Day 7
Imagine that we are at a wedding and all that we see in front of us are these delicious cakes. They look so, so good, and they were made by the best baker in the world. They smell good. Our senses are on overload and all we want to do is have the cake. We imagine that having the cake will make us feel so good. We are fixated on having the cake because it will bring us pleasure. We eat a slice of the first cake, and for a time it fills us, but then we wonder what the second cake tastes like. We think that it will give us more pleasure, so we get a slice of it as well. After we finish it, we think boy that was good, and now there is only a slice of the last cake, we had better get it because it will really help us to feel good. So we eat it and now we have an upset stomach and the goodness of the cake has worn off.
We get too fixated with pleasure. We are too focused on making the senses happy. “The wisdom of the flesh is the love of pleasure. This is the wisdom shown by the worldly-wise who seek only the satisfaction of the senses. They want to have a good time” (Preparation for Total Consecration, 33). We all struggle with this. “Everyone experiences temptations of the flesh” (Preparation for Total Consecration, 33). We get too absorbed on the here and now, rather than God. We want instant gratification. We want to feed the pleasure now.
We avoid anything that has to deal with delay. “[We] shun anything that might prove unpleasant or mortifying for the body” (Preparation for Total Consecration, 33). It is about this moment and what I can get now. So focusing on fasting, and other sacrifices is a way to help us avoid this pleasure and worldly seeking attitude that we have. Praying for God to help us also helps. It may not be cake that is our down fall, and yet we all have areas in our lives where our senses and the pleasure we instantly get are more important than anything else in that moment. If we want to totally give ourselves to God, than we need to work on delaying gratification and focus on loving God every moment of every day.