Homily for Ordinary Time 23 - September 9, 2018

Ordinary Time 23

September 9, 2018

Silence

            Here are four statistics to boggle your mind:

-          The average teenage girl sends and receives an average of 4,000 texts per month. That averages out to 133 per day, or 8 texts every waking hour.

-          There are over 13 billion web pages existing on the internet.

-          If you were to try to watch every single video on Youtube, it would take over 1400 years of non-stop watching. Even then, it wouldn’t work, because every minute, another 35 hours of video are uploaded.

-          The amount of “content” (music, videos, pictures, words written) that was produced from the beginning of the world until 2008 is now produced every two days, thanks to social media and the internet.

This should stun us. We live in a very noisy world. I’d be curious how many of us have social media; how many of us browse the Internet for an hour or more each day. A recent 2018 study shows that teenagers spend an average of six hours and forty minutes each day in front of a screen. That is a huge amount of time!

In all this noise – visual noise, audio noise, stimulation – are we going deaf to the things that really matter?

My mom used to joke around that we, her kids, had “selective hearing”. Oh, we could hear the TV just fine, but when she would ask us to mow the lawn, somehow we went deaf! I wonder if we as a culture, and we as individuals, have developed “selective hearing” where we are deaf to God?

All of this noise, distraction, technology addiction has brought about three negative consequences.

First, it has deafened us to God. God only speaks in silence. A lot of times people ask me, “How does God speak to me? I don’t hear Him?” He has made it clear how He speaks to us – through nature, through other people, through the Scriptures and the writings of the saints, through Christian music, through the Liturgy. But all of these require that we unplug from the other noise that surrounds us. He wants to speak to us, but He will not shout over the noise we surround ourselves with.

The Evil One is very cunning, and he knows that his #1 best tactic is to get us to stop praying. As long as we seek God daily, Satan has no power over us. So the Evil One doesn’t try to get us to give up our faith altogether, but bit by bit, little by little, he tries to distract us and block out the quiet voice of God. We must be aware that Satan has used technology and media to separate many souls from a regular life of prayer!

Second, we have to ask what messages are coming through all of this noise. Every Youtube video starts with an ad – am I being subtly told that my happiness will come if I buy this product? So many of our talking heads are shrill and divisive – am I being subtly told that the solution to our problems is to vote for this candidate or endorse this issue? Many articles and news sources come from the perspective that the Church’s teachings are wrong, that there is no God, or that we get to define right from wrong – do I subtly start to agree with them? Media forms us, forms our opinions, forms our culture. How is the media forming us, maybe without us even knowing?

Finally, has our technological noise brought about division among us and within us? There was a girl in one of my confirmation classes who had her earbuds in constantly. She was the type to put them in at the beginning of the day and not take them out until she went to sleep (and maybe not even then!). One day, I challenged the class to spend ten minutes in silence each day. She gasped and exclaimed, “I could never do that!” I asked her, “Why not?” I’ll never forget her response – “I am afraid of what I might hear.”

She was alienated from herself. She wasn’t at peace within herself. How much of our technological noise is due to the fact that we aren’t at peace with ourselves or with one another? We’ve all seen those families who go out to eat, and instead of talking with each other, they just stare at their phones for the whole meal. If we aren’t careful, technology can make us lose our ability to connect.

I do not mean to criticize all technology or all social media. Surely, technology has been a blessing in many ways. But it’s a tool that we must master, or it will master us. People often ask why I don’t have a smart phone. It’s simple: I don’t think I have the ability to master it – more than likely, I will be a slave to it.

So I challenge you: has your technology, has the noise of the media, made you deaf? The man in today’s Gospel was deaf from birth; we are often deaf by choice. Deaf to God, deaf to the Truth, deaf to our family and friends. If technology and media has made you deaf, consider giving it up, limiting it, using it less. Only then will we be able to hear God.