The 2010 elections proved one thing among many others: that ads have a way of influencing people’s choices and decisions. Huge spending for media exposure does pay handsomely in terms of survey ratings and potential victory.
Small wonder then that EDSA, the foremost artery that interconnects several Metro Manila cities from south to north, is filled with billboards and humongous tarpaulins every inch along the way. Commercial “teachings” fill the entire metropolis, enough to sway people’s preferences.
Teresa Tomei, a savvy media practitioner and communications expert, speaks about the “noise” that fills our daily lives 24/7. We are literally filled to the brim with the “teachings” of post-modernity and elite globalization.
We, Church people, may not be expected to be able to go against the tide of what Elaine Robinson calls the “media moment,” but we are called to do something similar. We are called to do as the apostles did soon after the Lord rose and ascended to heaven. They did it well enough as to merit a complaint from the Sanhedrin: “We gave you strict orders to stop teaching in that name. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and want to bring this man’s blood upon us.”
Last year, the mainstream media had the time of their lives analyzing to death the failings of one celebrity golf player. Last year, too, on thehome front, we were barraged with so much noise of the political kind — ads that build up candidates and destroy their opponents.
There is power and efficacy when the whole city and the world are filled consistently with focused “teachings” and ideologies.
Too bad, too sad, that the rousing call made by the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines still remains to be done — the late Pope John Paul II’s very same passionate call for a “new evangelization.”
Today’s first reading reminds us of precisely this — the need to fill “all of Jerusalem” with God’s teachings.Fr. Chito Dimaranan, SDB
Reflection Question:
Whose teachings influence my life — God’s or the world’s?
Lord, help me to tune in more to Your teachings than to the world’s.
St. Hilary, pray for us.
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