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Introduction

While scrolling through Twitter one day I came across a screenshot of a Snapchat taken at a high

school showing two circles of students congregating right next to each other. The Snapchat caption read “prayer circle next to the rap battle….” If you look again at the picture you can notice the rap battle circle has more students crowded within the chaotic excitement of the center, while the prayer circle is very orderly with every student in the circle holding the hand of the student next to them with each head bowed. I think we all need to admit that the odd and out-of-place part of this image is the prayer circle, and not the rap battle. This is for everyone else willing to admit that, and willing to talk about why. I write this in the spirit of St. Isidore of Seville, who Pope John Paul II proposed as the patron saint of the Internet in 1997. St. Isidore was considered the most educated man to had lived up to that point and had died in 636 writing a 20 book opus entitled Etymolgiae (Etymologies, also called Origins), in which he attempted to record literally everything that was known. It was considered the encyclopedia for all human knowledge for a thousand years. No one had attempted to do such a thing before. He collected knowledge from several different sources—whether that was knowledge on grammar, or medicine, or architecture, or angels—and created something beautiful. Knowledge was sacred for St. Isidore, and it mattered deeply.

I also hope to write this in the spirit of the Psalmist. The ‘Psalmist’ is usually the general term used when referring to the author of the Psalms. The Psalms had several different authors (even among the ones attributed to King David since it was normal in ancient Near Eastern writings to attribute something to the person you were inspired by when writing it) and several different curators, so the Psalmist isn’t an actual historical person. Rather, the ‘Psalmist’ provides us with an archetype of a kind of person whose heart is postured toward God. This is a person whose every thought and every emotion move with and toward God.

I am writing this in the year, 2015—the year Marty McFly time-traveled to in Back to the Future Part II. We are in the future, and we have to talk about that. I am writing this because I don’t know anyone else talking about prayer in the context of Post-Internet. I’m not writing this to outline a sort of path, or create a new theology. I want this to be a conversation starter. I want this to get people to start questioning how these things can relate in the world today—because we are in the future, and times have changed, and we must accept that.

I must also begin this piece on prayer with a clarification. We can all agree that whether God exists or not, the person making the prayer usually believes someone or something is listening. I’ve heard a lot of talk about what happens on the other end of that prayer after it leaves our lips, but I’ve come to the point where I’ve accepted that anything we say about what happens on the other end is speculation. The comforting friend will come with a wise justification after the prayer, for whatever the result—whether it’s God answers all prayers, but not in ways you’d expect, or Sometimes God just says no, or God will answer your prayer as soon as there is no sin in your life, or God wants you to fast about it first, or God wants you to get more people to pray the same prayer with you, or God just works in mysterious ways.

Even though that last justification is quite the cliché in the Christian world it is the one that I’m more comfortable leaning toward than any of those other answers. It is never me that is calling upon God, but rather I trust that God is the one calling upon me; and has always been calling upon me along with the rest of humanity. Any call upon God that I can muster up is actually a response to the call that I can’t ignore. What’s happening on the other end of that call, I cannot say for certain; and I will never be certain of any theory that we humans have developed over the period of our existence. As the Rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel said “We cannot make God visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to God.”1

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For millennia humans have cast their cares, worries, complaints and dreams up to divine beings,

in hope that they are being listened to. Whether there is someone listening on the other side I cannot prove, but I have radical hope that there actually is. I can also say that something truly transformative happens within the heart and mind when you are able to trust that there is something on the other side of your prayers. As a Christian I can say that the name of Jesus has named my spiritual experience. The name of Jesus haunts me like a trauma and lures me like a first love. The teachings and life of Jesus ring the most true to the type of person I want to be.

It has been posited that “we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar,”2 therefore if we had no linguistic ability to refer to something as God then we would have therefore never came up with a conception of God; thus we would then be rid of any idea of divine beings. That belief assumes that the conception of God formed because ancient humans had referred to whatever was mysterious, unexplainable and out of our control as ‘God’, and the idea just stuck around even after modern science helped answer some of those old questions. Perhaps this is the case, but what I know for sure is that I have always felt something pulling me forward, out of my selfish instincts. There is something that calls me to love more sincerely, and to do good for others. There is something outside myself that calls me beyond myself, and following the Way of Jesus has drawn me closer and closer to this call. Therefore I have faith that Jesus Christ is the one on the other side of my prayers. Yet again, I cannot discuss the mechanics or interworking of what happens on the other side of prayer, but rather I can trust that it is listened to.

This piece is more about what happens on our side of prayer. This is my attempt to talk about how we can continue to pray today, Post-Internet. Post-Internet is a helpful lens from contemporary art that describes artwork influenced by an awareness of the Internet. A PDF catalogue called Art Post-Internet (which inspired the title) by art curators, Karen Archey and Robin Peckham, clarifies that “post-internet refers not to a time ‘after’ the internet, but rather to an internet state of mind — to think in the fashion of the network.”3 Robin Peckham expands in a public talk about Post-Internet Art saying “the ‘post’ refers to a sense of continuity more than it does a sense of rupture. The ‘post’ implies that we have reached a point where an awareness of the Internet is engrained in our very beings; on a muscular level; on a cellular level.” 4

The Post-Internet discussion owes some credit to the New Aesthetic discussion as well. Aesthetics refers to how we see things and what we perceive as beauty. The discussion around a New Aesthetic began in 2011 when artist, James Bridle began to perceive new commonplace technologies with “a new wonder”.5 He, among others, began talking about how the way we perceive objects and images have changed since “the eruption of the digital into the physical”6 that’s been going on for a generation. A Harvard metalab article describes the sensibility of the New Aesthetic quite well, saying:

Central to the New Aesthetic is a sense that we’re learning to “wave at machines”—and that perhaps in their glitchy, buzzy, algorithmic ways, they’re beginning to wave back in earnest.7

Or as Marius Watz put it: “The New Aesthetic is faces glowing ominously as people walk down the street at night staring at their phones—or worse, their iPads.” 8

“Today, we don’t just consume stuff online,” music/culture journalist, Aimee Cliff explains. “We document every second of our interaction with said stuff. Within seconds of its release we reproduce it, screenshot it, memeify it and attach emojis to it…Our culture is a feedback loop…”9

The Internet has changed how we interact with the world and each other. My oldest sibling can probably remember a time when there was no Internet. I can only remember a time when there was slow Internet. As a child I pondered how relationships functioned before telephones. The next

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generation will ponder how relationships functioned before smart phones, tablets, and social media. Then in a decade or so the things I just listed off will seem like relics. In their 2011 book Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge talk about spaces where architecture and software combine to co-create experiences. A good example would be an airport, where software is used to process people through terminals and onto airplanes. Take away the software, it wouldn’t work. Take away the people, it wouldn’t get done. Take away the terminals and airplanes, and there’s no point in being there. We are constantly collaborating with technology to co-create our experiences. These code/spaces are everywhere and we are beginning to trust our technologies more than each other.

James Bridle ended a lecture in 2012 by alluding to Harry Reed’s original vision for the mechanical computer. Harry Reed was a computer scientist who worked on the first electronic general-purpose computer, called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940’s. In 1996 Harry Reed said:

The ENIAC itself, strangely, was a very personal computer. Now we think of a personal computer as one which you carry around with you. The ENIAC was actually one that you kind of lived inside…So instead of your holding a computer, this computer held you.10

This metaphor of the computer holding us should rattle us, and yet it’s one of those things we

don’t want to know that we know. In the same way that we don’t want to know how the animals are treated to provide us with our meat we don’t want to pay attention to how addicted we truly are to this thing. “This stuff is kind of all around us,” concluded Bridle. “We’re living in the machine now, and we better start getting good at it.”11

And that bit of “getting good at it” is what I want to focus on. I don’t want to tell you to stop using the Internet. You’re not. And I’m not. Rather, we have to get good at it. We get good at it by not letting it destroy us. We get good at it by adapting to it responsibly. I am aware of the problems that the Internet has provoked in our culture but I am in no way an anti-Internet activist. I believe the anti-Internet folks—nostalgic for human connection, pre-internet—do not provide any long-term solutions. We are not going to get rid of the Internet.

Humans have always overreacted to technological advancements by trying to get people to stop using them. In his review of Nicholas Carr’s Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains Jonah Lehrer sums up a bit of this history well:

Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the “Phaedrus,” he lamented the invention of books, which “create forgetfulness” in the soul. Instead of remembering for themselves, Socrates warned, new readers were blindly trusting in “external written characters.” The library was ruining the mind. Needless to say, the printing press only made things worse. In the 17th century, Robert Burton complained, in “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” of the “vast chaos and confusion of books” that make the eyes and fingers ache. By 1890, the problem was the speed of transmission: one eminent physician blamed “the pelting of telegrams” for triggering an outbreak of mental illness. And then came radio and television, which poisoned the mind with passive pleasure. Children, it was said, had stopped reading books. Socrates would be pleased.12

We must respond like we always have to advancement. We must simply adapt to it and learn to

use it responsibly. This particular technological advancement called the Internet is not good or bad. It is a tool. What we do with it is a different story.

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The Internet is here to stay. In fact, looking toward the future, we may eventually become a

society stripped of all resources where Internet is unavailable. Our society’s dependence on the machine-to-machine communication to live normal, well-resourced lives will only increase. An analyst of Apple estimates Apple’s products serves users’ needs about one third of their day, but have the potential to increase to 75% in the future.13 This is normal for us.

I believe there is only one thing that the Internet cannot compromise. And that is prayer. Sure, plenty of websites are deeply committed to conveying requests for prayer, but the Internet provides no solace, consolation or alternative when it comes to actual prayer, as the Psalmist describes as a soul panting and thirsting for the Living God, with the innermost depth of ourselves crying out to the innermost depth of God.14

Using the Internet irresponsibly has made many of us self-absorbed, anxious and indifferent. Instead of avoiding those things I want to see how we can learn to embrace them, and move beyond them. It’s hard to see in the clutter of our self-absorption, anxiety, and indifference how prayer can even make sense, and yet, I think prayer could be the thing that could save us. Therefore I want to discuss how we can approach prayer, Post-Internet.

Moving Beyond Self-Absorption

Having access to a whole universe in the phone in our pockets can make us forget that we are a

part of a much larger and more beautiful universe. We forget that we are but one species of roughly 8.7 million others on this planet. We forget

that our six billion trillion ton planet is spinning over a thousand miles an hour while orbiting the sun at roughly sixty-six thousand miles an hour. We forget that our sun is just one of the billions of stars in our galaxy, alongside the billions of other galaxies with billions of stars of their own that have their own orbiting planets. We forget that our planet is in a solar system that only takes up less than a trillionth of the observable universe.

We forget how small we are. How can anyone see themselves as the center of the universe when our planet is just “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark,” as cosmologist Carl Sagan says while discussing a photo of Earth taken from four billion miles away, revealing it as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”15

Even before all this information was accessible to us humans have been known to gaze at the stars with humility. The Psalmist says in Psalm 8:

When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers— the moon and the stars you set in place— what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?

You are very small. The particles that come together to form your body come from the dust of exploded stars. An awareness of how small we are in this overwhelmingly large universe can make us feel quite insignificant, and perhaps a bit depressed. And yet, this is the place from which we must begin our spiritual life.

Suffering befalls us and we cry out to God: “Why? Why me?” That question on the surface sounds like it may come from a place of curiosity, but I believe it usually comes from a place of entitlement. We want to know how a good God could let something so terrible happen to someone like me. We become frustrated with others’ suggestions of God’s love because we think that if God really loved us then he wouldn’t let something like this happen to us. But who are we? We’re just small human beings on “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Instead of asking “what are mere mortals that you

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should think about them?” like the Psalmist, we ask “What are you, that you don’t think even higher of us?

In journalist Rahel Aima’s critique of “The New Aesthetic” she said it was “about being looked at by humans and by machines — by drones, surveillance cameras, people tagging you on Facebook — about being the object of the gaze.”16 Being an object of someone’s gaze simply means being aware that you are able to be observed. It begins when you are a young child and you learn that you are a separate individual from everything around you. The danger with this however is when you become delusional about the excessive need to upkeep your position as the object of everyone’s gaze.

There’s something slightly twisted about being able to see ourselves in the front camera of our phones. It looks like me, and yet it also does not. It’s someone else—or something else. It becomes an object outside myself. Selfies have allowed us to become the object of our own gaze.

There are a lot of rumors going around about how selfies can cause narcissistic personality disorder (represented by an excessive obsession with oneself and/or one’s physical appearance) or body dysmorphic disorder (represented by an excessive preoccupation with an imagined physical defect). However, a better way to put it is that most the people who are seeking help for things like narcissistic personality disorder or body dysmorphic disorder also happen to be selfie addicts. This is what we see in Danny Bowman’s case—a 19-year-old who took 200 selfies a day and attempted suicide when he realized he couldn’t take the perfect selfie.17

So it is not the selfies themselves that are causing these disorders but perhaps it is the culture around selfie taking that may have something to do with it. I’m talking about the desire for approval through likes, comments, followers, retweets, favorites, reblogs, etc. Social media is a performance. We are putting on a performance of a story of the life we want people to think we have. Some people post daily photos of themselves laughing, pretending the camera isn’t there. Others post daily photos of themselves staring deeply and seriously into the camera. And the trend of posting unrelated meaningful quotes under selfies is obviously trying to portray something.

We are behaving as objects in the world and becoming less and less aware of everything outside of ourselves. Whether it’s an excessive interest with one’s self or appearance or an excessive insecurity about one’s self or appearance, we’re still absorbed with ourselves. This self-absorption must be healed with an awareness of the world around us and our place in it. We must choose to be fully aware when becoming people of prayer.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner recalls the story of Moses’ experience with God through a burning bush. In the story Moses’ attention is caught by the burning bush particularly because it is burning without being consumed. Kushner asks “How long would you have to watch wood burn before you could know whether or not it actually was being consumed?” Noticing Moses’ patience with the burning bush Kushner goes on to say:

The “burning bush” was not a miracle. It was a test. God wanted to find out whether or not Moses could pay attention to something for more than a few minutes. When Moses did, God spoke. The trick is to pay attention to what is going on around you long enough to behold the miracle without falling asleep. There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention.18

James Bridle began the discussion about the New Aesthetic by asking people to “see the

technologies we have with a new wonder.” This enables us to pause and step back from the constant technological advancements, and see the beauty of those advancements. A great example of this concept was found on a Tumblr page called #HYPERREALCG started in February of 2015 by two artists named David OReilly and Kim Laughton.19 The Tumblr page showcases hyper real 3D images made with CG (Computer Graphics) that look surprisingly real. The page went viral as numerous blogs and news

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sites posted images from the blog in absolute awe with what we can do with CG these days. The images showed average objects such as a fire hydrant, a pencil, a toilet, an ATM machine, a lamp, a slice of pizza, a man’s face, etc. Each image’s caption included the artist’s name, the software used, and the render time. This is definitely representative of the New Aesthetic: looking at “the technologies we have with a new wonder”.

Here’s the catch though: it was all a hoax. All the images were actually just real pictures taken with cameras—some were obviously even taken with a phone. David OReilly admitted to the hoax on his Twitter when he realized that people were taking it literally and not realizing it was a joke. The purpose was to simply poke fun at CG art and CG artists, and he had thought the joke would have been obvious. One tweet even linked back to the fire hydrant image saying “It’s not even subtle. You can see my shadow here.”20

The page lost a lot of buzz after the confession because no one cared about any of the images when they found out they were just normal everyday objects we see all the time. This exposes a problem with the “new wonder” in the New Aesthetic. For many people this new wonder has made them lose their old wonder. It can trick us into thinking that if it’s not new, if it’s not different, if it’s not cool, if it’s not groundbreaking, then it’s not interesting. I want to suggest that we continue pausing and stepping back in order to see absolutely everything with “a new wonder”. We must become aware of the whole other world right here within this one, waiting for us to slow down and notice.

There is an old Jewish teaching that says you should say 100 blessings a day. A blessing is a prayer of thanks. In Judaism there are several formal blessings said for each day or for each type of event, all beginning with “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who has…” What I love about this format of blessing is that it is never saying “Blessed be God for…”, but “Blessed be God who has…” It makes our prayers acknowledgments of the blessings that have always been there around us. It’s much like Jacob in Genesis 28, waking up from his miraculous dream and saying “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” It’s not about making God come to where you are. It’s about becoming aware that God has always been right there, waiting for you to realize it.

Another thing I love about the formal Jewish blessings is how so many mundane tasks have a blessing attached to them. Not only is there a blessing for each time you wash your hands, but there is also one for going to the bathroom. Imagine stepping into the bathroom, doing your business, and

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saying the traditional Asher Yatzar blessing:

Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who formed mankind in wisdom, and created in him all manner of openings and cavities. It is manifest and known before the throne of your glory that if any one of them ruptured or were blocked, it would be impossible to survive or stand before you. Blessed are you Lord, who heals all flesh and is wonderful in his acts.

Then you wash your hands and say the Al Netilat Yadayim: “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King

of the Universe, who has sanctified us with your commands and has commanded us regarding the washing of hands.” Suddenly one of the most mundane tasks of going to the bathroom becomes a sacred worship experience. Of course I’m saying this tongue-in-cheek, but there is definitely a feeling of added significance when you are able to slow down and acknowledge that your body is a gift, and that your body working as it should is an even more tremendous gift. You are able to become aware that everything is a gift, from each and every breath you take to the beautiful colors and structures around you. The first day I attempted to say 100 blessings a day I found myself at 50, dancing around a parking lot, slapping the asphalt, and yelling at my friends about how happy I am to be alive.

When Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi was asked by his students how he prays he is said to have told them “I pray with the table and with the chairs.”21 This type of prayer is aware that even the most mundane parts of our material existence are actually sacred. This type of prayer removes the barriers we put up between the physical and the spiritual; the profane and the sacred; the dirt and the glory. This type of prayer makes us aware that it’s all meshed up together in the most beautiful way. This is a kind of prayer that surrenders the constant plea for miraculous results to prayer, and sees life itself as a miracle. Our existence is a miracle.

There is another world, right here within this one that is able to be seen when we are not concerned with posting the experience online. Prayers of thanks radically open us up to that world. We must learn to see the world through our own eyes, and not through the eyes of others, wondering: Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Am I cool enough? Am I attractive? We must be fully aware of our beautiful existence in order to overcome our excessive self-interest or excessive self-loathing. We may think the solution to self-absorption is to avoid focusing on ourselves. Instead of avoidance however, we must embrace and move beyond self-absorption by being fully aware. We must be able to acknowledge ourselves, while at the same time understand how much of a gift it is that we get to be here. We must begin here before any petitions, requests, or work.

Moving Beyond Anxiety There is a website called alltheminutes.com that simply consists of a survey of tweets

representative of each minute of the day, running like a clock. If it is 8:56PM you will see slideshow of tweets that mention “8:56PM”, spanning over the last couple years. Then when the clock hits 8:57PM, it goes on to show tweets mentioning “8:57PM”. Interestingly most of the tweets that show up the first half of the day are about how long people are actually in bed, for example: “It’s 11:43AM and I’m still in bed.” Then when evening hits most of the tweets are about going to bed early: “It’s 7:01PM and I’m already going to sleep.”

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When I first saw this I thought it was hilarious but after watching it for a while I thought, “So this

is what we’re doing with our lives?” The excessive amount of updates we scroll through is staggering, and yet we’re not really doing or saying anything sometimes. We’re just scrolling, reading, typing, clicking, posting, blinking, etc.

Psychologist, Richard Leahy says “the average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950’s.”22 That was just in 2008. It has only gotten worse with the rise of smart phones and social media pressuring its users to consume as much as they contribute, lest they be forgotten. This is the problem when it comes to experience-based social networking. We’re socially interacting strictly based on reports of things we’ve done—whether that’s that day’s trip to the beach, that day’s meal, that day’s work-out, that day’s achievement, that day’s work, that day’s traffic, that day’s outfit, that day’s activity, that day’s joke, or that day’s observation.

In his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain Nicholas Carr talks about the difference between the contemplative mind and the attentive mind. The Internet has done a great job at making us more attentive, so we might be able to say that today’s generation is the more attentive generation than any generation before. However, today’s generation also seems to be the least contemplative.

Another way to put it is that today’s generation is able to think more quickly than any other generation, but has the hardest time thinking deeply than any other generation. The Internet has made it easier for us to process information quickly on the surface of our short-term memory, but it is difficult to let that information sink into long-term memory. And it is only by letting information sink into long-term memory that we learn and grow. Today’s young people know a lot, but they wouldn’t be able to explain a lot of the stuff they know. This is because it is harder to think deeper in the Post-Internet age. Prayer invites us to do just that.

Another important part of prayer is about surrendering control. Or perhaps you could say it’s about accepting how little control we actually have. For those of us with anxiety we tend to think that if we can only be in control of the situation then we would be fine. I’m not talking about being in control of people, I’m talking about having a full grip on what’s going on around you and why. I’m talking about making sure life is predictable. When things get unpredictable anxiety has a field day convincing you that it’s more threatening than it actually is. Anxiety feeds off of lack of control.

We’re afraid of not having control, and we’re afraid of being vulnerable—open to attack and open to love. Why else would people freak out so much over the NSA spying on our private lives, Facebook Messenger apps listening to our conversations, and nothing truly being secret? What are we so afraid of? We’re failing to see vulnerability as a gift. Vulnerability is a gift because it allows us to fully live in the present moment, instead of trying to control how it is perceived.

That’s what it means to be fully present. You’re not stuck in the past with regret or trying to explain things away. You’re also not stuck in the future with worry of how it will turn out or how it will

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look. You’re able to just fully accept yourself right where you are, no matter where you are. And that is one of the most powerful gifts anyone can have.

As the famous words from the Psalms go, “Be still and know that I am God.” In his book on contemplative prayer Richard Rohr breaks this prayer down saying “I use this prayer to draw myself and others into the second:

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am. Be still and know. Be still. Be.”3

We need to have moments where we can just simply be. I need moments where I can just

simply be me, and you can just simply be you, in all our weirdness, all our brokenness, and all our imperfection.

C.S. Lewis would ask people “What is the most significant conversation you have every day?” People would respond, “Your conversation with God, of course,” Lewis would then say, “No, It’s the conversation you have with yourself before you speak to God, because in that conversation with yourself, you decide whether you are going to be honest and authentic with God, or whether you are going to meet God with a false face, a mask, an act, a pretense.”24

We need to practice facing God without our false faces, our masks, our acts, our pretenses, our agendas, our lies and our performances. We need to practice being fully vulnerable, fully surrendered, and fully present within God’s presence.

Theologian, Paul Tillich famously spoke what it’s like to be “struck by grace”: Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness…Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” If that happens to us, we experience grace.25

It’s hard to accept that we are accepted. The Internet has a way of convincing us that our sole purpose is to consume and contribute. Is this not the purpose of a machine? If prayer can help us learn to just be, then prayer can help us break this machine mentality. Prayer can help transform us from human do-ings to human be-ings. We must intentionally practice being.

Moving Beyond Indifference The times we are in have also been referred to as the Information Age, highly influenced by the

Internet. The rise of the Internet has made it impossible to just live in your own bubble of ignorance. We no longer have the ability to ignore the suffering and injustice that occur outside of our city and outside of our country. Sure we could practice detachment and try our best to avoid it all but it won’t last for long; especially if we choose to respond to that which calls us beyond ourselves.

So how should people of prayer respond to this advancement? Does this widen our responsibility to pray about every tragedy that we scroll through on our news feeds? This is a daunting task for the Post-Internet generation. The daily flood of information that the Internet gives us has made many of us cold, detached and apathetic when it comes to national and global tragedies, treating them almost as fictions. How can we regain a desire to embrace an awareness of human suffering with an

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empathetic heart? How can we regain the ability to weep while we pray? How can we cry out to God from the depth of our being again, after the Internet? After all, weeping would seem to be a direct subversion of the spirit of indifference that the Internet can easily fester in us.

Pope Francis held a Mass in Italy where he also met with refugees who had arrived by boat from Africa and the Middle East. “Who has wept for the people who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who wanted something to support their families?” Pope Francis passionately asked during his homily. “We are a society that has forgotten the experience of weeping, of ‘suffering with’: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!”26

In another homily Pope Francis described tears as a gift. He said we can ask for the ability to weep like Mary Magdalene at Jesus’s empty tomb. “We too can ask the Lord for the gift of tears,” he said. “It is a beautiful grace…to weep praying for everything: for what is good, for our sins, for graces, for joy itself.”27

7th century Christian monk, St. John Climacus talked about the gift of tears as both joyful and sorrowful. In The Ladder of Divine Ascent he described it as “the joy that spontaneously springs up in the soul…which by rapture ineffably and unexpectedly transports the mind in spiritual light to Christ.”28

I am not saying that the gift of tears is required in order to pray in the Post-Internet age, but I do believe that we must move toward what the gift of tears implies in the character of one who obtains this spiritual gift: a softening of the heart. St. Ignatius of Loyola, who is said to have wept so much that he was afraid of losing his eyesight, said in a letter to a fellow Jesuit that if it were in his power to give the gift of tears, he wouldn’t.29 After all, it would be no help to their ability to compassionately move toward human suffering, and that movement is much more important than the tears that may come as a result of that movement. Ignatius encouraged those without the gift of tears to manifest it in their actions. The heart must be softened in empathy toward others. This leads us to what we can call prayerful living. These are action-oriented non-verbal prayers. Prayer, after all, is a state of union with God. It can be any moment where you are being purely authentic with God and yourself. Even though it’s incredibly difficult to do it 24/7 we can live in conscious connection with God, and everything you do in that conscious connection with God—whether that’s eating, working, joking with friends, or anything—that’s prayer. This is the kind of life the apostle Paul was talking about when he said “pray without ceasing”.30

It is important to note that prayer from the heart should not excuse us from verbal prayers though, in the same way that love from the heart does not excuse us from verbally telling someone how much we love them. They must go together, and they both need each other.

Sometimes it scares me when someone says they have nothing to pray for, because sometimes the reason could be an indifference to human suffering. Abraham Joshua Heschel brilliantly discussed this issue in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity:

Not only do we not know how to pray; we do not know what to pray for. We have lost the ability to be shocked. Should we not pray for the ability to be shocked at atrocities committed by humanity, for the capacity to be dismayed at our inability to be dismayed? Prayer should be an act of catharsis, of purgation of emotions, as well as a process of self-clarification, of examining priorities, of elucidating responsibility…Prayer must never be a citadel for selfish concerns, but rather a place for deepening concern over other people’s plight.

Perhaps not knowing what to pray for is a sign that we aren’t taking enough risks. Perhaps we are too comfortable in our indifference when we do not know what to pray for. If we want something to pray for we must go beyond ourselves and do something so risky that depending on prayer would be unavoidable. Or perhaps we may also need to soften our hearts toward the human suffering all around us, and engage in helping eradicate it. Heschel goes on to say:

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Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.

It’s incredibly important to note that some of the most well-known traditional prayers today were formed in the midst of suffering. There’s the Jesus Psalter of the 1530’s that English monk, Richard Whytford wrote during wrote “as a means of solace and supernatural protection during the bloody anti-Catholic persecutions of Henry VIII”.31 In 1912 the Peace Prayer of St. Francis first appeared in a small French spiritual magazine as “a beautiful prayer to say during mass”. It then became popular in 1915 when Pope Benedict desired a prayer for peace during WWI, and the French prayer was sent to him.

In the Spring of 1916 in Fatima, Portugal, three children (ages 6, 7 and 9) reported that in an apparition the Virgin Mary taught them prayers that they were instructed to pray in order to obtain world peace; prayers such as: “My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love you. I ask pardon for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope, and do not love you,” and “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy,” which was later added to the official Rosary prayers. Whether the apparitions were real or not these prayers for world peace during a time of terror changed that community, and subsequently affected the entire Catholic Church.

Several of these prayers can now just be found on random church printed prayer pamphlets,

encouraging people to pray more. The accessibility we have to these prayers has disconnected us from their horrific origins. We yawn at the earnestness and the zealousness of these long prayers filled with language we don’t use, and they appear to just be things that people who always go to church recite to feel better. Yet this dangerous misunderstanding makes us forget that these prayers were once rooted in deep suffering, on the lips of the oppressed and exploited, crying out to God for peace. More than ever we need new prayers, new visions, new apparitions, and new praying communities formed to give us prayers that can sustain us and encourage us to put hands and feet to each of these prayers. These prayers must also spur us to engage in our community, fighting against injustice with love and non-violence in order to bring freedom to the oppressed. This world needs healing. Rachel Held Evans talks about the difference between quick fix curing and the patient never-ending work of healing in Searching for Sunday. Several of us were taught that healing means that all the pain and suffering is removed, and we pray and pray for results of that. Evans approaches healing as not a removal of suffering but as a different way of relating to it.

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I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome…The thing about healing, as opposed to curing, is that it is relational. It takes time…Rarely does it conform to our expectations or resolve in a timely manner…Ultimately, an anointing is an acknowledgment. It’s a way to speak to someone who is suffering, and without words or platitudes or empty solutions, say, this is a big deal, this matters, I’m here. In a world of cure-alls and quick fixes, true healing may be one of the most countercultural gifts the church has to offer the world, if only we surrender our impulse to cure, if only we let love do its slow, meandering work.32

Sometimes being a person of prayer means being able to suffer alongside those who need you

most. Sometimes a prayer can be that silent stillness you experience sitting next to someone who is feeling an overwhelming absence of God. Sometimes we are called to fill that absence with our presence—not with our advice, our encouragement, our scripture references, or our result-oriented prayers, but just simply our presence. Nothing is more unnerving in a hard time than someone trying to pray your pain away and then just leaving you there with it—or worse, lifting their head after their amen, asking “Do you feel better now?”

The Apostle Paul formulated a lot of early Christian thought with his language of ‘the body of Christ’ in his letters to the first Christian churches. Paul called them to see each other as “members of one another”,33 and told them to “weep with those who weep”34, and “bear one another’s burdens”35. As humans we are interdependent creatures. We are wired to be in community and to be there for one another. This requires us to be fully engaged. We have trouble being fully engaged with the Internet taking up so much of our attention. We must overcome our indifference with prayerful engagement. We must remind ourselves: You are here. The person in front of you is important, and you get to experience this moment with them. This moment has never happened and it never will again. Don’t let it go to waste.

Go Pray There is a lot of talk in Christian circles about returning to the ways of the Early Church, as if

following their ways would fix the Church today. I am not interested in going back. Like I said in the beginning, we are in the future. We are in the future and we need to embrace that as the amazing opportunity that it is. Of all the eras that we could live me and you are alive right now at the same time. Isn’t that beautiful? We get to experience today, with all its complexity and wonder.

Go out and make the best of your existence. Are you fully aware? Are you fully present? Are you fully engaged? Both with God and the world.

Go and pray for people and with people. Call your friends and family and ask if you could pray for them. Ask that sad looking stranger if you could pray for them. Encourage someone. Tell them something wonderful.

Lists are a beautiful thing. Make a list of things you’re thankful for. Make a list of things you want to do better. Make a list of the people you love and pray for them every day. Don’t stop there though. It’s easy to make a list of your loved ones. Make a list of everyone who has hurt you, and pray the best for their lives. Pray for forgiveness. Make a list of the most irritating people you know and give them a good prayer.

If you go to a performance and someone hands you a list of the artists who contributed take it home and pray for all those artists. Lists are a gift. If you see a list of names, take it. There are millions of people out there who have no one to pray for them. Imagine all the people you could pray for if you just paid attention.

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Slow down. Walk around a city and pray that people would see how beautiful their city is, no

matter how ugly it seems. Say 100 blessings a day and weep at the sunset. Be brutally honest with God. Tell God everything you’ve ever wanted to say. Be authentic.

Accept that you are accepted, and then pass that grace onto others. Listen to God too. Be silent, still, and truly listen. Listen to God as intently as you want God to listen to you.

Paul talks about Christians being the aroma of Christ.36 This is a type of life where every action is pointing toward something else beyond itself. Every action makes people realize that there is more going on here.

I remember sitting outside one day and I saw a girl standing nearby singing. I was admiring her when she turned around, smiled, and said to me, “the sunset is that way.” She pointed to the beautiful setting sun that she had been staring at, and perhaps singing for. This is what it is like to be the aroma of Christ. This is how we are to live. We move with and toward God, and people follow us. And that’s going to require everything from us. That’s going to require living prayerfully.

The Scriptures speak again and again about the need to fear God. However, this “fear of God” shouldn’t be understood as terror with the purpose of driving you away, but rather as awe and astonishment with the purpose of luring you in.

In John D. Caputo’s critique of the superficial atheists’ criticism of God as a simple “projection”, Caputo claims that God is better understood as a “projectile, coming right at us”. After all, “the name of God is the name of trouble.” For Caputo, God is “a provocation, an insistent disturbance, a solicitation, a visitation by a stranger”. He goes on to say that prayer is “an exposure to a projectile, a willingness to stand out in the open in the middle of a storm, where there are projectiles everywhere carried by the wind, hence the extreme opposite of a projection.”37

In order to let God be God we need open ourselves up to a dangerous and unpredictable life with God. As Richard Rohr put it, “we do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” Therefore, this thing must be lived out to be truly understood. If this remains an interesting intellectual essay then I’ve failed. This must progress to new communities being formed offline in real life to discuss these ideas and put them into action. This must progress to people willing to come together to find ways of overcoming self-absorption, anxiety, and indifference. This must progress to people coming together to find ways of being fully aware, fully present, and fully engaged. This must progress to new ways of praying, new ways of communicating with each other, new communities formed where people can be vulnerable and honest about the themes in this essay.

With the Internet so prevalent in our lives we are most comfortable with detachment. Prayer calls us to be at our most intimate. There is no room for detachment in prayer. So to try to pray today may be awkward—much like the Snapchat image I talked about in the beginning—but also consider how subversive it would be to be committed to intimacy in a world of detachment. And that goes beyond prayer circles. That goes beyond the Internet. And that goes beyond you and me. We have been given a true gift to be alive today. Embrace it, and don’t let it go to waste.

Grace and peace be with you.

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1. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1996. Print. 341, 262-63.

2. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols”. New York: Penguin Group, 1982. Print. 483.

3. Peckham, Robin and Karen Archey. “Art Post-Internet”. 14 October 2014. Web. 4 April 2015.

<post-inter.net>

4. Das Platforms. “Robin Peckham: Tracing the Post-Internet”. Online video clip. YouTube. 24 July 2014. Web. 4 April 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXuKR1dKcyo>

5. Bridle, James. “The New Aesthetic”. Really Interesting Group. 6 May 2011. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://www.riglondon.com/blog/2011/05/06/the-new-aesthetic>

6. Sterling, Bruce. “An Essay on the New Aesthetic”. Wired. 2 April 2012. Web. 4 April 2015.

http://www.wired.com/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic>

7. “But it moves: the New Aesthetic & emergent virtual taste”. Metalab. Web. 4 April 2015 <http://metalab.harvard.edu/2012/04/but-it-moves-the-new-aesthetic-emergent-virtual-taste>

8. Watz, Marius. “The Problem with Perpetual Newness”. Marius Watz. 6 April 2012. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://mariuswatz.com/2012/04/06/the-problem-with-perpetual-newness>

9. Cliff, Aimee. “Popping Off: How Weird Al, Drake, PC Music and You Are All Caught up in the

Same Feedback Loop”. Fader. 8 August 2014. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://www.thefader.com/2014/08/08/popping-off-how-weird-al-drake-pc-music-and-you-are-all-caught-up-in-the-same-feedback-loop>

10. Bergin, Thomas J. “50 Years of Army Computing: From ENIAC to MSRC”. Google Books. Nov.

1996. Web. 4 April 2015. <https://books.google.com/books?id=iAr_Z1B494MC&pg>

11. Rhizome. “Stories from the New Aesthetic, James Bridle”. Online video clip. Vimeo. 18 Oct. 2012. Web. 4 April 2015. <https://vimeo.com/51675237>

12. Lehrer, Jonah. “Our Cluttered Minds”. Sunday Book Review. 3 June 2010. International New York

Times. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Lehrer-t.html>

13. Arthur, Charles. “How the Apple Watch could create a $1tn company”. The Observer. 9 March 2015. The Guardian. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/08/apple-watch-crunch-time-1-trillion-dollar-company>

14. Psalm 42

15. Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. The Random House

Publishing Group, 1994. Print. 8.

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16. Aimam, Rahel. “Desiring Machines”. The New Inquiry. 29 May 2012. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/desiring-machines>

17. Aldridge, Gemma and Kerry Harden. “Selfie addict took TWO HUNDRED a day - and tried to kill

himself when he couldn't take perfect photo”. Mirror. 23 March 2014. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/selfie-addict-took-two-hundred-3273819>

18. Kushner, Rabbi Lawrence. God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality

and Ultimate Meaning. Vermont: 1991. Print. 25.

19. “#HYPERREALCG”. Tumblr. nd. Web. 4 April 2015 <http://hyperrealcg.tumblr.com>

20. OReilly, David (davidoreilly). "It's not even subtle. You can see my shadow here - http://t.co/ZsJTfcCe3F". 3 Mar 2015, 02:03 UTC. Tweet.

21. Seeman, Don. “To Pray with the Table and with the Chairs.” Reverberations. 30 September

2013. SSRC Forums. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2013/09/30/to-pray-with-the-tables-and-with-the-chairs>

22. Leahy, Robert L. “How Big a Problem is Anxiety?” Psychology Today. 30 April 2008. Web. 4 April

2015. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/anxiety-files/200804/how-big-problem-is-anxiety

23. Rohr, Richard. Everything Belongs. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999. Print.

54, 20.

24. McLaren, Brian D. Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words. New York: HaperOne, 2011. Print.

25. Tillich, Paul. The Shaking of the Foundations. Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1948. Print. 162

26. “Pope on Lampedusa: “the globalization of indifference””. Official Vatican Network. 8 July 2013.

Web. 4 April 2015. <http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-on-lampedusa-the-globalization-of-indifferenc>

27. “Pope Francis asks for ‘gift of tears’ to see Risen Christ”. Catholic News Agency. 3 April 2013.

Web. 4 April 2015. <http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-francis-asks-for-gift-of-tears-to-see-risen-christ>

28. Climacus, John. John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent. New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1982.

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29. “The Gift of Tears”. UCAN Spirituality. 8 March 2014. Web. 4 April 2015. <http://spirituality.ucanews.com/2014/03/08/the-gift-of-tears>

30. 1 Thessalonians 5:17

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31. Zaleski, Phillip and Carol Zaleski. Prayer: A History. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005.

Print. 145.

32. Evans, Rachel Held. Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church. Tennessee: Nelson Books, 2015. Print. 208, 11.

33. Ephesians 4:25

34. Romans 12:15

35. Galatians 6:2

36. 2 Corinthians 2:15

37. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013. Print. 28.