18th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 4 August 2024
Recently, a friend told me that on average he receives on his mobile phone 120 social media messages a day. Facebook, Instagram, X, Whatsapp – all wonderful means by which we keep connected with one another. We enter a short message, like, “I am enjoying a walk in the park” and immediately all those on our contact list are made aware of this significance!
As someone who struggles to keep on top of any number of daily emails, the thought of receiving over a hundred social media messages astounds me. However, we seem to live increasingly in a cultural climate where many feel an extraordinary need to let the world know what we are doing. There seems to be an almost desperate need for us to ‘be seen.’ We can be seen by thousands of people on the social network websites; all those friends of our own hundreds of listed friends can see us. Many put forward their inmost thoughts on internet blog sites to be seen by millions of people.
We are titillated by the social sites where the fashionable are seen at the most sought after events. And who of us does not from time to time glance at those accounts of which celebrity has been see where. The ideal of the celebrity seems to saturate the media throughout. Subsequently, there can be a part of us that wants to become a celebrity, someone seen by all. Reality shows are curious not only because of their often banal content but because of the desperation of so many to be on them and thus to be seen by everyone. Even the TV show, “The Abbey” which some years ago focused on four women’s experience of life in the Benedictine convent near Wollongong, attracted some 6000 enquirers whittled down to 700 interviews.
We live in a media saturated age in which there seems to be such a desperate need to be seen by others. Are we that anonymous to one another that we have come to this?
We want to be seen but do we really want to be known? To be seen and to be known are not quite the same thing. It seems that to be seen has come to be more important than to be known. In fact, we find that a mark of our time is a critical tension: the need to be seen on the one hand, but the fear of being exposed on the other, the fear of being truly known in all our vulnerability. Thus, in the midst of this most delicate of tensions we actually find ourselves on a very harsh tightrope, and one often enough with very sad and tragic consequences.
What do we really want: to be seen or to be known? To be seen is relatively easy. To be known is a completely different situation. To simply be seen by all is to be known by no-one. Perhaps many of us are afraid of being truly known; that is why we prefer to be simply seen.
Yet, we know that to be known by another is, in the end, that which alone satisfies us. We cannot be known though without allowing another to know our hungers, our deepest needs and where and how we find ourselves vulnerable. As Thomas Merton, the great spiritual writer of the 20th century, once wrote,
I do have questions and, as a matter of fact, I think a man is known better by his questions than by his answers. To make known one’s questions is, no doubt, to come out in the open oneself. I am not in the market for the ready-made and wholesale answers so easily volunteered by the public and I question nothing so much as the viability of public and popular answers, including some of those which claim to be most progressive. [1]
A truly satisfying life thus calls us beyond simply been seen. It invites us to be known. To be known not by everyone, but by a few – a few who know us exactly as we are in all our hungers, in all our needs, in all our vulnerability.
Do we want to be seen? Or do we want to be known? In a sense, I think this, too, is the question at the heart of today’s gospel. Jesus comes before us and asks, what is it that we are truly wanting? For what are we truly hungering?
Jesus does not just see us. Rather, he knows us. He knows us because he knows our hungers. He invites us to know ourselves as he knows us. He invites us into a life in which we are truly known, known to ourselves, known by him, without fear.
Bread which nourishes and sustains, not circuses which parade and display, is what we are given in him. True reality not virtual.
[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, (London: Burns and Oates, 1968), v.
