“Behold…”
The word came to him in the middle of a crisis of faith that mirrored the thunderstorm rolling in all around him. Carlos Whittaker, an Evangelical Christian and popular author/ podcaster from Nashville, TN who boasts over 300K followers on Instagram, desperately wanted to go home. And yet he found himself standing on top of a weather-beaten mountain overlooking St. Andrew’s Monastery in Southern California when he first caught a glimpse of something all of us need to behold. But I’ll get to that in a second.
Let’s first talk about the experiment that led him there.
Smartphone domination
A few months earlier, Whittaker received a notification that he had averaged over 7 hours per day on his smartphone. Horrified, he knew he needed a drastic change. But like so many of us, he couldn’t imagine giving up his phone completely; it served too many good purposes in his personal and professional life.
Whittaker reached out to his literary agent and pitched a book about living tech-free for a time in order to “turn down the volume of the world and turn up the volume of God.” The goal wasn’t about becoming dogmatically anti-screen. Instead, “it was about remembering how we lived without [smartphones in particular] so we could find better ways of bringing them back into our lives.”
Before giving up all technology to live with Benedictine monks for two weeks, Amish farmers for two weeks, and with his own family screen-free for three weeks, Whittaker had an MRI to study the effects screen abuse had on his brain; the scan was then repeated post-experiment, and we’ll talk about his results later too, along with the previously mentioned mountain-top moment.
After the first scan, which proved to be typical for a tech-addicted brain, Whittaker turned over his smartphone to his best friend and was dropped off with the monks at St. Andrews.
Screen-free with monks
There, in his desert cabin without air conditioning, Whittaker went through actual physical withdrawal symptoms in the first few days of being smartphone-free for the first time in fifteen years. He experienced heart palpitations, shakes, nausea and night sweats. Still, he pushed through, participating in daily Mass, eating mostly in silence, and praying the Liturgy of the Hours. By day four, he found himself suddenly confronted with thoughts he hadn’t faced in years — age-old dilemmas he would have typically numbed by scrolling the news and social media: Who am I? Why do I exist? If God is good, why is there so much evil in the world?
A wise priest encouraged Whittaker to grapple with these big life questions out in nature. So, he did. And as he climbed to the highest spot on the monastery grounds one evening — as mentioned in the opening paragraph — he experienced God in the rain and the wind and the thunderheads flashing all around him: Behold! The word resonated powerfully in his soul as his gaze was drawn to a sky full of crushing purple clouds. Behold, behold, behold! He couldn’t stop whispering it to himself, and as he did, he realized he hadn’t really looked up in years.
A book about “looking up”
And in a nutshell, that’s what Reconnected is about — looking up, particularly from the 7-inch LCD screen in your hand. It would be a disservice to the book, Whittaker and you, the potential reader, to sum up this rich, multifaceted experiment with a list of practical, “lessons learned” bullet points — even though the book offers plenty of them — because this light-hearted, quick, yet profoundly deep read is so much more than that.
When Whittaker climbed down from the mountain top and reported his behold experience to the priest who sent him there, the priest responded by quoting the second century Saint Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive. And the life of the human consists in beholding God.”
In the weeks that followed, Whittaker leaned into St. Irenaeus’ wisdom whole-heartedly. He settled into his tech-free life with the monks and then the Amish so seamlessly, he began referring to himself as an Amish Monk. Whittaker put pen to paper each evening, journaling his often-humorous experiences of praying with the monks for over 2.5 hours per day, then later baling hay and shearing sheep with the Amish.
Identity, Godspeed, and Wonder
His meditative journal entries became the framework for Reconnected‘s chapters. Each one is titled in an understated manner — Identity, God Speed, and Wonder; these were a few that resonated deeply with me.
A natural storyteller, Whittaker has spun a real-life tale that reads like you’re sitting at a campfire with an old friend, hearing about the crazy adventure that proved to have a profound effect on his soul, body and especially his brain — the latter was proven by a post-experiment MRI that resulted in findings nothing less than fascinating. But I’m not going to go into detail here because I don’t want to ruin it for you.
If you’re anything like me, someone who struggles with discerning the proper role of technology — specifically smartphones and social media in my own and my family’s life — I encourage you not to wait; check out Reconnected today.