This is a powerful article from the Free Press. It points out the emptiness of all that sparkly things that consume us in the digital age. It is a meditation on a 1915 Novel “on Human Bondage” by W. Somerset Maugham (which I have not read).
“As he remembers the raucous warmth of his Sunday lunches with the Athelneys, Philip begins to realize something Plato hints at in his Symposium: Though not all beautiful things are good for you, all goodness is beautiful. His toxic love affair with Mildred is proof that the things we feel drawn to can hurt us terribly. Surface attractions, without inner substance, sharpen our hunger but never satisfy it. Torrid passions are just pale shadows of a deeper craving for the beauty of truly good things: companionship, belonging, love.”
This reminds me of CS Lewis’ insight that longing and joy come from and point to God. Screwtape observes, “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.”
Or again ““If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
This article provides some good insight into the problem, but doesn’t give us the full answer. In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) but also all treasures of truth, beauty, and goodness. I suspect the author knows this but is focusing on the problem. It is worth considering how many of our digital obsessions are really just mud pies.
MattTroupe.net 