Category: Behold Vancouver

On which sin are we reflecting today?  Envy.  A young married woman gave me permission to share how she’s struggling so much with not being able to have children yet.  Every time a friend gets pregnant, or someone talks about the beauty of children, her heart sinks.  Why can’t she have children of her own?  Why won’t God the Father give her something good, that we’re made to have?  When some friends try to console her by saying, “God’s calling you to be a spiritual mother,” that does nothing for her whatsoever.

Her pain is real and normal.  Let’s acknowledge the pain that many of us feel when we want something good and don’t receive it: wanting to get married, be healthy, have financial security.  But then there’s the sin of envy we feel when we see others have what we desire and we’re not happy for them.

We can understand the experience of the older brother in the Gospel.  He’s in the field working, and, while approaching the house, hears the celebration.  A slave tells him that his younger brother, who is depicted in the parable as truly an awful person, is receiving the celebration.  The older brother then tells his father, “Listen!  For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.  But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” (Lk 15:29-30).

The experience of perceived injustice is painful.  It would be one thing if the younger brother had received the same treatment as he did, but the younger brother receives more!

Here’s the first step in overcoming envy: Speak your pain.  Never insult God, but do say exactly how you feel.  The Father expects us to speak and listens to it.  

The second step is to ask Him questions: “Father, why do You give good things to those who don’t deserve them?  Why don’t You give basic good things to me?  Why can’t I receive them?”  Once we get it all out, then we’re ready to hear what He says.

The Gospel says that “his father came out and began to plead with him” (15:28).  This father is actually not unfair; he cares about both his children equally.  That’s why he humbles himself as a father and goes out to meet his elder son.  And his words reveal his heart: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (15:31).  The word ‘Son,’ and of course, ‘daughter,’ reveals God’s love for us.

One of the defining struggles of our generation is to balance the way technology occupies our attention and desire with our calling to live intentionally and boldly. Digital technology certainly enriches our lives, but we all know that restless, distracted feeling it can leave us with, too.

Cal Newport’s most recent book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, offers a practical and convincing solution to those of us who feel enslaved by the dizzying swarm of our technological “conveniences.” Newport, a professor at Georgetown and a New York Times best-selling author, understands that what’s needed is not merely a list of helpful tips or theorized critiques regarding our relationship with digital technology, but an entirely new approach to living.

Such an approach, according to Newport, is summed up by the phrase “digital minimalism,” which he describes as a “philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”

The key word here is “happily” — Newport isn’t proposing a way of life concerned with superficial outcomes like efficiency or utility, but rather one with greater happiness and fruitful relationships.

What I appreciate most about Newport’s insights (besides the fact that they are well-researched) is that he takes very seriously the issue of our addiction to technology. To be clear, Newport is no Luddite — he’s a computer science professor, after all — so he doesn’t fault the latest technologies in and of themselves, but rather their unintentional and aimless use. For Newport, a haphazard and unreflective relationship with the latest technologies ultimately hinders a well-lived life.

Here’s his main thesis: Our lives are cluttered with technologies that offer us little benefit in exchange for their cost. For example, it’s easy to justify maintaining platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter because of the benefit of possibly connecting to others who can introduce us to new opportunities. And while that can indeed be a benefit, if it comes at the cost of spending 20 hours a week on those platforms, then we need to reconsider the actual value of that benefit.

In other words, we need to be doing a cost-benefit analysis of the technologies we use and not overlook the hidden value of our time — something that we all have in limited supply. Such costs can come in the form of weakened relationships with loved ones, feelings of restlessness, and countless hours of lost time.

Newport also highlights that we tend not to think about how we use a given technology — only whether we should use it or not.

Throughout history, people have asked the question, what makes us human? Philosophers, scientists, and theologians have all tackled this question in different ways, and I won’t claim to have a new answer. But I have found that looking at humanity through the lens of technology — and the future we’re building towards with it — offers me new insights into the answer to that question.  

In its simplest form, a human is a person as distinguished from an animal or (in science fiction) an alien. However, being human is much more complicated than that. We are rational beings capable of understanding and making decisions, we have curiosity about the world around us and we have a wide variety of emotions that affect both of the former. In a spiritual sense, we are beings that live for one another when fully cooperating with the Lord through our free will. He did not want to make slaves or clones but instead, those who are in His likeness. Due to this, we are meant to be creators and not solely consumers of the things around us. 

The rise of technology

In the last two decades, technology has been a significant part of people’s lives. From the increase in household use of the World Wide Web to the unveiling of the iPhone in 2007, the world has been increasing its use of technology in daily life. Facebook changed the way we share information with friends and family, initiating the start of social media. 

Today, AI tools are capable of writing papers, creating realistic images, imitating people’s voices, and much more. Robot vacuums clean our houses for us. “Alexa” turns on our lights, sets reminders for us, and changes the temperature in the room with a simple voice command. We have increased people’s ability to talk with those on the other side of the world as well as enabled clearer communication for those who are nonverbal through keyboard or eye-scanning communication devices. 

Along with these benefits of advanced technology, there have also been drawbacks. Technology has pushed society towards more consumerism. Not only do we consume media through our phones and televisions, but we are also bombarded by advertisements in our social media feeds, encouraging us to buy more using an algorithm that pushes ads individually suited to our tastes and habits. 

Technology shapes our lives

Since the rise of social media and the widespread use of the internet, scientists have been interested in the effect of technology on the brains of both young and old individuals. One study found that most adults use the internet daily, and nearly one out of four report being online most of the time.

Maura’s Story

Around a dozen girls, sporting the reliable Catholic school plaid, sat in a classroom tucked away in a side hallway on the third floor of an all-girls high school. During the fall of 2006 and into 2007, the room was filled with raucous, back-and-forth conversations every time the class met. We talked about the genocide in Darfur, homelessness in our city of Boston, and the death penalty. Tough topics, but this was senior year theology at my high school: a yearlong class in social justice.

We read the work of Catholics who dedicate their lives to social justice work, watched Frontline documentaries, and studied the seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching until they were basically second nature. When we weren’t in our classroom chairs, there was a community service requirement to fulfill, because the mission of the sisters who founded our school, the Sisters of St. Joseph, is to “love the dear neighbor without distinction.”

We didn’t always have the same ideas about how to help or even who to help. One classmate sold T-shirts and donated the proceeds to a nonprofit. Another volunteered at a local food pantry. I helped out at a theatre camp focused on building self-esteem in preteen girls. But whatever we did, it all came back to the idea that every life has inherent value and potential.

I’ve been Catholic since my baptism in November 1988, but attempting to live out what I learned during senior year high school theology is why I’m Catholic today.

For me, the heart of the Catholic Church and Jesus’ message, is reaching out and helping others. Different messages and priorities might seem louder or more prominent, depending on who is talking, but my lived experience of being Catholic is one that aligns with the image of a welcoming Jesus — a man who sought out people who were different from him, who helped people who were otherwise overlooked.

There have been times when I’ve been embarrassed to be Catholic, especially with all that continues to come to light with the clergy abuse crisis. Sometimes, it feels like my experience of Catholicism might not exist anymore, and it definitely isn’t the one that gets attention. I’ve worried that people might assume the worst of me when they hear the worst of my Church. But then I remember those conversations in that third-floor classroom, and the group of women who went out into the world to bring justice to others, each in their own way. So I resolve to be that vision of Catholicism, to be representative of the Church at its best, not its worst.

One of my favorite church songs is called “The Servant Song,” and it includes these lyrics: “We are pilgrims on the journey, we are travellers on the road.

Research suggests that, on average, we make well more than 200 decisions every day about what we eat and drink. And yet, most people are aware of making only 15 to 20 daily nutrition-related decisions. These findings could easily be extrapolated to other areas of decision-making throughout a typical day. Not only do many of our choices lack intentionality, but often we aren’t even aware we’re making decisions at all.

We humans are an adaptive bunch. Arguably, there are thousands of micro-decisions to be made each day, and it would be overwhelming to deliberate over each one. (Chidi from The Good Place, anyone?) Part of the problem is that our commercialized culture presents us with a dizzying array of choices about things that don’t really matter, as author Thomas Merton famously diagnosed one day while shopping for toothpaste after spending the previous months “off the grid.”

The trick is to identify which decisions are worth weighing carefully and which aren’t. It might help to relearn the art of asking what might be termed “foundational questions.” Foundational questions come packaged in the rawest, most basic language and demand an answer not just from the information in our heads but from the very fabric of how we understand the mysteries of life.

Asking foundational questions is built into the very DNA of toddlers and college students, but somewhere along the way we mistakenly “outgrow” the habit. During our young professional years, many of us are busy developing the expertise and specialization necessary to analyze profit margins, decipher CT scans, or diffuse temper tantrums. Incidentally, the young professional years — when there is the least amount of mental and emotional space for asking foundational questions — are when many of us begin making for ourselves what might equally be called foundational decisions that shape the course of our lives and the type of people we’re becoming: deciding what neighborhood we live in, what kind of work we will do, and what and how much we consume.

For more than two millennia, folks in the Church have been asking foundational questions about life in this beautiful, broken, and messy world in light of three beliefs central to the Catholic Christian faith: 1) God lovingly created a good world; 2) the goodness of creation has been damaged by sin; and 3) God became human and invites us to participate in His saving work here and now toward our final good in the life to come.

Guided by these three tenets, people of faith and goodwill throughout the Church’s history have accumulated questions, time-tested good ideas, and real-life examples in building up what is known as the Catholic social tradition, or CST.

“Pass those plates down to the food disposal,” Grandpa would inevitably boom at the end of each meal, scraping sandwich crusts and half-eaten bowls of applesauce into a pile on his plate. Through the doorway of the adjacent dining room, our parents winced as Grandpa smilingly gobbled down his 18 grandchildren’s scraps. They knew that their admonitions to “Eat your dinner or no dessert” had been empty threats, for Grandpa’s presence at the kids’ table and his commitment to letting no food remnant go to waste were as ritual as the Sunday Mass we had just attended.

Grandpa hated wasting food. As he enthusiastically drank the briny juice from a pickle jar once the last spear had been consumed, he passed the value of being conscientious down to his children and grandchildren. Our attitude toward food waste is more than a family tradition, though; it is a value intimately tied with our faith. And it’s particularly linked to one of the greatest treasures of our tradition: Catholic Social Teaching.

Informed by Scripture, the Catechism, Vatican documents, bishops’ letters and more, Catholic Social Teaching offers an abundance of wisdom and guidance on living justly in our current world. The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops has identified seven key themes that run throughout the tradition, and some of them are especially helpful when considering how we treat the food that passes through our lives.

Option for the poor and vulnerable

Keeping a preferential option for the poor means considering first how the choices we make will impact the most vulnerable members of our world. This includes the small, everyday decisions of our lives. When the burger we ordered is overcooked, do we send it back and ask for a new one? What do we do when we’d prefer a fresh meal to finishing yesterday’s leftovers? When we’re in a hurry, do we take the time to wash and prepare the soon-to-spoil vegetables in the refrigerator? In each of these choices, we are called to keep the poor and vulnerable in mind and to remember that our decisions have repercussions. Refusing to waste may not solve the problems of world hunger, but it can reduce our grocery budgets so that we are able to share more with the poor, and it can act as an antidote to entitlement, reminding us that our priority should be considering the vulnerable, not minding our own preferences.

Rights and responsibilities

Human dignity can only be honored if basic human rights are met, including the rights to food, housing, medical care, education, equality, and freedom of religion. Those of us with full pantries have the responsibility to not only make thoughtful individual choices but also to consider how our food system can better protect the rights of the most vulnerable.