Freedom Takes Practice

If you can't say no to yourself, how free are you?

I recently took part in an event entitled “Scattered Attention, Real Encounters: Mission in an Age of Distraction,” hosted by the Gregorian University Foundation. Someone asked a question I keep thinking about: “Is the Sunday homily slated for irrelevancy in the post-digital age?”

It’s a fair question to ask me. I started the One-Minute Homily and have spent nine years making videos of a minute or less. You could say I’ve contributed to our shrinking attention span. Mine, anyway.

I also preach at Mass, where people who know my videos enjoy telling me afterward, “Now Father, that was more than a minute!”

I don’t think the Sunday homily is slated for irrelevancy, but I also know nobody walks into Mass on Sunday with an attention span that’s been left undisturbed all week. That includes the man in the chasuble.

Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium that the preacher “must know the heart of his community, in order to realize where its desire for God is alive and ardent, as well as where that dialogue, once loving, has been thwarted and is now barren.”

Knowing a community’s heart these days means knowing what has happened to its attention. People have less of it to give than they used to, and pretending otherwise from the ambo helps no one.

None of which means the homily should borrow the pacing of an Instagram reel. If anything, I’m more convinced we need the liturgy, precisely because it runs on a clock that isn’t ours. We need ritual and silence and sacraments. We need spaces where nobody is looking at a screen.

Freedom takes practice. The ability to stay with something that doesn’t immediately grab you is a freedom many of us are losing. An hour at church is good training.

Some homilies won’t land. I’ve given enough of them to know. But you didn’t come only for the homily. You came to praise our God. You came for the readings you didn’t choose and the Body of Christ given to you, whether or not you’re at your sharpest. When your attention fails you, the liturgy keeps working.