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If  you want to change your behavior, you’ve got to know how, and this idea was one of the biggest ones in western Christendom for centuries for a reason, from Augustine to Aquinas to Chemnitz to the modern day. And yes, it applies to your relationships with women in some pretty neat ways.

A little explanation of the terms, mortal and venial sin splits sin into two categories with useful applications for each. It’s not just “big” sin and “little” sin, but an excellent key for distinguishing what you personally are responsible for. A mortal sin is something that you choose to do that is wrong, with three conditions, free will, sufficient reflection, and deliberate consent. It’s wrong and you know it’s wrong while you’re doing it, you know exactly what you’re doing. Venial sin is anything wrong that we do that has a defect in one of the three conditions, and is more in the nature of a mistake than deliberately choosing wrong.

Mortal sin is far more serious, because you have have far more control, and therefore responsibility. This is a freeing concept however because it helps make clear what you already know on some level, a lot of the mistakes and stupid stuff we do doesn’t justify the level of fear or guilt that we associate with it, we are not fully, only partially, responsible. So, every time you make a mistake, as long as you didn’t deliberately choose something you knew was wrong, there’s no reason to view the mistake as a terrible set back.

In many ways being a better man is bound up more in not screwing yourself up than in “doing” certain things (although that is necessary). If it’s not intentional, there’s no real reason to be afraid of screwing up. When dealing with ourselves and the opposite sex it’s normal to have little flashes of cowardice or neediness or any number of harmful things. As long as you’re not deliberately and consciously indulging them, it’s just part of the growth process.

If you avoid the deliberate decision to be cowardly or needy (more commonly this takes the form of focusing on these ideas), your true, and best self, can start to come out. You see, “sin” is, among other things, anything you do that is harmful to you and your relationship to God. Cowardice is certainly harmful, and is, as CS Lewis says, the only sin that is entirely painful, painful to contemplate, painful to experience, and painful to remember. As long as you don’t choose it, bravery is, in some ways, your natural state. I think you’ll also find that when you stop deliberately choosing something that you know, at least confusedly, shows cowardice, the “little flashes” will have less frequency and intensity. You still can’t control them, but you can influence them.

Michael D.

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We live, like the ancient Chinese curse, in interesting times.

I ran into my pastor at Starbucks recently (he’s now leaving us to teach at a nationally recognized seminary). Perhaps the first time I’ve ever really had a real conversation with him. I told him about how most of what I needed to know for my own spiritual growth, I got out of books, not anything I learned in any church I’d ever been to. Perhaps a little bold, in retrospect, since that included his church, but he said something interesting.

That that was his experience as well.

What kind of state is the church in where a parishioner and a pastor both admit that they almost never learned what they really needed to know in church? About spiritual growth? Kind of the church’s mission isn’t it?

I know the old saying, attributed to St. Francis when I heard it that, “You should preach the gospel at all times, and, if necessary, use words”. Problem is words are necessary. Observing something without knowing what’s behind it is the death of knowledge, it keeps it from being passed on. When it comes to being a better man we have precious little to observe and almost no explanation. This is a state of affairs that cannot continue.

This blog is about dating, and everything applies to that as well. But dating is not a sector of your life cut out from everything else. Done right, you’re displaying who you truly are to a girl, your best self, someone she can trust, someone she has every reason to be attracted to. But, if you don’t know how to be better than you are now, you won’t have the tools to be better.

Because being the way you are now hasn’t worked out very well has it?

Michael D.

CS Lewis once said that that being good is less about doing good things and more about being the sort of person who does good things.

Attracting women purely through using tips and tricks is kind of unsatisfying ultimately. Went through my own stage with this, and you ultimately wind up with the same sort of problem that the rich and famous have in their relationships, “Does she like me or does she like what I have (fame, money, good looks, etc.)?”  I had to ask myself whether or not a girl liked me because I knew the right buttons to push, or because she like me.

One of the most exciting discoveries in my own life, is when I discovered that I could be a better man, and that being a better man makes better women automatically respond to you. It’s fantastic when a girl warms up to you and becomes open without any apparent effort on your part.

I’m not talking about some sort of false sunshine, feel good, “positive thinking” nonsense either. I’m talking about really becoming the man you desire to be, that you were designed to be. When you fit your own template of a strong and good man, good women are attracted to that, and the bad ones weed themselves out. You also become more aware of what’s really going on, paying less attention to what people say and more to how they’re responding and acting. The whole Male/Female dance becomes less of a complete mystery and more of a reality.

This is the introduction, so more, much more, later,

Michael D.