Friday Night at 8: Temptation

Mick Jagger, it is said, didn’t like this version of the tune so didn’t release it for a long time.  But it suits my purposes for this essay, and I kinda like it.

Pleased to meet you … hope you guessed my name …

Found an interesting etymological factoid about the word “temptation”:

[Origin: 1175-1225; ME temptacion < L tempt?ti?n- (s. of tempt?ti?) a testing.

Emphasis mine!

Been reading a lot of folks’ reactions to the Spitzer scandal (of course my view is that the real story is, sadly, being missed in the bright shiny distractions of sex and our lamestream media (h/t lasthorseman).

And of course we have Jeffrey Lieber’s essay which went into quite a bit of detail as to what it would take to make him do something so universally derided as stupid and hypocritical and idiotic and such … though at the end it seems Mr. Lieber would not have given in to temptation no matter how … well … tempting!

Now me?  I tend to have followed the philosophy of Oscar Wilde:

I can resist anything except temptation.

Well maybe those weren’t Wilde’s exact words, but you catch my drift, I’m sure.

I think it’s awfully easy to look at someone else’s really huge mistakes and proclaim after the fact, “Well, I would NEVER do something so damned stupid!”  And no doubt we wouldn’t do that exact stupid thing.

But temptation is a tricky force, I think, and I’m kind of superstitious about it, to the point where I try not to say “I’ll never ____.”  Because I’ve found that the moment I say I’ll “never” do something, damned if I don’t end up doing it!  And that kind of annoys me.

And of course we have the great historic religious temptations … Jesus being tempted by the Devil, that he will have absolute power on earth if he only swears allegiance to that man of wealth and taste, heh.  Even Buddha had to face Mara and was offered pretty much the same thing, before he achieved his final liberation over the ego.

Well, sex is a very common temptation, and the passions can overcome one without any preparation.  We can discuss that rationally and in our own minds swear that we would never be fool enough to fall for that obvious trap.  Me, I don’t think it’s that easy.  I’m sure many folks have managed to successfully resist the temptations of overpowering chemistry and sexual appeal.  And I’m sure just as many have not.

But there’s more to temptation than sex and power and money.

I read a book once, The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom … it was her memoir of growing up in Holland (Haarlem) during World War II.  Her Christian family hid Jews from the Nazis — they were eventually caught and Corrie, her sister Bessie, and her father, were all imprisoned in concentration camps.  Her father died almost immediately, he was very old, but Corrie and Bessie went through a long time in the camps.

Corrie’s sister Bessie was pretty much a saint, according to Corrie.  She prayed constantly and they ended up organizing secret prayer groups in the camps, which fed their souls.

Corrie, on the other hand, wasn’t much of a saint, according to her memoir.  She’d get angry and go through all kinds of confusions, even as her religious faith was very strong.

One of the anecdotes in the book that I found interesting was when Corrie was nasty to a fellow prisoner and justified it by looking at how awful the Nazi prison guards were, and in comparison her bad behavior seemed insignificant.  But later, she found herself completely unable to pray.  She contemplated this and realized that seeing folks do really awful things sometimes tempted us to downplay our own faults, and thus we could become less and less loving as human beings.  She ended up apologizing to the prisoner she was mean to, and found herself unburdened by the act and able to pray again.

Tempation is a funny thing, a strange test.  Giving in to temptation can also be seen in not acting as well.  When we walk past a homeless person and don’t bother to even notice, much less help, them, and we justify it by saying we are in such a hurry … when we hear of injustice and we don’t stand up against it because we feel oh we have no power to change anything, when we take money to do a job we know isn’t good for either society or the planet (Blackwater?  Halliburton?).  There are temptations everywhere, and the less spectacular ones are sometimes more insidious than we would think.

Well I’m no saint.  I’ve given in to temptation many times.  I’ve always marveled at the twists and turns my life has taken due to temptation … whether I gave in to it or stood firm and resisted it (I’ve done that maybe one or two times, heh).

An old lover once said to me that we never give something up until we find something better, something we want more.  In my spiritual journeys, I’ve seen the value in that advice.  As much as temptation can lure us in, can make us go against what we believe is right and good and true, we also have, in our hearts, a real desire for love and healing and compassion and helping others, even to the point of putting their needs before our own.  I believe if we try to make it more of a habit to tap into that desire, we will find it easier to resist the kinds of temptations that hurt ourselves and others, that we will more often pass that test of our own humanity.

But I’ll say one thing — I never underestimate the wiles of temptation.  Oh rats! I just said “never”!  Aaaaaaah!

Happy Friday to all you fellow wage-slaves out there and to all Dharmaniacs on the tubez tonight.  Yay!  It’s the weekend!