Homily

At the beginning of chapter 9 of St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, Paul asks the question “Am I not free?” And then he goes on to list all of the rights that are available to him, but he does not use them. Why does he not use them? Because he chooses not to use them. He is free.

Freedom, of course, the power to act or not act, to do this thing or that thing. The Catechism says, “By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness. Freedom reaches perfection when it is directed toward God, our beatitude.” We have free will and we are always in the position of being able to choose, using that free will, between good and evil. That is what basic human freedom is all about. It is not, as many people think, about the ability to do whatever one wishes to do. That’s why we have laws. Good laws help to guide us in choosing the good and if we break those laws, we may run the risk of losing our physical freedom in a jail cell.

We live in strange times. Times where there are a fair number of people who believe that their emotions are reasonable and acceptable guides to knowing what is true, good and desirable. The fact that people can believe that the word “reasonable” can be used in connection with emotions shows the problem. If there is one thing that we can be sure of, it is that our emotions do not spring out of our rational faculty, they are not the product of our thinking powers. For example, try to make yourself feel very happy that I am preaching right now. Very happy. Did it work? You can’t just force your emotions into being. They do not come from acts of our will. If emotions are not based in our power to reason does that mean they are always unreasonable? Not necessarily. When a relative dies I may feel sad. When the priest stops preaching I may feel happy. Are these reasonable emotions, reasonable responses? Yes, they are. But that does not mean they begin or come from our reasoning. They simply coincide or go along with the situation we are in and they do so in a reasonable way. But we also know there are times when we feel sad when we should be happy, or frightened when we should be at peace, because there is not always rhyme or reason when it comes to our feelings.

Our emotions can be very powerful, and strangely enough, it seems the negative and harmful emotions can be the most powerful and long-lasting. Rage, anger, frustration, hatred and fear are good examples. We can fall into these fairly quickly and easily and sometimes they can last for long periods of time, or they keep coming back, again and again because of some situation or some memory, and we may not even know why they are so powerful. Notice which kinds of emotions usually have the most force and the greatest staying power. How often do you think, “I just can’t get over this feeling of happiness, it just keeps coming back to me again and again and again.”? Or how about, “The doctor wants to run some more tests, and every time I think about it a great feeling of peace seems to get a hold of me.” It seems that negative feelings tend to hold us more powerfully and more easily than positive ones.

But emotions are just emotions and we do not choose them freely. They just come to us. Sometimes they are helpful, sometimes they are not, and sometimes they are dangerous to us, for other people, and for our Christian life and even our salvation. Emotions often push us to act this way or that way, or to think this way or that way. When someone acts with great passion we may say “He’s lost his mind” because he is not acting in reason, but by emotion. Still, most of the time we are not acting in some out of control fashion fueled by our feelings (unless we are driving on I-5). Yet we know that we let our emotions get the better of us at times. Instead of using reason we let our feelings push us around and prompt us to say this, and do that, and think like this. When we’re angry we lash out, when we’re afraid we lose hope, when we’re sad we wallow in it—these are some of the ways we let our feelings rule us. Our emotions can be very strong, very persistent and very persuasive, but my dear friends we should never, ever obey them, but rather we should use our God-given freedom to think and choose what is good and avoid what is evil. We have free will, and we should never give that free will over to our emotional states. We may not always be able to control them, but we should never, ever allow them to control us.

This is a basic element of our human freedom: we are always free to choose the good, no matter what our feelings tells us. We are free to choose to live in hope, no matter what fears cross our minds. We are free to act in love, even when we may feel hatred and loathing. We are free to deny ourselves even when greedy thoughts want us to take, and we are free to hold back even when we feel like lashing out. We are free to choose forgiveness over revenge, and free to seek peace of mind rather than to allow chaos to rule in our heads. We cannot necessarily control our emotions, but we should never, ever allow them to control us. We need freedom. We need that kind of freedom. But how to live more freely?

A few suggestions:

(1) Let us pay more attention to the difference between our emotional thoughts and our rational thoughts. Don’t let them become confused.

(2) It may not be possible to get rid of our emotional thoughts, but take control by telling them to “shut up and stop it.” And do this as many times as you need to do it. Fight yourself for your freedom.

(3) When a bad emotion grabs you, stop to pray for a minute. Ask the Lord’s help. Say the “Our Father.” A moment of prayer to allow the grace of God to enter can save you from bad actions, and even weaken the power of bad thoughts.

(4) Let us always choose to live in freedom, as much as we possibly can. Don’t let our feelings push us around, weigh us down and make our choices. Instead let us choose to be free in Christ. Free to choose the good for ourselves and for others, until that day we enjoy perfect freedom