For a while now, I really haven’t been very interested in the popular culture. It’s been slowly building for the past several years, but has become increasingly pronounced in the past year or two. Whatever’s trendy – fashion, music, TV, political memes – just hasn’t struck me as compelling enough to dive in. I have no doubt that some percentage of it is probably of decent quality, and that by not paying attention I’m missing out on something I might enjoy. But for me, the wheat-to-chaff ratio is just too low to bother.

I know that at least part of it is due to a shifting in perspective on my part, particularly in the realm of things eternal and things temporal. I still very much appreciate art and beauty, but “hipness” has lost much of its luster. Glimpses of eternal truth and beauty – however limited and brief those glimpses are – throw much of what currently passes for truth and beauty into sharp relief.

C. S. Lewis has probably summed it up as well as anyone:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”  ― C.S. Lewis, ‘The Weight of Glory’

I wish I could say that my fidelity and devotion to Jesus has grown in the same measure that my interests in current trends has waned. It hasn’t. But perhaps, in the long run, losing interest and letting go of the need to be identified with whatever is popular is a step toward that end.

There’s an old hymn by Helen Howarth Lemmel, ‘Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus’. I honestly had never heard any of that hymn until my college days, when the chorus was tagged on to the end of a song by the Christian rock band Prodigal to close out their album ‘Electric Eye’. I don’t think I even realized it was part of a hymn at the time, but I remember being taken with that ending. The words of that old chorus are ringing more true to me today than they were in 1984.

 

Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in His wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace