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This is an image of "The Return of the Prodigal Son," by Spanish artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo. (OSV News photo/courtesy National Gallery of Art)

Kneeling in the pigpen: Human connection in the age of efficiency


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OSV News Filed Under: Commentary

We live in an age that prizes efficiency above almost everything else. Tap your phone and a car arrives. Click a button and groceries appear. Swipe right and … well, that’s supposed to be connection, isn’t it? Except it’s not. What we’ve gained in convenience we’re losing in something harder to quantify: actual human closeness.

Josef Pieper saw this coming. Writing decades before smartphones existed, the German Catholic philosopher understood that love — real love — can’t be engineered for maximum efficiency.

“What is really sought, human closeness, overcoming of loneliness, union with another personal being,” he wrote, “all that can be had only in real love. But at this point we see a further segment of the vicious circle. For love — above all, eros — is by nature something that cannot be fitted smoothly and easily, without problems, into the functional context of utilitarian plans.”

In other words, love made to serve other ends ceases to be love at all. The moment we try to make relationships efficient, productive, useful — the moment we optimize them — we kill the very thing we’re after.

This is uncomfortable news in a modern culture that tends to treat everything as a problem to be solved. But love doesn’t work that way. Neither does friendship. Neither does the slow, messy work of actually knowing another person. Real connection requires what we’re increasingly unwilling to give: time. Embodied presence. Inefficiency. The awkwardness of sitting with someone who’s struggling instead of sending a text. The risk of being misunderstood or rejected.

It’s easier than ever to pull away from people with minimal consequence: ghost someone, block, unfollow. We’ve built technologies that make disconnection frictionless.

Which means forgiveness and reconciliation have become more radical, more essential to our humanity than ever. When you can walk away from any relationship at the first sign of difficulty, choosing to stay and work through conflict becomes revolutionary.

This is where St. Claude La Colombière speaks to our moment with unexpected power. He wrote: “Really humble people are never scandalized: They know their own weakness too well; they know that they themselves are so close to the edge of the precipice and they are so afraid of falling over that they are not at all astonished to see others do so. … We have no reason to despise anyone. A humble man sees his own faults. It is a sign of little virtue to notice the imperfections of others. A person may be imperfect today who in a little while, recognizing this, may rise to great sanctity.”

This should perhaps be written across the top of every screen and scroll across every social media site. What have our digital platforms become if not engines of scandalization? We’ve created spaces where noticing and broadcasting the imperfections of others has become not just entertainment but social currency. The algorithm rewards outrage. The architecture encourages judgment.

Real humility — the kind St. Claude describes — makes that impossible. When you know your own fragility, when you’ve faced your own capacity for failure, you can’t maintain the posture of the perpetually scandalized. You remember that you too are close to the edge. You extend to others the grace you desperately need for yourself. And that creates the possibility for actual relationship instead of performance.

There’s an image that captures this better than words can. Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “The Prodigal Son Among the Swine” (c. 1496) shows the wayward son at his lowest point — kneeling in prayer amid the pigs, surrounded by ruins. But here’s what strikes me: The one who prays in the midst of his sin already sees beyond his sins, even if he believes he can see nothing else. Dignity, which is reborn in the redeemed sinner, is here in its embryonic stage.

That’s the moment Dürer chose to depict. Not the celebration of the son’s return. Not the father’s embrace. But the instant when someone broken by his own choices turns toward home. Prayer amid the wreckage. The first stirring of hope in the heart of the lost. The prodigal hasn’t cleaned himself up yet. He’s still in the pigpen. But he’s already being transformed.

This is what human connection requires in our age: the willingness to kneel in the pigpen with each other. To stay present in the mess. To pray together when nothing is fixed yet. We can’t optimize our way to this. We can’t hack intimacy or engineer belonging. We can only do the slow work of showing up, choosing reconciliation over convenience, presence over productivity, the risk of real love over the safety of managed relationships.

The father in the parable was watching for his son. Watching requires time. Waiting requires patience. Welcome requires generosity. None of these fit into our utilitarian plans. But they’re the only way home.

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