There was once a man who made his living hunting vipers and selling them to a specialist who used their venom for medicinal purposes. One day, he came across a place teeming with poisonous vipers and began collecting them. He did not have time to return to the town to sell them, so he went to the hut where slept while hunting.
In the middle of the night, he awoke to feel something cold and slimy crawling over his neck and arms. The vipers had found a way out of the sack he had put them in and, drawn by the warmth of his body, had begun to surround him. Without moving, the man called to his assistant, who was sleeping in the next room.
“Go and get some milk. Pour it onto a plate, then place the plate on the floor beside my bed,” he told him when he entered the room. Once the plate of milk was on the floor, the vipers, drawn by its smell, began to leave the bed and move away from the hunter. When the danger had passed, he killed them all. Then he said to himself, “Even if I were starving, I would never hunt vipers again.” He kept that resolve and never again risked his life in that way.
The close call with the vipers made the man judge what is right. He had been lured by the high pay he received for hunting vipers, because the work was dangerous, no one else wanted to do it, it paid very well. In pursuing that reward, however, he was putting his life at risk and losing sight of what mattered most.
Something similar happens in the spiritual life. We often fail to judge things rightly from a spiritual perspective because we are drawn by the pleasure they offer. As a result, we play with temptation or place ourselves in situations that may lead us to sin, unwilling to give up things that are not sinful in themselves but that stir or feed our passions, making them very difficult to govern.
We must firmly resolve to distance ourselves from anything that could bring about the death of our soul, no matter how much we think we have our passions under control. The man in the story also thought he had the vipers under control. One day, without realizing it, we may discover that we no longer control what we thought we did, because we failed to judge things rightly.
If I struggle with gluttony, I must practice self-denial in eating and avoid foods I enjoy but find difficult to resist. If I struggle with lust, I must avoid whatever excites my imagination and desires, particularly movies and videos. If I struggle with anger, I must guard against its causes and distance myself from the things that make me angry. If I struggle with slandering, I should avoid being envious of others and try to be charitable with my neighbor. In the same manner, we could go on listing all the capital sins, as well as the importance of judging things rightly so as to protect our soul.
We should not wait until we find ourselves in an extreme situation before deciding to distance ourselves from anything that could bring about our spiritual death. Rather, we should make the firm decision to put all things that could jeopardize our eternal salvation far away from us.
