Christians are about to enter Holy Week, the period between Palm Sunday and Good Friday when we prepare for the glorious celebration of Easter. It is a fitting time to set aside our egos and allow God’s Holy Spirit to fill that space with life-giving renewal and restoration.
That is my introduction to a personal reflection on the unimportance of being recognized.
I may be wrong, but I think every one of us wants our work to be seen as important and our presence valued by others. I know I do. Social media has amplified that desire into something relentless. We are invited—almost compelled—to be followed, praised, and “liked” by as many people as possible. Analytics allow us to check our status minute by minute, measuring success or failure by numbers of clicks and comments.
It is, of course, a rather silly enterprise. These metrics measure very little. Random clicks of a mouse are no true measure of our worth—either to ourselves or to others. Yet they carry the illusion of meaning, and that illusion has real power.
The desire for recognition is as old as humanity itself, and it has always been a stumbling block to emotional and spiritual health. What social media has changed is not the desire, but its velocity and weight—its constant, seductive pressure.
Decades ago, when I was an occasional newspaper columnist, I would look forward to publication day and the quiet satisfaction of seeing my work in print. How many people read it, I never really knew—though from time to time a letter to the editor would arrive to explain my many deficiencies. That lack of immediate feedback did not diminish my desire for recognition, but it did keep it in check. Today, feedback comes instantly and incessantly. We track its rise and fall as if it were a stock portfolio, and far too easily allow our sense of worth to rise and fall with it.
A passage in Paul’s letter to the Philippians tells us that God, incarnate in Jesus, emptied himself—taking on the fullness of human life without clinging to divine status. One implication of that mystery is this: he had no need for recognition to sustain his identity. Freed from that need, he was able to engage others without discrimination and to restore what was broken as a gift of grace—not something measured by approval, attention, or acclaim.
It took his disciples a long time to understand that laying aside the need for recognition is essential to being fully present as agents of God’s healing and redeeming love. Anyone who has read Paul’s letters knows he never entirely set aside his own ego—but he tried, and perhaps came closer than most of us.
Among the medieval saints, Francis of Assisi may have understood this most clearly. He taught his followers that recognition is of little importance compared with the fullness of what God enables us to be. It is a lesson that should resonate with us today.
Martin Luther King Jr. was surely a man of considerable ego, and he was not immune to the satisfactions of recognition. Yet as he approached the end of his life, his words suggest that he had come to see how unimportant such recognition was compared with the work God had given him to do.
That is a lesson we might take into Holy Week.
Would I like to have tens of thousands of subscribers on Substack? Of course I would. I do not, and likely never will. What I continue to learn—sometimes reluctantly—is that the numbers do not count. I am called only to offer what I can, and then let it go.
It helps, I suppose, that my old friends Fred and Russ –– earnest right wingers —rarely fail to puncture whatever ego I have managed to inflate. It is probably a good thing for anyone who ventures into the public square to have a Fred or a Russ close at hand.
And now, for Holy Week.