i read this quote today and i read it several times to really understand it and then it made me stop and think for a minute or two about being a good mother and a thoughtful human being (and i hope that i am both),..
go on read it a few times and then think and then come back to my conclusions....
"Evil lust and evil passions are to a great extent generated by boredom and emptiness. It is difficult to struggle against that boredom by means of abstract goodness and virtue. The dreadful thing is that virtue at times seems deadly dull, and there's no salvation in it. Cold, hard-set virtue, devoid of creative fire, is always dull and never saves. The heart must be set aglow if dullness is to be dispelled.
...Lust is a means of escaped from boredom when goodness provides no such escape. This is why it is very difficult -- almost impossible -- to conquer evil passions through negative asceticism ... and prohibition. They can only be conquered positively, through awakening the positive and creative spiritual force opposed to them.
...Purely negative asceticism, preoccupied with evil and sinful desires and strivings, so far from enlightening the soul, intensifies its darkness. We must preach, therefore, a morality based not upon the annihilation of will but upon its enlightenment, not upon the humiliation of man and his external submission to God, but upon the creative realization by man of the divine in life -- of the values of truth, goodness and beauty."
-- Nicholas Berdyaev, from "Ultimate Questions: An Anthology of Modern Russian Religious Thought"
and just because i know you all will think i was actually reading that entire really thought provoking book, i wasn’t. i just found that quote on a blog that i read...
here is that blog in case you want to have deep thought tuesday yourself...http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/
now onto my deep thoughts early on a tuesday morning (really,it is way too early for such deep thoughts, but this is just how i roll)...
first of all, we are facing a generation of kids (and adults) who are bored and empty. no wonder we see incredible amounts of evil lust and passions EVERYWHERE around us. after reading amusing ourselves to death, i look at television in a whole new way. i don’t want a life spent searching after entertainment, a life concentrated on being amused and half awake, being duped into believing what my eyes see on the flickering screen. when i am more interested in someone’s fake life on television that the real life i am living, i am in trouble (thanks to lori for expounding that concept in starbucks).
anyway, i think as a parent, i have tended to rely on using negative stimuli to produce goodness in my children (and myself), and for the most part it has worked. but i would like to “set their hearts aglow if dullness is to be dispelled”, not a mere “external submission to God” (which i struggle with GREATLY) but a creative desire to seek what is Divine and wonderful in our lives and how we can bring truth, goodness, and beauty into all that we do. i want my inner life to be larger and more God centered than my outer life “appears”.
and i think with me it starts with me living more creatively first (and i know you all don’t even know how i could live MORE creatively). and encouraging that in my children. which is all very relevant (isn’t God SO relevant) because....
summer is a comin’ and with that free time for us all it typically means more television, computer, entertainment time for my children (and myself). but i really feel that God is leading me to do something different with all that time this summer. and it will start with turning off the television and the computer and unplugging a bit. not merely amusing ourselves through a summer. but really living through those days...
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility.”
from AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman
that is all the deep thinking i can do for a tuesday morning. i gotta go watch t.v. now...
ha ha ha.