A few weekends ago, a friend and I ripped the venerable carpet out of my spare bedroom. As carpet-ridding day moved inexorably closer, I found myself becoming nervous about…what? The subtle prickings of carpet-removal dread were baffling. My friend had agreed to do most of the work; all I really had to do was haul the old carpet and pad out the door in garbage bags. What was so dread-inducing about that?

I discovered the source of my dread the evening before carpet-ridding day. I had decided to save time on carpet-ridding morning by disconnecting the coax and pulling the modem, router, and power-strip out of the room before going to bed on carpet-ridding eve. The spare bedroom is the only room in my house with a functioning cable jack; thus, disconnecting the modem and router meant that my house would be effectively internet-less until the carpet was out and the room was back in order: a matter of 18 hours at most. Sure, I could always pull up websites on my cell phone, but doing this without the Wi-Fi churning away in the background of my life would eat up cellular data, pushing me towards a required upgrade to the next, more expensive, level of cellular service. So, in practical terms, the house would be internet-less for about 18 hours. As I spun the modem around, freeing it from the coaxial cable that allows both modem and router to talk to the World Wide Web, I realized that this was precisely what I’d been dreading: the Great Silencing of the Internet in My House.

The complacent part of my 21st-century American brain had already started running in semi-panicked circles of “what will you do without the internet if…???” “Get a grip, Lor,” said the part of my brain which remembered that ancient 20th-century period of my life when I’d been willing to live without a telephone because $14 per month for basic landline service seemed like highway robbery. This part of my brain continued to rebuke me: “exactly what kind of ‘internet emergency’ are you planning to have in the next 24 hours, anyway?”

Rest assured that I did not have any “internet emergencies” on carpet-ridding eve or carpet-ridding day. Indeed, I may have had the opposite of an internet emergency. The Great Silencing of the Internet in My House allowed for an unplugged Stillness in which to take a measured, thoughtful look not only at the role of technology in my life but also at my priorities. The Great Silencing of the Internet in My House both caused and allowed me to wonder about many things. Above all, I wondered what my reaction would have been had life confronted me with an inevitable 18-hour separation not from the internet, but from the beauty of the human spiritual experience. Would a separation of this sort have sparked the same subtle sense of anxious dread as my impending separation from cyberspace?

I suspect that I am not alone in wondering where spirituality falls in my list of priorities. The busy-ness and heavy materiality of day-to-day life do a pretty good job of masking the fundamental human need for spiritual connection. The taken-for-grantedness of the way-things-are-done-in-the-real-world all too often has a funny way of warping human priorities. But how would things be done in the real world—or at least my little part of it—if spirituality were always my top priority?

The start of Lent next week is a good time to experiment with the possibilities, exploring the richnesses of a human life unplugged.

-Lori Randall

Here is a hymn to lead you into your own version of a grand silence.