News overload

‘Drilling down’ has become something of a conversational catchphrase. I am not sure that conversations are particularly enriched by it, perhaps because drilling is too easily associated with dentists and oil wells. But the intent, the suggestive purpose, of the phrase does have something to offer when it comes to news overload. It is the depth, not the aggressive drilling which, seen from a different perspective, may have something to bring to the way we initially react to the conflicts and environmental catastrophes with which we are faced on a daily, if not hourly, basis. We brace ourselves for the news as if it were the dentist’s drill.

But there is a better way to play a part in healing the world’s pain than simply bracing ourselves for the next disaster. As Christians, we engage with the suffering of others by ‘deepening’ rather than resisting or ‘drilling down’ into it. Deepening is not the same as drilling. It involves dropping into and allowing rather than resisting. We deepen into the world’s suffering, and begin to participate in its healing, by first allowing the initial shock wave of the latest news feed to flow into us and through us, without trying to block or defer it by turning off the computer or television.

Two days ago, as I alighted briefly on CNN’s cable news channel to be instantly faced with the word ‘devastation’ written across the screen in capitals, I was tempted to do this. It was a typical news overload moment in which I could either have switched off, in every sense, or skimmed over the headline paragraph out of passing curiosity. But neither of these evasive tactics was an option. Instead,  I needed to ‘deepen’ into the Nepal earthquake, and the devastation it has wrought, by dropping down into its own darkness.

'Abseiling'
leisure-activity.co.uk 

This is not quite the same as ‘drilling down’. Dropping down is not a search for some pre-defined end, or even for a solution to the problem. It is a matter of letting go of one’s own initial resistance to the suffering of others by ‘abseiling’ down into their suffering and into all the circumstances which surround it, or which may have caused it. Abseiling, as defined by Wikipedia, is ‘the controlled descent of a vertical drop’. The abseiler has to both let go and hold on.  

When it comes to engaging fruitfully with the world’s pain, we are in a position to do something comparable. We let go and drop down into it in terms of our own inner life, this being the only life we can call real. Taken together, our other inclinations and habits of mind generally return us to an over familiar but far from complete, or real, self. They do not constitute life in the fullest sense because they invariably return us to that same place, what is of most concern to ourselves.

Following our inclinations and habits of mind, including switching off when we reach news overload, seldom enables us to be more deeply connected to others. This is not helped by the internet which makes all things instant, and thereby ultimately superficial. In an age of ‘friending’ and ‘unfriending’, depth is what we most need, and depth requires trust. Abseilers take a calculated risk while trusting completely in the competence of those around them.

For Christians, life in its fullest sense involves trust. To trust others means knowing ourselves to be connected to them, wherever they are, and taking them with us as we drop down ever more deeply into the life of Christ – the Christ who ‘abides’ or who, in the words of the New Testament Greek, ‘goes on living’ in each one of us, the Christ whom we are always seeking and always finding, but who seldom provides answers or ready-made solutions.

This is how Christians think of prayer. Prayer is a three way process. We take the world’s suffering, and the suffering of those known to us personally, into our inner life. We bring it with them into the presence of Christ who already abides with us there. At the same time, we allow them to hold us in their own darkness. We do not know that they are doing this, of course. But we trust that God sees the entire situation from a different and far more comprehensive vantage point, which is that of eternity and of his own divine and fathomless mercy. It is in this mercy that we too are heard and forgiven. In it, we will ultimately see ourselves most beautifully reflected in the faces of strangers.