Learning to love yourself

But it's too late ba-by, now it's too late / Though we really did try to make it / Something inside has died and I can't hide / And I just can't fake it...

You probably know the song, and dozens more like it, the premises of which run something like the following:

I have always just assumed that this is what happens when we encourage ill-raised young products of a comfortable society to write and sing. Think about it: take a boy who has never worked nor suffered greatly, teach him to preen and prance for the ladies, foster his self-delusion that he knows something about global politics, teach him to warble, and you've got John Mayer. Or Jim Morrison. Or John Lennon.

We've been vacationing in Colorado, which means that nap times for our youngsters are more serendipitous than planned. My wife and I keep books handy in our vehicle, so that if a little one is sleeping when we reach a destination, one of us can sit with him until he wakes. As a result my wife recently sat and read while half-listening to the radio of a car parked nearby. The radio was playing songs from the sixties and seventies. "You know," she told me later, "I think I see why the divorce rate grew in the generation before us."

The seventies in particular, she noted, saw the rise of songs about casual, replaceable relationships. ("I ain't ready for the altar but I do agree there's times/When a woman sure can be a friend of mine.") Maybe, she offered, that contributed in some small way to a worldview which sees self-fulfillment as the purpose of relationships. We proceeded to have an interesting discussion about causality, about whether songs and movies and magazines affect the underlying assumptions that define culture, or reflect them, or both. I wish I could tell you we had a wide-ranging and well-reasoned debate, but the one year-old woke up and demanded Cheerios, the three year-old needed to use the bathroom, and the older boys were itching to climb something.

And that's partly the point, I guess -- that while our nation's songs reflect the belief that a love relationship exists to fulfill its participants, the wise Christian knows the opposite is often true. I don't know any successful parent (read: parents whose children are peace-filled, obedient, articulate, educated, and God-loving) who did not daily walk a path of self-denial. Nor do I know of a successful marriage in which both spouses did not learn to pour themselves out for the other.

I know plenty of failed marriages, on the other hand, in which one or both partners had the pop song attitude best captured by Janet Jackson: "What have you done for me lately?" Or maybe I'm thinking of Whitney Houston ("Learning to love yourself/Is the greatest love of all"). And we've all seen how children turn out when their parents can't put down the remote control or golf club or shopping purse to take on the hard, unceasing work of training up a child.

The seemingly ironic thing is that only by pouring yourself out in a relationship can you see it take root and blossom. Only by abandoning the selfish notion that it exists to make you happy, in other words, do you have any hope of being fulfilled by it. I say that's "seemingly" ironic because we know that God has worked this way with us from the beginning, asking us to deny ourselves that we may be made whole.

While American culture lost self-conscious awareness of its Christian roots long before the seventies, there were at least the reflections of this awareness, in beliefs, for example, about the importance of endurance in marriage, and of self-sacrifice on behalf of children. Now even these roots seem to be dying.

I don't know if I believe the world will be healed as Christ's return approaches, or if we'll sit comfy in our hand-basket until we're within spitting range of Hell. Regardless of history's course, I wonder sometimes what would happen if we leveled some of the Roman columns on which our national fecklessness has been erected. What would be the effect, for example, if one could strike every pagan pop song from memory, and bar its replacement? Or if every boyish reader of Maxim suddenly had a burning interest in carpentry magazines instead? Or if John Woo magically acquired the talent to forego vulgarity in his mindless films?

Maybe none of it would heal the world. But it would be nice to find out, don't you think?