The Best and Most Necessary First Thing

Life Lesson: Prayer Before Technology

Rembrandt van Rijn, David in Prayer (cropped; source)

Power on

The title of this article could go in many beneficial directions. If I were writing a metaphysical essay, clearly it would be about God, who is the Best and Most Necessary First Thing (except that He’s not a thing, but “Being itself, subsisting of itself”: ipsum esse per se subsistens). If I were writing an essay about ethics, its theme would be happiness or beatitude, which is the best and most necessary thing in the moral life, the end that accounts for all the rest of what we do (be it well or ill). But my concern today is with the spiritual life, as befits the middle of Lent — for Laetare Sunday, which we just celebrated, is just about the center point of this season.

Imagine the following scenarios.

A man wakes up early in the morning. He clicks on a light, stumbles into the kitchen, starts the coffee maker, and, while waiting for his first cup of java, takes up his phone and scrolls through his social media pages.

A woman gets out of bed to start her day. She puts the kettle on for tea, and, while waiting for the whistle to blow, powers up her phone to look at some Instagram shorts, alternating between funny, cute, and sentimental.

A fellow opens his eyes to the new day and tells Alexa to make him some coffee. He rises, stretches, opens the curtain, and flips open his laptop to see what work emails have come in overnight from overseas. “Ah, good, the office in London accepted my edits.”

A lady does her morning stretches, then sits down with a fruit vitamin smoothie and catches up on the news from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. She signs a few online humanitarian petitions and then gets ready for work.

One could multiply such scenarios, which are, after all, variations on a theme. I think nearly everyone, at least in the modern Western world, can recognize himself or herself as one or another of these tech-dependent creatures.

What I want to say here is that making (or rather, letting) our phone or computer be the first thing we look to after getting up in the morning is the worst way to begin a day, and something we, as Christians, should try to avoid like the plague. Here’s why.