The Divided Heart and the Honest Fight

I was standing at the kitchen sink the other morning doing the sacred ritual of rinsing a bowl that was not really dirty, just morally suspicious. The window was doing that Pacific Northwest thing where the light arrives like an apology. And my phone was face down on the counter like a small sleeping animal I absolutely did not trust.

Because here is the ordinary scene of modern holiness. You are trying to be a person. You are trying to love your people. You are trying to pray without sounding like you are reading the back of a shampoo bottle. And you are also trying not to want what you want, which is complicated, because wanting is built into your bones. Wanting is the engine. Wanting is what makes you laugh when someone you love walks in the room. Wanting is what makes you scroll at midnight like you are looking for a missing child, and the missing child is your own peace.

Henri Nouwen had the decency to say out loud what we all try to manage with polite spiritual language. Part of him wanted to be a great saint. Part of him wanted to taste everything the sinners get to taste. As he put it, “I want to be a great saint, but I also want to taste everything that sinners get to experience. … No wonder my life is often tiring!” That sentence has the honesty of a man who has stopped pretending the Christian life is a self-improvement plan with better lighting.

So let’s stop pretending too.

The Christian life is not the removal of the wrestling match with sin. It is the transformation of how we wrestle. From secrecy to truth. From self-hatred to repentance. From compulsion to freedom. From isolation to communion. The ring does not disappear. But the rules change. The corner you stand in changes. The people who walk into the arena with you changes.

And that is hope. A plain, sturdy hope. The kind you can carry in your pocket without announcing it.

The tiring part is not temptation. It is double-mindedness.

It is one thing to be tempted. It is another thing to insist on two incompatible lives and demand that God bless both. That is the exhaustion. That is the split.

A man named John Cassian wrote about “double thoughts,” the inner tug-of-war in which the mind tries to serve two masters without admitting it is doing so. He was not talking about dramatic movie villains. He was talking about the ordinary inner storm. The half truth. The “technically.” The “I’ll pray later.” The “I deserve this.” The “nobody will know.” The private kingdom we keep insisting is not a kingdom.

Double mindedness is when you keep a room in your soul locked, and then you wonder why the whole house feels cold.

And in that locked room, the imagination does its little theater tricks. It runs scenes. It rewrites history. It auditions tomorrow. It makes sin look inevitable and grace look theoretical.

An old desert genius named Evagrius Ponticus described the “logismoi,” those thought patterns that arrive as suggestions before they become decisions. This matters because temptation often begins as a whisper, not a vow. A thought floats in like smoke. You could say that cutting thing. You could click that. You could hide that. You could take the shortcut. You could numb out. You could be alone with this.

But hope gets practical right here. A thought is not yet consent. You are not damned because something ugly knocked on the door. The knock is not the crime.

Sin borrows the voice of a good longing.

We miss this when we make Christianity into a list of don’ts. As if desire itself is the villain. Desire is not the enemy. Disordered desire is.

Maximus the Confessor helps with a distinction that feels like a window being opened. There is natural desire, your God given hunger for goodness, beauty, love, belonging, meaning. And then there is desire warped by fragmentation, when the soul tries to get the right thing in the wrong way, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, with the wrong intensity.

Sin is often a good longing driven into the ditch.

You want to be seen, so you manipulate.
You want rest, so you numb yourself into oblivion.
You want intimacy, so you grab a counterfeit version that costs less and delivers less.
You want joy, so you settle for stimulation.
You want to matter, so you collect attention and control like shiny objects.

The longing is not always the problem. The strategy is.

And when the strategy fails, we call ourselves names. We confuse struggle with identity. That is not repentance. That is despair dressed up as honesty.

The fight is in the whole human person.

We like to locate the fight in “the will,” because that makes it simple. Just decide harder. But the arena is bigger.

The fight is in memory and old grooves.
The fight is in the body and tired nerves.
The fight is in attachment and fear.
The fight is in imagination and rehearsal.

This is where the Catholic tradition is bracingly sane. It treats you like a whole person. It also admits that spiritual struggle can be intensified by emotional wounds without being excused by them.

A Dutch psychiatrist named Anna Terruwe, working with Conrad Baars, wrote about how emotional deprivation can intensify compulsions and repression. Not as an alibi, but as a map. If you are starving for affection, you may go hunting in the wrong forests. If you were never affirmed, you may chase applause like oxygen. Grace does not deny that. Grace enters it.

The good news is not “try harder.” The good news is: you can bring the whole mess into the light.

Remember this…Mercy is not softness. Mercy is fire.

If you grew up thinking God is mostly disappointed, this may feel like learning a new language.

Isaac of Nineveh writes about mercy as a fire that purifies without humiliating. God does not heal by crushing. God heals by burning away what is false while preserving what is human.

This is why confession, when it is healthy, is not a courtroom. It is a clinic. It is light. It is naming. It is surrender. A person says, “I am split,” and hears in return, “You are not abandoned.”

And confession is not the only practice that changes the fight. There is fasting, which teaches the body it is not the boss. There is silence, which exposes the noise you use to avoid yourself. There is Scripture, which rewrites the imagination. There is the liturgy, which reorders time. There is custody of the eyes, which is really custody of the heart. There is spiritual direction, which is help reading your own weather. And there is friendship.

A Cistercian named Aelred of Rievaulx wrote about spiritual friendship as truth without despair. Not a friendship that winks at sin, but one that refuses to let you fight alone. Isolation is gasoline on temptation. In isolation, shame grows teeth.

Bring one wise person into the arena. One faithful friend. One confessor. One companion who can say, calmly, “You’re not uniquely awful. Let’s walk toward the light.”

Think of Freedom as a trained desire.

A Dominican moral theologian, Servais Pinckaers contrasts a thin freedom, freedom as mere choice, with a thick freedom, freedom for excellence. The pianist is not free because he can hit any key at random. He is free because he has practiced the good so deeply that the good becomes possible, even joyful. Virtue is the schooling of desire.

And growth, as Benedict Groeschel reminds us, often looks like repeated return rather than dramatic victory. You come back. You come back again. You come back with your hands empty and your pride smaller. That coming back is not failure. It is the shape of fidelity.

The point is not to win by your own force. The point is to stop fighting in the dark.

Because in the dark, you confuse your worst moment with your name. In the light, you remember your name is beloved.

Say this to yourself…

When I want to be a saint and a sinner, I will tell the truth quickly and without drama.
I will treat temptation as a knock, not a verdict, and I will not confuse a thought with consent.
I will bring my hidden rooms into the light through confession, prayer, and one trusted friend.
I will practice small acts of freedom that train my desire toward the good, again and again.
And I will trust that mercy is not humiliation but healing, and that God is making me one.