Shoved to Them
When I was a young girl in Catholic school, I was terrified of Hell. (I’m still terrified of Hell, but I was preoccupied with my fear as a young girl.) I had countless nightmares about burning lakes of fire and coming face to face with the devil himself. For a long time when I was young, it was the fear of burning that motivated me to be good. It wasn’t love of God or my parents, but a desire to avoid going “the other way.”
I eventually confided my fears to a priest who was a friend of our family. I’ll remember forever the look on his face in the confessional as I cried out my fear to him. (It was face to face, no partition. It was the 80s.) He smiled at me and said that while being good was good, doing it to avoid burning was not the right motivation. Our resolve runs out when it’s motivated by fear, but if we do something for love we can do it forever.
Last week my typical pregnancy heartburn returned with a vengeance. Sugar or carbs will trigger an instant burning in my chest. It’s horrible and painful and every time I swear that I will never do it again. I return to an Atkins-like carb-free diet and the pain disappears. Eventually the fear recedes and chocolate chip cookies or homemade bread appear in my kitchen. My resolve weakens, my mouth waters and before I know it, my chest is on fire again.
The pain from carbs is close to instant, and yet I can’t resist it no matter how hard I try. I summon all my resolve, and then find myself nibbling thoughtlessly as I make dinner. The taste is too good and pleasurable for me to give up completely, and the fear of fire is too weak.
Fear can’t motivate us to change our habits forever, but love can.
Sin is no different from craving that piece of chocolate cake. If it tasted disgusting there would be no temptation at all. It is the momentary pleasure, the remembered attraction which overwhelms our fear of fire and lures us in. The devil is no fool. He knows our weaknesses and plays into them.
My eldest daughter asked me yesterday, “The carbs and sugars hurt you, but you still eat them. If they were bad for the baby would you give them up?” Of course, I told her, I love the baby. “But you don’t love yourself?” I simply sat dumbfounded by her question. If I were my child I would do a better job of protecting me.
I try not to sin because I love God and because I love the people my sin would harm. I don’t want to hurt anyone, and so I pray and ask for help with my areas of weakness. I work and pray on it daily.
I’ve never asked anyone in my family to help me deal with the physical side effects of pregnancy. I choose to carry this burden alone. Why shouldn’t I ask them for help? They could be the food conscience I have obviously not formed well in myself. Because these kids can nag like nobody’s business. I just have never wanted to ask the whole family to change the way they eat for me. I’ve seen that as somehow selfish, which is ridiculous.
The food on my table is something which is completely within my control. I am the master of the pantry, and yet I still fail daily to avoid temptation and the suffering which results from it. How much more difficult it is to maintain my fear of the fires of Hell. The truth of it all is that I am a weak human being and am not so great at avoiding temptation. I couldn’t even avoid the bite of doughnut my 2 year old offered me this morning. Temptation doesn’t come in ugly packaging, it comes wrapped in sweetness, covered with sprinkles and delivered with a smile. The trick, I think, is to know our weaknesses and avoid them at all costs (like not buying the doughnuts to begin with) and to fight our failings not with fear but with love.
We have to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves. We have to love ourselves in a way that allows us to die to the desires of the flesh and turn consciously to the way we should go. We need to learn to reach to God and each other in our weaknesses and ask for help. In asking, we are not placing a burden on other people, we are giving them a chance to love us in return. Whether it is the food in our pantries or the sin in our hearts, the temptation is the same, and the weakness is the same. The burning is not inevitable. We just have to remember where to turn for help.
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