---

I am "technology disabled."

Looking back, I suppose the first sign was my childhood ingratitude for an "Etch-a-Sketch" I'd received as a gift. The whole idea of sitting with this dull screen, turning knobs, displeased me. I wanted big pieces of snow-white paper on which to splash my colors, not a five-by-seven-inch screen fencing me in with charcoal lines.

The second clue was that I loved the cartoon "The Flintstones" and hated "The Jetsons." Television was the new communication technology of the 1960s, entrancing us. My mother was very strict about time spent with the "boob tube:" usually, a little "Captain Kangaroo" after breakfast and a couple of cartoons in the afternoon.

"Go outside and play" was the order of the day. I lived in fresh air and sunshine and a world I experienced firsthand. (Years later, during the camcorder craze, my constant refrain was, "You can't relive this experience later via videotape!")

As I got older, my disdain for gadgets and machinery grew with me. As my peers and I turned 16, I was the only one who had no desire to learn to drive. My mother's boyfriend, a car salesman, thought this so bizarre that he bribed me with the offer of a brand-new car if I got my learner's permit. I didn't take the bait.

A decade later, with much fear and trembling, I finally learned to drive. The boyfriend and new-car offer were long gone. I've always considered driving a necessary evil and daily cross.

As a journalism major in the early '80s, a required photography course I'd put off until my last semester ruined my perfect grade-point average. My advisor, in disbelief, teased, "But, Robin, people take photography for an easy A!"

I wound up with a C -- a gift, considering that I never learned how to load the film properly. Every picture I snapped was terrible. But when you asked me to paint a picture in words....

As technology has advanced, I've become a rare bird, teetering on extinction. The only cellphone I've owned is a flip-phone TracFone kept for emergencies. I've got 2,700 unused minutes to prove it.

I believe the blind acceptance of the goodness of technology based on perceived opportunity for possible benefit is always short-sighted. To count the cost of technologies after the genie is out of the bottle is an exercise in futility. However fabulous these new media may be doesn't make them superior to more ancient forms.

Emails and tweets can't replace the value of a handwritten letter. Music devotees are now trashing CDs and hunting for old records. Everything old becomes new again.

I also have a hard time reconciling how being snarled in the digital, virtual world squares with the Gospel of simplicity. Jesus "went about doing good" and reduced the law to love. Any child understands this, and aren't we implored to become as little children?

I treasure the phrase "went about" for the freedom it implies. Jesus wasn't tethered to a machine, a technology, a formula, a committee -- not even the cross, in the end.

The mission is simple, the tasks humble, the fruit untold. Our egos and Satan are the authors of confusion and complication. This noise-numbing, multitasking, digitally-drugged blur of existence is not of God. Simplicity and punctuality are lost virtues.

Because I don't possess a digital footprint doesn't mean I'm not present to society. Presence involves more than taking up physical or digital space. Presence, or attention, as French philosopher Simone Weil claimed, "is the purest and rarest form of generosity."

That quote is worthy of a day's meditation. How present are we when we can barely keep our eyes off our digital devices? What about cloistered and contemplative religious who, hidden from society, are more present to our most pressing and urgent needs?

What is the quality of our presence? Do we know what true attention is? Life is full of distractions, not all of them needful, and we can lose the simple, anointed mission God gives us in a whirl of unfruitful busyness.

What about the preeminent wireless connection: being present to God? How can one cultivate this connection without a definitive, deliberate commitment to silence and solitude, prayer and contemplation? Isn't this the very ground where fruitful evangelization is birthed? Isn't this the model Jesus gave us? Why have we assumed we can perfect it?

I think we mistake quantity for quality. We must reach the masses! Yet, we barely know the people in our own parishes. Jesus picked 12 Apostles -- not 1,200 or 12,000 -- who went on to change the world. The Lord multiplies; the world divides. Christian disunity is a testament of lunacy, not love. It's "love never fails," not, "Technology never fails."

It's hard to believe that, in our information-saturated world, there is anyone left who hasn't heard of Jesus -- but how many have met Him? St. Paul, after hearing about Jesus, still went about killing Christians, but when he met Jesus on the Damascus road, it was another story.

Have we been led down a technology rabbit hole? Has the fruit mitigated the cost? The more technologically advanced society becomes, the more inhuman we seem to be.

By the grace of God, I am what I am: a technology imbecile, evangelizing the old-fashioned way. I don't need a smartphone -- but I sure could use a sturdy electric typewriter with a ribbon full of ink.

(Robin Bunnell is a Catholic from Esperance. This column was submitted in hard copy, typed on a manual typewriter.)[[In-content Ad]]

---