The battle within

The Church Fathers of old used to say in a rather simplistic way that inside of each of us, there lays two minds and two hearts. Some of them even went on to say that there are also two selves inside each of us. Not that we are schizophrenic in a bad way, but that there lies a great struggle deep within and each day, we will find a ‘battle’ going on between the two selves.

In just one moment last week, right in front of me was what I just described. I was waiting to cross the road at the zebra crossing when I saw a man holding on to his little daughter’s hand ensuring that she would not run onto the road. This he did with his right hand. But it was what was in his left hand that was somewhat incongruous. In his left hand was a half-burnt cigarette.

The incongruity to me was more amusing than it was glaring. The man was clearly very caring for his daughter’s safety and life. But on the other hand (literally) he was holding on to what is proven to be something that is toxic to life – not just for him, but also for all who breathe in second hand smoke coming from the act of smoking nicotine.

While I am not a smoker, and will never be one, this column is not meant to upbraid anyone who is smoker. I convinced that with so much written about the negative effects of smoking, most smokers actually do know that what they are doing is simply not beneficial to their health. Whether they are doing anything about this is a personal struggle. It is the incongruence of what I saw that set me thinking about what the Church Fathers said about that two-selves struggle that many of us are grappling with in our lives.

We in the Christian faith say often that Jesus saves us. But this statement has so many dimensions that if we don’t pause often to think about it, it becomes a cheap throwaway phrase that doesn’t impact our lives very much in a real way. One of the ways that Jesus ‘saves’ us is by revealing to us that within each of us, we have the life of God. And the more we respond to this godliness by our life-actions, we become fully alive in God. But he doesn’t mean that God forces us. In fact, the more we freely choose to respond to the divine inside of us, the more we grow that godly mind; that godly heart within.

But aren’t we all an admixture of that divine image, as well as the broken person that struggles with a propensity to sin? That’s what the Church Fathers meant. Sometimes, we find ourselves choosing to go against our right reason, truth and right conscience. That is when we give in to our self-centered leanings and ‘go for it’, as the current lingo likes to put it.

But in reality, it’s not as clear as that, is it? The truth is that we all struggle, and for most of us, a lot of the time, we are like that man whom I saw across the street at the zebra crossing. We want to do good and we want to live out our divine calling, which is imaged in that man holding tightly to his daughter’s hand. But at the same time, aren’t many of us also holding on to our various cigarettes and sending out second-hand smoke to those who are around us, harming us as well as those we love? Especially when we do this with hardly a smidgen of reflection about the choices that we make?

Conversion is never a one-time event. We would be naïve to think that a baptism, or a RCIA journey is enough to make us immediately ready for heaven. It is a process, and within that process lies the discovery that the struggle, the choosing, the reflection has to continue. Our life becomes then that canvass on which we draw big – from that huge, generous and selfless mind and heart. Or conversely, we can be fearful and draw small squiggles – from that little, selfish and small-hearted mind and heart.

Just to realize that our lives are that juggling and struggling between the two selves is a step to conversion.