Terminal Disease or Taking Leave of our Senses

I just finished reading an article about a local private school that has emptied out its library of all books and now is completely on-line. It now has roomfuls of empty shelves, with everybody sitting at their own terminals.

I don't know about this - I feel like an old man even saying that I don't like it but . . . . . I don't like it. There's something about a book - holding it, feeling it. Even the smell of an old book brings back feelings of prior readings and places in my life. I know this sounds contradictory as I sit at a computer and type a blog, but if this is where we're heading, I can't help but feel a deep sense of loss.

There is something to be said about engaging in a full sensory experience - even with a book. When I hold my Bible, I feel everything involved in it. I feel passages I've read that have moved me. I see things I've written in the margins that marked struggles and victories in my life. I even have food-stained finger-prints of that day. And some pages, when studied closely, look like they've been gripped tightly, as if at that point in my life I was getting my heart ripped out by God. I think we're supposed to be like that, that's the way we're wired. We're meant to hold, taste, smell and touch. It's how we remember. It engages us, and years later, on subsequent readings, re-engages us.

I envy in some ways the Old Testament worship experience, where they could smell, hear, feel and ultimately taste their offerings to the Lord. It was all around them and they were fully immersed in it. We weren't meant to lose that when the sacrificial system was replaced by The Sacrifice. Communion, serving, singing, eating together, praying together, Bible studies . . . it's all meant to be a part of the normal community of believers. Our daily life together.

But now we have a "terminal disease" - each one of us worshiping on-line, reading and listening to our favorite pastors and teachers, never coming together and eating and talking. The community has fragmented and we're losing our senses. We've perfected the H1N1 Fistbump, having gone from a holy kiss to a hug to a handshake to a fistbump to a head nod. What's next, a computerized message of the events of our day? We even think that somehow, one hour a week in church will bring us some kind of connectedness.

I think the pendulum is going to swing back. It may even be happening now. We are wired for a sensory experience, and the churches that start to engage each other and get deep into the heart of the world will be the ones that will draw people in. The ones that create true communities that meet more than on Sunday mornings will find seekers knocking on their doors asking to get in.