You shall not covet … anything that is your neighbor’s. Exodus 20:17

“The Necklace”
Before he died of syphilis in 1893, Guy de Maupassant – one of the fathers of the modern short story – penned his own epitaph: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.”

His short story “The Necklace” reflects this sentiment.[1] Its protagonist – a perpetually discontented woman named Mathilde Loisel – covets the wealth, luxury, prestige, and approbation which others possess and which she feels are her rightful due as a beautiful and charming young woman. Though she marries a man with a respectable job – a clerk in the Ministry of Education – who provides her with all she needs, Mathilde is incapable of being satisfied with what he is able to provide: “she suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her.”

Each and every day, Mathilde “imagined” (coveted) what it would be like to live in a luxurious home, to have a staff of servants, to eat gourmet meals off fine china, to throw parties with famous guests – especially famous men “whose homage roused every other woman’s envious longings.” Yet, her imagination only fuels her unhappiness, for “she had no clothes, no jewels, nothing. And these were the only things she loved; she felt that she was made for them.”

By T. M. Moore|Published Date: August 02, 2010

Keep an eye on your affections.

“For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
--Mark 7:1, 22

Inside-outside-in

Spiritual growth typically occurs from the inside-out. That is, as we work to be renewed in the various elements of the soul – heart, mind, and conscience – these, in turn begin to direct our bodily members in the paths of righteousness. Outwardly, in our practices, we reflect the newness of life that Christ is at work within us to accomplish as we experience the transforming power of God to renew our thought life, affections, and values.

At the same time, as we, in the outer person, put those changes into practice, our new way of walking reinforces and strengthens what God has wrought within, so that, while we are changed from the inside-out, we reinforce that change through outside-in obedience.

The heart of spiritual growth

When it comes to the renewal of our souls, the Scriptures make it plain that the heart is the heart of the matter, the “wellspring” of all our existence, as Jonathan Edwards put it. Jesus tells us as much in the passage cited above – where we see that our thoughts and values (mind and conscience) are subordinated to whatever is in our hearts, and our hearts then, when they are corrupt, lead to defiled practices.

A modern morality tale

“This is a story, I supposed, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence.” So begins Doris Lessing’s 1963 short story “To Room Nineteen” which chronicles the unraveling of Matthew and Susan Rawlings’ marriage and Susan’s eventual suicide.[i]

According to the world’s values, the Rawlings have everything anyone could need to be happy: steady careers, plenty of money, a big house, four healthy children, an active social life, and servants who lift the mundane daily chores from Susan’s shoulders. Both are described as popular and smart, with the “infallible sense for choosing right” when it comes to making important life decisions.

Yet, after a decade or so, they are bored with marriage, bored with their family, and bored with life in general. There is a certain “flatness” in their lives which leaves them restless and searching for happiness in all the wrong places – Matthew in repeated affairs and Susan in ever-increasing withdrawal into herself, until she commits the ultimate selfish act: she rents a hotel room (Room 19), turns on the gas, and kills herself.

Feminists view this story – written mostly from Susan’s point of view – as a warning to young women that choosing the life of a suburban housewife is a recipe for misery. They see in Matthew’s adultery and Susan’s increasing emptiness a vivid reminder that devoting yourself to your husband and children will only lead to the death of your “essential” self. In their philosophy, it would be better for women to avoid marriage altogether rather than suffer such a fate.

“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40

Nothing Special

In 1982, Thomas Keneally published Schindler’s List, the story of Oskar Schindler, a German war profiteer who first exploited Polish-Jewish workers to make millions, then spent his fortune saving more than 1200 people from the Nazi death machine. Schindler’s story became widely known with the release of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film – which won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, despite the objections of some Holocaust survivors that the movie did not adequately portray the horrors they had endured. [i]

Whatever their shortcomings, both the book and the film raised the public’s awareness regarding the thousands of rescuers – more than 20,000 to date – who have been honored as “Righteous Gentiles” by the nation of Israel for risking their lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust. These include well-known figures like Miep Gies, who hid Anne Franks’ family; the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved more than 30,000 Jews by providing false Swedish passports; and Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch Christian whose sister and father died as the result of their hiding Jews, resistance fighters, and students who refused to cooperate with the Nazis. It also includes the citizens of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France – descendents of once-persecuted Huguenots – who sheltered thousands and who helped many more escape to Switzerland.

What is most remarkable about their stories is the common claim that they did “nothing special.” Yet their actions prevented the death toll – six million Jews and up to seven million Gentiles – from going even higher.[ii] The enduring question is why they chose to help – at the risk of their own lives and the lives of their loved ones – when so many others did not.

Global warming or not, we must conserve.

Forever, O LORD, Your Word is firmly fixed in the heavens. Your faithfulness endures to all generations; You have established the earth, and it stands fast. By Your appointment they stand this day, for all things are Your servants.
Psalm 119:89, 90

Still polarizing

The question of global warming and the environment continues to be one of the most polarizing topics of contemporary discussion and debate. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has a good many of the “green” party harrumphing and I-told-you-soing; while the opponents of environmental activism are on the defensive against the promised offshore drilling moratorium and cap-and-trade legislation.

Advocates and opponents marshal scientific evidence and practical arguments aplenty to support their preferred position. If the globe is in fact becoming as hot as the debate over this issue, then we’ve got a serious problem, indeed.

Amid all the verbiage and vitriol over “environmental change”, as the language of the moment has it, one matter has been overlooked. And that is that both advocates and opponents of this controversial claim are operating out of the same motive. And that motive is inadequate to achieve a long-term satisfying outcome.

Both those who argue the case for global warming and those who argue against it have as their primary concern the interests of mankind. Those who deny the threat of environmental change fear that adjusting for it will bog down commercial and economic interests. Those who insist that the danger is real warn that man’s environment is being adversely affected and, in the long run, that won’t be good for mankind.

As Bill McKibben summarized the last three years of debate over environmental issues, “For most of the past three decades, the battle over wilderness was pretty much between those people who wanted more of it and those who wanted to graze, mine, cut, build, and roar around” (“Walking Through an Idea,” Appalachia, Winter/Spring, 2008). Commercial interests want to get at and employ the resources of the creation without having to dance around restrictive environmental protocols. Environmentalists want to preserve more wilderness by clamping down on emissions – at great expense to industry – and preserving more wilderness from development. Both argue their positions as representing what’s best for humanity. Industry representatives point to the growing economic needs of a growing world population, while others would agree with Bill McKibben, who insists that “we need more wild for human reasons: we need to set aside land from our use simply to prove that we can do it, that we don’t need to control everything around us.”

For conservation, but…

I cast my vote on the side of the conservers of the environment, but not at the expense of using the resources of creation in a responsible manner.

For the larger issue in this question is how are the purposes of God best served? The earth is the Lord’s after all, not ours (Ps. 24:1). Every created thing is His servant (Ps. 119:89-91), and we must look to Him to understand how best to use the resources of the creation without exhausting them, and in a way that allows them to continue to be available to the generations that will follow us.

The seeds of a theology of the environment are contained in the Law of God, in passages such as Deuteronomy 22:6 and 7 and Deuteronomy 20:19 and 20. The first tells us that, if we come across a bird’s nest with eggs or young, and the mother bird sitting on them, we may take the eggs or the young, but not the mother. She can always make more, but if we eat her, the eggs or chicks will die.

The second text warns against destroying fruit-bearing trees in the course of conducting a war – or, we might suppose, any project to develop land. The birds and fruit-bearing trees are God’s servants, put here to provide for the needs of all creatures for many generations. As such they bear witness to God’s providential care and love, and remind us that He is a God of beauty, order, and plenty.

The debate about environmental change is going to be with us for some time. Christians should seek to inject a note of stewardship unto God into this issue, before those who think it’s only all about us begin to implement strategies that, because they focus on man’s concerns only, are sure to fail.

For additional insight to this topic, get the book, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature, by Roger D. Sorrell, from our online store. Or read the article, “Christian Environmentalism,” by Dr. Ray Bohlin.

And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. Philippians 1:9-10

The very connected yet disconnected 21^st century

Seinfeld, the quintessential show of the postmodern 90’s, was jokingly known as “the show about nothing.” This moniker was due to its frequent dealings with trivial issues. Nothing of significance was tackled in any episode, and it was full of typical Jerry Seinfeld-ish musings where everything, from the sacred to the serious to the menial, were all subject to the same fate of triviality.

Still, the show might also have been known as “the show going nowhere,” since what really made this show different than its predecessors was its lack of a clear story line. While most situation comedies before and since take the viewer from a clear point “A” to a clear point “B,” Seinfeld did not. Each episode was random, made up of mini-episodes loosely and ironically tied together. In this view, the various aspects of life – particularly actions and their consequences – are not connected as parts of a larger story that gives them their place and meaning.

Many of us who grew up watching (and laughing) at Kramer, George, Jerry, and Elaine risked being convinced that real life was actually as random as this, that actions and their consequences are not necessarily connected. In fact, it seems to be a rampant assumption of Generation X’ers and Millennials that life is a series of disconnected mini-episodes lacking any overarching direction or storyline.