Understanding the Purpose of Emotions
By Lisa Horn
“Yet, LORD, you are our father; we are the clay and you our potter: we are all the work of your hand.” (Isaiah 64:7)
Sometimes it feels as though my heart is a piece of clay, rearranged and altered by the slightest disturbance. A Facebook notification alerting me that yet another high school friend is engaged while I'm still single can lead me into a thought spiral of despair. A snarky comment from my mother about my weight can derail even the best of days. Attitude from a cashier can easily extinguish my joy. I wish I didn’t feel things quite so intensely. I wish I wasn’t so easily shaken.
I don’t know about you, but I often find having all these emotions extremely confusing. Sometimes they guide me towards what is right and good; at other times, they seem more like a distraction, sending me on an accidental detour in my journey to holiness. If that’s the case how can I trust them? Does this mean feelings are bad and sinful?
I grappled with these questions for most of my teenage years, until I finally brought them up in confession. Here, the priest told me that it is not our feelings or passions that are good or bad. We aren’t sinning every time we experience a “negative” emotion. Feeling the hint of resentment towards a co-worker’s achievements, feeling empty and frustrated during prayer time, or perhaps even dreading visiting certain family members, are all normal and part of the human experience.
The beauty of our emotions
The Catechism of the Catholic Church offers insight into the experience of emotion: “The passions are natural components of the human psyche; they form the passageway and ensure the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the mind” (CCC 1764). In other words, our emotions aren’t that extra dose of chemical X that God mistakenly threw into the mix when creating us. As inconvenient as a bad mood may be, God created us with emotions for a reason. Why? Because through them, He communicates with us. That peace you may feel when you walk out of confession? Yup, that’s from God. The frustration that may arise when people are talking during Mass? That’s an opportunity to turn to Him. Our passions are like a speed dial communication between our senses and our mind and God can use them to help us respond to the world around us: “Feelings or passions...incline us to act or not to act in regard to something felt or imagined to be good or evil” (CCC 1763).
The Catechism makes clear that it’s not what we feel but what we choose to do with our feelings that matters:
In themselves passions are neither good nor evil. They are morally qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage reason and will. Passions are said to be voluntary, ‘either because they are commanded by the will or because the will does not place obstacles in their way.’ It belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be governed by reason (CCC 1767).
To a certain extent, what we feel is out of our control. What is in our control, though, is how we handle these feelings. Do I allow my feelings to affect how I speak and act towards my co-workers or my friends? Do I cease to pray because I’m just not feeling it? It’s what we choose to do with our feelings (i.e., our actions and our words) that brings our moral responsibility into play.
We can very easily recognize this to be true by examining Jesus’ actions in several stories in Scripture. As our model of how to live good Christian lives on earth, Jesus was no emotionless robot. He expressed sorrow and cried with Martha and Mary when they told Him His friend Lazarus had died. He expressed justified anger by turning over tables when people were taking advantage of the poor and desecrating His Father’s house. When God came down to earth in human form, He took on everything that it means to be human. Emotions and all.
Emotions in a broken world
As a fallen human being, I’ve certainly experienced that, while emotions are not bad in and of themselves, they are often unpredictable and they can become disordered and lead me to sin. If I’ve received good news, I might not even notice a cashier’s attitude at the check-out. But if I've had a bad night’s sleep, this interaction might be the tipping point into an insufferable bad mood. The question becomes, then, how do we order our emotions and respond to them in a way that will lead us to God?
We can discern this question by using our knowledge of good and evil and our ability to choose the good in our actions. As CCC 1767 reminds us, we are called to be “governed by reason” in our expression of emotion, meaning that we are engaging our will and letting it guide our words and actions. Instead of acting on every impulse, we are called to stop and recognise where the movements of the heart are leading us. One way to do this is to pray the daily Examen. This Ignatian practice is a way of prayerfully reflecting on the events of your day and your feelings throughout it. It helps in discerning the ways you moved towards God or away from Him during your day, bringing clarity to whether or not your emotions and will were oriented toward Him in your words and actions.
In reflecting on the role of emotion in my own life, I’ve come to realize we are called to love God with our heart in union with our mind (Luke 10:27). As a wise priest once told me, we need to ensure that there is a lift constantly going up and down between our hearts and our minds and that we’re not cutting off the connection or relying too heavily on either one.
Our culture may lead us to believe that fulfillment is synonymous with feeling strong emotions and that the intensity of an emotional experience is a measure of something’s value, but the emotional highs that we find in rom-coms and high action films are typically unsustainable and don’t make room for a balance between the heart and the mind. Living mainly through emotion begs the question: What happens when we just aren’t feeling it? What happens when we’re just not in the mood to pray, or to go to Mass, or to love someone?
Allowing myself to be moulded
In order to experience life as God intended me to, I am learning to stand in the face of sorrow, guilt, anger, and fear as well as that of joy, affirmation, and pleasure and respond to them appropriately. In the presence of each of these emotions, I can choose to love through my will to do so (even when I’m not feeling it).
As a person who continues to feel things intensely, I have to remind myself that as important and urgent as my emotions may feel, my feelings are not the only component to consider in a given situation. By the same token, my emotions are not something I should run away from either. I’ve discovered that having a malleable heart is a great gift––it means it is soft enough to be carved and moulded by God.
From my limited knowledge of pottery, in order to make a ceramic vessel, clay has to be worked and kneaded until it is tender, so that air pockets—which may cause the piece to explode or crack—can be removed. God has much greater things in store for us than to remain dry, hard pieces of clay, and He doesn’t want us to be broken and shattered either. If we allow our hearts to be soft and open, if we engage our minds and allow God to strengthen our will and and knead out air pocket impurities, and if we allow Him to refine our actions in the kiln of his grace and mercy, we can become the particular vessel he intended us to be.
