2018.9.23 Sabbath Practice: Thou Shalt Unplug

2018.9.23 Sabbath Practice: “Thou Shalt Unplug”        Rev. Laura Bogle

Foothills UU Fellowship

Wisdom “text”: Nowhere Man by JohnLennon (listen and read lyrics here)

“He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land

Making all his nowhere plans for nobody

Doesn't have a point of view
Knows not where he's going to
Isn't he a bit like you and me?”

John Lennon.  I'm treating his song as sacred text today.  Text to be exegeted, interpreted like a scripture passage. 

The interesting story I found, somewhat ironically through the wonders of the internet, is the story that Lennon himself tells about writing this song.

Lennon: “I’d spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down.  Then ‘Nowhere Man’ came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down…So letting it go is what the whole game is.”  (1980 interview.  See citation here:  http://www.beatlesebooks.com/nowhere-man )

Paradoxically, when he was trying his hardest to do something, to go somewhere, he was going nowhere.  When he let himself just be, then the song came to him.

What does this have to do with technology and practicing Sabbath?

The thing about my iphone and my computer is they let me be everywhere else but right here.  They let me fall into the trap of thinking I have important things to do all the time.  They are tools that enable non-presence.

Confession time:  How often have I been sitting at a stop light, and decide to just check my email?

Or I’m sitting at the gymnastics place where I take my daughter and rather than watch her I scroll mindlessly through Facebook.

Or I get up during dinner to check to see the text that just pinged on my phone.

Spiritual director Stephen Smith describes our current technological culture as “always on, always available and always looking for something else to do.”

Are you always on, always available, and always looking for something else to do?  We think we are going somewhere, checking email, Facebook, texts, etc. but actually we are nowhere.

Nowhere man 

Doesn't have a point of view
Knows not where he's going to

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

– maybe because he is constantly saturated with other people’s input and perspectives

– maybe because he is going in several directions at once – distracted by a youtube video while simultaneously toggling between email and Facebook.

Just this year, musician Chris Thile wrote in his song “Power Off and Carry On”:

"I come to blinking in the void of light rising from my palm
Whose is this dusty mind, lousy with thoughts that aren’t mine or even necessarily from someone who knows of what they’re speaking?"

Now, look, I am not anti-technology.  I found that story about John Lennon because I was able to go online and search for some background about his song.  I found those Chris Thile lyrics because I heard the song on the radio and then I could go look them up.  It’s amazing to be able to access so much information.

And I can genuinely say that my life has been enriched by connections I am able to maintain in some way through technology – social media, texting, even the classroom app my daughter’s 2^nd grade teacher uses so we can get more glimpses into how she is spending her day.

But there is this shadow side.  This way of being that some call “absent presence” that today’s technology seems to encourage in many of us.

Study earlier this year by the Pew Research Center found that a quarter of Americans say they go online “almost constantly” and another 43% go online several times a day. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/14/about-a-quarter-of-americans-report-going-online-almost-constantly/

What is the impact?

Nowhere man please listen
You don't know what you're missing.

What are we missing when we are absently present?

Can the connectivity found through technology really take the place of real, in-person, human interactions?  When we aren’t fully present to ourselves, or with those we love, or even with the cashier in front of us at the store, where are we?  What are we actually looking for when we are “almost constantly” online?  And what does it do to my sense of self, to my soul?

He's as blind as he can be
Just sees what he wants to see
Nowhere man, can you see me at all?

The question I am trying to ask myself more often when I reach for my phone or my computer is, “What is this really for?” Do I have a purpose here or am I simply avoiding being present to someone or something else?  Or am I, perhaps, trying to fill some kind of void?  That void can be a desire to feel loved and connected. 

It can also simply be the void of boredom, or a feeling that I don’t know what to do with myself.

An article last year in the Atlantic Magazine cited a recent study by psychologists who found that “two-thirds of men and a quarter of women would rather self-administer electric shocks than sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/make-time-for-boredom/524514/

When we are constantly connected to input from other sources – whether that is social media or even television and radio—what we may be missing out on is ourselves.

Another question I am trying to ask about my technology use is “Who is this really for, and why?”  For instance, while I’m not planning to get off of Facebook anytime soon—though I have considered it-- I think it is important to remember that the platform is big business.  It is, of course, interwoven with a Western capitalist culture of consumption.

Judith Donath, author of “The Social Machine, Designs for Living Online,” has commented, “If your objective is to get people to buy more stuff, you do not want a population of people who look at what they have and at the friends and family surrounding them, and think to themselves ‘life is good, I appreciate what I have, and what I have is enough.’

If your goal is to manipulate people, to keep a population anxious and fearful so that they will seek a powerful, authoritarian leader – you will not want technologies and products that provide people with a strong sense of calm and well-being. Keeping people in a continual state of anxiety, anger, fear, or just haunted by an inescapable, nagging sense that everyone else is better off than they are can be very profitable.” 

Nowhere man, the world is at your command.

So, what do we do about this?

Well, no surprise, I think we have to intentionally set aside a different kind of time, Sabbath time.

Sabbath time is time to put everything back in its proper place—ourselves, our phones, our computers, our relationships with each other, with the earth, with God or the source of our being.

Sabbath time is being present. Being, instead of doing.

As poet Christopher Giffen says, Sabbath time is resting “from being who everyone else knows me to be.” It is time resting “from being put together and up to speed.”

Sabbath time is being right here even if we are bored or confused about what to do next.  And then seeing where that leads.

Sabbath time is paying attention and being grateful for what we do have.  It is remembering that we don’t earn or create the gift of life.

Sabbath time is letting go of the fear of missing out – as Wendell Berry says, Sabbath “asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help.”

Sabbath time is engaging in purposeless enjoyment with others, like playing a game like we did in worship last week.

Sabbath time can be the lunch hour without your phone.  It can be a nap that lets creative thoughts arise in you.  It can be turning off your computer and putting away your phone at a certain time every day.

It can be setting aside a day a week to disengage from technology and see what that feels like.

Sabbath time is reclaiming ourselves, our inherent worth and dignity that does not depend on how many “likes” we get or how good we are responding to the email in our inbox.

You know, John Lennon wrote Nowhere Man well before the age of the internet- but the struggle is the same, just with different trappings.  And his spiritual wisdom is the wisdom of spiritual traditions around the world: “letting it go is what the whole game is.”

May we all find Sabbath time-- time to let go, unplug, be right here.

Amen.