By Marilyn Barnewall
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Dr. Morgan Scott Peck died at his home in Warren, Connecticut on September 25, 2005. He was 69.
Peck was born May 22, 1936, in New York. His bachelor’s degree was from Harvard and he studied premed at Columbia University. He received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University.
In 1978, M. Scott Peck’s book, The Road Less Traveled, led readers to the realization that delaying gratification – planning for pain to precede pleasure – helped create decent human beings. It was, perhaps, the only “decent way to live,” he said.
The Road Less Traveled was published in an era when books encouraging self-centered behavior were flavor-of-the-month favorites. Regardless, The Book of the Month Club has ranked The Road Less Traveled as number three on its all-time list of books people say made a difference in their lives.
During this era when experts wrote books affirming people’s rights to live feel good rather than do good lives, Peck wrote about the importance of pain preceding pleasure.
The Road Less Traveled stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for 10 years… not 10 weeks or 10 months, but 10 years! If that does not speak of the hunger people have for spiritual leadership and the need to seek the Truth Jesus Christ said we must pursue to find everlasting life, I do not know what does.
The same day Dr. Peck died, I watched a Bishop Fulton Sheen re-run on EWTN (from the 1950s). Bishop Sheen’s message that day: “Rain always comes before rainbows.” I believe Peck would have enjoyed the program.
The purpose of Bishop Sheen’s television show was to discuss delayed gratification. He talked about the differences between gratification and fulfillment in the 1950s… long before Scott Peck. But Peck modernized the topic and added a scientific approach to the subject.
In an article I wrote last January, I reviewed Peck’s book, People of the Lie. In it, Peck explained that we cannot “begin to hope to heal human evil until we are able to look at it, directly.”
He explained that most people do not recognize evil when they see it… or even when they do evil deeds. Peck explained that people became evil when they excused everything negative they did. The method they used was to talk about their positive intentions (regardless of outcome).
A kind reader of that article sent me a brief note suggesting I look up the meaning of the word “prelest.” I did as he recommended and it truly gave me an insight bordering on a personal epiphany. I pass the recommendation along to you.
Prelest means spiritual deception. It refers to spiritual self deception as well as the spiritual deception of others. While Peck’s People of the Lie focused on our ability to recognize evil on the basis of physical actions in the physical world, prelest explains and makes recognizable the evil that invades our spirits… personal, corporate, political, and religious.
If we need examples to prove that corporations or political systems or religious institutions can, like all people, become evil, we have numerous examples. We can start with Enron and add to the count a lot of other companies that have destroyed thousands of people’s lives and retirements because of behavior executive management rationalized right to the end.
For political prelest, we can look for an example at the damaged victims of Katrina – a local mayor of a major city tossed the lives of people to the winds of fate while he rationalizes his behavior and places blame on others for his incompetence to this day.
Peck long ago made a statement that explains the behavior in New Orleans. “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.”
Prelest tells me that we are all sinners, but not all of us are evil. When do we cross the line from sinning to being evil? The definition of prelest says it is when we – as individuals, corporations, political systems, societies or churches — deceive ourselves spiritually that our good intentions overcome our evil outcomes. Then, sin becomes evil.
In other words, we maintain our status as “just sinners” so long as we do not deceive ourselves – or, others. The moment we begin to rationalize our sinful behavior to ourselves or to others (as Peck recognized), we cross the line from sin to evil.
How do we know when a person or a corporation or a political system or a society or a church is guilty of spiritual deception and, thus, has become an instrument of evil?
We stop listening to the verbal messages — the explanations (rationalizations) of the good they intended to do — and look at the results of their actions. We stop listening to rationalizations and excuses regarding good intentions and understand that a line between sin and evil has been crossed.
Dr. Peck was a man who will be missed by society… whether society knows it, or not. He is one person who, on his death bed, should have had no doubt that the life given him by his Creator mattered.
Peck pointed out that “It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.”
Thus, to remove problems from our lives does away with personal and spiritual growth. He pointed out that “Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”
Peck suggested that we should “share our similarities and celebrate our differences” and also noted that “Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”
It is a simple statement… but one many people rationalize when setting priorities for utilizing time each day.
M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled began with a sentence we should all remember: “Life is difficult.” The book sold more than 6 million copies, and was translated into at least twenty languages.
Like most people who write conservative material, Peck did not find it easy to get his book published. Random House, for example, rejected the manuscript, saying the final section was “too Christ-y.”
Simon & Schuster bought Peck’s manuscript for $7,500. The first printing was only 5,000 hardback copies. He wrote numerous other books and I will miss him.
Marilyn Barnewall, in 1978, was the first female to be named vice president in charge of a major loan and deposit portfolio at Denver’s largest bank. She started the nation’s first private bank, resigned to start her own firm and consulted for banks of all sizes in America and other countries. In June 1992, Forbes dubbed Barnewall “the dean of American private banking.”
Author of several banking texts, she has written extensively for the American Banker, Bank Marketing Magazine, and was U.S. consulting editor for Private Banker International (Lafferty Publications, London/Dublin).
This article originally appeared in the Grand Junction Free Press. Marilyn can be reached at [email protected].
