One of my favorite things about pilgrimages is the friendships that are formed. I love to look down a long table of women at dinner and see faces aglow with the joy of a shared joke, the concern of a listening ear, or the intensity of sharing a meaningful story. Night after night I watch friendships grow and bonds deepen over these shared meals.
But the choice to give oneself over to this process actually happened up to a year before our first dinner together. The foundation was laid when each woman applied for the trip and signed off on one of our core trip agreements – no woman will be on her phone during dinners (that includes texting, scrolling, posting, checking emails, or even having audible phone notificaitons) Yes, quick photos are taken of gorgeous plates, and then phones are tucked away, and the magic happens – connections form, attention is complete, our hearts are filled as we fully and tenderly listened to by others.
One of the greatest needs I hear that our pilgrimages fulfill is healing the wounds of loneliness. We are a lonely society. We long for connection, for friendships, to be heard by another person. And this is what happens when, for a week, phones are put away, and we learn again to live as humans, freed from scrolling, news alerts, and constant meaningless contact with a world that does not know us. When we forgo the meaningless distractions our phones offer, our hearts and minds can reset to our “default setting” God gave us of focusing on the people right in front of us. We can retrain our minds to focus with attentiveness to a story told in detail. We can attune our hearts to feel in empathy another’s joy, pain, loss, or concern. We can connect through shared experiences, increase our understanding through learning from another, and heal the wound so many of us have of feeling alone in this world.
The beauty of practicing this way of enoying time with others is that anyone can chose to live this way, it does not take flying to Paris to decide to be a present human again. It does take making a counter-cultural stance, and even diving into the hard waters of addressing how we and our loved ones live.
Here are a few tips for trying this practice with friends and family.
- At home have an intentional conversation with those you live with sharing your desire for more meaningful meal times. Establish some guidelines everyone can agree upon, even if it means just one dinner a week becomes phone free. (Phone free means phones are not only not at the table, they have been silenced from both noise and vibration notifications)
- Before going out on a date night with your spouse establish a phone use plan. If there are no kids at home, or a babysitter who may need to contact you, consider leaving your phones in the car to avoid the temptation and distraction.
- Having friends for a meal, or meeting out, send a text early in the day communicating how much you value your upcoming time together and propose a phone free night. Keep your phones off the table. Studies have shown that even the presence of someone’s phone laying on the table, communicates their divided attention to all present.
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