First Parish Unitarian UniversalistFare for Fair Spirits
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist-Canton, MA
May 4, 2003
Preachers should preach from experience. We should preach what we know about. I don’t know much about watching television. I’ve always had jobs with lots of evening meetings. I never did get around to watching “ Twin Peaks.” I haven’t seen “Friends” or “Buffy,” or “ER” or “NYPD Blue” except maybe once. I was never a fan of “Startrek” and not even, though I kind of wish otherwise, “Saturday Night Live.” Once a few years ago, I was a free on a Wednesday evening and sat down to watch “West Wing” so I could see why some of you like it so much, and wouldn’t you know, it wasn’t on that week!
So, this will be a sermon about what I do know. I know about not watching television.
When I was a girl, our house wasn’t anywhere near the first on the block to get a television. I can remember feeling excited when we got ours, a feeling that has long been reinforced by a certain photograph in the family album. It shows my three sisters and me and a whole bunch of happy, grimy neighborhood kids, all of us just in from an afternoon of outdoor play, sitting on and all around the old basement sofa that faced our new tv. I don’t know what my father said that lured everyone’s attention toward the camera, but we all did look so happy and so grimy, watching and singing along with the “Mouseketeers” on our new tv.
It wasn’t long before my mother figured out that she didn’t much like television, especially not the commercials. She let us know, in no uncertain terms, “if you saw it on tv, I won’t buy it, so don’t even ask.” No point in clamoring for Maypo or Frosted Flakes or whatever else they advertised back then—she wasn’t about to have her shopping list determined by Madison Avenue!
It was difficult enough to make it to the next payday as it was, without paying prices inflated by advertising costs. She also believed we should think for ourselves. And, a lot of what they advertised on tv wasn’t good for you anyway, she said.
(Deleted due to time constraints)
[When that television broke, my parents were in no hurry to fix or replace it. I was in fourth grade. When we had to write a review of your favorite tv show, I had to go up to my teacher and explain that I’d need to write a book review instead. I don’t remember being embarrassed. Somehow, my parents managed to instill a sense of pride that we didn’t have a tv, that books were better anyhow.
Our tv did come back after not too long, though. Soon enough for me, as a sixth grader, to watch President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas and his cortege in Washington that November. And, in February, to want to watch the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. My parents didn’t know what to make of those wild British boys, so they asked the advice of the church choir director. Lucky for me, he thought the Beatles were extremely talented musicians, no matter their hairstyles and the girls going crazy, so I got to watch the show.
I’m sure I watched television like a normal junior high kid, but by time I was a senior in high school, I’d shunned it along with other materialistic aspects of our culture (this was the sixties, after all!). That year, I remember sitting down to watch a public tv program about environmental pollution, when all of a sudden, my father plopped down next to me. “May I join you?” he asked. “If you’re watching, it must be worth watching!”
So, I know just a little about watching television.]
Fast forward. I’m married with young children, and no tv, or at least not much of one. It was a small black and white tv. Our kids might watch Sesame Street on it when they were sick, but everything was kind of boring in black and white, and we liked for them to do other kinds things with their time when they were well. I remember that we got it out to watch Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and followed the news of the first Gulf War on it in 1991. We were waiting to purchase a color tv until we felt our younger child was beyond a certain impressionable age, which we thought might be age five.
So, my children know about not watching tv, too.
When the youngest was six, we were at the free annual WGBH ice cream fest and saw a promo of the season’s new children’s show, “Ghostwriter.” We were all enthralled, even the parents. It was about an ethnically diverse and very appealing bunch of school age friends in New York City who used their reading, critical thinking and collaboration skills to solve neighborhood mysteries and tackle neighborhood problems, all with the help of a phantom ghost-writer. We excitedly decided that very afternoon to buy a color television in time to watch the first episode. And, we did, literally, buying it on the day of Ghostwriter’s premiere and getting it set up just in time for the show to start. Watching that show together became one of the highlights of our week for the years it aired, and after that, The Simpsons.
Thus we know a little about watching tv.
I know many of you know about not watching tv, too. You have restricted your young children’s television viewing to public television, or perhaps no tv at all. Do our children feel deprived? I don’t think so. What they gain in reading time, puzzle time, and outdoor grimy play time; from creating neat things out of whatever, putting on plays, building with blocks or legos; playing house or office, learning to swing a bat and hit the ball, making snowmen and putting on lemonade stands, and exploring the neighborhood enrich their lives greatly. Just hanging out getting bored teaches you something!
Do our children know too little about American culture as a result? I don’t think so. Why fill their minds and hearts with images of big-boobed Barbie and all her pink plastic stuff, the camouflage-green of macho-men action toys, and the sexism, violence and hyperactivity of cartoon shows?
At the end of her freshman year in college, my daughter told us with a smile that whenever she and her friends were discussing what show to watch or what video to rent, everyone knew that she hadn’t seen it, whatever it was! Well, I said, that’s why we wanted you to go to college, to learn new things!
I think children who don’t watch commercial tv are less brand-conscious, less style-conscious, and less likely to subconsciously think that their worth as human beings has anything to do with what they own or how they dress, than many of their peers. I think they are less acculturated to violence, to loveless sex, and to insipid inane sit-com type relationships, than many of their peers. I haven’t seen any scientific studies to prove these statements, but I think they know more about what is wholesome in American culture and less about what isn’t.
Can you raise wonderful children if you allow them to watch all the tv they want? Of course. But, your job may be more difficult, due to needing to counteract the media messages with which you disagree and maybe deal with behavior and learning issues you would otherwise not have. For years, according to a to a recent Wall Street Journal article, researchers have known that violent images on television can trigger behavior problems in children. It also reports that a U-Mass Amherst professor has found that the time that toddlers will play with a single toy or engage in an activity is cut in half when the television is on in the background (3/25/03, p. D1).
Maybe in my house we’ve missed too much of the good that television offers, but if you feel you’ve watched too much tv in yours or left it on just for background noise for too many hours, I hope you’ll rise to the TV-Turn-off Week challenge. With time on your hands and quiet in your house, I think you will discover new and interesting things about yourself and the world around you. You may even save yourself some money.
In her 1998 book, The Overspent American, Harvard economist Juliet Schor presents research showing that the more TV a person watches the more he or she spends. The affluent lifestyles we see on TV - in the programs as well as the commercials - inflate our sense of what's normal and what’s needed, Schor argues. Heavy viewers overestimate the percentage of the population who are millionaires, belong to a private gym and suffer from dandruff and bladder control problems. Television viewing results in both an upscaling of desire and a distorted sense of the significance of relatively minor problems. That in turn leads people to purchase more stuff than if they didn't watch. Within her study sample, Schor found that each additional hour of TV watched per week led to an additional $208 of annual spending. Those surveyed watched 11.5 hours of TV per week, enough to cost them more than $2,300 a year in unplanned, likely unneeded, expenditures. What could you do with $2,300?!! (from the TV Turn-Off website).
Saving money is not the point of TV-Turnoff Week, or of this sermon. But, isn’t it interesting, and frightening, how commercial television influences behavior? My mother was right. If you see it on tv, don’t buy it! Especially don’t buy it if you don’t truly need it.
Nutritionists tell us, “You are what you eat.” The food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe are used by our bodies in complex and, when you stop to think about these processes, amazing ways. Some of what we take in goes out as waste, but the rest of it becomes part of who we are, for better or for worse. The body has ways to clear out a certain amount of toxic stuff we take in, but some things make us sick or even kill us.
Long ago, humans learned to avoid eating certain plants. Foxglove and pokeweed, holly berries and wild mushrooms look edible, but they are poisonous. We’re still learning about what makes us sick—certain food additives, pesticides, fertilizers. And, most of us try our best to avoid eating what we believe to be bad for us.
And, what about water? As public water supplies were cleaned up in the 19th and 20th centuries, persistent public health problems such as cholera diminished. You wouldn’t knowingly drink polluted water, would you?
Or, consider the air we breathe. In many respects, it is cleaner now than when I was watching the “Mouseketeers,” because advocates worked to eliminate lead from gasoline, and to clean up coal-fired power plants and incinerators, and households aren’t permitted to burn garbage or leaves and brush anymore. We avoid second-hand cigarette smoke and step back from the curb when the bus goes by on a hot, humid day in Boston.
Food, water and air—we try to keep out what isn’t clean, what isn’t good for us. So, why would we be less careful about ingesting toxins of the spirit, things that are bad for our souls?
Violent images in movies or on tv leave their imprints on our minds and hearts—just like cigarette smoke, polluted water or chemical food additives leave their imprints in our bodies. Loveless sex, consumerist urges, insipid inane relationships—why allow them in at all? Why pollute our hearts and minds, our spirits, our souls?
If the body can clean out at least some of the physical toxins we take in, I wonder, how do we clean out the spiritual toxins that get in via television, movies, and the media in general? How long does it take for a toxic imprint to subside in the mind and heart? Is it like a footprint in the sand—a few waves roll in and it’s gone? Or more like a footprint in wet cement?
A heavy smoker who stops smoking begins to reduce his or her risk of cardiac disease immediately and brings his or her cancer risk to nearly normal in just seven years. I think there is similar hope for the heavy television watcher or violent movie-goer.
First, as in environmental protection, stop the flow of toxins. Install the emission control device in the smokestack, block the sewer that leaks into the river, don’t spray the grapes with toxic chemicals, turn off the tv!
Then, there is time and space for new fare for our fair spirits. In these words by Graziano Marcheschi, director of the Lay Ministry Formation Program for the Archdiocese of Chicago and director of a liturgical performing arts company there, we are reminded of the ways in which the arts are deeply humanizing.
“You hear an old song and the face of a lost loved one suddenly appears, and in the space of the song, the loved one grabs your loneliness by the collar and sends it out the door.
You stand before a painting and the peaceful landscape calls you in—or a scene of violent pain holds you in thrall—and for a minute that’s longer than eternity you enter the serenity, or you rage and grieve along with the picture’s tortured souls.
You read a piece of poetry and for the span of a minute—or an hour—you find a space ot sit and listen to the sound of naked joy, or to stare into the face of unfathomable grief.
More than anything else, that’s what good art does: not answer questions or set agendas, but create space—space to laugh, to mourn, and to wonder who and how and why we are.” (in Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, edited by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, p. 278).
The arts are good fare for our spirits. There are other menus from which to choose, of course. Worship here at First Parish, good works in the world, walks outdoors, gardening, physical exercise, silence, washing dishes, and good times with those we love. Maybe even a television show feeds the soul, but watch out for those commercials! What’s good fare for the spirit varies amongst us and changes over the years of our individual lives.
I feel sure you know what’s good fare for yours-- anything that feeds your creativity, renews your physical energy, takes you deeper into the meaning of life, lifts your hopes higher, fills you with praise and gratitude, or inspires you to renew your efforts to make the world a more fair, both lovely and just, place for all.
Amen, so may it be.