neglected the weightier matters of the
law: justice and mercy and faith. It is
these you ought to have practiced without
neglecting the others." -- Matthew 23:23
Like many of Jesus' recorded sayings, this
critique did not exactly endear him to the
religious authorities of his day. In essence
he accused them of practicing the details
of faith while ignoring the substance, and
he called them instead to pay attention to
all of it: the routine, the important, and
the earth-shattering.
I wonder if we're in a similar place today.
Consider the issues that occupy the
Christian Church. We've spent decades
fighting over sex, sexuality, and gender.
We worry about dwindling attendance
and suspect that if we were just more
dedicated, more evangelistic, we could
reverse the decline. We bicker (we always
bicker) about doctrine.
Few of these issues could be considered
"details." The debate over human
sexuality is, among other things, about
justice for millions of people whom the
Church has marginalized. Many Christian
doctrines are beautiful and speak to our
deepest yearnings. Neglecting these
things would have been tragic, if not
wrong.
To a large extent, however, we have
missed speaking out on other weighty
matters: the megatrends of our age --
issues so large that we take them as
givens and shape our lives around them,
rather than call them out for the risks
they bear. For instance:
Distraction.
The litany of apps and
smart phones, tablets and social media,
has been well documented, celebrated,
and bemoaned. Yes, they do add value to
our lives. Yet even as these tools connect
us, they also take us away from one
another and from the moment in which
we live.
How many face-to-face
conversations have you had in which the
other person is not looking at you but
fixated on his phone?
Even more worrying, we may be creating
a vicious cycle in which, the less we pay
attention, the less we can pay attention.
Neuroscientists (see, for instance, these
summaries in the Daily Mail and Wired)
have suggested that our use of screen-
based systems is reconfiguring our brains
for, among other traits, shorter attention
spans and shallower thinking.
But many of our world's most intractable
problems -- armed conflict, massive
poverty, preserving the ecosystem --
require the opposite: deep reflection,
sustained attention, dialogue that can
take months and years rather than
seconds and sound bites. The more
distracted we become, the less we can
grapple with healing the world in the way
to which God calls us.
Curiously, many of
these problems touch on the "justice and
mercy and faith" that Jesus emphasized
in his diatribe above.
Busyness. This lays the groundwork for
distraction, and much of U.S. culture has
adopted it as a virtue. Note the
widespread overscheduling of children to
provide as many enrichment activities as
possible, the way businesspeople boast
about their 80-hour work weeks, or the
expectation that our friends and
colleagues will be available to us 24/7.
The press of today's frenetic pace
threatens us with the idea that unless we
keep up, we will neither succeed ourselves
nor be able to provide for our loved ones.
So we do all we can to move faster.
Yet as with distraction, so with busyness.
Many things of enduring value take
slowness and painstaking effort:
persevering through family crises,
dialoguing across divides, earning a
degree, growing into God. By rushing
from here to here to here, we undermine
our ability to go deep. Is this why we hear
(and give) so many sound-bite answers to
complex questions, or seek quick
"closure" in matters of grief?
Cynical chic. Too many marketing
efforts use status, ambition, and sex to
sell products.
Too many elected officials
and pundits shape language and distort
ideas to their own ends. People from all
walks of life -- senators, athletes, spouses,
you and I -- make promises they cannot
keep. We might be excused for believing,
in the words of fictional doctor Gregory
House, that "everybody lies."
As a result, many people excel at sniffing
out empty promises and vested interests.
In such an environment, cynicism is a
survival tactic.
Yet it can go too far--
closing us off from life-giving messages,
like affection from a friend or wisdom
from a sage. If faith truly is committed to
the quest for truth, however elusive that
truth may be, should it not point out the
corrosive effect of the words we use to
bend the truth?
* * *
There are undoubtedly other trends the
Church could address. The question, for
me, is whether addressing these trends --
without neglecting the others -- might be
faith's highest calling in this age. Can we
create a world (or a place within it) for
slowing down, paying attention,
connecting deeply with one another,
questing after truth, and seeking God?
Faith has spoken with a prophetic voice
since the beginning of faith itself. Maybe
it needs to speak in this voice again: to
challenge the way in which "the way
things are" make us less than who we can
be.
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