It didn’t seem
particularly ominous last week when a five-year-old boy named Joshua who always
greets me after Mass said, “We have a new game!
It’s...” I was interrupted from
sharing his excitement by an even younger parishioner who tugged on my other
arm, so I excused myself from Joshua and further details of his game.
That same evening, my
dinner was late enough that I could enjoy it on the porch, where soon I was distracted
by cars behaving strangely. Instead of the
usual racing through the rectory driveway shortcut, they pulled straight up
behind the rectory and sat there like they were trying to see into the guest
room. About the fourth time this
happened, I came down off my porch to ask what was going on. The young driver explained that he was
playing the same game that Joshua had told me about that morning. There on his phone’s screen was the crucified
Christ statue on our back wall, but with an animated creature next to it.
The next morning’s
paper reported this very game as a phenomenon that was sweeping the
English-speaking world. It apparently
projects imaginary animated creatures onto images of actual places, challenging
the player to find and “capture” them. The
news reported how players of the game were so fixated by what they saw on their
screens that they were injuring themselves by bumping into objects or falling.
Since then my
housemates and I have found groups of people loitering by the rectory,
apparently in hopes of scoring points or something similar. If I speak to them, they are startled at the
interruption that reveals their playground as somebody’s home, and their
backdrop a sacred place.
It has been just over
hundred years since screens with pictures moving on them became part of our
experience. From marveling at the effective
representation of reality, people have acquiesced into accepting the projection
itself as a reality. Now screens are
ubiquitous and indispensable. As I
compose this letter, I stare at a screen.
It’s not just for entertainment anymore!
Already it is common
to see two people at a dinner table, each engrossed in his own screen and
seemingly oblivious of the actual person present with him. Some people lament their own dependence;
others lament only what would interrupt their fixation.
This has been the
case for longer than we would like to admit.
Long before most people had personal, portable devices that displayed
almost anything instantly on their screens, the image on the screen held strong
influence over people’s thoughts and actions.
And people who appeared on screens gained authority far beyond what is
reasonable: already it is four decades
since “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” became a successful endorsement.
This tyranny of what is seen gives
extraordinary power to anyone who can effectively project an illusion on a
screen.
People blithely
assume that they are masters of the eyes and minds that these images and
projections fill, and that they have and exercise right discretion over what they
believe and disbelieve. Believe that of
yourself only if you believe it of the people who fell off a precipice pursuing
an animated creature while playing Pokémon Go.
Who controls what is on the screen, controls also human behavior.
If people are
injuring themselves and ignoring their friends because artificial images on a
screen lead them to pay no attention to the realities that can be seen,
how much more injury and loss is accruing because of a taught unwillingness or trained
inability to pay attention to realities that cannot be seen? It is the devil’s most potent trick to
convince people he does not exist; it is not by any means his only
trick.
How can any of us
know what to believe, when our eyes are so readily complicit in our
deception? We do far better to believe
our ears: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have
the words of eternal life. (Jn 6:68)
Monsignor Smith
