Stubborn tick provides spiritual lesson

Editor’s note: Following is a commentary from the July 19 issue of The Catholic Spirit, newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. It was written by Dave Hrbacek, staff photographer. Dave Myers column will return next week.

CNS -- It was a warm, July morning as I pulled away from the boat landing at Turtle Lake in Shoreview for a day of bass fishing.

My partner for the day was Catholic Scripture scholar Jeff Cavins, who has made studying and teaching the Bible his life’s work.

He’s good with the word of God and good with a fishing rod, too. Several years ago, we discovered a mutual passion for chasing largemouth bass and vowed to do it together sometime.

This was the day. I started fishing Turtle Lake a few years ago, and it has been very good to me. I was hoping it would be good to Jeff as well. We both like casting plastic worms for bass, and this was our bait of choice on Turtle.

Actually, I had more than fishing on my mind as we started working a small point near the boat landing. This was my chance to pick the mind of a brilliant theologian, to ask him some of life’s great questions.

So, as we were casually flipping our worms into some weed clumps, I blurted out my burning question: What’s the theology of wood ticks?

Several weeks ago, I had found one of the nasty devils attached to my leg while in the shower. This being my first embedded tick, I struggled to figure out a way to remove it. First, I tried pouring liquid soap on it, a remedy I had read about recently. No go.

Then, I went to the old standby -- tweezers. I was shocked at how stubbornly such a small creature can hang on. It was like pulling a wood screw out of my leg.

The creepy experience left me wondering: Why would God create or allow such a creature to roam his beautiful creation? Is there a spiritual lesson wood ticks can teach us? Can anything good come from an embedded bug?

Some slow fishing gave Jeff time to ponder my questions. Turns out, ticks can teach us some practical lessons about the spiritual life.

“There are several things that come to mind,” he said. “In (the Letter to the) Hebrews, it talks about getting rid of the sin that so easily entangles us, encumbers us. In life, things attach themselves to us -- habits, ways of thinking. We become in bondage, slowly. A spiritual wood tick jumps on you, it attaches itself to you. It doesn’t seem to be a huge deal at the time, but, if you don’t deal with it, it starts to suck the life out of you.”

A wood tick, he went on, is like venial sin. It seems small, almost unnoticeable. Yet, it seeks the very essence of your being -- blood. And, unlike a mosquito, it keeps filling its body with blood for hours, even days, until it expands to many times its original size. All the while, it keeps an amazingly strong grip on the skin of its host.

Unfortunately, I did not discover an effective remedy for my tick problem until later. A co-worker told me that covering the tick with Vaseline will cause it to release its jaws and back out of your skin due to oxygen deprivation. What about spiritual ticks? How do we remove the sins and habits that suck the life out of our souls?

Cavins had the answer: confession. “Confession is kind of like taking the ticks off, taking those things that are sapping the energy from us,” he said.

Spiritual Vaseline, if you will. According to Cavins, one particularly menacing tick for men in our culture is lust brought on by a steady diet of pornography. The Internet is like a tall grass field in Minnesota or Wisconsin during the prime tick months of May and June. Even a short walk through such places can leave you picking dozens of ticks off your body.

Same with the Internet. You can be innocently surfing the Web looking for information. You type in certain key words on Google and, presto, up come dozens of pornographic sites trying to seduce you into the sin of lust.

Thus, prevention is another important part of dealing with ticks. I have done thorough research on how to keep ticks off while I’m in the woods wild turkey hunting. I have purchased the strongest repellents, plus a special suit designed to keep ticks away from your skin. I am proud to say that during hunts in three states this spring I did not suffer a single embedded tick.

But, my day on the water, which produced a handful of small bass, left me pondering a deeper question: What am I doing to keep spiritual ticks away from my soul?