MP3 audio

Alan Keyes
September 4, 2003
Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio

EMCEE: As a university community, we are very invested in a Catholic culture, and culture means more than just a few dimensions of life. It's really everything that we do--our academics, our athletics, our spiritual development, how we spend our leisure time. And we feel that we've been spending a good amount of time perhaps developing those first three, and maybe not enough on that whole area of leisure, and recreation, and refreshment, and socializing together. And so, we have an opportunity today to examine that, to look at contemporary entertainment from a Christian perspective. And so, I'm going to invite Father Terry, our president, now, to introduce our speaker.

FATHER TERRY: Former Reagan administration official Alan Keyes was born in New York on August 7, 1950, son of a U.S. Army sergeant. He is recognized as a leader in the conservative movement, and one of today's most in-demand orators, an active political figure. Keyes began his career as a U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer in 1978. Continuing his career in the State Department, he served as the councilor officer for Bombay, India, the desk officer for Zimbabwe, as well as a member of the State Department Policy Planning staff.

In 1983, Keyes became the Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, a post he filled for two years. In 1985, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs.

He was a Republican candidate for U.S. President in 1996 and 2000, and a two-time Republican nominee to the U.S. Senate for the state of Maryland.

Keyes is active in many organizations, including the Citizens Against Government Waste, which he served as president from 1989 to 1992. He served as vice president and, later, as president of the Ronald Reagan Alumni Association. In addition, he is the founder of National Taxpayer Action Day, and founder and chairman of the Declaration Foundation.

From 1994 to '99, Keyes could be heard on the radio as the host of the syndicated talk show, "The Alan Keyes Show: America's Wake-Up Call." In addition, he has published two books: "Our Character, Our Future: Reclaiming America's Moral Destiny," and "Masters of the Dream: The Strength and Betrayal of Black America." From January through June of 2002, Alan Keyes hosted "Alan Keyes is Making Sense," on MSNBC.

And this afternoon, we're thrilled to have him here on the topic, you know, "Contemporary Entertainment: Are We Having Fun Yet?" Let's give Dr. Keyes a hand.

ALAN KEYES: Thank you. I don't know about you, but I'm already having fun.

Actually, though, it's interesting, because I partly chose to look a little more relaxed than I usually would, because after all is said and done, that's what we're talking about, right? Things we do when we are not about what is ordinarily conceived of as our work. And we make a distinction, in common and ordinary culture and parlance, between our work and our play.

I think sometimes, though, that this is a sad distinction. It's one of those distinctions that bespeaks a loss of childlike innocence. One of the most famous moments I can remember from the life of my eldest son was when he was very young, and we had some visitors over. We were talking about this and that, and one of them asked his name, and they looked down at him because we had been doing the usual chit-chat about who does what and what work people do, and they said, "And what is your work?" And he looked back up at them and said, "My work is playing!"

Now, see, one of the secrets of life, of course, is when you discover that one way, at least, to lead a fulfilled life is when you find yourself walking down a path where your play is working. And yet, what does that mean? Partly that depends on your understanding of your work, but mostly it depends on your understanding of your play. And the happiest people in the world are probably those who, from the time they're a child to the time they're an adult, find that their understanding of what constitutes playing in their lives grows as they do, until it finally encompasses that which is most important in their lives.

I think, however, in our society today, the distinction that is made between work and play actually leads in a direction that reflects a fundamental challenge that, at the same time that it is challenging to the society's future, also represents a deep corruption of its present.

And that's mostly what I'm here to talk about today, because at bottom--and this is going to sound rather odd--I think that one of our major problems in our life today is that we don't take playing seriously enough. We don't take entertainment seriously enough.

Now of course, you can construe that if you like as my meaning to say that we don't play enough, we don't get serious enough about really letting our hair down, and getting things going, but that's not quite what I mean. What I mean would be reflected in one sense in the thinking of the ancient philosophers like Plato, when he wrote the "Republic," who made it very clear that one of the things you had to most seriously control if you wanted to educate the guardians to their proper role was you had to make sure you were in control of when and how they laughed, because laughter, unregulated, was a very dangerous thing. It bespoke, he argued, the possibility of an alteration of one's circumstances and one's situation and one's expectations that might or might not correspond to those ideals which were necessary for the kind of soul they were seeking to produce in the guardians.

This pagan's appreciation of the spiritual significance of entertainment is something that I think ought not to be lost on us, when, in the context of our Christian faith, we actually live under a great commandment that at one level precludes the making of this distinction which we take for granted, between what we do for entertainment and what we do as the serious vocation of our lives.

For, Christ said--did He not?--that we must love the Lord our God with, what? [audience: "Our heart, our soul, our strength."] And He put an adjective in front of them, which is always to me very challenging: whole! You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, your whole soul, your whole strength. Which then begs the question, doesn't it? If you're busy loving God with your whole mind, heart, soul, strength, then what is left? It suggests that nothing is left. I think that we have to take this very seriously. With absolutely every particle of our being, we are to reflect at every moment this love of God.

I think that, if we thought it through seriously, it doesn't necessarily preclude, but it certainly must color our understanding of all these distinctions we make in our lives and that we sometimes act upon without reflection. You know, "Today, I am going to be a citizen and I'll cast my vote. Tomorrow I am going to be out there getting some entertainment and amusing myself, and then the next day I will go to church and practice my saintly vocation." This doesn't make sense, because if we're loving God with our whole heart, mind, soul, strength, all of those things must somehow be involved in loving God, or we shouldn't be about them.

Now this is, of course, a conclusion that some folks might reach, and during the course of the history of the Spirit in the Church there have been people who have taken that to one extreme, like the saints who thought that it was necessary only to eat food that didn't taste good, because otherwise you were risking the sin of taking pleasure from something other than God.

Well, it might be that that distinction must underlie everything, but wouldn't it make more sense to suggest that since the law of God is writ in the Scriptures and writ in our hearts and writ, as well, in the nature of things, that somewhere in our own nature--in the hunger we feel, in the passions we experience, in those things which are, as it were, a consequence of the way He fashioned us at some level--He is still reflected, He is still involved. As a matter of fact, it may have been Eve's greatest sin that she forgot that, and thought that the devil could offer her something she didn't already have.

But we, of course, having had the truth of God's relationship with us confirmed in the coming of Jesus Christ, shouldn't be tempted to make her mistake. For, it is quite obvious that the Word became Flesh and in becoming flesh, at one and the same time, lifted our eyes to Heaven but also should have transformed our understanding of this flesh. For, at some level, that God Himself deigned to join us in this form has to mean that at some fundamental level, there's some common ground between what is God and what is us.

This would suggest, wouldn't it, that if we truly profess to respect God as we feel Him to be transcendent and "out there" somewhere, so we must, in that very fact, be determined to respect Him in here, which may be part of that surface contradiction, I've often thought, in the way that Christ formulated the challenge of the kingdom, for it is at one and the same time not of this world and yet within us, which suggests that that which is not of this world is also within us, and that if we are engaged in the business of loving and respecting God, we must carry that respect into the way in which we comport ourselves.

In our time, I think that is more than a platitude, because this business of entertainment has ceased to be a pastime. And I think that we're kidding ourselves if we don't realize that we are in the midst of what can only be described, I think, in spiritual terms as an ongoing war, and it might possibly be true that the most insidious and deadly instrument that is wielded by the spirit that hates God is, in fact, what we call "entertainment."

It's from that premise that I'll be speaking today. And I don't want you to think, when I do that, that I'm somebody who hates entertainment and never indulges in it, because this would be a lie. You will probably notice in the course of my remarks that I wouldn't be able to say these things if I didn't watch TV and look at movies and do other things. As a matter of fact, some people say I have an inordinate fondness for film; it certainly is one of those pastimes that I enjoy. But since I do look at it, I also can't help but notice certain of its characteristics.

One of the characteristics that I'm noticing in contemporary things--and these aren't necessarily movies that I have seen or would see, but they are movies the trailers for which you can go watch and so forth, and some of them you will read about--but isn't it fascinating how the theme of movies is starting more and more to center these days on the saga, the drama, of evil vs. evil? Have you noticed that? The most recent one, I think, which carries it to a height of folly that I don't understand--because I've never understood the horror genre, but leave that aside--is Freddy vs. Jason. You have the longest-running horror cycles imaginable, and they are going to culminate in the meeting of these two chief characters.

I have only one difficulty, though, because I have learned somewhere along the way that, when you go somewhere to a movie to be entertained, there is just a little requirement that you be able to identify with the characters. I go to see a movie Freddy vs. Jason, you know, Satan vs. Beelzebub, what's to choose? See? What are you going to do with such a film?

But in a way that is not quite so much a stark caricature of itself, that same theme has become more and more prevalent in our time. It probably started some decades back, when heroes became anti-heroes--but at the heart of the anti-hero of the '50s there was still the notion that, though the good in this person might be misunderstood, though it might be misdirected, though you and I and others might not by some conventional understanding appreciate it, it was still there. And there was still some sense in which, beneath this exterior that somehow didn't conform with all the round holes, and etc., of the society, there was nonetheless an admirable soul. "Rebel Without a Cause" was still, somehow, a cause for admiration, with the implication that somewhere in the midst of the anti-hero there was, nonetheless, a hero.

This started early on--figures like Humphrey Bogart, you know, externally people that were doing mischief, but underneath it all, when push comes to shove, willing to risk his life, not just for the girl, but for the country, for the world, to save that which is admirable and noble.

Sad to say, though, I do think at the end of the day, this is a far cry from what we get now. And even though there was a veneer of this sort of thing in a movie like "XXX," underlying it, there was the sense that, well, it's just gotten altogether too hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys--so you just throw up your hands, wash yourself of this difficult task, and be content to understand that, at any given moment, the only choice you're going to have is between one bad guy and another.

Now, you would think, wouldn't you, that this might only apply to action movies and adventure films and other forms of entertainment like that, but they've even managed to do it to romance. A matter of fact, I think maybe they've especially done it to romance. I'm not sure how successful it's been, at least at the box office, but it is a formula they're trying.

This most recent flop which I presume nobody saw--since, apparently, very few people went to it--that marked the moment of mutual perfection for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. I want to say the name of this movie, but I'm not sure how to pronounce it. And I certainly won't risk one pronunciation in here, and the other--Gigli, I think--sounds kind of foreign to my ears, but leave that aside. Here you were, confronted by these two beautiful people, and these are two individuals who in real life have all the attributes that are supposed to bespeak glamour and wonderfulness in our culture. There were a couple of small details, however, as one of them was a gangster who was in the process of kidnapping some underdeveloped man and the other was a---what was she?--a lesbian hitwoman, shall we say.

And there again, it's not exactly Freddy vs. Jason, but what's to choose, between such a romantic couple? Can't decide what's going to happen--will they steal your children, or kill you in the night? All you know is that they'll go back home in mutual admiration, and what does this say to us?

Why do I raise this? It's not just as a joke, because I think it ought to suggest to our minds the relationship between the themes of entertainment in our time, and what is, in one respect, the underlying theme of spiritual corruption that is pervasive in our day.

For, if you go to a movie and all you have is evil vs. evil, all you have is the wicked with the wicked, and whether it's from one point of view or another, you are simply walking down some path that from this point of view or that bespeaks a great wrong, what's absent? Well, good.

Yes. That is very good. But what is at the heart of good? What is the source of our understanding of good? Well, the implication, of course, of the absence of good is that there is no substantive basis for making the distinction between good and evil; there is no substantive Being that corresponds to what is good and that, in any absolute sense, establishes its claim of primacy over evil. The theme of evil vs. evil is simply a way of expressing, in ways that can conform with the glamour of evil, the fundamental premise that there is no God, and that thinking about Him wouldn't be much fun, anyway.

And I wish I could say that I think it's just here or there, but it's pretty pervasive. It reflects itself, as well--though I'm not sure we always think of it in these terms--in those aspects of the musical culture and other things that have become more and more offensive to sensibilities that still honor some kind of decency in human relations, and particularly in human sexual relations.

Now, what could the one have to do with the other? Well, I think it's pretty clear, because if there is no good--implying that there is no God--that also has the implication, as I'm sure you all know, that there is no order corresponding to the will of God, that there is no law which informs our nature or the nature of things, so that one can distinguish between that which is natural and that which is unnatural, that which serves and that which denies life as God has ordained it. In the absence of such distinctions, all things are possible, and one expression of those myriad possibilities is the absence of any sense whatsoever that there is a sexual norm, that there is a standard of behavior that ought to apply to relations between the sexes.

Now, there are commonsense ways of putting this, of course, in terms of procreation and family, but I think that we ought to realize that somewhere at the heart of it, there is also a theological premise, or at least an account of the world that implies a stance toward theology, an account with respect to God--an account which, at the end of the day, either denies the existence of God or His relevance to human things in any important way.

Of course, this doesn't imply necessarily that you can't make good use of God every now and again. As a matter of fact, I think it has become a basis for some of the more popular approaches to religion, so-called, especially if you go out to the west coast, there are people who actually have turned religion into a form of entertainment, and they're out to prove that God can be fun! But when can God be fun? God can be fun when you subordinate Him to your passions, when He becomes, as it were, another instrument of your pleasures, when you can approach Him in the same way that you are invited to approach that young lady or man who might be your partner, or the way in which you are invited to approach other human beings who might or might not be useful to your pleasures.

In that sense, God can be "useful" because, as some of the social psychologists want to tell us, He is, after all, just a kind of secretion of our consciousness, an emanation of our deep subconscious that serves our purposes--He and every other being conceived like Him--so that we may form and reform our understanding of Him according to those whims that are dictated by our pleasures. In that sense, of course, God simply becomes another toy, another instrument of our play and pleasures. And that's easy enough, in a world where, because of the absence of any sense of His existence or authority, we actually are invited to look upon all things in these terms.

One of the reasons, I believe, that the degradation that is implied in entertainment has such serious consequences for us is because, at the heart of it, there is an instrumental understanding of ourselves and other human beings.

As a parent, I've paid some attention to this, for good or ill, because I think it's the nature of a lot of the music of our time, that it's like a magician. There are heavy elements that capture the attention. It might be a beat, it might be an attitude, it might be a melody line--it doesn't matter. Put it all together, it becomes the mindless focus of attention and to some extent, I think, over the course of the generations in which this music has developed, it has become more and more the case that one involves oneself or can involve oneself in it sort of mindlessly, and yet at the same time, the moment you sit down and actually look at the lyrics of these things, you realize, you know, that some of it's just junk but other aspects of it are based upon an insidious intention--an insidious intention that goes quite explicitly sometimes into the business of rejecting God, of adulating wickedness, of encouraging attitudes that break all the usual bonds of affection and relationship, starting of course with all those which at one time would have been considered natural.

Now, I'm not going to, as some people might do in a talk like this, go through all the examples of these things that one can come up with--because, frankly, I think that unless we're blind, deaf, and dumb, we have encountered them at some time or another. What we want to do right now, though, is stand back and consider what the point is of an entertainment culture that seems to have as its fruit, as its end result, an effect upon the soul that frees it from all the usual bonds of sensibility, affection, and obligation. It's almost as if we are taking individuals and cutting them off from all those things that in the past would have been considered the basis of their existence in society.

Now, I want to say, just by way of contrast, that this isn't how music and entertainment always were. I mean, you go back and look at, I don't know, Shakespeare's plays and some of the music that is depicted in them, you consider what were the dances and other things through which human beings expressed themselves in the past, and what is fascinating to me is the organic connection that usually existed between the music and the society. And that was true almost all the time, even in simple folk things.

In our own culture, for instance, the square dance, which may in fact have been the origin of the derogatory use of the term "square," I don't know--but the square dance, what was it? Well, most dances like that, whether they were in the form of popular culture, peasant-type things, or the higher sort of pantomime that was carried out by aristocrats to the music of some of the great composers--most of them were an effort to walk through, in pantomime, the dance of human existence, to walk through the give-and-take, to walk through the hesitant exploration that could end in that relationship which became the basis of family and the perpetuation of one's own hopes and, of course, the hopes of one's city, society, species.

At one time in human life it would, in fact, have been almost inconceivable that there would be dances and music and other things that were separated somehow from the community and from one's faith, from one's piety.

And yet, we now take this for granted! That exists in a box over here, and then you have other things, and never the twain shall meet--because, of course, when we're here in the sanctuary of the Lord, then our music will praise the Lord, but when we go out, music's just entertainment. Sometimes I wish we would stand back when we're thinking about that and not just reflect on some of the kind of evil consequences and agendas that are involved this, but on the very meaning of this distinction.

Entertainment. A nice word, actually, entretenir. What's it mean? It basically means "to hold in between." It's sort of captured by the word "pastime," not quite, but it does imply that this is how we while away the time. But if you think of it, why would you want to while away your time in a way that had no purpose, meaning, or intention?

By and large, things that have no purpose, meaning, or intention fill us with a kind of emptiness and despair. Surely, we don't think of this as fun? And yet, if we don't take entertainment seriously, then it means that somewhere in us there is the belief that we can slip into moments when the meaninglessness will be our preoccupation, and that that meaninglessness has some, I don't know, refreshing significance for us.

But what can that emptiness possibly refresh, except our sense of the insignificance of all those things which we otherwise take seriously? Entertainment, then, becomes the moment in which we stand back in order to reflect on the futility of our existence. And of course, in some existential sense, I suppose, that would be wonderful, especially if you enjoy the angst that results. But what isn't so wonderful is the fact that, when that becomes a characteristic pastime, it's a little bit as if we were to plug ourselves into a reverse energy outlet, one that drains away our energy, drains away our hope, drains away our aspiration instead of filling us with a positive hope and strength.

A society under the influence of such entertainment becomes more wan and loveless and empty as the years go by, until finally you can see the people in it as kind of atomized whirling dervishes, each of them turning more and more inward upon themselves until finally, they are no more.

I think that that image is one that ought to have some cogency for a people like ourselves, who look to God and His Son and the Scriptures for our understanding of the significance of things. Because we are warned of it in the Scriptures, I think--even in the first Psalm, you know? "God knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish."

I've often reflected on that contrast, because you could take it, I suppose, as a suggestion that the ungodly will be punished. Now, I don't think that's exactly what it says. It doesn't say, "The ungodly will be punished." It says, "The way of the ungodly will perish," and that means that you can have a choice: you can be or not be.

If you walk the way of the Lord, you walk a path that is known to being, and that ultimately, therefore, is itself real. If you walk the path of the ungodly, you walk a way unknown to the Absolute Being, unknown to being--something that seems to, but at some fundamental level does not, in fact, exist.

That's why, in that same psalm, the unrighteous are compared to chaff before the wind, an image that suggests vapor and smoke, things that dissipate and leave only emptiness behind. Perhaps that's why the things that we now adulate in entertainment were once called "dissipation," because they represent a way that, at the end of the day, flies into the air like smoke and disappears--that not only, when we reflect upon it, can fill us with a sense of emptiness but that lures us into the sacrifice of that great gift of life that God has given us, for the sake of the empty nothing.

Now, of course, it's an empty nothing that's dressed up in glamorous terms, but it's dressed up in glamorous terms only until we are visited by its consequences--which, then, we don't want to see.

The soul that is prepared by music, for instance, and by the form of self-expression and dress that goes along with our music, the music of our time, is ultimately a soul that indulges itself in sexual promiscuity, that does not have heed for the consequences, that therefore must someday face the decision as to whether or not to abort that child in the womb, and that, ascribing no particular substantive significance to that life--since you can't ascribe substantive significance to another life when you're not fully conscious of the significance of your own--snuffs it out.

We should see these things as a continuum, because they are, that what seems over here to be a moment of distraction and play becomes, over here, a dance of death--a dance that plays itself out millions of times over, because the conscience that is informed by this kind of entertainment has been educated to accept the very heart of death as an engaging reality, to embrace the nothingness that is implied by it even though real life may be on offer.

Seen in this way, as I said in the beginning, the music and entertainment culture of our time is actually a great weapon against the soul, but to what end? Well, I think to the end of destroying it. And this therefore means that it goes hand in hand with some of the other trends and tendencies in our society, since almost everything seems to move this way now.

Is it surprising that we should have a music and entertainment culture that ends in the dissipation of the soul, when we live in the context of a scientific understanding of human things that denies the very possibility of its existence, that has drained from us all significance, because we are simply the excretions of material chance, having no intrinsic meaning or significance beyond that which, in the frenzy of our experience, we can ascribe to ourselves?

The music and that self-understanding go hand in hand. It could be, in one sense, why the music of our time is so disorderly, why it represents not only wicked behavior, but wicked behavior with a self-righteous attitude. That self-righteous attitude is because of that undercurrent of assumption that, somehow or another, this dissipation represents real knowledge; that, somehow or another, even at its heart it represents the only kind of courage that matters anymore: the courage to live in the void without clinging to the myth that God exists to relieve it of its emptiness.

And so, much of what appears to be the power of this popular culture, I think, comes from that kind of reversal of virtue--an understanding of courage which has a relationship to the old one, because it does involve a willingness to risk and surrender life, but it is not the risk and surrender of a physical life, not the risk and surrender of even social and moral life. It is the risk and surrender of any significance to life whatsoever, and those who are "brave" enough to embrace it then become the icons of this world of entertainment.

I think it's one of the reasons why you don't do very well in the modern entertainment culture if you insist on behaving like a person who thinks life has meaning. No, it's true! You must accept--this is one of the reasons why I think it represents what I call the imperialism of evil, because it is not content simply to be tolerated or to be left alone; it must expand; it must convert; it must, in a sort of dark sense, evangelize until all things have been converted to be like itself.

I have noticed this when I reflect on the life and career of some of these stars and other people, and it seems that the ones who have even a modicum of decency reach a kind of--what would they call it in the employment world--a glass ceiling? You can go thus far and no farther. If you're willing, however, to step across the line and indulge yourself in some really wicked fantasies, take all your clothes off in front of a camera and do whatever comes to mind, then you can receive the highest awards.

My example of this in recent times would be Halle Berry. She's actually not a bad actress. You know, a lot of people who are very good looking aren't good actresses, but she's not a bad actress. She did some films that actually showed her acting ability and so forth, but nothing came to her in the way of recognition from Hollywood until, what? Until she started taking her clothes off and then the made the raunchiest film that one can imagine without jumping off into pornography, pure and simple--which they will do eventually, don't get me wrong, but which they still hold back from at the moment.

Why would it be the case that you can't get the greatest awards until you have embraced the heart of the corruption? Because that corruption is the agenda. Because in one sense, that corruption has become the "meaning" of our entertainment.

It's one of the reasons why I don't think it can ever be approached without suspicion. I can't believe the folks who actually will think that they can go to a film, listen to a piece of music, and so forth and so on, and [think] that there is something innocent involved in this entertainment. The innocence of our entertainment was lost decades ago, and the lack of innocence has become more and more confirmed, because what does "innocence" mean, after all? I think the word, literally in Latin, innocere, means "something that does no harm." Right? "Nocere," the root of the word "noxious," harm-doing. "Innocere," meaning, "not doing any harm." When you think it through, what does greater harm than the music in our society? Luring people to promiscuity; luring them to drugs; luring them to styles of action and dress that correspond to the lowest possible models for human behavior.

This is also kind of interesting, isn't it? I mean, the icons of the popular culture, held out even to the very young, involve people who cavort in front of cameras wearing outfits that, not so long ago, would have been considered obscene; standing on Eighth Avenue looking for business in New York. And I was thinking about it yesterday as I was driving around--where was I?--I was going into Washington for a meeting. I haven't had to do that very much lately, which is good, but as school was back in and GWU, George Washington University, was back in session, I was driving down the street and something in my mind is just shaking its head, because you can see of course the tawdry influence of the icons of popular culture in the way that people wear their clothes and what they wear.

And if I may say so, if I am not looking at people who are pimps and prostitutes, then I am looking at people who are really guilty of false advertising when I go down that street. Right? Because they are certainly advertising to the world an understanding of themselves that would correspond to this corruption.

But you know, it's become such second-nature to us now--and I don't even think we realize it, or stop to think it through. For instance, you go to any magazine rack you see today, and the word that will figure on the cover somewhere--whether it's the women's magazines, the men's magazines, the home magazines, and so forth--"sexy." Right? It has become a word that has lost all its, even, faint odor of prurience.

"Sexy." What does a word like this mean? Well, I mean, literally translated, I think the "y" on the end would at one time have been "alike," right? "Sex-like." OK? And what does that suggest? It suggests that someone who is out there, and who has essentially adopted a way with themselves that is "sex-like"--or, to put it another way, who has adopted a way with themselves in order to impress upon the world their fitness for sexual activity. And so, the word "sexy" actually means "fit for sexual activity," but it is a fitness for sexual activity that is judged by what standard? That is judged strictly by the standard of instrumentality, by the standard of what pleasure will result from the use or abuse of this instrument which has dressed itself up in a certain way so that you'll know that, like a well-put-together car, it's going to drive well.

But what does the use of a word like that becoming so prevalent imply about the understanding of what we're doing? I mean, there might have been a time when, looking at the actual nature of the activity that's involved, the fitness for that activity would have been more involved with--oh, I don't know--folks who project an air of motherliness, people who project the kindness that is needed to actually care for and raise a child, people who give evidence somewhere in their being of the selflessness that must be at the heart of real parenting, people who are capable of the mutual consideration and reliance that lies at the heart of married life.

Now, is there anything in the way that Britney Spears dresses herself that would suggest any of these qualities? I think not.

And so it means that, in one sense, we have an understanding of this activity entirely divorced from anything that might be considered its real fruit. And that of course ought--and my formulation of that was an advised formulation, because it ought to bring us face to face with the true standard we should use for judging these things, and it's a standard that was provided by Our Lord. I'm not sure it's one we understand all the time, but it's there, because He told us to judge of people by, what? By their fruits. "By their fruits ye shall know them." See?

And I've always thought that an interesting way of looking at things, because it actually goes in a direction that's not very much emphasized, even when people think that they are being more profound. I mean, the superficial way of judging things is "by the cover," right? And we are warned against this in all the usual platitudes: "Don't judge books by their cover, don't judge people by their looks, don't judge folks by the outward signs," and so forth and so on. Get a little deeper and it becomes, "Can't just judge people by the professions that people make, and what they say with their lips," and so forth and so on. And then the folks come along who think that they're really practical and know what they are talking about, and they want us to judge by actions and effects, see--actions and consequences, isn't that right? And that, I think, is what passes for prudent wisdom in our world today.

It's also, by the way, the kind of reasoning that can then be turned around in order to relieve us of any sense of fear or guilt when it comes to certain kinds of activities. It's the reason why much of the corruption of our time can masquerade as innocent, because when you apply that standard of prudence which seems to be the one the wise aspire to--"judge it by its consequences"--two things can happen. You can engage in the activity in such a way that it has no consequences, and you can think of that in terms of the prevalent theme of our entertainment life as the "condom approach." We'll eliminate the consequences; we'll prevent the bad things from happening. That means that you can do it and not worry about it, because it doesn't have the bad consequences that everybody says it's going to have. We won't even go into what that bad consequence is; at least, we won't go into it for the moment, because it already involves--doesn't it--the standing of truth on its head.

But it also allows you to go even further. In our society now, a great battle is going on over what we're going to do with respect to homosexuality. The discussion of this has now moved into the political arena, where it will become more intense, but you and I both know it has been discussed in the entertainment arena for several decades, with increasing both frankness and high pressure in the direction of the acceptability of this kind of behavior. So, why is it acceptable? Well, it's acceptable because, apart from those illegitimate judgments that are only brought to bear on people because of faith and religion, apart from those illegitimate ways of looking at things, there are no consequences. Why on earth would we think there's something wrong, when there are no consequences?

Now, you and I might be a little less charitable, in that we look around the world at all the mayhem and death that has resulted from the enormous promiscuity that pervaded and pervades the homosexual community, and we might see that as a consequence--but we're not supposed to look at that. Whenever you feel tempted to look at that consequence you're to go home and watch--I don't know--"Philadelphia" or something, and overcome it.

Well, see, you laugh. Why was that movie so honored? If you've ever seen it, it's a so-so movie. Why was it so honored? It was honored because it was the media canonization of those who are, in one sense, the suffering martyrs of this culture, this entertainment culture of which we are speaking, and who represent in their person both the extreme of emancipated self-indulgence--an understanding, for instance, of human sexuality that has no end other than the pleasure and satisfaction of the parties involved; that's it! Can't be anything else!--that becomes the paradigm not just for sexual activity, but for all human activity.

Such activities can have no end other than the pleasure and satisfaction derived from them by the parties, because to posit such an end would require a place to stand apart from subjective experience. And looking for that place to stand would lead you, where? Well, right back to God, and there you must not go. See? And there you must not be allowed to explore.

All of this, then, coming from a way of judging things that looks at material things and says, "Well, what's the effect? What's the consequence?" Christ didn't tell us to do that. He said, "By their fruits ye shall know them," and what's interesting about fruit is that fruit is, in one sense, not an effect. It's a product, but not an effect. It's a product, but it's not a consequence. See?

I mean, if I happen to be standing near a tree when somebody cuts it down, and it falls on me and kills me, I am suffering the effects of that tree's existence. But the fruit is not, in that sense, an effect from a proximate cause. No. Actually, the fruit is very interesting, because the fruit is that which is produced by the tree but it's also, what? That which produces it. It is, in one sense, a product that refers us back to the beginning, that recapitulates the wholeness of which it is the fruit, and that therefore exists in a way that essentially respects the wholeness of that from which it comes.

Cause and effect don't necessarily have that kind of relationship. An effect might, in one sense, have nothing to do with the wholeness of the cause, might constitute something entirely separate from it in every respect--but not the fruit. The fruit is "of" the tree. It is, in that sense of its being, an expression of its nature, and a reference to, what? A reference to its essence, to its origins, to that which is the principle of its existence.

And I use the word "principle" advisedly, because it is that which refers to the first things. If you are to judge by the fruits, you must judge therefore in a way that respects the wholeness of the being, and that also takes account of its essence, of its principle, of its true origin. And if one sees in the fruit that which contradicts the principle, it is bad fruit. If one sees in the fruit that which fulfills it, then it is good.

But, see, the thing about judging something by its fruit requires that you go back to the beginning. It requires that you have some sense, some understanding, of both the origin and the end of that which you are talking about.

Now, tell me something. If we were to apply that standard to most of our entertainment culture, what would we do with it? Seriously. Well, I know one thing--we would take most of the music, and we would toss it into a vat of acid. No one of sense would listen to it, because it exists for the sake of denying the wholeness of our existence. It exists for the sake of accentuating that abyss which swallows up the meaning of our life! It exists for the sake of involving us in the moment in such a way that we forget the extension of our being from beginning to end which, in fact, reflects its nature and its true fulfillment.

The music does that, I think, in some ways more insidiously than anything else, because it is less articulate--and, of course, that which is less articulate is in some ways more insidious, because you are not going to be so clearly confronted with its possible effects until, well, it's too late.

But the films and things of this kind, I think, after a point, in them one clearly confronts this fruitlessness. One clearly confronts the sense that, if we're going to judge by the fruits, we would, on the one hand, have to judge by the poisoned stream that has been produced in our culture and those things which go beyond mere effects and which do not have to do merely with the numbers of people who are injured and killed, the numbers of families that are destroyed; no! Those things which go to the root for the disintegration of family, for instance, in America is due in great part to, what? To the denial of its wholeness. To the denial that sexual relations must exist in the context of that wholeness, and must always be judged in light of their fruit.

If you always judge human sexual relationships in light of their fruit, what must you always have in mind? Always. What is the fruit? The child! The child recapitulates the aim and end. That which is separated from the thought of the child is that sense of denial of the wholeness of that relationship, of the wholeness of its meaning, of the wholeness of its fulfillment. At the very heart of our understanding in the entertainment sense--music, movies, everything else, of human sexual relationship--at its very heart lies this denial! And as a result, it confesses from the very beginning that, by the standard of our Lord, it represents a great danger.

But, we don't always think of this because we've grown up to think of it as harmless, as innocuous, as something that, well, doesn't have effects, that is simply meant to engage one for the moment--but in that moment, one is changed. And this I think is the insidious problem here. And that insidious problem arises especially in our time, because the culture of which we speak is so pervasive.

I was thinking about it the other day, because one of the most pervasive phenomena in what we would have to think of as entertainment is that which finances it. What finances our entertainment? Some form of commercialization, and the best example is advertising. Well, I mean, it doesn't take much to see the extent to that pervasive reality--which, by the way, is put in such a way that advertising is exposed to everyone, right? The youngest children, the oldest adults, it doesn't matter who--we walk through a sea that, even when we are not paying attention to it, we are still being bombarded by it.

I always think of this especially when I'm in airports. Everywhere around you it's going on, coming from all those TV monitors, on the little billboards, passing by the magazine rack--in one way or another, the commercialization that underlies our entertainment is the other engine that underlies its corruption, because it's so necessary that it contributes to the pervasiveness of that culture, and therefore takes what was once pushing the envelope and puts it at the very mainstream of our pervasive existence.

My wife and I were reflecting on this the other day as we were watching some--what was it?--some "Fruit of the Loom" commercial. You look at that commercial and at one time, you know, you would have had to take that commercial home in a paper bag. Now, you watch it on television. And sad to say, the laughter is appropriate in one sense but in another sense, see, it bespeaks the underlying danger that I think is greatest for us. We've lived with this for so long that we don't realize it's killing us, and it is.

And I say it advisedly, and I say it even here. In the midst of fervor and faith, there is still that element of us which cannot escape the consequences of this time and this place. That means, in some sense, struggle as we might, there is still within us that carcass that we carry around as a consequence of just being here, having absorbed, and reacted to, and responded to, and engaged with a culture that has at its very heart the notion that the abyss that swallows up life itself is the heart of our entertainment, is a fit way to pass the time.

Now, I don't stand here and go through all this so we can all shrug and think how awful the world is and go about our business knowing that, come what may, we are drowning in a cesspool of ever-increasing corruption; no! One has to think through what's really going on, I think, in order to get back to an effort to think through the alternative.

And I don't know why we think that's so hard, now, except that we have come up in a time when it's kind of taken for granted that this nihilistic entertainment culture is the true meaning of entertainment. That's not so. There is a different way to build one's pastimes. Instead of starting from an effort to produce in the moment an intensity that distracts from the reality of its meaninglessness, one can begin from the other side. And that side is especially available to us.

And I guess that's why I really wanted to come today. I wanted to talk about this because of what Franciscan University represents. In the midst of a culture where entertainment has this kind of agenda and this kind of meaning, what might be the purpose of Franciscan, which in so many ways in the course of my experience is a university that is coming to represent a cutting edge, if you like, of spiritual renewal for people?

What we confront here is a task that is quite comparable to and even greater than what Hercules faced with the Augean stables. And maybe if we think of it that way, we're going about it wrongly. And that's where I'd like to start in thinking about it, because I don't think our job is to clean up this culture. I don't think it is. I don't think that has anything to do with us. Because if your job is to clean up this culture, then you're going to be taking rags and water and you're going to be washing off what's there and polishing up what's there, and so forth and so on--and if anything that I said has a faint smack of truth in it today, what's there is rotten to its core.

At its deep heart, it is objectionable. It represents in a sense that which is not, for the way of the ungodly shall perish. And what is future for us is present to God, so if the way of the ungodly shall perish, you'd better take heed, because that "shall" is entirely from our perspective. It is something that in one true sense has already come about. The way of the ungodly perishes; it is perishing; it is death; it is dead; it is deadly.

But we profess another way, a way of life. Is it possible to conceive of an understanding of entertainment that begins from the celebration of life? Obviously. I mean the very word [unintelligible], but something in our time, you see, tends to leave a little part of our soul reserved against that. "Yeah, that way of life, sure, but are you going to have any fun? Life is wonderful, but what about fun?" I almost think that--and I don't mean this in the way you might think--that one's start towards this, as one is thinking through how one builds towards a positive understanding of entertainment, it might be to reject the notion of "fun."

What is "fun," anyway? I'm serious. Now, I had an understanding of it when I was a child, but see, when I was a child, my time and my responsibilities were two separate things, and so, it was quite possible for me to pass time without reference to those responsibilities. After a certain point in life, isn't that impossible? And isn't that impossibility actually a good thing? Because to pass one's time without reference to how one answers for that time--that's what responsibility means--would mean that you pass your time as if there is no one to answer to for it. And from our point of view, that means that you are passing your time without reference to God.

With reference to God, and with reference to that standard of our relationship with Him that Christ suggests, no moment of our life is without responsibility, for, in every moment of our lives, we are answering the question that God has put to us in our very existence. We are responding to His gifts. We are rising to those occasions which are the consequence of His providence.

So, in that sense, there is no "fun." And because I say that, you say, "Oh, that sounds terrible!" No, it doesn't, actually--since, given how we just defined "fun," who'd want it?

Now, I'm not saying that was always the way fun was described. I mean, I have fun playing with my children. I have all kinds of fun that actually involves the fulfillment of my vocation before God. But being as how, in our time, this is a word that has become freighted with a sense of irresponsibility--freighted with it, by the way, to such a degree that every personality practically associated with the culture of entertainment typifies that irresponsibility. It's why, these days, nobody expects that stars and starlets and actors and singers and media people will stay married, because staying married is no fun. Staying married implies a burdensome sense of responsibility to something other than your own pleasure, and it is incompatible with the culture.

These things are not accidents. They are not quirks of the type of personality; no. We live with a culture of entertainment that selects for certain kinds of behavior because that behavior corresponds to its spirit, to its heart, to the emptiness that is its very soul.

The entertainment that responds to it, then, would be an entertainment that looks for the presence of what that entertainment culture denies. And I would think--as a matter of fact, I have found in life, that one of the best ways to pass time is to look for God everywhere. And I don't mean "look for Him" in the sense of sitting around with some empty words; no! To look for Him everywhere, to look for Him in every experience, to look for Him in every person, and in consequence of that looking and that exploration, one then deploys one's talents--words, music, whatever--in a way that expresses the result of that exploration.

I honestly believe, in the little reading that I've done, that somebody like Bach, when he wrote music, that this is what he was doing--because it was music that came from a place where God was revered, and that understood that that reverence cannot know boundaries, that it cannot know boxes, that it cannot know places where God is contained, that it must be everywhere and in everything. And so, in the poetry and in the music one is seeking to express that boundless encounter with the reality of God in this universe of His creation.

I think that that, in fact, would be a way of returning, but also of restoring, a true sense of what is involved even in the expressions of love, including what we call these days romantic love, with "romance" understood as that which leads to marriage and procreation, that which involves the difficult but also joyous business of finding one other with whom to share life in a special way.

There was a time, you know, when the music of popular culture did involve at least some modicum of respect for this, and down through the ages it led to incredible and extraordinarily diverse expressions of entertainment culture. I think that one must begin to look for this in the music, in the words, in the films, for even as, in a productive sense, one might make music in a way that reflects this constant willingness to be on the lookout for the Lord, I think you'll be able to recognize that in others, to hear in their sounds and to hear in the expression of their hear, a heart that has come off the road of such an exploration, that has paused for a moment in order to reflect and share the experiences that it found there.

In one sense, I think that this is what Christ exemplifies for us. There's a hymn that has run through my mind constantly, as I was thinking about and preparing for this talk. "'Dance, dance, wherever you may be. I am the Lord of the dance,' says He." What does that mean? Well see, I take it, at one level, to be a reference to what we are told in the Scriptures, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God," and we are told that "through Him all things were made," right? And you go back and you look at the account of the creation of the world, and at one level what is there in Scripture, especially if you consider the fact that God's being is comprehensive--so, when the Scripture tells us, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light," is it possible for us to imagine that light was somehow separate from God? I don't think so, because God is absolute; He's comprehensive.

There is, in one way of understanding it, no possibility of being without God. So, if God says, "Let there be light," His saying was not like our saying, "I'm here; the light's there." No! God's saying must have been different than that. For, as God spoke, so God was the light, receiving the word, and this in one sense I think is why Christ represents for us that Word, for He is the Word made Flesh. He is the Word in which the distinction between the word and the deed, between the word and the consequence, has been overcome in the power of God.

Well, what form of our expression is it, in which one is the music? One is the poem? One is the expression of the heart? That's what dancers do. That's what dancers do; they become what is beautiful. They take it upon themselves, and somehow manage in the way in which they comport themselves, to become in their very expression, in their very use of their body, they become that which they mean from the heart to convey.

And in that sense, to say that He is the Lord of the dance is to remind ourselves that He is the Lord of creation, and that we are invited by Him to join in that dance of creation. For, we are, in one sense, a being like Him that has sprung into being, as it were, as an expression of the will of our Father God--and as He reminded us in His very presence here, that that relationship with God, even as it may seem as distant as it is possible for any beings to be from one another, is yet as intimate and close as the dancer to the moves of His dance.

This, I think, at some level from our Christian heart, is the real meaning of artistic expression. It is the real meaning of that which, in the various ways that we sum up as artistic creativity, human beings can somehow try to express that reality which Christ represents to us in its perfection.

And that means, of course, that at the end of it all, because we cease to be fascinated by fun, that doesn't mean that even at the level that is most easy for us to understand, we are not invited, called to, a kind of pleasure--but it is not the pleasure of that transient moment which evaporates and which comes and goes in such a way as only to impress us with the insignificance of what we are. Rather, it is that pleasure which raises us up to a level of joy, in knowing that we have joined somehow in the sound, and in the word, and in the moment of our expression, with that glory which made the world and which remakes it through us in every moment of our lives.

Now, at some level, this does mean that our entertainment would probably be different in the sense that--well, see, think of it. Some of the greatest spirituals (and I always like that word, "spirituals"; there was a reason they called them that), some of the greatest spirituals that came out of the slave era were songs that people sang as they worked, songs that reflected the rhythm and the heart of their labor--sometimes a heart of grief, but sometimes, in spite of all, a heart of joy.

And this is how I think we would approach our sense of entertainment if we were going to live according to our faith, not as something that's over there, a thing that lets us withdraw from what we are; no! But rather, as something that comes off of our lives like a fragrance and that, like a fragrance, is in fact an expression of the very essence of what we are. In that sense, all our music and all our poetry and all those things which we admire as elements of the creative arts, they would be the spirituals of our lives, things that come out of that effort in us to live out the perfection of Christ's spirit within us.

And in consequence of that, I think that we would gain something--and we do--that goes beyond whatever it is that those people think of as "fun," because we don't have to seek it. Even as Christ came to save us, so in the midst of our work with Him the fragrance comes, to relieve us and to introduce us in the midst of it not just to our pleasures, but, to His joy, in the Lord.

And that, I think, in the end, would be the aim of our music, and by expressing that joy, it would become, what? Not just a way of passing the time, but a way of filling that time with our true vocation. For, as the fragrance of that joy comes off of us, it will move through the being of others until they, too, are drawn to the Lord. And this becomes the music that leads where, in the end, all good music should--not to a place of darkness and annihilation, but to the ultimate fulfillment of our life in truth.

Thank you very much.