Can you recall moments when something larger than yourself was holding you, as if being carried by a force you couldn’t quite see or explain? I recently recalled one such moment from my childhood.
At around ten years old, my Nana would sometimes take me to our local Catholic church on Saturday mornings to visit the fourteen “Stations of the Cross.” For those of you who didn’t grow up in the Catholic faith, the Stations of the Cross are a devotional practice that retraces the final events of Jesus Christ’s life, from his condemnation to his crucifixion and burial. Here’s how those visits went.
Starting at the back of the church, we would stand in front of station number one. On the wall in front of us hung a framed panel with bas-relief figures and scenes, sculpted in a plaster-like material that projected outward from the surface. Seven stations lined the left side of the church, and seven lined the right.
Holding my Nana’s hand, she would begin praying in a whisper, barely audible, for about thirty seconds. Then we would move on to the next station and do the same. This continued until we had prayed at all fourteen.
As we moved from one station to the next, Nana would explain that Jesus was being mistreated by people who did not know that God was living inside him. I remember feeling a sense of awe as I looked at each scene, wondering how one man could affect so many lives. I also remember thinking that God must be sad to see Jesus being treated this way.
Why was he treated so badly?
What did he do wrong?
Growing up in America in the 1950s through the late 1960s, I assumed God’s existence as a living reality, a fact of life. God was alive in the “heavens,” and He was always around in my life, up to and including punishing me for my bad deeds. (Ouch.)
During this time, broadly speaking, that orientation was shared across much of American culture. The prevailing Protestant-Catholic-Jewish consensus held that God exists, human beings are morally accountable to God, the universe has inherent meaning, and religion plays a legitimate role in public life. Differences certainly existed, yet these traditions largely agreed that the universe is a sacred, ordered reality, and that human beings occupy a defined place within it.
Today, holding such a view about God or the cosmos can seem peculiar or impractical, like reaching for a long-forgotten home rotary phone to call your best friend, only to realize the world no longer works that way, especially if you grew up in the 1990s or beyond.
Back when I was growing up, our rotary phone sat on the end table next to our living room sofa. If it rang, whoever was nearby answered it. Conversations took place within earshot of others in the room. Calls were often short because someone else might need to use the phone. If you called someone and they weren’t home, you waited. Communication belonged, in a sense, to the household. And in the house I grew up in, with seven siblings, there were plenty of fights over access to the phone.
Over time, that familiar rotary phone got replaced by the touch-tone keypad phone. Because my dad worked for the old New York Bell Telephone Company, he was able to get us one of these new phones, which he mounted on the wall in our kitchen. We were amazed at how quick and easy it was to dial a phone number using this keypad, compared with the slow turn of the rotary dial and its steady clicking as it returned to where it started, replaced now by a series of quick electronic beeps.
A few weeks later, our dad came home with what seemed like a magical device, a thirty-foot extension cord that made it possible to stretch the phone receiver all the way down the hallway and around the corner toward the bedrooms. I can still recall pulling that cord down the hallway and around the corner, trying to find a quiet place to talk with my girlfriend.
Then came the invention of the cordless phone. Walking around the house without having to stand next to the phone, or worrying about pulling the phone off the wall by yanking the extension cord too hard, felt like a whole new level of freedom in the house. But the landline touch-tone phone was still, largely, the reliable go-to phone, because reception on these early cordless phones was often spotty.
As reception improved, these personal mobile phones began to shift communication away from a location-specific, shared setting toward something more private and individualized. The cordless phone freed people from being tied to a single place, but it had not yet become the center of daily life, still largely limited to phone calls and rudimentary texting. That shift would come with the arrival of the smartphone.
This expansion was already underway with the rise of the home personal computer and early internet, and later with the portable laptop, though each remained something one had to sit down to access. I can still remember in the early 1990s opening up my IBM Butterfly laptop and dialing up an internet connection via AOL (anyone else remember?).
In 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, what we once used only occasionally became something we could carry with us and access at all times. Communication, information, and interpretation moved into the same device, available almost instantly and in private. Over time, this not only increased access but also created a more continuous form of engagement, where the flow of information and perspectives became constant and varied.
Today, many of us use this device from the moment we wake to the moment we drift off to sleep. (I confess, guilty as charged.) New patterns of attention, habits of behavior, and increasingly, how we understand ourselves and the world around us are shaped by it.
What began as unlimited, private, individual freedom to access the world via the smartphone has, in some cases, become full immersion in a highly speculative digital sphere. Now, with AI, the phone begins to take on a role in our thinking, offering interpretations that shape how we understand our experience and, increasingly, how we understand ourselves.
What was once held within a shared and structured phone culture has gradually morphed into something far more individualized, continuous, and private. Where communication once took place within a common space, shaped by visibility and informal accountability, it now occurs largely in seclusion, on demand, and without the same shared reference points. This creates a new set of conditions in which each person is increasingly responsible for managing a constant flow of input, interpretation, and response, largely on their own.
Just as the evolution of the phone gradually shifted communication away from a shared, visible, and structured setting into something more individualized, continuous, and private, a corresponding change has taken place in how we try to make sense of our lives.
We are now expected, almost as a rite of passage, to figure out for ourselves what is true, what matters, and how to live. Where we once believed we were held by something larger than ourselves, a world understood to be divinely ordered, where direction was already given, we now see ourselves floating in a sea of limitless possibilities, none of which arrive with any shared sense of what to trust or how to proceed.
And so the responsibility shifts, often quietly but profoundly, onto the individual to sort, interpret, and decide. This pressure to navigate our lives, almost as if we have to invent a compass to direct ourselves, can become all-consuming and exhausting. The question of where we actually stand and what kind of world we are moving within remains largely out of view.
What matters, then, is not simply how to navigate this ever-widening field of conflicting options, but whether we have first taken the time to understand where we stand within it. Before deciding what to believe, what to pursue, or how to change, there is a prior task, one that is easily overlooked in a world that encourages relentless forward movement and continual response.
This is what we might call the task of orientation. Of coming to see, as clearly as we can, the ground we stand on and the conditions we live in. Without that, even the best forms of navigation may lead us in circles, like our pet dog chasing its proverbial tail.
The deeper challenge, then, is not simply to move with greater discernment within the field of conflicting options, but to see more clearly the field itself, how it is structured, what it assumes, and how it quietly shapes what feels possible, necessary, or true.
Orientation does not solve the problem of how to live, but it changes the ground on which that question is asked. And without that shift, we may continue navigating, even successfully, without ever quite knowing where we are or where we are headed.