weeks passed, a core group of us continued to “talk” daily on Facebook. Our conversations were about Mark at first, and about faith, loss, God’s will, and the grieving process. But they soon turned to broader conversations about our lives, the minutia and the transcendent, bringing each other up to speed on what had transpired in the years since we had all been students at Wheaton.

A couple of weeks after Mark’s death, I found myself working on a newspaper column about an event that had recently transpired at our alma mater. One of our favorite professors resigned his tenured position rather than submit the details of his divorce to the scrutiny of a college panel. It was something of a scandal at the time, and I wanted to know what my fellow alumni thought about the situation. So I sent a group email to twenty friends on Facebook, a cross section of men and women with, I surmised, divergent perspectives on life, from the extremely conservative to the wildly liberal.

That email turned into a “thread” that continues to this day, more than six months since Mark went home to be with Jesus. After a few hundred posts, I relaunched the thread under the name “Wine and Jesus: The Communion of Sinnerly Saints,” and the increasingly intimate, vulnerable conversation carried on. As of November, the thread is in its sixth incarnation, and we’re more than seven thousand posts in.

Like many folks who skew more toward Generation X than Generation Z (for whom the social networking site was, as I understand it, originally intended) I began my foray on Facebook as an exercise in ennui abatement. I went trolling for college and high school friends, more to see how many kids they had and whether they’d lost their hair than for any loftier purpose.

My best friend in St. Louis was on there, and through her I found a few more friends, and so on until I (somehow) amassed upwards of 900 “friends,” including some people I actually know, or at least knew once upon a time. It was fun to log on and see who popped up. But it remained little more than a curiosity slaker and awesome time killer until our motley community came together online around Mark’s death. Our conversations range from the silly — we spent an entire evening posting our favorite scenes from Dazed and Confused and recently had a virtual 1980s dance party, sharing audio and videos of nostalgic dance music (think The Smiths and Flock of Seagulls) from our college days — to the eternal. Grace is a common theme that we come back to time and again, gracespotting, if you will, the hand of God as he reaches into our lives.

We’re having the kinds of conversations we used to have when we all lived within walking distance of one another on campus. Except now we’re in California and Hawaii, Chicago and New York City, St. Louis and Atlanta, Florida and North Carolina, the United Arab Emirates, the Bahamas, and Spain. Collectively we are husbands and wives; brothers and sisters (in-law and biologically); Protestants, Catholics, and Anglicans; conservatives and liberals; Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Green Party; vegetarians; entrepreneurs; stay-at-home moms; married, divorced, and widowed; mothers and fathers; adopted and adopters; seminary graduates, pastors, and chaplains; writers, filmmakers, artists, and lawyers; church members and church averse; and believers all. Some of us were close friends in college, some of us were acquaintances, and some had never met one another in person. But we are now, I would dare say, utterly and wholly committed to one another. As Bono said in U2’s theological opus, “One,” “we are one, but we’re not the same; we get to carry each other.”

A few of us have even begun to rediscover (or exhume) our faith. On Facebook. If you had told me even seven months ago that I would find community — real, authentic, deeply connected, deeply faithful community — online, I would have scoffed at you. I’m not, by nature, a joiner. Had someone created and invited me to join a group of Wheaton grads online to talk about faith and life, I would have declined. But this happened organically, not by design. And here we are, six months of daily interaction later, with a communion of twenty souls all over the world who share our lives, hopes, fears, struggles, and joys together in cyberspace.

We recently had a conversation about how to hard it has been for some of us to reach out, ask for help, and be willing to receive it. Being merciful to ourselves, is how Shani, the hospital chaplain, put it. In response, Brian, a filmmaker who is married to Sara, an artist, and who is in the midst of the arduous task of relocating their family (with two very young children) from Los Angeles to Boston, wrote, “Sara and I quote Henri Nouwen frequently of late: ‘The weakest among us create community.’ Somehow I feel I’m on the receiving end in this thread considerably more often than I am giving out. So thanks to all.”

For me, the thread, as we commonly call it, has become what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his book The Great, Good Place, described as a “third place.” Most people have two primary places — home and the workplace — and then there is a third place where they feel anchored and part of a chosen community. It might be a bar (illustrated beautifully in the television series Cheers) or a neighborhood restaurant, a house of worship, or a bowling alley. Wherever or whatever it is, everyone, Oldenburg argues, needs a third place.

Heidi Campbell, a professor of communications at Texas A&M University and author of the book Exploring Religious Community Online: We Are One in the Network, has been researching the topic of spirituality and the Internet since 1996. I asked her about my spiritual Facebook experience, and she said it’s something she’s seeing more and more. Facebook is a kind of “mediated third place that allows people to engage or invigorate their spirituality,” she said. “In a contemporary, information-based society, it’s often hard to get that face-time connection. It becomes that virtual third place where I can kind of connect with that transcendent part of myself through conversation when I couldn’t maybe take the time out to get to church to have it.” Or, as is the case with a few of us on the thread, find a physical church where we feel safe enough to have the conversation, as the case may be. On the thread, we’re all talking and, more importantly, listening in a way we might not be able to do in person.

We are a group of twenty because that’s the limit Facebook puts on the number of people you can have active on a single thread. A few months ago, we talked about starting a regular Facebook group, where the number could be unlimited and anyone could join. But after some discussion, we decided to keep the group as it was — intimate and, frankly, safe. Over time, a few of the original members have drifted out of the thread — too busy to keep up with our frenetic pace of conversation. When we reach a thousand posts, we ask if anyone wants out — to take a break — and if anyone has a suggestion of someone we should invite to the conversation. In all, about thirty-five people have been a part of the thread at one time or another.

“The beauty of Facebook or another online community is that you’re choosing your community,” Campbell told me. “Because it’s a lot of like minds gathering or people with a similar background, like your experience, you can develop a sense of intimacy more quickly. Some criticize that and say it’s a false sense of intimacy and a false sense of community because it’s self-selecting, homogenous, very tightly bound grounds. But I think you could argue that it’s the way you connect with people now. As middle age is staring us in the face, we’re trying to reconnect in a lot of ways. There’s some part of spirituality that traditional religion doesn’t really connect with, but there’s that meaning making, that God void, that I want to reconnect with, and so the Internet is becoming a great place, whether it’s to explore or to meet other people who are on the search.”

I’m not sure which one of us said it first, but somewhere around the second month, we began to refer to the thread as “church.” It sure feels like that to us. We’ve dealt with many of the conflicts that “actual” churches do. There have been misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and arguments over interpretations of Scripture, politics, and the economy. We even had to deal with a member who was acting inappropriately and making some of the women uncomfortable.

We pray together, bring our worries to one another, and share our doubts and faltering. In the six months we’ve been together online, we’ve walked with each other through divorce, childbirth, a transcontinental move, career changes, financial problems, deaths of loved ones, family members going off to war, unemployment, sickness, injury, depression, parenting issues, and — perhaps one of our greatest challenges in keeping the community honest and safe and loving — the presidential election. Short of deciding which color to paint the narthex — pink or black seemed to be the most popular options — we function much like any church, warts and all. (And we have a lot of warts.)

Earlier this year, I read with interest Shane Hipps’s Fermi Short titled, “Our Nomadic Existence: How Electronic Culture Shapes Community.” In it, Shane expresses his concern not only for the method of electronic communication but also for the medium itself. He says, “If virtual community functions like cotton candy, then authentic community is more like broccoli. It may not always taste good, but it provides crucial nourishment for the formation of our identity. Authentic community will undoubtedly be marked by conflict, risk, and rejection. At the same time, it offers the deepest levels of acceptance, intimacy, and support.”

Shane says he’s not morally opposed to cotton candy, as it can serve a legitimate — if limited — place in a person’s diet. “In the same way I am not morally opposed to virtual community; it also serves an important and limited function in our electronic culture,” he says. “The problem is that virtual community is slowly becoming the preferred means of relating.”

Now, I don’t intend for this essay to be construed as a polemic in support or defense of virtual community and/or online spirituality. But I feel compelled to tell the story of an absolutely authentic, trans-formative phenomenon that has truly enlivened my faith. Caution is a natural reaction to systemic change in our culture, and surely the dawning of Web 2.0 is a real, live paradigm shift. If we all stopped talking to one another in person and only communicated through blips on a computer screen, humanity would suffer for it.

But I think it’s equally dangerous to dismiss innovations in communication as frivolous or somehow fraudulent simply because they’re different. Is there a risk involved in becoming more “digital” and less “analog”? Absolutely. But so too there is an opportunity for God to make something beautiful out of something if not ugly at least soulless. The God I know is the God of infinite possibility and unimaginable creativity. God can use whatever God wants to use to connect us not only to him but also to one another. When we open our hearts and minds to each other — whether face-to-face, in writing, in music, or in art — a sacred exchange takes place. In my experience, the community of believers can be just as authentic and grace filled, just as maddening and difficult, whether it is experienced in cyberspace or a cathedral.

As mentioned above, our virtual church is not immune to conflict, risk, and rejection. We’ve wrestled through all of that, and I’m sure we will continue to do so as long as we remain a community — virtual or not. Rather than replacing face-to-face interactions, the thread has for us been a blessing of addition, not subtraction. Would that we could all walk down the block and plop down in each other’s living rooms. Unfortunately, we live all over the world, and so it’s just not possible most of the time. Some of us do live near enough to spend physical time together — and we do. The Daves are only a few blocks apart, and more often than not, we know what they’re having for dinner at whose house, and what wine they’ve decided to pair with it. Two of the women on the thread live in the same town where we all went to college, about a half hour from me in the suburbs of Chicago. The more we “talk” online, the more we’ve wanted to also talk in person. And we do. When we do, we’ve found that the face time is enriched by our shared cyberexistence.

Back in August, when my new book was released, my publisher threw a party for me in Chicago. The thread knew about it — as there’s not a whole lot about one another’s quotidian and extraordinary lives that we don’t talk about — and decided it was time for us to get together and share an actual meal, at an actual table, with actual wine. The Daves flew in from California, Susan drove up from St. Louis, Kathy flew in from New York City, Shani and Jen and their husbands made the short commute in from Wheaton, and James schlepped all the way to Chicago from Dubai. Yes, Dubai.

Some of us hadn’t seen each other in almost twenty years. A few of us hadn’t even met in person. I think we were all a bit nervous about whether the physical thread would be more awkward than the virtual thread. Happily, nothing could have been further from the truth. We clicked immediately, without a moment’s hesitation. It was just like our daily conversations online, except the only things standing between us were wine goblets and a table, not a computer screen and thousands of miles.

At our dinner in Chicago that night, we were able to remember Mark together. An 8-by-10 framed portrait of the one I like to call “Sweet Face” sat on a special chair — the “grace chair” — festooned with brightly colored flowers and fig branches at the head of the table. We prayed together over the food, toasted each other, told stories, and laughed until we cried (and a few times cried until we laughed). We thanked one another for being grace for each other. We thanked God for our friendship and, yes, for Facebook.

The Daves asked me to get up and say a few words. I didn’t know how to express all that I was feeling, but as I looked down the table of friends to glimpse Mark’s picture in the grace chair, I knew what I wanted to say. What had begun with something ugly — grieving the unfathomable loss of our extraordinary friend — had turned into something magnificent. God, in his grace, does indeed make beauty out of ugly things. That night together, sharing a meal and the same physical space, was one of the most moving, blessed experiences of my life. We didn’t want it to end, as evidenced by the fact that many of us stayed up until dawn talking, laughing, reminiscing, and making plans to see each other again in a different city on the East or West Coast as soon as we could swing it.

Rather than replace “actual” face-to-face community, the thread, in its virtual incarnation, makes us yearn to be in one another’s company. I think that has fueled the passion with which we keep our cy-berchurch going. When one or another of us is gone from Facebook for a few days, we miss each other. We ask where they’ve been. We go find each other. When I’m out traveling without a computer for a few days, I get a longing ache for my brothers and sisters online. I miss them. I want the contact — that authentic community. My spirit craves it.

For most of my life, I have been a member of a church. It was a given. But about a dozen years ago, the Episcopal congregation I called home had an acrimonious split over issues of homosexuality and scriptural authority, and I took a hiatus from church. Fellow churchgoers who judged one another mercilessly, making piety a competition and community too often a place where I felt the least safe, had spiritually injured me many times over the years. What started as a hiatus lasted until last month. I didn’t intend for that to happen, but it did. Personal spiritual trauma combined with my given vocation — as a religion reporter I went to church for a living — made it difficult for me to turn off my inner critic whenever I visited a new church, searching for a home but never finding it.

Perhaps the most extraordinary product of virtual church is that it has led my husband and me back to a physical church. Jen, one of the women on the thread who lives a few suburbs away from me, is in love with her church. She speaks about it with such fondness and gratefulness, recounting interactions with fellow congregants and sharing the beauty of the priest’s gentle, grace-filled ministry, that over time I became curious. Interestingly (God does have a tremendous sense of humor) hers is an Episcopal congregation that had endured a painful split a few years back over homosexuality and scriptural authority. After months of hearing about her spiritual home, I wanted to see what Jen was talking about for myself, setting aside my fears of getting hurt for the possibility I might once again embrace a local church home.

In October, my husband and I celebrated our eleventh wedding anniversary with Jen and her husband, David. We spent the night at their house and the next morning joined them and their four children for church. It just so happened the ser vice we attended was a healing ser vice, where any and all were invited to approach the altar for prayer. Surprising no one more than myself, I got up from the pew in the back of the sanctuary and walked up the aisle. When the priest approached me, asking what she could pray for, all I could articulate was, “So much. I’m just really broken.” She placed her hands on my head and prayed for God to heal me in whatever ways I needed to be made whole. I got up from my knees, feeling somehow lighter and full of joy. Walking back to my seat, I caught Jen’s eye. She was crying. That I couldn’t have seen online, but I know deep in my soul that without Facebook, I would never have seen those tears in person. What amazing grace!

As I understand it, grace is a gift. It’s something we can’t earn or lose. We can’t do anything to make us more or less worthy of God’s greatest gift to us. Grace is startling, wild, surprising, and life changing. A few years back, I had a conversation with the author Anne Lamott, who in books such as Traveling Mercies and Grace (Eventually) has spoken eloquently about the experience of God’s audacious, unearnable gift. I asked her if she thought we could be grace for one another. “I think we can hold space for one another,” Annie told me. Without my knowing it, Jen and David, and no doubt the rest of the thread, had been holding space for me until I was ready to move into it.

When I was a freshman at Wheaton, in an introduction to theology class I read a book by John V. Taylor called The Go-Between God. In it, Taylor argues that the Spirit of God can be experienced as much between people as in them. Perhaps the Spirit of God abides as well in the electrons that float through space when we email each other or post to the Facebook thread. Computers and the Internet may be the media, but the connectivity is altogether spiritual. Looked at it from that perspective, logging on takes on a new, profound meaning.

After all, there is no distance in the spirit. Even cyberspace can be a sacred space.

ABOUT CATHLEEN FALSANI

Cathleen Falsani, author of Sin Boldly, The Dude Abides, and The God Factor, is the award-winning religion columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. She attended Wheaton College and holds master’s degrees in journalism and theology. She lives in Laguna Beach, California, with her husband and fellow journalist, Maurice Possley.