Wake-up Call

God answered the question I posed in my June 6th post, writing to me through Thomas Merton by way of one of my favorite bloggers, the Anchoress:

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make us fear the means of grace the way we do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis.

and,

… evil is the defect of good, the lack of a good that ought to be there, and nothing positive in itself …

I have let the devil lure me away from the path to heaven not with anything positively wicked, but with neutral shadows: "It's late, there's nothing you can do that would make any difference to God or anyone else. Why not unwind a little with a computer game, or web surfing, or...."

That may or may not be a lie, and at the moment it's a harmless thought in itself. The problem is that that moment of neutral gratification grows, and I start to feel entitled to it: an hour, two, more, everyday, at work..., until I reach the point, without doing a single thing most people would consider evil, I have a shadow between me and the light which is my true, highest, and eternal good.