How Much is Too Much?
Wrestling with the Place
of Culture in Devotional 

"I was born in a house with the television always on," sing David Byrne and the Talking Heads in their song Love for Sale. What could be truer than that for most of us? Yet even with the television blaring (and sometimes because of the television blaring), we manage to hear God's voice in the culture...because He's everywhere, and not only in a monastery.

We know that, but we also feel a certain tension. Christians live in a gap between "Be still and know that I am God" and Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message." I for one often feel the pinch, wondering how to mind the gap.

Witness a recent morning, when I started the day with quiet meditation on events in Jesus' life using Ignatian exercises designed to help me see Jesus aright so that I "might be with Him, become more like Him and serve Him more." After an hour or so in prayerful reflection on Scripture, I went to the gym carrying two novels, a year-end issue of Time, and an iPod with a Tim Keller sermon downloaded and an energy-pumping playlist. I read from and listened to each in the course of an hour. I also had access, anytime I looked up from my elliptical machine, to four television screens, each tuned to a different channel -- as I was invited to think about (for far less than 30 seconds each) the plight of freezing citrus, the unethical treatment of elephants, full-body scanners, "healthiest super-foods" and "why the Sun didn't swallow the Earth." Just an average couple of hours for an average middle-aged woman, trying to orient myself towards God and live out the implications that flow from what I know and where and who I am. All before 9 a.m.

I'm used to trying to pay attention to everything all at once, yet sometimes I wonder if I fully take in any of it. Sometimes I scream an Anthony Newley-esque "stop the world; I want to get off" as I long for solitude and silence. At other times I want to be in the middle of the action. I still wish I'd been in the crowd for Oprah's and The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" flash mob scene on Michigan Avenue last fall. Yes it was commercially produced and motivated; but it was an orchestrated act of joy, and I even imagine it as a foretaste of heaven (probably with different lyrics).

Feeling that tension, I've been thinking lately about the dichotomy between the positive role of popular culture in my devotional (yes, devotional) life and the overload I feel when "the world is too much with (me)."

To continue reading go to its original placement on the Washington Institute's website.

--Cary Umhau

Cary is our guest writer, she regularly blogs at www.holyvernacular.wordpress.com and can also be found at www.caryumhau.com