Cyber Assault: A New Domain of Relationship Abuse

The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at Brigham Young University on October 23, 2002 by Dr. LaNae Valentine and Rachel Hickman.

LaNae Valentine:

I want to begin with a disclaimer that it’s not our intent today to vilify or benign the internet. The internet is a wonderful invention, and it has really helped facilitate our lives in many ways, and connect us to people from different parts of the world. It certainly has facilitated family history work and is a major contributor to the Lord’s kingdom, and building it, and fulfilling the mission of the Church. But that will not be our emphasis today. We’re going to be talking about how, as our title indicates, that cyberspace has really opened up a whole new realm of relationship abuse. Not that it’s created it, but it’s just another domain for abuse to play out. I will describe the problem, and then Rachel will be discussing solutions, and how we can protect ourselves and our families.

I want to begin with some definitions. I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word “abuse”, and the verb form is to ill use, or maltreat; to injure wrong, or hurt; to violate, ravish, or defile. Abuse as a noun is the process of using up or wearing out; wrong or improper use, misuse, misapplication, perversion. And then the word “violence” was defined: to do violence, to violate. But I really liked this 1650 translation which said, “the most sacred things are violence, and the most profane are licensed.” I think that aptly described our situation somewhat today. Also, I want to give a definition of cyberspace.

Cyberspace is composed of a variety of media such as email, list servers, bulletin boards, chat rooms, multi-user domains (which are referred to as MUD’s), virtual worlds, game spaces, and etc. That supports social interaction between people who are geographically dislocated. So again, the whole thing of cyberspace is bringing people together who typically could not be connected geographically. Many commentators view the fostering of social interaction as the most significant aspect of cyberspace. Indeed, there is no denying that these social media are used everyday, and inhabited by millions of people who are talking, chatting, flirting, discussing, arguing, and just chatting with one another. In general, analysts argue that the social media of cyberspace provide one, new conditions under which individuals can explore and manipulate their identity, and two, new spaces in which communities with very different characteristics to those in geographic space can be developed and sustained. So basically, what we have here in the realm of cyberspace is a bunch of people who might be, they may not by, but they may be manipulating their identity, so you don’t really know who they are for sure. And then you’ve got this realm of community that’s just in cyberspace. So, we’re going to be talking about how these unique features lend themselves to relationship abuse.

In cyberspace, interaction is conducted through a medium that strips away body coding, such as age, gender, race, and geographic place and community. A person’s identity is defined by words and actions, not body and place. So, this can lead to more facility in behaviors that could be violent or abusive, and I will cover some of those. The first one is the sexual solicitation of children. I recently heard a statistic on ABC World News that one in five American children is solicited for sex on the internet. And I thought that was a pretty alarming statistic. This is easily done in cyberspace because your body is irrelevant. You know, your gender, your age, your sexuality, whether you have a disability or not. All of those things are disguised. A person can create him or herself however they want to. A fifty year old man could portray himself as a thirteen year old boy, or even a thirteen year old girl, for that matter. Young naïve children are vulnerable targets for predators. Many children are learning to design their own web pages, and sometimes they put their pictures on their web pages, they put their addresses, the schools they go to, and lots of identifying information. This creates a virtual playground for sexual predators who utilize email and chat rooms to emotionally groom children for a meeting place and a time and opportunity to act out sexually. Children are not the only population who are solicited by sexual predators.

Teenage girls and college-aged women are another vulnerable population. Sexual predators are slick talkers who use flattery and manipulation to develop a false sense of trust with their victims. They are very skilled at conning and grooming a victim into sexual activity. I don’t know if you heard about Orem city police recently investigating a case where a twenty year old Orem woman met a fellow in a chat room on the internet, and was chatting, and after awhile, gave him her address, and he came over, and she invited him in, and he raped her. So, I think we need to teach our children to be very careful about who we’re meeting, and not to give out identifying information.

Another interesting phenomena and way in which sexual assault can occur is what is called virtual rape. Virtual rape can occur within a multi-user domain if one player finds a way to control the actions of another player’s character, and can thus force the character to have sex. So in a multi-user domain, you have a bunch of characters who have gotten together, and they’re creating this little society. A character could be a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman, whatever, and somehow, your character could get control of another character, and force that character to have sex, and be raped. And that’s a virtual form of sexual assault. And again, people can justify it, that it’s just a game, it’s just fantasy, but you have to wonder what kinds of ramifications that has on them. Things we need to remember is that there are perpetrators out there. We don’t know who we’re meeting on the internet. You know only what they are willing to share, and you have no way of verifying if what you are sharing is true, and predators often tend to prey on women and children. Another feature is online addictions. Many addictive- compulsive behavior is acted out on the internet such as sexual addictions, compulsive gambling, e-mailing addictions. I actually read in Time magazine that there’s a twelve step program for email addicts. You know, gaming and e-trading. People take up residence on the internet, it becomes their place of residence, and it becomes a very compulsive environment. Often, the internet is used as a place to escape problems when people are depressed or anxious, or feel guilty and bad, and it’s just very easy to get on the internet and escape into this other world. One must resort, however, to deceiving family members, sometimes, and colleagues and friends, and sometimes, whole careers and educations are jeopardized because of addictions that happen on the internet. Sometimes, there are significant financial consequences for online addictions. In all instances, one’s ability to relate declines. He or she withdraws from the family. No spouse can compare with the excitement and intrigue of the internet. Relational expansion results in being closer to an electron friend, with high sexual intensity, than to real people with human weaknesses and inconvenient demands.

Here’s a letter to the editor of Time magazine in June of this year-a woman who wrote in after reading an article on dangerous gaming. She said, “I do not believe that internet fantasy games like Everquest can ever be harmless family fun. My husband invests so much of his time in his fantasy character that if he were his real life character, he would have five graduate degrees by now. He gets so involved in games like Everquest that he ignores his responsibilities. At least when someone is watching too much TV, you can just unplug the set. That is not so easy with online computer games. I consider myself a computer widow. My husband tells me these games are fun, but he does a lot of cursing at the computer screen. It doesn’t look like fun to me. It looks like a violent, addictive game. Evercrack is a better name for it.”

Another phenomena that happens on the internet is cyber-stalking, or online harassment, and other cyber crimes, such as voyeurism, exhibitionism, stalking, privacy threats, financial scams, identity theft, and other illegal online acts. And so, I’m not going to go into all of those, but just any way a person can be violent and abusive, they can do that on the internet, and a lot of people are really concerned about the identity theft. They’ve purchased something over the internet, and someone has found their name, or their credit card number, and taken it on as their own. So again, we just need to be careful how we put ourselves out there. Violent video games are another phenomena that they are marketed to children and teenagers, and often simulate shootings, rapes, violence-all forms of violence. Certainly the producers of these games deny that they might have any adverse effects, yet there is evidence that continuous, or even infrequent viewing or participating in violent video games does affect behavior. I don’t know if you remember the case in Kentucky where the young man went to school and shot several children on the school grounds. And the police were really quite amazed that he was so precise in his targets-that every single child he shot he had shot in the forehead between the eyes, and this child had never fired a gun before in his life. He admitted to the police that he had gotten his target practice through simulated computer games that simulated shootings and targeting people in the forehead between the eyes. So, it just doesn’t seem like playing violent video games is conducive to developing loving, patient, respectful types of relationships.

Sex education on the web is another phenomena. Many young people are getting their sex education on the internet, and it’s an alarming fact that pornography is being used as a reference point for normal, natural, and commonly practiced sexual activity. Many young men admit that everything they’ve learned about how to treat women, they’ve learned from pornography. One young man responded regarding his pornography use is that “it just teaches you a lot of weird stuff you want to try on your girl.” Studies reveal that people who view pornography report more aggressive attitudes toward women. One respondent admitted that porn desensitized him to women, that it made him want to degrade them, and to slap them around. Others use such words as manhandle. Some even acknowledge that continually watching these images caused them to lose track of a real relationship with a real woman. Porn delivers an image of masculinity that is removed from emotion and any moral decision. There is a lot of violence in pornography that often goes unnoticed, because it’s sexualized. So any time you sexualize violence towards a woman or child, sometimes people don’t even notice it or see it.

Children are being profoundly affected by what they see. Sometimes children will accidentally stumble upon a pornographic site, and sometimes, they will be curious and be looking, but in either case, they see things, and they think “I want to try that”, and sometimes, they’re actually very traumatized by what they see. Some will become sexually aversive, others might become sexually aroused and compulsive. Another phenomena is the forced viewing of pornography, where someone not only views pornography him or herself, but uses it, enforces it upon another person, and uses it to convince someone to have sex, or to have sex in a way that they don’t want. They use the steps or the instructions outlined in the pornography. Specific pieces of pornography are acted out on someone in a dating, acquaintance, incestuous, stranger, or partner situation. Sometimes including verbal references to the pornography and behavior found in the pornography. Certainly, this is a form of sexual abuse when those sorts of behaviors are being forced upon a person against their will. Pornography is used in childhood sexual abuse to show a child what is desired and how to perform sexual activity, and to convince them that the activity will be enjoyable-again, another serious form of sexual abuse.

Another one is cyber sex and internet affairs. Sex is the most frequently searched topic on the internet according to Freeman, Longer, and Blanchard in a 1998 study. Estimates suggest that 20% of users engage in online sexual activity, approaching 75 million people worldwide. A study by MSNBC.com found over 9 million users visited adult entertainment websites, and 23% of women, and 50% of men surfed the web for visual erotica. Another MSNBC.com survey of 7,000 people indicated 60% did not consider cyber sex with another person to be infidelity. And then another interesting statistic-they found that most downloads occur between 9am and 5pm, which indicates that a lot of activity on the internet is going on during work time. So, they can’t be very productive at work if they’re doing that. Cyber sex involves using computerized text, images, or sound files for sexual stimulation. Cyber infidelity occurs when a partner in a committed relationship uses the computer to violate agreements of sexual exclusivity. So usually, an internet affair will start innocently. Two people meet in a chat room, and they begin chatting. Then it tends to progress into flirting, and it goes into these progressive steps. It usually begins with non-sexually explicit flirting, sexual innuendo, and then it becomes more explicit. Then they get together in a chat room and schedule a sex-laced chat. They begin discussing sexual preferences and fantasies, and then actually evolve into planning face to face meetings and physical contact, and that’s usually what happens. It’s easy for them to rationalize that it’s not as serious as a real affair, especially if they haven’t gotten to that point of physically meeting and acting out. But it is a betrayal when you begin flirting with someone and revealing emotions and things to that person that should be exclusive to your spouse.

Internet affairs are the epitome of self-presentation. That means presenting yourself in the way you want to be seen, and the antithesis of intimacy, which is self-confrontation and self-disclosure in the presence of a partner. So, there’s this illusion of intimate contact with this person on the internet, but it really is the absolute antithesis of that, because true intimacy involves revealing who you really are to another real person, and that does not happen on the internet. The privacy and anonymity of the internet leads to emotional and sexual engagement beyond what people often do in face to face encounters, even with their own spouses. Many clinicians are finding that women are just as likely to engage in cyber affairs as men, including many who in their daily lives would never dream of an emotional or sexual extramarital liaison. Internet affairs are facilitated by ease of convenience, self-deception, about where stepping over the line occurs, rampant opportunities for self presentation and getting validation from others. So it’s easy to have an internet affair, because the line is fuzzy, at least in a lot of people’s minds. I’m not really doing anything wrong, this is just a game, it’s just a fantasy. So even though, perhaps, the rise of internet affairs reflects how the technology creates this new ambiguity regarding violations of monogamy, it also reflects the difficulties people commonly have in defining the self and not violating it. So, one of the real problems here is in people defining “this is who I am, this is what my values are, this is what I’m committed to, this is what I stand for.” The people are having difficulty defining that, and not violating it. Another interesting thing that I read that explains why are so many people having internet affairs, and why are so many people caught up in pornography on the internet. According to David Shnarka, a family therapist, he says, “growing up in an emotionally volatile, or a sexually physically abusive household, accentuates the normal anxiety arousal and sexual arousal pattern into a dominant sexual response.” Given that a third of women are sexually abused growing up, he believes this explains the large number of women, in particular, who have internet affairs. So it goes back to this whole cycle of abuse that is perpetuated in society, or it can go back to that. That people who have been sexually and emotionally abused are more at risk, perhaps, of an internet affair. So, how do we explain and how do we justify all this activity in cyberspace. This unloving activity that does go into the realm of abusive and violent behavior.

Is it really possible to respect and love women and view pornography at the same time? Pornographers use every attribute any woman has and sexualizes and dehumanizes it. This process of dehumanization is the means of changing people into things. Women’s lives are made two dimensional and dead. It’s hard to remember that she’s a real human being. Dehumanizing someone alone is cruel, and is the first step towards violence. There is a desire to hurt, to intimidate, to humiliate. There is an underlying dimension of pushing someone down, subordinating them, making them less. And even though women and children are the obvious victims of pornography, men, too, are exploited and dehumanized by pornography use. Men are mis-educated and misled to believe that it’s normal to be aggressive, and treat women as they are portrayed in pornography. Also, by some of the degrading acts in porn, males are taught that women are less than men, and that they actually approve of the violence against themselves. Men learn an unrealistic standard of beauty, womanhood, and femininity. They learn that in relationships, women are supposed to comply and submit. Women learn that they are a standard of oppression, and they learn what they have to do in order to be accepted. I want to read a quote from a young man who had a pornography problem and was able to get out of it, and this was some of the reasoning he expressed: “It was in my personal attitudes toward women that I began to question more deeply my involvement with pornography. Probably my biggest source of cognitive dissonance was my comparing the women I saw on the computer screen with the women in my life. Particularly the women of my family, who were by far the dominant role models of my childhood. The family women were independent, intelligent, warm, humorous, well founded human beings. The women portrayed on screen were essentially objects for male pleasure. Personality wise, they were either obsequies and servile, or cold, conniving, opportunists. These two contrasting images of women from my family and the video screen never quite lined up in my mind.” He continues, “one of the most common questions asked is, does repeated exposure to pornographic images of women lead men to misogynistic attitudes? I would have to answer yes. It is my belief that a man could not disrespect, abuse, or rape a woman unless there was a preconceived notion in his mind that women were less than. When media in general, and pornography in particular, emphasize a woman’s body parts, impose notions of her sexuality, or her physical appearance above all her other qualities when there is a de-emphasis on her intellect, her creativity, her humanness, the stage is being set for perceiving her as an inferior, as less than. This warped perception may very well open the door to psychological, verbal, and physical abuse.”

I want to review the definition of the word pornography. I think that when we get to the very roots of words, it teaches us a lot about that particular phenomena. And I hadn’t known this that pornography, the word, comes from the ancient Greek porna and graphos, which translates into “writing about whores.” Porna means whore, specifically and exclusively the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut. The porna was the cheapest, in the literal sense. Least regarded, least respected of all women, including slaves. She was simply and clearly an absolutely sexual slave. Graphos means writing, etching, or drawing. So, the word pornography does not simply mean writing about sex, or depictions of the erotic, or any other such euphemism. It means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores. In pornography, the real pleasure of sex is the debasing of women. I thought that was really quite graphic in that that’s what that word means. It means writing about whores, debasing a woman into that term. So, when a person is viewing pornography, that’s basically what that person is doing, debasing a woman. And vice versa, if a woman is viewing a man in that way. Very far removed from loving behavior that connects us and makes us sensitive to one another. There was a time when our bodies, and I’m speaking mainly of women’s bodies, were not treated like objects, but were honored for their spiritual properties. The miraculous ability to give birth and nurture new life. But over time, this connection has been lost and repressed through the rise of the consumer culture. Women’s bodies weren’t created for the purpose of selling beer, new cars, and other products. Nor were they intended to be a commodity to control or manipulate in order to get what we need, or to define our self worth. All of us, men and women alike, are gods and goddesses in embryo, to be honored and respected as sacred. Our bodies are sacred-sacred means holy, consecrated, and to be revered. It also means to be secure against violence and abuse. So Rachel will continue now with some solutions to these problems that we find in the realm of cyber space.

Rachel Hickman:

So, as Lenae has begun to talk about, what is the result of these different uses of the Internet? And that result is disconnection. I’m going to read two different quotes, and it’s going to set up, almost in a sense, two ends of the spectrum, or maybe two things that are pulling at us at the same time. And the first one is from Rex E. Pinnegar. He said, “We learn truths by way of the spirit. But by way of the body, we learn to be like Heavenly Father. The body constantly reinforces truth, is constant testimony of truth. Truly, when kept pure the body is filled with the light of Christ. The body is a source of fullness for the spirit, because through the body, the spirit learns how to feel.” On the other end, there’s something else that’s pulling at us, perhaps what we’ve set ourselves up with in this particular society that we’re born into. This is a quote from Hayes, Stosil, and Wilson, they’re therapists, and they kind of made this distinction about what language does for us, and what we’ve created for ourselves. It says, “Language allows events to be abstracted and treated as objects. We are taught the nature and meaning of specific emotions, for example. A loose collection of bodily states, thoughts, behavioral predispositions and contextual factors are gathered together under a verbal label, and we learn to call them depression or anxiety. Our emotions become thing like, and verbally accessible. They are then evaluated, which gives them both conventional and valence functions. Virtually all of our measures of psychopathology are built on the assumption that to be psychologically healthy is to be free of disordered emotions and cognitive responses. According to this standard, a coma victim might be considered the ideal of psychological health. Popular culture is relentless in its promotion of this view of health. In a recent beer commercial, a bar filled with young vibrant women and men having apparently an ideal Friday evening, the characters in the bar looked quite normal except that instead of heads, they have big yellow happy face buttons. “Don’t worry, be happy,” the song says. The problem is that the ideal is a purely verbal concept. It is both unattainable and out of contact with how humans actually can move forward with pain. Not only does one not live such a life, the effort to produce it is destructive. Yet this motive is one of the central themes of our modern culture. It’s interesting, and I think we’re going to have to agree with Maya Angelou when she said, “the language you speak is made of the words that are killing you.” I wonder if with the language we’ve created and the verbal context that we’ve set for ourselves that we’ve set ourselves up to really struggle, and to suffer in ways that are maybe unnecessary. It’s true that pain is very characteristic of the human condition, and it’s not a bad thing, and yet we’re set up to think that it is, and we cause ourselves to suffer further. So, we’re encouraged to disconnect, in a sense, from ourselves, because we’re taught that pain is wrong, and then at the same time, going back to Elder Pinegar, he talks about us being created to feel, and also being in that we can feel, we’re also created to connect with others. So now, just returning to this idea of the Internet, we have two different items that we’re talking about then. We have, perhaps, these virtual worlds that Lenae talked about where we’re looking for some kind of connection, and yet we are isolated in doing so. And then this other form where it’s facilitating this disconnection that is already manifest in our society where we objectify and remove ourselves from people, and can treat them like objects, and then in turn, generalize that idea, and take that into relationships with people around us. And so, in those two respects, the Internet can help us to disconnect from ourselves, and the Internet intimacy trap that we previously mentioned, I believe that that is basically the idea that our needs for intimacy, whether they be emotional, intellectual, sexual, what have you, can be met solely through electronic means, and I believe that that idea is incorrect, and really leads us down a destructive road. We’ve talked about the Internet intimacy trap, and now we’re going to talk about steps to move forward, move beyond this trap that we’ve kind of outlined.

The first thing that we’re going to talk about as a solution to this, is connecting to self, and connecting to God. What I want to do is I want to tell a little bit of a story, so sit back and relax for a minute. This is a little parable written by a man named Spencer Johnson. He tells a story of a little boy, very happy, and a very content, very satisfied old man who watches him play, and work, and very much enjoys watching this little boy enjoy his life. The little boy often would come to talk to the old man, and the old man, in their conversations, introduced him to what is called the “precious present”, and the little boy was really excited. He knew about presents, he’d experienced Christmas and his birthday before, and as this old man talked about this precious present, he was excited and hoped that perhaps, one day, someone would give him this precious gift. As time went on, and he grew older, he became more and more distressed, because he never did get this precious present, and he would often come back to talk to this old man, and became very frustrated and said, “Why don’t you just give it to me?” And the old man would continually tell him, “It’s something that I cannot give to you. It’s something that you give yourself.” And so what this man did was set off on a journey, in a sense, where he went all across the world, looking in the tops of mountains, and under the ocean, he looked on Wall Street, he looked in the mirror, he looked in the newspaper, and wherever he went, and wherever he looked, he could not find this present that his good friend had told him about. He became very, very unhappy and very ill. Finally, during this process, he continually was returning to his old friend, and that’s where we’re going to pick up the story. He says, “After many years, the once young man returned to inquire further. He was now very unhappy, and often ill. He needed to talk to the old man, but the old man had grown very, very old, and all too soon, he spoke no more. The wise voice could no longer be heard. The man was alone. At first he was saddened by the loss of his old friend, and then he became frightened-very frightened. And he was afraid that he would never learn how to be happy until he finally accepted what had always been true. He was the only one who could find his own happiness. The unhappy man recalled that the happy old man had told him so many years ago that as hard as he tried, he could not figure it out. He tried to understand what he had heard. The precious present has nothing to do with wishing. When you have the precious present, you’ll be perfectly content to be where you are. The richness of the precious present comes from it’s own source. The precious present is not something that someone gives to you. It is a gift you give yourself. The unhappy man was now tired looking for the precious present. He had grown so tired of trying that he simply stopped trying, and then it happened. He didn’t know why it happened, when it happened-it just happened. He realized that the precious present was just that-the present. Not the past, and not the future, but the precious present. He realized that the present moment is always precious. Not because it is absolutely flawless, which it often seems not to be, but because it is absolutely everything it is meant to be at that moment. In an instant, the man was happy. He realized that he was in the precious present, and he goes through the process of all of a sudden realizing. He starts to lose that and says, well, look at all the time I wasted. Look at how many places I went, and what I did, and so many precious moments that I missed. And then he caught himself, and he realized, ah, I’ve lost the gift again. And then he was happy for a moment, until then he thought, “Will I be able to find this again in the future?” And then he began to realize he was living in the future. And then we move on. He listened to what he now knew, and he listened to the wisdom of his own voice. “It is wise for me to think about the past and to learn from my past, but it is not wise for me to be in the past, for that is how I lose myself. It is also wise for me to think about the future, to prepare for my future, but it is not wise for me to be in the future, for that too is how I lose myself. And when I lose myself, I lose what is most precious to me.” It was so simple, and now he saw it. The present nourished him. But the man knew it was not going to be easy. Learning to be in the present was a process that he was going to have to do over and over again and again. Now he realized why he’d enjoyed being with the old man. The old man was totally present. When he was with the younger man, the older man was not thinking about something else, or wishing he was somewhere else. He was fully present, and it felt good to be with such a person. The younger man smiled at himself the way the old man used to smile. He knew, “I can choose to be happy now, or I can choose to be happy when or if.” The man chose now. And now, the man was happy. He felt at peace with himself. He agreed to savor each moment in his life as perfect, the apparently good, and the apparently bad, even if he did not understand why. For the first time in his life, it didn’t matter. He accepted each of his precious moments on this planet as a gift. There’s something special about that metaphor. There’s something wonderful about the art of being present. I think in those moments when we are present, we can learn to connect with what we really are.

There’s a couple of questions that an author, her name is Aria Mountain Dreamer, presented, in the beginning of her book, and I wanted to read a couple of them to you for you to consider. She said, “what if it truly doesn’t matter what you do, but how you do whatever you do? How would this change what you choose to do with your life? What if you could be more present and open hearted with every person you meet-if you were working as a cashier on a corner store, or as a parking lot attendant? Then you could, if you were doing a job you think is more important. How would this change how you want spend your precious time on this earth? What if your contribution to the world and the fulfillment of your own happiness is not dependent upon discovering a better method of prayer, or technique of meditation, not dependent upon reading the right book, or attending the right seminar, but upon really seeing and deeply appreciating yourself, and the world as they are right now. What if there was no need to change, no need to try to transform yourself into someone who is more compassionate, more present, more loving, more wise? How would this affect all the places in your life where you are endlessly trying to be better? What if the task is simply to unfold, to become who you already are in your essential nature? Gentle, compassionate, capable of living fully and passionately present. How would this affect how you feel when you wake up in the morning? What if the question is not, why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am? What if becoming who and what we truly are happens not through striving and trying, but by recognizing and receiving the people and places and practices that offer us the warmth and encouragement that we need to unfold? Those are poignant questions.

And I believe this leads into our next idea, which is that once we’ve reconnected with ourselves, when we can be present, then we can be still. And as stillness permeates our life, the Lord is able to enter in. When the Lord enters in, he offers us something special. He offers us the enabling power of grace. In the Bible dictionary, it’s described in this way: “It is through the grace of the Lord, Jesus, made possible by His atoning sacrifice that mankind may be raised in immortality, every person receiving his body from the grave in a condition of everlasting life. It is likewise through the grace of the Lord that individuals, through faith in the atonement of Jesus Christ, and repentance of their sins, receives strength and assistance to do good works that they otherwise would not be able to maintain, if left to their own means. This grace is an enabling power that allows men and women to lay hold on eternal life and exaltation after they have expended their own best efforts.” Truly, I think the Lord meant what He said when He said, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Perhaps spirituality, or a connection with God, is not about Him removing our difficulties, our burdens and sorrows, wiping them away as if they are not there anymore, and as if they never happened. Perhaps it is about being filled with a power that strengthens us, that allows us to go from just being on this continuum of happy and sad, and being able to drift into a third place, where we can appreciate wherever we are, whatever context we’re in, and be filled with gratitude from the Lord. So again, when we accept what is, we give ourselves the possibility of accepting who we are, as we are right now. Self-acceptance allows inner-stillness. When stillness permeates our being, God can enter in freely; when God enters in, we can create community.

And what is community? I’m going to return to the Oxford English Dictionary, like LaNae, and read you some definitions. From the Latin roots of this word, we find these meanings: fellowship, community, of relations or feelings. I like that. A community of relations or feelings. Also, a body of fellows, or fellow townsmen. I don’t believe that community is merely a case of prohinquity, or geographic closeness to someone. I believe it’s also a quality or state of being, and you cannot separate those two. You cannot separate the fact that we need to be together, flesh and blood, body and soul, with also a quality and state of being. When we allow ourselves, and give ourselves opportunity to be with others, and to create community, we allow synergy to happen. Synergy is kind of a chemistry term where, in a sense, you have one element, plus another element doesn’t equal just the sum of those two, but rather maybe double, triple, or quadruple the power of those two on their own. But maybe even more so, creating community is something that we can give to someone else. I believe in my heart that creating community is about sharing, stillness, and acceptance with others.

I want to read you one last final quote. This is from a man named David Kearsey, from his book called “Please Understand Me”, and it’s entitled, “Different Drummers.” He says, “If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that what I want is wrong. Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view. Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstance, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly. Or yet, if I act or fail to act in the manner of your design for action, let me be. I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will only come when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you. I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend or colleague. If you allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself up so that one day, these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as a right, for me. To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me, you might come to prize my differences from you. And far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.” I think that’s the essence of community. I think when we can create a sense of community within our relationships with others, within our homes, and within our communities in general, within the towns or cities that we live, we are less likely to fall prey to the intimacy trap that the internet can offer to us. We’re less likely to objectify and to abuse others. Rather than that, rather than trying to force and control, we will accept and nurture. May we offer this gift to someone else, may we offer this gift to ourselves, and may we foster connections-true connections-in our lives, and be able to recognize counterfeits when they are presented to us.