Trapped in the senses

ON the heels of the latest massacre of little school children in Newton, Connecticut, is the raging debate about gun control. One item that caught my attention was that of the pro-gun advocate, Wayne Lapierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association.

He accused Hollywood, video games, music, the courts and the media of much of the culture of violence that seems to be engulfing American society in general. My spontaneous reaction was to agree with him.

Whenever I take a boat in my occasional trips to the islands, I end up having a terrible time because I cannot help but watch at least a little of the movies and hear the music shown and played in the vessels.

They all seem to swing between two possibilities only—violence and sex, and of course, a dam burst of inanities, senselessness and ridiculous plots and storylines that sometimes lead me to wonder whether the world has really gone crazy.

The little consolation I get is that many of the co-passengers appear not to be paying much attention to these movies. I only hear their reactions when the scene on the screen is comical. Otherwise, like me they seem to avoid looking at them.

But I worry about those who find these films and music interesting. And these are mostly the young people.

What do you think would happen if every day you get a heavy dose of sex and violence around? I would say that no matter how we consider ourselves as mature enough to be able to distinguish between real life and fiction, sooner or later we will be affected by what we see and hear often around us.

These days, there are many people whom I considered trapped in the world of the senses, ruled mainly by their instincts and emotions, and easily vulnerable to mere impulses of the flesh and the usually improperly grounded worldly values and ways.

I don’t refer much to those who are already emotionally or mentally disturbed and even sick. I refer more to the so-called normal people, who can manage to behave well in a civil way when in the open, but cannot regulate their wild instincts and emotions when they are hidden and solitary.

Their imagination can run amuck. The direction of their thoughts and feelings can really go berserk. And since these are mainly hidden, then they usually go unchecked and are allowed to fester.

This is when people can go spiritually lukewarm, losing interest in prayer, in keeping the effort to be in God’s presence, and in making sacrifices which are an indispensable ingredient of any follower of Christ.

This is when people start making compromises with evil, starting with little ones like the venial sins and worsening as time passes by, until big and horrendous crimes and other malicious acts can be done with hardly any pangs of conscience.

Sex is trivialized. Sacredness of life, of marriage, of fidelity and the other virtues ebb away like the sea in low tide. Since this condition usually prevails where the environment is not only spiritually lukewarm but also bombarded with sex and violence, then immoralities become social norms and can even be made into laws.

We need to be freed from the trap of our senses and merely worldly values, and thus some extraordinary measures would have to be used from time to time. The lives of saints show us this.

It is said that to preserve their purity, St. Francis of Assisi rolled on the snow, St. Benedict threw himself into a thorn bush, St. Bernard plunged into an icy pond. Many of us are averse to this idea, given our current culture, but measures like these are but the most logical thing to do to effectively counter the enemies ranged against us.

We also need to fill our mind with things of God. We should not just be contented with being naturally good, or good according to human standards, or to merely social and legal norms.

Christ himself said that “unless your justice abounds more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 5,20)

We need to make a conscious and abiding effort to be God’s presence and to make our relationship and working relationship of love.

Outside of these, we cannot expect to be freed from the grip of the sensual and the material. Outside of these, we will always remain vulnerable to the impulses of the flesh and the erratic ways of the world.