HOMILY FOR ASH WEDNESDAY CHAPEL OF OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY OF POMPEI
DOMUS AUSTRALIA, ROME, 5 MARCH 2025
Is the human attention span shrinking? The question is much discussed by psychologists, educators, tech gurus and social commentators.[i] Many students read only chapters or articles, not whole books. Newspapers prefer 400-word opinion pieces to the old 3,000-word essays. TV keeps news items short, with imagery changing every few seconds. Feed services provide headlines for people’s news, Ted talks and blogs offer opinions, flicking between webpages after a second’s glance excites. Many now watch a movie on screen while attending to their iPhone at the same time, or interact with another human being and a device at the same time, giving neither their undivided attention.
In response Pope Francis has advocated shorter homilies, as many can only focus for a few minutes and then get distracted or fall asleep, he says.[ii] I must confess to occasional disobedience to the Holy Father regarding homiletic brevity! But the claim is straightforward enough: we moderns are less willing or able to focus on the one thing for as long as our predecessors were.
Powerful new technologies are a big factor in all this. Hurriedly composed and instantly transmitted cell-texts and emails have replaced longhand letters sent by post. Summary apps such as Blinkist distill long tomes to a page, and the most popular YouTube clips are ‘shorts’ of no more than 60 seconds. Google’s latest ‘AI Overview’ feature even allows us to skip ever opening a webpage by curating and collating the sought-after information for us. The tech offers us so many quick and easy options for information and entertainment.
Another reason for the shift to the bite-sized is that we are now inundated with so much information and entertainment. We just don’t have the time for it all, so we often go for light-on, condensed, less taxing snippets. We attend to key facts or story outlines, but little else…
As a pastor and teacher I’m more than a little troubled by the decline of attention span. I know the importance of immediate impressions, getting to the heart of things, keeping things simple. But we lose a lot if we can no longer engage in detailed observation, complex argument or nuanced opinion, with rich characters, intricate plots, even theological niceties…
In an age of declining attention spans, Ash Wednesday offers a spiritual antidote. ProphetJoel.com gives us a flashy Reason for the Season: “Come back to me with all your heart” (Joel 2:12-18). But it’s no cakewalk. If it’s to be more than external appearances or a temporary fix, from and for the very depths of our being, it requires the “all-of-heart” commitment of at least forty days, and not just once-off but every year.
The first step toward a spiritual comeback is recognising we need it. We have left God’s path or become luke-warm in various ways and must own that fact for ourselves. No more excuses like ‘it’s my genes, my upbringing, my hormones, my culture’; no more ‘everyone’s doing it, or doing something worse’; none of that ‘we’re all just AIs in meat suits, programmed for sin’ stuff. “Nonsense,” says Lent, “you are gifted with Godlike intelligence, freedom and affections; you can choose; you can do better.” The ashes whisper “Admit it.” No more complacency about sin, no presumption about forgiveness without contrition, and no despair of mercy if we are contrite. Repentance is Lent’s greatest gift: you really can own up, change, be forgiven; you can know the divine mercy, like the Prodigal Son. In the words of our epistle, you can become “the goodness of God” (2 Cor 5:21) if you accept your need and allow God’s grace to work in you, turning back to Him with all your heart.
But the journey to Resurrection requires sustenance if we are to persevere. And in His goodness, God offers us prayer, fasting and almsgiving, not just as some things we do, but as some things that do things to us. Of course, self-denial is hardly the fashion of our age! A bit of fasting for the purposes of the body beautiful maybe, or postponing indulgence so we can get more later. But forty days in the desert? A Lenten lifetime of self-denial of various kinds? That can seem too much! But prayer, fasting and giving are exactly what we need if we want the ‘soul beautiful’ that matters so much more than physique, if we want to save treasure for heaven, not just for the next purchase.
Dear friends, as you receive the dusty memento mori on your foreheads, the sackcloth and ashes of repentance for your bodies and souls, resolve to turn your full attention toward the Lord in His Paschal Mystery this Lent. Do so my making a good Confession. Do so by prayer, fasting and charity. Then at Easter you will rise in glory with Him!
[i] Jamie Ducharme, ‘Why everyone’s worried about their attention span—and what you can do about it’, Time 10 August 2023; Gloria Mark, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity (Hanover Press, 2023); Hannah Kirk, ‘Are we really in an attention crisis, or are digital technologies getting a bad wrap’, ABCNews 18 August 2019; Emma Smith, ‘The big idea: Are or attention spans really getting shorter’, Guardian 23 October 2023;
[ii] https://www.ewtnvatican.com/articles/pope-francis-keep-your-homilies-short-or-people-will-fall-asleep-2867
