Technology, Us and Two Brilliant, Representative, and Antiphonal Voices

As I’ve written many times, technology can take us in both positive and negative directions. And there are brilliant voices for each.

      

First of all, consider the work of Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Now that’s an impressive title!) She wrote one of the definitive early books on Artificial Intelligence, The Second Self and has moved in an more concerned, even at times distressed, direction in her books, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from EachOther (2012) and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talkin a Digital Age (2015). The latter emphasizes how technology invades and prevents true human community and gets in the way of authentic conversation and empathy.

      
I’m not always sure that technology and education always mix well together. Turkle would agree—she is, for example, fairly relentless, and simultaneously quite thoughtful, about the problems of distance learning. (MIT apparently tried all this out quite early, and she's not impressed.) I suppose I could summarize her by saying that human relationships, and thus teaching, are messy. And that's good—because, through the messiness, we learn invaluable skills. And tech can interrupt education in other ways. In my hometown,

there’s a phone app developed by Chico State grads, PocketPoints, which rewards its users if they turn off the phone during college classes. I have a friend—a younger friend at that—who visited my college classes and cannot help but notice that, during a quick stretch break I usually offer my students in the middle of lectures—the students quietly text their friends or check their social media instead of meeting the people right in their vicinity. He’s rather blunt at this: “Why wouldn’t these guys want to meet some of the beautiful women that surround them?”
      

Indeed. It’s probably because they feel anxious, more comfortable “connecting” virtually instead of in real time, with real people. And—though I doubt this is true in my classes—they’re probably a bit bored. Boredom and anxiety—that potent combination which together make the German word angst and the French version ennui—propel us toward our cell phones like the proverbial moths to flame. The little shot of dopamine that’s released as we are stimulated by the new scream has addictive qualities. And so we continue. And so it is particularly with emerging adults, who were given screens to quiet them as fussy babies. Such earlier training is sticky and recalcitrant. This persistent use of technology can lead to anxiety—for example, “cell phone addiction”—and emerging adults would seem to be the most vulnerable.

       
A moment ago I mentioned Turkle’s defense of the messiness of community. (“Messiness,” by the way, is my word, not hers.) Conversations in real time with real people can’t be manipulated to the same degree that virtual interactions can be. “One new manager at HeartTech, the large software company in Silicon Valley, moved there so he could leave engineering and try his hand at management. ‘I left my previous job because it was too predictable. I wanted to work with unpredictable systems [here he means people].’” She summarizes this by asserting that we must

 “Challenge a view of the world as apps”

—that some app on our smart phone leads us toward a seamless solution to all problems. “The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results. But human relationships are unpredictable, chaotic, and complex—that’s what makes them both frustrating and exultant.

      
This “app thinking” can affect us relationally and spiritually. To take it up a metaphysical notch, our relationship with God is messy and unpredictable. The eternal, sovereign, God of the Bible cannot be managed. As C. S. Lewis put into the mouths of Mrs. Beaver as she describes Aslan the Christ figure in The Chronicles of Narnia, 

“He’s not a tame lion.”

On the other side, I’ve already noted how technology has historically served the Christian

church in its history. It also has broader implications according to its contemporary advocates. Researcher and technologist Jane McGonigal, in her 2010 TED talk “Gaming Can Make a BetterWorld," promotes the theory that computer games can actually lead to human community. (She’s also written SuperBetter: The Power ofLiving Gamefully, which demonstrates, if nothing else, that this tech revolution is going to involve making up new words.) McGonigal reveals that the world spends three billion hours a week playing online games—which shocks the audience—she then doubles down by asserting that we need to do more. How could this be the case? The problem solving skills of those virtual situations could be employed in solving real-world problems.

      
Naturally, almost all commercial forces see technological use by emerging adults as positive. Because it helps sell products. And generally, the power and material resources of marketing social media particularly and Internet use generally—and the devices that use them—is immense. And don’t we simply enjoy our smart phones? I do.

      
I know this sounded like I slipped back into the negative side of the ledger with tech. And that’s where my mind was—in addition to channeling my “say yes to no” approach around the time of that book’s publication—when I addressed a group of graduate students from the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapters of Stanford and Berkeley. My task was to inspire them with how to engage culture, particularly as formed by science, as bright, energetic, promising Christians. These people could change the world. That indeed sounds like a cliché. But the more I came to know these students, the more I thought it might be true.

      
I began my talks on Christian spirituality in today’s world with a scene from the film NachoLibre where Nacho, a cook at a Mexican monastery, is partnering with Stephen in a tag team free wrestling, or “luchador libre.” Nacho is naturally a man of faith, but Stephen denies any belief in God and declares, “I’m a man of science.” So this is a point of contention, about which Nacho feels fearful just before I fight against the team of “Satan’s Cavemen.” So, while Stephen is looking another direction, Nacho baptizes him. And my point (yes, I had one) is that often we often baptize science with our faith when scientists aren’t looking. And let’s not do that.

      
In later talks, I took on the problems of tech and the reasons to resist it. In and out of Ultimate frisbee games on a field nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains and around meals, some of the students quietly and thoughtfully resisted. Many, in fact, were involved in Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford or the Center for Social Sector Leadershipat U.C. Berkeley. Or they were just making the world a better place. They indeed were the first people to introduce to me to information and communication technologies for development (or ICT4D). “Did you know that cell phones can help farmers find the best price—so they can survive—in poor African countries? Let me tell you about it.” “Have you heard about using solar power to help with hospitals in rural Nigeria?” “I’m working on a project to bring training to the poorest 1% of the world through media players and I think Pico projectors can offered training to stem the tide of pandemics. (Actually, that’s my friend Matt York’s mission and what his organization One Media Player Per Teacher, or OMPT, did to fight Ebola, but he could have been there too.) 

      
That retreat may have helped those IV grad students spiritually, but it was a game changer for me. Though tech can often be negative for rich people in the northern hemisphere, it can often make the difference between life and death for the poor in the southern hemisphere.

I close with my paraphrase, or perhaps adaption, of a saying from Jesus (see Mark 2:27), "Tech was made for us, not us for tech." Let's learn how to use it well.

Thoughts on Christian Faith and Mindfulness

A few days ago, a friend posed three questions about the practice of mindfulness and the Christian faith. These seemed like good fodder for a blog entry. I'll start with the questions:

How do you think mindfulness and the Bible relate instead of contradict each

other?   

How do you utilize mindfulness as part of your spiritual life, quiet time, as a way of connecting with God? 

Why do you think some Christians have issues with regarding mindfulness?

1.     I think we probably have to admit that mindfulness, in at least a technical way, comes from Buddha’s teaching, namely part of his Eightfold Path. But, for what it’s worth, Buddha wasn’t probably trying to create a different spiritual tradition, but more of what we might call psychology. Today his teaching been further secularized in the particular practice of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), to be sure, and has become a practice that we, as Christians, need to see whether it’s effective and consistent with what we believe. I can't see that it's much different from applying Myers-Briggs categories to Christian life, for example. If there’s truth to be found in any endeavor, then we as Christians are right to follow it.

     John Calvin put it so well in the Institutes: 

“If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God.” 

     With this in mind, I would say that mindfulness does not contradict biblical teaching, but is consistent with a stilled mind (Psalm 131). In that it empties ourselves of destructive thoughts, it is therefore more of a preparation for prayer that prayer itself. Or if it is a form of prayer, it’s really close to centering prayer in the Roman Catholic tradition (Thomas Keating would be a resource here.)

2.     I use mindfulness throughout my life daily as a way of calming myself. If I’m starting the day right, I do a brief (1 minute) clearing of my thoughts and thus my "concerns/anxieties." Important note: this can be the same word in the Bible and thus not always negative—e.g., Philippians 2:20 “concerned” and 4:6 “be anxious”. It is similar to what I learned in Marjorie Thompson’s Soul Feast about “prayers of consciousness”—i.e., meditating on the state of your mind. If I make time, I may take about 3-5 minutes through a variety of mindfulness techniques, often as a preparation for other forms of prayer. One I enjoy is imagining my thoughts as clouds and then attending to them, without judgment, until the sky clears. (But there are others.) I then try to bring the practice of mindfulness into my day in an ad hoc fashion—e.g., when I’m brushing my teeth or generally when it’s a simple activity that I can do easily; when I find myself in a place I can find stillness while waiting for something to happen (maybe for a haircut, even waiting for a doctor); when engaged a particular activity (such as eating), I seek to bring my mind to a state of being undivided and focused; when my heart is beating too fast and I need to return to my breath. So, all in all, my actual technical practice of mindfulness is limited (maybe 5 mins/day), but I bring it into several other parts of my day.

3.     Christians’ issues with mindfulness usually relate, in my experience to a concern that we want to do God honor and not let alien spirits into our lives. Something from Buddhism may be disrespectful and even dangerous. Mindfulness “empties” our mind and opens us up to all sorts of influences. This resistance is also summarized in a slogan like “If it’s not found in the Bible, it’s not ok for Christians.” Instead, I would rather say (with many others like Calvin), “If it’s consistent with, or even doesn’t contradict, the Bible rightly understood—and if it’s true—then we as Christians are obligated to follow it.” This in a way is common sense: how could God address all the issues believers through time would face in one book (or even better, a collection of 66 books)? It’s not possible. But, to some degree, this resistance is about a wider posture of relating to the world around us, and I feel generally confident that Christ has come into the world and is "the true light that enlightens everyone" (John 1:9). At the end of the day, I'm confident that God’s Spirit and people will help us discern what’s true and what’s not.

Written During the Month of St. Clive (i.e., November)

This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, there was a longer version lurking behind it (which didn't fit within the WSJ word count). So I'm posting it now (and, incidentally, it's a short summary of my new book on Lewis.)

CSL memorial in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey

C. S. Lewis was born and died in November (116 and 51 years ago, respectively). Despite his long tenure as an Oxford and Cambridge scholar of Medieval and Renaissance literature—for which he could justifiable be remembered as one of the great lights of English academics—he remains best known as a popular spokesperson for Christianity, with a fourth major film poised for production from his landmark fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia. His bestselling books (with millions of copies sold) defend Christian belief by answering questions that a doubting public might be struggling with. As Anthony Burgess once commented in the Times Book Review, “Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.” Thus, for many, the patron saint of intellectual doubters is Clive Staples Lewis and November is the Month of St. Clive. 

            This brings me to a concern. Many might conclude that Lewis represented the Christian Answer Man, and more importantly, that these responses to struggles and doubts came effortlessly to his pen. However fluidly ideas emerge from his writings, I don’t believe resolving crises was painless for Lewis. Instead, in reading him for 35 years, I’ve learned each of those responses came through crises and pain. That is what makes him continually compelling.

      Debra Winger, who played Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman, in the film Shadowlands, when asked to evaluate C. S. Lewis, replied: 

He may make difficult questions accessible. I don’t think he makes answers ‘easy.’ I don’t think he answers questions. He discusses them.

Lewis doesn’t ultimately give us answers—he invites our response.

      And so his readers learn to engage their questions, grasp Lewis’s resolutions and ponder their own answers. That’s why I think his words have spoken to—and continue to resonate with—millions of readers.

      The crises that Lewis faced were substantial—his beloved mother’s death when at age nine, being sent within several weeks to a series of boarding schools which he detested, fighting and being wounded in World War I, living through the Great Depression and World II, caring for his alcoholic brother and for Janie Moore (the mother of a friend who died in WWI) who slipped into dementia toward the end of her life, and finally, experiencing the death of his wife, Joy. For these reasons alone, Lewis had to work through the crisis of suffering and death.

      And how did he work through those crises? His stepson Douglas Gresham records about Lewis’s response to the death of his wife, 

He did what he always did under extreme stress. He sat down at his desk, and looking into himself and carefully observing what was happening deep in his mind where we keep our inmost secrets, he picked up his pen and an old exercise book and began to write.

      So write he did. He wrote about the crises he faced with atheism, with the Christian faith, and those he faced simply as a human being. The first category I will summarize briefly. The middle—especially his crisis with the Bible—might be the most surprising.

      Lewis tells us that he became an atheist around fourteen, but that his prickly, cynical unbelief wasn’t entirely satisfied because he sought something beyond this world. He called this Joy, “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy led him to conclude that nothing in this world could satisfy. 

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

He looked beyond this world and in his early thirties (recounted with pardonable overstatement) became “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” The point here is that Lewis did not emerge from the womb as a man absent of doubt who glided gradually and effortlessly into prominence as a leading spokesperson for Christian orthodoxy. He struggled, and that struggle and resolution animate his writing.

      The middle set of crises easily deconstruct the misunderstanding of St. Clive as patron saint of easy answers to puzzles about Christianity.

      As he pondered conversion, Lewis had to grapple with his love of myth, which he spoke of as “at its best, a real unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.” How could he believe in the Bible in light of all the other myths he treasured?

      As a literary scholar, he how to read a book and prized what books bring. “There is nothing in literature,” Lewis determined in his famous academic study, The Allegory of Love, “which does not, in some degree, percolate into life.” He read the Good Book full of narratives, meaningful stories. He believed the Bible “carries” the word of God and that derives its authority from the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. He was by no means a fundamentalist, who believed every word from Scripture contained literal truth or that the Bible equals the Word of God. Instead, Lewis interpreted the Bible as a literary text, which is certainly not the same as taking the text literally.

      Finally, Lewis also took on crises that no human being can avoid—suffering, death, and what I call “the crisis of feeling.” The latter is that problem we face when emotions don’t lead us to contentment. Put another way, if life is supposed to feel good, what happens when it doesn’t? Feelings—particularly the emotional rush of life—remain for many the final arbiter of truth and decision-making.

    And yet Lewis found his own wisdom hard to take when his wife, Joy, died. The pain was excruciating and left him feeling “concussed.” Not only had he lost someone he cherished, but he saw his own life replayed—Joy had two young sons whom she was leaving behind at almost the same age as Lewis and his brother at their mother’s death. His anguish disturbed easy answers, and his searing honesty remains the most arresting feature of A Grief Observed, the book he wrote just after Joy’s death: 

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.

Yet as the book progressed, he resolved that even God himself does not respond to every inquiry: 

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’

Lewis himself did not receive every answer he longed for. And that, in the end, brought a resolution that transcended his understanding.

      So, if indeed November is the Month of St. Clive, and if Lewis has become a somewhat universal symbol of Christianity, let us not conclude that the best life can be discovered through the uncomplicated resolution of all crises, nor the easy answer to every problem. Instead, let Lewis model for us an engagement with crises and a life that lies beyond easy answers.

An Interlude on "Lectio Divina"

This entry accompanies my July 31 message at Bidwell Presbyterian Church, "The Savor of Scripture." (Click here to hear the message.) It's an entirely brief overview of the ancient spiritual disciple of lectio divina or “divine reading” of the Bible. 


As writer and Presbyterian pastor Marjorie Thompson presents in her fabulous book on the spiritual life, Soul Feast, reading the Bible is like savoring a letter from a good friend. (There was a time when we used to write letters instead of whip off an email?) And in this case, our friend is God, who wants our best. It is therefore reading for formation over information. (By the way, a good form of literature for this practice is poetry, which forces us to slow down.)

         

The Benedictines (a monastic movement that began in the early 500s) have developed a four-step spiritual reading called lectio divina that works well for those who want to practice biblical meditation.

•  lectio (reading): Start with silence. Quiet yourself. Then read the passage several times, being careful to read slowly. Using other translations is helpful in this step.
• meditatio (meditation): Think hard about the passage. Ask questions. Look up difficult words in an English or Bible dictionary. Mull over a verse or phrase that has arisen from the first step. Let it percolate.
•  oratio (prayer): Pray through the themes that God is bringing to your attention. This step may engage a wide range of emotions.
• contemplatio (contemplation): Simply enjoy the place that God has led you through this reading, perhaps even simply being in God’s presence. You may also want to think through the action to which God is leading you.

Try this and see how it transforms your life.