By DEXTER DUGGAN
Imagine a man is told that if he’ll just do a total fast for three minutes — no fluids or solids at all for 180 seconds — then he can eat and drink whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however much he wants for the rest of his natural life, and never become overweight or look like a glutton to anyone.
Who among us food-based beings could reject such an offer?
However, with a bit of revision, that’s the sort of bargain God has extended to everyone, but many people have trouble accepting it — or else turn it down.
If you’ll just repent of your follies and follow my ways for your lifetime of 20 or 40 or 70 or 90 years, God says, then I guarantee you not mere happiness but unending joy — forever and ever and ever.
Sometimes the pains and disappointments may seem heavy, but they’ll be over before you know — look how every century in history has elapsed — and then very literally you’ll have unlimited, lasting ecstasy.
Is there any doubt that if a person literally saw the flames of Hell and the bliss of Heaven in front of him that he’d choose Heaven? With so much at stake for salvation, isn’t it unfair of God to render the choice less vividly visible — people often receiving only printed or spoken warnings from sources like Church teaching and the Bible?
Actually, when many angels in Heaven were given that choice — when they already enjoyed the direct vision of God and possessed the full knowledge that can be instilled in created beings — they pridefully preferred to rule in Hell than serve God in Heaven, and were cast into the fiery pit.
The Bible itself, other literature, and a long tradition of spiritual admonition are among sources that present dire warnings but nonetheless may be rejected by many people as lacking substance or immediacy. Still: Do you not have the Law and the prophets? There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Complicating remaining on the right path during the earthly journey are devilish deceits and allurements, perhaps occurring more powerfully to mislead those who consider themselves materially well off. When they think themselves master of their own welfare and fate, the perceived need to implore divine assistance or guidance can seem less necessary.
The adage says, God must love the poor because He made so many of them. Aside from dire want, is some poverty potentially a gift, where humility and consciousness of one’s limits can enervate some temptation?
And how do today’s improving Third World economies factor into the plan of salvation for those nations’ individuals?
There’s no reason to further burden the poor? Our Lord repeatedly said to help them. (He meant you personally, not the government of Herod, Pilate, or the Democrat Party, which helps itself first.)
The American-style middle class is historically recent, and seems now to be slipping away in the U.S. If it can return, the middle class would seem to amount to the desirable middle way of moderation. Neither constant deprivation nor arrogant privilege to reside at the bungalow on the corner.
No station in life, of course, is ideal. One of many reminders of that would be Thornton Wilder’s play about an everyday small town, Our Town. Into each life some rain falls.
The Devil knows each person’s spiritual vulnerabilities. A person of modest means may be more liable to envy and jealousy, while the Devil could enter other gates to get within the wealthy.
Yes, even wealth brings its own demons to gnaw on frail, fallible, fallen natures. Our Lord Himself was plain about the obstacles posed by material treasures. It’s better, He said, to lay up treasures in Heaven, where they are uncorrupted.
If one truly wants to separate from material blandishments, that person can choose life in a monastery or convent, which, of course, is ringed by its own temptations — because the Devil never ceases from troubling here in our realm, not even sparing the Lord as He walked dusty Middle Eastern paths.
The potentially deadly allurements of substantial money and possessions — whether acquired honestly or not — can turn one’s head and induce the delusion of absolute self-sufficiency.
Novelist Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987 gave us the millionaire “master of the universe,” a mere human who thought himself more. A snap of the finger, a fast phone call, a haughty word, and one’s will is done. It seems it will go on forever — contrary to every actual, and actuarial, fact of human history.
The corrupt, scheming politicians Bill and Hillary Clinton are only one of innumerable possible examples, already aging and drawing closer to their personal judgment by God, but apparently thinking that glib talk, greed, and an ideologically sympathetic media are all they need to keep getting by.
Ahem, 50 more years at most and their temporal lives most likely will have ended. Then the earthly confinement of the grave closes around them, a sobering thought that should recommend a meditation on mortality and penance — not so commonly done these days, amid miracle vitamins and vaccines.
Fifty years ago, the Clintons were youngsters in 1965. Was that really so long ago? Who except the very young among us may possibly ring in New Year’s 2110? Aside from their frightening corruption, the Clintons could be many people.
Everyone should be happy that billions of people are rising above poverty these days around the world, and certainly not thanks to Marxism. But everything comes with a price. Marrying the girl of your dreams is highly unlikely to mean that your future life is only going to be a happy dream. This is the nature of imperfect earthly existence. Still, just a few decades of trial versus a promised and attainable unending joy if only the rules are followed.
Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out a path. In “A former fecundophobe’s reflections on fatherhood,” Matthew Cochran described at The Federalist (thefederalist.com) on June 19 how he and his wife, who both had opposed having children, changed their thinking.
“Finally, I began to realize where my aversion actually came from — how little of it came from God or nature or reason or even my own preferences, and how much of it came from what I had absentmindedly absorbed from my culture growing up,” Cochran wrote.
“Raising children seemed both unnatural and impossible, yet it was something every human being who has ever lived has been involved with in one way or another.
“It was something that even the average and below-average — people I had deemed far beneath my own special self — had been doing successfully for a very long time. Indeed, that was the only reason I existed in the first place,” Cochran wrote.
Basic Incompatibilities
Attaining earthly improvement has consequences, and possible advancement to different temptations. The headline above a December 19, 2012, New York Times story well summed up what followed: “Monks lose relevance as Thailand grows richer.”
Buddhist monks, and the central religious role they offered, were being dropped at society’s wayside as shopping at the mall replaced holy days at the temple in that country’s “rapid economic rise.”
In words that might almost have seemed Pope Francis’, one Buddhist monk was quoted, “Consumerism is now the Thai religion.” The monk reportedly saw “basic incompatibilities between modern life and Buddhism.”
Packaging a concept has something to do with success. The New York friend who mailed me the Times article scribbled next to a photo of monks at a candlelight ceremony, “They should call it ‘yoga’ and get a crowd.”
Whatever one’s rung on the economic ladder, “You have made us for Yourself,” said St. Augustine, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
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