THE PRIDE OF LIFE: LESSONS FROM ST. JOHN (PART 2)
“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world— the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life —is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 St. John 2:15-17).
Life is a gift. We did not make ourselves, we did not bring ourselves into being. Regardless of the circumstances of our birth, we owe our lives to the humans who conceived and delivered us, and to the God who breathed life into us to make us living souls. Running through the Christian tradition is a belief that no matter how corrupted a life may become, that the very fact of its existence is still a sign of hope and the ground upon which a moment’s reflection can spark thanksgiving to God to become the first step into communion with God. Because our life is not our own creation, we should not be surprised then that there are properties and limits written into our lives that give them shape and direction.
The notion of unconditional free will is a fantasy that has destroyed the modern imagination of the happy life; it is the repeating of a deception that has been with us since the Fall. One could even say that this fantasy is the cause of the fall itself. For in the world that God made He made us and all of this He made as He made it, good and true and beautiful. Life as it is given by God is a life of gift that lasts forever in communion and harmony with Himself as the Giver.
Yet in the Fall, we imagined and birthed a world of our own making in which we would live as God’s, defined only by our own desires, our own wills. But we were never created with the capacity to enjoy this self-creating life. This fundamental idolatry of self made a world defined by the worship of self, a world in which there would be unrestricted freedom to look on whatever we wanted and to claim it as our own on our own terms and to call it all good.
This is what St. John means when he refers to “the world.” It is a world that breaks with the fundamental relationship that gives light and life in the world as given by God. This is the darkness that seeks its own and so disowns the light. Eventually, “the world” becomes hell as it is no longer able to sustain its own life and so drifts into non-existence, stretched thinner and thinner as it scrapes the same shrinking pile of energy and resources and time into an attempt of validating itself against the endless abundance of heaven, the light and life of God, which only grows more full and robust and wondrous and delightful. Hell, in the end, compared to heaven, hardly exists as a sliver of shadow maintained by the only things in God’s good new creation that refuse to join the celebration.
This thing that will eventually be hell, the forever night of rebellion, is known to us in three ways according to St. John. He calls these ways the lust of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. The flesh means all of the infirmities that undermine our love for God and other.
They are, simply put, cravings for things around us out of place and time, sought because we want them and not because they are a part of God’s world of gift, a world in which everything has purpose and place. The flesh craves everything according to the yearning of the self to be like God, calling good and directing all things to itself. For when God calls things good in directing them to Himself, it is to their flourishing, their best and highest way of being. When we intrude on that to direct all things to the naked craving of ourselves, it is to the consumption of everything to its destruction and our own. The desire of the eyes, which serves this craving, is the allure and distraction of what is most obvious and spectacular. It means to prefer what impresses immediately and takes as most real what is most obvious.
This is a danger to the spiritual life, of course, because what is most real about us is precisely what is not most obvious. The light and life of God in us bear all the quiet confidence of real things and so do not need to vaunt themselves. The darkness and its manifestations must scream for as long as they have breath and draw our attention to them even as they exhaust themselves and fade into the eternal obscurity of hell. The fervor of this effort brings us to the final form of the world, the pride of life, which for St. John means taking security in the life we give ourselves rather than the life we are given. Ultimately, they are a temptation to give ourselves over to the ambitions that seek to replace the highest glory to which we are called.
As St. John will teach us, the truth of our destiny is a thing so grand that when it is revealed all other pretensions are stripped away at once. Any notion of comparison of the two worlds is a purely temporary thing. There will come a point at which the world that is passing will have passed and in passing reveal the poverty of its attempts to be the eternal life in God. But the full nature of that life is yet to be seen, and so for us remains a life of enduring fidelity to the light and life revealed in Jesus, -- this alone bestows the communion we crave in our deepest heart with the Father who made us. As we will come to see, there is nothing like the love of a child safe in the arms of their good Father in heaven.