The fellow I was talking to at the bar said he occasionally watched pornography the way you’d say you sometimes liked to watch hockey or old movies. It was apparently a kind of recreation for him.
Later I thought of the stories I’d heard, from priests and others, of men whose addiction makes them feel such shame they keep away from the Church, away from the place they can find forgiveness and encouragement to try again — and again, and again, as many times as needed. They defeat themselves.
But theirs is just a dramatic example of what we all can feel, if we’re really paying attention. We fail so much at so many things that we can easily feel we might as well give up.
I know a diabetic who can’t stop eating sugar because it makes her feel better, and people who keep drinking too much even though they put on pounds and harm their livers, and people who can’t stop buying things they don’t need, and people who try not to get angry at others, or judge them, or gossip about them, but keep doing it even after they hurt people they love. I know how intractable some of my own sins have proven to be.
I keep going back to St. Paul’s confession that he keeps doing the things he shouldn’t do and not doing the things he should (Rom 7:15). I think it’s one of the most comforting passages in Scripture, but also — again, looking at myself — a dangerous one.
We do need to try hard
The great apostle admitting his continual failures can feel like an excuse. If he failed so often, I certainly will. He was St. Paul! I’m just me. No one can expect me to do as well as the Apostle.
When I was a younger and more idealistic Christian, people pointed to those words of the apostle trying to comfort and encourage me. Slow and steady wins the race was the idea. What I drew from that was — and I think some of them meant this — I didn’t need to try so hard.
Slow and steady may win the spiritual as well as other races, but there’s slow and there’s slow.
There’s slow as in recognizing that you’re going to fall and stumble and occasionally run backwards, and slow as in feeling you can take your time and retrace your steps once in a while to enjoy something on the path behind you, as long as over time you make a little progress.
It’s like telling a sprinter that he doesn’t need to train all the time, that he can eat what he likes when he feels like it, as long as he works out and eats well most of the time. He will lose the big race, if he even qualifies to run it.
That idea encourages spiritual inattention and insouciance, and they can lead to our giving up just as much as being too hard on ourselves can. We’re not fanatics but we’re doing our best, we tell ourselves, and if that’s not good enough, why bother trying so hard? God will be happy with us even if we’re slacking.
But we also need to accept our failings
I’m sure some people saw a youthful hardness in me they needed to correct, and used St. Paul’s confession as a way to do that. Because there’s trying hard and there’s trying hard.
There’s trying hard as in working at something as hard as you can while recognizing that you’ll fail, and probably fail a lot, and there’s trying hard as in holding yourself to impossible standards of success, and worse, holding other people to the same standards. I was doing the second.
The first is like telling a marathoner at the limit of his abilities that he can rest on the curb for half an hour and then go on, that he’s not trying to come in first, because he won’t, but he does need to get to the finish line before sundown.
The second is like ordering the marathoner to keep going, to push himself till he drops, because he must come in first if he can, even though he can’t, and telling him that if he’s going to rest on the curb he might as well quit. And that he must tell all the other runners with him way back in the pack to run the same way. Real runners don’t stop.
The Church says: You need help, help not to do too little or too much, not to be too casual or too harsh, to accept your failings and yet keep trying to do better. And through the sacraments, she provides a way to live like that. Slow and steady does win the race.
