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We are besotted by celebrity. For most of us, the rich and
famous take on a god-like status and our own lives seem
small, empty, and hardly worth living in comparison to
what we imagine theirs to be.
Fame, we believe, gives someone a life bigger than our
own. We live in just one place, anonymous, domestic,
unknown, but someone who is famous, whose face is
recognized everywhere and whose name is a household word,
it would seem, is everywhere, omnipresent like God. No
wonder we view them as gods and give them worship.
But there’s more: We also believe that fame gives
immortality. Famous people may die, but they live
on—Marilyn, Elvis, Diana, we don’t even need last
names. Something about them stays, more than a gravestone.
Fame leaves an indelible mark. Our fear is that our small
lives won’t leave that. We disappear, the famous
remain.
So it isn’t surprising that we are so besotted with
the famous. They appear to us as gods—omnipresent and
immortal.
But does fame really make one’s life larger? If
someone’s face appears on billboards and magazine
covers everywhere is he or she in some real way
everywhere? Does a celebrity’s larger-than-life
status indeed make their lives larger than ours? Does fame
accord some kind of immortality?
 At a superficial level, yes. To be a household name and
to leave a legacy ingrained inside of peoples’
consciousness does, in a manner of speaking, make one
omnipresent and does give one a certain kind of
immortality.
But, being larger-than-life and having immortality, are
very ambiguous concepts. There’s something very
vaporous and unreal in the kind of omnipresence and
immortality that fame brings. You can’t eat it and
you aren’t present just because your name is. At the
end of the day, fame doesn’t really enlarge you, nor
give you the kind of immortality for which you really
long. There’s enough loneliness, paranoia,
fearfulness, breakdown, bitterness, drug abuse, and
flat-out emptiness in the lives of celebrities to more
than vouch for this. It’s no accident the three
celebrities mentioned above—Marilyn, Elvis, and Diana—died
as they did. Celebrity, of itself, doesn’t make one
larger than life nor accord immortality.
What does enlarge our lives and give immortality?
Compassion and contemplation.
Compassion: All the great religious traditions, from
Hinduism to Christianity, teach that what makes our lives
small is not place, anonymity, and occupation, but
selfishness, self-preoccupation, ego, and narcissism. My
life is small and petty precisely when it’s centered
upon myself. However, when I can, through empathy, break a
little the casings of my own selfishness and connect
myself to the feelings and thoughts of others, by that
very connection, my life becomes larger.
I know a hermit who has lived by himself for more than 35
years. He lives alone and his existence is known to few
people. Yet, paradoxically, his life is really
larger-than-life. He’s the most connected man I
know. When he prays at night, alone, by his own
description, he “feels the very heartbeat of the
planet, and feels the joys and sufferings of
everyone.”
That’s the very opposite of an experience we so
commonly have when, inside the very buzz of social life,
we feel nothing but our own obsessive restlessness and the
smallness of our lives.
Contemplation works in the same paradoxical way: We
connect ourselves most deeply to the world and we taste
immortality when we are in solitude, in contemplation.
What is that?
Contemplation is not a state of mind where we don’t
think of anything, a blankness beyond distraction. Nor is
it necessarily thinking lofty, sublime, or holy thoughts.
Contemplation is, as Thomas Merton so aptly defined it, a
state within which we are present to what is actually
going on in our lives, and to the timeless, eternal
dimensions inside of that. We are in solitude and
contemplation when we are really aware that we are
drinking water when we are drinking water.
Here’s how he, Merton, describes a graced moment of
contemplation:
[Today] it is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode,
with one’s hunger and one’s sleep,
one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed.
Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee
and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator,
reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my
ancestors have lived on this earth, until eventually I
die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my
life, especially about it as mine, though doubtless it
is not somebody else’s. I must learn to gradually
forget program and artifice.*
We are so besotted by celebrities because we are always
looking outside of ourselves to find what is timeless,
what can enlarge us, and give us immortality. But what we
are looking for is already inside of us, something we must
awaken ourselves to, namely, our union through compassion
with everything that is and our tasting of what’s
immortal and eternal through being aware of the cold and
the warmth inside of our own lives.
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*Taken from
A Vow of Conversation: Journals, 1964-1965. You
can find the larger passage
here.
Ron Rolheiser
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