Truly Present: Understanding Unplugging and Silence with God

I’m in the chapel at 2:00pm during my first year of college. I have set it up so that my watch quietly vibrates when my holy hour is over. There is no need to look at my phone because I have my watch. This was done for me to focus just on the Lord during my holy hour, rather than getting distracted by my colorful smartphone. I did not feel like I could ever focus fully on my holy hour if my smartphone was in my purse in the chapel. I knew it was not good to always feel like I had to check my phone. “What could I be missing? Did anybody text me? Did my grade for that paper get posted? Ah! I’m so anxious!!!” This is what I would say to myself everytime I grabbed my phone. No matter how I tried, I still could only stay away from my phone.

This phone that I carried in my pocket (I say “carried” in past tense because I got rid of my smartphone) was designed to distract me from my day-to-day life off the screen. We are made for a relationship with God. Silence and Solitude is spoken about by many of the Saints as absolutely essential for cultivating a thriving spiritual life. Before I made changes to start being more intentional with my technology, I was finding it incredibly difficult to carve out silence in my life. My prayer life was dead and nonexistent because of my restlessness.

I decided to give up social media for Lent in 2023, simply because I saw an Instagram post from a popular Catholic content creator that shared her decision to log off of social media for Lent. I was in the middle of multiple different life transitions: recently graduated college, starting professional life, and a long-term relationship ending. It was struggling to handle it all. I caught myself crashing on the couch every day when I came home from work, and I would scroll on my phone for hours until I would go to sleep. I was not making new friends. I was not enjoying my work. I was wishing that I would still be in college. I was not living in the present moment. During that Lent, I deleted podcast apps, photos, YouTube, music, and most of my apps from my phone. What I experienced from that fast changed my life. I grew to learn about my spiritual life in ways beyond what I could imagine. I didn’t expect the effect it would have on my battle with sin either. Of course, I do not expect the battle with sin to ever be easy, but there are ways I have found our smartphones contribute to this battle.

Getting rid of my smartphone has already helped me with pursuing virtue. Certain deadly sins (lust, gluttony, sloth, and greed) are less available to me now. Impurity has run rampant on the internet in our current culture. You can order takeout dinner to your doorstep at the push of a button. Online shopping makes it way too easy to overbuy material goods. It is slothful to lay down and unintentionally scroll on social media or a streaming service for multiple hours at a time, rather than entering into holy rest and leisure. In a world where sin runs rampant, unplugging from it has been one of the greatest blessings in battling sin in my life.

In my daily car drives, my conversations with other people, and in the little moments, I started to see God and hear God more intimately. Rather than being in a rush constantly, being plugged into my notifications, having work at my fingertips, and scrolling on social media for hours, I found time in the grocery store checkout line, in traffic, and on my lunch break to say quick prayers, think of God, and call on God. God started being part of the mundane, and I started to love the mundane. I prefer to slow down because that is where deeper connection with God happens. Deeper connection with God is where purification and healing have happened in my life. When I have been scrolling on social media, binge-watching YouTube, and blasting music into my headphones, it usually has come from a place of escapism and avoidance. I wanted to avoid the pain, responsibilities, and disappointments of my present moment. When I have allowed the noise to silence, I might have to face pain, responsibility, and disappointment; however, Jesus is brought to that space. While processing the discomfort, Jesus shows me how to navigate each thing that happens in my life in a way that glorifies Him. True Joy is found on the other side of each obstacle. This is possible no matter what choices someone makes with their digital life; however, I found boundaries in this area to be a major contributor to having a more consistent prayer life. In our noisy and distracted culture, I see a major need to turn back towards the language of God: silence.