I think we can accurately say that Elvis Presley never understood this. His life was a pitiful pursuit of materialism and sensuality. In Elvis’s heyday he earned between $5 million and $6 million a year. It is estimated that he grossed $100 million in his first two years of stardom.

He had three jets, two Cadillacs, a Rolls-Royce, a Lincoln Continental, Buick and Chrysler station wagons, a Jeep, a dune buggy, a converted bus, and three motorcycles.

His favorite car was his 1960 Cadillac limousine. The top was covered with pearl-white Naugahyde. The body was sprayed with forty coats of a specially prepared paint that included crushed diamonds and fish scales. Nearly all the metal trim was plated with eighteen-karat gold.

Inside the car there were two gold-flake telephones, a gold vanity case containing a gold electric razor and gold hair clippers, an electric shoe buffer, a gold-plated television, a record player, an amplifier, air conditioning, and a refrigerator that was capable of making ice in two minutes. He had everything.

Elvis’s sensuality is legendary. Those friends and relatives most familiar with his state in the last months of his life tragically reveal that Elvis had very much become the victim of his appetites. He was what he had eaten—in the profoundest sense.

Elvis Presley’s tragic life dramatizes the significance of the Lord’s teaching in this fourth Beatitude, because in it Jesus sets forth the appetite and menu that bring spiritual well-being: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”