“Your own personal Jesus…reach out and touch faith.” Depeche Mode
Sacrilege or truth, you decide…or do you? Are we so free that we create truth? Can I determine what my “own personal Jesus” is saying to me? I have a conscience; it tells me what to do and when. Our culture shouts support for our acceptance of our inner voice. What could go wrong? A whole lot from the looks of things. The character Bane from Batman demonstrates this in his banter with Batman,
“Ah, you think darkness is your ally. You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it. Molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but blinding!”
We understand him when he talks; his reason is intact, his will shines out in his desire to express himself, and he references the light. He hasn’t become a grunting animal but is easily identifiable as a human with all that entails by nature—a rational being who seeks the good and judges his acts through his conscience. The darkness may not have molded him, but he was written with a nod to what can happen when we misunderstand ourselves. Why do we understand Bane and Depeche mode so easily? One speaking of the darkness and the other the light? We understand because both talk about light from the lens of a particular human experience. Bane does it in contrast to what he has become, and Depeche Mode has their idea of the light as an inner spark, but they reference the same thing. Why?
Because we were born in it, molded by it.
When Peter said, “Master, to whom would we go? You have the words of real life, eternal life” (Jn 6:68), he spanned our creation and destination, the Alpha and the Omega of our being. Jesus has the words of real life, and God supports all the words ever uttered by his continued presence in every moment. Yes, we choose the words; we as men may have even made the words, “the man [did give] names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Gen 2:20). But we did this through participation in the mind of God.
We did not create our reason and will any more than Adam created what he named. And we don’t make the truth or freedom; we discover and participate in them. They work as they work in the mind of God. Any conception of ours that doesn’t line up with that must be seen as falling short or lacking in the way that a blind eye lacks the good of it, which is sight. The more we learn about truth and align ourselves with it, the freer we become. “For freedom on the one hand is for the sake of truth and on the other hand it cannot be perfected except by means of truth. Hence the words of our Lord ‘The truth will make you free’ (Jn 8:32). There is no freedom without truth” (Avery Dulles, S.J., The Truth about Freedom: A Theme from John Paul II, 129).
This may sound contradictory to modern ears at first blush; it “runs counter to the value-free concept [of freedom] so prevalent in contemporary culture” (Avery Dulles, S.J., The Truth about Freedom: A Theme from John Paul II, 130) but a little contemplation will show us the way through the knot. Can we be free if we follow God’s rules, the Truth? Isn’t freedom the ability to do whatever we want? In short order, most of us would end up in a world of hurt on this path. Dead, in jail, substance addicted at one extreme or mired in the desolation of a life lived on the surface with few developed skills and dependence on others at the opposite end. Contrast this with the life of Itzhak Perlman, whose freedom on the violin was earned through years of adhering to the truths of music. Like the church saints, Perlman reached the end he was oriented towards. The freedom he had was cultivated, demonstrating the progressive nature of liberty. It is not found here or there, in this one moment, and in that the next. That describes human passions, which, if followed blindly, can lead to the “slavery of sin.” Instead, freedom grows in us, as it grew in Perlman; the more we do what is good, the freer we become. Until, through the Grace of God, we become saints or martyrs, the supreme exemplars of freedom, who freely laid down their lives and thereby gave witness to the truth (Avery Dulles, S.J., The Truth about Freedom: A Theme from John Paul II, 136). It’s something we’d be hard-pressed to imagine Bane doing…unless (more on that later).
With all the competing voices, how do we know we are growing in freedom and not blindness? Growth is a fact, and a fact requires a value judgment. The Catholic Church tells us that our “dignity requires [us] to act through conscious and free choice, as motivated and prompted personally from within, and not through blind impulse or merely external pressure” (Avery Dulles, The Truth about Freedom: A Theme from John Paul II, 132). Bane was prompted from within, but where did he, and let’s be honest, do we go wrong? When John Paul II refers to the prompt from within, he references what the Catholic Church understands when she speaks of conscience. She explicitly uses the term “conscience” in speaking of the human person’s inner drive to discover the truth about human action and being” (William May, Conscience: Its Meaning, Formation, and Relationship to Church Authority,101). Understood this way, “conscience is a special and very fundamental mode of self-awareness – the awareness of how it is with oneself” (William May, Conscience: Its Meaning, Formation, and Relationship to Church Authority 101). It judges how closely our acts comport with reality and is the compass guiding us to freedom. It is not a decision maker deciding what we ought to do at every moment. It is truly a judge. If we don’t see this, we can quickly end up lost like Bane. Never learning that our conscience is “the messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules …as the aboriginal Vicar of Christ” (CCC 1778).
“It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself to hear and follow the voice of his conscience. [In our world of constant distraction and ever-multiplying “content”] it is necessary to “return to [our] conscience, question it…Turn inward…and in everything [we] do, see God as [our] witness” (CCC 1779). “For I am conscious of nothing against myself, but I do not thereby stand acquitted; the one who judges me is the Lord” (1 Cor 4:4). This “conscience enables one to assume responsibility for the acts performed. If a man commits evil, the just judgment of conscience can remain within him as the witness to the universal truth of the good, at the same time as the evil of his particular choice” (CCC 1781). And by so doing prompts man toward mercy, calling to his mind the requirement of contrition so like the thief on the cross who acknowledged the condemnation he was justly receiving, asked for mercy in the form of remembrance from Our Lord and entered Heaven through Grace (cf. Luke 41-43).
So, what about Bane? Is it too late? Is he the bane of his existence? Well, was he an actual person and not a fictional character, it would never be too late while breath was in him because “deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey” (CCC 1776) and “no one can abrogate it entirely” (CCC 1956). That law constantly calls him to repent, believe, know the truth, and be free.
Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed., Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997.
Depeche Mode. Personal Jesus. Mute Records, 1989.
Dulles, Avery. The Truth About Freedom: A Theme from John Paul II. Theological Studies, vol. 55, no. 1, 1994, p. 132.
May, William E. Conscience: Its Meaning, Formation, and Relationship to Church Authority. National Catholic Bioethics Center, 2013.