Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

In the myriad crises that the media, as usual, is helping to in some cases fan (economic) and in others foster (ecological, racial, political, etc.) it is not surprising that more end of days prophets have surfaced.  One good thing about this kind of environment is that I have found myself better attuned to consider more carefully the despair of our modern day nihilists.

As I was putting together notes for a lecture tonight, I was reading through JPTG’s theology of the body catecheses once again.   His commenting on a passage from 1 John struck me in a way that I had not considered in the who-knows-how-many-times I had previously read it:

On the one hand, “the world passes away with its concupiscence,” on the other, “the one who does the will of God will remain in eternity” (1Jn 2:17) [Waldstein, 101:7].

The context of his talk is the eschatological hope that one finds in marriage as the primordial sacrament.  However, what struck me is the lack of eschatological hope of so many in our society.  I suspect that the numbers comprising this group are those who are wedded to the passions of the flesh.  Why this is so is suggested in the above passage.

Fixating on the satiation of bodily passions to the neglect of the deeper needs of the soul attenuates, and perhaps completely suppresses, any awareness of that which allows us to transcend the material world.  That is, the spiritual aspect of our existence.  With our focus solely on the corruptible, and steadily corrupting flesh it is no mystery why we would have no long term hope in eternal life.

We see our own flesh, and that of others, decaying before our very eyes.  We have a clear, if subliminal, witness that concupiscence eventually passes away–even if it is our own.   In fact, our experience of concupiscence is that it does not provide a lasting substance on which to build anything.  Once a particular lust is sated, we are left empty.  When we respond in a disordered way to satisfy the urges of the animal aspect of our human nature, we kill again the spiritual life which gives us hope.

I suspect that the world’s hope for the future that rang in the ears of the practical nihilists during BO’s presidential campaign, for a moment at least, resonated with their innermost being.  This explains the explicit messianic adulation that BO received and continues to receive.  His message is one of hope without demands.  This is no hope at all.

This world is passing way as is the concupiscence that keeps it and us from acheiving its greatness.  For those who wed themselves to satisfying their concupiscent desires at the expense of their souls, even the exuberance of  the last election cycle will not be enough to keep them distracted for long.

Our economy has been based upon a rampant consumerism focused too much on an attempt to satisfy concupiscence’s infinite wants at the expense of truth.  The great demand to fill our spiritual void with material goods could not keep up with our incomes so we had to continue to fill the void with goods bought on credit.  It appears that the credit bubble has now burst.  I do not know if we have come to the end of the line with this or not but as any one with eyes can see the crisis we now face is more spiritual than it is economic.

Nevertheless, this world is fading away.  Perhaps now is the most auspicious time to proclaim the new world that this passing world still awaits as it groans in travail, the new creation that will be given to those who do the will of God.