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It was the biggest power cut in recent memory. All across Spain and Portugal the lights went out. People were stuck in lifts and on trains. Internet and mobile phone coverage went down. Businesses suffered. It wasn’t quite mass panic, but it was near enough. Similar technological breakdowns have recently affected Heathrow Airport and Marks and Spencer.

Isn’t it extraordinary how our society has become so overwhelmingly dependent upon something that a few hundred years ago most people had never even heard of.

Some years ago, I used to be the Chaplain of an Oxford College where the chapel didn’t use electricity. It was lit exclusively by candles. Some thought this was deliberately archane, and perhaps it was. But there was also a lovely simplicity to that space that some modern churches, with all their reliance on overhead projectors and whizzy sound systems don’t quite manage to achieve. And that includes my own, I confess.

Because all this technology can also be a terrible distraction. That still small voice of calm is often frazzled by the introduction of shiny new tech. I suppose that is why many find their God out on a walk in the sunshine or playing in the garden with their children.

These technological breakdowns remind us of the way our society is now inextricably bound up with a technological complexity that rules our lives. Yes, technology enables us to achieve so much more than our ancestors were able. It creates wealth, puts food on the table, allows us to communicate with people all around the world. But I also understand those who think we are addicted to it and can never be completely free whilst so deeply enmeshed within it.

The French anarchist theologian Jaques Ellul argued that the problem with technology is that it comes to mediate everything we do in the name of efficiency - and because of this something about ‘simply being’ is lost. Technology, he said, has become the new sacred. We worship it and the tech moguls who supply it. Every new app promises a kind of salvation, every gadget an ever better way of doing things. But is my fancy smart phone a tool for me to use, making life easier, more efficient. Or am I just it’s slave, its servant. Are the solutions we find to life’s many challenges just creating a new network of constraints to trap us inside?

I am not meaning to sound insensitive to the terrible consequences of what just happened in Spain and Portugal. But I wonder if there were also some people who, freed from the tyranny of the internet and the train time-table, found a surprising lightness. Or something else perhaps - I wonder if there will be a spike in the birth rate in 9 months time?

For a moment something had lifted - where older gods and more human pleasures could be given the time and space they need.

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