From Below

The old spiritual writers are unanimous: when you are provoked to some wrongful thought by someone else, you should give thanks that they have revealed the corruption that lurks inside your own soul, for if it wasn't there, you wouldn't have felt it. 

Yesterday morning on the way to the Steeple House an immensely violent thought shot into my mind, a picture of me hitting someone who has brought me a lot of trouble over the years. I tell people who are disturbed by the same sort of things that pop into their awareness that this isn't uncommon, that intrusive thoughts, whether violent, sexual, or disgusting, afflict almost everyone from time to time, and that they shouldn't focus on them but push them away and regard them as transient mental trash which you shouldn't pay attention to. However, the truth is that I don't really know how common such thoughts are because nobody really talks about it. Psychiatrists, psychotherapists and spiritual directors may, as they are used to dealing with the minutiae of people's interior lives, but it's hardly a daily topic of conversation, and perhaps there are lots of souls who are genuinely never disrupted by nonsense of this kind. 

My advice is usually that intrusive thoughts don't reflect the real personality of the person they assail: they bubble up spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious and if they represent anything it is the common and disturbing scope of the human imagination. But the truth is that sometimes there's something there. My violent image came from a bedrock of anger against a particular person and while I shouldn't pay attention to it - to the extent that I begin endorsing it and it turns from a thought into a fantasy - I should be aware of, and fear, it. 'He who hates a brother walks in darkness', says blessed John, and I should pray for that buried and denied emotion to be eroded by grace.