Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Something I’ve been pondering quite a bit lately is the impact of technology on faith, culture, and society. There are staggering patterns emerging that deal specifically with questions around mental health and social media/mobile device use.

For example, since 2010, depression rates and anxiety, which were fairly stable in the 2000s, rose by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate increased by 48 percent for ages 10 to 19. For girls 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

These are staggering increases. As a species, we are creating an environment inimical to human flourishing.

Beyond the impact on mental health are the impacts on our culture more broadly. Deep division and anger over real differences are one problem. But deep division and anger over manufactured differences are even more widespread.

Media outlets of all kinds, with few checks on the veracity or intent of the outlets, have a huge monetary stake in making us all more angry and less willing to listen to other points of view. Other points of view are a loss of potential profit.

In all of this, whether it’s comparing our lives to others in endless scrolling or whether it’s reading article after article that builds a mental and social silo around our thinking, the ultimate product is us. More specifically, it is our attention.

What we pay attention to is what will define us.

That’s one of those truths that is simple to say but that has massive implications for our lives.

Our focus is the most substantial gift we can give—and we’re all giving it away in ways that are eroding our health, destabilizing our communities, fracturing our relationships, diminishing our capacity for deep thought, and dehumanizing our neighbors.

Spirituality is simply this: it is the living of our lives within the tide of the eternal.

It enables us to weather the short term vicissitudes, the changes and chances of life, within the broadest scope. It helps us measure the true worth of all that we do. It teaches us the value of real relationships. It frames moral questions by exploring the wisdom and the heartbreaks of the ages. It challenges our temptation for easy answers and the lazy suspension of critical thought.

Spirituality cannot thrive in an era of addictive hyper-stimulation. Humans can’t either.

Faith, and life more broadly, requires our active focus if it is to be meaningful. It requires that we make the active choice to pay attention in a deep way because what we pay attention to will define us.

How we want to be defined is a crucial question. Are we content to be more angry, shallow, reactive, and unforgiving? That is what we are being manufactured into by our current habits of heart as a culture.

How do we want to be defined?

For Christians, that must mean paying attention to Christ in all the ways we can. All the simple acts of devotion and practice such as prayer, Bible reading, devotional study, service, and more have one particular way of profiting us and one singular product: making us more Christlike.

What we pay attention to will define us. How we will be defined is our choice.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert