Creatures of Man

The beginning and endgame is to rip us apart, it is to sterilise us, it is to make us dependent on man, it is to destroy the image of God

I was born in 1976, and even then, our family were ‘old fashioned’ for the time. We had one of those dial telephones, attached to one corner of the house. My Irish granny had a little area complete with telephone bench so that she could be comfortable during conversations with any one of her many friends, 7 children or 32 grandchildren, but calling between 8-10am was futile as she would be out walking to Mass with little grey-haired Flossie from Sandy Lane.

Making plans used to involve picking a spot, and a time, and having to stick to it. Today, I am one of these ‘no phones’ parents, but even then, I admit that I furnished my children with ‘brick’ phones during their early teens when they would be travelling around London unaccompanied.

Some parents place ‘apple tags’ in their children’s rucksacks to make sure they know where they are at all times. Even for anti-techie parents like me, brick phones are acceptable, because we are frightened. Why are we more frightened now than our parents seemed to be when they had far less in terms of monitoring?

The more we can monitor, the more pressure we feel under to do it, and the more responsibility we take on ourselves when things go wrong.

Growing up we had to be smart to avoid danger, we had to trust our instincts, stick together, know what to do in a crisis. We learned how to walk and talk, where to walk and not walk, when to talk and not talk, who to talk and not talk to. All these things were learned through almost imperceptible cues that we paid attention to because we weren’t looking at devices, we were looking at people and were aware of our environment.

Our children today are advised not to trust their instincts since doing so might be considered a micro aggression. And what instincts does your average young person have now anyway? To rely on instinct is to acknowledge something innate, it is to acknowledge a harmony between creature and his natural environment, such that discord rings out like an alarm bell.

In the space of just 50 years, we have ‘progressed’ almost unrecognisably. Much of what we were told would make our lives better has robbed us of our peace.

The more layers of artificiality we clothe ourselves in the harder it is to listen to that still small voice.

Before smartphones, when we went out, we were unobtainable. If someone wanted to reach you, they had to employ that lost art of…waiting. Waiting is not something we do; it’s not something we are trained to do. And so, when we have to do it, we lose our minds!

But some things are worth waiting for and if we refuse to wait, or seize them prematurely, we strip them of that worth. Marriage is worth waiting for, children are worth waiting for, death is worth waiting for, our Lord in the Eucharist is worth waiting for.

Pope Leo XIV has expressed concerns about the way in which