2014: Looking back and looking forward

Happy New Year!

Gears from the 10,000 year clock, being built in
the caves of Western Texas.

Student assembly address:

The end of the year is always interesting--people are fond of making “best of” lists. ESPN’s top play of the year in 2013, for example, was Chris Davis’ 108 yard touchdown return off a missed field goal with one second left on the clock, elevating Auburn to beat Alabama in this year’s “IRON” bowl. Time Magazine recently picked Pope Francis as their “Man of the Year” and CNN says that Pope Francis was their top newsmaker. Madonna is the most highly paid “celebrity” in 2013 at 125 million dollars, so says Forbes Magazine, beating out Steven Spielberg at #2, who made a mere 100 million dollars. Tiger Woods was the most highly paid athlete, edging Roger Federer. The best selling motor vehicle was a Ford 150; the best selling car, strictly speaking, was a Toyota Camry.

Oxford Dictionary on line picks a “word” of the year every year. The 2012 word of the year was “Hashtag.” The 2013 word is “selfie,” defined as a picture of yourself or yourself with friends, usually taken with a smart phone, that you post on social media sites. 

If the language we use is a window into the way we think, then the “word of the year” is probably a window into the way our culture thinks. SELFIE. I once heard a comedian discuss the evolution of popular magazines. He said that LIFE Magazine came into existence in 1883. “Life”—that’s a broad, inclusive term. PEOPLE Magazine began in 1974. “People”—still pretty broad, but doesn’t include all life. US Weekly began a few years later—narrowing the focus further: US-- but not them. Shortly after that, SELF magazine came into being. The comedian predicted that soon there will be a magazine that takes it right to the core: ME magazine!

There really is a narcissistic quality to our culture, a kind of infatuation with our selves, isn’t there? You can even see that is in our New Year’s resolutions. New gym memberships are swelling as people have resolved to get into shape. We’re being deluged with commercials about diet plans, as people have resolved to lose weight. Others are vowing to quit smoking, to drink less, to manage stress better, to manage money better, to take a trip. These are all good, but they have something in common—they aim toward self-betterment, rather than making things better for others. Of the thirteen most popular new year’s resolutions, according to USA.gov, only two are altruistic—volunteer more, and recycle more.

I’m not suggesting that trying to improve our selves is a bad thing—it requires real maturity and self-discipline to be able to look at our selves critically and muster up the resolve to improve those areas of our lives that need improving. We should all do this.

But I am suggesting that we do something beyond that too. How can my life make other people’s lives better this year? How can I make people happier? How can I be a better member of my family? How can I be a better son, or daughter, or friend? What difference does my life make to others? How does my faith play out in terms of service to others? You may have heard the old adage: If I were arrested for being Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict me? What is that evidence in terms of the way I treat others?

I heard about an interesting project over Christmas. A group called the “Long Now” is building they're calling is a “Ten Thousand Year Clock,” and they’ve secured millions of dollars of contributions from people such as Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, to help them build it. Their idea is to build a clock in a desert mountain in Western Texas that will last 10,000 years-- requiring very little maintenance, that will survive a human catastrophe, if we blew each other up in nuclear war, for example, or even if humanity ceased to exist altogether. It will chime a special melody at the beginning of every new century, with the first chimes to go off on January 1, 2100, well beyond the lives of all those involved in building the clock. (For more information on this project, go here. )

Why in the world are they doing this?

As their organization’s name “The Long Now” implies, they want people to begin thinking beyond the here and now. We’re all victims to what I heard someone once refer to as “present-itis,” being locked into the now, without the ability to really think about the future. The ten thousand year number reflects about the same number of years that humanity has existed, and these guys want us to think about and care for our planet for the next ten thousand years, whether we’re talking about climate change, or nuclear proliferation, or food supply, or clean water, or whatever. They hope this clock will serve as a monument to the fact we have a duty to care about each other and to care for future generations. They want us to begin thinking more along the lines of the Greek proverb that says simply, “A society becomes great when its old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.” They want us to ask, "Are we being good ancestors?"

As we begin this new semester here at JPII, as we begin this new year together in 2014, may we live in such a way as to reflect a real concern for each other—to not just make ourselves better, but our schools, our families, our communities, our country and our planet.

“Faith leads us beyond ourselves,” is a saying we’ve been using a lot around here. The best life is one lived for others. May we resolve to live this way in 2014.  

Happy New Year, everyone!

Out of Darkness

Student assembly address:

Did you know there’s now a web site called www.blackfridaydeathcount.com?

It features a giant “ticker” that tracks the number of people who’ve been killed or injured as the result of Black Friday, and underneath, there’s a link to particular news stories about these injuries. 

Here are a few stories from Black Friday from four days ago:

• An 11 year old girl was sent to the hospital after being stampeded during an early morning opening of a Walmart store in Boston
• A person was stabbed when two men got into an argument over a parking space outside another Walmart in Virginia.
• Two men got into a fight inside Walmart in Rialto, California, and when a policeman tried to break it up, he was hurt and had to be rushed to the hospital.
• An employee was injured in an Arkansas Walmart when customers got out of hand competing with each other to get the last few sales items.

(Apparently Walmarts are dangerous places to be on Black Friday.)

According to the ticker, there’ve been 7 people killed and 90 people injured on Black Friday since they started keeping statistics in 2006.

There’s something obviously perverse here. The very season we celebrate—the coming of the Prince of Peace--has become  cause for a “dog eat dog” competitiveness to see who can get the best prices on the most stuff, even to the point we hurt each other to get these things.

This week we begin the season of Advent, a period of four weeks when the Church asks us to prepare for the birth of Jesus at Christmas.  St. Paul, writing in his letter to the Romans, tells us bluntly:

Brothers and sisters:
You know the time; it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.

For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed;
the night is advanced, the day is at hand.

Let us then throw off the works of darkness
and put on the armor of light.  (Romans 13:11-13)

As we go about our lives these next four weeks—four very busy weeks of tests, papers, studying, exams, buying presents, playing sports, preparing for concerts, practicing---let us take St. Paul’s admonition seriously, to wake up from our spiritual slumber, to throw off the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light.

How do we do that this Advent? We look to serve each other, to place others' needs before ourselves. We go out of our way to build other people up, rather than tear them down, by finding ways to genuinely compliment them. We carve out of our day some time for prayer. We find ways to appreciate the people who are our friends and family, and forgive those who have hurt us. We ask God to help us. 

If we do these things, then Christmas for us will become something far more meaningful than the accumulation of presents. It will become an opportunity for us to draw closer to our families, closer to our friends, and closer to God.

O Come,  O Come, Emmanuel! 

Losing Our Moral Judgment

Student assembly address:

Nationally, marijuana use among teenagers is trending upward, with 22.9% of seniors in this country reporting they’ve smoked marijuana in the last month, according to 2012 data released by National Institute on Drug Abuse. That’s up from 18.5% five years earlier. It also means seniors are likelier to smoke marijuana than smoke a cigarette, as only 17.1 % of seniors say they’ve had a cigarette in the past month.  Alcohol usage nationally has declined slightly, with 28.1% of seniors reporting they’ve been drunk in the last month, down from 30.6% five years earlier.

Our sense here at JPII is that those national trends are reversed—that alcohol usage is on the rise, whereas marijuana usage, while still present, has declined.  Mr. McLaren reports he’s been informed of a rising number of events that occur in our families’ homes where drinking is a prominent feature.

So let’s talk about that for a moment.

When people drink heavily, otherwise sane and normal people do stupid, bad things. I’ve told this story before to a number of you, but my roommates in college at Notre Dame were good, smart and decent guys. One Thursday night in January, with the temperature near 10 degrees, a group of them went to the bars and got drunk. I was in the study hall on the ninth floor of my dorm, and I heard them when they came back, laughing loudly about something. About 5 minutes later, one of my roommates came in, looking sick, and said to me “You have to stop them.” “Stop them from what?” I said. “They have…. a cat. I can’t stomach it. “

So I walked out to the commons area, and what I witnessed almost made me throw up. They’d found a cat that was frozen to the sidewalk on the way back from the bars, took it back to the dorm, pinned it up on a bulletin board and were throwing darts at it.  Just as I walked in, one of my roommates jammed a pencil up one of the cat’s orifices, as everyone laughed, drunkenly. I took the cat down; they swore at me; one of them even tried to take a swing at me—a drunken swing, he missed—and I yelled at them to go to bed.  The next morning, after he sobered up, the roommate with the pencil came to find me and ask me what he had done, because it was fuzzy, and when I told him, he was absolutely disgusted with himself.  As I said, these were good guys. But they lost their sense of decency because they were drunk.

Being disgusted with oneself the morning after is a common theme of individuals who get drunk the night before.  Girls who are otherwise moral, good persons often lose their virginity—or even worse, become objects for multiple partners.  Men mistreat women in ways that they’d never do if they were sober, and because they’re decent guys, are eaten up with guilt about what they’ve done the next day.  It isn’t just an issue of not driving while drunk; it’s about losing all of our moral judgment, which opens us up to doing all sorts of horrible things to each other. Gang rapes in dorms are all too common in universities, even local ones, and drinking is usually part of the reason they occur.

Your character, your reputation, your good name—these are far more important than your GPA, your athletic or artistic accomplishments. All those things are fleeting and temporary, but who you are and what you’ve done stay with you.

One of the greatest advertising campaigns of all time is the Las Vegas commercial: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. “ It’s as if we can do whatever we want there, and then magically forget about it when we come back home to our regular lives. Except we can’t compartmentalize like that.  Location doesn’t matter, because we’re still the same person, whether we’re in Vegas, or in Nashville, or at home, or whether we’re drunk or sober. We carry that guilt, that burden with us.

Even so, God forgives. And when God forgives, he forgets—as if he takes a video of our lives and simply deletes forever those parts we ask him to forgive us for. If you’re carrying around some guilt, seek out Fr. McGowan for the sacrament of reconciliation, and unload that burden and seek God’s forgiveness. If you’re not Catholic, though Father can’t administer the sacrament to you, he is happy to listen to you.

God wants us to be happy, and to be free of emotional burdens. He wants to forgive us, but he respects our freedom. We have to ask for it. We have to seek him out. In the interim, let's do our best not to put ourselves in a position where we do harm to other people and harm to ourselves.