Many Catholics will tell you that taking the Lord’s name in vain, doesn’t mean using it as a curse word when someone cuts in front of you in traffic. Instead—they argue—taking the Lord’s name in vain is when you use it to justify ugly human behaviour.
They will try to convince you that taking the Lord’s name in vain is when you declare you are pro-life—because humans are made in the image of God—but then you refer to immigrants as sub-human. They say that taking the Lord’s name in vain is when you hold a protest sign that says, “God hates gays,” or when you insist that real Catholic women never ever say “no” to their husbands.
The truth is, of course, taking the Lord’s name in vain is both these things
What we say, ought to reflect what we believe, and what we believe ought to be shaped by what we say. We are what we do, and we are what we say. We are what we believe, and we are what we hold in our secret hearts that only the Lord can know.
If we are in the habit of being gentle and loving and generous and self-sacrificial toward others, then why would we not make the extra effort to also control our tongue? Why would we not use our voice to be gentle, loving, and generous towards our fellow humans and also towards God?
Using God’s name in vain is what you were taught in beginning catechism class; and it’s also something more subtle and more comprehensive.
Here’s another example of an updated understanding of virtue that corrects one error but makes a new one: It has become common for enlightened Catholics to insist that modesty is entirely an interior disposition and has nothing to do with the clothes we wear.
I understand how we got here. In the past several decades—or maybe centuries—some Catholics have made the concept of modesty into a mockery, insisting that a few inches of fabric one way or the other can determine whether someone is holy, or whether Mary is going to take great personal delight in casting them into Gehenna.
I’ve heard of absurdly immodest situations where Catholic school girls are made to kneel in front of their male teachers so the teacher can measure whether their skirts hit the floor or not, to comply with the dress code.
Now we are seeing an entirely sensible backlash against this style of humiliation and objectification of the female body, which calls itself “modesty.”
That’s not a bad thing! Some very holy people who spread the love of God wherever they go, wear clothes that other Catholics might find too revealing. While some extremely rotten people dress like Mennonites. So, it’s a good thing to avoid focusing solely on clothing.
But the lesson here isn’t “clothing doesn’t matter.” The lesson is that, just as with not taking the Lord’s name in vain, being modest is both an inward and an outward exercise. The two should be integrated and should inform each other.
Clothing is supposed to be an expression of what goes on inside. It’s bonkers to claim that it doesn’t matter at all. We’re not angels; we live not only in our bodies, but with our bodies. We are our bodies. Physical things are how we exist in the world, and physical things, including our bodies and our clothing, mean something.
So there comes a time when, if you truly are modest interiorly—meaning that you do not wish to push yourself on other people, or grab things that do not belong to you, or force your way into a spotlight where you do not belong—you will feel a little tug to express that exteriorly.
The main lesson is that every virtue I can think of involves both inside and outside, and if you’re attempting to do just one, that ain’t it.
It’s easy for us to see the folly in, “it doesn’t matter what’s on the inside, because I’ve got the outfit/jargon down pat.” But it’s equally a folly to believe, “it doesn’t matter what my body is doing because my heart is in the right place.”
We’re not pure spirits, and we’re not meat bags. We’re body and soul, and they should be in harmony. They want to be in harmony.
As is always the case, if we really want to pursue virtue—which is how to get closer to God, give your life meaning, and be at peace—then we should do two things:
Firstly, is to think deeply on how integrated our insides and our outsides are. If we profess to value something, do we behave as if we do? If we signal with our bodies, including our speech, that we value something, have we really let it penetrate our hearts? They’re equally important.
And secondly, is to mind your own business. This means not spending much time at all judging whether someone else’s life, either interior or exterior, comes up to our standards, and it also means probing ourselves honestly, and making changes when we need to.
This is especially true when it comes to the question of whether someone else is dressing modestly!
It might be hard to avoid forming an initial opinion about someone’s clothing, but we should get in the habit of quickly replacing our first judgment with a stern reminder that how someone dresses has nothing to do with us.
Minding our own business is a skill we can learn with practice, just like any other skill. If we do this often enough, then that initial voice complaining about someone else’s appearance will get weaker and weaker and will eventually die off. It will become so obviously not our business that we simply will not notice.
Like Jacob Marley said: Mankind in our business. And caring for each other begins with caring for ourselves and keeping our own interior house in order.
It sounds hard because it is hard. But if we were going for “easy” we can just ignore the incarnation.
See where that gets you.