Making A Difference – Part 7 – Final Thoughts

Something that sounds simple is seldom easy to accomplish.

In his commencement speech at Stanford on June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs said, “I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do” but people still take jobs they do not love and stay married even after the love is gone.

Circa 1982, a little schoolgirl in Oakland raised her hand and asked Mrs. Nancy Reagan what to do if someone offered her drugs. Mrs. Reagan responded that she was to “just say no” but 29 years later the war on drugs is still ongoing.

In my recent search for God’s truth, the pursuit of which would automatically lead to good works that cure acedia [1], the revelation was simply love but knowing it has not transformed my life.



[1] Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. The Purgatorio, Notes, p. 434. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: New American Library, 2003. This is where the translator wrote that “[a]cedia … is not simply the failure to perform good works for others, though it readily involves that failure. It is, more specifically, the failure to pay enough attention to the good, to make enough demands upon oneself. Were one to give all of his energy and attention to the pursuit of God’s truth, good works would follow automatically [emphasis added]” and where my inspiration to seek out God’s truth came from. John Ciardi continued to state that “[a]cedia may consist in being too torpid to arrive at a vision of the good, or in achieving that vision but neglecting to pursue it.” This I disagree with because I believe that we are born with a vision of the good. It requires no effort to achieve and torpidity does not prevent it from existence. Only when one freely allows oneself to be contaminated by evil does one’s vision of the good go blind. In other words, to claim that a vision of the good is the result of a willful achievement is to suggest that evil predominates naturally unless free will replaces it with good. That is plainly wrong for life springs from all that is good and remains good until evil is permitted to destroy it.