I am sure that everyone has heard his or her parents fondly reminisce about life when they were younger. I know growing up, my own parents often cautioned my brother and me about spending too much time talking to friends on the computer. A few times my parents mentioned how they actually wrote letters back and forth when they first met and still have those letters today.

Any parent or grandparent will attest to the added meaning of a handwritten letter. The sender had no recourse to a deletion key, and so, had to more attentively think about what he or she was going to say. The sender actually held the pen and wrote the letter which the received held and read. There’s an actual physical connection with that.

The ubiquity of email and texts, though, lends itself to less thoughtfulness, and a widening gap between people as thoughtful correspondence and face-to-face contact is diminished. Skype and other video chat applications are two ways the latter is undermined.

This generational discrepancy of the primary means of communication is illustrative of “sacramental imagination”—a theological concept that acknowledges the “grittiness” of how God works salvation through the world. In Letters to a Young Catholic, George Weigel defined “sacramental imagination” as “the core Catholic conviction that God saves and sanctifies the world through the materials of the world.”

Analogically, a greater divide between us today could lead to a greater divide from God—as we value true interaction less, isolating ourselves with technology, we could fall into the trap of valuing contact with God less.

Andre Dubus recognized the need for actual contact with God, so that he is not relegated to an esoteric abstraction. Referencing the Eucharist, Dubus’s “On Charon’s Wharf” said, “Without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is not place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.”

In Letters to a Young Catholic, George Weigel noted that Catholicism “is also an optic, a way of seeing things, a distinctive perception of reality.” He explained that Catholicism “teaches us to see the world in Technicolor and to live in it in three dimensions (or, truth to tell, four, because time counts, too, for Catholicism as well as for Einstein).”

Weigel translated the implications of a sacramental imagination, “The ‘Catholic world’ has a lot more to it than churches. It’s also a world of libraries and bedrooms, mountains and the seaside, galleries and sports fields, concert halls and monastic cells—places where we get glimpses and hints of the extraordinary that lies just on the far side of the ordinary.”

This reflection article does not mean to do away with technology. It is a great resource for long-distance contact and many other endeavors. However, one can never see the world in “Technicolor” as Weigel put it if he or she is always on a computer. If you have to contact someone in the same room as you, resist the text, and start up a conversation. And for that friend who is abroad, maybe even write a letter.