Should we give up our dreams, in order to escape our nightmares?

What are the nightmares that modern man is trying to escape when he gives up on God? They are nightmares built into a fallen people in a fallen world, and they are simply inescapable outside of Christ

I was struck by a quote which flashed up on my screen the other day.

“You would give up your dreams, in order to escape your nightmares, and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.” Cormac McCarthy

This is such a Catholic way of thinking, completely at odds with modern sensibilities.

The ultimate dream, the summum bonum, the highest good, is to “know, love, and serve God in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next”, and the real nightmare which must be escaped is the nightmare of sin and death which can only be achieved by hooking up to the life blood of Christ.

A people who have given up the dream (of becoming a saint) have done so by ignoring the nightmare. They believe that they have ‘woken’ up and as such there is nothing left to fear. They have fallen for the greatest trick the devil ever played, convincing them that he does not exist.

This sums up modern man perfectly. Is it any wonder that the term given to the most self-indulgent cancerous ideology around us today is ‘woke’?

What are the nightmares that modern man is trying to escape when he gives up on God?

They are nightmares built into a fallen people in a fallen world, and they are simply inescapable outside of Christ. So we live with the unintended consequences of this mistaken attempt to escape the inescapable.

And this is the fundamental difference that lies beneath all our external disagreements and wranglings over education, marriage, law & order, big state vs small state, freedom vs control, chaos vs order and all manner of politics.

Any answer to the question ‘What is good for man’ obviously depends on our answer to the question ‘What is man?’