Category: lust

The Age of Adonis (Part 3).

Part 3 of 3:  The Middle Distance.

There is a peculiar vantage point one gains simply by living in close proximity to other human beings.  Not close enough to know their secrets, but close enough to witness their habits; their triumphs, their peculiarities, their kindness, their small vanities, their authenticity, and quieter graces.  It is the view from the middle distance, where comedy and clarity often arrive hand‑in‑hand.

From this vantage point, I have watched our neighborhood Adonis swell into his mythic proportions, strutting through the hallways and on the neighborhood sidewalks like a man auditioning for a protein‑powder commercial.  His life is lived in bold, glossy strokes of sweat, swagger, and spectacle.  He found the easy way in life to make a dollar, becoming a grifter front and center on the unholy stage of a community fellowship group, sermonizing under the guise of praises and blessings peppered within his readings of scripture verses found in a distorted Bible.  He is the sort of person who seems to believe that if he flexes hard enough – whether it is flexing by quoting scripture or flexing muscles – the world will mistake it for virtue.  At the same time, he soaks in the adulation and attention as one would with water from the River Jordan.

And then, from the same vantage point, I have watched the quiet ones; the door‑holders, the plant‑waterers, the hallway‑softeners moving through the building with a gentleness that neither asks nor demands anything in return.  Their lives are lived in gentle lowercase letters, steady and unadorned.  They are not trying to be noticed, which is precisely why they are.

Modern life, for all its noise, has a way of revealing character in the smallest of moments.  The man who performs goodness loudly often performs it only for the applause and attention.  The man who waters the begonias when no one is looking is not performing at all.  He is simply and unobtrusively being who he is.

Discernment, I’ve learned, is not about judging people harshly.  It’s about seeing clearly and recognizing the difference between shine and substance, between the man who builds his body like an Old Testament golden monument and the neighbor who quietly builds a life of decency.  Humility, too, is not a grand gesture.  It is the quiet refusal to make oneself the center of every hallway and fellowship stage.  To learn what not to become is one of the great lessons of life.

And what about the comedy of modernity?  It’s everywhere.  It’s in the man who cannot lower his arms because his torso has become a personal billboard.  It’s in the fluorescent lights catching a thousand sequins on Cowgirl Betty’s jacket in the middle of a sunny day.  It’s in the way we all, at one point or another, take ourselves far too seriously.

But the deeper comedy is the one that makes you smile long after the moment has passed.  It is this: the people who most want to be admired rarely are, and the people who never think about admiration often end up holding the whole place together.

In the middle distance, the truth becomes clear.  Strength is not measured in inches of bicep or the girth of one’s chest.  Beauty is not measured in lumens of sparkle.  Virtue, the real kind, is almost always quiet enough to miss if you’re not paying attention.

But once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere.

This is the final chapter of three parts.

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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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The Profit That Destroys.

The question, “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?” cuts to the heart of a tension that every era rediscovers: the difference between a life that looks impressive and a life that is actually worth living.  We are surrounded by metrics — influence, fame, money, reputation, achievement, status — that promise satisfaction but often deliver only more insatiable hunger.  The question forces us to confront a truth we instinctively know: a person can win by every external measure and still feel hollow inside, a dried-up husk of a person.

Modern culture is skilled at rewarding the wrong things.  It celebrates accumulation, visibility, and speed.  It teaches us to optimize our schedules, polish our image, and chase the next milestone.  None of these pursuits are inherently harmful, but they become dangerous when they eclipse the quieter, more essential work of becoming a whole human being.  A person can spend decades climbing a ladder only to discover it was leaning against the wrong wall.

Losing oneself rarely happens in a dramatic collapse. More often, it happens gradually, when convenience replaces integrity, when ambition overrides relationships, when the greedy pursuit of More! More! More! crowds out the pursuit of meaning.  The world applauds these compromises; our inner life does not.  The cost is subtle but real: a thinning of character, a shrinking of joy, a sense that life is happening faster than we can live it.

To gain the world is easy.  It requires only that we follow the current cultural expectation.  To keep oneself intact is harder.  It demands reflection, boundaries, and the courage to choose depth over display, but only one of these paths leads to a life that feels like one’s own.

In the end, the question remains a challenge to every generation: what good is success if it costs you the very person you were meant to become?  The world offers many rewards, but none of them are worth the loss of yourself and your eternal spirit.

 

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