Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

A few days ago, in the context of the idolization of the will, I discussed Walker Percy’s observation that sometimes we love death more than life. Death is the “end game” so to speak, of our “right to choose”_________ (to prevent life during intercourse, to extinguish life already in the womb, to control our suffering, etc. . . . fill in the blank). I was rereading a magazine article this morning which seems closely related. Crisis runs an article in their July/August issue by Benjamin Wiker, on George Felos, which seems to illustrate another manifestation of this need to control our destinies, a control which ultimately ends in the pursuit of death.

Felos, if you will recall, is the lawyer who helped Michael Schiavo snuff out the life of his wife in last Spring’s tragic “right-to-die” case in Florida. Wiker bases his article on Felos’s autobiography. Felos is a strange bird indeed but the common denominator in this man’s struggle with life seems to be a death wish, for himself and others. In fact, he seems to have found a philosophical system/religion which provides the framework for his worship of death. Felos rejected his Christianity for an Eastern religion which proposes the old duality between body and soul in which the body is an illusion to be jettisoned; the soul is the only reality. Rather, the soul is detached divinity waiting to be subsumed back into the ocean of impersonal divinity. Felos is now in control, having reached the Self-consciousness required for this “return” to the divine.

It is not hard to see how this is a distortion of the real truth. We are made in the image of God, and when baptized, we are divinized. However, this is distorted in Eastern thought into our being divine ourselves. We are indeed, made God-like by our baptism but our nature never changes into the Uncreated God. We never lose our personhood; our ineffable unity with God and with others in heaven completes us as persons, it does not annihilate our unique identities. Death is in fact the door to eternal life but it is not ours to choose. God has given us our life with the mission to become perfect; to become as holy as He is Holy (cf. Matt 5:38). We are not divine in the Eastern sense and so Self-consciousness of our own divinity is not the source of our salvation. Rather, only in Christ will we be saved . . . but only if we endure to the end (cf. Matt 10:22). Felos’s satanic siren song plays on a desire to control one’s own destinies, to control even death by seeking it in a confused assumption that one can overcome it through his will.

As for Felos, he has reached his state of Self-consciousness and now seeks death for himself and others. In fact, he is Death’s evangelist helping others to die and hopefully reach this state of consciousness for themselves. If he is not always successful, well, at least he is well compensated for his efforts. Wiker reports that he made about a half a million dollars for his efforts in the Schiavo travesty. John Paul the Great wrote that ideas have consequences. He was thinking about the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century in this statement. We find the same is true today. When we exalt freedom and our will above “being” and life, like JP the Great saw in the century of tears, the result is always death.