Nov 25 Mon
Should I fight against my bad tendencies?
There is a topic that is not talked about often: how easy it is to be a revolutionary for others, and hardly a combatant with oneself, an aspect that Christianity, for example, does touch on.
Someone once asked Mother Teresa of Calcutta what had to be done to change the world, and she replied: "Start by changing yourself.” And St. Josemaría Escrivá said, "If you and I change, there will be two less rascals in the world.
Indeed, a revolutionary wants to change the world without changing himself; a Christian wants to change the world by starting to change himself. This is the true revolutionary: the one that begins with oneself.
It is what the idealism or moralism of certain ideologies lack: that, being utopias with no other anchor than the human one, they easily crumble as soon as the inevitable human weakness or contradiction surfaces, and the follower is placed at the limit of the contradiction between the character he pretends to be, and the person he is.
This moralism, often made law in the Parliaments, lacks the grace or the strength of Christ, because, in the face of human weakness, mere law or moralism is left without important support or help to fulfill its selective idealism.
Christianity preaches and takes seriously self-mastery in so many areas (temper, bad character, laziness... and also lust). Thus, it can do much more for the respect of women than the ideologies that promote a wrong anthropological and sexual vision. At least, Christianity believes in the original sin and in the consequences it left in our nature, wounded since then: that ‘fomes peccati,’ that tendency to sin, to evil, to selfishness, which should require us to fight against our bad tendencies.
These ideologies, on the other hand, seem to believe that people will do good simply by decree or by legal imperative; while actively compelling people to unleash, without further ado, their passions and forgetting the wide margin of freedom for good and evil of each individual (which requires educating them in the good and personal growth, not in giving free rein to the unbridled wild horse that each one carries within in many areas, including sexuality).
The moral good does not come by science but by conquest. This is the difference between the strength that Christianity promotes, and the laziness, they encourage. It is the difference between changing things starting from within (Christianity) or believing that things will change from outside because they are imposed by law or decree (some current ideologies).
Between Rousseau ("man is good by nature") and Hobbes ("man is a wolf to man"), there is a middle way. Mas has the potential for good, but this potential is weakened by an innate inclination to evil, and selfishness (to sin). This is the consequence of a natural wound we all have, that requires effort to achieve the good, overcoming oneself, and with the grace of Christ. That is Christianity.
Video;