Do We Remember How to Be Human to One Another?

D rop your phone and look at the person in front of you. Is this the most radical idea yet?

“A very widespread ailment of our time is the fatigue of living: reality seems to us to be too complex, burdensome, difficult to face,” said Pope Leo XIV during a recent audience in Saint Peter’s Square. Maybe it’s because this pope was born in the United States, but nearly every time I hear him speak (sometimes in English and with a Midwestern cadence!), I assume that he is talking to his fellow Americans. He gets us — he diagnosed us perfectly. And not a moment too soon, because our ailment is killing us. Pope Leo may just save our lives before he saves our souls.

“And so we switch off, we fall asleep, in the delusion that, upon waking, things will be different,” he continued. Sound familiar? This “falling asleep” refers to the many different kinds of numbing devices, outlets, and addictions we have, which get our hearts going until we’re overwhelmed and wiped out. So we go back to scrolling in the hope of going numb again. “But reality has to be faced,” Leo said, and then he made the Christian offering you would expect from the leader of the Catholic Church: “Together with Jesus, we can do it well.”

He made use of the reading in Mark in which a woman who has been bleeding for a dozen years approaches Jesus for healing (5:21-43). The pope cautioned that we can be inclined, unlike that woman, to reach out to Jesus in merely superficial ways, whereas it is our hearts that God wants, because He wants to heal us more completely than we can even think to ask. “We walk the surfaces of our churches, but maybe our heart is elsewhere!” Leo said. “This woman, silent and anonymous, conquers her fears, touches the heart of Jesus with her hands, considered unclean because of her illness. And she is immediately healed. Jesus says to her: ‘Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace.’”

The next day, Leo met with people participating in an international day against drug abuse and illicit trafficking. He told those gathered — many who were recovering from substance addiction — that their very presence was “a testimony of freedom.” He added: “Drugs and addiction are an invisible prison that you, in different ways, have known and fought, but we are all called to freedom. As I meet you, I think of the abyss of my heart and of every human heart.” He was referring to the abyss mentioned in the Psalms — “the mystery that dwells in us” (Ps. 63:7). The Holy Father turned to his beloved spiritual father, Saint Augustine, who famously confessed that “only in Christ did the restlessness of his heart find peace.” Leo said: “We seek peace and joy, we thirst for them. And many deceptions can delude and even imprison us in this quest.”

Now is the time of year when we Americans think of freedom in a political and historical (and day-off-work) context. But what about our hearts? What about our minds? We imprison ourselves when we doomscroll, when we let Donald Trump or MSNBC or whomever live rent-free in our heads. We and those in our lives are the ones paying the price: feeling constantly spent and beleaguered by our concerns and by all the injustices of the world, and powerless in the face of it all.

Leo asks us, instead, to look to one another. “And let us read in each other’s faces a word that never betrays: together.” That’s almost countercultural. For as many social media connections as we might have, in person, we tend to be apart. In how many restaurant scenes have you seen people gathered and yet divided by their individual screens? Drop the screens. “We conquer evil together,” Leo said. “Joy is found together.” And enough with the impotency: “Injustice is fought together.”

“The God who created and knows each one of us — and is more intimate to me than I am to myself — made us to be together,” is how Pope Leo summed it up. He acknowledged: “Of course, there are also bonds that hurt and human groups where freedom is lacking. But these, too, can only be overcome together, trusting those who do not profit from our suffering, those whom we can meet and who meet us with selfless attention.”

So, as you make your holiday weekend barbecue plans, consider leaving out the screens and excess libations. Consider how lives — yours and mine — might be different with God and man, together, in freedom. It would be a cultural declaration of the sort that no fireworks display or military parade can rival. Be free. In all its iterations and with all its connotations. We can do it together.

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