Getting What We Deserve

Registering his thoughts on an article by me published on the SBC website a couple of months ago, “When Government Fails,” Gene De, a regular website visitor whose frequent comments are always intelligent and welcome, posted this:

“Because spiritual sloth has set in in our country – and in the hearts of men – we doom ourselves by our own devices. In other words, we get what we deserve.”

Spiritual sloth? Get what we deserve?

Gene De was absolutely correct, and what he observes can be related to our life in eternity as well as in this world. On this score I’ll reiterate something I’ve said before on the SBC website and elsewhere and doubtless will repeat in future. It bears repeating on account of being an important truth which, like so many others, is obscured in our day.

Souls who spend eternity separated from God are not sent to Hell as a punishment inflicted on them by Him. They choose it. There was something they wanted in this world more than God and to which they therefore devoted themselves instead of to Him, and that is what they will get when their life continues on the other side of “death”. The drunkard seeks constantly to quench his thirst. He will be thirsty forever. The lecher seeks constantly to satisfy his itch. It will be a torment when it is forever. Another man seeks emotional relief by constantly blowing his top. He will spend forever venting his rage (what a Hell that will be!).

Another type of man is also in Hell. In fact he probably predominates: the respectable, law-abiding, bland, ordinary man. Let’s imagine a particular one who is Catholic. What he seeks in this world is no more than what he thinks of as happiness, possessing a comfortable home, good health, money enough for a worry-free retirement – in a word, security. On occasion, usually when an acquaintance dies, he may think of what he supposes awaits him: being welcomed by a grandfatherly God into a Heaven that essentially is an extension of what he seeks in this world. This being so, his membership in the Church doesn’t mean much to him. There is no need to devote time and energy to practicing the religion.

After he dies suddenly at age 53 when returning to the house from a morning run, he realizes that life for him will continue more or less as he imagined except in one regard, God isn’t anywhere around and never will be. It isn’t that He ever wanted to be absent, in the past or now, but the man had never sought His company. Realizing that had he made God part of his life, his existence now would be infinitely richer, the man will be filled with lacerating bitterness and regret forever.

There is no punishment in any of this. It is souls getting what they always wanted, getting what they deserve. That is justice, not punishment.

The habitually angry man won’t be the only one in Hell hollering and shaking his fist. Even as men too often fail to see themselves as the cause of this world’s worst troubles but blame them on anonymous historical forces, government inefficiency, fate or even God, souls in Hell do not accept responsibility for their being where they are. Thus one of the worst features of the place is the unremitting noise as the inmates scream at one another, “You led me here! It’s your fault I’m damned!” This brings us back to the social dimension of spiritual sloth – what I wrote about in my article and that drew Gene De’s comment.

The individual is responsible for his being in Hell, but nobody is there alone. In the same way, the individual may prefer the world and its pleasures to God and what Heaven offers, but there are social consequences to be paid when most of society prefers them.

The operative word in that statement was “prefer”. Whatever Puritans contend, whether they be Protestant or of Jansenistic stripe, there is nothing wrong or evil about loving this world and the life we have in it. The world and our life are gifts from God, He is their source, and He is good. More exactly, He is Good itself, the Sum of all good. Nothing bad can come from Him. This is exactly why He should be preferred to what is merely His creation, should be loved more than it, good as it is.

Of course it is easier to love the world. It is immediately present, at least to our senses, while God seems not to be. In truth, however, He really is present. As Scripture tells us, “In Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts, 17.28). No one could be closer. Only, He is not immediately apprehended by our senses. We have to make an effort – we have to work – to be mindful of His presence. Not to do this work, or to be lax at it, is an excellent definition of spiritual sloth. It is to be ordinary, bland.

Prayer, meditation, pious devotions are involved, they are part of it, but mainly as helps. The real work is disciplining ourselves so as to enjoy creation without becoming so enamored of it that we forget a greater love is owed to the One who provides it, the Creator, God.

When men forget God, they wind up living as if He did not exist. That is to say, they wind up living according to their own will instead of God’s. In liberal societies – and every nation in the formerly Christian West now proudly claims to be one – it is how men are supposed to live. This to the extent that politics, the means by which the life of a society is governed, are conducted according to the “will of the people,” not God’s. This principle of men living according to their own will is the very one around which society today is organized. When a society is advanced in its liberalism, as is ours, mere public reference or appeal to explicitly Christian standards – i.e., God’s will – can be deemed a crime, a “hate crime”.

The result is, well, “what we deserve,” to quote Gene De one more time. Do we deserve better? No, not as things stand. Whether better is possible is another question, but in any case would only be attainable by men who are less slothful.

If you enjoyed Mr. Potter’s article, you may appreciate his talk, “Life in the ‘Darkest’ of Times”.