Where’s Charlie? What Catholic Parents Need to Know About “the Charlie Challenge”

Posted on May 26, 2015 by GREG

It seems to have come out of nowhere and gone viral in an instant. There is a new “game” sweeping middle schools called “The Charlie Challenge.” Superficially, it seems like a silly, harmless, childish fantasy. Kids make a grid on a piece of paper that says, “yes/no.” They make an X out of two pencils and attempt to summon an erstwhile demon named “Charlie.” Then they ask him questions which he answers by moving the pencils. It’s rather creepy to watch. (I won’t link the videos here because I have no interest in spreading the craze but it’s easy enough to find online if you want to look).

For background, here’s a BBC story on the phenomenon. Also, Simcha Fisher has an excellent post on the topic that I highly encourage you to read.

Of course it all sounds like silly nonsense, except that it isn’t and in the mind of a middle school child, this game can be played for rather high stakes. Remember the 2 middle school girls who attempted to murder their friend to appease “Slenderman“? Sometimes child’s play isn’t just stuff and fluff.

That said, my concern is less with what the culture makes out of this phenomenon than what to tell your kids about it. Here are some suggestions.

1. Satan is Boring.

A lot of people who don’t know better are fascinated by Satan. But here’s the thing. Satan is boring. Jesus Christ ROSE FROM THE DEAD. Satan moves some pencils around. What’s so exciting about that? People who are fascinated by this nonsense are, simply put, foolish and stupid. Don’t be foolish and stupid. Christians have better things to do. We worship the God who kicked Satan’s butt. Don’t waste time with losers.

2. Stupid and Foolish Is Still Harmful

Just because something is foolish and stupid doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. Drugs and alcohol are stupid and foolish. High risk sexual behavior is stupid and foolish. Texting and driving is stupid and foolish. But each year these lesser demons claim thousands upon thousands of lives. Playing with “Charlie” is stupid and foolish too, because it purports to turn evil into a playmate. When we choose to associate with even the glamour of evil, we take our eyes off of God. That’s like turning off the lights before walking through a room filled with booby-traps and alligators just for the fun of it. We need to keep our eyes on the Lord at all times because he is our only reliable source of guidance and grace. The so-called, “Charlie Challenge” is a silly distraction that isn’t worth taking a single second away from the God who loves us more than anything and sacrificed everything to spend eternity with us. God has given us much better than this and he deserves better than this from us.

3. It is A Serious Sin

Playing this game is as serious sin and a violation of the First Commandment (Have no other gods but me). It represents the sins of idolatry and divination. Here is what the Catechism has to say on these sins…

Divination and magic

2115 God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.

2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to “unveil” the future.⁴⁸ Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others – even if this were for the sake of restoring their health – are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion.

In short, “The Charlie Challenge” is idolatry because it is attempting to ascribe godlike power (e.g., secret knowledge and knowledge of the future) to something that is not God. It is divination because rather than praying to God about their concerns this game has children asking a pair of pencils what the future holds. Who is it better to give the care of the future to? Lord God King of the Universe? Or a couple of pencils that, most days, can’t even manage to help a kid fill in the right circles on a standarized test?

4. Go to Confession.

If your child plays this game or has played this game, it will be important to go to confession immediately. Letting the devil in the door, even for silly reasons, is never something to take lightly. It is true that Christ has the victory and Satan has no power over God’s children–unless, that is, we invite him in. It doesn’t have to be a formal invitation. Playing a silly game is enough. The idea that we can wield power over spirits is a tempting thought but giving into that temptation–even over a silly game– can change our entire spiritual perspective. Instead of seeing ourselves as God’s disciples, we begin to see prayer, the sacraments, and sacramentals as talismans that give us power over the world. This is the antithesis of the receptive spirit required of a disciple of the Lord and Satan knows it. Anyone who dabbles in these kinds of activities will need to confess this prideful spiritual attitude to reorient themselves to a proper mindset for discipleship in which we learn the way of life by listening to God, not by trying to claim spiritual power over life by illicit means.

5. Don’t Freak Out.

If your child plays this game or has played this game your child will need you to treat him or her with gentleness, love, and affection. Not with anger, outrage, and anxiety. Talk to your child as if you were talking to someone who had no idea what he or she was doing and still may not understand what has happened. Most likely your child was acting in naivete and ignorance. He or she will need to be taught, not only why this was a poor and even sinful choice, but what to do instead. Your child’s playing of this game represents a distortion of the natural and godly desire to know God’s will and understand God’s plan for their lives. If you have not taught your child how to have a meaningful personal prayer life or discern God’s will, you will need to do so–or learn to do so–over the next several weeks together. Simply punishing your child without teaching your child how to bring his or her concerns to God and hear his voice is simply setting your child up for future occult involvement.

Using your own words, gently and patiently explain to your child the things that I have shared with you in points 1-4 above. Then take your child to confession. Let your child know how much you love them and want to help him or her learn how to turn to God to get the answers for the deepest questions of his or her heart.

See the Hidden Opportunity

The Charlie Challenge is not something to lose sleep over, but it is something to take seriously. Most importantly, it is an opportunity to teach your child to have the heart of a disciple who knows how to seek God’s will and hear God’s voice so that he or she isn’t tempted to seek counsel from more dubious and diabolical sources.

For more information on raising truly a faithful kids, check out Parenting with Grace and for more tips on helping your kids make moral choices in every aspect of their lives pick up a copy of Beyond the Birds and the Bees.

Living Inauthentically Causes Us to Feel Morally Tainted

Posted on May 26, 2015 by GREG

Image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

According to a report published by PsychCentral. A new study suggest that the human drive for authenticity — being true to ourselves and living in accordance with our values — is so fundamental that we feel immoral or impure when we hide our true colors.

This sense of impurity then leads us to engage in cleansing or charitable behaviors as a way of clearing our conscience, according to researchers.

“Our work shows that feeling inauthentic is not a fleeting or cursory phenomenon, it cuts to the very essence of what it means to be a moral person,” said psychological scientist Maryam Kouchaki, Ph.D., of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Participants who wrote about a time they felt inauthentic in one online experiment reported feeling more out of touch with their true selves and more impure, dirty, or tainted than participants who wrote about a time when they felt authentic. They also reported lower moral self-regard, rating themselves as less generous and cooperative, for example, than the authentic participants, the researchers reported.

To ease our conscience, we may be tempted to wash these feelings of moral impurity away.

The researchers found that participants who wrote about inauthenticity were more likely to fill in missing letters to spell out cleansing-related words — for example, completing w _ _ h as “wash” instead of “wish” — than those who wrote about authenticity.

The inauthentic participants also reported a greater desire to use cleansing-related products and engage in cleansing behaviors than the authentic participants, according to the study’s findings. The study also found that performing good deeds may be another cleansing strategy. READ MORE

The Divine Human: New Age Blasphemy or Christian Destiny?

Posted on May 21, 2015 by GREG

Image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

(The following is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart (available in stores June 2, 2015). Pre-Order your copy TODAY!)

There is an ancient, yet still surprising and little known Christian doctrine that asserts God’s intention to make each of us a god; perfect, immortal, and partaking in his very own divinity for all of eternity. This teaching, known by theologians as the doctrine of theosis or divinization is the ultimate destiny for the Christian. That’s right. As Christians, we are not merely called to become the best version of ourselves. It is not enough for us to be merely “good.” Instead, our true destiny is, ultimately, to be transformed into gods through God’s grace. As St Thomas Aquinas put it, “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.” (For more supporting evidence of this claim, see my previous post on this topic here).

Divinization is a gift that we receive as we run with abandon into the loving arms of the God who made us and who longs to complete his miraculous work in us. But how is this different from the common claim by the New Age/Neopagan movement that all humans are divine? There are three important points that popular theologian, Peter Kreeft, says separate the Christian view of divinization from the New Age pretense of a quasi-divine humanity; piety, objective morality, & worship (1988).

Piety

Piety compels the Christian to proclaim that there is something greater than us. For the most part, New Agers and neopagans believe that humans are divine on our own merits (Zeller, 2014). But the Christian view of divinization recognizes that we do not claim divinity as an essential dimension of humanity. “If you, Lord, keep account of sins, then who could stand” (Ps 130:3)? Christians recognize that especially in light of the Fall, humanity is deserving of anything but deification. It is only through Jesus Christ, Our Savior, that we are able to achieve the greatest of heights, daring to look God in the eye and see him, not as our Master, but as our “friend” (Jn 15:15) with whom we can rightfully expect to enter into a total union through his infinite, divine mercy.

Objective Morality

Second, Christians acknowledge an objective morality. The New Ager believes in many moralities and a multiplicity of truths. The moral reasoning of the modern neopagan represents a polytheism of “many gods, many goods, many moralities” (Kreeft,1988). In the New Age model of human divinity (or divine humanity) I am the author of my own truth, not God. It is my self-anointed right to pretend that I am capable of making reality whatever I say it is simply by closing my eyes and wishing on myself.

By contrast, the Christian acknowledges that there is a natural, objective order to the world, which was ordained by God, and to which his children are obliged to adhere, not out of a sense of slavish devotion to alien rules, but so that we might fulfill our incredible destiny to become gods through God’s grace. Our ability to accomplish this awesome task depends in large part in our active participation in this divinely created moral order because “nothing unclean can enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Rev 27:21).

Worship

The third point that distinguishes the Christian notion of deification from the New Age notion is that the modern neopagan, fails to worship anyone, ultimately, besides himself. He takes his de facto divinity for granted and demands that you acknowledge it too despite all appearances to the contrary. He believes he can do what he will–even if it hurts you–because he is divine, the master of his own destiny and responsible only to his own personal sense of self-fulfillment.

In contrast, the Christian approaches the notion that he is destined to become a god with a sense of wonder, awe, amazement, gratitude, and not a little bit of fear born from the recognition that there are serious forces at play within this promise. And yet, even that understandable fear is cast out by the perfect love (c.f., 1 John 4:18) that flows from the heart of the God who calls to us, runs to meet us on the road and wraps his finest cloak–his divinity–around us (c.f. Lk 15:22).

The Christian call for each person to participate in God’s plan to make men gods is not an exercise in narcissism, or wish fulfillment. It does not serves as a get-out-of-morality free card. It is an invitation, rooted in the love of our Heavenly Father for each one of us and extended to all of humanity through the saving work of Jesus Christ. To discover how you can more effectively cooperate with God’s grace to fulfill your ultimate destiny in Christ, check out my latest book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart. (Pre-order today. In stores June 2, 2015)

Kreeft, P. (1988). Comparing christianity and the new paganism. Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian apologetics. Ignatius Press.

Zeller, B. (2014). Ultimate reality and divine beings. Patheos Religion Library: New Age. Retrieved 5/24/14 at http://www.patheos.com/Library/New-Age/Beliefs/Ultimate-Reality-and-Divine-Beings.html

Escaping the Blame Game: 5 Steps to Reclaiming Your Power

Posted on May 20, 2015 by GREG

When things go wrong, we love having someone to blame. It’s a seductive game that makes us think that blaming others will give us control, but in reality, as long as we play the blame game–whether serving or being served–we have no power to change anything. We may manage to convince ourselves that nothing is our fault, but it also means that we won’t be able to do anything to respond to our problems because taking action would be akin to taking back the blame.

“Who? Me?”

Blame is an early fruit of Original Sin. In the Garden of Eden, when God sees Adam eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam responds that “the woman made me do it!” and in turn, Eve exclaims, “the serpent made me do it” (Gen 3:12-14). In this exchange we see the alienation and the powerless that comes from blame as well as how blame sacrifices love on the altar of pride. Rather than loving each other and working for each other’s good as they did before the Fall, our post-lapsarian parents can hardly wait for buses to be invented so that they can throw each other under one!

Love, and Responsibility

A running theme in Pope St. John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body is that the keys to authentic happiness and healthy relationships are love and responsibility. Love is the commitment to working for the good of others while responsibility represents “the ability to respond” effectively to the challenges we face. Blame undermines love by making us treat persons as problems–things to be fixed, not people to be loved and helped to grow. Simultaneously, blame undermines responsibility by paralyzing us. We tell ourselves we didn’t do it, so we “shouldn’t” have to do anything about it. But if the people we want to blame don’t accept that blame, we’re left staring at the mess feeling self-righteous…and stuck. The more addicted to blame we are, the more we surrender our ability to be authentically loving and effectively responsible which, ultimately, steals our capacity for both joy and happiness.

Accepting responsibility is not the same thing as accepting blame. Many of my clients struggle with this idea, but the truth is that having the power to respond to a problem says nothing about who caused it. When we embrace love and responsibility instead of blame, we stop worrying who caused the problem and begin focusing on what can be done to solve the problem.

5 Steps to Reclaiming Your Power

So, if blame disempowers us, how can we reclaim our power over the challenges and problems we face?

1. Identify the problem to be solved.

Stop asking who caused the mess. Even if you could solve this mystery, the mess would still remain. In fact, while you are arguing about who’s at fault, the mess is just running all over the floor and getting harder to clean up–so to speak. Instead, simply state the nature of the mess that has to be addressed.

2. Brainstorm solutions.

Ask what needs to be done to solve the problem. Collaborate with the people around you to identify the steps that would need to be taken to address the issue.

3. Take the Lead

Don’t wait for others to respond. Begin gathering the resources necessary to solve the problem and roll up your sleeves to address it. Don’t worry if “it’s not fair.” You’ll feel more powerful if you “do” instead of “debate.”

4. Enlist Support

While its good to take the lead, don’t let others off the hook. You might not be concerned with who is at fault, but you need to be deeply concerned with asserting that everyone has the ability to help you respond to the issue. Insist that everyone who is touched by the problem join you in responding to the problem.

5. Set Limits As Necessary

If someone who is affected by the problem refuses to join you in responding to it and attempts to leave you holding the bag, consider what boundaries you might need to set on the relationship or consequence you might need to apply to prevent yourself from being taken advantage of by that person in the future. Charity may require you to bear this current offence patiently, but it doesn’t require you to commit to living the life of a doormat. The “personalisitic norm” (i.e. the moral principle stating that human beings are persons–not objects– who have a God-given right to be treated with love and never used) tells us that we have a right to limit our relationships to people who are committed to working for our good and who want us to work for theirs.

Aiding and Abetting?

But doesn’t this approach just let people off the hook? How will guilty parties ever learn if we don’t force them to accept their rightful blame?

The 5 Step Process to Beating Blame I’ve outlined above allows the guilty person to experience their faults as a call to love and responsibility. Think of all the times Jesus confronted the sinner with the words, “I do not condemn you” (John 8:10). By following Jesus’ example, we enable the person who caused the problem to feel supported not shamed and because of this, we increase the likelihood that they will willingly join in cleaning up the mess and learn from their mistakes. Those who refuse to respond to this call to love and responsibility will either be compelled to change or will alienate themselves from their relationship with us because of the boundaries and consequences we impose after-the-fact. People with good hearts will respond generously and gratefully to this approach. By contrast, people who are intent on habitually finding other people to clean up their messes for them will eventually be sidelined, their impact on our lives mitigated by the limits we set to protect ourselves from their attempts to use us. Chronic offenders will either learn or be let go, but they won’t ever be let off the hook.

The next time you’re tempted to play the blame game, focus on applying these 5 Steps to Beating Blame and enjoy the increasing sense of competence and confidence you feel as a result. To learn more about leaving behind the blame game and setting effective boundaries with the users in your life, check out God Help Me, These People Are Driving Me Nuts! Making Peace with Difficult People. or contact the Pastoral Solutions Institute to learn how our telecounseling practice can help you stop being taken advantage of.

Your Cheatin’ Heart: This Risk Factor Doubles Chance of Infidelity

Posted on May 19, 2015 by GREG

Image via shutterstock. Used with permission

From The Science of Relationships

In a recent study of about 300 college students, researchers wanted to find out if individuals are more or less likely to cheat as a function of whether their parents ever knocked boots with someone that wasn’t ‘mom’ or ‘dad’ (while married to mom or dad). Students were asked whether or not they had ever cheated on a romantic partner (30% said yes) as well as whether their mom or dad had ever cheated on their other parent (33% said yes, with dads slightly more likely to perpetrate the infidelity).

Students who had cheated on a partner were twice as likely to have had a parent who cheated compared to those students who had not cheated on a partner (44% vs. 22%). Interestingly, having a cheating parent didn’t affect the way students viewed cheating — they were no more accepting of the idea of cheating in general (at least that’s what they told the researchers)– so it’s not entirely clear exactly how having a parent cheat increases the odds that somebody may one day do the same. It’s most likely that knowing your mom or dad was a cheater somehow influences one of the many proximal predictors of cheating (e.g., feelings of commitment to partners), but future work is needed to clarify the chain of events that links your parents’ cheating ways (or not) to your own.