Hard Teachings Help Us Cultivate Discipline

In the Bread of Life Discourse (John, Ch. 6) Jesus tells the crowd at Capernaum several times that He is the True Bread from heaven and that whoever eats His flesh and drinks His blood will live forever. Many in the crowd respond by asking, “[t] his saying is hard; who can accept it?" (John 6:60). They had difficulty accepting it and many walked away from Jesus. Today, flocks of people have also left the Church, unwilling to accept some the teachings it holds as Truth. I’ve heard non-Catholics assert how difficult it must be to be Catholic and that they could never become Catholic. It’s true; it’s not easy to live as a Catholic today. One needs courage, discernment, patience and trust to joyfully live out the faith in a rapidly changing world. Our “hard teachings”, however, present a great opportunity to cultivate a fruit that we cannot get through life without: discipline.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines discipline as “training that corrects, molds or perfects the mental faculties or moral character (Discipline).” This training takes much effort, practice and revision, but it is necessary if we desire to live with meaning and purpose. It is also helps us practice our faith consistently as society makes it more challenging and uncomfortable to do so. Catholicism’s “hard teachings”— for example, those on the Eucharist, the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the nature of the priesthood—give us the opportunity to undergo this training because they are not easy to accept at first and often contradict society’s ideas. They provoke a complex and uncomfortable character transformation, but this transformation is what signals our growth as human beings—an argument echoed in mainstream society. By allowing our lives to be transformed by discipline training, we can hope to come closer to our ultimate goal: Christ-like holiness that will prepare us to reach heaven.

 Discipline strengthens our character to fight through life’s battles with a resolve that lets no obstacle hinder our pursuit of holiness. The benefits of a disciplined lifestyle include the ability to focus our efforts on freely choosing what we’ve discerned to be good decisions that will help us grow in holiness; increased self-control over temptations to choose what we’ve discerned to be bad decisions that will inhibit this growth; sustainable perseverance in choosing good over evil; intermediary goal achievement as a measure of our growth; better relationships with ourselves, other people, and God to carry us forward; and the adoption of healthy behaviors that will up us maintain our stamina.   If our teachings were easy to accept, or if we were quick to dismiss difficult or unpopular teachings, our characters would weaken and we’d lack the growth needed to survive in the evolving world around us.

 Once we’ve identified holiness as our ultimate goal, we will discover the path that leads us to it. Discipline is the vehicle that keeps us on the path, and it gives us the ability to focus our attention on that goal. To focus—the first benefit of discipline training—means to make our ultimate goal, and all other goals that will lead us to it, the center of minds and behaviors. Those Catholic teachings that many dislike and refuse to accept (for example, the sanctity and uniqueness of marriage) actually give us the chance to improve our focus because they transform our hearts at first exposure, causing us to pause, listen to what is being said, and discern how we subjectively feel about the transformation. This initial transformation lays the foundation for our growth in holiness as we process the new information. If we did not allow ample time for this to occur—if the concepts were always easy to accept or if we dismissed them too quickly—this process may never mature and we could miss out on a critical life lesson. The willingness to accept what we’re taught will not always come easily, which is true of many things in life, but we cannot dismiss these ideas impulsively if we hope to uncover a deeper life lesson. How would it feel to experience tremendous suffering without effective coping tools contained in life lessons that we neglected just because we didn’t like what we heard?  

 With our ultimate goal in focus and an improved understanding of what can bring us closer to it, we can identify the things in life that can hinder our quest. By disciplining our lives we grow in self-control. Self-control is also called temperance, the virtue that protects from impulsive actions and steers us away from potential stumbling blocks in the pursuit of holiness. These stumbling blocks may be in themselves good things that bring us pleasure (also a good thing!), but they lose that quality when we turn them into our ultimate goals. Self-control (temperance) makes us pause and ask ourselves whether or not a particular decision and the pleasure it gives us will lead us closer to our ultimate goal. Self-control helps us make decisions that will help us grow in holiness while we weigh whether potential stumbling blocks posses any good, helpful qualities. Our emotions, for example, are inherently good because they indicate how life circumstances affect us, but they hinder our pursuit of holiness when we value them over holiness. If holiness is truly our goal we should not run away from “hard teachings,” such as the Church’s requirement that we fast for one hour before we receive Holy Communion. This rule emphasizes the sacred value of the Eucharist and its faithful observance reveals a commitment to discipline.

 With an awareness of life elements that will either help or hinder our pursuit of holiness, we can expect times of success and times of failure in our progress, given our self-awareness. By undergoing discipline training, however, we learn that God has given us the grace of perseverance to sustain us. Perseverance is the possession of a firm intention to get over the speed bumps along the way. By simply acknowledging the successes we’ve made through God’s love we know that He has given us this grace. Perseverance grows when we boldly choose to wrestle with uneasy feelings about our “hard teachings,” refusing to allow our emotions to become the sole dictators over our actions. This grace has little effect in our lives if we respond to, say the Church’s teaching on contraception, without careful study of both sides of the argument.   In order to persevere towards our goal we must strive for a healthy connection between our minds and hearts so that we can use them together to respond to new information. Patience allows this connection to form and it is an indispensable virtue for our daily struggles.  

As God reveals our successes through perseverance, we will better understand the critical elements of goal achievement, another benefit of discipline. First, we need a clear understanding of our goal, the steps we’ll need to take to achieve it, and an observable measure of success. Next we need to determine if this goal is realistic given our state in life, the surroundings God has placed us in, and the gifts He’s given us. We then need a specific, realistic time frame in which we hope to achieve it. Finally, the process we’ve decided to take to reach our goal must be reproducible. Can another individual—after we’ve clearly defined our goal, the process we’ve mapped out, and our indicator of success—follow our plan and accomplish that goal? This process would be meaningless to our growth if it never required much effort. This is why it is beneficial to have teachings (like why we use male pronouns when speaking of God) that are not easy to accept and may make us uncomfortable. Our “hard teachings” prepare us to set goals that will help us grow in this life and reach the next, and this process will definitely be arduous and uncomfortable. Our journey can be less of a burden when we remind ourselves of the fourth element of goal achievement above: Feedback from those accompanying us on our journey helps drive our success.

Just as He is a communion of persons, God made us to live in communion with one another because we are made in His image and likeness. As we grow in discipline we will develop healthy relationships with people who lead us to holiness as we do so for them. Healthy relationships provide us with accountability to help us to stay on track and re-direct us when we stray off our path. They help us to see ourselves in a new light, revealing to us strengths and weaknesses we never knew we had. Healthy relationships give us the chance to reciprocate the guidance we receive from others, helping one another answer the universal call to charity. Finally, by establishing healthy relationships with others we strengthen our own relationship with Christ as we learn more about Him through the gifts of others. As this relationship grows so does our ability to attain holiness. Healthy relationships with people who also strive for holiness help us wrestle with “hard teachings”—such as the requirement that we go to Confession at least once a year and when we commit a mortal sin—and are a critical presence as we cope with uncomfortable feelings. Healthy relationships help us persevere, no matter how difficult our suffering is.      

Finally, discipline leads to healthy habits that will foster our continued growth as human beings made in God’s image. Sr. Miriam James Heidland, SOLT, once commented on the importance of having obligations in our lives because they are good for us. It can be helpful to see healthy habits, like eating a nutritionally balanced meal or exercising, as daily obligations because they are good for us. It is also important to have obligatory habits in our faith lives—such as as a daily prayer routine, attendance at Mass on Sundays, and at least yearly (but ideally monthly) reception of the Sacrament of Penance.  These healthy habits provide organization and structure in our lives to keep us on the path which we’ve set out. Our adoption of healthy habits is an indicator that we have begun to reach our goal of holiness. This journey towards holiness lasts a lifetime, and this step of making healthy habits is only the tip of the iceberg.

Discipline is the process by which we train our hearts and minds to direct our behaviors towards our ultimate life goals. For Christ’s followers that goal is holiness that by His grace makes us worthy of heaven. When we solemnly commit our lives to discipline, our goal of holiness and the path into it will come into focus. From there, the obstacles and stumbling blocks will become clear to us and we’ll exhibit strength of character that will lead to greater self-control. A clear goal and a matured tendency to choose good over evil will result in perseverance, which will help us to see the requirements of successful goal achievement. Finally, we will discover the opportunities that God has put in our lives to develop healthy relationships, where we’ll find encouragement to continue our pursuit, and the inspiration to adopt healthy habits that will carry us the rest of the way to holiness and by Christ’s grace into heaven.

Discipline training is important for Christ’s followers because by undergoing this process we demonstrate to others and ourselves that we take our faith lives and our “hard teachings” seriously. It will often be arduous and uncomfortable because that is the reality of significant transformations of the heart. If we are serious about our desire to succeed, we need patience and discernment to allow the connections between our hearts and minds to mature, lest we act in haste and fall off the path to our goal. We also need a way to measure our progress towards our goal. Finally, we can find comfort in affirming that we have a God who loves us beyond measure and desires our greater good. He has surrounded us with people who will lift us up when we fall and strengthen us for this journey we call life! If we approach our discipline training as an act of love, we shall find that our “hard teachings” are in fact not that hard and that God created them because He loves us. Why wander from something created for us out of love?