Railing On Unnecessarily

I confess to sometimes beating a point to death. Would you be kind enough to forgive me up front if do that with yesterday's blog?

Yesterday (read it here: Being Mercenary ) I spoke about it being all right to do good for less than ideal reasons. Fear of punishment is one of those lesser ideals. Yet I wonder: isn't that how most of us begin doing good anyway? Or at least, avoiding bad? Generally, we discipline our children by threats of time outs or early bedtimes if they don't behave. An unusually angelic child may not require such warnings. But most of them do, at least from time to time.

Then as adults, how often must we do something good (in the sense of that something being right and just) when we really would rather not? Say you borrow something from a friend or family member and lose or break it. You know you must repair or replace it. How often is that done out of pure goodwill, a perfect selflessness? My guess is rarely. We make things right because we're embarrassed about it. Or we feel bad or are angry at ourselves for our stupidity. Or simply because we see that an obligation exists and know we have to fulfil it. My question is, how often do we do it with joy in our hearts?

At the end of the day the important thing is that we do what we ought to do under given circumstances, and preferably for the best reasons. But doing what's right is the critical thing. The better impulses will grow from that.

The Negative Man

I have been regularly watching on You Tube one Father Mark Goring, a remarkable young priest in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. A recurring theme of his is to look for the positive good and to do positive good: it will make you good.

In college, and I really should find it to reread, a class assignment was to read Dr. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Dr. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. As I recall, a story from his book was how one prisoner gave a hidden potato to another prisoner who was (if this can be imagined in such atrocity) in more dire shape. I still marvel at such a moral good coming from any given man under the unimaginably horrible circumstances of a Nazi death camp. Dr. Frankl believed that part of survival was finding something to be positive about and to do positive good.

My overriding point here is that we should strive to find, act, and be positively good. This can be done without denying the horrors of what is negative and working all along to fight them.  Fr. Mark for example when he feels angry prays to find a moral good to focus on and to do, because they're out there even in trying times. Indeed, it may be all the more important to seek the good when evil, yes, evil, seems so prevalent. But the thing is, if you seek the positive you find it.

The corollary is that if you search for the negative you will find that. If you find it you likely will wallow in it. When you wallow in it you become the Negative Man. When you then look in the mirror, will it be a vision worth seeing?