Celebrities: I've never followed them, which is why I was rather surprised to find myself having a conversation about them earlier this week. As I pulled some knowledge of the stars from the clutter of facts in my brain, I began to realize how truly inconsequential these people truly are and how very little I care about them.
On the same note, I love to listen to music. The genre doesn't really matter, I enjoy listening to and critiquing and savoring all kinds of music. Earlier this week I was on one of my frequent sibling chauffeur runs (and of course sampling some music) when I switched between radio stations. I went from yet another break-up song to one of my favorite praise songs. I was struck by the contrast. Sure, I suppose breaking up is a big deal, but it is absolutely nothing when compared with the greatness of the God that demands all our strength, mind, love, and worship.
I live in a culture that is contently obsessed with the unimportant.
This morning I finished my devotions and picked up a book by John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life. I often find that nearly everything I read or hear relates in some way to the issue I happen to be pondering at the time. Today was no exception. Piper was discussing television, but really his message applies to most of today's popular culture. His references to TV can easily be replaced with music, fashion, and celebrity gossip.
"A mind fed daily on TV diminishes. Your mind was made to know and love God. Its facility for this great calling is ruined by excessive TV. The content is so trivial and so shallow that the capacity of the mind to think worthy thoughts withers, and the capacity of the heart to feel deep emotions shrivels... We have become almost incapable of handling any great truth reverently and deeply."
Piper then quotes Neil Postman, who says, "Television disdains exposition, which is serious, sequential, rational, and complex. It offers instead a mode of discourse in which everything is accessible, simplistic, concrete, and above all, entertaining. As a result, America is the world's first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death."
Next, Piper quotes David Wells: "It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God's existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers' sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life."
Finally, Piper draws a passage from Douglas Groothuis, which reads, "The triumph of the televised image over the word contributes to the depthlessness of postmodern sensibilities.... One cannot muse over a television program the way one ponders a character in William Shakespeare or C.S. Lewis, or a Blaise Pascal parable, or a line from a T.S. Eliot poem, such as 'But our lot crawls between dry ribs / to keep its metaphysics warm.' No one on television could utter such a line seriously. It would be 'bad television'--too abstract, too poetic, too deep, just not entertaining."
While my stance is a little different from these men, I do think that they have clearly outlined one of the problems of our modern culture. While I shake my head at the insignificance of the world's passions, the world is shaking its head at the irrelevance of my God. The continual pursuit of pleasure and ease has led to desires that are now satisfied by triviality. I pity a people that craves what popular culture gives. I find it funny that right now, within arm's reach, I have a Bible, a volume of Calvin's Institutes, and all of Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. These are the substance with which I fill my mind and soul. I wouldn't want it any other way.
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