Category: human condition

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Five Hard Truths That Will Set You Free

I have received many requests to republish a post from several years ago. The following five truths from that essay are indeed hard. They rock our world and stab at the heart of some of our most cherished modern notions. If they can be accepted for the truth they convey, however, they bring great peace. These truths are not only good medicine for our collective self-absorption but they also help us to have more realistic expectations as we live out our lives in this imperfect and limited world. Study these truths well. If they irritate you a bit, good; they’re supposed to. They are meant to provoke thought and reassessment.

I did not originate the following five principles, but the commentary is my own. So thank the one to whom the Holy Spirit first spoke them and tolerate my meager commentary.

1.  Life is hard. We live in times of comfort and convenience. Medicine has removed a lot of pain and suffering from our lives. Consumer goods are readily available and we have a wide array of choices. Entertainment comes in many varieties and is often inexpensive. Hard labor is something that few of us are familiar with. Obesity is common due to overconsumption and underactivity.

All of these creature comforts have led us to expect that life should always be just peachy. We become outraged at the slightest suffering, inconvenience, or delay.

Our ancestors lived lives that were far more “brutish and short,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes. Life was a “vale of tears.” They understood that suffering was a part of life. When we suffer today, we start thinking about lawsuits and who is to blame. Suffering seems obnoxious to us and hard work unreasonable! We are angered and flung into anxiety at the mere threat of suffering.

This principle reminds us that suffering and difficulty are part of life; they should be expected. Accepting suffering does not mean we have to like it. Acceptance of the fact that life will be hard at times means that we get less angry and anxious when it is; we do not lose serenity. In fact, it brings a strange sort of peace. We are freed from unrealistic expectations that merely breed resentment. We also become more grateful for the joys we do experience.

2.  Your life is not about you. If you want to make God chuckle, tell Him your plans. If you really want to give him a belly laugh, tell Him His plans! We often like to think that we should just be able to do what ever pleases us and maximizes our “self-actualization.” However, we do not decide alone what course our life will take.

In this age of “nobody tells me what to do,” it is important to remember that our true happiness comes from getting not what we want, but what God wants. Our destiny is not to follow our star; it is to follow God. True peace comes from careful discernment of God’s will for us.

It is sad how few people today ever really speak ahead of time with God about important things like careers, entering into a marriage, or pondering a large project. We just go off and do what we please, expecting God to bail us out if it doesn’t go well. You and I do not exist merely for our own whims; we have a place in God’s plan. We have greater serenity when we discern that place and humbly seek God’s will. Accepting the fact that we are not the masters of our own destiny, not the captains of our own ship, gives us greater peace. It also usually saves us a lot of mileage.

Humbly accepting that our life is not simply about us and what we want is a freeing truth. We often don’t get what we want; if we can allow life to just unfold and not demand that everything be simply the way we want it, we can be more serene and free.

3.  You are not in control. Control is something of an illusion. We may have plans for tomorrow but there are many things between now and tomorrow over which we have no control. For example, we cannot even control or guarantee the next beat of our heart. I may think I have tomorrow under control, but tomorrow is not promised; it may never come.

Because we think that we control a few things, we think that we can control many things. Not really. Our attempts to control and manipulate outcomes are comical, sometimes even harmful.

Thinking that we can control things leads us to think that we must control them. This in turn leads to great anxiety and often anger as well.

We usually think that if we are in control we will be less anxious. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the more we think we can control, the more we try to control, which increases our burdens and anxiety. We end up getting angry because we discover that there many things and people we cannot control after all. This causes frustration and fear.

We would be freer and less anxious if we would simply accept the fact that there are many things—most things, in fact—over which we have no control. Our expectation of everything being under control is unrealistic. Life comes at you fast. Brooding over unpredictable and uncontrollable things amounts to bondage. Simply accepting that we are often not in control is freeing.

4.  You are not that important. This one hurts. We often think that the whole world should revolve around us. We think it is only our feelings that matter and our wellbeing that is important. We are loved by God in a very particular way, but that does not change the fact that we must often yield to others who are also loved by God in a very special way.

Sometimes other people are more important than we are. We might even be called upon to give our life so that others may live. We must yield to others whose needs are more crucial than our own. The world doesn’t exist just for us and what we want.

There is great peace and freedom in coming to accept this. We are often made so anxious if we are not recognized while others are, or if our feelings and preferences are not everyone’s priority. Accepting the truth that we are not that important allows us to relax and enjoy caring about other people and celebrating their importance.

5.  You are going to die. We get all worked up about what this world dishes out, but just take a walk in a cemetery. Those folks were all worked up too. Now their struggles are over. If they were faithful, they are with God; they are now experiencing that “trouble don’t last always.”

This truth also helps us to do the most important thing: get ready to meet God. So many people spend their lives clowning around and goofing off, ignoring our most urgent priority. In the end, this is freeing because we are loosed from the many excessive and often conflicting demands of the world; we can concentrate on doing the one thing necessary. Our life simplifies and we don’t take this world too seriously because we understand that it is passing away. There is great peace and freedom in coming to accept this.

So there you have them, five hard truths that will set you free. Think about them. Memorize them. Pull them out when life comes at you fast and hard with its agenda of control, self-importance, and empty promises of perfect comfort here on earth. A simple, sober, humble, and focused life brings great serenity. 

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Reminders on the Road to Victory – A Witness to the Truth of a Teaching from St. Catherine

One of the great battles in the spiritual life is mastering our emotions, by God’s grace. Our emotions are not evil, but they are unruly and easily manipulated by the world and the devil. Our own flesh (fallen nature) also contributes to the difficulty of self-mastery.

Yet as I have often testified, if we are faithful to the Lord and to prayer, growth in the spiritual life happens. Many of my once-unruly emotions have become more stable and are more quickly assuaged when they arise. I feel very good and confident about the progress I have made because I know it is the Lord who has accomplished it. Yes, I did my work: prayer, spiritual direction, Scripture, confession, Mass, and psychotherapy, but I know it was the Lord. For example, I remember awaking one morning and realizing that some very deep hurts from the past were gone. I couldn’t say when they had left; it seemed as though they had just evaporated. God was signaling me that it was over; they were gone, just gone. I felt a forgiveness, even a compassion, for those who had hurt me. I knew that I wasn’t the one who had accomplished this. Without God’s grace, I was prone to cling to my anger and resentments and rehash the injustices I had felt. Thankfully those feelings have never returned.

Anxiety was always the unruliest of my emotions. Beginning at ten years of age I would have crippling bouts of anxiety and panic. During these periods I could barely sleep and would obsessively ruminate over the fears that seized me. As a boy, I was terrified of various things: a house fire, someone breaking in and killing our entire family, etc. As I grew older and had more duties and responsibilities, I would have periodic attacks of extreme anxiety about assignments or about presentations/sermons I had to give.

The sporadic nature of these bouts seemed to confirm their demonic source. I could go for months, even years at a time, and be fine; suddenly, and usually for no apparent reason, I would feel an overwhelming panic or anxiety. For example, when I had been a priest for over ten years and been preaching and teaching with ease, I suddenly went through a period of grave anxiety over my Sunday sermons. I would worry all week long about the upcoming sermon.

Whether or not these were satanic attacks, the fact is that demons are opportunistic. They found doorways in my psyche and I, with the Lord, knew that deliverance prayer alone wasn’t going to be enough. The doors had to be closed. The work of grace and my cooperation with the Lord was going to have to win the day.

The heart of the battle occurred during a ten-year period, from my mid-thirties to my mid-forties. The medicines were these: prayer, spiritual direction, psychotherapy, sacraments, liturgy, the purification of the intellect (since most feelings come from thoughts), and learning by grace to trust God.

As in any battle, the victories came, but there were also setbacks and relapses. Little by little, trust triumphed over anxiety. A more stable, serene, and confident joy became my set point.

Now in my mid-fifties, I can say that the most recent ten years have been largely and increasingly victorious. I am seldom anxious about anything today. Thank you, Lord, and thank you also for all who have helped, guided, consoled, and encouraged me in my journey!

Every now and again, usually for just a moment (or no more than a day), I am reminded that I hold this treasure in an earthen vessel and that I need to stay “prayed-up”; I need to maintain the disciplines I have learned. Maybe it is a dream in the middle of the night from which I struggle to recover. Perhaps it is just a memory that seems all too real. Maybe it is the looming possibility of a new duty. Thanks be to God, though, the reminders are brief and whatever anxiety comes is manageable. I cannot tell you how grateful I am to God for this gift!

St. Catherine of Siena writes of these “reminders” in her major work, The Dialogue of Divine Providence. God the Father teaches her why He permits them:

Sometimes I resort to a pleasant “trick” with [the spiritually mature] to keep them humble …. For the sensual emotions slumber [even] in the perfect soul but they do not die. This is why, if they relax their efforts, or let the flame of holy desire grow dim, these emotions will awaken. It is essential to remain in holy fear of me …. Otherwise … the emotions seem to be asleep and it seems that they do not feel the weight of great sufferings or burdens. But then, in some tiny thing that really is nothing (that they themselves will later laugh at), their feelings are so aroused that they are stupefied. My providence does this to make them grow and go down into the valley of humility. [I do this] to give them give opportunity for merit, to keep them in the self-knowledge whence they draw true humility, to make them compassionate instead of cruel toward their neighbors so they will sympathize with them in their labors. For those who have suffered themselves are far more compassionate to the suffering than those who have not suffered

(The Dialogue of Divine Providence, p. 145).

We still need pricks and blows lest in our progress we become prideful or think that something is so far in the past that we forget to be grateful for our deliverance. The point is that we should never lose heart nor think that all progress is lost when we see a simple reminder of our frailty. With God we are strong, but only with God. Salutary reminders of this are necessary and the Lord, who loves us, provides them.

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But Men Have Shown They Prefer the Darkness: A Meditation on the Human Tendency toward Illusion

2.14blogWe live in largely skeptical times, steeped in a relativism, in which many scoff at the idea that we can know the truth or even that there is a truth to be known. Never mind that in so doing they are in fact making a truth claim of their own! But the ability to perceive one’s own logical inconsistencies is not is not a common trait these days.

Nevertheless, despite the tenor of our times, it does not follow that we should overcorrect by declaring certainty about everything, or even most things, we know. Illusion remains a pervasive human problem. And, as we shall see, illusion is more of a moral problem than an epistemological one. The problem of illusion does not mean there is no truth to be found or known; rather, it means that the human mind, and will wounded by sin have a tendency to entertain illusion.

The word “illusion” comes from the Latin in + ludere (to play games or mock), thus “to engage in games or play.” And so illusion is, by extension, a manner in which one tries to trick another, as in optical illusions or magic tricks. But internally, illusion is our own tendency (conscious or unconscious) to play games with ourselves, to play loosely with the facts, to indulge in logical gamesmanship or even entertain outright foolishness.

We are masters at this game. We can lie to ourselves for so long that we no longer even realize that we’re doing it. Yes, our minds are very wily. So easily our greatest strength and gift—our mind—can become the source of our greatest flaws. We can rationalize some of the most awful things by cloaking them in euphemisms and explanations that obfuscate rather than elucidate. Abortion becomes “reproductive choice,” lying becomes “mental reservation,” euthanasia becomes “death with dignity,” mutilation becomes “sexual reassignment surgery,” etc.

And then there are the smaller the illusions that apply to our daily lives. Fr. Thomas Dubay described some of these as follows:

If illusion means unrealized, possibly sincere, even enthusiastic error, there is far more of it in each of our lives than we are prepared to admit. All the way from our petty vanities to suppositions about our motivations, we are subject to all sorts of misjudgments concerning the way things are. There are the illusions of exaggerated self-esteem and its opposite, a weak self-image. There are the hundreds of illusory desires of which St. Paul speaks in Ephesians 4:22, desires for things we imagine we need. There are our illusory fears of things we ought not at all to fear (“What will they think of me? How will I look?”) and the illusory non-fear of things we ought dreadfully to fear. There are the many misjudgments of what is important in life and what is trivial—and who, if he be less than a saint does not err in these judgments many times each day? (Authenticity p. 35)

But where does this tendency toward illusion come from? Although our intellects are darkened by Original Sin and the cumulative effects of personal sin, illusion is more than just an intellectual problem. The roots of illusion are much deeper, in the center of the human person. Though we may not like to admit it, careful analysis shows that illusion and our tendency to entertain error stem fundamentally from sin. Illusion is something that, to some degree, we will; we decide to engage in it as a tactic. In most cases we don’t really want to know the full story or all the facts, or else we are simply too lazy to seek the complete truth.

To illustrate that illusion is more a problem of the will than a failure of our perception, Fr. Dubay uses the following example in his essay (Authenticity, p. 36): One sees a fruit tree in the distance with round, red fruits hanging in its branches. Upon seeing this tree, one might remark to the person standing next to him, very often in a hasty way, that it is clearly an apple tree. But of course it could actually be a plum tree. Rarely will someone humbly admit or say, “It could be an apple tree, but I’m not sure, so I’ll need to get a closer look.”

Our tendency is to draw a conclusion quickly, based only on limited evidence, so that we appear to know what we’re talking about. So we say, “That is clearly an apple tree.” We may do this out of pride, or vanity (to look like Mr. Know-it-all), or simply because we’re lazy and it’s too much trouble to go get all the facts.

Of course this example features a small matter. But we take this tactic with much more significant matters as well. We will often make sweeping conclusions about other people’s motivations, significant events in the news, scientific matters, or geopolitical matters based on very little evidence or information. And then based only on this small amount of information we entertain the illusion that we quite certainly and comprehensively know what is actually going on, what everything means, and what exactly should be done (if only people would ask us). There’s an old saying, “Don’t believe everything you think.” But this doesn’t stop most of us from doing that most of the time!

Why do we do this? Some of the reasons have already been presented, but let’s list them again along with some others.

  1. Haste (sloth) – It’s a lot easier to entertain the illusion that we know all the facts than to actually go out and find them. Certainly we have time limitations and cannot research everything completely, but that is all the more reason to resist the illusion that we know it all and to be more careful in drawing conclusions. We can and should make reasonable conclusions about the data we have, but we should also be open to receiving more information that may clarify or even challenge some of what we think we know. So it’s not a problem of the intellect per se, but of the will, influenced by sloth. We often decide to make hasty conclusions out of laziness.
  2. Vanity – Not only do we like to entertain the illusion that we know everything, we want others to entertain it as well. Because of this we like to impress others with our perceived knowledge and are slow to admit ignorance. Here, too, entertaining this illusion is something we decide to do. Our will (and intellect) are weighed down by vainglory. Sometimes we delude ourselves unconsciously while at other times it is a more conscious effort. Seeking to perpetuate this exalted vison of ourselves we also advance other illusions and errors by sermonizing, opining, and declaring things of which we are not really all that certain. Thus one illusion begets another.
  3. Social Ease – There is another form of sloth in which we pick up popular notions and simply parrot them. This usually wins us approval (more vainglory). We prefer to presume that popular notions are true rather than thinking things through more thoroughly and pondering whether they are true, or untrue, or perhaps need some distinctions applied. But all of this is just too much trouble; it also tends to put us out of favor with the many who would prefer that popular illusions not be challenged. And so we simply slip into the tendency to assume that popular ideas are true simply because most people think so. Behaving this way gives us a sense of social ease and helps us to feel safe even if, deep down, we know that a lot of it is illusion.
  4. Preference for lies (fearing the truth) – The truth tends to challenge us in ways that lies do not. Illusion is often a form of simplification. The truth is usually much more complex. We prefer the simplification that illusion provides. Our fantasy world is easier to navigate (because it is of our own making) than the real world. The truth often challenges our simplified culture, addicted as it is to the sound bite. And thus we introduce all sorts of mental filters and other forms of illusion so that we can hide from the truth, water it down, or outright resist it.
  5. Emotional satisfaction – It is generally easier (or at least more pleasing) to follow the whims of our emotions than to seek out hard facts. The truth might summon us to do something hard such as to resist what our emotions are demanding of us. Especially in this modern age, we live under the illusion that strong emotions, of themselves, convey truth. They do not necessarily do this at all. In fact, they may often be an overreaction of our psyche to the truth. Our passions and emotions have their place, but they can be very unruly and very deceptive.

We live in times in which many speak dreamily about the authority of emotions. Some will say, as if it were profound, “How can something that feels so good be wrong?” Others will claim that because some hard course of action might make someone feel sad or anxious means that that course of action should not be undertaken or insisted upon. Much of this is illusion because it exalts the lower faculties and would have them overrule (rather than be ruled by) the higher faculties such as the intellect and a properly disposed will.

Despite this, many people today prefer the dreamy illusions that emotions can supply. Moviemakers and advertisers know this well. A good tearjerker of a movie or a powerful song can confound reason and make us sympathize with the strangest causes. At the other end of the spectrum, advertisers often use fear to incite us to buy their products: you’re not pretty enough; you don’t drive the right kind of car; your hair is too gray; your life is somehow incomplete and you’re basically pathetic. Just buy our product and you’ll rise in the ranks and not be such a loser. Never mind that most of the fears incited are themselves illusions.

But that is just the point: emotionalism uses illusion to feel better even though illusion is part of the problem that drives excessive emotionalism. The solution is always more of the same: “More illusion please; the truth is mean and it hurts.”

So what is the solution? First it is essential to say that the solution is not to conclude that the truth cannot be known and that we are all somehow lost in illusion. We are equipped to know the truth and to come to love it. And because the problem is in our will more so than in our intellect, the solution is to make the decision to renounce our sinful tendency to indulge in illusion.

How do we do this? First and foremost, we love. If we learn to love God, by extension, we will learn to love His truth. When we love God we start to love the things and people He loves. We love our neighbor, but we also come to love the truth that God has set forth. We love what He loves: the truth that He has set forth in Sacred Scripture and Tradition. Out of love, we zealously seek the truth and joyfully embrace it more and more deeply.

This makes good sense because while we can be deceived, God cannot. His revealed truth is the surest and most certain source of truth. It is not admixed with error, nor is it trendy or changing. The solution to our foggy illusions is the clear light of God’s eternal and time-tested truth. And while some of us may entertain illusion even about God’s truth we cannot stay in this illusion for very long. The Lord teaches infallibly through His revealed Word, the testimony of the saints, and the Magisterium of his Church.

We suffer from illusions, but God does not. Love Him, run to Him, and listen to Him attentively as He speaks through His Word and His Body, the Church. Only this can save us from the fog of our illusions.

N.B. Many of the thoughts in this essay come from Fr. Thomas Dubay in his work Authenticity, cited above. The best thoughts in the essay are his; the inferior ones are mine.

Here is an interesting video on visual illusions: