Editorial October 27, 1980 Issue

God's glorified; we're satisfied

BEULAH M. ROEGGE

In the kingdom of heaven—the true spiritual consciousness of God that belongs to man—there is no unsatisfied longing or flat satiation. Jesus' preaching was of God's kingdom, and how mankind find it by looking within their own true spiritual being. Through his insight others often received such satisfying glimpses of divine reality that the course of their lives was turned around, their bodies were healed. This action of the Christ variously described as bringing a bit of heaven to earth and transporting the earthbound to heaven is always instantly available. But one must desire the vitalizing action of the Christ in order to experience it.

You and I need to cultivate desire, not quench it, nor attempt its gratification by the merely sensual. Rather, right desire must be enlarged and strengthened by the redeeming Christ.

Societies often swing from the repressive to the indulgent. A current writer describing the 1970's noted: "We were long on pleasure and short on self-denial. We were quick to give in to every passing fancy and slow to practice restraint." Suzanne Britt Jordan, "The Joy of Abstinence," Newsweek, February 25, 1980; The writer facetiously rephrases an old aphorism as, "Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder" and hangs a question over the future that we may want to ask ourselves: Are we getting geared for poverty and lack, reentering the old syndrome of "poorness=piety"? Is the antidote to instant gratification constant denial?

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