by Ross Martine-Eiler
Jesus’s birth reminds us that being Faithful is not being Famous
“I want to go someplace where we know somebody who can plug us into the social pipeline.” - Lloyd, Dumb and Dumber
Money, Sex and Power have always driven people crazy. Hence the traditional counsels: Poverty, Chastity & Obedience. The Christian community has long stood as an alternative; a place where greed, lust and dominion are curtailed through ascetic discipline and loving accountability while simultaneously meeting human needs and celebrating human goods.
The technocratic paradigm of corporate capitalism has elevated a fourth temptation, a relative newcomer; the Teddy Roosevelt of a satanic Mt Rushmore. This newcomer is Fame. The most powerful corporations of the world have employed sophisticated cognitive science research and technologies to capture our attention and addict us to screens, phones and social media in order to manipulate our attention and modify our behavior towards advertising, marketed consumerism and further technological dependence. Civic institutions such as schools and governments have encouraged this addictive dependence by shifting education, public life, and the public square to digital media. The primary incentive offered to people for their minds and attention is the promise of being seen.
This desire for recognition can partially be explained because human beings are hypersocial animals created for relationship in the image of the divine Trinity. FOMO is in our DNA. We want to be known, to be heard, to be seen, to participate in our communities. These are all Good things, just as our daily bread is good, sex in marriage is good, protecting and providing for children, widows and orphans is good. But just as daily bread can be pushed into greed, conjugal love into pornography, protection into oppression, so our hypersociality can be distorted into a desire to be known by all, to be seen by all, to be an “influencer”… to be famous.
Perhaps Christian Communities need a fourth counsel: A Vow of Obscurity.
In this, we would be keepers of the Christmas Spirit. The baby Jesus was born a poor laborer in a marginal province. Away in a manger, no crib for his bed. Wrapped in rags not purple. Superstar’s Judas had a point: it was a backward time and a strange land.
The story of a God who is born out in the sticks echoes the moral of all great wisdom literature: Our station, our fame, and our achievements do not matter. Our strivings to be noticed are not only illusory, they are counter-productive. Qoheleth calls it “hevel” - vanity, meaninglessness, absurdity, emptiness, breath, breeze, vapor, mist. Instead of striving for hevel, the Apostle Paul celebrates “your life is hidden with Christ in God,” that we are unseen instruments of God’s healing restoration. As the final lines of Middlemarch eloquently puts it: “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Our desire to be known is always - and only truly - met by the God who numbers the hairs of our head. Our desire to be seen is always and only met by the God whose eye is on the sparrow. Attention is vanity, a vanity currently being exploited and weaponized by capitalist technology. The loving gaze of God is closer than our own heartbeat. I invite Christian communities to explore jettisoning all digital tools of visibility in favor of a vow of obscurity.
Ross and his wife Andrea along with their four children are members of the Bloomington Catholic Worker.