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Last week I was stunned to discover that I was a member of a minority group. I was sitting in the Glasgow subway and noticed that in the carriage- which admittedly was not packed - I was the only person not staring at their mobile phone.

There's a simple reason for this – I don't have one. So I don't have access to the whole range of social media tweets, feeds and enticements to which a quarter of humanity are presently connected. I am therefore one of those benighted souls who has no idea of the latest early morning sound bite from the White House; nor do I receive countless advertisements specially selected and delivered via a pocket sized device.

Even more curiously, I don't feel deprived.

I count it a great privilege to do Thought for The Day occasionally and much more frequently to preach or speak across the country. But I have no compulsion to make myself more accessible by promulgating my latest passion or prejudice. I find myself in total concurrence with a friend of mine who is more 'linked in and wired up' than I am but who said the other day:
Why do we feel compelled to document every detail of our lives for the consumption of other people?

I'm also inclined to ask to whom are the huge social media companies accountable for the influence they have on a quarter of humanity, and for their encouragement of the thirst for instant news or self-publicity.

I don't for a moment disparage the undoubted benefits which social media have enabled in stirring consciences, enabling people separated by distance to keep in touch and all the other good things that users can identify. But the allurement of unnecessary self-promotion and the lack of media accountability concern me.

And then I think of the last lines in 'Leisure' by the Welsh poet William Henry Davies:

'A poor life this if, full of care,
we have no time to stand and stare.'

It is suggestive of what mystics and holy people have witnessed to for ages – the need to find a place, a space in which our souls are nourished not by propaganda but by contemplation and quiet reflection of experience....and this not as an escape from the world, but as a preparation for it. A place, a space in which we converse about ourselves with ourselves and with God, rather than feed to others thoughts and feelings we have not ourselves digested.

And we all can do this, as immediately as we can turn on our mobile phone, for we live in sight of the sky and in touch with the land which, for Davies and countless other Celtic poets, helped them to counterbalance the immediate with the eternal.

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