Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age

by Felicia Wu Song

Instead of simply removing the bad, we ought to fill ourselves with something good. Why? Because our hearts are restless and will remain so until we find our rest in God.

My hope is that we will be motivated toward a deeper exploration of our particular faith traditions to discover how longstanding spiritual practices might be re-envisioned as a counterliturgy in our digital age.

Instead, when set within the framework of understanding our digital practices as the work of the people, it is wholly possible (and even recommended) that groups of friends, family members, church communities, and work organizations sit down to discuss and come to a shared understanding of how digital practices will enter into all of its existing dynamics.

Liturgy: actions and habits that become so internalized that they form us and move us toward a certain direction in a preconscious way.

the more we turn to our technologies to optimally “fill our time” and circumvent the disagreeable experience of boredom, our brains are literally denied the necessary conditions to process the essential understanding of self and others to become a whole and mature person.

If attention is the capacity to direct one’s mind and heart in a particular direction, and distraction is just a poorly placed locus of attention, then our problem may not be that we don’t have enough time. The actual problem may be that we don’t have a sufficiently clear sense of what we ought to attend to.

If we shift paradigms and realize that our modern plight is about managing our attention rather than managing our time, we might discover that we are working out a wholly different puzzle. To shift from thinking about how we want to spend our attention (rather than our time) is to properly understand that we can and must choose wisely when allocating our attention to each deserving moment of our days. What would it look like to train in the art of attention?

see that our lives are best composed of opportunities to give and receive. Like inhaling and exhaling, we thrive when we can engage in creation, cultivation, care, and service, and are equally engaged in feeding, playing, resting, and worship. As such, while we ought to attend to our responsibilities in a posture of giving (in our schooling, our work, our families, our friends, or our communities), we also ought to attend to those renewing practices with a posture of receiving (through prayer, friendship, exercise, sleep, recreation, and creative expression).

Such a huge gap between perception and reality suggests that we are a people who have little or no awareness of what we are actually doing with our devices.

When we realize that what we have within our control is not time but attention, we can start to realize how those micromoments with our screens might come to have an effect on our soul formation.

we would be foolish to ignore the plain fact that given the particular landscape of noise, hurry and crowds in each age, certain elements of God’s nature will be more easily grasped and others more obscured.

If the disciples were preoccupied and caught up in the everyday sociopolitical dramas of their first-century lives, how much worse is it for us living in a twentieth-first century modern society where our capacity to fill ourselves with hurry, noise, and crowds is infinite and unbounded?

Jesus was someone who was available for interruptions.

send them out with this list of questions and ask them to handwrite their responses: ■ What is my noise? ■ Why do I hurry? ■ What crowds do I hide in? ■ In my life, my top five distractions are . . . ■ What would help me to change? Certain people? Silence? Space? Some kind of new teaching? Something else?

Every year, my students come back to the classroom expressing a new quality of stillness and calm. Every year, my students tell me how grateful they are for those thirty minutes to stop and breathe.

I have been surprised to find that even with such minor shifts in my daily life, there develops just enough torque to loosen up the tight grip that the culture of productivity otherwise has on my imagination and life.

Our vigilance and naturally felt capacity to privilege our devices’ notifications over all else is incomparable to what fragmented attention we give to each other and, if we are honest, what fragmented attention we give to God.

standing in line or sitting in wait, we diligently tend to our devices. Why? Because we are waiting and searching for joy, for satisfaction, for purpose, for love. We are waiting and therefore abiding in the digital. What would it be like if we were to cultivate such a permanent state of expectancy for God’s desire to communicate with us?

What if I knew that there was a word that revealed God’s very nature . . . waiting just for me. And that his nature was defined by a wild and faithful love that actually likes who I am, enjoys my company, and even takes delight in me. To be with someone who delights in you is a precious thing that we all long to experience.

Staying in touch, not just within ear shot but mindful and expectant—not because the Law demands it but in order to be in communion with the loving security of God, as expressed through the presence of the Holy Spirit. This is the way, the truth, and the life.

“We live in a broken, fallen world. We will all die, and many of us will die slowly. Most of us live as if it won’t happen to us, to our loved ones, but it will. And when it does, there’s no way out but through.”1

Jesus chose to care for people through the physicality of intervention, knowing that their bodily healing would enable them to be communally restored, establishing them with full social standing, and bringing great rejoicing in so many people’s hearts.

embodiment matters.

In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, theologian James Cone powerfully recounts how it was the voice of Jesus that enabled the mother of Emmett Till, Mamie Till Bradley, to find the courage to expose herself to further terror in her life by deciding to show the mutilated face of her dead son in an open casket funeral so that the world could bear witness to the horrific effect of white supremacy.2 Similarly, it was the voice of Jesus that gave Martin Luther King Jr. courage to press on in his efforts to seek civil rights for the African American community when he was regularly harassed by phone calls threatening to kill not only him but his wife and daughters.

In his book To Change the World, James Davison Hunter advances the idea that if Christians are going to actually “change the world,” they need to cease trying to do just that and learn to be faithfully present.

Rather, faithful presence is made of steely commitment and sacrificial love that often bucks the social norm.

Indeed, if the presence of God and the incarnation of Jesus are our key models of faithful presence, then Hunter’s call should be heard as one that is earthshattering and countercultural in its transformative commitment to love and to fellowship in suffering.

When confronted with those who are unlike us—whether it be in faith, ideology, class, gender, sexuality, or race—faithful presence demands a posture that is rooted in the firm belief that “the existence of the other neither threatens nor diminishes” oneself.

Faithful presence then calls us to seek out, learn from, or stand alongside those with whom we would otherwise be estranged.

The fruit of faithful presence then should upset the status quo.

To take seriously the call to incarnational presence then means taking our bodies to the hard and broken places and “developing the patience and discipline necessarily to stay long enough to see the needs.”9

First, by removing himself bodily from his town and situating himself in a cabin in the woods, Thoreau established a tangible boundary between himself and the town in order to cultivate the kind of interior life he longed to live.

Second, what most people don’t know is that Walden was just a two-year experiment. After this period, Thoreau went back to living in Concord. His time at Walden ostensibly had served its purpose in his life, and then he went on renewed in his convictions.

In particular, what does a Walden zone look like in relation to the digital?

in a postpandemic world, I hope that one of the observations that will stay quivering in our collective consciousness is how much we have discovered that embodiment matters.

Instead, perhaps she ought to trust that people actually want what is inherently built into the DNA of Christianity: the promise that the presence of Christ in us and with us is life-transformative?

In Matthew 9, Jesus was moved by compassion when he perceived in the crowds what we increasingly see in ourselves: a harried and helpless people, sheep without a shepherd.

Realizing this, the Cantor Art Center began offering its visitors not only the app but also a very old pair of technologies when they walk in the doors: a package of colored pencils and sketching paper. In providing these tools of counterliturgy, the museum signals the possibility of an alternative kind of visitor experience.

the Fourth Commandment states, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). Admittedly, it is a commandment that often feels the least consequential to us.

The idea of “keeping the Sabbath” has become so culturally ingrained as a sign of middle-class decency that we fail to recognize how it may actually be a powerful form of resistance against the corrosive tendencies of permanent connectivity.

I have begun to wonder if the Sabbath might be less about scratchy-laced collars and more about a teaspoon of honey that enlivens one’s spirit, like getting a real taste of the feast that is life in God.

It is a wonder that the Hebrew word for holy—kadosh, meaning “the mystery and majesty of the divine”—is first used in the Bible when it is applied to time! It was not to be found in an object, place, or person. Rather, as Heschel points out, “When history began, there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time.”

In the Jewish imagination, the Sabbath is meant to reawaken our souls to the joy and tranquility of God’s divine presence.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked volunteers in the civil rights struggle to not only behave nonviolently but also to cultivate nonviolence in their thoughts and words, and in their relationships with others, even those who opposed them.

Notably, these rules included: meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus; remember that the movement seeks justice and reconciliation, not victory; walk and talk in a manner of love, for God is love; pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free; and sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free.7

Instead, I wonder if we should be focusing on one of the unexpected gifts from the trials we have endured as church congregations during the pandemic: the renewed appreciation for how precious it is to gather together in mutual presence.

Instead of turning to our devices when we are waiting in lines or eating meals on the go, and instead of striving to fill every moment with gestures of productivity online or with the fodder of digital entertainment, we can lift our eyes to see where we are, who we are in proximity with, and we can begin to wonder at being wholly present and prayerfully open to the unexpected and hidden voice of God.