You can read all sorts of books about moral theology, and manuals describing the right way, and the wrong way, to behave. You can meditate on the lives of great saints, hoping to glean some wisdom on how to live. You can seek the guidance of great spiritual advisors. These are all perfectly fine things to do, and I would never discourage anyone from doing any of them. But, at the end of the day, I think the best advice we can ever receive is to trust out gut. Our gut-- our conscience-- our soul-- our spirit, call it what you will, but we all have an inner guidance mechanism that gets engaged when we're doing something we shouldn't, that makes us feel uneasy, that tells us to go a different direction. We fail to trust those inner stirrings at our peril. That was Herod's problem, as set forth in today's Gospel (Mk 6: 14- 29). At his core, Herod knew that John the Baptist was a "righteous and holy man." There was something about him that Herod couldn't quite put his finger on, something that struck him internally, which made him want to listen to John the Baptist, even though John made him "very much perplexed." When Herod had too much to drink, and was too taken by his daughter's dancing and the atmosphere of his party so that he made an offer he would regret-- whatever you want, even half of his kindgom-- he knew in his gut that he shouldn't grant the request of having John's head delivered on a platter. He was "deeply distressed," Mark tells us. His gut was trying to tell him something, but he didn't trust it. Instead he was more concerned about saving face-- having made the thoughtless offer in front of lots of his friends-- so he went ahead and ordered John's execution. It was the guilt that Herod felt from having done that, guilt that came from not following his internal governor, that caused Herod to believe that Jesus was actually John the Baptist raised from the dead. When I was practicing law, I would always tell young lawyers that their gut was their best friend, that if something felt wrong, it usually was and they should do something about it, whether than meant avoiding a person or situation, or reporting a problem to someone in authority. Almost always when something had been allowed to go on for too long that was wrong, the folks involved would say something like: "this always felt wrong to me, but I didn't know what to do." I am utterly convinced that if more people in authority had trusted their guts when it came to abusive priests, the Church would have avoided most of the abuse crisis. Folks knew things were wrong, but they somehow rationalized their way out of doing something. Herod didn't trust his gut-- look where it got him. That's a mistake we shouldn't make.