Between Clicks and Contemplation: Reclaiming the Sacred in the Digital Age
Between Clicks and Contemplation: Reclaiming the Sacred in the Digital Age
Before we begin, I want to ask you something. And I want you to be honest—at least with yourself.
How many of you checked your phone in the last ten minutes?
Yeah. Me too.
Look, I’m not here to shame anyone. I’m not going to tell you to throw your phone in a river or delete all your apps—though honestly, some days that sounds pretty tempting.
I’m here because we’re living through something strange. Something we don’t quite have words for yet. And we need to talk about it.
An Opening Story
Ed Catmull—you know, the guy who helped create Pixar—once said something that’s stuck with me: “Persist in telling your story. Persist in finding your audience. Persist in staying true to your vision.”
And I’ve been thinking about what that means for us, right now, in this moment.
Because we’re all telling stories every day now, aren’t we? Instagram stories. Facebook posts. Tweets. BlueSky posts, TikToks, etc. We’re constantly broadcasting our lives, our opinions, our lunches.
But are we staying true to our vision? Do we even remember what our vision is?
I want to spend our time together in this blog exploring that question. And I want to do it by introducing you to three people who—if they were alive today—would have some exciting things to say about our phones.
MEET YOUR GUIDES
Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who spent much of his life in “silence” in the hills of Kentucky. He wrote about prayer, solitude, and the search for God in a noisy world. And friends, if he thought the 1960s were noisy…imagine what he would say today?
Mortimer Adler was a philosopher and educator who spent his life teaching people how to read, think, and have honest conversations. He believed in “The Great Conversation”—that ongoing dialogue across centuries between the greatest minds in history.
And Joseph Cardijn was a Belgian priest who worked with young laborers. He gave us a simple but revolutionary method for changing the world: See, Judge, Act.
These three men never met. They came from different worlds. But together, they offer us a lens for understanding what the digital age is doing to us—body, mind, and soul.
And how we might find our way back to something real.
SEE: Let’s Look at What’s Really Happening
Cardijn always started with this: Look honestly at the world as it is.
So let’s look.
Right now, most of us are sitting here with a small computer in our pockets or next to our keyboards. These devices connect us instantly to billions of people. We can access the sum of human knowledge in seconds. We can see what’s happening on the other side of the world in real time.
It’s incredible, right?
And yet...
The average person checks their phone nearly a hundred times a day. Every ping, every notification—it’s like a little bell, constantly calling us back. “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.”
We’ve built a world where:
Time has collapsed into this endless, scrolling now
Our relationships get reduced to numbers—likes, shares, followers
Our attention—which used to be whole, focused, sacred—is now shattered into a thousand fragments
We built this world.
And now it’s rebuilding us.
What Merton Saw Coming
Thomas Merton, writing from his hermitage in the 1960s, foresaw this. He warned about “mass society” eroding what he called our “inner life”—that quiet space where we meet God and ourselves.
If Merton were here today, he’d look at our phones and say: “You’ve externalized your consciousness. These things think for you. They remember for you. They even tell you how to feel.”
Merton made an important distinction. He said there’s a difference between solitude and isolation.
Solitude is life-giving. It’s creative. It’s where you find God and yourself.
Isolation is soul-killing. It’s being cut off from yourself and others.
And here’s the painful irony: Social media promises community—but often delivers isolation in disguise.
We are, as one writer put it, “alone together.”
You know this feeling, right? You’re scrolling through hundreds of posts, seeing everyone’s highlight reel, and somehow you end up feeling more alone than before you picked up your phone.
What Adler Would Say
Mortimer Adler spent his entire life inviting people into what he called “The Great Conversation”—that long, slow dialogue between the greatest minds of history.
He believed wisdom came from reading deeply, thinking carefully, and talking honestly with people who disagree with you.
But what would Adler see if he looked at us now?
Tweets instead of paragraphs.
Reactions instead of reflections.
Hot takes instead of deep thought.
The algorithm—that invisible force deciding what you see—rewards what’s fast, loud, and angry. It silences what’s slow, patient, and trustworthy.
We are the most informed generation in human history.
And maybe the least wise.
Think about that. You can know what’s happening everywhere, all the time. But do you understand what it means? Do you know what to do with it?
Information is not wisdom, friends.
What Cardijn Asked About
And Joseph Cardijn? He always started with ordinary people. With their actual, lived experience.
So let me ask you:
How does it feel to grow up in a world where your worth is measured in followers?
How does it feel to check work on Slack at midnight?
How does it feel when your kids are sitting at the dinner table, texting each other instead of talking?
What people tell me—and maybe you’ve felt this too—is this:
We’re exhausted. We’re anxious. We’re together, but not really.
The technology that promised to free us has instead colonized our attention.
And our attention—that’s our soul, friends. That’s where we live.
JUDGE: What Does This Mean?
Now Cardijn said after we see clearly, we need to judge—or maybe better, to discern—what it all means in light of what we actually value.
Merton and the False Self
Merton said that every person lives between two selves.
There’s the true self—grounded in God, hidden deep within you, unchanging.
And there’s the false self—built on appearances, performance, what other people think.
And I’ll tell you: social media is a factory for false selves.
We curate our lives. We perform our identities. We measure our worth in clicks, hearts, and thumbs-ups.
We become brands instead of people.
But here’s what Merton knew: The sacred thrives in hiddenness. In what’s unseen. Unshared. Unmeasured.
Maybe holiness today begins with the courage not to post.
I know. That sounds radical. To live something beautiful and not share it?
But try it sometime. See how it feels.
Adler and Lost Conversation
For Adler, truth wasn’t a slogan you put on a bumper sticker. It was something you discovered—through conversation, through listening, through reasoning together.
But look at our digital public square. What gets rewarded?
Cleverness over clarity.
Anger over curiosity.
Echo chambers over genuine dialogue.
We’ve lost the art of thinking. But more than that—we’ve lost the art of thinking together.
So here’s Adler’s question, and it’s ours too:
Is this technology helping us become wiser? Kinder? More just?
If not—and I think we know the answer—then what are we even building?
Cardijn and Human Dignity
Cardijn rooted everything in two things: the dignity of every person and the common good.
And here’s where we need to face something uncomfortable:
We are not the customers of social media.
We are the product.
Our data gets mined. Our attention gets sold. Our emotions get engineered—literally engineered—for profit.
This is digital feudalism. A handful of companies own the landscape. And the rest of us? We’re laboring for free. Scrolling, posting, creating content to feed the algorithm.
And here’s what keeps me up at night: Democracy depends on shared truth. In everyday reality, we can argue about and work through together.
But when everyone lives in their own personalized universe—when the algorithm shows you only what confirms what you already believe—what happens to “We the People”?
ACT: So What Do We Do?
Okay. We’ve seen. We’ve judged. Now—Cardijn’s final step—we have to act.
And each of our three guides offers us a different path forward.
Merton’s Path: Contemplative Resistance
For Merton, resistance begins in silence.
He’d invite us to recover solitude—not as an escape from the world, but as a way of returning to it more whole.
Here’s what that might look like:
Take a digital sabbath. An hour. An afternoon. A whole day without screens. I know—it sounds scary. That’s how you know you need it.
Practice custody of the eyes. Be intentional about what you consume. You wouldn’t eat garbage for dinner. Why would you feed your mind garbage?
Reclaim hiddenness. Not everything has to be shared. Some of the most sacred moments of your life should stay between you and God.
Read slowly. Write thoughtfully. Pray deeply.
Merton would say: Your phone is the new desert. And the demons there? They’re called Distraction, Vanity, and Noise.
But enter consciously, and you might find grace.
Adler’s Path: Intellectual Renewal
Adler would call for a revival of the life of the mind.
He’d say: Wisdom takes time.
Read great books!!! Not summaries. Not threads. Not the top ten takeaways. The actual books, cover to cover!
Think WITH people who disagree with you—but in good faith. Honest dialogue, not Twitter or social media fights.
Write not to perform, but to understand. Repeat that statement. Use writing to figure out what you actually think.
Build small communities where you can have honest conversations.
Adler believed that excellence is contagious.
But so is mediocrity.
Choose what you spread.
Cardijn’s Path: Collective Change
Finally, Cardijn would say: Personal change isn’t enough. Structures have to change, too.
That means:
Advocate for laws that protect privacy and protect children. Yes, this is a justice issue.
Support platforms that serve people, not just profits. They exist—we need to find them and use them.
Rebuild local communities—parishes, schools, neighborhoods—where faces matter more than profiles.
Teach the young not just how to use technology, but how to live with it.
Individual conversion is necessary.
But systemic change is our moral responsibility.
The Practice of Presence
When you bring Merton, Adler, and Cardijn together, their message is beautifully simple—and radically difficult:
Be present.
Be present with others. Really there. Phone down. Eyes up. Here, see the eyes?.
Be present with yourself. Create space for silence. For boredom. For wonder. Go for walks and listen, as Merton would say, hear God in the wind through the leaves.
Be present with your work. Do one thing deeply instead of ten things badly. Remember, we humans cannot multitask. Only AI can do that.
Be present with creation. Step outside without your camera or binoculars and look. And look closely at the universe.
Be present with God, who waits in every quiet moment for us to recognize God in our universe.
Technology is not the enemy. But it’s not innocent either.
It can deepen our humanity. Or it can hollow it out.
The choice is ours.
In Conclusion (But Really, Just the Beginning)
I think the most sacred act we can perform in the digital age is also the simplest:
Step away.
Just for a moment.
Fast from the feed. Log off. Breathe. Be where you are.
And from that still center—that place of silence and solitude—return.
Not as consumers. Not as products. But as free people.
Present. Thoughtful. Awake.
Because only then—between clicks and contemplation—can your true self begin to live again.
The Question Before Us
Friends, technology is never neutral.
The digital age is asking us ancient questions in new forms:
Will we be present or absent from our own lives?
Will we pursue wisdom or settle for information?
Will we build a genuine community or accept algorithmic simulation?
Will we protect human dignity or commodify it?
Will we preserve the sacred or allow everything to become profane?
Merton, Adler, and Cardijn don’t give us easy answers.
But they give us a method:
See clearly. Judge truly. Act courageously.
The sacred in cyberspace isn’t something we can program or engineer.
It emerges when human beings reclaim their agency. When we protect our inner lives. When we pursue truth together. When we build communities oriented toward the common good.
Your Next Step
Remember what Ed Catmull said?
“Persist in telling your story. Persist in finding your audience. Persist in staying true to your vision.”
So here’s my question for you:
What’s your story? Not the one you perform online—the real one.
Whose audience is it? Not your followers—the actual people in your life.
What’s your vision? Not your feed—your life.
Those are the questions worth asking.
Those are the questions worth living into.
Now—let’s turn off our phones and have a real conversation.