First, there’s simply being too lazy or too preoccupied to produce anything.   This explains why, although Joseph Pearce cajoles his writers to blog regularly for The Ink Desk, I haven’t posted anything in over a month.  (Ha!  Little does Joseph know – writers are almost as unreliable as actors).

But more seriously than this, there’s the deliberate choice of sterility, of burying your talent in the ground.  This is something I’ve seen on a pathological level with the actors who have toured with me.  We might be in the midst of wonderful things, meeting wonderful people, seeing awesome sights – and the actors are plugged into their ipods or playing their game-boys or shifting uncomfortably on their feet, bored and nervous, dying for a cigarette or desperate to watch a video on their portable dvd player.  It’s a teen-age mentality, and it seems to last for some of these folks deep into their thirties.

This is a hallmark of the Culture of Death (or of the death of culture): young people addicted to the pathology of sterility, desperate to plug into any sensation that drugs away anxiety, that keeps them from the call to be engaged in the world around them, the call to be fruitful.  For if you don’t cultivate an interest in the world around you, if you don’t learn to appreciate natural beauty, interesting people, literature and music, you remain infantile – seeking a kind of onanistic stimulation that only serves to make you more and more miserable.

To my surprise, I’m not the only one in the Church musing about this Culture of Sterility (or sterility of culture).  This is from the most recent issue of the St. Louis Review:

“The bishop of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau said, ‘All love tends toward an incarnation that requires the daily cultivation of the soul of our souls in holiness. It is a call that we must respond to anew each day to God’s question, “Where are you?”  Family life today is in crisis because it is formed in a mentality of sterility.  And we might even say the sacrament of this attitude is contraception within marriage.  Family life, and by extension the culture and the Church will only be renewed when the “domestic church” rediscovers its call to fruitfulness at every level.’”

The bishop of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau (Missouri) is James V. Johnston, and while the Review quotes him as saying that love requires the daily “cultivation” of “the soul of our souls”, he more probably said, “the soil of our souls”.  Cultivation is cultivation of soil, and as farmers cultivate soil so that the seeds are better received and the crops grow and bear fruit, so must we cultivate the soil of our souls, so that (as in the parable of the sower – Mt. 13:1-23) the seed of God will be received and nurtured, not withered by our lack of care, our lack of “cultivation”.

Bishop Johnston makes a connection between this sterility of culture and the contraceptive mentality.  This is a very keen insight.

Think about the young “schlubs” we see around us, perpetually plugged in to their headphones, bored with anything that’s not some sort of anodyne.  What they are guarding against in building these walls of media drugs and alcohol about them is conception – having a concept, being struck by something outside of themselves that might really take root, grow forth, bear fruit.  This is the contraceptive mentality walking about in our midst.

“I have planted, Apolos watered, but God gave the increase,” St. Paul observes (1 Cor. 3:6) – but the increase will not come, for the mindset of Birth Control has infested our culture and made it an anti-culture, divorced us from the consequences of our actions, turned us into solipsists, narcissists, zombies.

May we all continue to pray for the renewal of Catholic Culture.