Emotions, Feelings, and Desires

I was recently thinking about how often I do what I feel like doing. It brought back memories of some teachings I received several years ago about feelings/emotions and their role in a person.

In the original creation of man, everything was properly ordered. Pertaining to this subject, it meant that his will was subject to his intellect which was supported by his emotions/feelings. When that original man sinned, disorder was brought upon him and the world. Since that day, our emotions/feelings no longer act in a supporting role to our intellect, but they contend over the will against the intellect. Admittedly, I think emotions/feelings win this battle just as much as they lose it in my life. So as disordered beings, we must work hard to live a properly ordered life, which often means doing those things we must do/should do/need to do instead of the things we want to do.

Of course this does not mean that we should throw our emotions/feelings out the window or kick our desires out the door. Doing this would be committing a worse error than giving into them all the time! God made us with emotions/feelings and desires, so they should not be rejected. Instead we should occasionally take time to reflect on which side is in control of our will, intellect or feelings. If feelings are too often taking charge, it is time to practice a little self-control (which can be quite painful) to gain some proper order in our lives. We should also occasionally evaluate our desires, which can come from one of three places, God, evil, or ourselves. Ideally, as in original man, our desires are perfectly aligned with God's desires for us, but that changed with original sin and now we are often unaware of the source of our desires. Either source can look like our own desires and the opposite as well. This is a more difficult thing to discern, but well worth the work.

It is amazing how good life can be when proper order is established, within us and around us. It is something definitely worth working for.