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Dear Parish Faithful,
People who grew up with phones—and even many older people who didn’t—can’t read a novel anymore, sit through a film without looking at their phones, sit through a TV show without pausing it to check their emails, finish an article online—in short, can’t really do anything without multitasking. There’s no moment of rapture in reading the first page of a book because the mind no longer expects to reach the end. The old tools of storytelling are obsolete; distraction supersedes even entertainment, let alone art. And because we can’t narrate our lives, “we can’t construct narratives connected to our own inner truth.” Truth simply falls out of the human vocabulary, replaced by big data: charts, memes, viral clips. Phono sapiens is “lost” in a “forest of information,” without passion or purpose.
—Matthew Gasda
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Not exactly the usual "lenten" fare that I have been sending out this Great Lent. But no less challenging than what we have read thus far from a Church Father, or our more contemporary voices: Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Frs. Alexander Schmemann, Thomas Hopko, and Lev Gillet, to mention a few. My contribution is not to add what you just read above, but to admit - confess! - that I, too, have found myself doing the same mindless and meaningless "stuff" with my phone. I am glad to be a member of homo sapiens, but distressed to even think that unless I am vigilant, I may be degraded to the ranks of Phono sapiens! In fact to curtail some of the above in my own life has been one of my focused "lenten projects" this year. Yet, I do continue to read long novels (and watch films) with great joy and attention, I am glad to further share. A suggestion: Choose a good, long novel for the summer and commit to reading it from start to finish.
