OUR NEED FOR CONNECTON

      

Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains

on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me.

John 15

A couple of years ago, I read a story about neighbors finding the decomposed body of a man, still sitting in his recliner. He had been dead for over a year and the TV was still on!  After that, I read about a forty year old woman in a busy London neighborhood who was found in her apartment. She had been dead for two years. We even had a cranky old priest in this diocese, a few years back, who had been dead in his apartment for several weeks before anyone found him. I once had a funeral for an old woman, who had been dead for several weeks before neighbors started smelling the odor coming from her house. What was most sad was that her mentally challenged son was still living with her and did not want them to come and get her. I have a picture clipping  in my homily  files of a woman who was found struck by a car out on the interstate. It shows her laid out in a funeral home here in Louisville. No one showed up for her visitation, except for the one solitary stranger in the photo who had read about her in the newspaper and showed up to say a prayer.

In an era of advanced communication technologies, in which it appears that no one ever has a thought without having to call someone and talk about it, it seems implausible that the number of solitary deaths have been on the rise in countries like ours. Alienation, dubbed the "great emotional sickness of our era" by an Italian filmmaker, remains a disease that even email, cell phones and online networking has been powerless to remedy.

Some experts are even suggesting that our social bonds may be breaking down, not in spite of these new technologies, but because of them. A decade or so ago, when many of us started to go online, Apple, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard and Intel funded a research project to study the psychological and social effects of using the Internet. While most first-time users went online for social purposes, the studies revealed the beginning of a steep decline in social activities beyond the net and increases in depression and loneliness. While magazines like Fortune and Business Week boasted the virtues of "interactive" sites such as MySpace and YouTube, most of its users were found to be joining fewer clubs, talking less in-person and physically hanging out less often with friends.  Even critics of the studies seem to agree that there is more interaction, but less and less of it is in person. You don't have to read the study, all you have to do is sit on my porch and see how many young couples walk down the sidewalk, hand-in-hand, while talking to someone else on a cell phone! The strangest thing I ever saw in this regard, was a young woman at a traffic light near my house, talking on two cell phones at the same time!

When I worked at Saint Meinrad Seminary a few years back, I had a coffee shop built to get seminarians out of their rooms and off their computers so they could talk to each other directly.  The problem, of course, is not the technology itself, but the fact that it discourages us from actually sitting and relating, face to face, with real people! What a world! We talk a lot more, communicate a lot less and find ourselves even more desperate for human intimacy and connection.

Nowhere is the hunger for connection more obvious than in the church. The Courier-Journal had another story, a few years back, about how struggling Protestant congregations look to change and grow.  Many of us are familiar with our own recent history of parish closings, downsizing, twinning and merging. As a priest who has spent a lot of time reaching out, listening to and preaching to "marginal" or "non-practicing" Catholics, I know that sometimes our Church seems to believe that all we need to do is publish new catechisms and canon law books and people will know "the truth" and come back to church. People aren't looking for information about God! They want to experience God. They want to feel connected to God. Information leaves them bored and uninterested. Experiences of God, the ultimate experience any human being can ever have,  leaves them breathless and connected.

It was the sterility of organized religion in the face of a rapacious appetite for spiritual experience  that gave birth to the "new age movement."  Because organized religion had lost its ability to satisfy this appetite for spiritual experience, many simply gave up on religion altogether, while others began to explore an individualistic spirituality outside the boundaries of organized religion. These are the people who proudly claim to be "spiritual, but not religious." In the words of our hero at Bellarmine University, Thomas Merton, "they only trust their own visions, their inner voices. They identify the will of God with anything that makes them feel a sweet, warm inner glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling, the more convinced they become of their own infallibility.  The truth, then, becomes whatever they feel that it is in their own hearts! There is no outside corrective."

Religion has two sides: an exoteric side and an esoteric side. The exoteric side of religion is concerned with the externals of religion, while the esoteric side of religion is concerned with what happens inside believers.  Because organized religion has become overly focused, and still is in many ways, on the organizational aspect of religion, we have lost touch with the experiential aspect of religion.  We need both, because our faith is not only private, but also communal. We need organized religion to keep our faith from becoming just a matter of what we personally feel, but we need personal experiences of God to give organized religion a heart.  When these two sides of religion are separated, the "crazies always take over the asylum." 

Just as a branch cannot sustain itself, without being connected to the main trunk, we cannot be sustained spiritually as Christians apart from the Church. Christianity is not, has not been, nor will ever be, a personal religion, but a communal religion. Let us never forget that the "original sin" was the denial of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, that we are inter-dependent, not independent.  We need each other. We cannot go it alone.       

P.S: I JUST FOUND THIS IN THE NEWS 

5-22-2025

Harvard University researchers have made a startling discovery: loneliness can be just as deadly as smoking.

Both loneliness and smoking impact levels of a blood-clotting protein, which could lead to severe health risks.

Feeling isolated doesn't just affect mental well-being; it has profound physical consequences too. The study highlights the importance of maintaining social connections for overall health.

Just like quitting smoking can improve your health, fostering friendships and social bonds can be a lifesaving measure. So, make sure to reach out and connect with others – your health depends on it!