Does Being Good Matter? – PART 5

davidluiz — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:01:48 +0000

I imagine Jesus responding to those lawyers – love your neighbor as yourself
and love God with all your might, strength and everything you’ve got, for this is
the sum of the work of the prophets and the giving of the law (obviously
paraphrased). Check the literature. You will find that this thing called ‘love’
is now the talk of the moment. Non-Christians and Christians alike
recognize its power and its relevance to the human condition. Even
psychotherapists! Would you imagine that? – When you’d have sworn that
science will concoct its own sophisticated response to the problem of mental
disorders! Today, thinkers insist on the primacy of love in human
functioning. This Vegetablian law is no foreigner at all; without it, as Peck
affirms, things start to go awry. When confronted with the mystery of
psychiatric illness, I found myself, so to speak, following a trail of blood for
a long way – until, presto, I arrived at the sound of labored breathing
belonging not to a seething unconscious (as Freud would have us believe) or
to an inadequate capacity to handle information, but to a wounded
conscience (of course, this is not all that could be said about mental
disorders. However, there are reasons to connect neurosis with sin). Let’s
put it this way: the law of the conscience or the imperative of the conscience
is simply the divine imperative – love your God and love your neighbor as
yourself. When we violate this law, which in other words mean that we stop
being good, we ‘heap coals of fire on our head’. When we live for anything
other than this great principle we naturally intuit, which is another way of
saying that we sin or become selfish, we substitute the rightful occupier of
our hearts for what Lewis called ‘the sweet poison of the false infinite’.
If sin, that is, transgression, were merely the transgression of a foreign law,
then it would matter little. Until we realize that sin is the transgression of
ourselves we cannot begin to understand the awful importance of God’s
enjoinments. We lose everything worthwhile when we stop being good; we
lose the taste of grapes, the wonder of a blossoming daffodil under a
yawning sun and the bliss of knowing and sharing the love of another in
mutual company and marriage. We lose ourselves. And even if God had not
taken pains to write down in ink what he has already written in our hearts
(the conscience), we would be just as much responsible to that awful, plain
and universal call to serve others above ourselves. Here is one world then –
interwoven with a single consideration, connecting all activity and thought,
and subjecting it to the great law of Love.
The story is told of a peasant in search of heaven. On being told that he may
find it at the summit of a terrible mountain, he begins his journey. On his
way, he runs into a small dog, who proves to be a companion and friend to
him in the midst of angry weathers, snakes, hunger and other constraints.
After days and nights of tears, doubt, hope and untold suffering, he finally
reaches the summit. Rapturous gold and angels with otherworldly beauty
herald him – but only for a moment. Looking at his companion with slight
irritation, one of the angels says, “The rules are quite clear – no pets allowed
in the kingdom. You must leave the thing to go its way, or you may not
enter”. What a moment! The peasant considers the friendship of the dog,
how he barked away little hideous snakes and licked his hunger, dust and
tears away – giving him the very thing he needed to arrive here. And now this?
The peasant turns his head away from the animal and replies, “Then I
will not enter. How can I do this thing to a friend, a companion? How can I
allow myself to be ushered into wealth and comfort and allow this hapless
creature die of a broken heart and bones? I want to enter, but if he cannot
14
come with me, then I cannot go in myself”. And with that, he starts to go
down the mountain – only for the strangest thing to happen at that instance:
the dog suddenly transforms into a Being of dazzling radiance and beauty,
who in one fell sweep answers the peasant’s confusion and fright: “The
heavenly are heaven itself. Only those who are heavenly find heaven in the
first place. Welcome home”.
And so, to the question ‘does being good matter?’, I do not think it
appropriate to merely say that it does because God says it does (for like we
have found, even if God is silent about it – or even says something to the
contrary, by the nature of things we would still think it matters), or because
we find heaven when we are, or because we gain good things like success and
prosperity when we are (which is not always the case). It may not even
suffice completely to say that being good is enjoined by our own natures
(and merely amplified by God) and avoiding our shadows is an easier task
than evading the consequences, which show themselves up in the mental
disorders and, of course, in the additional threatening of a vilified God. But
it surely must be beyond all further rancor and controversy to say that
being good matters in itself – it is the end of all things and must never be
treated as a derived principle; being good matters because it matters –
because by it everything else matters or does not matter. And should we
ever have reason to doubt if heaven really is at the end of Road 13, we might
take solace in the words of a dazzling Being, ‘the heavenly are heaven itself’.

The Behold File » coals of fire

Does Being Good Matter? – PART 5