The Way To Acceptance
Adventure
When a heart ceases to have a deep love for anything, it becomes bored. Putting the same kind of nut on the same kind of bolt day after day, hammering out meaningless correspondence on a machine, and collecting luncheon checks at a counter may all be necessary for economic livelihood, but their meaningless routine wears away and corrodes the dignity of personality. No wonder boys love Robinson Crusoe, teenagers love speed, businessmen want to make more money, jaded married women devour novels about romantic heroes, beatniks thrill to snapping their fingers, flaunting their dirty clothes and shaking their long hair at the convention of their elders. They are all seeking to break out of the prison bars of the tedium of society and organization by some kind of adventure or daring. Every single person in the world has a need of fulfillment, a thirst for the absolute.
Other nations are wrong in saying that Americans are money-mad. Is it money that businessmen are after, or a mysterious something which they lack? Is their drive really any different from the scientist's compulsion to do research, or the skindiver's plunge into new, unexplored depths? What really makes America great is not its wealth or its science, or its sense of mission to the rest of the world; underneath all of these is its passion for adventure, the quest of the new, whether it be a new frontier or a new combination of chemicals.
There are two kinds of adventures: quality adventures and quantity adventures. Quantity adventures are ones such as increasing one's stock holdings, escalating one's position from elevator operator to elevator starter, collecting seashells, moving from lieutenant governor to governor for the sake of power, increasing the dope intake or betting more often on the daily double. This kind of adventure may give excitement, but it never fulfills personality because there is nothing to these experiences but the addition of zeros. They are like adding box car to box car on a siding, but without an engine or a destination. To move up from a sports car to a Cadillac and then to a Rolls-Royce only means that one exchanges one dissatisfaction for another. Furthermore, all of the pleasure is outside personality and not inside it. Take things away and the heart is empty.
Quality adventure, on the other hand, has something to do with inner values, a drive for perfection and a quest for peace of soul. The adventure lies not in things outside the heart and mind, but within them. Among quality adventures the three most satisfying adventures are: knowledge, social service and religion.
Knowledge embraces all subjects which perfect the mind, such as empirical sciences like biochemistry, and the whole gamut of university studies including philosophy itself. The wise Greek Aristotle held that the knowledge of philosophy adds to one's existence by transmuting concrete existences into mental existence, thus enriching the joy of living. But the endless repetition of the same kind of knowledge that one finds in many a classroom is not very adventurous. Some professors are merely textbooks wired for sound. Teaching is too often reduced to the communication of the notes in the professor's yellow pages to the white pages of a student's notebook, without passing through the minds of either. Knowledge is adventurous only when it is progressive, when it tears aside old veils and reveals new horizons. One of the purest natural joys of living is the growth in the acquisition of truth.
Social service is another form of adventure and here is understood not just as sociological research into the fighting habits of racial groups, but rather as the broad service to mankind, particularly the impoverished half who go to bed hungry every night. The Peace Corps, which is the governmental side of missionary activity, is one such elevating experience. Missionaries in particular represent a special breed of the adventurous. They leave their country for life as did Abraham; they identify themselves with the people they serve; and they so love them that when they return temporarily to an affluent civilization, they are unhappy and anxious to get back to service. This kind of adventure, which identifies itself with the stricken, the hungry and the unlettered, pays the highest inner dividends, namely, the joy which comes from spending oneself and being spent in love of neighbor.
The supreme adventure is religion. By religion is not meant the sterile sitting in comfortable pews, but the response to the promise of the God-man: "I am come that you may have life and have it more abundantly." That is the point—"more abundantly." It challenges us to liquidate our unruly wills, our egocentrisms, our petty search for aloneness, and our selling a field to buy the pearl of great price. This adventure loves not the spark but the Flame. It reaches its psychological peak when it can say with Catherine of Genoa, "My 'me' is God, nor do I know my selfhood save in Him." That kind of love summons us to interest ourselves in the world, because God loves it, because God created it and is Himself engaged in this adventure. The joy of this commitment refuses to be satisfied with anything less than the totally satisfying. The totally satisfying is not something which should satisfy us, but something which does satisfy, down to the very toes of our soul.
The Joy Of Being A Prodigal Son
"I had a nervous breakdown"—no one ever blushes about making such a confession, even though it may have been caused by guilt. Such was the case of one whom we shall call Gerald, who had wasted away to skin and bones. He had been under psychiatric treatment for three years and had shown some slight improvement. The psychiatrist sent him to me saying, "His nervous breakdown has something behind it which I cannot find. I think it belongs in the moral order, but he is reluctant to tell me because he knows that I am not the best representative in the world of that order."
I asked Gerald a number of questions and then quickly shot in the query, "How much money did you steal?" He denied for five minutes that he had stolen anything. Repeatedly asking the question broke him down and he answered, "Three thousand dollars. But how did you know?" I told him that the description he gave of his conduct in one respect, such as wiping off money before he gave it away, gave me the suspicion that he was involved with "dirty money." Later on, he made restitution and found peace with God and, therefore, with himself.
In this world, where there is so much cheating, dishonesty and stealing, it is well to recall the stern, pedestrian fact of restitution. There are some who injure others and never ask for forgiveness; others who say they are sorry, but never mean it, like Pharoah, whose mock repentance only hardened his soul; still others admit a fault, but, like Saul, make so many excuses that their confession only works toward despair, madness and suicide.
There are three steps in soul purgation without which true inner peace is impossible. The first is the acknowledgment of our responsibility for any moral fact, such as injuring another's reputation, adultery, theft or any such disorder. It is a humiliating step indeed to say, "I have sinned." This admission may come on one in a flash as with David, or after many sleepless nights, as with Augustine. One wonders if, in the whole of literature, there is any book which has so much contributed to the unmasking of faults as the Confessions of St. Augustine; few works have so prompted others to say, "It is wrong to live for myself; it is not the design of happiness. In all my pleasures I merely multiplied zeros, and now at the end have nothing but regrets."
The second point is that the guilt must be seen ultimately not as the breaking of a law, but as the wounding of Divine Love. This point of view becomes more poignant in Christianity, where every sin is seen in relation to the Crucifix. I can see the relation between any pride and the crown of thorns; my lust and the flesh hanging from His Body like purple rags; my grasping embrace of mammon or wealth in the pierced hands; my lost and errant ways in the riveted feet; and above all, my false loves in the pierced heart. Few are sorry because they broke a law; but everyone is contrite in seeing what egotism did to the Beloved. No abstractions—such as humanity or class or party-can bind a man's hot passions from their self-indulgence, or bend his proud head in penitent confession of guilt. The honest cry is the one David wrote after his adultery with Bethsabee: "Against Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight."
At the root of every deed which breaks the heart and starts a civil war in the soul is the affirmation: "I am god; I am my own creator, my own redeemer." Generally, egotists are not as willing to declare their belief in this kind of god as they are to negate a belief in the God Who stirs their conscience to return to Him. Atheism is never an intellectual position, and neither is doubt or agnosticism; they are moral positions begotten of one of three kinds of behavior; pride, which refuses to bend the ego; lust or impurity, which detaches the flesh from true love; and greed or worldliness, which adds barns to barns as a kind of economic immortality.
Finally there is the pardon which comes with restitution if necessary. Pardon is not related to time. As the chemistry of years prepared for the eruption of a volcano, so the reconciliation with God takes place in a moment, despite the mounded dust of rebellious years. Alp piled upon Alp pass away as their mountainous guilts are cast into the depths of the sea. Really, the pity of life is not what men do; it is what they miss—the joy of being a prodigal son.
Acceptance Of Truth
An age of unbelief is always an age of superstition. As faith declines, credulity increases. In order to understand this statement, one must grasp the true meaning of faith. Faith today is identified with a kind of feeling or instinctive urge toward the acceptance of an idea. Very few today realize that reason is a prelude to faith. Whether they know it or not, they follow the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who wrote to Dom Deschamps in 1762, "Order and method are your gods; they are my furies. The state of reflection is contrary to nature. A man who meditates is a depraved animal. Don't think, it hurts; just feel."
In German, Goethe made Faust say, "Feeling is everything." Madame de Stael wrote a work on the influence of passions on happiness. Wordsworth said: "Our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous form of things."
It is very hard to convince those whose lives are dominated by feeling that faith has nothing whatever to do with emotion. Nor does it have anything to do with "feeling good," because very often faith recommends something that is very difficult, such as taking up a cross. Nor is faith something so compelling as to completely destroy reason, as if one might say, "It bowled me over."
Reason is absolutely essential as a condition of faith, for reason alone gives motives of credibility. Suppose you receive from a police station a telephone call saying your car has been stolen. It would do no good to say, "Well, I have faith that it has not," because all of the evidence is the other way. If faith be likened to the flat roof of the house, reason may be compared to the ladder. One must use the ladder to get on the roof. Once one is there, one could, if one so desired, kick away the ladder, though it would not be the proper thing to do because one must always use reason to elaborate on the faith that has been received.
It is reason that creates motives for believing. Faith is to religion very much as credit is to business. Just as one must have a reason for giving credit, so too must one have a reason for believing. The conclusions of reason for accepting the testimony of anyone—for example, the testimony of Christ—are not mathematically certain. They are only morally certain. They are very much like the certitude that you have that you were born of your own parents. If you were immediately challenged to prove that particular fact, you might be at a great loss to do so; but your certitude is greater than your reasons for your certitude. It is merely sufficient that reason be an adequate basis for a decision. Though Lord Nelson once put a telescope to his blind eye, there was still reason for believing that a telescope has the power, if applied to a seeing eye, to embrace objects which the natural eye could not see.
How does a man come to faith in the Divinity of Christ? His reason establishes certain motives of credibility, namely, (1) Anyone who comes from God should be pre-announced; (2) He should be able to work wonders and signs as an attestation that He is a Divine messenger; (3) nothing that He teaches should be contrary to human reason. Once one has the moral certitude for assenting to belief in the Divinity of Christ, then follows the act of love.
The human heart cannot love without the unseen, the invisible, the mysterious. Children must have their angels, their saints, and when they lose these, they have left only space cadets. Adults, when they lose faith, must have detective stories; as they lose the mysteries of religion, they begin to be interested in who killed the barmaid. Love has to thrive on an ideal, something unexplored. So religion is based on an eruption from an unseen order, a self-disclosure, something that is given.
When we try to make everything clear, we make everything confused. If, however, we admit one mysterious thing in the universe, then everything else becomes clear in the light of that. The sun is so bright, so mysterious, that one cannot look at it, and yet in the light of the sun everything else is seen. Chesterton said, "We can see the moon and we can see things under the moon, but the moon is the mother of lunatics."
Faith
What is Faith? Some conceive it as believing that something will happen, such as "I have faith that I will make a fortune before I am forty." Others think of it as self-confidence and self-assurance by which they make God a junior partner in some project of theirs. "I have faith that I will woo and win that rich girl." This is not faith but egotism; it is directed not to God but to self.
Faith is related not to self-assurance but to God; not to an. event, but to truth. In fact, there is often the greatest faith when there is the least prosperity. Such was the case with Job who, full of sores and sitting on a dunghill, said, "I will trust Him though He slay me." Faith is the acceptance of a truth on the authority of God revealing it. When a distinguished scientist tells me about the age of fossils, I accept it on natural faith. I never made a test of the bones to verify his estimate. But I have a sufficient motive in his credibility, namely, he is the kind of man who would neither deceive nor be deceived. Therefore his utterance about the fossil age I accept as true.
Now, over and above the human, there is the Divine. As a scientist can reveal to me truths which are beyond my reason, so God can reveal to me truths beyond the power of my intelligence. Since I know Him to be One Who neither deceives nor can be deceived, I accept His revelation in faith.
How do men receive a scientific truth which is beyond their knowledge? Some deny it, some ridicule it, some are silent through indecision. The same reactions happen in the face of a Divine Revelation. Remember the time when Our Blessed Lord cured the man who was blind from birth? The miracle was worked to prove that He was the Son of God. The miracle was to be a motive for believing in Him, just as our associations with certain people give us an assurance of their trustworthiness. But some, refusing to recognize the miracle, denied that it was the same man who was born blind: "He looks like him." In other words, "There is a fraud." But the man born blind, now restored to vision, said, "I am he."
Now that that fraud had been eliminated, some inquirers asked how the change came to pass. When he answered that the Lord did it, the answer of those who saw the miracle was, "How can a man. who is a sinner do such miracles?" Here is a new escape from belief. This time, deceit is no longer the excuse from assenting to belief, but rather an attack upon character. There was a latent consciousness that "this Man doth many miracles," but they refused to draw the proper inference. The parents of the man were insulted; they verified the blindness of their son from birth, but no amount of proof could convince those who refused to be convinced. Poor mortals! So often on hearing a truth, or discovering a fact which runs counter to their prejudices, they seek to disparage it. The man who was blind could not convince them though he said, "Since the world began it has not been heard that anyone has opened the eyes of one born blind. If He were not of God, He could do nothing."
In answer, those who refused to accept this conclusion attributed an evil life to the one cured. He must be rotten, a liar, a thief, an adulterer, an idiot, otherwise he would not be so believing. Later on, when Christ saw the man, He asked him, "Do you believe in the Son of God Who speaks to you?" He answered, "I believe, Lord," and worshiped Him.
Faith, it will be seen, has nothing to do with expectancy, with prosperity, with fate; it is not even related to an abstract statement. It centers in a Person—a Person Who is Truth itself. It becomes a dialogue between the human and the Divine, between a dark mind and a Light, between a weak will and a surrender, between Someone toward Whom we have a motive for believing and our poor self who eats the offered bread, though we know not all the mysteries of physiological digestion. Without that Someone, we all have an enfeebling sense of blindness; but when His Truth is accepted, we no longer stumble, but walk, aye, run into the Ineffable Light of the Perfect Day.
Health And Holiness
The accumulated wisdom of the human race has always acknowledged that there was some kind of relationship between peace of soul and health. "A healthy mind in a healthy body" is only an abbreviation of a statement from the Latin poet Juvenal, who wrote in his satires, "Your prayer must be that you may have a sound mind in a sound body." A more modern poet, Francis Thompson, wrote, "Holiness is an oil which increases a hundredfold the energies of the body, which is the wick." The Austrians had a proverb: "A sad saint is a sorry sort of a saint."
Today, however, medicine and psychiatry are combining to prove that there is some intrinsic relationship between holiness and health. The French tradition of medicine has always believed in a long interrogation of the patient in order to view the drama of his human life. Recently there has been published a treatise by the well-known Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Paul Tournier entitled The Healing of Persons, which is a contribution to a synthesis of modern psychology and the Christian faith. He holds that the physical problems of a person's life often correspond to mental problems and both of these, in turn, to spiritual problems. There is no physical reform possible without a moral reform. And there is no moral reform without a spiritual renewal. This boils down to saying that behavior and a mode of life are very important factors in determining health. Symptoms, he holds, may be exaggerated forms of normal defense reactions; they are abnormal as far as disease is concerned, but they may be normal as far as the defensive reaction is concerned.
A confirmation of this idea comes from Dr. Swain of Boston, who wrote of 270 cases in which the patient was cured on being freed from fear, worry and resentment. His conclusion was that sixty per cent of arthritis cases had their origin in moral conflict. Everyone is familiar with the conclusions of Dr. K. A. Menninger, who stresses the influence of the state of mind on the condition of those suffering from high blood pressure. The latter often seems to be a sort of physical expression of a moral hypertension which paralyzes it. Dr. Alexis Carrel, speaking of the alarming increase of neurosis and psychosis over the last hundred years, states that this increase "can be more dangerous for civilization than infectious diseases. Mental diseases by themselves are more numerous than all other diseases put together." Dr. Tournier holds that "all functional disturbances and, a fortiori, all neuroses, may be seen to involve thus a secret flight into disease. This, of course, is not to say that the disease itself is imaginary. . . . How many women there are who have a migraine every time they receive an invitation to visit their hostile in-laws."
Some years ago, Dr. C. G. Jung made a statement which has been quoted many times: "During the past thirty years, people from all civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. . . . Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them had really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook."
The vocation of a doctor may have been very much underrated. His ideal is not just to cure a patient of neuralgia or phobias, but also to be at one and the same time an educator, a politician, a man of God, a philosopher and a theologian, not in the sense that he takes over completely any of these functions, but rather that he recognizes that every sick person in the world has, to some extent, a combination of three disorders: physical, psychic and spiritual.
The Last Night
Christian truths, when they are rejected and denied, have a way of coming back like ghosts to haunt us. Take for example the notion of hell. After having denied it on the outside, hell moved to the inside, as modern man battles with the specters and ghosts and devils in his subconscious mind.
Another item in the creed which we believed we had intellectually surpassed was the end of the world and the last judgment. Today no talk is more common than the end of the world and the judgment of a nuclear war. The scriptural idea of a violent, catastrophic and sudden end of the world like the flash of lightning from the east to the west was scrapped; it was thought to be unbecoming to the evolutionary concept of unlimited progress. In this hour, the language of that horrible end is back again as man shrinks in fear, not from the judgment of God, but from the judgment of man. We now sit as startled beings waiting for the dread hour when, as it were, someone would throw a brick into the city's dynamo and all the lights would go out; or else when some human demon would poison the reservoirs of the world and we would perish in thirst.
The late C. S. Lewis, professor of philosophy at Oxford, has given to the catastrophic ending of the earth the title which he took from John Donne: "The World's Last Night." He stresses not so much the bomb shelter which will protect from the burning of a fissioned atom, but rather that clarity of conscience which alone is the safeguard in that apocalyptic night. As he puts it, "The schoolboy does not know which part of his Virgil lesson he will be made to translate; that is why he must be prepared to translate any passage. The sentry does not know at what time an enemy will attack or an officer will inspect his post; that is why he must keep awake all the time."
Thus those who denied that the Great Dramatist would have a last curtain now, as spectators, dread not the Dramatist, but that they may pull the curtain of doom upon themselves. When King David was asked whether he would prefer to be judged by men or by God, he chose the judgment of God, for the latter would be more tolerable. Our century, without such a conscious choice, is living in fear of what man, in a foolish moment, may do to the world.
The point of it all is not to increase fear and drive men, like groundhogs, into hysteria away from the light. Perhaps the lesson of the fright of the world's last night is that what we should be doing is this: going through our wastebaskets to pick out the great discarded spiritual and moral truths that we have been casting into it for the last few centuries.
The Great Heart Of God
Goethe wrote that everyone brings fear into the world, but not reverence. A bad conscience keeps a lot of snakes coiled within itself, and at night the nocturnal brood come out with their bitter fangs of poisonous remorse. But because men cannot quiet their hearts by themselves, it is not therefore true that the heart cannot find peace.
There may be times when our heart chides us that we have fallen far below our ideals, but with amendment one can always be sure of the Father's Love. There are always sensitive souls who are much too ready to think evil of themselves and to distress themselves with their evil thinking. It is better not to appraise one's own spiritual life and progress, but to leave it to God and to band all attention to advancing in love of God and love of neighbor.
From another point of view, it is true that the witness of our heart is not always reliable, and we sometimes have to appeal to God against our own hearts. Saul of Tarsus was very conscientious in his fierce persecution of the early Christians. "I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the Name of Jesus of Nazareth." There are some who boast that they have a good conscience, but in those who have given themselves to many excesses, this could really be a state that is called "past feeling" or a conscience that has been "seared with a hot iron." Many a conscience, wearied and exhausted through ineffectual remonstrances, eventually loses its sensitivity and becomes totally obdurate.
The person who has a good conscience, even though he has had many sins, always has confidence toward God. Our absolution by conscience is not infallible. The conscience is probably much more reliable when it condemns than when it acquits. One is always on the safe side when he follows conscience when it says, "You are wrong," but he is not always vindicated when his conscience says, "You are right." The inward judge needs to be stimulated and enlightened and kept under the guidance of the spirit.
When Peter was told to throw nets into the sea after having unsuccessfully fished all night, he said that he would obey the will of the Master. He dropped in one net which broke with the catch of fishes. He then changed the word Master to Lord and asked pardon saying, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord."
The consciousness of sin flashed upon him at once as a consequence of that new invasion of the Divine. He now saw his own hollowness and evil and had a desire to be forgiven. There comes to every man an awakening of conscience, sometimes at the sight of an infant, or a sickness, or a chance word, or a personal sorrow. For one split second there is a glimpse of the purity and holiness and nearness of God, compared to which we appear unholy, but are never in despair. When the heart accuses, God is greater than the heart.
Harmony Of The Whole Person
Those whose minds think only about one subject are like those who use only one set of muscles in the body. In one instance, there is incomplete mental development; in the other, incomplete physical development. The bow must sometimes be unbent, the Crops must be rotated and, in the name of inner peace and quiet, a protest must be raised against unceasing and exclusive occupation with things. Our lamps must be fed secretly with holy oil. As one of the greatest of the European psychiatrists has said, "It is as if in a beehive one section of the bees followed the Divine purpose dictated to them by their instincts, while others departed from it. One might indeed describe such a hive as diseased. That is why to seek in prayer the purpose of God for our lives, and to enjoy personal fellowship with Christ Who delivers us from the things that stand in the way of that purpose, leads to that harmony of the whole person which is one of the prerequisites of health."
The growth of character could very largely be the discovery that the things we thought innocent once are no longer innocent. The more saintly a person becomes, the more he feels himself a sinner. That is because he judges himself not by worldly standards nor by his weak neighbors, but by God Himself. Nothing is more clearly witnessed by individual experience than that we may do a wrong thing and think that it is right. Our Blessed Lord said, "They will kill you and think that they have done a service to God." A few honest moments of self-searching would reveal to the man who boasts that he has never done wrong, that his feelings would be quite different if he stood before the Throne of Divine Justice, holding out press clippings and pointing to a few marble busts in fieldhouses and copper plates in gymnasiums.
Years ago, when I was a student in Europe, I followed for a time the very popular courses in Paris of Henri Bergson, the famous philosopher. It was in vogue to attend his lectures; one would often see parked in front of the college de France the finest of European automobiles, from which descended ladies who were keeping up with the latest philosophical fashion. The popularity of Bergson in those days, however, did not blind others to the great value of his thought. The basic idea of his system was an attack upon reason and intellect. He felt that it did not give a complete insight into life, simply because life eludes all analysis. A wheat field, he said, could not be described merely by taking a straw, putting it on a paper card, and showing it to students.
No one has arisen in our age to play the same role in psychology that Bergson played in philosophy, namely, to crack down on the analysis which smashes human beings as if they were atoms, but can never put them together again. Sigmund Freud made psychoanalysis very popular, and in doing so, gave to the world insights into the depths of the mind which too long had been ignored. It could very well be that there has been such an emphasis or stress on psychoanalysis as to ignore the hidden syntheses of his thought. A distinguished Swiss psychiatrist made an analysis of the 260 clinical cases which Freud quotes in his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. All, without exception, would be classified in one or another of the four categories of sin described in the Sermon on the Mount: 57 are concerned with dishonesty; 39 with impurity; 122, with self-centeredness or egotism; and 42 with lack of love of neighbor.
Could it not be that all this analysis of the psychic life of the person is but the inverse of a synthesis which every peaceless heart seeks? Freud was actually describing what St. Paul long before had observed, namely, that within every man is a conflict of the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit. Ovid too had traced it in saying that everyone seeks the better things of life, but often follows that which is worse.
Is not the time ripe for someone to develop a psychology based on a synthesis or a unifying of the presently discordant and battling forces inside of man? Actually we are on the thin edge of that consolidation of the broken fragments of the mind and heart. While there always remain a certain number of mental aberrations which can be healed only by analysis on the psychological level, there are also many more aberrations of a moral character which can be healed only at the moral level. It costs considerable money to tell one's complexes to a psychoanalyst; it costs only pride and arrogance of soul to confess our sins to representatives of the moral and Divine order. The fact that we conceal sins makes them peculiarly our own. Then they are not just our fault; they are our very personality. Any concealed fault lays a heavy burden on the soul over and above the remorse for the sin itself. The shame of having hid it in the heart always makes the hider feel as if he were acting a lie; he despises himself in the midst of every word of praise that he receives. A confession to a neighbor whom we have wronged is prescribed as the very condition of our receiving pardon. God accepts no service or worship with our hands until we have confessed the wrong done to others.
This item 1426 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
