You see, some people say the Catholic Church needs a better marketing strategy. She's old, they say. She's slow, they say. Coke is fast. Coke is everywhere. Look how successful Coke is!
In reply, I say that products need marketing strategies. In fact, if you are being sold to, beware! It is precisely in the moment one realizes they are being sold to, that there has been some strategy crafted to coerce their hand to highlight the fuzzy feeling while diminishing the possibility of diabetes, they should pull back.
But we don't.
We buy.
A lot.
Of stuff.
Junk.
Coke.
But...the Catholic Church, the Catholic faith, is not Coke. The Catholic Church doesn't need a marketing strategy anymore than the ocean does. In fact, we might say that our "marketing strategies" for the ocean do harm to it. We could even say that the ocean is God's marketing strategy. Nonetheless, we ignore His message and think He needs a better one. We turn God's beautiful landscape into this:
Yet if you've ever stumbled upon this:
you know the difference. And when one finds the truth, it is always like the second image. We long for this, to be with Truth in its raw and authentic "being". Of course Coke exists and so does Miami Beach, but both exist as an object of human art, and as such subject to a passing away. Sometimes, this obsolescence can even occur suddenly -- which is frightening. Thus, we are suspicious of both and for good reason, because we were made not for the fire but for eternity.
And so too must be the faith of the Church, lived not in Mormon-esque YouTube commercials choreographed to entice and allure yet constantly communicating a "production" that wreaks of salesmanship and assumes a naivety to the whole affair. Instead, the Catholic "strategy" must remain singularly unfocused. Unfocused? Yes, unfocused, because the moment we take the wheel and imagine that we are building His Church -- we have ceased to understand the magic. The magic is that the Catholic Church is His Church, and He is building it and His marketing plan is simple yet painful: martyrdom.
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| Will you join him? |
That's right: death. Which is a counterintuitive theme for "marketing", I might add. Can you imagine a marketing campaign centered on the phrase:
"Come, die with me!"
If "the medium is the message", then death is the medium of Christianity. Which is the message of Christianity: death to self, a giving up of ego, an existence in a constant state of "for". At first blush, this would seem to be an awful proposition. No marketing agent would take this up. Even many Christian groups fail to make this their central message, instead trading it in for a few coins.
But the fact is, the message of the Gospel is just the opposite of marketing. It is the truth that in the experience of the real solicitude of the givenness of the other, a world would come to meet the Other who died on a Cross for them. This is the Truth we long for and that no product, even for a moment, can distract us from enough to quiet the voices in our head. It is why some of us constantly listen to music, fill our lives with meaningless "activities", and so forth, because we are trying to escape the fact that we have an eternal soul. But we do, and behind every "cutter" is someone who simply wants to know they are real.
"Am I more than a consumer?"
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| "Yes. But, will you join Him?" |
