Vicissitudes Of Life

Life has ups and downs.  They seem to be so normal that few stop and wonder if they are what God had intended.  Should anyone wonder?  I suppose it does not hurt to ponder the imponderables.

Let me begin with the assertion that there are no down days in Heaven.  Why would there be any down day when every "day" in Heaven is perfect (as if Heaven goes by earth's 24 hour day -- it does not, but this entry uses it for reference purposes).  Not a single day goes by in Heaven that is not completely fulfilled.  When a soul no longer has desires, it is at its optimum.  At any moment when everything seems to go well and all desires seem to be satisfied ("seem" because life is as much a reality and it is a delusion when reality is filter through man's intellectually rationalizing mind), the human spirit is at its optimum and that moment is an up moment, albeit not a true "up" moment.  If all consecutive moments with a 24-hour period are at their optimum, then that day is an up day.  How often does it happen?  That question is for someone who had experienced it to answer.

Even if up days are somewhat delusional it is sometimes better to have some of them than none of them.  To have a truly perfect day, life must first be perfect, then all up moments would be true "up" moments, but life continues to be imperfect because man chooses continually to reject the good.

What is good?  Everyone seems to know what "good" is [1] but only God knows what is good because good comes from God.  If God's good is too abstract for man to grasp, it has been made concrete by the Son of God and the Mother of God.  If Their lives are not accepted, understood and emulated, and the overwhelming evidence shows that they are not, then the world will never be like Heaven, and all of the sinful man's days will never be truly fulfilled and his hopes for fulfillment will never be realized.

Man does not seem to mind living his unfulfilled life [2] with God in the periphery.  He escapes his dissatisfaction by detaching himself from the reality of unfulfillment and engaging in activities that distract him, leading him further and further away from God and drawing him closer and closer to Satan's embrace, but the average man still has a conscience which originated from good, and it is man's periodic return to his conscience that gives him a true "up" moment.  True "up" moments are rare but that does not faze man.  He compensates for what he does not have with his intellectually-contrived up moments, as well as drug, sex and alcohol-induced ones, thinking that they would cancel out his unfulfilled desires when they only increase the intensity of his cravings, the very poisons that distract him from the good.

Unable to extricate himself from the downward spiral of pretensions of happiness and fulfillment that empties his soul, man continues to believe that his life is destined to be full of ups (mostly phony and short-lived ones) and downs (real and repetitive) when in fact man has chosen freely to refuse the realizable true and lasting fulfillment from Heaven in favor of a multitude of temporary fake ones from Hell.  So leave it to the poets and ponderers to philosophize about life's vicissitudes as if man cannot find his way out of them [3].




[1] The selfish man does only what is good for him, and thinks that what is good for him is also good for mankind.  Nothing can be further from the Truth for man is not prepared to sacrifice himself without some kind of self-serving gain.  Such is man's nature and such is the nature of Sin.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve sacrificed their obedience to God by eating the Forbidden Apple because they want to become like God.
[2] Beyond an unfulfilled life, life could be utterly miserable but for those who choose to endure the misery with patience and love for God will likely see God.  Those who find their lives too miserable to carry on and commits suicide have in essence rejected God's gift of life, and possibly God as well. If indeed they had rejected God, they will not see God.
[3] As a practical matter, man cannot find his way out of the ups and downs in his life because of Sin. Until Sin is gone, life's vicissitudes will stay.  In other words, this blogger continues to have a valid license to lament over the vicissitudes of life since vicissitudes create a longing for man's ultimate fulfillment that he can only find in God, a longing that lasts long as life is long until he is shown his eternal destiny.