Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Could you go off-line for the rest of today? That’s what the ‘Off Line Club’ is inviting us to do, to coincide with World Mental Health Day. I know – it’s short notice now, and you may already have scrolled through your socials! But even setting apart a small chunk of the day could make space for something special. The Off Line Club, by the way, is a growing global movement of younger people who create physical spaces where you leave your phone at the door and settle to an evening of guided stillness, reading, board games, conversation. How wonderful! It sounds like sacred space to me. And why not? The sacred doesn’t have to just reside in a place of worship. In fact, ‘a shared sense of sacredness’ is what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes is key to ‘elevating' young lives which have been dragged down by the online world. In his book The Anxious Generation, he says groups of individuals become community when they engage in rituals to enter the sacred together. One Biblical word for sacred I find inspiring is ‘kodesh’, which means ‘set apart’. Not set apart as in just untainted by the world, but as in stepping back, I like to think, to see afresh how holy all of life can be when we’re not distracted. We come off line, then, to come online to something more. More embodied, more present. Whether for a few moments, or minutes, or for a whole mental health day. I’m part of a small group which meets around our kitchen table once a month, as we did last night. We share food and stories – and within it all, share a short act of reflection, too. Light a candle, hold some silence, read a poem, say a prayer perhaps. It doesn’t have to be religious but it’s AN? offline sacred space, for us, because it’s gently set apart from just another natter, say. As it is, I’m sure, when you turn off your phone to have a coffee with a friend, and honour the ordinary with the fullness of your shared presence. Or when you remove your headphones on a solitary walk, pause the podcast and share in the sacred company of nature, or silence, or God. And as it could be, perhaps, if you accept today’s challenge and leave your phone at the door of the day. To embody life amidst a disembodied online world. To make sacred space, when it feels like all our space has gone. To be free to switch off from so much, yes, but to switch on too – to the holiness of so much more.