A CONSPIRACY AGAINST INTERIORITY

Our culture is a powerful narcotic, for good and for worse. But let’s begin with the good side. A narcotic soothes and protects against brute, raw pain. Our culture has got its very kind of thing, (from medicine to entertainment), to shield us from pain. That can be good, provided isn’t a false crutch.

But narcotic can be bad, especially when it becomes away of escaping from reality. Where our culture is dangerous, it can shield us from having to face deeper issues of life, faith, forgiveness, morality, and mortality. These constitute a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. How? By keeping us so entertained, so busy, so preoccupied, and so distracted that we lose all focus on the deeper things. We live in the world of instant and constant communication of mobile phones, and email, of iPods that contain whole libraries of music, of television packages that contain hundred of channels of malls and stores that open 24\7 , of restaurants and clubs that stay open all the time, of sounds that never die and lights that never go out.

We can be amused, distracted and catered for 24/7. All this have made our life so wonderful, but has also conspired against depth. The danger is that we are all developing permanent attention deficient disorder. We are attentive to so many things that ultimately we aren’t attentive to anything, particularly to what is deepest inside of us. This isn’t an abstract thing! Typical our day is full of things (work, noise, pressure, and rush), that we finally get home at night and have some time when we could shut down all the stimulation, we are so tired and fatigued and that what soothes us is precisely something that functions as narcotic, a sporting event, a game show on television, a mindless sitcom, or anything that can soothe our tension and relax us enough to sleep. Isn’t bad when we do this on a given night, but it’s bad when we do it every night. What happens, it becomes apparent that we can not find space in our lives to touch what’s deepest inside of us and inside of others.

Given the culture, we can go along like this for years until something cracks in our lives, a loved one dies, someone breaks our heart, the doctor tells us we have terminal illness, disease, or some other crisis is powerful enough to suddenly render all stimulation and entertainment in the world empty. Then we are forced to look into our own depth and that can be a frightening abyss, if we have spent years and years avoiding looking into it.

“I have lived too long where I can be reached” hence we end up with statements such as good people, but as people who are not immoral, just distracted, not lacking in soul, just preoccupied, not disclaiming depth, just lacking in practice. Our culture is a powerful narcotic, for good and for bad; it has the power to shield us from pain, to soothe us in healthy ways. That can be good, sometimes we need narcotic. But our culture can be over-intoxicating, too absorbing, it can swallow us whole. And so we have to know when its time to unplug the television, turn off the phone, shut down the computer, silence the iPod, lay away the sports page, and resist going out for coffee with a friend, so that for a moment at least, we are not avoiding making friends with that one part of us that will accompany us into the sunset.