How Facebook Damages Lives

I think that blessed Facebook was created as a way of swapping kitten pictures and for students to exchange idle gossip, and in that, it did remarkably well. Even in its later manifestations as SmugBook or the vehicle to declare loss of bodily lard, acquisition of sleep, self-pity or endless complaints about the job, it was not too bad. Tiresome, yes - but not bad. Even recent developments which cause international conglomerations to clamour for Facebook pages next to the spotty, smug or self-deprecating - that isn't too bad, if a bit tedious in the Spam Box. 

There is, I have discovered, a very dark side to Facebook. I would even go so far as to say something far stronger, that it seems to be the place that - if you want to discover evil - you only need log on. 

In my personal and professional life, I am fast gaining insights into the dark phenomena rife on Facebook. I am seeing people meting out such hatred and hurtfulness that I wonder if ever love could have existed between such people. If you want to become unhealthy obsessive about other human, you need only sit in a darkened room way too late and scavenge through their 'facebook' and get all the juicy updates. I have seen such pain and anger, not because people have been assaulted to their faces, but because they have read things on Facebook. 

Once upon a time, relationships would hit the skids and they either ended or mended. Now, this noble vehicle has become the macabre theatre of marital breakdown, bullying, abuse, libel and grotesque accusation. In the midst of Farmville and amusingly doctored imagery, you will now discover the fruits of utter hatred and its yield of despair. In the privacy of your own home, or indeed anywhere on earth as a result of smart-phones, you can say just about anything to or about anyone. The fact is, it seems to be the case that you can do more damage with a smartphone and a Facebook account than you can with a hammer and some measure of malice. 

The world will learn too late that what gets typed gets read and what gets read cannot quickly be forgotten - less so when you would wish it to be. Eventually, my own children will ask if they can have a Facebook account, the panacea of all life - and to be honest, I think I would rather send them unaccompanied to Jim'll Fix it than expose them to such a damaging arena. I thank God that I have never been a Facebook victim, but I know a growing number of those who are. Added to this, if you are not a Facebook victim, you may find that a daft outburst a year ago after a drink with friends will prevent you getting job, or else a careless comment under the wrong settings will cost you the job you do have. 

The solution is unclear, short of making the mistake of parents of teenage boys with certain editions from the printed press and banning it. The Church needs a voice in this dangerous world, a world made more dangerous by people who are not inherently bad or even intentionally malicious, but who simply have an outlet that they don't fully understand. 

Spiritual Warfare

William Hogarth - 'Satan, Sin and Death' c.1735

Someone said something out loud yesterday on a matter that normally I suffix with an inner-monologue comment that is normally in the vein of "Flippin' Whacko". They spoke of spiritual warfare, which is to say, on the matter of the battle that exists between the forces of good and the forces of evil courtesy of one Mr Satan D'Evil. Others have spoken about spiritual warfare in the past, and I have cast it aside unkindly as I have just suggested.

Please don't think me uncharitable, but I am not given to this stuff. It feels a little voodoo-esque to me and it might simply be that I have discarded that with which I cannot contend. I am a man who preaches a God of love, err towards a Universalistic theology of heaven, have little concept of Hell as a fiery pit or that my God of love would allow me to smoke for eternity in some timeless incinerator. The Prince of Wishful Thinking I might be, but that is how it is. 

However, my irrational and often unconditional rejection of such things does not mean that I don't then ponder on them. And this I did, after the luminary theological educator before me yesterday was next in line for the label 'Whacko". I remember the process by which I came to ordination. For those not in the know, it is a process of meetings and deep-and-meaningfuls that that tend to end up in myriad forms and written statements. This body of gathered knowledge then forms an application to selection before a panel who white-ball or black-ball us. The bishop of the diocese in which we are testing your vocation takes that recommendation and generally acts on it, and we are either sent off for training, or not! Trained, ordained, ministry (hopefully long and fruitful) and then a gentle death to the soundtrack of an angelic Magnificat. Badaboom. That's how it happens, or at least should. 

Only as I pondered the process by which I came to Orders did I remember something that struck me those years ago. There times when silly little events conspired either to stop me getting to meetings, posting forms, thinking stuff through. Normally, I overcame those things (one being finding not a single shop in the centre of Oxford that had stocks of stamps so that I could post my forms, and then when I did, ne'er a postbox could be found; or another being a car failing me a day after a servicing when I needed to get to a meeting with someone crucial to the process). There were times when I was convinced that something was at play designed to prevent me becoming a priest. I almost became paranoid about it. At one point, I clearly articulated that someone somewhere really didn't want me to be a priest. 

In recent times, I can offer accounts of times when my normally well-oiled extrovert thinking brain would fail to finds words for prayer. I never 'dry up' in prayer normally, but for a couple of occasions. Every once in a while, I have sensed an ill-wind - although I have immediately cast it aside as silly. You may also be familiar with that tendency at times when things go so wonderfully well, only then for something to go really rather badly. The good times are never un-fettered it seems, and that good actions seem to be haunted with the very occasional and easily-missed bad counter-action. 

I am not given to the spiritual warfare being about red demons. I regard satanism to be a strange whimsy (why would anyone adulate evil and death?). I am not given to taking this stuff with a bucket-load of emotion or a paranoid sense that there are spiritual trip-wires and bounding mines set by Satan and his imps - but I do acknowledge that there is more that I do not understand than I do. This will include forces that can or should be labelled 'evil'.