To pray the news
Lately there’s been too much death—in faraway places from terrorism, epidemics, hate crimes, honor killings, war; in our own cities from drugs, gang warfare, domestic strife, suicide, arson, accident; and in all places (there is nowhere to hide) from the long list of causes we deem natural. One of our closest friends died in mid-July after a three-year struggle with cancer; we returned from his funeral in England to find that another friend, a 98-year-old nun, had died peacefully the previous day. Our neighbors’ cat died—“He’s up in the sky where God is,” their small daughter told us as she brought us next door to show us not the sky where God is, but the newly dug grave in the backyard. And though the loss of an aged cat weighs comparatively little, this particular loss has planted in an innocent young mind the seed that will one day grow into what some psychologists call “middle knowledge” of the reality of death.
How much of this middle knowledge is good for us? St. Benedict said we should keep death daily before our eyes. But Benedict could scarcely have imagined a time when death would be placed daily before our eyes, not by deep reflection but by shallow projection on flickering screens, gazed at unprepared.
Because these flickering screens are omnipresent, the news of death is never far away. Because I am never far from a computer, I’ve slipped into the habit of reading news aggregators. Not surprisingly, Google News comes up first whenever I Google “news”—and its aggregated content is overwhelmingly about death, death delivered in graphic detail, death awareness in a form that is anything but good for the soul.
