When you spot your co-worker in the Chicago Avenue Red Line station just this side of 10 pm on a week night, striding as intently toward the train as you are away from it, and your paths are set to cross in three . . . two . . . one . . .

Don’t stop. Don’t take out your headphones so that he takes out his and the two of you exchange idle chit chat. The man’s got a train to catch.

Instead, just raise your right arm high, open-palmed, toward him, and don’t break stride. He won’t either, so that the collision of your palms will announce a collegial, even fraternal understanding to everyone in that train station with a CLAP to signal that, whatever else you lack right now, you’ve for sure got that guy.

 

Don’t engage a compliment built on an insult of someone else. The person who is quietly weighing you against somebody else and finding you superior isn’t doing you any favors by telling you that. If you allow their verdict to tickle your ears they’ve got you. Plus, some other person is getting diminished, unchallenged by you, and that’s not a win either.

No, don’t engage. Make it clear that negative chatter will find no audience with you.

My mother would have none of this kind of behavior. When I, a self-righteous pre-teen, complained about my father in the hopes of some maternal sympathy, that he was making me wash the dishes when it was indisputably my brother’s turn, she would barely look up from her ashtray and intone, “So do the dishes.” No amount of incredulous gasping moved the needle. She never engaged.

You shouldn’t either.

The Macarthur Foundation has been funding research into teenagers’ use of digital media since 2008, and if you’re not tracking their findings you’re missing out. This is important, nuanced, evidence-based stuff that anybody who works with teenagers should grapple with.

Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living And Learning with New Media came out in 2009, and I eagerly recruited a couple of high school students to help me teach it to the adults in our church. Danah Boyd’s It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens followed in 2014. I taught that to grown ups too (next to Douglas Rushkoff, danah boyd is my biggest brain crush).

Now here comes another book out of all that research: The Class: Living And Learning in The Digital Age by Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green. I ordered a copy today and will jump at the first chance to get into it with grown ups.

The authors followed 13-year-olds for a year to observe their use of digital media. Their findings throw cold water on alarmist fears about teenagers addicted to smartphones who are unable to sustain face-to-face conversations. Livingstone wrote a little summary here, but I’ll tell you a couple of her most promising insights now.

 

First, teens’ use of social media is less about the impulse to be “always on” than it is about exercising some agency over their relationships with adults. If was about being on all the time they would be far more responsive to digital media demands being made by teachers and other adults. Messaging is a tool for disconnecting from adults, not for interacting with them (my refusal to use Snapchat is vindicated!)

Second, teens prefer face-to-face interaction. They seek it out, and they prolong it for as long as possible when they have it. They may be interacting with phones when they’re together, but being together is the substance of what they most want to be doing.

This is important work, and I can’t wait to read through it all. Big ups to Cory Doctorow and BoingBoing for their coverage of it.

 

“People are too busy” justifies the status quo. A narrative of busyness discourages risk and connection because we decide out-of-hand that people are already overbooked. A midweek gathering of youth for community building and faith formation sounds great, but who has the time?

We need to poke around inside this busy claim a little bit. How busy are people, really? And how many of them? Surely some of them have said yes to soccer and theater and AP Calculus to the point that they couldn’t fit another activity, even if they wanted to. I’m pretty sure I’m overestimating how many of my people are in that particular boat, though. I’m also pretty sure I’m too contentedly abandoning people to that boat as it sinks.

The risk of inviting busy people to connect is that they will be unable to consider your invitation for all the better ones they’ve already received, and you will feel rejected. They’re good people. They like the idea. They looooove you. They just can’t make the time out of all the other good ideas and great people they’re already committed to. That you can make the time? Right, there’s the risk: the conclusion that you must not have anything more important to do.

Those who work with busy teenagers literally have nothing more important to do than invite them into connection: with their peers; with adults who are interested in them; with a religious tradition and its texts and habits; with their selves; with God. This is what we have to be working on.

 

Even amidst the busiest communities, there will always be a hunger for this, and abandoning people to their busyness is an abdication of our calling. There are teenagers in the bustling crowd who are searching for connection and belonging. We fail them if we allow their peers’ busyness to drive all our programming.

We also fail their overextended peers when we defer to that activity load and choose not to plan new things, because they may be looking for deeper and more authentic community. They may care more about learning to love their neighbor than they care about learning how to get into Harvard, they just don’t have the invitation to prove it yet.

 

I broke something of great value the other day, something that does not belong to me. That’s not a metaphor. There is a thing that belongs to someone else, and through clumsiness and a lack of attention, I ran into it and it broke. Like, B-R-O-K-E.

I lay on the floor for a moment taking in the damage, stunned. My appendages were all accounted for, and blood was not flowing. Damn. That was my first thought: I would feel so much better about this if I were injured.

My daughter was there, so my attention turned to her. It was she who asked for me. She set the breakage in motion, didn’t she? Maybe I would feel better if I blamed the episode on her.

Nothing doing there. All that was left was to report the breakage to the owner. His face registered both the value of the object and the seriousness of the damage. Maybe I would feel better if I berated myself in his presence. Maybe I should let loose my self-loathing in the living room.

When we break something, it is tempting to hide in sympathy, in blame, or even in flagellation of ourselves. By hiding, we shelter ourselves from the impact of our mistake, be it intentional or accidental. That impact has to go somewhere, though, and hiding from it forces it onto other people–innocent bystanders, or even the people we’ve hurt.

If you broke it say so. With a straight face. And your hands in your pockets. Apologize. Then stop talking.

And of course, be more careful.

 

Our environments act upon us. No amount of awareness will stop that. Nearly every place we inhabit has been designed by some figure behind a curtain to elicit from us a response: home, store, theater, church.

My wife called me a “Stick in the mud” last night during a play, when the actors broke the fourth wall and invited audience members to take selfies and dance the cha-cha. I wasn’t into it. I like my theater scripted, with me not in it. I forced a half-hearted smile and mostly watched.

Maybe it’s easier to be comfortable in an obviously manipulated environment if you haven’t experienced the political or religious extremes of that practice. Maybe sitting through dozens of carefully choreographed altar calls breeds an allergy to having your environment manipulated.

We should study the tricks of advertising so we can spot when it’s being done to us. But it’s always being done to us, and sometimes going along is the better part. Sometimes the figure behind the curtain isn’t malevolent. The actors in the theater last night weren’t selling anything or converting anyone; they were constructing an environment for connection and a shared experience, and I missed it.

We want to recognize the figure behind the curtain and to identify which levers she’s pulling. That’s healthy. But there will be times when we need to trust her too.

 

Fundraising for youth mission trips is important. Asking congregants to give money toward the cost of travel, food, and program costs when students spend a week serving in the church’s name tangibly involves church members in something they otherwise wouldn’t participate in.

Could the trip’s costs be covered entirely through the operating budget? Maybe. Probably not. But maybe.

Are the families of the youth who are going able to pay 100% of the expenses? In some cases yes. In most cases no (but beware of the assumptions behind your assessment of who can or can’t). Bake sales and pancake breakfasts build a cushion so that any teenager who wants to go can; working to raise money their family didn’t contribute empowers students to own their experience. We should have a target for that cushion. Year after year we should note whether that target is going up or down. It can serve as the canary in the church’s financial coal mine.

Still, apart from the financial necessity of fund-raising for mission trips, there is a theological necessity. The church’s mission extends to places not all of us can get to, and so we share in the work of those who can at the times they can, by praying, sending, and giving. We should not be embarrassed about this.

This is a political season, and so it is a season of open letters, like this Open Letter To My Friends Who Support Donald Trump or this Open Letter To Bernie Sanders. 

I have always felt a certain antipathy toward the open letter genre, even though I once wrote one. They mostly feel like fake invitations to dialogue. They list grievances, disagreements, demands, all with a posture of conciliation that is unbelievable. Like, “We welcome the chance to talk with you about all the ways you’re wrong.”

I’ve never read an open letter to someone the author thought was right.

So here’s my crack at it, my open letter to Chad Andrew Herring.

May 12, 2016

Dear Rev. Herring,

I think you’re pretty great. We all do.

Sincerely,

Rocky