It seems God had one more Lenten experience in store for me on the way to Easter, and it has come from an unlikely source. A few weeks in, I was able to give up the internet with the help of AT&T.
On one level, this deprivation has been easier than I thought it would be (so far). Is it really so bad not to have access to the news headlines that are 90% death and destruction, and 10% serious harm and extensive damages? All the British mystery shows my wife and I stream almost daily will be waiting for us, I am sure, once we get reconnected to the internet.
But there is a significant issue with being internet-less. In a world increasingly “online only” it is not trivial to be disconnected. We have a doctor who consults almost entirely remotely, and when a procedure is performed in the office, the results are to be located on a special online portal (I am sure there are more than a few people who follow the same protocol).
Our daughter’s nursing school relies heavily on internet communication as our grandson’s second-grade teacher does. The days of the “parent-teacher” packet that goes back and forth from home to school has gone the way of the Pony Express. And then there are the everyday things of life, like paying bills and other financial necessities, which without access to the internet, can become not just inconvenient but bring to the brink of crisis.
For the most part we have been able to navigate these troubled waters without too much disruption. I have full internet contact at my work office, so I can take care of certain necessities there as a stopgap. Our cellphones still work, so I can receive and send emails. In other words, we have not been relegated to using hurricane lamps for light or compelled to hunt and forage for food.
We should be thankful, and for the most part we are, that our cellphones work and we can maintain some connection with the “outside” world via our friendly neighborhood cell tower. But I am a man of my time, and I am sure my phone can do even more wondrous things, but I will never understand how to take advantage of those wonders.
More penitential, in fact, has been the process of dealing with our internet provider, who we pay diligently every month for a service we have been without for more than a week. It has become a New Age version of Lenten penance. If I were better at controlling my anger, I would be able to transform the frustration of waiting interminably long hold times just to speak with a disembodied AI generated voice who thinks “she” is fooling me into believing she is human, and that she is there to help. Even when you get the rare opportunity to speak with a real live breathing human being, the call almost always ends with me thinking that if Dante was alive, the “Divine Comedy” would have had to have one more circle of hell in it.
Through this experience we learned how reliant we have become on our emails for everyday essential tasks. But we have also learned something else: We can live without television. Because my daughter is a woman of her time, she has been able to find something called a hotspot on her phone, and has paired that hotspot connection to her laptop, so we are not completely blind. We hover over her small laptop screen and watch our favorite hockey team live and in color — just like the pioneers of old must have done, I guess.
Between that, and our extensive and not so antiquated DVD collection, we are not completely screen-free, but the removal of the random noise and the TV just being on for the sake of being on has been removed.
The quiet lends itself to more introspection, more reading, and more conversation. Not being able to watch a Dodgers pre-season game may not be the moral equivalent of a Desert Father living in a cave and subsisting on a little water and less bread, but any bump in any of our roads can be turned into something bigger and better than ourselves, if we just reorient things upward instead of inward.
