A few days after Mark’s death, the Daves set up a memorial website for him where they could catalogue all of the stories we were sharing on Facebook with the rest of the world. With Mark’s family, they planned a memorial service for him on the beach in Laguna where he spent so many hours atop his board in the surf. They instructed those who were able to attend to please where flip-flops — Mark’s sartorial mainstay that he always called “flippity-floppities.”

GRACESPOTTING

For those who couldn’t make the trip to California, the Daves posted dozens of photographs from the beach service online accompanied by one of Mark’s favorite Grateful Dead songs, “Brokedown Palace,” so we could share in the experience from a distance. I wasn’t able to travel to Laguna, and the virtual memorial service online was an enormous grace. I must have watched the online slide show 100 times, crying and laughing at the images, some of them with the smiling faces of friends from college I hadn’t seen in more than 15 years.

As the weeks passed, a core group of us continued to “talk” daily on Facebook. Our conversations were about Mark at first, and about faith, loss, God’s will, and the grieving process. But they soon turned to broader conversations about our lives, the minutia and the transcendent, bringing each other up to speed on what had transpired in the years since we were all students at Wheaton.

A couple of weeks after Mark’s death, I found myself working on a newspaper column about an event that had recently transpired at our alma mater. One of our favorite professors resigned his tenured position rather than submit the details of his divorce to the scrutiny of a college panel. It was something of a scandal at the time, and I wanted to know what my fellow alumni thought about the situation. So I sent a group email out to 20 friends on Facebook, a cross-section of men and women with, I surmised, divergent perspectives on life, from the extremely conservative to the wildly liberal.

That email turned into a “thread” that continues to this day, more than six months after Mark went home to be with Jesus. After a few hundred posts, I relaunched the thread under the name, “Wine and Jesus: The Communion of Sinnerly Saints,” and the increasingly intimate, vulnerable conversation carried on. As of November, the thread is in its sixth incarnation and we’re more than 7,000 posts in.

Like many folks who skew more toward Generation X than Generation Z (for whom the social networking site was, as I understand it, originally intended), I began my foray on Facebook as an exercise in ennui-abatement. I went trolling for college and high school friends, more to see how many kids they had and whether they’d lost their hair or packed on the pounds of encroaching middle age, than any loftier purpose.

My best friend in St. Louis was on there, and through her I found a few more friends, and so on until I (somehow) amassed upwards of 900 “friends,” including some people I actually know, or at least knew once upon a time. It was fun to log on and see who popped up. But it remained little more than a curiosity slake and awesome time-killer until our motley community came together online around Mark’s death. Our conversations range from the silly — we spent an entire evening posting our favorite scenes from “Dazed and Confused” and recently had a virtual ‘80s dance party, sharing audio and videos of nostalgic dance music (think The Smiths and Flock of Seagulls) from our college days — to the eternal. Grace is a common theme that we come back to time and again, gracespotting, if you will, the hand of God as he reaches into our lives.

We’re having the kinds of conversations we used to have when we all lived within walking distance of one another on campus. Except now we’re in California and Hawaii, Chicago and New York City, St. Louis and Atlanta, Florida and North Carolina, the United Arab Emirates, the Bahamas, and Spain. Collectively, we are husbands and wives, brothers and sisters (in-law and biologically), Protestant, Catholic, Anglican, conservative and liberal, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green Party, vegetarian, entrepreneurs, stay-at-home moms, world travelers, married, single, divorced, widowed, mothers and fathers, adopted and adopters, seminary graduates, pastors, chaplains, activists, writers, filmmakers, artists, lawyers, church members and church averse, and believers all. Some of us were close friends in college, some were acquaintances, and some had never met one another in person. But we are now, I would dare say, utterly and wholly committed to one another. As Bono said in U2’s theological opus, “One,” sisters and brothers — we are one, but we’re not the same; we get to carry each other...

A few of us have even begun to rediscover (or exhume) our faith. On Facebook. If you had told me even seven months ago that I would find community — real, authentic, deeply-connected, deeply-faithful community — online, I would have scoffed at you. I’m not, by nature, a joiner. Had someone invited me to join a group of Wheaton grads online to talk about faith and life, I would have declined. But this happened organically, not by design. And here we are, six months of daily interaction later with a communion of 20 souls all over the world who share our lives, hopes, fears, struggles, and joys together in cyberspace.

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