Power

Aquinas listed four created goods that the human heart, made for God, can mistake for him: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Power is the most adult-looking of the four — it is the capacity to decide, to direct, to make outcomes happen. A man in the second half has accumulated a great deal of it, often without naming it as such. The substitute is not power itself. It is the grip on power as the thing that keeps you who you are.

In the second half, this substitute is harder to see because it looks like leadership. The decision you fight for because you're right, but also because you're not done being the one who decides. The frustration at not having the last word. The quiet relief when the room defers to you. The way your day organizes itself around who needs your sign-off.

Christ knelt and washed the feet of the men who would scatter on him the next day. The Son of God, who held all authority, used it to wash twelve pairs of feet. That is the only safe form of power in the Catholic tradition: power held by a man who has already given it away to its true owner.

The work in this season is the slow conversion of authority into service. Keep the decisions that are yours to make. Refuse the ones that are not. Submit, somewhere real, to someone you'd rather not — a confessor, a wife, a board. The man who cannot be told what to do is not yet a free man.

In the Catholic tradition, this substitute is most closely tied to the sin of Pride.