Gospel Saturation

Well, Christmas music has begun colonizing the Bluetooth. Too early for my taste, but I can affirm the desperate hunger we have for the brightness and cheer of Christmas, and it’s hard to blame our society for our impatience to feel that. What I don’t really care for is new Christmas songs. I think my parents, like most people, were nostalgic for their own childhood memories, and so they just played those songs around our house. So for me, Christmas is properly scored by Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Andy Williams. Elvis too, but my wife limits the number of times I can spin that record in a given year. In this way (and others too), I’m a bit of a man born out of his time. 

Those were the years of the advent of color television. Throughout the Sixties, NBC promised to show us the world “In Living Color.” Screens now had a feature called “saturation,” where you could turn up color the way you could turn up the volume. It could blow you away. This became a symbol for deeper realities, as RCA President David Sarnoff told President Eisenhower in 1958: “We want everyone in the world to see America in its true and natural colors… Here we do not seek to be anything other than what we are. And what we are is not hidden by curtains and what we say not hidden by censorship.”

Saturation, or “Living Color” became a way of talking about authenticity. At St. Patrick, we use the word saturation to describe “when there's so much grace around that earth looks heavenly.” We say we want to saturate our neighborhoods with something like that. The world, or at least our everyday sense of it, has become dull enough that we feel a sense of relief when peppermint and colored lights jump the gun as early as October. But let’s chase that down. Let’s get curious about what that relief might be telling us about our deeper desires for glorious encounters, and where they can be filled. Where is heaven local?