It seems to me that if we could step back far enough, and diagnose the largest disorder of our time & place, it would be that we are a people overexposed: We are too constantly public, and too rarely private, and our movement from solitude to community, then back to solitude has been interrupted. Our solitude is never truly private (our cell phones go off, or we’re by ourselves, but checking e-mail)–and thus our community can never truly be whole, either.
If, of course, it’s the case that being in community fully & well demands that we also are able to be alone, safely & at rest.
We are half people, unable to be all of the one thing or all of the other that we need to be, and so we can never be fully human, or never fully ourselves; we have lost the ability to know what that is.
So, maybe humanity is changing. What it means to be human is changing? If being truly human is at all defined by being in community & being alone, in a world where “community” and “solitude” are being slowly re-defined, then to be human in a human context isn’t what it was a 100 years ago.
I could be completely out there, of course, and I’m not sure what or if it would matter anyway. But if we are never really “by ourselves,” and never fully present to the people we are physically near, we hold less power to deeply affect the world for good–and, I think, for God. Thoughts?