Our People

For the past few weeks of your course you have been considering some of the building blocks of Christian moral life. You have, I hope, come to see that it is not just a lot of hard-to-live rules which came down from some mountain in Israel with Moses several thousand years ago or came through the internet in the latest papal address from Rome. It is about a vision of the human person: what it is to be fully alive, fully the people we are meant to be, all that we can be with the help of God’s grace and our good will. It is about what we are, what we do because of what we are, and what we become because of what we do. We are, in a sense, writing our autobiography with the decisions we make and the question is: what’s my story? What is the central character in my life-story like? Will that character be someone to be proud of by the time the story is finished?

 

Catholic morality, then, is not first and foremost about the moral rules, important though they are. It starts with the big picture, a vision of the human person, community, life together, with each other and with God. But big picture stuff can be a bit too big at times, a bit vague and unfocussed and unreal. Is the vision that God and his Church has for me realistic? Is the moral life I am asked to lead really possible for a mere mortal like me? Or is it an impossible ideal, noble, attractive but ultimately unattainable for most ordinary people? Is it really intended for saints only, while the economy class Christians can only be expected to stumble along with our repeated failures and moral compromises?

 

Undoubtedly Christian moral life is ‘ideal’ in some important senses. For one thing, it is often hard and sometimes very hard to decide what the right thing to do is. For another, once you know what you should do, it is often hard and sometimes very hard actually to do it. Both of these aspects of moral decision-making require a determined and life-long effort in the face of serious obstacles – both internal and external – and at times, personal failure.

 

But simply because it is hard to be fair, generous, honest, chaste or courageous does not mean we should settle for less. Being a good friend, student, spouse, employee or citizen is not an impossible and unrealisable ideal: the fact is, there are lots of good friends, students, spouses, employees or citizens out there. Even less is the effort to be a good friend etc. somehow optional. The vocation to goodness – what the Second Vatican Council called ‘the universal call to holiness’ - is just that: universal. So it is not an elective for the Christian, like a course I can either take or give a miss at uni. It is our life’s purpose, our meaning, our goal. Its what life’s all about. The commonsense of what it is to be a good guy (what academics call ‘the requirements of practical reasonableness’) like being kind to people and not directly hurting them, are basic to living a fully human life for any human being. Any additional demands that the Gospel makes of us Christians – to give and forgive, to share in Christ’s redemptive work, to follow our vocation, to participate in the Eucharist –are likewise fundamental to living a fully Christian life for any Christian.

 

If, then, Christian morality is not just some nebulous ideal attainable only by the Mother Teresas, it must also be the case that no one is expected to do what is impossible for them. God and moral reason never ask of anyone more than is possible for them. For some people there are some very real obstacles to living fully the good life: internal factors such as depression, neurosis, obsessions, bad habits and ignorance, and external factors such as a corrupt culture and various pressures from others.  These can limit how free and informed they are when they make their decisions. Put technically this means that there are factors which limit our responsibility (both culpability and merit) and qualify the degree to which an objectively right or wrong act is subjectively so (and thus sinful or meritorious). A pious cannibal who eats his enemies may very well not be sinning. He cannot be held morally responsible for anything that he cannot truly choose to do, either because it does not occur to him (doesn’t everyone eat their enemies?) or because it occurs to him but does not make sense to him (I know those weirdos, the Christians, who live on the other side of the mountain don’t eat their enemies, but that’s because they’re superstitious...), or because he can think of no way to even begin doing it (we’ve always eaten our enemies: how could you hope to change that?). Some of these obstacles can be overcome as we mature in life and faith; others will be much more intractable. And like it or not we live in a culture that is in many ways more corrupt than a cannibal culture. It can be very hard for us to see that things like having sex when and with whom you like, killing our unwanted babies, drinking ourselves stupid, lying and cheating in various ways, compromising our principles in order to get ahead and so on, are actually wrong. Even if we can see it, lots of people around us can’t.  And it can be hard to live out our best moral judgments.

 

On the other hand we shouldn’t keep making excuses for ourselves or those around us. The fact is that most of us could, if we tried, make a pretty good fist of it living a humanly and Christianly good life. Each of us, in our more honest moments, will be painfully aware of our own failures to live up to the demands of what was in fact morally possible for us and required of us at one time or another. All too often out of selfishness, laziness, a desire to be accepted or some other motive we are reluctant even to give morality a go: we hold back on really trying the Christian thing because Christian life can seem so unsettling, so challenging, so unpopular.

 

Of course the kinds of young people who come faithfully to a Catholic Youth Leadership Course like yourselves probably have long tried to give the Christian thing ago, and for all I know there are two hundred saints in this room already. But we all know that Christian living can be difficult – especially in a culture that is often not very supportive – and that you can’t go it alone. You can’t be a saint just by willing it. What are we to do when we face a really tough decision, one of those ones when, try as we may to puzzle out what is best to do, we ‘just can’t decide’? Maybe we feel that we’re “damned if I do and damned if I don’t”. Maybe we feel both options have such strong arguments going for them that I’m trapped in a tug-o-war. It might be one of the really big decisions in my life or in the life of someone I am in a position to influence. Should I try the priesthood or religious life? Should I get married and, if so, to whom? What’s the best career for me? How would I know? It might be a smaller decision. Should I go to my youth group or go out to a party with my friends? How should I spend that fifty dollars I’ve got in my wallet? Should I just go with the flow when my friends or people at work want me to do something that I’m uncomfortable about morally? Should I resist and make a martyr of myself or seem judgmental and ‘holier than thou’?

 

The voice of conscience

 

We have all been in situations where we have not been sure what is the right thing to do. Conscience is not some special voice that pops out of nowhere and gives us an easy answer in these situations. No, conscience is just the human mind thinking practically. Its job in these situations is to try to discover what is the truly right thing to do. Its not a ‘get out of gaol free card’ we can play to make an exception to the moral law for ourselves. Its not a fancy name for doing my own thing. Its not a tax-lawyer trying to find us a way around the regulations, trying to see how close to the wind we can sail without doing a really bad thing, a ‘mortal’ thing.

 

The question for the Christian conscience is not ‘Am I free to do as I please or do I have to abide by the moral law?’ but ‘Given that I am free, what, all things considered, is the best way for me to act?’ I want to suggest a few strategies for dealing with difficult moral dilemmas which you might use yourself or help others to use as young Christian leaders yourselves. I will use the following dilemma to illustrate some of these points.

 

Kylie and her best friend, Lisa, are into the raves and party circuit. Months ago they both tried ecstasy, the ‘hug drug’ that makes you like everybody and gives you energy to party. Everyone said it doesn’t mess up your head the way some other drugs do. In fact they say ‘disco biscuit’ helps with depression and low self-esteem, helps you connect better with others, turns a room full of strangers into new friends. But Lisa didn’t just try it one or twice. She seems to be hooked on it now. And its having some bad effects. When Lisa’s on it she can be hyper and doesn’t look after herself. Kylie has heard stories of people overheating at parties and baking their insides out. She worries about Lisa when she’s on ‘E’ or ‘X’. And when she’s off it  Lisa is nervy, fatigued, faint. Lately she’s been emotionally messy and might be trying harder drugs. Kylie fears it will cost Lisa the HSC mark she should be getting and could mess her up even more.

 

Kylie wonders if she should tell someone. She’s tried reasoning with Lisa about it but doesn’t get anywhere. Everyone knows you mustn’t ‘snitch’ on your friends. To tell on Lisa would be to betray her friendship and her trust. So Kylie is caught in a bind, “damned if I do, damned if l don’t”. She asks your confidential advice as Kylie’s youth group leader. Telling her to ‘follow her conscience’ would not be much help as her problem is that her conscience seems to be tugging her in all directions. Put simply: her conscience is confused.

 

Some religions and philosophies have little or nothing to say to Kylie in this situation. New age religions, for instance, mostly just tell us to be comfortable with our dilemmas whatever they are. Many modern isms like ‘do your own thing’ subjectivism and ‘follow you own lights’ liberalism are equally useless here. So is facile and cynical talk that right and wrong are all a matter of opinion’, ‘boring’, ‘uncool’, ‘for saints and dags only’ etc. But Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life, came among us to draw us to himself in this life and the next. He offered us a wisdom to live by and the grace to live it. So the natural law which he gave us as he created us and the Gospel law he gave us as he re-created us will have something to say to Kylie.

 

Here, then, are ten rules of thumb for Christian moral reasoning that you might use yourself and pass on to those you are with. Not, of course, that everyone will consider each of them discreetly and in this order, in every choice: rather this list suggests some of the steps involved in a difficult moral reasoning process, and some of the skills worth cultivating which will be in the background of good decisions.

 

1. Pray

 

We cannot live as Christians unless we give ourselves over to prayer (that great goodness getter), to meditation upon the Word of God (that great goodness guidebook) and to the sacraments (those great goodness engines). Only when we let God into our hearts and minds can we make really wise and sometimes heroic decisions and find it in us to follow them. Only then will we persevere when the going gets tough. Only then will we find consolation in trials and a new start in failure. As a great moral theologian named Bill May put it: “Jesus, our best and wisest friend, is the great ‘enabling factor’ of our moral lives, but he cannot help us if we do not let him do so.”

 

So in the face of moral difficulties the faithful Christian turns to God for wisdom. The virtues – habitual excellences of character such as prudence, which we need for sound decisionmaking – are given by nature and acquired by practice: but they can also be infused by God’s grace. So Christians participate in the sacramental life and worship of their community, and they engage in private prayer and contemplation, asking God for assistance in their moral reasoning as in the rest of life. For Catholics the process of examination of conscience and sacramental confession is an important part not only of dealing with the past but preparing for the future. So Kylie should, immediately and naturally, pray for wisdom and courage, and bring her fears for her friend to God in prayer and worship.

 

2. Contemplate

 

Secondly, Christians naturally turn to the sources of their faith – the Scriptures, the living Tradition of the Church, the best of our philosophical tradition, the experience of Christians down the ages and the authoritative voices among them, the lives of the saints, the Sacred Liturgy and so on – for their vision of ‘the good life’ and for more particular knowledge of moral right and wrong. We need to give time and energy, heart and mind, to this task of contemplation upon the greatest sources of wisdom. We must also seek to inform our consciences with sound moral principles derived from these sources and to form our consciences to apply such principles in accordance with their example. So Kylie must bring her dilemma to God in the teaching Church and seek wisdom there, rather than in teen magazines or her peers’ advice which may well sell her and Lisa short.

 

3. Take counsel

 

Thirdly, especially when faced with difficult moral dilemmas, Christians turn to those within their community whom they believe have a certain wisdom in these matters: they ‘take counsel’ from Church leaders and other wise people of faith. The Church is not just there to provide a ‘magisterium’ regarding natural and revealed moral principles and their applications. The imagination, skills, virtues and sensibilities required for moral reasoning can only be cultivated and practised within the context of a morally sound culture and community. This is one of the things that the Christian community attempts to provide for its members: exhortation, encouragement, support, healing, nurture, the wherewithal to live the Christian faith.

 

4. Identify all relevant facts, features, options

 

Fourthly, be careful to identify and give due weight to all the relevant facts, features and options. Sometimes moral dilemmas are the result of insufficient knowledge or understanding of the scientific, social or personal facts of the matter. Or they may represent a lack of sensitivity to the morally salient features of the situation. Or they are the result of our knowing but blocking out consideration of some crucial matter. Or we might fail to see that the choices are not only between X and Y: there might well be another possibility Z. Kylie, for instance, might be thinking that the only choices she has are between total silence and reporting her best friend to the police, when in fact there are various other options such as talking to a school counsellor or Lisa’s mother.

 

Why do we so often fail to see all the relevant features of a moral dilemma? Often, I suspect, it is because we are in the habit of seeing things in particular ways, or we are not sensitive or imaginative enough about the various aspects of situations or the ways of dealing with them, or we are under various pressures such as urgency, fear of making a mistake, pressure from others, and so on. Kylie, for instance, may be so thoroughly habituated to an ‘us’ against ‘them’ model of relations between the generations that she is failing to appreciate important facts about the situation, e.g. the real help which some adult intervention might well be able to provide for Lisa. She – we – must cultivate greater sensitivity and imagination if we are to see things right.

 

 

Next, consider carefully all the morally relevant features of the problem, the values at stake, and the real object of each option, that is, the intended goal and means. What am I really about in choosing to do this or that? Is this a good intention, one that seeks a genuine human good for myself or others and not merely self-gratification? Or does it involve some bad intention, one that directly attacks a human good? Are the end(s) and the means morally permissible? Sometimes we over-simplify or over-complicate our moral difficulties by failing to sort out carefully what is at issue.

 

 

What are the values at stake? Humility, piety, hopefulness, perseverance, prayerfulness, fairness, hospitality, forgiveness, compassion, equal respect, peacefulness – according to St Paul. It is always reasonable to pursue and never reasonable directly to attack such goods as life and health, friendship, work and play, beauty and truth, faith and morals, and so on. These are the things that make life worth living, what make us flourish as human beings.

 

Kylie, then, should know that what is at stake are life and health for Lisa and friendship with her. She knows she must do her best to serve and lead and care for her, in all humility and compassion. She knows she must pray for her and keep hoping for her and persevere even when her friend rejects her efforts to help.

 

 

A sixth aspect in moral reasoning is to ponder all the relevant moral norms and their application to the problem. St Paul identifies for us the most basic principle of morality: “avoid what is evil; strive after what is good”. He also has advice on how to pursue each of the basic human goods:

There are obviously negative norms – don’t do’s – as well, such as don’t hate, hurt, kill, blaspheme, lie, misuse our sexuality or friendships or resources or opportunities and so on. Sometimes such moral norms compete for our attention. But at other times apparent conflicts of responsibilities result from rivalry between a genuine moral absolute and one we mistakenly take to be an absolute, or from some attachment, promise, custom or law which we have inappropriately relativised or absolutized. Kylie’s particular moral conundrum is significantly shaped by what she imagines to be a moral absolute: that she must never tell on her friends. A deeper analysis of the basis of that norm (in friendship, loyalty, trust, compassion, confidentiality) might help her to see the limits to confidence-keeping and the real requirements of friendship. Consideration of all relevant moral norms may not immediately solve Kylie’s dilemma, but it may well exclude certain options such as abandoning her friend as ‘a lost cause’ or joining her along the path to self-destruction.

 

 

Next, consider whether each of the options, even if not excluded outright by some intrinsic consideration, will foreseeably have significant good effects and ill-effects. In such circumstances the action might still be permissible, even required. But I must ask myself: would it be good for me to seek or permit those effects on myself or others?

 

Here Kylie has, I think, a number of important considerations to take into account. First, the ‘reflexive’ effects of her choices: what will they make her, incline her towards in the future etc. She apparently fears that one course of action will make her into a snitch, a traitor, a police informant; better by her silence to keep herself trustworthy and a good friend. Or she might look at her situation differently: one course of action may make her a life-saver and true friend, the other a failed friend, someone who has abandoned another when they might easily have intervened. Either course might affect her moral personality for the future. Then there are the effects which her action or inaction might have on Lisa and on all those who love Lisa. Of course, she will not be equally responsible for all the effects of her actions: sometimes we rightly tolerate side-effects of our actions that we do not intend.

 

Kylie must therefore consider the effects of speaking to someone about Lisa’s problem and the effects of her not doing so. Side-effects like a loss of face, Lisa never trusting her again, her other friends finding out and no longer trusting her, the school or Lisa’s parents not responding as well as they might – may all reasonably weigh on her mind. But so should the effects of her doing nothing: Lisa’s continued spiral into drug-dependency, harder drugs, crime, self-destruction. There are, of course, no scales on which to balance up all these risks, no computer program to calculate them for her. But it is important that in making her decision that Kylie is sensitive to and realistic about all the effects of her action or inaction, especially the intended effects, but also the foreseeable but unintended ones. Again, some options may, in the circumstances, be ruled out as intrinsically immoral: they would amount to an attack on some person or some instance(s) of one or more basic human goods.

 

 

Assuming, therefore, that I am now contemplating only options which are not excluded outright because they are intrinsically immoral, or not excluded for other reasons such as their unjust effects on others: how am I to decide? One thing I might ask is: what would a virtuous person do in these circumstances? What would the wise person I admire do? A Christian would ask: what would Christ and the saints do? Like applying the do-unto-others rule, this requires a certain degree of moral imagination. Note, too, that the test is what the wise person would do ‘in the circumstances’, if they were in my shoes, if they had made the (reasonable) commitments I have made, were limited in the ways I am, and so on.

 

Kylie may not be inclined to compare herself to the Virgin Mary: a different Madonna may well be pinned up in her room at home! But one way or another she needs to appreciate that she is capable of more than she probably credits herself, that there are times in life when she like others will be called to a certain moral heroism, and that she may surprise herself (and inspire others) by making the hard but good choice. If the saints are too distant, perhaps she might consider some unsung saint she respects, some wise person she knows – the old lady next door, dear old Uncle Bob, or even (dare I say) one of her parents or teachers or her youth group leader. She might ask herself what they would do in her situation.

 

 

Next we  might ask: how well does each option under consideration fit with my (reasonable) long-term goals, my commitments, plans, sense of vocation? If I were to review two versions of my life-story, one with each of the options under consideration, which would be more coherent with my nobler long-term goals, the kind of life-story I want to write with my life, the kind of character I want to be in that story?

 

Once again, Kylie may not be very far advanced as yet along the way to deciding what she wants to make of her life, but there will already be the commitment of faith, hope and love to her God, her friends, her family, her music and whatever. And here, once again, there is a space for her to consider the fit of the particular jig-saw pieces she is contemplating choosing for the jig-saw of her life.

 

 

At this stage moral reasoning may have taken Kylie (and anyone else) about as far as it is likely to lead. There is not a single, clear-cut, right answer to every moral dilemma, even after doing the ‘hard thinking’ about which options are morally permitted and which ones are excluded. In this case discernment of feelings may be required.

 

Despite my having suggested tonight that objective and rational morality is very important, I would not want to give the impression that morality is purely a ‘head trip’ from which the ‘heart’ is excluded. On the contrary, our emotions are indispensable in the moral discernment process. We must consider carefully the feelings, motivations, attractions and repulsions of the various options before us. If my motives are mixed, what are my principal motives? Are these motives worthy ones? Are they too narrow? Which option under consideration seems to me more likely to satisfy and fulfil me at an emotional level? Which one is more likely to make me ashamed and remorseful? How well do the various options comport with and express the best aspects of my personality?

 

Feelings are important in motivating, appreciating, assessing and acting. But they can also distort our judgment by making us impulsive, inclined to seek unreasonable sensual gratification, prejudiced against or partial towards certain people, unresponsive to certain goods for which one should have a greater affection, unimaginative or disinclined to tread unfamiliar paths. In our story Kylie is significantly affected by perfectly understandable love and fear, much of it well-founded, some of it possibly distorting. We must exercise a certain caution and self-criticism even as we take our emotions seriously.

 

 

The ten aspects of moral decisionmaking that I have identified tonight are all for purpose only: so that we may decide and act. There is no point in endlessly examining our options and the upsides and downsides and taking advice and looking for signs: the time comes to choose. There are people who decide to enter the religious order of perpetual discerners: that is, those who are paralysed by indecision and think that talking and agonising is as good as deciding. It is not. Our conscience – the mind thinking practically – is there so that we can act practically. And not deciding, whether we realize it or not, is in fact deciding: it is deciding for the status quo, for things staying as they are in my life, for not moving ahead. After doing my best at moral reasoning and discernment, I may reasonably consider right that which seems to me most likely to be so: I must follow the best judgment of my informed and formed Christian conscience.

 

St Thomas Aquinas was once asked whether the Christian life is harder or easier than that of other religions. He immediately answered with Jesus’ words: “my yoke is easy, my burden light”. But Tom was too commonsense, too aware of human reality not to acknowledge that in one sense it is more difficult, more demanding, for the Christian Gospel invites nothing less than perfection. Yet for Christians this does not seem so impossible: they know the Gospel to be a real pattern for living the good life, a life that, whatever hardships it involves, will ensure our ultimate happiness; they know the Saints to be proof of the possibility of living such a life, a life in which they are transparent with grace and in which God’s kingdom comes and his will is done.

 

St Thomas was convinced that God never asks the impossible of anyone. Life in Christ is, he said, made easier, light, joyful by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, that life of grace which divinises us. Living ‘the new law’ authentically IS possible. For the moral life is made easier by the clear and authoritative guidance of the Church, by the development of virtues within the Christian community, and by the confidence in divine mercy, especially in the ordinary means of grace through Scriptures and the sacraments. Sanctity, he insisted, is worth giving a go and as the many of the saints testify, it is possible!