by Mary Hess

As I sit down to write, I see the front page of today’s newspaper: Yet another young person has been murdered in my city. I turn on the radio, and there are grim reports of car bombings in foreign locales. The television schedule is full of stories and images of violence. When I go with my 9–year–old son to spend his hard-saved money on a video game, I know we will have a conversation–we always have this conversation–about why he’s not allowed to buy "shooter" games.

One response to this endless stream of media violence is simply to withdraw. Some religious organizations suggest that we boycott television and film altogether, and refuse to let our children even read about violence. The assumption behind this kind of advice is that there is a direct link between seeing depictions of violence and doing acts of violence.

The problem, however, is that violence is part of the human condition. Our brokenness, our sinfulness, is pervasive. Our earliest media document this violence, rather than cause it. In Genesis we read of Cain and Abel, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of armies and kings, of sacrifice and birthright. Even the story of Adam and Eve contains the seeds of violence, pointing to human disobedience and the pain that accompanies it.

No matter how hard scholars try, they have been unable to establish clear links between watching media violence and doing actual violence. Yet clearly there is some connection. We know in our gut that a steady diet of violent media cannot be good. Martha Stortz’s reflection on the biblical narratives (p. 27) is helpful here. She notes the advice we are offered —"you are what you eat!"–and suggests that the biblical version would be "you are what you look at." This is powerful advice.

People of story and of food
We cannot go without eating. Food is nourishment, food is culture, food is creativity, food is family. For many of us, food may be the only connection we still have to our ancestral homelands. The special foods we make for holidays, the ways we prepare festive spaces to share food with friends — these are basic elements of who we are. It is no coincidence that our Christian faith is centered around the table and a meal that is shared.

The same thing is true of media. We can’t not see or hear. Human beings need food to live, and we need media to make meaning. Media is the plural form of the word medium, and it helps to think about a definition of that word — "the substance in which something is grown or cultured."

Human beings are storytellers. God created us that way. We tell stories to figure out who we are, where we come from, where we are going. The Bible is full of stories, and our own personal stories help us connect our lives with God’s story. Various media — books, letters, movies, television shows, music, drama — provide spaces in which these stories are grown. They become a way in which we share what we know of God and of what

God is doing in our lives. We are a people of word and sacrament. Of story and of food.

We know with food that there are practices that are healthful, practices of preparing and sharing food that are good for us, and others that are not. Although scholars cannot claim direct connections between seeing violence and doing violence, they have observed that a steady diet of media violence tends to reinforce ways of living that use violence to express anger or to respond to other violence.

Eating only junk food tends to make our bodies crave empty calories, and eventually we are caught up in a cycle that is very hard to break. Something analogous is true with media. If you watch only "empty" media, you tend to crave more and more of it. The adrenaline flows, but sooner or later the thrill fades, and you need more and more to get that jolt again.

Healthful habits
There’s no federal agency that studies the science of storytelling, of story–sharing. There are no nutrition labels telling us how many calories, how much fiber, how many vitamins our favorite shows contain. But perhaps some of the things we are learning about food can help us as we think about forming healthful habits with our media practices.

Engaging media is about practice more than about content. The content of a show matters  — not all calories are alike — but it is the process through which we watch, through which we listen, through which we tell our stories, that really matters. It makes sense that a household with four people and five television sets watches TV differently than a household with four people and one television set. The latter household undoubtedly argues more about what to watch, but that’s part of the point: They are thinking and talking about the stories they share.

Just as with food, it’s important that media use emphasizes community, that it emphasizes relationships, that it is something we do more often together than alone. Each of us has some special food we enjoy–for me, it’s ice cream – but I know something is wrong if I am eating ice cream by myself. I am much healthier when eating ice cream includes taking a 20-minutewalk with my kids to the ice cream parlor than when it means wolfing down a pint of chocolate pecan ripple all alone in front of the television set. "Grey’s Anatomy" may be my television treat of choice, but it’s much more fun — and healthier — when I watch it with friends, or at least talk about it with them when we’re together.

Thinking about life and death, about what God might be calling me to or guiding me away from, is easier when I’m thinking about it and talking about it with other people than when I’m all alone. We know that Jesus used stories — parables — to help his disciples think about such things together, and we’re still talking about those stories and the conversations he and his followers had about them.

As Martha notes in her reflection on eucharistic living (p. 30), we are one in Christ, and that oneness means that we must learn to attend to the Christ in each of us. Talking about our stories together can be one way we do that.

Living faithfully with media means looking for and watching all kinds of stories, especially those produced independently or locally. Just as it’s important to have a certain amount of grain in your diet, to eat some dairy, some fruits, and some vegetables, it’s important to make sure that your media diet has variety in it.

If the only media you watch are mass–produced, mass–marketed shows, you might be missing out on some richly satisfying fare. Public television shows interesting programs from all over. Independent and foreign films are available through public libraries and through companies that rent DVDs by mail. Local cable networks are required by law to teach people how to use their equipment, and in doing so, they facilitate the telling of all sorts of local stories.

And what kinds of stories are you watching? Is it mostly Hollywood blockbusters offering the calculated excitement of stage managed explosions? Or are you also hearing and seeing the stories of women and children who have been driven from their homes in war-torn lands? Mass-produced, mass-marketed media tend to tell only some of the stories of the human condition.

Even local television is not immune from the desire to jolt us with images that feed our fear. But the other side of the story — the people who responded with love and prayer, who reached out in kindness to those who had been hurt, who stopped like the Good Samaritan to help neighbors in need — those stories are not as often told; they don’t usually come with dramatic pictures. But finding and sharing such stories is crucial.

Just as we need plenty of fruits and vegetables but not so many sweets, it’s fine to enjoy some of the less nutritious stories in our vast entertainment realm, as long as our main diet consists of the stories that will help us attend to all those whom Christ loves.

It is important to tell your own stories and your family’s stories in media you can share. Once the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized Jesus — and he vanished — they didn’t cherish the experience and keep it to themselves; they ran to their friends and shared it. They found ways to tell their own stories of time with him, to share those stories with their community.

People are reclaiming what our parents and grandparents knew: baking bread from scratch, growing vegetables, canning sauces. We are rediscovering that cooking and sharing food is an essential element of who we are, of how we share our families’ stories.

Part of the gift of being alive today is that there are more ways than ever to tell our stories. E-mail and digital cameras have not superseded older forms of media — there is more scrapbooking going on than ever before, and quilt–making stories abound — but they have given us more ways to share our stories. Taking photographs and turning them into family histories has never been easier. Creating Web pages to connect distant family members is as easy as starting a free Web log, something you can do on a computer at home or at the library.

Love and courage
As Martha writes in her Bible study, eucharistic living is about sharing. As we live and grow as faithful disciples of Christ, we need to share our stories. That includes our own stories of sorrow and violence. Perhaps that means the pain of silence around addiction or the hurt of domestic abuse. Perhaps that means hunger in the midst of plenty or poverty scorned by wealth. Violence may indeed be all around us, but very few of our stories of such violence are shared, let alone the stories of how we meet such violence with love and courage.

The Lutheran community bears a special gift to the rest of Christianity, a deep awareness of the theology of the cross, a deep recognition of our sinfulness and the overwhelming love that comes as God’s grace. Here is a story that is written in the very fabric of our lives and must be shared in our media. We can tease this story out of our engagement with even the fluffiest shows on television and we can tell it in the most intimate photos from our own lives. But tell it we must, and share it we must. And that, finally, is how we live faithfully even in a world full of stories of violence.

Mary Hess is associate professor of educational leadership at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn. Her research focuses on how pop culture affects religious experience and vice versa. You can read her Web log at www.religioused.org/tensegrities.

Resources
National Institute on Media and the Family www.mediafamily.org