Distraction and Useless Things

the highest things in life are useless because they're done for their own sake but I think we we have so hyper emphasized the useful that people are often lost they don't know what to do with their use less time and therefore it's filled up with a lot of triviality welcome back to the word on fire show I'm Brandon bot the host and the content director at word on fire joining me from the Santa Barbara studio is Bishop Robert Barron Bishop Baron good to see you hey Brandon always a joy to be on with you how's little Gilbert doing he's good he's walking around causing tear he's taking swimming lessons now which is you know something that all families in Florida have to do when they're alright just the other years old and he's if she's floating if you like his namesake yet anyway hey I've liked seeing a lot of the pictures and videos coming out of Santa Barbara as you guys trying to figure out creative ways to still worship and share the sacraments and the liturgy with people of course you know you did your daily online masses for a while in your local region of Santa Barbara one cool thing he recently did was there was a whole drive-in service at a nearby parish where you offered benediction sort of a Liturgy of the word talk about that how'd that come about and how'd it go that was marvelous it was just he prior to getting the permission to bring people back to church so we didn't have that yet but the county said we could have an outdoor service if people stayed in their cars and didn't receive communion so I said yeah let's do it you know it's not perfect it's not ideal but it's something we can do so I did in two places one up in Santa Maria which is about an hour north of Santa Barbara and then another one in Carpinteria which is about Oh 20 minutes south of me and in each place we gathered I don't know maybe 200 cars but each car I'd say at least two threes I'm as four people in them so there were a lot of people there and we got up on a little dais with the good sound system and so we did basically the Liturgy of the word for Pentecost and then benediction and it was very moving to me and we brought out the Blessed Sacrament and did the benediction but just to have people there they wanted to be in the presence of the Eucharistic Lord you know and it was powerful for them we had pictures of people weeping you know they've been starving for the Eucharist and it was like I was like looking through the window of a bakery I suppose but you can't have the bread yet but you're sensing it you know so I was very moved by it both places there was a marvelous turnout a marvelous enthusiasm one of my favorite might happen in both places at the end the pastor got up and just said you know it was wonderful to have everybody here and we can't really see you I wonder if you could somehow signal so all of these hands came out the the you know the window but then as people started to haunt and before you knew it all the horns were honking and it was like a little I don't know like a little Alleluia a little bit Church Oh expression and the same thing happened in Carpinteria at the end as I was walking off the horn started then everyone's horn was was blowing you know I don't know I just loved it it's like the spirit groans in Rumble yeah even the heart listen today we're gonna talk about the topic of distraction now you and I have mentioned this on several episodes especially the ones where we talk about social media and phones and their addictive qualities and all that kind of stuff but I don't think it's any surprise to viewers of this episode especially if you're watching it on your phone or on social media or whatever that we're all hyper distracted we feel pulled in a million directions it's hard to focus on just one thing for an extended period of time I think of pascal's great quote that all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone and do you think that quote is still true 400 years after he uttered it oh it's truer than it was when he uttered it and what he meant of course was we distract ourselves so readily from the great questions that ought to preoccupy us when you sit by yourself alone in a room i know it's maybe an introverts dream but it means i got the time and the space to think about god about the meaning of my life about Who I am of what I am doing the trouble Pascal said a long time ago was DVF T Simone and his French diversions or distractions and you know to be fair he he had a problem with this he was somewhat addicted to gambling and he's of course Pascal is the famous wager of Pascal that's grounded in a way in his his typical distraction of gambling but he knew that that he was frittering a lot of his life away now here's Pascal one of the great geniuses who accomplished more than you know almost anyone but yet he himself thought I fretted a lot of my life away with with idle distractions so he felt most of us most of the time and I think you know that's not a bad way to examine your conscience at the end of the day is to go back and say okay how much of my day was spent in kind of trivial stuff just distracting myself from the really essential matters bishop I think if anyone's self reflecting honestly they'll admit that they have way too many distractions in their lives yet at the same time we keep coming back to them we why do we back up with all these distractions why do we keep going back to them because we like them you know because of Pascal's point that we'd rather do that it's hard to sit by yourself alone in a room it's hard to wrestle with the really important questions and so of course we prefer distractions we prefer triviality now look I get it you can't spend every moment of your life wrestling with the profoundest questions I get it of course we need you know light or more trivial things but do we spend most of our time doing that one way to distinguish it Brandon is between leisure activity that's more contemplative in nature versus trivial or frivolous leisure activity and that's an important distinction because you can be involved in leisure activity let's say you're not working or maybe you're not wrestling with the most profound questions but you're engaged in something contemplative and that's all to the good I think you know as a sports fan watching a baseball game is that's not really a DVT sim all in in Pascal sounds like an idle distraction I think that's a form of contemplation we say more about that but I'd make preps that distinction too lest you think everyone should become a monk and spend their entire life in a Cell wrestling with the most difficult questions I wouldn't want to go that far but we've gone to the other extreme we're gonna talk a little bit here in a moment about leisure that's part of the reason why we tell us episode distraction and useless things useless things being a good not something we should avoid we need things that we do for their own sake not because they're useful for something else but I want to before we get there spend a little time talking about this 2018 book it's by Maggie Jackson who has become sort of an expert in this realm of human distraction and it's titled distracted reclaiming our focus and a world of lost attention she makes the point that a lot of the things that we get distracted by are good they they draw us towards some good end however these perceived Goods actually drift us further from the ultimate Goods and she gives three examples I want to spend a little time talking with you about each one of them first of all multitasking she says the BlackBerry you know at that time now the iPhone fulfills a longing in our American culture psyche that since work is is perceived to be virtuous the more we work the more virtuous we are then being able to multitask means we're you know more virtuous we're always ready to take emails always ready to answer a phone call even if that means putting on hold what's in front of us what's the danger of this multitasking dependency you know I think of it a lot I have a lot of money airplanes and you know of course you can't be on the iPhone when the planes actually flying but you know when you're waiting in the waiting area and then you get on the plane people are just I remember thinking you know can't that wait no you're dealing with some you know businessman that can't wait for a couple of hours you have to do that right now and so yeah it's introduced us to this sort of constant plugged in mentality what's wrong with saying no part of the day I'm really unplugged from all that you know even though traveling is difficult in a lot of ways there's there's something kind of nice like when I go traveling I usually bring a book or like a more serious book because my my move on a plane at her waiting areas to kind of cocoon I kind of go in my own little space and I block out things and I'm really gonna concentrate because in a way on the plane you we have a lot of distractions you're sitting in your chair you could turn on the movie or some if you want but there you are and you don't know the people on the side of you is you don't have to talk to them really and you can focus so I that's a contemplatively often people do the other thing as they say no no I'll just keep working working working working working until the very last minute maybe unplug and contemplate rather than work it seems like the whole culture is fighting against this tendency to just focus I'm thinking about airplanes and air travel specifically I'm like you I I see airplanes as the best time to rear it's my most contemplative time I you know I don't have obligations for kids or for work I can just sit yeah but even then the little TV in front of you is like turning on automatically even when I'm trying to turn it off or there's announcements over the speakers and when you get to the airport a lot of restaurants and airports now set up iPads bolted to the table in front of you I used to take your order but to play games and stuff and I'm like you just want to focus on the person in front of you or the book that I'm holding it's it feels like you're fighting a huge uphill battle yeah and all the time and and it's again that distinction between work and and contemplation work is good and that's true in the biblical tradition it's true in the great philosophical tradition we all know that now work I'm defining here as some practical activity that we do for the sake of some greater end so you go to work in order that you might you know get the money which you need to take care of your family you go to work that you might have the money you need to pay for your apartment or whatever it is fine fine but then what do you do when you do have that time when you are actually with your family they've been fed you're now home in your apartment that you've you've paid for through your work now what do you do and see I find people often have a hard time answering that question what do I do when the goal of my working has been achieved see the useful has done its thing which is great now comes the beautiful time for the use less and you mentioned that earlier that's Aristotle's great intuition the highest things in life are useless because they're done for their own sake but I think we we have so hyper emphasized the useful that people are often lost they don't know what to do with their use less time and therefore it's filled up with a lot of triviality it's filled up with DV LT samal rather than with legitimate objects of contemplation if I can put it that way one of which might be I love when parents do this they'll talk about just looking at their kids can be a great source of of joy and I mean joy like with a capital J like a deep sense of of the meaningfulness of their life that's a contemplatively playing with your kids is a contemplative exercise right because it's useless but you're spending time in this joyful activity with your kids reading a book or watching a film or going to a baseball game those two are contemplative activities I think in our culture we we grossly under play all of that we don't train people how to do it we train them in the work work work mode the useful mode but the useless sight of life we don't and therefore it does get filled up with dvt samal and that causes spiritual trouble in her book distracted Maggie Johnson mentions a second culprit behind this distraction culture the first is sort of multitasking and this emphasis on work work work the second though is speed and efficiency so we're always trying to find the quickest easiest most efficient way to get something done and to maximize our output I've noticed though especially among Millennials and jins' ears there's sort of a return to the slow the you know on non-digital ways of doing things things that are less efficient that take longer but they're doing them on purpose because there's a value and not just trying to maximize your potential but I've found if that's your goal if you're just trying to you know complete as many projects as possible people become in her words administrative appendages you know they're just sort of cogs and the Machine of your efficient life then distraction is the inevitable outcome because there's just so much going on yeah I used to give years ago I used to give a mission a parish mission and it was on it's called food for the soul what is the soul like and one of my themes there was the soul likes to go slow so we are addicted to speed that's true we like speed and everything fast connection oh yeah this is a faster you know program that gets me all right but then when you've quickly gotten all these tasks done you've quickly gotten where you want to go now what do you do see cuz now the soul kicks in the soul likes useless things and useless things should be done slowly because you're meant to savor them not race your way through them right think of people it's a largely lost art in America but when I was in Europe studying you'd see this you see it still now in Rome when you go there people that know how to savor a meal anyway Europeans eat you get to a restaurant and you're just there you're just looking dig a gave you table or do your food the food comes slowly you know a bit at a time you savor it you linger over it you spend many hours in conversation it's not at all unusual in Europe's start eating it you get there 7:30 dinner comes maybe a dish or so it's now 10:30 you're having your after-dinner drink or something you're still talking that's not indulgence or that's not something decadent there's something beautiful about that it's someone who knows how to go slow through this great event of eating and socializing and spending time with you know what do we do now I'm guilty this to get to the restaurant where's that waiter where's the waiter come on let's order you know the food comes and then how often look around a restaurant America what you'll see is people now they're all together the table but they're all like this right they're all looking at our phones no no this is the time for you to talk to each other look at each other listen to each other you know I'm a baseball fan a classic critique of baseball and there's something to it because it's the game has gotten too long I agree with that but a classic critique is all baseball come on it's so slow I mean coming hours and hours no but you're you're meant to savor a baseball game you might to spend a lot of time with it looking and listening and watching what's going on that's a lost art well Maggie Jack Jackson has a bunch more analysis of how we became such a distracted culture so I encourage people to check out her book again it's titled distracted 2018 but I want to spend the rest of this episode on practices we can adopt to alleviate our hyper distracted lifestyles the first one and I think we've hinted at it a few times already is to favor leisure and useless things and I think here not just of the ancient Greek philosophers but more contemporary people like Romano Gardini Josef peeper his writings on leisure and the late Roger Scruton who wrote a lot on quote unquote useless things and their value how do we find things bishop that are properly leisure and useless things and how do we stick with them instead of getting distracted by other things don't you love people I think of William F Buckley I'm dating myself here a bit but you know prominent figure some years ago but Buckley was a great you know social commentator a political commentator but he was a man of great passions and one of them was sailing and he was a sailboat he said large ocean crossing vessels and Buckley has these wonderful books about when he crossed the Atlantic Ocean with friends crossed the Pacific Ocean with friends and the great adventure of that and loading the you know the food and the wine onto the ship for their their leisurely elegant meals and so on but also talking about navigation talking about the weather talking about just spending time on the deck you know looking at the Stars and so on I love that as someone who was so clued into this useless thing because heck you could take a plane across the ocean much more efficiently but they chose this form of transportation that involved these sort of contemplative disciplines of studying and looking and waiting and so on develop a passion for useless things like that as I mentioned baseball sports as bites nature contemplative that's what the Greeks understood and we might see it more superficially but they didn't see it superficially at all it was a type of contemplation of the beautiful you know books obviously you and I are great bibliophiles read a good deep profound book that takes a long time to get through and to understand you can't do that superficially let's talk about another practice to adopt and that is to turn our noisy devices like our iPhones and to more single function or limited type devices you know there's been a trend among all electronic devices to have more functions and be able to do more at one time I'm thinking specifically of the Kindle devices you know originally indle was just a device to read books really go down what books you read a book now even Kindles have added apps and music and the internet browser and all this other stuff so they're inviting you to go from your book to some other activity making it harder to read we talked I don't know if several months back about digital minimalism is a book by a Cal Newport and he he posed the question asked what tasks that you need your iPhone for for example and then ask yourself are there simpler ways to accomplish this goal either on my phone or through another device that remove these distractions you know so I don't know if it's if it's you know like reading latest articles on the website that you keep tracking multiple times every day can you instead set aside an hour once a week and then just catch up on that day is it really necessary to check in 1015 times a day but I think a lot of people struggle with this bishop with iPhones it feels like there's a never-ending invitation yeah click this try this open this app go to this website you experience that I know you do don't sure and and the makers of all these things know just what they're doing they know it's not that hard to get someone addicted to something we're like we're animals attune to addiction it seems to me and they know how to do it and you're right it you start looking at the iPhone before you know it you're drawn into something like why am i looking at this what why am i spending time my favorite example is just the Facebook feed you know is this things coming up on Facebook but you find yourself kind of scrolling through it and it's it never comes to an end face Mueller Instagram it's an endless feed yes and then you say what wait a minute why why am I doing this there's something to about screens I don't know if it's it's the bright light it's the colors there's something about screams that draw us are addictive we're like looking at the printed page of a book that can be like well it's kind of drab you know give me some pictures and some color now again I love pictures in color but there's a danger because if you're if you're distracted away from things like books that require a lot more attention whole world's remain opaque to you I found this brand in my years of teaching so I taught at Mundelein from 92 I became rector in 2012 so on and off for about 20 years I noticed it for sure in those 20 years a certain decline in people's capacity to read a lengthy and complicated text so when I first started teaching you know you just sign I want you guys to read you know these 75 pages of the confessions for next time I want you to read you know this whole section of Plato's Republic and then as the years went by people I I mean I can't possibly read all that I'm not going to I think I read these two paragraphs by next class oh wait a minute wait a minute too much so I know that's that that's the danger and it's a discipline it's a discipline and you've got to give it time and you know you've got to talk to people who know how to read books like something you know I use all-time as a pen so if I'm reading a book seriously not not at something before I go to bed I'm out I'll read like a novel or some history pouring out of bed but if I'm reading seriously I always have a pen in my hand because it keeps me in the game it's like keeping score in a baseball game if you're keeping score you're hit your minds really in the game so with the pen I'm checking questioning what you know I'm commenting on the book or like yeah good or then an arrow well that sounds like something else I just read it you know so that keeps me in the game you know so there's disciplines you can use but we've got to get better at that I think when I came into the Catholic Church one of the new practices for me was Eucharistic Adoration never heard of it before never practice it before but I know a lot of people in my generation raised around noisy screens and notifications and news feeds and all that stuff find Eucharistic Adoration to be such a relief because you walk into this room no sound no conversations no quiet there's a locus of attention everything's directed toward one thing adoring the Lord and the Blessed Sacrament and especially if you commit to like an hour of adoration you know you tell yourself I'm locked in here there's nothing else that's gonna pull me away I'm committed to this that's sort of like rewires and retrains your mind and makes it easy to contemplate elsewhere what what at what else does the Catholic spiritual tradition offer as an antidote to our distracted culture oh so much I mean think of Lexi Oh Divina which is a very slow prayerful way to read the the Gospels or read any part of the Bible contemplative prayer so Eucharistic Adoration I think participates in that category of contemplator prayer think of meditation and Ignatian type meditation where you spend the time to enter into the scene of a Gospel story and you you look and you smell and you hear what it's like and so on all of those are contemplative practices or you know even something like you go to the great medieval cathedrals and you find those those labyrinths and I've always loved that because the labyrinth let's say it's shark the most famous one you enter and I've walked it a couple times and it takes you a long time it's a big big thing and it's a winding path kind of intestine like it winds back on itself and then goes here and you end up you start here and you end up like there you can walk there and like ten or five steps but you've just taken 25 minutes to get there in this sort of meandering way well remember the soul likes to go slow it doesn't like to get there likes to go slow so I mean all those are practices designed to overcome this sort of trivialization or DVT semana proach and learn to look you know so much of prayer they can even go beyond the Christian tradition here go into the Eastern yang Buddhist traditions it's just to be awake to something really awake to it here's a flower here's a river going by to really see it I see it watch it contemplate it over over a long period of time those are all kind of soul calming moves if we can offer maybe one final recommendation at the risk of sounding a little self referential but the last episode we talked a lot about the word on fire Bible and I think that that text itself can beep a major antidote to distraction because it pulls you in through the art and through the scriptural text it's something you can sit with for a long while and meditate on and reflect on so maybe if you want to start reading deeper books and longer reading sessions maybe try it with the word on fire Bible because in some ways it's made for that kind of deep contemplative reading that was behind that Bible many ways was this whole idea of how to draw someone into the Bible especially distracted contemporary people here's the Bible with some little tiny footnotes the bottom that's probably not gonna do it but something that does grab their attention through the visual but also lures them into a contemplative stance that's very much behind what we were doing there [Music] [Music] well it's time now for our question from one of our listeners you can send in questions to the show by visiting ask Bishop Baron comm you can record your question on any device today we have one coming from Gabriel in Massachusetts he's asking about how to prove that there's a transcendent realm here's the way he puts it hello my name is Gabriel from Natick Massachusetts my question is a prerequisite for the question of God how can we prove there is this other dimension something we don't inhibit and that we can't measure and scientifically or mathematically true thank you yeah good I'm in many ways that's the question of basic apologetics but you know I'm gonna take a clue from your the question itself think about mathematics for a second mathematics Plato understood this it's it's still true when you move into a properly mathematical realm you're not looking at seven items in front of you you're you're contemplating the number seven you're not looking at a triangular Li shaped figure in front of you you're thinking now about a triangle or about a circle not a circular shape that you can see like that camera lens but circularity a circle in the geometrical sense you have stepped out of the sensible world because points and circles and and lines and triangles in the abstract sense are not visual items they are pure abstractions they are if you want invisible realities now press it a little further you mentioned both math and science all of science rests upon objective intelligibility right there has to be some kind of formal structure to reality or the sciences cannot get off the ground there for something like ordered harmonies necessarily structure a scientific approach to life press it further especially contemporary science Reed Einstein and the quantum theorists and all those people it is inextricably tied to mathematics you can't do high science especially today without desperately abstract mathematics therefore science we say oh that that most orders me to the sensible world well yes in a way but you can't analyze the sensible world scientifically without mathematics mathematics is in itself invisible it's a non sensible reality I think of my nephew you know was at MIT and doing all this high science and he's gonna be you know building and designing robotics and all this business terrific it's about the sensible world but he cannot begin to do that work without being very comfortable in the invisible world that's why mathematics actually is one of those doors that opens to what I would call I think you're hinting at it a transcendent world see I'm just a bitter opponent of this reductive materialism and scientism which is which is compromising the souls of people today and I just want them to say even as they hold up science which they should I hold it up to we love science we love science but to say science is to say math to say math is to say the invisible and so don't play this game of all these poor old religious people with their crazy wacky ideas about a higher world if you're doing science you are in the higher world that I'm talking about you've at least walked through into the vestibule of the world that I'm talking about so I would I would turn that on its head that objection it's precisely math and science that orders you to a transcendent world okay end of rant on that subject well as we work to get Bishop Barron's blood pressure back down I wanted to mention one final time to pick up your copy of the word on fire Bible we talked about it during the whole episode last week it just came out last week on June 15th but you can find it at word on fire org slash Bible we have three beautiful versions a paperback version a hardcover version and then the leather version if you have young sons or daughters or college students or just people in your life that haven't read the Bible aren't familiar with the Bible don't like religion is the book you can pass them to lure them back into become Rhian chanted with the religious world of the Bible so check it out at word on fire org slash Bible well thanks again for listening and watching we'll see you next week on the word on fire show thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video I encourage you to share it and be sure to subscribe to my youtube channel

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 194,368

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Id: xrjJbWJuPa8

Length: 31min 48sec (1908 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020