I was standing in the work cafeteria, next to a young man, glowing from the gym. We were contemplating breakfast: glistening piles of sausages, shoals of bacon, baked beans swimming in a vat of tawny sugar, fried eggs skimming across a pond of oil. I was waiting for a humble poached egg.
“I was going to be good,” he said, forking sausages onto his plate. “But I think I’m going to be bad.”
A few minutes later, a plump young woman came by and eschewed the sausages. “I’m going to be good today,” she said.
Not long afterwards I heard another girl say, of her calorific breakfast, “I’ve been a bit bad today.”
Good and bad used to refer to real sins. Lechery, envy, avarice, anger – all those wicked things. Now they refer to eating habits and keeping fit. A good person eats healthy food and goes to the gym. A bad person eats sausages for breakfast.
We meet this everywhere – the flotillas of cyclists in Lycra on Sunday mornings who scoot past church doors. They feel virtuous in a way church-goers used to. And the quasi-religious approach to running a half-marathon: “This is my goal! I must achieve it! It will be wonderful!” And the friends reply – “Go for it! You will achieve! it will be wonderful! “ When, actually, he just ran a distance, and nobody benefited, except himself. Or she didn’t eat a sausage. And felt she was good.
It is hardly surprising that the rigorous approach to morality espoused by our Muslim sisters and brothers is so attractive. Now it is Ramadan, and the Muslim community fast, far more punishingly than any self-obsessed dieter. They fast for religious reasons, to grow closer to God. They fast, not to glorify their own body or their own achievement, but as part of a corporate act of worship, a self-emptying before God.
Western society puts the individual and his achievement before the greater good, and certainly before God. But in the end, those who turn that aspiration on its head, and see that doing good is about others and the Other, will win the ultimate prize – blessedness.
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