Is it a sin to have bad thoughts? How do I deal with bad thoughts? How can I be sure to avoid the unforgivable sin?

Q: Thank you for your excellent series on scrupulosity. I have a question that relates to it, namely the occurrence of “bad thoughts” — thoughts that are negative, vile, or even blasphemous against any of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity or Our Lady herself. I understand that these may occur in cases of psychological imbalance, or gross immaturity, for which I presume there is little culpability. In the context of those trying to develop their spiritual lives, bad thoughts appear to be temptations flashed before us by the devil as a form of spiritual warfare. My understanding is that since temptation is not a sin, the best course of action is to ignore them. In addition, because one is more prone to these thoughts when tired or hungry or under stress, good sense would indicate the importance of food, sleep, exercise, and prayer. But given that, what is the “dividing line,” so to speak? I love God and never remotely want to get close to the “unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit,” yet these thoughts can be alarming. When and how does one confess them? How does one order the spiritual life to purity of thought?

A: Your question itself contains a lot of wisdom. Actually, it also contains a lot of questions (three, to be exact). Before answering them, we need to make one more distinction.

For someone who is already actively and sincerely trying to follow Christ, bad thoughts may be flashed directly by the devil, as you point out, but there may also be two other sources. First, they could flash up from our own subconscious. If someone has undergone a conversion (or reversion) after spending years in a self-centered, sinful lifestyle, echoes of that lifestyle will still reverberate under the surface of the mind. From time to time, they may break the surface and grasp at the conscious mind, trying to regain a hold on the will. In this case, the bad thoughts are not planted directly by the devil. If we resist these last gasps of our old habits, they will gradually lose energy and their appearances will decrease in frequency. Second, bad thoughts can be the result of carelessness. We are surrounded by non-Christian, and often un-Christian mental influences: images on the Web, billboards, and advertisements; ideas in news articles, movies, books, and television shows; anti-values woven into music and secular art. If we allow ourselves to imbibe these toxins, they will have their effect later on, stirring up thoughts that would pull us away from friendship with Christ.

Guarding the Castle

Thus, the first answer to your third question: we can grow in purity of thought by guarding our senses and minds from toxic input. This may seem a bit puritan in a pluralistic society, but it is only common sense. We are careful about the food we put into our body, because we know that it affects our physical health. We should be even more careful about what we purposely let into our minds and hearts, because that will affect our spiritual health. (Another favorite image used by spiritual writers is that of a drawbridge and a castle. You don’t let down the drawbridge when enemies come knocking; you keep it securely in place to protect the castle from invasion.)

A wife who regularly reads grocery-store romance novels (which are a subtle form of pornography), or who daily drinks in the titillating sensuality of your typical soap opera, is clogging her marital arteries and setting herself up for a spiritual heart attack. A husband who goes to strip bars “just for business,” spends more time with atheist buddies than with fellow Christ-seekers, and doesn’t take the initiative to protect himself from Internet pornography is not keeping in spiritual shape. In both cases, “bad thoughts” and blasphemous ideas will pop up more and more frequently, even without the devil’s direct provocation. In these cases, we are at least partially responsible for the evil thoughts that come up to tempt us, and we should confess this negligence in the sacrament of reconciliation, and God will give us strength to be more coherent.

Spiritual Self-Defense

One other tactic useful for developing purity of thought consists in responding positively to the bad thoughts that do come up, whatever their source. As you mention in your question, once we recognize the flash of a bad thought, the last thing we want to do is pay attention to it. If you can simply ignore it and get back to doing God’s will with your whole mind and heart, great. But if the bad thoughts are violent and insistent, ignoring them is not always easy. In those cases, we need to have a prearranged plan. We need to be ready to counteract them with prayer as we try to turn our attention back to God’s will. This can be a simple vocal prayer, like the Our Father or the Hail Mary. It can be a favorite verse from Scripture used as a shield against evil (e.g. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” Ps 23:1). I recently heard the example of a man battling to overcome sexual temptations who committed himself to singing hymns until the sensual thoughts dispersed – he said that he ended up memorizing four whole verses to more than a dozen hymns in his efforts to grow in purity! If we fail to fight actively, with a spirit of faith, against the evil thoughts that tempt us, or if our efforts to fight them are lackadaisical, then we should confess this negligence in the sacrament of reconciliation, and God will give us strength to be more courageous.

Circumstantial Evidence

This brings us to your first question about where to draw the line. If you know that certain circumstances (the use of particular media, or physical tiredness and stress, as you mention) tend to increase the intensity, frequency, or seductive power of evil thoughts, you have a responsibility to make a decent effort to avoid those circumstances. Eighty hour work weeks may win you the promotion you covet, but is winning that promotion worth exposing yourself to the occasions of sin? Jesus didn’t think so: “What, then, will anyone gain by winning the whole world and forfeiting his life?” (Mt 16:26) At times, however, the circumstances are out of our control (needy babies make for sleepless nights). That’s when our Lord is inviting us to lean more fully on him, and on the means for perseverance that he gives us (the sacraments, prayer, healthy friendships, a loving spouse…).

If you are actively making a decent effort to do your part to live a Christ-centered, balanced life and to grow in purity of thought, and still the evil ideas and images plague you, they really do not qualify as material for confession. They are more like bad spiritual weather. In this sense, it is worth mentioning that many saints experienced violent and intense temptations to blasphemy towards the end of their lives, when they were well advanced in the spiritual life. The devil sent these temptations to cause confusion and to try and steal away their confidence in God and their peace of soul. If that happens to you, put up your umbrella of prayer and obedience to God’s will, and endure the storm for as long as the Lord allows it. As you do so, you will exercise all the major Christian virtues, thereby growing in holiness and building up the Church.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

Understanding and overcoming scrupulosity – Part II

Q: Father John, I seem to be struggling with scrupulosity.  However, when I read St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, they exhort that any small sin or attachment can keep us from union with God.  How do I know if I am scrupulous or just sensitive to sin?  How do I avoid taking sin too lightly?  If I am scrupulous, how do I overcome it?

A: The word “scrupulous” comes from a Latin word meaning “pebble.”  Like a scale that registers the weight of even the tiniest pebble, the scrupulous conscience is thrown into doubts about its love for God and fidelity to God’s will by tiny faults or questions that, objectively, should not disturb its peace.  Scrupulous people feel intense anxiety after confession: “Did I confess everything?  Did I confess sincerely?  Did I explain everything sufficiently?”  They also often feel debilitating anxiety about whether or not they are truly in the state of grace, and whether they should receive communion (when we sincerely doubt whether we are in the state of grace, we should make as sincere an act of contrition as we can, and then receive holy Communion).  As we explained in the last post, this condition of over-sensitivity can cause great interior suffering.

Whether scruples arise from a combination of personality and circumstance, or whether they are more developed and a true trial allowed by God and sent by the devil, the direct remedy is the same.  It consists of practicing the virtue of obedience.  This is simpler for those in the religious life than in the lay life.  Nevertheless, the principle is the same.  Scrupulosity is like a temporary darkening of the conscience; one’s interior compass has gone haywire and you can’t tell what direction you are going in.  The only way out is to let oneself be guided by an objective party, a confessor or a spiritual director who knows how to listen, is experienced in the spiritual life and in guiding others, and whom you can trust solidly.   If you don’t have a regular confessor or spiritual director, but you find yourself suffering from scruples, that should be a good motivation to ask God to help you find one, then go looking.

The Task of Obedience
When you explain the situation to your director, explain fully why you think you suffering from scruples.  The director will listen to the description of your situation, ask some questions, and restate what you have said in such a way that they show they have understood clearly.  They may either confirm your suspicion that this is indeed a case of scruples, or they may offer another explanation – a misunderstanding about the difference between venial and mortal sin, a misunderstanding about the nature of a particular sin, another psychological factor… In either case, the key step for you is to obey.  Trust that God will use your director to guide you, as he has used directors to guide all the saints.  Your director will probably give you some very specific and firm points of work and instruct you to report on them.  For instance, as regards the sacrament of reconciliation, he may instruct you to confess specifically only your mortal sins, and to confess all your venial sins together, as a group.  He may instruct you to absolutely discard any doubts about whether you have sinned, practically ordering you to admit as sin only those actions where you have absolute, mathematical certitude.  He may instruct you, even without giving reasons (scruples can blind our capacity to reason clearly), never to confess again past sins that you have already confessed.  He may even tell you that if you do not trust him enough to obey, he will help you find another spiritual director whom you can trust.  These kinds of instructions may be hard for you to fulfill, but fulfill them you must, if you want to make your way though the dark valley of scrupulosity and emerge back into the interior peace of a healthy, balanced conscience.

The very nature of the cure, firm and faith-guided obedience to a trustworthy confessor or spiritual director, shows why God at times permits his children (us) to suffer this painful trial: it is an excellent workout for the virtue of humility, and it is a sure way to purify us from hidden attachments.

In our day and age, a lax and lazy conscience is more often met than a scrupulous one.  In either case, however, the first sign that we are deviating from the true path of moral and spiritual growth is usually inner turbulence.  Our God is a God of peace, and his peace goes deep.  When we lose it, that may be because we are trying to paddle through the shallow muskeg of an apparent shortcut.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek

Understanding and overcoming scrupulosity – Part I

Q: Father John, I seem to be struggling with scrupulosity.  However, when I read St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, they exhort that any small sin or attachment can keep us from union with God.  How do I know if I am scrupulous or just sensitive to sin?  How do I avoid taking sin too lightly?  If I am scrupulous, how do I overcome it?

A: First thing: if you are sincerely concerned about not taking sin too lightly, you can rest assured that you are not taking sin too lightly.  If, on the other hand, you find yourself convinced that you really don’t sin and don’t ever need to go to confession, then you are probably taking sin too lightly.  All the saints were keenly aware that they were sinners and made good use of the sacrament of confession.  Now on to the heart of your question.

Scrupulosity is oversensitivity to faults.  It consists in seeing sin where there is no sin, which causes us to become emotionally tense and spiritually tied up in knots.  It paralyzes the will, fills the mind with turbulence, and can cause intense interior suffering.  Since it comes in different forms and from different sources (and since the word itself is slippery), there is no single solution.  We’ll tackle this one in two parts.  First we’ll look at the types and causes of scrupulosity, then we’ll examine the practical question of what to do about it.

Sin Matters

Sin is disobedience to God’s express will.  It is a rebellion against God, a breaking of the eternal law.  As such, it offends God (just as teenagers who insult their parents offend their parents).  As a result, it disrupts, weakens, or ruptures our friendship with God.  And since friendship with God is the whole purpose of our existence, sin is our arch-enemy, the source of all unhappiness and tragedy.

Today’s culture tends to minimize and belittle sin.  What matters to a hedonistic, relativistic consumer society is comfort and personal autonomy.  Where does sin fit into an ethos like that?  There is no eternal law to break, no universal moral order against which to rebel, no Father to offend.  This poisonous ethos has a powerful ally inside each one of us: our fallen human nature.  We have an enemy within.  We tend towards self-centeredness (to which any parent of a two-year-old will eloquently attest).  This is why most spiritual directors would agree that a scrupulous conscience is less common than its co-conspirator, a lax conscience.

The essential evil of sin explains why St Teresa and St John of the Cross so fervently exhort us to mercilessly excise every sinful habit and tame every wild tendency.  We must give no quarter to sin and make no compromise with temptation – just ask Eve.  Sometimes the term scrupulous or scruples is used by folks who have made a pact with certain personal sins in order to criticize other folks who have refused to make treaties with the devil.  Their conscience is bothering them, and the presence of people more upright than themselves exacerbates the bother, so they use the label “scrupulous” as a shield.

Personality-Based Scrupulosity

Scrupulosity understood properly, however, is an authentic spiritual difficulty.  It comes most often in two forms.  The first is related to certain personalities.  Whether by temperament, upbringing, or a combination, some people have a strong tendency towards perfectionism.  When they begin taking seriously the adventure of holiness, this tendency can help, usually by energizing their efforts and giving them staying power in the face of difficulties.  But the same tendency can tangle things up.  God works patiently; perfectionist tend to be impatient.  This impatience can take the guise of paralyzing discouragement or even desperation in the face of one’s imperfections.  Keenly aware of their shortcomings, these personalities often equate holiness with impeccability – they can start straining out gnats while they still need to stop swallowing camels. 

An interior flash of self-centered anger or impatience, for example, is rightly recognized as a fault – it flows from the selfish tendencies in the soul, tendencies which are un-Christlike and need to be purified.  But God is less interested in the selfish flash itself than in how we react to such things.  As soon as we recognize it, we should reign it in, like a dog that wants to run out of its leash.  Exerting our faith and willpower to keep that selfish flesh from turning into self-righteous judgments, wounding words, or spiteful actions – that’s what should concern us.  If we think we have already sinned just because the flash flashed, we are being scrupulous.  Our sinful tendencies are not sins; they can be the source of sins, if we let them.  But if, with God’s grace, we fight against them, the powers of our soul will gradually be trained to react less violently and less selfishly.  In that way, we grow in virtue.

Turmoil and Temptation

The second form of scrupulosity comes from the devil in the form of a temptation.  In this spiritual attack, the person who is sincerely seeking holiness and has made progress towards it is suddenly confronted with doubts about what God’s will really is for them.  If sin can be understood as rebellious disobedience to God’s will, holiness is its contrary: loving obedience to God’s will.  But what if you start seeing God’s will everywhere?  What if you start thinking that choosing which outfit to wear has as much moral and spiritual weight as obeying the commandment against murder?  Well, you think to yourself, what I wear does matter to God – he wants me to reflect his dignity, but he also wants me to avoid ostentation and provocation.  So what is his will for me?  Which outfit should I wear?… These kind of doubts can also come in even more subtle forms.  We experience a flash of interior anger; we govern it as Christ would have us; all is well.  But then, we start wondering why the flash happened in the first place.  Did I encourage it without realizing it?  Did I allow a selfish thought to take root in my mind, and the thought bore the fruit of that flash?  Am I doing something to displease God that I don’t even realize?… And we find ourselves in a labyrinth of doubts and “what ifs” and “maybes” that really torture the soul and won’t leave it in peace.  It is a trial, and it can be severe, that many saints have undergone.

Sometimes this second kind of scrupulosity can also derive from psychological conditions that are clinically treatable, chemical imbalances or wounds from trauma.  It is not always easy to tell the difference.  Usually it takes looking at other factors and behavior patterns in a person’s life, not just the scrupulosity itself.

Those are the common manifestations of scrupulosity, or over-sensitivity to faults.  More could be said about each one, but that’s enough to lay the groundwork for the next post, which will examine some tactics for dealing with scrupulosity in practice.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC