I Have a Religious Objection to Cellphones

One day, after lunch at the Calabash in Grahamstown, South Africa, we held a door open for another couple. As we did, they asked us where we were from. That chance question led to a 45-minute conversation about crime in South Africa, the current government, their children’s struggles with boarding school, their current lifestyle (he has left the 80-hour weeks behind to work part-time and live here), etc. Who knows? Maybe they needed to express a lot of that, and the conversation did them good. In any event, we learned even more about the extraordinary place that South Africa is.

If we had been on cellphones when we opened that door, we would have missed all that—and the door would have closed in their faces.

Multiply that by several hundred, and you might understand my eccentric objection. Through the habitual use of cellphones, we’re suddenly living our lives somewhere else, all the time. What’s more, it’s even difficult to pay full attention to the person on the other end of the line.

Paying attention to the here, and the now, that God has given us is a priority in many spiritual traditions. When we pay attention, we give our entire selves to the matter at hand. We might be surprised by what unfolds before us. Most important, we tune our heart to pay attention to God, wherever he might choose to encounter us. What better way to cultivate a friendship with God than to be prepared—at every moment—to hear his voice?