Turn the Stream to its True Channel
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| (Found here) |
. . . This, I think, is what St. Paul means when he says, ‘As you have yielded your members to serve uncleanness, and iniquity, unto iniquity; so now yield your members to serve justice, unto sanctification.’ And again, ‘Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body; . . . neither yield ye your members as instruments of iniquity unto sin, but present yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of justice unto God.’
The picture before his mind is a vivid one. He sees the soul as the servant of sin and using all its members, faculties, and senses in the service of sin, and increasing thus the sway of sin — eye, ear, hand, heart, and imagination working for sin, in its service, and dragging the soul down.
Well, St. Paul says, I do not ask you to give up the use of one of these powers, or to leave them idle: I ask you to give yourself no longer to sin, but to God, as one alive from the dead, and then use every power you have in the service of God as instruments of justice unto holiness. Use them for the very purpose for which they were given. It is in the splendid energy of positive action that the morbid power of sin is to be overthrown. Let God reign in your heart, and you will find plenty of work for head and hand.
Of course, between this vigorous living in the full and free exercise of all the powers and the life of sin, there lies that period of discipline and mortification in which the misused powers have to be restrained and checked and trained for their true work. A man who all his life used his imagination for evil will not find it easy to use it as the handmaid of faith. There will be revolts and relapses, and the pictures of the past from which he has turned he will find often vividly mirrored upon it. There will be days of darkness when it will seem to him as if he has undertaken an impossible task.
But he will be sustained by two thoughts: that this misused faculty, however defiled, however much disordered, is in itself good, and that only in using it for that for which it was given can it be redeemed. These thoughts will sustain him and encourage him to bear the suffering that is the price of its redemption.
It is as though one who had a great talent for music but had no technical training, and consequently could never produce the best results of his art, were to put himself under a great master. The first lessons he will have to learn will be, for the most part, to correct his mistakes, not to do this and not to do that. It will seem to him that he has lost all his former freedom of expression, that he is held back by all sorts of technical rules, that whenever he seeks to let himself go, he is checked and hampered. And it is no doubt true.
But he will soon begin to realize that as he learns more and suffers in the learning, possibilities of utterance reveal themselves that he has never dreamed of. He knows, he feels, that he is on the right path, and as the channels are prepared and the barriers against the old bad methods more firmly fixed, he feels the mighty tide of his genius rise and swell; he hears the shout of the gathering waters as they sweep before them every obstacle and pour forth in a mad torrent of glorious sound. All those days of restraint and suffering are crowned with the joy of the full and perfect expression of his art. The restraint and discipline he knew full well in those seemingly unfruitful days were but the means to an end. The end is always before him, and the end is positive expression. The dying to his old untrained and bad methods is but the birth throes of a larger and richer action — verily ‘for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross’ of discipline.
This is the true principle of all Christian self-discipline. Without such an inspiring motive, it is meaningless; it is cruel self-torture. We need — who does not know it? — to fill our life, not to empty it. Life is too strong a thing, our nature is too positive, to be content with mere restraint and repression. Many a soul who has given up one thing after another and emptied its life of interest after interest, learns to its dismay that its energies, finding no means of expression, turn inward and revenge themselves in morbid self-analysis and sickly scruples. They need an outlet; they need interests. You may check the flow of a stream while you are preparing to divert its channel, but you cannot stop it. If you try, it will only gather force behind the barriers that hold it back, beat them down, and rush through with a strength and volume all the greater for the restraint.
And the stream of life cannot be merely held back. Many a man trying thus to repress himself finds after a time that temptations have only grown stronger and passions more violent, and that he seems to have become worse rather than better through the temporary resistance. What he needed, what might have protected him from failure and despair, was to be taught that all the restraint was but temporary and in order to turn the stream into its true channel.”
~Basil Maturin
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