Fr. Bembol, DSPNSDA Parish Priest, as he was greeted by his parish workers.
Can habit, mere habit, become a virtue? Do we become what we do? One of the greatest mistakes we can ever make-and even the greatest of men or a great number of them, have made the mistake- is to assume that we can do false and discreditable things and still remain (“deep inside us”) good people or the same people. If we do it long enough or often enough, the act or the habit transforms the person. It is like the old temperance saying: “FIRST THE MAN DRINKS THE DRINK; THEN THE DRINK DRINKS THE DRINK; THEN THE DRINK DRINKS THE MAN.”
We can see it plainly in the case of something like alcohol, but it is harder to see in the weakness of spirit: in habitual envy, or greed, or double dealing, of faithlessness. This is part of what Aristotle meant when he said long ago: “VIRTUE IS A HABIT.” A habit of the mind, of the will, of the heart.
But the inescapable fact that we become what we do has its positive side also. It is renewing and renourishing as well as punishing. We can also become what were not by what we do, in an upward and growing way. This is psychologically true or it would not be morally true.
Max Beerbohm, who is generally thought of as an “uplifting” writer, wrote a superb short story that is little known, called THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE that makes this point in a most touching manner. The chief character is a cynical Regency rake named Lord George Hell, debaucher and despoiler of women who inexplicably falls in love with a saintly young lady. To gain her trust and affection, he conceals his corrupt and ravaged features with a mask of a saint.
She, being naïve and vulnerable, takes the appearance for reality all-too-predictably falls in love with the pseudo-saint. They soon marry. All goes well… until a jealous female of his past enters the scene and threatens to expose him for the vile hypocrite he is unless he takes off the mask and bares his true nature. Caught off guard as it were by this contretemps and having no choice, he pulls it off in front of his good wife- and, astonishingly enough, beneath the saint’s mask, is the face of the saintly person HE HAS BECOME by wearing it in the name of love. There is here no DEUS EX MACHINA or any such unnatural aid to the happy resolution of the plot, but all- natural transformation by the power of love, God in us, through God’s grace.
This DORIAN GRAY story-in-reverse, as it were, exemplifies the maxim that we become what we habitually do and what we habitually feel. In a sense there is no “deep inner self” that remains inviolate despite our actions and relations with the world.
Personality is like an onion: peel off layer after layer and when the final layer is discarded, there is no onion left. The core of us reside with the layers of love or hate, straightness or crookedness, in our daily dealings and in the habits we form and are formed by! Unfortunately, it often takes a lifetime for us to realise this.
