By Cary Umhau

"I was born in a house with the television always on," sing David Byrne and the Talking Heads in their song Love for Sale.  What could be truer than that for most of us?   Yet even with the television blaring (and sometimes because of the television blaring), we manage to hear God's voice in the culture...because He's everywhere, and not only in a monastery.

We know that, but we also feel a certain tension.  Christians live in a gap between "Be still and know that I am God" and Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message."  I for one often feel the pinch, wondering how to mind the gap.

Witness a recent morning, when I started the day with quiet meditation on events in Jesus' life using Ignatian exercises designed to help me see Jesus aright so that I "might be with Him, become more like Him and serve Him more."  After an hour or so in prayerful reflection on Scripture, I went to the gym carrying two novels, a year-end issue of Time, and an iPod with a Tim Keller sermon downloaded and an energy-pumping playlist.  I read from and listened to each in the course of an hour.  I also had access, anytime I looked up from my elliptical machine, to four television screens, each tuned to a different channel -- as I was invited to think about (for far less than 30 seconds each) the plight of freezing citrus, the unethical treatment of elephants, full-body scanners, "healthiest super-foods" and "why the Sun didn't swallow the Earth."  Just an average couple of hours for an average middle-aged woman, trying to orient myself towards God and live out the implications that flow from what I know and where and who I am.  All before 9 a.m. 

I'm used to trying to pay attention to everything all at once, yet sometimes I wonder if I fully take in any of it.  Sometimes I scream an Anthony Newley-esque "stop the world; I want to get off" as I long for solitude and silence.  At other times I want to be in the middle of the action.  I still wish I'd been in the crowd for Oprah's and The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" flash mob scene on Michigan Avenue last fall. Yes it was commercially produced and motivated; but it was an orchestrated act of joy, and I even imagine it as a foretaste of heaven (probably with different lyrics).

Feeling that tension, I've been thinking lately about the dichotomy between the positive role of popular culture in my devotional (yes, devotional) life and the overload I feel when "the world is too much with (me)." 

In one week recently, I encountered two things that - together - helped me start thinking through that dichotomy. First I read Thomas De Zengotita's Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (a book assigned by Steve Garber in his "Reading the Word and Reading the World at the Same Time" course) and then I attended a day-long seminar called "Finding God in the Culture" at Wesley Seminary in Washington, DC, taught by author and professor Greg Garrett.  And the juxtaposition of the two in a few short days caused me to wrestle out some manageable parameters for my own life so that I can attempt to be culturally informed, stimulated and relevant but not unaware of or bowing to the influences of culture that leave me begging for an isolated cabin in the woods without electricity for months at a time.

It is De Zengotita's premise that there is very little left of life that we experience outright -- as opposed to having it mediated and interpreted and represented for and to us in ways that flatter us, offer an endless array of options for our personal satisfaction (tempting us towards arrogance and narcissism), and divorce us from reality.  The contrast between experiencing raw, untouched nature and visiting a nature preserve with signs explaining the "lifestyles" of the animals serves as illustration. 

He talks about the disparity between how Americans experienced Pearl Harbor and then the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  The former "merely" happened (people heard about it, yes, but when they talked about it, the conversation was about the event itself) as opposed to JFK's death, which happened and then was quickly "mediated," becoming about us (as evidenced by the way we ask still "Where were you when you heard about JFK?").  De Zengotita himself was in a Method acting class, and the students thought the announcement of JFK's death was a prompt to which they were supposed to respond.  Tragedy with a twist.

I've lived so "mediated" that I didn't see it until he told me. But even as I began to reflect on how I, a fish, could have not known I was living in water (what else is there, really?), I didn't want to throw out the baby with the bath water (or the fish with the scummy fishbowl water).  What is the role of media and culture in my life as a Christian?

Before reading the book I could have told you that I enjoy culture in many forms, that I don't think Christians should live in bubbles plastered with Bible verses and Christian-themed art, singing only Christian songs, and eating Christian food.  It has long mattered to me to be able to navigate the world that most of the people I love inhabit (as if it were a separate world!).  It has long mattered to me to serve as a tour guide, when invited, to show those who think God is absent where He may be peeking out from behind some cultural reference or where He may be lurking, even in graffiti. I have long felt God's presence in the common graces of music, art, and movies. I do know that I straddle two worlds (worlds which I wish were more seamless). I know that dualism began to die with Luther.

Yet I hadn't really thought about how much of life I live through the lens of someone else's choices about what I see and how I see it, how much of what I experience is designed to cater to me as a consumer, or flatter me as a repository of truth and meaning, even in my most banal, postmodern "whatever" utterances. I hadn't focused on how much of life I interpret to others even as I am living it (as in "it hasn't happened until I post my pictures on Facebook").

And as I mused about De Zengotita's Mediated with a healthy degree of horror, along came Greg Garrett and his "Finding God in the Culture" seminar.  Garrett is an academic who teaches people how to use the culture to find God.  His books cover Hollywood, the Simpsons, U2, The Matrix, superheroes and plenty of Scriptural truth.  His seminar at Wesley Seminary brought a winsome, welcome use of media into liturgy (from a Cool Hand Luke clip in the morning liturgy to the celebration of a "U2Charist") as he taught us about incarnational theology. 

He validated in teaching so much of what I know from experience and in the Bible: that we can't escape God's reach anywhere, that Christ is "in all things, and in him all things hold together."  We live embodied, with physical realities that are subject to and tools of a loving, redemptive Creator, making impotent the dualism that delineates "holy" and "unholy" along lines of "Christian and approved" and "unchristian and unapproved." 

That fits my experience.  Some days St. Ignatius is my guide; at other times Tracy Chapman accompanies me.  There are days when the only way I can pray is to listen to my iPod, letting the randomness of the shuffled playlist propel me where the Holy Spirit leads.  Perhaps I'll hear Dan Fogelberg's Part of the Plan, think of high school for a moment, and then realize the truth of...

I have these moments all steady and strong
I'm feeling so holy and humble
The next thing I know I'm all worried and weak
And I feel myself starting to crumble
The meanings get lost and the teachings get tossed
And you don't know what you're going to do next
You wait for the sun but it never quite comes
Some kind of message comes through to you.
Some kind of message comes through
And it says to you...

Love when you can
Cry when you have to
Be who you must
That's a part of the plan
Await your arrival with simple survival
And one day we'll all understand...

That's a version of the Psalms in its realism and surrender.  It can lead me to regret my inconstancy. It can lead me to accept.  It can lead me to God.

Or perhaps I'll be lifted up by Dave Brubeck's soaring All My Hope, a gloriously raucous Eucharist piece, part of his "To Hope! A Celebration" mass, remembering that Jesus' body and blood are supreme good news for me and that I should dance to the communion table.

Or I'll resonate with the Ramones "I Wanna be Sedated," admitting that I'm a bit maxed out.

Am I saying that every word of every song is God-glorifying and edifying and overtly spiritual?  Heavens no.  But I am saying that God meets me where I am, creating something in me with - as they used to say on television commercials - "tools found around the house."

So I wrestled with the differing reactions I had to De Zengotita ("media saturation can be too much") and Garrett ("yes, God touches me through culture"), wondering where the line is for me.  And I realized that the cultural line for me is drawn at the intersection of "me focus" and "God focus."  Too much mediation leads me to narcissism; appropriate use of media leads me to God. 

De Zengotita talks about how the media exposes us to unlimited options for our own consumption, among which we can pick and choose, creating our perfect "me world." In that default mode, I'm the star in my own life. And as I think about what to do on a given day, I wonder, "What would I do?"... as in "What would I, the character in my reality show, do to stay in character?" In purely mediated mode, it's easy for me to be arrogant, displaced from God and others.  I can ride along in my hermetically sealed car which I designed online (I'm not a sucker who would buy a car off the proverbial shelf, after all), listening to my own songs on my own iPod.  And from the privacy of that car, I can Twitter about it ("Grooving to Dishwalla, peeps"), update my Facebook status ("Cary is road tripping to see her BFF"), and stop for lunch when my GPS subscription tells me that I'm near a Road Food-approved regional restaurant (previously scouted out by other individuals who wanted to find one-of-a-kind, non-chain surprises along the highway). 

Except that now we individuals all see each other coming and going (much like the New Radicals express in Jehovah Made This Whole Joint for You):

So original in her black lipstick
listening to some obscure band
But isn't she pissed that all the other non-conformists
listen to that same obscure band.

I (and you) live with the constant stress of wondering if we're losing our edge, losing our specialness, and whether we are indeed choosing well, when five new options present themselves every second.  We're in danger of being obsolete. We're numb.  No one can keep up with the raging river of alternatives.

Witness this video on information technology.  You may have seen it, and the video itself is probably outdated, but it serves a point.  It says that the amount of technical information alone is doubling every two years.  So for those in technical schools, the rate of new knowledge is so fast, that half of what a student learns in the first year of a four-year degree will be outdated by year three.

You snooze, you loose.  You loose even if you don't snooze.  We can't compete.  We can't relax.  We have to protect our territory from others.  We're mediated; God help us!  The medium remains the message.

Yet the medium is only one message.  There is a bigger message, flowing from God's good news, the Biblical metanarrative, which sets us firmly in the greatest story ever told, shows us our place (made in God's manifold image, yet stained by our sin), and assures us that all will be set right through Christ, whose kingdom we are charged with loving and shepherding, each in our own way, through our particular gifts and vocations.

We are physical people in geographically diverse places in a particular time in history.  We Christians are responsibly implicated by where we are and what we know. Each of us has subcultures in which we live and move and have our being.  And we need to learn to read our subcultures, to know and love them.

Many today will not set foot in a church, but will experience a transcendent sense of community and belonging at a concert.  Many will hear song lyrics that invite a hopeful "wonder if."  The truest stories told in movies grip the human heart and draw us in.  God reaches us through the culture, in the mediated messages we hear.  He is all and is in all, and we can't relegate his movement to Sunday morning church services. 

As a writer, my part in the priesthood of all believers is to engage and make use of words, sentences, paragraphs and stories (the tools of my trade) for redemptive purposes, knowing that redemption flows from reality.  To isolate myself from stories that aren't pretty or wrapped in a bow is to disallow or uninvite redemption.

Many stories we will hear (including those the media bring us) demand grief and call for raging against the "what is," even as we long for and pray for the "what will be."   Yet as uncomfortable as grief is, it's not optional; a Christian worldview demands lament. 

Lest the grieving come close to destroying us, we do it in the context of abiding, biblically-mandated abiding in Christ. Which isn't dull, passive nothingness.  It's active wonder, vibrant listening, and utter responsiveness.  As I say yes to cultural engagement, I must be objective enough to "be still and know God," seeing Him in ways that aren't overt spiritual disciplines.

Contrast this with being mediated to death with flattering representations that cause me to believe myself the center of the universe, a false illusion if ever there was one.

Since the truth will set us free, reality matters. Media is valuable to us when it tells the truth, tells stories that resonate. Created things are vehicles of grace.  But good stories and true lyrics are common graces that lead to more of God, not to more of me.

So for me, after wrestling with where I fit in the gap between silence and cacophony, between a monastery and a flash mob, I am thankful for seeing the ever-growing media saturation, the fishbowl I lived in without even knowing it. 

And there will still be days when God meets me as I watch Garden State for the umpteenth time.  And there will be other days when I walk in the woods by the river, sans iPhone, see a Great Blue Heron, have no one to tell and no way to Twitter about it, and resort to -- what else? -- praise!

Cary Umhau is Communications Director of The Washington Institute.