Article
Attention
Culture
Digital
Easter
4 min read

Let your mind wander if you want to make the most of Lent

How to escape the cold and bitter tunnels of digital distraction.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A montage image places a woman, with eyes shut and hands on hip, at the centre of blurred circle of ground and tree branches.
Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

According to Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French polymath: all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. 

And now, four hundred years later, we have proof of how hard we find this. 

Researchers carried out an experiment, putting several people in a room on their own with nothing else to do but sit there for fifteen minutes.  A majority admitted feeling uncomfortable with little but their thoughts to console them.  The experiment was repeated, only this time an instrument was placed in the room that could administer an unpleasant electric shock.  In the fifteen-minute period, one in four women self-administered the shock to relieve the boredom.  Two in three men did. 

There is a chance we draw the wrong conclusions from social experiments because it is hard to get into the minds of others, but we can make a good guess here.  Our lives are over-stimulated.  To be alone in a room with our thoughts for any length of time is unusual to the point of weird.  We don’t need to live like this.  Our smartphones are the ‘rod and staff which comfort us’.  Any spare moment can be spent using TikTok, Instagram or Spotify.   

As people age, they tend to think the world is losing its attention span without realising that focus declines as we grow older.  But something seems to have changed in the last two decades.  A whole new digital architecture has been designed that wasn’t there.  It creates the buzz of the city but has gone up around us like skyscrapers, creating cold shadows and bitter wind tunnels of anger and distraction that block out the warmth.   

This new online city is intentionally designed to keep our attention; to prevent us from doing anything offline.  And it is working.  Between 2010 and 2020, globally, we consumed twenty times more information.  This is a colossal increase for our brains to cope with in the blink of an evolutionary eye.  Our minds have become less like the cool, white minimalist interior design people aspire to in life and more like the junk garage where broken and pointless stuff is tipped. 

According to Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, we tend to blame ourselves for this state of affairs.  After all, if we tell others our smartphone is distracting us, the answer we get back is to turn it off.  While we can take steps like this, Hari says it lets tech companies off the hook.  As with shopaholics, there is individual responsibility, but there is also the edifice of consumer capitalism designed to make us buy more stuff or absorb more information. 

Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention.  It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive. 

When we consider what it means to follow Jesus today, we often do not appreciate what tech is doing to us.  The gains are obvious – having the world at our fingertips, being able to talk to family and friends in an instant – but the losses remain obscure.  How does digital distraction affect reading of the Bible and a commitment to prayer?  There is little research on this, but we may be giving God less devoted attention than before.  In flitting from one source to another, like a fly on a hot summer’s day, we do not stay long enough in one place to discover if God is waiting for us there. 

Prompts from God frequently emerge outside the thinking of the Church.  A cohort of Silicon Valley tech wizards has come up with the idea of the digital Sabbath, where people spend one day a week unplugged.  Though describing themselves as not especially religious, their manifesto practically drowns in religious tradition.  They advise people to: 

  • Avoid technology 
  • Connect with loved ones 
  • Nurture your health 
  • Get outside 
  • Avoid commerce 
  • Light candles 
  • Drink wine 
  • Eat bread 
  • Find silence 
  • Give back 

It is sabbath re-imagined for the digital era.   

Johann Hari also lists some practical actions that can be taken, like staying on task and limiting exposure to social media in particular as it is shown to be bad for mental health in large doses.  We should also allow our minds to wander.  This does not contradict the argument about not losing focus.  Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention.  It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.   

When the prophet Elijah meets with God at Mount Horeb, there is first a strong wind, then a powerful earthquake and lastly a raging fire.  But God does not reveal himself in these gripping phenomena.  He is to be found in the sheer silence which follows; in the whisper of a voice. 

The sheer silence today is broken by the familiar buzz of a news feed or social media update – or the shock of an electric current.  The moment we move out of earshot of the faint audio of the divine.    

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Review
Culture
Film & TV
Monsters
Race
4 min read

Sinners is standout thanks to Ryan Coogler and his ‘no stupid people’ rule

A cleverly choreographed culture clash between the living and the un-dead.

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who host's the 'God in Film’ podcast.

Two actors in 1930s clothes sit in an open car while the film director gestures towards them.
Delroy Lindo, Michael B. Jordan, and Ryan Coogler.
Warner Bros.

Coming off the back of Black Panther and Creed, Ryan Coogler fights off franchise fatigue with Sinners, a historical crime drama turned horror film that might be his most personal film yet. Set in 1932, Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers returning to their hometown in rural Mississippi to open a juke joint. But a trio of guests, both unwelcome and undead, crash their opening night. 

Any film set in the Jim Crow era South following a Black protagonist can set off warning bells for savvy audiences. The blatant racial oppression can often bring with it a fair share of trauma porn. But that’s not what Sinners is about. For a significant chunk of the run-time, the film is downright hopeful. Jordan’s dual role as the brothers Smoke and Stack presents them as dangerous and driven, but also compassionate, responsible and endlessly charismatic – the type of figures who could easily become folk heroes. There’s a scene where Jordan’s Smoke not only employs a young girl to watch his truck, but also teaches her how to negotiate, doing himself a worse deal in the process. Watching them recruit musicians, cooks and sign-painters for their juke joint from the under-appreciated and under-paid is a compelling exploration of Black enterprise. 

As night descends, and the juke joint opens for business, this peek into Black enterprise turns into a delightful celebration of Black joy. Chris Hewitt of Empire magazine referred to this film as a ‘stealth musical’ and it’s not hard to see why. Almost every main character gets a musical interlude of some sort. The standout by some distance is newcomer Miles Caton, who plays Sammie, the guitar-playing cousin of Smoke and Stack, who they recruit as the centrepiece of their entertainment for the night. Sammie is at the centre of a musical sequence that will have you leaning forward in your seat in amazement at what cinema is capable of. This film brings with it its own mythology, telling us that there are people whose music is so transcendent, they are capable of piercing the veil between the past, present and future. Sammie is one such person, and his talent attracts everyone for miles around, including ancient Irish vampire, Remmick, played by British star, Jack O’Connell.  

Perhaps what’s unusual for a vampire film is that, as an audience, we’re having such a good time at the juke joint, we can almost resent the imposition of the vampires forcing themselves into the narrative. The racial parallels of these monsters might not be as obvious as the ones you find in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but they are still there. Remmick, as the head vampire, gains the memories of each of his victims, and he wants Sammie’s abilities as a means to communicate through time with those he’s lost. (Yet another example of Ryan Coogler’s ‘no stupid people’ rule. Every character has a convincing reason for doing what they do, even the blood suckers.) The vampires here are drawn in by the music and can represent a white ruling class that wants to exploit Black music for its own purposes, in much the same way that culture vultures took music of black origin like the blues and rock, and popularised it with more palatable white artists like Elvis Presley.  

The sequence where the vampires themselves have a riotous, yet melodic dance in the dark, reminiscent of a rowdy worship session.

Perhaps another reason why vampires are such a popular monster to revisit in western culture is how they are a literalised inversion of Christianity. In the same way that Christians are promised an eternal life through the blood of Jesus Christ, vampires get immortality through drinking the blood of their victims. Even the rule where vampires can’t enter a private building without permission could be seen as warped version of the image of Jesus standing at the door of our hearts and knocking as shown in Revelation, the last book in the Bible. Vampires are a perverted vulgarisation of what it means to be a follower of Jesus and this, on an unconscious level as a society, might be why we find them so fascinating. The way the vampires use words like ‘fellowship’ to make their dark gift sound more appealing to those still inside the building suggests Coogler is conscious of this parallel. The sequence where the vampires themselves have a riotous, yet melodic dance in the dark, reminiscent of a rowdy worship session, further emphasises how music can bring people together.  

There are so many fascinating aspects to the film it’s impossible to mention them all, which might be deliberate on Coogler’s part, as he tells EBONY:  

“I wanted the movie to feel like a full meal, your appetizers, starters, entrees and desserts, I wanted all of it there.”  

While this does mean a sequel is unlikely, and some critics have complained of it being over-stuffed, it does mean that the film will richly reward repeat viewing.  

By now, Sinners will have no doubt secured its spot in many critics’ top films of the year. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners could so easily fall apart in the hands of a less skilled storyteller, but in the hands of one of the best directors of his generation, it absolutely sings.  

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