Resisting Disordered Passion
one
Temptation
“Concupiscence” is the term we use to describe a situation we all find ourselves in
I.e., sometimes our passions, our feelings, our emotions pull us the wrong way.
This is pretty much what we mean by the word “temptation” – a disordered passion, the desire to sin in one way or another.
Temptations can pull us towards an evil we shouldn’t do, or away from good thing we should do.
We can have temptations to drink too much
We can also have temptations to tithe too little
Temptation is a constant feature of human life. We all know we shouldn’t give in to temptation – but is there anything we can do to actually get rid of our temptations?
Actually, there is.
two
You can control your passions
One of the great lies of our contemporary pseudo-therapeutic culture is the notion that “you can’t change how you feel.”
People say this all the time about passions they know are counterproductive. They say, “Well, I can’t change how I feel about this thing, or about that person – but I’ll just try to ignore it.”
This kind of fatalism of disordered feeling – of temptation – is really dangerous.
If you think you can’t do anything about your temptations, that you’ll be stuck with the same temptations, and that they’ll have the same intensity your whole life – man, that’s going to be demoralizing.
It’ll make you more likely to give in to a temptation if you think the alternative is an exhausting struggle against this relentless force inside you that you’ll never be able to escape.
But the good news is: you can control your feelings!
Not all at once, of course.
St. Thomas Aquinas says our control over our passions is “political,” not “despotic.”
In other words, we can’t just tell ourselves to feel a certain way and expect them to obey us immediately.
It’s a long, slow, process. And there’s almost always going to be some resistance.
But if you’re willing to put the work in, you can make major changes to your emotional life. You can not only resist temptation – you can live a life where you no longer experience temptation as the overwhelming force it once was.
three
What temptation are you vulnerable to?
Before going any further, stop and ask God to show you what your dominant temptation is
Is it pride – the desire to find your identity or self-worth in your work, your kids, some achievement?
Is the need to be right or affirmed or in control?
Is it the consuming desire to win
Is it envy and the desire to gossip or the tendency to resentment?
Is it lust?
Is it sloth – a lack of interest in the things of God and the desire to stay busy all the time or veg in entertainment?
Is it greed and the desire to find happiness, security in homes, wealth, travel, or experiences?
Is it gluttony – the desire to escape fear, anxiety, pain or boredom with food, alcohol or drugs?
Is it anger?
Or complaining?
What disordered desire do you think displeases God the most?
What feeling do you wish would go away?
What temptation do you want to start fighting right now?
four
Checking the passions
The first step to changing your disordered feelings – your temptations – is, guess what? not giving into them!
That’s right: Resisting temptation is the first step to diminishing temptation
Why is that?
Because there’s a reciprocal relationship between feelings and behavior
On the one hand, our feelings about things, whether we like them or dislike them, affect our choices. We tend to do what we like and not what we don’t like. Feeling motivates our behavior
Our feelings prompt us to act – and not to act – in certain ways.
On the other hand, our actions over time change the way we feel about things
If you act a certain way, over and over, you get used to it, you come to like acting in that way.
We are habit-forming creatures – and a habit is where something which may not have felt natural or desirable before begins to feel natural and you start to like it after you’ve put in enough work.
Suppose you have a terrible profanity problem
Well, if you can keep yourself from cussing long enough, you’ll find that when other people around you use coarse language, it starts to feel really wrong.
Or suppose you really have an aversion to spending time in daily meditation
It’s really something that doesn’t appeal to you.
Well, if you make it part of your daily routine, eventually you’ll come to a place where you want to make sure you pray every day – and you won’t like how you feels on the days you don’t pray.
So if you can repeatedly do the right thing and not do the wrong thing enough times – well, then eventually you form a habit and your passions/feelings/emotions change so that we like the right things and we don’t like the wrong things.
When that happens, well then our emotions and feelings are working as God designed to propel us toward what is good and away from evil.
Imagine how great that would be – and it is totally possible because that is how God designed you.
five
God’s grace
The point is, living well becomes easier the more you do it. That’s virtue.
But before you have virtue – before it feels natural, before your repeated behaviors have really been able to reduce the force of temptation…
How do you do the right thing under those circumstances?
The answer is: By Jesus living in you!
With baptism Jesus begins to live in us and us in Him.
That doesn’t mean He makes it easy;
He is within us
But so are our disordered passions
And they will be a constant source of resistance to Him until we’ve had time to get them under control.
But we have to trust that by sharing His life with us the Lord gives us the means and the opportunity to live beautiful and powerful lives.
It may be a real challenge at first – but the good news is, the more you strive to resist temptation and do what is good, the easier it gets.