Michael Sack, president of a research and marketing firm, claims that today’s young people see almost 1000% more images than 60 year olds witnessed in their youth. The impact of this on our ability to communicate the Gospel is important for us to note. Those over 60 find it a lot easier to derive meaning from print or video. They haven’t been as bombarded as the baby boomers, so they are still considered impressionable. The can take in and emotionally connect with many of the images they see. The “young and bombarded,” however, being flashed with so many different ones on a daily basis, find that the emotional impact of the images has lessened. Sack says that the younger the person, the harder it is to convey meaning or moral value to him or her through images. “The young,” says Sack, “eat images like popcorn; older adults eat them like a meal.”

Sack asked thousands of people to make a collage that would show the God they believe in and the God they don’t believe in. From the boomers on down, those 55 and younger, the God that they did not believe in revolved around images of discomfort. Evil, sin-induced suffering, had been edited out of their theology and their lives.

This is why we need a time of quiet reflection. We need to see those images that we avoid, the ones we edit out, because they seem to have little color, little movement, little entertainment value. In the quiet, the pain of the world begins to set in. We see how desperate this world is, how much this world needs a message of hope and healing.

This coming Wednesday, December 1, will be World AIDS Day. It is a day when people throughout the world pray for those suffering from this deadly disease. It is a day when the Church seeks to raise people’s awareness of what we can do in response to the pain and suffering caused by AIDS. Not a pleasant image, but one we had better see. We don’t seem to be able to stop this disease, yet many of us would like to edit AIDS right out of our lives.>p>

Here are a few facts to ponder;
# 39.4 million people are living with HIV/AIDS in 2004.
# 17.6 million of those living with HIV/AIDS are women.
# 4.9 million people were newly infected with HIV in 2004.
# 3.1 million people died from AIDS in 2004.

from Father Jake Stops the World