CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT NEW OUTREACH PROGRAM

“My brother, I am going to mention a number of things now and you will tell me which ones are morally right and which ones are morally wrong.”

Listen carefully:

(1) someone who buys a product for N50 and sells it for N500
(2) when a neighbor whom you have warned several times puts his load in front of your door again, then you decide to give one of his wares a little crack so that next time he wouldn’t do it again
(3) when you have an information that would be helpful to your neighbor and you give her the information late because you were concerned that you wouldn’t stand a chance for the opportunity if she is assessed with you
(4) lastly, when you decide not to point out when someone is wrong because you are benefiting from the person but you don’t hesitate to call out someone else who you don’t get any benefits from but does the same wrong

“Well, some of this things you mentioned are normal things. You know, to succeed in this life one has to be sharp if not express would leave you behind. As you know many people are wallowing in frustration because they refuse to wake up and see the opportunity in front of them. For example, based on the first scenario you talked about profit in business. You know I am a business person and for me if you have people that would buy at that rate then it is fine. On the second scenario, sometimes one has to use other methods to teach people a lesson, I won’t say it was the right thing to do but I can imagine that after that episode the fellow stopped leaving things in the wrong place. In the same way, I think the action in scenario three is out rightly wrong because I believe if you want to help someone you should do it with your full mind but then again it is not bad to protect one’s interest. Then the last scenario, hmm, this is a though one and it is very common in our society today. Ehn, it is not good to have double standard but sometimes it is difficult not to compromise. That is my answer.”

“You know I really like your response as it would help us shed light on what we would be discussing today. Did you notice how you tried to rationalize the scenario to play to your interests? This is what we see everywhere. People no longer call black, black or white. white instead they start looking for the different shades in between to justify their actions. Let’s look at what Archbishop Fulton Sheen says in his book Your Life is Worth Living.”
“As we know one of the things that differentiates humans from other creatures is the gift of free will. In other words, we human beings have the ability to make choices concerning different aspects of our life and by extension choices between good and evil but just like the response I gave earlier when I was asked about the four scenarios, more and more people are inclined towards sitting on the fence even though sacred scripture says “if you are neither hot or cold I will spit you out”

“Hmmm, but a question many would ask is- if God is all loving and kind why did he create an option for evil in the first place. I mean if we had only good in the world we would have all been living happily and we won’t know what evil is. Wouldn’t that have been a better world for all of us?”
“The vision of that looks very nice but Archbishop Fulton Sheen has an answer for us. He says God intended to build a moral universe. He willed from all eternity to build a stage on which people with character would emerge. He might have made a world without morality, virtue or character. He might have made a world in which each one of us would have sprouted goodness but He chose not to make a world in which we would be good. He willed to make a moral universe that by the right use of the gift of freedom, people with character might emerge.”
“But how was that going to be possible without an example of what that moral practice should be? People would end up running free because there is no manual. Or what do you think?”

“Well, God knows all things but gave us freedom of will. What this tells us about God is that He is the very embodiment of love. Love us to be what we are mean to be, a free person in the highest sense of the word. The ideal is that the more you are led by God’s love, the more you become yourself and that is done without you losing your freedom.”

“This is true. Morality implies responsibility and duty, but these can exist only on condition of freedom. As we know Stones have no morals because they are not free. We do not condemn shea butter because it is melted by heat. Praise and blame can be bestowed only on those who are masters of their own will. It is only because you have the possibility of saying no that there is so much charm in your character when you say yes. “

“Yes. And when you take the quality of freedom away from anyone, it is no longer possible for him to be virtuous. If you take freedom away from life, there would be no more reason to honor the fortitude of martyrs. Those who blamed God for allowing man freedom to go on hindering His works are like those who see errors in the student’s notebook. They would condemn the teacher for not collecting the book and doing the copy himself.”
“In that example of the teacher and student, just as the object of the teacher is sound education and not the production of neat and well-written notebooks, so the object of God is the development of souls and not the production of biological entities. “

“Often times we ask ourselves— “If God knew I would sin, why did He make me?” Remember that God did not make any of us as sinners, we made ourselves sinners! In that sense, we are creators. The greatest gift of God to man, short of grace, is the gift of human freedom and the power to love Him in return.”

“So in essence, we are called to work within God’s love and by the leading of the Holy Spirit to discern between good and evil and then make the right choices.”
“Yes, that is Correct, still along these lines let’s take a closer look at other aspects of this topic. I have observed that there are some people who downplay good conduct, and some others attribute their negative behaviors and actions to external sources or some occurrences from their past. Have you observed this too? What are your thoughts on that?”

“Yes o, I have. I remember Mama Nkiru’s second son who was caught taking other people’s belongings in school. You won’t believe she came to our women’s meeting to say that it was nothing serious and that he used it as a way to punish those people whom he felt were bullies in his class. She made no attempt to rebuke his bad behavior but rather made it seem like it was a non-issue. Well, I think this creates a confusion in conduct because a good child who has seen that such negative deed was downplayed would see nothing wrong in doing another version of it rather than adjusting to reality and its demands.”

“This example you are giving shows that we have a bigger issue in our hands. This means that the confusing phenomenon causes the spiritual faculties of man which enable him to act against his impulses to be ignored, and to refuse the course of least resistance because of his allegiance to an ideal.”

“True. All of us have the power of choice in action at every moment of our lives. When we say “I couldn’t help doing it,” it is the weakest and least likely of excuses. It is particularly favored by liars: they say, “She asked my opinion of a dress she wanted to buy or a man she wanted to marry, and I couldn’t tell her the truth!” Why not? The truth is not supposed to be offensive when it is told with charity.”
“‘I simply had to’ is not a valid excuse for committing any sin, and lying is a sin. Christian tradition attributes evil to a personal choice, an act of the free will which misuses the liberty that God gave to man. “

“This even goes against the role of the conscience. Every human soul was born with a conscience and that feature is supposed to help prompt us make the right choices but some people have corrupted their consciences and false consciences such that we no longer get wise counsel but and adulteration filled with excuses and leading us to sin just like we saw at the beginning when my brother created different reasons why wrong should be right. It has become so easy for us to do this because we have overtime created a false conscience.”
“Yes o. a lot of people have set up a new morality gauge with which they measure their actions so they are never wrong. All this just to escape the discomfort of good conscience.”

“I think we all need to reflect on our lives and reevaluate our stance on good and evil and the choices we have made and are still making.”
“Now that we have identified the areas where we might be going wrong, what are some of the things we can do to neutralize these negative actions.”
“Well, one of the ways is by prioritizing kindness. You know when someone is kind and considerate they won’t be thinking of evil or negative things that would affect other people. There are also other steps we would look at to help us overcome some bad habits we have picked up which we now view as normal and part of us. We will be drawing from the teachings of Josemaria Escriva in his book The Way, and our dear Archbishop Fulton Sheen again in his book the Ways to happiness.”

“So just like you pointed we would start with kindness. It is very good to be kind to people but there are some people who would be kind in their homes or among people they know but when they get outside they are totally different people. Imagine all the insults you hear from drivers in a traffic because of bad driving, or the reactions we sometimes give a random stranger who is trying to sell something to us- like those who hawk things on the street- how to we relate with them? What do we think causes our negative reaction?”
“Well, I think it is because at home we are known but outside we are nameless and anonymous. What I mean is that at home or in familiar gatherings people know us by our names and can easily point out our wrongs but in public the person we are reacting badly to does not know us and cannot cause us shame.”

“This is an interesting perspective. But to be kind because of the fear that other would think we are unkind is not real kindness, but rather a disguised form of egotism. Because kindness is related to love, it follows that the kind person loves another not for the pleasure the other person gives, nor because the other person can do us a kindness in return, but because the other person is lovable in himself. The basic reason why everyone is lovable is because God made him.”

“Yes. Since God finds us lovable because He put some of His love into us so we can find others lovable, because we put some of our love into them. But to do this implies a basic kindness which is always prepared to be pleasant with other people. If we start with the belief that most people in the world are criminals, imagine how many criminals we will find. If, however, we go into the world with the assumption that everyone is nice, we will constantly run into nice people. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest kindness one can render to any man consists of leading him from error to truth.”
“That is why it is said that to a great extent the world is what we make it. We get back what we give. If we sow hate, we reap hate; if we scatter love and gentleness we harvest love and happiness. Other people are like a mirror which reflects back on us the kind of image we cast. The kind man bears with the infirmities of others, never magnifies trifles and avoids a spirit of fault finding. “

“To be really kind, we must see in everyone an immortal soul to be loved for God’s sake. This means that everyone is precious.”
“At this point and as we progress, let me share a quote by G.K Chesterton, a renowned Catholic author that says “There is one thing in the world that never makes any progress and that is the idea of progress”. By this he means that unless we have a fixed concept of what progress really means we can never know that we are making any headway. So if progress remains an idea in our mind that has no outlined action plan then what we are calling progress may never happen. Unfortunately, there are many who, instead of working toward an ideal, keep it as an aspiration and call it progress. We hope that would not be the case with all the eye-opening things we have heard.”

“I think that quote is apt because now we will consider how we can overcome bad habit. As it is said the first step toward repentance is acknowledging the wrong doing. It is the same thing for a bad habit. Once someone says “I have a bad temper or drink too much, I criticize a lot or I am lazy” it means that the person still believes that nobility of character is an important goal. Once one can realize these things—any bad habit can be broken.”
“However, to break free from the habits one needs to have an introspection which helps to isolate habits and see it for the wrong that it is. Some people are afraid to look into their consciences for fear of what they might find but introspection is to the soul what diagnosis is to the body—the first necessary step toward health.”

Fr. Thomas Merton would say: “Unintentionally and unknowingly we fall back into imperfections. Bad habits are like living roots that return. Those roots must be dug away and cleared from the garden of our soul”
“Another step towards breaking free from bad habits is Avoiding the occasions of sin. If Emeka knows that he has the tendency to drink and get drunk, he should avoid passing the road that leads to the beer parlour; if Calista knows that once she goes to visit Chinedu she would be led into sin she should avoid going to his house; if Mama Uju knows that by visiting Mama Chikamso she would spend hours gossiping about everyone in the community she should desist from going to see Mama Chikamso. If Papa Nnamdi knows that people keep things carelessly in his work shed and he is always tempted to steal things he should either change location or stay in a corner that doesn’t make him think about stealing.”
“Yes o. Temptation is hard to overcome at the last moment, when the sin is within our reach; it is easy to overcome if we act decisively to avoid a situation in which we might be tempted. Environments can make sin repulsive or attractive to us, but we can choose the environment we wish and can reject the one that leads to trouble.”

“After all Our Lord told us, “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. This means that if the books we read, the homes we visit, the games we play cause us to stumble morally, then we should cut them out and cast them from us.”
“Another thing that can help us overcome bad habits is our will. If we are to overcome our vices, we must bring a strong will to force them out. I have heard people who want to do a diet say “I was on my own and the came to give me soft drink”. But you are the same person that swore not to take soft drink for the whole month. Where is your will power?”

“We acquired the bad habits only because we gave ground to them by a consent of the will, until they became automatic and perhaps even unconscious. To conquer them, we must reverse the process and use the will to break their automatic functioning. Our characters do not consist in what we know, but in what we choose, and choosing is done by the will. After the Prodigal had reached a point of realization and left the environment of sin, his next step was to brace himself with the great resolve, “I will arise and go to my father.”
“Another step to consider is having a right philosophy of life. Evil habits cannot be overcome by the will alone: love is required as well. A person who gets drunk all the time is not cured until he finds something to value more highly than the attractions of alcohol. No other evil is renounced until the sinner finds some positive good he prizes above his sin. Our Lord warned us of the house, swept and garnished, which was filled by seven devils worse than the first; this was the inevitable result when an evil was driven out but no good was sent to take its place. Even in the moral world, nature abhors a vacuum.”

“Habits cannot be efficaciously fought unless we have a philosophy which makes our lives revolve around the God for Whom we are made, and without Whom we are miserably bound to the companionship of our own growing imperfections.”
“In all these things, Josemaria Escriva in his book The Way admonishes us to not let our life be barren. We must be useful and make ourselves felt. Only then can we Shine forth with the torch of our faith and love. if everyone’s character was perfect we would never become saints because without the friction produced by contact with others, we would not learn about the imperfections and defects of our character, and then adjust them.”
“What role can we say humility plays in having a good conduct?”

“St. Josemaria says Humble yourself: For all your learning, for all your fame, your eloquence and power, if you are not humble, you are worth nothing. You are humble not when you humble yourself, but when you are humbled by others and you bear it for Christ.”
“Yes. Humility is another good way to achieve interior peace. Christ tell us to learn from Him because He is gentle and humble in heart. It is good for us to ‘Humbly acknowledge our weaknesses so that, with the Apostle, we can say: ‘It is when I am weak that I am strong’.”
“We must also be willing and ready to deny ourselves of certain worldly things to be able to consistently be of good conduct. Renowned author Scott Hahn says: self-denial is not a mask for self-contempt, but the necessary means for achieving self-mastery; for self-mastery makes possible our self-giving and self-fulfillment.”