The Wired Soul

by Tricia McCary Rhodes

  These are the kinds of questions that we pose through oratio as we bring our digital lives, our technological devices, and our virtual worlds into loving conversation with God, seeking to understand the ways in which we’ve somehow succumbed to idolatry, even if unaware. We must ask for spiritual revelation regarding not only the amount of time we spend beholding our digital screens but also the ways we are seeking to satisfy our souls in that space. Now, perhaps more than ever before, we must fight to secure the time and focus to allow the gentle voice of God to break through our busyness, pierce our hearts, and show us how we, driven by the technology we can’t live without, are falling short of the glory for which he created us.

  PRACTICE

  EXAMEN REGARDING CORRUPTED DESIRE

  ESTIMATED TIME: ONE WEEK

  And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.

  MARK 4:18-19

  But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

  EPHESIANS 4:20-24

  WHAT WOULD IT MEAN for you to be a good steward of the gifts of technology you have been given? How can you be certain that you are exercising dominion over them as a part of your calling according to Genesis 1:26-28? This is the purpose of the following practice.

  Saint Ignatius, about whom we will learn more in chapter 8, offers a way to explore some specific weakness or sin over a period of time. We will use an adaptation of his “Particular Examen” to carefully examine our digital lives for one week, seeking to do the following three things in loving conversation with Christ and others:

  To develop an awareness of my digital engagement, looking for any liturgies (patterns or practices) that demonstrate a way of being that is corrupted through deceitful desires (Ephesians 4:22).

  To repent of seeking ultimate joy or fulfillment in any products of digital engagement (achievement, competition, popularity, escape, esteem, ownership, and so on).

  To develop greater discipline regarding digital engagement through specific and intentional consecration of my time and habits.

  Each day for one week, you will check in with God three times during the day for about five minutes each—morning, noon, and night. This particular practice will benefit greatly from interaction with others in your faith community and a level of accountability with them.

  Days One and Two

  Morning. Spend a few minutes in prayer with God, offering him free access to your heart and your digital activity. Ask for wisdom and revelation as you go through your day. Consecrate all of your time to him to use as he wills, even hours you may be officially at work.

  Noon. Take five minutes to look back at the morning, writing down your answers to the following questions in a journal:

  What percentage of my free time this morning was I “on” a digital device (smartphone, e-reader, tablet, TV, and so on)?

  What were the kinds of digital activities that I engaged in (surfing the Web, sending/receiving e-mails or texts, making purchases, clicking on ads or hyperlinks, and so on)?

  Before bed. Answer the same questions you asked at noon, and jot your answers down.

  What percentage of my free time this afternoon and evening was I “on” a digital device (smartphone, e-reader, tablet, TV, and so on)?

  What were the kinds of digital activities that I engaged in (surfing the Web, sending/receiving e-mails or texts, making purchases, clicking on ads or hyperlinks, and so on)?

  Review your answers to these questions and then ask God to give you wisdom regarding the following questions:

  Lord, in what ways, if any, did I seek some sort of satisfaction or fulfillment through my digital activity?

  Lord, are there any liturgies I engage in with my digital devices that demonstrate my love for or worship of anything other than you?

  End with a time of confession and repentance as needed.

  Days Three through Seven

  Continue with the same practice that you performed on days one and two, checking in with the Lord in the morning, at noon, and at night and renewing your consecration each day. In addition, begin the time before bed by considering the following question and jotting down your answer:

  Am I changing in my digital engagement as I have sought to focus on this?

  You may want to continue this practice for another week, or until such time as you feel that you are no longer under technology’s rule and that you are prayerfully guiding your own digital life through submission to the Spirit of God. This practice can also be a valuable periodic checkup regarding your time and involvement with technology.

  CHAPTER 07

  ALONE . . . TOGETHER

  Remember, there is no such thing as an individual brain. Transformation requires a collaborative interaction, with one person empathically listening and responding to the other so that the speaker has the experience, perhaps for the first time, of feeling felt by another.

  CURT THOMPSON, Anatomy of the Soul

  HE MAY WELL be heralded as one of the most important people of the twenty-first century, but most of us have probably never heard of the winsome twenty-two-year-old Palmer Luckey. An upbeat homeschooler who began taking community college courses at age fourteen, Luckey loved video gaming, and he spent his free time buying and taking apart used virtual-reality headsets in his parent’s garage. He wanted to see whether he could come up with something that would make his experiences more realistic. By age eighteen he’d constructed his own headset, the Oculus Rift, from scratch.

  Luckey planned to sell his headset in kits for a growing crowd of gamers interested in virtual reality. Instead, his invention caught the attention of some legendary software developers. It contained technology eons beyond anything on the market. Luckey joined forces with a company to develop the Oculus Rift for the market, and eventually Facebook purchased the company (and the technology) for somewhere around two billion dollars.

  What does the Oculus Rift actually do, and why is it so important? The small, goggle-like headset enables users to be completely immersed in a computer-generated environment—sort of like 3-D animation on steroids. Cory Ondrejka, Facebook’s former vice president of engineering, described how this was different from anything we’ve ever seen: Through the use of 360-degree video cameras, we will share a sense of place and presence with others, which our brains will interpret as real, even though we are nowhere near each other. While Luckey’s vision for the technology was limited to video games, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is convinced it will be the next mobile platform to saturate the world:

  Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home. . . . These are just some of the potential uses. By working with developers and partners across the industry, together we can build many more. One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.[1]

  The goggles are still being fine-tuned to make them affordable and user-friendly, but already there is a growing number of apps waiting in line that will enable the user to wander around the inside of a pyramid among the ancient ruins in Egypt or to move through virtual rooms in cyberspace alongside friends and strangers alike. Hotels have already begun providing this type of virtual service to guests; it is more than likely that this technology will soon be a regular experience for many reading this book.

  How vastly our worlds will once again change as we enter this hyper-experience phase of the technological revolution. As exc
iting as it will be, now is the time for us to consider its potential impact—whether the benefits of virtual reality are going to outweigh the costs to our psyches or our relationships, or whether the gains of this kind of cybernetic engagement will turn out to be as fulfilling as the promise. Can we assume, for example, that having this incredibly tangible way of connecting, one that even our brains consider real, will deepen our interactions or create greater authenticity and closeness with each other? Will virtual reality help us build better relationships?

  If we learn anything from the past, the answer is probably no. The truth is that the more choices that digital technology offers us, the more complex our lives become, further compromising our ability to attend to each other. While we may connect in superficial ways to hundreds of people via social media, we struggle to find the time and energy for meaningful personal interactions with even a handful of close friends. Regularly feeling depleted, we too often opt for the convenient lure of digital contact (texting supersedes talking), rather than investing in real-time, face-to-face engagement with others. The cumulative losses of this are egregious to our souls and particularly so in our pursuit of authentic Christianity. From God’s perspective, spiritual formation can never be relegated to a solo endeavor. Oratio—loving conversations with God that lead to greater consecration—is deeply meaningful in times alone with God, but practicing it together is an indispensable component of any Christ follower’s formation in his image.

  Formed in Community

  Perhaps no group, with the exception of the nuclear family, suffers more keenly from the consequences of digital overuse than communities of faith, in which relationships are the very currency of spiritual growth. The problem is obscured, however, by a false sense of living out our spiritual destiny through cyber-connections. Believers can partake of a church service by themselves almost any day of the week via their computers, smartphones, or TV screens; keep up with the very latest in worship music online from their living rooms; receive powerfully written devotional blogs daily at their desks via e-mail; participate in inspirational causes by “liking” pages on social media; and join others in Bible studies and prayer groups through specialized apps. While these things and dozens more like them may be valuable tools for aiding our spiritual growth, they only seem relational; in actuality they take place in isolation. They can never replace the kinds of embodied relationships for which we are made.

  When our Trinitarian God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—launched the human story with “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26), he established the pattern of communal life, and so it has always been. Our spirituality flourishes amongst the pulsating presence of others. This means that the Christian journey is uniquely incarnational: Not only did the Word become flesh and dwell among us, but together we also become the tangible, physical presence—the embodiment—of Christ on this earth. We must never take this lightly or let its beautiful mystery get buried in the busyness of our hyperconnected lives, for as Douglas Groothuis reminds us, “When the flesh becomes data it fails to dwell among us.”[2]

  As members of a collective—the body of Christ in this world—we thrive through the physicality of being together. Paul yearned for this, writing to the Thessalonians that he felt as if he’d been torn from them and that his desire to see them face-to-face consumed him with earnest prayer day and night (1 Thessalonians 2:17; 3:10). The aging apostle John wrote that although for a time he was limited to writing letters, he hoped soon to be face-to-face with his family of faith “so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 1:12). Truth be told, we all long for and need this kind of communion, whether we realize it or not. Not only does interacting face-to-face with others enhance the well-being of our souls, but as it turns out, our brains are also actually wired for it.

  There Is No Single Brain

  My son and his family care for foster babies. I remember well when they brought baby Gina into their home. The back of her head was completely flat, an indication that she’d been left alone lying face up for the bulk of her young life. Placid to the extreme, baby Gina rarely cried; instead, she spent hours staring blankly at the ceiling. This didn’t last long, however. Once my son, his wife, two sets of grandparents, four siblings, and a host of friends began to love on her, the metamorphosis was amazing to behold. Gina quickly became a laughing, cooing, kicking, wide-eyed image of contentment, entertaining us all with her antics for months to come.

  Attachment theory tells us that Gina, like all babies, came into the world looking for connections—her brain could not develop properly without it. Her initial lack of interactivity reflected what she had failed to receive in her early months. This is why it is said that there is no such thing as an individual brain. Our neural networks have been established through hundreds of experiences that began when we were infants in relationship with our mothers or fathers or other caregivers. Given the plasticity of our brains, our interactions with others will continue to shape how we see ourselves, other people, and the world in which we live for the rest of our lives.[3]

  Simply put, each of us is “a story wrapped in skin.”[4] Our stories are inscribed on the neural pathways located largely in our prefrontal cortex. All of our lives we look to others, not only to make sense of what we experience but also to help us rewrite the pages in us that are flawed because of painful life circumstances or relationships. Even what we think we know of God has been formed through life in a fallen world. As a result, we need authentic and vulnerable connections with other believers in order to really know God. As Christian psychiatrist Curt Thompson explains, “Your relationship with God is a direct reflection of the depth of your relationship with others.”[5]

  For years I believed that God needed me to “get the job done” and that his acceptance and approval rose and fell based on how well I was doing it. As an adult, I began to see that a biblical understanding of grace didn’t support this view of me or God, so I tried hard to change. But I couldn’t dislodge that deep-seated propensity to perform with God or others. One night I voiced my frustration to my husband, telling him that I didn’t know what to do if God didn’t need me. He smiled and said, “That’s just it: You really can’t do anything, can you?”

  This wasn’t the answer I wanted, and the next morning I sat before God in tears, terrified at my growing feelings of vulnerability. After a time, I ventured out to try and share with my husband, but I couldn’t even articulate how I felt as we sat on the couch together. So he simply held me as I cried, and then at some point he looked me in the eyes and said tenderly, “Tricia, God doesn’t need you, but he wants you.”

  I was undone. Later that morning, a friend came over and, in essence, spoke the same truth to my soul. This was the beginning of my new story, my new ability to experience God’s affection for me as his precious child, who didn’t have to perform to enjoy his love.

  Heart-to-heart connections like these—connections that can alter our faulty stories, rewire our neural circuitry, and form us as Christ followers—won’t happen through snippets in texts or likes on social-media pages or even by entering into each other’s virtual reality. Person-to-person, face-to-face, embodied communion is essential for the kinds of bonds that God has afforded uniquely to human beings.

  Mirror Neurons and Digital Relating

  One of the more fascinating discoveries in brain science is the existence of what are called mirror neurons. These neurons fire when we observe someone else doing a specific action, as if we were doing it ourselves. For example, when you see a mother pushing a stroller, neurons fire in your brain almost as if you were actually pushing the stroller yourself. When we notice that someone is hurt—physically or emotionally—the mirror neurons in our brains simulate their experience for us as well, enabling us to empathize with them. Mirror neurons also trigger humor in us when we hear another person laugh, which is why laughter can be so contagious. The emotional component to mirror neurons is an amazing gift that has been given only to human beings. Only we can
feel each other’s sadness or pain or happiness.

  But we are called to move beyond feeling to acting—to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15), to be tenderhearted toward each other (Ephesians 4:32), and to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). For this to happen, we need to be present to each other, something extremely difficult via digital engagement. Why? Between 60 and 90 percent of the time we communicate our feelings in nonverbal ways—through the expressions on our face, eye contact, physical touch, the inflections in our voice, or our body language. Whether we are the ones experiencing the emotion or the ones empathizing with it, we are dependent to a great degree on nonverbal cues, which easily get lost in a digital environment. Emojis and emoticons are sorely insufficient substitutes for heartfelt expressions.

  I experienced this in a profound way years ago when e-mail was in its nascent stages. A friend wrote to me of how he was feeling directionless and without hope. While I felt sad for him and wanted to help carry his burden, I had no idea of the depth of his struggle. I assumed he wanted advice, so I gave it.

  My concern and support did not come across in my e-mail. In my prosaic and rapid response, he heard only judgment. He responded by saying, “I was looking for a friend, not a judge and jury.”

  In that moment I realized that there were some things that could never be meaningfully shared without person-to-person contact, and I determined never again to use e-mail to communicate anything of a sensitive nature. While digital engagement can surely augment our interpersonal connections, it is inadequate at best. At worst, its sterile structure can be dangerous to the well-being of our souls and of those we love. The more we are immersed in our cyber-worlds, the easier it is to lose sight of this; in the process, we end up squandering something of our own humanness.