Spiritual lesson from a big furry mutt

Just about every day I take the dog to our local park for his walk. It’s a big enough park that we don’t always go by the same parts of the park each trip. Most of the time as we walk, he prefers to walk on grass rather than on pavement – probably much more comfy for his paws. A few days ago we crossed a weedy area and the little fellow got a thorn in his paw, which I quickly removed. Yesterday we went by the same area again and he refused to walk in the weeds, staying instead on the paved path.

He’s a quicker study than I am as it only took him one time of getting a thorn to learn the value of staying on the right path. There are several weed-patches in my life to which I unfailingly return, so it’s no surprise that I got rather reflective in the wake of this little event. I learned something that’s both interesting and useful, at least to me.

Before today if you’d have asked me which of the seven deadly sins (alphabetically: anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride and sloth) was the biggest problem for me, I’d have had the same ready answer*, as there was one of those seven sins that occupied a great deal of my time, energy and attention – both in what I was most likely to do wrong, to recognize as wrong and to exert efforts at amendment. I’d even gone to the trouble of categorizing various offenses from the less severe to the more severe, as I saw them at the time.

So for a long time, I fitfully tried to avoid the sins I’d categorized as relatively serious. I didn’t really have a problem avoiding the “most serious”. The ones that I had seen as more minor, happened pretty frequently. For quite a long time, even after my conversion to Catholicism, I had the same struggle and similar lack of success.

Eventually I started working more on avoiding the less severe items and then real progress started. It turns out that my original categories were badly flawed. They were based more on the frequency of the sin than on anything else. That, together with a good confessor, frequent reception of the Eucharist, lots of prayer on my part and a lot of prayer from people holier than me, has lead to good results.

The upshot is that the sin that had for so long been my most characteristic sin, is now no longer the one that gets me in the most trouble. It’s taken several years, but I’ve finally found a way to stay out of that particular weed patch – at least most of the time. (One particular example comes to mind: I usually go weeks at a time without a particular sinful activity that was once a part of very nearly every day of my life. It’s still nowhere near “perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect”, but it’s on the way there.) So I come to the challenge of directing more of my efforts at reducing sins that historically have received a lot less of my attention. It’s a challenge I’m glad to face!

*I decided against mentioning the particular sin in this post as I think the lesson is applicable to any of them.