Denver Catholic

27 DENVER CATHOLIC | MAY 27-JUNE 9, 2017 Pride, humility and social media O n a recent trip to Sacramento, from my home base in the L.A. area, I fl ew Southwest Airlines. In an idle moment, I reached for the magazine in the seatback pocket and commenced to leaf through it. I came across an article by a woman named Sarah Men- kedick enti- tled "Unfi l- tered: How Motherhood Interrupted My Relationship with Social Media." The piece was not only wittily and engagingly written; it also spoke to some pretty profound truths about our cul- tural situation today and the generation that has come of age under the infl uence of the Internet. She argues that to have swum in the sea of Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube from the time that one was a child was to live one's life perpetually in front of an audience. Most millenials never simply had experiences; they were conditioned to record, preserve, and present those experiences to a following who were invited to like what they saw, to comment on it, to respond to it. To be sure, she acknowledges, the social media, at their best, are powerful means of communication and connection, but at their worst, they produce this odd dis- tantiation from life and a preoccupation with the self. Here is how Menkendick puts it: "I've come of age as a writer at a time when it is no longer enough just to write. A writer must also promote her work and in the process promote herself as a person of interest…I learned the snarky, casually intellectual voice of feminist and pop culture bloggers, the easy outrage, the clubby camaraderie." But then something extraordinary happened to the author: She became a mother. On the front porch of her home, nursing her baby, she discovered that she had a visceral aversion to snark and absolutely no desire to share her experience with an audience or curry favor from it. She didn't want to cultivate any ironic distance from motherhood; rather, she wanted to believe in it with all her heart, to let it wash over her. "Before I had a child, I took it for granted that no intellectual writer-type could ever be taken seriously were she to cave into conventional sentiment. As a mother, I was swept away by these huge, ancient, universal emotions I'd previously dis- missed as uncomplicated." Her baby, in a word, broke through the carapace of her self-regard and let in some real light. Again, granting all that is truly good about social media (which I use massively in my own ministry), they can easily produce the conviction that we are the stars of our own little dramas, always playing for an eager audience. Authentic spirituality always gives rise to the opposite conviction: Your life is not about you. To grasp this distinction more com- pletely, let me propose two scenarios to you. In the fi rst, you are engaged in conversation with someone that you desperately want (or need) to impress, say, a prospective employer or a popular fi gure whose friendship you crave. In this context, you are indeed speaking, listening, laughing, looking pensive, etc., but more importantly, you are watching yourself perform these moves, and you are exquisitely atten- tive to the reaction of your interlocutor. Is she laughing at your jokes? Does she look bored? Did your witticism land eff ectively in her consciousness? The point is that you are not really expe- riencing reality directly, but rather through a sort of veil. It is as though you are looking at a beautiful landscape, but through a foggy window. Now a second scenario: You are in lively conversation with a friend, and there is no ulterior motive, no egotistic preoccupation. You become quickly lost in the discussion, following the argument where it leads, laughing when you are truly amused, watching your partner, but not in order to see how she's reacting to you, but just because she's interesting. In this case, you are immersed in reality; you are looking at the landscape through a clear pane of glass, taking in its colors and textures in all of their vividness. Now, to use the language of the classical moral and spiritual tradi- tion, the fi rst situation I described is marked, through and through, by pride, and the second by humility. Don't think of pride, fi rst and foremost, as self-exaltation, which is, in fact, but a face or consequence of pride. In its most proper nature, pride is seeing the world through the distorting lens of the ego and its needs. On the other hand, humility, from the Latin humus (earth), is getting in touch with reality directly, being close to the ground, seeing things as they are. This is why Thomas Aquinas famously says "humilitas est veritas" (humility is truth). What makes the fi rst scenario so painful and cringe-worthy is that it is out of step with the truth of things. What makes the second scenario so exhilarating, so fun, is that it is full of reality. What Sarah Menkedick intuited was the manner in which the social media environment can be a breeding ground for the unique type of spiritual distor- tion and dislocation that we tradition- ally call pride. What made all the diff er- ence for her was the arrival of her baby, in all of his densely-textured reality — a reality that she could appropriate only through humility. BISHOP ROBERT BARRON Guest Column Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series "Catholicism." gave out. This year, I'll be part of the support team as 40 members of Team Samaritan House pedal a 447-mile loop from Alamosa to Salida from June 10 to June 17. Why do they ride? For the love of the homeless and to raise $150,000 to support the shelters of Catholic Charities. I encourage you to support one or more of them at sam- housedenver.org/rtr. And after you do that, make plans to come down to Samaritan House and help serve dinner to the poor. On a training run, one of our riders met a group of three men from Australia, riding their bikes. Just because they wanted to be a part of it, the men ended up helping Team Samaritan House serve a special pig roast dinner to resi- dents of the shelter. "I have competed well; I have fi n- ished the race; I have kept the faith," proclaims St. Paul in 2 Timothy 4:7. D ear Editor, It's good to see that the archbishop has taken a civic step in signing the "No on 4/20" petition. This concrete, public action sends an important message to all of us in the pews that he is forthrightly addressing his civic responsibility. Likewise, I commend the Denver Catholic for spotlighting the immigra- tion issue in our state in a recent issue. You have open-mindedly grappled with the complexities of this signifi cant issue and, in the process, have also right- fully grounded it in the rich social justice teachings of our Church. I'm writing to implore you to continue and, indeed, expand this kind of coverage. A number of other issues of competing importance loom before us — the upcoming Senate debate on health care cov- erage for millions of our fellow citizens, tax reform in an era of income dis- parity, the resurgence of racism too often witnessed — all of which challenge us people of faith to respond in a Christ-like way. You, yourself, could add to this list, but the point is that we have to bring our faith to challenges like this every day as we try to respond to the needs they present. The archbishop's thoughtful guidance (with your help as Denver Catholic staff ) can bring clarity to each issue. What does justice look like in the resolution of this issue? What Christian principles bring us to the greatest good for the great- est number in a legislative proposal, for example? How can we as Catholic Christians assert our infl u- ence to make this happen? You undoubtedly have your own analytical questions. The archbishop and our local Catholic press can and should aspire to a place of leadership in the public square by addressing these issues. Where, if not in our Church, can we rise above the partisanship of 2017 to assert the teachings of our Lord and Savior in the public discourse? Only with your help can we link arms to magnify our infl u- ence as citizens with an eff ect that far exceeds what we could accomplish as individuals. We're already busy in our parishes and as individuals grappling with these issues, but if we are to have a prayer at bringing Christ's values to our world, we must work together. Real progress commences only when our archbishop, in concert with our priests and lay leaders, demonstrate their concern, too. MEL PREUSSER LETTERS

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