By Nicholas Soellner
Connecting Faith and Life
On Father’s Day weekend, my family and I went to the movies to see “Inside Out 2.” I was pleasantly surprised. I’d say it’s one of the few movies in recent years that has made a worthy sequel. An early exchange between Joy and one of the new emotions, Anxiety, was a highlight of the film: “We all have a job to do, you (Joy) make Riley happy. Sadness makes her sad. Fear protects her from the scary stuff she can see, and MY job is to protect her from the scary stuff she CAN’T see! I plan for the future.” Of all places to hear this truth! God has given us every emotion encoded into the human design for a reason. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as good anxiety.
Just like being a “good person” involves developing virtue, our emotions require similar attention. Put simply, virtue can be understood through the analogy of a triangle. The top point of the triangle represents the desired virtue. Love, also called charity, is a virtue that loves others selflessly as God does, but one can stray by sliding down either side of the triangle, much larger than the point. To the left is the vice of apathy, to the right, is the vice of obsession. Thus, becoming a virtuous person can be seen as a balancing act of our human will cooperating with the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus did.
Along with his perfect obedience to the Father, Jesus assumed all aspects of humanity to redeem them, including our emotions. We look at the image of Christ upon the crucifix each day and see the most virtuous person to ever live. This is who God calls us to imitate. But this isn’t something we can do by ourselves, so God sends us his Holy Spirit so that we might be “transformed into the same image.”(2 Corinthians 3:18). This wouldn’t be a fair discussion however, without acknowledging the problem of suffering.
Suffering, among other things such as natural disasters, illnesses or death, is referred to as a “Natural evil” by the Church, as such evils do not require our own choices to occur. God created the physical world and while it was good (cf. Genesis 1:31), it was yet to be perfect. As the Catechism states, “With physical good, there also exists physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection” (CCC 310). While it is true that our own decisions can make us more vulnerable to or likely to experience natural evils, it cannot be understated that we do not choose them. Clinical depression, general anxiety disorder nd others are natural evils. Why God permits these things to occur to his beloved children will likely remain a mystery to each of us until we meet him face to face (cf. CCC 314). So what are we to do?
Surprisingly, “Inside Out 2” also touches on this question. Early on, it is revealed that Joy has been sending undesirable memories to the back of Riley’s mind to keep them from affecting her “core self.” This predictably backfires and it later requires unleashing a tidal wave of these repressed memories in order to save Riley from her new teenage emotions that have run amuck. This series of events reflects a truth many of us have seen only in hindsight: “God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequences of an evil (CCC 312). But this doesn’t mean any evil is desirable.
As Father Mike Schmitz has said on several occasions, “If you’re praying, ‘please God, take this away from me,’ you’re not praying the wrong prayer,” but there may be times when God doesn’t. This is often the moment of truth when obeying Jesus’ command, “Follow me” is hardest. This is exactly what Jesus wrestled with in the garden. On the interior, we control what we can, working to master our emotional virtue. And when natural evils come, the most Christ-like thing we can do amid our sufferings is to trust the Father as Jesus did and say, “God, use this.” Discipleship is a constant invitation to imitate Jesus, both inside and out.