God Does Not Delay
On earth we think sinners get away with their crimes for far too long. We even think they “win.” Standing here, “outside” (by which I mean in the World), we see that the sensualist has totted up a great number of pleasures. My model of the sinner is the sensualist, the one who crows in delight over sexual delicacies. I cannot speak of what I do not know, at least in thought. When I castigate him, I am speaking into myself for that is what I am when I fail.
We'll see that justice eventually came, but it gives us little satisfaction. For we fondle his crimes in our imagination and find them fascinating. Of what punishment is time in a jail cell to that? Or how much hurt can banishment from society give to one who can at any time enlarge the self by going over his memories of daring crimes and secret pleasures? His way is eased, in fact, for he no longer needs to keep up a pretense.
And what of death? If there is a heaven then he'll say he's sorry and be allowed in. If there is a hell, then the great criminal on earth may well become a captain there. And so, thoughts of justice bring us little satisfaction. It is too easily ignored, or weighed against the fascinating evil fruit acquired in a life of sin.
But I know we are wrong about this!
When you see on the surface, you easily come to understandings which hide true understanding. Which stubbornly mix up cause and effect. And then layer the misunderstanding with a “bulwark” of proof you found somewhere else and set upon your error as a capstone to protect it.
Sensuality is a spiritual failure. And its causes and its effects are inner realities. We see widgets appear outside a factory, and imagine the life inside. We would error less if we “saw” from inside the heart of a sister factory. But most of our seeing is error because we use the eyes attached to the brain, and not the eyes of the heart.
The only reason you care about this topic at all is because you have received a great gift: you hunger for God. You might call it “knowledge” or “human advancement” or you may as of yet only vaguely feel you should be a good person (you are young in this case, and will walk many paths in error...but don't give up!). But those inner promptings that make you a patient reader, patient with your friends, able to resist temptation are...holy things. They are the harbingers of joy. If you knew how long you'd “lived” without sensing them, you would weep with gratitude.
The man or woman whose heart rests in God is in a different and better world. It is a high country...a parkland which knows the seasons. Which celebrates each one in memory as it passes, and anticipates the next with a warm glow. One sees far, up there. Spans of days and years far below in the gloaming...
Really, I should be silent about this place because to feel it is the thing.
The sensualist counts his pleasures, and unlike that high and distant country they are immediate, sharply focused and bursting as ripe fruit. He feels that he is “really living.” His world is not grey. It is a dark and fruited jungle of daring escape and pleasant fuzzing of consciousness as he eats and drinks to contentment.
He easily feels like a bigger man, because being lost, he is surrounded by lost beings like himself. And when he accomplishes a new sin, they turn to him and lift him up with their attention. Not knowing that their attention is not worth much (they are lost and have little to do...they obsess over a thing and move on), he thinks he has figured out the world.
As he “counts coup,” he drifts further from high ground and slowly migrates towards another pole. His desires are demonic counterparts to the angels of conscience and duty. Ultimately they will rule him. And so, not long after he began to cherish his sin, his spirit drifts into darker waters.
Have you sat in a room with such a person? Have you seen their fear of being alone? The obsessive run of their thoughts...back and forth between memory of pleasure, anticipation of pleasure, jealous bickering and running down of competitors. They will try to instruct you in their ways. They'll find you strange, but comforting. They would like to teach you in their ways, not knowing that those ways need no teacher, for they are pure gravitational force submitted to without thought.
These people are miserable, and misery-making surrounds them.
You, standing somewhere on higher ground, but not yet in truly high country, compare their sin-taking with your rare (but very real) occasions of sin. You remember how easy it was. How little it disturbed your equinamity. Your error is that you don't know that gravitational force moves your entire context to a different place. Commit as many sins as the one you observe and you will live in the cloud of thought that he does, and be equally miserable.
I recently saw the old Pinnochio film. The transformation of boys into donkeys is like this. What a wonderful and horrible cartoon...very instructive! The braying at the end stage....
Lately we've had Harvey Weinstein. Look at this gray man:
Without knowing anything about him, you can see that he believes the body is all there is. And so his body ages rapidly...it visibly decays at an alarming rate. Remember those scenes in vampire movies where they decay to dust? It just occurred to me that the vampire is an ultimate sensualist. Feeding the self every more, with ever greater predation finally makes it an entity that cannot bear the light of consciousness at all (ie, the sun).
To believe too much in the body is to grind it to dust. It is not the sunlight that did it. It is the road of sin too long walked that led to another being dragging you into sunlight. The road did it. And the road is simply the repetition of choice.
“I choose this.”
“I choose this again.”
“This is my way. Of course I choose it.”
Or, as Emerson said it: "Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny."
We usually remember that quote as a way to uplift ourselves, but forget that it functions in the reverse, too!
Therefore, to live long in this slow approach to a darker sphere is to live in a miserable way. The punishment is already in the crimes. Or, rather, I should say the suffering. For in truth, there is not some external “punisher.”
I know it appears that way on earth. A civil servant with a gun on his belt approaches and locks you in a cell. But that is only the dutiful approach of an antibody carrying out its purpose. It wouldn't be near you if you hadn't, through innumerable choices, acquired the markings of disease.
The process of deepening sin is a lonely, internal one. Good beings are trying to reach you but you've closed the door. What chance does the subtlest being, the one who respects your freedom to the highest degree, have against such closed doors?
It is said that God made heaven, and humans made hell. This is how it happens.
So...I hope you can see there is nothing to envy in the rows of sins committed. There is only the loneliness of outer space and the very real possibility of never finding your way back. How long must this being fight against the gravity of darkness, without any of his old rewards to move back into the penumbra of Light? What horror, if our sun was just one of many distant stars, and you'd forgotten which one?
I said before that there is no punishment, only suffering, all self-inflicted. But mercifully, what I had to say was bounded. There is a willing punisher, and this is another of His manifold gifts to us.
Punishment...real punishment is the sweetest gift. What is it exactly?
It is the directed, focused holy attention to your ever-faltering steps on the right road. Punishment is mercy. It is when a higher being looks at you and says “I will help this man.”
The being says “I will accost him when he steps wrong.” And “I will give him a plan of simple actions to be carried out exactly.” And even “I will use all my wiles with him. I will threaten, I will cajole, I will plead and even deceive if I must.”
“I will love him back into Light.”
Now...the word punishment is used from the sinner-side. All of this, to him, will feel like a cruel scouring. A remorseless, hideous inhumanity.
But...when the surgeons knife is freely chosen, then healing is swift.
Mendoza, who killed his brother in rage in the film The Mission, carries a heavy burden of weapons up a cliff. He takes active part in his punishment.
from a good article about the film, "Choose your own penance":
When the sack gets stuck on undergrowth, one of the Jesuits (played by a young Liam Neeson) hacks it off and lets it fall below. Mendoza climbs below again, reties it, and continues. Not only has Mendoza chosen his penance, but he chooses its completion. In speaking with the other Jesuits, Father Gabriel says Mendoza doesn’t think he’s done, and “until he does, neither do I.”
And in a very different (and wonderful) film, "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring", a patient old monk accepts his pupil back to the isolated, floating temple after he committed murder. First, he binds the young man, cruelly, to stop his fits of suicidal rage. And then sets him a task of carving the Heart Sutra into the floor of the temple.
It is a good beginning to punishment. In labor, the young man's hatred is finally felt for what it is: a thing that cannot long last in the loving light of focused, Godly attention.
When you see these wrecks...on tv...in books...say a prayer that your own sinful nature receives loving punishment as it chafes even now, longing to carry out the crimes which it calls freedoms. Say a prayer for the one in the dock.
There but for the grace of God go I. And may yet go. For until we are in the highest country, we may become willful, and descent a midnight path. We may lose all our riches at any time. Be watchful!