temptations

I have been thinking about Satan tempting Jesus while He was fasting in the desert for 40 days. If Satan thought he could make Our Lord fall, how easy does he think it is to tempt us to sin and to do his dirty work of tempting others? If I think about it long enough, I get intensely sad. I think about how many times I took the bait...and how many times I, though inadvertently, urged others into sin. (I always thought I had good intentions...I would have been horrified had someone pointed out that I was tempting someone to sin.) Satan is much more present in the world than any of us realize and he has a myriad devious ways to sway us away from our dear Lord.

I have a friend whom I met online a couple years ago through an online match service. When we met, we agreed that, since he was still married in the eyes of the Church (no annulment in sight...he hadn't even turned in the necessary documents and questionnaire), we wouldn't get romantically involved. Over time, I learned that he was "romancing" others online. In fact, he met someone quite a distance from his hometown and she had visited him for 5 days and then had invited--she used her daughter to do the asking--to her daughter's wedding to be her escort at the wedding in HER hometown! After learning of this, his parish priest told him never to bring any woman that wasn't his wife back to the parish. (They'd gone there for Mass while she was in town.) His response, when I asked him about it: "we'll simply go to another parish when she comes to town". Shortly after all this, he sent an e-blast to everyone in his life, telling us that he'd asked the woman to marry him and she'd accepted. He said they were praying that he would get an annulment and that what they were doing was of God. Watching it all unfold, I was horrified. When I tried to remind him of the Church teaching regarding marriage and dating/adultery and the scandal they had caused at the wedding (the priest there told him it would be an honor to preside at THEIR wedding!), he screamed at me, calling me bitter and judgmental. (His paramour even wrote me a letter, telling me how it was with me along these lines...as IF she really knew what I was about--great audacity and arrogance there! She wrote it anonymously through him so I couldn't reply directly to her.) I was neither of those things. However, I WAS horrified that my friend had been tempted into grievous sin and he'd taken the bait. I was trying to help him see what he was doing was against God's law (which he already knew, given our many discussions on the subject, so I should have realized my attempts were going to be fruitless). We've since parted company--well, he threw me out of his life by telling me NEVER to contact him again in any form. He didn't want to hear the truth. He wanted what HE wanted when he wanted it. He called sin good. I am still so very sad for him and I continue to pray for him, hoping that he will one day see the light of Truth and be willing to live in it once again.

This example reminds me of my own sinfulness. Truly, how many times have any of us taken the bait? And, isn't it amazing the lengths to which we will go to deny Christ? I believe pride is at the root of our response to temptation. We think we know better. The Church has reasons for all of Her teachings--and they are all for our good. They are designed to help us glorify God, to bring us closer to Him so that we might enjoy eternal life with Him. Yet, in a given moment in time, we don't care. We want to do what we want to do when we want to do it, denying that it's really sin we are committing. I can't tell you how much I hate that I have done this many times in my life. I think about how my sins helped nail Our Lord's precious hands to the cross--hands that healed, hands that touched little children, hands that broke Bread and gave us life...and I weep and weep and weep in remorse. In those moments, I think about St. Peter's three-time denial of Jesus and how he wept when he realized what he'd done. I believe I know just how he felt. Yet, the fact that Peter is now a saint fills me with great hope.

This season of Lent can be an opportunity to look at where we go wrong and to work at correcting ourselves. Through prayer, fasting, alms-giving and other sacrificing, we can find our way back to the road that leads us to God. When you consider the sacrifice HE made for our sins, anything we might think to do seems like a tiny sacrifice! However, I know in my heart that Our Lord appreciates what we have to offer and so I continue to try. It isn't always easy when temptation comes so beautifully packaged and desirable.