But non attachment from the world, as ideal worth seeking for itself, is not the answer. We cannot say, with Aldous Huxley, "The ideal man is the non attached man. Non attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non attached to his cravings for power and possessions. Non attached even to science and speculation and philanthropy. The non attachment of Buddhism or Taoism is not the Christian ideal; though it sounds very noble to say that they who possess are possessed, are slaves to the illusions of life. Non attachment and unworldliness are vain unless they are regarded as secondary, as a mere means to attain to the primary goal, which is love of God and neighbor.

But this is not an age in which asceticism, as an end, offers so great a temptation to most people that they need this warning. Self-indulgence is an error many times commoner today. It is more fatal, too. There is nothing so dangerous for a civilization as softness, as there is nothing so destructive of personality as a want of discipline. Arnold Toynbee, the historian, tell us that, out of twenty-one civilizations which have vanished, sixteen collapsed because of decay within. Nations are not often murdered; they more often commit suicide. That is the sinister meaning of our present mood of selfishness and love of pleasure, our affirmation of our egotism, our widespread refusal to discipline the self. Although two world wars have imposed upon us many sacrifices that we have accepted willingly, even these have not been sufficient to make us perform the greatest sacrifice of all - to give up the illusion that a person is most self-expressive when he allows the animal to gain mastery over the spirit.

We are scandalized at seeing what the release of the sub-human has done to the Fascists, Nazis, and Communists. Yet we have not learned that the same deleterious effects can be present in the individual who, starting with the philosophy that he is only a beast, immediately proceeds to act like one. To just the extent that a person is unmortified in his selfish passions, it becomes the necessary for some external authority to control and subdue those passions. That is why the passing of morality and religion and asceticism from political life is inevitably followed by a police state, which attempts to organize the chaos produced by that selfishness. Law gives way to force; ethics is replaced by the secret police. "There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of civilization. On the contrary, absorption in case is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay."

The totalitarian regimes are symptomatic of a disease that has also attacked the men and women in countries that are free. It is the disease of disorder within humanity. Few realize the terrible dimensions of the present catastrophe; they are blinded by the fact that man has made great material progress. The truth of the matter is, however, that humanity has lost control over itself at the very moment when it has gained control over nature. Because humans have lost self-control and denied the spiritual purpose in life, they utilize for destructive ends the forces of nature that they have harnessed. Every gain in mastery of the forces of nature becomes a potential danger unless it is matched by an equal gain in man's mastery over his animal impulses.

To just the degree that a materialist psychologist interprets self-expression as the release of the animal instincts, he contributes to the world's present woe and disorder. Animal guided humans cannot conduct a civilization. They are more at home in war than in peace. We of today can be united against a common enemy through hate; it takes spirit and a common purpose to bind us together when peace comes. It used to be that wars were hard to wage, that peace came naturally with victory. Today the situation is reversed; the power of destruction are greater than the powers of construction in the modern world.

Peace is a fruit of love, and love flowers in the person oriented toward God. The greatest privilege that can come to a person is to have his life God-directed; this follows when he has remotely paved the way by disciplined self-direction. God cares enough for us to regulate our lives - and this is the strongest proof of love that He could give to us. For it is a fact of human experience that we do not care very much about the details of other people's lives unless we love them.

We are not deeply interested in hearing more of those individuals whom we meet in the subway and in the street and on the highway. But as soon as we begin to know and love any of them, then we become more and more interested in their lives; we have a greater care for them. As we bring them into the area of our love, both our interest and their happiness increases. It is like this when we bring ourselves into the area of God's love: there is an increasing Divine guidance of the details of our life, and we are ever being made more sure of the depth and reality of His Love. To the extent that we abandon our personality to Him, He will take possession of our will and work in us. We are no longer ruled by commands coming from the outside, as from a cruel master, but by almost imperceptible suggestions that rise up from within. We feel as if we had wanted all along to do those things He suggests to us; we are never conscious of being under command. Thus our service to Him becomes the highest form of liberty, for it is always easy to do something for the one we love.

And God, of course, wishes us to seek the happiness. He can give if we will let Him. A mother who has a wayward daughter desires nothing more than to penetrate into her mind to inspire her will; her greatest sorrow is her inability to do this. The happiness of both is conditioned upon the daughter's allowing the mother's love to operate, for no parent can ever guide a child who wars against the parent's will. Neither can God guide us if we allow the animal in us to direct our will, demanding the satisfaction of each of its rebellious claims. As the whole order of the universe rests on the surrender of the chemicals to the plants, of the plants to the animals, of the animals to man, so the peace of man comes only in the surrender of self to God. Psychologists teaching that the needs of the id are more important than the ideals of the superego, that a discipline of sex ends in a tension and neurosis that can be released only by carnal abandonment - these individuals have increased the world's selfishness, egotism, and cruelty.

The principal cause of all unhappiness is unregulated desire - wanting more than is needed or wanting what is harmful to the spirit. The modern world is geared to increase our desires and our wants by its advertising, but it can never satisfy them. Our desires are infinite; the supply of any good on earth is finite. Hence our unhappiness and anxieties, our disappointments and our sadness. The only exist from this state is by control of the sense through mortification. This is what Our Lord Jesus meant when He said, "And if your hand or your foot scandalize you, cut it off, and cast it from you. And if your eye scandalizes you, pluck it out, and cast it from you." - Matt. 18:8-9 - Because, in our modern civilization, the biological is divorced from the spiritual, because freedom is isolated from dependence on God like a pendulum cut off from a clock, because liberty is interpreted only as freedom from something and not as freedom for something, it is especially necessary to revive the Christian practice of self-discipline.

As Rom Landau, rightly observes; Nothing short of religion will inspire self-detachment. A person will refuse for the sake of himself or herself as a finite human animal to undergo the discipline to which he will gladly submit, once he is brought into conscious relation with God. This is the crux of the entire problem. Separate a man from his spiritual nature, let him talk of himself merely as a physical organism, and his respect for himself will not be such as to induce him to make a sacrifice for anything that he considers essential to his material well-being or enjoyment. Once he faces God and becomes aware of the divine nature of his personality, he will recognize that more is involved than what constitutes his physical being. He will do for himself as related to God what he would not dream of doing otherwise.

Christian self-discipline is really self-expression - expression of all that is highest and best in self; the farmer plows under the weeds for the completest expression of the corn's desire to grow. Self-control, through mortification or asceticism, is not the rejection of our instincts, passions, and emotions, nor is it  thrusting these God-given impulses into unconsciousness, as the materialists accuse the Christians of doing. Our passions, instincts, and emotions are good, not evil; self-control means only curbing their inordinate excesses. To take a little wine for the sake of one's stomach, as Saint Paul told Timothy, is to obey an instinct; but to take so much of it as to forget that one has either a head or a stomach is to abuse wine as a creature of God.

Once the instincts and passions are subject to the will, they can be controlled and guided. The Church does not repress passions when it restrains their unlawful expression. It does not deny emotions, anymore than it denies hunger; the Church only asks that, when a person sits at table, he shall not eat like a pig. Our Lord Jesus did not repress the intense emotional zeal of Paul; He merely redirected it from hate to love. Our Lord Jesus did not repress the biological vitality of a Magdalene; He merely turned her passion from love of vice to love of virtue. Such a conversion of energies explains why the greatest sinners - like Augustine - sometimes make the greatest saints; it is not because they have been sinners that they love God with their special intensity, but because they have strong urges, violent passions, flowing emotions which, turned to holy purposes, now do as much good as they once did harm.

Strong passions are the precious raw material of sanctity. Individuals who have carried their sinning to extremes should despair or say, "I am too great a sinner to change" or "God would not want me." God will take anyone who is willing to love, not with an occasional gestures, but with a "passionless passion" a "wild tranquility." A sinner, unrepentant, cannot love God, anymore than someone on dry land can swim; but as soon as a person takes his errant energies to God and asks for their redirection, he will become happy, as he was never happy before. It is not the wrong things one has already done that keep one from God; it is present persistence in that wrong.

Someone who turns back to God, as the Magdalene and Paul, welcomes the discipline that will enable him to change his former tendencies. Mortification is good, but only when it is done out of love of God. Asceticism for asceticism's sake is actually a form of egotism, for self-discipline is only a means, the end of which is a greater love of God. Any form of asceticism that disrupted charity would be wrong - this was the mistake of the monk who decided to live only on crusts and upset the whole monastery, turning it into one vast crust hunt to satisfy his idiosyncrasies. Asceticism that makes us less agreeable to our neighbors does not please God.

Mortification of the right sort perfect our human nature; the gardener cuts the green shoots from the root of the bush, not to kill the rose, but to make it bloom more beautifully. As the perfection of the rose and not the destruction of the bush is the purpose of pruning, so union with God is the purpose of self-discipline. God deeds are done for human ends, such as to perpetuate one's name, receive nothing but a human reward; only deeds of mortification, done out of Divine Love, perfect the soul.

But they must be done from the right motive, and they must sacrifice the very things to which we wish to cling. Saint Paul reminds us powerfully that the most intense mortification done without love of God is useless: "And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profits me nothing." - 1Cor. 13:3 - Archbishop Francois Fenelon shows how reservations in our willingness to accept self-discipline impede spiritual progress.

"People often hover around such reservations, making believe not to see them for fear of self-reproach, guarding them as the apple of the eye. If you were to break down one of these reservations, you would be touched to the quick...a very sure proof of the presence of evil. The more you shrink from giving up on any such reserved point, the surer it is that it needs to be given up. If you were not fast bound by it, you would never make so many efforts to convince yourself that you were free. Why is it that the vessel does not make way? Is the wind wanting? Nowise; the spirit of Grace breathes on it, but the vessel is bound by invisible anchors in the depths of the sea. The fault is not God's; it is wholly ours. If we will search thoroughly, we shall soon see the hidden bonds which detains us. That point in which we least mistrust ourselves is precisely that which needs most distrust."

Mortification is based, not on hatred, but on preference. The mother sacrifices the bloom in her cheek to put it on the cheek of an infant daughter; the scholar surrenders any hope he held for the development of his muscles; the moral life demands our saying "No" to false ideals that glorify power and egotism. It is quite a wrong thing, therefore, to say that you "give up" something during Lent. Our Lord Jesus never asked us to give up anything; He asked us to exchange: "What exchange shall you give for your soul?" When someone is in love with God, he finds that there are some things he can get along without, namely, the peace of soul that comes from obeying God's Will. So he exchanges the one for the other, surrender the lesser good to gain a Kingdom. He makes such a series of profitable exchanges everyday he lives.

Love of God thus becomes the dominant passion of life; like every other worthwhile love, it demands and inspires sacrifice. But love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance that inspires no sacrifices. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What human has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads people, instead, to express their own egotism in a book or a lecture that patronize the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated. Never once did Our Lord Jesus say, "Tolerate your enemies!" But He did say, "Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you." - Matt. 5:44 - Such love can be achieved only if we deliberately curb our fallen nature's animosities.

Self-discipline does more than this for us, however; it gives our lives a steady goal. The form of self-discipline most valuable in helping us to know where we are going is meditation, which will finally give us self-control through self-realization. Most tragic of all modern souls are those self-imprisoned in their own minds; meditation alone can break that maddening self-centered circle with an invasion by the Divine.

There are many men and women today who never meditate or discipline themselves in any other way. They find that they are cloyed with what they thought would satisfy; they try to make up for each disillusionment with a new attachment; they try to exorcise the old disgusts and shames with febrile new excitements. They change their partners in love, but their boredom and ennui remain. Their disorders become habit, and a seeming necessity; they allow open wounds in their souls because they deny that there are wounds, or even souls.

The chains of their slavery to despair are forged; their past sufferings still persist in their remorse; their future is dark with fear; their pleasures are less keen that they used to be, their anxieties more permanent; their excitements follow more rapidly, and their conscience is less in repose; their minutes in sin become nights of fear. They are a burden to themselves, a bore to their friends, disgusted but never satiated, made more hungry but never satisfied; in the end they pay charlatans handsome fees to be told that there is no sin and that their sense of guilt is due to a farther complex. But their moral cancer remains, even then; they feel gnawing at their hearts.

What shall these poor, frustrated, psychotic, and neurotic millions in our midst do to escape a creeping insanity and a growing madness? The only answer for them is to enter into themselves, to lift their eyes to the Divine Physician and cry, "Have mercy on me, O God!" If they only knew it, a single confession would rescue them by helping them to have their sins forgiven; it would also save them the small fortune spent in having their sins explained away.

God has promised us pardon if we are penitent, but not if we procrastinate. Sin will wear out mind, heart, and soul, but it will not wear itself out - it will have to purged out. The secret of peace of soul is to combine detachment from evil with attachment to God, to abandon egotism as the ruling,determining element in living and to substitute Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ as the regent of our actions. What is anti-God must be repressed; what is Godly must be expressed. Then one will no longer awaken with a dark brown taste in the mouth or a feeling of being run down at the heels. Instead of greeting each day with the complaint, "Good God, morning!" one will say, from the happiness of a soul in love, "Good morning, God!"


BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN  ( 1895 to 1979 )

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.

HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -