Comfest '10

Spent my lunch hour Friday listening to a band at ComFest, aka Community Fest. It's a 3-day series of free concerts ala Woodstock but without the mud or acid. A jazz band played while I read This Rock (surely the only person there reading a Catholic apologetic magazine). Copped a pretty sweet vantage point near the entrance. (Picture taken below was from said vantage.)

Each year it gets bigger and more commercialized; you could say it jumped the shark when fair food was introduced. Somehow cotton candy and BBQ ribs don't gibe with the general hemp-isphere and veganopoly.

The particular article I was reading in This Rock was a piece by Carl Olsen, excerpted below. But first...:

By then, John understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling of taking the wrong things seriously.

I read that selection from the novel Prague, and then Godincidentally the Olsen piece on the consolations of philosophy. "Ye shall be like gods," I think the serpent said to Eve, and ironically we shall be like gods - in God's time, when we are made saintly, when we assume his nature as He assumed ours, i.e. when we become happy. Boethius as quoted in This Rock:

What they [men] wish to acquire and accordingly long for are riches, high positions, kingships, fame and pleasure; and the reason why they want them is because they believe that those are the means by which they gain self-sufficiency, respect, power, renown and joy. So in their differing pursuits men seek what is good, and this readily indicates the scope of nature's power; for though their aspirations vary and are at odds with each other, all are at one in choosing the good as their goal.

Olsen comments:

Before providing a more accurate and exact account of the perfect good, Philosophy explains why each of these five goods are lacking and, in fact, can easily lead to false happiness and melancholy...True happiness is found in the perfect good, and the perfect good is God... "The belief which human minds share demonstrates that God, the source of all things, is good; for since nothing better than God can be imagined, who can doubt that something has no better, it is good?"

He goes on to say, "Since men become happy by achieving happiness, and happiness is itself divinity, clearly they [men] must become happy by attaining divinity....Hence every happy person is God; God is by nature one only, but nothing prevents the greatest possible number from sharing in that divinity."