Would you drink poison?

At the end of the James Bond film Quantum of Solace there's a great scene with profound implications.

(no need for a spoiler alert - you all know how every Bond film ends)

Bond is in the desert with the key villain of the film, and before leaving him there, he gives the villain a quart of motor oil and says something like "I guarantee that you'll be drinking this within an hour".
In the final scene Bond's boss "M" tells him that the body was found with oil in its stomach.

It's gruesome yes, but it captures a reality I see on a daily basis.



It turns out that we'll "drink poison" so to speak, not only when we're physically thirsty, but also when we're desperate to fulfill a psychological wish.

How many of us will make terrible, destructive choices, in moments of desperation? When starving or thirsting for love, companionship, affirmation, security, peace, certainty,...we'll choose whatever is available, even if we know that it will kill us.

So often we view our choices as a product of our own moral or characterological failures. We often do the same in viewing the choices of others. But the truth is, context, the state of mind you're in, play a big role in what we choose. If we perceive ourselves to be unable to attain the thing we so deeply desire, we quickly grow desperate, and make bad choices.

Most of us reading a blog like this don't actually have much experience with real physical deprivation. But all of us have perceived ourselves as needing something we seem unable to attain. And for most of us in N.America, those are psychological things like love, and support, and certainty.

I don't know what I'd do if I were dying of thirst in a desert. I'd probably drink anything. But what my life of faith is teaching me, is that many of the things I perceive myself as desperately needing, are a matter of my perception.

When we're lonely, it's easy to grasp onto the first companion we might find to quell that loneliness.

When we're feeling unloved or unloveable, we'll mistaken all sorts of things that seem like love, but aren't actually love at all.

When we're anxious and overwhelmed by an uncertain universe, we'll create a false sense of certainty to give us peace, even if it invites all sorts of other terrible things into our lives.

It's not that love, and connection, and security, and peace aren't authentic and good human yearnings....but often we mistaken a yearning for a need. We treat the desire to be loved by another in a particular moment as being equally urgent as the biological imperatives to eat or drink.

We construe our present discomfort as being a desert. And, being the humans that we are, we choose things that poison us.