Despising During Lent

By Thomas Creen, MJ • Lviv, Ukraine

For about a year when I was in college, I played bass in a wedding band that worked in the Chicago area. It was good money at the time and a friend of mine played keyboards in the band, so we would goof around like crazy at the gigs, improvising way outside any standard notion of tonality during the songs we hated to play, which were most of them. Nobody in the crowd seemed to notice or care because they were at a wedding, having a good time, eating, drinking, talking, and dancing.

Those wedding band gigs stand out as the first time in my life that I remember really experiencing contempt for people and actually despising them. Although I must have looked utterly despicable myself up on that stage with my long hair and tuxedo, I remember looking down at the people dancing and being repulsed, thinking how stupid they looked, and almost pitying them for liking the horrible music we were playing.

I wasn’t aware of how bad it was to think like that. In the words of a U2 and B.B. King song, “I did what I did before love came to town.” Once God called me to give my life to Him and the Church in Miles Jesu, I learned that the saints taught us to do exactly the opposite if we wanted to have peace of heart and eternal life. St. Teresa of Jesus taught that to reach perfection we need to despise the world, despise ourselves, and despise no one else. I was loving the world, loving myself, and despising others. And I still today need to watch out for loving and despising the wrong things.

St. Teresa’s advice will keep me busy for Lent.

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