WHERE DOES GOOD AND EVIL LIVE?

In one of my more esoteric moments, when I try to wiggle past all the experiences and knowledge I have gained in a lifetime of trying to push through the limits of what I think my mental capacity is, like an astrophysicist who strains to see that last patch of something beyond what others have discovered, I thought about where my roots of choosing good or evil might reside. Here are some of my ideas that come from my Lectio Divina (Philippians 2:5) meditations that led to my contemplative questions and what follows.

I looked around me in my office and saw where I normally function, computer, desk, chairs, walls, color, nick-nacks, or trophies from past campaigns won. So, where do good or evil live? Are the atoms and gases that surround me bad? What does bad mean here? Is it just a semantic aberration of what my mind sees as good? But, when looking at physical reality, I don’t consciously (or as far as I know, unconsciously) think of things around me as bad or good. This reality of the physical universe can’t possibly house what is good or bad because, if I am the source of this duality, I am only one person in all that is, and I only live for 83.9 years (so far).

There must be a source of what I perceive to be good or bad outside of me in the rest of reality. If this is true, I reasoned, then butterflies and bumble bees can’t contain evil or good, yet I perceive that good and what I consider evil comes from my knowing about it and placing a value on behaviors that are authentic to me or aberrations of conduct.

Yet, I am not you and you are not me. Each person has within themselves what I observe to be the ability to choose freely (with or without constraints from a third party). I see that butterflies are not the same as humans, although we both exist. Our levels of complexity and consciousness differ vastly, but we are all part of that continuum of reality moving forward toward an undefined point in the future. The difference of living things divides itself into two categories, humans, and everything else.

Here are some lightning thoughts about good and evil. In a reformed moment of making my blogs shorter, I offer you the following.

• Human nature and physical nature are essentially good.
• Human nature, according to the Genesis commentary on what it means to be human, suggests that it is not God who created or sustained evil, but the unpredictable effects of original sin, or as Scripture puts it, “through one man, sin entered the world…and all of sinned.”
• Good or evil, in terms of our choices to become more human, comes from within each of us individually.
• We have reason and the ability to choose good or evil. Only humans possess this trait.
• What makes us wrong is not our wounded nature, which makes us bad, but choosing the wrong thing to fulfill us.
• We can choose what is easy or what is right. B.F. Skiinner’s operant condition got it right, our human nature chooses what does not give us pain or cause us discomfort.
• The problem comes when to be Catholic at our deepest level, we have to die to ourselves or choose what is right versus what our human inclinations and emotions tell us is good for us. This is the way of the cross.
• To reach the next level of our evolution as humans, I suggest that we die to the very things our minds and the world’s values say make us fulfilled.
• This last phase of our movement of complexity and consciousness is an individual choice, not an automatic consequence of natural selection.
• God, being the source of all life, like a good Father, wants those who so choose to have the truth, not clouded by human corruption, and so give us the energy through Christ to be adopted sons and daughters of the Father and heirs to that last phase of human evolution.
• We have reason and the ability to choose for a reason. It is so that each individual can say YES to the truth, which does not come from humans but from the energy of God.
• I access this through the Catholic Church when I voluntarily place myself in the presence of that energy and say, “Be it done unto me, according to your Word.”
• Lay Cistercian spirituality provides me with a structured and focused way to daily grow in Christ (capacitas dei) and convert my false self to my true self (conversio morae).
• Good comes from God. As St. Benedict says in Chapter 4 of the Rule, “Place your hope in God alone, If you notice something good in yourself, give credit to God, but be certain that the evil you do is always yours to acknowledge.“(RB 4:41-43)
• My problem comes when I hold onto or horde those things that I think make me entertained and physically pleasurable when they are actually death to my life in the spirit. “The wages of sin is death.”
• If I want love to conquer hatred, I must put it there. I can put it there because of the energy of Christ through the Holy Spirit that allows my daily conversion.
• Because of the effects of original sin, even if I choose Christ as my center each day, it is a struggle to keep my focus on the way, what is accurate, and lead a life that leads to Life Eternal, my heritage as a human being.

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