Will Smith Inadvertently Prepares Us for Easter

W ill Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. You didn’t even have to know the Oscars were on or have seen a single movie nominated to know that this happened and was at the top of the news for days. (It was still on the front page of the New York Times a week later.) This incident exposed the depths of my phone addiction as I clicked on link after link unintentionally to a “news” story that had just about zero impact on anyone’s life — beyond apparently increased sales for Rock’s comedy shows. (Again, something I don’t need to know.) This media frenzy was a bit like a siren warning us all to step away from our screens.

And it’s timely. We’re about to enter into some of the holiest days of the year. Holy Week and Easter (Western, and then Eastern), Passover, and Ramadan all overlap a bit. Not everyone reading this is Christian, but I suspect that, unless you have a deep hostility possibly encouraged by Christians behaving badly, you probably wouldn’t mind Christian neighbors who take their faith seriously. Blessed are the poor in spirit. . . . Blessed are the merciful. . . . Blessed are the peacemakers. Right now, I don’t think the world is overwhelmed with Christians living this life. These final days of Lent are an opportunity for us to do better — to remember what it is we Christians are called to. The Gospel is radical and shows us the possibilities of self-sacrificial love. It is life-giving. It forgets the self out of love for the other. It requires a constant journey of getting to know God and wanting to serve Him through others.

Getting back to Will Smith and Chris Rock: The Gospel requires silence. I preach to myself, as I often use my phone to pray. Put it away. Be silent. In New York City, it’s next to impossible to find somewhere to sit without loud, obnoxious music. Unless you find a church with an open door. During the height of Covid, they were few and far between. St. Dominic’s in Washington, D.C., was among those that kept the doors open as much as they could. A young woman happened in who was not Catholic. And she relished the quiet and, she said, the presence of peace. Later a religious sister explained to her that Catholics believe that Jesus is present in the Eucharist, in the tabernacle. She had a Divine encounter. I remember years ago hearing Mika Brzezinski from MSNBC describing something similar — bringing one of her daughters to a Catholic church for a calming.

But it doesn’t have to be just in moments of a wee bit of desperation. Father Donald Haggerty is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York currently assigned to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He’s author of a number of beautiful books on prayer; his latest is Saint John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation. Written during the coronavirus shutdowns, it was a labor of love and gratitude. Father Haggerty got to know John of the Cross in seminary, and the spiritual master has been a guide to him ever since. He contends that exposure to the saint’s writings “can change our lives permanently, as it evidently did the lives of some saints.” He writes that “the soul itself becomes more contemplative as we give ourselves more fully to God, just as it becomes more wise, more charitable, more humble.” Frankly, clicking on every tempting link on our phones can be the opposite of this, with the opposite effect. It is good to know what is going on in the world so we can make the right civic decisions and direct our charity, in some regards, appropriately, but beware when it distracts from what — and who — is right before us. Great, I know about the Oscar moment, but did I notice the cruelty I unintentionally inflicted on another? Did I even notice another? Or was I too busy clicking on links and ranting about some political issue I have no power to solve today or tomorrow?

In the introduction to his new book, Father Haggerty relays a story of a simple Carmelite sister who once told Saint John of the Cross that whenever she passed the pond in the monastery garden where she lived, she noticed that the frogs on the edge of the pond would leap in to hide from her as they heard her approach. “Saint John of the Cross replied that these frogs were going to the place where they were most secure,” Father Haggerty writes. “They preserved themselves by plunging into the depths of the water. He advised her to do likewise. She, too, should flee from creatures and descend into the depths where God is hiding, and where she could conceal her life in him.”

Now, of course, most of us do not live in monasteries. Most of us are not called to be hermits, as tempting as it may be some days. But we need to fight for quiet. If we claim to be religious, we must commit to spending time with God alone. That is how we come to love like God. That is how we come to know what love truly is. And at this time of a return to some degree of “normal,” consider what is good and what is poisonous about that concept. Don’t seek false securities and conscience-numbing habits (including endless clicking on “news” irrelevant at best to your living a good life). Let your life be changed by a little silence with God every day in a new way.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.