Our Searchings

by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

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Hammers, Not Anvils

Many changes have taken place in the field of psychiatry in recent years. Psychiatry formerly believed that man was determined, to a great extent, by subconscious repressions; the new psychiatry is much more concerned with that which makes man human—namely, his reason—and attributes many of the ills of the mind to a want of purpose in life. It is true that a melancholy majority of men do not choose a course in life, but rather allow it to be made for them by circumstances and the outward influences of eye and ear which happen to beat upon their minds. There may be a decision to take a 7:15 am. train to the city, but there is a general want of an overall purpose in life. Standing at the parting of the ways, these people lack a clear notion of what they are aiming at, and allow themselves to be pressured by impulse, like weeds in a stream which move with the current or like jellyfish that are borne along by the waves. God meant that we should be hammers and not anvils. "Choose you this day whom you will serve."

What is history but the record of the tragedy of evil choice? Two alternatives are always before us. One is to work out our impulse toward truth and goodness and love of neighbor; the other is to have our lives determined from without by a rabble of confusion.

It is not enough, however, to know an ideal. One must be prepared to serve it at any cost. Principles are of little value unless we arc prepared to live in accordance with them. The past is past, the future is God's, the present alone is ours. The present, however, is not a fleeing moment, but one pregnant with sacredness and infinite value. As Emerson said, "The present hour is the decisive hour, and every day is doomsday." The poet Whittier expressed it:

The Present, the Present is all thou hast
For thy sure possessing;
Like the patriarch's angel hold it fast
'Til it gives its blessing.
Then of what is to be, and of what is done,
Why queriest thou?
The past and the time to be are one,
And both are Now.

When clay is on the potter's wheel, the lightest touch of the finger can impress it with any pattern he desires; when it is taken off and hardened, nothing will change the shape of the vase except smashing it to fragments. Lord Byron, looking back on his life of wrong choices, said, "I have not had ten happy days." Lord Chesterfield declared, "I have been the whole round of pleasure, and I am disgusted." Simone de Beauvoir in her recent autobiography states that she has sounded all of the pleasures of life, and concludes, "I have been gypped by life."

Freedom of choice is too frequently a beautiful and dangerous gift which, like a sword in the hands of a child, injures us. But we cannot divest ourselves of our responsibility, not even by calling sin a complex. Neutrality and compromise are impossible in life. If God be not the Object of adoration, then any occupant of the throne must be considered as His enemy. Dagan must fall from his pedestal when the ark of God's Presence enters the chamber of the heart. Both God and mammon cannot be served. Once religion is chosen, then it modifies the character of every action, transforming it into an offering laid upon the altar to the glory of God. All that we have and are we send to the mint and receive back stamped with the Divine Image and fashioned according to His desire.

Wars Inside And Out

It is an illusion to believe that we should not always be without war. War is the law of life. Here we are speaking not about wars among nations, but about another kind of war, which is to be waged against evil. Even heaven itself had a battle, in which Michael flashed an archangel spear against rebels who fought not for justice, but evil. Freedom has within itself the frightening power of turning an angel into a devil.

War seems to go on even in creation, as Genesis pictures the gradual emergence of light over darkness and creation over chaos. Written across the universe is the law, "No one shall be crowned unless he has struggled." God came to this earth to reaffirm the importance of struggle. "I came not to bring peace, but the sword."

There are two kinds of swords: one that swings outward, and the other, which is thrust inward. One is to harm the neighbor, such as the sword of Peter that hacked off the ear of the high priest's servant. It was this kind of sword the Divine Master bade be put back into its scabbard. The other kind of sword is the one that cuts out egotism and selfishness and greed. The first sword, which nations hold, creates wars against others; the spiritual sword is a sign of war against ourselves. The less men wage war against the evil in their own breasts, the more they will wage war against their neighbors and nations. The more they battle against their own sins, the less need there is to do battle with the enemy without. The less we shed our own blood figuratively, the more we shed our neighbor's blood physically. Self-righteousness in persons and civil strife against neighbor go hand in hand.

He who does not find the enemy within will find the enemy without. Every man has a civil war going on inside his own breast. If he does not bring this civil war, which is a struggle between the higher and lower self, to a victory of the spirit, he will invariably extend that civil strife to the outside. He who does not crucify his own concupiscences and his libidos will nail others to a cross. He who does not take up his own cross will lay it in contemptible self-righteousness upon the back of a neighbor.

We often wonder why there is little peace on the inside of our hearts. The real answer is that there is no peace on the inside because we are not at war with ourselves; we are not at war with ourselves because we deny that there is an enemy within to be conquered. He is never at war with himself who has never had a thought of the goodness and the holiness of God. Self-interest is his law, self-love his inspiration, self-satisfaction his end and self his god.

But look at that same man after he begins, under the inspiration of grace, to wield the sword the Master brought. Thanks to the peace that is within, his stiff, unbending self becomes supple and kind; unlovely expressions are wiped from his features. The truth has laid hold of him, has entered into him, has won his approbation, becomes his intense desire.

But

Whenever anyone begins to compliment you in such a way as this: "You acted well, you moved about the stage gracefully, your diction was good, your character portrayal was fair"—the word you always expect next is "but." One sometimes wonders if it is not one of the most important words in our language. It always represents a hesitation, a doubt, a compromise. Christianity may be growing in the world, but if it is growing, it is growing like a goat—it has a butt.

Somewhere on a journey to Jerusalem three young men came to Our Blessed Lord. The first two said, "I will follow Thee," but to the third Our Lord said, "Follow Me." The first two offered their services and their submission; the third was given a summons. But in each case there was a but. What the particular hesitations were are no different from those which postpone the peremptory decision of religion. One man might say, "Lord, I will follow Thee, but the nature of my business prevents me," or, "Lord, I will follow Thee, but there are yet a few doubts that I would like to clear up," or, "Lord, I will follow, but—

"First, I would see the end of this high road
That stretches straight before me, fair and broad:
So clear the way I cannot go astray,
It surely leads me equally to God."

The first would-be follower was rather rash, setting no limits to his discipleship. He was ready to go anywhere, until Our Blessed Lord put before him His own abject condition. "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air their resting places; the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His Head." At this point the but came into the mind of the young man, for when he said he would follow, he never imagined that he would have to stoop to One Whose circumstances were so indigent.

The second man was willing to follow Him, but he laid down one condition: "Give me leave to go home and bury my father first." To him Our Lord answered, "Leave the dead to bury their dead; it is for thee to go out and proclaim God's Kingdom."

The third had a social but, so he asked, "Let me take leave of my friends." To him the answer, "No one who looks behind him, when he has once put his hand to the plough, is fitted for the Kingdom of God."

In each and every instance there is the rejection of conditional discipleship. The word "but" undermined the highest resolves and spoiled the fairest offers. True religion demands unconditional commitment. Augustine, before his conversion, used to say, "Dear Lord, I want to be better, but not now, just a little later on." There can be danger in delay. Julius Caesar had a letter given to him by Artemidorus the morning he went to the Senate. That letter told him about a conspiracy that was on foot to murder him, and how he might easily prevent his death; but he neglected to read it and was killed by Brutus. The answer of the Lord to the would-be followers was taken from the plowman who cannot make straight furrows if he looks back. Looking back denotes a hankering for the world, and he who looks back, later goes back. The meanest occupations demand a fixed attention and devotedness of purpose. If the plowman and the oarsman and the helmsman must have a fixed eye, then so must those who follow the Master.

How To Become Neurotic

1. Deny there is such a thing as guilt. Start with the assumption that you are responsible only for the good you do, but not the wrong. Insist on praise, recognition and honor for what you consider work well done, but attribute the evil in your life to either your mother or father, your grandmother or grandfather, or because in school someone called you an idiot and your family had only a Chevrolet in a Buick neighborhood.

2. Next, make yourself a judge of others. Once you deny guilt and sin, then proceed to find everyone else guilty. This will take your mind off the judgment which your conscience makes against yourself. This incessant fault-finding will release in you the mechanism of self-justification and help make you more "innocent" than ever. Read a lot of gossip columns, for this will also help to repress your real guilt by finding others more guilty.

3. When you are judged, immediately become irritated.. Let your anger increase the more you recognize that the criticism is justified. If you refuse to take the advice of your wife to take a particular road while motoring, and your decision proves to be wrong, get mad at her for not explaining it more properly.

4. After becoming irritated against your neighbor, next become irritated against God. Make fun of religion. Seek out its failures in certain individuals who professed to be religious and make them stand for the Church itself; develop a grudge against God; finally, deny His existence and thus make yourself a god. Just as you projected your guilt on your fellow man by hyper-criticism, so now you can ease your uneasy conscience by blaming your guilt on God.

5. Become hard, obdurate and rebellious. If you are young, begin smashing things. This will enable you to give strength to your individual hatred of everybody and of Him Who made everybody. Your irritation thus becomes obduracy and finally aggression until you find it "hard to live with people"—they are so unappreciative of you.

6. Go to a psychoanalyst, not a psychiatrist. Choose particularly the psychoanalyst who will: 1) tell you that all guilt is abnormal; 2) tell you that you need more liberation through sexual license; 3) tell you that your false sense of guilt is due to an Oedipus complex if you are a man, and an Electra complex if you are a woman. Carefully avoid reading good books by such psychiatrists as Paul Tournier or anyone else who holds that abnormal manifestations of guilt have a true guilt at their base. You now will have a full-blown neurosis, which a great psychiatrist has described as "a failure to exonerate oneself from guilt."

7. Crush immediately all promptings from God to recognize that your denial of sin is worse than your sin. These promptings, also from the subconscious mind, are what are known as actual graces. Though they bid you see that your denial of vision makes your blindness incurable, crush them immediately. Call them crutches and say to yourself, "Why should I lean on anyone else? I am my own creator, my own savior. My eye has its own light, my stomach has its own food, my ear needs no harmonies outside itself, my mind needs no teacher, my guilt needs no— I have no guilt." You are now fixed in your neurosis. From this point on, all you need do is find it less burdensome. Alcoholism will help until your head becomes clear, then you will have to drink again to repress the guilt; sleeping tablets will produce an unconsciousness, but you will become more uneasy when you awake. Your tolerance for human distress, poverty, sickness and infirmity will become less and less, for they are reminders that you should not spend everything on yourself. Your cynicism will make you take refuge in meaningless aphorisms about life, such as, "If you don't expect anything from life, you are never disappointed." One recalls what Simenon observed: "And if you don't breathe, you never swallow microbes." Follow the above rules, and you will develop a neurosis made from the guiltlessness and the innocence of your sweet life and the wickedness and the brutality of the lives of others. And in the last analysis, what is your neurosis? Cowardice. The seeking for explanations instead of forgiveness. The mistaking of a cross for a crutch. What fools we mortals be. A crutch is something we lean on; a cross is something that leans on us—for healing.

Reasons And Excuses

A reason is something we give before a conclusion is reached; an excuse is something we give for not following out the conclusion. Reasons generally are sincere; excuses generally are a rationalization of conduct. A reason is a reality; an excuse is an invention, or at least a weak reason.

The reason Adam ate the forbidden fruit was because it was sensibly pleasing to him; the excuse was that Eve gave it to him. The reason the man in the Gospel "hid his talent" was that he was indifferent and lazy, "a wicked and slothful servant." The excuse was that the master was "a hard man." The reason men did not come to the Gospel banquet was because they were all dedicated either to their possessions, to the things that made them proud, or else because they were indifferent to the Divine Food served at the banquet of Eternal Life. Their excuses were: a newly purchased field that had to be seen, five new yoke of oxen that had to be tried and a wife that had to be loved.

That is why in dealing with people it is not so important to know what people say, but rather why they say it. A writer may give very elaborate historical reasons why he hates a particular religion; but these are not nearly so important as to discover the psychological motivation for the attack. Perhaps he left that religion; perhaps he left morality. But somewhere there will be discovered the real why of the hatred. The real causes are seldom avowed, particularly in spiritual matters; these are concealed and others are suggested which serve the immediate purpose.

One day Lincoln was entering a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. A young man running into the hospital knocked Lincoln sprawling on the sidewalk. He did not know Lincoln, but immediately began to excoriate him saying, "You big, long, lean, lanky stiff—why don't you watch where you are going?" Lincoln looked up and said, "Young man, what's troubling you on the inside?" Lincoln, with his very profound knowledge of human nature, was not so much interested in the external as he was in the warped mind and heart of the young man that had provoked his rash judgment.

A person who rightly uses his reason does so in order to take an impartial stock of the evidence and, insofar as it is possible, to keep his wishes and above all his unconscious mind out of the whole business.

Psychoanalysis does a world of good when it skims off the superficial justification for actions and discovers the real reason beneath. But there is no field in which more excuses are given than in the realm of the spiritual and the moral. Any excuse is better than none for the acceptance of the word of God, which demands the pricking of the balloon of pride, and the surrender of the illegitimate revels of the flesh. That is why there has to be a Day of Judgment to send the excuses to Hell and the reasons to Heaven.

Why We Fail

It is not always true that "nothing succeeds like success." The lust for success may make us work so hard that we beget failure. Businessmen low down on the totem pole of a big corporation may constantly send memos to the boss to attract his attention, with the result that the boss puts them down as a bore or a pest. Golfers who are determined to be successful as long-ball hitters try so hard that they spoil their rhythm and end up as dubs. A teacher who is resolved to be a success uses such big words and amasses such confused and unrelated blobs of knowledge that the pupils cannot understand him. I have found, after thirty years in universities, that the more books a professor brings into class, the less prepared he is. One of the greatest failures I ever knew as a teacher was one who used a cart to haul into the classroom his undigested hut seeming knowledge. A speaker who yearns to be a success, cultivates poses, changes his voice and affects humor, so destroys his personality in the end that no auditor believes him to be sincere. Elderly unmarried women who want to be married try so hard to succeed that they alienate men by forward approaches which remove from men all challenge and the joy of pursuit. Anxiety about success leads to failure.

Another reason for failure is being stuck up and inflated about our own importance. Adler has called this an "inferiority complex." A more proper name would be a "superiority complex." Such people in their own estimation are not in caves, but on pinnacles. Inferiority is not a complex with the proud; it is a reflex. The egotist reacts to every situation so as to make himself the leader of the parade. A very pompous bishop was once described by a group of the junior clergy as a "one-man procession."

Because we generally bump up against people who are our superiors because they are more beautiful, better singers, etc., we become saddened; then, in our unconfessed heart of hearts, we know that we are failures. What are two ways to escape this failure completely? The first is to enter into ourselves and find out what we really are. As a business house calls in an outside certified accountant, so we take stock of ourselves. The reason for doing this is that there are two kinds of truth in the world: outside truth and inside truth. Outside truth is what we learn in school about things and history, and read about in the daily press—truths that do not affect us any more than passing traffic. Inside truth is something that sweeps inside of us, controls us, makes us see ourselves as in a mirror; inside truth makes us look at ourselves as we do when awakening at night in the dark. Inside truth is honesty; that is why, in certain flashes of our real nature, we feel awkward, ashamed and haunted by our meanness, our brutality and our selfishness. Sometimes other people get inside us and we react, "That person gets on my nerves." It is when we reach the point where we say that of ourselves that we have the true estimate of our worth.

Once conscious of our capital and real worth, we can now go forth to meet new challenges; maybe learn a new language, take up painting or, better still, begin to serve our neighbors. Knowing our limitations in one direction, we are better prepared to develop the talents we have in the right direction.

The second therapeutic for our vaulting pride is reliance and trust in God. There are here two extremes to be avoided: one is to

believe that man does everything and God does nothing, which is the Western sin of pride; the other is to believe that God does everything and man does nothing, which is the Oriental sin of fatalism. The golden truth is between the two, as expressed by Paul: "I can do all things in Him Who strengtheneth me." One then discovers inner peace, which comes from doing the best one can while relying on God's help. If there is success, there is a thanksgiving; if there is no success, then one still accepts the Divine Purpose.

In the Divine Order, what generally seems at first a failure may be a vestibule for a further success. St. Paul was told if he went to Jerusalem, he would be bound and imprisoned. Paul went away, knowing it was his duty. He was cast into jail and the Word of the Lord came to him. "Take courage, as you have testified about Me in Jerusalem, so you shall bear witness to Me in Rome."

What was a failure was turned into a tremendous success in a new missionary endeavor. Sometimes nothing succeeds like failure.

Whom Not To Consult

In a world in which minds are bewildered by problems of life, marriage, ethics in business and medicine, broken homes and shattered hearts, to whom should one turn for direction?

In general there are three types one should generally avoid, though there are particular circumstances in which consultation might be profitable. It is obvious that here we are referring not to problems of the mechanical, economic, legal or international order, but rather to those which are moral, spiritual and ethical.

In general, one should not consult the young. Not only are they lacking in experience, but there is also the possibility that they may "throw the book" at the person in trouble. They have not lived long enough to be able to make a transfer from the abstract knowledge they have of a problem to the very concrete case before them.

Knowledge is like timber: it is better when aged. In the scientific or political order, however, youth often surpasses maturity. At the age of twenty-seven, Napoleon executed his great military campaign in Italy and drove back the routed Austrians to their capital. The King of Babylon chose young men, well-favored, without blemish and with great ability to stand before him. But the moral leadership of the young did not equal their political acumen.

Every adolescent is an adverb turning into a personal pronoun of either he or she. Until that maturity is reached, it is not well to seek moral guidance from youth, unless they are saints in the making.

It will be recalled that the young man counseled King David to be cruel, a policy which proved to be wrong. Sometimes the self-will of youth makes it impossible for them to enter into the will of others. Our Blessed Lord told Peter how differently he would act when he was old than when he was young. "As a young man, thou wouldst gird thyself and walk where thou hadst the will to go, but when thou hast grown old, thou wilt stretch out thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee where thou goest, not of thy own will."

The second type of counselor that should be avoided is the one who is immoral. An adulterer should not be consulted about purity, a thief about honesty, a divorced man about the meaning of marriage, a careless parent about juvenile delinquency or a crooked politician about international rights. Before seeking the guidance of a legislator about a minimum wage law, it is always well to find out how much he pays his servants. The robber does not want to have a policeman's light shining upon him as he robs a safe. Neither do the evil like to have the moral law shining upon them in their misdeeds. In their darkness they are incapable of taking a bewildered hand in the shadow and leading it into the light.

How very different is teaching from counseling. An immoral man is just as capable of teaching higher mathematics as a moral man. In fact, if his intellectual preparation and equipment are better, his teaching is more perfect. But when one comes to what is called the practical intellect, as distinguished from the speculative, then the way a man lives determines the way he thinks. If a husband or wife, therefore, are having marital troubles, it would always be well to find out from the marriage counselor or psychiatrist, before they consult him, if the man beats his wife.

A third type of counselor to be avoided is one who is always active, but never contemplative. He who is caught up in the whirlpool of life can never extricate another from its whirling waters. Martha, who was busy about many things, was not as good at advising others as Mary, who sat at the feet of the Master in quiet and contemplation. One of the wisest of sayings is that of one of the most learned men who ever lived, Thomas Aquinas: "Contemplata aliis tradere"—"We deliver to others those things upon which we have meditated." In the next article we shall give the positive side of counseling.

Whom To Consult

In the previous article, we spoke of three kinds of counselors to avoid if one seeks advice in the spiritual or moral order. We come now to the positive side of counseling. The best one to consult is one who has suffered. Here we do not mean suffering only from a physical point of view, but rather one who has suffered with meaning, seeing in it a kind of Good Friday that leads to an Easter Sunday; one who sees suffering as a fire that purges away dross to make the gold finer; one who envisages pain as a kind of a detachment from the material that makes attachment to the spiritual easier. This kind of suffering always makes it possible to identify oneself with the other. The suffering may be physical, mental, social or moral, and from it comes not learning, but wisdom. In the Teahouse of the August Moon the wisdom of Sakini is given: "Pain makes men think; thought makes men wise; wisdom makes life endurable."

Pius XII, just a short time before he died, told someone whom I know very well, "You have suffered a great deal and it has been difficult." The speaker said to him, "But I would not be without it, for it has drawn me closer to God." Pius XII answered, "That is right. We get learning from books, but we get wisdom from suffering."

When Moses was on the mountaintop, the Lord said to him, "The time has come now when I mean to visit thee, wrapped in a dark cloud, so that all the people may hear Me talking with thee and obey thee without question henceforward." God wished to make a man to speak to people; should He leave his energies unimpaired for the great work that he is to do? Rather, because Moses was destined to be the great counselor of people, God fitted him for the task by making him pass through a dark cloud. Far from hiding God, the cloud brings Him to the soul. It was here that Moses derived his eloquence as a speaker, his force as a teacher and his inspiration as a counselor.

No man can ever impress another man and lead him out of the depths unless he himself has met God in a dark cloud. It is not enough that one should merely speak to God; he must see Him in a storm. Men who live in gardens amid fruits and flowers and bask in perpetual sunshine can give counsel when money is in the bank, when the blood tingles in the veins and when the heart is light. But when woes, worries, wounds and distress come, then only the man who has lived in the shadow of the cross can advise. Only a man with scars can help the wounded; only one who has stumbled to his throne can lift up the fallen; only the afflicted can bring comfort to those in affliction; that is why only a God Who has come to this world and taken up a cross can ever give the final consolation. "It is not as if our high priest was incapable of feeling for us in our humiliations; he has been through every trial, fashioned as we are, only sinless."

Leisure

Leisure is taken from the Greek word skole, from which our word school is derived. School, therefore, was a place of leisure, inasmuch as it enabled one to perfect his mind by a kind of contemplation. The Latins had the word negotium, which is the negation of leisure or ease and, therefore, means business. The use of the English word negotiations for business is an apt description of the very denial of leisure which is so necessary for the human mind.

Leisure, therefore, is not idleness or incapacity, but a spiritual and moral quality of the soul. It has nothing to do with external factors, for example, a day off from work, a holiday, a weekend vacation, a day at the golf course. Piper, in analyzing leisure, has given the following factors:

Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery or a waterfall. As the Book of Job puts it, "God gives songs in the night."

Silence is something like that wordlessness which happens between lovers. As Maeterlinck said, "It is only before strangers that we must speak."

True leisure is not an interruption from work, a coffee break, a recess. It is not at all in the same line as work, but rather passes at right angles to it. It is not a pick-me-up for work. It is not something for "iron-poor blood." Leisure is the capacity to raise the heart and mind out of the workaday world, to get in touch with superhuman life-giving powers. It is a recognition that "every man has a hole in his head" into which, as William James has said, "saving influences pour."

Labor Day is a relic of the time when men worshiped on feast days and holy days. When God rested on the seventh day, He made that the day of worship.

Throughout history there was land that was set apart for a temple, and that land was regarded as holy; so too, there was a time separated from work which also became related to the temple, or worship. Hence, the seventh day was a day of rest and worship. As worship passes out of life, leisure becomes impossible. It reduces itself either to laziness or boredom, emptiness or compulsion. As Baudelaire wrote, "One must work, if not from taste, then at least from despair." Work is accepted because it is less boring than pleasure.

Russia emphasizes "the worker" and not the person. Such is one of the effects of the denial of leisure for the mind and worship, and to remind us that the whole of our being is not satisfied with six days of profit-making. Where there is culture, there is leisure; and where there is leisure, there is worship.

As Dostoevski has said, "A man who bows down to nothing can never bear the burden of himself."

The Quiet Time

Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician who lives in the Hippocratic oath which all doctors take, wrote, "I shall keep my life pure and undefiled, and my art also." This doctor also wrote a line which has struck modern medicine and psychiatrists profoundly: "Meditation is for a man's spirit what walking is for his body."

The word meditation is rather an abused word, for it conjures up certain formulas of prayer, such as the Ignatian method and the De Sales method, which so formalize thinking as to destroy it. It would be much better to use the words "quiet time," in which a person shuts out the noise of the world, enters into himself and judges himself not by his press clippings, but how he stands with God. There is an old story of a Saracen woman who came to England seeking her lover. She passed through the foreign cities with no word upon her tongue that could be understood by those who heard her except the name of him whom she was seeking. Many today are wandering through the earth as strangers in the midst of it. They cannot translate the cry of their own hearts, but it really means "my soul thirsteth for Thee." There is only One Who can respond to these deepest aspirations of the heart.

In this quiet time, we see that every single life is a summons of His voice: our sorrows by their bitterness and our joys by their quick passing alike call the heart of Him in Whom alone sorrows can be soothed and joys made full and permanent.

Each person decides for himself what is the best quiet time in his life. Some are owls, others are roosters; some are winders, others are unwinders; some are brightest and most penetrating early in the morning, others are most alert at night. This quiet time is no mere vacuum, but it is rather the opening of a door which in the noisy life is closed. As the Psalmist puts it, "Be still, and know that I am God." The quiet time is also a kind of natural fortress where one takes refuge from the emptiness and distractions and fulfills the injunction: "When thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber and, having shut the door, pray to the Father in secret."

God does not save by the barrel load. He summons all because He summons each. He does not cast out His illuminations at random over the heads of a crowd, as a rich man might fling coins to a mob, but He addresses every one singly as if there were no other soul in the universe to hear His voice. The quiet time individualizes this summons, appropriates it and allows us to see ourselves as we really are.

This quiet time should be a minimum of half an hour and, if possible, an hour. It takes almost a quarter of an hour to shut out the distractions of the world. One begins with a confrontation of self, denudes his pretenses, throws off the mask he wears before others and looks his faults in the face. Then there takes place an expansion of the field of consciousness which Janet tried to establish by hypnosis and Freud by the analysis of dreams and bungled action. One enters first into a dark room where there is nothing but a shapeless mass of particular problems, confused ideals and bitter remorse. Then the field of consciousness begins to contract, and one discovers in the unconsciousness what we have been hiding from ourselves. It has well been said that the practice of the quiet time leads to "a progressive recession of the frontier between the conscious and the unconscious."

Then there begins to be an encounter with Divinity, a half-articulate plea for pardon and a growing assurance that heart-seeking is sure to issue in heart-finding. "Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find." This quiet time is an absolute necessity of life, and without it, personality dies. The traveler on a journey looks forward to a spot where he can stay a while; the sailor has his haven where he can furl his sails and find shelter from the storm and tempest. The soul needs actually more rest than the body, and it could very well be that our restless soul is at the basis of many of our physical ills.

The Secret Of Meditation

"Do not walk on the thin ice," every mother tells a child who lives near a body of frozen water. Such knowledge remains a theoretical warning until the child is actually confronted with thin ice. Then the warning of the mother becomes emotionally stirred up in the mind of the child and relevant to the situation at hand. When one adds together the advice of mothers and fathers to children, the counsels of teachers, psychiatrists and preaching from the pulpit, one wonders how much good is really being done. Does not preaching refer to an object outside of the hearer? Is not its truth a kind of "it" unrelated to the "me," much as the stone a geologist picks up does not affect his own personal life?

Much of the criticism directed against religious and moral counseling is based on its inability to have concreteness, like the mother's injunction to the little girl when she got near the ice. Many of the thinkers and poets of our day believe that the solution is for man to refer all of his moods to himself, to ignore anything objective and to treat his subjective states as antennae which contact the depths within, but without a standard outside self.

While there is indeed a failure in counseling to make truth and morality personal, the answer is still not to be found simply by referring to oneself. As Kierkegaard has said, it is as if a man had been shipwrecked at a point in the sea where 70,000 fathoms of water were his whole support. A man thrown into the sea can just thrash about. This is what the beatniks and the Bohemians do, but without any hope of finding something substantial on which to rest.

Though many of our contemporary writers are correct in protesting against the mere indoctrination of truth which is never lived out, they have generally failed to offer the one means most calculated to make knowledge relevant and personal, and that is by meditation. Meditation acts on man somewhat the same as functional medicine. Not long ago, doctors were so specialized that they treated only diseases and not sick people. Now medical practitioners affirm the necessity of treating the whole person. In like manner, it is only by meditation that one personalizes a truth.

Taking an example from Buddhism: A student is supposed to so meditate on the bull's-eye he will shoot with arrows that, after many hours of practice and meditation, he can not only hit the target with his eyes closed, but he can also make a second arrow hit the first arrow which hit the center of the target. The concentration of the student is on the target, and not just on the bow and arrow.

Meditation generally is considered as a reflection on something that one seizes and makes part of oneself, for example, the compassion of Our Lord in feeding the hungry multitude. Meditation, rather, is not merely thinking of compassion outside of oneself, but also trying to think oneself into compassion and mercy and kindness. Here one touches on the great difference between German and Oriental mystics on the one hand, and the great Spanish mystics on the other. The former were satisfied to be absorbed into Divinity, but the Spanish mystics, among whom the greatest was St. Teresa, tended to absorb Deity into themselves. St. Teresa wrote:

This Divine union of love in which I live
Makes God my captive and my heart free.
But it causes me such pain to see God my prisoner
That I die of longing to die.

Here there is a flaming dart plunged into the saint's passionate breast through her meditation.

One may give a thousand lectures on the chemical composition of water to a swimmer, but there is nothing like his plunging into the Mediterranean and feeling the warm water buoy him up and quicken his spirit.

How different our lives would become if we would take an hour a day not to think about the attributes of God and the moral law, but to make the love of God and the love of neighbor experientially present in our own heart and soul! Man does not want to be with God as much as God wants to be with man. This is the secret of meditation. Try it and be happy.

"Aye" Or "Nay" To Eternal Destiny

Often those who complain that they receive "no breaks" in life are the very ones who have not utilized their gifts. It is true that there is a diversity of talents, some being given ten, others five, and others only one; but condemnation in the Gospel is meted out only to him who does not make returns on his gift. This is because we are not merely receptive beings; we are also active. A lake, unless the living waters flow through it, becomes stagnant and putrid like the Dead Sea. The sun shines to light a world. The fleeting streams flow self-content by seeking out the ocean. The tree yields its fruit, the air ministers to life by passing through the lungs. Nature knows no arresting hand, no selfhood.

Gifts can be perverted and turned to disloyal uses, but they can also be neglected through personal ease and indulgence. Those who have not received many gifts sometimes undervalue them with perilous modesty, forgetting that the weakest vessel can hold some water, the simplest speech can praise the Lord, a stupid ass carried Him into Jerusalem.

The muscle that is not used atrophies. The U.N. reports an increase of certain diseases in the underprivileged nations because of malnutrition. But what of the privileged nations? Among these, there is an increase of coronary thrombosis, which is attributed in part to excessive fat and want of exercise. Minds are underdeveloped because they will not put forth the energy necessary to bring them to the)joy and thrill of knowledge.

In the Gospel, he who is perpetually condemned is the one who does nothing with his gifts. It was so in the case of the priest and the Levite who passed by the wounded man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho; it was so of the rich man, of whom no ill is recorded except that a beggar lay at his gate full of sores, and yet no man gave him to eat; it was true of the servant who hid in a napkin the talent committed to him; and also of the unprofitable servant who had only done what it was his duty to do. A man plants a tree in order that it might bring forth fruit. The tree in the Gospel which bore no fruit was ordered cut down because it only cumbered the ground. God expects returns for His great and wonderful investments in us. The condemned man is the negative man who gives way to the inertia of the moment, follows the line of least resistance, remains stunted, starved and profitless to society.

The law of nature and of grace is inexorable in this matter of neglect. He who has the capacity to learn and wastes his time on mental pastry eventually reaches a point where he cannot read a good book or absorb a spiritual inspiration—not because it lacks interest but because it cannot interest him. Men may sin away the very capacity even to desire the thing they need; they can even atrophy the ability to pray. Macbeth knew what he should pray for; words were not wanting, thoughts were not wanting, but in his soul he knew that he did not wish for the very thing he ought to pray for, because he had killed the power of a better affection and aspiration.

The most serious neglect is that of soul-making. For each minute of time is given to man to say "Aye" or "Nay" to his eternal destiny. Every now and then, there bursts in upon the mind a brief light from another world, revealing the precipice that stands before one, as well as the pull of the stars. Sometimes it is darkness that gives vision scope, but even to the most neglecting souls there comes that still, quiet voice of conscience beckoning one on to peace. It is an unsolicited favor and one procured at an infinite price, but it offers deliverance, peace to men of business fretted with anxiety, to women with the care and delight of children, to youth in the full bloom and blossom of springtime promise, to the aged that the greatest life is yet beyond. This is a special kind of peace; it is above the human; it is also free. That is why it is called "grace." For a people to be living in a plague and refuse the antidote which could cure would be foolish. But how often it is true: "I would, but thou wouldst not." The greatest things in life are free, and greatest among these is Divine Life—if we do but seek it.

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