“THE DISMAL COMPANY…ONLY TO SELF TRUE!”

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “THE DISMAL COMPANY…ONLY TO SELF TRUE!”  By:  Ron Woodrum

      There is an unusual quote, from a very unusual source, that God recently brought to my attention that describes our world today, both those inside and outside the Church, quite accurately. It describes our most destructive attitude that perpetrates and perpetuates our dilemma. It comes from Dante Alighieri. Who in the world is that Pastor? That is the full name of the famous Dante of Dante’s Inferno: The Divine Comedy. Few of us read his work anymore that describes the medieval view of Hell. While being given a tour of Hell Dante hears sighing, crying weeping, wailing and railing. He writes, “At first I wept at such wailing and lamentations…shrieks, yells, and groans. Whereupon I asked, ‘Master what is this I hear?’ ‘Who can these people be, so distraught with grief?’ He answered, ‘THE DISMAL COMPANY, OH WRETCHED SPIRITS THAT FIND THEIR RECOMPENSE DUE, WHOSE LIVES KNEW NEITHER PRAISE NOR INFAMY…WHO AGAINST GOD REBELLED NOT, NOR TO HIM WERE FAITHFUL, BUT ONLY TO SELF WERE TRUE!’ “They tell us the road to hell is paved with “good intentions”. The residence of hell is filled with “great regret”. The residents of hell will be eternally quoting the words of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem-“For of all sad words of tongue or pen-the saddest are it might have been”. But hell is not the only place of regret. When we all get to heaven, and look back over the opportunities of our lives, that poem will also express the feelings of many of God’s saints too.

The great tragedy of our time is that we have chosen who and what will come first in our lives, and it is not God! It is ourselves. We come first. We live for ourselves. We are true to ourselves. We want to include God in our lives, on our terms. We have not rebelled against Him that much, but we have not been sold-out faithful to Him either. Our lives do not deserve praise neither infamy. What a tragedy! If we do not take specific action to put God first in our lives -the kind of action that Rick Warren made clear and popular in his book The Purpose Driven Life-we may find our lives lived only for ourselves, and making no impact for eternity. I am fond of a description from a nineteenth-century writer Van Wyck Brooks, who described his futile life, in his autobiography by saying that as he surveyed his life he concluded that his efforts had been sown in an environment where they could not grow and not even a furrow remained from where he had ploughed. His words are so descriptive of futility-it is as if he had been “ploughing the sea!” The great Irish Poet W. B. Yeats wrote in a similar vein in his memoir Reveries: “All life, weighed in the scale of my own life seems a preparation for something that never happens!” That is the tragedy of most of our Christian lives. We intend to put God first; to live a surrendered life; to witness and win others to Christ; to make an impact for Him; to do things that will be worthy of Him saying to us in that day-“Well done thou good and faithful servant“. But we have been “ploughing the sea” and can’t even retrace where we’ve been. Our lives…always preparing for impact for Jesus…but “nothing ever happens!”

Greg Levoy calls this the “common cold of the soul”. He says our lives are filled with “Sinful patterns of behavior that never get confronted and changed. Abilities and gifts that never get cultivated and deployed–until weeks become months, and months turn into years, and one day you’re looking back on a life of deep intimate, gut-wrenching honest conversations you never had; great bold prayers you never prayed; exhilarating risks you never took; sacrificial gifts you never gave; lives you never touched; and you’re sitting in a recliner with a shriveled soul and forgotten dreams, and you realize there was a world of desperate need, and a great God calling you to be part of something bigger than yourself-you see the person you could have become but did not; You never followed your calling; you never got out of the boat; if you want to walk on water you have to get out of the boat. Most of us have never gotten out of the boat!”

Garrison Keillor, in a story called “A Day in the Life of Clarence Bunsen” tells of an older man who realizes that life has slipped away and his life has missed something. He goes to see Father Emil for advice and comes away empty. He goes back to a hill that overlooks his childhood hang-out at Lake Woebegone and watches kids playing and reflects on his life. He thinks to himself, “I wish I could be like that. I just seem to go through life with my eyes closed and my ears shut. People talk to me, and I don’t seem to hear them. Whole days go by, and I can’t remember what happened. The woman I’ve lived with for thirty-six years, if you asked me to describe her, I’d have to stop and think about it. It’s like I’ve lived half my life waiting for my life to begin, thinking it’s off somewhere in the future, and now I am thinking about death all the time. It’s time to live, time to wake up and do something!” Henry David Thoreau summarized what Clarence Bunsen might have been trying to say, when he said, “I did not wish to live what was not life…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life!” We could take a tip from Pablo Picasso. He wrote, “When a man knows how to do something-he ceases to be a man when he stops doing it!” James put it this way, “He that knoweth to do good and doeth it not…to him it is sin!” (James 4:17). We need to take purpose-driven steps to avoid the “Dismal company-being only true to ourselves”. We need to quit “ploughing the sea” quit living life with good intentions “preparing for something that never happens!” Get over our “common colds of the soul” and “wake up and live that life of impact for Christ now!” “Do not live life that is not life-suck all the marrow out” and once we begin, “never stop doing it!” That is the path to an eternity with “No Regrets!”