uncommon enemy

the Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

And on some days I believe it too.

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"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

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Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

- David Foster Wallce, This is Water

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Maybe the dangerous thing about sin is that you become better at whatever you do repeatedly, and what sinning does is that it gradually teaches your mind and your soul not to fight, to do the easy thing, to surrender to passivity. To perceive less, appreciate less, love less and want more. Maybe the cost of sin is the thing you've had to choose and work hard for and sacrifice to build up - the thing that used to be called 'character.' Maybe, every time you sin, you unknowingly give in exchange for the pleasure and the thrill your noble beliefs, values and principles; the repeated compromise of which gradually erodes them into nothingness, until you are a hollow husk of a person, comprised entirely of appetite with nothing deliberate or holy or precious inside you.