Today is the feast of St Matthias, the man providentially chosen to replace Judas Iscariot as the twelfth apostle (Acts 1:21-26). The early church recognized the symbolic significance of the number twelve. Twelve tribes prefigures twelve apostles. Jesus, as the True Israel, reconstituted the people of God, not around physical lineage but rather around right relationship to him. Matthias was chosen by lot over the other candidate (Joseph/Barsabbas/Justus–maybe Matthias was chosen for nominal simplicity!) and took his place in the ministry of the apostles as a witness to the resurrected Son of God.

Like several of the other apostles, we know next to nothing about Matthias from Holy Scripture other than his name and, in his case, this peculiar selection ceremony. But unique among the Twelve, Matthias was never mentioned in the gospel accounts. If it weren’t for this scene in Acts 1, we would never know that a man named Matthias had followed Jesus “beginning from the baptism of John” (Acts 1:22). But, of course, many went unnamed in the gospel: the 72, some of the women, many of the healed individuals. So, in a way, we might say that Matthias serves as a patron saint for gospel obscurity (Tradition actually identifies Matthias as the patron saint of alcoholics, because of an apocryphal saying attributed to him by Clement of Alexandria: “We must combat our flesh, set no value upon it, and concede to it nothing that can flatter it, but rather increase the growth of our soul by faith and knowledge.”)

As Matt and I have repeated a number of times, one of mentors, Craig Bartholomew, has encouraged us for years with this axiomatic advice: pursue obscurity. Last year, I published a piece reflecting on this advice. Here’s how it begins:

Craig Bartholomew, who has been a friend and mentor to many of us younger Christian scholars, often repeats the admonition: “pursue obscurity.” It is not enough simply to accept obscurity, if it happens to be our lot. Rather, there is virtue in positively pursuing obscurity, in seeking anonymity and non-recognition. I have thought a lot about this proverbial advice over the years. In fact, it has become a kind of life code for me, even if it often remains more aspirational than actual. I think about it especially in terms of our Lord’s warning in the Sermon not to practise our “righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them,” but rather to practise our spiritual disciplines – fasting and praying and almsgiving – in secret, where only our Father can see and reward (Matt 6:1–18). Jesus often exhorts us with this countercultural demand: to take the lowest place rather than the place of honour (Luke 14:7–11), to lose our lives rather than save them (Matt 16:25), to serve rather than be served (Matt 20:28). Comfort with obscurity is one important test of genuine Christian discipleship.

In the article, I apply the advice especially to the pursuit of craft: the kind of work that demands undistracted and unnoticed discipline and solitude. Below is how I land the plane, but you’ll want to read the whole thing to learn the source where Craig got the proverbial advice. But today, we can thank God for St Matthias and the challenging example he leaves to all of us.

The quest to be fully present to everyone all of the time is, of course, only amplified by social media. We can’t let a single thought go un-Tweeted, a single experience un-Instagrammed, or a single life update un-Facebooked. The internet, as the prophet Bo Burnham reminds us, offers “a little bit of everything all of the time.” And it perpetually invites us to become our own content creators and publicists. But at what cost? What is lost in this perpetual need to be seen, this constant pull toward public exposure, this chasing of personal platforms? Is it really so hard to discern the ways that our souls shrivel when their doors never close for craft and contemplation? Surely there is wisdom in resisting what Robert Cardinal Sarah calls the dictatorship of noise. Surely there is wisdom in keeping some reserve on tap….Surely there is wisdom in accepting and even seeking obscurity and preserving those most intimate moments for our shops and cells rather than our social media timelines.