Step 3: Know Thyself

Welcome back, fellow pilgrim.  This chapter is on knowing yourself.  First of all, to know what your sins are at this moment in your life in order to make a solid confession to the priest and second, to take stock of yourself to answer the question, “Who am I?”  You might also call it the Step of Lists because you will be making, or at least starting, three lists here.  So, I hope you have your pencil sharpened while we restate the Step 3 and discuss our strategy:

3.  I will know myself; both to determine what sins I’ve committed and also so that I know what are my “hooks”.  I will examine my conscience and my life so that I really begin to know my sins and myself. I will seek to learn my own temperament, from my Amends List I will begin to make amends to those who I have wronged, and from my Grudge List I will forgive, from my heart, those who I hold a grudge against.

As I just stated, there are two objectives to this step.  The first objective is to simply examine your consciences in preparation for making a good Confession, possibly for the first time in many years so you might need some words of encouragement to have the nerve to actually do that.  I have presented a thorough Examination of Conscience in the Appendix for you to go through so that you don’t forget any mortal sins that might be lurking deep within the recesses of your conscience.  The question you will be asking yourself is, “How have I sinned and how often have I committed these sins?”  From this you will make a written list of those sins.  You’ll destroy this list after your confession so it isn’t permanent.  Future confessions should be more frequent so the list presumably won’t be so long so you won’t need to write future sins down.  The second objective is starting the process of gaining a real understanding of yourself so that you have an in-depth knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses.  Here we will introduce the Classical Four Temperaments in order to help you see how Satan has used your own natural weaknesses against you and how you can use your innate strengths in the fight against our hook.  You need to be as smart as your enemy if you’re going to defeat him.  Once you have identified your own temperament, you will begin working on a long-term, or strategic, objective that you will work on for the rest of your life, to constantly strive to have a more intimate knowledge of self.  Your examination of conscience and your self-examination into your temperament will enlighten you with increased knowledge of the forms of bait the Evil Fisherman has used to lure you into sin as well as some of the people that you have hurt through your sins.  From these two groups of people we will start to create two more lists.  The first one is the Amends list.  This is the list of people to whom you have to make amends in some way and how you plan to do it.  It could be an apology, forgiveness, money, return something taken, or some other action.  The second list is the Grudge list.  As I am sure you know too well, we addicts have a lot of anger inside.  Some temperaments are worse than others about holding grudges but we all have this anger or resentment and we hold it against certain people for some reason that is either real or imagined.  It is critical, dear friend, that if we are going to defeat our hook we have to defuse that resentment because these are the times when we are especially susceptible to the hook.  Therefore, we make up a list of those people and why we hold that grudge against them.  We will use these two lists in later steps and since it takes time to check off all the action items on the list, we need to write them down for later reference.  Why are we doing all this?  It’s important for us to make amends for past sins so that they are forgiven.  It is also necessary for us to work out our anger towards these who cross us so that this form of tackle is removed from the Fisherman’s tackle box.  This last point on forgiving others is actually one of those crucial actions. When we say the Our Father we say, "...and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." Jesus wasn't kidding. These grudges are a huge impediment to us receiving the graces necessary to defeat our hooks. This will assist us in eliminating our sins due to our hook in the first place but, down the road, this will help us to eliminate all our attachments to sins, both mortal and venial, which will then leave us free to eliminate our imperfections.  We will do all this by seeking the answers to these questions:

Ø  How have I sinned?

Ø  Who have I hurt?

Ø  Who am I?

Ø  What are my strengths?

Ø  What are my weaknesses?

Ø  With whom am I angry?

AN OBJECTION: WHY CAN’T I JUST EXAMINE MY CONSCIENCE AND BE DONE WITH IT?

I suppose there are some readers who might wonder why this step isn’t just a checklist of sins for one’s examination of conscience and that’s it.  That’s a fair question as I’ve found most of the objections to the different points of the Catholic 12-Steps to be.  In answering it, I think that it’s important to understand that we are in this for the long haul so we need to see the big picture as well as just the “tactical” problem of preparing ourselves to make a good confession.  For that matter, I’m sure that a good number of readers haven’t made a good confession in a long time and that another sizeable number have never even learned how to make a good confession.  In any case, if we are to sever the line to our hooks, we need to take steps to make sure that that line is permanently severed and as close to the hook as possible.  Please keep in mind that Satan is much smarter than any of us and that he will use every form of bait at his disposal in order to keep reeling us in.  That means that he’s studied who we are from every angle to discover our weaknesses.  He knows us better than we do!  We need to even the odds a bit and that requires us to use our intellects and memories to learn what he already knows about us.  Besides the obvious benefits we’ve already described, this exercise will be helpful to start strengthening our souls.  You see, the intellect and memory are two of the three faculties of the soul and, just in the same way that you strengthen your muscles by exercise, the same goes for our souls as well which also needs to be exercised to grow in strength.