Readers of The Lamp wanting to change their relationship with technology will be happy to learn that I have some advice for them. This advice codifies nicely into a four-step program.

Step one: Unburden yourself of all worldly responsibilities. Sell your house, quit your job, put your younger siblings in the care of trustworthy pious virgins, and enter the novitiate of your local convent. You may find that your commitment to the regular observances (silence, prayer, cloister, penance) gives you an inner spiritual peace and clarity beyond which you could ever have imagined. But it probably won’t. Instead, you are more likely to find that you start tapping things—your desk, your bag, your skirt pocket—and then feel strangely frustrated. Eventually you will realize that this novel nervous tic is focused around the places where you previously kept your phone. As you strain to grasp the permanently gaping portal of entertainment, information, and consolation that until now has accompanied you your whole adult life (and possibly a good chunk of your childhood, too), your hand now closes only upon an unfamiliar bundle of unacknowledged desires, subterranean memories, the natural poetry of the seasons, aching boredom, and the existence of other people. It is a hard, unyielding reality which you soon come to realize has a name: the present moment.

Step two: Be incorporated into the convent community by temporary profession, during which time you will be given access to a smartphone which is shared between all other sisters in formation. Your texts during this time will consist almost entirely of “The train is fifteen minutes late,” or “The train is half an hour late,” or (hypothetically, if you do not live in the South of England) “The train is on time,” followed each time by an “OK THNAKS” from the sister who will be picking you up from the station. One year, make sure you are sent to a World Youth Day in a large European city. There, a well-meaning teenager will take pity on you during a metro journey and teach you some nifty things you can do with your phone which everybody else your age has been doing for the past five years. You will return to the convent radiant as the prophet descending from the mountaintop, ready to tell the rest of the juniorate all about WhatsApp voice messages.

Step three: Make religious profession usque ad mortem and then receive from the community a phone for your exclusive (or near-exclusive) use. Take some time to sit with your new phone in the convent common room: Set up two-factor authentications, subscribe to three Catholic podcasts to listen to on long journeys, download a fun-looking language learning app and then delete it the next day after the novelty wears off. Begin to find ways to accommodate the regular use of the convent phone into your new affinity with the present moment; it’s much the same skillset as trying to welcome a new housemate who doesn’t seem to know how to clean a bathroom, or walk up a flight of stairs quietly when coming home after midnight, into a houseshare which is otherwise serene and well-functioning. Allow yourself to feel pleased that certain tasks—the kind of twenty-first century chores from which even life in a convent does not absolve you—are made quicker and easier by your re-introduction to technology. But do not be afraid of that persistent, though for now wordless, feeling of discomfort which accompanies it.

Step four takes place some time after final profession. In an airport departure lounge, on one of those delayed English trains, or simply while walking down the street, take a moment to watch the people around you as they hunch over their phones, stroking the screens like the furry hide of a beloved pet. Allow a realization to hit you. True, you too are pulling the phone out of your pocket every so often to check a timetable or re-assure your superior you haven’t gotten yourself lost in a foreign country. Yet this act looks and feels very different to the frantic rectangle-gazing going on around you. Why? Because you are not just physically situated in the present moment in the way that everyone else here is; you are also spiritually and psychologically embedded in it. And lessening your grip on it with the help of a phone-screen feels not like a relief or a comfort to you, but an absurdity.

This is when you understand that the reason you are detached from that phone in your habit pocket is not simply because you haven’t used it much, if at all, for six years. After all, renunciation is never an end in itself; it is always a path to re-ordering and renewal. What has detached you from your phone is the transformative power of a life in which nothing can be achieved, nothing can be received, and nothing can be resolved without a face-to-face encounter with other persons: the human faces of the consecrated persons who make up your community, and the face of Christ by which we discover the mystery of the three-personed God. And yet this key principle of religious life is not one you find much in evidence beyond the enclosure doors.

In a recent address, Pope Leo XIV connected personhood to two distinctive aspects of our embodied humanity: human faces and human voices. “Our faces and voices are unique, distinctive features of every person; they reveal a person’s own unrepeatable identity and are the defining elements of every encounter with others,” he said. But by “simulating human voices and faces,” he went on, “the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems, but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.” The challenge thus posed by artificial intelligence, the pope concluded, “is not technological, but anthropological.”

Pope Leo’s address uses the same biblical and anthropological imagery which the Church uses to describe the nature and purpose of religious consecration. One of the most important postconciliar documents on the religious life, In the Service of Authority and Obedience, is also known by its Latin incipit, taken from Psalm XXVII: Faciem tuam, Domine, requiram; it is your face, O Lord, that I seek. “A pilgrim seeking the meaning of life, enwrapped in the great mystery that surrounds him, the human person, even if unconsciously, does, in fact, seek the face of the Lord,” we read. “Consecrated life, called to make the characteristic traits of the virginal, poor and obedient Jesus visible, flourishes in the ambience of this search for the face of the Lord and the ways that lead to him.”

The consecrated religious life is given to the Church and to the world as a radiant witness: a witness to love, to freedom, and to the goodness of God. Perhaps, in the midst of the current anthropological crisis which Pope Leo has described, it is also called to serve as a witness to something else: to the joy and fulfillment of a life in which has at its heart neither productivity nor prestige, but rather the face-to-face encounter with divine and human persons by which we ourselves become fully who we are called to be.