Dying To All The Globe

April 16, 2019

Tuesday in Holy Week

Working with young people is such a privilege because they are making the transition from the confusions and insecurities of adolescence into the journey of self-understanding that is adulthood. Adolescence has always been a difficult time. We all stared into the mirror at spotty faces and struggled to see someone who we thought was attractive and likeable and who could succeed in a harsh competitive world.

But today young people aren’t just staring anxiously into the mirror, they are staring anxiously into the “beyond-the-looking-glass” world of social media. These technologies exacerbate the adolescent tendency to be harsh on ourselves by holding before us unattainable standards. It’s not just that today’s teenager feels inadequate, it’s that all her friends appear to be happier than her, more beautiful than her, thinner than her, more fulfilled than her. And she doesn’t realize that that’s exactly how they all feel too.

Huge amounts of external pressures are placed on young people to look certain ways, behave certain ways, think certain things. And we don’t yet know the real consequences of growing up in this social media age. But we do know that anxiety disorders, depression, self-harm, and suicide have risen dramatically for girls in Generation Z, that’s the first generation to grow up on social media. And if we’re honest about it, these technological changes to how we live our lives, are starting to affect us too. We can feel inadequate. We can find ourselves chasing Facebook likes and retweets.

That’s why some of the verses in tonight’s Gospel reading can be dangerously misunderstood. “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Even St Augustine in the 5^th century said we should not understand this as the self-hatred that leads to self-harm and suicide. I think instead we should interpret it precisely as a wariness to fall in love with the superficial self that is constructed by all these social pressures, its projections and expectations.

We’re reflecting this week on prayer and on what it means to be someone who comes regularly before God in silence and attention, reflecting on scripture and holding the troubling realities of our world before God. When those habits of prayer move beyond the superficial, prayer starts to become the cultivation of an inner life that is honest about who we are and that becomes more resistant to worldly projections about who we ought to be.

What I worry about for Generation Z is that they can become so caught up in the online presentations of ourselves and our views that they don’t know how to develop the inner capacities of a self that is reflective and questioning and which knows itself to be flawed but, by God’s grace, deeply forgiven and loved.

This implies that prayer is something far more challenging and involving than we often assume. Prayer isn’t reeling off a list of our requests to God. It is the cultivation of an attentiveness to the God who doesn’t just listen but has things to say to us, challenging things about what we need to let go of in our lives and our self-understanding.

Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” This is clearly an allusion to his forthcoming death and resurrection. But for us to share in that resurrection, we are called to ask ourselves what needs to fall to the earth and die for us to be people who bear much fruit. Will it be the grains of our fantasies of glamour and success? The grains of our autonomy from other people or the fragile eco-system? The grains of our independence from God, the illusion that we are not in need of grace and redemption?

So Jesus is playing with a lot of paradoxes in this passage. We need to hate ourselves in order to love ourselves. We need to let go in order to receive. We need to die in order to live. And that is at the centre of the mystery we celebrate this week, the Passion in which we are called to share.

The hymn writer Isaac Watts expresses this in his famous Passiontide hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

His dying crimson, like a robe,
Spreads o’er his body on the tree;
Then I am dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me. 

When we look at the cross of Christ we are confronted with total desolation – the death of God and the death of every pretense about ourselves as gods. But that is all to make possible the new life of resurrection. Our illusions die so that our true recreated selves can live. In the words of another Easter hymn:

Forth he came at Easter like the risen grain, 
he that for three days in the grave had lain; 
fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been; 
love is come again like wheat that springeth green.