Thomas Merton, Advertising, & America – Serious or Seriously lost?

“Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.” Thomas Merton

This past weekend I met a young man who was born in Iraq and is now a freshman at the University of Michigan studying neuroscience. He is a Christian, a threatened belief in the Middle East, and we spent a great deal of time talking about faith, culture, and his future hopes and dreams.

One comment of his dropped me in my tracks. I asked what he thought of his fellow college students, and America in particular, and he said without hesitation, “no one is serious.”

No one is serious.

My mind flashed to popular television shows, magazine titles in supermarket checkout lines, the drivel on Facebook news feeds, and a culture totally consumed by the importance of self. Trivial. Time wasters. UNSERIOUS.

The most shocking thing to this young man was that in a world where there are wars, economic problems, environmental problems, you name it, people just don’t seem to care. Distractions seem more important to most of his peers at UM than anything serious.

Our talk made me think about the quote on advertising from Thomas Merton that I started with. Our culture is truly sick. We treat what we are fed on television and the internet with more seriousness than the sacraments. For heaven’s sake, how many people in American today have even approached a sacrament much less approached them with seriousness.

Thomas Merton also said the following:

“The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

This selfishness is why we are not serious.

If your world is in turmoil. If life is slipping through your hands and all you are left with is an unquenchable thirst for pleasure. Look in the mirror. Don’t be afraid to admit the problem is you and your selfishness and lack of seriousness. It is only then you can set forth on the path to joy.

I LOVE America and have the honor to work with and serve many “serious” people. But eventually culture impacts even the best of us and the more people we have living seriously, finding joy and peace, and doing their part to make the world a wonderful place, the greater chance we’ll have in making our lives and the lives of those around us deep and meaningful.

Ultimately, life is about finding and fulfilling our purpose while looking out for each other. That takes seriousness. Not a face stuck in an iPhone.