Digital Monasticism
Some call it digital minimalism. I call it digital monasticism. What started as an annual Lenten fast from social media slowly shaped my desires and called me to the desert. After Covid, I finally deleted my social media accounts. My wife and I ditched the smartphones. The Wi-Fi is gone. As St. Basil says in the Longer Rule:
that we may not receive incitements to sin through our eyes and ears and become imperceptibly habituated to it, and that the impress and form, so to speak, of what is seen and heard may not remain in the soul unto its ruin, and that we may be able to be constant in prayer, we should before all things else seek to dwell in a retired place.
For Basil and his monks, this retired place meant the desert or mountains away from the city. For the contemporary Christian, one must make the home such a domestic monastery, secluded from the “incitements to sin” of the digital world.
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Seth Hedman is Pastor of Garwin Valley Community Church in rural Iowa and a member of the Society of St. Bede. In his life, family, and church, he is pursuing a Benedictine lifestyle of daily prayer, study, and work.
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