Browsing tag: practice

  • Curb Your Urge

    For this reason Scripture warns us, Pursue not your lusts Sirach 18:30.  (Rule of St. Benedict 7.25)

    We live in a culture where it’s supposed to be fun to let yourself go.  People announce that they’re about to let themselves go, and then they do it.  Not only do they not feel shame: they expect you to pat them on the back.  Most of the time they act with good humor, and with no thought of harming themselves or anyone else.  The binge is benign these days.

    Until it’s not.  The fact is that we have countless people who are suffering the tragic consequences of their own impulses–or worse, of someone else’s.  Some of them refuse to admit responsibility.  But others are discouraged, because they’ve tried and failed to change.

    Self-control is not an instant thing.  It’s the work of a lifetime.  It’s the practice of a life well-lived.

    If you want to be an athlete or an artist or any sort of skilled worker, you start at the beginning and practice basic moves first.  Checking your own impulse is one of the most basic moves of all.  It’s an element of any future action.  It’s not just that refraining from one action frees up time and energy for an alternative.  Curbing your impulse also builds strength and skill.  These in turn open up new possibilities that would otherwise have remained out of reach.

    A century of Freudian psychology has led us to assume that checking an impulse means repressing desire.  When you repress a desire, you don’t act on it, but it comes out in some other, weird way that you don’t control and that you may not even be aware of.  So you might as well let yourself go.

    Suffering the consequences?  That’s someone else’s specialty.  Next, please.

    The difference between self-control and repression is that self-control does not suppress desire.  Self-control nurtures and trains desire.  While the binge lets desire loose, without regard for other people, self-control keeps desire on a leash and exercises it with consideration for others.

    The lure of the binge is easy pleasure fast.  But the thrill tends to decrease with repetition.  You work harder to get less.  And you suffer the side effects.  With self-control, on the other hand, you start small, but the enjoyment increases with practice.  And the horizons are infinite.

    The best the binge can claim is not to have harmed anyone else.  But self-control allows you to do good to others actively.

    People who can’t control their impulses only get along with others who want to do the same thing at the same time in the same way.  When a whole collection of individuals are all out of control together, they meld into a mob.  The mob tramples any divergent individual.  But then the frenzy burns out, and the mob disperses.  The same individuals go back to competing ruthlessly against each other.  They separate, each alone with an ungoverned desire.  The endpoint is a life without any relationships at all: just interactions that serve the appetite.

    But self-control allows you to live in community.  Christian community aims not to meld but to harmonize individual desires.  It’s a complex challenge, but by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we do make a life together.  This calls for active participation on the part of each one, rather than a passive letting go.

    Life in a family is a training ground for harmony.  Baby learns to sleep at night long enough for Mom to get the rest she needs.  Baby learns to go for longer without eating, so that eventually the child’s habits match the habits of the family.  In practice this effort takes years, and every time a new baby arrives, another individual process is thrown into the mix.  Easy is not part of the deal.

    But the endpoint is paradise, which Jesus describes as a banquet Matthew 22:1-14; 25:1-13.  A banquet is a fancy dinner where people dress their best, eat together and enjoy each other’s company.  When you have a family sitting down to a meal together, you have a foretaste of heaven.  The food may be simple.  The clamor around your table may not sound divine.  But consider what you’ve achieved: you’ve taken human beings from a state of chaos to a state of sociability.  Even if it’s not yet heaven, it is the foundation of civil society, and that’s something no one should take for granted.

    Ultimately: heaven.  Here and now: a functioning society.  Earliest of all: a family meal.  But it all begins with harmonizing individual impulses.  And so, each one of us must achieve a measure of self-control.

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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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  • 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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