Despite unprecedented access to a multitude of media tools and stimulation, many people today experience profound existential isolation, mental confusion and the fracturing of identity.

Different generations have their own digital intoxicants of choice – Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat – each platform creating and clamouring for time and attention. They flash out images in mazes of algorithms that capture the spark of human imagination and intelligence.

This article is not an anti-technology diatribe.

Here at the Thomas More Centre, we have saved thousands of miles and hours of travel and effort to reach each other as colleagues and to make new friends using new social media tools and devices.

Access to the online world has expanded our reading and listening. It has enabled new conversations and recovered old masters who were once locked up in remote libraries and collections.

The expanding digital universe is like fire (either Heraclitian or otherwise): a useful servant but at times a brutal master.

The glow and the whir of millions of screens from handheld to wall-sized seem to keep us gratefully connected in this large continent and world of ours, but at the same time, they leave us strangely flat, exhausted and at times de-natured.

No wonder then that a few people are drawn by the hope of abandoning the electronic device (and all its trappings) and recovering our place in wild nature – to recover what at first is the pagan attraction to the creative fire of untrammelled and pure nature.

This was so sensually and brilliantly captured by the 19th-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ about the relatively gentle climate of England:

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous / ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases / in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed / dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks / treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, nature's bonfire burns on.

Other people seek to find solace and belonging in the multitude of human constructions. They burrow further down the screen to find for themselves a community or a tag in the identity politics of gender, race, neurological function or in the poetics of online gaming.

Here at the TMC, we want to acknowledge the reality of human aspiration in both these directions: the need to reconnect not to faceless “nature”, but to Creation, and there to be “re-embodied” and to find company.

At the same time, we encourage the humane use of the best of technological communications. We are blessed with young colleagues who are “digital natives” and assist in the improvement of these things.

At our schools, talks and events we want to deepen our understanding of the basics that assist in building the authentically human. We also realise that people flourish when their search for knowledge and understanding is supported by lively cultural surroundings and elements, by friendship and appreciation and by beauty and virtue.

Best of all, this happens when people can participate in all of this in the flesh, around the table or the drink. We are essentially “hobbits” and flourish in the hobbit-clime.

We also recognise that no purely human pursuit can ever reach beyond the passing and mortal.

It is useful to realise that in southern Australia, the liturgical season of Lent often coincides with the bushfire season, when both nature and human constructions are burned to ash and charred gum leaves (some of these are drifting down on Ballarat as I write).

We therefore unapologetically pursue our work by drawing upon and returning to our Christian sources, culture and worship.

It is Gerald Manley Hopkins in the poem above who realises that it is only the eternal diamond of Christ, the logos of God, with His suffering, death and resurrection that can recover the passing spark of human existence with all its hunger for lasting truth and community.

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping / joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam.

A blessed Lent!

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre