A new Lenten pillar: Abstaining from technology

Since we are halfway through Lent, it’s a good moment to consider how it’s been going.

The purpose of our self-denial is conversion, as we learn to let go of control and to depend more upon God. The essence of Lent consists of a forty-day fast, originally entailing fasting throughout the day and abstaining from meat, animal products, oil, and wine. The hunger this daily fast engenders should lead to increased spiritual hunger. It’s so easy for God to be pushed aside in favor of our material needs and distractions.

The Church Fathers could not comprehend the fullness of sounds, images, videos, and texts we consume each day. Alongside the fasting they enjoined from food, we need a new form of it, one, likewise, focused on making space for God and learning to depend more on him.

For the rest of Lent, therefore, and as an annual tradition, I recommend a technology fast. Just as we cut down on food in a meaningful way, we should do the same by letting go of digital content in some significant way—opting out of social media, turning off the phone, turning off Wi-Fi, abstaining from the news, Netflix, or video games. It’s a pressing enough concern for the spiritual life that it even merits standing alongside the other pillars of Lent: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and abstaining from technology.

Technology crept into our lives little by little, and we accepted it for its convenience without prior knowledge of its effects. Smartphones and social media have been around just long enough now that the results are beginning to trickle in: increased depression, disconnection, and brains that, as Nicholas Carr explained years ago, have become increasingly shallow.

But what about the effects on prayer? Does technology turn our minds from God, drawing them downward and hindering our ability to attend to God’s silent presence? If so, it may have become a new tempter that gives us stones to eat as our daily bread, drawing us to bow down to its constant presence, and even leading us to throw ourselves off spiritual precipices without a second thought (see Matthew 4:1-11).

During Lent, we follow Jesus into the desert, a place of silence and solitude, but also of testing, where we must face these challenges. The desert naturally leads to fasting, with its sparse resources, and also to prayer, insofar as we must depend on God there. Letting go of fulfilling our own needs should foster attention to others’ needs, freeing up resources and time for almsgiving.

Furthermore, it’s hard to conceive of entering the modern spiritual desert with a smartphone or laptop, as they mitigate against its basic spirit—an empty space where we can see God and, through him, see into our own souls. Without some space from our devices, how can we focus our attention on God and hear his voice, which, as Cardinal Sarah explains, can be heard only through the language of silence.

His book, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, serves as a needed guide for the modern desert. Although the noise of our culture comes mainly from technology, he doesn’t focus on it in the book. This is telling, as we won’t drop our gadgets just because some wise man told us that we should. There must be some more compelling reason: the search for God that stands behind all true Lenten practices.

If man seeks God and wants to find him, if he desires a life of the most intimate union with him, silence is the most direct path and the surest means of attaining it. Silence is of capital importance because it enables the Church to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, imitating his thirty silent years in Nazareth, his forty days and forty nights of fasting and intimate dialogue with the Father in the solitude and silence of the desert. Like Jesus, confronted with the demands of his Father’s will, the Church must seek silence in order to enter ever more deeply into the mystery of Christ (The Power of Silence, 219).

This search for silence has become a new quest for spiritual freedom. A technological curtain surrounds us, drawing our attention away from the beauty of nature, relationships, and God’s transcendent presence. Because of this, we must make a concerted effort to break through and rediscover these essential goods that surround us. Even under the best of circumstances, attending to God’s silent voice within us presents the essential challenge that motivates Lent.

Now, all the more, do we have to return to reality, learning to see and hear more clearly in the barren desert. As Cardinal Sarah explains,

God’s being has always been present in us in an absolute silence. And a human being’s own silence allows him to enter into a relationship with the Word that is at the bottom of his heart. Thus, in the desert, we do not speak. We listen in silence; man enters into a silence that is God. (26)

In the last three weeks of Lent, let’s retreat to the desert, leaving our devices behind at least for a few hours a day. The disciplined use of technology should become a regular ascetical practice for those striving to hear God’s voice and find his presence within us. Lenten discipline must respond to the changed conditions of the modern world, adding a fourth pillar that will enable us to follow Jesus into the desert to do battle against the enemy and all that prevents us from following him unreservedly.