Browsing tag: Church

  • Bless Those Who Blast You

    If people curse you, do not curse them back but bless them instead. (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 32)

    Sadly, the right to retaliate is not an inalienable right.  It may be necessary to fight your enemies and to defeat them, for the sake of the common good.  But the Christian must not inflict harm merely for the satisfaction of revenge.  Yes, it’s hard.  And unfortunately, this isn’t just St. Benedict’s idea.  This is Jesus himself Luke 6:28.

    Can we give them the light-activated puzzle map of the United States?  If they fail to replace Montana, Alabama and Arizona, they’ll be learning about Helena, Montgomery and Phoenix every time the headlights of a passing car flicker through a chink in the curtains.  If they bury it under blankets in the closet, in the middle of the night a strangled voice will say, “New Jersey: Trenton.”

    Not only are we not allowed to give their children motion-sensitive, musical toys with no OFF button: God requires us to pray for them as well.

    When we suffer an insult from another person, we have a reaction, anger, which is as natural as the body’s inflammatory response to injury.  If you didn’t feel anger at being wronged, it would be an emotional failure, just as it would be sick for your body not to react to a wound.  But just as your inflammatory response can itself become a problem if it doesn’t subside, so anger can become destructive to the person who feels it.

    St. Paul describes anger as the devil’s foothold Ephesians 4:26-27 (also translated “place,” “room,” “opportunity.”)  Anger serves as the devil’s foothold because it’s not in itself wrong.  All the other vices are absolutes.  Only anger has this ambiguous quality of being at the same time justified and harmful.  St. Paul tells us, “Be angry but do not sin.”  This means that anger itself is not the sin.  The sin is what the devil tempts you to do when you’re angry.

    Your anger is just.  The wrong is real.  To dismiss the offense would flaunt the law of God.  But because the anger is justified, the devil can easily slip in temptations to vengeful acts which are against God’s law too.  So, anger functions as the gateway through which righteous people can be tempted to do things which normally would repel them.

    When the thirst for revenge sets in, it’s like a bacterial infection that develops in a contaminated wound. If it isn’t addressed immediately, it can become chronic, like vengeful feelings that persist for years after an offense.  The infection can invade your entire body and ruin your health.  Vengeful feelings can obsess you even after the perpetrator is dead.

    It’s true that revenge can attain to the level of tragedy.  There are wrongs that no mere mortal can bear alone.  But usually the vindictive person is shallow and selfish.  It’s the conceited person who punishes someone for an honest remark.  It’s the spiteful person who exacts retribution for a petty grievance.  You don’t want to become that person.

    This is why God prescribes such a horse-pill.  Praying a blessing on the person who has wronged you is like swallowing one of those enormous pills.  The prayer operates like an antibiotic within the soul to combat vengeance.  You don’t have to be enthusiastic about it, not anymore than you have to like those pills.  It may take you more than one try to get it down.  Your natural gag reflex might seem at first insurmountable.  But even a nauseated blessing through clenched teeth will begin to alter your interior state.  Whenever you have vengeful feelings, say, “God bless [so and so].”  That’s all you have to do, but you may have to do it many times, every three hours for weeks. Daily for months. Weekly for years.

    You’re not requesting on their behalf a life of luxury, flippant and carefree.  Still less are you asking for evildoers to continue to do harm with impunity.  When you bless those who’ve mistreated you, you’re asking God to intervene in their lives.  You may have detailed ideas for how exactly God could proceed. He will consider your suggestions fairly.  But at the end of the day, you surrender judgment to Christ.

    Who is the person who does inspire respect?  It’s the one who can laugh off an insult and make a joke of it. The one who sticks to principle in the face of harassment is inspiring, not the one who lashes out in fury. The one who gets back up after being knocked down and keeps right on running toward the goal: that’s who you want to be. Outmaneuver your opponents. Leave them in the dust, and leave revenge in the hands of God. “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.‘”

     

     

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  • Hallow Your Speech Or Hollow Your Home

    Rid your heart of all deceit.  Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love.  Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue.  (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 24-28)

    Do not lie to your children.

    What about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?

    When my first child asked me if Santa Claus was real, I told her quite frankly, “No.” She didn’t believe me. She argued with me. On Christmas morning she said, “See, Mommy! Look at all these presents. Where do you think these presents came from, if Santa isn’t real?”

    With the second child, I explained patiently that Santa is based on a real person, Saint Nicholas, who lived a long time ago and started the tradition of giving presents to poor children at Christmas. Then I got a phone call from my mother: “Do you realize that Anthony is going around telling people that Santa Claus is dead?”

    With the third child, I decided to let my husband handle this issue. He shamelessly played along with the whole charade. Not only Santa but the Tooth Fairy was real. He snuck presents under the tree and put excessive amounts of money under her pillow, inflating the value of teeth and provoking competition.

    With the fourth child, I avoided the whole problem. I told her the Tooth Fairy forgot about her tooth, but she might try selling it to her dad instead. I told her to ask her siblings about Santa.

    It seems to me that if children can’t trust you to tell the truth about something as inane as the Tooth Fairy, how can they trust you on more important topics? However, I realize that many people feel very strongly that a happy childhood includes belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other specialized proxies.

    It’s one thing to let Santa live on in everyone’s imagination. It’s another thing to lie to your children in order to manipulate them into doing something quickly and without protest. Ten years later, the little-white-lie parents are the ones complaining about how their teenagers (shock, horror) deceive and manipulate them. How nasty those teenagers are, and how sweet they were, back in the days when they still believed everything we told them….

    The difference between the tall-tale-teller and the deceitful-manipulator is that the tale-teller wants the children to grow up and learn to distinguish reality from fiction. Nothing tickles a tale-teller so much as the efforts of a knee-high pipsqueak to put one over on him. And sometimes the pipsqueak wins this game, to everyone’s delight. It’s a game that develops the wits just like pitching softballs in the back yard develops athletic skills. It’s quite different from the morbid nostalgia of adults who hate to see the children maturing, for murky reasons of their own.

    But what really harms children is that worst form of deceit, “the hollow greeting of peace.” This corresponds to the pretense of love on the part of a parent who is essentially selfish. The friendly father who abandons his family is hollow. The effusive mother who neglects her children is hollow.

    There’s no point in glancing around to see if other people are affected. It’s in the nature of the thing to be invisible from the outside. Right now everyone looks fine. It’s all good! But when the relationships collapse, and the hollow family splays out into the open, you get a sickening glimpse inside.

    What is the opposite of hollow? The opposite of hollow is to be truly, through and through, what you appear to be on the outside. It means actually taking care of your children. That job includes teaching them to distinguish truth from falsehood, in whatever way you do best. You aim for their ultimate good, not your immediate convenience. It’s possible that no one around you will acknowledge that you’re doing anything worthwhile at all. But in the long run, integrity stands.

     

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  • King Once And King To Be

    It is love that impels them to pursue everlasting life; therefore, they are eager to take the narrow road of which the Lord says: Narrow is the road that leads to life Matthew 7:14. (Rule of St. Benedict 5.10-11)

    When my son was not yet six years old, he asked me at Christmas: “How can God be both everywhere AND a baby in a manger?”

    I said, “Yes, and he’s also a Spirit who is present to each of us at every moment.”

    He said, “That’s CRAZY.”

    So I said, “One day you’ll learn that the really dangerous crazy people make perfect sense.  Everything fits together neatly for them.”

    Fortunately, at that point he dashed off to something else, so I didn’t have to explain that the baby is an exiled king who will one day return, and we’ve given him our allegiance, which involves us in all sorts of struggles while we wait for him to reclaim his inheritance.

    Or maybe that’s not theologically correct.  Maybe he is already King of everything.  It’s just that his enemy usurps his territory and seduces the allegiance of his citizens—usually the easy way, with inducements.  For those who don’t respond to inducements, there are threats.  For those who disregard threats, there are punishments.  Some of these are worse than being condescended to at cocktail parties.

    Sell out?

    In other words, there’s a romantic loyalty in the Christian call.  Something about love.

    The Christian does not obey a set of laws, a system of ideas, an abstract principle or an impersonal force.  The Christian has committed to obey a person.  That person is Christ.  So, Christian faith is not an exercise of the imagination.  Nor is faith an intellectual assent to a set of propositions.  Still less is it membership in a club.  You do have both an imagination and an intellect, and you are free to join clubs, but faith is something else.  Faith in God is trust in a person.

    It’s exactly at the point of obedience that you start to wonder if you really believe in this guy.  Why should you put yourself out for someone you neither know nor trust?

    You shouldn’t.  If it strikes you that God asks far too much, proceed with caution.  Take a step in the direction of what he seems to want, and see what comes of it.  And begin to claim his promises for yourself.  It’s only as you begin to experience God making good on his word that you’ll begin to feel confident in him.  If you never expect anything of him, you’ll never know him.

    Also realize that if you are yourself untrustworthy, you will never know God.  “Faithless” means treacherous, fickle, false.  This sort of person is incompatible with God.  If you want to experience a relationship with God, be faithful in your dealings with other human beings.

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  • Rid Yourself Of Anger

    You are not to act in anger… (Rule of St. Benedict 4.22)

    It’s easy to be angry when interacting with children, because children are constantly doing things wrong. The more children you’re responsible for, the easier it is to remain in a state of perpetual irritation.  But just because it’s a chronic feeling doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.  Parents should take seriously what St. Benedict says here, which is also what Jesus himself insists on: “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5: 22).

    Habitual anger is the result of ingrained dissatisfaction. If we constantly focus on the myriad disappointments of life, on the things that don’t live up to our standards, anger will always be at our elbow. It’s true that yearning for the thing that’s beyond our reach can be a powerful motive for action, and for good. But lots of things remain out of reach. There’s only so much we can do to achieve what we want, and anger is an instinctive response to frustration. If the frustration collapses into despair, we give up working toward the goal and are left with nothing but the chafing desire for something we don’t believe we’ll ever get.

    This simmering soup of dissatisfaction, disappointment and hopelessness is such a regular meal for so many people that it’s impossible to overstate the dangers of it. Left unattended, it can boil over suddenly into violence. The culture we live in keeps the heat on relentlessly. They can’t sell you what you don’t want, so they figure out how to make you want it. Not everyone gets to the explosion point, but many people do struggle constantly to keep themselves from blowing their lid.

    The antidote to anger is joy. You cannot enjoy something and simultaneously feel angry. Joy casts out anger.

    Joy in its ultimate form is a lofty mystery. But the pathway to joy begins here and now, in the tiny thing that we can actually enjoy in this moment. Don’t worry about the great saints who weirdly experienced joy in the midst of torture. You can experience joy simply by focusing on whatever good presents itself in the moment, and giving thanks for it.

    It can take a huge effort to haul your attention away from the disappointments you’ve been focusing on, but the benefits are enormous. As with physical medication, you have to give this practice some time to work. You know that if you swallow a couple of pills for your headache, it’s going to take at least half an hour for them to take effect. Similarly, begin to make the effort to thank God for what you can find to enjoy, and soon you’ll begin to feel relief from chronic anger. Only realize that this treatment is an ongoing therapy. Thankfulness has to build up in your system and maintain a certain level in your bloodstream to be effective.

    For Christians, thankfulness is not a vague, self-referential thing. It’s not that we work ourselves up to feeling thankful in general to nobody in particular. We believe that God is the originator of all good things. This is why we give thanks to God for the thing we enjoy. It’s important here to be completely honest. Maybe in your life almost everything is the opposite of enjoyable. You have to exert yourself to identify something—anything—that you can truly enjoy. Often this one thing is small and ordinary. Perhaps it’s just a cup of hot coffee that you’re able to enjoy in an otherwise miserable moment. So, give thanks to God for your cup of coffee.

    As Christians, we also recognize that human beings have their freedom and can choose to do evil or good. So when someone does a kind thing, that person truly deserves thanks. We practice saying thank you to specific people at specific moments not just as an automatic social reflex, but because of human freedom. The other person didn’t have to bring you that cup of coffee. So, say thank you to the person through whom you received the good thing that you enjoy.

     

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  • Trick Or Treat

    Obey the orders of the abbot unreservedly, even if his own conduct—which God forbid—be at odds with what he says.  Remember the teaching of the Lord: Do what they say, not what they do Matthew 23:3.  (RB 4.61)

    Do what I say, not what I do?

    Well, we’ve all been there.  We shouldn’t be too quick to accuse others of hypocrisy.  People who fail to live up to their own standards aren’t usually hypocrites: they’re just human.

    So, actual hypocrisy involves a deliberate, conscious, sustained discrepancy.  If you create an alias and leave remarks online that you wouldn’t want anyone who knows you to find out about, that’s hypocrisy.

    As for hypocrisy within the Church, it’s nothing new.  There have been fakers all the way back to Ananias and Sapphira.  Of course, it’s disturbing when those people rise to positions of authority.  When this happens, they’re never in isolation.  A hypocrite can’t remain in power without supporters who collude to maintain the fiction.

    Hypocrisy is always expedient.  The anonymous cipher behind the false front has a goal.  Sometimes it’s the glaringly obvious goal of retaining a position of influence (“accomplishing all the good we do”).  Sometimes the real goal is so murky that only a brilliant psychoanalyst could uncover it.

    If you’re a sincere person, you may be more easily duped at first, because you assume that others are equally sincere.  They will play you.  But when you figure out what’s going on, you’re not obligated to stick around for more.  You’re free to move on in search of integrity.  In fact, there may come a time when you must move on, if remaining means playing their game.

    St B reminds us that the experience of other people’s dishonesty is not an excuse to behave badly ourselves.  Even if you have no power to change the system, you can choose to remain honest yourself.

    Children are natural prophets.  They will call you out on your discrepancies: listen to them.

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  • Contend Courteously

    The brothers, for their part, are to express their opinions with all humility, and not presume to defend their own views obstinately.…In the monastery no one is to follow his own heart’s desire.… (Rule of St. Benedict 3. 4-8)

    Sure, you have freedom of expression.  But is it going to be the expression of a war zone?  Because there’s another option.  You can choose to approach your messy zone as a construction site.  It’s true that injuries can still occur on construction sites, but the goal is to build something.  On the other hand, victories can be won on battlefields, but the devastated area remains uninhabitable afterwards for years.  Will you be a destroyer or a builder?

    You’re your own person.  But when you got married, you chose interdependence.  Does your pursuit of your goal disrupt your household?  Is your personal ambition undermining your family’s team spirit?  Is the thing you want placing an undue burden on everyone else?

    These are tricky questions.  Your self-assessment may be at odds with your spouse’s.  Maybe the two of you should figure that out first.

    It could be that there’s nothing antisocial about how you’re spending your time.  Maybe it’s the way you express yourself verbally that’s the problem.  Be polite, even to the person you sleep with.  Courtesy is the thing that counts.  Listen first, then speak.

    And be honest.

    How can you be both honest and polite?

    Only with a sense of humor.

    The goal is harmony.  For this, you need the grace of God.  But it also helps to check in with each other on a regular basis.  You can avoid a lot of conflicts if you anticipate difficulties and discuss them ahead of time, instead of always playing catch-up to poor communication.

    Remember that it’s on you to explain what you expect.  The marriage vow does not bestow psychic powers on your spouse.  Only you can figure out what is going through your own mind.  So, the more complicated it is, the more time you’re going to have to give it.

    Don’t assume that the underlying problem is that you are right, while the other person is wrong.  Maybe the other person knows you’re right but is tired of hearing you repeat it. Try a different approach: humor. Watch Monty Python’s The Argument Clinic and have a laugh together.

     

     

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  • Eat Your Vegetables

    Raising Kids

    …we must be vigilant every hour… (Rule of St. Benedict 7.29)

    The kid who is old enough to chew solid food will also be smart enough to realize that you’re cooking peas with his pasta.

    He’s willful enough to feel insulted.

    He’s passionate enough to throw a screaming fit.

    Because you’re a Christian mother–loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle and self-controlled–you don’t beat him with your wooden spoon at the end of a long, hard day.  Instead, you pour yourself a glass of wine, turn up the music, get down in his face with the bag of frozen peas and say: WATCH ME.  Then in defiance of his will you add the peas to the ziti while he howls and kicks on the ground at your feet.

    So what if he removes every pea from his bowl and refuses to eat even one?  So what if he peers into each tube of ziti and sticks his finger in it to expel each internal pea?  You’ve held the line.  You’ve retained your principles.  That was the Battle of the Peas, and you won it.

    When he’s a little older, you’ll no longer permit him to remove all vegetable matter from his personal space.  Even if he won’t taste the broccoli, he must tolerate it.  He may not remove it to the table, or throw it on the floor, or foist it onto someone else’s plate.  He must suffer the presence of the hated green thing.  When at last he resigns himself to its existence, you’ve won the First Battle of Broccoli.

    Then there’s the Second Battle to fight: he’s got to taste the broccoli.

    When he gags and vomits at your dinner table, you feel disheartened.  You’ve already toiled through years of cooking for an ungrateful, complaining family.  Now you want to give up and never eat again–not with them.  But the night is darkest just before the dawn.  The little boy who gags on his broccoli will one day volunteer to cook dinner for his whole family (Fettuccine Alfredo; extra Parmesan; no peas).

    Far, far more important than the presence or absence of vegetables are the social principles he has internalized:

    1. Everything the cook serves must be TASTED.
    2. The one who provides dinner must be THANKED.
    3. If you want it different, do it YOURSELF.

    The first two principles are essential to civilization.  The laws of hospitality are older than Abraham. Flaunt them at your peril.  The third undergirds a free society.

    So persevere.  One day you’ll reap the rewards of having trained your children in good habits.  When you feel yourself flagging, just take a look around at the consequences of giving up.  Habits of self-control and principle go far beyond food choices.  Children who’ve learned that food consumption is not an act of self-worship will later be able to put other forms of consumption into context.  Habits acquired in childhood are difficult to break.

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  • Beware Fatal Attraction

    Rage Definition

    We must then be on guard against any base desire, because death is stationed near the gateway of pleasure. (Rule of St. Benedict 7.24)

    Last week a man identified himself with death and stationed himself at the gateway of pleasure to deal it out.  

    This was not a Kenny Rogers kind of Gambler.  But was he one of us?

    Answer 1:

    We don’t see the appeal of murdering as many people as possible before killing ourselves.  If we were to kill ourselves, we’d just swallow a bottle of pills.

    Answer 2:

    Ending it all is not necessarily the goal.  You just want what you want, and you don’t care if it kills you.

    Answer 3:

    The lure dangling before your eyes is more playful.  You figure you can take the bait and leave someone else on the hook for it.

    Answer 4:

    None of the above.  You want to live a good life.  And you want to be happy.  Why does this have to be so hard?

    St. Benedict’s approach:

    St. Benedict warns us not against desire in general, but against base desire.  We keep all our other desires in check because our deepest desire is for life itself.  Only God can satisfy this desire.

    First mistake to avoid:

    The first mistake is to imagine that Christian faith requires a repression of desire itself.  

    Not so: Christian faith is all about the ultimate fulfillment of desire.

    Second mistake to avoid:

    The second mistake is to imagine that because desire itself is good, therefore all of our particular desires must also be good.  

    Not so: the practice of the faith involves learning to distinguish between right desires and base desires. We also develop self-control, so we can enjoy good impulses without giving in to bad ones.

    Third mistake to avoid:

    The third mistake is to imagine that because there are right desires and base desires, every impulse must have a moral rating.  

    Not so: many actions are in themselves neutral.  The rightness or baseness of a desire resonates within the forms of God.  Where God is silent, we may improvise as we please.  But where God reveals, we heed and harmonize.

    The theory isn’t that difficult.  It’s the practice that gets you, as you finger your way through the cacophony. All around are neurotic types who want to dominate, each according to his own devices. There are hedonist types who want to let everything go, especially themselves.  And there are neurotic hedonists: the peculiar creatures of our time.

    The neurotic hedonist rejects the forms of God in their entirety, by rejecting the very existence of God.  He sets himself up as a replacement for God.  This sort of narcissist glorifies the impulses of the self.  But the neurotic hedonist also regulates the worship of the self with a complex, compulsory structure.  Then when he really gets going, he tries to impose the worship of himself onto everyone else.

    The Enraged Man:

    A neurotic hedonist can develop into an enraged man.  For a lifetime he cultivates anger at everything that does not conform to his control.  For a lifetime he refuses to tune the one thing his creator asks him to adjust: himself.

    The Christian script calls for an entirely different way of living.  We worship God and attempt to follow his lead.  We subordinate our wills to his on principle and seek to harmonize our desires with his.  But within the parameters set by God, we enjoy complete freedom.  We’re under no compulsion to do anything in a fixed way.  We rid ourselves of anger, rage, malice, slander–how?  By giving thanks to the one from whom we receive every good thing.

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  • Align Your Will With God’s Will

    Scripture tells us: Turn away from your desires Sirach 18:30.  And in the Prayer too we ask God that his will be done in us Matthew 6:10.  We are rightly taught not to do our own will, since we dread what Scripture says: There are ways which men call right that in the end plunge into the depths of hell Proverbs 16:25. (Rule of St. Benedict 7.19-22)

    You don’t need to wait for eternity to see the train wreck.  The bitter rewards of folly are everywhere exhibited around us.  How agonizing to watch as people you care about make foolish choices and then inflict the consequences on others.  Like King Lear they resent honest advice and choose instead to listen to flattery.  They reject offers of help and surround themselves with toxic influences that justify their decisions.  They go from delusion to destruction and leave sorrow in their wake.  Like the Fool, you trail along in the aftermath: faithful, sorrowful, impotent.

    Or not.  If you have a will of iron, for the love of mercy bend it to conform to the truth.  Sometimes that means diverging from those who have been companions.  There are others following behind you who deserve to arrive at destination safely.  Granted that it’s impossible for any human being to act always with perfect insight.  So, commit yourself to the will of the One who knows everything, and who is always, everywhere working for good.  This is what you’re doing when you pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”  You subordinate your will to the will of God.  You align yourself with his plan and trust his Spirit to guide you through this world and into redemption.

    It’s not that we never make independent decisions or take spontaneous action. We don’t wait around for a special revelation about every detail of our lives.  God is not a micromanager.  God is a delegator. Jesus compares our relationship with God to that of a steward whose master has gone away on a journey, and with whom there’s no communication.  He doesn’t know when the master will return, and he’s on his own with his responsibilities (Matthew 25:14-30.)  God entrusts us with enormous freedom to act at our own discretion–more freedom than we want.

    Subordinating your will means that when you have the impulse to depart from his command, you don’t bestow on yourself permission to disobey.  This temptation can come even after years of righteous living, as another steward parable describes (Matthew 24:45-51.)  It’s tough when you find that your practice of the Christian character, rather than earning you the respect and gratitude of those you’ve helped, actually inspires their contempt.  When someone to whom you’ve always been kind abuses you, it calls into question your mode of relating to others.  There’s a natural impulse toward revenge.  And yet, life depends on curving off to the good.

    This includes speaking out.  The record of Scripture and of the Church shows models who speak cogently and forcefully.  We don’t subordinate our will to the will of everyone we meet.  Still less do we defer to the collective will of any group.  On the contrary, knowing what’s right and wrong–based on the standard of Scripture and of the Church, rather than on a code of convenience–we have the courage to stand firm, and to protest.

    We don’t see what lies around the bend into the future.  But the message of redemption is that when we align our will with God’s will–even when we’re not sure where that’s going to take us–a whole new vista opens up.  There is a path forward, through whatever terrain we find ourselves in, over the horizon and into eternity.

    (“We can but trust God,” says the parson in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors.  Read it once for the detective story.  Then come back to it for the flashes of spiritual insight.)

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  • Yield Your Imagination

    Our thoughts are always present to God… God searches hearts and minds Psalm 7:10….  The Lord knows the thoughts of men Psalm 94:11….  From afar you know my thoughts Psalm 139:2….  That he may take care to avoid sinful thoughts, the virtuous brother must always say to himself: I shall be blameless in his sight if I guard myself from my own wickedness Psalm 18:24. (Rule of St. Benedict 7.14-18)

    Invite the Holy Spirit into the house of your mind Romans 12:2 ; Revelation 3:20.  The dark and horrible corridors hold no terror for him.  Hand him the keys, and you will find that the doors you tried so hard to keep locked will soon be propped open.  A ray of light will penetrate even fearful corners.  A breath of air will stir in stagnant places.  The Holy Spirit will not demolish your imagination: he will inhabit it.

    Your imagination is not the part of yourself that you must overcome.  Rather, your imagination is the organ God endows you with to help do the overcoming.  Just as he designed the human body with a liver that filters out toxins and aids in digestion, he designed the human mind with imagination.  If you were never exposed to toxins, you wouldn’t need the liver to be the heaviest organ in your body.  If you were living in the Garden of Eden, an impure thought would never enter your mind.  But even if you lived in a pristine environment, you wouldn’t necessarily do the right thing in it.  Adam and Eve certainly didn’t.  Conversely, history shows that the holiest people have often been exposed to terrible things.  Removal from contamination does not guarantee righteousness.  Proximity to evil does not produce sin.

    It’s true that moral toxins can overwhelm the imagination, just as alcohol abuse can overwhelm the liver. You shouldn’t expose yourself deliberately to poisonous influences.  But day after day, a functioning imagination helps us process the moral challenges to which a fallen world exposes us.

    For example, there are occasions when the task that duty calls you to is onerous, boring or repellent.  When you’re cleaning up vomit off the floor, should you fully engage in the moment with all of your faculties?  Because the sight and smell of vomit can induce such nausea that you’ll be unable to complete the task.  In such a situation, the imagination offers a way to distance yourself–to redirect your attention–so that you can complete the task without quite focusing on it.  At the end of the day, right action remains the standard of right living.  If your weird fantasy helped you do your duty, then you’re in better shape than the people who ran away from responsibility because they couldn’t enjoy the moment.

    The imagination also serves as an aid to right living when we rehearse various options for behavior.  When we’re angry, we may imagine any number of phrases we could say to the person who has offended us, or vengeful actions we could take.  But what do we actually say and do?  The imagination gives us a way to consider the consequences of wrong behaviors without actually living them out.  Sometimes it’s only through the process of imagining a wrong behavior that we come to feel that it is wrong.  The important question is whether, after imagining our options, we reject the wrong and choose the right.

    A third way that imagination helps us is by entering into evil, not to embrace it, but to combat it.  If you want to vanquish evil, you must gain an understanding of how it works.  Not all thinking about evil things is sinful, not anymore than working with a deadly virus is sinful, if your goal is to find a vaccine.  However, you must take precautions.  Don’t underestimate the thing you’re called to combat.

    Your imagination also provides a place to escape to, when you’re too weary to cope with reality.  Sometimes your fantasy reveals a specific stressor that you need to address.  In constrained situations, the escape into fantasy may be the best alternative available.  We live in a culture with fewer physical challenges than ever before in human history, but with overwhelming mental challenges that produce chronic psychological exhaustion.

    God knows all of this.  Even in our most intimate, most embarrassing, most bizarre moments, we can always turn to God and ask for grace to grow into habitable dwellings for the Holy Spirit.  When we feel ourselves inclined to evil, we should admit it and ask for strength to behave rightly.  Entrust your thoughts to God, and keep dreaming.

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