Posted on 03/04/2020 8:40:53 AM PST by Salvation
We live in a world of unprecedented comfort: electricity, indoor plumbing, heating and air-conditioning, medicine, healthcare, abundant food, myriad consumer products, and entertainment available with the click of a button. Despite this we do not seem more grateful or at ease than our forebears. If anything, we aremoreanxious. For example, though people have never lived so long nor been so healthy, we have never been more worried about our health.
One would think that such abundance and comfort would lead us to be exceedingly grateful and to overlook small setbacks, remembering how much more difficult life was for our ancestors—but the opposite seems more often to be the case. We seem to be easily frustrated and to have little tolerance for enduring even the most minor suffering. Our comfortable couches have made us soft and our countless options have made us overly particular and easily annoyed. There is an old saying that “Expectations are premeditated resentments.” We certainly have a lot of expectations these days, many of them unrealistic in the long run. The insistence on everything being perfect seems to rob us of the happiness we should enjoy. Everyone wants the ideal, and if there is any ordeal, they want a newdeal.
We seem to have lost the idea the idea that life is a time of testing for us. We live in paradise lost, and there are going to be difficulties. St. Augustine reminds us that trials have their purpose:
Our pilgrimage on earth cannot be exempt from trial. We progress by means of trial. No one knows himself except through trial, or receives a crown except after victory, or strives except against an enemy or temptations. [From a commentary on the psalms by Saint Augustine, bishop (Ps. 60, 2-3: CCL 39, 766)].
Yes, trials and tests help us to gain self-knowledge and self-mastery. Trials also have purifying and humbling effects. So good is God to us that He allows His graces to become our merits. For, having engaged the battle of life and undergone its trials, the crown of victory will be granted to us. St. Augustine surely has in mind St. Paul’s confident hope:
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on the crown of righteousness is laid up for me, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but to all who crave His appearing(2 Tim 4:7-8).
Where would you and I be today without the trials of the past? We do not seek out suffering, but the suffering that inevitably comes in both small and large doses helps to form our character, make us stronger, and give us wisdom.
We who live in the developed world today have, for the most part, “First World problems,” and we do well to remember the inevitability of trials in this life. We don’t have to like them, but when they come, we should accept and endure them graciously. Resentment and anger at such trials do not bespeak spiritual maturity. Enjoy the good things and comforts of this life but beware the tendency to become soft and overly fussy. Remember, too, that this world is passing away.
The song “We’ll Understand It Better By and By” has these appropriate lyrics:
Trials dark on every hand
And we cannot understand,
All the ways that God will lead us
To that blessed Promised Land.
But He guides us with His eye,
And we follow till we die,
And we’ll understand it better by and by.
Monsignor Pope Ping!
Lord,
Please give Salvation a man sized problem today.
Thank you, but I have enough problems today including a trip to the ophthalmologist.
I recently read one of the books about the lessons of St.Francis of Assisi’s life ————
Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from St. Francis by Murray Bodo. As often found in the lives of saints, he gave up luxury and fine clothes and a chance at the good life financially and instead endured hardship, pain and suffering to give help to others and to serve God’s purpose.
Again I thought of how far I am from sacrificing like that but how much meaning there is in serving and helping others.
Monsignor Pope’s mention of air conditioning and other taken for granted comforts reminds me that once the average car did not have things that were either not yet perfected or were “options” for more money. AC, power steering, power brakes, automatic transmission, rear window defrosters and many more were once options and are now “bundles” or packages with most cars and trucks. Just expected and barely
mentioned in descriptions.
A person even older than I (imagine) said classified newspaper used car ads used to abbreviate “htr” to say the car had a heater! The first couple of years the new idea of side mirror defrosters on Lincolns came out, the company tried to cut costs by dropping them. Buyers reacted and said they missed them, so they went back on the next model year and were soon added to many other car brands.
One of the key aspects in life is self testing
In this world unless you have a drill sergeant, and you’re in the Marine Corps , you need to become that for yourself!
Today it is very easy to get sucked into a 2” x 4” piece of glass
None of the online world matters a whit in the long term, or in reality
To be sure , what matters in this life are two things :
first is your own health and well-being
second is your relationships with others. Your family , friends , colleagues
And the other people in your life
And again I will again assert that the only thing that matters is face to face interactions with these people - the online world means nothing
Sounds interesting.
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