The screen in your pocket is a highly sophisticated, addictive, dangerous device that has robbed many of us of the ability to focus. We often miss the real world because this screen has us captive. It feels more important, more pleasurable, and more comforting to stay fixed on the screen than to look up and "be bored" for a moment. 

What I'd like to briefly touch on is how this screen acts as a mirror. And I want to contrast this mirror with another mirror: the orthodox icon.

The social media apps are profiting around the clock from human attention. They reflect back to the user, as a predictive mirror, a stream of algorithmically curated "reflections" in the form of content aligned with your personal tastes, desires, and life circumstance.

Think about looking in a mirror, and how closely aligned your reflection is to you. You move, it moves. You look deeper, it looks deeper into you. Today, you watch or engage with a piece of content on your screen, and it constantly uses that information to predict what you'd like to consume next. 

But the screen in your pocket is a sort of predictive mirror that can only predict you, it cannot know you. It anticipates. It does not intuit or truly understand. 

The icon reflects what the human person is intended to be. It reflects back the beholder's true identity, calling, and spiritual condition. The most important icon—of Christ—reflects the image of Christ ... the image in which all human beings are made.

As the mirror of our phone screens reflects our fallen, broken state, the icon reflects the restored, transformed, and radiant human person. 

If we spend more time consuming and gorging ourselves with content, we will never be able to look up, see the real world for what it is, and see a reflection that calls us into a relationship with Christ who is the one calling to us. 

If you want to hear more explanation on this subject, check out this episode of the Luminous podcast with guest Fr. Maximos Constas. Go to the 35-minute mark. 

Thank you for reading! I hope this reflection sparked something good for you. Please share this post with one person you think it could have a similar benefit.