The wireless device, a morally ambiguous piece of equipment, has become a tyrant. What Thomas Merton said in 1961 is eerily prophetic: “This becomes a kind of religious compulsion without which people cannot convince themselves that they are really alive, really ‘fulfilling their personality.’ They are not ’sinning’ but simply making asses of themselves, deluding themselves that they are real when their compulsions have reduced them to a shadow of a true person” (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 85-6).

The modern person doesn’t live by text alone, but the continuous stream of texts, Facebook updates, and tweets suggest that many, too many, of us believe that WiFi is the very air we breathe.

How many meetings are interrupted now by coworkers glancing at an incoming text? How many romantic evenings are botched by a screen lighting up? How many people must die before we learn to turn things off?

Get free.

Put the thing down for awhile.

Be human.

If you can’t, name it for what it is, an addiction, and get help.

You’ll never truly be free until you face your compulsions. Unless you can say “no” to your bodily appetites not only will you not be able to pray, but you’ll not be able to resist the maddening choices that assault you every day. Your sanity and your spiritual vitality depend on being able to resist impulsive action.

So long as you eat or drink or smoke whatever you want, so long as you indulge in whatever sensual stimulant arouses you, so long as you cannot turn off your cell phone or close down your Facebook page for awhile you’re a slave to external impulses that overshadow, abuse, and diminish your interior identity.

There are some who are hooked to texting and tweeting as disastrously as a junkies were hooked to heroine when I was young.

The keypad is their needle and wireless is their drug.

Is it yours?

Some readers have expressed interest in the line of thought in my previous post, and especially my reference to Aristotle.

I’d suggest a longer treatment of the argument in Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Slim book by a strong Catholic philosopher. About it the New York Times Book Review says, “Pieper’s message for us is plain…. The idolatry of the machine, the worship of mindless know-how, the infantile cult of youth and the common mind-all this points to our peculiar leadership in the drift toward the slave society…. Pieper’s profound insights are impressive and even formidable.”

On the first page Pieper writes: “It is essential to begin by reckoning with the fact that one of the foundations of Western culture is leisure. That much, at least, can be learnt from the first chapter of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. And even the history of the word attests the fact: for leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English ’school.’ The word used to designate the palce where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means ‘leisure’. ‘School’ does not, properly speaking, mean school, but leisure.”

This is an important philosophical critique of Modern culture and our captivity to endless doing.  It plumbs the classic tradition inviting us into the spiritual intelligence necessary not just to survive but to thrive.

New York City artist Makoto Fujimara’s Illuminated Gospels.

Sociologist Tony Carnes sees Fujimura as part of a “global religious transformation,” the result of blurring lines between mainstream and religious culture. Another recent illustrated manuscript of Genesis, by decidedly secular illustrator R. Crumb, is evidence of this shift.

Fujimura also recognizes this movement, saying “the Age of Faith is coming.” This illuminated manuscript, painted in Midtown Manhattan by a cultural navigator like Fujimura, will be further affirmation. “Jesus is a New Yorker,” Carnes says. “And he’s got an illustrated Bible.”

The commission is an illuminated manuscript published by Crossway, to commemorate the four hundred year anniversary of The King James Bible, set to be released January 2011. The leather-bound English Standard Version of the Bible, printed with a six-color metallic process, will comprise the four Gospels as designed and illustrated by Fujimura.

We need more beauty like this. It gives us eyes to see beyond into the mystery that’s all around us, and it opens our hearts to express that mystery in our own ways.

Fujimura – 4 Holy Gospels from Crossway on Vimeo.

Here’s a helpful talk that urges us to consider ways we can learn to engage technology responsibly.  Just because cell phones and the internet makes just about anything available to us at any time doesn’t mean we’re obligated to stay wired 24 hours a day.

But many of us do, as some of these humorous (and alarming) examples make clear.

If we’re unconscious and out of control (or being controlled because we’re unconscious), we never fully present where we are.  This is  partial definition of insanity.

In his blog about this video talk and its relation to the teaching of Jon Kabat-Zinn, Trent Gilliss comments:

“Kabat-Zinn describes a person viewing a sunset. Instead of simply taking it in, he says, we either are thinking about how we might write about it (or perhaps tweet or blog it), or, that certain somebody standing next to you actually has to gab away and tell you how gorgeous it is — which completely removes you from the moment of recognition and contemplation. In other words, we have this compulsion to do something with the moment in order to make it meaningful. We are not being mindful.”

Prayer is life.  But we”ll never meet up with God if we’re not really living it.

Music connects with something deep within us.  It awakens us spiritually.

Here’s my 19 year old son, interpreting a song by Yiruma.  He’s added a bridge he wrote, but it fits in so well I can’t tell what’s his and what’s Yiruma.  And that’s as it should be when the river flows in you.  Josh started playing the piano this past year.  But it connects deeply within him.  This video reveals the way he’s letting his body inhabit the music.  Rather than just playing notes, he’s beginning to yield; whenever we yield the the Spirit we’re no longer playing at something, we’re being played.

Okay, so I’m a proud father.  But Josh’s playing illustrates the path of spiritual awakening, the yielding that’s necessary for prayer.  There comes a point when we must lose our heads and inhabit prayer itself, until we’re no longer conscious of praying, but find ourselves being prayed.

Josh is still a beginner and probably making some mistakes.  But he doesn’t care; he’s already letting go.

So, if you’re beginning at prayer, don’t let your need to get your praying right dam up the river that wants to flow in you (John 7.38).

1. Make some mistakes.

2. Try new things.

3. Feel.

4. And let the Spirit pray in you.

From Facebook, Lydia Morris commented yesterday on my Flamenco and Prayer post. “Wish I could pray like that,” she says, “strong, fearless, bold, and with all of my everything. Oh how the enemy will tremble when the we fall madly, insanely in love with our God, and can dance and pray with nothing held back. I see Jesus now inviting His beloved to dance.”

Last December 31, 2008, I wrote this poem that improvises on the same theme:

Teach Us to Pray

And this is what I saw–

Leviathan leaping,
full length,
in radiant delight,
up from the dark depths of Mystery.

The night sky, clear;
the moon full
casting its silver light across
the whale-fractured sea.

And then,
she crashes full length
A million silver shards
dancing their holy glee.

As she
disappears again
into the dark, silent depths,
to soak in Thee.

Why then
pray like some dead fish
in this, God’s sea?

Dance, fly,
play, plunge.
That’s what prayer is meant to be.

On a recent hot evening in Fresno, La Canela and El Quijote and Cerro Negro, gathered some fifty of us, crowded into the courtyard of our host’s home, into the spirit of Flamenco.  I’ve known Flamenco, even traveled several times to Andalusia, the southern region of Spain, which is home to Flamenco.  But there I’d encountered only commercial Flamenco.  Though beautiful, it’s commercialization misses the true spirit of Flamenco.

Flamenco is more than music, song, and dance.  Traditional Flamenco, the Flamenco of the gypsies is communal, spiritual, even contemplative.  In Flamenco—not performed on a stage, but in the round—all participate.  All are together in the sound and movement.  All are caught up in the ecstasy and agony that is the soul of Flamenco.

It’s not saying too much to say that Flamenco is prayer.  And Flamenco helps me see more fully the nature of expressly religious prayer—the kind of prayer I’d be better off praying.  Sadly, like commercial Flamenco, much praying misses the ecstasy and agony that is true prayer.

The art of Flamenco makes me wonder how I’d pray the Psalms, for example, if I let the gypsies show me how to pray them—for the Psalms contain the full anatomy of the human soul.  Too often I pray them as if I were reading a menu.