We Are What We Eat

Many of us try to keep a close eye on the types of food we eat and we expend incredible amounts of energy and money on healthy living and exercise. Doesn't it make even more sense to keep a close eye on our appetites for entertainment?

While my children were growing up, I maintained a very careful guard over everything they read and watched on television and saw in movie theatres. A very careful guard. I didn't even open the door to video games until my youngest was five years old. Now that my grandchildren have arrived, I unreservedly support their parents' efforts to provide wholesome, carefully selected books. (We are not moving to television or films yet.)

Of course, I am not alone in my concern for what my children absorbed during their earliest years. Every parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle feels the same mandate to protect children. Now that mine are adults, I am confident that they continue to fill their minds and hearts with good things. Or at least with mostly good things! But I know it is amazingly difficult to fend off the sheer quantity of material that we are encouraged to read or see. (For example, how many of you now have an indelible image of Kim Kardashian imprinted on your brain after this past week?) If I express my aversion to reading or watching something which "everyone" is reading or watching, my friends (and some family members) just shake their heads and relegate me to the "not up-to-date with our culture" category.

I don't watch films or shows featuring gratuitous violence, horror, soft or hard core pornography, bleak hopelessness, or a malevolent stance on the inherent value of each human life. I really don't care if millions of my fellow citizens flock to these types of movies and rate them highly. Am I simply incapable of handling "mature content"?

Why do I keep my door closed to these types of visual experiences? Once a person has seen something, he or she can never 'un-see' it. Yes of course we know that films and television shows are fictional, and we supposedly make a 'willing suspension of disbelief' when we watch them. But the images are in our memories forever. I don't want ugly, violent, misshapen images hovering in the background of my mind, ready to pop up and disturb me. I don't want garbage floating loosely through my memories.

If our appetites yearn for literal, visual depictions of horror, violence, sex, sadism, and so forth, and we satisfy those appetites, we become what we eat. Perhaps not killers or sadomasochists, but people whose lives grow darker because of these appetites. It's a slippery slope. This kind of "food" makes us as ill as a diet of non-stop sugar and pastries. And the resulting illnesses burden us with a terminal spiritual diagnosis.

Does this attitude mean that I have my head in the sand? Am I avoiding "human drama"?  No, dear reader, quite the contrary. I keep abreast of current events all over the world, and am only too cognizant of the sufferings and struggles of so many. Enough bad things happen in reality. I don't seek to be entertained or titillated by dramatic recreations of them.

I acknowledge the rough and painful parts of human life, but I don't despair.  And I am trying to feed myself with good things.

Always in my mind are the wise words that Saint Paul wrote to the church in Philippi: "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence, and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things".