I recently posted on my other blog about my dental situation and how it affects my eating habits. Since I've been without teeth (and awaiting dentures), I think so much about food. I also realize that so many types of appetites affect me (us) - not just our appetite for food.
One of the things I pray quite a bit about is my different appetites - food, attention, gossip, and many other (often) unhealthy things.
When I first got serious about living my faith, music was one of the things I had trouble shedding an appetite for. I grew up listening to all sorts of music (including gospel and other Christian genres) but my favorite artists were mainstream pop, rock, and R&B. Almost none of those were helpful to my Christian life. They actually fed a lot of my other unhealthy appetites - mainly lust. Still to this day, there are songs I cannot even hear in passing without a stirring of some sort of fleshly feeling. Walking through a grocery store once, I heard someone's ringtone playing the opening bars of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On". That's never aroused anything good in my thoughts!
For me (for a lot of us, I'm thinking), music is one of the best tools the Enemy uses to get inside our heads. Music is something that can get access to our brains without us even realizing it. We hear a harmless-sounding song like "Imagine" by Lennon and maybe don't understand what he's asking us to imagine. No heaven? Why would a follower of Christ want to imagine that? Probably none of us do, but Lennon's voice and music lull us with a Satanic beauty. The same goes for songs like the one from another Beatle, George Harrison's holy-sounding-but-hellish "My Sweet Lord." His "lord" is not the Lord I serve. But, again, we hear the melody and the word "lord" and our brain thinks it's hearing good things.
I'm way more aware these days of how sneaky music can be. Another entertainment medium - television - is one I am just learning to watch with a discerning eye. Still, I struggle to give up some of the shows.
Recently, I got access to Hulu and started bingeing "Boston Legal". It's funny, snarky, witty, and stars James Spader (of "Blacklist" and "Pretty In Pink") on whom I've always harbored a mostly harmless celebrity crush. It's harmless in that even if I ever did meet him, I'd never act so silly as to show my crush. I'm strongly in the camp of never meet your heroes crushes.
Anyway.
The show is a good watch but probably not healthy. It's certainly not helpful to me as a person of faith. I've watched it in the past but seeing it fresh, I realize how awful it is in terms of the behavior and ideas it pushes. One of the female characters is smart, pretty, and very life-capable but lives proudly as a sleep-around chick. Her main role is to promote the whole "friends with benefits" lifestyle. From her viewpoint, it is seen as healthy, liberated, and normal. I guess these days it is normal but normal does not mean right or healthy.
Spader's character - highly intelligent and ruthless - is that of a deeply damaged soul. He wants everything that comes with the richness of love and intimacy but pursues random and careless physical sex. The character is, of course, extremely liberal and seems sure about everything pagan but is very unsure of God and the purpose of "religion".
William Shatner plays well off of Spader's. Their friendship is admirable but twisted. They are both damaged but validate each other. My worldly eyes see their camaraderie as something to envy. My discerning eye however sees this partnership promoting dangerous ideas. Theirs is a friendship that makes two bad people look likable.
There is one character who is more comfortable living as a cross-dressing sass, reminiscent of Flip Wilson's Geraldine. He's very likable and, in a lot of ways, draws the viewers' sympathy (or empathy). But his cross-dressing is never portrayed as anything but "quirky" and not that off-putting.
Other characters are just as bad as those mentioned. The more conservative-leaning characters are shown to be uptight or buffoonish and mostly undesirable. Older characters on the show are just as rowdy, randy, and sexually loose as the others. Except for the, you know, uptight "weirdos".
Yeah, most of the best-promoted shows are not something I should so gleefully watch. "Living Single" (the precursor to the whiter-casted "Friends") promotes, on one hand, the idea that people of color are just as smart and accomplished as any other race. On the other hand, they are promoted as just as morally loose and spiritually confused as characters on most shows. Any "religious" characters are usually shown as being silly, foolish, or not truly "Christian" at all.
Reaching way back, I will mention "The Godfather) movies and books. I noticed that out of all the ruthlessness shown by the characters, as a whole, the Mafia families are touted as being better at governing than other groups of people. The admiration shown for the "codes" the families live by is more prevalent than the horrendous lack of respect for life. Don Vito is a wise and careful administrator of Mafia justice. His Consigliere is shown to be smart calm and in control of his emotions. Then you get the broodingly sexy and attractive Don Michael Corleone. Even most of the women - good Italian ladies - are willingly blind to the deadly culture of their men.
Still, even though I can see the flaws in this kind of entertainment, I am drawn to it. I often tell myself that I'm just fascinated with it and enjoy perusing these shows with discernment but, truthfully, I just have an unhealthy appetite for watching them.
This is a strange world we live in, isn't it? I mean, for us Christians. I am still learning and growing and reigning in my fleshly appetites. It's a daily struggle. The spirit and the flesh - the willing and the weak.
Pray for me and for all of our brothers and sisters dealing with worldly appetites.
Peace
--Free
P.S.: Here is something that Got Questions says about entertainment. I found it interesting.
.png)
