Mis-Apps: Tales of technology and spirituality

Spirituality and technology, if personified and shut in a room together, would kill each other by staring contest to the exclusion of all bodily functions. Spirituality would stare with a high nose and higher consciousness. Technology would probably not think to do anything else but stare until commanded to do it. Neither would back down until they croaked.

And yet I love them both, so I will sit here until they either become exhausted or notice that I am watching them. At times, their fierce stares seem to waver into a warm desire to work together for humanity's benefit, and I worry about being discovered. But most of the time they glare. I don't even try to hide my voyeurism anymore. In fact, want some popcorn? I'm sitting down to replay some of my favorite techo-spirit clashes: 

I.  Moral Market Watch

Recently I heard a tv commercial for a Christian dating website. The tagline was “Let God choose the one for you.” No, thanks. What kind of matchmaker would the traditional Christian God be? Would He put down his lightning bolt and pick up a little black book? Would he read through that long survey about so many dimensions of your personality - for each person? Wouldn’t God already know the results of the survey? Then why have people fill out the survey? 

And then how would you know which one God had chosen for you? Would an angel appear behind your date’s left shoulder some night at dinner and give a glowing thumbs up? Maybe there should be an app to show divine approval or disapproval of one potential partner or another. Given humans’ imperfect judgment, this would seem an important part of an online Christian dating package. 

Yet why stop there. It would end the stare-down and curb a lot of fruitless debate if technology and spirituality could team up to communicate God’s commands directly. You send a text: “God, should I give my money to charity A this year? God responds: “Like.” You send a text: “God, I just used my position in high profile investing firm B to make a foolproof stock purchase.” God responds: “Dislike.” You: “Pancakes for dinner?” God: “Dislike.” Macaroni and cheese? “Like.” 

All of the technological aid already available from apps, however, might also soon drive the almighty into the job market. Using apps, people can: discover their location in the wilderness (GPS), find estranged friends and family members (Classmates.com), learn about the eight wonders of the world (Wikipedia), sign petitions for marriage equality (Moveon.org), choose baby names (babynamewizard.com), experience revelation on a self-help forum (beliefnet.com), and light up their field of vision (with a flashlight capability built into the iPhone.) Apps seem to have the spiritual market cornered, and the stare-down continues. 

Then again, maybe all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Maybe apps are holy little convenience-wells sent by a God of the future, dropped into phones from a golden stork that circles the world reciting prayers in all languages.

From what I’ve seen, I don't think so. I think spirituality and technology are engaged in a sweat-drenched battle for our dependence. 

To prove it, let me tell you about a group of pioneering techno-nuns: 


II. The Fall of Sister Francine 

Once upon a time, there was a community of nuns living in perfect harmony with each other and their surrounding community. They made their own clothes, their own food, their own soap, their own shoes, their own jam, and their own joy. They even kept bees and sold honey to their neighbors. 

Yet, as is true with all groups of high achievement and good repute, there was a tortured soul among them. Sister Francine kept an iPhone stored under her pillow at night. During the day it rested in her simple wooden desk’s drawer. The Abbess forbade all technology from the convent; the limitless information it provided would infect their sweet and humble ways with all the complications of modern life. 

But Sister Francine couldn’t stop herself. After a silent community meal, she would go to her room and watch youtube videos on her phone with the volume turned off. She looked up the latest stock quotes in Tokyo. She browsed the app store for hours, downloading the best free ones she could find; if she didn’t pay, it wasn’t a sin. 

Coincidentally - or perhaps not - one of the apps she downloaded provided medical information. For free, she got info about symptoms, current research, treatments, and emergency advice for most of the world’s biological ills. Coincidentally, Francine risked toting her phone to the garden one day. (The trailer for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie had just come out.) Some said the Abbess had a heart attack before seeing the phone, others that it came directly after. None disputed that Francine’s app, which advised her to run inside, grab two aspirin, and throw them down the Abbess’ throat with water, saved the Abbess’ life. 

Severe in both her discipline and her generosity, the Abbess then ordered that each of the nuns receive an iPhone. The local community, hearing the story of Francine’s app-enabled heroism, happily contributed to cover the cost of bringing the nuns into the modern age. 

At first, it was beautiful - the nuns balanced their industriousness with the fun of phones that knew more than all of them combined. Some confused the “vibrate” setting with the conviction that a bee had wandered into their bedroom at times, but otherwise they were happier than they had ever been. The Abbess surveyed her beloved community thriving, and smiled at the fruits of being open to change.

Then Francine became troubled again. Her Sisters had slowly stopped smiling at each other - world news is “so depressing,” said Sister Ann. Sister Patty gave guests only half of a hug as they entered the monastery, too engrossed in Angry Birds to use both arms. The mittens knitted each year by Sister Nancy contained odd patterns, if you could call them patterns. Sister Holly left her phone out in the rain one night, and threw a cooking spoon toward Sister Natalie’s head when she found out it had stopped working. Sister Natalie forgave her. Worst of all, however, the Abbess had set up a profile on a Christian dating site, “just for kicks,” she said. Francine found a laptop abandoned in the prayer hall one day, and saw one AbbFabgrl7’s About Me section: “ROFL, chilling 24/7 w/ m sztrs 4 Life, FTW. IMHO, G*d is d gr8est & ppl r sinfell. OTOH, WWJD?”

Knowing that God would, if nothing else, be unable to understand all of the Abbess’ acronyms, and possibly think the sisters had all lost their Way and started typing in tongues, Francine resolved to return things to the way they were before. She told the others she was going into a season of deep ascetic prayer, bought a bunch of trail mix, and shut herself in her little room until she had developed a talking hologram of Jesus that would appear to the sisters during one of their communal meals. Eight months and three days later, the moment arrived at a Sunday evening silent meal.

The hologram came. It told them they had strayed. The sisters put down their phones. They listened. The impassioned Jesus figure continued on for minutes, citing scripture, referencing current events and recent natural disasters as signs of impending doom. He walked from table to table talking at length, and ended with a prayer for their return to their prior simplicity. Francine crossed her fingers as he faded while floating toward the ceiling in the center of the room. 

Silence fell upon the room. More silence. More. 

Sister Ruth broke the quiet, and encapsulated her community’s evolution to modern faith, in a simple statement:  “Relax sisters. The real Jesus is my friend on facebook, and he looks nothing like that guy.”

Notes from a young feminist

When I was working as a business technology journalist directly out of college, my favorite song was Lily Allen's "The Fear." I wouldn’t have told anyone that, though. I wouldn’t have told anyone a lot of what went on in my head. 

Although separate parts were reasonable on their own, altogether my thinking was a humiliating contradiction. I was living and obsessed with a housemate who once asked me to cook a meal for him and a love interest so they could launch into a weekend road trip on-schedule. Yes, I cooked that macaroni and cheese, and they drove away together on time. I didn't know why I did it.

I was also an aggressive technology journalist and graduate of a community-minded women’s college. My social conscience balked at the insularity of the business technology industry, my feminist education balked at my mac ‘n cheese-making, and my technology-focused brain told me that I didn’t need anything but sound logic to gild my opinions into truth. 

Lily Allen’s song cheered me up as I drove to and from the outside world to my quirky, stranger-filled house, feeling otherwise guilty for emitting exhaust fumes into the environment and not suppressing more of my humanity at work. I viewed myself as a pathetic, helpless young woman whose only consolation was making fun of the media, specifically that stupid girl who sings about “not knowing what’s right or real.” 

I was also attending church more than most young New Englanders at that point. Every Tuesday, I went to a meditation service followed by dinner and discussion of a “faith issue” held at a church down the street from my house. There was no top-down morality being imposed there, just middle-aged people discussing why they believe in an invisible, unprovable source of existence. And me, breathing, not thinking, hoping that I wouldn’t betray a sign of my general desperation. 

Then I lost my job in a mass layoff. On the day of the layoff, I went for a long walk in the rain down to an exhibit at Brandeis University on women’s rights in the construction industry. I enjoyed it and then walked the mile back to my house in the pouring rain. I was soaked, but more determined to prove my superior logic to my crush: “Emotion plus an air of defiance = romantic success.” Yeah, Gloria Steinem. Yeah, soaring polemics. Yeah, fame-through-the-fight. Ms. Allen sang to me: “Forget about guns, forget ammunition/Cuz I’m killin’ them all, on my own little mission,” and I knew that I would prove my independence, thereby gaining what I wanted.

Usually I’m not that stubborn; I think there were a couple of factors at work here, some that maybe I shared with a broader community of young women: the isolation of being young, intelligent, and always on the verge of moral disaster due to an inborn will to rebel; and the fear of being stuck between wanting to be a modern, flawlessly reasoning woman and needing to be more than just logical.

The technology industry was the most successful and prevalent of the era in which I was raised. The story of technology, I learned as a reporter on the industry, was that of eccentric, brilliant, often alienated men spending years alone developing tools that would revolutionize society. They embodied the notion that one can reason one’s way through anything and come out a fuller, better person than one was beforehand. The model of feminism I grew up with was similar; one had only to reason one’s way out of dependence on patriarchy, and then you were free to do what you wanted. Free from believing in a power external to yourself, free from guilt, free from self-doubt.

The self-sourced logic of computer programming in itself, I still believe, is wonderful, and technological tools hold the potential to empower many men and women with knowledge. Independence from a patriarchal form of judgment is also good. That practical logic that prods individuals out of themselves and into deeper creative existence ensures that a bedrock of relationship will catch failed abstractions as they fall.

My three additional housemates might have provided some comfort, this sense of community. Night after night, though, we each went to our rooms and watched TV or surfed the internet, alone. I put up a white board and wrote messages on it continuously about what I was doing and where I was - my own household form of Twitter. No one seemed to care. I was either a robot or a complete airhead, I thought, erase-board marker in-hand. I couldn’t connect.

Lily’s song has emerged for me an epitaph for a girlhood in which proving myself was possible, when valiant ventures outward were always followed by a return to a lunch made with TLC by Mom. I eventually realized that I couldn’t in good faith make my crush any more lunches with TLC. My faith, in fact, called me to a version of logic that defied his apathy toward people who didn't fulfill his desires, and my previous desire to transform his apathy into respect for the willpower and wisdom of woman. It cured me of my contradictions.

And here it is: A fight is just a fight. 

The entirety of who I am as a woman, as a professional, and as a partner cannot be decided by a contest. A few years ago, I wanted to be like feminists from my mother’s generation and like the lone genius on top of the tech industry. Now, I’ll sing along with Lily about plastic making my life f***ing fantastic one day, and give a presentation on ethical considerations faced by technology corporation leaders in the distribution of knowledge capital the next. I am a feminist in my rejection all forms of power that would stiffen my body into something to be won or lost. Me and Lily. 

I’m not suggesting that anyone go out and embrace the pop lifestyle of self-starvation, drug use, and ignorance toward anything that doesn’t gravitate toward one’s own ego. That is what my mother taught me not to do, and also that from which women who pioneered the rights to equal pay and to speak our convictions liberated us. Nor am I saying that the next Bill Gates won’t be Bella Gates.

I am saying that it’s good to believe that you’re more than the sum of your negative parts, and less than the sum of your positive parts. It’s enough to be human,  to have the fear, and to let the world know all of the stupid stuff going on in your living mind and your sweet, desperate, deepening heart. 

Some recommended reading surrounding this post:


http://gomakemeasandwich.blogspot.com/2011/01/re-launched-wow-galleries-analysis-part_12.html

http://feministing.com/2011/02/03/faith-feminism-here-i-stand-without-the-goddess/#more-29717

http://thenewgay.net/2011/02/the-debate-over-bisexuality.html

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/definition/Our-Favorite-Technology-Quotations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

The Nobility of the Vote: a guided meditation on election day

The phone is ringing. The newspaper is still in its plastic bag on the driveway. Nobody is home - you woke up late. The world has started without you, voting without you. You'll still get to work on time, but the most important decision of the day will wait 10 hours until you can get to 38 Pepperdock Lane tonight.

It feels good not to care as you floss at a stop light in your car: like a chemical release erasing the memory of the ads and stories wasting the mental space that could be used on self-tailored entertainment. I can't miss my twitter, my facebook, my sweet YouTube. Not for you, Laura Demlady, Joseph A. Reformingman! Green light.

What will happen if I don't vote? I'm not informed adequately anyway. It's just a sedative to make me believe that I hold power in a dysfunctional system. 


At work, no one says a thing. The coffee machine sounds its finish from the break room; Aaron, Lisa and Ron get up and file toward the sound. You split between reviewing emails form your boss and skimming local political news and blogs.

"Hello _____," says your boss over the cubicle wall. It's an open office. You smile, craving a moment of wall-scriven absurdity on facebook.

"Good morning."
"Did you vote this morning?"
"Not yet."
"You should do that tonight. I'll check in on that ________ project after lunch, OK?"
"Great. Thanks," you nod. Screw voting. Coffee is your need now.

11a.m. You've dozed off in a post-french-roast crash. People, citizens surround you in their booths, little pencils in hand. A finger pokes your back; you turn around to see a ten-year-old smiling broadly. The child holds a sign reading "SUNSHINE is the best disinfectant." Zip code, S.S. #, connected arrows. Sun shines through the skylight of the gym at Pepperdock Elementary school, and you start weeping. Then a distinct thought "For the raindrop, joy is entering the river." A Rumi quote from french roast? Did you ever wake up this morning? Are you really at work? Are you a Democrat or a Republican?


Lunch brings you out of that pseudo-dream with a dull PB&J and a saccharine bottle of mango-peach juice.

"I like Asiago," says Ron across the lunch table.
"No, Steven Jenright is my guy - my kids need a real education." You don't have kids. Maybe you won't vote for him.
"Laura Demlady has 20 years of experience as a real estate lawyer. And she's a decent person."
"What does that even mean, decent? Reformingman listens to his constituents," responds Lisa.

Your colleagues have already voted. They ask you - for whom did you vote?
"No one, yet. I'm going tonight."
"Oh, good luck with that. The polls are a nightmare after work."

Unless you don't go.


Only an hour more at the office. A window open to facebook rests next to ten or more political blogs. The review went well - ________, Inc. is happy, even glowing, over your performance. If you had kids, or even a spouse, this'd be good news for them. A raise is coming.

A candy bar commercial runs through your head, and sticky caramel with cookie crunch and nougat and chocolate calls to you in fantastic contrast to the fluourescent-lit afternoon of high, dry achievement. The vending machine is full of choices - A5, B6, C2, D8, F4, B7 - choices you can barely decipher in your desire for them. The gummy strawberries have vitamins A, C, and E. The creme-filled crackers remind you of your grandparents' house. The trail mix would fill you up. The chocolate bar would bring that zany commercial to life, but leave you crashing while driving home - sleep behind the wheel is too dangerous. Your dollar sneaks back into your pocket, and the next 45 minutes lead you in and out of various e-published assessments of candidates Laura, Joe, Steven and Asiago the Independent. Why don't political candidates change their names like celebrities? Nobody should run under the name of a cheese!, you assert incredulously.

"Huh? Did you say something?" asks your cube-neighbor.

It's time to go - home or vote?

"Oh, good night, Dameon! See you tomorrow!" You buy a candy bar from the machine on your way out of the building.


At home, sunlight spills through the kitchen window where you stand. Your dog stares at you. Your roommates are out. Your brother calls, but you don't pick up. You notice yourself becoming transfixed with an ant crawling along the top of the dish rack when the neighbors across the street picks up her Demlady sign from the lawn and floors it out of the driveway. You run out and ask if you can hop in, feeling like a 12-year-old and a fugitive.

"Uh, OK," she says. You get in; you will vote.


At the booth, a wave of chocolate-cookie-caramel-nougat-induced exhaustion hits you. You exhale, blogs dogging your consciousness.

What a load of nonsense. What a patriotic sap. What a political pansy you are, trying to say no to well-earned apathy in the face of a bullying system. Blog, schmog. You're a person with your own parties to go to - conservative and liberal labels don't mean anything. You won't even be categorized as an independent. Independents just undermine the success of people who are going to bomb each other to political pieces, anyway. YOUR news is that you have a real li- OWW!


You're on the floor rubbing your ass. Two kids are playing tag at the polls, one having just knocked your knees from under you.

"But I was bored, Mom! This place stinks."

"I know, hon, I know. Someday you'll be the one getting knocked down, though, and then you'll realize what a pain in the butt you're being right now."

Your neighbor stands by the exit as the mother and son skirmish past her. You fill out your choices, hand it in and leave with her.

"Who did you vote for?" your ride asks on the way home.

"I don't remember," you lie. Privacy is dignity when voting is an inevitable comedy. "My butt hurts. I should win."

Ethnic studies are bad; Bible is good - OR, Angry Rant at No One

A law was passed in AZ on May 12, 2010 that has scheduled the end of ethnic studies in the state for December 31, 2010. This is overdue. Ethnic studies promote the overthrow of the government. They encourage minorities to join in what they call "solidarity," or a mob-like state in which people assume that they are disempowered and must kill their oppressors to attain justice.

Do we need our youth learning that they are "oppressed" and need to free themselves through violence? No. If they are oppressed, it's better that they keep their peace in oppression than that they break a system that is working for many well-intentioned white people.

More power to you, Arizona!

I feel a little bit conflicted, though, because if I am all white, does that mean that I don't have an ethnicity? There are no ethnic studies classes for white people. "Ethnos" means people, so does that mean I am not a person? Ethnic, according to The American Heritage Dictionary 2000 edition I have at my house, also has as one of its meanings: "not Christian or Jewish, heathen." So, because I am not covered in ethnic studies, I am a Muslim terrorist?

Or what if one of my white ancestors was an oppressor of my other white ancestor, and one part of me tries to rise up and destroy the other part to free itself? I am both English and Irish. Shouldn't I pass a ban on myself from reading Irish literature to protect the English part of me from being choked in my sleep by a drunk, power-hungry Irishwoman? And maybe I am not all white. Maybe I am a real, ethnic person, and not a terrorist at all.

Maybe one of those not-white people slept with one of my English ancestors, and my Irish self is choking me in the night without just cause? I could be part African, or Chinese, or Nigerian, or Indian, and not even know it. Then my Chinese self might decide it's oppressed and take out its English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch and Lithuanian oppressors in me. But only if I start reading about Chinese culture.

The only safe way for even a peace-loving caucasian like me to escape the rage of the oppressed is to not read anything except the Bible. There are no ethnic people in the Bible. It is the history of pure people and God's call to them to come home throughout history. Even if someone who wasn't in the Bible has snuck into your family, it's OK if you only read the Bible because you're not reading anything that would make them think that they didn't deserve their oppression. But if you are very white and you know for sure that you are, it is even more dangerous for you; don't read anything - just listen to the voice of God, which is unobstructed in you by threats of biological insurrection.

And if you aren't white, do you really think you need to kill people to have a good life? No, well why are you fighting to read books that encourage the overthrow of the government? People will die if you overthrow the government. People are dying now, but those are from natural causes. Death is a part of life, so stop trying to think that you need to do something to make the world better.


HB 2281, thanks for saving us from the wretched bodies of the earth. Their brain cells are a threat to the American way. See them in detention, self-serving their agitated state. It's contained and right; we're free from their spite and history.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Watch out for the rainbowed rest, the so-called oppressed. And the Irish.

Horse, carriage, plane and spaceship

I teach English for Speakers of Other Languages. This morning I was making copies from a grammar book for my students, and saw a profile on the Wright brothers, and this text in the margin: “Did You Know: Neither of the Wright brothers ever married. Their only love was aviation.”

For me, marriage is the ‘other language.’

The trivia fact made me smile until tonight while I was doing research on the brothers. I saw them described several times as ‘eccentric geniuses’; what if I end up having traded companionship for faithfulness to my ideas when I die? What if I end up being an eccentric genius whom no one ever knows? Or, worse, if I simply end eccentric and alone?

Understanding how two people could be happy in a “marriage” is like learning a foreign language for me. Sometimes I feel like I am daily moving into acquisition of the grammar of interpersonal intimacy. Other times, a whisper of the topic of commitment enters conversation, and I effuse to anyone who will listen about freedom in self-sufficiency.

Then I usually have an inner reprobation about how helpful it is to have a safety net in being a rugged individual. I think of the multiple times that I left my headlights on, draining my car of batteries and requiring a jumpstart - multiple times in a week. Or the time when I got lost driving on the backroads of my hometown trying to find a new way home after a New Year’s party.

And the absolute thrill I get every time I step onto an airplane for a journey alone into a new part of the world. This pull between independence and security is exhausting. How liberating it might be to say, once and for all, “My only love is ____________.”

Aside from the Wright brothers profile, another piece of text that caught my eye recently was in an article about a female astronaut. It was a profile of her rise to a brilliant career as one of the first African American women in space exploration. The article detailed her early passion for science, her start at Harvard, the mentorships that shaped her path, and finally her groundbreaking achievements as a successful space traveler and technician. Then, near the end of the article: “Smith, who is single and lives near Houston’s Johnson Space Center, says her next goal is a long-duration stay on the space station.”

What is up with these people who like to fly? Can marriage - or even partnership beyond the point of brotherhood or settling down long-term with a space station, coexist with passionate career genius?

One of the two Wright brothers, Orville, stopped speaking to his younger sister Katharine when she got married. My grandmother often tells me the story of a distant cousin who didn’t get married until she was in her fifties, and doesn’t regret waiting. A part of me detests marriage as the door behind which no wonder, no surprise, no spontaneous discovery lives.

I love ideas. I love to travel. I love learning from my own mistakes. A part of me loves marriage as a language whose grammar channels selfless abandon into the ideal of sharing life. A language of freedom. Freedom from thinking, from ideas harassing me as an inner itch to question even the most mundane facts of daily experience; from doubting that I am not leaving a piece of my heart designed for partnership as an orphan, cold and without mercy; from weird, harsh vowels and consonants crocked together in a way that hurts my ears but feeds my mind with dreams of a deeper, unmet harmony in the realization of profound ideas.

When I wake up in the morning, however, I see the Wright brothers, brilliant ‘til death did from them their curiosity part, and I love them more than I love marriage.

Like the brothers, I want an open contract with my intellect. I want to experience partnership as something constantly moving away from emotional certainty, rather than into it, over the course of a lifetime. Be that with aviation, outer space, an idea or a living, imperfect human being, I’ll take it when I find it.

Yankee Girl Gone Wild, Democratic

Not every country is such a hot mess as is the United States of America. Our outward-facing point of pride in the world is democracy, yet the GOP still has representatives like Scott Brown in blue Massachusetts, able to knock out the Democratic supermajority in congress. Republicans are de facto accepted as having the word on American values; who objects when someone holds up a pro-life poster next to an American flag? If they do object, it’s not as loudly as the voices protesting welfare, affirmative action and stem cell research.

Another messy point: democracy was first prevalent in the South, where Republicans now avidly denounce those slippery Democrats. The government is a tool to build up business, the industrial north said. People, in their ignorance, cannot be trusted to govern, it said. The North started out full of the same ideological stubbornness that now defines many red states’ voting. They leaned on intellectual status rather than active concern for the radically “Other” for social security.

How did New England become a place where no idea debuts without passing the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of students and passionate autodidacts? Sounds like a shameless democracy. Sounds like we northerners let our wild ideas get in the way of our peaceful, boring decency.

I am deeply opposed to the possibility that thinking could be a source of moral decay. Thinking - that process of withdrawing from human events in order to procure ideals that may positively direct those human events - is one of my favorite activities. I am loathe to surrender my thoughts to belief without extracting proof first, and am disdainful of anger as a reaction to hardship. I don’t believe in losing my head in argument - that’s the quickest way to lose. When lonely, I would rather go to the library than talk to someone about it. Drawing moral boundaries feels like an intellectual cop-out. Sharing my feelings without reflecting on them first - sometimes I wonder if at that point they still are feelings - is the pathway to anarchy.

Therefore, the South - in its love of immediate gratification, its reactionary tendencies, its obsession with human stories in country music, the dysfunction of its cholesterol-filled arteries and its violence against those who cross social boundaries - is the face of America that terrifies me as a wild dog terrifies a housecat, or a football player a gaunt, traveling musician. It is the embodiment of the most negative experiences I have had, from being called cruel names for not flirting with a football player to being deaf to people whose ideals are unpopular. My Southern self chastises me for keeping a closed heart to social authority, and on the other hand drives me to guiltily cling to the authority of my native cultural smugness. I am comfortable with the kind of social authority that excludes the earnest. If there were any social authority in me aside from the pomp of fashionable thinking, I don't think I would recognize it.

Collaborative reason in government is that of which our country has to be most proud, but New England is not where I see it happening. Yes, democracy is thought about more here. We ask constantly: What is democracy? How is it structured? Is it possible under the current conditions in Massachusetts, New England, the United States, the world? Does it require moral sacrifice? Where is evangelism’s place in democracy? The media’s, education’s, the fine arts’, unions’, self-doubt’s, sex’s place? How should we use our money? Where should we place our attention as a world power with the ability to direct the development of “second and third world countries”? Have we made racial progress? What can science do for humanity now? What defines the human family? Why have we failed, failed, failed to be a force for good in the world?

With all of these problems to occupy a Bostonian's mind, it is easy to see people who bring their personal desires into community as unthinking caricatures. The label that speaks to me most immediately is that of the Southern Belle. Talk about a hot mess - feeding her vanity at every opportunity, demanding respect, making mistakes and then taking them back, breaking hearts without remorse as she discovers who she is in all of her "wild beauty."

Everything that gives a sensible industrial girl a headache. Everything that brings a Federalist to the point of bitter surrender in the cause for progress. Everything that undermines the values of hard work, pride-in-virtue, self-inquiry and having one’s ideological act together.

Everything that bears out a politics of humanity, and a source of hope for America as a compassionate world power.

Haggling as a road to divine behavior

Behavior. What do you have in keeping to it? A shared identity, a history to look back on, a sense of momentum? Behavior, integrity, consistency, a language of connection, a band of followers or enemies. One's behavior sets the lights and darks, warms and cools, the texture of one's days.

From this position, behavioral patterns also have the ability to replace human will. There is no choice involved in being faithful to a single identity. Self-composition gives way to exercise. For example, when an ice cream truck dives into the neighborhood on a summer night five minutes after you brush your teeth, behavioral consistency will cause you to pull the covers over your head and run your tongue over youth baking soda-washed enamel. The flicker of imagination tugging you to a happy break has no chance. The art of living expires in a cloudy refrigeration of impulse. And one misses out on ice cream.

But isn't there reason to brush your teeth aside from that you do it every night? It's not as noble as taking a political stance, but practicing a behavior is a path away from submission and into self-initiated social discipline. Behavior can be a cure to boredom and to interpersonal power imbalances.

Instead of being bored, the behaving person takes up a new behavior. Or, instead of following what his friends do, he acts* characteristically spontaneous. Adhering to a chosen set of behaviors allow one to escape the state of mind in which the future stretches out as a numbing and inevitable win.

I am not talking about the "sit, stay, come" kind of behavior. That animal types poses no threat to choice or calling into discipline. The only choice in the obedience-reward dynamic is between effort and apathy. It is not a moral relationship, but a transaction with determined terms. It doesn't say anything about a person that they pay a cashier $5.21 for a $5.21 pair of sunglasses. What else would they have done in order to arrive at the desired outcome of owning the sunglasses? Yet morally-questioning conversations are more often seen as haggling than as purposeful discussions in our culture.

This kind of behavioral haggling opens up relationship from the predicable to the creatively contractual. I'll behave this way if you behave that. I'll follow these rules if you follow these too. Maybe this time if you tell me to sit, I'll turn in a circle - that's good too, right?

This bargaining doesn't necessarily get you an object of desire, but does offer a delicious social thrill. It takes some daring to enter into a thing that might lead to a stubborn debacle. An unearthed disagreement might prove impassable, and then spread from the two who happened upon it to several others, and then more, and more people until it is a source of widespread anguish. All eyes then point back to the two who thought it would be fun to play around with the price and reward of relationship.

Religious texts are arguably the world's source of authority on how to arrive at good behavioral contracts, often called covenants. The Qu'ran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible all contain guidelines to what kind of social agreements have made human community work. But if when judgment day comes, we as humans have only read these books and not looked elsewhere for shared spiritual truth, might not any God be tempted to say something like "You kiss by th' book?"

Depending on which religion you follow, you could be condemned for getting amorous with anything outside of a husband or wife, so I'm keeping my kissing on hold for now. There is a person for whom the religious canons have chosen for you. Not an immaterial being, a way of life, or an ideology. It is the human task to find the person made by God for her and love them forever.

It's been proven, though, that life is good at getting in the way of forever. Each day, week, month year, decade, presents new ways to behave in ways that are more pleasing to oneself than to God. At sixteen, one may love Shakespeare, but at forty-five, hate it. It is in a person's freedom to chose how to spend their time at each age. Maybe at sixteen, you also promised yourself to read all of Shakespeare's plays once a year for the rest of your life. No holy book mandated this promise, but it supported and gave you hope to go forward at the time you made it. What other reason is there to make a sacred vow? And what flimsier?

It allows one to haggle. Kisses, sunglasses, television, books, husbands, girlfriends, career pats, friendships - each asks for its own commitment. When one is able to commit himself to certain behaviors toward the people and situation about which he cares, it allows the embrace of life outside of those behaviors as an ongoing haggle. It promotes fidelity toward his own nature, and gratitude for the freedom to play into a living relationship with that which (or they who) counters it.

The basic problem with this sorting of religious and living commitments is that the human will is loathe to commit to anything. Religion especially. If you switch from an active to an observational experience of behavior, however, you only have to behave as you will and then keep the stuff that works for you. A religious behavior does not please or necessarily get noticed by others, but has the ability to quietly blow one's mind. A haggling behavior draws attention and provides a succinct feeling of satisfaction.

Religion's traditional counterpoint to the allure of unchecked human haggling has been that people, in their semi-knowledge, usually choose to destroy their relationships. There is evidence of this; humanity's choices have resulted in a broken world economy, mass wildlife extinction, and multi-billion dollar global drug and sex trades. People choose their behavior, institutional religion says, creation starts circling the drain, and God groans and shuts the door to brood - over and over again throughout human history.

Or, maybe He puts his reading glasses on for a closer look at the planet earth. While one is beating oneself up for making another stupid move, maybe God is calculating a better contract, a new proposal for what these strange humans could be to His creation, if we wanted to. A human and God might then observe each other in a cantankerous but real desire to discover a relationship of mutual input. Talk about revolutionizing the workplace!

In that case the only task left would be to let go of the idea that humanity is too selfish to understand how God would prefer that we behave. Instead of grumbling about hopes thwarted by the world God has created, we could then lay out our terms as informed by experience. To a God who seeks to participate fully in life on earth, isn't it more selfish to fake peace than to fight for another chance to reveal ourselves as temporarily up in arms about the best way into the future?

Behaviors. There is a lot to gain n keeping to those one chooses, so long as they come at a fair price. I'm not sure whether that price is measured more in religious or experiential currency, but I wouldn't turn down a deep conversation about this beautifully confused world - or a divine kiss while still here.

*Acting is a type of behaving that can lead away from discipline rather than toward it. If one acts a certain way uncharacteristically, it could be out of a need for self expression rather than out of an aspiration to self-possession. Acting becomes behavior when one does it in the hope of giving some kind of shape to one's character.