I have recently been reading a very insightful book called Rekindling Wonder: Touching Heaven in a Screen Saturated World by a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, Fr. Christopher Seith. The book reflects upon how our attachment to our digital screens imprisons us in a dangerous spiritual apathy. At one point during the book, Fr. Seith compares our mindless online scrolling to a gambler’s addiction to a slot machine:

When I ask Mollie if she is hoping for a big win, she gives a short laugh and a dismissive wave of her hand. “In the beginning there was excitement about winning,” she says, “but the more I gambled, the wiser I got about my chances. Wiser, but also weaker, less able to stop. Today when I win — and I do win, from time to time — I just put it back in the machines. The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win.”

Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing — to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”

I ask Mollie to describe the machine zone. She looks out the window at the colorful movement of lights, her fingers playing on the tabletop between us. “It’s like being in the eye of a storm, is how I describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there — you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.” (Seith, Chris. Rekindling Wonder: Touching Heaven in a Screen Saturated World (pp. 46-47). En Route Books and Media, LLC. Kindle Edition.)

I’m not sure about you, but I found that conversation eerily relatable. We may initially get on social media to connect with other people or to find the latest news, but our scrolling often turns into something else entirely. Like the gambler Mollie, we enter the “machine zone” – or the “screen zone,” if you prefer – where the world around us begins to fade away. We end up returning to our devices not because we actually expect them to connect us, inform us, or fulfill us, but because they allow us to escape reality.

The ancient Christians called this the sin of acedia, a sadness about the life that God has given us and a desire to numb ourselves to that God-given life. Fr. Seith’s informative book argues convincingly that this is the “underlying spirit of our age.”

The antidote to acedia, as the title of the book suggests, is to “rekindle wonder,” to renew within ourselves a sense of amazement at the reality of our lives, which are given to us by God, redeemed by Jesus Christ, and called to be sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Viewed through the eyes of faith, every detail of life is part of a divine love story between God and us. Even the most ordinary moment offers us the opportunity to offer ourselves to the God who has given himself to us.

The season of Advent is a particularly appropriate time of year to rekindle our wonder at the Gospel. The season challenges us to keep our eyes open and our hearts alert as we wait both for the coming of the Lord in glory and the annual celebration of his birth.

If you would like a helpful cure to this spirit of acedia, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Fr. Seith’s book!