160 Nation*

For some technology is the enemy. For me it is a seductress. I love the latest gadgets and gizmos. I am certain that in among the pile of “must have and don’t need” items touted in the pounds of magazines and newspapers I wade through every week, there is at least one item that, if used creatively, can turn the spiral of human consciousness up a notch toward God-realization. Today I think that technology is text messaging.

I can remember not very long ago reading that the computer was going to ruin our children’s capacity to write. Yesterday morning’s USA Today (Tuesday, May 30th) tells us that IM-ing and text messaging have given writing a new cache, and frets that text messaging will ruin our children’s capacity to speak.

I am not much of a fretter. If people are communicating more and more through text messaging over computers, cell phones, BlackBerrys, etc., I want in on it. I want to bring them the Word along with the word. But how?

The Word I care about is the Word high jacked by John 3:16. What John imagines as Jesus, God’s Son, was originally Chochma, God’s Daughter (see Proverbs 22:8). I want to share her teachings, the teachings of the world’s perennial wisdom literature, with people. Wisdom speaks through proverb, parable, and koan— written forms perfect for IM-ing. In Proverbs she sends her apostles (all of whom are female) to call to us from the towers and invite us to the feast of wisdom, the feast that is this life lived with justice, compassion, humility, grace, and humor. Today these towers could be cellular towers, and the feast and the way to it have not changed.

This is my calling (pun intended), but I don’t know how to answer it. I have written about Wisdom in my book “The Divine Feminine,” and I am working on creating a Wisdom Academy to study her teachings during five-day retreats. But I suspect that something more immediate and simple is called for. Something using today’s communication technology and the already ingrained custom of text-message communication. I want to reach the IM generation with the timeless wisdom of Wisdom.

I will wrestle with this and see if something is given to me. If you have any ideas, let me know.

* 160 characters is the maximum text message length.