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Aspiring to introduce social media into our children’s life in a healthy and limited way, a couple of years ago my sisters and I got onto Be Real. If you are not familiar with this app, let me just say it is 90% great. At a different time each day, you receive an alert that it is “Time to Be Real” and then you have two minutes to take a picture of exactly what you are doing at that moment. The app takes a picture in both directions at the same time—i.e. of your face and what is in front of you—and then, regardless of how many of your chins are in the picture, you hit send, because unless you share what you are doing you can’t see what anyone else is doing either. Once you post you experience the joy of knowing that everyone in your family is alive. And then there is nothing else to see. No scrolling to be done. Just one quick picture a day, and then that picture will also disappear the next day when the “Be Real” alert goes off again. Your double chins will not live on in infamy.
Now mind you, our children have shown limited interest in this app. Sometimes they post. Sometimes they don’t. My own son will have nothing to do with it. Mostly it has ended up being just me and my sisters finding out that every day we are doing the exact same things with our lives. We are sitting in front of our computers. We are driving in our cars (or in my case flying in another cramped airplane). At night we watch tv. And sometimes we cook… though probably not as much as our families would like.
Occasionally things get more exciting. A niece went to Italy for five weeks earlier this summer and cooked there instead of in her own kitchen. One sister did an anniversary trip to Ireland that (at least during Be Real moments) involved a lot of rain and wind. Sometimes the teens take pictures that involve puckering up their lips first and holding the camera lens high above their heads. Those of us over forty do not really understand why they do this, but we are always happy to see them and, as I said, know everyone is still alive.
Now I say that the app is only 90% great for two reasons. One, the app has started to include daily ads, so that now I not only see my own nieces pucker their lips but also a few random teenagers I do not know interested in showing me their new clothing items. I am docking the app 5% for that.
The other 5% is due to the fact that when the app goes off and I am wearing my Apple Watch, it doesn’t just announce itself with a slight buzz. Rather my watch will say aloud, “It’s time for Be Real.” Except that it doesn’t quite sound like that. It sounds like my watch is saying “It’s time for your Burial. You have two minutes to Burial.” Okay, maybe this is an issue with my watch more than with the app. Nevertheless, I am docking the app a couple of points for the daily reminder that my life is fleeting and my time limited. I’m not quite ready for my burial. Another birthday last week has made the sensation of time moving swiftly past even more acute.
As the poet Mary Oliver says in “The Summer Day”:
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
I suppose that most of the time what Be Real catches me doing is exactly what I want to be doing with my one wild and precious life. Yes, I’m at the computer again, but it is interesting stuff I am working to pull together for a talk or emails I’m answering in reply to people I care about. Yes, I’m on a plane again, but going somewhere I want to go (or at least will want to be once I get there).
What causes me consternation, however, is what Be Real will reveal to me years from now about what I call the “Anne Frank question.” You see, while Be Real does not save others’ photos, it does save your own snapshot taken each day, providing a photo diary you can look back on. I wonder in the future what I will be able to say to my grandchildren about what I did during the particular season of history I am part of right now.
When I was a child and read the Diary of Anne Frank, I wondered, “What on earth were all the people doing as Jews were disappearing from their midst? Where were they? How did no one stop this?” And now I know. They were working at their desks and they were cooking for their families and they were trying to just make it through the day while it felt like the world fell down around them and their news sources were unreliable and they weren’t sure who to believe or what to trust. Some perhaps did not know what their government was doing. Many perhaps did know but weren’t quite sure what to do about it. Maybe they were scared for their own loved ones and didn’t want to draw attention to themselves.
If Be Real had existed back then, perhaps some would be caught doing things that looked like normal life but weren’t. The Be Real photo diaries of Miep Gies and others who helped to hide the Frank family probably still would have included lots of office work and traveling around town and cooking dinner. You can’t always see in snapshots the good work people are doing. But I imagine that at least occasionally, it would catch them engaged in daring acts of sneaking food to the attic or saying “no” to Nazis at the door.
I hope that my Be Real record of this time will also provide some evidence that I wasn’t simply oblivious to the atrocities being enacted by my own government and going about my ordinary life in an ordinary way. If it does I know I will go to my Burial having done something terribly wrong, and perhaps that is why I find that daily announcement from my Apple Watch so haunting. I don't wish to die asking "Tell me, what else should I have done?"
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” says the marvelous writer Annie Dillard. “What we do with this hour and that one, is what we are doing.” In the future, may the evidence reveal we were attentive and responsive during these days of terror for so many whose lives are also singular, wild, and precious.
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I’m attaching here my most recent preaching for the feast of St. Thomas and his struggle to “Be Real” or at least "Be realistic." I realize the feast is now past by over a week. (Sometimes it takes me a bit to put together these newsletters.) But Thomas is a great saint for this season of history, regardless of the particular week. I think you will appreciate this one and find it a nice nudge toward action.