When to Shush your Phone for a Long Exhale

 

Last Thursday my phone vibrated off the window ledge in front of the sink (smart, huh?) and went swimming in a pool of bubbles. Unfortunately, it was already cracked in a spider web from stem to stern. There was little hope for survival.

 

The slow bake didn’t work. The rice bag backfired. The reality? No more phone.

 

What started as panic turned out to be an invitation to remember what quiet sounded like. The crickets chirping from under the bush. The hum of the refrigerator. It was also an invitation to listen to the sheer level of noise bouncing off the walls of my interior life. More on that in a moment.

 

 

What started as forced silence turned longer. At the same time Hurricane Florence wreaked havoc on the coast of Texas, it also brought the logistics department at the AT&T warehouse to a screeching halt. My phone arrived in a small tan package on my welcome mat six days late. And yes, I checked Every. Single. Day. I’m only human People.  

 

But this gave me a week full of almost silence. Sure I could access Facebook on my computer and Netflix on my tv but I found I didn’t reach for the remote as fast. The silence lingered longer.

 

I found I craved it. And it surprised me.

 

I recognized that what had started out involuntary had become a healthy pause, a deep breath, an internal spaciousness.

 

 

It shouldn’t have surprised me. During my spiritual direction residencies when we had scheduled silence from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning I was positively giddy. No agenda. No one to take care of. (Anyone else an enneagram 2?) Just the gift of gorgeously velvet slow hours.

 

On episode 23 of Unhurried Living’s podcast, Gem and Alan Fadling chat about the beauty of a rhythm of life. Rhythms of Life, (rules of Life as St. Benedict called them) give people a chance to schedule nourishment, spiritual disciplines, and rest in order to undergird an active life. It’s a brilliant episode. I hand it out to many of my spiritual directees. Alan and Gem give an illustration of 3 different active saints and their rhythms of life: William Wilberforce, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King.  

 

Ever since I heard the episode, Mother Teresa’s rhythm has stuck in my head. One hour of silence a day. One day of silence a week. One week of silence a month. One month of silence a year.

 

What happened in those silent hours which enabled her to get back on the streets of Calcutta with her pitcher full to the brim with compassion? My guess is that in the quiet she slowly set down the heaviness of her work. Maybe even in the silence she remembered her smallness.

 

 

This lectio divina scripture from Mark 9 (embedded in this blogpost below) includes those words of plucking out eyes to save our souls. They feel awkward. Extreme. Usually I rush right past them. But in the light of this week’s invitation to silence, they no longer sounded extreme; they sounded like an invitation to life.  

 

Kris McDaniels preached a sermon at Trinity Atlanta a few weeks ago and invited us to listen to our need for solitude because it’s in the silence, he said, that we attend to the hard questions.

 

And in these verses of cutting off and plucking out I heard these questions: Is my phone time bringing life? Or is it bringing death?

 

And here’s how those questions are getting parsed out in my head: Is my phone building the kingdom in my soul (in the world)? Or Is it tearing it down like vines grasping old bricks? Am I more filled with the fruit of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, self-control, etc.) during and after? Or am I filled with comparison and depression, striving and noise?  

And if I’m honest, in the course of one day’s time there’s often a whole basket of both/and.

 

 

The truth is that often this tiny black screen is a door wide open (the podcasts, the accessibility to my people, the music etc.) and other times it’s like sitting in a crowded, smoky cocktail party in a too-tight dress grasping one too many.

 

And I’m wondering after this week of quiet if the difference between life and death with this bossy little thing is a rhythm of life. I’m wondering if having a pattern of engagement and withdrawal will reflect the rhythm of an inhale and a slow exhale. Perhaps it will be one hour a day (or many more?), one day a week, one week a month, one month a year. 

 

Is a rhythm of life something you’ve thought about? Or is it new?  What’s yours? Is there something you’d like to add?

(Get weekly lectio divinas and encouragement for the WITH-God life by subscribing on the right.)

 

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash, Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash, Photo by Nicolas Prieto on Unsplash, Photo by George Morgan on Unsplash, Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash