The Minds Tongue

When my church speaks of “sins of body desires” we Catholics jump to sex sins.  But the body has many other parts that could practice bad behavior.  I find the tongue to be a powerful and oh so easy way to drag me down.  How? One obvious way is in gossip, speaking judmentally about someone, in which we practice false pride.  You say “I am not a gossip!”  Well, there is the “Tongue of the Mind.”  The tongue of the mind is where you might think something about someone, and carry on a whole conversation with yourself, muttering and grumbling silently or even talking to yourself out loud.  Yes, some of us do this while driving alone in the car.  We think of gossip, or making judgments about another, as something we say out loud to another person.  Some of us can avoid that or at least repent of doing it afterwards.  But we seem to let slip by, and therefore repeat habitually, the gossip of the mind’s tongue.