The High Cost of Distracted Senses: How Ignoring Nature is Impacting Our World
Our overstimulated senses have us miss the cries of the earth.
I know I’m not alone in being disturbed at the traffic light when a car around you is blasting its music. Sometimes the window is open, sometimes it’s not. One time the bass was thudding so hard it vibrated my back windshield.
Notice it’s never classical or country music. You also never hear the Beatles, Depeche Mode, or Carly Simon. It’s usually some hard-hitting sound.
My friend’s boyfriend used to play his music this loud, and he started losing his hearing in his 20s. I would imagine many people who play their music too loud lose their hearing as well. Then they have to play their music louder because their hearing senses have weakened.
They probably never hear the subtlety of each bird singing. They can’t hear the crackling of the fire. I wonder if they ever hear their own heartbeat.
I used to do bodybuilding competitions, which requires very strict dieting. You can’t add salt to your food, let alone any sauces. No sugar, either. You get used to eating boiled chicken and steamed broccoli for months on end. Food isn’t fun. It’s strictly fuel. Really, that’s food’s purpose. We’ve only made it a delicacy to please our senses.
Once the competition is over, you get to have different types of food again. Sugary foods taste much sweeter, and you find yourself no longer needing a ton of spices for your foods. Your taste buds become more sensitive to the natural flavors of food.
Our senses have dulled
When we’re overstimulated, we lose our ability to notice the subtleties of the moment. Our senses are meant to cue us to threats in our environment. Our senses help us prepare our stomachs for food. When we get too much sensory stimulation, the senses dull, and we need more stimulation to get the same gratification. Our senses can easily take over rather than have the senses serving us.
It’s the same thing with the way we live our lives. In our incessant fear of missing out, we actually miss out on the subtleties of life. We fail to see the progress of slow-moving events like climate change because our attention is darting to the next viral clip.
It’s kinda like a kid’s soccer game, where the kids are crowding around the ball. Meanwhile, there’s lightning in the distance.
Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander describes it well. “News, argument, and the juices flow. We do not want the news, but the flow of juices. Stimulation is the lie, and we cannot get along without it.”1 Remember that Merton lived and wrote well before the Age of the Internet.
I honestly wonder what Merton would say about climate change. He was very critical of war, particularly the threat of nuclear war. Even though we like to quote his “shining like the sun” when it comes to his enlightenment, his time in solitude allowed the sharpening of the senses necessary to see things for how they are.
I mourn for the earth. I believe that God exists everywhere, not just “up there,” behind a veil, or between panes of stained glass. Every step you take, you’re in God’s sanctuary. We take such care for our official houses of worship, but our senses are dulled when it comes to the subtle cry of nature.
Nature isn’t playing its music loud…yet. But our senses are so tuned out to the cries of creation because we’re tuned into the juicy stimulants and spices that keep us from noticing what’s really going on.
Every step you take, you’re in God’s sanctuary.
And the billionaires in the oil and gas industry sit in their high towers in the Hamptons and tell us to keep doing what we’re doing. It’s clear they don’t see God in the natural world—if they believe in God at all.
Yes, the world of profit and power wants us to stay distracted. They want our senses dulled. They want us to fight over the makeover of M&Ms or renaming sports teams.
When you step away from the flow of juices, you see what’s really important. Simplicity grants you the refinement of senses. And you notice how many people in this world are desecrating God’s church. You try not to look, kinda like those Humane Society commercials at Christmas.
But the prophets keep warning us, “Repent.” And yet we ignore the prophets just like our ancestors did thousands of years ago.
Merton writes, “[I]f nothing is left of nature, there is nothing for grace to build on, there is nothing left to be sanctified and consecrated to God. This is not consecration, but desecration of the temple of our being.”2
What we do to the earth is what we do to ourselves.
1 Merton, p. 353
2 Merton, p. 19