A pox on our passion for worldly things

A reader of this 'blog who shall remain nameless but is no less appreciated for her interest queried me about the story of the Black Friday stampede up in New York that killed a Walmart employee as more than 2000 shoppers ripped the store's doors off their hinges in a frantic attempt to get a good deal.

What might I say about this, she wanted to know.

This 'blogging site can't give me enough space to say what I really want to say about it. My trusty thesaurus leaves me virtually wordless. Adjectives like horrific, abhorrent, sickening, angry, furious, just don't cut it.

So when unable to draw upon my feeble human abilities to get something done, I do what I've done most of my life, I call down inspiration from The One Who Made Me.

And He reminds me of the poem by William Wordsworth titled, "The World Is Too Much With Us."

In the poem, Wordsworth laments the waste of lives and time on things that are not eternal, that do not reflect some aspect of eternality.

"The world is too much with us,
Late and soon, getting and spending,
We lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
We have given our hearts away,
A sordid boon."

There's more, but the first stanza says it best.

Our culture in general has abandoned its spiritual life in favor of the things of the world. And anyone who's ever read what the Bible has to say about this tendency knows that when this happens, all hell is sure to break loose.

Sodom and Gomorrah with its loves of vice and idol worship was destroyed.
Egypt was so in love with its slavery that it endured plague after plague until it gave up the Hebrews.
The children of Israel were made to drink water made bitter by a ground up golden calf after Moses caught them worshipping the statue instead of You Know Who.
And in what is perhaps THE most famous example of soul selling for worldly gain, we have Judas Iscariot who chose to betray a friend for thirty pieces of silver.

Not unlike the hordes at Walmart who cared more about bargains on cheap junk from China than their own integrity, common sense, and compassion for another human being.

The world IS too much with us. What can we do to make it go away?