Good and Evil

​This week we consider good and evil. God allowed Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of every tree in the Garden of Eden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They disobeyed and men have been loath to accept limits ever since.
Not content to abide within the limits of his strength, stamina, and speed; man harnessed beasts. To surpass even those limits, man created machines. Man’s capacity to exceed all limits and bend nature to his will seems boundless, yet we still have difficulty discerning good from evil.
   God created us to love, honour, and serve Him and, by extension, all He created. He brought us forth and our life is a journey back to Him. Along the way we have many particular tasks, but they should not lead us away from our true end. What signs will guide us to the correct path at each fork?
    We are often encouraged to follow pleasure, gain, and success, yet none of these is morally better than pain, loss, and failure. The merit of each must be weighed in the context of the situation. It is, in fact, impossible to have these perceived goods without some measure of the perceived evils. As the saying goes, “No pain, no gain.” Every choice we make is a balance of combinations of these values, but these measures do not determine whether an act is good or evil.
   The good things ​we find through our physical, spatial, and temporal perspective more often distract us from, rather than guide us to, our true end. We do better appreciating them as consolations rather than setting them as goals. So our problem remains: who will guide us to the place from which no one has returned?
   Since we have no guide to where we haven’t been, our best chance is to move away from where we have been. Our path to good is found by placing evil behind us. We must flee from our sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. We must harness the virtues of humility, charity, chastity, kindness, temperance, patience, and diligence, and riding them to our final end.
   Perhaps, that way, we can finally learn to properly love and honour the gifts our Lord has provided rather than merely use them. Perhaps we can learn to tend and harvest our environment rather than rape and pillage it.​ Perhaps we can learn to live within proper limits. Perhaps we can learn to rein in our wants and service our needs.
     I’m not there yet, but perhaps we can make this our journey rather than merely a dream.

                                                                                          God bless.

---