Texts: Exodus 19: 1-6; Isaiah 40: 3; Luke 4: 1-14
Whatever Happened to Solitude: Wilderness, the Divine,
and the Invitation to Digital Minimalism
It might be that the most powerful wisdom we gain in life comes from our encounters with wilderness. So it is, at any rate, in the Bible. It’s not an accident that the most vivid encounters that the Hebrew people have with the Divine come while they’re wandering in a desert. The very law, those sacred principles by which that community organized its life, emerged from that wilderness. It’s not an accident that when the prophet Elijah is discouraged, he goes to live in a cave, where a still small voice speaks to him. Nor is it an accident that, in the book of Isaiah, the announcement of the arrival of the Messiah emerges from the wilderness. If you want to touch life’s deepest mysteries; if you want to get in touch with your core; if you want to experience the source of life and creativity that many of us name God, you will have to experience the wilderness.
Jesus understood that. That’s why, on the eve of his public ministry, he disappeared into the desert, where he spent time in solitude. It was the scene of an inner struggle, and it’s true that it brought with it a confrontation with the devil. But it was also the scene of consolation, where Jesus becomes who he most deeply is, and where he is enabled to begin the reconciling work to which he was called. It’s the wilderness that gives him the skill and the confidence to trust that he truly was God’s Beloved.
I believe we too need moments of wilderness solitude if we are to grow deep spiritual and emotional roots as human beings. Sometimes we need to rewild our lives if we are to get in touch with the sacred core of what it is to be alive. It can happen by going to the desert, or going to the woods. But today, I’d like to speak about a different kind of rewilding, a resetting that we might all undertake in one form or another. What I’d like to do this morning is to think about our digital lives, and to ask what effect technology is having upon our relationship to ourselves, our relationship to others, and ultimately, our relationship to that which we name God. In essence, what I wish to propose this morning is a kind of rewilding of our emotional and spiritual lives.
Let me pause to reassure you that this won’t be a rant about the ill effects of technology. I’m not a Luddite. I depend upon digital technologies for work, for learning, and for maintaining relationships. I’m grateful for GPS every time I try to find my way to a new place. I love that Spotify gives me access to most any piece of music I can think of. I enjoy listening to books and podcasts on my phone – quite often, that’s how I discover new ideas. So I won’t be asking you to chuck your phones or smash your computers in this sermon. I simply want to dig a little bit, in the interest of exploring solitude, a dimension of our inner lives that seems to be shrinking by the hour.
Solitude, by one definition, is the ability to be alone with oneself for an undefined period of time without input from other minds. I take it that stretches of solitude are what allow for creativity. Solitude is what allows you to process complex emotions. It enables you to refine the principles on which a life of character can be built. It’s what allows you to solve difficult life puzzles. The problem, of course, is that we have fewer and fewer moments when we allow ourselves to be free from the input of other minds. I don’t mean that we’re never alone – it might be that we’re the loneliest people in history. It’s that the content of our digital lives now fills most every crevice of our time alone, and our time together. TV, podcasts, books, news articles, advertisements in public spaces – all of it works to crowd our minds like never before. Add to that the multiple platforms by which we’re digitally available to one another – by phone, by text, by email, by Snapchat, by Facebook, by Instagram, to name but a handful – and it’s no wonder that many of us feel stressed and overloaded, even when we haven’t done a whole lot. The word that many of us use to describe our relationship to technology is exhaustion.
Last year, when the novelist Dave Eggers came to FCCOL to write about our sanctuary efforts, he offered a glimpse into this own relationship to technology. His visit happened to occur on my daughter Sabina’s birthday. She was twelve. For several years, Rachael and I had said that when she turned twelve, she could finally, finally, get a phone. We had promised to do just that later in the day. Somehow, the subject came up when I was chatting with Eggers. He has kids, and so I asked if he had dealt with that transition in his family. He smiled, and pulled a flip phone from his pocket. “This is about as far as I go with phones,” he said. “So no, we haven’t given smart phones to our kids.” He paused, and then said, “Actually, my wife and I have elected not to have the internet in our house. We use it at work, or in public places, but we try to allow our home to be a space for other activities.” When I pressed him about those activities, he said they were things like reading, writing, conversation, art, and physical activity. He said that he simply wished to preserve a domain in which he and his family were autonomous, independent of the auditory and visual chatter to which most of us are subjected, if not addicted.
I’ve returned to that exchange with Dave Eggers often over the course of this past year, because it seems to me he is on to something profound. There is, for starters, the fact that we’re living through a period that one writer recently dubbed “the age of surveillance capitalism.”[1] Using our computers, phones, and tablets enable an ever expanding number of corporations to observe and monetize every aspect of our lives – our movements, our tastes, and our purchasing habits. Our devices know our questions before we even ask them. Not long ago, my daughter Elsa was doing an art project involving paint. “How do you make the color brown?” she asked me. I replied that I didn’t know, and then promptly pulled out my phone. “How, Do, You…” I typed into Google. I got no farther because my phone finished the question for me: “make the color brown,” it said. It had been listening. One price of our dependence on these devices is that we’ve auctioned off our privacy.
But another cost has to do with the political ramifications of our digital lives. I hope I don’t need to remind you of the ways our political system was manipulated by spreading misinformation across Facebook and Twitter. That caused far too many people to embrace conspiracy theories, paranoia, and outright lies about people, about institutions, about science, and so much more. Not only that, those platforms have fueled resentment, anger, and have given the far right a credibility it would otherwise never have known. Social media, by and large, is responsible for helping those ideas and attitudes to go mainstream. I’m not saying that everything that comes across our Facebook feeds is false, or unhelpful, but it has become infinitely harder to sort the wheat from the chaff on such a platform. Much of it, it must be said, is chaff. Our digital lives have made us ever more susceptible to political manipulation.
But the most important effect of this digital shift is that our capacity for a spiritual life is being atrophied by our phones and tablets. That’s because we no longer have the capacity for solitude. What do you do when you’re faced with a few moments of unstructured time – in a waiting room, in a line, on public transportation, before going to sleep? If you’re anything like me, you swipe through your phone, even when you know there’s nothing new to look at. In public, as often as not, we have our heads bowed, swiping, swiping, swiping. That’s not an accident: the tech companies have invested enormous amounts of research and money to perfect the algorithms that are going to keep you hooked, absorbed in one more thing, and one more after that. It’s no longer merely a tool. It is now our constant companion. Did you know that, like Dave Eggers, Steve Jobs, who gave us these devices, wouldn’t allow them into his home either?
That’s because he knew that his creativity would be impeded by his own creations. It’s because he knew they would erode his capacity for what Cal Newport, a professor at Georgetown University from whom I’ve borrowed much in this sermon, has taken to calling “deep work.”[2] Deep work is anything in your life, whether professionally or at home, that requires long periods of sustained concentration if you are to do it well. Writing a book would be an example of deep work. Solving complex technical or emotional problems on the job is deep work. Sustaining meaningful conversations or building lasting relationships – that’s deep work. Knowing how to respond well to the cares of another – that’s deep work. But building a rich interior life, a spiritual life, attuned to whatever it is that’s happening inside of us, as well as how best to conduct ourselves with grace and truth and generosity in matters large and small – this too is deep work. Indeed, our spiritual life is the deep work to which we’ve been called. But a lot of research and money has been dedicated to preventing us from ever experiencing the realm of the deep.
Do you remember the film Super Size Me? In it, Morgan Spurlock documented what happened when he subsisted on a diet of nothing but fast food for 30 days. He strained his heart. His kidneys and liver went into shock. He was at risk of a stroke. He gained weight and he felt all around awful. Many of us are beginning to absorb what happens to our bodies when we subsist on junk. And so we’ve begun to eat less meat, to eat more plants, to buy organic and to choose whole, rather than processed foods. Through conscious choices, we’re making the switch.
We need to think about our digital environment in a similar way. Most of us consume far too much junk, and it’s rendering us susceptible not so much to bodily diseases, but to social and spiritual diseases – loneliness, depression, anxiety, distraction, and all the rest. We need the equivalent of the conscious food movement for our digital lives as well.[3]
And so what is to be done? How do we get there? Here, I’d like to return to the issue of wilderness that I began with. Nearly every significant spiritual teaching I am aware of begins in the wilderness. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, to say nothing of the indigenous traditions we’re honoring this weekend – each of them establishes a moment of retreat in order to touch the sacred. That opened each of those teachers to doubts, to temptations, to the dark thoughts that can sometimes swirl when the chatter of the world ceases. But with persistence, trusting in the deep work of the Spirit, profound revelations take place. The way Luke’s Gospel puts it is this: when Jesus returned from the wilderness, he was filled with glory.
What if, for us, entering the wilderness had to do with enacting a form of digital minimalism in our lives?[4] And what if it opened to something like glory, which I take it is the Bible’s way of describing a nonalienated life, a connected life, in all of its emotional and spiritual connotations? For example, what would happen if you simply deleted your social media accounts? All of them. What would change for you? I’m here to tell you that you wouldn’t die. You’d even be in good company. Before taking on any of his free solo climbs, the mountaineer Alex Honnold, who free soloed El Capitain a couple years ago, deletes all of his accounts, in order to enhance his powers of attention. Many people in the tech world are wising up to the effects of their creations, and are removing themselves from social media. All I’m saying is that your world won’t collapse if you abandon those platforms, and if you quit clicking “like.” As another possibility, make a 30 or 60 or 90 day fast. And if you choose to go back, use whatever platforms you return to sparingly, for a specific task.
Absent such input, you’ll likely have more time for other meaningful things, like exercise or reading, like physical, rather than digital, relationships, or like cooking or eating. You could use it as an opportunity to join something. You could use it as an opportunity to learn how to make something, or play something. Above all, you could use it as an opportunity to connect more deeply with the natural world. All of that would require intentionality. But I would venture to say that by taking measures to enact forms of digital minimalism, you’ll hear from yourself in ways that you may not have for a long time. I’ll also venture to say that in such a wilderness, you stand a greater chance of touching the sacred, of connecting with something in the world that feels holy and true. You may experience withdrawal at first. It might even expose some of your inner demons. But what if you persisted? Could it be that new vistas would open up in your spiritual life, your emotional life, and your relational life?
I’m acutely aware that some of you may not relate to what I’m describing at all, because you didn’t adopt these technologies into your life in the first place. That’s likely to be true especially of our older members. If you’re in that category, I think you have a role to play too. It might be that your role is to help remind the rest of us what it is to cultivate solitude, to sit in conversation, to connect with nature, to open yourself in prayer. It may be that you’re the wisdom keepers right now, and that many of us need to spend time learning what it is you already know. If you’ve been reluctant about these technologies, I hope you won’t understand yourselves to be out of touch. I have a hunch that you just might be in touch with some of the things that matter most.
I’m also aware that some of you may not sense much of an issue here at all, and that you may find this assessment of our digital lives far too gloomy. So be it. I’ll simply beg your indulgence.
As for the rest of you, I’m curious to know what you make of all this. I wonder if you can imagine embracing a life of digital minimalism. It’s not an argument for abolishing technology. It’s an argument for how best to use it. Nor is it an argument for disengagement from the world. If anything, it’s the opposite. My wager is that by exploring a life of digital minimalism, we might all become more engaged, more present, and more attentive to life than we have been for a long time. My wager is that such a practice will expose us to God in a deeper way.
What would it mean to enter this wilderness together? What would it mean to reclaim the capacity for solitude? What might we learn, and who might we become?
[1] Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2019).
[2] Newport, Cal, Deep Work (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016).
[3] A useful analogy made by Newport in a recent interview.
[4] Newport, Cal, Digital Minimalism (New York: Portfolio Press, 2019).