Browsing tag: self-control

  • 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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  • Hold Yourself Together

    You must not be proud, nor be given to wine Titus 1:7; 1 Timothy 3:3.  Refrain from too much eating or sleeping, and from laziness Romans 12:11.  Do not grumble or speak ill of others.  (Rule of Saint Benedict 4. 34-40)

     

     

    There are so many ways to let yourself go, in a society that is constantly egging you on to do so.

     

    You let yourself go spiritually when you imagine yourself to be more important than other people. You let yourself go mentally when you drink till you can’t think. You let yourself go physically when you eat too much of the wrong things or not enough of the right things. Or, there’s the other kind of letting yourself go: the just not bothering to do the thing that is in fact your duty. There’s the emotional letting go of complaining. There’s the insidious social let-go of gossip.

     

    This list of vices is certainly not exhaustive. It can serve as a point of departure. The really difficult thing, in a self-referential culture, is to grasp the paradigm: that you are responsible for holding yourself accountable to external standards in your own thoughts, words and deeds.

     

    Why would you bother to make this effort, when you’re surrounded by people who define themselves by their imperious impulses?

     

    The first and most glaring reason is: disgust. Merely not to resemble a long list of repellent people is powerful motivation for figuring out whatever it takes to be the opposite of what they are.

     

    However, you need more than negative motivation to live a happy life. You need something good to aim for, something inherently worthwhile. That’s what you need, but you can’t live that sort of life unless you are that sort of person.

     

    The first thing to do, and the secret to success in all these other areas, is to restore right worship: of God, not yourself. Do drag yourself to church on Sunday. Then rest. Taking the seventh day to rest is one of the OG Ten commandments. Yes, we are to maintain standards, but the purpose of our lives is neither productivity nor perpetual self-improvement. Your purpose is to live joyfully in harmony with your Creator, who called you into being and sustains your indestructible existence moment by moment, forever. He also gives you and everyone else freedom, for better, for worse.

     

    When you take that seventh day to rest, you’re reinscribing yourself within a primordial order. You are also in a very real, urgent way acknowledging that all the things you want to accomplish depend on the will of God, who can take infinite action to support your endeavors if he chooses to. When you desist from work, you recognize that it’s the Holy Spirit working within you who transforms you. You are not your own creator. Neither are you the one holding the universe together. Within a society structured around antithetical premises, merely to desist from work is a genuine act of worship, and it’s not easy. This in itself will put you at odds with just about everyone, including the religious people.

     

    Then, on Monday morning, you get up and try again. Don’t make the mistake that so many people make, of dismissing your one vice because you’re so good in other areas. Your one vice can ruin your life all by itself. Your one vice can blight the lives of everyone connected to you.

     

    On the other hand, don’t make the opposite mistake, also desperately common, of reducing your life to one principle that you obsess about. No doubt that one principle is a good one. But a good principle applied to the exclusion of all other principles does not yield a good life.

     

    When, on the other hand, you work intermittently but regularly on all fronts, you’ll do quite well in most areas without heroic efforts. It’s important to come to an awareness not only of your weaknesses, but of your strengths. By exercising discipline regularly–not perfectly–on all fronts, you’ll both build on your strengths and gain experience of yourself. You’ll start to realize that the impossible, overwhelming thing in your life is actually related to lots of minor things over which you can in fact gain control. In short, you will learn how to manage yourself.

     

    Don’t try to go it alone. Find saints. Imitate people who exhibit virtues that you are trying to develop. Pray.

     

    Immediately if you shift your thinking in this direction, your life will get more real. Suddenly every little action is like a spiritual muscle twitching. Yes, you might feel like you’re flailing for a while. But you’ll also feel like you’re really living.

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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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