A lot of Catholic (or Christian) thinking seems to distill down to two ways of living…living for God or living for “self”. Living for God in due course becomes Heaven, or The Beatific Vision. Living for “self” in due course becomes Hell, or a permanent separation from God.
For many, life is all about maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Once pain permanently outweighs pleasure, as it invariably will, the logic of suicide or euthanasia kicks-in because after all, what’s the point in being alive in the first place? But even those living to maximize pleasure might concede that excessive amounts of certain pleasures like food, drink, sex, drugs, etc. are addictive and ultimately not good for us.
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m a Catholic perspective, living for “self” is problematic even if we are pursuing the good things of this world like life, health, livelihood, friendships, reputation, etc. The reason is because we are made by God, for God and never completely satisfied until we rest in Him as St. Augustine observed. If we (and this is the true nature of sin) refuse to recognize this limit and try to live without God, standing alone in pursuit of all the good things in this world, then precisely by adopting this attitude we set ourselves up for a final separation from God because we deem Him unnecessary or irrelevant.
All this can help explain a basic question about life…Why do bad things happen to good people? It is permitted precisely to help save us as this article explains. It sheds some light on the parable of the weeds among the wheat in the Gospel of Mathew. When the slaves ask if they should go and pull up the weeds, the master says, “No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest…” (Mat 13:29-30).
Try to imagine a world in which only good things happened to good people (no weeds) and only bad things happened to bad people, but at the same time all the people still had the stain of Original Sin. This would drive more and more good behavior, but not for the love of God; it would be for the love of “things”. If the connection between good behavior and worldly blessings is too close, we will pursue the former for the wrong reasons. We cannot be with God in the world to come if we become too attached to the world that is, and suffering helps prevent this.
For example, suppose your employer asks you to tell a lie at work and you refuse. You are then promptly fi
red, but one of your co-workers is willing and eager to tell the lie and is promptly promoted. It’s a classic case of a bad thing happening to a good person and vise-versa. But because this was allowed to happen, and depending on your disposition, you may now find it easier to detached from your former employer and continue to pursue righteousness for God’s sake, while your co-worker becomes further entrenched.
We find ourselves in a world with both goodness & beauty as well as evil & ugliness, but we are meant finally for union with God. Therefore, the soul must be free from its attachments to finite things, even if they are good, so that we can be made free for God…who is Goodness itself!
A very good post, Ben. Thank you.
I often think of this when I hear the parable of the sower. Some seed fell on the path, some on rocks and some among the weeds, but some fell on good soil. How did that soil become good? It had to be prepared! The sower plows the field first. From the farmer’s perspective, this is a good thing … But from the perspective of the soil, it’s like the whole world is being turned upside down! 🙂
Thanks “cag” and nice insight on the parable of sower!
In my neck of the woods modern farmers do not plow they inject the seeds. There are round-up beans and corn which are impervious to Round Up so that when it is applied it only kils the weeds. The stubble leftover from the harvest is turned under or just left to decompose and feed the soil. Two types of Round Up. The one with 24D by federal law is not allowed to be used on or near orchards or vineyards. On a hot day the sprayed on liquid can become air borne and travel as much as 1.5 miles and defoliate an orchard or vineyard. No leaves, no photosynthesis, no crop.
I wish the former blogmeister of 1P5 who is now a self-professed agnostic with a deep and abiding hatred against an “absentee God” (his words on Twitter) would read this and re-gain the faith which once he fought so hard to defend. Pray for him.