Porn & The Good. The True. The Beautiful.

The other day as I was doing some research, I stumbled upon the website of a glossy women’s magazine. I was thoroughly disappointed but not shocked to find the magazine unashamedly promoting porn. It’s not just a men’s issue anymore. Porn and talk about porn is trendy. The porn industry and its consumers are successfully marketing themselves to adults and children. Christians aren’t exemplars in this area either. Many believers are trapped in the throws of a porn addiction and need support from the body of Christ to help free them from slavery. But lest you think I am merely going to rail against porn in this post, I raise the issue because something greater is at stake. I fear that many of us do not have large souls nor large imaginations. We have not tasted of the beauty and goodness of God. We salivate over vile paltry things, laying our lives down for innumerable death-filled hoaxes that consume us. But God, through the good, the true, and the beautiful calls to us. He calls us to something higher, to beautiful, good, satisfying, healthy life. He calls to us in the streets, in creation, in our lives, through beautiful  music, literature, art, films, the church, and others, perhaps through this post. He calls to us most loudly through Scripture. But more often we choose death instead of life because we don’t know what life looks like, what it tastes like. But we do get hints of it in the good, the true, the beautiful, in this life. All of the time. God’s fingerprint and life-filled breath is all over the universe. If we cannot see, if we cannot taste or feel it, perhaps our senses are out of whack. We are sick or bent up. That is the reality of sin.

So if you are drowning (whether a Christian or not) and have little hope, if you know that there has got to be more to life than this, please receive this answer: there is. God has not abandoned you to death or a meaningless, beautiless, pitiful, existence. God in Christ calls out to you and wants to set you free to live and to taste of the good, the true, and the beautiful in the midst of a suffering world. And then you too can tell others that what the ancients have been saying about God in Christ is true, because you experienced it (it is true regardless of our experience, but we are better able to explain that which we experience).

Although I am not saying that the theology in this particular song is completely accurate, I think the song Viva La Vida by Cold Play hints at what I’ve been talking about in the post. Coldplay hints at that which is beyond us (the good and the beautiful calling out to us). They sense it and I think we can sense it in their song. I post it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvgZkm1xWPE

Tomorrow, I will let C.S. Lewis speak to this topic.

May you taste of God today in the good, the true, and the beautiful that Christ has brought to us in creation and through his resurrection.