More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 14 - May 14, 2022
Our job then is to cease sleepwalking through our daily routines and awaken to how our external behaviors both signal and shape something about our loves and who we are becoming.
what ought to motivate an honest examination of our secular liturgies is the brutal realization of how they actually frustrate our capacity to cultivate the quality of life and freedom that we genuinely desire.
Earth’s crammed with heaven And every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
In my everyday senses and digital routines, am I cultivating the capacity to recognize the glory of the divine that is everywhere but hidden for only those who have eyes to see and ears to hear?
For if we consider how checking our phones has replaced the disciplines of Scripture reading and prayer that Christians have historically practiced during the early morning and late evening, we have to ask ourselves: What soul formation (or mis-formation) is taking place when we go to sleep and arise with our emails and social media feeds bookending our bodily rest? What types of desires do our digital practices encourage in us? How are they training us to love something very different from the kingdom of God?
Rather, to recognize the necessity of wrestling with the role of the digital in our individual and collective lives is to acknowledge each of our vulnerability against one of the key “powers and principalities” and idols of our age.
What are the counterliturgies to these routines of mis-formation? How do we seek out generative approaches to developing practices and routines that can redirect our loves back to the kingdom of God?
To meet our tendencies to devote our morning and evening attention to what is on our screens, we can follow the church’s tradition of engaging in morning and evening prayer to help us come to know our Creator God better—heeding the same rhythms of creation and rest. As poet and essayist Kathleen Norris described, Each day God spoke more and more into being, and then, it seems, let it all sit until the next day. . . . Lauds (or morning prayer) reminds us of our need to renew, to remember and recommit to this process of creation in our inmost selves. . . . The evening [prayers] are a
...more
I’ve come to believe in the long-term work of liturgy. Even when it doesn’t seem productive or to yield any particular fruit, I have come to trust the regularity of liturgy itself to do the work, to shape my loves, to turn my heart toward the kingdom reality that I know exists but have yet to experience in full.
Given the social reciprocity that is built into so many of our contemporary digital experiences, I would submit that our digital practices do not need to be—and ought not be—reduced to matters of personal discretion.
counterliturgies that help each other resist the compulsive tendencies we have about our digital devices.
when we stop thinking about how to limit our technology and spend more time investing in how to get serious about practicing our humanity—recovering our sense of presence and place in the fullness of our bodies and our relationships.
They ought not be merely conceived as part of a self-improvement program, a road to increased productivity, or a legalistic set of rules that Christians use to appear more “sanctified” or “holy.” Rather, the development of counterliturgies should be animated by a robust and theologically grounded story about who we are as persons and what kind of life we are trying to live.
For those who identify with the Christian faith, we have arrived at the point where we must make a choice: we can either ignore the signs and risk further impoverishment of our lives or we can get serious about what we already profess to be committed to and, in the process, begin forging a path toward a more thoughtful technological practice that addresses the frustrations and fears that beset us as a society.
Liturgy: actions and habits that become so internalized that they form us and move us toward a certain direction in a preconscious way.
Create a new bedtime and morning routine for four days:
Productivity is not the only measure of time well spent.
This chapter reflects on the role that digital devices have come to play in reinforcing and amplifying our culture’s presumption that the good life is a relentlessly “productive” life—one that involves always pressing onward to the next meeting, to the next email, the next coffee conversation, the next carpool ride, the next meal cooked. It examines our culture of productivity and the ways that our digital ecology both normalize this existential mode of hurrying and cultivate a heart of restless distraction—one that is driving us to risk missing out on the life for which we actually long.
It examines our culture of productivity and the ways that our digital ecology both normalize this existential mode of hurrying and cultivate a heart of restless distraction—one that is driving us to risk missing out on the life for which we actually long.
Our culture of productivity tells a story of what we believe to be our human condition and how we ought to live life together: we are a species that gets things done.
unprioritized demands on our attention and our lives.
The anxiety that this induces drives us further into the arms of the lie that claims there are no costs to fragmenting our attention through multitasking.
Curiously, while the urging promises of productivity and the logic of time management can relentlessly whip us into feeling busier than ever, they don’t provide us any guidance on how to determine what to prioritize or value in our lives.
The objectification of time into increments of hourly blocks that we manipulate or manage doesn’t help us better understand what a good life might actually require of us.
the great irony is that the more we demand our brains to attend to being productive, the less our brains are able to grow us as persons in key areas of identity construction and empathy. This doesn’t even address the more widely known contention that sometimes it is only when “nothing is happening” that something actually can happen. Sometimes it is only in our repose or cessation of activity that we actually come to realize solutions to puzzles that have stumped us or experience joys that we had been running too fast to even receive.
And 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.
When we fill our so-called dead time with digital distractions like a silly game or scrolling through our social media feed, we need to realize that what makes it a “distraction” is not that we are no longer attending to anything. Rather, the essence of distraction is actually too much attention—too much attention paid to that which is undeserving or lacks sufficient import for our life energies.
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.
If we are to pursue a life oriented around stewarding one’s attention, we need to begin with an entirely new set of diagnostic questions: ■ What do I give my attention to? ■ What do I invest my brain power in? ■ What do I invest my emotional energies in? After assessing the nature of what we do attend to, we then need to ask evaluative questions about how we ought or want to live: ■ What should I give my attention toward? ■ What should I invest my mind’s energies toward? ■ Indeed, what do I want to be doing with my life?
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). Mirroring the rhythm of God’s nature in the creation account
If we intentionally work on stewarding our attention, we might realize that the choices we often make when we multitask or when we take a quick peek at our screens are not merely half-conscious efforts to “save time” or half-hearted attempts to thwart boredom. Rather, they are meaningful choices that add up to a lifetime of who we become and how we go about experiencing the reality of being human.
the Adversary successfully employs such mundane features of modern life as noise, hurry, and crowds to pull us away from who and what God intended us to be and do, is disheartening but surely recognizable in each of our lives.
we can carry the noise, hurry, and crowds with us in our pockets or plugged into our ears all day and all night.
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.
and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.
This explanation of what actually weakened the plausibility of spiritual faith is both overwhelming and underwhelming. On the one hand, it is sobering to acknowledge how much religion’s legitimacy in the Western world has severely declined. On the other hand, the assertion that the decline is caused not by the antagonistic forces of intellectual skepticism, unbounded hedonism or flagrant “godlessness,” but by the banality of efficiency and productivity is an even more chilling observation to consider. It seems we ignore the idolatrous power of “being practical” to our own peril—both personally
...more
In this way, the seemingly innocuous urge to “be practical” may prove to be the source of our souls’ spiritual erosion.
Indeed, unless we intentionally cultivate an awareness toward those aspects of God that run contrary to the framed assumptions of our digital ecology, we might never come to perceive key features of God’s essential nature.
Hiddenness of God.
Given our state of permanent connectivity, how do we create conditions of social life that allow us to retrain our contemporary sensibilities to have a chance at quieting our inner beings so that we can discover the God who refuses to be coercive or controlled by our whim, but in his divine sovereignty chooses to hide himself in unlikely places and reveal himself in due time?
Holy interruptions. When our lives become so bent on maximizing productivity that we fill every second of our day, interruption is anathema.
gospel according to time management, interruptions a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Jesus was someone who was available for interruptions. He was so grounded in his identity and purpose within the Father God that he was not threatened by them.
Adoration.
Given social media’s propensity to drive us to perform and broadcast a particular version of ourselves, self-forgetfulness is the last thing we are given opportunity to cultivate and learn in our lives. For those whose livelihoods involve maintaining social media selves, keeping blogs, or recording one’s voice or face for digital consumption, these activities all require a self-referential posture that is vigilantly aware of how our words and images appear to others.
How can we become people who can dwell in such deep focus and self-forgetfulness as to be capable of the adoration of God?
■ 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?
For tech-specific examples of counterliturgies, here are a few that I have sought to practice: In the morning, I endeavor to wake up before my family does and take in a slow, quiet ritual of tea that consists of seeing the morning light and having my own thoughts. I try to avoid my phone for at least thirty minutes, so that prayer, Scripture, and journaling are the foundation from which I can take on the rest of the day.
face of injustice. In the second instance, Jesus models to us what it takes to become someone who is empowered with a love that comes from outside himself (sourced in the Father God) to exercise compassion and give to those in need. He shows us in his bodily practice that he too needed to inhabit time by removing himself from everything and seeking the solace and communion with his Father.
