Do Monks Tweet?

Do monks tweet?  Would the daily use of twitter make sense for a person whose life was shaped by the daily rhythms of prayer, worship, and work characteristic of most monastic communities?  Or put the other way round, would the daily rhythms of monastic prayer and worship make sense to someone who is a daily user of Twitter?

The above questions are focused, but cryptic.  So let me say a little more of what I want to explore.  I want to ask, how interesting and important - in the general scheme of things - is what I’m thinking and doing and feeling right now?  The presupposition of Twitter is that the daily register of my personal life is both interesting and important enough to share with others.  The presupposition of the monastic tradition is that what I currently think, feel, and plan to do is much less important than we might assume.

Twitter is not an accident.  It makes perfect sense in our North American culture.  I have no doubts that it is entertaining and socially useful and productive for marketing purposes in all kinds of ways.  But notice what it betrays: that we have an extremely high view of the importance of what’s going on in our individual psyches at any given moment.  Twitter is what individualism looks like when it metasticizes. Modernity and the enlightenment were, in one regard, a “turn to the subject.”  Is this is the nonnegotiable horizon in which we will raise our children, choose the kind of work we do, entertain ourselves, and exercise our imaginations?  Or is there some important way in which “post” modernity might afford us an opportunity to unthink this “turn to the subject” in ways that do not reproduce the predicament that led to the “turn” in the first place?

A friend of mine suggested that our church would do well to avail ourselves of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  I agreed, but with two caveats - that the focus should be on what’s happening in the church, not on my life personally, and that my wife and other staff people take up this task, since I need not be the one doing it.  My friend pushed back, and suggested a few reason why I should be the one tweeting.  He suggested articles which focus on how best to use Twitter.  Twitter’s question, “What are you doing right now?” (in 140 characters or less) should be replaced, so this argument goes, with the question, “What are you thinking right now?”  Even that question looks odd to me - what would be the possible benefit of daily registering what’s going on in my head?  Let me tell you ahead of time . . . it’s total crap.  Half-baked stuff I’ll abandon tomorrow.  Emotional reactions masked as something different that are exaggerated and ill thought out.  Conventional platitudes that reinforce the worst of present practices instead of pressing down into something deeper that might open a new way forward.

So the content of what I’m thinking at any particular moment is largely something to be forgotten instead of communicated.  But that’s not the worst part.  The worst part is what will happen to me as a person if I submit to culturally manufactured obligations to foreground what I’m thinking.  This habit will inevitably lead me to place great importance on what I happen to be thinking.  Can I tell you something?  I am frequently thinking something that diminishes others or myself.  I am angry at my wife, or my kids, or myself, or God.  Often I doubt whether God is actively present in this world to redeem and renew it.  Often I am thinking of ways to get what I want from others.  

Last week I listened in on a conversation about spirituality on a college campus.  The students in the class had just returned with their professor from a weekend retreat to a nearby monastery.  Though all the students were Protestant in background, all of them had a powerful and positive experience at the monastery.  They had worshiped and prayed and eaten with a group of about 100 monks from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon.  What most struck them was how little the monks had to say about themselves.  For example, the students participated in ten separate services from Friday evening to Sunday.  And not until the tenth and final service - the Sunday morning mass - did the students hear a monk speak in his own voice.  Specifically, it was a short, scripted reflection on Scripture - but it was in the monk’s own voice.  The previous nine services were all borrowed words.  They sang songs and prayed prayers whose wording had not changed for centuries.  They prayed the words of the Psalms.  They listened for God’s voice in the reading of Scripture.  They participated by response in an ancient liturgy.  And they read the prayers and theological writings of the ancient church fathers.  

Our culture places a very high premium on self-expression.  (Another memoir, anyone?)  It is very important to us that we speak in our own voice.  That we communicate to others in worship and in daily life what we are thinking and feeling.  The human personality has become itself a kind of sacrament - functioning as the primary place that God meets us.  This is a kind of Christian faith only imaginable after the modern “turn to the subject.”  It has enormous advantages - spontaneity, warmth, fellowship, and transparency.  No doubt it will continue in a variety of forms to be the dominant religious orientation of many Christians around the world.  

But there are downsides to foregrounding our always changing beliefs, attitudes, and experiences.  We might come to believe that our own psychic journey, in all its ups and downs, is the most important story about us.  The alternative, of course, is to inhabit a tradition.  To borrow the words and stories of others.  On some given day that I feel like a failure (or angry, plagued with doubt, have given up hope, whatever), perhaps what is most important about me is not that feeling but that the person feeling that way is housed in a larger story that has a completely different logic.  The larger Christian story, narrated in Scripture, sung and prayed in the liturgy, is that God loves us in Jesus Christ and has called us to a sharing in the divine life and mission quite apart from how I’m feeling about all this on any given day.  

I am not against feeling or experiencing the truth and beauty of the good news.  But it need not be foregrounded in all I do and say, nor in how we worship together.  And these practices of not foregrounding “what I’m thinking right now” will serve us well on those days we don’t believe the gospel, those days we don’t love or trust God, those days we aren’t grateful that the Son of God died for our sins, those days when we do not hate our own sin, or when we hate ourselves, or others, or God.  The monks know that what they are thinking or feeling “right now” may not be true.  It may be at odds with the larger story in which their lives are housed.  Was this longer than 140 characters?