Watching the grass grow
Every once and awhile, my mind wanders off during church.
It drifts along, pondering this or that until — bang — something in the sermon, or the scriptures, or the prayers in the liturgy connects with whatever is happening inside my head. Since I’m a newspaper guy, this usually means a collision between the past and present, with an eternal truth crashing into a newspaper headline.
This happened a few weeks ago when our priest was reading a familiar passage in the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus tells the story of a wealthy man who decides to hold a great banquet. A strange thing happened when his servant handed out the invitations to his master’s friends.
“They all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it; I pray you, have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I have to go examine them; I pray you, have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ “
Now, I can imagine that handling oxen could be complicated and a newly married man has to do what a newly married man has to do. But, on this particular Sunday morning, it struck me as especially funny that someone opted out of a banquet just to go look at a field. Maybe he was in real estate and his lawyers made him do it. Maybe he just liked to watch the grass grow.
And then my mind wandered off, back to something in a newspaper. It was one of those stories that show up from time to time reporting some of the frightening facts about the role that television and other forms of mass media play in our lives.
As the Washington Post reported: “Children today live in bedrooms that are fully equipped media centers, spending hours watching television and listening to music by themselves with little parental supervision and almost no rules, according to a survey of more than 3,000 children ages 2 through 18 released . by the Kaiser Family Foundation.”
For most children, various forms of mass media were combining to eat up 5 hours and 29 minutes per day, seven days a week. It was 6 hours and 43 minutes a day for kids eight and older. It was like these children had been given an adult’s full-time job and that job was to sit and soak up mass media, mainly television. Sixty-five percent of kids older than 8 had televisions in their bedrooms.
The report emphasized that the content flowing through those media channels has changed radically in recent decades.
“While one generation of Americans experienced a childhood in which they shared a single black-and-white, three-channel TV with their parents, the next is growing up with a Walkman glued to their ears, 100 channels in the bedroom and a World Wide Web of information at their fingertips,” according to the authors of the Kaiser report. “One generation may have flinched at gunshots in a western; the next generation plays video games with violence so vivid it leaves them ducking to avoid being splattered.”
If the children are going it alone, where are their parents?
The odds are good that the parents are at work, at play or in the next room watching Oprah or ESPN. The parents have 100 channels in their bedroom, too, as well as media hook-ups in the kitchen, the den, the office and sometimes the bathroom. Everyone is watching his or her own niche-group commercials and sit-com reruns and the talking-head politicos and regular- season basketball games and talk shows and chase scenes and music videos and whatever else is on, world without end. Amen.
It’s hard to hold a banquet, when everyone has his or her own TV tray.
Nevertheless, invitations are still being delivered to the banquet. Many of us are invited to the banquet called marriage and then to another called parenthood. There are banquets of friendship and fellowship and learning and service. God loves banquets.
Yet right now, out there on the World Wide Web or community-access cable television, I bet someone has a digital camera aimed at an empty field, perhaps an empty football field. And, right now, some man is probably saying that he has to watch the grass grow in that field, because it’s a good excuse not to go do something else that he really knows he should do. Perhaps he’s avoiding a walk with his wife or a chance to read Bible stories to his kids.
And he’s missing a banquet, whether he knows it or not.
When an Orthodox bishop enters a sanctuary, he is traditionally greeted with the following words chanted in Greek — “eis polla eti, despota.” [more]…