Purity: What Goes In

I was reading Emily T. Wierenga the other day, catching up on her newer posts and found myself reflecting on a change.  Not a change I made, but a change that happened and doesn't let me be the same person I was before.  And it all hinged on purity, on what comes in and what goes out.

I thought about my childhood, about the limitations that were placed on my home, on me.  I didn't listen to popular music in the 80's.  I thought Amy Grant was the world's biggest music superstar.  Madonna?  Cyndi Lauper?  AC/DC?  I learned about them in middle school and high school, when I went to dances and spent the night with friends and we played music and I thought, this is good stuff.  I read children's books, I devoured Anne of Green Gables and The Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley Twins.  When I was 12 or 13, my sister and I discovered that the Twins had grown up and gone to high school...we brought that series home from the library and our father read one chapter and declared them off-limits until we were actually in high school.  Liz created a hiding space in her closet and we brought more Sweet Valley High home anyways, we read about drug experimentation and hickeys and driver's ed.  We found Lois Duncan and Fear Street and I was grossed out but intrigued, and I kept going back to that wall in the library, the one behind the librarian's desk where you had to show your library card and could only get the books if it wasn't a "children's" card.  And then a friend discovered Harlequin Romance novels.  These also became covert artifacts, read inside the covers of parent-approved books, smuggled in backpacks and traded from locker to locker.  The words inside were like a secret language, words that I could pronounce but never used together in such a way..."thrust" and "clench" and "moan" and "ecstasy".

Then there was TV.  I don't ever remember watching Sesame Street or The New Mickey Mouse Club.  I sat beside my parents and watched Hill Street Blues and Star Trek, and sometimes late at night I lay in my bedroom doorway and watched Saturday Night Live while my parents guffawed on the couch, unable to see me unless they came out for a bathroom break.  I can still remember Wednesday evenings watching 90210 from the very first episode.  When I was 10, I watched Grease everyday at my babysitter's house for an entire summer.  I learned all the songs and would jump up and dance along with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.  I didn't see it for awhile after that, but rediscovered it when I was 16...although by then I realized that the entire movie was about sex and drinking, there was so much that I still didn't understand, wouldn't understand fully until I became a wife and experienced it first-hand.  My sister and I had the distinction of being the only kids in our church group who watched ThunderCats.  Apparently the other moms and dads had decided it was too violent?  I'm not totally sure what the uproar was about that show; it was a cartoon about anthropomorphic cats in space who battle a reanimated Mummy.  Later, these would be the same boys who showed me Reservoir Dogs and It.

The point of all this to say that when I was little, I didn't want to be.  I wanted to be grown and mature and an adult, and I thought tearing through pop culture was the way to get there.  I never once thought about turning off the TV or walking out of a movie theater, even when I watched American Psycho.  I didn't want to read the fluffy, Amish novels that entranced my mom; I thought mature, adult-themed books would give me a knowledge I didn't have.  I didn't make a change, but something changed.  Maybe it was becoming a wife and mother and watching pieces of my heart dislodge and roam the earth in the bodies of others; maybe it was my baptism and my prayer to share my Father's heart.  Maybe I realized that being an adult is dramatically different from the books and movies.  But I realized I didn't want to read Danielle Steel anymore.  I didn't want to watch Quentin Tarantino's movies; Kill Bill Vol 1 was the first movie I ever walked out of.  I cringed the day I dug out one of my cd's I made in college, and song after song was about "chicken heads" and "magic sticks" and "ghetto booties".

These days, I really enjoy singing along to Dora the Explorer and Seeds Worship, and I love hearing my boys belt out every word.  I'm by no means perfect, and this is not to make anyone feel bad for enjoying Jay-Z or The Walking Dead.  I like Mad Men and Smash and Once Upon a Time.  My favorite books I've read lately are Gone Girl and The Passion of Mary-Margaret.  I still watch movies, and occasionally make it to the theater.  But I have a line.  I can only take so much before I'm done, the book is gone, the movie is returned, the station has been changed.  My heart can't take the hurt, the misguided, the dirtiness.  I pray for the people reading it, creating it, marketing it.  I pray that they see there still is a "right" way to live.  I pray that we all see the path we are on and where we are going.  With all the media emphasis on "de-sensitizing" among our kids, I've never heard anyone talk about re-sensitizing.  But I can say its happened to me.  I just can't force myself through the gore and the violence and the breasts and the crude way we discuss it all.  I've found that, although the romance novels got the terminology right, they missed the tenderness, the privacy that comes with marital love.  Hollywood directors don't usually show the grieving families, the orphaned children and abandoned spouses that are the real by-product of the gun shoot-outs and lives of crime their characters act out.

I choose what I take in.  I skip over ones that I know are going to bother me, and I walk away from things that go too far.  I don't feel like I'm missing anything anymore...I know I'm holding onto something more precious than authors like EL James can tell me about.