You Have to Eat your Thistles

I once saw cattle eat thistles.

Cattle don’t eat thistles. They aren’t palatable to the beef critters. Your cattle will eat all the grass and leave the thistles to take over. (Note that "beef critters" or "beeves" is how you refer to singular cattle. English doesn't have a word for whatever these things are other than "cow" or "bull.")

There is a tendency among people who have cattle to turn them out into the pasture and forget about them. The cattle, being hungry, proceed to eat all the things that they like. They eat the tasty grass and ignore the rest, like the thistles.

What does this do to the pasture? The tasty plants, the ones that the cows really like, get eaten down and start to die out. The bad plants, the things cattle don’t find palatable, thrive. Soon the whole pasture is full of the bad stuff.

We’ve talked about this before.

How did that rancher get his cows to eat thistles? They were packed in tight and restricted to a small area. The only food they had left were thistles, and so they ate them. Yum!

Let’s do an analogy. The pasture is the soul, with all its drives and passions, its interests and possibilities. Your consciousness is the bull or cow. You have the whole pasture of the soul laid out before you. Your choice of actions are the grazing. What are you going to do?

If you are like most people, you are going to choose the things that you like to do. You’ll doom-scroll on your phone, listen to the boomer hits of your youth on spotify, talk only to your closest friends, avoid sensitive conversations with your spouse, and sit on the most comfy couch in your house. You will do mostly those activities that are pleasant to you. The things that you really need to do, such as to work on your virtues, be reconciled to your enemies, or to apologize for your failings, you won’t do.

Allow me another example. You are attempting to get strong. You’re really good at the bench press and the squat, pretty good at the press, and lousy at the deadlift. Should you only do the lifts you like and neglect the spinal erectors? Clearly not. You have to do stuff you don’t like or you will have parts of your body that aren’t as strong as they should be.

Unfortunately for you, you don’t have a rancher constraining your activity by electric fences. You have to be your own electric fence. You need to do whatever it takes to get yourself to do the hard stuff.

This is the job formerly accomplished by religion. Aquinas derives the word religio from religare, meaning to tie oneself to something. His etymology might be correct, but his theology definitely is. In a religion, you have a community that enforces rules that you need to follow, whether you want to or not. The Lenten fast is the best example of that. Early Christians wouldn’t eat any meat or dairy for the whole 40 days. By disciplining their will in this way, they were working on their character. Who is the better person, the one who can go 40 days without meat, or the one who can’t resist a hamburger this afternoon?

How are you going to do the good things that you don’t like doing?

You have to eat your thistles.