Disney’s Jiminy Cricket tells Pinocchio to “always let your conscience be your guide,” and the Catholic Church teaches that the conscience is our “most secret core and sanctuary,” within which we are alone with the voice of God. It is clear that an individual’s conscience holds a respected place both in our wider culture and certainly within church teaching. But the nuances around informing and listening to our conscience can feel mystifying.
While a strong sense of personal accountability is a good thing, the conscience can also be incorrectly invoked as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card to justify whatever decision we’ve made.
Or conversely, some of us may have an overactive conscience, a kind of perfectionism that migrates to the moral sphere, also known as “scruples” in religious contexts. So how can we best understand the role of our conscience in our spiritual life? And how do we discern right moral action when we are contending with competing voices and complex scenarios?
On this episode of “The Spiritual Life,” Father James Martin welcomes James Keenan, S.J., a pre-eminent moral theologian at Boston College, to help tease out the finer considerations for forming our consciences.
Before we think about the acts or decisions of our conscience, Father Keenan suggests we first reflect on vulnerability as a precursor to conscience. He draws this insight from the parable of the Good Samaritan that Jesus tells in the Gospel of Luke. What enables the Samaritan man to recognize the needs of his neighbor, beaten by robbers on the road and left for dead? It’s certainly not shared culture or a biological sense of kinship—as Jews and Samaritans were known to despise one another at that time. The answer, Father Keenan asserts, is in their vulnerability.
[Related: Vulnerability isn’t weakness. It’s what makes us human—and able to love.]
“Vulnerable does not mean to be wounded or having been wounded,” Father Keenan explains. “It means capable of being wounded…. So all three of the people in the Good Samaritan parable were vulnerable. They were capable of responding to the man on the road, but only one really stopped.”
The questions for us, therefore, become: Am I vulnerable to knowing what I need to know? And if I don’t share an immediate connection to another person, am I willing to get out of my comfort zone, to plunge into the uncertainty and chaos of another person’s life, in order to relate to their fundamental human needs? Just because I have never endured racial discrimination or homelessness does not excuse me from being open or “vulnerable to” the needs of those who are. How can I allow my heart to become tenderized to the plight of the poor? How can I educate myself on the very real challenges they face? This formative process must happen in an ongoing way, as a precursor to the decisions we make in our conscience to act. In other words, our decisions made in good conscience are already subjected to daily formation, social relationships and community connection; they are not isolated verdicts of the heart.
Finally, Father Keenan urges us to get familiar with the inner workings of our conscience: “See how your conscience guides you, whether your conscience warns you, whether your conscience indulges you, whether your conscience prompts you,” Father Keenan says. “These are all different movements. And those that make you move toward the good, that’s a real conscience. The others are kind of maybe a superego or something else at work.”
Here are a few suggestions from Father Martin for examining your conscience as you continue to deepen your spiritual life:
- First, ask God to help you be honest.
- Second, ask yourself where you, as Father Keenan would say, have failed to bother to love.
- Finally, make a firm resolution to change, and if need be, see a confessor.
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