A “Breaking Bad’ Examination of Conscience

    After hearing multiple friends describe themselves as “Breaking Baddicts,” I finally got around to watching “Breaking Bad,” the award-winning AMC series about a cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who begins cooking and selling crystal meth with a former student as a means of providing financially for his family after his death.

    The show is definitely dark and sometimes brutal, but it illustrates well the potential for great evil within every human being, especially those who think that noble goals can justify immoral means (something, according to Catholic moral teaching, that can never be done).

    As Walter descends into darkness, it becomes apparent that his motives are not as pure as we first presume. As the show progresses (I’ll try not to spoil anything), familial concerns no longer drive him. Instead, Walter’s ego takes center stage, displacing anyone or anything that thwarts his pursuit of self-vindication from the bitterness of his unrealized career and financial aspirations.

   His wife Skyler is the first to see through his masquerade of noble intentions, recognizing that the world he is creating for himself is putting his family (Skyler and their two children) at great risk. She pointedly reminds him, “Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.” Even so, Walter is so thoroughly blind to himself that her words have no impact.

  Self-deception like Walter’s is not uncommon, even for those who don’t sink to his felonious  depths. One reason the Catholic faith encourages a regular (even daily) “examination of conscience” is that our own hearts are uncannily adept at hiding our baser motives. As the t prophet Jeremiah declares, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt;
who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

   And like Walter White, the duplicity of our intentions is especially evident in issues related to family life. The longer I am a husband and father, the more aware I am of how our family frustrations are often driven by motives that are less noble than we think.

   Take, for example, the distress parents go through over a difficult child, one whose misbehavior is a growing problem or who seems apathetic toward even moderate academic success. These situations not only create anxiety within the parent—who feels as if the child is self-destructing before their eyes—but they also stir outward turmoil in the home, as the frustrated parent badgers the child relentlessly with all the effectiveness of pushing a rope.

  I have been that parent, so emotionally vested with the crisis at hand that I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) take a harder look at my own motives, such as asking what really was bothering me about the refusal of this child to “get with the program?” Why did this situation make me so intensely angry? Was it primarily a concern for the child and his or her well-being? Or was it rooted more truthfully in own need to be vindicated as parent?

   Don’t misunderstand—this is not an epiphany I arrive at quickly or easily. I tend to leave plenty of scorched earth behind and around me on the path to enlightenment. And there continue to be moments when, like Walter White, I am a blind prisoner of my own pride. Believe me, that’s a lonely place to be.

   But I am learning. Isn’t that about the best we can hope for in the vocation of marriage and parenthood? It’s what the domestic life is about—refining us via God’s preferred school for our sainthood. And a big part of that schooling has to do with exposing the selfish motives that animate many of our frustrations with those we live with.

   Here’s an idea. Take a piece of paper and write down two or three challenges in your family relationships. Mull each of them over in turn, asking God in prayer for a deeper spiritual insight regarding what frustrates you. Pray as David did in the Psalms, “Search me, o God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts” (Ps. 139). You may realize that your irritation is about ego more than anything else, or that a legitimate smaller complaint is magnified by bruised pride.