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Discipline for the Technologist
By Rosie Perera | August 24, 2008 at 2:34 am
I am not sure whether there is an accepted generic term for those of us who have vocations in technology: programmers, web designers, games developers, software test engineers, database administrators, network administrators, IT managers, and computer geeks of all kinds. I will use the term technologists.
Co-blogger Wan Phek How and I (both technologists ourselves), along with members of the Technology and Theology Group at Regent College, have been in conversation trying to come up with a set of disciplines to help people develop the sort of relationship with technology that maintains a healthy spiritual life.
My friend David Taylor, author of the blog Diary of an Arts Pastor, has recently posted a portion of a talk he gave in which he shared five thoughts on discipline for the artist. But I realized they can apply equally well, with a bit of tweaking, to the technologist. Here they are with my tweaks (brackets and ellipses to show my minor changes, italics for major new additions). You can read the original text here.
—FIVE THOUGHTS ABOUT DISCIPLINE —
1) The disciplines of a disciple of Jesus entail the reconstruction of our whole self. No part is left off. Every faculty of our person has been damaged—head, heart, hand—every faculty requires the re-habituation of its appetites away from sin toward Christ’s good order.
[So many of us] reduce our Christian faith to a set of activities that only addresses parts of our person. For instance, we feed our [minds] with great head knowledge but leave [ourselves] emotionally debilitated. We…study and pray, but neglect…the disciplines of feasting and silence.
The result of our compartmentalized discipleship? We end up as programmers who write world-class software but are immature and egotistical (I know; I worked for a company that seemed to attract such people, and I was one of them!), or web designers who are experts at their craft but who are addicted to the Internet, spend their entire lives online, and have no in-person interpersonal skills.
It’s important for us to remember that a dysfunction in one part of our person will negatively affect the whole. What we need is a model, both comprehensive and sensible, for disciplined life that brings about the God-superintended restoration of our whole person.
2) The disciplines are God’s instruments of grace. They are our way of reverently cooperating with the initiating and sustaining work of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Dallas Willard:
“No one ever says, ‘If you want to be a great athlete, go vault eighteen feet, run the mile under four minutes’, or ‘If you want to be a great musician, play the Beethoven violin concerto’. Instead we advise the young artist or athlete to enter a certain kind of overall life, one involving deep associations with qualified people as well as rigorously scheduled time, diet, and activity for the mind and body.”
The disciplines are what strengthen our muscles so that we can become the kinds of persons who do the good “naturally.”
3) Learning a new way of being a human being is hard work. All kinds of forces, inside us and outside, fight against this renovating work. My craving for approval, for example, may lead me to avoid conflict at all costs, including the cost of truly being known. I have to choose—every day—to adopt the kind of habits that will enable me to become a different kind of person, the kind God exultantly imagined before the foundations of the world.
But while plenty hard at first, the way of Jesus eventually becomes easy. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” he once said, and he wasn’t speaking theoretically. He was speaking plainly.
…
4) The consequence of living an undisciplined life, or as Eugene Peterson puts it, an “unscripted life,” is that we become governed by our inordinate appetites. They sabotage our best efforts to grow up. We find [ourselves] using TV, internet, food, books, or busyness to medicate the pain of a deep loneliness and sense of failure.
What the disciplines do is re-orient, day by day, baby step by unexciting baby step, our appetites away from destructive habits towards the narrow way of Christ that leads to life.
5) The disciplines are best practiced in a community of friends. What kind? You only need three. You need 3 friends who are doggedly constant in their love for you; the kind who will walk with you everywhere, loving you no matter what and who are not afraid to tell you when you’re full of crap—a crappy attitude, crappy behavior, or crappy technology.
[Apologies to David for taking liberties with his writing.]
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