There’s an App for That!
“…You have a machine to dig the raw materials for you, a machine to manufacture, a machine to transport, a machine to sweep and dust, one to carry messages, one to write, one to talk, one to sing, one to play at the theatre, one to vote, one to sew and a hundred others to do a hundred other things for you, and still you are the most nervously busy man in the world. Your devices are neither time-saving nor soul-saving…”
Abraham Mitrie Rihbany (1922)
“We cannot escape the indictment. The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man. Like the rich man of old, we have foolishly minimized the internal of our lives and maximized the external.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963)
I was sitting in the worship service yesterday while a young, thirty-something man sitting near me played games on his cell phone. I try to go into the sanctuary after he has seated himself so that I can sit on the other side of the room, because every Sunday, it is the same. I wonder why he comes--surely there are more comfortable venues for playing games on a cell phone. I’ve thought of giving him a gift-card to Starbucks and asking him to “worship” there on Sunday morning.
I can’t talk, really. I carry my cell phone everywhere I go, and can’t sit still unless there is music or TV blaring in my ears. We really have lost track of our inner lives with our technology. I remember when I was a child in the 1950’s; a vacuum cleaner salesman came to our house and demonstrated the wonders of Electrolux. He vacuumed a section of our living room rug and we were scandalized by how much dirt it sucked up. My parents bought that heavy, unwieldy contraption, plus about a dozen labor-saving attachments even though it cost more than a month of my dad’s wages. It was still in the house, tube wrapped with duct-tape, when my mother died a few years ago. I guess she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away.
It is a fact that our technology, much as we love it, has not produced the leisure time it promised. In fact, we are busier now than in the days of Electrolux and Nash Rambler. Our technology allows us to work around the clock. Neither my sons nor their wives have a clue about the eight-hour day.
I don’t know exactly how we Americans got this way, but I do know that we have lost touch with our inner landscape. We have produced guided drones and misguided children. Our teenagers are "sexting" and "hooking-up" with strangers they've met online. The pace at which we live causes many of us to resort to drugs just to slow down enough to sleep.
I understand that technology is the way of the future, and you couldn’t pry me loose from mine if you tried, but we are still flesh and blood humans. Somehow we must find a way to put down our iPads and our smart phones, and get in touch with our eternal souls. We need to create solitude and quiet, undistracted time to catch up with our spirits. Perhaps someday there will be an app for that, but until there is, I encourage you to take at least fifteen technology-free minutes today to simply sit with yourself.
Keeping the faith,
Jane
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