Vacationing in a beach destination is a little like being in Sodom and Gomorrah. You are surrounded by people intent only on pleasures of the flesh. Everyone is there to have a good time and there is a propensity to overindulge.
Among the many vacationers comprising many families, friends and couples, you also see couples who are clearly involved in mere transactional relationships. No judgement on older, male foreigners and nubile, female locals who alternate between looking bored and acting coquettish, what you have is dross, nothing one can call meaningful or significant.
Is this so wrong, filling the need for companionship by paying for it or staving off loneliness by exchanging bodily fluids so casually? Yes, it is, for love is so trivialized and altered that it is an indistinct facsimile of the real thing.
Worse, we soon believe such relationships founded on lust to be the standard of love in our lives and we no longer bother to search for the genuine article for it is too elusive and takes too much effort to attain.
We become fast food people in our way of life. We seek instant gratification and are willing to consume what appeals only to the senses but in actual fact is bad for us on many levels.
We look only for the easier, faster way of attaining pleasure without wanting to sacrifice time and effort on our part. We grow lazy, selfish and become users of people.
We forget about God and eschew His ways for who wants to fast, abstain, spend time in prayer or give alms when one could be having fun? We fail to understand that being good and following God's ways does not necessitate giving up pleasure, and yet, this is the biggest misperception of Christianity.
The salvific beauty of Christianity and the call of Lent is to return and repent. It calls for a period of conversion, a time of purification where we seek a time of solitude, prayer and fasting in the desert so as to prepare our hearts to enter more deeply into our covenantal relationship with God.
Whether we recognize it or not, this relationship exists between every single human being and God and when we choose to develop it, especially during the Lenten season, we will experience a deep and lasting joy that cannot be found in the surfeit of food, drink, sex and pleasure one indulges in on vacation, or at home.
Why would I want to surrender my will to God in a way that means deprivation for me? What is the upside?
Father Robert Barron writes that in life, there is a pull toward hedonism - the philosophy that the good life is the physically -satisfying life. Food, drink, sex, material things, money, comfort, a secure sense of the future are the supreme values for many, especially in our culture.
Many, many people throughout history are waylaid by this powerful temptation. It is appealing because the desires are so basic. Thomas Merton said that the sensual desires - for food, comfort, pleasure, and sex - are like children in that they are so immediate and so insistent.
But our lives will never expand to greater depth as long as we are dominated by our physical desires. This is why in so many of the initiation rituals of primal peoples, something like fasting or deprivation is essential. It is also why initiation into a demanding form of life, like the military, often involves the deprivation of sensual pleasures.
When we give way to this temptation, it shuts down the soul, for the soul has been wired for God, for journey into the divine. When sensual desire dominates, those deeper and richer desires are never felt or followed. They are, as Merton said, like little children, constantly clamoring for attention, and never satisfied.
This is why Jesus responds: "It is written: 'One does not live by bread alone.'" Life means so much more than sensual pleasure. Love, loyalty, relationships, family, moral excellence, aesthetic pleasure, and the aspiration after God are all so much more important. How tragic then when we think that life shrinks down to the contours of pleasure or bodily satisfaction.
Having eaten and drunk more than I should have this last week, I welcome the season of Lent: to go into the desert and reconnect with the One who conquered death, and evil. I welcome the opportunity as Pope Francis puts it, to place myself on the path of Christ, who is "the road that leads to life."
In the desert I will be tempted as Jesus was, but engaging in spiritual combat will teach me to identify evil more readily and to "know how to respond to the attacks of the Evil One."
Pope Francis added: The Lenten desert helps us to say no to worldliness, to the 'idols', it helps us to make courageous choices in accordance with the Gospel and to strengthen solidarity among the brothers.
I found much beauty during my time in Cebu and Bohol, even as I encountered the ugliness of a godless, secular culture that celebrates lust, greed and gluttony.
As I return home, I will bring back with me great memories of natural beauty, friendship, honesty, generosity and hospitality that have enriched me. And I will offer up the ugliness of sin I found on vacation in my Lenten journey forward.
Hopefully, as I travel from beach to desert, I will make this Lent a time of renewal - of my Baptismal covenant and all the commitments that flow from it.*
* To read Pope Francis's full Lenten address, go to: http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/angelus-address-on-crossing-the-lenten-desert?utm_campaign=dailyhtml&utm_medium=email&utm_source=dispatch
Among the many vacationers comprising many families, friends and couples, you also see couples who are clearly involved in mere transactional relationships. No judgement on older, male foreigners and nubile, female locals who alternate between looking bored and acting coquettish, what you have is dross, nothing one can call meaningful or significant.
Is this so wrong, filling the need for companionship by paying for it or staving off loneliness by exchanging bodily fluids so casually? Yes, it is, for love is so trivialized and altered that it is an indistinct facsimile of the real thing.
Worse, we soon believe such relationships founded on lust to be the standard of love in our lives and we no longer bother to search for the genuine article for it is too elusive and takes too much effort to attain.
We become fast food people in our way of life. We seek instant gratification and are willing to consume what appeals only to the senses but in actual fact is bad for us on many levels.
We look only for the easier, faster way of attaining pleasure without wanting to sacrifice time and effort on our part. We grow lazy, selfish and become users of people.
We forget about God and eschew His ways for who wants to fast, abstain, spend time in prayer or give alms when one could be having fun? We fail to understand that being good and following God's ways does not necessitate giving up pleasure, and yet, this is the biggest misperception of Christianity.
The salvific beauty of Christianity and the call of Lent is to return and repent. It calls for a period of conversion, a time of purification where we seek a time of solitude, prayer and fasting in the desert so as to prepare our hearts to enter more deeply into our covenantal relationship with God.
Whether we recognize it or not, this relationship exists between every single human being and God and when we choose to develop it, especially during the Lenten season, we will experience a deep and lasting joy that cannot be found in the surfeit of food, drink, sex and pleasure one indulges in on vacation, or at home.
Why would I want to surrender my will to God in a way that means deprivation for me? What is the upside?
Father Robert Barron writes that in life, there is a pull toward hedonism - the philosophy that the good life is the physically -satisfying life. Food, drink, sex, material things, money, comfort, a secure sense of the future are the supreme values for many, especially in our culture.
Many, many people throughout history are waylaid by this powerful temptation. It is appealing because the desires are so basic. Thomas Merton said that the sensual desires - for food, comfort, pleasure, and sex - are like children in that they are so immediate and so insistent.
But our lives will never expand to greater depth as long as we are dominated by our physical desires. This is why in so many of the initiation rituals of primal peoples, something like fasting or deprivation is essential. It is also why initiation into a demanding form of life, like the military, often involves the deprivation of sensual pleasures.
When we give way to this temptation, it shuts down the soul, for the soul has been wired for God, for journey into the divine. When sensual desire dominates, those deeper and richer desires are never felt or followed. They are, as Merton said, like little children, constantly clamoring for attention, and never satisfied.
This is why Jesus responds: "It is written: 'One does not live by bread alone.'" Life means so much more than sensual pleasure. Love, loyalty, relationships, family, moral excellence, aesthetic pleasure, and the aspiration after God are all so much more important. How tragic then when we think that life shrinks down to the contours of pleasure or bodily satisfaction.
Having eaten and drunk more than I should have this last week, I welcome the season of Lent: to go into the desert and reconnect with the One who conquered death, and evil. I welcome the opportunity as Pope Francis puts it, to place myself on the path of Christ, who is "the road that leads to life."
In the desert I will be tempted as Jesus was, but engaging in spiritual combat will teach me to identify evil more readily and to "know how to respond to the attacks of the Evil One."
Pope Francis added: The Lenten desert helps us to say no to worldliness, to the 'idols', it helps us to make courageous choices in accordance with the Gospel and to strengthen solidarity among the brothers.
I found much beauty during my time in Cebu and Bohol, even as I encountered the ugliness of a godless, secular culture that celebrates lust, greed and gluttony.
As I return home, I will bring back with me great memories of natural beauty, friendship, honesty, generosity and hospitality that have enriched me. And I will offer up the ugliness of sin I found on vacation in my Lenten journey forward.
Hopefully, as I travel from beach to desert, I will make this Lent a time of renewal - of my Baptismal covenant and all the commitments that flow from it.*
* To read Pope Francis's full Lenten address, go to: http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/angelus-address-on-crossing-the-lenten-desert?utm_campaign=dailyhtml&utm_medium=email&utm_source=dispatch
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