Responding to the Truth and Motivating Pursuit of the Good We have been meditating on the powers of our soul: the intellect, the free-will and the passions and their purpose. King Solomon had an amazing intellect, may be the smartest guy who ever lived. He also had a strong will – he got a lot accomplished. But his passions were totally out of control. Solomon never harnessed his passions and feelings which led him to be enslaved to his desire for power, wealth and women – 700 wives and 300 concubines. These turned his heart away from God to the worship Satan hidden behind the pagan gods Molech and Ashteroth, to whom he offered child sacrifice and burned his sons. In the end Satan always demands human sacrifice in the form of abortion, infanticide, suicide and war. The point is, Solomon made a train-wreck of his life because the powers of his soul were not integrated. It must not be so for us! The Intellect is designed to know reality – how things really are. Once the intellect grasps reality it has the truth. Then it must make a judgment: this is good or this evil. The Intellect then tells the will to choose what it perceives as good and to avoid what is evil. Our passions are designed to: 1. Respond to the truth perceived by the intellect 2. Motivate the will to choose the good and avoid evil The passions are situated between intellect and will, and they’re supposed to originate from the intellect and prompt a right choice of the will. Through my intellect I know fish and vegetables are good for me. My passions respond to this truth by moving me by desire to prepare and eat them. This is the case of the powers of my soul working as they should. This is not always the case…too often, my passions propel me to choose something that is not good for me which causes harm to my body and even more to my soul. The better we understand this, the more able we are to cooperate with God’s grace to get the powers of our souls working as we should. There are three ways we regularly screw up the way the powers of the soul should work and make a mess This happens first of all when our intellects and wills don’t do their jobs. If we don’t know the truth, our passions will be responding to a faulty picture of reality. If you have a wrong perception of things, your feelings will be correspondingly imbalanced. If you think the world is a brutal, senseless place, or if you think you yourself are worthless, you’re going to feel pretty lousy about everything – even though you shouldn’t, and these lousy feelings about the world or yourself will propel you to make the wrong choices. Often our thoughts and feelings are not in tune with reality, with God’s design for things. Catch yourself; think – what does God want; chose that. Are my feelings and desires in line with reality, with God’s design? If not, then I must choose to live according to reality as God made it and not according to how I feel or what I desire. The second way we screw up our soul is when we make a habit of the wrong choices. Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny. Do something bad enough and you get used to it, and then you get to like it, and then you get to need it. And at that point your emotional life will be all out of joint. One act of pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony or lust is bad. But if you do any one of these actions enough, they become habits, they become second nature. Now we have a vice, a bad habit. Vices change our nature and make it vicious. Even worse, the more we do what is bad the more we desire it and the more our passions propel us toward what is bad. This is how we form addictions. We have a routine of choosing something bad for so long that we have malformed our passions to desire it and propel us toward it without even consciously thinking about it. Do you know which of these deadly sins you have made a second nature?