“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off, and if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.”
The hand, the foot, and the eye: three things are very dear to us. To lose even one of them can make life very difficult. So, if we think of something very dear to us – it could be a job or a person we love, symbolized by the hand, by which we feed ourselves – that can snare us in sin, that something is like food that is spiritually poisonous. Or the foot – that on which we stand, a part of who we are – it might be a mentor perhaps, or an organization to which we belong, providing us with direction, but leading us into darkness and to our own eventual destruction. Finally, our eyes, the most precious of the five senses – our eyes can deceive us, even blind us, so that we walk right into the pit. This can refer to a certain mode of thinking, a set of ideas that we might have embraced when we were young and which feels illuminating, but is in fact leading us astray.
Because they are precious to us and feel like part of who we are, such things are very hard to eradicate. Indeed, it is difficult even to discover their destructive nature. So, we can say “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off,” but we don’t always see clearly what is sinful and destructive. Why?– often enough, because we don’t want to see it. There’s that old expression: “There are none so blind as those who will not see”. We don’t see, because we simply don’t want to see; this is a kind of self-deception.
I’m as guilty as anyone in the Church. We see this even in the hierarchy, who are, after all, human beings; just consider the history of the Church. The sinfulness and blindness of the Church reeks from the pages of history. How do we explain the blood shed, the bigotry, the Church’s tolerance and defense of slavery, or the death penalty, or the buying and selling of Church offices, and much more? There are all sorts of factors involved, from plain ignorance, to weakness, to willful blindness. Try convincing a person that something is a sin who just does not want to see it. It’s not going to happen.
So how do we get out of this? Sin blinds, and so although I want to eradicate sin in my life, I don’t always see what is genuinely sinful, because of ignorance – or worse, my own willful blindness.
The way out of this difficulty is to pray to want to see what God wants me to see. It’s very difficult to know what God wants me to see, just as it is difficult to know what God wants me to do in a particular situation. I remember in my final years of teaching, I said to my spiritual director: “I don’t know what I should do. I can retire, but I don’t know if God wants me to retire or to keep teaching. How do I find out?” He said: “Don’t try to figure out what God wants you to do; you’re not going to be able to know that. There are myriad possible avenues you could take. Instead, pray to want to do what God wants you to do.”
That’s a very different prayer: “Let me want to do what you want me to do.” If we are open and God answers that prayer, He will mold the heart, dispose it in a certain direction through grace, so that we will ultimately want to do what He wants us to do. It is the same thing with sin. This is important, because we can be our own worst enemy, even the most religiously pious among us. Some of the most devout people can go through their whole lives without ever moving past the immaturity and vices they’ve had from their youth, whether that’s a matter of envy, or personal pride, a condescending spirit, or greed, lying, bigotry, the inordinate love of security, jealousies, abuse of authority, vindictiveness, looking at others with contempt, indifference to the poor and the suffering, etc. Piety does not guarantee that one will be freed from the snares of self-deception, and neither does ordination.
So, the way out of this darkness is to pray, asking God to help us want to see what up to this point we simply did not want to see, and to give us the courage to endure the pain of that vision. The result will certainly be painful, difficult at first; it will be a death, and death is always painful. But it is an entering into the tomb of Christ, and the good news is that the tomb is empty. Christ rose. The result of this will be a new life, a resurrected life with a much deeper joy.
In this joy, we will begin to see the hell we lived in up to that point – sort of like Ebenezer Scrooge after he woke up from his ordeal. Life on the outside did not change at all, but he changed, and the result was a joyful life from that point onwards, as opposed to the miserable and blind existence he led before, which was spawned by his own avarice, arrogance, and lack of generosity. He acquired a sense of humor and referred to himself as a blind fool, weighed down by the chains of greed and indifference, like his partner in business, Jacob Marley. He could see it now. His eyes were restored.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen of New York used to say that heaven and hell begin here; we create that heaven or hell for ourselves, and it really boils down to love of others. The more we refuse to go out of ourselves, the more we remain the center of our own lives, the more we will be weighed down in misery, in our own hell. The sad thing is we won’t really understand what a miserable hell it is, until we are on the outside. But the more we transcend ourselves in a self-forgetting exit of self in a genuine love of others, the greater will be the joy in which we live.
Image: Adobe Stock. By DedMityay.
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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