brave new world

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want
freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be
unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have
syphillis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be
lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow;
the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of
every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

--from Brave New World






OK so this is a section from one of my all time favorite books, it was one of
those silly books that you HAVE to read in high school, but for some reason
this one stuck with me. I really liked the book. I was looking for something
else, and came across this section of the book, I hope you have read the book
at some time or it will make less sense than if you have not. Still, I love
the part about not wanting comfort, but God and pain and sin and real danger.
The two guys are very different in that one is a “civilized” controller, he has
been genetically engineered to be the smartest and most advanced person in an
engineered world where people are born in bottles and are all preprogrammed to
do a certain job or function. The other is a “savage” someone who was actually
born, who grew up on a reservation with none of the normal controls that exist
in the rest of the world.

Somehow I think that we have become a society that values comfort over life. We
don’t want to live life if it is uncomfortable. Do we really want a religion,
or do we want a comfortable thing? How often are we persuaded to leave a
church because “I just did not feel comfortable there”; or, “we just did not
seem to click”. Any number of excuses will do, the fact is that we are always
searching for the thing that will make us comfortable. So where is the line
for this whole thing? On one hand I don’t want to be a part of a church that I
am so abrasive with that all I do is cause pain, on the other, is God trying to
teach me something here? I love the part in W@H where Eldridge talks about
setting up a new set of questions in our journey from boy to man (girl to woman) where we stop asking God to make our lives easier, and start asking what
we need to learn. Well, I just thought I would put this one in the cooker and
let it stew for a while, I need to go write up a lab report on muscle twitch
response.

M@





"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is
music." ~Aldous Huxley