Examine yourself about your inclinations. Everyone has his own. For it counts for nothing to examine particular actions if we do not make ourselves aware of roots restricting us that we have to take pains with first. If you are naturally animated, you have to work at becoming cool, offering to God the injuries that your primary nature has caused you. If you are free, work at restraining yourself. If you are too gloomy and too quiet, try hard to speak at the right time in the right place and a little more than others. On the other hand, if you feel an inclination to speak and to give your opinion freely about everything, as happens very easily to someone with a straightforward temperament, to a young man, to a keen disposition, to someone born into the upper classes, use the presence of these strains and this secret violence to help you dominate your speech and learn to be silent.
Remember that the Son of God said that we will have to answer for the least idle word. But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. It is not easy to imagine how far this idleness extends, there being nothing except usefulness or honesty in speech which prevents it from being idle. This truth relates directly to faith and kindheartedness without which there is nothing according to our faith that is useful and honest.
I find that the main warnings of Scripture concerning habits are about controlling the tongue, an example would be the epistle of Saint James. If any man among you seem to be religious and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. But there are so many other examples that you could make a volume out of them. And I often admired why the Holy Spirit has taken so great care to repeat these warnings. I see the main reason for it Paradise where the tongue was the main cause for the fall of Eve and then Adam. It is easily believable as the cause if we know that all the moral instruction of Scripture has the purpose of ruining the capital sins which appeared in the fall of Adam and that the devil wanted to make come alive again by tempting Jesus Christ. By his admirable answers, he taught us to learn to keep this rule of Saint Paul: we speak before God in Christ.
This warning is followed by another warning concerning another vice which, relating both to the eyes and to the tongue, depends more on the tongue than on the eyes. Saint Augustine learned it from Scripture and calls it by the name of curiosity. He names it the second general root of concupiscence which extends to all things and which among those who make a profession of studying extends more to science and to the desire of knowing a great deal than to other objects which are without a clear shape and are more dangerous in appearance although their effects are less so.
We have difficulty controlling the movements and the revolts of the flesh and we are unaware that the only way to control an inferior part is to keep in a good state a superior. For the natural disorder of man nourishes and maintains itself by the same causes that produced it. But faith teaches us that the disorder of our reason disordered our senses. Thus all our evil came from the head, by the two parts that dwell there, reason and the tongue. Whoever wishes to cure all the rest has only to put into good order his tongue and his reason, which he can do by preventing himself from being curious and a talker and someone always reasoning.
There is no other rule more universal. It includes all the rest. It is the reason why Saint Augustine complains of being obligated because of his duties as a bishop to speak about the subject of God in a church. He does it so often that I put together once a notebook where were contained the complaints he made of not being able to be like Mary Magdalene who used to listen in silence to the word of God at the feet of Our Lord. One can find not a single word she said after her conversion except one at the death of her brother. Likewise one can not read either in the gospel any word either of Saint Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary, or of Mary herself after the mysterious rebuff she received at Cana.
That caused this saintly doctor to say that there is not a greater interior humility, which is the source of all exterior humility, than to listen to others speak with joy.
This made me desire, and I still have this passion, to be able to purge the faults that I committed even when speaking about God by a silence of nine months like Zachary. And if I might have been so happy to have found someone who would have given me early this warning about the tongue, I would have followed it as an oracle provided that I would have had then the sentiment I have now of truth and of the grace of God.
What I did not do early in life I mean to repair by attaching myself with affection and kindheartedness to someone who, by the unity that charity causes between two persons, gives me the means by the reformation of his tongue to satisfy God and to give God the honor that I took from him by my failings. It is only that that impels me to speak about it in this way without knowing up to what point your virtue will go because of it. And I do not know either if God granted you a bias by his grace so that you avoided in your youth the excess that I complain about and that I committed by curiosity, by talking, by reasoning and by free judgment regarding truth and knowledge.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.
The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
amazon.com/author/graceisall
amazon.com/author/graceisall
No comments:
Post a Comment