Day 7: Falling On The Sword

When I was quitting my 20 year habit of using nicotine eight months ago, one thing that was a game changer--in addition to an accountability partner, having a game plan for quitting, and God's grace--was the recognition that the only one who could make me smoke...was me. No one was holding a gun to my head. No one was duct taping my limbs to a chair and popping cigarettes into my mouth and lighting them against my will. The only sure fire way to quit was to NOT SMOKE.

It was a fascinating psychological experiment on habit and the will. I may have been physically and psychologically addicted to nicotine, but I still had the capacity to choose to use it, hard as it was not to. If you caught me on hidden camera, it may have felt like someone had a gun to my back forcing me in the car at 1 in the morning to go to Wawa, coercing me in to going outside and smoking, or convincing me that stopping was not possible. But on tape, you would have seen that the only one in the picture...was me.

St Catherine of Siena has an amazing treatise on the will that I came across recently. She says,

"Only the will can commit a crime; neither devils nor any other being can force it to commit the smallest sin if it is not willing. Therefore the sinful will which submits to the temptations of the enemy is a sword which kills the soul when it is offered to the enemy by the hand of free will. Which is more cruel, the enemy or the person who is wounded? We are the more cruel, for we agree to our own death." 

This is why baptism is such an amazing grace, and why it is necessary for salvation.  Aside from welcoming us into God's family, and washing away sins and removing the temporal punishment due to sin, baptism literally breaks the chains that bind us due to Original Sin. It gives us the capacity to avoid sin, for as St. John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor:

"Keeping God's law in particular situations can be difficult, extremely difficult, but it is never impossible....it is anathema [to say] that the commandments of God are impossible of observation by one who is justified. Man always has before him the spiritual horizon of hope, thanks to the help of divine grace and with the cooperation of human freedom. If redeemed man still sins, this is not due to an imperfection of Christ's redemptive act, but to man's will not to avail himself of the grace which flows from that act." 

The Devil convinces us he has more power over us than he actually does. Christ has him bound. He is a dog on a leash, albeit a dangerous, rabid one. And yet, every time we sin, we hand over our freedom to him. He doesn't even have to work for it sometimes, we just hand it to him. And what do we get in exchange? Death.

Gangstas talk about The Game, and how it's so hard to quit. The Game plays out on The Streets. Gangstas are well aware that they can get popped at any moment. They are aware of the dangers. But the lure of money and prestige is sometimes too great a lure. It's hard to get out, and even if you do manage to get out, some days you wish you were back in.

Our white-washed sinful lives may be more sanitized, but the stakes are no less deadly. It's hard to quit the sin game...the roots that we have laid run deep, the eggs we let hatch are countless.

And yet, when we repent and confess our sins, God washes it all away in one fell swoop by his blood. We have every grace we need by virtue of our baptism to resist sin in the future and not let it make a home in us. God calls us to hard things, but not impossible things. We can start anew. We can start NOW. We don't need complicated spiritual formulas or complex strategies or professional counselors for avoiding sin. We just need to call for help in times of temptation, will the one thing, and be willing to suffer when our flesh chaffs up against our spirit. We can be made new. Today.

"For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

(Mt 11:30)