The Problem With "Technology"

I'm currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I may have read it in my twenties but I honestly don't remember, so it feels like the first time. The book holds a Guinness Book of World Records for being a best-seller (5 million copies sold) while having been initially rejected by 121 publishers. (Gives me hope for my own writing)

I can see why. It's a tough book to put in a category--it was shelved in the Non-fiction section at the library, though it reads like a novel, even though it's not. It's more like a fictionalized autobiography of a father and his 11 year old son who take a motorcycle trip from their home in Minnesota to San Francisco with a couple of friends. It's not really about Zen, and it's not really about motorcycle maintenance (specifically) either, but Pirsig's attempts to carve out a nice in the world of philosophy with his ponderings on the issue of Quality using the father-son trip as a platform on which to build his ideas. 

Interestingly, Pirsig wrote the novel in 1968, I believe, after his wife divorced him and he was committed to undergo shock therapy (ECT) to treat his schizophrenia. He went to college at 15, and had a 170 IQ, so he was a really smart guy. Which is kind of remarkable, because while the book is coherent, knowing his background you kind of wonder "should I really put much stock in these philosophical pinings? Is this the manifesto of a madman?" 

When I was in my twenties I owned a 1979 Yamaha XS750 motorcycle. I took it to class, used it to get around, though the longest trip I took was from Philly to Wildwood Crest, NJ, where it stalled out in a rainstorm. It was always breaking down on me and my neighbor in the apartment behind me would graciously pick me up when needed with his pickup truck. I didn't know anything about working on engines or motorcycles, had no way of transporting it, and was at the mercy of mechanics to diagnose problems. After I got a flat and the plates were stolen (and then it was subsequently towed outside my apartment due to not being tagged), I surrendered the title and was glad to be done with the whole thing. 

I've bicycled across the U.S. and it was a good way to see the country because you are going slow, yet aren't confined by the barrier of a car which separates you from the country side. When it's hot, you're hot. When it rains, you get wet. Still, I wouldn't have wanted to drive cross-country; I drive enough as it is these days. 

On a motorcycle, you're traveling the same speed as a car, but aren't framed in by one. You're still exposed to the elements, and limited in what you can carry. There are more mechanical parts to break down than on a bicycle. So I guess seeing the country the way Pirsig and his son did is a 'split-the-middle' between bicycle touring and car-touring.  

The book is a little on the dry side, and I think that's because Pirsig definitely falls into what he calls the "Classical" camps, which he contrasts with the "Romantic" camp. Think of it as left-brain vs right brain, where the author falls squarely into the left-brained (logical, analytical, mathematical, engineer-type) classification. He struggles to understand his riding partners, John and Sylvia, and their aversion to all things mechanical and (as we will see below, 'technological') because they are what he would consider "Romantics." In the context of the below passage, he is referencing the couple having a dripping faucet at home but not being inclined to fix it, nor are they inclined to work on their own motorcycles and know how they work. For the author, it's hard for him to relate to this non-technical, non-mechanical way of thinking. 

I realized I am much more like John and Sylvia in the book, and I get kind of annoyed at Pirsig's overly-technical, engineer-type brain pontificating, even when talking about Philosophy. 

When it comes to technology, I would consider myself a techno-pessimist. Which is why the following passage spoke to me for some reason, even though it was 1974 by the time it the book was published. Still, I think those feelings among many people like myself with our relationship to technology square with the passage below, even though they were written over half a century ago.

I know I will suffer for my antipathy towards technology. I know I will be left behind if I don't get on board. Which fills me with fear and anxiety, because not only do I not understand it or incompetent with regards to it, but I feel shut out from it. For the first time in my life, I feel as if I may become a serf rather than a vassal--one at the whim and control of a force more powerful than I am, that doesn't care for me or my petty resistance or ideals or objections. The data centers will go in despite protest, the AI will subsume us, and I will soon be an old man shouting at the clouds. All this fills me with dread, and it's not 'technology,' per se, but the absolute helplessness I feel in its looming shadow.  

Anyway, have a read and let me know what you think.

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"It's not the motorcycle maintenance, not the faucet. It's all of technology they can't take. And then all sorts of things started tumbling into place and I knew that was it. Sylvia's irritation at a friend who thought that computer programming was 'creative.' All their drawings and paintings and photographs without a technological thing in them. Of course she's not going to get mad at that faucet, I thought. You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. Of course John signs off every time the subject of cycle repair comes up, even when it is obvious he is suffering for it. That's technology. And sure, of course, obviously. It's so simple when you see it. To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycle in the first place. For me to bring it back to them just at the point and place where they think they have finally escaped it just frosts both of them, tremendously. That's why the conversation always breaks and freezes when the subject comes up.

Other things fit in too. They talk once in a while in as few pained words as possible about 'it' or 'it all' as in the sentence, 'There is just no escape from it.' And if I asked, 'From what?' the answer might be 'The whole thing,' or 'The whole organized bit,' or even 'The system.' Sylvia once said defensively, 'Well, you know how to cope with it,' which puffed me up so much at the time I was embarrassed to ask what 'it' was and so remained somewhat puzzled. I thought it was something more mysterious than technology. But now I see that the 'it' was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But that doesn't sound right either. The 'it' is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape. I'm putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less defined way this is what it is. Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman language when describing what they do. It's all parts and relationships of unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it.

That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a larger city and there is all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it's for you don't know, and why it's there, there's no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn't belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn't want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. It's very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, 'Get out.' You know there's an explanation for all this somewhere and what it's doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn't what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that's ultimately what's involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don't want to get into it.

If this is so, they are not alone. There is no question that they have been following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone. But many others are also following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone and the natural feelings of very many people are similar on this matter; so that when you look at them collectively, as journalists do, you get the illusion of a mass movement, an antitechnological mass movement, and entire political antitechnological left emerging, looming up from apparently nowhere, saying 'Stop the technology. Have it somewhere else. Don't have it here.' It is still restrained by a thin web of logic that points out that without the factories there are no jobs or standard of living. But there are human forces stronger than logic. There always have been, and if they become strong enough in their hatred of technology that web can break.

Cliches and stereotypes such as 'beatnik' or 'hippie' have been invented for the antitechnologists, the anti system people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. John and Sylvia are not mass people and neither are most of the others going their way. It is against being a mass person that they seem to be revolting. And they feel that technology has got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass people and they don't like it. So far it's still mostly a passive resistance, flights into the rural areas when they are possible and things like that, but it doesn't always have to be this passive.

I disagree with them about cycle maintenance, but not because I am out of sympathy with their feelings about technology. I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does as the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha--which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua." 

Robert Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. William Morrow & Company, New York, 1974 (23-26).

You Have To Choose

It is a remarkable thing that some of the weightiest choices we make in our lives are undertaken with the lightest of reasoning. 

We marry because we "like being with" so and so. "He makes me laugh." "We both enjoy running." And so on.

We bring children into the world, sometimes inadvertently but most times having chosen to do so. Maybe so we have someone to love. Or that someone will love us. At least that is the wager.

These choices bring unforeseen consequences into our world, and to the world at large. Typically they are wonderful consequences. We rolled the dice on love, or made a calculated wager, and we are surprised by how much it pushes us, makes us grow and dig deep, forms us into someone we would have never been otherwise. Or we are surprised by our capacity to love and sacrifice for children, never having known a love so great in our lives before they came into existence. 

None of these choices--to love, to marry, to bring forth life--come with guarantees. There is no assurance of happiness or contentment, of being able to provide or having the kind of life you envision for yourself. The only guarantee is that you will die, and so will those you love. No one in the history of the human race has escaped this conundrum. 

But were the "what ifs" to choke out our purview like a cloud of gnats and we defected on the chance to choose--to love, to marry, bring life into the world--that too would be a choice. What we believe to be non-choices are not defections, but choices in and of themselves. We may choose to decline a proposal, or put up barriers to keep life from breaking onto the scene, to control our destinies and keep hurts and possible betrayals at bay.

The choice to remain single when one could have married is a choice, one with consequences--sometimes positive, sometimes heavy with grief and regret. And then you get to a point when choosing an alternative is no longer a choice.

The choice to remain childless, choosing to not have children, is a choice, one that often prioritizes one's own life and autonomy. A couple may believe they do not have the resources to do so responsibly, that they do not owe a world in need of replacement with new humans anything beyond themselves. Or maybe they are just prioritizing their own wants before anything else, refusing to let them be compromised. 

I think middle age brings the reality of the choices we make into focus. We choose, or fall into, one career at the expense of doing something else. By the time ten or fifteen years go by, one is more or less cemented into that path, and it becomes difficult (but not impossible) to change course. 

Even the "sins of omission" are a failure to do something for the good, and are in themselves a choice with consequences. We fail to step in and help in a situation in which we could be of benefit, maybe out of cowardice or inconvenience, like the priest passing the injured Samaritan. Or we fail to speak up when we could have made our voice heard. Or we bury our talents in the yard. 

God gives us freedom to choose as a great and risky gift. We can choose our own destruction or make choices to deify and join him, eventually, in the heavenly realm. Even when we choose wrongly, he forgives us and resets our path; we are not always destined to die eternally with the result of one wrong or bad choice. He can even use the consequences of those misguided choices to fortify us for the future, to teach us lessons we would otherwise not have learned.

And of course, love means nothing if it is not chosen, freely given. We choose to love God in our actions, not just our minds and hearts. We choose to get up and pray, rather than choosing to go back to bed. We choose to stop drinking, or to untangle ourselves from that toxic person, as a hard decision in the right direction. Choices take effort because of the consequences we have to then deal with. We reap from those harvests, eventually, the sum of good choices. But even the detritus of bad choices can fertilize the soil for a future harvest, provided we learn from it.

Having the opportunity to choose is also a privilege, one not everyone is afforded. A slave does not make choice. He is told what to do, what he can and can't do, where he can go and when he can sleep and what he must engage in. So even when we are afforded that "terrible freedom" Dostoevsky writes about, we should be grateful for it, because it makes us human, is part of the human condition--the freedom to make choices for ourselves. 

I do thank God I am not the sum of my bad choices. Even when we have to accept the consequences of those actions, there is forgiveness, and forgiveness itself is a choice of Christ's. Just as he chose to pick up his cross and not eschew it, he chooses to forgive us; he does not withhold it when we ask for it. He does not condemn us forever, unless we are unrepentant. Because of those choices Christ made (and they were true choices made in human freedom), we have life. Because of the choices we make, we bring life into the world and perpetuate the human race. 

A Tree By Its Fruit

We moved into our home in 2015. I planted an Shinseiki Asian Pear tree in our quarter-acre backyard the following Spring. I pruned the limbs and suckers diligently each winter, and fertilized it with my own compost produced from our kitchen scraps, leaves and grass clippings. It took a few years to mature, but eventually it began producing fruit.

Every year for the past eight years, it has produced a bounty--fifty to seventy-five--of golf ball sized Asian pears, my favorite fruit.

And for the past eight years I have not tasted a single one. The squirrel gets every last one. Year after year. He waits until late July, when I think to myself "maybe this is my year. This is my year!" I go to bed with fifty fat pears on the tree, and wake up the next morning and there are none. Stripped clean. And I just can't take it anymore.

I have done everything I could think of to preserve the harvest--I netted the entire tree one year. Another year I put plastic cupcake holders on each and every pear. This year I put plastic sleeves and a chloroplast skirt on the trunk to try to keep the squirrel from being able to climb up. 

Everything I did failed. Nature has defeated me so thoroughly it is enough to drive a man to nihilism.

During those early years, I removed a 20'x20' plot of grass, covered with cardboard and compost (20 years of grass clippings and leaves dumped behind the shed by the previous owner; a rich, black, airy humus-like compost) and horse manure and topped with wood chips from a recently taken down maple tree. I set 8 foot stakes in the ground, wound chicken wire around the lower perimeter and fishing wire around the top. Planted eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, turnips and beets, lettuce and spinach and bok choi. Living out the little suburban homestead fantasy. Cute. So full of hope and promise.

First year I got a few things; most of the "crops" grew well. At least in the first year. But the compost ran out and the soil over the years became harder to nourish without amenities like animal manure and a steady supply of compost. Increasingly I was fighting a war on multiple fronts--woodchuck, deer, fox, squirrels, voles--anything and everything that could work against me did. Even the five chickens I picked up one year got picked off one by one.

I got worn down. Those pilfering animals didn't deserve the fruit of my labor, for the "laborer is worth his wages" (Lk 10:7). It was heartbreak after heartbreak. The futility of fighting nature. The garden has returned to grass now. I'm considering cutting down the tree as well. "Why should it deplete the ground?" (Lk 13:7). It's flaming white blossoms each Spring mock me with hopeful beauty, though. A spiteful testament. "Maybe this year will be different." But it never is.

Homesteads are a nice Pinterest fantasy. Or maybe yours produces enough so you're not running a deficit of time, money, and labor. I give farmers so much credit--what they have to deal with, the risks, the unpredictability, the stress. For $9.62/hour (average wage for a farmer here in PA). God bless them. No farms no food. 

Homesteaders are not farmers. They are playing in the sandbox. It's great. It's an honest minimum wage hobby work to produce that $64 tomato. Just a different league is all. So many things to manage as well. So many things to go wrong. Homesteading does not save you money (not that that's everyone's motivation). I guess it's a "labor of love." Your self-sufficiency is a fantasy.

Is there a Christian lesson here? I imagine working for the Church, perhaps, could be akin to the homesteader. You would think working for the Church as a Music Director or Campus Minister would enable a living wage, to be able to support a large family for those living by the Church's teaching. But instead it is high expectations with low compensation. Long hours. Burn out. Squeezing employees for all they're worth "for the sake of the Kingdom." I don't know. I think I dodged a bullet having applied for so many diocesan and Church jobs and never getting hired for one. I'm not surprised Catholic schools are closing or are sub-par with regards to their academic standards unless they are elite prep-schools. Parents are getting squeezed by tuition, infrastructure bills still need to paid, and you're trying to retain good teachers at forty grand a year. Fighting nature. Entropy. Having the fruit stripped from the tree. Year after year.

God bless our farmers. No farms, no food. God bless our priests. No priests, no Church. God bless our religious and those on mission and those who have given up all to follow Christ and proclaim the Gospel. God bless those who volunteer their time, talent and treasure (even when the Church squanders it viz a viz lawsuits, settlements, etc all while simply "managing the decline"). God bless the FOCUS and NET college students on fire for the Faith, evangelizing good will. May they never burn out, but retain the fire of the Holy Spirit all their lives and fertilize the fields of their soul with caritas and charity. May they never give up and give in when they stop feeling like fools for Christ and instead feel more simply like just fools. May their faith be infectious, infectious like the powdery mildew that spreads over the zucchini vines, but let it give life and not choke it out. God bless the laborers in the vineyard who do not give up hope for a harvest. 

God forgive me.

Time Is Slipping Through My Fingers Like Sand

 

I did not expect to struggle so much as a father with my kids getting older. Lamentably, my memory is very poor and I only have little snippets of mental vignettes in my mind from when they were young. I do not, cannot remember. It is distressing. I feel like a lost man searching his mind for his kids, and I cannot find them. This is why I struggle to write as well, because the pool of details in memory to draw from is very shallow. There is no shortage of material to work with when you have memory. So I write from the present, but long to write the past as well, a past which is dispersing like vapor faster than I can preserve it.

My oldest two are teenagers now, while the youngest is 8. I know every parent goes through this at some point, but I was not prepared for it, the speed at which time accelerates. Next year the oldest will be driving. Maybe a job. Then college. Then...what? I am sad. I also am struggling to keep up with the changes. I want to hold on to them, control everything like we did when they were toddlers, but to do so would be to stunt them. 

Letting go is very hard. So, whether it is fair or not, I hold my youngest tight--I stroke his cheek and slip my hand in his. I have him fall asleep next to us in bed sometimes. I try to record his little voice to preserve it. He is the last, and when is grown there will be no more. 

I also am not sure I could have handled more than three kids. God knows. I know He gives the grace, but grace builds on nature. The Epistle at Mass on Sunday from 1 Corinthians: He will not let you be tested beyond your strength. We had seven miscarriages along the way. God knows.

I lost all my photos in a botched iPhone transfer last Fall. It was pretty traumatic, and in fact I am considering looking into EDMR therapy to deal with what has become a real problem in my life lately--being triggered by tech. I am standing still as the world is rushing by me. I am getting left behind. My wife has a good amount of photos on her phone, but I almost want to print the best ones out, keep them physical and in a album in our family room. I don't want to Zoom, I want to hug. I don't want to Facetime my grown kids, I want to hear them chew and laugh at the kitchen table. I don't want to be locked out of life, which is becoming increasingly digital. I am scared. I cannot keep up. 

It is very hard to live in the present, because the present is constantly shifting. We can take our time in the past, linger in memory; we can create futures for ourselves, make ourselves anxious or sick with longing. But the present is flitting, requiring constant attention, focus, and awareness. By the time you seek to hold on to it, it is gone. You cannot hold on to the present. And so each day I get distracted and my kids get one day older, one becomes two, to weeks and months, and then they are almost slipping out of my grasp. I am not a controlling dad, but I do have fear--fear for what my kids are being launched into--and fear is not of God, is antithetical to trust, which God requires of us to live in faith. 

I was watching Terrance Malick's Tree of Life last night, a beautifully shot meditation on memory, past, nature, and grace. The opening monologue contrasts "the way of Nature" with "the way of Grace" and that one must choose which one they will follow. Jack (Sean Penn) is a middle-aged corporate executive trying to make sense of his present by reflecting on his past growing up with his mother, father, and brothers (one of whom died at the age of 19) in Texas in the 1950's. The way of Nature is reflected in Jack's father (Brad Pitt)--loving yet authoritarian, teaching the boys discipline and that the world is a hard place where you need to be on your game to survive. Jack's mother is the way of Grace--gentle, caring, empathetic. There's no real "point" or plot to the film, but the meditative aspects reminded me that memory is composed of those subtle moments that take place in the present--the trace of a mother's finger across her sleeping son's chest, the evening sun piercing through the pine trees, the sound of the screen door closing. The day their brother died. 

Without memory, or with it being so compromised, I feel as if I am disappearing. I want to remember because I want to preserve, be a good custodian of the my past. Everything is moving by so fast, and I can't stop it, can't stop my kids from getting older, nor would I want to. I just want to hold them in the present, and keep the memory from that now-past for my future self. 

Team We

 

Team Me We

For our sixteenth wedding anniversary, my wife got me a card from the Dollar Store. That sounds callous and pathetic; however, we have a mutual agreement to only do Dollar Store cards because all the cards are overpriced, the Hallmark cards at least, and they are all cheesy anyway so it just simplifies things. I got her card from the Dollar Store too, and picked flowers from around the yard to make her a bouquet which I arranged and put in a vase on the kitchen table. We didn't go out to eat or to a movie or even have a date because I was feeling low, a kind of suicidal low, and everything would have been tainted by that no matter what we did to celebrate. 

So we postponed until we were at the beach visiting my parents and brother the following week. Even then, too, I was feeling awful--anxious, weepy, irrational and still suicidal. We did go out in town, walked along the beach and then to the wharf to sit on a bench. We wanted coffee but it was late, so we settled at a bar and had a Coke and a Twisted Tea. It was fine, it was good, but I felt bad not being able to show her how much she meant to me, to be happy about it and actually celebrate those sixteen years. Because she is great, she understood and squeezed my hand to let me know it was okay, as if I were an invalid in a hospital bed, which was how I felt at least.

Anyway, back to that card. Most of the cards we have to choose from are either gag worthy flowery, probably AI generated sonnets, or the "funny" cards that are lighthearted and stupid. But this one she got me this time was just right. All it said on the front was:

I'm on team YOU!

And inside she said there was no other team she'd rather be on than Team Me.

She has the card sitting on the bay window sill in the kitchen where I can see it, next to an orchid some friends got us that has died and come back to life each year for four years now, maybe to remind me that there is in fact a Resurrection, that it is not a myth or a dream, that things will not always be awful and I will not always want to die, that things can come back from the brink and bloom and flower and be just as gorgeous and intricate and beautiful as that orchid is each spring when it blooms, leaving the previous year's pale colored stalk like a tentacle of death on the plant, like the rings of a tree you can ascertain its age by. I know it is in its fourth year of blooming because there are three of those spindly tentacles protruding from the main stem. 

And we do nothing to this plant except a tablespoon of water every few days; no fertilizer or care. I would have thought it would have used up or exhausted the soil in the small white pot, but it has not. As if something so beautiful demands an intensive input, managed care, to come back year after year as radiant as the year before. As if it does not deserve to live or be beautiful because of that lack of care.

And yet, it lives. 

And so I'm reading the cover of this card from my wife--mind you, not even the handwritten contents on the inside, and fighting back tears because inside I'm thinking "You piece of trash. Look at you, using up the food and the oxygen in the air. You don't deserve it. You are a loser." And other such self-recriminating thoughts. 

And yet here is this woman, this gift to my life, who would care to disagree with those statements. I am on your team, she says. I choose you. You and I are in this together. I am on team You. 

And of course, I want to say, you've made a mistake, I'm a lousy bet, a bad horse, and yet she won't be deterred. She pours into me, believes in me and the family we have created together. And there is no force stronger on earth for a man than a wife who believes in her husband. I cleave to her too, because she is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. And it does not occur to me in the throws of all these self-accusations of worthlessness and being a loser that I am accusing her of those things as well because we are one flesh, what's hers is mine and what's mine is hers. 

She doesn't deserve those self-defacing titles. And neither do I. They come from the Accuser under the guise of my own voice, like some kind of AI hack, a counterfeit trying to steal my identity. Because I am a child of God. I belong to Christ, I am not my own. I rebuke the demon but the echoes of the voices remain.

That exclamation mark at the end of the "You" on the cover of the card, I think that's what pushed my tears over the edge to spill out the corner of my eye. So juvenile, but it underscored that my wife was not begrudgingly choosing me as if I were the last kid left on the court and resigned to being on Team Rob, but she was in fact enthusiastic about it, believes in me, in us. Not that I will carry her her whole life, but that she will shoulder me when I am hurt and wounded, throw me over her five-foot-four frame and not give up on me or leave me for dead just because I cannot walk on my own in this war. It's a given that I would do the same for her, but to know that she would do it for me--a nurse, a soldier, doing whatever needs to be done for the team. Team Us.

There is a mural I painted that hangs in our bedroom. I painted it when we were engaged, stretching the canvas myself on scrap 1x2s and using cheap little tubes of acrylic paint. It is based on a poem that the boxer Muhammad Ali composed and recited spontaneously, the shortest in history:

Me. We.

The "me" is small, in black print, while the "We" sweeps up, the tentacle of the "W" diving the "m" and the "e" in "me." The "me" is tenuous on its own and easily split apart, but the "We" is indivisible, even while one would think a "we" would be more easily divided in two because it is made up of two parts, while the "me," or self, is a single entity.

While the card from my wife moved me--that she would entrust her future to someone as fragile and ill-equipped for life as myself (Team Me)--in her I see the potential for something elementally stronger, like a water molecule, a fusion of hydrogen and oxygen. Team We. The chemical fissure, the atomic glue, the spiritual epoxy is the sacramental grace of our marriage that not even the pope can dissolve, for no man should tear asunder what God has joined together. I would rather be a single drop of water in an ocean with her than an entire atmosphere of either hydrogen or oxygen alone by itself. 

For God can keep an orchid alive with a drop of water a day, and not only keep it alive but resurrect it year after year, bringing it back from death again and again and into new, radiant life. There are sixteen stalks, sixteen tentacles on our stem, giving testament to our life together, and I pray for the grace of sixty more.