Dear Portrait,
Again, dear brother, you remind us of what we should be doing. For some, going to the movies or coming home and turning on the TV have become habits. There was a brief time in my past when I was ignoring the bad and brushing it off as “Oh, that’s not so bad.” Then God sent me a friend who woke me up from my indifference, a malady among Catholics of which Pope Benedict has spoken of. I had the good fortune of mentoring a young screenwriter recently who is now working on his first script for a name movie producer. He is very intelligent and has a great deal of knowledge in many areas. I was quite impressed by him and his work. When the issue of profanity in movies came up in a discussion, he simply said that he is able to ignore it.
We should be joyful that when we were once captives of sin, Christ has set us free. And He told us, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” So, we can enjoy our lives. In Psalm 1:2, we are told: “But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
Why should we be mindful, and reminded, often, about his law? Too many of us are putting in one hour of Church a day, and getting only a fragment of what we need. I dare say that for some, it appears once they leave the Church building, a mental shift in gears occurs, from God ON to God OFF, and they immerse themselves in too many things that the world asks us to meditate on. Those messages and images and public behaviors become a part of us. This happens so that we feel like we “fit in,” or that we’re part of our social circle. Two very close friends of mine told me of the strange looks and words of surprise they got from coworkers when they found out they didn’t watch TV. In their home, the TV is used to play certain movies. Once they received a phone call from a survey company asking them to name their favorite TV shows, but they couldn’t name any current shows. When asked why, my lady friend responded: “Too many TV shows are about tops and bottoms and we’d rather not watch.”
Much like trying a less harmful drug, the media gradually increases the dosage and then adds more harmful drugs as we become hooked. The full phrase is “pushing the envelope of what people find acceptable.” Which people? Christian people. The people who wish to “push the envelope” are fine with it. TV shows and movies are planned, scripts are screened for content, and sexual content, profanity and other unsavory elements are gradually added over the years. It would be wrong to give a blanket condemnation to Hollywood or to any particular screenwriter or production company, but I know it’s true that directors are still subject to those who have the ability to tell them they’ve gone too far. I’ve read one account where a director wanted a certain amount of skin in a particular scene for 30 seconds. When he was told that was too long, a bargaining session began, cutting it down to 20, then 15 and finally settling on 10 seconds. You see, these people know the effect it will have on the viewer. Contrary to prevailing misconceptions, modern man is the same person we read about in the Bible. Take away our gadgets and we would immediately go back to farming, horses and candles.
The evidence is that the pornography industry that began in the 1970s is gradually merging with the totally incorrectly named, mainstream media. But 40 years of gradual poisoning will find too many of us defenseless or too weak spiritually and mentally to speak up and say, “enough is enough.”
Some have implied that they wouldn’t know what to do if they stopped much of their TV viewing, or cut the numbers of movies they saw down to a few. So, like drug addicts, they feel they are being told to cut down their drug usage. But they fear withdrawal, they fear the loss of those thrills and highs - that their lives would become dull since “what else is there?”
Our faith needs to be lived daily. And we should be actively and fully conscious of the world around us. We cannot afford to be passive. We just can’t. I know that it is far easier to go with the crowd, to imitate others, to get their approval so we can join in. This stems from a desire to avoid feeling lonely or left out or considered odd. How, some of us may think, can I have any friends if we all can’t talk about the latest movie or TV show? Or even cross into territory we should not? We have been conditioned to follow the path of least resistance.
And I speak to myself as I write all this, but too many of us take an emotional approach to most any sort of commentary like this, with some taking offense, all the way up to: “How dare you tell me what to watch, read or hear? How dare you imply that I am not mature enough in my faith to know these things?”
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, are some of us taking in too much bad with the good? As the lines between “soft porn” and graphic porn get blurred, our ability to see what’s wrong will grow dimmer and dimmer until some of us become blind. I won’t bring up the more extreme examples, but some of us, especially the young, look at the picture of life and how to live as presented by the media as good or average. No, the media does not force us to behave in certain ways but that’s why advertisers spend millions of dollars on ads that are designed to influence our behavior. I would argue that TV programs and movies do much the same thing.
Peace,
Ed
