Thursday, May 23, 2013

Death and Life - Blessing and Curse



“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.
Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” 
(Deut 30:19)

This quotation came to mind as I was thinking about the issues surrounding a recent video that was posted by one of our students to express his frustration with those who choose to stereotype others and who use anonymous (or not so anonymous) means to be hurtful and mean, especially via current social media. Another word that might be used to describe the gratuitous, intentional act of demeaning another person is the word “evil” and all that it implies.

While this word may bring to mind images of fierce-looking beings from Gustave Dore’s drawings for Dante’s Inferno, in actual fact some of the more evil people in the world are and have been, to all appearances, the most common of men and women (characters from The Hobbit notwithstanding). It’s only in police photos that suddenly those who commit crimes look glum, expressionless, unappealing and ruffled; sort of like we look when we look at ourselves in the mirror each morning, which in itself is a good reminder that there is this same capacity for evil within each of us, and we neglect paying attention to it at our own peril. “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” (GK Chesterton)

Traditionally, committing a sin is doing something evil, whether to a smaller degree (venial sin) or to a great degree (mortal sin). The three conditions that are given for deciding whether something is a mortal sin are also good gauges to see whether something is just a really bad thing to do. First, it must be something that is a grave matter, something that has serious consequences and truly breaks relationships with others and with God. Secondly, it must be something that is done with full knowledge, with a clear notion that this is something that will hurt others seriously. Thirdly, it must be something that is done with deliberate consent, with the conscious decision to do something that you know to be bad. The Catholic Catechism gives a straightforward definition: “Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbour caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity.” (CC1849) Bad is bad even for the bad, because it is the good that defines our core.

Hiding behind an anonymous identity makes evil easy and even appealing. If others cannot hold us responsible, and if we don’t have the capacity to hold ourselves responsible, then all those hidden parts of our nature, the dark corners where the bad bits dwell, have an opportunity to come out.
Gollum wasn’t a bad guy when he started his life, but things went from bad to worse when what he thought was precious wasn’t, and what he thought was evil wasn’t. That’s the glamour of evil. When rain-water discovers a hole in the roof, it begin to drip into the house and ends up making things quite messy, uncomfortable and finally unliveable for everyone. But some people just get used to it.

The fact is that we have a choice, that we can make a choice. That is what the quotation on top is all about. The fact of being able to choose makes it possible for us to drift towards the evil side of things or to the good side of things. The habits of choice that we develop, drip by drip, shape the character we become. Things like anonymous identities, letters or postings, spoken words (gossip), and the like don’t have to be used for bad things, but they are unfortunately more likely to be used that way. It’s a problem that is related to what the church calls the “Original Sin” that is part of our nature, whereby we are “subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.” (CC396) The tendency to doing bad things draws us with a thousand shiny baubles, while that of doing good things seems to require more work. The moral life is not reached for free.

We move our souls each day by the choices we make, online or not, and so change our world and the world of others for good or ill and in ways unknown and unimagined. It pays to pay attention.