Distracting the divine out of you: how smartphones obscure the sacred
Part two of 'The fight for our aliveness: reality vs the digisphere'
‘Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.’
—José Ortega y Gasset
Prelude: gasps of firmament
‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’
—William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’
So often it is the gasps that save us—those involuntary intakes of breath sparked by a sudden plunge into awe, or wonder, or pleasure. Even the gasp of horror is a kind of icy salvation: the defibrillator reminding you that you are still human, still a creature of compassion, and that the empathy has not yet been numbed out of you.
These gasps are rumours of the divine, showing the fragility of the idea of aloneness. We are part of the fabric of things, and when something beautiful or terrible ripples through that fabric we cannot help but quiver. It happened to me recently, when a planet burst through my living room window.
This January and February, the northern hemisphere has been treated to a ‘parade of planets’, as Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn have draped themselves across the night sky, with our moon frequently joining the ceremony. The front of my house faces south-west, and when I peeked through my curtain one evening I was confronted with Venus and Saturn escorting the rising crescent moon. No matter how many times I see Venus, its brightness shocks me—a jolt of silver fire in the firmament. I gasped, and for a few moments felt the river of wonder flow through me. I called to my daughter, and together we rushed out of the front door to get a better look. But then I committed an act of violence.
I took out my phone.
We are part of the fabric of things, and when something beautiful or terrible ripples through that fabric we cannot help but quiver.
Moments are fragile things. Shy, delicate, flighty. Like a doe in the wood, they’ll bolt at the slightest disruption.
My thought when I reached into my pocket for the device was, ‘This will look great on Instagram.’ I could post some poetic words to go with it and get a bunch of likes and affirming comments. I raised up the phone, took the photos, and then was hit by a sinking feeling.
Moments are vulnerable things. Easy to kill.
I had instantly removed myself from the flow of what I had been experiencing. My presence vanished into the rectangle of glass and craving that I was holding. Instead of allowing myself to feel the wonder and share it with my little girl, I’d sought to commodify it.
It’s a feeling I’ve had many times before—a sense of violation, perhaps desecration. It hits me most ferociously when I’m with my daughter. We’re in the moment, having fun playing a game or admiring a tree, when I get my phone out and everything seems to deflate slightly, or lose its colour.
The gasp-inducing, the joy-worthy, the drops of beauty and simple delight that are the sap rising in our lives… these things matter, and profoundly, and yet frequently and increasingly we are finding ourselves not experiencing them, but documenting them, or, worse, missing them entirely. All because of the sharp and frightening decline in our ability to stay present; to pay attention.
The poet Mary Oliver declared that ‘attention is the beginning of devotion’. So without attention, what is it that we’re devoted to?
The awakening of the masses
‘To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity.’
—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The swell of writings against smartphones, social media and big tech is deep, broad and expanding. It no longer feels counter-cultural to say that the digital landscape is a ruinous one. It is still an act of resistance, yes, but one that has the force of a widening gyre of thought and feeling behind it. The mass enshittification of online platforms, the dread advent of AI, the surging revelations of the harm being inflicted upon children and adolescents in particular might finally be turning the tide, awakening the masses.
You would have thought that Instagram making young girls kill themselves, or X opening its arms to fascism, or Facebook helping to instigate a genocide in Myanmar (conveniently forgotten by more or less everyone) would have been enough. Not to mention the polarisation, the echo chambers, the spread of disinformation. The very fact that these things haven't been enough to drive us away from it is proof of the sick hold social media has over us. But people may at last, and hopefully not too late, be realising that these platforms, far from being a neutral tool, are antagonistic to human flourishing.
It may not have been this way at the beginning. Facebook was, once, a useful way to keep up with old friends and organise events. But social media stopped being about social networking years ago. As soon as their business model became centered around keeping your eyes locked onto your screen for as long as possible, all the genuinely useful features of social media—the reasons we got onto it in the first place—were systematically sidelined in favour of hyper-distracting ‘content’ made by strangers and, now, increasingly, not by humans at all.
Encouragingly, young people are increasingly at the forefront of the resistance. That is not to say that the fight has been won. Far from it. But at least now it's a fight.
People may at last, and hopefully not too late, be realising that these platforms, far from being a neutral tool, are antagonistic to human flourishing.
In the last few weeks alone, three books have been published—The Extinction of Experience, by Christine Rosen; Superbloom, by Nicolas Carr; and The Siren’s Call, by Chris Hayes—to join the pantheon of work ringing the alarm over the way that smartphones and social media are corroding far more than merely our health, but our very humanity. Other notable examples would be Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, Catherine Price’s How To Break Up With Your Phone, and Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
What do I have to add to the conversation? Firstly, I’d point out that the more alarms that are sounded, the better. But in terms of the scope of this reflection, I want to talk about how smartphones are making you lose touch with the sacred.
To do that, I of course must define what ‘the sacred’ is. Which ought to be straightforward and not at all controversial.
A rustling in the leaves
‘All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.’
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges
Here's what I don't mean by the loss of our sense of the sacred or divine: anything religious. This isn't about the decline in church attendance, or how often people say their prayers, or where you may or may not go after you die (more on that later). Not that those things aren’t important, but they do not even begin to encompass what the sacred might mean. It cannot be bound by decree, or dogma, or organisational structure; a divine that is not ineffable is not feasible. How, then, do we encounter it, experience it?
Through experience itself.
Christian scripture declares that all things are made by, through and for Christ, and that through Christ we live (Colossians 1:16; 1 Corinthians 8:6). Christ is not Jesus’ last name, nor does it merely refer to a Christian messiah. Ilia Delio wrote that ‘Christ is God’s active power inside of the physical world… [and is] present in the entire cosmos, from the least particle of matter to the convergent human community.’
We are therefore living inside, and are ourselves part of, the revelation of the divine. It is not only that the heavens declare the glory of the Lord (Psalm 19:1)—the whole universe is thrumming with it, animated by it. It is something that is both within us and surrounding us; it is the direction we are moving in and the current that is carrying us. The sacred might be ineffable, but its qualities can nonetheless, according to St Paul, be ‘clearly seen, being understood from what is made’ (Romans 1:20).
When I say that I believe in God, what I am really saying is that I revere reality.
This is not an idea unique to Christianity. It is there in Jewish mysticism in the concept of Ein Sof: the divine spark that permeates all things. In Sufi Islam, there is the belief that the divine presence is encountered through love and beauty. The Brahman (ultimate reality) of Hinduism is described as not only being transcendent, but immanent and immediate; while the Tao of Taoism is a force that flows through everything in existence.
When I say that I believe in God, what I am really saying is that I revere reality.
We observe God through the observable; experience God through the experiential. It is in our aliveness that the divine is disclosed: the wonder, the pleasure, the joy, the awe, the love; the sounds and sights and textures and tastes of being. Faith, therefore, is simply the art of paying attention. If you want to draw close to God, draw close to your vicinity; notice the world around you: people, plant, creature, cloud; linger in your senses; open up the present moment and wander around in it.
The divine is analogue; not an abstraction, not hidden in some unreachable sky, but rustling among the leaves, lying in wait in the dark soil, sitting at the table chuckling as you tell that story to your friends, the air swimming with communion.
What is this strange, gorgeous and frightening thing we are part of? What is it within me that seems to be stretching out towards something? Why should snowdrops make me smile and dappled light stop me in my tracks? What am I conferring with through the glittering streams and unknown depths of my living?
In Man Is Not Alone Abraham Joshua Heschel pointed out that ‘“Where is Man?” Is the first question that occurs in the Bible. It is man’s alibi that is our problem... God is less rare than we think.’ Adam and Eve don’t go looking for God; God goes looking for them. So it is today. The inconspicuousness of the sacred is an illusion brought about by a failure of attention. Without attention there is no connection, no communality, no intimacy. What we do not know we cannot love; God is love, and so we are estranged.
I say ‘failure’ of attention, but that might make it sound as though it’s our fault. But your attention hasn’t failed: it’s been torn out of you.
It is in our aliveness that the divine is disclosed.
Screen wraiths
‘The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.’
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
If you’ve been following my writing for a while now then you’ll know that I have a particular affinity with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings. Sometimes I shoehorn a quote into a reflection just to satisfy my love of this masterpiece, but this time no such shoehorning is required. Because the analogy is obvious.
You’ve been wearing the One Ring.
Take these lines from The Fellowship of the Ring, where Bilbo is describing the Ring—created by the Dark Lord Sauron—to Gandalf: ‘I am always wanting to put it on and disappear... or wondering if it is safe, and pulling it out to be sure. I tried locking it up, but I found I couldn't rest without it in my pocket.'
The most obvious parallel between the Ring and our phones is the compulsive hold they have—the anxious tug that makes us take it out and look at it without even knowing what we’re doing. But there is another, more pernicious parallel:
They both make us disappear.
Whenever someone puts on the One Ring, they enter the Unseen Realm. It is the world of the Nazgûl: the Ringwraiths. And the more time anyone spends there, the more their soul is pulled into it, the more their thoughts and identity are corrupted and consumed by it, and the harder it is to live in the real world. To wear the Ring is to expose yourself to the influence of the Dark Powers. Prolonged use of it leads to a physical and mental withering—a deterioration that turns the user into a shadow of their former selves.
Sound familiar?
To pick up your phone is to abandon the present. For all intents and purposes, to stare at that screen is to vanish from reality.
If you’re on a beach, but you’re staring at your phone, then you’re not at the beach, you’re staring at your phone.
If you’re having lunch with your friends, but you’re staring at your phone, then you’re not having lunch with your friends, you’re staring at your phone.
If you’re at a concert but you’re staring at your phone, then you’re not at a concert, you’re staring at your phone.
If you’re playing with your kids but you’re staring at your phone, then you’re not playing with your kids, you’re staring at your phone.
For our faces to be lit up in the insidious glare of the smartphone screen is to be dead to the world. My daughter is instinctively aware of this. She knows that when I’m on my phone, I’m not with her in any real sense. When you’re on your phone, you’re not with the people you’re with, and you’re not living in the world you live in.
To pick up your phone is to abandon the present.
‘The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day,’ says Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, ‘and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.’ This theft of our presence means that we are no longer paying attention to others, and so are increasingly unable to form deep relationships and communities; we are no longer paying attention to ourselves, and so are unable to confront our feelings and heal our wounds (for you can only transform what you face); and we are no longer paying attention to the world, no longer noticing the divine spark around us: the joy, the wonder, the awe, the pleasure—the sorrow, too, and thus our ability to address it.
We are gasping less and scrolling more. To be distracted is to be godless.
Reclaim your attention
‘My experience is what I attend to.'
—William James, The Principles of Psychology
Life means presence. It means connection. And social media is deliberately, violently, and bloody effectively opposed to those things. Tech companies just want you to be distracted. That's all they want: eyes on screens, not on the world. Because that's what is making them apocalyptically rich.
What do we do? We resist. We refuse to let ourselves be currency in the attention economy. We stop conforming to the pattern of distraction.
Reclaim your attention, and therefore your life—your intimacy with the present, your sense of the sacred. Delete your social media accounts. Delete any app that distracts you, that isn’t adding life to your living. Set strict screentime limits. Turn off notifications. Turn off your phone. Go places without it. Ban it from your bedroom, the bathroom, the dinner table. Make it a tool that you occasionally use when necessary, not a constant nagging companion (resources such as
’s How To Break Up With Your Phone can help with all of this).Or get rid of your smartphone completely. Be radical; fully alive again. And let’s drop the excuses for why we think we need all these things. At this stage they sound increasingly feeble, like a desperately clinging-on smoker. You don’t need social media to stay in touch with your friends; there are more direct, more real ways to do this. And besides, the excuses aren’t really coming from you, they're coming from the part of you that's addicted. ‘The real reason you’re still on social media,’ technology expert Cal Newport says, ‘Is that it’s secretly a casino.’
The real reason you’re still on social media is that it’s secretly a casino.
The real world does still exist. You can go there, if you want. Social networks, real social networks, the kind that are made face to face, still exist. You can join one, or create one. It will take intention, and effort, it might even be inconvenient, messy—but guess what? That's what it takes to be human. Call someone. See them face to face. Write them a slowly written letter. Read books. Listen to your favourite album from start to finish. Go somewhere beautiful and don’t take any pictures. Un-commodify your experiences. Do something. Start something. Meet up. Join a club. What are you passionate about, interested in? What do you enjoy, or want to learn more about? Move deliberately and imperfectly into those things. Find other people there, or bring them with you. Start experiencing your life instead of merely documenting it for the benefit of some online ‘audience’ that doesn’t really care about you.
Go to heaven
‘If you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you'd likely end up with a smartphone.’
—Catherine Price, How To Break Up With Your Phone
I won't tell social media and smartphones to go to hell, because by some definitions they are hell. Hell is whatever is the opposite of aliveness, humanness, being. Hell is whatever is anti-presence, anti-peace, anti-community, anti-matter, anti-human, anti-life. Hell draws us into ourselves, builds walls of ideology and othering, draws our gaze away from what really matters, from the things that have always mattered, and should always matter. Yet we are, in a very real way, forgetting about them. Or, more accurately, being distracted from them.
You get to decide whether or not you go to hell. Not by what you believe, but by how you choose to live. Hell is something we become by how we decide to move through the world.
So is heaven. I want to become more heaven. And that means radical kindness and generosity. It means grace. It means love. And it means presence. And that requires cutting off the digital umbilical cord that keeps pumping me full of the tech companies' bleak blood.
The video below was made in 2017. It would be hard, impossible even, to say that the digital landscape has not become even worse since then. It’s a harrowing watch, but maybe the shock of it will help save us.
I don’t want to live in that world. So I won’t. A better one is available: the one we had all along.
I began this piece with a famous quote from Mary Oliver. It’s worth providing the quote again now in its full context, as it helps show the way forward.
‘Teach the children... Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones–inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones–rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.’
—Mary Oliver, Upstream
The children, yes, and us too.
To know the divine presence, just be present. Return to deep attention, for when we do we cannot help but become alive, and more abundantly. Even if, at times, that life might look like rage, or sadness.
The sacred is all around us; the earth is thick with it; it is the Christ-song singing out from the living world. Pay attention to it. You can remove the veil from the divine by lifting the scales of un-presence from your eyes.
Pay attention to yourself. Your depths. Your aches. Your desires. Your tiredness. Your anger. Your joy. Pay attention to the world. It really is astonishing. Pay attention to other people. They're all going through something. We're all going through something. Something extraordinary.
A little note to say…
I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other beautiful things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get! If you’re able to make a small contribution to my work, I’d be incredibly grateful. It will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.
If you need to catch up on part one:
The curse of the unimpeded human: AI, creativity, and the end of imagination
‘People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.’
Of course, the irony is: I'm reading this on my phone. I love your writing Gideon, but I would never have found it and wouldn't be able to follow it without social media/ technology. There must be a happy medium. I'm going to try harder to find it.
Thank you for this affirming wake up call, Gideon. 🙏🔥✨