c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) America’s ambivalence, once directed mostly toward in-laws, is now focused on cell phones. Like pets that aren’t housebroken, cell phones ignore the rules, break in where they don’t belong and distract us.
But just as people don’t want to put down their pets, they don’t want to get rid of their cell phones either.
Cell phones fit this time of giving thanks because even in scraps of overheard conversations, they symbolize the mystery of being human that is celebrated in the end-of-the-year holidays, from Thanksgiving to Christmas and from Kwanzaa to Hanukkah.
Thornton Wilder contends in his play “Our Town” that we have to “overhear” the truth about each other. The cell phone allows us to do just that because it is as much an instrument of revelation as it is of communication.
It is a mystery that so many Americans complain about a lack of privacy and think nothing of throwing it away by talking about themselves on their cell phones in waiting rooms and airplanes. We all become father confessors when we hear them laying bare their lives across crowded rooms everywhere.
We have all overheard the business traveler loudly making calls that reflect his self-importance more than his work. We see in him an uncertain boy pretending to be a grown man. He is not confessing sin as much as professing how human he is.
The side effect is to remind us of how, with our own full complement of vanities, we are human too.
We can be thankful for any moment in which we grasp a central truth of the mystery of life: To borrow psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan’s phrase, “We are all much more simply human than anything else.”
Psychotherapists are trained to listen carefully to the opening and closing statements of their patients. We ordinarily do not listen carefully to these phrases that people use to reveal their most important concerns about themselves and their lives.
People use the modern cell phone to tell each other the oldest and most moving of truths. I heard a fair sample on a trip last week: “I didn’t want to leave without telling you I love you,” one traveler said as an opening. Another closed with, “I just want you and the kids to know I love you.”
Variations on this theme _ all of them short and simple and right from the heart _ are an antidote to the easy cynicism of postmodern times. Without cell phones, we might not hear any of them.
Cell phones allow revelations about how much we share in common, even when politicians and others emphasize what pulls us apart. It’s the same revelation watching people select greeting cards _ their faces light up when they find just the right one to express their special love for somebody else. It’s the same when watching the faces of those waiting for their loved ones to get off an airplane.
Caught up in the wonder of their loving and being loved by others, most callers forget that anybody else is listening. We all want to tell others how we love them _ and hear them tell us the same _ before the year (or the phone call) ends.
The beginnings and endings of cell phone conversations celebrate how much more simply human we are than anything else.
(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)
KRE/PH END KENNEDY
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