Slaying monsters
Wis 12:13, 16-19; Ps 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16; Rom 8:26-27; Mt 13:24-43
At the end of the 18th century, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya produced the etching “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” (“The sleep of reason produces monsters”). If you have never seen it, I encourage you to look it up online.
The work depicts an eerie, unsettling scene in which an artist lies asleep, sprawled out over his drawing table, while foreboding, evil phantasmal animals, including bats and owls, swirl about his head.
Goya’s work presents an enduring lesson: When reason “sleeps,” the darker angels of our nature tend to emerge. Insofar as our reason is one of the most precious gifts we receive from God, its erosion has not only intellectual but serious moral consequences.
When we fail to rightly understand the world and the people in it, we are prone to ignore or deny their inherent beauty and dignity. Then it becomes so much easier to give our hearts over to feelings of prejudice, hypocrisy, resentment or disgust.
Furthermore, we lack empathy and compassion and can delude ourselves, or be easily deluded, into thinking that the victims of our rage or neglect actually deserve what we are hurling against them.
How do we get to such a state? No one wakes up in the morning and asks: “How can I become the most ignorant, deceived version of myself that I can possibly be today?” I think the answer to this perplexing question lies in the fact that we actually are reasonable beings. The very reason we have received from God can be twisted or perverted, but not completely destroyed.
Our spiritual enemy, the devil, knows this well. In his “Rules for the Discernment of Spirits,” St. Ignatius of Loyola points out that the enemy tries to dissuade a person from attempting to cleanse his or her heart of sinful attitudes by proposing “fallacious reasonings” (Rule 2). That is, the devil does apply reason, but he applies a “false” reason based on fantasy fear, or imagination.
Any time we seek to rationalize behaviors that are inherently wrong, we fall into this trap. If I seek revenge on someone who has hurt me, I might reason that “he had it coming.” I might further conclude that not only he, but “all his kind” deserve the same treatment.
Notice how our willingness to be guided by false reason is often fed by feelings of fear or of having been misunderstood. If I’m afraid of what you might do to me (or that you might repeat an offense I have already suffered), then my perception of your worth can be twisted much more easily.
Usually, this false reason creeps in slowly and quietly over time. We don’t directly hear it from our spiritual enemy. On the contrary, its seeds are often sown early in life: from our families, our communities or the wider culture into which we’ve been born. The sowers may not even be aware of the seeds they plant.
Enter this Sunday’s parable of the weeds and the wheat. It’s no accident that the “enemy” sows the weeds at night, when all are asleep. Those thoughts and actions that move us away from God’s love usually coexist with those that draw us to him. That’s because we only have one faculty of reason, and it can be turned toward or away from Jesus’ love for us.
While the “reckoning” of the separation of the weeds from wheat at harvest time can be taken as a metaphor for the final judgment (cf. Matthew 25), I suggest that we can also read it in light of discernments we make every day.
“Harvest time” can represent our willingness to make a firm assessment of the underlying reasons upon which we are basing our thoughts and actions. This calls for brutal honesty and may require that we seek out — and listen to — the critical voice of an impartial friend or spiritual guide.
Exposing the fallacy of a twisted reason is the first step in dispelling it. Contrary to the enemy’s lies, we can awaken from the lethal slumber of hatred or prejudice and slay the monsters that the sleep of reason begets.