Separation from the world

[Paul]

In Scripture we are told to separate from the world. We are told not to love the world, not to be friends with the world, not to bear the yoke with unbelievers, and to set our minds on heavenly things instead of earthly things. In fact, we are even told that friendship with the world is enmity with God (and the Greek word translated "enmity" is translated "hatred" elsewhere), and that light can have no partnership with darkness. That's very strong language! So it is clear that separation from the world is important. Since Scripture also tells us that we cannot escape the world, it follows that this separation is more of an attitude than a physical action.

However, there are steps we can and should take. For example, I have (mostly) given up the world's media because they teach the philosophy of the world. Following God's call, I have decided to stop pursuing anything social for an indefinite period of time (could be only one more day, could be 40 years), since such things invariably lead me to get stuck on worldly thinking. I have mostly given up reading opinions on the faith written by today's popular Catholic writers and am focusing on Bible study, supplemented by spiritual classics. Many hobbies I had before my conversion are no longer an option (let's leave it at that). For me, I have found that this is what avoiding worldliness entails. My next step in this area is overcoming the attachment I still have to all these things I have decided to give up.

What have you had to do to stop loving the world? What have you found to be required of you as a result of this commandment? What is your next step?

[susanna]

Paul, I could have written your post (though not as well.)  I don't think I had to do much to stop loving the world.  I think one day I just realized the fact that I didn't love it and looking back, I wonder if I ever really did.  If I need confirmation, I just look at some of the sewer on TV, listen to talk/hate monger radio, or have conversations with folks who don't pay any  mind to Faith.   It requires self-affirmation.  Worldlings think you don't have "a life."   I also focus on bible study and classics.  I've lost trust in today's church, clergy and religious.  So I look to the saints of old.    Now I'm trying to break the attachments I have to "stuff" and downsizing.   My next step - ideally find a place to live where I could conveniently attend the traditional Mass every day.  Right now it's 12 miles away with traffic problems.     

[Paul]

That's interesting, that you never really loved the world. For me, it's been the opposite. I thought I wasn't worldly, but it turns out I was just as worldly as the people I complained about. A big part of my worldliness has been, ironically, my hatred of modernism. While I still hate sin (and heresy is a grave sin), back then I was angry because I didn't get to live in a culture of devout Catholics. Now I see that this is God's will for me, because social activity makes me more worldly. I have no friends except my mother (and God and the saints, of course), and that's exactly how God wants it.

I'm ashamed to admit, the only way I've found God's will is by spending years fighting it. When we spend years on the same problem and get nowhere, it means we're going against God's will.

Like you, I mostly don't pay attention to the modern Church. I do my best to obey what they tell me through the Catechism, and what my priest tells me to do (since obedience is a virtue). But I don't pay attention to what they do. Like you, I am working on downsizing and being less attached to stuff.

It's so true that worldlings think I have no life! They tell each other, "He's really into religion," when talking about me, as if I were obsessed with golf or politics. But I'm happier than I've ever been, thanks to my relationship with God. While they're watching trashy TV or violating the 6th commandment, I'm studying God's Word. If having a life means agonizing about relationships, being blown about by every wind of doctrine, and and obsessing about getting more and more stuff, then I don't want one.

[Shin]

Worldlings think you don't have "a life."

I am part of this world thinks you have 'no life' club as well. 

[susanna]

Worldlings think you don't have "a life."

I am part of this world thinks you have 'no life' club as well. 

We are pilgrims here.   

[Paul]

Yes, we are just pilgrims. As the song goes, "This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin' through." Or as another goes, "I am just a weary pilgrim, plodding through this world of sin, getting ready for that city, when the saints go marching in." We are soldiers of Jesus, and a soldier does not get involved in civilian affairs (Douay-Rheims translates that as "secular businesses").

I have found that when I make the mistake of allowing myself to get emotionally attached to any worldly thing, all I get is pain. It really makes no sense to be attached to things, since they cannot last. That's not just material things, but relationships, plans, opinions, and situations. Even our own selves are not stable. What I wanted a year ago is not what I want now. Therefore it makes no sense to stake any emotion on what I want now, since I may not even want it in a year, in a month, or even tomorrow.

We should only want one thing: that God's will be done. He knows better than we do what will make us holier and thus keep us out of Hell and shorten our time in Purgatory. And since everything but sin is His will, if we make His will the basis for our happiness, we will never be unhappy. How often we lust after outcomes and gamble our happiness by being happy when one thing happens and sad when another thing happens!

For me, every worldly plan I ever made has been a complete failure. This has been such a blessing, since it led me to seek God and is still leading me to detach from my own desires, which are based on my ignorance of the future and are therefore no more than a source of worry.

And yet, it's so hard to detach. The root of the problem is that we perceive a need to satisfy our feelings. But feelings lie to us. They call evil good and good evil.

Therefore I see only two solutions. We can suppress our feelings. Or we can reorient them so that they like what is good and hate what is evil.

[Shin]

I think both of those solutions are necessary!


'Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him.'

1 John 2:15

[Paul]

But we must also not hate the world, either. Enmity with the world is just as much a work of the flesh as any other enmity. I fall in this area far too often. We must be neither friend nor enemy to the world. Rather, we must simply detach.

When I first converted, I fell for the rhetoric of the apologetics/culture war crowd, showing how "bad company ruins good morals." They led me to believe the following:

1) I must personally attempt to eradicate modernism from the world, just because it's so evil. Somehow, eradicating my own sin and pride was rarely mentioned, if at all.

2) We must change laws to achieve this. Never mind that modernism is also invading Islamic theocracies, which have religiously based laws "out the kazoo," so to speak.

3) Evangelism consists mainly of exposing the logical flaws in the other person's belief system, as though people were Vulcans.

4) Catholics have the right to live in a Catholic culture. If we are not allowed to exercise this right, it is because we are too lazy to vanquish the evil modernists. God's will has nothing to do with it.

In short, it's all up to us, or so I was taught. But experience proved otherwise. My elaborate arguments fell on deaf ears, because people follow their emotions instead of their brains. Even the person I managed to convince to convert eventually fell away. No argument could convince him that following God is more important than his cherished sin.

In reality, everything except sin is God's will. All the suffering we go through is from God, to make us more holy. Not having access to any kind of Catholic culture has been such a blessing for me, though I didn't think so even a few months ago. It has forced me to learn the faith myself, and I learn better from books than people. The time not spent socializing is now spent studying the Bible. The lack of friends frees up my emotional stamina for God. The fact that I have to stay in the closet at work (my own boss told me he would send all Republicans to Hell if he were God!) keeps them from seeing me as some pompous "religious nut." The evil content in the media keeps me from wasting time with it. And so on.

We complain about the state of the world a lot. But God decided that we should live in this present evil age and be under its rule. It would have no power over us if God had not decided so.

[Shin]

It sounds like you've had a hard time Paul!  

It makes for many thoughts about my own experiences hearing about yours.

So many people put the cart before the horse. I know I unknowingly did, in my enthusiasm. I wonder how much good or not I have done by being too much ahead of myself. Folks want to do good, but they don't know virtue and vice sufficiently well enough yet, have the prayer life sufficiently well yet, so they do the exterior good or they think the are doing it because of the ultimate goal, but the interior is lacking, the means are lacking, the whole soul of virtue is lacking.

It doesn't serve the Church to go out and spend a good deal of time fighting for tradition and doctrine without grace and virtue. It doesn't serve your own soul.  God has it all in His hands. You may be called to fight on particular occasions or even more, but you have to discern, and take the care to do it well. Your soul needs to be ready, no?

Telling people not to do something is one thing, but in our own lives we know we require a good, a virtue, to replace the previous sins or we fall back. Where is the good we provide? If we do not have it, how can we give it?

So early on people get into apologetics and verbal conflicts and try to fight for the faith in various ways enthusiastically, I have done this.. And yet there's too much of the natural and not enough of grace in it often enough.. Something begun too early without, out of good motives, without enough foundation?

I can say what a saint said, but do I have the grace of the saint which, when he said it converted thousands? On the other hand some saints spent quite dry decades, I think St. Francis de Sales had many years of no success before a bountiful harvest. One's own holiness matters to how things will turn out regardless of the externals..

I don't know.. Just the thoughts that come to me as I think back on what I did and saw and see other folks doing.. Hope something useful in there. But.. On another thought..

I hope this little place to be a little spiritual family or retreat or refuge of Catholic culture! When one cannot find it nearby, or not enough of it.  

It's meant to be a little home. A retreat from the fighting and battles.

A place to be Catholic, as if this all were not happening to some degree.

[Shin]

Even the person I managed to convince to convert eventually fell away. No argument could convince him that following God is more important than his cherished sin.

Perhaps long in the future the dry soil something will grow again!  A prayer for your friend!

[Paul]

I can say what a saint said, but do I have the grace of the saint which, when he said it converted thousands? On the other hand some saints spent quite dry decades, I think St. Francis de Sales had many years of no success before a bountiful harvest. One's own holiness matters to how things will turn out regardless of the externals.

I love that! Just the fact that we can quote saints without the same effect makes one think. We need to get holy ourselves before we can do anything about the holiness of others. We have to take the beams out of our own eyes before we can help with even a speck in someone else's eye, let alone a beam.

I now see that what I was doing was full of self-love. I wanted to remake the world in my own image. I thought of holiness as getting as far away as possible from what modern culture believes. But Satan believes everything the Bible and Church teach, and it doesn't make him a bit holier. I followed anyone who had a way that seemed like a better way to get close to God; though they were Catholic, many of their ideas smacked of Protestantism. I fell for a few bad ideas. As a result, I learned that I'm too prone to following my own way, too easily influenced by rebels who say what I want to hear.

These days, my focus is getting to know God through His Word and applying it to my life. Jesus didn't start His ministry until He was 30. It could be 30 years from now before God calls me to something. In the meantime, all I can do is let Him change me through the Word and the events in my life.

And that's the hard part. It involves giving up my most cherished ideals. I become holy by submission and obedience, not by trying to outdo others in holiness. I become holy by putting up with people's faults, not by escaping them. Instead of following my own pet plans on how to become holy, I have to do things that fight against those very passions. Moving to a more Christian area sounds good, but bearing persecution is better. Studying the Bible is good, but if my mother needs me to take care of something for her, that time is worth more than the time I would have spent on Bible study.

Holiness is nothing more or less than complete submission to God's will, as revealed in Scripture, Church teaching, and the circumstances of each moment. When I realized that dealing with my mother's unbelieving friend is one of the things God is using to make me holier, I said to Him, "Couldn't I just give up comics or something instead?" But giving up comics would not make me holier (I read children's comics when my brain is too tired for pious books). Being tolerant of unbelievers, on the other hand, would do a lot (since this is one of my weak areas, to say the least).

The lack of holiness is nothing more or less than an attachment to one's own feelings. Even if those feelings are godly, the attachment itself is the problem. Our feelings are part of the world we must separate from.

I'm afraid I still have a very long way to go.

[CyrilSebastian]

A person may not want the things which are in the world.   
However, what does he do if his career is selling things which are in the world?

[Shin]

We cannot make a career of selling people evil things, that is not allowable in good conscience. 

[CyrilSebastian]

We cannot make a career of selling people evil things, that is not allowable in good conscience. 

   
What if the salesman is selling dress shirts to customers in a men's clothing store?

[Shin]

Dress shirts are fine clothing for going to Mass.