I was blessed to be raised by a mother and father who loved the Lord. If I woke up early enough, it was a certainty that my dad would be sitting in his recliner, drinking coffee and reading his Bible. My mom’s Bible was always on a coffee table or somewhere ready at hand. There was little doubt in our home how our parents’ priorities were ordered. A Christian’s Bible –provided it is not lost—travels with them through time and accompanies them until the end. The words of the great American folk singer, Gillian Welch, say it beautifully: “Til my body gives, I’m gonna read those gospel pages” (Rock of Ages).
Some years ago I had a realization, as I sat on the couch saying Morning Prayer from one of the very powerful and convenient prayer apps, that combines readings, prayers, and propers for the liturgical day: When my children came down the stairs early in the morning, they would see their dad staring at his phone. For all they knew I was watching YouTube, scrolling through social media, or shopping online. I don’t wish to be dogmatic on this point, but the witness of a Bible seemed worth preserving to me, and the role it played in the life of my family.
One of the realities of a sacramental church tradition that took me the longest to appreciate, but that I now quite value, is the idea of consecration. Yes, there is still a part of me, when saying a prayer for a new cross or some other liturgical item, that says, really? What exactly does this accomplish? But the setting aside of a physical thing for a singular and spiritual purpose marks an essential and vanishing value in our society.
The smartphone is of course a very powerful tool that has combined and streamlined many disparate elements of our lives into one device. Though many of us have misgivings about the power that phones, or online devices, now wield over us, the convenience is basically impossible to resist. It is more than just convenience that drives phone usage, however. It is the reality of continual connection to the online universe, the real world in a sense, which masquerades as a kind of spiritual reality that somehow pervades every aspect of our lives.
This digital reality is so pervasive that just reading a book can feel like a kind of isolation. Even though a book might be connected to a particular time and place, and to the history of ideas, it can feel like a dead letter that is limited by its publication date, and its inability to hyperlink or connect to the current pace of the internet. A book has limited use, which is to be read, referred to, and pondered. As philosopher Albert Borgmann has written: “Supernatural brilliance, limitless variety, and unreal availability constitute the normative identity and charm of virtual reality. The actual world seems drab, poor, and hard in comparison” (Holding onto Reality, p. 185).
There are also spiritual pressures that contribute to the blurring of meaning and use. One often hears Christian writers speak about the need to break down distinctions between the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and natural. Things like clerical orders, special vestments of worship, and particular time and places of worship, can be perceived by some as realities that uphold a false sense of division, as if God is only present in some things and not others. Surely if God is all in all, then we cannot seriously imagine that some things are more holy or spiritual than others.
It is a difficult and sometimes dangerous distinction to articulate. Often when people defend books over e-readers, for example, they struggle to delineate clear reasons for defending the book. There is something about the tangibility of a book, someone will say, about its history, or the way it feels. It’s harder to say what exactly that something is, except that something is lost when the distinction dissolves. Again, Borgmann sees modern technology as the culmination of the modernist trajectory toward the leveling of meaning, and the complete dismantling of hierarchical or structural accounts of the world: “Cultural landmarks, dimensions, and distinctions are dissolving. Everyone is becoming indifferently related to everything and everyone else” (Holding onto Reality, p. 15).
It is precisely this aspect of indifferent and inarticulate relations that makes the smartphone such an incredible and dangerous tool. Its ability to combine so many unrelated purposes into one platform enables a kind of fluid and unreflective movement between dissonant realities, as if everything in the world were simply mashed up into one formless mass of information and reality. God, the Scriptures, the life of prayer, can become just another set of images that flash and disappear on our screens, among all the other common realities of the internet: endless ads, pornography, social media clamor, relentless newsfeeds, all disorganized and “indifferently related.”
At least one reason that some people are returning to traditional forms of Christian faith is that these traditions order reality in ways that are deeply meaningful and intentionally distinct. Advent is not Christmas and Lent is not Easter, but all the seasons are part of an intelligible whole that is composed of its essential distinctions. This is true of Christian spaces as well. An Anglican church, for example, is not traditionally a multiuse space, but one where different features of the building have distinct and singular purposes. In the BCP service of consecration of a church, the bishop stands at the altar, the font, the chancel, the lectern, and prays that they would each fulfill their spiritual purpose. The church is consecrated by the bishop: “separating it henceforth from all unhallowed, ordinary, and common uses; and dedicating it entirely to thy service, for reading therein thy most holy word, for celebrating the holy Sacraments, for offering to thy glorious majesty the sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving” (1962 BCP, p. 684).
Consecration is not a kind of magic, but a spiritual determination that certain purposes will be fulfilled, purposes that are easily lost, confused, or ignored in the Christian life. Though it would be difficult to measure, it is not clear to me that the proliferation of Bible apps and online Bible platforms have increased or deepened scriptural knowledge among God’s people. The opposite actually seems true: we have become scattered, distracted and impatient readers of Scripture, at a time when a singularity of purpose is most needed.
When reality is not intrinsically or meaningfully ordered, confusion and despair begin to overwhelm people. We live in a society that seems increasingly unsure of how to separate good from evil, truth from falsehood, love from hatred. The consequence is that we are increasingly unsure how to act or what to do, what Borgmann calls a kind of moral paralysis. The bishop’s prayer seems especially apt today: “Grant, O Lord, that by thy Holy Word, which shall be proclaimed in this place, the hearers thereof may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same.”
I still read the Bible online, and make use of prayer apps as there are circumstances in which it makes complete and practical sense. But more and more, I find a kind of spiritual solace in putting the device far from reach and entering into the solitude of Scripture. As for many people, the seemingly “supernatural brilliance” of the digital world often seems to me more compelling or real than the world of the Bible. But so far as I can tell, distinguishing one reality from another will be one of the most critical vocations of the church in the years to come.
