What virtues can I practice to overcome the root sin of sensuality?

Q: Dear Father John, thank you for the post on root sin.It has definitely helped me. My question is, charity and humility seem to be the virtues to practice if the root sin is pride or vanity. But what would be the virtue to practice to overcome sensuality? It seems that it is more of an emotional response, hence the sensuality. Thanks to your article have identified this as my root sin, I am not entirely sure what to put in place/practice to overcome it.

A: I am so glad you asked this question! For two reasons. First, you didn’t let yourself become discouraged by the long post about root sins. I hesitated to publish that post, because I know how difficult it can be for us to face head-on the reality of our sinful tendencies. The ideal place to reflect on one’s root sin is during a retreat, with a retreat master or spiritual director close at hand. They can help us stay calm amidst the surprise and discouragement that can result from seeing more clearly the sheer force of selfishness within us. They remind us that God is not surprised by our sinfulness, and discouragement never comes from the Holy Spirit.

The second reason I am glad you asked this question is because it shows that you have understood the key dynamic at work in a program of spiritual work, a “reform of life” program, as it is sometimes called. The core of such a program is the patient, prayerful, and consistent effort to grow in virtues that correct our deepest sinful tendencies. Sins and vices always involve disordered behavior; virtue is the formation of habitually well-ordered behavior. The only way to go from disorder (for example, taking pleasure in deceiving people) to order (taking pleasure in being honest) is through growth in virtue. In this case, the vice is lying and the virtue is truthfulness, or sincerity. God’s grace helps us grow in virtue, just as nutrients help muscles grow. But since virtue and vice are always connected to our free will, we also have to do our part: exercising our free will in a well-ordered manner so as to strengthen well-ordered habits of behavior.

Two Anti-Sensuality Virtues

Enough theory. Two virtues will help you overcome sensuality: temperance and fortitude.

Sensuality can show itself as a tendency to seek what is most pleasant or comfortable, even to the point of sacrificing what is truly good. Temperance is the virtue by which grow in our ability to govern desires for pleasure.

But sensuality can also show itself as the avoidance of effort, strain, or pain when the pursuit of what is truly good requires those things. Fortitude is the virtue by which face up to exterior obstacles, difficulties, and suffering in order to attain what is truly good.

Wisdom from the Past

Two images from medieval art can help us understand those concepts. The image most often used for the virtue of temperance was a woman pouring liquid from a large container into a smaller container – measuring out the proper amount of the liquid.

The pleasures available to us here on earth (food, drink, knowledge, sport, sexual intimacy, etc…) are not evil in themselves. They are part of God’s creation. But they become evil when we turn them into idols, when they enslave us. Temperance is the virtue, the habit of correct behavior, by which we use our willpower to enjoy these pleasures in a proper, reasonable measure. Temperance can be subdivided into specific virtues, depending on which pleasure is in question: abstinence vs gluttony (food); sobriety vs drunkenness (drink); chastity vs lust (sexual pleasure), etc.

The image most often used for fortitude is that of a woman holding a shield and a sword. As we pursue our life-mission, we constantly run into difficulties and enemies. Fortitude is the virtue which enables us to battle against them and continue forward, instead of being stymied by them. Fortitude has two major manifestations: courage, when the initial choice for what is right and good demands some kind of self-sacrifice (for example, turning down a bribe even though it may mean losing one’s job); perseverance, when the challenge comes long after the initial choice has been made (for example, being faithful in a difficult marriage, or a difficult season of one’s marriage).

Bite-Sized Doses

Whichever manifestations of sensuality are most evident in your life, then, you will want to make a program of life that includes some specific ways for you to exercise these virtues. In both cases, the key concept is self-discipline. And growth in that virtue only happens little by little. Start small, forming little habits of self-mastery (going to bed at the same time every weeknight, for example, or taking faster showers on weekday mornings, or abstaining from the snooze button…). This will begin to strengthen your capacity to control those deep-rooted tendencies towards over-indulging in pleasure, comfort, or fear.

Finally, don’t forget that the standard Christ has set for us in every virtue, temperance and fortitude included, is not a standard we can follow relying solely on our own strength. We need his grace. That’s why every program of life must also include a prayer program. We need to spend time each day meditating on the example of Christ – his temperance during the temptations in the desert, his courage to challenge the corrupt authorities in Jerusalem, his perseverance in mission even to the point of death on a cross… He is the model of every virtue, and when we meditate on his example, his grace flows into our hearts and helps us follow him, just as his grace healed the woman with a hemorrhage when she touched the tassel of his robe (see Matthew 9). Together with the sacraments, this kind of daily mental prayer is the most effective ingredient to insure progress in spiritual growth.

Yours in Christ, Fr John Bartunek, LC

How can I identify my root sin?

Q: I am not in spiritual direction right now, but I am trying to put together a program of life anyway. Can you give me some pointers about identifying 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:

The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.

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:

• too high an opinion of myself
• annoyance with those who contradict me, brooking no contradictions
• anger if I don’t get my way or am not taken into account
• easily judgmental, putting others down, gossiping about them
• slow to recognize my own mistakes, or to see when I hurt others, and inability to seek and give forgiveness
• rage when others don’t thank me for favors
• unwillingness to serve, rebellion against what I don’t like
• impatience, distance, brusqueness in my daily contact with others
• thinking I am the only one who knows how to do things right, unwillingness to let others help
• inflated idea of my own intelligence and understanding, dismissing what I do not understand or what others see differently
• not feeling a need for God, even though I do say prayers
• nursing grudges, even in small matters
• never taking orders
• inflexible in preferences
• always putting myself and my things first, indifference towards others and their needs, never putting myself out for them
• centering everything (conversation, choices..) on myself and my likes
• calculating in my relations with God and with others

COMMON MANIFESTATIONS OF VANITY:

• always seeking admiration and praise, worrying about not getting it
• excessive concern about physical appearance
• being guided by the opinions of others rather than principle (this is sometimes called “human respect”)
• some types of shyness
• sacrificing principles in order to fit in
• placing too much a premium on popularity and acceptance
• easily discouraged at my failures
• taking pleasure in listening to gossip and hearing about others’ failures
• always wanting to be the center of attention, at times stretching the truth, or lying outright, or being uncharitable in my words in order to achieve this

COMMON MANIFESTATIONS OF SENSUALITY

• laziness
• always the most comfortable, what requires least effort
• not going the extra mile for others
• procrastination, last-minute in everything
• shoddiness, complaining, excessively affected by minor discomforts
• inability to sacrifice
• not doing my part at home
• expecting everyone else to serve me always
• behavior and decisions ruled by my feelings and moods instead of my principles
• daydreaming a lot with self at center
• unable to control my thoughts when they attract me, even if they are not good
• doing only what I enjoy (choice of food, work, etc)
• uncontrolled and overpowering curiosity, wanting to see and experience everything and every pleasure
• my senses and impulses overrule what I know is right and wrong
• acting out my feelings (frustrations, desires…) with no regard for my conscience, God or others
• only working with those I like, being easily hurt
• fickleness and inconstancy
• can never finish what I start

Yours in Christ, Fr. John Bartunek, LC, STL

Spiritual Direction Post and Series Index

Dear Friends,

To make it easier for you to find key posts on spiritual direction we have updated our Spiritual Direction Index page. As well, we have ordered the posts in a way in keeping with the flow of topics. Click here or go to the upper right hand corner of the site and click on “Spiritual Direction.”

Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him,

Dan

How much of spiritual direction should focus on prayer versus sin and virtue?

Q: Dear Father John, how much of a discussion in spiritual direction should focus on moral issues, such as habitual sin and possibly that of grave matter which may not necessarily be mortal sin? So much discussion here is only about how to pray well, making a program for life, finding a spiritual director and things of that nature. What about living life every day? It seems to me that talking to a spiritual director about lofty things like praying wonderfully is great, but that seems secondary to getting habitual sin eradicated. Please address how dealing with morality factors into spiritual direction, and how it differs from discussion about it within the Sacrament of Confession. I hope I’m not the only sinner here!

A: Thank you for asking this question so directly. I will try to be as direct in my answer.

Spiritual direction, in its essence, is merely one means (though a powerful one) to help us know, love, and follow God more deeply. And so, the guidance received in spiritual direction should touch on those activities and experiences most directly related to our communion with God. Without a doubt, sin is one of these, and so the topic of sin will be part of spiritual direction. But before we look at how, let’s remind ourselves of what sin, that disobedience to God’s eternal law, really is.

Sketching a Profile of Sin

Sin is rebellion against God. It is an echo of Satan’s refrain, “I will not serve!” It is a denial of our status as God’s creations and his children, dependent on him for our existence at every single moment. It is a repudiation of his goodness, love, and wisdom. It is the prodigal son wishing his father were already dead so that he could get his inheritance and abandon home. When we sin, we cut ourselves off from the very source of meaning, virtue, and happiness, both temporal and eternal. When we sin, we become absurd and self-destructive, like trees uprooting themselves from the soil because they feel constrained by their roots. Sin is turning our backs on our Creator, Redeemer, and Savior. (For a more detailed discussion of sin, and its different types, see our entries on scrupulosity.)

The Throes of Repentance

Usually, when someone is at the point in their spiritual life where they are seeking regular spiritual direction, they are repentant. This means they have received the grace to turn away from their sins and to sincerely desire to come back to the Father’s house. Otherwise, why would they be wanting spiritual direction? But repentance from past sins rarely includes the total banishment of sinful habits, actions, tendencies, and attitudes. Repentance is the first step of a difficult journey along the path of holiness, a journey fraught with temptations to fall back into old sins or dive into new ones.

For this reason, spiritual direction has to involve a frank discussion of our most common temptations and falls (usually, this forms part of the “program of life”). In the sacrament of confession, we confess our sins, receiving forgiveness and the grace of renewed strength to resist temptation. But in spiritual direction, we analyze and discuss our sinful patterns and tendencies, trying to understand their roots and identifying ways to overcome them. This discussion and analysis has to do at least two things:

1. First, it should help us, gradually, get to know ourselves better and better. Sometimes a particular habit of sin is actually just a branch of a deeper selfish tendency. If we keep trying to cut off the branch, it just grows more vigorously, as when we prune a tree. We need to find the roots if we want to overcome definitively those habits that stifle our spiritual growth.
2. Second, it should help us identify things we can do to strengthen ourselves against temptation. Our greatest allies in the battle against sin are prayer and the sacraments, so spiritual direction has to be a place where we receive guidance about how to live those more fruitfully. But spiritual direction also gives us the advantage of being accountable to someone, so we should discuss lifestyle choices (how we use our time, what kind of entertainment we engage in, which relationships hinder our growth in virtue…) that are connected to our moral and spiritual integrity. We should identify faith-damaging habits that we need to break, as well as faith-encouraging habits that we can form, and hold ourselves accountable to our spiritual director for the consistency of our efforts. For example, we should talk about situations we keep putting ourselves in that lead us into sin (traditionally called “occasions of sin”) and how we can avoid them in the future.

Stages of Growth

At the earlier stages of the spiritual life, the emphasis falls on weeding out the sinful and self-centered habits that are constricting the action of God’s grace in our lives. As we grow, the emphasis changes. There are fewer weeds in the garden, and we begin to focus more on how to make the good plants (the Christian virtues) grow and bear more fruit. We also become more sensitive to less dramatic sins, to more subtle manifestations of selfishness (which is why we never grow out of confession: the more we love our Lord, the more sensitive we will be to even the smallest offenses to his friendship).

A tendency to anger, for example, may lead to frequent, violent explosions early on, but to less visible spats of impatience later. In both cases, however, these are weeds; they are obstructing our friendship with Christ, and we need to work intelligently to uproot them by growing in the virtue of fortitude. Spiritual direction should help us in that effort, by providing both spiritual encouragement and tactical advice.

Moral integrity (avoiding the big, obvious sins, like those alluded to in the Ten Commandments) is the foundation of the building called holiness. But the building really begins to soar once we establish that foundation firmly and become free to focus our spiritual energies on the active loving of God and neighbor, not simply the avoidance of offending them. Thus, our prayer, our program of life, and everything else associated with spiritual direction is not meant to be divorced from daily life, but actually should enable us to live each day more deeply and fully, by helping us plug even the most mundane activities into the great adventure of seeking, finding, and following our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, may his name be praised forever!

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

What is a “program of Life” and why is it important to my spiritual progress?

Q:  Father John, what is a “Program of Life” and why is it important to my spiritual progress and Spiritual Direction?

A:  One of the enemies of good spiritual direction is excessive subjectivity.  We all have urgent personal issues that come and go; they occupy our attention and energy intensely for brief periods, but they really don’t touch the deeper regions of our character and personality.  When a child is sick, it preoccupies us.  When someone at work is having problems that affect the rest of us, it preoccupies us.  Sometimes issues like this are important enough to deserve ample attention during spiritual direction, but not usually.  And yet, because they are on our mind, we will naturally tend to let them dominate our conversation during spiritual direction.  This can inhibit us from the kind of deep, systematic, and structural work that spiritual direction is really designed to foster.  The headlines of our lives change every day, just like the news headlines.  But headlines are by nature superficial.  We need to make sure that we don’t waste all of our spiritual direction talking about superficial headlines. This is where the Program of Life comes in; it helps us to keep our ongoing spiritual work objective and profound.

To understand how it does that, we only have to understand what it is.  The term Program of Life has some siblings: Rule of Life, Reform of Life, Plan for Spiritual Growth, Game Plan for the Soul, Business Plan for the Soul… In all cases, the core meaning remains the same.  The Program of Life is a tool that helps us personalize the principles of spiritual progress:

Prayer - Everyone needs to pray, but how often should I pray, what type of prayer should I focus on, what factors are making prayer hard for me?  Every individual person, because of their life-situation, background, education, and temperament will find individualized answers to those questions.

Virtue - Likewise, everyone needs to become more Christ-like through the practice of Christian virtue.  But which virtues do I most need to develop and how exactly can I work on them, which habits of selfishness are most deeply rooted in me and how can I diminish them, what is the underlying cause of my most frequent sins and faults?  Again, every individual will answer these questions differently

State in Life - The same goes for the fulfillment of God’s will through fidelity to the responsibilities of one’s state in life.  Every father needs to guide, discipline, and spend time with his children; every husband needs to give his life for his wife, as Christ gave his life for the Church; every professional needs to be another Christ in their workplace – but these ideals will take on unique (and uniquely beautiful) characteristics as they are incarnated in the unique and dynamic reality of every individual.

The Program of Life consists of the personalized answers to all these questions, phrased and arranged in such a way that they become a guide for daily living.

The Program of Life, then, is like a spiritual workout program that insures spiritual growth because it is customized to the individual’s needs and opportunities.  When we meet with our spiritual director, it is good to start by going over the headlines, but, reviewing together the main points of the Program of Life is the real path to consistent, substantial progress.

Three other things are worth noting. 

• First, when we draw up a Program of Life together with our spiritual director (which is a very good idea), our efforts to follow it have the added benefit of being acts of obedience, since we are doing not just our own will, but God’s will as manifested through our director (we are not speaking of a vow of obedience, but the virtue).  An effective time to draw up a Program of Life is during a retreat; a little distance from the daily grind sharpens our spiritual vision. 
• Second, a good Program of Life includes a personal (usually weekly) schedule with prayer commitments that are decided upon ahead of time.  This saves us from the inconsistency that comes from moodiness and constant improvisation.   It also includes concrete areas of activity (the formation of good habits of behavior) that directly counteract the most salient manifestations of one’s root sin.
• Third, the Program of Life is a living entity.  It can and should change as we get to know ourselves better and as we grow.  Living it out is not like following the Ten Commandments, to which there are never exceptions.  Rather, it’s like following a game plan on the basketball court; flexibility in the face of life’s dynamism is preferable to scrupulosity.

If you want to learn more about the idea of a developing a Program of Life, pick up a copy of Father Thomas Williams’ book “Spiritual Progress.”

Yours in Christ, Fr John Bartunek, LC