Posted on: 11th March 2025

When I was a small boy growing up in Bangladesh, my father, somewhat ahead of his time, chronicled our family life with 8mm films which he took on a bulky, shoulder mounted cinecamera. It produced black & white flickering films of the sort you see on TV when they want you to know that this happened a long time ago. 

(Interesting fact: one of the very earliest pioneers of motion picture cameras was designed in Leeds by Frenchman Louis Le Prince in 1888. He had built a 16-lens camera in 1887 at his workshop here).

My father took quite a lot of films and as a result my memory of Bangladesh is a combination of what I actually experienced and what I have seen on the films. I can’t quite tell what is a real memory and what is a memory that has been mediated through film.

That dilemma now seems to have morphed into a perpetual condition. The 21st century soul is exposed to many, many images – the vast majority on a screen - more in one day than I would have seen in a whole year as a child. So much so that we have difficulty in working out what we have experienced directly ourselves and what we have seen on a screen. The demand on our attention by the warm phone in our pocket, by the pings, pop-ups and buzzes, is perpetual – and separates us from reality.

Ahead of his time, this is what Theodore Adorno, in Minima Moralia, calls “the withering of experience.”

Christine Rosen, in her book the Extinction of Experience writes, “More and more, we relate to our world through information about it rather than direct experience with it. This substitution of information for experience explains why we like to eat convenient meals prepared by someone else while watching TV chefs create elaborate meals from scratch.”

The apostles’ testimony of personal experience was important, as John writes, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” (1 John 1:1)

This shift toward giving my attention to what’s on a screen (small or large) has tragically diminished the attention I give to real life. If what Simone Weil wrote is true, "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity" then I am being most generous to the digital world and the titans feeding off it - rather than being generous to those around me, to the natural world I am privileged to walk in and, most crucially, to the One whose loving gaze is always attentive to me. 

It is frankly unimportant whether my memory of running barefoot around the paddy fields is real or comes through film – but what is very important is that my relationship with my Saviour is fed by being attentive to the real experience of His presence in my life and in those around me. 

My prayer is that I can turn my attention away from the unreal and toward the real. I am grateful that Jesus saw this coming when He promised, “And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept Him, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. But you know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you.” (John 14:16-17).

Come Holy Spirit.

By David Flowers, Leeds Vineyard