Our Last and Perfect Day

I want to lead you through some simple thought experiments.

First, imagine your "perfect day." Imagine that God (or if it's too hard even to imagine that God would be so kind, then you can imagine a genie instead) granted you one perfect day. Briefly go through that day.

Second, imagine your "last day" as though that day were to be the last of your life. You are not necessarily at the end of your life, old in age; instead, imagine for example that tomorrow were your last day, and after that you knew you would die. Briefly go through that day.

Now, I want you to reflect on what you imagined, and I want to suggest that if you imagined either of these days to be rosy, carefree, processing in the way you wished, or filled with recollection or consolation, where everything seems to go well, sin is avoided, good deeds done, prayer fervent, relations all well, if you even imagined that you woke up in a positive, healthy state (or did you even notice how you woke up when you imagined your days?)—I want to suggest that you actually shouldn't imagine your perfect or last day to be like this. If you equate these days with being on your "best," I will suggest that your "best" doesn't have to do with how you feel, and in fact, your "best" will be what you do in spite of how you feel.

Perhaps many of us wake up already with some sort of stress or burden—lack of sleep, or poor sleep; anxious dreams; immediate worries and plans of the day ahead barge into the mind; problems from the previous day or week creep in; stomach ache or headache. Maybe someone or something else rudely wakes you up. Maybe you sleep through your alarm, and you jolt up to realize you're late to some responsibility. Panic is your first state. Perhaps feelings of humiliation and self-loathing follow. Imagine, also, that you were given the realization that this would be the start of your last day.

Imagine that on the last day of your life, you got into the same petty arguments you normally get into; the misunderstandings that seem to occur when you least expect; the mistakes and embarrassments that always seem to return no matter what resolutions you've made and how often. Imagine people were just the way they always are—most don't care about you; perhaps they don't even extend "common" courtesies, which means they are no longer common.

Thus, we have a tendency to romanticize our perfect day and our last day. We have a tendency to think that everything will go as we hope it will go. We don't ever realize the extent to which these hopes bias even how we imagine this perfect or last day to unfold, right from our rising from bed.

But actually, we have to realize that every day is potentially our last day. And regardless of whether it ends up being our last day or not, we must treat it as though it were our last day. We must give up the romantic idealization that we'll wake up perfectly rejuvenated, with no concerns, or at least with all the feeling of preparation for the concerns and duties that face us for that day. We must give up the idea that every move we make will be elegant and graceful, that every interaction we have will go smoothly and be edifying, that every prayer will be fervent and focused and pious. We must take the day as it is given, and it is given by Providence. How I feel here and now does not form the basic constitution of my day but what I will do with it.

What I will do in spite of what I feel and what the circumstances present, against all my hopes and romantic dreams of when I think I'm doing my very best as opposed to what God believes is my very best. Here we have to realize that my very best is not what I think it to be but is realized by the grace offered me here and now in the everything-but-ideal day. My cooperation doesn't make the less-than-ideal rosy and smooth but helps me die to the expectation that my happiness depends on rosy conditions, that my life is lived best when it is lived most pleasurably, even in spiritual matters, such as fervent prayer and spiritual consolation in the heart.

Therefore, with God's grace, we must use all the vigor of our will power to embrace the present moment. This is called fidelity to grace and the grace of the present moment. This is the point of the practice of the presence of God. This is the way of the Cross, the narrow way, and the only way to happiness.

G.K. Chesterton and Austin Ruse on "Gay Marriage"

When I was a freshman in college, I flew to China for my spring break with the chamber singer choir in which I sang for a tour. At the time, there were two homosexual choir members, both of whom I looked up to as singers because they were very talented. I remember as we flew from Shanghai to Beijing, I was seated next to one of them, and we talked for a while on various topics. Eventually he brought up how he had recently gone to some sort of political convention promoting the homosexual cause. He told me how he was sorely disappointed because he had been looking forward to intelligent conversation and meeting other like-minded men but found out that most of the men there simply "confirmed the stereotype about gays," namely, most of them were looking to hook up and have anal sex. My choir friend told me that he felt that such behavior betrayed their very cause because it showed them to be precisely what they're demonized for being: sexual hedonists rather than people who carry intellectual and moral weight. I agreed and still agree.

My father, who did his medical internship in San Francisco hospitals, would tell me stories about how some of the most horrific trauma he would see came from men in the homosexual communities, trauma caused by violent "sexual" activity.

I recently read a fascinating article on the issue of homosexual promiscuity, and I want to quote some excerpts with my emphases:

Lee [a homosexual author] writes about a gay bookstore in Austin, Texas called Lobo’s where if you look in the front window you see bookshelves full of books, gay books certainly but books. In the back, behind a curtain was a section on pornography. No one could be seen among the stacks of books, everyone was in the back room. He said such an arrangement was perfect for the big lie that active homosexuality was normal and non-threatening to any straight person looking in the front window. The reality, though, was that everyone was in the back room with the porn. This was the reality of his life and the lives of gay men....

Lee got a computer and continued his futile attempt to find gay monogamy. He joined a Yahoo group loosely affiliated with Dignity, the “Catholic” organization that affirms gays in their active homosexual way of life. A young man posted a note asking if “any of the subscribers attached any value to monogamy?” He received “dozens of responses, some of them quite hostile and demeaning, and all but one—mine—telling him to go out and get laid because that was what being gay was all about.” ...

Reilly [another author] quotes psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Santinover in Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth that “The typical homosexual (needless to say there are exceptions) is a man who has frequent episodes of anal intercourse with other men, often with many different men. These episodes are 13 times more frequent than heterosexuals’ acts of anal intercourse, with 12 times as many different partners as heterosexuals.”

Reilly goes further. “The most rigorous single study—the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study [1987]—recruited nearly 5,000 homosexual men and found that: ‘a significant majority of these men … (69 to 82%) reported having 50 or more lifetime sexual partners, and over 80% had engaged in receptive anal intercourse with at least some of their partners in the previous two years.’” ...

Dr. Santinover cites a study by two homosexual researchers that found that out of “156 couples studied, only seven had maintained sexual fidelity; of the hundred couples that had been together for more than five years, none had been able to maintain sexual fidelity.” They said, “[t]he expectation for outside sexual activity was the rule for male couples and the exception for heterosexual couples.” 

Reilly cites a 1997 Australian study that showed “only 15% of the men reported having fewer than 11 sex partners to date, while on the other end of the spectrum 15% had over 1,000 sex partners. A whopping 82% had over 50 partners and nearly 50% had over 100.”

Source: Austin Ruse, "The Real Lives of Gay Men," Crisis Magazine, November 22, 2013, accessed November 22, 2013, http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/the-real-lives-of-gay-men.

There is also a great article by Dale Ahlquist that summarizes G.K. Chesterton's take on "gay marriage."

Chesterton shows that the problem of homosexuality as an enemy of civilization is quite old. In The Everlasting Man, he describes the nature-worship and “mere mythology” that produced a perversion among the Greeks. “Just as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshipping man.” Any young man, he says, “who has the luck to grow up sane and simple” is naturally repulsed by homosexuality because “it is not true to human nature or to common sense.” He argues that if we attempt to act indifferent about it, we are fooling ourselves. It is “the illusion of familiarity,” when “a perversion become[s] a convention.” 

In Heretics, Chesterton almost makes a prophecy of the misuse of the word “gay.” He writes of “the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion.” Carpe diem means “seize the day,” do whatever you want and don’t think about the consequences, live only for the moment. “But the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people.” There is a hopelessness as well as a haplessness to it. When sex is only a momentary pleasure, when it offers nothing beyond itself, it brings no fulfillment. It is literally lifeless. And as Chesterton writes in his book St. Francis of Assisi, the minute sex ceases to be a servant, it becomes a tyrant. This is perhaps the most profound analysis of the problem of homosexuals: they are slaves to sex. They are trying to “pervert the future and unmake the past.” They need to be set free.... 

Philo of Alexandria said, “Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle.” But compassion must never compromise with evil. Chesterton points out that balance that our truth must not be pitiless, but neither can our pity be untruthful. Homosexuality is a disorder. It is contrary to order. Homosexual acts are sinful, that is, they are contrary to God’s order. They can never be normal. And worse yet, they can never even be even. As Chesterton’s great detective Father Brown says: “Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.” 

Marriage is between a man and a woman. That is the order. And the Catholic Church teaches that it is a sacramental order, with divine implications. The world has made a mockery of marriage that has now culminated with homosexual unions. But it was heterosexual men and women who paved the way to this decay. Divorce, which is an abnormal thing, is now treated as normal. Contraception, another abnormal thing, is now treated as normal. Abortion is still not normal, but it is legal. Making homosexual “marriage” legal will not make it normal, but it will add to the confusion of the times. And it will add to the downward spiral of our civilization. But Chesterton’s prophecy remains: We will not be able to destroy the family. We will merely destroy ourselves by disregarding the family.

Source: Dale Ahlquist, "G.K. Chesterton: It's Not Gay, and It's Not Marriage," Crisis Magazine, February 21, 2013, accessed November 22, 2013, http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/g-k-chesterton-its-not-gay-and-its-not-marriage.