Category: appearances

The Age of Adonis (Part 1)

Part 1 of 3:  Reflections on Vanity, Virtue, and the Modern Parade

He was the sort of man who made a living preaching The Word while somehow managing to sidestep most of its demands.  You could see it in the way he carried himself; earnest on the surface, but with a hollowness underneath, like a sermon missing its last page.

When I first met him, he was almost aggressively unremarkable: small, soft around the middle, a crew cut that looked like it had been administered by someone in a hurry, and some type of cologne that would gag a maggot.  He told me he had left the Church and was now preaching at a non‑denominational fellowship down the road.  He quoted Scripture with the enthusiasm of someone who had just discovered the footnotes and wanted everyone to know and be impressed.  Truthfully, it felt less like devotion and more like a performance of mental gymnastics meant to impress.  They didn’t.

In our brief conversations, he mentioned he was a former drug user, now clean, and that he was “still learning” and had “a long way to go” in understanding The Word.  That part, at least, I believed.

But then something shifted.

Slowly, his upper body began to expand.  It was first subtly, then alarmingly.  I would see him at the neighborhood gym, or returning from it, sweat pouring off him in rivulets that perfumed the condominium hallways with a scent that could only be described as fusty.  Other days, I’d spot him leaving Atomic Health Club in town, towels slung over his shoulder, his wet T‑shirt clinging to him like a second skin.  He would leap into his sports car with the flourish of a man starring in his own music video and drive off like a bolt out of the blue.

By summer, the transformation seemed complete.  One afternoon, he and his family walked down the hallway on their way to the swimming pool. “Walked” is generous—he lumbered, unable to lower his arms fully because his torso had grown to mythic proportions.  He wore only baggy shorts (I cannot call them trunks), his thick thighs rubbing together and his calves looking like chicken legs.  It looked like it hurt him to move his legs, and for that moment I felt sorry for him.  His pre‑tween daughter wore a bikini so revealing it made me blink twice in embarrassment.  His wife and son, ironically, were dressed modestly befitting a church picnic.

His upper body had become enormous, his thighs still pronounced, his calves still comically thin.  He reminded me of a Greek statue carved by an artist who ran out of marble halfway through.  It was unsettling, the kind of physique that makes you instinctively step aside in case it topples or explodes.

He strutted through the building with the air of a man fishing for admiration, or perhaps for something more.  Someone once told me that people who leave one addiction often find another to replace the high.  Maybe this was that; maybe it wasn’t.  I’m not his confessor; I can only pray for him.

What I do know is this: the greater his muscles grew, the quieter his preaching rang.  There was a disconnect between the man he proclaimed himself to be and the man he was becoming, between the humility of the Gospel and the vanity of the mirror.

And perhaps that is the real caution of the Age of Adonis: when the body becomes the altar, the soul is left without a place to kneel and worship the one true God.

Part 2 will be published on April 16, 2026.

 

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A Lesson in the Checkout Line.

A couple of weeks ago, we were in the checkout line at the grocery store, the kind of slow‑moving line that gives you time to observe more than you intended.  In front of us stood an elderly woman with a cart full of groceries and a look of growing concern.  Something was clearly wrong, though I couldn’t hear the details—because the man behind us had just answered his cell phone and immediately launched into a booming, play‑by‑play commentary of the situation.

He was delighted to narrate.  Absolutely delighted.  According to him, the woman had “decided not to pay for everything,” and the cashier was now forced to “re‑ring the whole cart,” and on and on he went, blah, blah, blah, embellishing freely, as if auditioning for the role of Town Crier of Checkout Line Four.

Meanwhile, the elderly woman stood quietly at the register, her shoulders slightly hunched, her hands folded around her wallet.  She wasn’t dramatic, nor causing a scene.  She was simply trying to sort out whatever the problem was.

It wasn’t until later, after we’d checked out and were walking to the car, that my best friend, who had actually heard the real exchange, told me what had happened.  The woman’s EBT card hadn’t covered all her items, and she had tried to pay the remainder with a personal check, but the cashier couldn’t accept it for some unknown reason.  That was the entire “scandal.”  No theatrics.  No attempted grocery heist.  Just a woman trying to buy food and running into the quiet humiliations that come with limited means.

The man behind us, however, had been proudly broadcasting a story about her of his own invention, complete with moral judgments and imaginary plot twists.  He had turned her sad difficulty into laughable entertainment.

I thought about that on my ride home; the ease with which some people narrate other people’s struggles, the confidence with which they fill in the blanks, the laughs, the casual cruelty of assuming the worst when the truth is usually simpler, quieter, and far more human.

A checkout line can reveal more about character than we expect. Sometimes it’s not the person in trouble who tells the story; it’s the person who can’t resist telling the wrong one and laugh at a person’s misfortune.

 

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The Poverty of Perpetual Anger.

There is a particular sadness in watching people who live in a constant state of anger, and I see this quite a lot in my neighborhood, and especially since 2020.  Their anger is not the righteous anger that rises to defend the vulnerable, but the chronic, simmering kind; the kind that becomes a personality, a worldview, a permanent narrowing of the soul.  Some of these people turn ugly and violent when they are cordially greeted by neighbors.  These are people who treat every encounter as a contest, every disagreement as a threat, every difference as a personal insult.  Perhaps they believe they are defending themselves, but in truth they are defending the walls that imprison them.

Anger becomes their only vocabulary.  They speak it fluently, instinctively, even proudly, and peppered heavily with vulgar and filthy words.  But beneath that lies a deep poverty of spirit.  A person who must always be angry and offensive is a person who has forgotten how to be free and kind.

The tragedy is not merely that they harm others—though they do.  The deeper tragedy is what they lose within themselves without realizing it.

  • They lose the ability to be surprised by goodness.
  • They lose the capacity for joy that comes from generosity.
  • They lose the peace that only humility can give.
  • They lose the richness of a larger world than their own reflection.

They trade all of this for the brittle satisfaction of being “right” and boorish, even when that “rightness” isolates them.  They probably do not realize that the fortress they build to keep others out is the same fortress that keeps them in.

My sadness for them is not schmaltzy.  It is not the soft sadness of pity.  It is the sharper sadness that comes from recognizing wasted possibility.  These are people who could be expansive, curious, generous, a positive addition to the neighborhood, but instead they choose the cramped rooms of anger and rejection.  They choose to live in a world too small for any soul.  It is as though they are possessed by demons.

A life fueled by anger cannot lead to peace.  A heart closed to others cannot experience love.  A mind that rejects difference cannot grow.  They may cling to their fury and their narrowness as if these things protect them, but in the end, they protect nothing.  They only ensure that the person holding them remains untouched by the very things that make life worth living.

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Squirrely Pearl.

I made my way to the deli counter at my friendly neighborhood grocery store, ready to place my order, when a five‑foot‑nothing woman glided under my elbow with the confidence of someone who has never waited her turn in her entire life.  Before I could blink, she was already whisper‑dictating her order to the clerk.

“Four slices of Havarti cheese,” she breathed, in a tone so soft it sounded like she was sharing state secrets.

When that order was handed over, she continued.

“Six slices of Buffalo‑style chicken breast,” she whispered again, as if the poultry might overhear and object.

This pattern repeated itself — item, whisper, handoff — like a tiny, highly specialized espionage operation.  Then came the tasting sample.  The clerk offered her a slice of Gruyere, and that’s when her true form emerged.

She took a tiny, tiny bite.  It was a bite so miniscule it would have required laboratory equipment to detect.  And she chewed it with her front teeth, slowly, methodically, exactly like a squirrel working through a hazelnut.  Then another tiny bite.  More squirrel chewing.  I half expected her to scamper up the deli case and store the rest in her cheeks for winter.

The whole performance was incredible: she whisper‑talked like Jackie Kennedy and nibbled like Rocket J. Squirrel.  I never did get my order in (I eventually grabbed some pre-cut cheese in the refrigerated case), but honestly, I left feeling like I’d witnessed a rare and delicate species in its natural habitat.

 

 

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Are Our Lives Truly Well-Lived?

A lifetime spent chasing approval, possessions, and the noise of the world gradually drifts away from its own center.  From an early age, we learn to shape ourselves around external expectations, as if our worth could be measured by admiration, status, awards, or the objects we manage to collect, and the amount of money we amass.  Yet these pursuits, however dazzling in the moment, dissolve quickly.  What remains is the quiet sense that we have been living outward rather than inward – living as part of the world, rather than in it.

Philosophers across centuries have warned of this drift.  They remind us that the self becomes fragmented when it is scattered among too many desires, especially those desires that are not truly our own and those that make us look “better” to our family and friends.  Simplicity, then, is not merely a lifestyle but a discipline.  It is the art of refusing to be ruled by the shifting opinions of others or by the endless accumulation of things that promise satisfaction but deliver only distraction.

To live a life well done is not one that has a swanky mansion, a jet set lifestyle, and a fat bank account.  It is, rather, one that turns toward what endures: clarity of mind, steadiness of good character, faith, humbleness, and the courage to act from one’s deepest convictions.  Approval fades, possessions decay, and the world’s applause is notoriously fickle and false.  But integrity and true faith — quiet, unadorned, and often unnoticed — has a way of anchoring the soul.  It allows us to move through life with a sense of coherence rather than fragmentation.

When we stop performing for the world and begin listening to our inner voice that asks for honesty, restraint, and purpose, something positively shifts.  The anxieties that once governed our choices loosen their grip.  We begin to see that the real measure of a life is not what we accumulate but what we cultivate: meekness, compassion, wisdom, and a mind unburdened by the distractions of excess.

This is the freedom available to anyone willing to step away from the noise and chaos.  It is the freedom to walk lightly, to choose meaning over clutter, and to rest in the quiet assurance that a life of depth will always outshine a life of accumulation.

Peace,

Susan Marie Molloy

 

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