Mobile device proliferation and the spiritual life
2.12.2010 | All Blog Posts, The Arts, Technology, and Prayer, Those Who Show Us the Way
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.
2.12.2010
This sounds like Sunday’s gospel text. Peter, on the Mount of Transfiguration, in the midst of all this blazing glory, chatters away through the mystery of the lit-up Christ. He’s got to find a handy label for this moment, even though it should have left him speechless. When the cloud appears, Peter is terrorized and at last, silenced. Only now can he hear the Voice, “This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to Him.” Listening to Christ, staying close to His words–that’s the only way we will be transfigured.
2.13.2010
Sharon, I’d love to hear you preach this text!
5.24.2010
The “provocative Teds video” hits the nail on the head—in spades! The guy on the motorcycle in India, unreal; but that’s part of the ecological disaster called India. Yet, is anyone listening to the prophet crying in the wilderness? This makes me even more convinced to spurn such, yes, human-robot devices.
21st-century Luddite
5.24.2010
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.”
– John Lubbock
No further comment needed, other than I’ve been there—many times.