A few weeks ago I became very upset about some events that were happening in our country. Apparently, I was not the only one who was upset. From the news on television I learned that town hall meetings were taking place across our country, at times drawing large crowds. Many citizens thought that by making their thoughts known, this might help to improve our society.
I felt that the situation was so serious that I wanted to be part of any discussion that might improve matters. I did something I have never done in my life. I called my congressman. When I got his secretary on the phone I suggested that we ought to have a town hall meeting. She informed me that others had called and that a town hall meeting was being planned. She told me that it was going to be virtual. Virtual? That did not seem like a good idea.
I thought that no one would know about it, that it would receive no publicity. I called her back and suggested that making the meeting virtual would prevent the event from being known. She told me that it had already been decided that it would be virtual. don’t understand the technology that was involved in making the town hall meeting virtual but apparently people could participate by phone. My understanding was that there was no limit to the number of people who might participate.
A few days later I learned that the meeting was very suc- cessful. After I learned of the meeting’s success I asked a friend to guess how many were involved in the phone conversation. My friend guessed that six were involved. I informed him that it was more than six. Nine thousand were involved! A few weeks after the town hall meeting I was invited to lead a discussion on a Saturday evening on David Brooks’ terrific book “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen” (New York: Random House, 2023). The meeting was organized by Dr. Mary Lee Morris, who teaches film at St. John’s University. Mary Lee invited 30 people, some Catholic, some Jewish.
In her invitation, she announced that would lead the discussion. I was honored and saw the evening as a kind of extension of my involvement with the town meeting, and as another opportunity similar to contacting my congressman, to make a difference. Basically I thought of the event as an evening discussing how we can be more loving and more lovable. In my mind the evening took on a religious dimension.
Brooks writes the following: “If you want to see and understand people well, you have to know what you are looking at. You have to know what a person is. … A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world. Like any artist, every person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world.
That representation, the subjective consciousness that makes you you, integrates your memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, fears, desires, and goals into your distinct way of seeing. That representation helps you integrate all the ambiguous data your senses pick up, helps you predict what’s going to happen, helps you discern what really matters in a situation, helps you how to decide how to feel about any situation, helps shape what you want, who you love, what you admire, who you are, and what you should be doing at any given moment. Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction.
People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life” (p. 64). Though I am using terminology different than that used by Brooks, I think that Brooks’ book is all about love. To pay attention to another person so that you can understand that person better is an act of love. I was going to write “a small act of love” but I don’t believe that any acts of love are small.
Paying attention to another so that you might understand the person more deeply is a self gift that one person is making to another. I believe that allowing another person to know you more deeply is also an act of love. When I first read in Brooks’ book that he thought not knowing one another was the most serious problem in our society, I thought he was exaggerating. I no longer think that. What Brooks is encouraging is something like Buber’s I-Thou relation or even Pope Francis’ hope for a revolution of love. Brooks is in good company.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. His new book, “The Cosmic Love Story: God and Us,” is available on Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.