Ruining your appetite

Besides fearing an Islamic terrorist at the Motel 6 in Michigan, I was aware of being in danger of another enemy-the television in my room. I don't have a TV at home. (Or, to be more precise, we have a box that once served as a television but now plays only the infrequent DVD.) And we have never had cable. So I was curious about what you get with basic cable.

Do you know that there is a station where they talk about weather all day long? That was an eye-opener. I got bored after about an hour of that and switched to what I hoped was more scintillating programming while I was making my quinoa and pesto concoctions. But by the end of my stay, I realized that The Weather Channel was the best bet-everything else was the equivalent of very bad junk food. You know how you feel after you eat a doughnut? That's how I felt after watching bits of the dramas I was surfing.

The reason I bring this up is because I made a discovery at the Motel 6: If I want to keep my appetite sharp for God, I can't be imbibing in the sludge that's served up on TV. Even though it is insipid, it still somehow ruins my desire for spiritual things. I just can't do it. There is an old hymn that says: "The hill of Zion yields a thousand sacred sweets before we reach the heavenly fields." Before. But those sweets are available only to those who don't clog their arteries with worldly fare that deadens the taste buds.

The interesting thing is that I have not even needed to agonize over the "legalism" question regarding this choice to quit TV. It is not so much that I felt I had to make a rule for myself about swearing off certain kinds of entertainment, as that I just plain lost the desire for it. This is a work of the Holy Spirit, not mine. But so as not to "grieve the Spirit," I am resolved to not dredge up from the graveyard something He has killed.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian historian who opened the eyes of the West to the Soviet prison camps through his books The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard in 1978. They thought he would praise the West, but they had another thing coming. Though he had nothing good to say about socialism, he surprised his audience by saying this about his host country:

"A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. . . . [W]e have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being. . . . After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by . . . the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music."

I also want "things higher, warmer, and purer." I have tasted the joy of the Lord and the powers of the age to come (Hebrews 6:5). Why should I want to go backward?

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