Being human: the difficult task of 2025

“We are not asking you to be anything other than human…”

This was said by a colleague during a meeting. It was just an aside in the play, but my lectio-antenna urged me to write the words down before I lost them, because the truth seemed almost unbearably poignant in its simplicity – so simple that we regularly miss it, as we do with most people. heavenly supplications. It struck me with the same painful simplicity as Jesus’ lament in Jerusalem: “How often have I longed to gather your children together” (Mt 23:37) or the watchful sorrow of Eleanor Rigby: “Ah, look all lonely people. .”

True to my antenna, the words resonated in my brain and informed my prayer lists, acting like an acid or cleansing agent dissolving so many current distractions until this harsh reality: you are not asked to be something other than human.

This column was meant to be a sort of warning for the new year, a heady warning about all the “troubling trends to watch out for in 2025,” and God knows there are enough alarming currents sweeping all around us.

One in particular has enough repercussions to bring down the entire society: the story of Luigi Mangione, the Baltimore native’s murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, and the hero worship that ensues – demonstrated by “holy” candles, decks of cards, -shirts and more are snapped up by admirers who probably think they’re opposed to capitalism but still need to display the season’s assassin chic.

There are enough tentacles coming out of this Kraken story to worry anyone capable of reasoning, but most troubling is the recent Emerson University poll that shows that 41 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 find Mangione’s cold-blooded action as an acceptable means. until its end.

Perhaps too many modern children, raised on “Assassin’s Creed,” have been denied access to the fairy tales and fables of yesteryear, which for generations have slowly honed our abilities to see “behold monsters” and “be careful what you wish for”. in social maps.

The murderous braggadocio of elite vigilantes is just one of the trends we need to pay attention to and resist in 2025, alongside these other trends, some of which are related:

— Increased social fragmentation and isolation;
— Human minds increasingly closed (and closed by an echo chamber);
— Global governmental and economic instabilities;
— Persistent neglect of a growing mental health crisis;
— The influence of artificial intelligence for better and for worse;
— The growing unconsciousness of God at work in our world;
— The strange collective yawning in the face of society’s totally confusing and constantly debased use of sexualities, sexual movements and sex simply to fill in the blanks and find meaning.

When a 23-year-old girl can monetize her decision to dehumanize herself and 100 men in an empty, loveless, joyless 24-hour sex fest, only to announce (to the shrugs of much) his ambition to try again, only with 1,000 men, when what can we say other than that we live in an age of numb irreligious and existential boredom, an age that is sinking the world into a evil life slime. disorientation from which he may not be able to escape.

But you don’t need to read about it here – you read about it everywhere else. Instead, let’s bathe in rising tides that portend something positive – something we can experience with a little hope.

Like the fact that Bible sales are increasing, even though no one seems to know why.

Like the fact that old miracles and new miracles are currently being recognized, linking the past and present in a demonstration of the continuum of God.

So even the smallest of recent miracles – “small” only because in our minds we are so quick to say that “surgery could have fixed it” – reminds us that healing comes unexpectedly, that nothing is too small to pray. nothing is too uncertain to be brought to the communion of saints for intercession, and brings the (colossally important) communiqué that absolutely no evil, injury or inconvenience is so slight as to exceed the God’s care or God’s action.

This is another thing we forget too easily.

So we enter 2025 after a wild and frenzied season of confusion, hatred, deception and instability. The feeling that things are very out of whack and that the centers don’t hold is almost palpable.

But in the midst of all that is boiling, it is good and solemnly vital that we remember this: we are not asked to be anything other than human. The task before us, then, is to define and model to the world exactly what it means to be human.

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