Pay attention! Listen to me when I’m talking to you! Look where you’re going! Be careful; you’re going to fall! How many times do you hear things like this? I know my parents used to say those things to me pretty often when I was growing up. I think if I could hear my guardian angel out loud, he would be screaming these things at me all the time even now!
I think all of us – young people and older people alike – find ourselves distracted a lot of the time. The biggest culprit that causes this distraction, I think, are the screens we have in our field of vision. It used to be that the television at home was the thing that was a distraction for us, but now we can add our phones, computers, and tablets. Most of us have our eyes on screens all the time. Ask the adults here who go to daily Mass how often I have to remind them to turn off their phones. We are all caught up in what’s going on on our screens, that we miss what’s right in front of us.
But even if we didn’t have screens, my guess is that human nature would find something to distract us. That’s kind of what Jesus is getting at in today’s gospel reading. He takes the people to task because he knows they get caught up in talking about the weather. They were agricultural people, so they all knew how to look up at the sky and predict what was going to happen. They knew when rain was coming, or when it was going to get hotter.
But the problem was, they could see what was up in the sky, coming a day or two down the road, but they couldn’t see things that were happening right here, right now. They couldn’t see that it was a real problem when they had disagreements with other people that they refused to settle. They couldn’t see that forgiveness and mercy were vital to their survival and salvation. Jesus wanted them to stop getting caught up in the distractions of their lives and take care of the things that really mattered, things that were really important.
As I pointed out, we are a lot like that too. We know who posted what and when and on what social media platform. We know what so-called celebrity went out with whom and where. We let our relationships boil down to emojis and lols and idks and don’t take time to really see the people in our lives. We let the ringing of phones and pinging of instant messaging distract us from prayer, life, and the people all around us.
When my mom was sick, my sisters and I used to text every single morning so that we would all know how mom was doing that day and how we were handling it. We liked that, so we continue that every day even now. Now, we just tell each other what’s going on in our lives and how we are feeling, and telling each other we love them. That’s nice. But we have also found out that it is no substitute for actually seeing each other, and spending time together. So now we make it a point to do that too.
There are all sorts of things in our world and in our lives that distract us from God, prayer, the people in our lives, and our relationships. We can’t let that cloud our ability to really see the people in our lives and to see what’s going on around us. We have to pay attention, to listen, to really see, and to love as God loves us. Anything else is just a distraction, and it’s not worthy of us, of our loved ones, or of our God.
Pay attention.