Have you domesticated God?

I’m slowly reading Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps. All about how technology shapes our faith. 

Ever since the days of Oregon Trail & typing class in 6th grade, technology has slowly become an extension of who I am. I’m fascinated to read Shane’s take on how its forming us as people.

This comes from a section on how the invention of the printing press shapes how we think and speak. 

The exaltation of reason is the great legacy of the print age…Emotions are seen as pesky little distractions that get in the way of good reasoning. So we try to suppress emotions.

Perhaps the most damaging effect of suppressing the heart is that it deadens desire. That deep longing for life, love, and God fades. Instead, we come to expect less from life. We acquire the bland taste of a domesticated God who resides somewhere in our head. 

Knowing God comes through direct experience. This experience blooms in a wide-open heart where desire burns fiercely and freely. In this way, desire is the path to experiencing God. Desire in all its forms. Even our dark desires, the ones we’re most fearful and ashamed of, the ones we call sin. Even those desires are merely disfigured drives searching for the divine in counterfeit form. If we pay attention to them, own them, and push beneath them by peeling back layer upon layer of desire, we eventually find our Original Desire – the deepest longing that leads us home.