Contemplative Emailing

I never thought or anticipated that this job would involve so much emailing! But email, I suppose, is basically the preferred method of communication these days; whether it’s students on campus, colleagues at the church, or former professors, the primary way I get in touch with them, near or far, is through the tap-tap of a keyboard which magically produces words on a screen and instantly sends them firing through microfibre cables to their intended destination. And as I continue to establish connections with a variety of people on campus, it is an important and useful tool. 

We should be cautious, though, about email and electronic connections. I don’t want to necessarily ultimately condemn or condone simply making use of them; what we need to be attentive to is what kind of mind, body, and spirit they are shaping in us the more we make use of them.

Email is fast. Email is convenient. Email is efficient. Speed, convenience, efficiency – these can be and often are all good things. But they are good things in moderation. They are good things if we don’t let them dictate every part of our life. However, it is fairly easy for them do just that; we might subtly and without noticing it look for fast and efficient meals, fast and efficient conversations, fast and efficient reading, meetings, church services, etc...

But my conviction is that we are not only created for speed. We are created for silence, stillness, and slowness, created to be attentive to things, places, and people that can easily get caught up in the flow of a fast-paced, email-dictated day. God is always present, always available, always wanting deeper communion with us; but fast-paced technological lives can sometimes paradoxically make us fast asleep to God’s creative reality.

So maybe we need to effect a sort of reversal; instead of allowing an efficiency-based thing like email to dictate those parts of our lives that require more time, like food, friendship, and reading, maybe we can also let those slower activities affect the way we do our fast-paced activities. Instead of making dinner into an email event (quick, convenient, microwavable) we can make email in a dinner event (slow, careful, over-baked for a few hours).

Of course, I don’t mean to deprive us of the convenience and efficiency of email. This is an attitude change, not a literal change. Spending hours on a simple email might not (though it certainly may) be feasible or possible. But maybe it is possible that a slow, contemplative dimension can work its way into the seemingly most un-contemplative activity, like writing a short email and sending it off through the internet at the speed of light. If we take conscious-time to slow down, maybe for a few minutes at the beginning and end of the day, then that attentiveness to God’s presence in those few minutes can open us up to God’s presence in those emailing-type activities that can threaten to dominate our outlook on life. 

And if we do that, then we are truly following Jesus, who not only embodied God everywhere but saw God everywhere; “Consider the lilies of the field…”