Missing and Multi Texting

I watched someone texting with one hand and shopping for groceries with the other.

We are indeed a culture committed to multi-tasking. It sometimes seems every aspect of life is being shaped so as to ensure it can be done while doing something else. We eat finger food so we can have a hand free to browse the web while the other hand reaches for the carrot stick. We write a paper, go to a party, text message our way into a new romantic encounter, and follow the basketball score all in the same evening, or even all at the same moment. It’s as if life is a supermarket, and we have one hand on the cart while the other hand is always available to touch and sample the myriad experiences and opportunities available on the other side of the aisle, tossing each consumer possibility into the cart with little or no thought to the checkout.

But check outs do occur. Because important things often can’t be addressed by us with just one hand. Holding a baby, it’s pretty scary, because all your well-developed social skills go out the window. Especially if it’s someone else’s baby, this is not an exercise you want to get wrong. It really does take two hands. And if new life needs two hands, so does death. You don’t want to be sitting by the bedside of a suffering loved one thumbing out a text message or scrolling your way through Facebook.

Friendship can’t be multitasked; they need two hands too. A good hug takes two hands. Who are you content to be silent with – not have great laughs, or great debates, or great dancing, but just company and stillness and companionship. Those are the places and the people with whom we can be still, through whom we can know what matters most, for whom we think it’s worth using both hands.

St. Augustine of Hippo distinguished between two kinds of things. One kind of thing we enjoy. These are the things that are worth having for their own sake. They aren’t a means to an end: they’re a joy in themselves. They’re things that never run out. You don’t have to make an argument for why they matter; they speak for themselves.

The other kind of thing we use. Things we use aren’t good for themselves – they’re a means to some further end. They do run out. They serve only a limited purpose. I want to suggest to you that what we grasp or take or juggle in one hand is what we use and what we yearn for and treasure and shape our whole posture to receive and cherish is what we enjoy. What we use only requires one hand: we can use a number of things at the same time. But to enjoy something, or someone, we really need both hands, because it takes all our concentration.

This applies to God too. God doesn’t use us. God enjoys us. God life is shaped to be in relationship with us, to enjoy us. God always approaches us with both hands – because we mean everything to God. The great mystery, of course, is the mystery of whether we will enjoy God in return, and shape our life in order to receive God with two hands, or simply try to use God as just one more consumer good in the shopping cart.

There’s a story about the Irish humorist Oscar Wilde. He was at a party and the hostess came up to him and said, “Mr. Wilde, are you enjoying yourself?” He replied, “Madam, there’s so little else here to enjoy.”

Living life with both hands takes time – because what you receive with both hands takes longer to assimilate than what you grab with one. It takes gentleness – because treasuring moments, people or places with both hands, rather than grabbing them with one, means cherishing them, tenderly noticing their details, carefully attending to their difference from you but rejoicing in your presence with them.