Splitting a dessert is my way of getting a little something sweet after a meal while holding down the calories and the cost. But this time my friend couldn't share the confection I had my eye on.

"I gave up dessert for Lent," she said with a pained smile.

"This is when I'm so relieved to be a Baptist," I replied, going for the easy sectarian quip -- and the espresso chocolate mousse cake. (A better Christian would have joined her in spiritual solidarity; at least I took my indulgence as carry-out.)

But this year some Roman Catholic priests in Italy have proposed a personal sacrifice for the Lenten season that intrigues this non-Catholic and tech-skeptic: They're asking parishioners to forgo text-messaging on Fridays until Easter.

The idea is spreading both in geographical and technological scope. It's drawing attention in American cities with big Catholic populations, and it's now encompassing other modern technologies like iPods and the Internet.

The idea behind these proposals is that the nonstop clamor of our high-tech gadgets can distract us from real relationships -- with each other and with God. You don't have to adhere to any particular religion to see the wisdom of this insight.

When the writer David Foster Wallace took his own life last September, he was working on what would surely have been another much-discussed novel. The unfinished manuscript was excerpted in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker. The book suggests, according to the accompanying article, that "properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment."

The article also quotes from a 2005 commencement speech Mr. Wallace gave at Kenyon College: True freedom, he said, "means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

And it's so much harder to choose what to pay attention to when certain things demand attention by beeping and pinging at us every 15 seconds.

Totally hosed? Think of poor Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's aide, sleeping with his BlackBerry on his chest.

Both the Wallace article and texting-free Fridays remind us to lead "the examined life" -- to ask ourselves of any activity or substance, "Am I controlling this, or is it controlling me? Does it deserve the amount of time I give it? Or am I twittering myself into the twilight of my own soul?"

The Catholic Church, it should be noted, is by no means taking an anti-technology stance. While the priests who made the no-texting proposal lead parishes scattered around Italy, the Vatican launched its own YouTube channel in January, with Pope Benedict XVI welcoming his viewers to a "great family that knows no borders."

With technology, as with anything else on the planet, the challenge is to claim its benefits while withstanding its potentially destructive aspects. "It's all about how we use it," said a member of the Boston archdiocese.

One of the characters in the late Mr. Wallace's unfinished novel (which he called the "Long Thing") wonders whether people avoid boredom and seek stimulation "to distract [them] from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way."

The novel's main characters are Internal Revenue Service employees who screen hundreds of tax returns each day. Some of them manage to do this numbingly repetitious work while their minds roam happy and free; others struggle on their own hazard-filled psychic frontiers and can't seem to live at peace inside their own heads.

Mr. Wallace invites us to consider the possibility of embracing boredom to discover bliss, but his vision was painful to experience even vicariously, as a reader. A few tech-free Fridays during Lent, rather than a long-term job choice, is enough "boredom" for me.

With new technologies, as with the ascendence of television decades ago, we have to ask ourselves whether, or to what extent, the medium is the message. Are the truncated messages of endless texting simply tools we control? Is the sum of their fractured parts all the life narrative we really wish to write?

Evaluating anything so deeply requires stepping away from it long enough to gain the critic's perspective. Perhaps in the silence we will hear a "still, small voice" --whether it's God's or simply our own.