In the darkness, once the light comes on we can see more clearly.

Homily for 3^rd Sunday of Ordinary Time

22^nd January 2023

First Reading:      Isaiah 8:23-9:3

Psalm                    26(27):1,4,13-14

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:10-13,17

Gospel:                 Matthew 4:12-23

The theme for this week is “the people who lived in darkness have seen a great light”. Isaiah talks about this, and his words are read by Jesus in the synagogue before he begins to preach the message, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand”.

We live in a time where there seems to be much darkness. Doom and gloom. Our phones keep on pinging with notifications demanding our urgent attention and like drug addicts, we hastily drop everything to get our latest fix. Then, before we know it, we have lost track of time in our distraction forgetting what it was we were doing in the first place. Ding. Another notification draws us back into that cycle once more. It is hard to break the habit.

But that’s the point. This technology has been designed for the psychological behaviours associated with drug abuse and gambling addiction. It is deliberate. I know of many people who have taken themselves off social media because they found themselves becoming anti-social. One of the appeals of becoming a Deacon was it gave me an opportunity to get away from the computer, and now away from the mobile. It gave me a break to meet real people. Much more fun.

YouTube allows me to publish my work. It is a platform I can enjoy searching for full-length documentaries to watch. Yet, if you believe the hype around social media, we have an attention span of about 3 seconds. One thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. That’s three seconds.

In journalism, you are taught three words equals one second. You have just nine words to express yourself. That’s because if this was a video that comes in your social media stream, that’s about as much time I would get before the Mighty Thumb would scroll past, onto the next blur of information. That quickly. If you think about how much data you have flicked through in the last week can you remember what you saw or who it was from?

A big issue currently is people forgetting things. It is not just those who have seen a few score years behind us, multiples of twenty. Even teenagers are struggling to concentrate and retain information because of constant distractions. Ding, another notification draws us away from what is important.

A recent video I watched was of an artist. She developed her skills as an illustrator using traditional techniques. It takes a lot of time to build up such skills, years of practice and experimentation.

She had been encouraged to set up her business to use social media. She found she had less time to develop her art. In fact, she was being encouraged to constantly produce content to feed the social media streams to make her presence known.

The problem was, the more she did social media the less money she got producing free content. She also met fewer people, real people she could talk to, person to person. She felt quite isolated.

About three years ago, she decided to stop using social media and put all her effort into her illustrations. Her art got better. She went out more and met real people because she had time to do so, helping with her mental and physical well-being. Through word-of-mouth, people got to know her, and her social skills developed. She had come out of the darkness and into the light.

My job in television was as a video editor. What people got to see on television was about 1/10th of the material that had been filmed for the programme. Social Media Content is the same. It is the best part of people’s lives. Just moments in their life. Not everything. The problem is that if we get hooked on constantly watching such content we can very quickly become disillusioned with our own lives. The reality is that our own lives are just as amazing as all those around us. We do not have to constantly get approval.

In the darkness, we grope around aimlessly trying to find our way but once the light comes on, we can see more clearly. This is where we need to let the light of Jesus come into our lives as he accepts us for who we are just as we are. He wants to get to know us, especially when we can find the time to be still in prayer or simply to be still and listen. We need to stop looking inwards at the darkness and start looking outwards at the light. We must simplify things and make life easier for ourselves.

Perhaps we need to look at our lives and see what harm is being done to us in the way we think, and what we do with all the things we have around us. Perhaps once we recognise, we have more to give by being with other people and not constantly worrying about what they think of us, we can have a happier life.

It is only when we can accept that there is something wrong in our lives that we can focus and put in the effort needed to make things right. And we do not need to do this on our own. In fact, we are encouraged not to but to be more social and interact with people in person and to drop the media part out of it. It’s time to remember: “The people who lived in darkness have seen a great light”. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand”.

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