Do not do it!

*

Duessa as if threw her eyeball over the bus line from city to city, a remote device to watch the man she knew was corresponding with her daughter. And the poor man never knew. He merely shivered and faltered.

*

"You are good and you bring forth good." Father Sam made a vow during the previous Lent neither to touch alcohol nor to let the thought of alcohol remotely touch *him*. What a worthy vow. He would walk around strutting even when in fact he was sitting down. A dynamite vow! I am so proud!

Progress! I have made progress!

There was now less blocking of his own presence in the divine presence. And this presence was the summation of his faith. It was an inundation. Every Christian knows that belief in God actually follows from the presence, felt first, which is why all our proof arguments seem so futile and misdirected. The presence is the proof.

Look at me, Sam said. I am on the way to health.

And a step closer to my Lord. Because "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word."

Then came a bad day, when a stranger went ballistic on him in the corner store and his paychecks stopped and his health began to shrink inward. Lent felt shredded and full of holes, not forever, but just for an instant -- a tiny interval that was wide enough to fall through. My holiness is just a front and this I have always known. The stranger walked away, almost mindless -- like a robot that the devil had infected and used.

Poor Sam, how the bar called tohim now. He was inside drinking before he'd even made the decision to do it or refrain. There wasn't time to say Don't do it! There was no space for any vow. The devil moves at the speed of light or probably faster still, this is the privilege of its utter depravity. I will leave you now, please take care, Satan said. Such a soft spoken and caring person. Walked out of the bar, leaving his new friend bereft and hardly upright.

But in the morning Sam found himself on an old parishioner's couch. Shaken awake. Each second more more conscious of who he was and what he had just done. No no no. Only a complete moron would succumb so *easily* and be such a soft touch for evil. The shame of being so *easily* corrupted.

But Father you are never really cured of this one, his parishioner said. You have to step down from your little dais now.

But I made a vow! Sam said.

Oh but there can be no more vows like yours. A broken vow is just bad behavior. Why not try to behave from moment to moment until this turns into day to day, and then week to week? Save your vowing breath and use it to perform what it behooves you to do. Not so much later as right now.

Give it a try? Why not?

*

And the sight of a bottle finally came to turn Sam's stomach, so that he had less need of a vow and no need to break it. The pain had broken things in advance so that it was not a vow that now occurred but a different kind of revulsion, a turning away. And he let his body lead his soul away.

*