As easily as I can fall back into old habits, when I’ve quit old habits I can fall into righteousness. Correction: I can fall into a false righteousness. There’s no sugar coating this. Here’s the sequence of events: once I stop going in the wrong direction, I will do the next right action. I get on the beam and walk, steady, as she goes. I’ll ask for forgiveness. While in that state I will understand the need for love of God and others over myself. In tune with a Higher Power while I’m in the recovery zone, I feel the good. Fresh from the rut of doing the wrong thing, I am refreshed, restored, raised up from the gutter.
But then, the danger comes. I will pass over that middle ground of understanding and humility and slide right over into a feeling of pride about my own goodness in this newfound recovery. Pride, in all forms, is the direct opposite of humility. As I’m doing the next right action, I begin to think that I am right, that I am good, better than others. I’ll think that I have knowledge, and that now I am standing on the high ground over the valley of the deadly sins. This can easily beckon me onward to the belief that everyone should act like me. Suddenly, I am the model. Everyone should be standing on the mountain like I am.
This is the great danger of getting “clean.” Funny, we still use the word “clean” as in cleansing, or bathing, when we have won in battle over an addiction or vice. As Jesus pointed out about the Pharisees, they were always washing to be clean on the outside. We are still constantly scrubbing today, trying to be clean. We can get equally lost being clean as we can being dirty. Pride suffocates any sense of mercy or humility.
There is a plateau that exists between the where the Prodigal Son eats with the pigs in his valley of despair and where his upright brother, the Righteous Brother, stands at the peak of presumption. Despair and Presumption: both are wrong. Even the climber high on a mountain can fall into a giant glacial crevice that will swallow him in darkness. You are not safe from falling just because you are higher in the mountain. No, in the rarefied air near the peak there is less oxygen and more cliffs to tumble down.
The parable of the Prodigal Son is not just about the wastrel brother who comes back to God. The popular part of the story is about the drunk, foolish brother. We all love the idiot brother, and we read it sympathizing with him and his father for forgiving him. Why? Because mercy rings out in the story as a right action. We’re sentimental to stories of mercy, rightly so, since we all need mercy. But we kind of hate the older brother, the do-gooder who judges his returned brother and complains to his father that the grand reception of the foolish brother isn’t fair.
But this parable is every bit as much about the older brother, the one who does everything correctly. And I am both of them. I have been both brothers and probably will be both of them again in the future. We are all, I suspect, both of the brothers at different points in our lives. Even today, in small ways, I may be both brothers.
I stray away from faith, away from trust in God, in different ways now than I did as a teenager. When I was in my twenties or thirties, I strayed in different ways than I did as a teenager. In fact, today, I am more likely to stray in the manner of the older brother than I am to stray like the Prodigal Son. The older brother wants some justice against his younger brother. He wants fairness. He’s been holding down the fort, running the estate, keeping the business together all these years. He wants some recognition, and really he wants to feel superior and even get a little revenge. All this time he has been showing up, doing the work, staying on target, never wavering. If his father doesn’t punish the younger brother, but instead celebrates his return, then why hasn’t the father ever celebrated the older brother’s work? He’s been doing the right thing and being responsible for so many years, how can this not be recognized?
He’s right, it’s not fair. Or, according to our instinctual sense of justice, it’s not fair. This happens at work all the time, where someone who doesn’t put in effort receives the same bonus or raise as those who do. Everyone knows this isn’t fair and it often destroys morale. Employees have a very sensitive feel for exactly how little work must be done to achieve the most benefit, and high-flying achievers often quit or complain when someone who doesn’t work gets the same rewards. The interesting thing about the parable is that so many of us dislike the older brother’s reaction, but that is exactly how we tend to react. If anyone gets anything more than us, and especially someone who seems undeserving, outrage is inevitable, anger rises within us. I have seen co-workers outraged at someone for receiving a coffee mug that others did not receive. And the parable is talking about eternal life here, not a porcelain mug that cost two dollars.
The drunken, foolish brother so clearly needs help that the parable often seems only about him. Really, the foolish brother has an easier and more joyous experience in returning to God because he has fallen down on his face and is forced to change. His need for change is obvious. His burden requires that he let go of his ego to return to God, utterly humbled. Humiliated is the right word. After choosing vices and sin instead of good behavior and trust in God, he needs forgiveness and mercy from God. His burden and need to return is easy to understand. But it’s not as easy to understand for someone who has been following all the rules all along. This is the difference between disobedience and pride, where the former shows up in obvious errors made, often externally, while pride robs us of the proper interior state that is needed. This can be seen all the way back to the Old Testament versus the New Testament, where Adam disobeys God in pursuit of worldly pleasures, while Jesus obeys and denies himself any form of pride. The old teaching was to obey, the new teaching is how to fix your heart. The brothers of the parable show us both the exterior and interior problem of all humans, and the fix for both is shown in the life of Christ.
When I screw up, I know that I have to turn back. This is the easy part. Well, this wasn’t easy for a long time, but once I realized the lies that culture sells us, and that turning back to God is the way, the recognition of being on the wrong road happens more often. The trick is to remember to turn back every day, every hour. The saying that “God writes straight with crooked lines” is a common refrain in recovery. Those that overshoot the true path, the right way, can always turn back. So even a truly righteous person, like Peter or Paul or Mary Magdalene, zig zags through life. Only by effort can we return to the path, and only Jesus ever walked on the straight line the entire way. As for us, we are all too ready to justify our gossip or drinking or drug use or swearing or jerking off as normal, acceptable behavior, because we have chosen the modern religion where all things are permitted. Thus we think we we don’t have to deal with it. But for every “whatever” or “meh” we say now while selecting these actions, we will have to deal with the choices made, someday, right after we exhale our final breath, in the long moment known as eternity. If this doesn’t concern you, in the end it will burn you.
The younger brother turned away from God and lived wildly, only to find himself eating with the pigs at their trough. This seems easy to turn away from. But it’s not. Not at first. I’ve spent many chapters or episodes of this journey describing how hard it is to turn back to God once you have gone the other direction. When on the wrong path, stubbornness over bad choices can make it difficult to even admit there is a problem. Once your wrong path is seen as correct, an immense change of heart is needed to turn back again. However, each time you turn back, and try, and ask, and seek, and knock, and cry out for help - it gets easier to do so. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the foolish brother is fully restored, and perhaps, we like to think, he never turns back to his wayward lifestyle. This is a “happily ever after” parable.
But I can tell you what the danger is for the Prodigal Son once he has repaired his life and found his way back to God. The danger that awaits him is excess righteousness, like that of his older brother. In the parable, the older brother is coached down by his father from the peak of presumption to join the despairing brother on the plateau of understanding.
The older brother cannot fathom how his father rejoices over the idiot son that squandered his fortune and sullied the family name. The older brother could be from our world today, striving in our merit-based economy and chasing the accolades of the honor culture. He is disgusted by the fool he must call his brother. “Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders.” But his father explains that the true glory of this world is finding the lost brother. He explains that the older brother does not lose anything by rejoicing in the return of his brother, who is restored to health. And the righteousness melts away from the older brother once he understands. He has been doing the right thing for the wrong reason, and he has to change his heart from righteousness into understanding, returning to loving his brother instead of clinging to his own merit and clutching his pearls of self-worth.
By doing the “next right action,” I can go from being the younger brother to the older brother, and neither is in the right place. Since today we all worship ourselves, the older brother is everywhere. We all think we are right, or righteous, that our opinions and decisions are the correct ones, and we love to stone people online who fall outside of our worldview. Our world has billions of righteous brothers and billions of foolish brothers.
This middle area between the ruts is the right place. That is the place the brothers need to strive toward, to be on the plateau where Jesus taught us to stand. The ruts of pride and disobedience both suck you downward and further away from the light of heaven. The younger brother, once he has found his good sense and received his dad’s love again, he may very easily perch himself upon that same cliff of presumption that the older brother occupied, and he will fall headlong into the ditch of pride. There is much to say about the older brother of this parable, but I will return focus to the problem child, the foolish brother, as at the end of the parable he is now in danger of becoming the older brother.
The trick to fixing yourself without become overly righteous and without dwelling too much on the past takes some practice and if you’re like me you will fail. You’ll fail. Just remember the two quotes: 1.) “Progress, not perfection” and 2.) “Perfection kills.”
Somehow, someway, you must preserve your mistakes and keep them ever ready to hold up in front of your own eyes, like nightcrawlers in a glass jar under your arm. Otherwise you may forget about those mistakes and soon pretend you never held a jar full of nightcrawlers. But at the same time you can’t cry and grovel for forgiveness and wear the jar around your neck like a millstone. If you have sincerely tried to make the change through conversion and penance then you start from there and move forward. You take a picture of that jar of nightcrawlers and keep it in your wallet, or put a poster on your wall. To never forget those mistakes is important, otherwise self-justified righteousness will swallow you just as easily as the urge to do the wrong thing pulled you off course in the first place. Preserve and remember those times.
Yes, I’m referring to those awful nights that will keep you from ever running for public office. Yes, those mistakes should stop you from ever considering the idea of starting a blog or podcast because you are such an extraordinary hypocrite. And yes, you should have those mistakes dangled in front of you now and then by someone that doesn’t like you, because being humbled is the best possible thing that ever happens to you in this world. Embrace the mistake. Don’t deny it. If anything it should keep you humble, because the error of becoming “perfect” means you presume that you have no sins, which is a sin. The sins are well-defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and even if you don’t like what it tells you, it is very logical and consistent. Despair is the sin of thinking that you cannot be forgiven by God, which is what the Prodigal Son does. Presumption is thinking you are already perfect, which is what the older brother does. Both of them are block us from proper humility before God.
Never forget the mistakes, but move on. Move on because you cannot wallow and dwell in that worm dirt forever or you may never grow out of it and you’ll only be compost. The time of supplication and mourning must lead to the next phase of the heart, which is the interior change. By suffering we grow. By challenge we change. Without suffering and challenge we would always be children or adolescents. Without suffering or challenge we would continue on wrong paths until death. Most importantly, without suffering, Jesus would not have conquered sin and death.
He told us quite plainly, as Jesus is so good at doing: “Unless a wheat falls to the earth and dies, it will bear no more wheat. But if it dies…it will bear much more wheat.” Thus it is not some exterior appearance that must change. Penance is a dirty word in our times, but I believe that’s only because we don’t understand it anymore. Here’s a hint about what it means:
Jesus' call to conversion and penance…does not aim first at outward works…but at the conversion of the heart, interior conversion. Without this, such penances remain sterile and false; however, interior conversion urges expression in visible signs, gestures and works of penance.
Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life… (CCC 1430-1431)
When I believe I have made the conversion of the heart, I can easily fool myself. There’s a movie called The Devil’s Advocate with Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves, where Pacino plays the devil and works on the vanity of his target, a lawyer played by Reeves. The devil dangles the bait of glory in front of the lawyer, aiding him to become the best lawyer in New York, helping the lawyer win case after case. Despite defending guilty and repulsive clients, the lawyer revels in the glory, while rejecting the needs of his wife and mother. The devil is eventually rejected by the lawyer, who has a change of heart. The lawyer’s free will wins as he chooses the next right action which separates the devil from him. So the lawyer is freed from the temptation and he appears to move on with this life. A happy ending is in sight. He’s very humbled, and once humbled he becomes quickly satisfied with himself. He’s like me, he dusts off his hands, thinking, “Well, I took care of that problem of evil and found the Lord!” But at the end of the movie, Al Pacino returns in disguise as a newspaper reporter who wants to do a story on the “lawyer with a conscience,” who lost a case for choosing to do the right thing, following morality over glory. And suddenly the devil, once again, has the lawyer chasing a new lure of fame, a different kind of glory, but still the same vice. The devil, Al Pacino, all toothy and smiling, says at the end of the movie, “Vanity: definitely my favorite sin.”
The lesson? When you are led astray, you get yanked off course by one of these vain wishes or addictions, by the desire to do the wrong thing. Worse yet, even when you are pulled back to sanity you can get lured right over to a different desire. Glory, honor, pleasure, wealth, power - there are more disguises over these hooks than you’ll find in a bait shop. In other words, the desire for one thing may seem conquered, but that doesn’t kill off the problem. It returns in a new form, using a new method, in a new manner, unsuspecting but just as cunning. It never stops. This problem isn’t something to beat and put on a shelf like a trophy. No, it returns. Unceasingly, it finds you and you find it. The only way to combat this constant pursuit of you is that you must have the interior conversion. You must receive God to believe and believe to receive God, every single day. There is no day off. You never get to dust off your hands and hang up your hat. There is not an end of the road at a truck stop named “faith” where this problem stops. Interior conversion is an active, living, breathing, idea you must pursue. To believe is a verb. To pray is a verb. Prayers use present tense, not past tense. You don’t need help yesterday, you need it now and tomorrow. Choices you made yesterday have come and gone; your free will has already played that hand. But today and tomorrow have many choices yet to be revealed, traps to watch out for, and sufferings to endure. Some examples of powerful prayers are as follows, all using present or future tense:
Prayer of St. Michael: “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil…”
Hail Mary: “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou…”
Prayer to the Holy Spirit: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love…”
Prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.”
Jesus Prayer: “Lord, Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Prayer is to give glory to God and ask for help now, today. We’re not stocking up prayers for next week or when I’m eighty years old. The power of prayer is that is gives strength, direction, and orients us back toward God, which means we receive the gift of humility.
But once I correct myself from errors, and after I find that humility, what can happen is that I shove off the dock of those sins and think I will never see or experience that shore again. I say, “Adieu, Prodigal ways, it’s back to the trough and the pigs with you!”
As that place of sin recedes on the horizon, into days past, I grow smug and quickly righteous, thinking I’ve escaped my weaknesses, only to wake up one morning surprised to find that the problem is back in bed with me. Like Jonah, I can’t outrun myself. How hilarious to find yourself in these ancient Biblical stories. Except it’s not so funny when you first go through it, because you realize that the allegories and characters are more than old writings, they are a fact of your very real life.
“Wherever you go, there you are.” That’s a saying I know well. I travel with myself wherever I go. The dock and shore, the time and the place - those things never held or harbored the problem. Those are just places and things. I have the problem. It’s part of me. The dysfunction travels with me. Things are just things, but I am the carrier of the disease. Watch the news today and you will see the evidence that all men and women carry this problem, not just a few.
This interior conversion then must be renewed constantly, or the proper placement of self starts to wander, or my compass to true north gets skewed by the magnetism that draws me into the wrong thing.
Humility is the right place to be. The elevation of the self is how both brothers in the parable make their error, one by chasing pleasure and the other by assuming honor. The middle, between them, is where they both realize they are not God, that they are both sinners, and that they need and love each other.
There is one other kind of error, not in righteousness, but in challenging God in arrogance. To think that God owes you something, that he is a personal Genie or sugar daddy, is a great mistake. How small we make God out to be in our minds.
Consider Jesus on the cross between the two criminals. The first criminal is not like the older brother in the Prodigal Son. No, he’s in an even worse state of mind. He hasn’t acted righteous, not at all, but he is deriding Jesus and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’
Not only is he mocking Jesus, but he’s expecting some kind of transaction from him. He’s saying, “Well if you’re so great, why don’t you show us.” How many people today are like the first criminal on the cross next to Jesus? This is how a lot of us pray. We give nothing to God because we don’t believe in him, and then say, “Well God hasn’t done anything for me.” He owes you nothing, and if you have rejected God because you didn’t get something, you are the first criminal on the cross. He’s not righteous, he’s not sorry, he’s not humble, but he wants a miracle and worst of all, feels that he deserves one.
Put that against the humility of the second criminal, the good thief, who has committed the same crime as the other criminal but reacts in a completely opposite manner. The first shows arrogance to God, while the second shows humility. And although he is late to the game of conversion, he’s now in the stadium and he’s staying, as Jesus recognizes true faith when he sees it, no matter when it comes in a person. He tells the second criminal, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
The danger of humility is that it can be in the right place, only to switch into righteousness or arrogance in the blink of an eye.
This is where faith, hope, and charity must be prescribed. I’m not a doctor, but a doctor today would offer some cocktail of pills as a cure. There is a better pharmacy, and it’s free, and it’s called a church. Faith and humility go together. In fact, they are inseparable. Likewise, faith and joy go together. These too are inseparable. No, I’m not a doctor but I wish doctors had suggested these three things called faith, hope, and charity to me years ago, as I might have saved two decades of searching. Then again, even if they had suggested it, I doubt I was ready to hear it. I would have demanded the pills anyway, I suspect.
After you screw up, take the next right action, ask for humility, and pray for hope. Pray for the willingness to be willing. If you lack belief, say this awkward sentence: “God I believe, help my unbelief.” That always sounded ridiculous to me, but it works. If you want belief, if you say, “Come Holy Spirit,” it shows up. I’m not selling anything here. I’m not advertising anything that I will make money on. This is all free to anyone. I don’t want your money or praise, I just want you to know that there is hope and if you pray for willingness to be willing, if you try to believe while you are riddled with doubt, something will happen to you. There is so much hope, even when you doubt, but you have to try to receive it.
What is hope? Here’s a definition.
Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit…
The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men's activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity. (CCC 1817-1818)
As St. Paul said, "So faith, hope, charity abide, these three. But the greatest of these is charity." I could have ten episodes on these three virtues and never cover it. Others have written about it much better than I can anyway, such as St. Theresa of Avila’s Interior Castle or St. Francis de Sales Introduction to the Devout Life.
When the next mistake comes around, don’t throw up your hands and stay in the rut. Step out of it. Stay out of the twin ruts of disobedience and pride. Pray for humility, pray for hope to keep your spirits up, and recall that your life is not about you. Remember that one? “My life is not about me.” Make it about something built to last and those somethings are: faith, hope, and charity.
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