Windows and Doors

I am reading a small book that Pope Benedict wrote when he was a cardinal with the name "On Conscience", and he reflects on something that really struck me. When people only follow their personal conscience, they believe that they are living in a state of radical freedom, they are the masters of their own universe, but the truth is they are locked in their own small world, with their only context for reality being, their own thoughts and feelings. The person that allows his conscience to be purified by Jesus and by the Church, lives with the doors and windows of his soul completely open, because the Church is working with 2010 years of experience, and countless sinners and saints as teachers. Its the height of hubris to wake up in the year 2010 and think that you know it all.

That part of the book deals with a worldly deformed conscience, the other end of the spectrum is the deformed conscience of the sincere believer, this is known as scrupulosity, when the conscience convicts a person when there is in fact no sin or a very minor offense. It struck me that both have a similar problem, being closed in on oneself. Being closed. Both have a need to open the windows and doors of the soul.

Michael O'Brien in his book Sophia House has a central character who struggles with severe scrupulosity, and he is always writing in a diary, watching himself closely, when at the end of the book he realizes something powerful, life is only a real life, when its lived outward toward God and towards others. He writes in his diary,

"This is my final entry in these archives, no longer do I need these mirrors, for all around me are windows and doors," Peter Kreeft says it best, "Don't look at yourself so much, look at God and other people, there a lot more interesting,"

It was incredibly interesting to me that both Pope Benedict and Michael O'Brien used the image of Windows and Doors to describe the opposite end of a deformed conscience. One sure fire way to avoid struggles with conscience is to unite closely with the Bible and the Church, because there is hard won wisdom in both, and age old truth that sinners and saints have testified to.