Social Media Sabbatical Week Two: Presence vs. Procrastination, & Prayer

One of my goals for this social media fast/sabbatical was to be more present in my daily life, to pay attention to what I am doing and who I am with at any given moment rather than shifting my gaze to a virtual community.

So far, that’s been happening, more, but it still requires some effort on my part. Giving up Twitter doesn’t magically help me become engaged with what’s happening in front of me. My capacity to be distracted is immense. My ability to zone out is not to be discounted. This week I started reading a book that called  Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything (recommended to me by the magic algorithms of amazon.com) which has a chapter titled “Never Underestimate the Inclination to Bolt.” In the chapter, the author talks about a silent retreat she attended where she attempted to hire a helicopter to come pick her up in the middle of the Joshua Tree State Park desert, because she couldn’t handle being alone inside her own head for so long.

I realize my inclination to bolt is always there. Whenever I sit down to work or write, I immediately have the urge to get on Twitter or Facebook, because if I do that, I can procrastinate working just a bit longer. This week, without social media, I’ve turned to eating as a way to procrastinate work. I ate an entire batch of Toll House cookies in three days (Toll House cookies, by the way, are the pinnacle of Western civilization. “I thought classical rhetoric was the pinnacle,” said my husband. “Nope,” I said, “it’s Toll House cookies, for sure.”). But I keep procrastinating, keep eating, keep bolting, rather than doing the hard work of being alone with my thoughts (that’s what writing is, of course —being alone with your thoughts).

I have also found that I feel like I don’t have anyone to talk to (not true, of course, but that is what it feels like). I miss my online community, because they listen to me and respond. And then the inevitable thought: does that mean I’m using social media as a substitute for prayer?

Yikes.

What might that mean? Does that mean social media is, at least in the short term, as satisfying (or perhaps more so) as prayer is? Instant gratification, instant confirmation, instant reassurance. That’s what social media gives me, anyway. Prayer is harder work.

I have found that prayer is not virtual, but more like an “IRL” relationship (what online folks call “in real life,” or, more disgustingly, “meat space”). A prayer relationship with God is one that builds over time. It can be frustrating, painful, excruciating. It can be joyful, delightful, fulfilling. Sometimes it is all of those things at once. Sometimes it is none of those, but just dry, or lonely, or boring. Prayer does not “naturally” come to fill up the space what social media, or food, or any other Lenten fast leaves. It is hard, and because it is hard, I want to bolt from it.

I need to read this again: Practicing the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. He talks about being present where you are, and in that present, praying. This is the exact opposite of bolting. This is what I’m wanting from my social media sabbatical.

As great as Toll House cookies are, they’re not what I want out of Lent. OK, they’re not all I want.