The Wall
Robert F. Gotcher, Ph.D.
Parishioner at St. Anthony's Parish, Milwaukee
If we were to keep track of the cultural activities (movies, television, radio, books, or music) in which we engage in our homes each month, what percentage would predate 1960?
The past 50 years have seen an explosion of creative activity. We live in an era when music from the 1960s and movies from the 1980s (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) are considered classics. In how many of our homes do we possess and spend time with the classical cultural production of the great past of human history, whether the film noir of the 1940s, poetry of Wordsworth, the music of Bach, the art of El Greco, the plays of Sophocles?
Even when we do indulge in the archaic, it is often filtered through modern sensibilities. For instance, the Christian specificity of the “Brothers Grimm” is stripped out by the Disney filter. Compare the ending of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” to the Disney version. Even A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh is often present in homes in Disneyized form.
The fact is, the sheer volume of modern cultural creations, some of which is very good, creates a wall between us and the beauty and wisdom that comes from past ages.
This same phenomenon is paralleled in Christian home life. Do we read regularly great Christian literature by Dante, Dostoyevsky, Waugh, and Tolkien (not the Peter Jackson version that changes Galadriel, who is almost a type of the Virgin Mary, into a dark sorceress)? Do we fill our bookshelves and our children’s with stories of saints, classic and modern? We don’t have to compromise artistic excellence to do so. See, for instance, Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” Franz Werfel’s, “The Song of Bernadette,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Edmund Campion”, or Mark Twain’s “Joan of Arc.” In our homes or our churches do we hear sacred music from Palestrina, Mozart, or Benjamin Britten? Or, do we just limit ourselves to those composers that have been active since 1970, as good as they are? Do we watch the Christian-themed plays of Shakespeare as much as we watch “CSI” and “The Sopranos”? Is the artwork on our walls rock posters and Thomas Kinkaid, or do we also have icons and prints from Fra Angelico? Do we read only the most recent and “relevant” best-selling pop psychology and spirituality, or do we also spend substantial time reading spiritual classics, including the Bible, “The Little Flowers of St. Francis,” “The Imitation of Christ,” “The Introduction to the Devout Life” by St. Francis de Sales, and “The Story of a Soul” by St. Therese of Lisieux?
Even though there have been real contributions in the past 50 years, it is not an either/or choice. One does not have to shut out the cultural and spiritual contribution of the past 50 years in order to take advantage of 2000 years of Christian heritage, but we also should not spend all of our spiritual and cultural time on the past 50 years.