Family friends visiting from out of town joined us for brunch before heading to the airport on a recent Sunday, and our young adult children were in the room.
Talk turned to texting, and how bad we oldsters are at it.
Apparently, everyone my age or older sounds like they are angry when they text. Like, one of my children said, I am about to disown them.
This was about a text in which I acknowledged their previous text and agreed with them, by saying, “Ok.”
We laughed about it, and my kids acknowledged that they know I am just old and set in my ways and not really mad when I insist on texting with punctuation, and the conversation moved on to what the Bears likely prospects were that day.
But that conversation pointed out the obvious: that texting, which my kids and all their friends seem to use as their preferred method of communication, makes it very hard to tell the tone of what is being said.
I like to text as much as anyone; truth be told, I prefer a text to a phone call if I need to share (or someone needs to share with me) a brief bit of information, like what time my teenager needs to be picked up or what I want my husband to add to the grocery list. I don’t have to stop what I’m doing in the moment to get a text, and the information is there on my phone in case I need to refer back to it.
But still, a text, even a text conversation, isn’t the same as a face-to-face, in-person conversation, one in which people can see the expressions on other people’s faces, read their body language, see what they are looking at, whether they are fidgety or calm, maybe even reach out a comforting hand if the situation calls for it.
It’s harder to understand anything besides the explicitly stated information, and harder to offer that sense of understanding to other people.
That extends to our understanding of church as a community of people in relationship to God and in relationship to one another. None of us is a church of one; our worship is communal, and we call the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith, Communion. The hymn says, “We are the Body of Christ,” not “I am the Body of the Christ.”
We need to find that community — that communion — outside of church, too, by being present to those around us: our families and friends, our neighbors, those we interact with even on a superficial level. We need to see those around us instead of looking past them, and we need to let them see us.
Otherwise, we’re just trying to figure out whether the period at the end of a text message really meant anything.