Also, Over the past several months we have been working through a series of posts entitled “The Gentle Slopes.”  The central content we have been using in these posts is C.S. Lewis’ (1898-1963) The Screwtape Letters, which is a profound satirical work from the perspective of a demon named Screwtape who writes letters to his impish nephew Wormwood in the hopes of training him in the best tactics to destroy the Christian “patient” he is assigned to.  Throughout the book we witness Screwtape advising his minion to utilize a variety of temptations to unravel the soul of the Christian man – such as unsavory friendships, bouts of doubt and skepticism, struggles with lust, self-centeredness, and even boredom and distraction.  These sobering insights are a powerful reminder to us as believers of the infernal tactics we face in the everyday ordinariness of spiritual life. 
 
If you have not gotten it from this series of posts, let’s make it explicit: all of life is spiritual and all of ordinary existence is saturated with eternity.  This is one of the central themes that permeates Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters and stands at the heart of the Gentle Slopes series.  We need to be awakened to the reality of how everyday ordinariness can become a battleground of spiritual warfare. 
 
PROSPERITY AS ENEMY OF SPIRITUAL LIFE
Towards the end of The Screwtape Letters, the senior demon begins to worry that his minion Wormwood may be failing at his task of insnaring his patient.  Even worse, Screwtape fears that his diabolic toady may allow his patient to die prematurely amid war, which would ensure his immediate assent to Heaven (C.S. Lewis wrote this when the Germans were bombing England in World War II).  The senior devil, therefore, takes the initiative to write his naïve underling and remind him of the necessity to keep his patient safe from harm so more time may be given to defeating him.  One of the goals of Hell, Screwtape reminds, is to make sure the Christian has a long, healthy, and prosperous life of mediocrity.  He puts it like this,
 
[Humans] tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so. Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda. I know it seems strange that your chief aim at the moment should be the very same thing for which the patient's lover and his mother are praying - namely his bodily safety. But so it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye. If he dies now, you lose him. If he survives the war, there is always hope. The Enemy [God] has guarded him from you through the first great wave of temptations. But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it - all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition . If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is "finding his place in it", while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.
 
The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth….   So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology, or what not. Real worldliness is a work of time - assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience….
 
How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy allows us so little of it. The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth. It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a "normal life" is the exception. Apparently He wants some - but only a very few - of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the better we must use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can.[1]
 
I do not presume in one post to exhaust the wisdom within this passage, but I wish to focus upon one major truth that permeates it: One of the greatest threats to our spiritual lives is prosperity.  Arguably there are few things more capable of producing in us a indifference and lethargy to spiritual things than affluence and safety.  The famed German poet and novelist Goethe (1749-1832) said,
 
“Everything in the world may be endured, except continual prosperity.”[2]
 
How profound when you dwell on it.  People can endure tremendous amounts of suffering and evil, and yet many times come out the other end reforged into a new creature full of charity, temperance, strength, and calm.  But how many people have you ever read about in history, how many nations can you think of, how many individuals have you known, that have been destroyed by prosperity?  My mind immediately thinks of Solomon, Rome, America, and modern lottery winners.  I am reminded of one author who wrote,
 
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”[3] 
 
This sentiment is true not only with nations but individuals, and not only with the material but even more so with the spiritual.  Peace and success most often are the central tools by which the Adversary births within us an anemic and apathetic soul.  We hate to admit it, I hate to admit it, but if we are honest, it is the truth.  When things are good, when all is well in body and soul, God is more often than not put on the back burner of priorities.  He becomes an event or individual penciled into our busy schedules, or perhaps not even that.  This is all very subtle of course.  Very few of us would acknowledge nor bring to the frontal realms of our consciousness the idea that we think less of God when things are good versus when things are bad.  Few if any of us consciously say, “You are unimportant to me God.”  But again, that isn’t how spiritual warfare works most of the time.  It isn’t usually blatant blasphemous rebellion; it is slow-growing seemingly “benign” indifference.  Remember that spiritual decay is a slow leakage – a methodical regression of caring.  It is a settledness of spirit content with in its mediocrity.  Prosperity is chief in this process all too often.  The English bishop and writer George Horne (1730-1792) said it this way,
 
“Prosperity too often has the same effect on its possessor that a calm at sea has on the Dutch mariner, who frequently, it is said, in these circumstances, ties up the rudder, gets drunk, and goes to sleep.”[4]
 
What is so sad about all this is how often our western churches help inculcate in us a desire for and even expectation of prosperity.  In many of our modern churches, we are preached at incessantly, unto death even, on how much God desires to give us what we want.  His goal, we are told, is to bless us with unbounded health, wealth, and peace.  We are told “God wants you never sick but always healed,” (even though this never happened to the Apostle Paul) and “God doesn’t want you to ever beg bread” (even though many a prophet did), and “God has promised to give you the desires of your heart (even though said desires are to be aligned to Kingdom desires).  God wants all of this for us, we are taught, even though the long and marred History of the Church reveals that untold suffering and even martyrdom are at the core of the Faith.  The Early Church Father Tertullian (155-220 A.D.) long ago said,
 
            “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”[5]
 
Could you imagine such sentiment being stated in our modern western church settings?  Now, let me just detour but for a moment at this point.  Do not misunderstand.  Can and does God often heal and feed and clothe his people?  You bet!  To think otherwise is to deny scripture and history.  Can and does God answer our prayers regarding earthly desires and needs?  Absolutely, as testified through the ages and the Word.  But there is more to the story than this.  There is an objective difference between requesting the blessings found in Christ versus demanding and expecting them.  Furthermore, we tend to forget that God can and does often use struggle, suffering, and even lack for the reason to reform, refine, and realign our souls back to Him (the Book of Job, Romans 8:18, 2 Corinthians 4:17, 1 Peter 5:10, Hebrews 12:11).

Even more so, we tend to forget that there are far deeper and far grandeur levels to what qualifies "blessings" than physical safety and success.  They are richer, higher, and more transcendent than just our earthy ends.  That should, therefore, be our central focus when we consider "blessings."  Jesus Himself taught it like this,
 
19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.
Matthew 6:19-20
 
And the Apostle Paul instructed Timothy saying,
 
17 As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. 18 They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, 19 thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life.
1 Timothy 6:17-19
 
Again, God can and does bless us with prosperity (and I mean this not in the sense of Bill Gates but contentment, peace, security, health, and normalcy of life) but we should stop expecting this as a guarantee.  The fact is God doesn’t owe us a thing.  He doesn’t have to do anything for us, and what He does is a sheer act of His grace and love.  We need to get this truth and chew on it lest we be consumed with a sense of unwarranted disappointment because God is “not doing what we ask.”  We should have a fortitude of faith that can declare, as Job did,
 
Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him
Job 13:15
 
Can I declare such a thing?  Can you?  We better.  Even more so, when you think upon it, if it is the case that God knows in His foreknowledge that prosperity would, in fact, make us indifferent and indolent spiritually, then why would He grant such requests to begin with?  He would be unjust and unloving to do so.   So in a very real sense, denying us prosperity can in fact be an exercise of His love and mercy for us at times.  Read Job if you have any doubt, and then try out Ecclesiastes and Lamentations.  But I digress. 
 
COMFORTABLE IN A FALLEN WORLD
A major danger of prosperity is that it tends to make us desire and expect more of it, which in turn tends to become the central focus of our field of vision in life.  Subtly it morphs our spiritual relationship with God into one of expectation rather than gratitude, of haughtiness rather than humility, and fickleness rather than perseverance.  What can creep in is a hellish Health-n-Wealth type religion that believes that our “hard work” for God is somehow deserving of “hard work” from Him for us.  Again, we won’t say this publicly or even perhaps consciously, but it can be there in the depths of our soul.  God HAS TO bless me, cause I’m His!  Right!?  It’s this idea that if we put in a lot of mileage “doing for God” (going to church, praying, seeking Him) that He is going to “do for us” because, after all, we are His children.  Right?  Aren't we His little cosmic pets living on a spherical terrarium we call Earth, being fed directly by His hands and never having to be concerned with lack or want?  Isn't He required to clean our litter boxes and resupply our food bowls?  

Such an attitude is bred into the minds of a people who are obsessed with the idea that prosperity is defined in the narrow frame of earthly material accommodations (both body, property, and money).  It is almost inconceivable to us in the West that prosperity from God can occur through suffering and even lack.  It is almost inconceivable to us that prosperity can exist outside the realm of complete health and wealth.   Sadly, such a view is as unbiblical as it is asinine - and it doesn't hold muster in the vast life of the Church beyond American shores, where continued suffering and slaughter is a regular recurring reality.  Again, I digress.  
 
Is it any wonder that the Scriptures are replete with cautioning us about worldly success and prosperity for fear it will distract us spiritually?  In fact it is quite sobering just how much the Bible tells us about this.  We are told that when we have eaten and been satisfied we tend to become proud and forget God (Deuteronomy 8:10), that confidence in riches tends to lead to gloating (Job 31), that trust in abundance versus God is evil (Psalm 52:7), that when we trust in riches we will fall (Proverbs 11:28), that abundance can lead to rebellion and blasphemy (Nehemiah 9:25), that wealth brings spiritual satisfaction and forgetfulness (Hosea 13:6), that the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), that one cannot serve God and wealth (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13), that wealth has a deceitfulness that chokes the Word and spiritual fruitfulness (Matthew 13), and that the desire for riches tends to plunge us into ruin and destruction (1 Timothy 6:8).  There are so many more examples, but the point is made that we are creatures that all too often simply cannot handle prosperity.  John Newton (1725-1807), the great 18th Century hymnist and abolitionist, spoke poignantly on such a point when he said,
 
“Experience testifies, that a long course of ease and prosperity, without painful changes, has an unhappy tendency to make us cold and formal in our secrete worship….  When things go on much to our wish, our hearts are too prone to say, ‘It is good to be here.’”[6]
 
What Newton is getting at is a profound truth: Prosperity has this seemingly inevitable effect of making living in a fallen world more comfortable for us.  Lewis echoes this by saying that prosperity tends to “knit us to the world” and produce in us “a sense of being really at home in earth.”  This is so true, even in thinking in my own life!  Even worse, we get to a place where we centralize our earthly abundances and begin to, as Lewis says, “believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date.”  In short, it has the effect of reprioritizing our values and desires towards the secular as opposed to the sacred, to see the eternal through temporality rather than the temporal through the eternal. 
 
PUTTING PROSPERITY IN ITS PLACE
I cannot get around the need for us to have an eternal perspective in combating our struggles with prosperity.  I have come to this theme on multiple occasions concerning battling other struggles, but it applies here as well.  The “deceit of riches” (prosperity) happens when we slowly lose sight of eternity and focus more on the finite fulfillment with no clear focus of how they only echo the deeper Reality found in Christ we are longing for through them.  Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) said it like this,
 
In this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us….  The only good thing in this life is the hope of another life, that we become happy only as we come nearer to it, and that, just as no more unhappiness awaits those who have been quite certain of eternity, so there is no happiness for those who have no inkling of it.[7]
 
Pascal is not saying anything here that is not in line with Scripture.  I have said this before, but it bears repeating, over and over again the Scriptures remind us to think of life through the lens of the eternal, and even death itself, for by this our souls are grounded to the Greater Beauty that truly fulfills.[8]   When we do this we realign our values and desires, we transform our views of the spiritual disciplines, and we begin to even see prosperity in a new light.  The Apostle Paul declared,
 
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.  5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you…
Colossians 3:1-5
           
The central means by which we curb our obsessive slips into the deceits of riches is to “seek the things above.”  When we think eternally, “where Christ is seated,” what we desire and pray for, how we view health and safety, what we fear and long for, transforms because it is revalued through the work and person and nature of Christ. 
 
Before closing, I cannot help but be reminded of the wisdom of Agur in the Book of Proverbs.  In chapter 30 of the book, we are given the only prayer that exists in the entire set of proverbial writings in the Bible.  It just so happens that such a prayer has a major focus on prosperity.  Agur declares,

7 Two things I ask of you;
    deny them not to me before I die:
8 Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
    give me neither poverty nor riches;
    feed me with the food that is needful for me,
9 lest I be full and deny you
    and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or lest I be poor and steal
    and profane the name of my God.
Proverbs 30:7-9
 
Think of the gravity of this prayer.  How many times have you heard preachers pray, “God, I pray that these people do not have too little…and do not have too much”?  How many of us have ever prayed that we would not have riches as much as we pray about not having poverty?  But why such a prayer?  Agur affirms, for “lest I be full and deny you” oh God.  Fullness comes from abundance, which in turn breeds satisfaction which in turn makes us forget the LORD – it is the loss of the eternal perspective.  I wonder if it could be possible that our Health-n-Wealth obsession in America is one of the reasons our churches are so ineffective in bringing lasting spiritual change.  We are so focused upon God “giving us” abundance as a sign of blessing that we forget that “giving us” lack can also be a blessing to us.  If that is the case, and it is, then perhaps we need to pray that God staves His hand of riches in our lives to drive us towards Him rather than be content and full of earthly things.  God help us in this.     

_______________________________________________________
[1] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 267-268
[2] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as quoted in Tyron Edwards, A Dictionary of Thoughts (United States: F. B. Dickerson Company, 1908), pg. 450
[3] G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain: A Postapocalyptic Novel (Michael Hopf, 2016)
[4] George Horne as quoted in Tyron Edwards, A Dictionary of Thoughts (United States: F. B. Dickerson Company, 1908), pg. 451
[5] Tertullian, Apologeticus, L.13, (c. 197 A.D.) https://www.tertullian.org/works/apologeticum.htm
[6] John Newton, Letter V, Cardiphonia or, The Utterance of the Heart, vol. 2 (United Kingdom: Murray & Cochrane, 1807), pg. 22-23
[7] Pascal, ibid, pg. 191-192
[8] Consider these scriptures that deal with the evanescence of our lives and seeing life through eternity and death: 2 Samuel 14:14, 1 Chronicles 29:15, Psalm 90:12, Psalm 144:4, Job 14:1, Ecclesiastes 1:4, Isaiah 40:6, James 4:13-14.  All of them call us to have a healthy understanding of death so that we may have a proper understanding of life.  

The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart — an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.
 
Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship….
 
This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both….
 
But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate [the] horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will…. The Enemy [God] loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking ‘Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?’ they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on.  And great work has already been done.[1]
 
These are words of truth uttered by a demon.  Well, let me clarify, a fictional devil named Screwtape created by the indispensable C.S. Lewis (1898-1963).  This excerpt is from Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters in which he takes us through the veil of spiritual warfare, from the perspective of Hell.  It is as jarring as it is profound.  Over the past several months we have been reading selections from this work to understand the diabolic methods by which Satan and his minions work to destroy our intimacy and passion for God’s truth and love in the daily.  Within the excerpt above we learn how the devils encourage boredom and novelty as a means of driving us towards spiritual restlessness and rot. 
 
THE VALLEY OF BLAH & THE STATE OF “I-CAN’T-WAIT-ISM”
Lewis points out that one way the Adversary works his dark magic is to perpetuate in our souls a dissatisfaction with the seeming mundanity and repetitiveness of life.  He makes us swallow the lie that life is only truly lived in light of perpetual novelty.  Quite often, without even physically saying, “Is this all there is?” we begin to live out loud this sentiment by having less and less purpose and joy in the everyday activities that consume most of our existence.  This could be in our work, cooking, cleaning, parenting, fellowshipping, church-going, or spiritual disciplines.  We can begin to see these things as weights keeping us from “truly living.”  One way we, therefore, try and overcome them is to overshadow them with novelty. 
 
We tend to become creatures who worship novelty.  We extol the bright, shiny, and perhaps even edgy or bawdy as “true living” while we balk at the regular or old as enslaving or passé.   Who likes vanilla anyways as opposed to the thousand and one other flavors able to titillate the taste buds?  Through the novel, we believe we can ascend from the Valley of Blah to the Mountains of True Satisfaction.  So, we take up some new activities (social outing, parties, classes, services) or new gadgets (iPhone, computer, gaming system, car), or new amusement (social media, movies, video games, sports) in the hopes it will ignite into reality our deepest fantasies and desires at the expense of the black-and-white malaise of “Real Life.”
 
Let me make this flesh and bone for a moment. 
 
Consider seasons for example.  Very often we are a people who are never pleased with the season we are in.  When we are in the Summertime, we speak of yearning for Fall and Winter (“I can’t wait for sweater weather & pumpkin spice!”), and yet when we are in Fall or Winter we wistfully dream of Summer (“I can’t wait for pool weather and cookouts!”).  When we are in Thanksgiving Season we shop for Christmas and when we are at Christmas we prepare for Valentine's.  It seems that while we are living in the moment we longed for we are never pleased.  What does this say about us? 
 
Or consider how we do our entertainment.  We tend to obsess over upcoming or new releases.  We exclaim, “I can’t wait until they release X!” or “That is the greatest Y ever!” (insert movie, song, game, gadget…etc.).  Our commercial and trailer culture only perpetuates this behavior in us.  Funny thing is, the release comes, we consume it (or even binge it) and it is awesome…until it’s not.  We will then repeat the cycle when the new stream of trailers releases to ignite our curiosities. 
 
Or even consider our jobs and careers.  We tend to skip from one venue to the next, rarely enjoying where we are at even when we chose it at the expense of previous preferences.  Rapidly the new environment and colleagues become old, showing their warts and “true selves,” and we thus begin seeking yet another venue in which to win our bread and butter.  Even amid our careers, in the monotony of daily loads, we exclaim the desire for the novel: “I can’t wait to get out of this place,” or “I can’t wait for the weekend,” or “I can’t wait for a vacation,” or “I can’t wait for retirement.”  Again, we seem to be unpleased with being pleased. 
 
In all these examples we are living in a state of “I-can’t-wait-ism” which lays within the quest for novelty.  It is a state we live in as we go through the Valley of Blah (which is just another name for regular everyday living).  We seem to be incapable of ever really being at rest in the things we do, even when we are doing the things we wanted to do in the first place. 
 
The great malady in all this is the fact that all the gadgets, activities, new venues, and amusements we ingest tend to have a lesser and lesser appeal the longer we plod upon this narrow globe.  What is happening is we are succumbing to what Lewis called “the law of diminishing returns.”  The allurement of “the new” quickly devolves into the “blah” as we oscillate from moments of emotional high and low which are shackled to the contingencies of events and people.  As a result of all this, what do we do?  We keep repeating.  We are like gerbils on a ceaseless wheel of filling our lives with more and more activities, gadgets, and amusements in the hopes they will bring us out of “blah” only to find that they lead us to “blah” which in turn makes us seek even further amusements.    
 
OUR RELENTLESS QUEST TO BE RESTLESS
We post-modern westerners are especially susceptible to the Law of Diminishing Returns.  Consider for example our accessibility to movies and entertainment (something I enjoy and therefore have thought about personally in my life).  In 1950 there were less than 100 television channels, today there are close to 2,000.[2]  In 1990 there were no streaming video services, today there are about 200 with over 70,000 movies and shows just on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.[3]  On Steam (a video game digital distribution service) in 2008 there were around 200 games available, today there are over 10,000.[4]  Around 1990 there were around 150 video games released annually, today there are close to 6,000.[5]  However, amid this tsunami of amusement available to us we have less and less sustainable wonder and joy in our consuming.  We mindlessly search for "something to watch" only to say "nothing is on."  Or we flip something on in the background, not caring about what it is, while we flip through our phones to find one bout of idiocy after another on Tiktok.  What does all this say about us as a people?  Have you not experienced the feeling that movies and the games and the shows “aren’t what they used to be”?  Why do we tend to think this?  And yet this sentiment seems somewhat pervasive as we seem less and less able to sustain excitement or interest in new releases.  Is our more somehow becoming less to us?  Is it any wonder we are obsessed with retro things (from Dunkaroos to windbreakers to 2D gaming) and seeking to grasp at the wonder and joys we experienced as kids?  There is a post waiting to be written just on this topic, but I digress. 
 
I will not give more stats nor belabor the point for fear we will go off focus but suffice to say enough ink has been spilled in the world of philosophy and psychology to show us that we post-moderns seem to be suffering from a strange malady of “boredom” that did not really exist in previous generations.[6]  Think on that for but a moment. How quickly do you end up saying, “I am bored,” in-between one pursuit and another?  How quick are you to need some activity or sound to tantalize your senses so you feel fulfilled or don’t have to think?  Again, in asking these questions, I cannot but be reminded of when the French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) remarked,
 
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”[7]
 
Why is this?  Well, a full-orbed discussion will go beyond the confines of this post but suffice to say that one central element at play is our loss of purpose and meaning in life.  We have little peace or contentment in our hearts and minds because we do not really have a sense of who we are, what we are to do, and how we are to live.  Part of all this lies in what great thinkers through the centuries have coined “human restlessness,”[8] which is this inability to find a sense of peace and security in our souls.  As a result, we fill our lives with novelties, noise, and nonsense in the hopes they will stimulate our indifference to life.  But they don’t, they just aggravate it.  Pascal piercingly revealed this problem rising in his day (which is unduly exacerbated in our own time) saying,  
 
[People] think they genuinely want rest when all they really want is activity.
 
They have a secret instinct driving them to seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness. They have another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest and not in excitement. These two contrary instincts give rise to a confused plan buried out of sight in the depths of their soul, which leads them to seek rest by way of activity and always to imagine that the satisfaction they miss will come to them once they overcome certain obvious difficulties and can open the door to welcome rest.
 
All our live passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement.
 
We think either of present or of threatened miseries, and even if we felt quite safe on every side, boredom on its own account would not fail to emerge from the depths of our hearts, where it is naturally rooted, and poison our whole mind.
 
Man is so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom, by the very nature of his temperament, and he is so vain that, though he has a thousand and one basic reasons for being bored, the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, will be enough to divert him.[9]
 
How raw and in your face.  We are a people, Pascal says, that never rest and in fact despise rest – and by rest Pascal is speaking not of sleep but a serenity of spirit and a capacity to soak in silence and peace.[10]  Why do we do this?  Pascal asserts it is because we hate to think of “our wretchedness.”  In other words, we hate to come face to face with ourselves or our situations, so we cover up the mirror of our souls with a million little mice to divert deep reflection.  But again, these diversions only satiate but for a time, until we are resolved to find further venues of contentment, which in turn do not fulfill.  It’s the gerbil on the wheel.  Ad infinitum.   
 
OUT OF THE CYCLE OF PERPETUAL NOVELTY
Once again, let me do an addendum before I close this post.  There is nothing in what is said here that asserts it is somehow inherently wrong to desire taking up a new activity or a trendy gadget or to enjoy a new amusement.  To walk away with such a notion is to miss the point entirely.  The goal is to get us to stop for once and think about what we consume, what we desire, and how we are viewing our lives; it is to draw us towards reflecting on where we perch our real contentment and joy. 
 
That said, we need a way forward through the Valley of Blah.  As always, I do not presume to give be-all-end-all solutions to addressing our maladies, but I think part of the way out of the Valley is to come to terms with the fact that the valley is itself a place where joy and satisfaction can be found.  In short, we need to see the Valley of Blah with fresh eyes.  Part of the release from the seeming monotony of the every day is to see that monotony as part of the cadence of human existence – there is monotony in novelty and there is a novelty in the monotony.  The Preacher of Ecclesiastes put it much better than I can.  He wrote it like this:
 
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
    vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
    at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
    but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
    and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
    and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
    and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
    but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
    there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
    a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
    nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
    and what has been done is what will be done,
    and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
    “See, this is new”?
It has been already
    in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
    nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
    among those who come after.
 
12 I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 14 I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
Ecclesiastes 1:1-14
 
And yet after saying all of this he goes on to say by chapter 3,
 
9 What gain has the worker from his toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man.
Ecclesiastes 3:9-13
 
There is so much goodness in these passages, but time fails me to do full exegesis.  Suffice to say, life is a dance of permanence and change and change becoming permanence.  Lewis called this “Rhythm,” that union of difference and durability which is at the heart of our existence as created beings.  When we come to see what the function of “toil” and “business” and “everyday life” is – that it has the heartbeat of eternity – we come to be freed from feeling enslaved in it.  Our enslavement comes from our inadequate view of what life should be instead of coming to see it as it is.  Nothing lasts and everything that comes is really just a rehashing.  “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.”  This is life. 
 
We have got to get to the place that we embed within our philosophy of life the truth that “God has made everything beautiful in its time” as the Preacher said.  The doing good, the eating, the drinking, and yes, even the toil, is “beautiful in its time” and is “a gift from God.”  How could this be?  The every day and the seemingly mundane, as well as the experiences of the novel, all have the embers of eternity in them.  They are not eternity but they reveal it to us.  Through them, they show us what it means to be a creature, what it means to need to find the Ultimate Rest for our restless souls that are found not in them, but perhaps, however faintly, through them in God Himself.
 
The Preacher of Ecclesiastes and a whole lot of great thinkers and sages through the ages have told us the same message: Stop thinking your happiness and satisfaction rests in the novel.  It doesn’t.  It can’t.  That which is new becomes old and that which is old repeats itself.  This is your life.  To crave infinite newness to satiate your restless soul is to remain infantile in your perspective on life; it is to be stunted into a pubescent soul that is enslaved to people and things.  Find your rest in the One in Whom there is no change and there you find true living amid the ordinary. 

______________________________________________________
[1] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 257-259
[2]https://www.statista.com/statistics/189655/number-of-commercial-television-stations-in-the-us-since-1950/
[3]https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/how-many-movies-on-netflix; https://www.diffen.com/difference/Hulu_vs_Netflix#:~:text=Hulu's%20original%20series.-,Size,shows%2C%20and%20over%202%2C500%20films; https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-prime-video#:~:text=The%20streaming%20service%20has%20roughly,channels%20with%20Prime%20Video%20Channels.
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/
[5] https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student-works/analysis-of-video-game-sales-from-1980-2016/;https://gamingshift.com/how-many-video-games-exist/#:~:text=After%20doing%20some%20research%2C%20our,games%20for%20the%20Nintendo%20Switch.
[6] Consider some philosophical reflection on the concept of “boredom” by Wendell O’Brien, Boredom, A History of Western Philosophical Perspectives from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/boredom/.  Also consider these scientific studies on boredom: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201703/bored-in-the-usa; https://www.sciencenews.org/article/social-distancing-boredom-covid-19-public-health-pandemic; https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191119123750.htm;
[7] I cannot find the exact source for this but I believe it is in his Pensées
[8] I would suggest considering some of these great thinkers who have discussed human restlessness: Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book 1 in particular; Blaise Pascal, Pensées, particularly section “VIII. Diversion;” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Part II, Chapter XIII and Volume II, Part III, Chapter XVI. Also consider a discussion on this topic in Paul Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).  I would also recommend: Peter Busch’s article “Modern Restlessness, from Hobbes to Augustine” from Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (www.mdpi.com/journal/religions)
[9] Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 1995), pg. 40
[10] Consider the previous post I did called The Gentle Slope of Relentless Noise, (https://www.faithunderstood.com/articles/the-gentle-slope-of-relentless-noise)