Been listening to a bit of old music lately. When I say old I mean old music from my old life, the life I lived before my conversion. Bands like Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Bob Dylan. Nirvana aside, S.P. and Dylan are not all negative and dark but bands like NIN are. They were a big fav of mine. WERE. These bands do ring true to me on an emotional level though and bring me back to a time in my life when I was....not sure the word I am looking for...sad , yes I think is the best word. Obsessively and addicitvely sad.
With that being said, while I can listen to some music that is purely secular in nature and find nothing terribly immoral about it, let me give you a challenge. If you are a music lover as I am, the next time you turn on the radio or pop in a CD really examine the lyrics and the tone of the music you are listening to. Most lyrics are about love, that is true enough but we can't stop there. Many times lyrics are about heart-break, anger, fornication, lust, adultery, abuse, or in the very least they are way too sickeningly sweet and overly-sentimental. In addition, many tunes and rhythms are based on bass, thumps if you will. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Picture the episode of the cartoon
Tom and Jerry, the one when Tom starts playing the bass to impress a girl cat. "Is you is, or is you ain't my baby?" Jerry's head turns into two symbols and he bounces out of his little sardine bed. Not a bad illustration of what happens to us in real life. These sounds (perhaps not the song in Tom and Jerry but certainly in Lady Goo Goo and many others) effect and stimulate our base desires. When our base desires start to rule us and are out of control you now see what is wrong with the world today or the world during any period of time. That is called SIN. If it is found on the radio, 99.999% of the time there will be themes, tones and rhythms which are going to try to pull you away from your faith, granted you are living a life of faith. Even the Pope has spoken on this
subject. He said:
'Rock' [music]. . . is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe” (not sure when he said this but I have read it in the past as well).
I think I agree with our beloved Pope on this even though he is not speaking ex cathedra. In fact, I do agree with him! More and more his words ring very true to me. See, the Devil is very subtle and wants us to believe that he doesn't exist in order that he may more fully enter into our psyche and the psyche of our loved ones. He does this through any medium including TV, radio, movies, Internet, etc. See where I am going with this? I would venture to say that most secular media is demonic. Yes demonic. That is not a hyper-religious, overly-pious, fear-based sentiment. It comes after many years of discerning, listening to great preachers, reading the Bible and the works of our beloved popes, attending daily Mass and partaking frequently of the Sacrament of Confession AND buying, throwing away, rebuying, and re-throwing away my secular CDs! A consistent deluge of secular music brings me down. Plain and simple. And it is a spiritual thing, a spiritual thing and a physical thing because you can not separate the two.
In my heart I believe that most secular entertainment is trash and if it ain't from God then who is it from? Could it be, hmmm, let's see, could it be from......
Satan?! Ummm, yes actually, it is from the Evil One. Yes you are correct. Even though SNL makes fun of it, Dana Carvey is right on in what he is saying (for the most part!). You see how the culture minimizes and chides the truth. But what happens when we fall for this world's lies? We end up getting hurt, hurting others, we become sad, depressed, and, now this is key, our intellect becomes
darkened. This darkened state of the intellect, if followed through, will lead us to pursue other darkened forms of entertainment and pretty soon you are "knock, knock, knocking on porno's door." God-forbid. With the lights going dim on intellects around the world it should be no surprise that so many adults (and frighteningly more and more children) are on medication because they have depression, ADD, ADHD, OCD, ABC, dementia. I mean, yes, some people may need some medication for mental problems as a diabetic needs insulin but I would venture to say that most do not. They need love. They need to go to church. They need to pray. They need to live an upright life. That's it! Will this cure all disease and sickness? (ideally it could). Practically, no because we live in a fallen world. BUT, that is the formula for happiness, not seeking it directly but by doing the right thing. Then, the by-product of living a good, upright life is happiness, even in the midst of
suffering.
I think it was St. Augustine who said, "A sin in the beginning is a sin indeed." Let's watch our beginnings because our ends may end up burnt.
