Confused about the holy and the profane? (I really need help, please answer)

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Ambasea

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So I’ve recently been confused on the difference between the holy and the profane. From what I can tell, the holy are the things that were specially set aside for God’s purpose, while the profane is everything else. Profane things are usually not sinful, for example my computer and my house are profane because they aren’t set aside for God’s purpose. Am I getting the definitions right?

I’ve also heard that it is a grave sin to try and mix the holy and the profane. But in that case, because we have been set aside for Christ and are now holy, would it be wrong to “profane ourselves” by watching profane TV, music, etc.? Would we be making ourselves unholy mixtures?

Thanks 😃
 
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To clarify, this isn’t another one of my super-OCD questions that I ask on here. I’ve been legitimately confused about the definitions and applications for a while now 😃
 
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You’re using the word profane as an adjective, which means something not associated with religion, or simply something secular.

Your house, car, tv, phone, and other possessions are secular objects, i.e., not specifically set aside for God. That does not mean they are inherently evil…they are completely neutral.

You are really overthinking this. We are temples of the Holy Spirit, but we live in a secular world. We are lights on a hill illuminating the way to Christ, but we live in the real world, which means we automatically mix with things holy and secular.

Very few things are specifically blessed and set aside for God, but we like to have those things, like crucifixes, rosaries, Bibles, statutes, etc. in our homes to continually remind us to lift our hearts to God and to bring His blessing into our home.

It’s perfectly fine to live in your home, watch your TV, and use your possessions. You would only be sinning if you treated a sacramental or other holy object in a contemptuous or blasphemous manner.

Hope that helps. Please speak to a priest or a counselor when you have worries and anxieties like this.
 
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The word “profane” comes from the Latin that means “outside the temple.” From an online Bible dictionary—
  1. Irreverent to any thing sacred; applied to persons. A man is profane when he takes the name of God in vain, or treats sacred things with abuse and irreverence.
  2. Irreverent; proceeding from a contempt of sacred things, or implying it; as profane words or language; profane swearing.
  3. Not sacred; secular; relating to secular things; as profane history.
  4. Polluted; not pure.
  5. Not purified or holy; allowed for common use; as a profane place. Ezek.42. and 48.
  6. Obscene; heathenish; tending to bring reproach on religion; as profane fables. 1 Tim.4.
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So, to use your example of mixing the holy and the profane— a crucifix in a bucket of you-know-what is going to be a bad idea, even if you call it art. That’s bad on many levels. It’s an example of the first definition-- where you’re treating a sacred object abusively. Having the idea in the first place and thinking it’s a good idea-- it’s an example of profane art, the second definition.

Then you get to your third definition. Yeah, my computer is profane, because it’s secular-- it’s not set aside for God’s use. But there’s nothing bad about my computer; it’s just an object, although I can put it to profane use if I do the wrong thing with it. If I do something impure with it-- that’s getting onto the fourth definition.

Looking at the fifth definition, that would be, like, the church tabernacle vs the church parking lot. One of those is set aside for God, and most people don’t have any business meddling with it. Anyone can go to the church parking lot, including kids who want to practice their bike riding, skateboarding, or people practicing how to drive a stick shift.
 
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When it comes to the fourth definition:
Obviously, things are polluted and impure when they have sin in them. So if I were to write a fictional story and depicted sin in it, would that make the story impure?
 
From one scrupulant to another, this is scrupulosity. Please stop torturing yourself with this and try to get help.
 
Ambasea said:
Obviously, things are polluted and impure when they have sin in them. So if I were to write a fictional story and depicted sin in it, would that make the story impure?
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About 15, 16 years ago, I felt like writing. I didn’t really care what I wrote; I just wanted to get paid for writing stuff people wanted to read. So I looked around to figure out what the easiest profitable thing for a nobody to write would be— and I thought about dashing off a few novels for publishers like Ellora’s Cave or Samhain or Triskelion or whoever. I had any number of plots that would have worked decently as a stand-alone novel; I just had to wrap it up in a package that included a spicy, explicit love life, and made the development of that love life be just as integral to the plot as the rest of my plot/setting/character development/etc. History was full of people who didn’t share my moral perspective. History was full of people behaving badly. So just take a few cues from real people, and even though I’m not interested in x, y, and z, it’s not so bad as an imaginative exercise, right?

Except I couldn’t.

No matter how much of an intellectual exercise it was to write about people with a spicy, explicit love life, especially when I was frustrated and annoyed with my own; and no matter how much of an intellectual exercise it was to write about people who weren’t bound by the inhibitions and restrictions I was bound by… I just couldn’t glorify that kind of lifestyle. Even if I married my couple on page 1, or married them ten years before page 1 began, or wrote them as part of a culture that has a polygamous lifestyle where it’s perfectly normal to have any number of spouses or partners or whatever… I just couldn’t.

So I ended up writing other stuff.

It wasn’t as profitable as what I could have earned with Ellora’s Cave, or Triskelion, or Samhain. On the plus side, I got to avoid all those disasters when those publishers (and others) caught on fire. 🙂

But at least I write-- and get paid to write-- stuff my mom can read, under my real name, and not under some pseudonym, and hope that my church doesn’t find out about it. 😛

I have similar hang-ups with murder mysteries, btw… I have a terrible time of it, even though the whole point of writing a proper mystery is to serve up justice to the guy Whodunnit. 🙂 Even Msgr. Ronald Knox, who’s one of my personal Catholic writer-heroes, didn’t have any problems with writing murder mysteries, at the same time he was doing stuff like translating the Bible and the Imitation!

So I’m sure a lot of it is sort of like scrupulosity in real life. Everyone puts their personal bar in a different place. But I tend to be way more scrupulous in my writing-life than I am with my personal life. Not that I go around offing people or keeping a male harem… 😛
 
I definitely don’t mean depicting sexual sin or violent sin such as murder. I’m talking more like “Johnny stole a candy bar. His mother found out and asked him to return it, but Johnny didn’t want to. Eventually, Johny realized stealing is wrong and he apologized.”
Obviously not that simplistic, but there were two sins depicted in that story.
 
Think of how much sin is depicted in the Bible. That’s obviously not wrong.

You really need to speak to your spiritual director/confessor about all these worries.
 
Ambasea said:
So I’ve recently been confused on the difference between the holy and the profane. From what I can tell, the holy are the things that were specially set aside for God’s purpose, while the profane is everything else. Profane things are usually not sinful, for example my computer and my house are profane because they aren’t set aside for God’s purpose. Am I getting the definitions right?
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Definition:
Profane =
  1. to treat (something sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt : desecrate
  2. to debase by a wrong, unworthy, or vulgar use
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Ambasea:
I’ve also heard that it is a grave sin to try and mix the holy and the profane. But in that case, because we have been set aside for Christ and are now holy, would it be wrong to “profane ourselves” by watching profane TV, music, etc.? Would we be making ourselves unholy mixtures?
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That brings the correct analogy to light.

In ~A.D. 180 Irenaeus told a story he heard (probably from Bp Polycarp who was a direct disciple of St John) about St John.

Bk 3 Ch3 v 4 Against Heresies
" There are also those who heard from him that John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.”

John apparently gave no slack to those who were disordered.
 
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As others have said, you’ve said before you struggle with OCD. You should not be asking these kinds of questions here, as that could feed your compulsions. Please refer these kinds of questions to your priest and mental health professional.

You are in my prayers
-Fr ACEGC
 
Ambasea said:
Profane things are usually not sinful,
for example my computer
by watching profane TV, music, etc.?

Would we be making ourselves unholy mixtures?
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Depends how Holy you want to become -
or how diluted - watered down - you want your personal holiness to be -
before God - before your family - before coworkers - etc
 
Ah, that’s totally different. Because that one depicts our struggle with sin. Sometimes we fail, but we overcome it, make amends, learn why it was wrong, and become better people who are closer to what God wants us to be. We do that every day-- it’s a giant part of our life journey, and if it wasn’t there, there would be no growth or improvement.

But much of that growth or improvement is along a common theme throughout our life: subjugating what I want at this moment in time, and doing the right thing even if I think it would be more gratifying/fun/whatever to do the wrong thing. Once we’re in the habit of disciplining ourselves in small things, we can successfully take on things that require more restraint.

When you’re a little kid, it can take the form of not stealing a candy bar, even though I really want to eat a candy bar and I don’t have any money. Or it might take the form of doing my multiplication tables without yelling at my parents because it’s getting in the way of my cartoons. Or it can take the form of not telling lies to get my brother in trouble, because he’s not doing what I want, so I think I’ll stir up some trouble for him.

When you’re an adult, it can take the form of not doing stuff that trashes your life, lands you in jail or on the six o’clock news, or ruins your health or your marriage.

But the key difference is the whole growth-and-learning thing, versus presenting something bad as something good.
 
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