Dis/connected

I just spent a week taking care of four kids and three cows at the Washington County Fair, a major agricultural event in this region for over a century. I had help. Geoff and I took turns watching the kids who watched the cows. The other of us would skip home during the day, returning at night to a happening whose fun, food, and festivities can amount to an all-out sensory assault, depending on how deeply you imbibe.

At one end are the amusement rides, where you strap yourself onto a pop-up truck bed that hurls, twists, drops, spins, shakes, and otherwise throttles you through space while you passively receive a barrage of thrills.

To get to the rides you walk through clouds of spiced grease, emanating from rows of container cars, peddling fried you-name-it: potatoes, onions, zucchini, chicken, steak, fish, cheese, and of course, dough, served in large tubs or plate sized dog bowls. Next door you can get soda, lemonade, or mix your own fruit slush in liter cups with fast flowing, wide mouth straws. A good dose makes the rides all the more amusing.

At the other end of the Fair are the pulls: tractors, trucks, and ATVs tug various weights to see how can pull the most, farthest, and fastest, belching out plumes and fumes of exhaust. Mufflers are optional.

In between rides and pulls, you find barn after barn of farm animals: horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and rabbits of various shapes, sizes, and breeds, whose time tied and caged in close quarters is relieved by an occasional trip to the show ring, the showers, or the milking pen.

Three Jersey cows in one of those barns are our responsibility. Or rather, my kids’ responsibility. They are on duty 6 AM to 10 PM, in charge of every drop of matter that goes in or comes out of their animals. It is expected that they will wait vigilantly, ever ready for the "phone call" they try to catch with a shovel on the way down. So the six of us live on the grounds, in a tent, shuttling back and forth from home for staples that come from another land—fruit, salad, pasta, and whole wheat bread.

This is farm country. The Fair was once a time for isolated farmers to gather together for the week, share their wares, strut their strengths, and build community. Now, it seems we are making machines, and the machines are making us. Various competitions prize cows as milk-making machines; sheep as wool-making machines; chickens as egg-laying machines. Our horses are simply replaced by horse-powered machines. And through it all, we become pleasure machines, seeking the satisfaction for which we long by overriding and overwhelming our sensory selves.

It is fun! A feast! A blast! Yes. But it also offers a vivid snapshot of who we are. In lives where we regularly practice overriding our sensory selves, the Fair is less of an escape than it is a place to reinforce the sense of our selves we are already practicing. Mind over body. It's just that easy.

A periodic override of the senses can feel energizing. Rejuvenating. It can charge open new sensory spans, spurring new possibilities for our becoming. But when the sensory assault is seamless, relentless, we lose sensitivity rather than gain it. To register the same pleasure response, we need more. The warning signs are there: the movements we are making are making us addicted to a constant stream of sensory stimuli to fund our desire for the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we lack.
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Jump now from the Fair to the problem which with we ended last week: navigating religious differences. The two are related. For what is happening to our farm life is happening to our religions too. Networked, globalized, and high tech, we are making (ourselves into) machines.

It is one of the ironies of our time. Technology links us more closely than we have ever been. We send our messages of hope, peace, and love across vast distances instantaneously. Yet individuals are also more alienated and isolated, more in conflict with those who think and feel and act differently than they do. Discussion and dissension among and within religious groups is louder than ever.

Some commentators explain this paradox in terms of increased exposure. There simply aren’t the buffers between peoples and groups that once gave them the space to tolerate one another. What we know is near, we fear.

There is another explanation, however, and it has to do with our mind over body sensory education. Our globally networking technologies are educating our senses to expect a constant stream of stimuli. We regularly, eagerly, even willfully seek out a sensory overload that fills us up, and makes us feel important, happy, loved. Even at the Fair.

Yet the more we depend on our mechanical or electronic devices to connect us with nature or with the world, the more separated we become from the sensory awareness of our own bodily movement. And it is this sensory awareness that provides us with our lived, living connection to ourselves and others. Without it, we stay in touch with others but not ourselves. Disconnected with ourselves, we grow less tolerant of others.

Competition among religions is fierce. With so many lives in the balance, competitors drawing on business and marketing techniques designed to snare our sensory selves—endlessly repeated sound bites, catchy logos, tear-jerking tales, emotionally entrancing rhythms, tunes, and movements. The competition forces a homogenization along the axes of the battle: each religious representative stakes a claim to truth and knowledge, exercising the right to believe. Without a sensory awareness of our own bodily becoming, we lose the ability to perceive a religious alternative as anything but a threat to our existence. (My) Truth versus your truth.
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When we cultivate a sensory awareness of our own bodily becoming, we acquire two precious things: a sense of how we are thoroughly dependent on our relationships with others to be who we are; and a sense of how everyone else in the universe is similarly webbed.

No one can thrive in a world devastated by war or environmental decimation. We are related in more ways that we can think or know. Humans need each other. We need to learn how to live with one another. And no amount of arguing towards a rational program will work unless we are aware of how the movements we are making are making us. What is enabling us to argue as we do? Why? How is it that what we believe has Authority for us?

Once we understand how our movements make us able to believe and think as we do, then we also understand how different movements made by different others would find expression in different beliefs and reasons and thoughts. We still may not agree. We may vehemently disagree, but instead of simply butting heads, we can appreciate the different networks of relationships that have enabled each position to emerge. We can begin to appreciate the trajectories for growth present in each as well, and move with them. For that, however, we need quiet time to think and wonder and dream, and to cultivate the sensory awareness of the movement making us.
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The path to peace begins with our bodies and in our bodies because our bodies are irreducibly relational. It begins with working to create environments where we can attend to our humanity… and live it. It is in doing this work, whatever shape or form it takes, we will find the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we seek.

As fun as the Fair was, I am happy to be home.

Next Week: Living it.