The limits of our endurance. . .

St. Thomas Aquinas has a sort of way with words.  One of my favorites is the things we love tell us who we are.  He has effectively jumped through time to perceive and describe what is the weakness of our age.  "...where a man is accustomed to enjoy pleasures, it is more difficult for him to endure the lack of them..."  We have, to use his own words, become addicted to pleasure itself and therefore work not only to preserve them but to prevent us from having to surrender any of them.  

It is an apt description of the joys of sex.  We are addicted to them and cannot surrender them even when we admit that they are not quite moral.  Think, for example, how difficult it is for even Christians to give up cohabitation.  It has become more than normal.  It has become that which is so precious we cannot even consider forsaking the right for any purpose.  Add to this premarital sex.  It has become the most normal thing of all to presume that sexual desire is too strong to be reined in for any cause or purpose and therefore they must be accommodated because they cannot be controlled.  It has become normal to presume that someone's gender identity can be in conflict with their DNA, chromosomes, and reproductive organs and to think that such a conflict is so egregious that the body must give way to the feeling at any age.  In this way, our feelings have become more powerful than facts and those things that govern and define us most of all.

It is not limited to sex.  We have indulged in the entertainment of self as a higher goal even than education, service, duty, and community that we insist that everything in life is secondary to this right to be entertained.  Work must give us something more than a paycheck and a means of supporting us or our families.  It must also reward us with personal fulfillment.  It must entertain.  Indeed, this aspect of work has become more important than the paycheck for many in the workplace.  We are jealous of our me time and guard our time and activities even over friendships, relationships, and community.  We are literally amusing ourselves to death.

It is not limited to amusement.  Perhaps since Covid though I do not think due to the pandemic, we have become insistent upon the right to personal security.  Safety has become one of the pantheon of deities we hold dear.  We do not answer our cell phones nor do we go to our front doors.  Instead, we call back those who we want to talk to and after the people have departed we check outside the door for packages we may have ordered.  Face to face encounters have become limited to only those whom we trust.  We will have our groceries delivered to our door with the favorite foods from our restaurants because we are addicted to convenience and because it preserves our illusion of a safe and insulated life.

Strangely enough, privacy is no longer a value as highly treasured as convenience and amusement.  We will gladly surrender some of our privacy in order to receive these other goods which we esteem more highly than privacy.  We will allow government, social media, and apps on our phones access to what was in the past considered privileged information all because we value convenience and amusement.  Even pornography has become such a right we demand as a culture that it too has become normal.  Of course, it also reveals that digital relationships are easier for us to handle than the messy nature of personal ones.

Again, how curious it is that we hold the right to end an unwanted pregnancy to be something of more value to us than the actual having and raising of children.  As a culture we have decided to ring the alarm bell against any effort to restrict the right to abortion but do not seem to notice the decline in marriage and the birth rate.  One is acceptable to us and one is not.  It should not surprise us that the one we cherish is also the one that preserves our pleasures without responsibility while the other presumes sacrifice and a cost from us.

Indeed, sin is an appeal to the immature side of us that would sacrifice other things of more value historically for that which entertains and amuses us in the moment.  Neither Adam nor Eve seemed to recall the warning of the Lord that if they ate they would die but in the moment they seemed unable to keep from grabbing the forbidden fruit and eating it.  Moments later they knew it was wrong and in their shame they tried to cover up their failure.  In the long run, the reign of sin in our lives has been remarkably the same.  We continue to cover up the consequences in order to preserve the illusion that amusement and entertainment are the only real things worth having.