To Forget [by Silas] Relate to Others: Relationships track Lately, I’ve had a hard time justifying pure entertainment—to choose to fill two hours of my life with what is effectively the white noise of a mainstream movie. It can, at times, simply be the postponement of thought, but at other times, I believe it is less innocent. I wonder: is entertainment so popular because it is like taking a tour through what it is to be a human, passing through carefully allotted amounts of joy and pain? Because it’s taking the necessary dosage to trick yourself into feeling like you live an emotionally fulfilling and meaningful life? The phrase "emotionally fulfilling and meaningful life" may, in itself, mean next to nothing to the honest person. But, truthfully, everyone desires to find some meaning in life beyond the simple biological imperatives. And that can be difficult. In a world where 7,000,000 people (the equivalent of the population of New York City) are added to the population every two weeks, it can be difficult to believe your teachers when they tell you about snowflakes and specialness. Our culture has created entertainment to lend sense to an otherwise senseless system and set up celebrities as counterfeit gods. The most disturbing aspect of this is that we have placed, at its heart, the phenomenon of love. The very phenomenon that, according to Jesus, has the power to actually change the world, we have copied, and made an idol of it. The movies we watch tell us to worship love, but the love they show us is not "patient and kind" (1 Corinthians 13:4), it’s a quick, magic shortcut to meaning. It’s not love at all. Go watch nearly any romantic movie of the last half century. The relationships in these films begin, mostly, in lies and misunderstandings that all turn out to be hilarious upon revelation and only a small stumbling block on the way to the finding of true love and all the meaning in the world and also maybe help turn our egocentric characters into wonderful people. I’m not against fun, or forgetting my cares for a while. I am against the presenting of a facsimile of a thing in its real place, especially when that thing is love, which is hard and dirty, which people have died for, and which, according to the Bible, is powerful enough to cover all wrongs and is called greater than any other thing in this world. "Three things will last forever—faith, hope and love—and the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13). Silas
Posted on: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 01:53:47 +0000