The Insult of Inattentiveness
As a high school English teacher, one of my favorite activities to organize for my students was a Shakespearean insult contest. Two students would face off and cast their most acerbic aspersions at each other, ideally to the cheers and jeers of the rest of the class. It was far more fun than slogging through the text of entire acts of the plays.
It turns out that there are a lot of ways to insult people. One of them is so common that we may not even think of it as an insult:
Enlightened hearing takes in what is said. He who is lacking in [this quality] insults the person who has spoken. —Maximos the Confessor*
More often than I’d like, I find myself distracted in conversations, and sometimes it’s my own fault. Most recently, a friend called while I was doing light office work. Instead of calling back later or stopping my work to give my complete attention, I tried to do both. Even if photocopying doesn’t take a lot of attention, the tiny bit it takes made me less present to a dear friend, who was—fortunately for me—sensitive and gracious to offer to talk at a later time that would be good for each of us.
Perhaps considering our failure to listen attentively as an insult to the speaker will motivate us to give more attention to the attention we give others.
*In his 2nd Century on Love, #97
The Calculus of Priority
No one can have it all. Knowing this, however, doesn’t seem to prevent me from trying to have it all every now and then. So sometimes I write to remind myself of truths that I easily forget, like this one about trade-offs:
He who is not indifferent to fame and pleasure, as well as to the love of riches that exists because of them and increases them, cannot cut off occasions for anger. And he who does not cut these off cannot attain perfect love.
Maximos the Confessor, First Century on Love, #75
Not many people will strive for one thing—like “perfect love” or an Olympic gold medal—at the expense of all others. If they do, it’s because that one thing is worth it to them. Most of us will pursue some sort of balance, maintaining what we deem to be the best prioritized tension between everything we want. This calculus of priority is something we all need to work out for ourselves, but it is a zero-sum game.
If you’re as prone as I am to forget this reality, it would do you good to consider questions about your priorities that help you rebalance or refocus: What do you want most? About what do you care most?
Love in 3D
Conscious of Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement, “the medium is the message,” a friend recently shared these thoughts with me:
We are about to enter into a new phase of virtual technology. The iPhone 13 mini is supposed to be the end of the line. What is next is goggles. Someone from my high school reunion wrote me that she is “hooked” on OCULUS II. In keeping with the insight that “the medium is the message,” I think we can say that we become what we do. If we spend our time doing virtual things, we will become virtual people. If we spend our time doing things in the physical world, we become real people in that world.
There is no better time than Christmas to reflect on our use of digital media, for Christmas (at least in its original, non-commercial meaning) is the commemoration of the earthly birth of Jesus Christ, whom His followers believe to be God—timeless and bound by nothing created, able to alter created matter instantaneously by His word alone. From a faithful perspective, the birth of Jesus transformed the world. Even from a secular perspective, it altered the course of human history in a profound way—not instantaneously like a “viral” but ephemeral GIF but slowly and enduringly over time, person to person.
The myriad bits and bytes zipping across cyberspace supported so many relationships and so much work during the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Digital media were a gift in so many ways, chiefly in helping us avoid infection while maintaining relationships. But in what ways are digital media detrimental to us? How is a remote relationship different than a local one? What dimension do we lose when a relationships shifts from 3D to 2D? What are the human limits for remote relationships? How many can one maintain before the time they take negatively impacts one’s local life? Who gets to define what “community” means and how? Lots of questions, but these are questions of our time.
Along with Jesus’ passion, His Nativity is for faithful Christians one of the greatest expressions of love in 3D—and a paradoxical “scandal” of particularity—local, yet drawing magi from afar and angels from above. As we gather during these days—whether at a church or a home, whether for a dinner or a party, for Christmas caroling in our neighborhood’s streets or hot cocoa in a cul-de-sac—we convey the message of these days in the truest way: in the medium of our flesh.