Self-preservation is one of the first laws of nature, and it implies a legitimate self-love; for if we did not love ourselves, we could not continue to live. Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ reminded us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Self-love, knowing it cannot exist by itself anymore than the stomach can exist without food, extends itself in one direction by the acquiring of knowledge; and the more we know of the truth, the more of our personality is developed. The quest for perfection of the self reaches to the infinite. No one has ever said, "I know enough." That is why we hate to have secrets kept from us (men hate this just as much as women) We are incurably curious; we were made to know.

We escape the limitations of the body in another direction by the expansion of our flesh in the procreation of other personalities. Love always tends to an incarnation. In order that human life might be preserved and continued, God implanted of two great appetites and pleasures in man. One is the pleasure of eating to preserve the corporal life of the individual, the other is the pleasure of marriage to preserve the life of race.

The third way of perfecting ourselves is through the ownership of things. Just as we are free on the inside because we can call our soul our own, so we want to be free on the outside by calling possessions our own. Personal or private ownership is natural to man; it is the economic guarantee of freedom, as the soul is its spiritual guarantee.

The Church teaches that the human person is constantly striving for perfection and is restless until it perfects its mind in knowledge, or generates its kind in marriage, or assures its economic security through things. Each of these urges and instincts and cravings is right and God-given. In each instance, the "I" is attempting to find another "I". Because the "I" loves itself, it also loves wisdom, it loves the flesh, and it loves property.

Where then does abnormality arise, if these pursuits are natural? How could they cause a psychosis or anxiety or a complex, any more than the eye does in seeing or the ear in hearing? If we were animals, these pursuits toward perfection would, indeed, never cause disturbance, for an animal's desire can be fully satisfied; but human being cannot. No animal is curious about chlorophyll when it sees a plant, not does a squirrel have an anxiety complex about whether there will be a shortage of nuts ten years hence. But man's impulses and passions are subject to his will. Not being mechanically ordered as means to the salvation of his soul, he can misuse his passions, make them ends in themselves, try to find the absolute in their relative.

Self-love which is good, can be preserved into self-adoration, in which one says, "I am my own law, my own truth, my own standard. Nobody can tell me anything. Whatever I call right is right; what I call wrong is wrong. Therefore, I am God." This is the sin of pride, the perversion of self-love into egotism. Such undue self-inflation is one of the principal causes of unhappiness; the more a balloon is inflated, the easier it is to puncture it. The egotist walks warily, in constant danger of having his false values destroyed.

The sex instinct, which is good, can also be perverted. In the days of pagan Rome some corrupt individuals attended banquets, gorged themselves with food, tickled their throats, disgorged the food, and then went back and ate more. This was wrong because, as reason told them, one eats to live and the pleasure must not be separated from its function. In like manner, when the fires of life are aroused deliberately, not to light new torches of life, but to scorch the flesh, there is the sin of lust. This is a perversion animals cannot commit because they cannot defunctionalize and artificially centralize their instincts.

Third, humankind's legitimate desire for self-expansion through ownership can be perverted into an inordinate passion for wealth, without regard for either its social use or the needs of the neighbor. This is the sin of avarice, in which a person does not possess a fortune, but a fortune possesses him.

Because the human will can pervert the good passions, instincts, cravings, and aspirations into pride, lust and avarice, the Church enjoins mortification - through prayer, which humbles the proud soul, through fasting, which harnesses the errant impulses of the body, and through alms, which detach us from inordinate love of things. In the higher realm, the Church allows some chosen souls to take the vow of obedience to atone for the proud, the vow of chastity to redeem the licentious, and the vow of poverty to compensate for the greedy. These vows are taken, not because enjoyment of the mind, the flesh, or property is wrong, but because some members of society abuse them and pervert them. These holy souls make up for other's excesses by bending backward, as it were, in their own use. Thus is the right order of goods preserved in God's universe.

In the light of the above, there is no more towering nonsense than to say that the Church is opposed to sex. She is no more opposed to sex as such than she is opposed to eating a dinner, to going to school, or to owning a house. Nature is not corrupt. As Aristotle said, "Nature never tells a lie." It is humanity's false use of nature that darkens the face of the world. Nor does the Church, like a monomaniac, believe that sex is the only instinct a human has or that all other instincts are to be interpreted in terms of sex. Rather, with a deeper understanding of human nature, she says that the craving for perfection is basic and that sex is only one of the three ways in which a relative perfection is achieved in this life.

Where, then, did the sex fanatics get the idea that the Church is the enemy of sex? They got it from their inability to make a distinction - a distinction between use and abuse. Because the Church condemns the abuse of nature, sex fanatics think that the Church condemns nature itself. This is untrue. Far from slighting the value of the human body, the Church dignifies it. It is surely nobler to say, with the Christian, that the body is a Temple of God than to say, with some modern minds, that man is merely a beast. As Saint Clement of Alexandria said, "He ought not to be ashamed to create."

There is no sin in the right use of the flesh; even without the Fall of Man, the human race would have been continued through procreation. And Saint Thomas tells us that there was more pleasure in marriage before the Fall than now, because of the greater harmony and peace in man's soul. Saint Augustine has said, "We should, therefore, wrong our Creator in imputing our voices to our flesh; the flesh is good but to leave the Creator and to live according to this created good is mischief."

The Church does, of course, speak of sin in the domain of sex, as it speaks of sin in the domain of property or of sin in the area of self-love. But the sin does not lie in the instinct or the passion itself. Our instincts and our passions are God-given; the sin lies in their perversion. Sin is not in hunger, but in gluttony. Sin is not in the seeking of economic security, but in avarice. Sin is not in drink, but in drunkenness. Sin is not in recreation, but in laziness. Sin is not in the love or the use of the flesh, but in lust, which is its perversion. Just as dirt is matter in the wrong place, so sex can be flesh in the wrong place.

An undue concentration upon a single one life's activities tends to make a person abnormal through lopsided interest. This is especially true of an excessive preoccupation with the carnal. It tends to make what is physical psychic, by tracing back everything to a single instinct. Sex in other ages was physical; it resulted in new life. Today, because it often thwarts life, it is also psychic. Sex is thought about as a medium of pleasure to such a degree that it has become an obsession. Just as a singer could go crazy by concentrating on his thorax instead of his song and an orchestra conductor could become a neurotic by concentrating on his baton instead of his score, so humans today can go crazy thinking about sex instead of about life.

For it is the isolation of the sex factor from the totality of human life, the habit of regarding it as identical to the passion an elephant might feel, the ignoring of the body-soul tension in the human, which causes so many abnormalities and mental disorders. False isolation of the part from its whole is a common trait in contemporary thought. A person's life nowadays is divided into many compartments that remain not united and not integrated.

A businessman's business has no connection with his life in the family - so little in fact that his wife (his "little wife") is kept ignorant of her husband's income. As there is no connection between a man's profession and the rest of his daily existence, neither is there a connection between his daily life and his religion. This chopping up of life into watertight compartments becomes more disastrous as occupation and work are related, less and less, to a strictly human ideal; mechanization plays a catastrophic role.

Serious effects result from this mechanization and the whole tendency to overspecialization in modern life. These two phenomena of our times are both related to the analytic habit of mind, imposed by the fashion of a predominantly scientific approach in the intellectual world. Everything is viewed in isolation by modern man, because this method is the legitimate procedure of science. But there are fields where a study of the unit torn from its context ceases to be adequate. The study of life itself has begun to suffer by an excessive use of analysis - hence the reaction of "holism" in psychology and biology.

The human sex drive is at no moment an instinct alone. Desire from its beginning is informed with spirit, and never is one experienced apart from the other. The psychic and the physical interplay. Just as the idealists, who deny the existence matter, sin against the flesh, so the sensualists and carnalists sin against the spirit. But to betray either aspect is to invite revenge. "Our body is a part of the universal order created and preserved by God. Rightly viewed, it is itself a self-contained universe entrusted to us as a limited but sacred property. The most substantial sin is that which we commit against ourselves and especially against our own body. The offense against our own body includes a sin against the Creator.

Sex instinct in a pig and love in a person are not the same, precisely because love is found in the will, not in the glands - and will does not exist in a pig. Sexual desire in a person is different from sex in a snake because in the human being, it promises something it cannot completely supply. For the spirit in a man anticipates, which a snake does not: man always wants something more than he has. The very fact that none of man's passions for knowledge, love, and security can be completely satisfied here below suggests that he might have been made for something else.

The existence of shame (which exists nowhere except in humans) again shows how this one instinct, above all others, involves soul. Shame draws a veil over the deepest mystery of life and preserves it from impatient use, holding it in check until it can serve life as a whole and can thus satisfy both body and soul. There would be no such disgust in man were it not that everyone of us feels the body to have a peculiar sanctity, not only because of its potency to continue the creative act of God, but also because of its possibility of becoming a veritable Temple of God.

The person is in search of the absolute, for example, perfect happiness. To use sex as a substitute for the absolute is a vain attempt to turn the copy into the original, to make the shadow become the substance, and the conditioned, the absolute. The infinite cravings of a soul cannot be satisfied by the flesh alone. Love, remember, is not in the instinct; it is in the will. If love were purely organic, no more significant than any other physical act, such as breathing or digesting, it would not sometimes be surrounded by feelings of disgust. But grown-up love is much more than these - it is not an echo of a child's forbidden fantasy, as some would tell us. Each soul feels a restlessness, a longing, an emptiness, a desire, which is a remembrance of something that has been lost - our Paradise.

We are all kings in exile. This emptiness can be filled only with Divine Love - nothing else! Having lost God (or having been robbed of Him by false teachers and sex charlatans) the person tries to fill up the void by promiscuous "love affairs." But love, both human and Divine, will fly from him who thinks it is merely physiological: Only he can love nobly who lives a noble life.

It is wrong to say that the deep spiritual love of the saints for God is a sublimation of the sex instinct - as some perverse minds have actually suggested. This is like saying that love of country is derived from the elephant's love of the herd. The idea that religion had its origin in the sex instinct is almost too silly to be refuted, for the greatest religious influences in history have been the most detached from sex. The more a person lives in the presence of God, the more he or she develops a reflex against the wrong use of sex, as automatic as the way an eye blinks when the dust blows.

On the other hand, the sex fanatics are not only non-religious persons, but usually anti-religious persons. It is curious to hear such people urge that we ought to repudiate Christian morality and develop a new ethics to suit the unethical lives of a few thousand individuals they have polled. Because statisticians can find 5,000 living carnal lives, it is suggested that their ideal shall be made the universal ideal. An equal number of cases of lockjaw could be found in the United States; one wonders if lockjaw should therefore be made a physical standard of health? Sins do not become virtues by being widely practiced. Right is still right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. Some have contended that sex aberrations are as common as the common cold; but nobody has so far asked us to consider the cold normal and desirable.

On the possible side, it is the Christian position that the sex instinct is the reflection of love in the spiritual order. The sun comes first, then its reflection in the pool. The voice is a sublimation of the echo, and neither is the belief in God a sublimation of a carnal instinct. All love and all perfection and all happiness are first in God, then in things. The closer creatures, such as angels and saints, come to God, the happier they are; the farther away they stay, the less they can reveal the works of Divinity.

There are five aspects of love by which the nature of man is uplifted and fulfilled: The love of man or woman for God; the love of man and woman for each other; the love of parents for children and of children for parents; the love of men and women for country or community; and the love of men and women for excellence in some creative activity, in art, in literature or philosophy. These are not five kinds or species of love which are given to ennoble men, but five aspects of love which is one, even when we think of it as flowing between God and man. In every little child lying in his mother's bosom, there is something of the Incarnation; the mystery of humanity becomes the revelation of Heaven; and in such incarnation of the Divine Love we can behold, born in every aspect of human love, the Word become Incarnate of Him in whose will is our peace.

Since the stress on sex is due to a forgetfulness of the true nature of man as body and spirit, it follows that the release from anxieties, tensions, and unhappiness (created by identifying man with a beast) is dependent upon a restoration of the meaning of love. Love includes the flesh; but sex, understood as animal instinct, does not include love. Human love always implies Perfect Love.

There is a double love in each of us - a love that is self-realizing and looks to our own good, and a love that is self-effacing and looks to the good of another. Both loves are included in the Divine Command, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." - Matt. 22:39 - The one love is self-assertive and possessive - it makes us eat, drink, and work to sustain our life. The other love is sacrificial or possessed and seeks not to be owned, not to have but to be had. The first takes water that it may live. The other shares or even gives up the water that the neighbor may live.

Each love is right and good and is meant to act as a brake on the other. If self were entirely neglected, one would not only lose all self-respect, but one would be consumed, as a moth in the flame. No one of us wants this; we do not long see our personalities extinguished or dissolved in some great Nirvana of unconsciousness. But selfless love is essential, too. If it is neglected, we have egotism, selfishness, conceit, snobbishness, and carnality.

To put this tension between the two loves into other words, there is in each heart a pull between the romance and the marriage, between the courtship and the union, the chase and the capture. Earthly love that is only the quest is incomplete; love that is only attainment is inert. If love is limited to possession, the beloved is absorbed and destroyed; if love is limited only to desire, it is a useless force that burns itself out. This failure of either search or satisfaction to satisfy causes the mystery and sometimes the pain of love.

As pursuit alone, love is death by hunger; as satisfaction alone, love is death by satiety and its own "too much." If love could reach no higher than earth, it would be like the pendulum of a clock alternating and ticking away between chase to capture, capture to chase, endlessly. But our hearts crave something more. We long for an escape from this weary iteration of pursuit to capture; we do not wish in love to emulate the hunter who starts for new prey only because he has already killed the old.

And there is an escape. It lies in the eternal moment that combines both search and finding. In Heaven we shall capture Eternal Love, but an infinity of chase will not be enough to sound its depths. This is the Love in which you at last may have yourself and lose yourself in one and the same eternal now. Here the tension of romance and marriage is reconciled in an eternal instant of joy, an instant that would break the heart were it not that Love is life.

Never to thirst would be inhuman, ever to thirst would be hell; but to drink and thirst in the same eternal now is to rise to the highest bliss of Love. This is the Love we "fall just short of in all love, the Beauty that leaves all other beauty pain, the unpossessed that makes possession vain." The closest we can come to such experience in our earthly imagination is to think of the most ecstatically happy moment of our lives - and then to live that moment eternally. This kind of love would be speechless and ineffable; there could be no adequate expression of its ecstasies. That is why the Love of God is called the Holy Spirit, the Holy Breath - something that is too deep for words.

It takes not two, but three to make perfect Love, whether it be in the flesh (husband, wife, and child) or in the spirit (lover, beloved, and love) or in Divine Nature (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) Sex is duality; Love is always triune.

It is this fullness of Love that every heart in the universe wants. Some suspect it not, because they have never lifted the blind of their dark hearts to let in the light of God; others have been robbed of the hope by those who cannot think of love in any other terms than the concourse of two monkeys; others draw back from it in foolish fear lest, having the Flames of Love Divine, they may lose the dying embers of their present perverted desires. But others see that, as the golden streaks across the waters of the lake are reflections of the moon above, so human love is but the crushed-out reflection of the Heart Divine. In God Alone is the consummation of all desires.

To the woman at the well who had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband, Our Lord Jesus said, "Whoever drinks of this water, shall thirst again" - John 4:13 - There are no human wells deep enough to quench the insatiable thirst of the human soul. But this desire can be satisfied: "He that shall drink of the water that I will give him, shall not thirst forever; but the water that I will give him, shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting." - John 4:13-14 - Religion ennobles love, and those who rob man of God spoil his nature. Only a Divine religion can protect the spiritual against the physical or prevent the animal in us from conquering the mind, making man more brutal than the brute.

How life changes its meaning when we see the love of the flesh as the reflection of the Eternal Light shot through the prism of time! They who would separate the earthly sound from the heavenly harp can have no music; they who believe that love is only the body's breath soon find love breathes its last and they made a covenant with death. But they who see in all earthly beauty the faint copy of Divine loveliness, they who see in fidelity to every vow, even when the other is untrue, a proof that God loves us who are so unlovable, they who, in the face of their trials, see that God's love ended in a cross, they who allow the river of their rapture to broaden out the blended channels of prayer and worship - these will, even on earth, learn that Love was made flesh and dwelled among us. Thus, Love becomes an ascension toward that blessed day when the limitless depths of our souls will be filled with the boundless giving, in one eternal now, where love is life's eternity and God is Love.

BY  ARCHBISHOP  FULTON  J.  SHEEN  ( 1895 to 1979 )


                                                                          Page 2
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.

By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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 -