We Used To Be Souls
Turn off, tune out, drop in
Almost 25 years ago, when my husband and I were newlyweds, I remember saying to him, “I think technology might take us out.”
It was a gut feeling…an impending sense that something radical was about to change in the culture, in humanity and in the Souls of man.
I think, as do many others, that we’ve now peaked in our digital insanity and can go no further. I think about this as much as I think about anything else.
And as a brand new Catholic, at 52 years old, my entire orientation in the world has shifted. Having come from the world of new age spirituality, where the spiritual buffet is your oyster - a little bit of mediumship, with a dollop of tarot, sprinkling some past life regression and finishing with a nice, psychic chianti - my compass has turned due North; upward; heavenly; to God and God alone.
This has reoriented everything, including my physical life and the attention I pay to worldly things.
While I always had a sense that our prolific online life dangerously mimicked a kind of Master and Servant quality (this master being of a serpentine nature), I think I underestimated just how nefarious and disorienting these digitized worlds are.
Changes in dopamine, increase in anxiety, catastrophizing, group-think, extremism, conspiratorial thinking, disruption of circadian rhythms, paranoia, nervous system dysregulation, abrupt changes to socialization, addiction, chronic exposure to radiation, 24 hour a day access to pornography, gambling and shopping…these are just some of what we are dealing with.
For someone who deals with chronic autoimmune issues, I have come to ask God in prayer to unburden me - to help me pick up this cross and follow Him. Many insights have come as a result of daily prayer and contemplation: to shift certain relationships, to tell the truth no matter what (a very big deal in any autoimmune sufferer) and to completely recalibrate my relationship with tech.
And you might wonder what tech use and the digital world has to do with someone who deals with illness. And let’s say illness of any kind; including anxiety, depression, rumination, issues of self-worth, addiction….All of these, at their core, expose a highly sensitive soul; a porous person, someone who absorbs their environment like a sponge and is then tasked at parsing apart what they digest.
I don’t know about you, but that is my experience. I take it all in with my eyes, my senses, my body. I feel everything down to the cellular level. Always have. And then I begin the task of sorting through and making sense of what my eyes, ears and senses are taking in.
Some of us do this more than others and I’m talking to you.
This, right here, is probably the best reason to flip the bird to the internet. Because it fries our circuits. We were not meant to take in the sheer amount of information, images, opinions, conflict and fear that the internet throws at us every time we open an app.
Our human circuitry was not built that way.
It would be like watching 8 - 10 horror movies a day and wondering why we were suddenly jumpy all the time and couldn’t sleep at night.
Andrew Sullivan, a British-American political commentator published an article in New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer in 2016 - so keep in mind we’re almost a decade deeper into this digital chasm - called I Used To Be A Human Being.
He writes a highly compelling account of his own slow seduction by the digital world that made him both physically sick and mentally broken. He believes it’s been the systemic erosion of the silence that all of us once had consistent access to, that has changed us so irrevocably.
Faith and religion, he says, were marginalized both by design and accident. As modernity crept in with industrialization, consumerism and finally digitization, we found ourselves in territory where the constant white noise rendered the transcendent irrelevant.
The Soul and its orientation to silence simply could not endure in this new space.
But there’s a much bigger issue at stake. It is the issue of Identity. Not only is this not an inconsequential issue but it may be the single most important undertaking of your life.
No one writes more poetically and more succinctly about Identity than Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk, writer and theologian.
He wrote that, “The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God…Therefore I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in Him.”
So unless I am oriented upwards and outwards, I cannot hope to find out who I really am.
I stress the ‘upwards and outwards’ part because everything that I learned in new age practice was the exact opposite.
It’s all in YOU! Look inside and you will find yourself. All of the seeds are planted within.
This might have worked if we were all living in the pre-Enlighenment era. In medieval life, we saw ourselves as Souls, first. That was our primary orientation. We lived in a devoutly religious world and we lived as if God was the final destination.
Because He was. He still is.
But the ‘Soul’ gave way to ‘The Self’ in the era of the Enlightenment, where religion gave way to reason and the intellect. And then ‘The Self’ gave way to each, individual ‘Identity’ during the Sexual Revolution.
We decided that we could invent and reinvent ourselves based on how we felt in a given moment or phase, depending on what feelings or desires were coursing through our veins at the time.
We conflated our most base desires with our Identity. We, as Bishop Barron says, became ‘incurvatus in se’ or curved in on oneself. We became our egos and our desires.
In Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism, prophetically written in 1979, he wrote about a culture that had become performative and totally individuated. He wrote that, “…people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to “relate,” overcoming the “fear of pleasure.””
This, he says, is our ill-fated attempt at establishing a single, autonomous identity, rather than submersing our identity in a larger cause.
He goes on to say that as religious life took a nose dive, a therapeutic model birthed itself in its place. “The new therapies spawned by the human potential movement…teach that “the individual will is all powerful and totally determines one’s fate”; thus they intensify the “isolation of self.”
How could we have known that to focus in on the ‘self’ and its feelings, its desires, its improvement and optimization, would make us the most miserable.
Talk about the ultimate cosmic joke.
But we kept going and going and ultimately came to see this as seeking higher consciousness through ‘self-development.’ But this can never be. We can never know who were we were ultimately meant to be without a direct and deep relationship with God.
God conceived of you, after all. “Even the hairs on your head are numbered.” - Matthew 10:30
You know yourself by knowing God.
And where do we find God, but in the silence. In his creations where his creations are nothing but themselves.
As Thomas Merton says so poetically, “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him. It “consents,” so to speak, to His creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.”
What profound simplicity.
What ease.
We were built for this kind of ease.
Years ago in new age retreat of all things, God managed to find His way into my experience. During the end of retreat meditation, I ‘met’ God, directly.
I was held…suspended before Him in the most profound silence I’ve ever experienced in my life. He asked me a question in the silence…Are you ready?
No, I said. He already knew what my answer was. But the question was asked because one day, I would be ready.
And here I am.
Fumbling, in all of my humanity through the silence, back to God.
The space in which I met Him that day was totally, deafeningly silent. The silence held everything.
I remember knowing that all things burst forth from this silence. It was encoded. It was Life itself. It was the creative force of the Universe.
We can’t expect to find ourselves, then, in the noise. In the opinion of others. In the comments section. In the side-taking, in the performance, in the dualing egos, in the culture wars, in the “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS leftist in gruelling debate…”
It’s all just noise.
What I have learned is that the Devil distracts. The dark one entertains. He finds infinite ways to keep you from God. It may not seem nefarious but this near constant distraction may be the Devil’s most clever game.
The truth is, you have a destination. Your Soul has a blueprint. Like a tree is simply a tree and is therefore at total peace, you too have an ‘is-ness’ about you.
You fingerprint is the only one in existence. You have been created with a supreme purpose. Not to perform and or gain attention or dance like a monkey for the masses.
That’s just the darkness calling you back.
You have been created for an ongoing encounter with Love itself. It’s the only place that you will find yourself.
Find God and you find yourself.
Thomas Merton has a final warning to us: “The “marriage” of body and soul in one person is one of the things that makes man the image of God; and what God has joined no man can separate without danger to his sanity.”
Our sanity, I believe, is on the line. We can keep going down, down, down this digital rabbit hole…this performative, prideful experiment…or we can put it down, completely, to join body and soul in a reunion with the One our hearts truly long for.
I believe there is a revolution at hand. One that rejects the insanity of this new, digital age. The numbers currently returning to religion are staggering. Something is afoot.
Turn off. Delete if you must. Go UP. Look up. Have a daily encounter with your Maker. Find out who you were meant to be.
Take off your mask and step into your Destiny.