There’s no doubt the Catholic who has thought, “Things would be soooo much easier if I weren’t Catholic! Look at all the things (here name your spiritual poison) I could do!”
No doubt the Ten Commandments often feel onerous when they stand in the way of a temptation into which we want to be led. Some might even imagine religion as the barrier to their choices, or might hope for an occasional “weekend furlough” from its constraints.
Yet St. John tells us that God’s “commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). John is only echoing Jesus, who assures us, “My yoke is easy and my burden light” (Matt. 11:30).
So is God gaslighting us? Or do we, as the Act of Hope calls us to do, believe him “who cannot deceive nor be deceived”?
There’s the conundrum—and the choice. It’s a choice of faith, which is, after all, the whole context of the Johannine passage, which begins, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God.”
Well, faith and reason are not mutually exclusive, even if they are not mutually coextensive. God often gives us reasonable foundations to push us along the road to faith, so let’s think about them.
First of all, let’s examine the experience with which this essay opens: I want to do something I ought not to do. That experience both answers my question and addresses a modern error: the idea that I am the author of the moral order. The fact that I have the experience of “ought”—something that is not of my making since, if it were, I could dispense myself—tells me right off that the moral universe and its arcs of justice are bigger than me and my will. The human phenomenon of experiencing the demanding challenge of an “ought” not of my own making questions my “right to define one’s own concept of . . . meaning [and] the universe,” as Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy put it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
So right there is evidence that the moral law is not just the product of organized religion or “a bunch of celibate old men in the Vatican.” The fact that every human being has experienced the demand of an “ought” means that demand is rooted a lot deeper than some extrinsic rule imposed by a religion.
St. Paul gets at that same question when he insists that all people are sinners (Rom. 3:23). Much of that part of Romans turns on the question of the Law, but Paul is clear: it’s not just the Jews who are sinners because they had the Law and disobeyed it. Everybody, Paul insists, is a sinner. The Gentiles may not have had the Ten Commandments on stone tablets stored in the Ark of the Covenant, but they had that moral law written in their hearts—a moral law they know, from human experience, they violated. That is the experience of an “ought” that I didn’t, or an “ought not” that I did.
Okay, so the moral law is not just a bunch of ecclesiastically imposed rules, but, admittedly, something deeper—maybe even part of me. That still doesn’t make them any less of a burden.
Well, let’s look at that.
If the moral law—at least in its generalities—is written on our hearts, it means a couple of things, two of which are important: (1) I am a creature, not the Creator—including not the Creator of the moral law, and (2) if the moral law is written within me, then what do I think of God?
Because if God put the moral law in my heart, yet I still find it (and the “ought” that accompanies it) “burdensome,” then whose fault is that? There can only be two choices: God’s or mine.
If it’s God’s, it means God is a mean and sadistic being who frustrates our happiness by inscribing dissatisfaction into us. If it’s me, then it means that God’s design is for my good, but, adapting the immortal words of Jimmy Buffett, “some people claim it’s God to blame, but I know it’s my own damn fault.”
Let’s consider the “burdens” God’s law imposes. To love him from whom we receive every good gift. To respect and worship him, which means to have a relationship to him. To love our parents. To be for life. To respect the integrity of the husband-wife relationship of marriage. To respect others’ things. To bear witness to the truth. And not to split my heart so that I secretly pine for those things I won’t take with my hands.
What a yoke-oppressed world!
Let’s consider, too, the “freedoms” we might gain by circumventing God’s “burdens.” A world in which I use other people, starting with my parents and then working my way outward. A world in which violence and even killing might alleviate “burdens.” One in which orgasm trumps fidelity. One where what’s thine is mine (but rarely vice versa). One where my word has nothing to do with my honor. One where I grasp in my heart for what my hands are too cowardly or weak to take. In other words, a world that is neither heliocentric nor geocentric, but “me-centric” in a universe stretched to try to fit . . . me. “This universe ain’t big enough for the two of us, pardner.”
What a light burden!
John is right in telling us, “His commandments are not burdensome,” as long as we are willing to recognize that we are ourselves in communion with others. The design of that communion is not some arbitrary bunch of regulations superimposed on us, but the design of love written into our hearts by Love (1 John 4:8).
Do you still feel imposed upon?