Bridle Your Passions

Alma 38:12 (excerpt)

…And also see that ye bridle all your passions, that ye may be filled with love.

I remember, as a youth, being taught this verse more than a few times - always, it seems, from a sexual perspective. I can understand why, I suppose: one of the chief purposes of the young adult program these days seems to be to usher the young people of the Church into adulthood with their virginity still intact. Still, this heavy-handed, one-sided interpretation of the verse has left little mental room for other nuances or shades of meaning in it. Lust is certainly meant to be included, but the verse says ‘passions,’ not passion. So what else is there?

Passion means a strong feeling or emotion. When someone is passionate, they are intensely emotional. This means that fear, anger, rage, despair, grief - even happiness, laughter, joy - all ought to be bridled. When we give way to intense emotion, we often allow ourselves to do things we would otherwise consider a bad idea, and the still small voice of the Spirit is crowded out. Even worse, we are sometimes able to convince ourselves that we ‘couldn’t help it,’ that we couldn’t resist the pull of these feelings, or that they made us do it - as though our emotions have some sort of intelligence and can use it to take control of us.

A still less often mentioned interpretation concerns passions as meaning hobbies. Anything that interests us enough that we pour time, money, and energy into it needs to be considered, evaluated, and if we must confess that it is a passion, bridled.

So what does it mean to bridle our passions? A bridle, of course, is a piece of equipment worn by a horse, and is meant to control and direct it. It is not meant to destroy the horse, to repress or imprison it, nor is it meant to torture, punish or starve it. By bridling a horse you certainly are not pretending that it is not there, or ignoring it. The analogy is clear: our passions are important to us, to who we are. We need them, but they must be controlled, and given direction, or we will be ‘carried away’ with them - often to our misfortune. Controlled, their strength will serve us, lending us their power in answer to our needs. They must be controlled, however, or strong emotion and too-deep involvement in our pastimes will run roughshod over the gentle, quiet feelings of love and peace that are integral to a happy home and a happy self.