GODSTUFF

FACEBOOK: FINDING A SACRED PLACE IN CYBERSPACE

What began with simple curiosity has, in a few short weeks, become something deeply meaningful. And it all happened on Facebook.

Like many folks who skew more toward Generation X than Generation Z (for whom the social networking site was, apparently, originally intended), I started my foray on Facebook as an exercise in ennui-abatement. I went looking for college and high school friends, more to see how many kids they had and whether they’d lost their hair, than any higher purpose.

My best friend in St. Louis was on there, and through her I found a few more friends, and so on until I (somehow) amassed upwards of 500 “friends” on Facebook, including some people I actually know, or at least knew once upon a time.

It was fun to log on and see who popped up. But it remained little more than a curiosity slake and time waster, until one of our friends died suddenly last month. Most of us learned of his death on Facebook, and we started to mourn together — online.

More old friends joined and reconnected as we worked our way through the early stages of our grief. Our Facebook exchanges ranged from silly reminiscence — remember the time he pretended to jump off the roof of the Congress Hotel? — to soul-wrenching questions about why and what it all means.

It’s been five weeks since our friend was killed, and we’re still talking, digging deeper together in wide-ranging conversations that cover faith, doubt, division, denominationalism, law vs. grace, Roman Catholicism and Reformation, social contracts and divine covenants. All of it transpiring (mostly in the evening hours) on Facebook.

We’re having the kinds of conversations we used to have when we all lived within walking distance of one another on a Midwestern college campus. Except now we’re in California and Hawaii, Copenhagen and Abu Dhabi, Brooklyn and London, Sweden and the suburbs of Chicago.

Some of us, I would dare to say, have even begun to rediscover (or exhume) our faith. On Facebook.

For me, it’s become what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his book The Great, Good Place, described as a “third place.” Most people have two primary places — home and the workplace — and then there is a third place where they feel anchored and part of a chosen community. It might be a bar (illustrated beautifully in the TV series “Cheers”) or a neighborhood restaurant, a house of worship or a bowling alley. Everyone, Oldenburg argues, needs a third place.

Heidi Campbell, a professor of communications at Texas A&M University and author of the book Exploring Religious Community Online: We Are One In The Network, has been researching spirituality and the Internet since 1996. I asked her about my spiritual Facebook experience and she said it’s something she’s seeing more and more. Facebook is a kind of “mediated third place that allows people to engage or invigorate their spirituality,” she said. “In a contemporary, information-based society, it’s often hard to get that face-time connection. It becomes that virtual third place where I can kind of connect with that transcendent part of myself through conversation when I couldn’t maybe take the time out to get to a church to have it.”

Or find one where you feel safe enough to have the conversation, as the case may be.

Some of us in our peculiar Facebook community are members of churches. And some of us left the church not long after college and haven’t returned. Most of us are still trying to live the faith. What I think we’ve begun to do, though none of us has named it such, is pastor one another. Whether it’s the Massachusetts Yankee who converted to Roman Catholicism while living in the Middle East, the Dutch-Reformed-turned-Episcopal surfer, or the Buddhist mommy-to-be, we’re all talking. And more important, we’re all listening to each other in a way we wouldn’t be able to do in person.

“The beauty of Facebook or another online community is that you’re choosing your community,” Campbell said. “Because it’s a lot of like minds gathering or people with a similar background, like your experience, you can develop a sense of intimacy more quickly. Some criticize that because they say it’s a false sense of intimacy and it’s a false sense of community because it’s these self-selecting, homogeneous, very tightly bound groups. But I think you could argue … it’s the way you connect with people now.

“As middle age is staring us in the face, we’re trying to reconnect in a lot of ways. There’s some part of that spirituality that traditional religion [doesn’t] really connect with, but there’s that meaning-making, that God void, that I want to reconnect with, and so the Internet is becoming a great place, whether it’s to explore or to meet other people who are on that search.”

When you think of it that way, logging on takes on new meaning.

Even cyberspace can be a sacred place.