Divinations and omens and dreams are folly, and like a woman with labor pains the mind has fancies. Unless they are sent from the Most High as a visitation, do not give your mind to them. For dreams have deceived many, and those who put their hope in them have failed.—Sir 34:5-7.
Recently I saw some news: A large Catholic company hired a rabid pro-abort to do some voice-overs. When the Catholic CEO was challenged on this decision by mainstream Catholic media, the CEO’s said publicly, “It’s something we have discerned intensely” and “this is what God is calling us to do” and even added “we prayed deeply through this decision and consulted heavily with our advisors.”
Shockingly, the mainstream Catholic media gave him a “pass” on such silly gnosticism. Was this because it sounded like a pious answer? Probably so. Yet all the businessman essentially said to justify himself was: “Leave me alone about my bad decision because I prayed about it.” No evidence at all to back up his decision to partner with a pro-abort.
It got me thinking. Why did the Catholic media (after hearing he hired a pro-abort) let him off the hook with the answer “I prayed about it, discerned it and sought counsel”? Probably because most American Catholics have conflated their emotions with God. The thrust of the self-deceit usually goes something like this:: “If I feel I should do this or that, then that is God ‘talking’ to me.”
Oh really? So if you went to adoration and “felt good” about divorcing your wife, then that was God talking? Or if you were at Mass and God told you He looks at your heart—not at your yoga pants—then I’m supposed to believe you? Or if you were praying the Rosary and you had a sense you could meditate better by watching the Chosen then it must be the Blessed Virgin Mary? I don’t think so, since that show blasphemes her. All of the above sentences are examples of one’s emotions deceiving a beginner in prayer.
Most Christians today are so shallow that their idea of “prayer” is just looking for feelings where they can essentially claim that God has rubber-stamped their foregone conclusions. How convenient. I had good feelings it was a good idea to expose online the flirtatious attitude of this woman in my Bible Study so that definitely came from God. This is the erroneous theology of millions of American Christians—including Catholics. They claim, for example, that gossip is not gossip. They choose from any battery of excuses from, “I know God would want me to vent and not hold everything in” to “That flirty gal in my Bible study proved she needed more prayers from all us ladies in the Bible study!”
I think you see where this is going. You can justify every sin in your life if you believe God is actually talking through your emotions. This is very dangerous theology. You may have heard it in some guy saying “God told me to get an annulment at Mass because my wife is horrible…” or some woman saying, “Mary told me in adoration I am not supposed to veil my head at Mass.” The list goes on and on with these stupid foregone conclusions rubber-stamped in “prayer.” And I put “prayer” in quotes because if it were real prayer they would never get a different answer from Scripture (such as Mt 19 on marriage ceasing only at death or 1 Cor 11 in regards to women veiling their heads in a Church.)
I wish I could say “The solution to this is to get a good spiritual director.” But as I pointed out in the opening paragraph to this article, the CEO who hired a pro-abort claimed he sought much counsel before paying the anti-Catholic celebrity to work for his company. Yes, you can find a Catholic priest to justify selling your children into slavery if you look hard enough and set up a sob-story well enough for a priest with a low-price. (And by low-price, I don’t mean only financial. I mean many priests are so lonely or political that they’ll tell you exactly what you want to hear just to keep a friend or parishioner, even to the point of ushering you into mortal sin.) It’s all further reason I suggest you get a solid regular-confessor, but not a spiritual director.
The answer if you take this into your own hands is first to expect challenges in prayer more than rubber-stamping of what you feel like doing. Your emotions aren’t God. Jesus said Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.—Mt 10:37-39. In other words, in prayer, you’re going to be called to the cross if you’re praying the right way. On the other hand, your own tricky emotions will ratify your hopes for a life of ease and pleasure.
Keep in mind before you go to prayer: Christ is more interested in your eternal happiness than your earthly happiness. That means if you find the easy way out in “prayer,” you’re probably not praying hard enough. (I’m not saying the hardest way is always the way, either.) But if you constantly look for “God” to ratify a conscience that has never been formed according to the Church Fathers or St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Alphonsus Liguori, well, you will find it. But that internal interfacing will simply be your own neurotransmitters telling you to do sin because it feels good, while simultaneously giving “God” credit for bringing you to your foregone conclusion to sin. Such blasphemy won’t bode well on the final report card. So, you better learn to either pray harder or study harder if you frequently find yourself saying stupid things like, God told me…
How do I know it’s “stupid” to talk like that? Look at the Annunciation. Mary (the Mother of God who is certainly higher than the angels) still had to talk to an angel right before the Incarnation took place in her. So, you think the Immaculate Virgin Mary had to sometimes go through an angel to God in her absolutely pure and sinless state, living from her Immaculate Conception at the highest stages of the unitive stage of prayer, but you in your sweats in the suburbs of Phoenix get to go communicate directly with God while drinking your coffee because you had some caffeine-induced consolation? No, those feelings were probably not “God.” It was probably just coffee. So please stop saying things like, “God told me to go to Target.”
The other problem with this is it ceases communication with all other would-be interlocutors. Imagine a good friend says back to to the Target-bound woman: “Honey, you can’t go to Target, because that company was involved in pushing transgenderism on children and never took it back.” Well, the woman who wants to go shopping so badly will easily say back: “Yes, but God told me to go to Target, so I’m going to listen to Him, not you.” Do you see how cowardly and manipulative it is to claim that direct bat-cave line to the Gotham City mayor above by simply shielding your conscience in something as shallow as your emotions? It is dangerous for your salvation to put emotions ahead of reason. Why? Because the Church Fathers all teach that reason was less affected at the fall of Adam and Eve than their emotions.
All of this is not to say that the Holy Spirit’s gift of counsel is not a very powerful gift. Or, to put it in the positive, we truly can rely on the Holy Spirit’s gift of counsel to know (quite rapidly in fact) to know what to do, what to say, and even what to think as our lives turn so fast on a dime. But that gift only works as the conscience works: Fully-formed in true Catholicism that seeks to love God above oneself. Supernatural charity has to be ordered before the deeper levels of the ascetical life can be tackled. Counsel works, but only for those truly living in sanctifying grace, usually for a while in a mature interior life. Or for the few childlike (not childish) souls who readily avoid every form of spiritual-vanity and duplicity it also works.
If you are following the Gospel and the Magisterium as best you can (even if you’re not a saint) you can pray for the Holy Spirit’s gift of counsel to again help you know over long periods (or even short periods) of time how to think, say or act. But these heavenly acts of counsel will never ever contradict the articulated faith and morals of the Church. That is why you have to get down pat your traditional theology before you go around telling us casually what “God told you” while brushing your teeth. I don’t care what “God” told you brushing your teeth anymore than what you watched on HBO in the 1980s. Both are probably fictional.
Follow Jesus Christ, not your emotions. They really are not one and the same. And if you truly do sense that you have an insight from the Holy Spirit while living a true Catholic life while [most likely] being in sanctifying grace, just say in all humility to your friends or family: “I had an understanding in prayer…” not “God told me.” The former allows real discussion with friends. The latter leads to spiritual manipulation.
