“You are not being asked to be anything other than human…”
That was uttered by a colleague during a meeting. It was a mere aside to the room, but my lectio-antenna prompted me to write down the words before I lost them, for the truth seemed almost unbearably poignant in its plainness — so simple that we routinely miss it, as we do with most heavenly pleas. It hit me with the same sorrowful simplicity as Jesus’ lament to Jerusalem, “How often have I longed to gather your children together,” (Mt 23:37) or the watchful ache of Eleanor Rigby’s “Ah, look at all the lonely people.”
True to my antenna, the words have echoed through my brain, and informed my prayer lists, acting like an acid or a cleansing agent dissolving so many newsy distractions down to this stark reality: You are not being asked to be anything other than human.
This column was meant to be a bit of a new year advisory, a heady warning about all the “troubling trends to look out for in 2025,” and heaven knows there are enough alarming currents sweeping all around us.
One in particular has enough undertows to sink the whole society: the story of Luigi Mangione, the Baltimore native’s murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson and the ensuing hero worship, of him — demonstrated by the “holy” candles, card games, T-shirts and more being snatched up by admirers who probably think themselves opposed to capitalism but still need to display the season’s assassination chic.
There are enough tentacles reaching out from this Kraken of a story to concern anyone capable of reason, but the most troubling is the recent poll out of Emerson University showing that 41 percent of voters aged 18-29 find Mangione’s cold-blooded action an acceptable means to an end.
Perhaps too many modern children, raised on “Assassin’s Creed,” were denied access to the fairy tales and fables of old, which for generations gently honed our abilities to see “here be monsters,” and “be careful what you wish for,” in the social maps.
The assassination swagger of elite vigilantism is just one trend we must watch out for and resist in 2025, along with these others, some of which it connects to:
— Increased social fragmentation and isolation;
— Increasingly closed (and echo-chamber enclosed) human minds;
— Worldwide government and economic instabilities;
— Continued neglect of a growing mental health crisis;
— Artificial Intelligence’s influence for better and much worse;
— The growing obliviousness to God working in our world;
— The weird collective yawning over society’s utterly confused, endlessly debased use of sexualities, sexual movements and just plain sex to fill voids and find meaning.
When a 23-year-old girl can monetize her decision to dehumanize herself and 100 men during an empty, loveless, joyless 24-hour sex-fest, only to later announce (to the shrugs of many) her ambition to try it again, only with 1,000 men, then what is there to say but that we are living in an age of irreligious and existential benumbed ennui, one that is sinking the world into a muck of diabolical disorientation from which it may not be able to rescue itself.
But you don’t need to read about that, here — you’re reading about it everywhere else. Instead, let’s bathe in some incoming tides that portend something positive — something we can thrill-ride with a bit of hope.
Like the fact that Bible sales are up, though no one seems to know why.
Like the fact that old miracles and newer ones are being currently recognized, tying together past and present in a demonstration of the continuum of God.
Like that even the smallest-seeming of recent miracles — “small” only because in our minds we are so quick to say “surgery could have seen to it” — reminds us that healing comes unexpectedly, that nothing is too small to pray for, nothing is too iffy to bring to the communion of saints for intercession, and brings the (colossally important) communiqué that absolutely no hurt, no injury or inconvenience is so slight as to be beyond God’s caring, or God’s action.
That is something else we too easily forget.
So, we enter 2025 after a careening, mad season of confusion, hate, deceit and instability. The sense that things are vastly off-kilter and that centers are not holding is almost palpable.
But amid all that is teeming and roiling, it is good, and solemnly vital, for us to remember this: We are not being asked to be anything other than human. The task before us, then, is to define and model to the world exactly what “being human” means.
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