January 13, 2011

To get right to the point, we at tothesource are asking readers (especially pastors, priests, ministers, and religious education instructors) to take The St. Augustine Challenge. The Challenge is simple. Read St. Augustine’s Confessions for one hour—and here’s the hard part—without interruption from the internet or cell phones. Not a minute here and a minute there; not in between checking your text messages; not while you’re surfing the net or answering email. One hour. Sixty minutes, back to back. You, the book, and silence. Then, after one hour is up, write down what you learned: about yourself, about your restless heart, about your mind’s capacity to concentrate.

We want to hear about what happened. We especially would like to hear from pastors, priests, and religious educators who would be bold enough to try the St. Augustine Challenge with their congregations or their students. We’ll publish representative responses in tothesource (anonymously, if requested). We also ask you to forward this email to others you think would be interested in taking the Challenge.

Of course, you want to know why. A few months ago I published a short article elsewhere about Nicholas Carr’s profoundly important book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Using the latest scientific data, Carr argues that the internet and smartphones are having a real, measurable, ill-effect on our brains. In sum, constant use of these new technologies actually atrophies the part of the brain that allows for concentration, deeper thought, and profound connection-making. The beep-click-surf-text technology is making over our brain in its image. We are losing—measurably losing—what defines us as human. We are becoming agitated and distracted, merely restless creatures.

Realizing that many readers would simply brush off Carr’s analysis as reactionary hype, I issued a challenge in my article: “Pick up a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions—a book—and read it, say, for an hour. The effect of reading a good book is to push away all other distractions, concentrate our mind, gather its powers, and draw it down deeply into the mind, the soul, of the author. Reading a good book is a lot like prayer; the power to pray is the result of controlling one’s attention, aiming one’s focus at God, and away from all distraction. Both demand quiet of soul. The medium of book and prayer, as modes of communication, both depend upon and produce the power of attention. Attention is the opposite of distraction; reading deeply is the opposite of surfing the surface.”

A reader—a man in charge of a youth religious education class—took up my challenge for his whole class: read St. Augustine’s Confessions for one hour at home, he bid them, then report the results.

He passed the results on to me, and they were quite interesting and predictable. Almost all of his students felt like they were being tortured. They tried to turn the powers of their mind to the page, but they found themselves longing for the distraction of the internet. Their minds continually reached for their cell phones, and it was all they could do to keep their hands from following. They felt agitated, uncomfortable, unable to concentrate. In a word, they were completely defined by restlessness of heart and mind.

Here’s the lesson, and it’s a hard one for all of us. We are rendering our souls completely incapable of concentration. We are becoming—by habit, and habit is second nature—agitated surfers of trivial information and titillation, restlessly splashing about in the shallows, when God and our soul are only found far down below the surface.

Note well. As Carr makes clear, the problem isn’t the substance of what appears on the internet, but the medium itself. St. Augustine’s Confessions is no doubt on the internet. But the difference the medium itself makes will be made clear if you take the St. Augustine Challenge on the web. Try reading it for an hour on the web without checking your email, without answering a call or a text message on your cell phone, without blipping off on an internet chase after some related or unrelated topic, without slipping off to your favorite news site or blog. The medium will bend you to itself.

Are we then saying that the internet and cell phones are evil? Obviously not—we’ve reached you through the internet. But we are saying that, as with all our machines, we have the God-given responsibility as creatures made in the image of God, to see that we not allow ourselves to be made in the image of our machines. They should serve our human needs and not deform our human nature. If we can’t concentrate, if we can’t read deeply, and most of all if we find ourselves unable to pray, then it’s a sign that we have become merely restless.

So, be brave. Take the St Augustine Challenge. We’re waiting to hear from you.

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