resist

I realize that this is the beginning sentence to a lot of my blog posts, but while I was in the shower this morning, a piece of a song lyric began to haunt me. I don’t know where it came from, or what fertile soil I’d provided for it to take root, but take root it did, and by the time I was driving to work, the entire song was playing in my head. I began to think of the profundity of the simple, outrageously ridiculous lines of the song. Of course the lyric was from Neil Peart (shock).
January’s readings in the Celtic book of Prayer had essentially been a blog on the lines of the hymn, Be Thou my Vision, so it occurred to me to blog the lyric of this song. When I got to work, I had no choice but to quote the lyric to my first student:

I can learn to resist
anything but temptation.

He just kind of developed an odd look and said, “well, what else is there to resist, but temptation?” “Precisely,” I said.
The punch comes in the realization that we tend to get a false sense of righteousness from resisting things that have no allure for us. Our false righteousness results in judgment of others who do have to fight temptation with the things that cause us no problems. The self-righteous man feels good about himself because he does not, for example, abuse alcohol, and looks down upon those who do. What he fails to consider is that there are plenty of people who claim no righteousness at all, but who have no struggle with alcohol abuse.
Perhaps the bottom line here again is that we’re deceived into believing that our goodness comes from avoidance of things that we think aren’t good. But as we all know, deep down, our goodness does not come from not doing bad, but from doing good, and our righteousness comes from neither.
When we think that resistance causes us to be good, we will list things to resist from worst to least according to the magnitude of our own temptation with these things. This way, we will have a better chance at avoiding the worst, and thus feel better about ourselves, and of course, worse about those who do struggle with the things that cause us no struggle. Of course the things that tempt me are nowhere near as bad as the things by which you are tempted.
In this way, we begin to believe that we are resisting bad things although they cause us no temptation, and this is a good thing because we need an avoidance behavior measurement tool to feel good about ourselves.
Thus Neil Peart's statement that we can resist anything but temptation speaks to our spending time feeling good about things that are easy for us and don't bother with the bad things that require change, development, transformation in ourselves.
We look for ways to feel good about who we are, rather than becoming someone we can feel good about.