Do you need a digital detox?

You know how you see people on the sidewalk, or in the crosswalk, in what's become a typical pose--one elbow crooked like they're flexing a bicep, a hand raised to about six inches in front of their face? They're squinting, face glued to the tiny screen in front of them. Or think about how often you see people at a restaurant, sitting comfortably across from each other but one of them is texting while the other looks idly at her food. Sometimes she's glued to the screen as well.

Or, God forbid, the number of people at a stop light, looking down into a little screen.

It's hard to get away from the constant and instant access afforded by our digital devices.

A recent study found that 80 percent of 1,000 U.S. workers surveyed worked after leaving the office. The study found people check their email in bed in the morning (50%), before 8 a.m. (68%), after 10 p.m. (40%), when they are out with their families (57%), and when they are at the dinner table (38%). And 69 percent say they can't go to bed without doing so. All of this means we are almost working an entire extra day of work from home. (The Atlantic Wire website, July 2, 2012)

But there's a revolt afoot. Or, at least, there are young cultural leaders who are finding a more healthy way to live in relationship to these devices.

Digital Detox is a movement started by a young 28 year old techy, who hosts parties and even weeklong summer camping "retreats" that help tech-obsessed young people get off the grid and find a better way to be human again.

Here's what the movement says about itself:

Disconnect from technology and reconnect with yourself. Recharge your mind, body and soul.

Digital Detox is an organization dedicated to finding and creating more balance in the digital age.

The Digital Detox retreat is a tech-free personal wellness retreat where attendees give up their smart-phones and gadgets in exchange for a few days of serenity and bliss.

Intention: Maybe I can't get away for a weeklong detox from the technology that too often runs my life, but I can learn to take breaks, close my lap top, turn off my phone, and engage the world that's right about me. The world won't end.

Are we frozen by fear?

Each morning I bring in the newspaper and unfold it on the kitchen counter. Each morning my wife asks the same question, "Is there any good news? Tell me some good news." There's not much. More revelations about the government's mining of private data. Labor camps in China. The Taliban bomb Kabul.  Egypt teetering again. The sad story of a mother separated from her daughter by the Mexican-American border fence. Turkish protests. More Syrian brutality.

We seem frozen by fear, mistrust, anger, violence, greed.

So I put down the paper and turn to a book of theology. I read these words from Catholic scholar Connie Fitzgerald:

"At a time when polarization, suspicion, denouncement, investigation, silencing, alienation, anger, cynicism and sadness divide our Church, and when our country is rocked by economic meltdown precipitated by years of wrongdoing and greed, our earth menaced with extinction, the religions of the world plagued with extremism and age-old distrust that fuel war and terrorism, the people of the world abused with violence, slavery and deprivation too great to measure. . . We are encumbered by old assumptions, burdened by memories that limit our horizons and, therefore, unfree to see God coming to us from the future."

I read this and find hope again.

Am I odd? Maybe.

But I'm Christian, and that means I find hope in the oddest places.

It was along the road to Emmaus, that two disciples frozen in fear, "unfree to see God coming" to them from the future, met the risen Christ. Or better, were met by Christ. And I think the latter sentence makes all the difference in the world.

Intention: Today, I'll let myself feel the sense of impasse, gridlock, even despair that plagues our world. And then I'll hold loosely the old assumptions and burdensome memories which are our chains. I may not be able to rid myself of them completely, but I can decide not to be enslaved by them. I'll open myself to see God coming to me from the future.

A simple way to begin the day

The alarm goes off before dawn. I hit snooze . . . at least once. My wife finally nudges me and I turn off the alarm and click the prayer app on my smart phone. For ten drowsy minutes we lie there, listening to the guided prayer from Pray As You Go. A bell begins this morning meditation on scripture. The summons to prayer is followed by an introduction by a lovely British voice, then a piece of sacred music. All this prepares us for the reading of the text for the day, and a few sentences spoken reflectively, inviting us to listen for the whisper of God illuminating our lives, preparing us to experience God this day.

Look, I don't always stay awake for the whole thing. But that doesn't matter as much as the fact that the sounds are awakening my mind and heart to the Holy even before I put my feet on the floor. It has an effect beyond my rational awareness of that effect.

Of course, sometimes, I'm stunned by the appropriateness of the meditation to what happened the day before, what came to me in my dreams, or what I sense is before me. But much of the time, it's just a gentle influence upon my first conscious thoughts . . . a better way to start the day, than stumbling in the dark, muttering to myself about the day that's already coming hard at me with its many obligations.

Take a look; better, listen in daily as a way to start a fire of prayer on the hearth of your heart.

Pray-as-you-go, http://www.pray-as-you-go.org

Intention: I'll try this simply guide to prayer, either tonight as I prepare for sleep or tomorrow morning as I awaken.

The way you awaken each day matters

The way you awaken each day matters. It can set the mood, and that mood can affect or infect the rest of your day. You know what it feels like to awaken in a panic because you're running late. You don't eat. You're still getting ready during your commute. You pick up breakfast on the way--a sweet roll or breakfast burrito with coffee from the drive through. (And why is it you think the drive through saves you time?). You get to work or class barely on time, adrenalin pumping through your body. And let's be honest, by now, you're as addicted to the always-running-late adrenalin rush as you are to the coffee you need to get you going.

Maybe it's hard to imagine living differently, setting a different mood as you awaken. But there's a part of you that would like to. There's a part of you that needs to, whether you know it or not. You can't live this way all the time. You need good sleep and good food. You need exercise. You need prayer. I know, getting these sounds impossible. But get even one or two of them and you'll change the way you live your day, the way you experience living.

There's probably a lot that you can change about the way you awaken each day. Getting to bed earlier. Falling asleep without the TV on. Rising early enough that you can actually enjoy some kind of morning routine. Boiling a few eggs the night before, so you can spend six and a half minutes eating a hard boiled egg and a little yogurt instead of sitting in line at the drive through.

Just try one thing to shift the way you awaken, and that one thing, no matter how small, will change the way you enter the day.

Intention: Tonight, I'll do one thing to prepare myself to enter the day with more purpose than I did this morning. That'll give me a little traction so I'll be less a victim and more a victor.

Receiving the gifts of those very different from ourselves

A few days ago, I sat on a train, headed to Los Angeles for meetings. I was minding my own business. Since Amtrak has wireless, I was grading student reflections on their reading of Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. The readings invited them to move out of the zone of their own comfort to encounter God in others. One of them, Joseph, wrote:

"God created us to be in relationship with one another. It is my tendency (and I believe most of humanity's tendency) to shut out those around us. I can no longer assume that God can't use all people and all relationships to speak to me."

No sooner had I read this, than a man behind me asked if he could use my cell phone. Busy with my "work" I'd taken no real notice of him. "I said 'no.'" And went back to my work. He stood up and started down the aisle with an handful of five dollar bills asking people if he could pay to use a phone.

He was a middle aged black man, dressed in a black T-shirt and sweat pants. The T-shirt was new. It still had the crease lines from being recently liberated from its package.

"I need to call my wife and tell her I'm arriving at Union Station in LA."

He looked desperate. And his desperation pulled me out of my cramped, little world just enough for me to say, "Hey, use mine. But you don't have to pay for it."

After he'd made the call, I learned that he was on his way home after several years in prison. "Just out this morning," he told me. "Can't wait to see my wife. But I can't walk from the station, 'cause the shoes she sent me are too small."

He grinned happily despite his discomfort. A man who'd just be let out of prison was seeing the world with new eyes.

I've never known a day behind bars, but captivity doesn't require a jail cell. I need others, people very different from myself, to step out of all that holds me captive inside my own cramped little world.

Intention: Help me today, Lord Christ, to see the world with the eyes of one who's not so used to it all that I can't enjoy its wonder.