Land of Quake and Fire
On the Los Angeles Fires, Social Media, and Prayer
Normally, a spectacular sunset in southern California is a sign of smog. Usually we choose not to think about pollution in favor of enjoying the blazing sky.
But when smoke fills the horizon, as it has incrementally for the past week, the sunset — although more dazzling than ever — brings pain. It is not every evening, though, that the eastern sky alights red and deep orange. On some evenings it has remained relatively placid. That means that the winds have picked up, blown the smoke out past the Santa Monica Mountains, and shot the fire up into new hills and neighborhoods. The next night the colors return, and we wonder whether that means that the winds have subsided, but we worry that they’ve driven the fires into the residential valleys, bringing the colors with them.
I attended a salon talk last night on city planning and the cost of housing in California. The speaker advocated for a YIMBY (“yes” in my backyard) approach to zoning and residential development. The event was scheduled months before the conflagrations broke out (January isn’t the typical month you’d expect for wildfires), but they were on everybody’s minds. Outdated and uncreative zoning policies scatter housing developments into areas at greater fire risk, as opposed to building “up.”
Of course, the speaker wasn’t here to talk about wildfires. And it was easy to see his discomfort with the situation — speaking about sprawl versus density when those geographically marginalized families are some of the people most affected by the current devastation.
Driving home, my wife checked her phone. Two more colleagues lost their houses during the 3 hours of the event. This adds to the tally. Two days earlier, two friends lost their churches and one of their children’s schools. 25 families at a high school where a friend is the Head lost their homes. Dozens of colleagues and friends are evacuated.
If you live in the LA area, then you have your own list to add. Or you yourself may have lost property or seen your community devastated.
Hildegard College partnered with a couple other organizations in a clothing drive Saturday. Hundreds of people donated clothing, toys, and household goods. I posted an update of it on social media, and crowds of folks “liked” it and added links to drives in their own cities.
But social media is a tough world to explore during a disaster like this. We show support on Instagram and other platforms, but in so doing we position our support alongside our documentation of restaurants we visited, post-workout selfies, nature walks, and book club gatherings. I’m not criticizing anyone for using social media to relay news or raise support — I’ve been using it for this reason myself. And certainly social media has a unique power to mobilize awareness and sometimes action.
But I’m prone to the kind of melancholy that comes with social media saturation. Not just regarding the fires, but any major social issue. As user-after-user posts their gesture of solidarity, it’s impossible for me not to wonder what that solidarity amounts to.
As a technology, social media is interpersonally superficial. That’s not an opinion; it’s just in the nature of such an accessible and fluid platform. Still, our more serious and personal posts are often authentic and personally meaningful. Yet when a superficial mode of communicating takes over more and more of our means for sharing thoughts and experiences, I wonder what the backwash is, how the recoil of the medium affects the message or even our message-making faculties, our social souls.
In a time like this, there is no difference between social pressure and duty. We want to tell people about the drive where we just dropped off clothing, or about the families we know who need places to stay, or about the gofundme we’re donating to, but it’s also the case that the tacos you just ate at an LA street market would be wholly inappropriate to place between two solidarity posts. Even writing this article feels conflicted because yet another cultural comment about social media seems trivial while fires are still raging so close by.
A circumstance like this reveals how social pressure and real ethical duty have become difficult to separate. That’s because a national disaster has to be acknowledged, especially by those of us who can do (or will do) relatively little that is concrete to help. Social media allows for a lower level of action than used to exist — lower than calling a friend in trouble, than sending $100 to the Red Cross, than spending 5 minutes in prayer. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, so long as it doesn’t detract from those other activities.
Prayer especially is a convicting activity to compare to social media. Prayer is typically private. It’s unseen by the world outside. Prayer uses completely different muscles in the soul — introspection, humility, confession, sacrifice. Have you ever tried praying in order to boost your sense of social belonging or sense of perceived appreciation? It doesn’t work. Praying for another person forces us into an attitude of pure altruism. It’s virtually impossible to pray for somebody in order that a good for them will turn into a good for us.
The last thing I want to do is to use the suffering caused by the ongoing fires to weigh into the merits of social media. Like all technologies, its merits depend on how it’s used. Still, in a time like this I’m reminded of how technologies have a way of either sharpening or dulling our powers of intentionality.
My encouragement to you and to myself is to use the occasion of our neighbors’ need to reach out to them directly and also to pray for them — as when we fast, to respond to the knee-jerk desire to scroll by instead recognizing their need to God.
Social media is like the LA sunset in this way. It’s aesthetically powerful, but it always points to a reality beyond itself, one that needs our attention.
I’ll conclude with a poem that has come to mind several times this past week. Former California poet laureate, Dana Gioia, wrote the lyrics for a choral and orchestral oratorio performed at Christ Cathedral in Orange County. Formerly known as the Crystal Cathedral, it lies between freeways, malls, and Disneyland, shooting spires of glass above the skyline like a crystal shard. It was purchased by the Catholic diocese, and this song was performed to rededicate it.
Gioia writes about the fragility of the California landscape, a land of “quake and fire.” It’s a metaphor for the human condition in general, opulent and prone to self-celebration, but breakable, and, in acknowledgement of this, sometimes also “folded in prayer.”
Upon this rock,
Our cross and spire
built in a land
of quake and fire.
Fragile as glass,
bright as the air,
the angled walls
folded in prayer.