Free from passions. Free from sin.

Last week I mentioned that Christian freedom is freedom from sin.  I must admit, I left that a little vague, and if I’m honest, it’s because I really don’t know what “freedom from sin” means. Fortunately, I might have just figured out where some small part of it lies: freedom from passions.  That may not sound like me—I’m a passionate guy, after all—but listen to this story, and then please feel free to attempt to remove the log in my eye. 

Here it was, 2:30 am, and I’m reading another fantasy novel despite my rapidly approaching alarm. (The book was City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, if anyone’s interested).  It occurred to me I had already fallen for half the guys in the book. In my defense, they were basically half-angels and one is actually gay—a rarity in fantasy novels.  However, this happens so often as to be cliché: I start a book, there’s an interesting guy, I develop a crush on yet another guy who’s out of reach, and I can’t stop reading.  It doesn’t matter or 3 whether it’s 3 am and I have to catch a train back from Chicago early the next morning, or it’s the airplane flight during which I promised myself I would finish this post.  I somehow turn page after page, helpless . 

Sadly, the need to read is not the aesthetical appreciation of a burgeoning literary connoisseur.  It’s not even yearning for the magic in them, or a world where you can fight flesh-and-blood demons.  Since the interesting guy in them tends to be the one who somehow becomes the romantic interest of someone or another, I tell myself that I’m experiencing love vicariously because of my remarkably one-sided love life.  But a need wells up in me while I’m reading the book—an appetite—and when the book is over, instead of feeling satisfied, I’m only left wanting more.

Just before reading that fantasy novel, I had just read a passage by St. John of the Cross: “Appetites...resemble little children, restless and hard to please, always whining to their mother for this thing or that, and never satisfied” (The Ascent of Mount Caramel I.6.6).  When the yearning—the appetite—came upon me while reading this book, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by its yoke, and I was moved to say a simple prayer—“Free me, Lord. Release me from this passion.”

This was an odd prayer for me.  With so much of the rest of the world, I’ll admit that I’ve never really been able to understand the detachment teaching so many religions are so wrapped up in. I throw myself into everything I do whole-heartedly. I've always resonated with this quote from my favorite Harry Potter fanfic (yes, I went there, and sadly this work is no longer available on the internet.):

“Draco didn’t waste moments, Draco threw himself into them.  Draco’s enmity towards him had been wholehearted because Draco knew no other way to be.  Draco was utterly appalling or utterly amusing, but he was utterly something, because there was always passion there.”

I’ve always seen detachment as the opposite of passion.  Cold. Aloof. Almost inhuman.  I never understood what was different between detachment and apathy, and, after all, God loves us personally, doesn’t he?  How can He love personally and detached simultaneously?

But suddenly I understood the need.  Isaiah’s words, “He will turn to the right and be hungry, and eat toward the left and not be filled” (9:20) seemed to be the hidden text behind Cassandra Clare’s characters.

I realized I am a slave to that passion—that appetite for human companionship—and I long to be free of this never-ending need.  I know it won’t end with a boyfriend, husband.  And ignore the whole gay thing—it’d be the same thing if tomorrow I woke up straight and married the perfect girl.  As long as I need human love, as long as I am consumed with an appetite for it, I’ll never be able to love a human. I’ll never actually be complete.  “Man...cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes 24).

And appetites and passions are different from being passionate about things.  It is attachment that is the opposite from detachment, and we know that being attached to things of this world will never truly satisfy.  We are in this world, not of it.

Perhaps the passion that ensnares you isn’t reading about interesting guys, or any other human companionship.  It could be money, prestige, “success.”   But I go back to Dean Wells’ point that I mention in my first post, if we can’t love, then we can never truly find ourselves.  We can’t give a sincere gift of ourselves; we hold something back—our appetites demand it.  And as we hold what we desire for ourselves back (often without even realizing it), we poison our love, and we tell ourselves the physical acts that are the inevitable result are somehow a reflection of something holy, when really they are the outward sign of inward disorder.

So, my friends, I may not know what freedom from sin is.  I know it’s not simple, but I know that the road starts with freedom from our appetites. So, my brothers and sisters, in the words of the ancient desert fathers of our faith—“flee.”  Flee from worldly appetites.  Flee to Christ, and Christ will set you free. 

“And we must unite inside her, or we'll crumble from within.”

(Spoiler alert: if you have neither read the Harry Potter series nor seen the movies, please immediately remedy that, and then come back and read this post.)

When I first got the news, I’ll admit I was a bit unsure of how to take it.  I had gone onto Pottermore, taken a JK Rowling-approved house-sorting quiz, and the results came up Slytherin. 

Sure, it seems utterly superfluous, but still—if only there had been a real sorting hat!  I could have pulled a Potter and begged, “Anything but Slytherin, anything but Slytherin!” The hat would have hemmed and hawed and said, “Well, if you’re sure, better be GRIFFYNDOR!”  and all of you would have been so proud to be friends with me.  After all, choosing not to be a Slytherin is a Potter-endorsed way to show how we carefully gather all the information and give others the benefit of the doubt before passing judgment.

Wait—he begged not to be in Slytherin based on a single rumor he heard from a person he just met? 

Oh. 

Well if Potter neglected to charitably portray his rival house throughout his story, allow a new member of the House try to rectify matters.

The Ravenclaw Eagle

The way I understand it, each house is characterized by certain traits.  Ravenclaw is marked by intelligence and ambition.  If we Catholicize Ravenclaw, I think St. Thomas Aquinas would have found his home here. This Dominican Scholastic theologian was dedicated to reasoning his way to uncovering the mysteries of God, and attempted a summation and defense of all the Church’s teaching in his never-completed Summa Theologica.

The Hufflepuff Badger

Hufflepuff is marked by compassion and loyalty, and I think that if she found herself in Potter’s world, Mother Theresa would have joined this one.  The tiny nun dedicated her life to service of the poor and emptied herself past the point it hurt in service to them, even when no longer feeling the comfort of Christ’s immediate presence.

The Gryffindor Lion

 It’s no mistake I said the hat would have sorted me into Gryffindor if I had permitted myself a snap judgment against my house.  When I finished 8^th grade, one of my artistically-inclined best friends drew each of our friend group a fantastical creature (we are admitted fantasy-addicts).  For me, she chose a Griffin: partially characterizing it in her letter of explanation as “brave, stubborn, compassionate, and obsessed with truth to a fault [i.e. idealistic].”  I think St. Joan of Arc was a Gryffindor at heart.  A peasant from Domrémy, she takes directions she hears from Sts. Michael, Margaret, and Catherine all the way to the French prince, convincing him to give her an army and eventually breaking the English siege of Orléans in her conspicuous white armor—persevering in her beliefs even through being burned at the stake for heresy after being captured.  

The Slytherin Snake

Slytherin is complex, and you probably have a knee-jerk reaction to hate and fear it, so bear with me while I give my house a bit of discussion. My admittance letter from Prefect Gemma Farley focused on how fiercely loyal Slytherins are to each other.  And of course they’re ambitious, but that means they’re reaching for some ideal.  It must be admitted Slytherins don’t always choose the best ideals—in the case of Tom Riddle it was power and eternal life.  However, Salazar Slytherin sought the seeds of greatness in his students, and there are many ways to be great—those that are holy, and those that aren’t.

I think most all of us at Duke have ambition.  Otherwise, instead of selfishly taking up all of our time working for good grades and doing all the extracurriculars and SATs, SAT II’s, etc. in high school, we’d have been in soup kitchens actually helping people.  And, sure ambition out of hand can easily lead to Voldemorts, but that’s why which why the Church gives us the litany of humility: perhaps the most important  and difficult prayer for any student at Duke.  But ambition isn’t intrinsically prideful or against God, so long as we keep in mind what Sam Wells had to say in my first blog post. Would it be wrong to have the ambition to become a saint—something we’re all called to do.

I think St. Ignatius would be a Slytherin (and his Feast day is conveniently on my—and Potter’s and Longbottom’s—birthday). His Autobiography tells us how he was from an aristocratic family who read of Jesus and the saints when convalescing from a war injury, which transformed his ambitions from having a glorious military career and successfully wooing a pretty lady to doing great deeds for God.  He transformed this ambition ad majorem Dei gloriam to the Order he founded: the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), who, with their fourth vow of obedience to the Pope (i.e. House loyalty), spread throughout the world.  It eventually became so influential that the threatened monarchs of Europe pressured the Pope to have the Order suppressed, though even this did not last forever.

All four paradigms represented by Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Gryfindor, and Slytherin have their place in the Church–each has its representative saint, after all.  However, each paradigm has its own pitfalls—after all, even Peter “was given a thorn in [his] flesh.”   Individual service is necessary, but as the Church’s social teachings instruct us—ministering to the poor without also planning for institutional change will leave the poor with plenty of warm fuzzies, but those that will fade with the dawn of a new day and the return of the same problems.  The Summa is perhaps one of the greatest single intellectual masterpieces of all of Christendom...that almost no one bothers to read anymore, and which most Catholics would have trouble applying to their life.  Fighting for the Church has been blessed by Popes for millennia, but without exploring the wider consequences of war and without careful considerations of all sides of the issue, we have the Crusades.  And what can go wrong with ambition dedicated to an ideal within an environment of loyalty and obedience, if it is untempered by love and compassion?  Why, welcome, most esteemed High Inquisitor.

It takes all types to make a Church.  We are all one Body, and each one of us complements the others in serving Christ our head.  In doing this, we must remember last words of the sorting hat we hear in the series, as he finishes describing the differences of the houses:

“And we must unite inside her,
or we'll crumble from within.”

For, “the whole body, being fitted together and held together by what every joint supplies causes the growth of the body for building up of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:16).