Pints With Aquinas - I Stopped Listening to Music.

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Fr. Pine shares why he doesn't listen to secular music and avoids watching movies or shows for entertainment, and why he thinks other Christians would probably serve themselves and the Lord best by doing the same and getting rid of Netflix and Pop Music. What do you guys think? Have a Question? We only really take questions from Locals members. Signing up is free and it works as a kind of screen to sift out the trolls and those who aren't serious about being a part of Pints. Join for FREE today: Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📗  Fr. Pine's Brand New Book (get it and you're cool): https://amzn.to/3ylrUOJ ☀️ Godsplaining Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/c/GodsplainingPodcast/featured 🌞 Godsplaining Summer Retreats: https://godsplaining.org/events-1 💻 LINKS   Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 📱 SOCIALS Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Gab: https://gab.com/mattfradd

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines with Aquinas. In past episodes or past conversations with Matt, I have made mention of the fact that I kind of tried to stay away from music. I think the first conversation that I had with him was actually about modern music. And in addition to that, that I tried to stay away from certain forms of entertainment and here I'm thinking mostly of like movies. And so somebody in the community section of Matt's YouTube page asked the question like

why or kind of like what's your thought behind that or what's the reason for which? So like what if that is just personal and what do you think of that ought to be a more widely practiced. So this video is about, yeah, my thoughts about like music and movies and general entertainment, how that represents maybe an obstacle to growth and holiness, or how we can live our Christian lives with these things present and do so in a way that, yeah, conduces to growth. So let's get after it. So I think my basic starting point here is that we, as human beings made to the image

and likeness of God, have a contemplative end. How do I know this? Well, because of the revelation of the fact that we're made for heaven. So in heaven, there won't be anything to do in the sense of like, this needs getting done, or it's going to be left undone. Like everything will have been done. God will be all in all. But it will be for us to worship, right? To know and to love, right? And to enact that by a kind of perpetual liturgy which will draw on all of our stores, which will have us firing on all cylinders, okay? So at the end of the day, you as a human being

are not just a doing, right? You are a being. And your human being-ness is made for the knowledge and love of God. And what is true in heaven is true on earth. Now mind you, on earth we experience bodily and emotional and psychological and spiritual need in pretty acute ways. And oftentimes when we attend to those needs,

we're gonna have to get out of your head and into your body. You're gonna have to do practical things and think in practical ways. But that should never cover over, that should never occlude the fact that ultimately we're made for the knowledge and love of God. So Aristotle and those who follow in his tradition distinguish between the speculative and the practical use of the intellect.

And so when St. Thomas, for instance, talks about different forms of life, he has an extended commentary there on a certain passage in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where he distinguishes, yeah, between those for whom the speculative intellect dominates and those for whom the practical intellect dominates. And he says, yeah, at the end of the day, the speculative is higher, right? Because the speculative is engaged with higher things, right?

It engages us in our highest power, namely our intellect, right? The heights of our intellect. And it's the type of activity which, even if we can only sustain it for short periods of time on Earth, affords the greatest delight because it represents our deepest perfection. It represents what corresponds most wholly and entirely to our human nature. It's the point at which we, as human beings, kind of attain to an angelic nature. We become, says Aristotle, like gods in this exercise of our mind. And so I think that, yeah, part of my reasoning is that we,

as human beings, have a contemplative end, or we are contemplative creatures, and that we should always and ultimately be ordered in just such a way, right? We should have that fact reflected in our daily goings on. Now, does that mean necessarily like music and certain modes of entertainment like movies are inimical to our contemplative end? No, I don't think that, right? Some music actually can be, you know,

supportive of or can contribute to our attainment of the contemplative end of life. But I think that a lot of modern means of, you know, like music and entertainment, movies, whatever, can undermine that in kind of subtle ways. So, yeah, why? Well, because contemplation, for us as human beings, it requires sustained attention. It requires a habit which the Christian tradition refers to as recollection. So it's a thought to which we must constantly return. We need to be always directing our gaze to God, right? When our minds

might stray, when our eyes might stray, we need to be directing our gaze back to God, recovering this Godward gaze which we lost with original sin, in which we kind of on the way towards redemption are always in search of, or always seeking to deepen, or seeking to secure yet more perfectly in our lives. And I guess a simple way to express that is, you know, we need to guard our peace. I think about the book that Jacques Philippe wrote called Searching for and Maintaining Peace, which I return to often in my mind and in my heart, and he says, you know, it's of utmost importance that you guard your peace because the

evil one is going to try to rob you of your peace because if your interior life is all disturbed, if it's all agitated, then you are less likely or less well suited to be an instrument of the grace of God in your life. You're less likely or less well suited to receive all of those gifts that God is bestowing upon you day in and day out because instead,

you're just thinking about all the problems you have and how they need to be trouble shot, etc. So this first point here about the contemplative end of man is that we, made to the image and likeness of God, are capable of knowing and loving God. And that's a very real thing, that's a real feature of our human lives. And that my nervousness about modern means of entertainment, whether that be music or movies or otherwise, is largely a matter of being nervous that we're going to get too immersed in the practical or too immersed in the senses, too immersed in body, in emotion, in the psychological, and not sufficiently given to the things which are eternal,

to those things which are perennial, to those things which endure unto ages of ages. So that's just a first kind of framing thought. And then maybe just kind of drilling down on my experience of these types of, you know, music and movies or entertainment otherwise, is that oftentimes I find that it's, yeah, it's like largely based on the science of advertising, okay? So I find that these forms of entertainment are trying to get me as an embodied spirit, right? They're trying to get me as a rational animal deeper and deeper into their network into their web So it feels often to me like these things are are projecting themselves or offering themselves in a way

That's it's kind of violent or kind of oppressive or in a way that, yeah, it's more urgent than it need be. It's never like a kind of serene, like you might do this or you might not do this. It's all the same to me. You can prayerfully consider it as an option for your future. It's often like, you need to listen to this. You need to listen to this now or you need this. And if you don't have this, then you're going to die and everyone else will be talking about it. or you need this and if you don't have this, then you're gonna die and everyone else will be talking about it and you won't have any sense

of what's going on in the 21st century and blah blah blah. Yeah, so I don't know exactly how to describe that better, but my basic sense with a lot of these kind of modern modes of entertainment is that they're all consuming and that once you watch season one, you're on board for season two through nine if you're gonna have significant conversations

with the people with whom you work, because that's all they're doing at this point. They just spend all of their time watching Netflix, or listening to music in the car, or whatever it is. And the other thing is, what this does is to kind of stir up lower desires. So it stirs up desires for food and drink and sexual intercourse.

It stirs up desires for more entertainment, for endless intercourse. It stirs up desires for more entertainment, right? For endless entertainment. And I've noticed this with little kids. So parents are often just kind of driven to the edge of their sanity by their many, well by the demands of their children, by the many demands of their children. And so sometimes they'll just use a screen to pacify their child. And it's instantaneous the way it works. It's fascinating, right? But the problem is it doesn't end there because in the subsequent, you know,

whatever you would say, follow-up encounters that come with each passing day, week, month, etc. Those children are going to have a greater and greater need then for pacification because they're not learning to integrate their emotions. They're not learning to chill out. They're not learning to self-soothe. They're not learning to entertain themselves, right? They're just learning to, I don't know, just depend more wholly and entirely on those modern modes of entertainment. And so yeah, the children become socially maladjusted, they don't play well with each other, they themselves don't develop hobbies or interests and yada yada, and they're just

slugs on couches just needing shows in order to make it through the day. So I get it, like I get why parents do that and I'm totally sympathetic to the desire to have a free moment. You know, like if it's my responsibility to babysit my nieces and nephews and I'm like, listen, I just wanna watch episode nine of The Last Dance because what's Michael Jordan gonna do

in the 1997-98 basketball season? It's a very pressing issue for me. Right, I'm not gonna wanna be like, hey, let's build Lincoln Logs. I'm gonna be like, let's just stop talking. How about that? So, yeah, so I get it. But my fear is that with this kind of violence,

with this urgency that seeks to stir up desire, we ourselves are just going to be left, yeah, like endless pits of unsatisfied need without the means whereby to build up a genuinely human culture in our own lives and in the lives of our family and the lives of our polity, our church, etc. So I'm worried about that. I'll just leave it at that. And then my final thought is that life is hard, okay? So life is hard. And I think that we need to engage with the difficulty of life, whether that be as we experience it in terms of You know sadness or anxiety or loneliness or whatever life just is hard and there's no papering over that

And I think that we're always going to experience it in some way and if we choose to soothe or if we choose to evade that Then it's going to come back in some other way shape or form and oftentimes it's going to come back sideways So the question is how do you respond to the difficulty of life? Okay So like for instance when I find it really difficult to read for long periods of time I will sometimes listen to music But then I find that that music will recur at night as I'm trying to go to sleep and so then I'm just tired or the Next day so it comes back sideways and then I'm more dependent upon music to stay awake through large chunks of reading and yada Yada, it just propagates through my day

So my experience is that when you indulge and kind of like lower or crasser forms of entertainment that that indulgence just begets further indulgence There's a brother, you know in the order with whom I entered in the novitiate, you know We're classmates and at one point he was working as a barista and this lady came in and she said, you know This is my last whatever it was, you know, caramel macchiato. And he looked at her and he said, no, it's not. Your last one was your last one. And she was kind of bewildered. She was bemused. She's like, what are you trying to tell me? Like, you're not going to give me this coffee? And he's like, no, I'm not going to give you this coffee because you don't stop doing something by doing something. And so I think that, yeah, when we engage with the difficulty of human life,

we have to engage with it. And that's hard, but it doesn't get easier by avoiding it or by evading it in the present, right? I don't say like, okay, I'm just going to like watch a show now, but then I'll get down to the serious business of confronting the difficulty of life, whether it be the sadness, the loneliness, the anxiety. I think you just have to confront it. And oftentimes that means like, you know, opting for more humane or more edifying up building forms of recreation. For me, it's reading novels, okay? Like when I'm at my best and I'm done my day's work at whatever, you know, 9 47 and I've got a few minutes before I go to sleep, you know, like what I, what I need to do there isn't, you know, like watch short, you know, YouTube videos that make

fun of people who need to be made fun of. What I need to do there is read a little bit of Kazoo Ishiguro's, what am I working on right now? The Unconsole, okay, even though that book just completely confuses me. I need to do that because while the input energy is higher and while it's more engaged of an activity, it's just truer to form. It's something that hands me back my humanity as transfigured and it doesn't haunt my dreams or keep me awake throughout the course of the night. It's something that I can repose on. It's a thought to which I can return. It's something which, yeah, builds up a human culture and I can premise conversations on in the future which are more enriching and more ennobling.

So those, my friends, are some random scattered thoughts about my musings on entertainment, specifically like movies and music and otherwise. They're not especially coherent but I hope for them to become more coherent. So if you have thoughts of your own, drop them in the comment section and maybe we can get a good conversation going and we can revisit these in future iterations. So cheers. This is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel and then push the bell and you'll get email updates when other cool things happen here on the channel. And then if you haven't yet, please

do check out God Splitting, which is a podcast to which I contribute with four other Dominican friars. We've got a good thing going and it's picking up steam and it's real sweet. So it'd be great if you were to share in those conversations too. We also have retreats this summer, so it'd be great to meet you in person. And you can apply for those retreats at godsplaining.org. We're running out of real estate, but you might still have time yet to get on one of those.

So we have an all-comers retreat, young adults retreat, and a men's retreat. Check them all out. And then third and finally, I wrote a book, and it's called Prudence. Choose confidently, live boldly, and I think you might like it, because it's about living a life

which reflects yet more perfectly our status as made to the image and likeness of God, specifically through choice, through decisions. And these are the types of decisions that you have to make at 9.47 p.m. as concerns what to do with the next 30 minutes. So, boom, yeah, that's what I wanted to share. Know that my prayers are

for you. I'd ask that you send some prayers back in my direction. Prayers for my family, prayers for my own growth, prayers for my thesis. Right? At present I'm trying to learn German so prayers for my learning of German. Okay, that's all I got. Until next time, I will catch you. I'm Pons of the Quinas.