Slow Fade

From Casting Crowns Song "Slow Fade"

It's a slow fade when you give yourself away

It's a slow fade when black and white have turned to gray

Thoughts invade, choices are made, a price will be paid

When you give yourself away 

People never crumble in a day

Daddies never crumble in a day

Families never crumble in a day

This past weekend we here in the US celebrated Valentines Day - a wonderful time to express and demonstrate the love between a man and woman.  Flowers, dinner, chocolates, heart shaped cards with poetic verse and rhyme.  My wife and I spent an evening out together to reconnect and tap into that love once again.  My buddy Jim wrote a wonderful tribute to his bride over at the Vibrant Catholic Marriages Blog. 

Also this weekend our pop culture offered a different view of a relationship between and man and woman in the form of a movie based on a popular book.    The fact that I don't have to mention the name speaks to the attention it has garnered, and the power and enticement it has engendered.  The slow but persistent metamorphosis of the worlds definition of love has now led us to the point where a mainstream movie - one my 16 year old daughter can go see without my knowledge or consent - is normalizing the thought of a loving, lasting relationship containing elements of physical and emotional sexual abuse. 

Black and white has indeed turned to grey.

 In an online article entitled "This Guy Gets Real About Yoga Pants and Lust and Blows the Cover Clean Off Our Little Modesty Talks," author Al Banton lets out the large elephant everyone supposedly ignores on every street corner, living room, department store and office.  Banton writes"

Lean in close and I want to tell you a secret. You ready?  Yoga pants aren’t the only way we are tempted.

On any given day, men are bombarded with sex. Almost anywhere, our eyes are tantalized by steamy, Basic Instict-esque images. We could be going to CVS to get a Toblerone and a can of Brut and—WHAM!—some scantily-clad, heavily-airbrushed fireball is staring at us from the cover of a magazine. We could be flipping through the channels and—BOOM!—Hardee’s commercial with model lustfully chomping a Thickburger. Playing golf and—GREAT SCOTT!—Bo Derek is slithering out of the pool in her sling bikini.

Sex is oozing out of our technology, where we have an all-access pass to the Land of Filth. But accessibility does not cause us to stumble. It merely opens the door. We choose whether or not to walk through...

This has been the great struggle in my life....The sin of lust is every man’s battle, and any man who tells you he doesn’t struggle in this area, to some degree, is not being truthful"

So, as the song lyrics state and Mr. Banton is want to stress, thoughts invade and choices are made.   Will you choose to reject the cultures' definition when it comes to love and sex, instead grasping for what is good, true and beautiful - being a man who aspires to love virtuous and noble women - or will you join the cultures slow fade into a crumbling world where the lowest common denominator grabs our attention and is allowed to rule the day.

What will you choose? 

"To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, and goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women." 
Archbishop Fulton Sheen

More links on the subject to consider:

Porn Goes Mainstream
50 Shades on Valentines Day
Why Pornography is not good for Married Couples
The Porn Effect- secular Science on the Nature of Porn