Soul and Super-body?

ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!

With the proximate arrival of X3 AND Superman Returns, I can't help but entertain the usual boyhood daydreaming of having super powers. So to keep me grounded, I thought these might help.

ST I, q. 91, a. 3

ST I, q. 117, a. 3 and 4

Tomaso locates all the cool superpowers I want in God's elevating of our natures for his purposes. Ah man!

And just because I think it would be a really cool book to have. Whiskey? Sapientiae Amator?

-CS

Pop Culture Strikes Back

CS (not Lewis) on Grace:

At every moment of our lives, God graces us in existence and is eternally present to us. I heard a priest say once, that the word grace is literally, "that which is given." And sin is "that which is taken" or "manipulated" [take this to prayer and it will change your life]. Every moment of our lives is a grace because it is literally a "given situation." I can waste a lot of time complaining about how things are, but God has ordained and/or allowed every situation to be just as it is, and my desire should be to find him there since he gives himself to me always and everywhere, in every situation--even the really evil ones.

**setting the previous paragraph as the background music**

I can't help that God has designed me in such a way that I have an involuntary ability to unconsciously soak up certain things around me. I don't think I'm alone in this. It's easier to moderate what some of those things are now that I'm older and can reflect on my experiences, but it's part of the human condition for which I don't readily have to feel guilty. Sometimes I soak up some really great things, sometimes good things, and sometimes really nasty things--it's all a little mysterious. But when I look back on my childhood and my teenage years, I had no real "control" or conscious ability to live according to a certain ideal. Thankfully God gave me a conscience, but it was nevertheless immature at those times. Because of my socio-historical condition, I was raised in a very pop culturally-oriented society. Therefore, I soaked up a great deal of it (as many of you are painfully aware). I think it's unavoidable unless you have highly attuned parents, but even they have no absolute control.

All this to say, I can look back objectively at my life and choose to look at the culture I grew up in with disdain. The sound of a synthesizer can sometimes lead me to immediate nausea. [How ironic...I'm typing this in the Cap Bar with Collegium Cantorum's beautiful melodies coming from down the hall.] And yet, there is a layer of grace that covers my whole upbrining. There has to be. This is what is so wonderful about nostaligia; it can be the precursor to gratitude for the good things God has given us. Music and movies have the potential to generate nostalgia almost as mneumonic devices for grace. When we remember certain lines from a movie, we're reminded of good times or good experiences. But, there is also the potential to remember even a not so good line from a movie or song, and reflect on why I retained this line. Is it just because I'm sinful? It could be an invitation to reflection and conversion, God's showing me where I still need his grace.

This I hope doesn't trivialize our responsibility to be honest about where we might have a strong attachment to the "feelings" of consolation that come from music and movies. Neither do I intend to whitewash the media as pre-evil depending on an individual's disposition. There are certain forms of movies and music that are always and everywhere dangerous and to be avoided. Having said that, I will only digress momentarily to say, it is a whole other issue to think about the potential vocation some of us have in relation to the world around us. The Mystical Body has many members and some are called to be culturally savvy for the sake of reaching out to those enslaved by it. Others are called to renounce the whole enterprise all together as a reminder to the rest of us that there is more to this life than the fleeting pleasures of this world.

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