A Bishop, a Burner, and the Search for the Divine
Backstage at Web Summit — That’s Marian, Paul, and me.
Hi Backchannelers,
Jessi here, writing to you from Lisbon, Portugal. I’m in town for the annual Web Summit conference, where thousands of developers, founders, and other techies convened this week for a marathon of conversations addressing the future of technology. Although Americans make up the minority of the summit’s attendees, the election dominated nearly every conversation. Nobody expected the outcome. (Well, OK, the Brits claimed they weren’t surprised.) In the speakers’ lounge, I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with four dozen people I didn’t know, many of whom were not American, to watch Hillary Clinton give her concession speech on a small TV screen. Several people around me wept. The Americans with whom I spoke blamed their cousins in Red States. They blamed income inequality, racism, sexism. They blamed Facebook. They blamed themselves.
No one was yet ready to reach for a hopeful future.
Against this backdrop, I moderated a conversation between two unlikely bedfellows: Bishop Paul Tighe is the Adjunct Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture at the Vatican. An Irish priest with a gentle smile and a strong grasp of social media, he is largely responsible for getting the Pope on Twitter (@pontifex), among many other things. He was to be paired with Marian Goodell, a founding board member of Burning Man, and the art festival’s first CEO.
In the most obvious respects, Paul and Marian represent communities that have little in common. Burners — all 75,000 of them — retreat to a desert, strip naked, and celebrate art and life for several days each year. Catholics believe in Jesus Christ. Burning Man is 30 years old. The Catholic Church is, well, “a little bit older,” says Paul.
But in truth, Marian and Paul found a common connection quickly. Because really, they’re each reaching for the same thing — a deeper connection to a presence they consider divine. They gather in community, observing rituals. And, as Paul pointed out, each has a set of rules to which the community has agreed to abide. Burning Man has ten principles. Says Paul, “We have the ten commandments.”
Perhaps most significant, Burners and Catholics are people of faith. They believe in something larger then themselves. For Burners, this is amorphous and undefined, and it can take many forms. For Catholics, it has clear form. But in each case, it’s a divine presence. “We believe in something larger than ourselves,” says Marian.
Yes, I moderated this conversation at a tech conference. Why, you ask? Reasonable question. The answer is twofold: first off, I wanted to know whether technology — and specifically social media — helps or hurts these spiritual communities. Burners leave their phoness and laptops behind when they migrate to the desert every year. And you don’t want to be the one to forget to silence your cellphones in mass. Both Paul and Marian described social media’s great usefulness in disseminating information. But while it can be the convener of community, it is not to be mistaken for community itself. People connect to the divine through the act of being with other people.
Through that act, they also connect more authentically to each other. As the United States recedes into crimson red and royal blue, I wanted to know how two leaders who hold radically different world views engage with each other. They both found this to be a curious question. The first of the burners’ principles is radical inclusion. We welcome and respect the stranger. Catholics preach empathy. Love your neighbor as yourself.
This generosity toward others is at the heart of many spiritual paths. And as we begin to make our way forward, preparing for a new President, we would do well to keep it in mind. As much as the US election was the selection of a leader, it was also a conversation between two Americas, neither of whom could hear each other talk. Now that the decision has been made and the election is over, the listening must begin.
We can all learn a lot by watching a bishop and a burner converse. Each offers a version of the same advice. People are searching for something spiritually, says Paul, a sense of hope. Marian concurs. Through each of their practices, there is a clear path toward finding it.
How? Says Marian, “We must make ourselves available to others.”
This week, Backchannel dealt with the election by doing what we do: publishing stories that, we hope, you aren’t reading everywhere else. That started with our editor-in-chief’s explanation of why we won’t be staying in bed for the next four years.
The iphoness Is Bigger Than Donald Trump__: “__It might not feel like it today, but technology and science is a bigger story than Donald Trump. Think about it. Who ran Italy when Galileo made his discoveries? How was Italy even run back then? Who was king during the industrial revolution in England? The quirks and flaws of government leaders are not relevant information when studying the enlightenment. In the long run, the Galileos and James Watts of the world have even more influence than the Napoleons,” writes Steven Levy.
This Election Violates Everything We Thought We Knew About Data__: “__In the aftermath of an eight-year Democratic hold on the oval office, Republicans concluded that they needed to build a better data operation. This year the parties would equalize. The Republicans would begin to catch up to the Democrats in modern campaign science. Instead, we got Donald Trump,” writes George Washington University professor David Karpf.
I Am Mark Zuckerberg: “Everybody, I think, Googled their own name to see what comes up. I found another Mark Zuckerberg, and there was a picture of him sitting on his bed when he was probably 12, or 13. I said, ‘Oh look, there’s another Mark Zuckerberg, I had no idea!’” Indeed, he had no idea. I interviewed Indiana bankruptcy attorney Mark Zuckerberg.
