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Good morning. When I was growing up in the 1970s, our phone was in use all the time – calls to grandparents, to friends, to doctors’ surgeries, to local businesses. Now my landline never rings at all apart from junk calls. Plenty of people have got rid of their’s altogether. According to Ofcom’s latest statistics, what we really love to do now is not have long conversations on our mobiles but send written messages. The number of online messages sent in the UK has increased from approximately 100 billion messages a year in 2012 to over 1,300 billion messages a year in 2022. While I message as much as the next person, it seems to me a shame that conversation via calls are not as popular as written messages. Organisations, like Age UK, which runs SilverLine, a phone companionship service for older people, say phone conversations can be a lifeline for the lonely. Instead of those conversations we have a different kind of chatter going on – a sort of noise that fills our heads from constantly using our phones for other purposes. Of course, phones can often be vital; we’ve seen video footage from mobiles that has brought home so vividly what is happening to ordinary people in Israel and Gaza. But too often our use of mobiles takes up too much of our time. I notice myself doing it: reading messages, looking at social media, scrolling emails, playing games, when I’m, say, on a bus. I try to remind myself to stop and look out of the window instead. There’s a neurosis about phones: we fiddle with them constantly, and fret they’ve disappeared for good when we can’t find them for a moment. What we have lost, it seems to me, is the capacity for day-dreaming, for reverie. Those quiet, silent moments, maybe just a snatch here and there, where we can think, be quiet. It’s as if contemporary humanity can’t bear to be without something that fills up its time. In the early days of Christianity, the Desert Fathers were hermits who were followers of Jesus and would go out into the desert to get away from the hubbub. They gave away their possessions for a simple life and embraced silence – that deep silence many people have experienced in the desert – in order to contemplate God and their lives. One of the texts they would no doubt have known well is from Psalm 46: Be still and know that I am God. Perhaps a contemporary version might be: put the phone down, dream, and think about who you really are.