Soul Care in a Collapsed Age

In his recent book, Superbloom, Nicholas Carr surveys the history, development, and use of various media technologies. He laments that these tools touted as connective mediums actually do more to fragment than bring us together. One of the unintended effects of such advancements Carr describes is the concept of content collapse. As the regulations for online media became increasingly lax and the power to broadcast messages was democratized, distinctions between form, register, sense, and importance became blurred. Text, image, and even sound became flattened into one undifferentiated feed––severed from their histories, forms, and purposes so they could be consumed efficiently.

The result is that everything is now categorized as “content”, regardless of its actual shape or voice, and all content must fit the internet’s conventions of immediacy, novelty, and efficiency. 

But what Carr describes as “content collapse” is not merely a media phenomenon. It has become a way of seeing—one that trains us to strip things of history, context, and form so they can be consumed quickly. Once learned, this way of seeing does not stay online: collapse cascades from online spaces to interpersonal relationships like an orchestrated demolition. And one marked casualty in the rubble of this collapse is the craft of soul care––the art of attending to the whole, distinct person in bringing God’s gifts to his people.

Character Collapse

Content collapse encourages us to view people the same way we view information: as context-free snippets all categorized within the same indistinct register. This is because, as Samuel James notes, the web is an epistemological habitat. As such, it not only rewards certain ways of thinking, it actually reteaches how we think. James gives shallow skimming and knee-jerk intuitions as primary examples of such retraining.

This is certainly a crisis on an informational level. But the rewiring of our brains wreaks relational havoc as well. We have become epistemologically habituated to shallowly skim people too. We primarily think of others, James says, “via the profile page”, a soul in motion reduced to a digital snapshot. Thus we’ve learned to process people the same way we process content.

Like content collapse, we suffer from something like “character” collapse––each individual we encounter is viewed as no more than a flat, momentary manifestation of their being. We are the main character; they are supporting roles that seemingly appear on a page ahistorically and disappear just as quickly. We slide through social interactions much the way we scroll through a news feed, with nearly all context removed. Carr describes this sort of removal of personal context as dislocation.

But it's one thing to sever bits of information from their intended form and sense. It’s another to cut off a human being from their history.

History Whisking

Our online habituation––with immediacy and efficiency as king––has formed us into “history whiskers”. I’m taking this language from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. In it, Huxley paints an eerily prophetic vision of society-as-machine. Towards the end of the novel, explaining how the powers-that-be come to achieve such a “stable” society, the World Controller says,

“History is bunk. History,” he repeated slowly, “is bunk.” He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk-and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk-and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom-all were gone. Whisk-the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk...

The goal was stability, the means to that goal was history whisking––the removal of any story that could elicit an extraneous emotion, feeling, or thought that didn’t serve the vision of an efficient society. The result of such historical eradication were collapsed classes of people––Alphas, Betas, all the way to Epsilon Semi-Morons––that were predictably generic. Whisking away history did not merely produce ignorance; it produced predictable people who were easy to manage, categorize, and consume (like context-free content).

While fiction, we are not as far from Huxley’s world as we may like to believe. Sociologist Sherry Turkle coined the “Goldilocks effect” for how we prefer our relationships not too close, not too far, just right. We use technology to “clean them up”, digitally categorizing others, flattening people until they fit predictably within the narrative of our life.

But this is not how people are meant to be viewed. Great story tellers know this. In his memoir On Writing Stephen King advises against creating a flat “bad guy” or “best friend.” No real human can be so simplistically reduced. King’s counsel is to create and then bring the whole of the character's life to bear on the narrative, suggesting that this helps guard against stories full of “one-dimensional dopes”.

King recognizes the irreducible complexity of the human story, and rightly knows that to whisk that composite history away is a misrepresentation of the human experience unworthy of even works of fiction! How much more impossible must it be for image-bearers of the Triune God to be one-dimensional dopes. As Lewis said, “there are no ordinary people.” And yet, our default mode is to relegate others to the role of one-dimensional actors—flat “neighbors” or “coworkers” or “parishioners”—orbiting around our multi-dimensional roundness. 

So what happens to a soul when it is robbed of its history? Simply put, it cannot be properly cared for. When history is whisked and people are flattened, the contours of the soul are fundamentally misunderstood, thus grace can never be appropriately applied.

Soul Care After Collapse

The care and cure of souls is not a new ministry endeavor. We have wise examples throughout church history from Bucer to Baxter, all seeking to apply our Lord’s command to “feed my sheep.” However, the Spirit-filled art of learning Jesus’ way must now have a greater focus on rejecting the ahistorical flattening of others. 

In his collection of essays on John’s gospel, Richard Bauckham points out the evangelist’s use of the full spectrum of character types: from flat, “walk-on” characters, to full-fledged “individuals”––round characters with unique histories and personalities. Bauckham’s emphasis, though, is not the typical observation that these characters respond differently to Jesus; rather, that Jesus deals with them differently: He meets Martha in her mourning; Peter in his failure; Nicodemus in his religious rigidity. Jesus applies his healing contextually, the particular soul encountered determing the specific plan for care.

It is interesting that the accounts of Jesus’ omnipotent healing in both Mark 2 and Luke 5––where the title Great Physician is drawn from––both include a nod to Jesus’ omniscience. Inseparable from his physician-like healing is his physician-like knowledge of the unique, multi-dimensional histories of those right in front of him. He is not merely the Great Physician of diagnosis and treatment; he is the Great Physician of oral history! 

True soul care always takes place in the context of soul knowledge.

So while merely modeling our ministry on the omniscient Healer is utter folly, we must––as attendings filled with the Physician’s Spirit––seek to follow his ways within our human limits. Harold Senkbiel, a skilled practitioner in the art of soul care, likens soul knowledge to the gathering of an oral history by a doctor. In medicine, and in life, no two patients are the same. The difference between successful and unsuccessful “treatment” can be attention to this unique history:

The right word at the right time lies at the heart of faithful soul cure, and we won’t know what word to speak unless we have both prayerfully meditated on God’s word and attentively listened to the soul.

Notice Senkbeil’s both. Yes, of course Scripture discloses the history of redemption (medicine), but we must also know the history of their redemption (oral history)! Likewise Eugene Peterson agrees there are no fail-proof prescriptions; each person is a complex being with “shapeless longings” and “badgering questions”—symptoms that must be considered in light of their history. There are no boilerplate blessings. True, the promises of God in Christ apply to everyone, but those promises need to be skillfully mapped onto the soul in history. 

In his philosophically rich work on inhabiting time, Jamie Smith points out that it is the historical creature that is redeemed. Indeed, we do not merely have a history, we are a history. And it is the “me” with a history that God has dealt with in time through the person of Jesus. God’s salvific act of justification is a final verdict of judgment decreed in eternity that is then applied in history in the life of the person sitting in front of you.

History as Spiritual Practice

It is, then, the historical creature we must attend to in caring for the soul. The personal history of the redeemed is worthy of our attention, because it is there where God has chosen to act. Senkbeil says the first crucial component of soul care is paying attention in Jesus’ name. Such unhurried leisure of listening, as Peterson calls it, became his metric for a fruitful week of soul care: he reflected not on “How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?” but “How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?”

But what exactly are we listening for? Again Peterson is a worthy guide:

• What has God been doing here? 
• What traces of grace can I discern in this life? 
• What history of love can I read in this group? 
• What has God set in motion that I can get in on?

Listening for this––listening at all––is an increasingly tall order for an overstimulated and deeply distracted age. However, this only compounds the immense gift that attentive ears can be to burdened souls. 

Peterson is adamant that such attentiveness must be used to “read the minutes” of the previous meeting (i.e. their previous meeting with God). We must reject our main-character disposition and realize with each person we encounter that God is already at work. They exist as a multi-dimensional person outside of our experience of them and we are coming into that pre-existing process. 

One simple way to grow in this practice of minute-reading is to actually keep minutes in the form of pastoral notes. Taking such notes is not a technique for efficiency, but rather is an act of honoring history. Practically, we must do the hard work of learning all we can about someone in the context of genuine relationship and document as much as possible (discernment around issues of confidentiality goes without saying). Then, we should update these “minutes” after each future encounter with them––glimpses of grace seen, sadnesses left unsaid, offhanded comments worth remembering. These are living documents that take on the shape of the soul in time. It is important to emphasize that this is not a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system––such systems typically encourage collapse for efficiency's sake. Rather, this is a practice of honoring the history of time-inhabiting souls. 

Practically, reviewing these notes before meeting with someone in their home or out for coffee then becomes a spiritual practice––a historical liturgy to prepare our hearts for a multi-dimensional encounter. This practice reminds us that this person is not merely a supporting character in the story of our life. They are a storied soul that has been acted upon in history by the Eternal God. Such perspective helps us refrain from becoming what Peterson describes as a project manager ordering busywork, and instead allows us to pay attention to who they are and ask God, “How can I join what you are already doing?”

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In a collapsed age, keeping history is an act of care. To remember a person’s story is to refuse the lie that they are interchangeable, manageable, or finished. Soul care after collapse is not the mastery of technique, but the patient, prayerful insistence that God works in others in time, forming a unique history that cannot be whisked away.