The Theology of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and Today

I write this post for those of us who yearn to find a responsible justification for our fixation with psychedelic funk bands, cheezy rock ballads, and 80s "B" movies. But of course I'm writing about it, so please be prepared for an extremely long post or 2. Maybe one day the Lord will give me the dual grace of eloquence and brevity. As it is, I have neither.

A liberal arts education has the advantage of turning us on to the pursuit of REAL truth, beauty, and goodness. And unsurprisingly, we naturally begin to take an interior inventory of things in our life, looking for the transcendent. This is a huge grace we've been given--to not only understand (to some level) what it is we have received, but then to responsibly reflect and begin to try to live according to what St. Paul says:

"...having the eyes of [our] hearts enlightened, that [we] may know
what is
the hope to which he has called [us], what are the riches of his
glorious
inheritance in the saints...(Eph 1:18)"

We know this inheritance is God himself, given to us individually and in communio. "God you are my portion and my cup." And so, we live our lives experiencing God proleptically, albeit in a hidden way (but oh so much fun!). He is hidden from us on one level because we encounter God as mediated (conceptually, materially, etc.). But sin also has this disturbing way of obscuring our way to God.

If I may quote a husky Cistercian priest: what does this have to do with us? We know that "leisure is the basis of culture" and to be a devout Catholic does not mean saturating our lives with only religious pursuits. So, yay, we can (and should) find joy and spiritual rejuvination in certain secular forms of re-creation. But not every form of recreation is spiritually edifying.

What readily comes to mind is the topic of this post, music and movies--the bases of the American culture. I want to come right out and say I have a certain bias when it comes to pop culture, and contend it is not de facto a sign of weakness or spiritual immaturity (there are other reasons for my weaknesses...hehe). It is true pop culture has this vulnerability of being a vehicle for mediocrity, and is therefore sometimes--maybe most times--objectively less good, less true, and less beautiful than many classical works of Western Tradition.

Taking it a step further, entertainment can be a sneaky little devil, quite literally. It has a certain addictive quality to it, both for those performing and those listening. As a musician, I have played before large audiences, and have to admit, there is a "high" that comes over you that is almost ineffable (I said almost), especially when the audience really "digs" your "fat chops." Performers therefore also have a nasty propensity toward vanity, and other forms of sin, e.g. "sex, drugs, and rock&roll (hip-hop, R&B, rap, country, etc.)." If the performers aren't acting about it or living it, they're singing about it, all to a catchy tune. The fans then have the additional struggle of fighting the temptation to make real idols out of these ma and pop stars, while filtering out all of the lies latent in the movies or songs.

And on this level, it's almost a non-issue that movies and music can be very detrimental to our spiritual lives. All of a sudden we're humming a song that speaks about fornication or quoting a line from a movie that in no way compares to the wit of ol' GK. It's this latter example that begins to snag on some, and sometimes even on me. Isn't it somehow formatively and therefore spiritually inefficient to run on a lower-grade of fuel when you can afford to fill up with the high octane of really good art and literature? I think most would be quick to say, "yes." I even want to be quick to say, "yes." But besides the justifiable immediate gratification of a "potentially quasi-morally neutral" movie or song (the good of tonal music, even if it is cheezy), there is I think a historical and formative issue.

Break on 3: 1-2-3