For all our busy-ness, we have too much time on our hands. Some of the most recent evidence is the controversy and commentary (guilty!) over the He Gets Us Super Bowl ad campaign, which promotes Jesus.
The message was confusing, it has been said. The commercial involved people washing the feet of other people, often from the other side of the political, ideological or economic fence. You can only convey so much during a football commercial. And what did the commercial do? Say the name of Jesus and show a little window into the Gospel and the Beatitudes -- which are the ultimate gamechangers.
I was taking to a famous secular sociologist a few years ago. He knew I was Catholic, and started talking to me about the Sermon on the Mount. He said that if Christians really followed its message, the world wouldn't be in the mess it's in today. Amen.
In the first week of this year, a group of young people seeking something more from life gathered in St. Louis for a rally organized by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. My friend Monsignor James Patrick Shea, who is president of the University of Mary in North Dakota, spoke to them about the human predicament. "The human race is haunted," he said. "We, among all the creatures on the face of the Earth, are ill at ease with our existence. We are lost in this world. We are lost in our own lives, and we can take that for granted.
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"We can think it's how it's supposed to be and that it's normal. But it's not," he continued. "It is very surprising, highly unusual and it demands an explanation. In the last decade, we have seen a societal explosion in loneliness, anxiety, deep sadness and a general inability to cope with life."
A critical part of the monsignor's point is that the kids are not the problem, but the culture is. And why is the culture a problem? Because we are not loving each other. It's simple in a sense, and may seem simplistic, but it's also less complicated than we make things out to be.
The most important moment in the He Gets Us ad involved a woman sitting with a young girl outside of an abortion clinic. The ad didn't use Planned Parenthood's name, but it was quite clear that's where they were. A pro-life woman washed the feet of someone who was presumably going to go inside the clinic for an abortion. In this time after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion has become even more contentious -- seemingly an impossible feat, and yet here we are. And in a split second during the Super Bowl, we saw that there may be more to the story. There may be people who want to serve. There may be young women who want accompaniment.
Some of the criticisms lodged against the campaign complained that it checked "woke" boxes because it included some "social justice" issues. Maybe, as we enter the humbling season of Lent, it was meant to serve as a reminder that there's so much more to life than the politics we tend to obsess about.
He Gets Us is a reminder that we can help each other to be something more, to spread the light that the world so badly needs. And whether you are a believer or not, God's grace doesn't hurt. Your neighbor can be the conduit -- which probably was the point of the ad.
(Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan's pro-life commission in New York, and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.)
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