Sunday, May 01, 2005

The urge to live cont'd.

Continuity of pleasure would seem to be what people are so desperately seeking yet by their actions and words they chase away this simple prospect. Were it not for the urge to live having been implanted, programmed as it were into each of us, our wiles would quickly bring about our self-destruction. Already we see suicides on the rise and sometimes even appearing as rational acts given the despair of the individual caught up in a culture of grief and misery.

Our media tends to celebrate grief, commemorating at every opportunity mass death and destruction. If stories are not sufficiently rife with misery, violence and aberration then the media seems little interested. What we call “edgy” or “pushing the envelope” has all been done to death a million times before through the ages as people are faced again and again with the same challenge to live with integrity and dignity, especially concerning their intimate and social lifestyles.

The Pharaoh’s eldest son may well have been thrilled with thoughts of kiddie sex as so many are today. Coveting another’s wife isn’t exactly sensational news any more, unique to this age. Hoarding money and accumulating possessions to lord over others is not just yesterday’s news but is ancient and tawdry history. Men pretending to be holier than thou for their own personal purposes is as old as the Atlantean hills. All of our great epic stories have all repeated in one form or another similar human conditions and trials. There is truly nothing new under the sun where the human proposition is concerned.

And that proposition is simple, so obvious that even the least educated among us can catch the drift: know God. This palpably serene state of knowing far surpasses any movie-going experience or the so-called thrill of driving a speedy car, or the pleasure of lounging about your pool fretting to impress others.

But consequent of so many successive generations of nescience, we have created a problem now even with the word “God.” Every culture has produced its holy hierarchies and they have each interpreted God’s will according to their cultures. A simple guide may be found in acknowledging that all science is the discovery of God’s intelligence, all true human joy is the stuff of His intimate body, and all has been designed with beauty for our gratification. His empathy, despite burdensome times of suffering, is real and yet He is not disposed to interfere, as neither would a good father.

These aspects of the giver of the creative design may be identified as comprising a personality; inscrutable and confounding only when we are sucking that mud of our chosen environment, but clearly parental.

If indeed we have been designed for continuous joy, then the designer must have the same wherewithal for enjoyment, and must have a vested interest in our plights and our emancipations, as those emancipations will involve His pleasure. But most busy themselves with ultimate rationales and schemes to put in place which would defy this divine personality, and take charge of the administration of life and love. Just ask the tyrants who would drive people into hunger and despair and who themselves are privately commiserating about their own profound sense of emptiness.

Must millions of wailing generations of lost souls pass before the bounty of the personality of the infinite will finally become as obvious as the radiant sun? The earth itself awaits the return of the footfalls of the emancipated man to reclaim his place in godliness. And a multi-faceted and wondrously complex heaven may exist nowhere else in this vast universe but under this sun of such blinding splendour.

No comments: