How many times must one hear the same message before its point hits home?

John the Evangelist supposedly spent the last years of his life leading an early Christian community in Ephesus, where he was known for sticking to a seemingly simple sermon: “Love one another.” When an irritated disciple asked when John was going to preach on a new topic, he replied, “When you’ve followed this one.”

For the better part of my time as a Marquette University undergraduate, I played guitar at the 10 p.m. Tuesday night Mass at St. Joan of Arc Chapel. Each week, another John essentially offered the same homily his namesake had. Father John Naus, S.J., who served at Marquette in various capacities for nearly 50 years and died Sunday, presented this theme by way of phrases, quips and quotes that are familiar to all who knew him:

“To see the world through God’s eyes, imagine the words ‘Make me feel important’ written across the forehead of everyone you meet.”

“The best cure for a bad day is a good friend.”

“To make a difference in one person’s life is immensely more precious than the value of the whole world.”

“To see the smile on their face, to hear the laughter of a little child...of a very old person...of someone who is ill...and to realize that you put it there, makes the holiest day holier still.”

Father Naus’s life highlights are oft-told and well-known in the Marquette and Milwaukee communities. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1955 and spent most of his teaching and ministerial career at Marquette. He lived in the university’s Schroeder Hall for 28 years and was a popular ethics, Eastern philosophy and philosophy of humor professor. Father Naus was most famous, however, for entertaining students and hospital patients as Tumbleweed the Clown, sending 4,000 Christmas cards each summer, interrupting university tours to teach prospective students the Wisconsin handshake and presiding over Tuesday night Masses.

The thread that connected all of Father Naus’s activities and actions was, of course, his love. I have never encountered someone more unquestioningly open to people than Father Naus. This applied to everyone he met. We used to frequently get lunch and even continued exchanging letters when I moved to Peru. He often made a point of telling me I was one of his best friends. While I have no doubt he meant it, I am also sure he said this about most people who had the good fortune of knowing him.

In the beautiful remembrances shared about Father Naus on Marquette’s Web site, much has been made of his wonderful, childlike persona and just how extraordinary his commitment to others was. As I reflect on these qualities, I realize that his love for others was, at least in part, fueled by his willingness to embrace his own lovable-ness. For while Father Naus thrived on making people happy and, as he often wrote in his cards, doing whatever he could to help someone, he was completely comfortable in letting others be kind to him, too. 

He effusively lauded the Walgreens employees who sold him his Hallmark cards, graciously thanked anyone who held a door for him and responded to praise with a chorus of “Oh, but it’s hard to be humble when you’re perfect in every way...” I imagine this was especially true after a stroke in 2004 confined him to a wheelchair, but just as Father Naus was the most unhesitatingly caring person I have ever known, he was also one of the least self-conscious. He accepted and loved others because he accepted and loved himself.

So how many times must one hear the same message before its point hits home?

I probably attended somewhere in the ballpark of 80 Masses Father Naus celebrated, and every day, I struggle and often fail to practice that seemingly simple sermon he offered each week.

Who knows when Father Naus first heard John the Evangelist's recurring homily. Who knows how many times it took to sink in. But at some point, probably very early on, it stuck. And every morning from then on, Father Naus rose, said his beloved “Jesus Prayer” and dedicated himself to trying to live up to it.

The Jesus Prayer
Live, Jesus, live
So live in me
That all I do
Be done by thee
And grant that all
I think and say
May be thy thought
And word today
Amen

When I was diagnosed with pericarditis—an inflammation of the fibrous sac around the heart—while volunteering in Peru, the reaction of a number of people surprised me. Until that point, most of my Peruvian friends had demonstrated no medical proclivity whatsoever. Suddenly, I had no shortage of people anxious to share any tidbit of therapeutic information they could.

“You’re lonely,” said some. “You need a girlfriend. Or more male friends.” While I appreciated their concern that I was living with four female roommates, this theory seemed to fall short in explaining how my heart’s membrane had swelled to unhealthy proportions.

“You are so skinny,” offered the cooks at the parish cafeteria where I ate. “You aren’t eating enough.” Again, while I was grateful for the guidance and extra helpings of lunch, this did not really match anything my doctors had told me.

“Why aren’t you wearing a jacket?” exclaimed the women selling crafts in the plaza of the Andean town where I lived. “You’re going to get sick again!”

I filed each piece of advice away with all the rest, regularly noting that I should probably confirm with real physicians whether there were any connections between the state of one’s pericardium and the things my friends were saying. I did not, however, think it necessary to bother my cardiologist with every hypothesis. This was particularly true of the suggestion that I had been infected by some kind of leech while swimming in South Africa four years ago.

I thought this penchant for over-participating in other peoples’ health lives was an annoying quality of my Peruvian friends. When I returned to the United States for additional care, however, the practice did not cease.

Despite never having visited or read much about the Andes, a number of acquaintances seemed to think Peru was simply swimming with bacteria and infectious diseases. If these people were right, I was incredibly lucky not to have caught something sooner.

“Maybe it was the altitude,” some proposed.

‘Did you develop that theory at the medical school you never went to?’ I wanted to ask.

Listening to people offer strange and usually incorrect ideas about how I contracted pericarditis has been a frustrating part of recuperating. That my doctors have not been able to determine a specific cause of the ailment (SPOILER ALERT: Pericarditis usually results from an unidentifiable virus) evidently bothers people to such an extent that they either offer glib reassurances (i.e. “It’s all going to work out fine”) or uninformed speculations as to why I am sick.

My preference would be for everyone to call it like it is: “No one knows why this is happening, so too bad for you.”

I have learned, however, that such a reaction is contrary to human nature.

History’s greatest thinkers have spent thousands of years arguing whether humans are inherently good or evil. I doubt I have much to add to the conversation, but my recent medical adventures cause me to tip my hat to innate goodness. For saying I have had no limit to the number of people who want to comment on my health is really to acknowledge that I have had no limit to the number of people who want to help.

The past five months have been a royal pain. I spent two convalescences in a Cuscanian hospital, left work, returned to work and left work again, took a fruitless trip to Lima to ascertain the cause of my disease and finally left my service placement six months early for treatment in the United States. I am currently taking an obnoxious assortment of medications and trying to navigate a culture shock that leaves me wondering what would happen if everyone’s smart phones stopped functioning for 20 seconds.

It has been a tough time, but through it all, I have experienced unending generosity from friends in both Peru and the United States. People have reached out with hospital visits, phone calls, cards and gifts. Even when they know there is little they can do to make life easier, they still try.

So whenever someone tries to hearten, heal or diagnose me, I try to smile past my irritation and remember how fortunate I am to have so many doctors, trained or not, looking out for me.

One of the quickest, easiest and laziest ways to demonstrate intelligence bona fides is to title drop.

Mentioning the books one enjoys reading or television shows one likes watching and, perhaps more importantly, the books one hates reading or shows one cannot stand watching is a sure way to display consumption virtue.

Never mind that disparaging comments about the Kardashians, Glenn Beck or the “Twilight” books betray the fact that someone has spent enough time with these people or products to know what they entail; well-placed remarks like, “I would have so much more respect for CNN if they reported more on the Syrian conflict and less on the royal baby” a) allow people to consume trivial information under the guise of lamenting its coverage and b) let others know just how painful one finds it to live in such a superficial world.

Though I have certainly been guilty of making these kinds of sanctimonious observations, I have no doubt that we truly are often presented with media that is shallow and inconsequential.

What I find myself thinking about more and more is why this is the case.

Some might argue it has simply always been this way. In a 1958 address to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow said television in his time showed considerable “evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”

Others would point to the advent of the 24-hour cable news cycle. As Jon Stewart has acknowledged, it is not hard to fill time in the wake of global catastrophes and truly breaking news events like the earthquake in Haiti or the September 11 terrorist attacks. But in the absence of such incidents, news providers are compelled to talk about whatever will keep viewers watching.

What keeps viewers watching has, of course, been documented by everyone from Stewart to Marshall McLuhan: sex, violence, stories about celebrities getting divorced and basically anything that piques interest but causes little exertion to comprehend.

Fox News, MSNBC and the other major, hype-driven cable news networks are common scapegoats for this kind of reporting. But the fact of the matter is these networks do what they do because it works. The old adage “If it bleeds, it leads” applies. If viewers gravitated toward programs that attempt to comb through public policy or explain politicians’ views in more than 30-second sound bites, news organizations would probably produce more stories like this.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where Chelsea Manning has become more famous for her desire to undergo hormone therapy than for leaking classified documents.

Networks, by the way, are not just shooting in the dark when they assume consumers prefer the sensational to the significant. In a fake editorial that rings devastatingly true, the mock newspaper The Onion explained from CNN’s managing editor’s perspective why Miley Cyrus’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) was the network’s top story the following day:

“[A]s managing editor of CNN.com, I want our readers to know this: All of you are to us, and all you will ever be to us, are eyeballs. The more eyeballs on our content, the more cash we can ask for. Period. And if we’re able to get more eyeballs, that means I’ve done my job, which gets me congratulations from my bosses, which encourages me to put up even more stupid bullshit on the homepage.

“I don’t hesitate to call it stupid bullshit because we all know it’s stupid bullshit. We know it and you know it. We also know that you are probably dumb enough, or bored enough, or both, to click on the stupid bullshit anyway, and that you will continue to do so as long as we keep putting it in front of your big, idiot faces. You want to know how many more page views the Miley Cyrus thing got than our article on the wildfires ravaging Yosemite? Like 6 gazillion more.

“That’s on you, not us.”

Those of us who ravenously followed the VMA aftermath ought to ask ourselves a few questions. Did we read articles about the show’s alleged racism and sexism because we genuinely care about those issues or because pundits and journalists cleverly raised those topics in stories with Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke mentioned in the titles? Did we even know there were wildfires in Yosemite National Park? Who is Bashar al-Assad?

A recent report conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates industry cutbacks are leading “to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands. And findings…reveal that the public is taking notice. Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.” A 2012 survey conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University actually found that in some cases, people who do not watch any news can correctly respond to more questions about international events than people who watch cable news.

As I said before, I, too, am accountable for bemoaning the very media I continue to consume. I am also sympathetic to the argument that this media’s biggest problems are incredibly hard for a viewer to escape. The Pew Research Center and Farleigh Dickinson studies make this quite evident.

But I reject the notion that all this is completely inevitable. There are plenty of alternatives doing truly admirable work in both the print and broadcast realms. The Economist, “PBS NewsHour” and “Democracy Now!” are but a few examples. Does it take more time, legwork and concentration to pursue these other options than to turn on “Good Morning America”? Of course it does. But when has being well informed ever been a passive activity?

In the aforementioned speech to the RTNDA, Edward Murrow said, “To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. This instrument [television] can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.”

I hope Murrow was right to trust our better instincts. And I hope we are as determined as he expected us to be to use media to those ends—to learn, to be illuminated and even inspired.