In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In an article in the New York Magazine, Kathryn Jezer-Morton writes, “The world has become increasingly oriented away from life itself and toward forms of distraction and compulsive avoidance… We are always one foot out the door already.” A few weeks ago, being the responsible parents that we are, we introduced our oldest daughter to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It had been a while since I had seen it myself and one of the things that struck me was how long the shots in the movie were. I looked it up and the average length of a movie shot, how long each camera angle is held before it changes, has gone down from 12 seconds in 1930 to 2.5 seconds today. Less than every three seconds – that’s how long a single shot can be expected to hold our attention.
Researchers have also found that our attention span has decreased dramatically in recent decades to the point that barely anything can hold our attention for more than a moment. We can blame technology, screens, entertainment – but none of that blame changes reality. The result is that when we reach the end of our very short attention spans, we perceive it as monotony, even as suffering. Jezer-Morton continues in the article, “Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be constantly escaping from… Reading is boring; talking is awkward; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all – overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do.”
She says that according to the data about how we use technology, most people would prefer to not be human. Silicon Valley has figured out that dehumanizing friction-reduction tools are the most lucrative. Don’t want to leave the house and interact with someone to buy groceries? No problem, there’s an app for that. Not sure how to tell a friend that their behavior really bothered you? No sweat, just ask AI to craft a text to make the point. We are being sold a friction-less experience, which is why perhaps everything feels so slippery these days.
The article, while not at all a theological piece, makes a profoundly theological point about what it means to be human. She writes, “The dullness and labor of embodied experience has become unbearable… It’s infantilizing adults, and we don’t even have a word yet for what it’s doing to kids, but we all know that it is happening.” And so, she says her commitment is to friction-maxxing in 2026, which she defines as “not simply a matter of reducing your screen time. It’s the process of building up tolerance for ‘inconvenience.’” It’s about consenting to the limits and frustrations of the world as we strive to be present to our lives.
Friction, as much as we’re being trained to reduce it, is a part of what it means to be human. For one, friction generates heat. We might say that the spark of being alive comes from the friction of ideas, circumstances, and relationships. When there is no friction, we just slide right through life, unable to grab a hold of anything.
Friction also builds resilience. It is as St. Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Challenges and boredom build us into resilient people.
And the other thing that friction does, as in the brakes of a car, is that it slows things down. Lent, in particular, is a great time to think about adding a bit of friction to our lives so that we can experience, instead of trying to avoid, the gift of being alive.
Jezer-Morton has a few suggestions: Don’t use AI. Looking for a recipe? Try a cookbook. Or ask a friend. Or just go the grocery store and find something. Invite some people over to your house for dinner without worrying about how clean it is. Give your kids some more responsibilities around the house, knowing full well that they will probably do a bad or incomplete job. I would add that we can allow ourselves to be bored. Instead of pulling out our adult pacifiers, also known as a phone, we can daydream or have a conversation with a stranger. If you can’t remember something or have a curiosity, think about it or think of a friend who probably knows the answer and reach out to them instead of having a search bar rob us of the very human characteristics of curiosity, wonder, and conversation. In all these things, the goal is to add friction – to add that spark of humanity, to build tolerance and resilience in the face of challenges, and to go slow enough to enjoy life.
In the Gospel text from Matthew, Jesus commends three practices that add some holy friction to our lives. The first is almsgiving. The word for “alms” is derived from the word for “mercy.” Showing mercy might be one of the most friction-filled actions we can undertake. Mercy has us look another person, particularly someone who is suffering, who is dealing with a lot of friction, in the face. And in coming to face to face with their suffering, we are often put in touch with our own. When we act with mercy, we come up against the limits of our ability to fix things, to control things, and to understand things.
Showing mercy is terribly inconvenient because we have to give something up – energy, money, time. Being merciful also has us give up our sense of deservingness. We don’t show mercy to people because they’ve earned it, but because they need it. It’s a great practice that helps us to receive the mercy that God gives us in our same state of neediness.
Jesus also commends prayer – the giving of time and attention to God. The word for prayer used in Scripture is about facing towards someone. This will involve friction as we turn our gaze away from screens, from news, from our agendas. Prayer brings us face to face with God, but also with our insecurities and anxieties that surface when we dare to slow down. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said 400 years ago that “All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Praying will make us encounter boredom, perhaps, questions about effectiveness, and other such friction-inducing thoughts. In prayer, not only will we encounter God, but ourselves. Both of which can be terrifying experiences if we aren’t used to that. In prayer, we will be enveloped by the Love that made us and the Love that is making all things well.
And Jesus mentions fasting – which could be a fast from shopping, ordering on Amazon, streaming, YouTube, meat, alcohol, cable news, getting into unnecessary arguments about unimportant things, or really anything else that would force you to be more mindful about the choices you make. When we fast, we pay attention to our desires and hungers, which then allows us to be intentional about whether we want to feed those desires or choose a different path. We can add some friction by saying “no” to the things that are chosen for us or that we are tired of choosing. Fasting is an intentional “no” so that we might say “yes” to God’s call to us.
In just a few minutes, we will have ashes smeared on our foreheads. These ashes are signs of Sin and Death – the ultimate frictions we face. I know full well that we heard Jesus say that we aren’t to disfigure our faces to show others how holy we are. And if that’s how the ashes function for you – by all means, go to the bathroom sink after worship and wash them off. But the ashes might also add some holy friction – in which case, leave them on. If they make you self-conscious, if they might open a conversation with a stranger, if they confront you with the fullness and depths of your humanity, keep them on and let the friction do its work. This Lent, don’t worry about what you might give up, instead pray about what friction you might add, what discomforts you can welcome, what inconveniences you can learn to tolerate for the sake of being more human.
By the time we arrive at Easter, we will be reminded that God washes off those ashes from all of us, as Sin is forgiven and Death is defeated in the Resurrection of Jesus. In Lent, the Church invites us into friction-maxxing – into works of mercy, time for prayer, and fasting so that we might have enough friction to slow down, to be inconvenienced, to recognize just how badly we need God to do as is promised in Psalm 51, to “Create in us clean hearts and renew a right spirit within us.” Amen.
