Everyone’s life is unique with unique challenges. The rich ones are not exempt from torment and certainly cannot buy their way out of the worst of it, nor are the poor ones blessed with constant joy when they do not have the minimum amount of food and creature comfort that only those with some means can afford.
Torment is the result of Original Sin and its manifestations. When torment is accepted with this understanding and humility, it begins to wash away Sin's derivatives but not Original Sin. Original Sin is indelibly embedded in every sinner that only Christ was able to take away, which He did by His suffering and His resurrection. Therefore, man needs only be concerned with his own sins, not the Sin of his first parents, Eve and Adam.
When man refuses to accept the pains of his torments and commits suicide, thinking that he has ended all sufferings would find out that the thought that compelled him to end his own life was a Satanic temptation that opens the door to Hell. God gave man his life and it is for God, not man, to end it.
Therefore suicide, assisted-suicide, along with capital punishment, murder and euthanasia are Satan's ways to steal from God what belongs to God which is life by ending it with a sinister form of death that is not natural. Those who advocate such forms of death or participates directly and indirectly in them are under Satan's influence. Torment could very well be their eternity.
Of all the creatures, Satan understands torment most of all because It is engaged in a war against God that It cannot win. For this reason, Its torment is eternal. Since misery loves company (as the saying goes), therefore Satan wants to ruin as many souls as It can so that they will end up in Hell to accompany It.
Life is punctuated with bouts of torment, and Satan is there with Its temptations to help man to numb the pain and to forget about it temporarily. Wanting a quick fix, man indulges in drugs, alcohol, sex and other vices that eventually defeats the man then ruins his soul, unless he turns to God for help in his battle against Satan.
God is not here to take away man's pains since the pains of torment are reminders of man's own selfish and sinful existence. By recognizing them as such, and enduring them with humility, man is transformed and perfected ever so gradually. This transformation, however, will not turn a sinful man into a saint overnight but it is progress nonetheless, nor will it replace man’s torment with lasting joy.
Joy does not come easily for this blogger. As he begins to age and to experience more and more intense difficult periods in his life, as he is being forced to no longer live in his dreams, as he begins to see more and more of the truths and the pretenses, while his romantic side had dissipated ever so imperceptibly, he is hardly able to imagine joy and express it.
He now experiences joy vicariously through the joy of others or so it seems. Ironically, he finds this joy mainly in music composed by Ludwig van Beethoven who was tormented by what this blogger believes to be agonizing tensions between his personality and physical limitations on the one hand and his God-given musical genius on the other.
Joy, in the music of Beethoven, is not always apparent. Beethoven's joy seemed elusive. In some of his compositions, his joy appeared to be shrouded in a mist of sadness, if not completely blotted out by his wrath. Perhaps this joy, as it shined through a diaphanous veil of deep sorrow, was the true joy of the spirit that Beethoven presented to God through his music, that the listener can only share a moment of with his eyes closed.
An expression of Beethoven’s quiet and unspoken joy, tinged with sadness and resignation but cradled by a sense of interior peace, was revealed in depth by members of the Lindsay String Quartet in their performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130, Movement V: Cavatina. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC26f1XBKjQ
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