Wednesday, 7/30/14
Jesus spoke of a wise men exchanging all this world’s
riches for the joy of living in God’s friendship.
You might remember a Persian poem advising us to make the
opposite choice. One quatrain of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khaayyam tells us:
Some for the glories
of this world,
And some sigh for the
Prophets Paradise to come,
Oh, take the cash, and
let the credit go,
Don’t heed the rumble
of a distant gun.
The trouble with amassing this world’s wealth, and availing
of all its pleasures, is that one ends up dying desolate.
Michelangelo dramatized that desolation with one figure in
his depiction of the Last Judgment that he painted above the altar in the Sistine Chapel. Halfway down his mural he
has a slightly overweight near-naked man being hauled down to hell by a joyful
green demon. The eyes of the damned fellow cry out his horror that everything should have come to this.
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