Tag: PrideHow can I identify my root sin?
A: You are already on the right track. A program of life is worthless (well, almost worthless, at least) without having identified our root sin. Unless we understand the dynamism underlying our frequent faults and failings, we will never be able to work intelligently to overcome them. It’s like gardening. If you want to get rid of the weeds, you can just pull out the stems; you have to get at the roots. Otherwise, progress is short-lived and unsubstantial, and sooner or later discouragement and frustration set in. In trying to identify our root sin, the wisdom of the Church comes in handy. Spiritual writers through the ages have identified three possible candidates. Before I describe them, however, it behooves us to make one clarification. All of us, simply because of our fallen human nature, have sinful tendencies linked to all three of the candidates. Saying that we have a “root sin” simply means that for each of us, one of the three is dominant. It’s bigger than the others and exerts greater influence on our day-to-day behavior. That said, here are the three possible root sins: pride, vanity, and sensuality. Pride, in this sense, refers to a disordered attachment to our own excellence. The proud person tends to seek meaning and fulfillment in their own achievements and conquests. Vanity is a disordered attachment to the approval of other people. The vain person tends to seek meaning and fulfillment in being appreciated or liked by other people. Sensuality is a disordered attachment to comfort, ease, and pleasure. The sensual person tends to seek meaning and fulfillment in taking it easy and simply enjoying life. Notice that each of these root sins is a disordered attachment to something. The things in themselves – achievements, relationships, pleasures – are not evil. The problem comes when we seek meaning and fulfillment in those temporal, created realities. In fact, we are created and called to seek our meaning and fulfillment in God alone, in our ever-deepening relationship with him. Achievements, relationships, and pleasures are meant to be ordered around and towards that principle and foundation of our life. As the Catechism puts it in #27:
Again, it is important to realize that we each have tendencies that spring from pride, vanity, and sensuality. None of us is exempt from any of them, because we all have inherited a fallen human nature. But in each of us, one of the three is usually dominant. If we can identify which one, we can better aim our efforts to grow spiritually; we can strive to develop the virtues that counteract the cause, the root, of our falls and faults. We can identify this root sin, also called “dominant defect” by some spiritual writers, by looking at the common manifestations of each. The manifestations which are strongest in your life can clue you in to your root sin. Below you will find a list of these common manifestations. Read through them once quickly and make a note of the ones that characterize you most. You will find that sometimes you fall into all of them, but some of them will jump out at you as particularly common or strong in your life. Whichever of the three has more of those is, most likely, your root sin. As you go through this exercise, you may find it more difficult than you would like. That’s because self-knowledge is slippery. And that’s one of the most compelling reasons for finding a spiritual director to help us be objective in our spiritual work. I hope you keep looking, and pray that God will lead you to one. COMMON MANIFESTATIONS OF PRIDE:
COMMON MANIFESTATIONS OF VANITY:
COMMON MANIFESTATIONS OF SENSUALITY
Yours in Christ, Fr. John Bartunek, LC, STL Frustration and Humility – Is there such thing as an “Act” of humility?
A: This question is clearly a direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit: Where else could a desire to make “acts of humility” have come from? I will try to share some thoughts that will help you follow this beautiful inspiration. Traditional Catholic spirituality often uses the phrase “act of” when referring to a particular type of prayer. You have probably heard or read about an “act of faith” or an “act of hope” or an “act of love.” The term can be traced back to the Latin verb “agere,” which has the past participle form of “actum” (it’s always good to review our grammar!). That verb is juicy. “Agere” means about a dozen different things in Latin, but the core sense of the word is to put into motion, to focus energy upon. Our word “action” is derived from this root. So, when we make an “act of faith,” we put into action, in a conscious way, the virtue of faith. An act of faith, in this sense, is an activation of our belief, a focused assertion of our assent to what God has revealed as true. An act of humility is the same conscious activation of the virtue of humility, a focused assertion of our absolute dependence on God for existence, salvation, and growth in all that is good and healthy, naturally and supernaturally. Your instinct that there may be short acts of humility (ready-made formulas that can help us make this conscious assertion frequently and energetically) is right on target. All spiritual writers agree that we should frequently lift our hearts to God, even in the midst of our busy schedules. In fact, the Church has attached a partial indulgence to the lifting of our hearts and minds to God during our daily activities, even for a brief moment. This is how we stay in tune with our heavenly trajectory in life. At the end of this post, I will include some formulas for acts of humility that you may like. But I want to emphasize that the value of these types for formulaic prayers is not in the word themselves. They are not magical incantations. Rather, their value is in their ability to help us focus our minds on the deep truths that God has revealed to us in Christ. They give us words to express our deepest convictions. And every time we express those convictions consciously, really meaning what we say, we deepen them. And it is from deep, mature Christian convictions that virtue can grow and flourish, that we can gradually learn to live in elegant and dexterous harmony with God’s unceasing action in and through our lives. So, by all means, make frequent acts of humility, but when you find yourself falling into the empty or routine recitation, don’t be afraid to switch formulas, or to use your daily prayer time to compose a one yourself! (Yes, we are allowed to write our own prayers – sometimes these are the very best ones, because they come from the very depths of our experience of God.) Some short prayers that can be used as acts of humility:
Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC Struggling with impatience, what can I do?
A: You will not like the answer to this question, but I will try to answer it anyway. There are two things you may be doing wrong – or you may be doing both of them. Going to the Root First, you may be chopping off the visible stems of this weed in the garden of your soul, without digging up the roots. We all have a unique combination of selfish tendencies, and they express themselves in a unique combination of manifestations. Just like a big weed with a lot of stems and branches. We have all had the experience of pulling up weeds. We know that if you don’t get the root out, the weed will just grow right up again. From your question, it seems that you tend to consider impatience to be the root of your selfishness. Chances are, that is not the case. Impatience is one of the many offspring of the capital sin of pride, which is a disordered attachment to one’s own excellence. You get impatient because deep down you have a strong tendency to think you are so smart, sharp, and gifted that you should be able to manage yourself and all the circumstances around you with perfect elegance. (I told you that you weren’t going to like this answer.) Therefore, you will never be able to overcome your impatient patterns of behavior simply by ordering yourself to become more patient. You will have tiny flashes of patience if you follow that strategy, but that’s it. What you really need to do is work positively on growing in the virtue of humility. Humility will strike at your impatience where it is rooted. How do you grow in humility? Ask for the grace, first of all, every day. Secondly, continue your determined commitment to mental prayer, meditating on the life and words of Jesus, who is the perfect model of humility. Thirdly, increase your conscientious use of the sacraments of confession and Communion. Finally, never let a day go by without making AT LEAST one small, HIDDEN act of self-denial, e.g. purposely eating another helping of something you don’t like, purposely not turning on the radio for the first five minutes of your commute, purposely not responding to someone who unfairly criticizes you… Great Expectations In the second place, your expectations may be wrong. Growth in any virtue does not follow a Hollywoodian schedule. In Hollywood, you can go from chump to champion in just two hours, like Peter Parker or Rocky Balboa. In real life, growth in holiness and virtue takes a long time and happens gradually. This is why Jesus always used parables of seeds and growing things. If we sit and watch a seed grow, nothing seems to happen. But in fact, a lot is happening, if the parameters for growth (soil, water, sunlight) are present. In our spiritual lives, we too often want to see the fully matured fruit right now. Well, the fully matured fruit will not be seen this side of eternity. Sorry, that’s just the way it is! As the Book of Job puts it, in the first verse of Chapter 7: “Does not man have hard service on earth? Are not his days like those of a hired man?” Frustration is almost always a function of expectations. If you have been working seriously on becoming a more patient person, following the example of Christ more closely, I can guarantee that you are more patient today than you were five years ago. Guaranteed. I would bet my life on it. So don’t let the devil trick you into being frustrated with gradually becoming more and more patient, just because you aren’t perfect yet. Instead, every time you fall, just brush yourself off, look up to heaven, and say, “You see what a pile of dust and ashes I am, Lord? Thanks for putting up with me. I know you’ll never give up on me; help me never to give up on you.” Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC How do I get rid of my “inner ugliness?”
A: OK, brace yourself for this really blunt answer: You still feel “inner ugly” because you still are “inner ugly” – at least partially. Let’s be blunt again: It’s obvious from your question that you feel frustration at the stubborn persistence of some of your faults, in spite of your efforts to extricate them. Where does that frustration come from? Does it come from God? Is God frustrated with you because you aren’t perfect yet? Is he up in heaven tapping his watch and raising his eyebrows? Not a chance. Let me tell you, as a Catholic priest, that he is OVERJOYED with the fact that you have followed his nudges and made your way through the wilderness of our secular society onto the one path of holiness. Yes, you are on the path of holiness; you are on the “steep road” and passing through the “narrow gate” (Matthew 7:13) that lead to salvation, wisdom, Christian joy, everlasting fruitfulness, and eternal beauty. He has been trying to convince you to get onto that path for a while, most likely. Now you are there, and you are traveling it, and you are following the road signs (prayer, confession, spiritual direction… Heck, you’re in the fast lane!), and he is delighted! So, if your frustration doesn’t come from God, where does it come from? I am sure you have already guessed it: your pride. You want God to go at your pace, but God is not always going to go at your pace. He knows better; he is going to go at his pace, and we (all of us) need to learn to follow that pace. If not, we will never grow in humility, the bedrock of all holiness and true happiness. Baking School Imagine: You are teaching your teenage daughter how to make an angel-food cake. First you make one together, and she really just watches and assists you a tiny bit. So then she gets really excited about it, and she wants to do one all by herself. She is so excited that she tells you, “Mom, you go running or something; I want to do this myself.” So you go running. And you come back to find her huddled over a rather floppy, lopsided, misshapen, and gooey culinary mutant. She is either crying or fuming. She is an impatient girl and wants to do everything perfectly right away, but the reality is that some things can’t be rushed. If she were a bit humbler and more patient, she either wouldn’t have tried to do it all on her own so soon, or she would have had more of a sense of humor over her delicious dessert disaster. Transitioning the Garden Here’s another analogy. Think of your soul as a large garden. You haven’t always been attentive to taking care of the whole garden. In fact, there were parts you didn’t even know you had, sections with amazing potential. So now the Lord has shown you the potential of your garden, and together with him you have rolled up your sleeves and gotten to work to make your garden into what it should be. There are various phases to this work. First, you have to repair the broken fences, cracked fountains, and disheveled walkways. Then you have to extract the weeds that have been growing freely for a while (maybe for a long while), so that the good plants (the ones already there and the ones you want to plant) have room to grow. Then you have to dig up the soil, aerate it, water it, fertilize it. Then you have to keep tending the good plants (protecting them from rabbits, deer, birds, etc.), repair things that get broken during storms, keep weeding, etc. That’s the process. It’s long and hard, but it’s what matters most, because the flowers and fruits that come from our spiritual gardening are the ones that matter most: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22). That’s the opposite of the “inner ugly” that you are striving for. Right now, you are working hard, sweating, and doing all the right things. But you are discovering that the weeds had deeper roots than you thought. You are discovering that the broken fences are taking much longer to mend that you anticipated. You are finding out that the soil is extremely dry and alkaline in certain areas and needs a lot of deep digging. You like the look of the new plants, but they are still so little, while some of the older, ugly weeds are still big. So you see the fresh inner beauty, but you also see the stubborn inner ugly, maybe even more clearly (more realistically) than before. Letting God Be God God can speed up the process whenever he wants (and in some aspects, he probably already has, whether or not you realize it). But when he doesn’t, he has his reasons. We can only make a decent effort to do our part (what more could he expect from us?). God’s part is up to him. If he is going at a pace that makes us uncomfortable, we need to trust his wisdom. The worst thing to do would be to let your frustration get the better of you and give up. The best thing to do, being the little and beloved daughter of God that you are, is to wipe the sweat from your brow, smile, and keeping following his lead: “But as for the seed that fell on rich soil, they are the ones who, when they have heard the word, embrace it with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance” (Luke 8:15). He has guided you faithfully so far, and he won’t lead you astray now. And remember, the frustration doesn’t come from him – he is DELIGHTED with you! Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC |
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Q: Fr John, I have been struggling with some interior trials with forgiveness, resentment and jealousy. I call this “inner ugliness.” I have been praying fervently, going to confession, and receiving excellent spiritual direction. I have been willing myself to be charitable even when I am not feeling it. So here is my question. What am I missing, why do I still feel “inner ugly”? How do I let go of all of this?
