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Combatting the 'Evening Demon'
Dear Parish Faithful,
In continuation from Thursday's Lenten Meditation, taken from Sister Vassa's book Praying in Time, I have included today some of her very practical advice on how to combat what she calls the "'evening demon' that drags us by our fingertips to our phones at night." Of course, if you face no such challenge you do not have to read further except, perhaps, out of sheer curiosity.
Sister Vassa is by vocation a monastic, but she is not currently attached to a monastery, but lives in an apartment in downtown Vienna, Austria. So she understands the challenges of urban life and of living within a different way of reckoning and experiencing time. All the more important for us to learn how to "redeem the time," and even "sanctify" time through well-structured and consistent prayer. Be that as it may, here are some of her "timely" points of advice - someone edited - for us to think about as we turn Great Lent into a real "springtime of the soul."
1. "Turn off the phone at least half an hour before bedtime, and leave it in another room, not your bedroom, until at least one half-hour after you wake up in the morning. ...
2. "Don't depend on an app or texts in your phone; use a prayer book instead, if you read the Evening Prayers of the Prayer Book."
3. "If you are plagued by thoughts of possible emergencies that might happen at night, and of which you might be notified via your phone, ask yourself: When was the last time you were notified at night, via your phone, of such an emergency? Would it have changed anything, were you to have found in the morning? And, what did we all do in such cases, before we had mobile phones?
4. "Do not despair or give up on evening prayer entirely, if/when you slip, staying up late into the night with your nose in your phone for no good reason. Tomorrow is another day and another evening, when God willing, we will have the chance to do better.... I'll note here that I think it's very important that we keep talking to God, even when we completely lose focus, because that keeps up breathing, so to say, even when we feel close to (spiritual) death. God wants us continuously to stay in touch with him, even when we are down, just like a first responder bends over a barely conscious person who has been in an accident, saying, "Keep talking to me! Look at me! Keep talking to me"!"
