Mass readings for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Sirach 3.17-20, 28-29 Psalm 68.3-6a, 9-10 Hebrews 12.18-19, 22-24a Luke 14.1, 7-14
It’s being said that celebrity culture is on the wane and may be coming to an end. This is in conjunction with the decline of Hollywood, and other centres of mass cultural production like New York City, Los Angeles, to a lesser extent London, England and Toronto. That is, no one gets quite so excited to see in person the actors from a movie as perhaps we once did. And that’s a good thing. Celebrity culture was definitely not conducive to what our scriptures are about today: humility. Humility which, as our catechism teaches (CCC2546), is to be the foundation of our lives, the basis of our prayer. And to be clear, its voluntary humility, what we see in Jesus Christ; and not humiliation.
The incarnation, the word become flesh, is the divine Christ in humility becoming human out of love for humanity. We in our own modest way are asked to follow Jesus in putting ourselves aside for the sake of others; yet in doing that, we find a fulfilment that ultimately far surpasses what adulation the world can offer us.
But besides that, to forsake the virtue of humility is to tend then towards its opposing vice: narcissism, what in our tradition we call “vanity.” We can drift in that direction, especially if there is encouragement to do so. If you’ve ever suffered narcissism in another person, it is such a draining, discouraging experience dealing with them. Where people are captured by undue self-concern, a sense of self-importance, and where a culture so focuses on individualism and makes heroes of the most successful self-promoters, too many take lessons from that and conform themselves to the egotistical among us to the detriment of themselves and all of us. Narcissists in the end are lonely and afraid; they’ve only known how to use people, not how to love. So, they don’t know how to be loved. And where their ethos predominates, we create societies of loneliness and fear. And as a church we’re to militate against this, to break out from the trap of ego, to find our liberation in our encounter with others in Christ’s love.
Now, the media environment of the modern era has been truly exceptional. Up til then, the number of personalities beyond people we really live and work and actually know was very few: kings and emperors would have their images in wide circulation, we’d be told things about them, all good, and the few times we would be apt to see them, it was usually an instance of impressive pageantry – the effect was to fill us with awe. But in the past hundred years as the “bandwidth” of information that can be transmitted to all of us grew, the major corporations that produce information and entertainment discovered that tying their products to personalities was a really successful way to promote them; and then our minds came to be stocked with hundreds of people who were now famous; and we responded to them in a manner somewhat like we did for our kings – we were in awe, and fascination. So, we headed to the cinema to see Tom Cruise, or Will Smith in whatever they were appearing. Even in the more serious realm of news and information, audiences were drawn to the personalities attached to the newscast, the “anchormen” like Peter Mansbridge, Keith Morrison, Tom Brokaw. They were promoted to us as “trustworthy”, and many of us not only trusted them, but saw in them an authority, a power, to be admired because of the constant promotion of this image.
Additionally, these celebrities would be seen receiving awards and tributes, and they would be glamorized. This was ostensibly just the recognition of colleagues, but somehow became a source of general admiration by the public. An outsized, grotesque amount of praise that distorted our collective values. We became conditioned to admire and trust on the basis of superficialities; to believe the public relations that had us looking up to the famous because of invented or exaggerated virtues. And for the celebrities themselves, too many believed their press releases, became addicted to adulation, used the love of fans to fill emotional and spiritual voids in their own souls. None of this was good; it was vanity, and ultimately sinful on the part of those who created it, participated in it, and for the majority of us, who consumed it. Its most insidious effect was then to reproduce all this in our own mundane lives, to instill in us a desire for recognition, admiration, to worry about how we were seen by others when we should be concerned by how we look to God. Today we have an environment flooded with images, messages, adverts and information in which so many vie for attention on social media on the internet because being known is the key to their success in whatever they do. And strangely enough, just like the movie industry, so many other industries have gala award nights that try to reproduce the glitz and glamour, the red-carpet experience for realtors, tourism professionals, car dealers, every imaginable area of business, and government too. Everyone wants a trophy.
Now, this isn’t to say that the movies we see are themselves sinful because of the promotion culture that surrounds them: some great art has been made in cinema; and there are many actors who are grounded people with a proper perspective on what they do for a living. So, we can admire a movie star in the specific sense that they are capable actors and good movie-makers; not that they must also be wonderful people who we should model our lives on. We shouldn’t fall over ourselves in their presence, and insist they take the upper seat, they be ushered into the privileged place for no other reason than their fame. And that should be an attitude that is transposed in other situations. Plumbers, roofers, dermatologist, veterinarians, school principals and politicians; our relationship to these and everyone else is not on the basis of personality and how they present, on superficialities, but rather substance. And that substance should be authentic humanity, but also, as Christians, evidence of Christ at work in them, even if they themselves are not believers.
The Church has long confessed its conviction of the potentialities of human beings having their source in a divine spark, a seed of the divine planted in the heart – what the ancients called the spermatikos logikos – and St. Paul spoke of this when he said God’s law was already written on our hearts, and so in the calm and peace of God we recognize what is good, and just, and true, and so pursue it. But it’s in the hurly-burly of life, of the world filled with distractions and dangers that we fail to calm our hearts in prayer, and so see properly into ourselves and our motives, and recognize the signs of virtue and vice in the words and actions of others. We need to be very careful who we admire and so, reward; and we need to be especially so in evaluating ourselves and assessing what we deserve in terms of reward and recognition. We don’t want a life of resentment and hurt that comes of being disappointed by our apparent anonymity, especially as our lord teaches that our joy is to be found in taking up his work, and that is something God sees and knows of even if no one else does. And with regard to others, we don’t want to be duped, and so embarrasses and angered, by someone who appeared trustworthy because of the smile, the nice clothes, the professional demeanour. In encouraging humility, we are also fostering honesty, and the valuing of it by others.
We gather together today in our poverty, in our lameness, and so, in humility before our God, and the honoured guest of the eucharistic feast is Christ. It’s in joining ourselves to him that we rise to a higher place; as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, in this mass, we climb Mt. Zion, come to the heavenly Jerusalem with innumerable angels, the saints, and God.
The fallen world’s counterpart is the tawdry company of celebrities, and the communion of the merely famous; it is a cruel exclusive club, ejecting the forgotten and rejecting the humble though worthy.
In God’s kingdom, at the heavenly banquet, there is room enough for all who respond to Christ’s invitation, dress themselves in virtue, and in patience and humility wait for their seat. How much better a place to be, how much better company to keep now, and forever.
Amen.