Don’t Become the Evil You Oppose

So, how do we fight monsters without becoming monsters ourselves? 

The short answer is that when we operate on our own power, we can’t. The temptations of monster-fighting are many and varied, but the most insidious of them is our ability to parse words, exploit meanings and paste ideas together to form new ideas. In other words, the greatest monster-maker of them all is our own excellent brain and its many talents. 

We can convince ourselves of anything. I know. I am a victim of my own ability to lead me into doing bad and thinking it is doing good. My worst sins involve me, convincing me, that wrong is right. 

That’s why I welcomed the Catholic Church with its uniform teachings with such gladness. It was an everlasting relief to have somebody separate right from wrong and tell me what they were. I don’t want to be a moral arbiter. I want to be a faithful follower. 

But the fact of the clergy sex abuse scandal shreds the bishops’ moral leadership. How can anybody not look at their moral leadership with a jaundiced eye after 20 years of being pounded by revelations of clergy sexual abuse of minors, children, seminarians, parishioners and nuns?

That makes the task of fighting monsters without becoming a monster even more fraught. Or, at least it does for me. 

What that means to me as an individual is that I have been cast out of the comfortable safety of just looking to my church for moral guidance.

So, where do I go? 

What I cannot do is allow the frustration of this lead me into rage. Rage is enough to make anyone lose their judgement and do things they will regret later. 

Rage is the lighthouse of vulnerability that signals all the demons everywhere to turn and look in your direction. Rage attracts the cold eye of the abyss and it begins to look back at you. 

How do we fight monsters without becoming monsters ourselves when our shepherds have forsaken us? 

We fight the same way that good people have always fought evil. We stay inside a wall of law and faith and allow that to protect us from ourselves. 

The law I’m talking about is not the law of the land, although we certainly should obey that. The law I mean is the Law of God as laid down by Jesus Christ. 

Go to the Gospels of Christ. If you want to know what Jesus requires of us, read the Beatitudes. They are the fulfillment of the Ten Commandments. Read the Sermon on the Mount. It is the Law of the New Covenant.

Meditate on Jesus at Gethsemane, before Pilate, under the lash and hanging on the cross. That is the absolute fulfillment of the Law, the end of the Temple sacrifice and the beginning of grace. Think on the Resurrection. That is our future. 

You cannot avoid becoming a monster if you cherry pick the Scriptures and use them to justify yourself and condemn others. 

On the other hand, you cannot be a monster if you earnestly and honestly follow the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. 

In tomorrow’s post, we’ll look at the particulars of what that means.