Correspondence as Sacrament: The Lost Art of Letters in a Text Message World

Ways of being human.

The Civil War soldier sat in his tent with a pencil stub and a single sheet of paper, knowing he might die before another mail call. He chose each word as if it cost money, which it did: paper was scarce, postage dear, and the opportunity to write uncertain.

His letter home would take weeks to arrive, weeks more for any reply. In that temporal gap lived something we’ve eliminated: the weight of words that cannot be unsent, the commitment of thoughts that cannot be immediately clarified, the trust required to send sentences into silence and wait.

Today we fire off hundreds of messages daily, each one ephemeral, disposable, instantly reversible. We’ve gained immediacy but lost gravity. We’ve achieved connection but sacrificed contemplation. The difference between a letter and a text isn’t just technological but ontological.

They create different kinds of thought, different forms of relationship, different ways of being human.

To understand what we’ve lost, examine the physical act of letter writing. The writer gathered materials: paper, pen, ink, envelope, stamp. Each element cost something. The paper itself demanded respect; you couldn’t waste it on incomplete thoughts. The pen enforced linearity; you couldn’t delete, only cross out, and too many corrections meant starting over.

The envelope created privacy; these words were for one reader, not an audience. The stamp represented commitment; sending required effort and expense. Before writing the first word, the letter writer had already invested more than we do in a day’s worth of digital communication.