God, is that You Calling?

At a Christmas party last week, I became the proud owner of an orange rotary telephone. This artifact came into my possession via a gift exchange where guests were instructed not to buy anything. Typically what happens at these kinds of gift exchanges is that people either set to work doing virtuous things like baking a loaf of banana bread or they rummage around in their house for something that either don’t need, don’t like, or think would make for a hilarious gag. I’m pretty sure some of the gifts at this particular party have been circulating for at least half a decade. It’s all great fun.

Well, what does one do with an orange rotary telephone in the digital age? We still have a land line, but we haven’t used it for a while. I’ve tried to disconnect it for years, but they keep lowering the price to convince me to keep it. Something about “maintaining the infrastructure.” I think we pay a nickel a month to keep it. Like the vast majority of the human race, we all have our own mobile phones, and these are our primary source of addiction connection to the world.

I don’t think my kids had even touched a rotary phone before this week. My daughter plugged it into the wall and seemed delighted to discover that it actually worked. We spent a few minutes chuckling as we called our land line and listened to the old-fashioned ring tone. It brought me back to the days when, as a teenager, my heart would leap at the sound of that tone due to the possibility that a certain teenage girl might be calling, and where I might look forward to hours sequestered in a downstairs utility room, rotary phone cord stretched around the corner, pouring my heart out to said girl (who I have now been married to for nearly three decades).

But I digress. Back to the phone. We don’t have a phone jack on the main floor, so we decided to put the phone upstairs in the guest bedroom. It might contribute a vaguely cool antique aesthetic, right? This morning, as I was ironing a shirt before work, I thought, what the heck, why not plug the thing in? If nothing else, it might be interesting in a nostalgic kind of way to hear that ringtone occasionally. It would probably hardly ever ring, right? I plugged it in, finished getting ready for work, and went downstairs to pour a coffee and head out the door.

You know what’s coming, right? As I was about to leave, a strange sound emerged from up the stairwell. The orange rotary phone was ringing! I smiled, nostalgia kicking into high gear. But this was almost immediately interrupted by the cold realism of 2023. It’s almost certainly a telemarketer, right? Who else would call a landline? Nobody we know well, or care about would be calling our home phone number. Even by the time we disconnected all our home phones (maybe 3 years ago?) ninety-five percent of the calls were telemarketers. The other five percent were wrong numbers or people over eighty-five using old church directories.

I paused at the bottom of the stairs. Should I answer or just let it ring? It was probably nothing… but what if it wasn’t? What if it was something crucially important? What if someone was in crisis and didn’t know my mobile number? What if it was someone I hadn’t spoken to in years who had no other way of reaching me? In the end, I bounded up the stairs, picked up the receiver from the cradle, and stretched the cord up to my ear. “Hello?” I said, optimistically.

There was a pause.

Which was followed by a robotic greeting and a voice telling me that there was an important announcement about my banking information being compromised.

Sigh.

(A bit anticlimactic, right? You were expecting something  more exciting than that! Sorry. This remains the real world.)

So, what made me run up the stairs like an expectant fool? Was this the analog equivalent of panting after the endless notifications that pop up on our smartphones? We hear a ping and even though we know it’s quite likely something trivial or stupid, we just. can’t. resist. checking. Yeah, maybe. Actually, almost certainly. God knows, I am the chief of sinners here. I have had to disable nearly every notification on my phone and delete all my social media accounts in an attempt to beat back the beast that is my temptation toward distraction and my hunger for affirmation in all its paltry forms.

But I think it might go beyond this. I think each one of us has a hunger to be addressed. Personally. Our phones ping or we see a little red notification indicator, and while we know that the most likely explanation is that it’s some algorithmically generated piece of garbage communication designed to harness our attention for profit, there’s a chance that it might be someone reaching out to us, personally, for connection. And it’s this chance, however minuscule, that keeps us checking.

I’ve spent the last week or so listening to a podcast called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Its focus is on how “The New Atheism” kind of fizzled out and how a surprising number of atheists or agnostics or public intellectuals are reconsidering the value of religion or faith or God or Judeo-Christian values or a Tom Holland-style cultural argument or… something. It’s been very interesting, not least because I spent a good chunk of 2007-08 writing a master’s thesis on The New Atheism and it’s fascinating to see how the movement has aged over the last few decades (spoiler alert: not well). People seem to need more — morally, existentially, culturally — than what the New Atheism offered (which was mostly an angry, and morally incoherent screed against the form of religion or belief that they most disliked). Who could have imagined?

One theme that pops up repeatedly on the podcast is whether you can have “fruits without roots.” Many are seeing that the cultural legacy of Christianity is something worth cherishing and preserving (and is rapidly fading away — I’ve written about this often, for example here and here). They would very much like this not to happen, but they can’t quite bring themselves to believe in God. They see a very ugly and merciless culture (or cultures) emerging and long to return to the values produced by the Christian West (human rights, tolerance, liberalism, freedom of speech, the possibility of forgiveness). But, God? Well, um, not sure we can go there. We’ll take the fruits, but not the roots.

Like many, I don’t think this will work. You can’t just subtract God from the equation and imagine that the culture will carry on. It would be somewhat analogous to appreciating the aesthetic and the nostalgia of my orange rotary telephone but ruling out in advance the possibility that you could be personally addressed through it. I’m a big fan of the cultural argument for Christianity. It’s fascinating and hopeful to see people begin to make some connections between the values we hold most dear, the institutions we rely upon and have perhaps taken for granted, and the beliefs that formed them.

But for me, the critical question that must be asked is as simple as it is profound. Is someone trying to get through to us here? Are we, against all odds, being personally addressed?