Health and Holiness

Being a bit lazy today, I am sharing some quotes from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.  He went to his reward 32 years ago, but his radio and TV programs are still clear in my mind.  He wrote and wrote and wrote, besides.  The quotes here are from his book, Peace of Soul.

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   There are many people who go about their duties in the daytime with an apparent peace of mind but who at night, because of an unrequited sense of guilt, feel those pangs that make them afraid of the dark. As a person may have a clear head and an active mind but also may have a disease of the brain that will later reveal itself, so many a person may be apparently upright and noble-minded, generous and tolerant, yet be gradually eaten away from the inside by a hidden guilt. That is why the spritual ancients of old cried out, "Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord."
     How can we avoid these modern sufferings that stem from secret guilt? Many of them would yield to nightly examination of conscience.
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    It is not true that acknowledging our sins as sins induces a guilt complex or morbidity. Because children go to school, do they develop an ignorance complex? Because the sick go to the doctor, do they have a sickness complex? The students concentrate, not upon their own ignorance, but upon the wisdom of the teacher; the sick concentrate, not upon their illness, but upon the curative powers of the doctor; and sinners, seeing their sins for what they are, concentrate, not on their own guilt, but upon the recuperative powers of the Divine Physician.
     There is  no evidence whatever to sustain the position of some modern psychiatrists that consciousness of sin tends to make a person morbid. To call someone an escapist because he or she asks God for forgiveness is like calling a householder whose home is on fire an escapist because he sends for the fire department. If there is anything morbid in the sinner's responsible admission of a violated relationship with divine love, this is a jovial sanity compared with the real and terrible morbidity that comes to those who are sick and refuse to admit their illness.
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 A complex, according to the usage of contemporary psychology, is a group of memories and desires of which we are not conscious but that nevertheless affect our personality. An anxiety complex would be a system of unhappy memories submerged in the unconscious and producing many kinds of symptoms. Everyone has anxiety; fortunately, everyone does not have an anxiety complex.
     The difference between peace of soul and discontent comes from the kind of anxiety we have; the broadest division of all is between anxiety over the things of time and the values of eternity. Of the first, Our Lord said, "Be not anxious, for your Heavenly Father knows you have need of these things" (Mt. 6:8). The second kind of anxiety is normal because it is bound up with human freedom and is a result of our creatureliness. This anxiety is a restlesness with anything short of the perfect happiness which is God...
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I may follow up with more of Archbishop Sheen from his Guide to Contentment. Health and holiness may have a relationship.

10/15/11