Am I Reprogrammed?

"Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that some one or something, has been tinkering with my brain. My mind isn't going—so far as I can tell—but it's changing in, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." This isn't the first time I’ve referenced Nicholas Carr's Atlantic essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" His article describes the shifting of his own thought patterns; how he once could delve easily into long bouts of prose, but now found him mind railing off after skimming only a few pages. As a writer, I think he was probably the one of the first to applaud the instant wonders of Google searches, information-trails, and hyperlinks ad infinitum. I like His writing because it seems he, like me, vulnerably,  wonders aloud .  This time about the cost of it all. I confess I have been struggling with the personal costs of seeking relationships with the young and younger generations when having to do with media idolization.

Then there is the University of Virginia English professor, Mark Edmundson, who I’ve  found to be another voice attempting to articulate the current cultural ecosystem, and the minds, souls, and relationships it cultivates. In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education he attempts to describe the turbo-charged orientation of his students to life around them. "They want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they've ever known... They live to multiply possibilities. They're enemies of closure. They want to take eight classes a term, major promiscuously, have a semester abroad at three different colleges, (and) connect with every likely person who has a page on Facebook." Edmundson argues that for all the virtues of a generation that lives the possibilities of life so fully, there are detriments to the mind that perpetually seeks more and other options. For many, the moment of maximum pleasure is no longer "the moment of closure, where you sealed the deal," but rather, "the moment when the choices had been multiplied to the highest sum...the moment of maximum promise." 

There is a phrase in Latin that summarizes the idea that the way minds and souls are oriented in the way lives are oriented. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi is an axiom of ancient Christianity, meaning: the rule of worship is the rule of belief is the rule of life. To me, meaning that the way I am oriented in worship (whatever it might be that I focus on most devotedly) orients the way I believe and, in turn, the way I live. In a cultural ecosystem where I’m tempted to worship possibilities, where freedom is understood as the absence of limitation upon my choices, and where the virtue of good multitasking has replaced the virtue of singleness of heart, it is understandable that I can be both realistically and metaphorically "all over the place"—mentally, spiritually, even bodily, in a state of perpetual possibility-seeking.

Of course, I’m aware that the ancient Christians who first repeated the idiom, Lex orandi lex credendi lex vivendi, did so with Christ in mind as the subject, aware that the Son of God was the only object of worship who could ever quiet their own restless souls. Before any formal creeds were written, the early church held this adage, knowing that the essence of their theology would rise from their acts of adoration, thanksgiving, and petition. And they knew that the ways of their worship, the things they said when they prayed, not only defined their ultimate beliefs, but ultimately defined their lives.

I’m thinking that it is true of me this morning:  No matter what my object of worship. That which claims the most thorough part of my heart, soul, mind, and strength both is reflecting and shaping the rest of my day and tomorrow. I firmly believe, I am now certainly living in a time when the greatest commandment comes with great difficulty, when focusing my heart, mind, and soul on one thing is a challenge met with a constant parade of options vying for my attention. But the God who longs to gather me, whose arm is not too short to save (even from myself), nor ear too dull to hear, is the same yesterday, today and evermore.

As I continue to wade thru Confessions my distracted soul is hardly unique to the age of Google. There was a time when the ancient church father Augustine of Hippo defined his soul as "too cramped" for God to enter. He prayed that God might widen it, seeing too that it needed to be emptied. "You prompt us yourself to find satisfaction in appraising you," he prayed. "You made us tilted toward you, and our heart is unstable until stabilized in you."

Father, thank You for exposing Yourself to me as the God of all possibilities.  I realize through experience that fully approaching You as such, I find rest, focus, wisdom-and indeed, possibility for my soul.  I thank You for showing me that my faith must not be just a part of my life but the whole or it will become an optional pursuit of one more hyperlink or just a skimming process. May Your Holy Spirit continue to convict me of the fact:  As I worship, so will I live.  Amen