Self-mastery

WE have to be more aware of this need of ours. While we normally like to be spontaneous in our behavior, we sooner or later realize that spontaneity alone, without self-mastery, can be dangerous. That would be like an energy without direction.

You see, we are a very complex creature, with many layers of awareness and tendencies, with conflicting forces and competing impulses, due to the many different parts, aspects and stages of our life.

We are at once body and soul, material and spiritual, individual and social, private and public, local and global, in time and outside of it, etc. Each aspect has its peculiar properties that need to be integrated with those of the other aspects.

We are subject to different times and places, historical and cultural conditionings, that certainly exert some influences on us, often in very subtle but effective ways.

Besides, our Christian faith teaches us about our sinful origin and wounded nature that would make our life more complicated and exciting, and our need to integrate things properly more challenging.

“Breaking the relation of communion with God causes a rupture in the internal unity of the human person, in the relations of communion between man and woman and of the harmonious relations between mankind and other creatures,” (29) the Compendium of the Church’s Social Doctrine explains.

If there’s no conscious and well-thought-out effort at self-mastery, we’ll soon find out we are terribly lost, we can unwittingly harm ourselves and others. We’ll be adrift in some ocean not knowing where we would be heading. We’d be ill-prepared to face our increasingly complex world.

There are different forces, both inside and outside us, that tend to dominate us in their own selfish terms without due regard to what is truly good to us, according to an objective truth about man or to any reference to the common good.

What worsens this is the modern attitude that denies there’s such thing as an objective truth about man. The truth about man, they say, will always be changing and shifting. Nothing can be held absolute and permanent. And so what our Christian faith tells us about ourselves is thrown out of the window.

Thus, our mind can go one way, while the heart can go the other. Our speech can just be some mindless chatter, rid of balance and direction. Bad manners, instead of refinement and delicacy, prevail. There is chaos instead of peace and order.

Sometimes, our appearance has nothing to do with what is inside us. Hypocrisy and deception get systematically cultivated, undermining our integrity. And these discrepancies and anomalies can go on endlessly.

Then you have the hormones and the urges that can just pop up anytime, urgently needing discipline. The young ones are most vulnerable to these, often leading them to obsessions and addictions, to harmful practices and vices.

If we consider our environment just a little, we’ll realize we are constantly teased and titillated, often arousing the body while killing the spirit. We easily become victims of the so-called freedom of expression or artistic rights that often go their own selfish and shallow ways.

This explains why we have to struggle against laziness, complacency, disorder, proneness to discouragement, imprudence. There’s also the propensity to lack focus and determination in our activities, to be dominated by changing moods.

We should not be surprised therefore that given this state of affairs, we often find ourselves in some quarrels, both small and big, from petty feuds with neighbors to devastating wars between countries.

We have to understand that underlying the big conflicts we have, for example, in politics is this often ignored problem in the personal level where self-mastery is missing.

There has to be a continuing awareness of this need, starting in the personal level and always reinforced by the family, community, the Church, schools, etc. Plans and strategies to attain or improve in it should be initiated and pursued.

We need to foster greater self-knowledge among ourselves. Networks of helping others cope with their personal difficulties should be put in place. If we put our mind and heart into this, we will realize this ideal is quite feasible. It’s not quixotic.

Together with the appropriate human means, the spiritual and supernatural
means should never be neglected. These are prayer, sacrifices, sacraments, ascetical struggle, doctrinal formation, spiritual direction, etc. These are indispensable.