Losing Our Way

Like many people, I use Waze to help me get from point A to point B. I call the disembodied voice Gladys and, most of the time, she is very helpful.

Last week, I was headed to a parish I had not visited before. I could see it. I knew in my gut it was a left turn ahead and not a right turn. But Gladys kept telling me to turn right, so I did. My instincts, it turned out, were correct. Gladys was wrong.

As I pulled into a driveway and turned around, it made me wonder why I listen to the voice coming from my phone more than I listen to the voice inside my own head. I thought about all this again on Thursday as the young people from my class at Sacred Heart University circled the neighborhood looking for our house. I had invited them over to watch A Man for All Seasons as we ended the semester but I finally had to send two of the children outside to flag some of them down.

You see, when the neighborhood was built, the new homes were mostly for executives from General Electric and everyone got to choose their own house numbers. I am not kidding. We live at 301 but 305 is across the street. 87 is roughly seven houses away and is next door to 228. There are not “evens on this side and odds on that side.” Nope, it’s a big hot mess. I will admit, however, that it is fun to watch the substitute UPS driver try to figure it out. Apparently, the personal assistants the students were using could not figure it out either and so the children were sent to flag them down.

In this week’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells Thomas, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (Jn 14:6) And yet, we often give more authority to our smartphones (which are making us dumber, some would argue), or the television (real news vs. fake news), or the people around us (even if ill-informed). We live in a world where it will soon be possible to animate a real person and have that person appear to say things the person never actually said. Think about that. You could be watching television and think you are watching the Pope or the President or the leader of another country giving a speech when, in reality, the words are made up to incite others, not inform them. To echo Mark Twain, that false account will likely get around the world much faster than the truth.

Jesus is the way to God, the way to peace, the way to life eternal. No hacker or virus or false media report can make that less true. It is the Truth to which we must be converted so absolutely that it dominates our every thought, word, and deed.

This week, I will silence the voices around me – in my car, on my phone, and in my head – and listen to the Truth I learned long ago. Might I challenge you to do the same?

May your week be blessed.

-pjd

The Things We Care About

When I was a teenager, I told my mother I went to see “The Color Purple” at the movies when I really went to see “The Breakfast Club.”

I do not really know why I wasn’t supposed to see “The Breakfast Club” and now, having seen both, it was really the tamer of the two, but those issues notwithstanding, I lied. I got caught, and I got punished.

I thought about that this weekend as the networks raged on about the size of the crowds at the Inauguration last Friday. Like a little boy who embellished the number of attendees at a party, the newly-minted leader of the free world seems to be bothered by very accurate reports that the crowds who attended his party were not as big as the crowds that attended parties in the past.

We even have new language, thanks to our new leader’s friends and advisors: “alternate facts.”

Yes, the press secretary lied. Yes, he presented “alternate facts.” But herein lies the problem. Alternate facts are not facts, they are just noise that gets in the way of a truth that, in this case, no one really cares about. In his must-read book, This Is How, Augusten Burroughs writes that “the truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air.”

He continues:

Truth is an unassailable fact. Not your opinion of the fact. Nor is the truth you report of the events from your own, uniquely distorted and biased view, where there could be a disco ball hanging in the way blocking the most important element.

One in five children in the U.S. live in poverty. One in five.

Four children are killed by abuse or neglect in the U.S. each day.

Seven children or teens are killed by guns each day in our great country.

The United Nations reports that a record 65 million people were forced to flee homes 2015. That’s one out of every 113 people in the world.

These are facts. Unassailable facts. True statements. I could go on.

The reality is this: the country is divided. People on the left do not trust the people on the right. People are the right are afraid of the people on the far right. To move forward, we have to find common ground, mutual trust, and at least pretend we are interested in conversations about what the other side wants.

Because while some are busy introducing “alternate facts” into the conversation, the homeless, the hungry, and the marginalized still stand on the periphery struggling to be heard.

These are the things worth talking about.