What concerns us most at any one time is often decided for us by the media.  They pick up causes at whim and drop them just as quickly when something else comes along.   Often we are left wondering - so what happened next?  What's happened, for example, to those poor French families who lost loved ones in that dreadful air accident a few weeks back?  How are the people coping in the far East now that the Tsunami is, for most of us, a distant memory?  And what's really happening in Zimbabwe these days?  Of course, the sheer volume of global news makes it quite impossible for the media to keep up with things but it just goes to prove what concerned us passionately a few weeks or months ago bothers us less now.  The poet T. S. Eliot was so right when he said that humankind cannot stand very much reality.

Or maybe it's really a case of the media dropping stories once the sensationalism has gone out of them.  That's sort of beginning to happen about the reporting of Swine Flu.  Because the number of new sufferers has declined and there haven't been a lot of deaths this week, Swine Flu is getting less attention though because newspapers love doom and gloom we are told to just wait until the autumn! 

The media cannot report even good news without looking for the bad news lurking in the background.  So, a few good pointers towards economic recovery are tinged with the view that this may be a blip and it probably won't last.

Something about this approach feeds on a deep-seated feeling that we must for the good times in some way.  If something good is happening to us then maybe it's because something really bad is waiting round the corner.   Perhaps it is this negativity within us which gives the doom and gloom merchants of the media so much authority.  We quite like seeing the bad in people and situations.  Which is why newspapers still sell so many copies.

Christians ought not to kow-tow to all this, of course, because at the heart of our faith is Good News, not bad.  I was heartened, therefore, to read something this week by the late Mother Jane of the Sisters of the Love of God.  She once wrote:

"Jesus teaches us to look at each individual person as unique and to consider the particular circumstances of every case in which a decision has to be made.  This is not easy, but each of us can try in the limited sphere of our own little lives not to be pressurized into mass thinking.  Instead, we need to remember the friendly greetings, the words of encouragement and sympathy, the small acts of kindness which people exchange a thousand times a day, and most of all in times of trouble, and which are a true measure of the spirit of humankind."

Of course that kind of sentiment will not sell many newspapers but it sort of follows on from what we thought about last Thursday at the feast of the Transfiguration. There, on the holy mountain, God gave us a glimpse at the true glory of Christ and, by extension, a vision of what we might become.  We are not bad people.  We are people on the way to glory.  That's Good News.  We should try to live as if we believe it.  Maybe then we will.