Does it seem like “someone is out to get you” every single day ― even though that “someone” is anonymous, faceless and you have no idea who he or she might be?
Social media, cell phones and constant streaming cable news on television sets and laptops have brought the world together with instantaneous news about anything going on in the world at any time of day or night. The Age of the Internet and the Information Superhighway has brought more knowledge and facts to the average human being than was available to any of the learned geniuses of the past such as Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein.
The democratization (small “d”) aspect of the information revolution, at least, has been a good thing.
On the other hand, the way news media and internet pros, hackers and bots can manipulate what you see every hour-on-the-hour on your cell phone, based solely on your personality traits and search proclivities online, can make you positively paranoid if you let it manipulate the way you see the world.
Do you feel like people are “out there” who want to do you harm? Are there people who want to see you not prosper and succeed? Is there a concerted effort on the part of some group ― conspirators of evil, if you will ― who want to make you feel like an aggrieved, sad oppressed person based solely on the color of your skin, gender, ethnicity, heritage or socio-economic situation?
Dorothy Leigh Sayers cleverly offered hope in one of her “Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World’. Sayers was a great Christian crime novelist, poet and theologian during the first half of the 20th century who counted C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and other members of The Inklings literature group in London as close friends.
“Surprisingly, the Christian Church now finds herself called upon to proclaim the old and hated doctrine of sin as a gospel of cheer and encouragement. The final tendency of the modern philosophies — hailed in their day as a release from the burden of sinfulness — has been to bind man hard and fast in the chains of an iron determinism.
The influences of heredity and environment, of glandular make-up and the control exercised by the unconscious, of economic necessity and the mechanics of biological development, have all been invoked to assure man that he is not responsible for his misfortunes and therefore not to be held guilty.
Evil has been represented as something imposed upon him from without, not made by him from within.
The dreadful conclusion follows inevitably, that as he is not responsible for evil, he cannot alter it…
Today, if we could really be persuaded that we are miserable sinners — that the trouble is not outside us but inside us, and that therefore, by the grace of God, we can do something to put it right, we should receive that message as the most hopeful and heartening thing that can be imagined”.
It is hard for modern American sensibilities to admit any of us have sinful natures. It is particularly considered impolite and impolitic to ascribe any sinful behavior to anyone other than yourself, if you are willing to do so. It is far easier to blame “someone or something else” for the various misfortunes of life which all of us encounter at some time or the other.
The truth of the matter is that most people are so focused on their own lives they scarcely have the time or the energy to concoct intricate conspiracies to rob anyone of any race, religion, gender or age of their happiness and prosperity. Plus, most of us are so egotistical and self-absorbed that it is near about impossible to focus too much time on helping or hurting others every day of the week as a constant vocation.
During this Epiphany season after Christmas, it might be a good time to read some of Dorothy Sayers’ “Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World” and meditate on them. If each of us assumes the mantle of being the peacemaker and the progenitor of love towards others first, how then could we have anything but joy and anticipation for the new year before us?
