Aug 27, 2012
On a recent Saturday morning my 11-year-old son said, “Dad, I’m bored. What are we going to do for fun today?” Like many kids in our age of digital innovation, my youngest son was looking for something new and exciting. Not a bad thing in itself, but his question got me thinking: Do we adults also crave excessive change and entertainment in our lives, and does this desire spill over into how we view our Catholic faith?
I often hear complaints that the “Mass is boring,” “the priest is difficult to understand,” or “he didn’t wow us with an exciting homily.” Still more complaints center on the lack of exciting music during Mass, the “inconvenience” of having to go weekly as well as on Holy Days of Obligation, or a local Protestant church that has better music and entertaining preachers.
With these and other complaints, I wonder if we suffer from spiritual ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder. Many studies cite kids’ overstimulation from video games as a contributor to the problem, yet we adults also struggle with our own addiction to smart phones and information overload from computers and TV. Does this problem affect our spiritual lives? Do we go from parish to parish looking for some sort of “Catholic buzz”? Do we flirt with heresy by attending non-Catholic churches? Are our brains, craving stimulation, incapable of finding peace?
Yet we need to tune out the “noise” to achieve the quiet and focus required at Mass.