Driving has been an inseparable part of my job from day one. I frequently had to cover long distances, and sometimes, it felt like I was a professional driver with a priestly job on the side. I’ve never been into cars, treating them just as a means of transportation. Consequently, the car in question has always had to be cheap to buy, cheap to run and – most importantly – reliable. I have never looked for fancy things in a car except one: cruise control. I thought it particularly useful on the Polish plains with their long, straight roads and motorways. Alas, for most of my driving “career”, such a feature was reserved for high-end cars that I could neither afford nor wanted to have. Eventually, like most novelties in the car industry, it made it to the bog-standard vehicles, and when I bought my previous car, at long last, it came with cruise control as standard. Not particularly useful on the narrow, winding roads of Moray nor in the city of Aberdeen… In the meantime, a certain American car manufacturer implemented in its cars a revolutionary thing called Autopilot, described as “a suite of advanced driver assistance features that are intended to make driving safer and less stressful.” The car’s manual stressed that “none of these features makes [the vehicle] fully autonomous or replaces you as the driver.” But who reads manuals? Soon, there were reports of sightings of drivers in those cars doing all sorts of things except actually driving, despite the manufacturer’s clear statement on its website that “current ‘Autopilot’ features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.” Such behaviours have been “linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths.” A US governmental agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said that “the brand name ‘Autopilot’ is misleading, conjuring up the idea that drivers are not in control.” Although I don’t condone it, I understand why drivers might want to do such things. I used to like driving, but these days, I’m not too fond of it as I see it as dull and an irretrievable waste of time. Journeys by plane, bus, or train are so much more productive than being in the driving seat. These are, effectively, travelling on autopilot, but by design.
The term might be modern, but the attitude is as old as humankind; in fact, it’s widespread in the animal kingdom, too. We are creatures of habit, and we develop them without too much thinking in order to glide through life as efficiently as possible. The main reason is the limit of our mental capacity to process all the information our senses are bombarded with all the time. Habits or routines help us to deal with repetitive tasks or similar challenges automatically, without a second thought, leaving enough bandwidth to handle unusual potential risks or threats. In short, we go through life more or less on autopilot while trying to deal with unexpected bumps in the road.
Habits can be highly individualised, but we share many with others, such as family members, friends, or the wider community. They have become part of our identity; we usually call them traditions, which are kept and cherished as precious legacy and heritage. History provides plenty of examples of people who paid the highest price defending their traditions and identity against forced assimilation. In today’s first reading, Moses addressed a different danger potentially faced by the People of Israel. In the biblical tradition, having wandered for forty years in the wilderness, the Israelites were about to enter the Promised Land, Canaan, inhabited by seemingly more prosperous tribes. The danger was that they would adopt their way of life, customs and traditions to reach the same level of prosperity but, in the process, lose their identity. So Moses urged them to “take notice of the laws and customs that I teach you today, and observe them, that you may have life and may enter and take possession of the land that the Lord the God of your fathers is giving you” as the alternative, better way of achieving prosperity. Did they listen to Moses? Their ancient history was quite checkered. The irreversible dispersal of the northern tribes, the Babylonian exile of the Judeans, and the attempts at forced assimilation by the Seleucid Empire were seen as punishment for the Israelites’ perceived disloyalty. Some held similar views in the times of Jesus when Judea was a vassal province of the Roman Empire. Some Jews expressed defiance by keeping traditions and customs as reported in today’s gospel. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, their stance led to a clash with Jesus, who called them rather scathingly “hypocrites.” What triggered such a harsh response?
The gospel reading provides three clues. The Jews in question came from Jerusalem, the capital city; they were the Pharisees, a puritanical faction of the then-Jewish establishment. Their intricate and elaborate customs played an essential role in their lifestyles. Those who lived from hand to mouth – most of the Jews – could hardly afford this, time-wise as well as financially. The second clue is the Pharisees’ strong assumption that Jesus’ companions should emulate their intricate practices. Jesus’ response is the third clue. He dismissed the Pharisees’ de facto accusations. He condemned their customs as empty shows without any substance behind them, quoting the prophet Isaiah: “This people honours me only with lip service, while their hearts are far from me.” He then offered an alternative, effective way of achieving purity to that of the Pharisees: “Nothing that goes into a man from outside can make him unclean; it is the things that come out of a man that make him unclean. For it is from within, from men’s hearts, that evil intentions emerge.”
We are all in danger of switching our habits, routines, customs, and traditions from useful and helpful “cruise control” to full autopilot mode. When that happens, they quickly lose their meaning and effectiveness. We need to keep them in check and ensure that we remain active and in control. Life is too precious and too short to go through on autopilot.
Image by inno kurnia from Pixabay
