Social Penance, Social Media

The practice of having a Lenten resolution is still very much alive in our American Catholic culture. Given that many penitential practices in the U.S. have fallen by the wayside, Lenten resolutions are all the more commendable. Each year brings another time of discernment for the faithful who want to make a sacrifice to mark the preparatory and penitential season of Lent. The traditional triad of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving can be conceived of broadly enough to allow for everything from giving up soda or chocolate to keeping a gratitude journal to volunteering at the parish food pantry.

Even putting a smartphone on grayscale can fit with this traditional Lenten triad!

The diversity and multitude of Lenten penances in contemporary American culture can be misleading, however. It can give the appearance that Lent is only, or primarily a "me and Jesus" type of thing. Lent can be mistaken as an individualistic pursuit of proving one's willpower to oneself. That is far from the meaning of Lent.

Prior to the Lent of 1967, Catholics shared a common penance for the season of Lent. That penance involved daily fasting, as is now obligatory only on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. It also allowed for meat only once a day, excepting Friday, which was a day of complete abstinence throughout the year. This may seem a difficult penance, but the ordinary faithful were able to do it, in part because they did it together. Because daily fasting was required, it was a common experience with social expectations and practices in place that supported it.

Partly because it was obligatory, over the years this Lenten fast became routine for many Catholics, who fasted out of habit but perhaps were lacking in the spiritual meaning behind Lenten fasting. For this reason, the bishops in the U.S. decided it might be better to let individuals exclusively make their own Lenten resolutions that would be more meaningful.

Thus the social nature of Lenten penance was largely lost, to be replaced by the faithful discerning their own individual resolutions. This gave rise to the situation of also having to discern whether to conceal these resolutions from friends and family or share them. Hiding them might seem to prevent pridefulness, but it could actually add to it. Sharing them might bring the support of others, but a comparison might make one person or another feel their resolution was inadequate. Not telling others the resolution would prevent embarrassment if the person failed, but telling others might help keep the person more accountable. Suddenly the internal struggle seemed to convey that Lent is an individual, competitive pursuit, rather than a team sport.

If Lent had, in the past, tended too much toward an unthinking, routine, social penance, Lent now tends too much toward this overthinking, individual, competitive penance. In fact, the social nature of penance is crucial for the Catholic Church. Why?

1. Biblical reasons. When Jonah approached Nineveh, he was sent to a people. So also, throughout the Old Testament, we see the Hebrew people performing penitential acts together, as a people.

2. Traditional reasons. Throughout Christian history, the faithful have partaken of penance as a group, at times simply out of custom, and at other times due to official regulations, i.e. canon law.

3. Effectiveness. Most people have experienced the ability to stick with something difficult because they are surrounded with others doing likewise. Sharing a penance with others who are doing the same sacrifice can be both inspirational and helpful in surmounting difficulties and maintaining the Lenten resolution.

4. Meaningfulness. Social penance gives people the opportunity to be supportive of others. Although each person may have a unique experience of the penance, he or she does not feel it as a solitary pursuit. We know we are ecclesiologically linked in the mystical body of Christ.

5. Individual resolutions. There is nothing inherently wrong with individual resolutions. In fact, when people are part of a penitential culture, knowing that penance is something shared, as a team sport, they are better able also to commit to individual penances as well.

6. Loving Christ and his cross. The mystery of Christ's love for us to the point of his death on the cross inspires in us a response of love for Christ and for that cross, which we must take up daily as individuals, but which we also take up together, as the body of Christ.

Smartphones are perhaps at once the epitome of individual and social. They are personal devices, often carried around on the person, with unique settings and apps tailored to the individual. But they are inherently intended to be social in nature, connecting us to each other through phone calls, messages, and social media.

It is fitting, then, that going grayscale for Lent is something best done together. Its impact on the individual may be remarkable or not, but the shared experience of going grayscale has the potential to link the faithful to the biblical and traditional social penances, to help people to stick to the penance, finding it to be meaningful while also encouraging other individual penances and to grow in love of Christ and the cross.

Grayscale and the Traditional Lenten Triad of Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving

Putting your phone on grayscale for Lent may seem like quite an unusual Lenten resolution. In fact, if we look back over 2,000 years of Christianity, I think we can be pretty certain that this particular Lenten resolution was not ever a popular voluntary Lenten penance. So we might ask ourselves why go grayscale, especially when it is not a traditional Lenten practice?

First of all, what are the traditional triad of Lenten penances?

Prayer- spending extra time in prayer or increased intensity in prayer, e.g. attending daily Mass during Lent, saying a Rosary daily, dedicating extra time for mental prayer, reading the Gospels using  lectio divino, keeping a gratitude (to God) journal, etc.

Fasting- giving up those foods that we enjoy. Before the Lent of 1967, all Catholics practiced daily Lenten fasting with partial abstinence from meat, excepting Fridays, which were days of complete abstinence from meat. Voluntary fasting since 1967 has come to include many things, such as fasting from chocolate, snacks, meat, dairy, soda, alcohol, coffee, etc.

Almsgiving- dedicating additional funds toward the poor. Especially given a more simple Lenten menu, there should be extra money available to give to those in need. Almsgiving can include direct giving to the poor and beggars, as well as charitable giving to organizations dedicated to helping the poor. It can also include the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, such as visiting the imprisoned and clothing the naked.

Now, where might going grayscale on our phones fit into this schema? The answer is...everywhere! In his book, The Strangest Way, Bishop Robert Barron borrows the Buddhist idea of "monkey mind," to describe what sometimes happens when we begin to pray, placing ourselves in the presence of God. Even with the best of intentions and desires, our mind eagerly jumps from topic to topic, distracting us from the presence of God.

Smartphone usage is a sort of a training in monkey mind, an easy way of exacerbating a tendency that we already have. Jumping from app to app, from bright red circle notification to the next, scrolling quickly through a social media feed, or skimming news headlines and emails. There are a multitude of ways we use our phones - often to good purpose as an amazing tool - and yet, it feeds a sort of monkey mind, where conscious choice can be minimized as we follow the whims engineered by app designers who study how to distract us and employ those means to win our attention.

There are wonderful prayer apps that we can download to our phone...but, lovely and useful as they are, they nonetheless appear as one app among many. Even with dedication to a particular prayer practice, we can easily fall into a desire to get that breviary done so we can go back to FaceBook. Having a smartphone does not preclude having a good prayer life, but we must admit that facilitating and encouraging monkey mind through training ourselves with these screens can detract from and diminish the quality and quantity of our time in prayer. Going grayscale has been evaluated as increasing conscious choice, meaning we are ruled once again by our reason and not the drunken monkeys jumping around in our head. Those who advocate a grayscale phone setting claim that it also diminishes overall usage on the phone, which means the minutes available for prayer time increase.

Fasting from certain foods during Lent is also a way of increasing consciousness, of thinking more carefully about what we are consuming. It can help us to live more simply and be aware and appreciative of our resources. The bright colors of the screen are highly consumable, albeit not by our mouths and stomachs. Many of us have had that experience of having our attention drawn to the bright red notifications, feeling like we must click in order to get it erased. Push notifications draw our attention to breaking news, and we feel a desire to consume this news immediately. Fasting from food is a way of slowing us down, and so also is fasting from color. Our phones become less attractive and less consumable.

Almsgiving is a practice that ultimately has its root in seeing God in others, acknowledging the truth that when we give to others, we are giving to God and showing him our love. Many of us have had the experience of feeling ignored by others who are looking at their phones. Many of us have also had the experience of knowing that someone near us feels ignored because WE are looking at our phones! The attractiveness of entertainment or communication with others that we love can easily distract us from the people that surround us. It can prevent us from recognizing God in others and from identifying their needs. We can miss out on opportunities for the corporal and spiritual works of mercy because we are buried in what is happening on our screens. If going grayscale, combined with an intentional desire to be more present to those around us, can help us to decrease our overall phone usage, we can be more present to others, recognizing God's presence in them.

So, in short, while going grayscale on a phone is very new as a specific Lenten practice, it is nonetheless in continuity with the tradition of Lenten penances. The aim of the U.S. bishops in making Lenten penances voluntary in 1967 was precisely so that the faithful could identify penances that would be meaningful and appropriate to the current situation. Going grayscale is a great example of a penance that addresses the needs of our times.

iPhone: How to Go Grayscale

Here are the directions for changing your iPhone's setting to grayscale.

Open Settings.

Select General.




Select Accessibility.

Select Display Accommodations.

Select Color Filters.

Toggle the Color Filters on.

Select Grayscale.

Going Grayscale for Lent

What is "Going Grayscale"?

Smartphones have a display setting that limits the colors of the screen to shades of gray. Switching a screen to grayscale reduces the attraction of looking at the screen, thus reducing overall phone usage and increasing conscious choice, rather than simply responding to bright colors designed intentionally to attract attention and cause distraction. For more on the results of going grayscale, see this piece by Nellie Bowles, entitled, "Is the Answer to Phone Addiction a Worse Phone?" You may also be interested in a TED talk by tech ethicist Tristan Harrison on "Time Well Spent."

The Phone Temptation

A mere two years ago, I finally got a smartphone, with the hopes of finally being able easily to read the texts from my daughter's soccer coach. When I told my brother, he said, "You'll be a slave to your phone in about a month." I laughed. I didn't think I'd be like those people who always have their phones out. But before long, his words started to become more and more true. Like many people, I started using my phone for everything from prayer to driving directions to email to FaceBook to weather checks to recipes to, well, you get the point.

Smartphones are dead useful, no doubt. And yet, lately there has been a new round of concerns about the effects they have on us individually and on our society as a whole. Jean Twenge, writing for The Atlantic, asked "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" Another piece noted, "Your Smartphone Reduces Your Brainpower, Even if It's Just Sitting There," citing a study indicating that even a silent, powered off phone can be distracting. Many of us can't imagine going back to not having this useful tool. But on the other hand, we acknowledge it would be great if we had more control over the phone than it has over us.

Lent: 40 Days of Gray

Having recognized the particular temptations to distraction represented by their phones, Lent often finds my friends trying to find a way to limit their time. Some give up FaceBook for Lent. Others try to give up games on their phones. Some try to make a point of doing something positive or religious on their phone. The creativity of Lenten resolutions around phone usage is amazing, and even inspiring. It shows that we can recognize the way we feel like slaves to our phones. Even more so, it shows our desire for exercising our free will in a conscious and recollected way, particularly during Lent.

The traditional penitential practices of Lent are fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. Going grayscale, while not a dietary fasting, nonetheless is a sort of fast, from the flashy and inviting colors of the screens we carry around with us. Grayscale is a choice to abstain from the color we would ordinarily see. Grayscale users find their overall screen time decreases, and this means there should be more time available for intentional prayer.

Together is Better

For the last fifty years, Lenten resolutions have largely been individualistic. But before 1966, all American Catholics shared the same Lenten fasting practices, including daily fasting (one meal, two snacks not totaling a full meal) during the 40 days of Lent. One reason these vigorous practices were possible was that the faithful did them together. Lenten penances were never meant to be a contest of creativity or difficulty; instead they are an opportunity to support one another.

This blog is connected to a FaceBook group for people who are committed to going grayscale for Lent. While members are encouraged also to take up other Lenten resolutions, the Go Gray for Lent group is meant as a way to recognize a shared struggle. Those who are not on FaceBook (or have given it up for Lent!) can follow this blog and let others know about the shared penance by referring others to this post.