NCCL Catechetical Newsletter
June 1, 2005

TO LOVE THE WORLD THE WAY IT IS:

Integrating Media Messages and the Spiritual Life

By Rose Pacatte, FSP

(A somewhat edited version of this article appears in the July 2005 issue of Catechetical Leader, www.nccl.org; used with permission)

Last year I had the opportunity to make a 30-day retreat, or Spiritual Exercises, at our Generalate in Rome. Although the venue is located about twenty minutes from the Vatican on a busy bus route, the building, and garden quickly became a sacred space of silence.

Bl. James Alberione, founder of the Daughters of St. Paul

I knew I wanted to make this month-long retreat based on the Ignatian method that our Founder, Bl. James Alberione, S.S.P. (1884 – 1971) had adapted for the members of the Pauline Family (1) ut I had not fully realized why. I discovered that I was desperately in need of silence.

When you make a 30-day retreat you start to hear different sounds. Instead of phones ringing, pagers buzzing, television blaring, people talking, and movies beckoning, I became used to the small noises of everyday life. Quiet steps in the stairwell, roosters crowing early in the morning from the backyard of the convent of Russian Orthodox nuns next door, and the drone of heavy, black Roman mosquitoes flying lazily through the chapel air.

The retreat director told us at the beginning that this experience was about God loving us and us needing God, not about obligation. We were free. Over and over during the retreat my need for God became evident to me as I rumbled around the limits of my soul experiencing God’s love in that silence. It was a re-kindling of spiritual fire and a daily conversion for which I will always be grateful.

A silent month-long retreat seems a luxury in our fast-paced, noisy existence, and for me it was a once in a lifetime experience. When it was over, I returned quickly to reality and its sounds. I was the same, but changed, because the spiritual exercises are ongoing. I was not just hearing life now; I had become a listener, a seeker of the sacred silence of God’s love amid the clamor of daily life. For me life includes the sisters in my religious community, the people with whom I work and share faith, and every form of entertainment and information media in the convent and the many movie theaters in the Los Angeles area. It’s my job to engage in media and cultural literacy as an expression of my communications ministry as a Daughter of St. Paul. And I happen to like my job a lot.

But spiritual exercises or no, to integrate media messages and the spiritual life is a demanding task that requires silence, openness, awareness, listening, discernment, and action. In this article I would like to propose a process that has worked for me.

1. Define and Embrace Spirituality

Once we affirm silence as a state of being as well as a state of mind integral to the spiritual life, we can move on to how we understand spirituality. Traditional spirituality has a variety of definitions. Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) wrote, “The spiritual life is first a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied; it is to be lived.” Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, wrote, “Spiritual life is the banquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfillment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed upon it.”

To me, spirituality is the free, intimate, personal relationship with God, a dynamic response to God’s love. The spirituality of my religious community is a way of life rooted in the Gospels and the Letters and life of St. Paul that helps me integrate faith and the reality of everyday life; we call it Pauline spirituality. It is a spirituality that integrates love for self, for Christ, all people, and the world. Pauline spirituality is one expression of Catholic spirituality among many, such as Franciscan, Ignatian, Dominican, and so forth. For Paulines, spirituality is about ways of seeing through the lens of the Gospels, taking the time to contemplate, discern, and in our case as citizens of the 21 st century, to listen to and view deeply the world, especially its media culture. To be alive in the spirit in our day and age is to be able to say at any given moment with the disciples on their way to Emmaus: “Were not our hearts burning within us as he talked with us along the way?” (Luke 24:32)

There is one essential attitude for living the spiritual life amid the visual, audio, and commercial noise that I found best expressed by John M. Staudenmaier, SJ in his article on the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, To Fall in Love with the World: Individualism and Self-Transcendence in American Life (2)Staudenmaier says, “We [early 21 st century] capitalists need, it seems, an inner discipline that honors our urgent hunger for self-understanding and respect the anxieties that burden us while instilling the confidence and courage it takes to love the world…” To fall in love with the world today, not the world of twenty or a hundred years ago, as Bl. James Alberione used to encourage those who joined him. I call this longing for the past “nostalgism” and it is a spiritual dead-end that creates a dichotomy in us. It makes us work to recreate the past instead of working to bring God’s Word to the people of today and catechize in fidelity and relevance.

To love the world the way it is, is an incarnational approach to life and culture lived as the integration of faith and everyday reality. To paraphrase John 3:17, “For God did not send his Son into the culture to condemn it, but that the culture, through Christ, might be redeemed.”

Step one in the quest to articulate a media spirituality for catechists, then, is to fall in love with the world, the culture, today.

2. Identify Sources of Spirituality

There are so many. We can find God in the world around us, nature, the babies who are limousined past us at the mall in their high tech strollers, the homeless on the streets with their cardboard signs begging for work, the elderly alone in their nursing homes, at the library, the mall, and in our churches and schools. If we are listening in the silence and viewing deeply, we can also discover God in technology, our work, leisure activities, study -- and the stories told through entertainment and information media. These stories communicate values, lifestyles, world-views, moral dilemmas, news, war and rumors of war, crime, natural disasters, human need, and astounding generosity.

Stories are the life of the soul. In her book, From the Beast to the Blonde: on Fairy-Tales and their Tellers, (1994, Chatto and Windus, London) Marina Warner recounts a tale from Kenya:

“While a poor man’s wife in the village thrives, the Sultana in the palace grows thinner and scrappier by the minute. The Sultan summons the poor man and demands to know the secret of his wife’s happiness. ‘Very simple,’ he replies. I feed her the meat of the tongue.’ The Sultan sends out for all the tongues money can buy – ox tongues and lambs’ tongues and larks’ tongues; still his sad Sultana withers away. He orders his litter, makes her change places with the poor man’s wife; she immediately starts to thrive, becoming the picture of health, plumper, rosier, gayer. Meanwhile, in the palace, her replacement languishes, and soon has become as scrawny and miserable as the former queen.

“For the tongue meats that the poor man feeds the woman are not material, of course. They are fairy tales, stories, jokes, songs; he nourishes them on talk, he wraps them in language; he banishes melancholy by refusing silence. Storytelling makes women thrive – and not exclusively women, the Kenyan fable implies, but other sorts of people, too, even Sultans.”

Although this seems like a paradox, to live in silence we must refuse it by communicating with others, it is not a contradiction. For we are sensual beings, and as Aristotle taught, there is nothing in the mind or soul that is not first in the senses. Once again, we are reminded of the Incarnation, of Christ who came to earth to dwell among us. Christ did not reject the world; he loved it and died for it.

The liturgy, the work of God, celebrates and reinforces spirituality because through Word and Eucharist, Christ’s life and ours are bound together in community.

Step two, then, of our quest to articulate a media spirituality for catechists, is to stop, look, and listen to the sources of spirituality around us today and discern that which can help us take the next best step in our spiritual lives.

3. Revisit Moral Integration

As Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R. attests in his books Spiritual Passages (Crossroad, 1983) and The Journey Toward God (Servant, 1999), moral integration is the first step toward leading a spiritual life. This means to reject sinful behavior and choose to lead a life according to the Ten Commandments, Beatitudes, and Works of Mercy, and the teachings of the Church, in daily conversion, prayer and the sacraments. This is not as easy as it may sound because it takes time to stop, look, and listen, choose and decide to change the path of one’s life where it does not converge with God’s plan for us: “You have been told , O man, what is good; and what the Lord requires of you, only to do the right and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

This notion of moral integration as the starting point of a flourishing spiritual life is nothing new. Yet it is good to be reminded of it here because this article is about “media spirituality for catechists” – and entertainment and information media tells stories that are about the moral struggle that people face every day but often deal with them in ways that are at odds with what catechists teach.

Who is a catechist? The word is from the Greek meaning to “make an echo” of God resound in the hearts of those with whom we share faith.

Yet, when a catechist parks her car in the church lot and enters the parish precincts to teach others about the faith, what does she bring along? What personal spiritual struggles, a good movie, or a distracting song playing in her head, a story chosen from the wealth of her life, and/or her spiritual and religious experience does she use to bring home the catechetical message for the week? How peaceful is she feeling at that time? How will she integrate all this dust, baggage and grace so that her example and teaching can make an echo in the hearts of her students? Through prayer and silence.

4. Become a Contemplative

There is a scene early in the film Sister Act (1992) where the new Sister Mary Clarence, played by Whoppi Goldberg, leads the sisters in a hilarious prayer of grace before meals. She casts around quickly in her head for anything that sounds like a prayer from her past and out it comes:

“ Bless us O Lord for these thy gifts which we are about to receive, and yea though I walk through the shadow of the valley of no food, I will fear no hunger; we want you to give us this day our daily bread and to the republic for which it stands and by the power invested in me I now pronounce us ready to eat. Amen.”

Prayer, in whatever form, is communication with God. Sister Mary Clarence’s prayer was poorly formulated, but as the movie continues with its less than accurate portrayal of religious life, her life and that of the sisters is transformed by song (“He who sings prays twice” said St. Augustine) and good works. Through comedy, Sister Act teaches us about silence, contemplation, moral integration, community, social awareness, and prayer in the modern world. For the more educated and spiritually sophisticated among us, Sister Act may seem to be too “low brow” to bring to catechesis, religious education or the homily. Yet from both Catholic and Protestant Christians that I know, the film continues to inspire people of all faiths to laugh, to reflect, and to do good. What more can we ask? Popular media can bridge the gap between Sunday and the rest of the week, so to speak.

In times of trouble, our communication with God is often fragile. We may default to prayers we have memorized such as the Hail Mary, Our Father, the Twenty-Third Psalm, the Serenity Prayer, or Prayer of St. Francis, because we are unable to think of anything else. This prayer is as precious as any we can engage in at the best of times, if not more so. In the stories that television shows, popular film, and music tell us, we can see and hear people who pray in all kinds of ways as they seek to resolve the dramatic (and/or comedic) conflict in their lives.

If we, as catechists dwell in silence and are paying attention to the world around us, we can find models and motive for prayer at every turn. The term that best embodies this attitude and world-view is contemplation.

5. Discover Theological Reflection

Theology is faith seeking understanding, according to St. Augustine. Theological reflection is to think theologically, to bring our faith into dialogue with our life experiences, to discern God’s presence and action in our daily life, to see and judge through the lens of faith and the teachings of Jesus through the Church.

If you have a copy of the 1989 Paulist Production film Romero, watch it from the very beginning for thirty minutes. Stop the film when Archbishop Romero (played by Raul Julia) declares over the dead bodies of the priest, the old man and the little boy, that there will only be one Mass in the archdiocese on the coming Sunday and that he will deliver a powerful message to those who resolve things by violence.

Romero’s actions exemplify the four steps of theological reflection in a continuing cycle (cf. Joye Gros, O.P., Theological Reflection, Loyola Press, 2001):

• Attending or paying attention : Romero walks around the group of people with his hands clasped behind his back, a symbol of non-involvement. Yet he listens to what the people are saying.
• Dialogue : Romero then confronts Father Grande (Richard Jordan) and tells him what people are saying about him, that he is a subversive. Grande tells Romero to listen to the people.
• Learning : Romero is forced to dialogue within himself about the experience he has had at the plaza, on the road where the soldiers force him to walk back to town with the people, in his room when he learns he is to be named archbishop, as he relates to the rich and powerful, at the bishops’ meeting and the watering down of their anti-violence statement, and finally when he is confronted with the consequences of violence. He learns and accepts the reality of his people because he has stopped, looked, and listened.
• Decision and action : When Romero sees the three bodies of those killed by the soldiers, including his friend Fr. Grande, he articulates the action he is going to take. Confronted by these murders, all that he has lived from the beginning of the film pours forth from his pastoral soul in a plan of action. He will no longer keep quiet.

By mindfully watching a character in a film or television program go through the stages of theological reflection as Romero did, we cannot help but personally enter into the experience. Because we are paying attention and viewing deeply, we will dialogue with the story using “inner speech” that is, by talking to ourselves. Better yet, have a conversation about the film with family and friends afterward, even at the water cooler.

Other films with characters that convey this process, even if not explicitly theological, are Message in a Bottle, Erin Brockovich, In Good Company, A Man for All Seasons, The Bridges of Madison County, Cry Freedom, It’s a Wonderful Life, Marvin’s Room, The Insider, The Crossing Guard, Bagdad Café, Crash, The Upside of Anger, and so forth.

Keep a journal of the films you see to reflect on the inner and metaphorical journeys the characters make. You will discover that you are actually reflecting theologically in the silence, perhaps deciding to change something in your own life to be more Christ-like or to resolve a difficult situation.

6. Become a Media Critic

In 1997, Sister Wendy told PBS’ Bill Moyers that everyone can be an art critic (3) because everyone brings who they are to the beauty, truth, and goodness of the artist’s creation, a place where the critic must confront his or her own truth. Sometimes people are afraid to express their interpretation because they are afraid they will be wrong. But everyone has the ability, and the right to interpret art, whether masterpieces on canvas, or movie, television, literature, news, songs, etc., according to their own lens made up of age, life-experience, education, faith, and moral formation. Interpretation of art is always subjective. Sometimes the artist’s work does not reflect beauty, truth, or goodness and the mindful critic will see this lack as well, though there will always be someone who does not agree.

Counting how many scenes of sex, violence, and bad language do not a critic make, though reviews that do this help parents decide what they permit their children to watch at what age. A critic goes beneath the surface and eventually sees, for example, that many films released in 2004 were saturated with nihilism and television always purveys consumerism as the American dream. These false ideologies give rise to scenes of sex and violence that can be extraneous to the context of the story and distract us from the ideological issues that are even more pervasive and insidious.

The fastest way to begin your career as a media critic is to articulate and write down the three main values, those transcendent ideals that guide your life. These can become your viewing criteria:

1.

2.

3.

Or, you may choose the principles of Catholic social teaching as your lens:

• Life and dignity of the human person with rights and responsibilities; are people represented with dignity regarding race, status, gender, culture and religion?
• Family, community and participation- the common good
• Preferential option for the poor
• Solidarity - one with the human family
• Integrity of creation
• Universal distribution of goods – rights of workers
• Subsidiarity : that no higher level community should strip another community of their capacity to see, judge and act on their own behalf

Next, interrogate what you see, hear, and read. Ask “why” the story is told in such a way, ask “why” women are objectified, ask “why” you do not find yourself represented in primetime television. Look to see if there are consequences to the choices and actions of the characters. Then, talk about your media experiences, unpack them and compare them to your criteria.

Finally, when confronted with a program like Desperate Housewives (which I happen to think is one of the smartest and funniest shows on television), do as my Presbyterian media literacy friend Teresa Blythe does: she exercises her moral imagination and thinks about what kind of advise she would give each of the women if she were their spiritual director.

Conclusion: The Media are here to Stay

When the catechist arrives at the door of her classroom, she brings with her a lot of baggage. In her mind and heart are her family and work, the ups and downs, the media stories and noise of the previous week, as well as her hopes for the coming week. Her students, who are often less able to integrate those experiences with their faith lives and developing spirituality, also come with noise and baggage.

If we have any hope of being relevant and faithful as catechists, let us begin by loving the world the way it is today, a visually and aurally noisy world mediated by technology, so that God’s word may resound in the hearts of those with whom we share faith.

This is what a media spirituality for catechists looks like.

And get yourself to a weekend silent retreat. Once you drink from that font, you will want to return for more.

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1) The Pauline Family is a group of ten congregations and institutes that founded by Bl. James Alberione; my congregation, the Daughters of St. Paul, was founded in Alba, Italy in 1915; www.pauline.org

2) Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, St. Louis (26/3) May, 1994.

3) Sr. Wendy in Conversation with Bill Moyers, 1997, check eBay for copies

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Sister Rose Pacatte , MEd in Media Studies, is a Daughter of St. Paul and director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Los Angeles. Rose has a Diploma in Catechetics and a Certificate in Pastoral Communications from the University of Dayton. She is the film and TV columnist for St. Anthony Messenger and is co-author with Peter Malone of the award-winning three volume series, Lights, Camera… Faith! A Movie Lectionary. Their newest book, Lights, Camera...Faith! The Ten Commandments is due out in 2006 from Pauline Books and Media.