Deacon Doug McManaman
“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; all three are very dear to us, and to lose even one of them can make life very difficult. So, something very dear to us, it could be a job or someone we love, symbolized by the hand, by which we feed ourselves, can snare us in sin, and so we are feeding on something that is spiritually poisonous. And then the foot, something also very dear to us and so much a part of who we are, can symbolize a mentor perhaps, or an organization to which we belong, and which provides us with some direction, but can lead us into darkness and to our own eventual destruction. Finally our eyes, the most precious of the five senses, can blind us and thereby cause us to walk right into a 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 will in fact lead us astray.
Because they are precious and feel so much a part of who we are, they are very hard to eradicate. In fact, it is difficult to become aware of 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, and the reason is that very often 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 it because we simply don’t want to see it, which is a kind of self-deception. I’m as guilty of that as anyone in this Church. We see this even in the hierarchy, made up of 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, 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 difficulty? 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 one 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’s a myriad of 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, and we will eventually 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 religiously devout people can go through their whole lives without ever moving past the immaturity and vices they’ve had since their younger days, 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, because 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. We will begin to see the hell we lived in up to that point, sort of like Ebeneezer 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 existence 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 greater our refusal to exit ourselves so that we remain the center of our own lives, the more we will be weighed down in misery, in our own hell, and the sad thing is we won’t really understand that it is a miserable hell, 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.
A Catholic Philosophy and Theology Resource Page by Deacon Douglas McManaman 