“A very widespread ailment of our time is the fatigue of living: reality seems to us to be too complex, burdensome, difficult to face.”
Maybe it’s because we have a pope now who was born in the United States, but near-every time I hear Pope Leo XIV speak, I assume he is talking to his fellow Americans.
He so gets us — and not just because he’s a baseball fan. During a recent audience in St. Peter’s Square, he perfectly diagnosed us.
“And so we switch off, we fall asleep, in the delusion that, upon waking, things will be different,” he said. Sound familiar? Coping with the “fatigue of living” may not mean literally falling asleep — though it might. It could be any kind of numbing device/outlet/addiction, including doomscrolling, which gets our hearts going until all we can do is be wiped out by the overwhelm.
“But reality has to be faced,” Leo said. And then he makes the Christian offering you would expect from the leader of the Catholic Church: “Together with Jesus, we can do it well.”
He made use of the reading in Mark where the woman who had been bleeding for a dozen years approached Jesus for healing (5:21-43).
He cautions that we, unlike that woman, can be inclined to merely reach out to Jesus in superficial ways, when it is our hearts God wants, because he wants to heal us more completely than we can even think to ask. “We walk the surfaces of our churches, but maybe our heart is elsewhere,” Leo said.
Now is the time of year we Americans think of freedom in a political/historic/day-off-work context. But what about our hearts? What about our minds?
We imprison ourselves when we drown ourselves by doomscrolling, when we let Donald Trump or MSNBC or whatever it is live rent-free in our heads. We’re really the ones paying the price — along with everyone else in our lives — that comes in feeling constantly spent and beleaguered for all the injustices of the world we wind up feeling responsible for yet are powerless in the face of it all.
To this Leo says: “Look around. And let us read in each other’s faces a word that never betrays: ‘together.'” That’s almost countercultural. For as many social media connections we might have, in person, we tend to be apart. How many restaurant scenes have people gathered and yet divided by their own individual screens? Drop the screens.
“We conquer evil together,” Leo said. And how’s this? “Joy is found together.” And enough with the impotency: “Injustice is fought together.”
So as you make barbeque plans, or whatever it is that might have you with people, consider doing it without screens or excess libations. Consider how lives — yours and mine — might be different with God and man, together, in freedom. It’s a cultural declaration of the sort no fireworks display or military parade (!) can rival. Be free. In all its iterations and connotations.
We can do it together.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book “A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living.” She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan’s pro-life commission in New York and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.
