Faith or folly? Salvation or suicide?
Deuteronomy 30:19
I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live(.)
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Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
—Anthony Bourdain, dead by suicide.
Anthony Bourdain, whose darkly funny memoir about life in New York City restaurant kitchens made him a celebrity chef and touched off his second career as a journalist, food expert and social activist, was found dead on Friday in his hotel room in France. He was 61.
His death was being treated as a suicide. Christian de Rocquigny du Fayel, the prosecutor for the city of Colmar, in the Alsace region near where Mr. Bourdain was found, said the death was by hanging. “At this stage, we have no reason to suspect foul play,” he said.
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Contemporary society is replete with false gurus touting the hip, the chic, the trendy. The dissemination of their false gospel is aided by a power hungry media that knows not how to protect society from the propaganda of the amoral.
Sadly, the more people encounter stories such as Bourdain's, they might just see through the lie of licentiousness and anarchy that Bourdain captured so neatly in the quote above. His life may have inspired many to take up the banner of libertinism; his death by hanging is the lie exposed.
A former user of cocaine, heroin, and LSD, in Kitchen Confidential (Bourdain) wrote of his experience in a trendy SoHo restaurant in 1981: "We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in refrigerator at every opportunity to 'conceptualize.' Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get."—Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. New York: Bloomsbury. Bourdain, 2000.
As so many others, Bourdain was raised without religion. Too many people are left defenceless against the wickedness and snares of the devil. Confronting a world full of challenges spiritual and material, they medicate themselves in ways the human mind and body can only take for so long before reality catches up. The recent death of a local young woman who took a lethal dose of fentanyl she purchased from a drug dealer is a tragic reminder that death lingers near, especially near to those who choose to "enjoy the ride", because of some twisted fascination, naiveté, sheer stupidity or a desperate attempt to find relief from the emptiness of a life without faith and hope. Death waits nearby, waiting to be invited to seize and destroy the temple which Bourdain cheaply described as an amusement park.
Let us hope that the media frenzy which is accompanying Bourdain's suicide does not further fuel the contagion of despair gripping a generation of men and women who, having ignored the dangers of the "anything goes" waters of the 1960s social revolution, have drowned themselves to death.
May God have mercy on Anthony Bourdain's soul.
May God have mercy on Anthony Bourdain's soul.
Contrary to Bourdain, the body is a temple, a temple of the true, the good and the beautiful. When life is lived with that in mind, other people are treated as temples to be respected, honoured, cherished. Of course, we've seen that, without faith in Jesus Christ, it is far too easy to turn the temple into an amusement park. That amusement park is nothing less than a killing field, a house of horrors.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
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