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·NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS

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·Neuroses and Sacraments
BY
ALAN KEENAN, O.F.M.
SHEED AND WARD
LONDON
1950

·FIRST PUBLISHED 1950
BY SHEED AND WARD, LTD.
110/111 FLEET STREET,
LONDON, E.C.4
Nru. OI:STAT: GEORGIUS SUITII, S.T.D., P.D.
CENSOR DEPUTATUS
INIPRINIATUR: E. MORROGN BERNARD
Vic. Guy,
H'ISTI!ONASTT.RIT, DIC 134 FEBRUARII, 1950
Niin Onstat: FR. GERMANZI Hrrox, O.F.A., Pır.D.
Fr. Iluro Mickay, O.F.11., S.T.D.
Cuxsorrs Dr.PUTATI
IUPRIMI POTEST: FR. PAULISUS Lavtry, O.F.M.
VISITER PROVINCIAL.IS
LONDISI, DIr ga ARTII, 1950
This took
may not be reproduced by any means in wolr.
or in part without permission. Application with regard
to srproduction should be addressed to the publisticr.
I'RITTD 18 GREAT DOTAI:
AY I'LAXS11, A: 10*15, LIT).
L'AL'LTON ("OUT.PET) A:n LOYDYUX

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·FOREWORD This book is about the things people tend to dismiss from their minds—things they put into their mental cellars. In the darkness of the cellar rot sets in. The book examines the rot. It follows the poison spreading from the inner darkness of the mind. The light of Christ still shines in the darkness. There are still ways of groping through the blackness to the Light. These ways are the Sacraments. By them the neurotic can live out the Gethsemane of Christ. Christ is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is our Life and our Light, who illumines them that sit in darkness. The author takes full responsibility for all statements in the book. In writing it he was greatly assisted by the encouragement and advice of his mother. He wishes also to thank Miss M. Philips for her kindness in correcting the proofs.

·"If, He says, this chalice may not pass away but I must drink it, Thy Will be donc. This voice of the Head is the salvation of the entirc Body; this voicc has instructed all who bclicve in Him, it fires all who confess Him, and it crowns all who dic in witness of Him. For who can overcome the hatreds of the world, or the whirlwinds of temptation or the terrors of those who persccute, iſ Christ suffering in all of us and on behalf of all of us did not say to His Father: Thy Will be donc." (St. Leo, Sermo 16: de Passione.)

·CONTENTS PART I THE LAST END CHAPTER I. THE NORMAL MAN PAGE مر 6 ΙΟ 13 19 II. SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS III. DIVISIONS OF NEUROSIS IV. PARADISE V. ATLANTIS VI. PARADISE OR ATLANTIS VII. THE PRICE OF ATLANTIS VIII. THE MARKS OF CHRIST IX. A PAIR OF TURTLE-DOVES 22 27 30 34 PART II THE FIRST BEGINNING 39 $ 43 46 X. THE THREE KEY DOCTRINES XI. THE SACRAMENTS: INTRODUCTION XII. THE SACRAMENTS IN GENERAL XIII. THE SACRAMENTS AND THOSE WHO USE THEM XIV. THE SACRAMENTS AND EQUILIBRIUM XV. THE SACRAMENTS AND EMOTION so 54 57 ix ·X CONTENTS CILAPTER PAGE 61 XVI. ADULT MEDITATION ON INFANT BAPTISM XVII. PRELUDE TO BAPTISM-THE SPIRIT BUILDS His TEMPLE XVIII. BIRTH, BAPTISM AND BABYHOOD XIX. THE THREE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES 64 67 . 70 PART III THE COMFORTING OF MIND AND HEART 75 XX. THE COMFORTING OF THE MIND XXI. THE COMFORTING OF THE HEART XXII. THE COMFORTING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT XXIII. THE DISCIPLINE OF CHRIST 79 85 89 PART IV GUILT AND ATONEMENT . 95 XXIV. THE INSTRUMENT OF GUILT XXV. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT XXVI. THE REMOVAL OF GUILT 99 104 PART V SEX AND MATRIMONY III . XXVII. THE SACRAMENT or MATRIMONY XXVIII. THE SEX INSTINCT XXIX. SEX AND PUBERTY 114 119 ·CONTENTS xi PART VI PAGE LOVE AND THE EUCHARIST CHAPTER XXX. THE NEED FOR LOVE XXXI. THE HOLY EUCHARIST 125 130 PART VII HOLY ORDERS AND THE MASS . 135 XXXII. THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST XXXIII. HOLY ORDERS AND THE MASS XXXIV. THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE LAITY . 137 140 PART VIII THE FINAL COMFORTING XXXV. EXTREME UNCTION 147 . PART IX REFLECTIONS ON MAN IS3 . XXXVI. THE BACKGROUND TO NEUROSIS XXXVII. PEACE OF MIND APPENDIX INSTITUTIONAL CASES 159

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·PART I
The Last End
Summary
The different kinds of neuroses (chapter üi) have a
descriptive common character of withdrawal from
reality (chapter ii). Such a withdrawal may have
multiple causes, of which one only is considered in
the book, and this cause is withdrawal from the
reality of seeking a Final End (chapter iv), which is
the End of coming to God. To attain it we must
grow into Christ, and the Sacraments were founded
that we might do so (chapter i).
We can substitute a final end for this one (chapter v),
but a final end we must have, whether it is ersatz or
Teal (chapter vi). Ersatz ends levy their own premiums
(chapter vii). But the true end integrates us into the
humanity of Christ (chapter ix) and gives a new value
to the suffering of neurosis (chapter viï).

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·CHAPTER I THE NORMAL MAN DIAGNOSING neurosis is comparatively easy. For the behaviour of a neurotic person is not only out of tune with the behaviour of normal people but also it follows a stereotyped pattern. These behaviour differences can be observed, noted, catalogued. From them you can argue to the state of mind which they express. In a word, you have diagnosed mental illness in terms of difference between its behaviour and the behaviour of the recognised majority. You have compared the abnormal with the normal. Your diagnosis of mental illness is, then, a simple matter of inductive inference based on observed facts. Further progress will consist in placing your patient in the precise group to which he belongs. From now on the diagnosis will be largely a matter of arriving at a more exact definition of the character of the neurosis , by distinguishing it from allied disorders; by discovering the boundaries within which operates; and by tying a label on to the symptom picture. This is a matter for the specialist—but always the criteria which he uses will be the observed behaviour patterns of the majority. Yes, diagnosing neurosis is comparatively easy. But diagnosing it is very different from defining it. The reason is that if you define neurosis in terms of how the Normal Man behaves, and how neurosis departs from this standard, you are basing your definition on two assumptions. You assume, first, that your abstraction of the Normal Man (and it is an abstraction equivalent to a common denominator you draw from your observation of the majority) is a correct one. You assume, secondly, that it 3 ·4 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS your Normal Man is in fact a man who acts as the nature of man requires, so that his behaviour is a sound standard. Let us deal with the first assumption, the common denominator of man you have drawn from your everyday observation of men. Your mass observation will not be free from preconceived ideas. If you are a rabid Communist you will cut out capitalists from your abstraction. In your view they are not normal. If you are a materialist you must, by your own logic, regard the followers of religion as abnormal, both in thought and in practice. If Communism is true, if materialism is true, your abstractions may be correct. Your ideas of men govern your abstraction of Man. The second assumption is that the Normal Man in fact acts according to his nature. On this assumption, studying men in our own country, we might come to the decision that it is the nature of man to be free from the stimulus of God and of religion, of worship, of church-going and of religious education. The saints, then, would be abnormal, in the sense that they have reacted to the full to a stimulus which Normal Man does not recognise. In a word, Normal Man does not recognise a stimulus which Christianity for centuries has taught is the most important and vital in the world, and your abstraction of Normal Man will be an abstraction minus a spiritual dimension. There are, in fact, two ways of looking at neurosis—the doctor's way and the patient's way. The doctor defines, or should define, the neurosis as it is , and the patient defines it as it is felt. The doctor sees lack of harmony; the patient feels its emotional repercussions. Most of us have in mind the patient's point of view when we think of neurosis, but the point of view of the thing in itself also matters, the lack of harmony as well as the way in which people feel it. Instead of talking about the Normal Man let us talk about- Christ as Man. He is God as well, but He is also Man. Later we shall see that on Christ as Man all men have been ·THE NORMAL MAN S modelled. In this sense He is the Norm to which we should relate all men. We are created in our bodies in His image as man; in our souls we are created in His image as God. Hence if we really want an objective criterion for mental disorder we can say that it is a departure in varying degrees from the sanity of Christ. Departure from the sanity of Christ is not necessarily a departure from His sanctity. We may be different in our minds from the human mind of Christ as a cripple is different in his body from the human body of -Christ. Being different from Him in this respect does not mean being distant from Him. He may often be closer to neurotics than He is to the sane. During His earthly life He had a special affection for the sick in mind--for the sorrows of Martha and Mary, for the anxieties of Nicodemus, for the lunacy and diabolic possession He encountered, But mental disorder is a departure from the sanity of Christ; the more like to Christ we become the more balanced and sane we should grow. Once one has grasped who and what He is, it is natural to enquire if He has given us ways by which this likeness can be accomplished. There are such ways. By the Sacraments we are helped towards likeness to Him who healed the crippled body and soothed the tortured mind. They are not the weapons of a higher psychiatry but they are the instruments of Normality by which we grow ever closer to the Christ-Norm on which God created us. That is the pivot of this book. Summary: Definitions of neurosis based on the behaviour of the Normal Man are unsound bccause long ago Normal Man departed from Christ-Man. Departure from the order which is present by primacy in the humanity of Christ is the deeper objective criterion of neurosis. By the proper use of the Sacraments the mentally disordered can grow towards the sanity of Christ.

·CHAPTER II SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS OBJECTIVELY, we have agreed, a neurosis is a lack of order in the neurotic personality; subjectively, the neurosis is the patient's experience of this lack. The objective lack of order can be observed in the individual's inability to cope with the demands of the external world; subjectively, this is experienced in unhappiness. Neurosis, then, is an illness of the personality resulting from an individuals inability to withstand external stresses. These external stresses are bound up with living and are part of universal experience. Of themselves they are not causes of mental disorder. Their potency stems from the fact that the subject who experiences them has a flaw in the personality, which they expose. The unhappiness which is experienced may be felt most strikingly at the emotional level, but it can also affect the intellectual and moral level. One can be intellectually unhappy but emotionally sated. However, it is mainly at the emotional level that failure to adjust oneself to environment does the damage. Individuals live in a world which is constantly stimulating and laying stress upon them. The dynamic balance and equilibrium which an individual strikes against his shifting environment is called his power of adjustment. The distinctive mark of a neurotic is that he tries to adjust himself in the wrong way. His power of adjustment is inadequate. The sum of his inadequate adjustment is his neurosis. What happens is that a neurotic shares a reaction to stress which is common to everybody. But he amplifies this reaction so that it differs from the ordinary reaction both 6 ·7 SCOPE AND. DEFINITIONS in severity and persistence. Consequently, a set of circumstances which causes slight reaction in most, causes a major reaction in him. Thus in an anxiety neurosis there is an amplification of a normal state of fear; in melancholia, an enlargement of depression. Neurotics, then, are people who suffer from an illness of the personality. The complete personality is not impaired; a substantial part of it still maintains contact with reality. A motor car will still go, though its tappets nced adjusting. The engine does not work very well and sounds out of tune. The neurotic does not adjust himself to reality properly. He is out of tune, rather than out of touch, with reality. Those who are completely out of touch with reality are defined here as psychotics. They have escaped from life into a dream world of their own. They speak tlieir own bizarre language and abide by a private logic which is infinitely smaller than life. Their behaviour is regressed and immature and it is difficult to establish contact with them. · They are not here our primary concern. But a number of people suffer from neurosis of one sort or another. There are as many degrees of neurosis as there are gradations in departure from the ordered personality to the completely disordered one. The major departures are classified and in a moment will be described. This book is written for all who have strayed from that inner order in themselves which should be there. It will offer nothing new in the treatment of psychological disorder, for that is completely out of its depth. What it attempts, is to stress a major means of achieving normality. It is concerned with a forgotten fragment of the multiple factors leading to a neurosis. This fragment is not unimportant, and in some people it may be central. Among the stresses that play upon an individual are the stresses that come from that abandoned dimension—the ·8 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS . dimension of the spirit. These are the demands inade on the personality by its need for God. Man was made by God. God did not make man idly, on a whim, for no purpose. He made man for union with Himself. Man, therefore, is full of powers intended to unite him with God, powers which must be frustrated if not used for that, and of needs which only union with God can meet. Many of the stresses, as we shall see, that lead to the formation of a neurosis come from outside. But this set of stresses comes from within. They lie at the very centre of the soul. The mind needs God as an object of its knowing power, the will needs Him as an object of its loving power, the whole personality hungers for the life and the strength that come only from Him. This hunger, unfed, means starvation to men, whether or not they know what they are hungry for. This hunger the Sacraments are ordained to appease. Sacramental life is the ordered response to this normal spiritual stress. Let it be clear that I am not claiming that the absence of spiritual life will necessarily promote the presence of neurosis, for, as we shall see, men find ways of disguising their starvation from themselves. Nor, of course, is it meant that a neurotic cannot hope for sanctity. In fact a neurotic has a potent instrument of sanctity in his hands, and we will discuss this in a later chapter. Similarly, we shall analyse the psychological processes by which many men's personal need of God is converted into something else. At the moment I am merely pointing out that the stress of a man's personal need for God is a real one and that there are ordered and disordered ways of meeting and adjusting oneself to it. The correct adjustment to this very important stress by the use of the sacraments is one which confers some immunity to neurosis, though, of course, this immunity, while not absolute, is at least relatively more than the spurious immunity of those who refuse to meet the stress at all.

·SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS
9
Summary:
The neurotic adjusts in the wrong way to external
stresses. The external and sensible stresses are more
familiar but actually less real than the stress within of a
man's personal need for God. Some form of adjustment
is always made to this, but often it is the wrong sort.

·CHAPTER III DIVISIONS OF NEUROSIS THE MENTAL disorder of neurosis is radically different from the organic disorder of a broken leg. It is not localised and it spreads over the whole personality in such a way that the term "functional” is used to describc it sometimes. Its essential causes are not usually physical, although these inay be contributory or instrumental. Where the exciting factors are exclusively physical the accompanying psychological conditions are referred to as organic mental disorders, as, for example, in delirium tremens or in the insanity following from neglected syphilis. In the realm of psychological disorders which do not affect the total personality (as the psychoses do), there is, first, spiritual neurosis , which results, as we have seen, from refusal to meet the personal need for God. This division will not be found in the text-books, if only because it is an internal imponderable stress which escapes observation and experiment. Secondly, there are a number of psychic illnesses, though in these, too, the spiritual stress may play an unsuspected part. They usually fall into three classes. (i) Anxiety states which are amplifications of normal fear reactions. In this condition, circumstances which may be trivial call forth in the sufferer a response exaggerated in its intensity, its persistence and its morbidity. These fears are often bound up with a desire of avoiding responsibility. On the plea that the strain is too much, irksome tasks may be avoided. Duty is exchanged for worry. The particular aspect of reality which imposes obligations is deftly hid in emotional sand. Sufferers from this condition have frequently inherited IO ... . . .

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·12 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS that there is a hereditary taint and that the obsessional ideas weresown at some climax in life, such as at a difficult puberty. (ii) Hysteria is the third of the major psychoneuroses . It is experienced largely, but not exclusively, by unstable women. They are very often of high suggestibility and react to external stimuli, not, like the anxiety neurotics, by overaction, but by underaction. What they do to stresses evoking fear or anxiety is to convert the resultant unpleasantness into bodily symptoms. These symptoms do not follow the ordinary boundaries of organic diseases. They follow the boundaries which the patient conceives to exist in her own body. Although one associates hysteria with marked emotional upset, frequently hysterical people are more placid than they seem, for the upset has been converted into some bodily symptom. They like the limelight, are unstable and shallow, and readily exchange health for a set of functional symptoms which serve to disable them for, and free them from, the demands of life. There are, in addition, numbers of people who, without being actually neurotic, are depressed, bored with life, s frustrated, full of tensions and ill-defined unhappiness people who come under no very special division but react by deep unhappiness to a feeling of inner emptiness in themselves. They have lost or never known the value they actually have. For they are created on the model of Christ, and God calls them to Him. In the hope that men thus suffering may read and remember the forgotten Christ and move towards the divine Physician, this book has been written. Summary: All the neuroses have a descriptive character in common of flight in some way from the stresses of life. Flight is not escape. Better to give oneself up into the hands of Christ.

·PARADISE IS Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity. He is God the Son. He possesses in its fullness the Divine Nature with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of the Second Person, the Son, consisted in the union in Him of the Divine Nature of the Son with a human nature. How this was done by God we do not know. We know only the fact, which Christ Hiniself revealed to us. In language that we all know, God was made man. He was no less God. When He talked of His Father He referred to His Heavenly Father, the First Person of the Blessed Trinity, to whom, as God, He is co-equal. The humanity which Christ took from Mary His mother is the perfection of humanity. St. Paul tells us He was like to us in all but sin. Christ always remains the Second Person of the Trinity, and in this His personality, being divine, is infinitely different from our own. Nevertheless, His humanity is flesh of our flesh. Scotus used to teach that if ever the Second Person had withdrawn from His humanity, His human nature would have become a human person. Thus, from all eternity, the humanity God was to create was always bound up with the Man God the Son was to become. The plan of man was the humanity of Christ. The first thought was the thought of the Word vested in the garments of humanity, the High Priest of all creation, for in Him was the perfection of manhood and the perfection of Divinity. Even those who do not know He is God have a feeling that there was a perfection in Christ merely as man, something that sets Him above all other men. Christ, then, is the model upon which we are made. We are most ourselves when we are most like Him. What did He see as His Last End: To come to His Father in heaven. And as the rule of all His actions here upon earth: To do the will of God who sent Him. The first man created was Adam, and God made him in the image and likeness of Christ. Adam was the head and ·16 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS representative of the human race by being the first man, as Christ was later to be by being the perfect man. Adam, although a creature, received from God a gift to which he had no right. God not only made him a man, he adopted him as His son. Now Christ is the only-begotten son of God; Adam, made in His likeness, received by a supernatural gift (that (that is, a gift above his nature) a creatureshare in this divine sonship. This gift was a gift of life, over and above man's natural life of soul and body; a gift, then, of supernatural life. By it man was given a share in the life of God, this is how it made man God's son. Being a life, it gave man new powers of action, powers to do things which by his mere nature he could not do, to live with a new closeness to God here on earth and to see God face to face when his life on this earth should be ended. We shall be discussing these powers a little further on. Here we need only note that this supernatural life-we also refer to it as sanctifying grace, which means the gift that sanctifies --was given to the first man and that without it neither he, nor any man, could be what God wants every man to be, His son. Like Christ, Adam was without sin, but he could sin, and in this he differed from Christ. In fact Adam did sin. The result of this sin was that God took away from him (and from all his descendants) the grace of adoptive sonship. But before we get indignant over what God has taken from us let us remember that God took away a sonship which is (a) not our right, and (b) not our nature. In other words, as the result of our first parents' sin God took from us what we had no right to whatsoever. Until they sinned they shared, so to speak, in the Divine Nature by a special continuous act of God which implied a fresh creation within them, superimposed on their humanity. As Christ is the Son of God by nature, so Adam and Eve were adopted sons by grace. In the normal course of events their children

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·18 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS stress, this being Christ by grace, then one day we will be in heaven. For heaven is for the sons of God: the life of heaven consists in a relation of the soul to God, which, without sanctifying grace, would be beyond our powers. Summary: The first stress is the Last End. Wc achieve this end if our humanity is bound by grace to the divinity of Christ. This will not be achieved without suffering. We will suffer, anyway, since Christ our model suffered. All of us in the person of Adam are the cause of that suffering.

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·CHAPTER V ATLANTIS THE HUMANITY of Christ is the model upon which all men are created. To share by adoption in the Sonship of Christ, and so come to the Vision of God in heaven, is the end to which all men are called. Apart from Christ, man has no meaning in the eyes of God. His humanity is meaningless unless it is bound to the Divinity of Christ by grace. An extension of the mystery of the Incarnation must take place in every individual, and the Sacrament which achieves this, as we shall see, is Baptism. We are not conscious of this in the way in which it has been explained. What we experience is a deep-seated desire for happiness. We will find, if we have not found it already, that only the possession of something which the mind knows to be completely satisfying will satisfy the deepest desires of the human spirit. The spirit of man expresses itself at its highest natural level in the acts of knowing and willing. In the act of knowing, something known is united with the knower. In the act of loving, something loved is possessed by the lover. Whatever we set ourselves as a final end, whether it be God or whether it be Mammon, must be capable of these two things: of union, and of real possession. Nothing outside us will do. It will have to be something within. The spiritual part of our nature will only be satisfied when something has entered the naked fibre of its being and made one with it. God alone is capable of this. He has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. 19 ·20 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS Another way of describing the longing of the soul to be possessed by and united with that which is the source of its happiness is to remark that we have two faculties, of knowing and of willing, which have each a proper object. This proper object is for the knowing part, truth; and for the loving part, goodness. Whatever we choose as our Last End must seem to us to satisfy these faculties, and the evidence for it is purely experimental. An honest glance at your private experience will convince you that this is what you really want. Not bits and pieces, and fragments of love, but the totality. There usually comes a moment in a man's life when he falls in love with a woman. At the peak of this he construes the beloved as the sum of happiness. She is the complete and final good, and all he desires is union with her. After a time he descends from the peak, but there was a magic moment when he was not of the earth. That is the sort of desire we have. God alone fills it. He alone has the Infinite Being to satisfy the boundless horizons of love and knowledge. Now no matter whether we accept this stress or not, we must act as if we have some sort of final end. The end of any action is either complete and final in itself, or it leads us on to another end which possesses the same alternative qualities. Eventually we are driven up against the wall of something which owes allegiance to nothing, as a nail might receive blow after blow from a hammer and sink further into the wood until it can go no more. Each blow with the hammer on the nail drew its final meaning from the purpose of embedding the nail in the wood. The motive for our actions must eventually be a final one, otherwise we race round an infinite circle of goods and ends which have no final tape to give them meaning. We must act for something which is so worth while in itself that it can be subordinated to nothing higher. This is but another way of talking about our need for God.

·23 PARADISE OR ATLANTIS this disorder will be by no means proportional to the disorder. The main reason lies in the misguided powers of compensation which the personality possesses. It is important to follow out the psychological processes by which a man converts his personal need for God as the end of his actions into an imagined need for something else. As will be seen, it follows the general lines that neuroses follow in ridding a neurotic of the demands of the external world. There is the same sort of substitution and refusal to face up to reality; the same deft concealment of the real thing under the emotional sand. But this time the stress is something which arises from within. The minimal spiritual energy possessed by people can be filtered off at lower levels. (By spiritual energy we mean the drive to seek for the Last End as the object of willing, and the general desire we all have to find happiness.) The filtering-off process follows the laws of substitution. People scale down their wills and intellects by feeding them on lesser ends and lesser values which they convince themselves into regarding as ultimates. They say they do not need a God. They mean they have found a substitute for God and other outlets for their spiritual energy. For man must have a God. He must have a Final End. The two are the same thing. As St. Paul said of the Epicures--they make a god of their bellies. People seek either the uncreated God or one of their own making. In life we are constantly substituting many easily attained ends for a single difficult one. If any particular end we have set ourselves turns out to be difficult of achievement we often find ourselves doing lots of easier things as a sop to the failure of our initial drive. The student faced with hard study for an examination may chase red herrings on his course rather than focus all his energies on essential study. A man faced with a search for something lost may try all the casy unlikely places before trying the difficult ·CHAPTER VI PARADISE OR ATLANTIS THERE is one law which no one can escape, the law that compels him to seek for happiness. Happiness is the peace of the spirit in pursuit of its Final End. Final End there must be, whether it is God-made or man-made, Paradise or Atlantis. Everyone seeks it. The neurotic seeks it, too. The man who pursues the Final End which God has ordered draws inevitably near to Christ. For Christ, who is God-Man, combines the perfection of two natures, the divine and the human. The God-made end draws humanity near to God; the closest that humanity can get to God is in the union of the Divine and Human natures in Christ. The man who follows the pattern for human conduct laid down by Christ is the man who is drawing near to his Final End. He is the man who is in Christ. In him the divine and human intermingle by grace. Such a man is , sharing something of the order which is in Christ. His actions are in their proper hierarchy. His activities are devoted to loving the Final End. He has responded to the primary stress, and all the other ends and stresses which he is called upon to meet dovetail without effort into the primary one. Love, says St. Augustine, and do what you will. He is by adoption and by grace what Christ is by nature. He is now God's adopted son through Christ. He is happy. His spirit rests on Christ as John rested on the bosom of Jesus in the Upper Room. If the mind and heart of a man are not directed towards the Absolute Truth and the Absolute Good which is God, he is not an ordered man. There is disorder in the personality. Now the amount of unhappiness which accompanies 22 ·23 PARADISE OR ATLANTIS this disorder will be by no means proportional to the disorder. The main reason lies in the misguided powers of compensation which the personality possesses. It is important to follow out the psychological processes by which a man converts his personal need for God as the end of his actions into an imagined need for something else. As will be seen, it follows the general lines that neuroses follow in ridding a neurotic of the demands of the external world. There is the same sort of substitution and refusal to face up to reality; the same deft concealment of the real thing under the emotional sand. But this time the stress is something which arises from within. The minimal spiritual energy possessed by people can be filtered off at lower levels. (By spiritual energy we mean the drive to seek for the Last End as the object of willing, and the general desire we all have to find happiness.) The filtering-off process follows the laws of substitution. People scale down their wills and intellects by feeding them on lesser ends and lesser values which they convince themselves into regarding as ultimates. They say they do not need a God. They mean they have found a substitute for God and other outlets for their spiritual energy. For man must have a God. He must have a Final End. The two are the same thing. As St. Paul said of the Epicures—they make a god of their bellies. People seek either the uncreated God or one of their own making. In life we are constantly substituting many easily attained ends for a single difficult one. If any particular end we have set ourselves turns out to be difficult of achievement we often find ourselves doing lots of easier things as a sop to the failure of our initial drive. The student faced with hard study for an examination may chase red herrings on his course rather than focus all his energies on essandil study. A man faced with a search for something lost may try all the casy unlikely places before trying the de ·24 a NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS likely one. Rather than have a difficult tooth extracted people try mouth-washes and medicines. A girl may give up reading rather than wear spectacles. A boy may develop headache rather than do homework. What we are doing is dodging reality, camouflaging the necessary in the convenient, putting our heads in the sand, If the original aim we are side-stepping was really worth while, then we are losing by evading it, and in the end we gain nothing. This process can be labelled desublimation and it stands in opposition to sublimation. Sublimation is the Freudian conception of how libido or sex urge is transmuted into other drives towards religion, the fine arts, social work, and so on. It might explain the Jacob in a man --how he can win a spiritual birthright through a material mess of pottage-how he arrives at his religion by sublimating his sex drive. But there is, perhaps, an equal case for the Esau in a man-how he can sell his spiritual birthright for a material mess of pottage. If animal man reaches religion through sublimating sex drive, so does spiritual man reach out to matter by desublimating his religious drive. In a word, it is possible and it is easier to lessen the drive for a single noble end by the grasshopper pursuit of many lesser ones. It calls for less discipline to be a grasshopper over the pursuit of the Last End; and the more we hop, the more dissipated the energy. Finally we may be too tired to crawl to God. After a few centuries of it humanity welcomes a Freud. It is easier to follow him than to follow Christ. We can desublimate our need for Christ into a need for psycho-analysts. We can desublimate our love of God into the love of the fine arts and desublimate our love for them into a love of sex. We are back where we started; back to the mess of pottage and animal man. Esau outwits Jacob. It is easier then to desublimate a single drive than face up to it. For the stress of meeting the Final End involves ·25 PARADISE OR ATLANTIS RADISE a personal discipline, whereby, at the highest of levels, we canalise all our energies towards one end. Having set one's hand to the plough, it is so easy to look back. The discipline of Christ is a yoke. It is all-absorbing, and there are no excuses. Whether you have bought a farm or married a wife, whether you bury the dead or amass riches, they cannot as smaller ends be allowed to stand in competition with the last one. They must be integrated into it, not set on a pedestal apart. Desublimation of the Final End, however, is but the first step. It is the flight from the Last End. Escape has yet to come. You have so far only robbed Peter to pay Paul. Your heart is not resting in God but ready to rest in anything else, and at the moment not quite succeeding, like a bridge player who has gone a grand slam minus an ace. This does not extinguish the debt. Like the unjust steward, you must fraudulently convert it. And you must convert to the limit , for you cannot serve God and Mammon. The debt is this. Granted that you have filtered off your energies in the pursuit of many relative ends instead of one final one, it still remains that only ultimates will satisfy the infinite yearnings of the human heart. The next step in self-deception is, therefore, to trick the mind into regarding a relative value as an absolute one. For the mind must have something worth while to work for it needs ideals. For this it is its own propaganda agent and its own executioner. It sells itself a cause and sets the cause on a pedestal and proceeds to work for it as though it were worth while in itself. Thus the Marxist works for his millennium, the scientist for his atoms, the artist at his self-expression. You must now be persistent in maintaining the fraud. The self-appointed ends we work for have an occasional back-lash. They are undoubtedly good in themselves, otherwise we could never have sold ourselves to them. But they are not completely good, and occasionally, as we shall ·26 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS RAMEN see, they let us down. The veil we have drawn over reality conveniently conceals the cardinal fact that they have not their goodness of themselves. If they are good, they are good because they participate in the goodness of God. They are not the end of the road. They are sign-posts to the source. Like the beauty of the heavens, they bespeak the glory of God. God Himself is always trying to enter the darkness we have chosen. The love of God beats upon the blacked-out windows of the soul, seeking for an entry to shine within and illumine the idols we have set up in His Temple. We have to maintain our fraudulent conversion against the expectation of the soul. We have to cover the face of the living God. Sumimary: The human mind is very good at gymnastics. Having once located its Final End in tlic pursuit of crcated values, it proceeds to desublimate its drive for God in the worship of what it lias substituted for God. These may soften and weaken the primary and normal spiritual stress if persevered in; and they usually are. Persistent mental gymnastics may enable the mind to keep moving in a spiritual vacuum. The movement cannot satisfy the mind but will keep it quict.

·CHAPTER VII THE PRICE OF ATLANTIS may be SUICIDE is the expression of a person's conviction that the Final End is lost. We have seen that the Final End God-made or man-made. The conviction that God is lost is called despair by the theologians. Judas is a concrete example of despair and suicide. The suicide's Final End has gone and all the lesser ends which dovetailed into each other because they led to the final one are emptied of their meaning and drive. There is no warmth in reality any more. The fire is out and there are only dull grey ashes in the grate. The main différence between losing God and losing a substitution for God is that you can always get back God again. He has given you a Sacrament, the Sacrament of Penance, for just this purpose. Judas need never have hanged himself. Peter betrayed Christ as well . But if you have put your own little gods on pedestals there is no guarantee that you can erect them if once they fall. You must pay the penalty for your mental gymnastics. Your mind has been built upon the pattern of the mind of Christ. It is satisfied only with ultimate values. You have converted these by psychological trickery into ersatz values, and you must cherish these as you should have cherished your Final End. You are now moving in a closed system which excludes a spiritual dimension. From it are rigorously excluded grace, miracles, supernatural charity and union with God. In your closed system you are minus the integrating power of Sacraments. Hence you must look for solidity not within but without. In your pantheon the dull little gods must be tight on their pedestals. 27 ·28 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS The stock-market must rise; the atoms split; the picture be painted; the wage-rise be obtained; the divorce go through; the degree be won. For now we worship at the shrine of money; adore the cause of science; pray in the studio; offer incense to the boss; immolate ourselves for the other woman; walk in the temple of learning. We are loving these things with the power of love which God gave us and which can be satisfied only by Him. We have invested things with a magic they never had. We have defined the end of man as a big income bracket or the perfect woman. We blame these when we should blame ourselves. For things promise us nothing. The mind invested them with qualities they never even laid claim to. They are outside us and cannot either be really possessed or, more to the point, possess us. The spirit desires possession within. Only God can do that. Thus do the Baals begin to totter on their pedestals. They are in competition with God who made us for Himself . They are too sharply defined for our limitless desiring. And now-if the lover shakes us free, if the thesis is rejected, if the market falls, if we lose our millennium, or fail in the party, or the academy sends the picture backwho is to put the broken god back on its pedestal: No one. We are dead and there is no resurrection. If we are still in doubt a careful reading of the weekly suicides in one of the lower Sunday papers can convince us. It calls for less effort to be lost than to be saved. That is one of the effects of original sin. But it still remains that the Last End can only be lost by determination, self-deception and persistence. There must be a complete material conversion of our spiritual energy and a steady blotting out of the voice of the salvific will of God. If we finally lose the Final End we lose it because we obstinately want to, like a starving child obstinately sucking sweets to the end. In the end it must be Paradise or Atlantisor,

·29
THE PRICE OF ATLANTIS
objectively, God or Mammon. One wiser than Solomon
said so.
Summary:
It is easier to lose one's soul than to gain a man-made
Final End. Suicide is the response of the personality
to this axiom. It is the last neurosis, the action of the
mind which is unsound because it has at last escaped
from the sanity of Christ.

·28 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS The stock-market must rise; the atoms split; the picture be painted; the wage-rise be obtained; the divorce go through; the degree be won. For now we worship at the shrine of money; adore the cause of science; pray in the studio; offer incense to the boss; immolate ourselves for the other woman; walk in the temple of learning. We are loving these things with the power of love which God gave us and which can be satisfied only by Him. We have invested things with a magic they never had. We have defined the end of man as a big income bracket or the perfect woman. We blame these when we should blame ourselves. For things promise us nothing. The mind invested them with qualities they never even laid claim to. They are outside us and cannot either be really possessed or, more to the point, possess us. The spirit desires possession within. Only God can do that. Thus do the Baals begin to totter on their pedestals. They are in competition with God who made us for Himself. They are too sharply defined for our limitless desiring. And now if the lover shakes us free, if the thesis is rejected, if the market falls, if we lose our millennium, or fail in the party, or the academy sends the picture back who is to put the broken god back on its pedestal? No one. We are dead and there is no resurrection. If we are still in doubt a careful reading of the weekly suicides in one of the lower Sunday papers can convince us. It calls for less effort to be lost than to be saved. That is one of the effects of original sin. But it still remains that the Last End can only be lost by determination, self-deception and persistence. There must be a complete material conversion of our spiritual energy and a steady blotting out of the voice of the salvific will of God. If we finally lose the Final End we lose it because we obstinately want to, like a starving child obstinately sucking sweets to the end. In the end it must be Paradise or Atlantisor, ·THE MARKS OF CHRIST 31 the stock-exchange. On the other hand there is no strict correlation between the presence of Christian life and the absence of neurosis. People may be neurotic through physical causes and through heredity, although there are generally psychological causes as well. Good people have suffered from scruples; saints have suffered from melancholia. Above all, people may be saintly and good in spite of, and even because of, neurosis. Considered in its subjective aspects, neurosis is mental pain and suffering of the mind. In a previous chapter we have spoken of suffering and traced its connection with original sin. In the mind of God all men are seen through the mirror of the humanity of Christ. Christ is a suffering One, and He suffered by human instrument, because when sin came so did death, and the Model of humanity chose death as the consummation of Atonement for the sin which had lost us our sonship. Christ came in suffering for Atonement. He is a suffering King, and His subjects are suffering subjects. But remember it was His subjects who crowned the King with thorns. All humanity, then, suffers as the King of men suffered upon earth. This happens whether you are a follower of the King or not. Jew and Gentile, black and white, they all suffer. They carry the mark of the seal whether they know it or not. In each the Passion of Christ reappears. The Christian has a supreme advantage, however, because, enlightened by grace, he not only knows this truth but can be convinced of its value. The Christian is one who is identified by the Sacraments with Christ. He is called to be the son of God by grace, as Christ is the Son of God by nature. In the eyes of God Christ is a suffering one. He carried the wounds of Calvary. Now the Christian can carry his wounds--and his neuroses--as a witness of his sonship before the Father. Of all the wounds a man can carry perhaps the wounds ·32 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS of the mind are the hardest to bear. Christ shed His blood on Calvary; but He sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane when the weight of the world's cvil pressed upon His mind. You remember how, on the night before His crucifixion, He went with His apostles to Gethsemanc. And there, as St. Matthew and St. Mark relate, He said to them: "My soul is sorrowful even unto death.” Here is St. Luke's description of what followed: “And he was withdrawn from them a stone's cast: and kneeling down he prayed, saying: Father, if thou wilt, remove this chalice from me: but yet not my will but thine be done: And there appeared to him an angel , strengthening him. And being in an agony, he prayed longer. And his sweat became as drops of blood trickling down upon the ground." The neurotic is called to accompany Christ, not so much on the road to Calvary as on the road to Gethsemanc. We all meet neurotics. We pity them. We may fcel superior to them because they cannot stand on their own feet. We see ourselves in thein, caricatured and magnificd as if in a convex mirror. That is the root of it. We sce humanity, raw and quivering, and there is no urge to pour in oil and wine; we do not like travesties of ourselves. But let us pause, as Francis paused before the leper. Like him, we will discover Christ. In the ‘neurotic, even in the psychotic, the manic depressive, we see the torture of the mind of Christ. In that twilight of the human spirit is the answering echo to the call of Christ to His Father in Gethsemane to let the chalice pass from Him, and in the darkness of the soul Christ calls, as He called on Calvary: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The pain of the Christ Mind turns to God in the pain of the human mind. The nicurotic carries the mental stigmata of Christ. This is credible, but, for some, not palatable. Only the flame of faith will carry conviction of it, and even then the flame may scorch whilc yet it heals.

·THE MARKS OF CHRIST 33 To any neurotic who may read this, let us add that only the nearest friends of Christ, the chosen apostles, were invited to Gethsemane. They were healthy and slept. Perhaps only the sick of mind can really keep the vigil. The supernatural limit to pain is martyrdom. Martyr, of course, is a word which means witness. The neurotic is called to martyrdom within. He is the witness of Gethsemane. Only the nearest friends of Christ are invited there. Summary: Christ suffers in all humanity. The neuroticis privileged to live out the Gethsemane of Christ. He can, if he wishes, carry these wounds within as a witness of his sonship with Christ before the Father.

·CHAPTER IX. A PAIR OF TURTLE-DOVES WHEN Mary's baby was born He was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. His mother received a gift of gold from the Magi. Yet forty days later she could, for His Presentation in the Temple, afford only the poor woman's offering of a pair of turtle doves. The obvious inference is that she had given the gold away. Her Son was infinitely of more worth than His weight in gold. It not infrequently happens that people undergo a form of neurosis following an accident in which they may have received only minor injuries. The determining factor is that financial compensation should be attached to the injury. In railway and road accidents this possibility is a real one. The kind of injury may be the same, no more nor less than one received on a football field or in a sporting event. In this case there is no neurosis. But let the injury, slight though it may be, come under workmen's compensation, let the individual know that there is a possible financial evaluation of the injury he has received, and this neurosis may set in. The sufferer need not be a person whose temperament predisposes him to the onset of any neurotic symptoms. All that is necessary is some form of injury and some legal machinery whereby he can receive financial compensation. The course of this neurosis is, briefly, that it works itself out in the form of false hysterical symptoms, and inability to recover from the injuries for as long as compensation is withheld. Once compensation is granted recovery sets in. Until it happens medical treatment is often useless. The sufferer must persevere in his sufferings 34

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·36
NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS
because He is man. There is no other humanity in the world
but His humanity, in which we move and live and have our
being, our first, and our last and our dearly beloved whom
Mary gave us, Mary of the turtle-doves who gave away the
Magi's gold.
Summary:
Being alive means sharing in the humanity of Christ.
There is no greater wealth. Yet people can let their
minds twist their bodies into wounded shapes for the
sake of money. Mary is the patron of poverty.
Having nothing, she possessed all things. She was
His mother.

·PART II The First Beginning Summary: 'We are the heirs to the wealth of the Incarnation, the Redemption and the Sacraments of Christ (chapter x). These mysteries are related among themselves and related to us in terms of our Final End (chapters xi and xii). · They discipline rather than cure emotional neurotic disturbance (chapter xv) and can work on the abnormality of the neurotic by stressing the normal (chapter xiv). They benefit all who use them well (chapter xiii) from the first moment of their Baptism (chapter xviii). At this moment the Holy Spirit takes possession of the Temple of the Body. He has built this Temple in the womb on the model of the embryonic development of Christ (chapter xvii). From the moment of Possession by Him we are in sanctifying grace with the infused virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity (chapter xix).

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·CHAPTER X THE THREE KEY DOCTRINES UNDERLYING the rest of the book are the threc doctrines of the Incarnation, the Redemption and the Sacraments. The doctrine of the Incarnation concerns the teaching on the way in which God has approached men; that of the Redemption concerns how men may approach God after Calvary; that of the Sacraments concerns the ways God has laid for men to approach Him. There are many other ways of regarding these doctrines. Our interest lies in the ways just defined. (1) THE ROLLING UP OF THE CURTAIN— THE INCARNATION We cannot define God because we have no terms of reference. Reason can grasp His existence, but not His essence in any comprehensive way. What we know of Him, we know largely because He has rolled up the veil. . Revelation means literally rolling up the veil. Slowly the curtain rises through book after book of the Old Testament, revealing little by little, more and more of the nature of God. There was no need in God for God to raise the veil, any more than there was need for God to create. He is the Self-supporting and the Separate One, infinitely happy in Hintself. The Incarnation is the Supreme Revelation of God, in that God Himself became Man. St. Paul describes it in terms of “taking the form of servant”. For a man who is made by God not only owes his existence to God but owes his continued existence to God, as a stone you might lift from the ground is not only lifted in your hand, but depends 39 ·40 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS upon you to keep it above the ground. We are supported by the Self-supporting One. In this we are servants. Thus the Incarnation was, in one sense, the embracing of man by the Separate One, in so far as He became one of us. The veil can rise no further here. So much did He become one of us in Christ that we find Him mistaken for a man and no more. People of His time found it hard to believe that Christ was God, first because He was so fully Man and secondly because they thought of God as the Separate One. They found it hard to believe that Christ had been born and had grown up. Again there was no need in Christ for Him to leave come in the way in which He did. But He was conceived; His mother was pregnant; He was born; He was a boy; He was a man; He died. He was still God. But He was emphatically Man. The matter goes further than that. If He was Man, it follows that His humanity was, of all possible natures, the nature on which God modelled all men. When God created man the divine idea of man must have been related in some way to the fact that, in the fullness of time, He would become Man. For this reason, perhaps, St. Francis of Assisi used to say that a man in his soul was made in the likeness of God and in his body in the likeness of Christ. The Incarnation, then, was the inoment of history when God became Man; but tens of centuries before, the first man had received his humanity from the hands of God, in the likeness of the humanity which God was to wear in that future moment of history. As you read this now, tens of centuries after, men are being created in the likeness of Christ. (2) THE SPLITTING OF THE CUNTAIN THE REDEMPTION During our Lord's time the innermost region of the Temple at Jerusalem was the Holy of Holies. This was

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·42 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS this book. There are seven ways in which God pours the life of His grace into our souls. By them we should grow ever more conscious of the supporting hands of the Self-supporting One. This is no great virtue in us. It is a bare spiritual minimum. Beyond the tight little material system of eating, drinking, sleeping, mating and working there is a whole spiritual universe, entry into which is only by Christ, progress through which is only with Him. The veil is rent, God is approachable, we can enter His House with Christ in the Sacraments. Even then, says Augustine, we are but beggars in the household of God. But we are better off than Lazarus. We rest on the bosom of Him who Is before Abraham was. Summary: The light of Christ illumines the darkness of God in the Incarnation; the blood of Christ opens the way to God in the Redemption; and the life of Christ received from the Sacraments brings us to God. Christ is the Truth and the Way and the Life.

·CHAPTER XI THE SACRAMENTS INTRODUCTION BY THE Sacraments a man grows into the likeness of Christ, achieves his Final End, and becomes, successively, with their reception more pleasing to God. For the benefit of any non-Catholic readers the following simple account of them is given. The great work of the Redemption having been accomplished, Christ entrusted to the Church seven channels through which the grace won for men upon Calvary might be brought to the individual soul. These ways are the Sacraments. As we shall see in a moment, they are as various as the needs of man, but they have this in common, that in all of them a material thing—bread, water, wine, oil-or a temporal event--the utterance of the agreement to marry, the utterance of one's sins—is made to bring sanctifying grace to the soul. In other words, the Sacraments are a union of the spiritual with the material especially suited for God's dealings with man, for man also is a union of spirit and matter. The first of the Sacraments is Baptism. By it a person, in the words of Christ, “is born again of water and the Holy Ghost”. The new birth is a new creation. To the natural life of the individual is added the supernatural life. As well as being the child of his parents, he is now the adopted child of God. Special grace, called, as we have seen, sanctifying grace, brings about this new creation. It is a gift from God which 43 ·44 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS we have no right to, but Adam had it once, until he lost it by disobedience. That act of rebellion lost sanctifying grace to all his descendants. Baptism restores it to us. By it we become by grace what Christ is by nature. We become sons of God by adoption. By this inpouring of life from Christ to us we become one body with Him, vitally united to Him, and to all others who are similarly united by shared life with Him. The whole Church is thus in a mystical way His Body. Through the rest of the Sacraments we receive increase in sanctifying grace. We grow more and more like to Christ by grace. All the major needs of a man are, in addition, answered by the special additional helps or graces which the Sacraments give. A man's puberty and growth into manhood is met by the Sacrament of Confirmation. His sex instincts are met by the Sacrament of Matrimony. His sense of guilt and need for atonement are met with in the Sacrament of Confession. His need for love and the need of his soul for food are answered by the Sacrament of the Eucharist. His need for Christ's priesthood to re-enact the sacrifice he must offer to God is met by the Sacrament of Holy Orders, by virtue of which Christ offers His Sacrifice of Calvary in the Mass through His priests. Even the death of a man finds a sacramental echo in the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. This supernatural life which is life in Christ answers every major need of natural life. Christ, so to speak, unites the natural life of a man with Himself and makes it supernatural, as He united a human nature with His Divine Nature in the Incarnation. The great point of difference between our natural and supernatural lives is that until we die our supernatural life can always be growing; while in our natural life there is a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death. There are no limits to supernatural

·THE SACRAMENTS: INTRODUCTION
45
life. It is as unlimited as the final end to which it is
directed.
In all who use the Sacraments there is a renewal of the
mystery of the Incarnation. The human intermingles with
the divine through the Person of Christ.

·CHAPTER XII THE SACRAMENTS IN GENERAL THIS CHAPTER expands the preceding one in a little more detail. God imparts grace and sanctity to men by material signs. These are the Sacraments. There are seven of them in Catholic teaching: no more, no less. They were instituted by Christ and they bear their effect through His Passion. The Church dispenses them. She is the society which Christ founded and which has the custodianship of the Sacraments. Each of them gives sanctifying grace, but not all to the same extent. Some give more. The effect of sanctifying grace is to render one a son of God by adoption and to give the soul new powers of action in relation to God beginning in this life, as we shall see, and culminating in the next in the power to live the life of heaven in a union with God of inconceivable closeness. Christ is the only begotten Son of the Father. By grace we are privileged to share His Sonship. All the Sacraments give their own special graces corresponding to the major needs for which they minister. Three of them, Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Orders, give, in addition, a spiritual character or invisible seal set upon the soul. The effect of the character is to give us a sharing in the Priesthood of Christ. The Priesthood of Christ is intrinsic to Him. The function of the priest is to offer sacrifice to God. There is only one sacrifice which is supremely efficacious in the sight of God and this is the sacrifice of Christ offered by Himself, the sacrifice of Himself offered by Himself on behalf of all men. As Man He can offer for all men; as the Son of God His 46 ·THE SACRAMENTS IN GENERAL 47 offering and sacrifice are infinitely effective on behalf of men. By Baptism we receive an inpouring of life from Him, which makes us one body with Him; we are members of His Mystical Body. We receive the power of sharing in Christ's sacrifice. The mark of the suffering Christ is laid upon our humanity. In the Sacrament of Holy Orders the recipient receives a character from which all the functions of his priesthood spring. There is only one Priesthood and this is possessed by Christ. He exercises His Priesthood through His priests. The priest possesses the power of offering the sacrifice of the Mass; but it is Christ who offers through him Christ's own sacrifice of Calvary. At Mass the priest gives himself to be used by Christ; his words and actions are Christ's; he consecrates bread and wine so that they become the Body and Blood of Christ; Christ is really present upon the altar. Christ, through the priest, offers Himself, thus present upon the altar, to His Father in heaven. The Sacrament of Confirmation enables laymen to participate in the Priesthood of Christ, but not in the same way as in the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Christ exercises His Priesthood through the priest; the priest passes on and transmits, so to speak, the Priesthood of Christ to the layman, who further transmits to all whom he meets. The character which the layman receives renders him capable of this; it makes him a soldier of Christ and gives him responsibility in the Mystical Body. It is the source of the lay apostolate. All of the Sacraments are efficacious as Christ is efficacious; that is to say, that because of their direct institution by Him they carry with them the power of His redeeming act. This redeeming act, exercised on Calvary, is our justification before God. By it we are made one with Christ, who through death now stands before the Father, making ir. cession for us. We are called to carry this union with ·48 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS through every level of our personalities, so that by the grace He has restored to us we may in, through, and with Him be sons of the Father in the love of the Holy Ghost. The channels through which this Christ-life comes to the soul are the Sacraments. And in this economy each of the divine Persons plays a part. God the Father is the first mover. He sent His Son to us and chose us in Christ. Yet without the Word, the Son, there was nothing that was made. We were moulded upon this archetype of human creation. We are reconciled by Him to the Father and He is the Son of God; so, too, we are called to share mysteriously by grace in that Sonship. Each man to whom the merits of Christ's Passion have been applied is, in St. Peter's phrase, “a sharer in the Divine Nature”. Lastly, the Holy Spirit is specially named by Christ as the divine Person whom we receive in the Sacrament of Baptism, when we are born into our sonship "by water and the Holy Ghost”. The Sacraments, then, are the supernatural mechanism by which we grow to the likeness of the Father, at His call, through, with, and by Christ, into whose Sonship we grow through adoption by the working of the Holy Spirit. In summary, their successive effects are as follows: By Baptism original sin is removed, we are set upon the way to our final end by the inpouring of sanctifying grace on our souls, making us co-heirs with Christ to what He has won for us, and members of His Mystical Body, the Church. We receive the infused virtues and also the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. We shall have something to say both of the virtues and the gifts later; the gifts especially are of enormous importance to the neurotic. Confirmation is the sending of the Holy Spirit upon the soul, by Christ, with an increase in sanctifying grace, a growth of responsibility and the ability to be soldiers and

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·CHAPTER XIII THE SACRAMENTS AND THOSE WHO USE THEM IN THE last analysis there are no such people as atheists. They exist only as figments of people's minds. There are simply theists and idolaters, because the urge of the soul is for the ancient beauty, and if you do not seek for it in God you will seek it in a substitute for God. The wells of your actions are fed by the springs of love, and only a good which is completely worth while in itself and owes allegiance to none will drive you. What you construc as a substitute for God must fail to possess this charactermonly God possesses it: but we are talking about substitutes for God. The human mind is an adept at standing on its head. Once upon a time it chose Barabbas in place of Christ. The first class of people are those who do not use the Sacraments, either because they do not believe in God or because they do not believe in the Sacraments. If they do 110t believe in the Sacraments it may be that they have never examined the evidence that the Sacraments are founded by Christ, but it is more likely that they accept the existence of God as a lazy man sees the answer to a clue in a crossword puzzle. He is too tired to get the pencil or he does not think it matters. They accept that God exists, as they accept that the earth is round; but what does geography matter, anyway. If they are hard-headed stoics they inay get by; but not if they are soft-scented epicures with few natural reserves of toughness to fall back upon. Then their substitutes for God may break down and they have no fibre to put the pieces back again. The hard-headed and SO ·SACRAMENTS AND THOSE WHO USE THEM SI hard-hearted may often be unimaginative, hard-working types, who bury the lament for beauty under the tinkling of financial or social cymbals. They sit at their desks like graven images, expecting the service that a big balance and power in the firm can give. They shout for action. They mortify their digestions with desk luncheon trays and enlarge their thyroids with unceasing activity. The boss is at the desk and the factory hums. Give him the production figures and plug him into the transatlantic 'phone. His factories are going up along the sea-boards. His products are on the markets of the world. The boss is dynamite; lie is colossalm-what does he need with Confession and Communion? He needs them no more than he needs night-clubs, because he is far too busy. His life is stern and strict and well ordered. The business, that's what it is, the business, first, last and always. One-tenth of all this industrial dynamite, used sacramentally, and the boss would make progress in the spiritual life. But there is no time; there is no pencil. What does geography matter? The transatlantic 'phone is ringing again. Then there are the bare minimum types who use the Sacraments when they are forced to, who know that God is good, but do nothing about it. They have the talents, but they bury them deep. They try to compromise between God and Mammon, and Mammon always wins. If they are of unstable temperament, the Sacraments, which they hardly ever use, will not give them equilibrium and they will never adjust to external stresses adequately because they never attempt to meet the primary stress. They may want to get to heaven, by way of the Tower of Babel; and if you ask them what they think of heaven, nine times out of ten they will describe to you the best of all possible earths. Thirdly, there are people who use the Sacraments and are neurotic. Any number of the multiple causes which operate at natural level may have brought this about.

·52 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS Without the Sacraments they would be worse off, and they will often tell you this themselves. In some cases they could get more out of the Sacraments than they do. They may haunt them--for the wrong reasons, as superior psychiatric weapons or as so many sops to emotion. If they knew more clearly what the Sacraments were intended by Christ to do they would perhaps get more enrichment and more mental equilibrium. This does not imply that the Sacraments rcquire mental exercises before you approach them. It simply means that you take the trouble to find out what you are doing in the same way that you would read your incometax demands before writing a cheque, or look up a train before going to the station. Thus if the Sacraments build us into Christ, it is elementary to read the Gospels now and again and think about what He did and said. We receive Him in the Eucharist. We also receive our friends in society. Does His coming get equal preparation: Equally, a clear notion of what the Sacrament of Penance gives to you and what Christ expects from you in using this Sacrament are necessary. Fourthly, there are people who are neurotic and let this keep them from the Sacraments. They feel they are in a frustrating hell in which God is separated from them by infinite oceans of misery. The operative factor seems to be that God cannot be good, otherwise He would not let this happen to me. This is frequently an emotional rather than an intellectual conviction. If it is a purely intellectual conviction then it is heresy. But it is often emotions turning the clock back. We become little children and think and rcason with our feelings. We go and sulk in the nursery corner instead of going where all children really are on the knce of Christ. In all this emotional blackness the only light really worth while will come from Him through the Sacraments. The sullen child need not be the father of the neurotic man—not in this system, anyway, not if we sit on ** ·SACRAMENTS AND THOSE WHO USE THEM 53 the knee of Christ. Christ will teach us that God is our Father and that we can leave the frustrating childish patterns which some psycho-analysts tell us are the sole raw materials of our neurotic actions. If we carry the Cross in the mind we do not do so alone; rather, Christ carries it in us. Our blood could mingle with His in the Garden of Gethsemane. It will be dark there under the olive trees, but it will never be night. At first He, too, wanted the chalice to pass. You alone could understand this because you are sharing with Him the Gethsemane of the mind, in the dark, under the olive trees. Fifthly, there are people who might be neurotic if they did not have the Sacraments to give them equilibrium and mental richness. Open to them is an apostolate of giving their charity to the suffering Christ in their neurotic brethren. Lastly there are normal people who use the Sacraments well and have no troubles. Of their charity let them pray in the Mass-at the moment when the bread which has become Christ's Body is broken--that neurotics may recognise the Christ who is suffering in them. Summary: The Sacraments operate and produce their effect if have the right dispositions. The better our dispositions, the more fruitful will be their operation. we C ·CHAPTER XIV THE SACRAMENTS AND EQUILIBRIUM SOME THEORIES on the origin and development of neuroses presuppose that the accompanying psychological processes are subconscious. Knowledge of how these processes have begotten neurosis is considered to be of great importance to the patient. In some cases this is so and has hastened a cure. However, in other cases there is evidence that the patient knows how the neurosis has begun and persists in it for the functional benefit derived. Hysterical people often derive benefit from the fuss and attention they receive, and can be artful in deepening their symptoms for this end. People may get a sense of importance and of being the centre of interest, which they did not get when normal, but now receive as neurotics. A strong sense of drama can find outlets if you play the role of a sensitive type crushed by life yet bravely struggling. Neurotics sometimes do not want to know how their neurosis has come about. That would defeat the purpose of it. They want to withdraw from a world which cannot be faced. There is a natural weakness in such people which needs to be countered by the infusion of strength. This is where the Sacraments can be so useful, since they give an inner core of strength to a person to grasp the purpose of life and go towards it. They are essentially practical. It is important to realise how they work. First they confer the grace which they signify: bread of the Eucharist to nourish; water of Baptism to cleanse; oil of Confirmation to strengthen. The grace which they signify is the grace Christ attached to them, and within this limitation they are S4 ·SS THE SACRAMENTS AND EQUILIBRIUM efficacious, as Christ is efficacious. Secondly it follows that it is useless to expect from them graces Christ never attached to them. Confession removes sin but not the neurosis of scruples. The Eucharist is a receiving of Christ for the soul's nourishment, but not a passport to ecstasy. Baptism makes us children of God, but is not a short cut to heaven. Through all the Sacraments we receive an increase of sanctifying grace, but do not think that this will level the hills and fill in the valleys. So many people would be good Christians if God made them saints automatically. They think that the wind of God should rush through the empty caverns of their soul. They want to be robots in the spirit yet carrying all their natural freedom. They have quaint ideas of heaven: beauty parlours on fields of Asphodel, a pink-clouded Elysium. They are defining Olympus and not heaven, and Olympus is what they really want. What God wants is their love. He gives them the Sacraments by which all the major aspects of life can be canalised into love of Christ. It is useless to expect from the Sacraments results Christ never meant them to give. They enable us to grow into Him, if we use them. Thus if Confession is mainly a queue on Saturday night and Communion the privation of early-morning tea; if we are miserly in their use and have no generosity and enter the group of once-a-year Easter-duty types, we build up a set of barriers against their more fruitful operation. The neurotic must not expect from the Sacraments a superior kind of psychiatry. For him they are the means of normality. They bind him into Christ. They meet all the major needs of his personality. In using them he is using the means which will enable him to face up to life in its truest sense. The better he uses them, the more he approaches the norm, the closer he can bind his mental suffering to the agony of Christ in the garden, the nearer he

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·CHAPTER XV THE SACRAMENTS AND EMOTION IF THE Sacraments gave an emotional bonus to those who used them, and paid off, so to speak, in a subjective flood of warm sentiment, there is no doubt that they would become as popular as the movies. For that is what the movies do. They please us, not as intellectual exercises so much, or as examples in moral probity, but rather as pleasers of the emotions. This is not to say that there are no films which appeal at all levels, but it is to record that by and large the most calculable box-office factor lies in a film's emotional appeal. Undoubtedly Christ could have attached emotional thrills to the reception of His Sacraments. That would have pleased us. The Sacraments please God. They are objective and necessary ways by which a person becomes pleasing to God. It is not necessary that they should make persons pleasing to themselves. That is not objective. One result of the Reformation was to pull people away from this conception of an objective sacramental order laid down by Christ. Once Luther started to say that the Sacraments were only signs for exciting justifying faith, the whole value of the Sacraments was on the way to being reduced to the emotional punch of an old-time mission sermon. Once the Sacrament of Confession had been put in the reforming furnace, the conception of jurisdiction exercised objectively by the Church as the prerogative given to her by Christ, disappeared. Every man was promoted henceforward to be his own authority, led by the Holy Spirit in a very nebulous sort of way. In this new 57 ·58 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS subjective framework, so attractive just because it is subjective and elevates any man to be his own theologian, there are no controls, except those imposed by the individual himself. For the new Protestant Churches, having slipped off the old yoke of Christendom, had now to be careful not to impose a similar yoke themselves. If every man was his own private judge, the spiritual grounds of the old authority, which rested upon the Mystical Body of Christ, must now be jettisoned. No longer did Baptism make you a living cell in the Mystical Body, or Confirmation elevate you 'to responsibility in that Body. Confession was not the healing of a diseased part of the Body, and Communion was no longer the feeding of its cells. Marriage was not any more the means of spiritual meiosis or procreation of new cells. No longer did grace flow from the Head to the members through Our Lady, because there was no Mystical Head any more. The Head was a moment in past history at the beginning of A.D., and the organic continuity of the Incarnation in the reality of the Mystical Body was only a cheap theological trick by which the Vatican sold its members the idea of its own temporal power. The power of the Protestant Churches declined as the emotional pendulum swung back from its reforming zeal. Now and again persecutions of Catholics injected new emotional blood into the hardening emotional arteries and checked the swing of the pendulum. But eventually the pendulum had to stop under its own inertia. How could it move any more, now that Christ had been banished to heaven? In the emblem of a Cross without the figure of Christ stands the judgment of the reforming Churches. Now so many people carry this legacy even though, as private theologians with private judgment, they have buried their reformed Church. They still look to religion, if they do look to it any more, as valuable for the emotional thrill they privately judge it should give, not for the light ·THE SACRAMENTS AND EMOTION 59 it sheds upon the way of life, or the light it gives for treading the way to the end. So there are more empty hassocks in the pews. The Cross without Christ can give nothing. Hence the importance here of stating what people can expect from the Sacraments in the ways of emotional return, especially, perhaps, neurotic people whose troubles are so frequently bound up with their emotional life. There are two extremes to be avoided. First, there is the extreme of going to the Sacraments in a revivalist spirit, that is to say, for the emotional satisfaction we imagine they should give; and, secondly, the extreme of going out of stern duty to let them minister to the soul and not to the whole personality. The first extreme is likely to be more common. The only adequate motive is to go willing to receive them as Christ wishes us to receive them. To go meaning to give oneself wholly to Christ emotionally, physically, morally, and intellectually. It may be that there is no emotional return whatsoever, and this must not be allowed to become off-putting, because the dusty dispositions of the naked will are more pleasing to Christ than the dispositions of a will enflamed by emotion. If we do warm emotionally--that is the gift of Christ, and let us burn with fervour but not forget the value of the ashes. The rich man after his delicious meal may be expansive to the beggar, but surely the gift of alms from one hungry beggar to another is greater. If we feel our poverty of spirit in receiving the Sacraments, that is no excuse for not giving our mite, and none for not receiving The frequently used Sacraments of Confession and Communion carry with them a disciplining of the emotions which is good for all of us, and so for neurotics. You cannot examine your conscience and see a sin in the false glamour it had when you did it. When you try to confess it, it is not a thrilling wild oat any more. It is just a dirty little movement of the human will against the infinite majesty of God ·60 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS $ and your spiritual oneness with a crowd shouting for Barabbas. When you go to Communion your emotions may be sluggish, perhaps your blood has not got its normal sugar concentration because you are fasting. Should a fragment of biochemistry influence you in your attitude towards Christ? Does it matter if Christ works out in you the weariness he felt on the Cross or on the way to Calvary? Your soul could be Veronica's veilif you would forget the absence of emotional thrill. This might be the normal reaction you feel. You might feel nothing but the frustrating reaction of underaction. You might feel like the Desert Father centuries ago, who went to try his vocation in the novitiate of St. Pachomius. The saint pushed his staff in the ground and told him to water it. Day in and day out the novice carried the water meaninglessly from the well to the staff until he felt he could do it no more. He took water from the well to the staff for the last time—and found it heavy and sweet with flowers. Summary: The Sacraments are the ways in which we become pleasing to God, not pleasing to ourselves. Christ may let us share His joys, but often enough He may ask us to share His sorrows, and to feel nothing, as He felt nothing, and to get no return, as He got no return so often in His day.

·CHAPTER XVI ADULT MEDITATION ON INFANT BAPTISM IT WOULD help neurotic people considerably if they pondered over the implications of their infant Baptism. The main reason why is as follows. Very often they have a false conception of their personal valuc. They have cither a deep sense of inferiority or an overweening scnsc of their importance--for the wrong reasons. In the onc casc thcy cannot bear an audience and in the other they cannot do without one, but the division is not a clear-cut onc. People with inferiority are sometimes urged by a perverted sense of compensation to do public actions; and pcoplc with pride withdraw into themselves as aloof and abovc the world. The common factor is a wrong perspective of themselves. Common also is a deep personal sensitivity. Their sensitiveness makes it difficult for them to make friends. Their need for friendship can be quite considcrable. One of the reasons why they fail in fricndship is that they make abnormal demands on their friends, corresponding to the abnormal importance they attach to themselves. Quite simply, they are very selfish. It is difficult for them to walk alone. They may have exchanged the burden of reality for the millstone of anxiety, or have converted the difficulties of life into a disabling loss of body function. They may walk in twisted internal worlds of obsessions and compulsions. But they will not want to walk alone. They look for friends as props. They expect their friend to shield them from rcality. Without him they are frightened to meet pcoplc or to change environment. He becomes after a time their private property. Trespassers are prosecuted. No one clse can share 61 ·62 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS him. He is shield and buckler, helmet and visor, the armour whose protection they scek. Hc resolves their doubts, soothes their fcars, listens to their outbursts. He ought to—but generally he does not. He is no substituto for God. Only God can be that kind of friend. Baptism is the beginning of love between Clirist and the soul. Then there is litcrally a sacramental sealing of the Final End, and the baptiscd can say with Paul that it is no longer hc who lives, but Christ who lives in him. No matter what happens, he walks with Christ. While he is a baby, the baby Christ lives in and through him; while a child, he is the Christ child; when at school, Christ stands in hiin before the teachers and the doctors; later, at work, Christ thc worker sanctifies his hands; if he marries, he loves Christ in his partner as Christ loves the Church; while he suffers, he watches with Christ in the Garden; when he dics, Christ commends him into the Father's hands. All that personal sensitiveness he or she has can be united to the sensitiveness of Christ--for other people. What has happened to him in fact has happened to millions of others. They, too, are one with Christ. They, too, are incorporated into the unity of the Mystical Body, the Church. In them, too, is Christ waiting to be discovered. At the moment, the neurotic person is lypersensitive to what happens to him. Supposing lic became hypersensitive to what happens to other people! Supposing he decides to project onto others all the carc, anxiety, fears and preoccupations he has for himself . What happens? Christ sharpens his vision. He discovers that what he does to the lcast of the brethren he docs to Christ. For Baptism not only gives sanctifying grace to the individual--it puts him into contact with all other people whom Christ has sanctificd. What makes Christ rcal in a person's life is the power of love. People sometimes discover His rcality not in themsclvcs but in the face of the lesser brethren.

·ADULT MEDITATION ON INFANT BAPTISM 63 The importance of this baptismal charity lies also in the fact that without it the neurotic cannot really unite his mental pain with the suffering of the mind of Christ in Gethsemane. For, by his Baptism, he begins to participate in the priesthood of Christ, and he cannot unite his suffering with the Passion unless he remembers that Christ was laying down His life for His friends. There are few more potent weapons for extroversion than the charity of Christ. The neurotic may find that becoming obsessed with the cares of others is the best cure he will find for his own obsessions. He is nearly always a sensitive creature. There is an exquisite vocation open to him of lending his sensitiveness to Christ, who through him will comfort the sorrows of other suffering members in the Mystical Body. Summary: The friendship of Christ which Baptism brings, offers to the neurotic a sense of his own value which he will not get from human friends. He can escape from his self-preoccupation by searching for Christ in the members of the Mystical Body.

·OSES 62 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS him. He is shield and buckler, helmet and visor, the armour whose protection they seek. He resolves their doubts, soothes their fears, listens to their outbursts. He ought to--but generally he does not. He is no substitute for God. Only God can be that kind of friend. Baptism is the beginning of love between Christ and the soul. Then there is literally a sacramental sealing of the Final End, and the baptised can say with Paul that it is no longer he who lives, but Christ who lives in him. No matter what happens, he walks with Christ. While he is a baby, the baby Christ lives in and through him; while a child, he is the Christ child; when at school, Christ stands in him before the teachers and the doctors; later, at work, Christ the worker sanctifies his hands; if he marries, he loves Christ in his partner as Christ loves the Church; while he suffers, he watches with Christ in the Garden; when he dies, Christ commends him into the Father's hands. All that personal sensitiveness he or she has can be united to the sensitiveness of Christ--for other people. What has happened to him in fact has happened to millions of others. They, too, are one with Christ. They, too, are incorporated into the unity of the Mystical Body, the Church. In them, too, is Christ waiting to be discovered. At the moment, the neurotic person is hypersensitive to what happens to him. Supposing he became hypersensitive to what happens to other people! Supposing he decides to project onto others all the care, anxiety, fears and preoccupations he has for himself. What happens Christ sharpens his vision. He discovers that what he does to the least of the brethren he does to Christ. For Baptism not only gives sanctifying grace to the individual—it puts him into contact with all other people whom Christ has sanctificd. What makes Christ real in a person's life is the power of love. People sometimes discover His reality not in themselves but in the face of the lesser brethren.

·ADULT MEDITATION ON INFANT BAPTISM 63 The importance of this baptismal charity lies also in the fact that without it the neurotic cannot really unite his mental pain with the suffering of the mind of Christ in Gethsemane. For, by his Baptism, he begins to participate in the priesthood of Christ, and he cannot unite his suffering with the Passion unless he remembers that Christ was laying down His life for His friends. There are few more potent weapons for extroversion than the charity of Christ. The neurotic may find that becoming obsessed with the cares of others is the best cure he will find for his own obsessions. He is nearly always a sensitive creature. There is an exquisite vocation open to him of lending his sensitiveness to Christ, who through him will comfort the sorrows of other suffering members in the Mystical Body. Summary: The friendship of Christ which Baptism brings, offers to the neurotic a sense of his own value which he will not get from human friends. He can escape from his self-preoccupation by searching for Christ in the members of the Mystical Body.

·CHAPTER XVII PRELUDE TO BAPTISMTHE SPIRIT BUILDS HIS TEMPLE THE LIFE of the person begins before it is born, at the moment when into the fertilised ovum God breathes a soul. From all eternity the person has had an existence in the mind of God, and now in the fullness of time God has ordained that, like His Son, he should be born of a woman under His law. God has modelled our beginnings on the beginnings of His Son; and the tiny embryo, whose physical life as yet is only chemistry, is infinitely precious in the mind of God, for such was once His Christ in the womb of Mary, a tiny cell of undifferentiated protoplasm. The map of all its physical potencies is written on the genes of its parental chromosomes which are as yet its only portion in the land of the living. The single cell begins to divide rapidly into two, four, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four cells. This is a commonplace of biology, but ever fresh in the mind of God. For so had His Christ developed, like us in all but sin. From all eternity the pattern of development of the embr Christ had been chosen as the pattern of developmen all the sons of men. The Spirit was the architect of t. flesh of Christ and is now the architect of the biological building which has its tender foundation on the mother's placenta. When she knows she is pregnant for her baby and love it fiercely, but this is but the faintest ccho of the love its Creator bears for this which will be called by grace to be His son. As it develops, a membrane grows around it filled with water. The membrane is called the amnion, and in it she will yearn 64 ·PRELUDE TO BAPTISM 65 floats the embryo. Over the waters of the amnion hovers the Spirit of God as once He hovered over the waters of the world in the primeval dawn of its creation. The love of God, the Spirit , breathes order into the developing cell mass, overshadowing with His wings the exquisite geometry of its growth. Whole regiments of cells are marching at the whispered command of the Spirit; cells which are unconscious of the functions they will enjoy. Cells for seeing, cells for hearing, in the silent darkness of the womb. Ectoderm cells for the formation of nerve, which as yet cannot feel; blocks of mesoderm for muscle which as yet cannot move. So the building progresses; so the windows of the senses are built; so the pattern of the embryonic Christ is followed. For the Spirit is the architect of His own Temple. During its nine months' development the embryo undergoes far-reaching changes from its unicellular origin to its multicellular term. It was first a two-layered cell mass similar to the jellyfish, then a three-layered one similar to the fish; it had gills formed similar to those of the tadpole and a private pond formed in the amnion similar to that of the reptile; even a tail rudiment similar to the tails of other mammals. Finally its growth organisers confer on it a typical human form. During its development the embryo successively embodied a set of stages which resembled the series of stages possessed by adult animals in the major animal families. If recapitulated, so to speak, the major achievements in the animal kingdoms, passing one by one the milestones in animal progress. Those milestones were passed by the embryonic Christ, for in Him was epitomised the whole of creation. In Him, says St. Paul, all things were brought to a head. This is the biological representation of the spiritual truth. All things were created in Christ. In His development in Mary's womb this has its biological echo, as, in the King of ·66 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS humanity, the Holy Spirit paints the portrait of creation. As with the King, so, too, with the subject; as with the seal, so with its mark, for on our humanity is indelibly marked the humanity of Christ. The Father creates. The Son is the Model. The Spirit is the Architect. All unborn children accompany the unborn Christ, as with Him they recapitulate the beings which God has inade. In them is the growth pattern designed by God from all eternity to take place in the womb of Mary. As yet Christ does not grow formally by grace; but He grows materially, as the unborn child is woven by the Spirit on His pattern. Sometimes a mother may be advised to have an abortion to save her life. This, of course, is murder even if sanctioned by law. The higher consideration, however, is that if she wills to go to natural term she is laying down her life for the humanity of Christ. Summary: In the womb the Spirit begins His work on His Temple. The embryo grows on the pattern of the embryonic Christ, recapitulating with His Model the whole of creation. The unborn hands are clasped by the hands of the embryonic Christ.

·CHAPTER XVIII BIRTH, BAPTISM AND BABYHOOD as AT TERM the infant will have eyes like the eyes of the infant Christ, senses like the senses of Christ; cars, nose, the same humanity, the same reflexes. At birth it enters the light as once He entered when they laid Him in the manger. The baby now has the humanity of Christ but as yet not His Divinity. This is to be, the free gift of God in Baptism. This is its destiny--to be, by sanctifying grace and by adoption, what Christ is by nature, a son of God. The Spirit hovers over the waters of the baptismal font, and the waters flow He forms the Son of God in the soul of the child, so that the Father looking down, as once He did over Jordan, sees now only the face of Christ in the face of the baby and once again accepts the witness of the Spirit that this child is now His Christ in whom He is wellpleased. At this moment the Spirit takes possession of His Temple. This now is the privilege and duty of its parents—to regard it through the eyes of Mary. Like Mary's Child, it is completely dependent. At first it is a bundle of reflexes. The reflex to clasp, to suck, to kick, to respond to pain by cries. Its eyes cannot focus, its cars differentiate sound. Its cortex is undeveloped, its senses immature. No images can be fed to the waiting soul, hence there are no judgments, reasonings, decision. It is helpless with the helplessness of the infant Christ. It must be fed and cleansed and loved. For soon reality will begin to exercise its stress. A stream of afferent stimuli will begin to bombard the child through its ripening senses. As yet 67 ·68 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS there is no maturity to interpret them, and the primitive biological defence is fear. All the elemental sensations of noise, coldness, darkness, hardness and pain cannot be referred to past experience. It must be wrapped in the mantle of the love of the only persons whom it can understand, its parents. · Reality can scar the tender mind which cannot understand, nor explain the frightening things in the world about it. This is where many a neurosis is born. Things are burnt into the child with a red-hot iron. Its pattern of reaction is going to be the raw material for its future behaviour. The love for its parents is going to be the measure of the affection which it will later learn to project on others. The world is the world of one, namely, the mother; then, a little later, the father. Both must build up its early confidence and give it internal strength to meet the challenge of things beyond the buffer of the family. In a word, it must have security based on love. If its parents quarrel violently in front of it they upset the security and destroy the love. If they frighten it by oversevere punishment they are digging the bed on which mental disorder will grow. How much are devotion to Mary, Confirmation wisdom, and the actual graces of matrimony necessary here! Insufficient love will rob it of security. The wrong sort of love will spoil it. There are fathers who care more for their geraniums and mothers who seek consolation for frigid husbands in their child's affection. There are jealous husbands who resent the affection given to the child. There are stupid wives who deliberately annoy their husbands by over-fússing the child. And, God forgive them, there are parents who resent the presence of the child and drag it through neurotic hell, where wave upon wave of wordless misery sweep over its soul and fill it with blackness and despair in the golden age of its innocence when it needs something of the love of the ·.. BIRTH, BAPTISM AND BABYHOOD 69 Mother of God. Not only the first-born needs this. Every child is the Christ child. Charity begins with every pregnancy. The first girl in a growing family of boys needs extra care. For they can unconsciously frighten the life out of her. Many a bed-wetting would be avoided if the mother understood this. Here in childhood is the genesis of the future adult . Here in the home the symbols through which reality will be interpreted are impressed in the plastic mind of the child, Of all the symbols , the love which the mutual affection of the parents should represent, and the love which they have for their child-this love is the most important symbol of them all. For it is so easy to train the child to project its love for them to God. After all, the mutual love of the parents is only the echo of the love Christ has for His Church; and this they can transmit to their child. If they try to love him as Mary loved Christ they cannot go wrong. Summary: Baptism engrafts the child into Christ. If its parents treat it as an infant Christ they cannot go wrong.

·CHAPTER XIX THE THREE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES WHEN CHRIST is born and laid in the manger of our souls by the Sacrament of Baptism we are said to receive sanctifying grace. This means, literally, means, literally, a gift which makes us holy. Baptism does this precisely. Christ is God the Son made Man, With God the Son, are God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, the three Persons in one God. In this is the essence of the supernatural life, for it implies the Creative Entry of the Trinity into the soul. Christ has led the Trinity within us. This life of union with God is our Last End. Both natural man before Baptism and supernatural man after Baptism need God, as a violin needs a bow. After Baptism we get: a new kind of violin. When we receive sanctifying grace we also receive from God three special virtues, known as Faith, Hope and Charity. By a virtue. we mean a power of action, and these three virtues give powers of action in the supernatural life. Why we need them at all is because we now are raised to a new supernatural life and we simply have no power to do anything in this new life unless God gives us that power. When we dance we merely express a natural power of movement perfected by practice. If we are wallflowers and cannot dance it does not mean that we have no power of dancing. It mcans that we have never had the practice. But a supernatural power gives a man a capacity for action which he did not possess before. Faith is God giving the intellect the power to accept what He has revealed. You and I have no natural right to receive 70 ·THE THREE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES 71 this revelation. Why should we? Even when the revelation has been made, we still have no power to assent to the revelation unless God gives us the supernatural power to do so, We are talking about a new life, a new violin. But God moves the bow. Hope is God giving the will the power to move to God as the Last End, with trust. Charity is God giving the will the power to love God. Faith gives us the power of accepting God's truth; Hope gives us the power of seeing God as good for us; Charity gives us the power of loving God as good in Himself. If you still think we could do this naturally anyway, you have missed the point. We can do these things as natural acts, but they would mean nothing as supernatural acts, they would not be acts of God's sons. They only become supernatural when God gives us the three supernatural powers. God has raised us to a life of grace. He has adopted us as His sons. We act as His sons, provided He gives us the power to do so. They are not, of course, the only supernatural powers we have, but they are the essential ones and, according to Scotus, the source of all other supernatural virtues. What it adds up to is that a man must have these three essential virtues given to him by God at Baptism if he is going to live in the new order of sanctifying grace. The operation of these powers is of considerable importance in an individual's conception and conviction of his Last End. The natural conclusion of reason, that God is the End of Man, is supernaturally underlined--that God is true, that God is good for us, that God is lovable in Himself, are three fundamental points. In practice, the Christian, by using these powers as much as it is possible to do so, can generate a burning conviction of the reality of his need for God as the Last End. This is what so many people lack.

·72 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS Ever since Luther said faith was only trust, that Christ would camouflage our sins, people have been thinking that faith is an emotional trust; that our sins are not really taken away by sanctifying grace but just not imputed to us any more. The difference between nature and supernature was lost. Faith is something, they think, that you ought to feel. But Faith is God moving the mind to assent with certainty to His revelation. It has nothing to do with emotion. The result is that people no longer think of faith as the exercise of a divinely given power, whereby we assent to divine revelation. They no longer have this deep humble sense of believing without doubt whatsoever God has revealed. They believe what they want to believe, not the objective facts God tells them to believe. They cannot live properly in Charity as a result. Asceticism without dogma is not enough. The Last End becomes a dead end. There is no fire in their nature any more. They do not burn for God and their hearts grow cold. They go through life as a caricature of Christ-made in His image as men, but without His likeness in their souls, like jewel-boxes full of cigarette stubs. Silmmary: Faith, Hope and Charity are the supernatural gifts without which we cannot give asscnt to God's Truth, move to God as our end, and love Him in Himself. They underline the urgency and supreme importance of God as our Final End.

·PART III
The Comforting of Mind and Heart
Summary:
One of the effects of sanctifying grace is the infusion
of seven gifts from the Holy Spirit, some of which
strengthen the mind in its conviction and pursuit of the
Last End (chapter xx) while the others strengthen the will
in pursuit of the Last End (chapter xxi). An additional
donation of these gifts comes in the Sacrament of
Confirmation (chapter xxii), giving to the neurotic, if
he will but use them, the integrating influence of the
discipline of Christ (chapter xxiii).

·No text on this page.

·CHAPTER XX THE COMFORTING OF THE MIND FOLLOWING the gift of sanctifying grace comes the infusion into the soul of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. These seven gifts are the great virtues of Christ. They comfort the mind and comfort the heart. Below each of our natural virtues is now the sustaining power of a Gift integrating our humanity with the humanity of Christ. Of the seven gifts, Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge and Counsel support the mind. St. Bonaventure teaches that as charity is queen of the virtues, so wisdom is queen of the gifts. Wisdom is the diamond-hard conviction in clarity and truth of the essential links between one thing and another. It is distinct from natural knowledge because it works in depth on the essential causes of things, and distinct from philosophy because it is ever expanding into action. It tends to the perfection of knowledge because intuitive, and is exempt from the sterility of knowledge by the fertility and richness it confers on action. Through it, said Solomon, kings reign and the makers of laws discern justice. It was Solomon's gift and Christ's prerogative. He was wiser than Solomon. In the prologue to his Gospel, St. John refers to Christ as God in the term “Word” or Logos. As such Christ is the perfect expression of the thought of God. He is Wisdom. As the word expresses the thought of the speaker, so Christ expresses the thought of God. By the gift of Wisdom Christianity becomes conviction, as the law of gravity becomes conviction when we fall 75 ·76 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS . downstairs. No amount of knowledge will necessarily make us wisc. By standards of knowledge the Curé of Ars was a very ignorant man, but none has ever doubted the Christlike quality of his wisdom. The gift of Wisdom carries to a man conviction of his Last End. By using it prayerfully one sees that nothing matters but union with Christ. Things go into proportion. The glitter goes off money, ambition becomes a bit empty, jealousy disappears, what people think is seen to be futile. Why? Because wisdom works in depth and gets down to the roots. As Wisdom said Himself: "What doth it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his soul?" What do the neuroses matter provided the neurotic use them to link him to Christ: In this perspective they lose some of their importance. To gain the perspective the gift must be used. As Solomon said, those who watch for wisdom will find it. But the vigil must be kept. The gift of Understanding affords insight into the truths of faith, and into the mind of Christ. By using this gift and by using faith, the neurotic can make Gethsemane his spiritual home. The light of faith and the revealed truths to which it commands assent are so necessary in the darkness of the wounded mind. Without Christ, suffering is a synonym for unhappiness. One is thrown back upon stoicism, and this ends only in pride. If natural courage fails there are only the escape mechanisms of fantasy, neurosis, drink, drugs, insanity and suicide. The light of understanding gives a new aspect to reality. Its stresscs may wound, but now they will never destroy. The scars of Christ only glow the brighter as we witness to the love we bear for our Elder Brother. The gift of Knowledge is a gift which enables the mind to judge of the world in relation to God. If wisdom is the light ·THE COMFORTING OF THE MIND 77 of the Holy Spirit, knowledge is the lens which focuses the beam on reality. By it, one judges of the world with the judgment of Christ. This is so necessary, for one way of flight from God is to desublimate our love for Him into the beauty of the world which He has made. Christ loved creation as the work of the hands of His Father; but some succeed in loving it for itself. They take the bite out of reality by wallowing in cloudy mysticism which is merely more subtle than the earthly ways of drink and drugs. Some of them worship beauty and go to the opera as a Catholic might go to a mission. Others worship self-expression. All of them thrive on the distrust of the less gifted majority. This cements them together in the esoteric fellowship of the few. They succeed fairly well in isolating the world from God who made it. For them the arts cloak, instead of revealing, the beauty of God. Like Christ they see the beauty of the lily of the field and the pathos of the falling sparrow. But they forget to render them to God. Through the eyes of Christ everything is the work of His Father in heaven. It is a question of focus, and knowledge is the lens of wisdom. 1 The gift of Counsel directs the gift of Wisdom onto oneself by underlining the natural virtues of sincerity and prudence. It is not only important to have a crystal-clear conviction of one's Last End and a Christ-like perspective of reality. One must know the secrets of one's own heart as Christ knew what was in man. All of us are good at deceiving ourselves. For years we have been demonstrating that the wish is father to the thought. The neurotic can deceive himself very easily. The emotional surplus he carries with him can colour his intellectual vision. If he suffers from an anxiety neurosis, his emotions invest what happens to him in fearful colours; if he is a depressive, his vision is coloured by hopelessness, or by privation of love;

·78 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS
if he is a sex addict, he sees it in the red supremacy of lust;
if addicted to drink, in the perpetual amber of spirits; if
scrupulous, in harsh blacks and whites. What is needed is
a personal sincerity to recognise and strip off the veils of
fantasy. Christ loves us as we are. Nothing clouds the
divine Glance which knows us from eternity more closely
than we know ourselves. For them, as for all, lies the gift
waiting to be used to quicken the inner vision and enable us
to see ourselves as we are to the
eyes
of Christ.
Summary:
Wisdom, Knowledge, Understanding and Counsel are
the gifts of the Spirit which strengthen the mind.
Wisdom convinces of the Last End, Understanding
affords insight into the truths of faith; Knowledge
judges of the world with the judgment of Christ;
Counsel enables us to judge prudently of ourselves.
Their use sensitises the mind to Christ.

·CHAPTER XXI THE COMFORTING OF THE HEART FORTITUDE, Piety and Fear of the Lord are the gifts of the Spirit which strengthen the will. As Wisdom gives the conviction of experience, so the gift of Fortitude brings seasoned strength. Both bring as a gift what is normally won after years of experience. Fortitude is opposed to fear. It is surprising how much genuine fear exists among people, not so much physical fear as moral fear: fear of unemployment and of poverty; fear of failing examinations; fear of what people think; fear of the future and fear of death; and the fear which is buried as soon as it arises—the fear of what happens after death. In itself fear is a defensive reaction which arises in response to any stimulus which is considered alarming. It can be the cause of neurosis among unstable people who are called on to face persistent danger, or exacting work which causes tension, or among people who are thwarted continually or who face insecurity. It can cause mental disorder among children when they have to face up to cruelty in the family, and among women when they cannot find happiness in marriage. Fear is the formula of the scrupulous. Those people who have abandoned God as a final value, or who do not accept His governing of the world, are in a more difficult position than the Christian. Belief in Providence is a great check on fear. Again, people are often afraid because they attach to a stimulus an importance which it does not possess. Thus a stockbroker who has substituted money for God may show neurotic fear during a market slump. He cannot face a fallen trinity of pounds, 79 ·80 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS shillings and pence and escapes into suicide rather than face its consequences. Moreover, his biological reactions parallel the falseness of his conceptions. He will have an increased sugar content in his blood, pounding heart-rate, increased blood pressure and all those primitive bodily defensive reactions which would be valuable if he were really facing up to a situation which normally might make him frightened. If he were running from a bull in a field his physiological reactions would be just those, and they would be very, very useful. They merely make him pathological when he runs down Threadneedle Street. For fear works not only on the mind; it works on the body. It brings out the animal; it brings out the herd; it brings out self-preservation. It brings out all the instincts which sent the apostles scuttling away from the Garden of Gethsemane when the soldiers came to take Christ. That is why it is so important to control it, and there is no better anodyne than the fortitude of Christ which is given to us as a gift by the Holy Spirit. For on occasions Christ was afraid, but He never ran away. Fortitude conquered fear in the Agony in the Garden. Pilate saw only fortitude in the prisoner before him. It blazed in His wounds and the scars of His scourgings; it blazed in the basement of Antonia when the bandage went around His eyes and He waited for the reed to beat down upon the crown of thorns. There was only fortitude as the leaden minutes went by on the Cross as He waited for the end. The Model of all fortitude spoke, indeed, when He said there was no greater love than tħat a man lay down his life for his friends. The fortitude of Christ is the gift which some ncurotics need most to use. The persons who sit in solitude at home because they are frightened of meeting people; the man who broods because he could not stand up to the boss; the scrupulous who are surrounded by bristling moral hedgcs; the boy who is frightened of the dark; the person who can ·THE COMFORTING OF THE HEART 81 never make decisions; the timid who are frightened of the public demands of justice and the bold urges of charity; the poor man frightened of poverty; the newly-weds dreading babies; the artist fearing frustration; a woman facing the menopause; the man who is facing himself; the dying approaching judgment--to all is given this virtue of Christ if they will but use it. Christ loved the fortitude in His apostles—the rock-like character of Peter, for example: remember, too, His affectionate name for James and John, the Boanerges, the sons of thunder-and all of them, like the Master, were called upon to the supreme test of fortitude; all save John, who alone of the apostles stood in fortitude at the foot of the Cross. Not all will be called on to render the consummation of fortitude in the spirit of the apostles. God allows only a chosen few to be nailed to the Cross of His Son. But at least in the slow martyrdom of daily life which all encounter to some extent, and the neurotic most, the gift is poised at our service. But one should always remember that fortitude is an attacking gift. The possession of it does not bring the security of being in a castle with the drawbridge up. It controls fear rather than flies from it. This is no soporific gift but an attacking one. In its spirit one goes out to meet the Goliaths of the world, and, like David, one needs faith in the living God. The gifts of Piety and Fear of the Lord are complementary ones, and fear of the Lord bears a special relation to fortitude. The old Roman virtue of pietas inculcated a filial reverence towards the gods. The piety of Christ breathes forth a filial piety towards the Father. The Roman piety was tribal; this gift is personal and based on love. It is the sublimation of the primitive emotion of fear evoked by anything stronger or greater than us. Since our identification with Christ in Baptism, the Spirit never ceases to echo ·82 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS Abba, Father, in our hearts. The fear of our Father could never be tribal. It is a fear of love lest we lose Him in the death of the soul by sin, as the child fears, wordlessly, the death of his father in the body by disease. This puts the gift of filial fear in its proper relation with the gift of fortitude, and the emotion of fear itself in its proper hierarchy. The best fear we can have is the fear of losing God. Some of the neurotic's emotional surplus could well be canalised into this. The gift of Fear does not bring fright. It is fear of the Lord which shall delight the heart, we read in Ecclesiasticus. The fear it brings is the fear of the lover that something might happen to the beloved. It calls forth complementarily an increase of love. For this reason St. Bonaventure links it with charity and St. Paul says it is useful for all things. One of its greatest uses is its sobering effect on pride. Pride is the queen of the vices as charity is the queen of the virtues, and the two are contraries. The object of charity is God and it is expressed in love; the object of pride is self and it is expressed in love. All of us are bound to love ourselves as well as our neighbours, but our self-love is to be a sharing in the love that God has for us and infinitely less than the love we are bound to give Him as the Last End. The mnalice of pride and its antithesis to charity reside in the application of our power of loving God, as the boundless good, to ourselves, as though we were the infinite object of that love. We give to ourselves the love which is due to God alone. It is not the love of one's self-which we are bound to exercise--but the inordinate love of one's self that is the root of the sin. The consummation of pride, like the consummation of charity, lies in infinite worship. Like the fallen angels, the spiritual part of our nature can bend back upon itself and offer to itself all that boundless loving which God allows us to share with Christ. In this sense all mortal sins are sins of pride because they balance ·THE COMFORTING OF THE HEART 83 against God the choice of our self, seeking to discover in creation what can be found only in the Creator. It is obvious that there are degrees in pride, and it is rare that one finds its complete and continuous consummation. It is a potent source of neurosis, however, and can lead to psychosis . In schizophrenia it is part of the symptom picture. Of all the desublimations of the Final End it is the most dangerous. Only God is satisfied with Himself in ultimate analysis. When someone starts acting as if he were God, personal disintegration is well on its way. Corruption has set in. Neurotics must watch their pride. Their standards are usually too subjective and they live too much within. The urge to compensate for their imagined lack of personal value can take strange perverted forms. Thus the frustrated neurotic who seeks for solitary sexual pleasure may, on honest analysis, really find that the physical pleasure gained is actually secondary to the psychological power of the accompanying images . His fantasy triumph over the male, female or child-the summation of superiority he or she feels at orgasm-may really be the dominant level. For a brief moment they wield god-like power over the creatures they call up in their imagination for these are the symbols of reality, and in this twilight of the soul they must conquer or die. If they are married they must watch again for this link between pride and sex. If they are men, the physical dominance they exercise over their wives may reverberate and cause psychological echoes in sadistic notions of god-like strength and mastery. The woman also may regard herself as the creature of the man's; or, conversely, equate her frigidity and refusal of intercourse with aberrant notions of her power over men, or, more likely, to a false valuation of her integrity. These notions are transient enough and indeliberate usually. The danger arises if the motive for intercourse centres upon this revenge on reality. For, not ·84 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS only does this violate the intimacy which has been blessed by Christ in the marriage Sacrament, but it also defeats a natural check on pride, namely, the humility of love which comes from mutual self-surrender. In such a twilight of the soul we come nearest to Satan. Care must also be shown in the indulgence of any violent passion or emotion, such as anger, hatred, fear and the rest. For the physical level of the brain at which these passions find their neural representation is a level which, when deprived of higher control, expresses itself in the form of a violent release, feeding crude and violent images to the mind. A man in whom the higher controlling brain centres have been disturbed and weakened by drink is an example. The level at which his emotions have their physical representation becomes dominant, and he may become excessively maudlin, or violently aggressive and obscene. He is the drunken lord of all he surveys and let no one contradict him. Against all these deep-level power drives the fear of the Lord and deep-seated filial reverence are the best antidotes. "Our Father," prayed the Model of Filial Piety and Fear of the Lord, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' Summary: The disintegrating effects of fear are best avoided by using the fortitude of Christ. Of all conversions of the love of the Final End, that conversion which projects it onto oneself is the most dangerous. It is best countered by the filial reverence of Christ and by genuine fear of the Lord.

·CHAPTER XXII THE COMFORTING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT THE GIFTS of the Holy Spirit which have just been described follow the infusion of sanctifying grace in Baptism. In Confirmation there is a further outpouring of these gifts by the Holy Spirit. In fact the Sacrament of Confirmation is our sacramental tie with the Spirit of God. As the Eucharist binds us to Christ, so Confirmation binds us to the Holy Spirit, with the difference that we receive Christ in person in the Eucharist, and the Holy Spirit in Confirmation by grace. Thus we read in the Decree of Pope Eugenius IV to the Armenians that the effects of the Sacrament stem from the fact that the Holy Spirit is given for strength as He was given to the apostles on Pentecost day. The sacramental grace is substantially the same as the grace they received. Hence Confirmation is the Sacrament of Pentecost renewed. Christ sends upon us His Holy Spirit as He sent the Spirit upon the apostles. The effects of the Sacrament are twofold. First there is an increase in sanctifying grace, and secondly there is an engrafting as in Baptism of a character upon the soul. The sanctifying grace which is given is essentially strengthening grace. “Roborans” is the theological Latin' for it. Robur originally meant a very hard species of oak. Confirmation grace gives the hardness of oak. The whole personality is strengthened. There is a double comforting in the Christian life. Christ, promising Confirmation to the apostles, said He would send another Paraclete”. Paraclete is the Greek work for Comforter. Christ is the first Comforter, comforting the soul 85 D ·86 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS in its character of son; the Holy Spirit is the second Comforter, strengthening the soul in its character of soldier. Moreover, Christ continued, the Holy Spirit would abide with the apostles and be in them, and abide with them for ever--words expressing the closeness of the sacramental bond between the Holy Spirit and all who would be confirmed, a closeness which referred both to the Church and to the individual. Hence we repeat that Confirmation is our sacramental tie with the Spirit of God and the Sacrament of the Pentecost renewed. The confirmed man walks in the spirit of Paul and in the company of Stephen. In Paul we see what the Holy Spirit can do to a man provided he offers no obstacle. Paul faced stripes, imprisonment and death. He witnessed to Christ in the strength of the Holy Spirit before hostile Jews and scheming Pharisees, before prejudiced converts and Judaising Christians, before trade-union silversmiths in Ephesus and naval dockers in Corinth, before soulless dons in Athens and cynical consuls in Asia. Around the periphery of the Empire, Paul travelled along the great Roman roads carrying the standard of Christ in the spirit of the soldier. In the heart of the Empire Peter rested like a general and around its circumference travelled Paul. Like a pair of compasses each supported the other. Peter was the fixed arm, the general in the centre; Paul was the swinging arm, the soldier in the field. Neither arm could act without the other. The rock of Peter needed the mercury of Paul. They were the compasses of Christ, swung by the Holy Spirit. As they swung with the fixed arm on Rome and the moving arm on the Empire, ever wider grew the arcs, more embracing grow the circles, as with each missionary journey the soldier conquered new fields for the general, who was the visible representative of Christ. The Spirit calls all who are confirmed to move towards the Final End and the witnessing of Christ, in the arnny of ·THE COMFORTING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 87 Peter and Paul. For, as we read in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, the character which is given at Confirmation promotes a Christian to the perfection of spiritual age, renders him a soldier of Christ and gives him at once the power and the obligation of fighting strenuously against the enemies of the faith, fighting strenuously for those who are in danger of being overwhelmed. We are stamped with a character in this Sacrament, which is our spiritual conscription. The unifying influence of discipline, which has as its object the will of Christ and as its agency thc grace of the Holy Spirit, need not be emphasised. The neurotic person is the Temple of the Spirit of Jesus. “In tribulations, in necessities, in distresses,” Paul bids us, "let us exhibit ourselves as the ministers of God.” Indeed this Sacrament is the priesthood of the laity, and many who lack conviction of the purpose of life might well stir up the grace of the Holy Spirit which now is in them and seek the strength of the oak to buttress their failing spirits. The advice given to neurotics in an earlier chapter, to turn their sensitiveness from their own cares to the cares of others for the love of Christ, is now sacramentally underlined. In the apostolate of Christ to others the sensitive person now carries the warrant of the Holy Spirit. The difficulties involved are now met by the Confirmation graces. In one sentence Paul crystallises all the laboured argument of the above. “For Christ therefore we are ambassadors, God as it werc exhorting by us. The Holy Spirit is now bound to us sacramentally. He hovers above our heads, not only like a Dove but also like a Hawk. At the first sign of movement He will plunge into our souls; but movement there must be. “Being bound in the Spirit,” said Paul, “I go.” The bonds of the Spirit are wings on the feet. How blessed are the feet of that carry, like Paul, the good tidings of His pc?

·88
NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS
Summary:
Confirmation puts us under spiritual discipline as
soldiers of Christ. There is no better integrating
influence for the neurotic than attempting to follow the
demands of the Spirit.

·CHAPTER XXIII THE DISCIPLINE OF CHRIST CHRIST faced reality exactly as it was. Reality was the world in need of redemption and in need of revelation. Men needed to be saved and to be taught. For this the Son of Man had to be raised on the Cross. For this He came to bear witness to the truth. All His energies were devoted to teaching and salvation. There was no time but for the Father's business; no place where He might, like the foxes and birds of the air, be at home and at rest. No legions of angels were called to save Him from Pilate; there was no descent from the Cross at the challenge of the Pharisees. He was poor like the people in His parables; tired like the fishermen among whom He moved. He slept in the boat. The strength of God is weary, marvelled St. Augustine. He was always God although He had taken the form of a creature, but as a creature, as possessing humanity which Hc created, He sought no freedom from its claims, like unto us in all but sin. Not only did Christ always face reality. There is no record of His ever having fled from it. In the Passion He embraced it. During His life He withdrew from those who would cast stones or throw Him over the brow of the hill, for those were not the moments. Calvary was the moment. As God He knew it all along; as nian He made no attempt to escape it. He did always what was right; He spoke only what was true. No enmity, no hatred, no fear ever made Him swerve from the path. Our Confirmation graces and gifts enable us to share in Christ's refusal to escape from the bitterness of reality. 89 ·. 90 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS There are so many avenues of escape open to us today that if we use them for the wrong motive our moral calibre and power of resistance are imperceptibly weakened. Cinemas, bars, theatres, novels and girl-friends are all things which are good in themselves. The trouble is that we may use them continuously as fornis of escape. There is no escape to happiness; there is only escape to pleasure and the two are radically different. Pleasure is the concomitant of action; happiness is the corkomitant of ordered action. We can have action without order and pleasure without happiness. Pleasure wäcinis escapism, pure and simple, can be dangerous. Drunkards do begin a life of drink as three-bottle men. The thing is itperceptible. A few drinks, when the wifc has been naggi ng perhaps, and the pleasant realisation that the edge comes off worry, are sometimes the basis. Chesterton used to advise people never to drink when they are miserable, but only when they were happy, and perhaps he had this in mind. Similarly the drug addict probably starts in a mild way. The psychology of addiction to drugs and drink possibly centres upon a flaw in the personality when it meets circumstances with which it finds difficulty in coping. When this carries over into addiction the physical craving for the satisfaction only aggravates the mental aspect and this in turn works upon the physical. In the end heroic virtue may be necessary to uproot the habit, and those addicted are rarely heroes. The tendency to look for soporifics in time of crisis is almost universal. Within reason there is no quarrel, as long as people remember that soporifics arc temporary makeshifts and that sooner or later they will liave to meet the problem squarely. At the intellectual level onc safeguard is to distinguish between pleasure and liappiness, and to bear in mind that the honest union of pain and mental discomfort with the sufferings of Christ can bring happiness whiile not extinguishing the emotional unplcasantness which has still to be ·THE DISCIPLINE OF CHRIST endured. People who have no motive for enduring suffering will find this impossible. At the moral level it may also be useful occasionally to sweat the boredom and unpleasantness out. It will go eventually. After a time the emotions in a particular crisis will wear themselves out. Those who are addicted to sexual perversions should first of all try and discover what is the dominant aspect of life they are seeking to escape by indulgence in these habits. They must then try to build up a pool of self-control, refusing to be discouraged by lapses. Sometimes the physical habit has carried over from adolescence and there is little attempt to fly from reality, but rather an overpowering desire for the relaxing of physical tension. In these cases the great thing is to try and keep the imagination free from motor images. It will be useless trying to do this if they keep pictures of pin-up girls and indulge in sex phantasies in bed. If they go at the problem wholeheartedly from every level a wonderful moment will come for them when they have sweated away at a particular temptation and know suddenly that they are victors. There again the sufferer can unite his efforts with the sufferings of Christ. At all times Christ is by his side; the Holy Spirit, by His Gifts is breathing forth fortitude for the struggle. The struggle will be won if they keep at it, but it must be an all-level effort. Make me clean, Augustine prayed before his conversion, Make me clean, Lord. While in his heart he was saying, But not yet. Here is an opportunity to answer the generosity of Christ. The Sacrament of Holy Eucharist, moreover, implements our Confirmation graces . Here, as we shall see, is the closest possible union, here, for all perverts and all neurotics, the sweetness which comes from the Strong One. And sweetness we need as well as strength lest the world we face up to infuses the inner bitterness which is its own.

·92 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS Summary: Facing reality is a discipline best exemplified by Christ. The gifts and graces of Confirmation make this casier than it would be without them. The Sacrament of the Eucharist gives the personal help from Christ which prevents the stresses of life from making us bitter.

·PART IV
Guilt and Atonement
Summary:
The true conscience is the mirror of Christ (chapter
xxiv). If we cloud His reflection we enter the labyrinth
of guilt (chapter XXV); escape is through the Sacrament
of Confession (chapter Xxvi).
7

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·CHAPTER XXIV THE INSTRUMENT OF GUILT CONSCIENCE points to duty as the needle of a compass points to the magnetic north. Conscience is the moral compass by which we steer to the Last End. It is not a special faculty, it is rather the mind reflecting Christ. If we depart from the path it bids us steer, guilt is felt by the mind. In this sense conscience is the instrument of guilt. One of the difficulties facing pagan psychologists is to explain it in the sense of explaining it away. This is difficult, for they have consciences as well. It is also a fact that we do not judge of actions as actions, but as actions which are right or wrong. What such psychologists sometimes try to do is to isolate the conscience from Christ—to attempt a natural explanation of its workings and trace these workings to social instinct. This is basically due to the fact that they are treating man as a higher animal. The social instinct is readily grasped in this context and conscience is classified as a developed social instinct. The development of the social instinct in this pagan apologetic is linked with the development of speech. "What places man on a plane above the animals is his gift of speech.” “Man is a tool-using animal.” The animal speaks; the animal uses tools. Mankind is bound, not in the unity of Christ but in the unity of the word. All men are bound into brotherhood by the advances of the machine. The unity of the written word in the press and the spoken word on the radio; the brotherhood of daily flights to America and international trade exhibitions—these are the 95 ·96 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS visible expressions of the solidarity of the tool and the word. It is tempting to think we have advanced socially because of our heavy urbanisation and higher plumbing and the way our machines have conquered space to link the human family closer together. It is cven more tempting to imagine that moral evolution has kept pace with technological advances. But the cvidence from cxperience is rather the other way. Better social services do not make us more moral men. Technological advances rather serve to amplify moral problems which existed before the triumph of the machine. The tribal wars our ancestors fought now become global wars, since we have conquered time and space. We have mastered our environment, but, like our ancestors, we have still to master ourselves. It does not matter that we have wool instead of woad, and steel instead of stone. Morally some of us are back in the Stone Age. We walk in the jungle of the big city. Primitive tribes in Australia and Central Africa may sometimes indulge in customs that are immoral by our standards (though not necessarily by theirs). Comparison between their moral lives and ours may convince us that we have evolved morally. But the evidence simply proves that we have had as a standard the life of Christ and His grace. They are what Europe once was in the dark days before the coming of Christ. People are sometimes told that in following their consciences they are simply enlarging their egos. The motive of thcir actions, they arc told, is simply to give themselves a sense of power. They are striving towards a personality they do not possess, and conscience is only a disguised form of pride. It is further discountenanced by being called a guilt complex. The word "complex" suggests the possession of something people should not have, like an infcriority complex or an Oedipus complex. They may be told that this complex has been caused by the struggle of healthy ·THE INSTRUMENT OF GUILT 97 imprisoned instincts and their jailor conscience. The dictates of conscience are, in fact, inhibitions. No one likes to be called inhibited, as this implies that they have an inferior power of self-expression. What they need is re-education of their dispositions. Re-education consists in showing a person how conscience cannot solve a struggle between instinct and inhibition. You may banish it from the threshold of consciousness and the realm of conscience, but the struggle simply goes underground and there wages underground war on your conscious life. When you are asleep the mind's vigilance is relaxed and the dream is your attempt to solve the conflict. Hence if you reveal your dreams the underlying conflict can be analysed and you can be told what appropriate readjustment you should make. The Christian attitude towards conscience is radically different. It centres upon all men's personal conviction that they are free agents. The individual is able to choose between right and wrong. If he chooses the right he is acting as his Model, Christ, acted, and in Him the will of God is done by free co-operation. True conscience is the will of God urging us to act like Christ. The urge is never compulsory, but the urge is generally there. Thus St. Paul says that God has written His law on the fleshy tablets of our hearts. What He wrote on the stone tablets of Sinai He had already written on the spiritual tablets of the mind. In the prologue to his Gospel, St. John speaks of the Divinity and Incarnation of Christ. In verse 9 he refers to Christ as God, as "the true light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world". The sense of the verse is that before and after the Incarnation the light of Christ shone and shines in the mind and heart of every man who is born. The word “true” in the phrase "True Light” which St. John uses does not mean “true” in the sense of a copy bearing a resemblance to the original. The Greek word means, rather, true in the sense that Christ was the ·98 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS archetype or primal source of everything that possesses truth; in the sense that anything that is truc is only truc because it participates in this perfection of truth. In this sense the light of Christ which shines in our consciences does actually bid us to be better men. But the drive is not a drive towards pride, nor an urge even to self-expression. It is the will of God attempting to express Christ in us, and the word "attempt” is used because God respects our freedom. When we follow this urge we are moving towards the Model of what we should be. Conscience is the true light of Christ. Following it leads us towards the thought of God in regard to men. This true light shines in our minds. Nothing can conquer it, even the darkness of chosen wrong.mthe light is shining though the darkness did not comprehend it (verse s). We are true men just in so far as conscience reflects the light of Christ; we are fully alive only in so far as that light is allowed to glimmer. For His life is the light of men (verse 4). Otherwise we are spiritually dead. We join the Shadows of Gethsemane when the darkness came down on the Light of the World, as when Judas went out from the Light in the Upper Room, and afterwards John wrote that it was night. But in our dark victory there is always defeat. The light cver shines in the darkness. Conscience, like Christ in Gethsemane, docs not sleep. Summary: Pagan psychiatrists are the high priests of Materialism, of the closed system in which conscience plays no part and guilt must be shown to be a chimæra. In fact true conscience is the light of Christ enlightching the mind.

·CHAPTER XXV THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT WE HAVE defined conscience as the light of Christ reflected in the mind of man. In its action it is a practical judgment of the goodness or badness of an action here and now to be done. The criteria of goodness which it uses are the agreement or disagreement of an action with the moral law discovered by reason. The moral law is the will of God for His free creation. The will of God is that men should act after their Model, Christ. Hence Christ is the pivot of the law and the human conscience is His mirror. The moral law and conscience are the natural means by which, under the guidance of grace, a man grows into the likeness of the Model upon which God created him. Any radical departure from the moral law is a departure from Christ, and hence a departing from the Final End. It is not surprising that the psychological concomitant of sin is guilt, nor that the consequences of guilt can exercise a disrupting influence on the personality. Guilt is not pain, though it may be accompanied by mental pain. It is a unique psychological phenomenon. It is an intuitive grasp of a privation, a strong stab of consciousness that something is missing from one's integrity, something which should be there. Suddenly one feels less whole, less entire and less human. This happens in the deeps: we are not dealing with sense knowledge. It is as if a fog or mist had suddenly rolled before our mirror, concealing Christ. The thing may reverberate through other levels intellectual, physical and the like. But basically it is without words; something 99 ·100 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS which happens between our spirit and God, a revulsion that occurs in wordless depths. It is no wonder that the psycho-analysts arc obsessed with guilt. Guilt keeps them in business. One may tako it as axiomatic that a psychoneurosis, which is an illness of the personality, will express itself at every level of the personality, not excluding the moral level. One will generally find that a neurotic has some trouble with his conscience. It will be either over-active or under-active and will generally not be a true conscience. This does not mean that people who have bad consciences or no consciences or seared consciences are necessarily neurotic. It only means that a neurosis will find expression morally. Thus people who have anxiety neurosis are often, in the language of theologians, scrupulous, which means unhealthily scrupulous, making mountains out of molehills, molehills which are usually not there. People who have depressive psychosis may have as one of the symptoms a conviction that God has abandoned them; that they are predestined to hell; that they are an object of the vengeance of God. Hysterical people may convince themselves that they are about to die and are unprepared. Schizophrenics may cven persuade theniselves that they sec guilt lying around them on walls, on their fingers or clothes. They may be driven to manic patterns of atonement, selfmutilation and the rest. The will of God still moves in the minds of these people. Christ is still reflected in their conscience; but their practical judgment has gone wrong. Their reason misrepresents the moral law or distorts it. In many cases they are not responsible for their actions. In all cases God loves them. The moral faculty develops quite carly, more or less with the development of reason. Children very soon learn the difference between right and wrong. The point is that they have to learn, there are no private revelations on this ·THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT IOI matter. The main teachers are the parents, and if they have no moral life neither will their children. The child will readily accept the rules of right and wrong conduct, and will measure them solely against the activities of others. The big stumbling blocks will be anomalies between what it is told to do and what it sees its parents doing. Later on, if the moral development is normal the child will unconsciously review the precepts it has learned and accept them. What simplifies matters is that everyone has an intuitive grasp of the first principle of the moral ordergood must be done. The child accepts this, of course, and its corollary-evil must be avoided. If any suggested course of action is good the child forms the practical and simple reasoning that this course of action is good, good must be done, and hence it does this here and now. This last step is the directive of the conscience. In fact, difficulty rarely comes over obeying the imperative to do good and avoid evil ; it comes over true conception of what is good and what is evil. Some young children are, for example, objectively indecent by adult standards but quite innocent by their own. The overzealous parent may punish this sincerely and try to avoid its repetition by stories of hellfire and so on. The right course is not so much to correct as to instruct. Correction without instruction will only create a false conscience, and a feeling of guilt will arise with the exercise of natural functions. For guilt is the reaction to the moral principle-good must be done, evil avoided, and wherever this principle is applied falsely grave consequences may ensue. Thus a young girl was once told that babies were conceived by kissing. The first time she was kissed she developed a false pregnancy and great distress of mind, went into hospital, had appendicitis diagnosed and her innocent appendix removed. Later she was kissed again and the same false pregnancy recurred. Eventually the root of the trouble ·102 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS was discovered and no doubt she kissed and lived happily ever after. It is abominably easy for highly strung parents to sow the seeds of first-class scruples in the fertile minds of sensitive children. Once they are there they grow, and by adult life have grown so many roots as to stifle the love of God in the soul. A special duty lies on the fathers of families here. Their young children have an image of God based on them. They must be moral and just, in terms that a child can understand, for the love of the Christ Child in their children, for the love of the thought of God in the mind of the child, for the love of the reflection of Christ in the conscience of their children. As the child develops into manhood or womanhood it grows more conscious of its own responsibility and relies more upon itself. If all goes well and the conscience is exercised normally, it will develop normally. Otherwise it develops in one of two extremes. It either becomes scrupulous or it becomes seared. The scrupulous conscience is a false one, seeing evil where none exists, conceiving obligations where it is not in fact bound, and walking around in a cloak of misery and guilt with no objective foundation. It is rather a manifestation than a cause of an unstable temperament. If one does have a tendency to anxiety the moral sphere rather than any other lends itself. The seared conscience is one which has lost its sense of right and wrong to a large extent by the constant repetition of actions which it knows to be wrong. It is as if the finer cdge of the soul had been blunted by constant misuse and the treasure of our Last End and our sonship were slowly mortgaged away. The mirror of Christ loses its silver. The corc rots. Humanity atrophies. Wc nail ourselves to the cross of pride in a caricaturc of Christ.

·THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT
103
Summary:
Guilt is the moral reaction to rejection of the primary
moral principle that good must be done and evil
avoided. This principle is personified in Christ who
is the Moral exemplar and pole to which the needle
of conscience swings.
Neurosis
very
often in a disordered
conscience. Scrupulous people have neurotically false
consciences by overaction. Seared consciences are
neurotic by underaction. The normal conscience
depends largely upon sane upbringing by parents of
their child.
expresses itself

·CHAPTER XXVI THE REMOVAL OF GUILT NORMALLY people who do something they conceive to be radically wrong experience a deep sense of guilt. Naturally cnough they will want to get rid of this. In some way they will usually wish to atone for the wrong they have done. This sense of atonement is a hсalthy nioral desire to restore the condition they experienced before they felt less whole and integral through guilt. It is remarkable how dccp-seated this desire is and how long-lived it can be. Guilt and atonement always run together. Now the Sacrament of Confession is a Sacrament of atoncment and removal of guilt. If the Last End has been lost by the doing of something which is incompatible with it, that End is restored. The grace which it gives is grace which remits sin and forgives it. It restorcs the life of adoptive sonship in Christ, if this has been lost by serious sin, and restores us again to the friendship of God. The power to forgive sin, as Our Lord said, is possessed by God alone. Christ, as God, forgave sin on earth. He transmitted to the Church the jurisdiction or power He has over the forgiving of sins, and the Church exercises the power thus transmitted through her priests. Thus Christ acts through the priest in the confessional. He applies the merits of His Passion to the penitent. By virtue of His capacity as High Priest and of His Infinite Sacrifice on the Cross, He makes atonement to the Father for our sins. Non-Catholic misconceptions on the nature of the Sacrament contre upon the human aspect of a man listening - 104 ·THE REMOVAL OF GUILT IOS to the sins of his fellow-men, muttering Latin words and announcing that the sins have gone. They do not see the need for intermediaries because they cannot realise the need of atonement to God through Christ. There is no human jurisdiction here at all. The Church exercises the jurisdiction given to her by Christ and delegates it to her priests. But God alone can forgive sins and proceeds to do so in the framework that Christ has laid down. If the non- Catholic says he is going to God by private contrition, and his contrition is valid, then his sins will be forgiven-but still by the same mechanism of atonement through Christ, and by the same power of Christ's jurisdiction over sin. Moreover, such people will not have the same sort of certitude that God in fact has forgiven their sins as have those who use the Sacrament of Confession. For the Sacraments act ex opere operato, that is to say, automatically, provided the right intention and dispositions are there. Only those who have experienced the relief of Confession and the certitude given by Confession can understand this. The urge to confess wrong done is quite deep, centring upon the relief of tension in the mere act of sharing an unbearable secret with another. The psycho-analysts realise this, of course, and urge their patients to confess under the method of free-analysis, hypnosis, pentothal. But their limitations begin when the confession is over. The guilt is told, relief is there, but how can atonement be made? For the patients will want to atone in some way. They can be talked out of it, perhaps, but how completely? They can be given other avenues by which they may convert their atonement into something else, but this is, at best, improvisation. Only the Sacrament of Confession can penetrate down to the deeps and incorporate us into Christ our Model, in such a transcendental way that we bury our sins in His Sonship and walk with Him again ·Іоб NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS in the joy of resurrection. Those who have to deal with depressive psychotics or manics in institutions may cncounter this desire for atonement of sin. The patients may be prepared to mutilate themselves or display suicidal tendencies, in an attempt to atone for real or imagined sin. It might help if they were told very simply that Christ lias done what they are trying to do and that in Confession He does in a moment for them what they may spend their lives vainly trying to do. If they can be got to Confession frequently this may in time sink'in. One day the Gadarene swinc might go over the cliff, and the patients might find themselves sitting peaceably at the feet of Christ. Anxiety and depressive types find Confession a nightmare. They will go looking for mathematical certitude that their sins have been forgiven and this they will not get. The conception they must cultivate is that the priest speaks with the authority of the Church, and hence of Christ, and they must follow him with total trust. They must follow his rules of certitude if they want to recover. Their own worries and self-torments can be spiritualised if they unite them with the agony of Christ in the garden, and they will receive actual graces to enable them to follow out the directions they receive. It is necessary for them to realise that Confession removes guilt, not imagined worries, and that it is no use employing it every day as an aspirin. The pendulum for them has swung too far in the wrong dircction; they have lost their sense of proportion and only unswerving obedience to the rules given them will bring them to normality. It sometimes helps, actually, if such people come and discuss their worries outside of Confession. Once in the confessional, they carry with them an aura of gloom and despondency, making them uncommunicative and unrcceptive. If they leave this artificial atmosphere and talk it over man to man with the pricst, the light of common sense may bring new and abiding light to their darkness,

·THE REMOVAL OF GUILT
107
They should realise, finally, that it is a Sacrament of love
as well as of justice. The Shepherd has the warmer welcome
for the errant sheep.
Summary:
Confession answers the deep need of atonement felt
after the incurring of guilt. Christ atones for us by
inserting us into the mystery of Calvary.
If psychotic people are capable of going to the
Sacrament they should be encouraged to do so.
Scrupulous people must stop using it as an aspirin and
seek for criteria of certitude from the confessor.

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·PART V
Sex and Matrimony
Summary:
In marriage the parties share in the love of Christ for
His Church (chapter xxvii) and their sex instinct is
the echo of God's urgent desire to create (chapter
xxvii). Christ is ready to accompany us through the
troubled gates of puberty (chapter xxix).

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·CHAPTER XXVII THE SACRAMENT OF MATRIMONY Sex is an overworked word which originally derived from the Latin word “secare”, meaning to cut; the idea being that humanity is never fully possessed by any individual but is rather in two sections, male and female. This idea has more depth than appears because it does not place sex on the animal level alone. It carries it through other levels in the personality, through intellectual and moral levels not that women are more or less moral than men but that they have a different approach. The animal differences are more striking but less subtle than the higher level ones. In this sense men and women are fully human but do not possess the fullness of humanity. Their differences, again at all levels, complement each other. Neither possesses fullness; they seek it in each other. This desire to seek a complementary partner is the sex instinct, and, once again, this works at all levels. When people use the word sex they generally think of the physical sex differences and the physical desire for sexual union that these differences stimulate. This is incomplete and only a component of a much larger complex of differences . There will never be a lasting union between a man and a woman if they complement each other on the physical level alone. Their sex instincts at the deeper levels will never be satisfied. On the other hand, people who do complement each other at all levels must still not desublimate their final end into worship of each other. There is an inner power of loving which only God can satisfy. A true complementary union will foster mutually the deeper emptiness which only God can fill. III ·II2 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS The physical expression of the sex instinct is bound up with the survival of the race and at this level is very strong. Freud thought it was so strong as to be ungovernable, but as his theories on conduct were largely drawn from neurotic people this is not surprising. Most people find difficulty with sex, but neurotics especially so, as we shall see. It might be thought that marriage is the complete answer to the problem of sex. Often it is not. It is the immediate answer to the physical clamourings of the sex instinct, but it does not necessarily answer the needs of the parties at other levels. A true complementary union will answer additionally a person's needs at emotional, intellectual, moral and spiritual levels. Of these the spiritual is the highest. When it is omitted from people's calculations it is surprising how much integration can be lost at lower levels. The Sacrament of Matrimony blesses the marriage contract at all its levels , but especially at this spiritual level. The conception of marriage that it brings is one which makes all the aspects of marriage somehow take on a spiritual meaning. St. Paul calls it “a great mystery" and bids the partners love each other as Christ loves the Church. Christ Himself blessed this Sacrament and affirmed its indissolubility. The union between the parties is transcendental. God has bound them together. Each party should love the Christ in cach other. Every time intercourse occurs they do something holy, because this is in the nature of a contract which Christ Himsclf has blessed and raised to the Icvel of a Sacrament. Thic grace of the Sacrament is one which actually confers on the husband the moral power of loving his wife as Christ loves the Church, and confers on the wife the moral power of being subject to her husband as the Church is subject to Christ. This is a depth and sincerity of love ·THE SACRAMENT OF MATRIMONY 113 which beggars into prose all the finest poetry on human love. Hence the mutual love of husband and wife sponsors their mutual growth into Christ. If a child is born of their intercourse they have at the level of the Sacrament, co-operated with God in producing citizens for the kingdom of heaven. They have given of their flesh to God so that the Holy Spirit may fashion from it the vestments of Christ. When the child is born it is human as Christ is human and soon it will be filled with the indwelling of Christ by the grace of adoptive sonship in Baptism.. In the spirit of the Sacrament there are infinite possibilities of love which far transcend the sentiments of the crooners. Christ is present in this Sacrament by grace as He was present in person at Cana. At Cana He changed the water into wine. In marriage He changes the water of a contract into the wine of a Sacrament. He brings all the riches of that change into matrimony, provided that it is not an escape from Him. Summary: The contract of marriage is raised to the dignity of a Sacrament by the Sacrament of Marriage. The sacramental grace is for the sanctification of the parties, and the love they have each for the other must not be an escape from Christ since it is His power of loving the Church which now is shared.

·T CHAPTER XXVIII THE SEX INSTINCT THE SEX instinct is an inborn drive in men and women to seek fullness in each other. As the Church is incomplete without Christ, and Christ's fullness depends upon His love of thc Church, so men and women are incompleto without each other and are urged by St. Paul to love each other as Christ loves the Church. By the Sacrament of Matrimony, the Church, the mystical Body of Christ, is prolonged in space and time in so far as new members are procreated for that Body by the marriage partners. One of the special qualities of the Sacrament is that it converts a lawless instinct to the service of the economy of Christ. How strong this instinct is at its lowest level of physical desire is part of universal experience. The fullness that men and women seek in each other becomes a part of sensible cxpcrience in scxual intercourse. At this level the instinct is racial, for its urgency is far out of proportion to the individual needs of the organism. To classify it at this level as an individual instinct is grossly to misreprescnt it. Certainly, in intercourse, the subjective experience of the parties is that they complement cach other at all levels of the personality and achicve an ecstatic union which someone has pointed out to be a symbol of the Beatific Vision. Nevertheless, the object for which intercourse exists is, in itself, distinct from the experience or even the desirc of the partners. The object of the instinct is the continuance of the race. Some people are scandalised at the urgent demands this instinct makes upon an individual. But why should they be? It is the biological ccho of the love of 114 ·IIS THE SEX INSTINCT Christ for the cells of His Mystical Body. The problem is not its strength or its urgency at all but how to use it in the framework that Christ desires. Here many people part company with us, for they desirc the subjective all-level union which accompanies the fulfilment of the physical instinct and positively prevent the object of procreation being achieved. They may think of a dozen good excuses for escaping the object of the instinct, but none of these is watertight against the rushing torrent of God's desire to create and create and create. God has made us all, on a secondary level, like to Himself, and, on an infinitely lower plane, we are creators supported by His sustaining will. The artist urged to create, the parent urged to create, the urge to create symphonies or sculptures or crops and machines, are all part of the same story. All have a given reserve of energy which will seek outlets through channels favoured by the individual words, paint, stone, music, work, prayer, experiment, sex. All creation is a form of self-expression; and procreation, perhaps, is the unique form of self-expression in so far as from the expression of oneself a new self comes into being. The depth of this creative desire is not sufficiently appreciated. At its highest level it is the creation of Christ in the soul by one's co-operation with grace, the soul's entry into the uncreated rhythm of the life of God by prayer, the soul's entry into the Passion of Christ by suffering. At its most concrete level it is the co-creation of a child. AŬ human creation, of course, depends upon the primary creative power of God. We are secondary creators in all the things we make. But we are still creators, even if dependent, for the Creator made us in His own image and likeness through Christ. A neurotic person is generally insufficiently creative. From this aspect neurotics are persons who are in reaction against their failure to express themselves adequately.

·is 116 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS For a man does not express himself in a vacuum but in relation to others. Even prayer, which might be regarded as a private form of expression, has the social medium of the liturgy to remind us that God made us social individuals. Here the neurotic finds difficulty, for the social side of reality is, often enough, the side of reality he is trying to escape. The phrase "bottled-up” describes the state of the neurotic excessive timidity and shyness of his fellows, deep fear of public opinion, the frustrating loneliness he is forced to cling to when he wants human comforts. What is bottled up usually bottled up under pressure and will burst out through any avenue that occurs. Not infrequently this avenue is through sex expression, usually perverted. Thus in the artificial conditions of male confinement seen in prison camps during the war, or occasionally in jails where there are no creative outlets, unstable types tend to homosexuality. Unstable women sometimes form Lesbian friendships, if conditions have prevented them from marrying. Occasionally both men and women may attempt escape from deep frustration through solitary perversion. Sex is the golden thread which leads out of the labyrinth; the escape to health and happiness. It is none of these things. The pleasure which comes from its perverted use is but the prelude to further mental pain, as they slide from the peak of elation into the trough of depression. They were out of tune with scality alrcady; they merely tightened the strings the notc was sharper, the strings made mclody of a sort, but afterwards they made nonc. Reality is duller than ever, flat beer after the draught of ncctar. The pipes of Pan play a fleeting melody The psychological and moral reverberations will go on long after the brief beating of the gong. There is the flatness and the moral hangover and none of the joy and the fulfilment that follows the consummation of the instinct in the framcwork that Christ has blessed.

·117 THE SEX INSTINCT For these people the road to normality is difficult . They will usually have formed a habit and will regard the habit as necessary to them. What will really cure them is a change of the mental condition which underlies the bad habit for this habit is more a manifestation of their neurosis than its cause. It can, perhaps, be explained to them that in everyone there is an internal rhythm of hormones that act on the central nervous system, making it sensitive at times to sexual stimuli received through any of the senses. Everyone has to face up to this strain, though not by any means all in the same degree. Their immediate problem is to see that during these peak periods of desire external stimuli are not allowed to touch off or reinforce the internal rhythm because resistance will then become very difficult. If they can form the habit of not doing something they like very much and keeping this hobby or very pleasant pastime in reserve to be used only during the periods of desire, it may serve to keep their minds free from temptation. Physical desire in this context is sporadic, that is to say, although imperious in its demands it will wear off after a time. Then, too, if they can be made to understand that any creative work will lessen this desire, they may finally be convinced that creativeness exercised at its highest level, namely in prayer, will finally sublimate their energy to its highest level which, by definition, contains the lower levels as well. It is a mistake to admonish these people severely because what they need is encouragement. Given that they will usually try; and even if they fail in trying they need persuading to carry on. To assess the morality of people suffering from mental disorder is difficult and should be left to God, and in the meantime they should be encouraged to use the Sacraments as often as they can.

·118
NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS
Summary:
Sexual desire is the manifestation of the physical
component of sex, which is a word used to define the
all-level differences between men and women. Their
complementary union in the Sacrament of Marriage
can be a potent factor in working out their mutual
salvation. In its physical end of procreating children,
this Sacrament, blessed by Christ, provides God the
Father with children who are called to share in Christ's
sonship by the work of the Holy Spirit.

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·I20 go out NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS come to the surface during this time. For it is a time when the boy's emotional growth outpaces his intellectual development. He lacks poise and maturity; his internal glands of secretion are over-active; he chooses to be loud and noisy and abounds with superfluous energy. He enters a new psychological world in which he is faced with undreamed-of erotic stimuli. He is independent and aggressive and a worry to his parents. For he is apparently beginning to distrust them and regard them with suspicion. In his own mind he may be trying to absorb the shock of discovering that the organs of excretion are the organs of reproduction. He may snigger over girls and barn-yard physiology, and marvel at the broken-voiced Lotharios who boast of their conquests. At home he shrivels up if his mother shows him any affection. He would probably rather die than shopping with her and be seen by fellow companions. He is passing through a temporary neurotic phase. He is carrying the unbearable secret of life. He is at his most plastic and at his most impressionable age, and bad habits he forms now may carry over to manhood. What are his parents going to do to help him? First, they must realise that he does not echo their placid purity of heart. Gone are the curls and the soprano voice. Is Mother's affection going to weaken because the apronstrings are loose? Is Father going to get furious because his boy is loud, noisy, fond of jazz, surly and given to answering back: To play the dominant father and insist on discipline is mcrcly to tackle the surface symptoms of a much deeper problem, which is to preserve in their son his union with the adolescent Christ. Giving him clean collars, and doggedly darning his socks, buying him clothes and buying him shocs, are expressions of an affection which must be greater than this and correspond to the minor crisis through which he is passing. First of all they must take their courage in their hands and, at a cost of some personal embarrassment ·SEX AND PUBERTY I2I may cause give him the sex instruction that he needs. He will get it, anyway, but not in the atmosphere which really matters, not in the security of the home, but when his defence is down in the local playground or in a classroom conversation behind the master's back. While knowledge does not make for virtue, at least the right presentation in the right environment does not make for vice. He will be worried over nocturnal emissions. These should be explained. He should be instructed in hygiene and told that in the bath he should clean his reproductive organ of anything that him stimulation. He must be taught to call on his Confirmation gifts of fortitude and self-control , and to speak of his problems frankly. False modesty is no use here. Christ talked of birth and excretion. The parents must do the same when the occasion demands, fitting the right amount of instruction to the boy's needs. Frankness is a great natural help. Fungi grow in the dark. Solid blocks of charity are what their son needs, a practical virtue which here should strive to foster the growth of Christ in their adolescent boy. Family devotion to Our Lady in the Rosary is of considerable help. Summary: Girls and boys may go through a neurotic period at puberty. This must be countered by supernatural charity which is essentially a practical virtue and directs the parents to do their best to foster the growth of the adolescent Christ in the troubled souls of their sons and daughters. The actual graces they have received in the Sacrament of Matrimony cater for just this sort of domestic emergency.

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·PART VI
Love and The Eucharist
Summary:
The Holy Eucharist is both the Sacrament (chapter
xxxi) and the sublimation of love (chapter xxx).

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·CHAPTER XXX THE NEED FOR LOVE PEOPLE have the power of loving almost anything. They love flowers; they love money; gold; rocks; animal pets; themselves. Sometimes they love God. What they love is always a good, which is an object which perfects them in some way. The part of them which loves is the will. Anything which can be an object of willing can also be an object of loving. If we loved only with the will, the psychology of love would be simple. But no faculty in the personality, even if it is a spiritual faculty, acts in a vacuum. Just as the working of the intellect involves the use of images, so the working of the will involves the use of emotion. Moreover, intellect and will work together and image and emotion are interlocked. Thus in life one does not know an object simply and detachedly. What is known is known also as good or bad. Concomitantly, we have an image of what is known, which is either attractive or repellent. There is a further complication. We can have a welcome image and a welcome emotion and an unwelcome knowledge and an unwelcome volition. Thus one can have a warm image and a welcome emotion centring upon the possession of a car. But the intellect knows that the family budget cannot afford it, and the will decides reluctantly to refuse it.. St. Paul said all this much more wisely when he distinguished between the law of his members and the law of his mind, both ordering him to do contrary things under the common plea of the good. Of the two laws, the law of the mind was the one he had to follow. This was 125 ·126 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS the higher law because it was the will of the soul; while the law of the body was the lower one and had to be subject to the higher. In all humility we must accept the conditions under which God created us. He created us rational animals. The faculties of rational nature are those of knowing and loving; those of our animal nature are imagining and emotion. God might have made us angels with no animal nature to war with our spiritual nature. : But in fact He made us on the Model of the humanity of Christ, and there is a school of thought which believes that Satan fell possibly because of this fact. We have something which the angels could never have: we have tlie humanity of Christ. The object of natural order is to keep these two systems in balance. When the good which attracts our animal nature is in harmony with the demands of goodness made by our spiritual nature there is no problem. We say, for example, grace before meals. We become acutely conscious of the problem when there is double desire directed towards mutually exclusive objects. A girl loves a man but wants a career. A man loves drink yet wants to be sober. A boy wants to become a priest, yet has to support his widowed mother. The object of supernatural order includes this natural desire for balance, but the motive reaches further. One wants to keep one's humanity integral for the indwelling of Christ-not to get married, for example, so as to be one with Christ. This is the order of grace and in it one has more chance of balance. The bad Catholic has a better chance of equilibrium than the good pagan. In everyday life the two systems come up against each other. Efficient people go shopping and cannot get efficient service. Part of them advises not to get annoyed (usually for the wrong rcasons, such as loss of dignity), the other part clamours for immcdiatc service (the selfish part). That is not forthcoming and the reaction is one of frustra- ·THE NEED FOR LOVE 127 tion. Frustration may be defined as the psychological reaction which follows when we cannot get what we want. Whenever there is a conflict between mind and sense we will feel frustrated. The more we are in the habit of giving way to our senses the more frustrated we will feel. Freud made a great fuss about frustration and its harmful psychological results. But since he regarded man as purely material he obviously gave primacy to sense, and frustration to him was rather the conflict between different aspects of man's materialness than between the demands of the spirit and the demands of the body. After solid practice in firmly refusing to be dominated by. sense appeals people can rise above frustration. Since Freudian man is bidden to follow his instincts he will never rise above them and will inevitably feel far more frustration in trying to follow them out than an unenlightened Christian who has practised at least some mortification. The trouble is that people do not inhibit lower drives, emotions and images with enough determination. It is not enough merely not to follow them. For the time being they must be put to death which is the literal meaning of the word mortification. Thus women of early middle age may have had the misfortune not to marry only because they could not find a suitable partner. If they faced up to the facts and said to themselves that they must make the best of things without a partner and proceeded to do so at all levels, there would not be any trouble. However, they cherish the idea that they might get married or at least regard themselves as marriageable. They have at times fantasies of how nice it would be. They become very unhappy as a result. There is no question here, necessarily, of frustration, because they cannot have a sex life. This rarely enters their calculations. What they want is a home, affection, children, someone to look after and depend upon-and they would not be women if they did not want ·128 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS this. All the emotional repercussions at being deprived of it trouble their minds. Work seems empty, even to one who has been a career girl, and she would willingly exchange the income bracket or the row of degree letters for what, in the normal course of events, she will not get. If she takes her troubles to a psychiatrist he will tell her to sublimate this, and if he follows Freud, he says it in a hollow voice, because the Master said that no amount of sublimation ever succeeds finally in relaxing the tension. If he is a Christian he will first tell her, or ought to tell her, to face the facts and kill the fantasies and then give her some positive outlet for the mass of bottled-up affection. A woman's affection bears no relation either to her figure or her face. It is there, the echo of the love of the Mother of God waiting wordlessly to love the baby Christ. In fact all her surplus love can be canalised into love of Christ. This means that instead of loving lesser ends she will love the Last End, which, by definition, is the whole goodness and contains within it all the lesser goodnesses and that particular goodness of loving a man which the woman cannot have. If she does not do that, all her affection will gradually, under the slow oxidation of incrcasing years and the violent reaction of the menopause, turn to acidity and bitterness and a wayward form of spinster rightcousness which compensates for the absence of sex in inverted puritanism. The trouble with neurotic pcople is that they have rarely loved right down to their roots. They share this condition with men and women who have only loved cach other, to the exclusion of Christ. In this connection we ought to notice the behaviour of the heart-brcaker or of the professional flirt. Wc do not here mcan ordinary flirt, the person who exercises his or her powers of attraction in padded shoulders and neat moustaches and sheer nylons and off-the-shoulder dresses or the ·129 THE NEED FOR LOVE rest of the rules of the game. This is part of the pattern of courtship and in itself is good. The heart-breaker is the person who sins against the charity of Christ; the man who sets out to win the affections of a woman just to hang another scalp from his belt, the woman who excites a man for the malicious pleasure of leaving him cold. The woman is the more common of this sub-human species, and is worth a moment's glance. Most women are out to attract, not to excite, a man. This is where the flirt comes into her own. She knows just how much she can excite and provoke a man, and proceeds to do so with calculation, as an experienced angler might bait a fish. But she is careful not to land him. The fun of the game is to whet his appetite and then ask him to wind some wool. This is the equivalent, to her, of an orgasm, for she has desublimated what normal sex she had into love of herself. She is frigid and cannot love. She is precious and takes care to wrap the parcel up. For this reason she goes to Dior or Molyneux as you might go to a priest; and to a mannequin show as you might go to church. She can belong to any class—the will is there, even if she cannot afford Paris fashions or Antoine. If she had the choice between having a poodle and having a baby she would inevitably prefer the poodle. She is not even in the class of Salome. Heart-breakers, men or women, have somehow moved out of the charity of Christ. Time and mortality punish them and they often become neurotic. For the loveless and the unloved awaits the boundless charity of Christ, ignored because untried. In the Sacrament of the Eucharist is the secret of love. Summary: In last analysis balance consists in right loving. This keeps our humanity integral for the indwelling of Christ. At this level frustration loses its meaning.

·CHAPTER XXXI THE HOLY EUCHARIST THIS CHAPTER on the Eucharist follows the chapters on marriage by design. For this Sacrament is the consummation of the love which Christ has for the members of His Mystical Body. The bread has become by consecration Christ's true Body; where His Body is, there Christ is, whole and entire, for He has risen from the dead and can no longer know any separation of His wholeness; receiving what looks like bread but what we know to be His Body, we are receiving Christ Himself. As the consummation of marriage represents the closest union possible of the partners, so the reception of the Sacrament of the Eucharist is thc closest spiritual union possible on earth between Christ and the human soul. In all the Sacraments Christ dwells by grace, but this Sacrament is Christ in person. Those who receive do not so much receive Christ as be received by Him, and the glance of the Father on His son by grace sees now one integrated into His Son. The love of God, which in its goodness diffused itself upon the world and willed that all mankind should be patterned on the humanity of the Son, which hovered over the waters of the amnion in the womb, building the temple of the Holy Spirit, which hovered over the waters of thc font, calling us into Christ, which hovered over the living waters of baptismal grace and gave us the virtues of Christ , now incorporates us physically into the fullness of Christ. By this Sacrament Christ is closer to the soul than wc arc to ourselves, and cach time the Sacrament is received the mystical marriage between Christ and His bride, the 130 ·THE HOLY EUCHARIST 131 soul, is consummated. This Sacrament is the heart of God's love. The perfection of love between two persons lies in its reciprocity. In the Eucharist the only block to the love of Christ is the degree to which we impede its influx. There is no barrier at all on the side of Christ. There is no neurosis which will not lessen if this Sacrament is used to its full. There is no anodyne to fear, misery, depression, pride, anxiety which can compare with the love of the divine Physician for the patient who loves Him back. This is love at its very highest of levels, including within it all the lower and the lesser forms of love. Maternal affection, filial love, the love of married people, are all lesser participations in this supreme love which created the love in the heart of the tenderest mother, the most devoted child, the model husband and wife. Hence for those who are neurotic because in early days they received hate from their parents, this is the substance for the shadow they missed. For those whose affections have never been sought or have never been returned, those who are unhappy and lonely because husband or wife has never been theirs, those whose fund of love has turned to water, for all those exists this divine Elixir out of whose strength comes sweetness, to change the water back again to the wine which once it was. For all the loveless and the lonely, for all the separated and forgotten, waits the matchless friendship of One who laid down His life for His friends. People will go on loving long after they have ceased striving to know, and knowledge itself is barren and sterile unless informed by love. Love can be the great integrator of the emotions. Jealousy, fear, anger, hatred, lust, can all be transformed by a love which operates at the highest of levels. Perfect love will cast out more than fear. The emotions fall into place like a puzzle when the key has been found. What the soul receives at each Communion is an ·132 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS increase of sanctifying grace which strengthens the life of the soul. It increases the power to love Christ. For the mind which is sick there is no greater therapy. The Sacrament comes to us in the sacrifice of the Mass, with which it is so intimately bound up. As the Mass is the sacrifice of the suffering Christ, so is the Eucharist the Sacrament of the suffering Christ. In the sacrifice one is certain of atonement for the wrongs one has done. It can be the means by which all the sufferings of the neurotic are united with the sufferings of Christ. Here, in the presence of the sacrifice of Christ, re-enacted bloodlessly on the altar, all mental sorrows can be united with the mental sorrows of Christ on the Cross. At a certain moment in the Mass, as we have seen, the priest breaks the consecrated Host in two and prays that the peace of Christ may come on all; at that inoment the neurotic can offer the broken mind with the Broken Body and be certain in his heart that the love of Christ which passes all understanding will bring him peace. Summary: The love between the soul and Christ which the Eucharist promotes is love at its highest level. This lcvcl includes within it all lower ones and those who are neurotic through absence of affection can meet the divinc Physician in the Sacrament of Love.

·PART VII Holy Orders and The Mass Summary: Christ exercises His Priesthood (chapter xxxii) primarily in the Mass (chapter xxxiii); secondarily in the hearts of all members of the Mystical Body (chapter xxxiv). In this framework the neurotic can share with Christ the Gethsemane of the mind. F

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·CHAPTER XXXII THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST THE Protestant reformers failed to distinguish properly between the natural and the supernatural. They did not realise that a man's relations with God in the supernatural life are raised by God to a completely new order of being and that these relations depend upon all the Sacraments. None of the Sacraments can be removed without grave damage to the whole supernatural framework. Thus, if you reduce matrimony to a contract only, you sterilise the Mystical Body and make marriage a bilateral agreement dependent upon the will of the contractors. If you say that Communion is merely remembrance of the Lord you starve the Mystical Body, which does not need memorial cards, but food. Nowhere is this clearer than in the reformers' refusal to accept the Priesthood of Christ as a reality still functioning, It shows a failure to understand the dominant central part that Christ plays as a continuous Mediator between God and man. The main purpose of creation is to give glory to God. The angels and men, having intelligence, can give to God adoration. This is the special glory which only intelligence can offer. Now no creature can adequately adore the Creator, because it is a question of a finite being attempting to exercise an act of religion which has as its object the Infinite. What we need is some sort of supernatural framework in which God is worshipped on a scale worthy of God. We have that framework in the Mystical Body of Christ and we have it in no other. The reason is as follows. 135 ·136 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS When God became man, we had in Christ a true Adorer, who could worship God as God, while still being a man. As Man He is one with humanity. Humanity, which has received from Him the Redemption won on Calvary, forms His Mystical Body, or His Church. Within this Mystical Body men can tap the reservoir of infinite merits He has made. In that Mystical Body and united to Christ as its head, they can adore God to the limit possible upon carth. The Mystical Body is the adoration of God by His Divine Son in the hearts of the members of His Church, You and I cannot join that Body cxcept by the Sacraments. Only by all the Sacraments does that Body exist and in that Body alone can Christ exercisc His Pricsthood on behalf of men. People who suffer froin neurosis may have a privileged position in the Mystical Body, but you can be neurotic because you do not know what purpose you have in life and because you do violence to your nature in not rendering to God the things that are God's. Religion will mean little to you unless you see that as a creature you must adore God, and that you cannot adore God as He should be adored unless you are a member of the Mystical Body of Christ. For only then can God be adequately adored, by Christ adoring Him through you, and in this supernatural framework you nccd all the Sacraments. Without them therc arc no rungs in Jacob's ladder. Summary: Man must adorc God, but lie can only do this in its fullness if he is a member of the Mystical Body of Christ. Then Christ adorcs adequately through him.

·CHAPTER XXXIII HOLY ORDERS AND THE MASS THE FUNCTION of a priest is to offer sacrifice to God on behalf of men. The value of the sacrifice depends upon the nature of the priesthood and the quality of the sacrifice. Between God and His creation there is only one Priest and He is Christ. The nature of His Priesthood is that He is both God and Man, and as such is the Infinite Worshipper of God in the finite vestments of His humanity. The quality of His sacrifice is in the quality of Himself, because what He sacrificed is Himself. Hence the sacrifice is infinite in quality and the Priesthood is unique. There is no other, and all priests are priests because they share in it. They share in that Priesthood through the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Hence it is a Sacrament by which the Priesthood of Christ is exercised through men. The sacrifice of the Christ Priest is the sacrifice of Calvary. Since all priests share in the Priesthood of Christ it is their function to offer the sacrifice of Calvary. They do this, as we saw in chapter xii, in the Mass, not of themselves but because Christ does it through them. They have no other essential function but this to consecrate bread and wine so that they become Christ's Body and Blood, to offer Christ thus present on the altar to His heavenly Father, to communicate Christ thus present to the faithful. Other functions are allied or derived. They are true ministers, but secondary ones; the primary minister is Christ. By the Sacrament of Holy Orders Christ perpetuates His sacrifice on Calvary, through the Mass, which the recipients of the Sacrament are now empowered to offer. Each time the 137 ·138 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS Mass is offered, Christ is offered to His Father as He offered Himself on Calvary. As a result, God receives infinite praise and worship on behalf of us; infinite thanksgiving; infinite appeasement; and it is the most noble prayer we are capable of offering. The Mass, then, is continuous Calvary, in the sense that it is said at every hour all over the world. In a sense it is the completion of Calvary. The Mass on Calvary redeemed man once and for all, but our daily Calvary in the Mass makes this redemption individually our own. We appropriate to ourselves what Christ has won for us. The Mass is the embrace of the crucified Christ. The hands are outstretched by the nails and are nailed to the wood. The Mass is the outstretching of our hands to His. By it we fulfil in our individual selves what He has won for us all. No matter who we are, hardened centurions or cynical Pilates, tough criminals or timid Nicodemuses, this sacrifice will affect us. Whether we are neurotic or tepid or fervent, cach Mass will do something for us. For we stand with the suffering Mother of Christ bencath the Cross of her Son and hear the cry of the humanity of Christ, the great "Eloi, Eloi" of the forsaken One and the Lonely. On the Lonely had come the affliction of being forgotten, of not being received by His very own, of having His Priesthood abandoncd by Judas, of receiving hate from the world which Hc loved so much. All about Him had been created in His image and likeness. He was their King, the pride of all humanity, as He lay upon His wooden throne and the crown of thorns was on His brow. On the Forsaken had descended the sins of the world. There is no mental pain which does not find its echo here in the Calvary of the Mass. Your mental sufferings are in the mind of the Crucificd Christ. The mind of Christ suffers in your mental crucifixion. Here is the poem and paradox of human suffering.

·HOLY ORDERS AND THE MASS
139
put Him
Christ suffers on the Cross because creatures have
there. Hence all must suffer. But the Mass is the Sacrament
of suffering. It is the outward sign of the inward grace
whereby Christ is crucified in our sorrow. All who attend
it have their sorrows united with the sorrows of the Crucified
Christ.
Summary:
Christ is the High Priest of all creation. In the Mass He
renews, by those who, through the Sacrament of
Holy Orders, share in His Priesthood, the sacrifice of
Calvary. None of the witnesses of Calvary remained
unchanged; none of the witnesses of the Mass remain
quite the same.

·138 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS Mass is offered, Christ is offered to His Father as He offered Himself on Calvary. As a result, God receives infinite praise and worship on behalf of 1s; infinite thanksgiving; infinite appeasement; and it is the most noble prayer we are capable of offering. The Mass, then, is continuous Calvary, in the sense that it is said at every hour all over the world. In a sense it is the completion of Calvary. The Mass on Calvary redeemed man once and for all, but our daily Calvary in the Mass makes this redemption individually our own. We appropriate to ourselves what Christ has won for us. The Mass is the embrace of the crucified Christ. The hands arc outstretched by the nails and are nailed to the wood. The Mass is the outstretching of our hands to His. By it we fulfil in our individual selves what He has won for us all. No matter who we are, hardened centurions or cynical Pilates, tough criminals or timid Nicodemuses, this sacrifice will affect us. Whether we are neurotic or tepid or fervent, cach Mass will do something for us. For we stand with the suffering Mother of Christ bencath the Cross of her Son and hear the cry of the humanity of Christ, the great “Eloi, Eloi” of the forsaken One and the Lonely. On the Lonely had come the affliction of being forgotten, of not being received by His very own, of having His Priesthood abandoned by Judas, of receiving hate from the world which Hc loved so much. All about Him had been created in His image and likeness. He was their King, the pride of all humanity, as Hc lay upon His wooden throne and the crown of thorns was on His brow. On the Forsaken had descended the sins of the world. There is no mental pain which does not find its ccho here in the Calvary of the Mass. Your mental sufferings are in the mind of the Crucificd Christ. The mind of Christ suffers in your mental crucifixion. Here is the poem and paradox of human suffering.

·139 HOLY ORDERS AND THE MASS Christ suffers on the Cross because creatures have put Him there. Hence all must suffer. But the Mass is the Sacrament of suffering. It is the outward sign of the inward grace whereby Christ is crucified in our sorrow. All who attend it have their sorrows united with the sorrows of the Crucified Christ. Summary: Christ is the High Priest of all creation. In the Mass He renews, by those who, through the Sacrament of Holy Orders, share in His Priesthood, the sacrifice of Calvary. None of the witnesses of Calvary remained unchanged; none of the witnesses of the Mass remain quite the same.

·CHAPTER XXXIV THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE LAITY THE PRIESTHOOD of the laity is a participation in the Priesthood of Christ by virtue of the fact that the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation incorporate the laity in the Mystical Body of Christ. Christ offers adoration to God as the Priest of mankind especially in the Mass. He offers it secondarily to God in the hearts of each of the faithful in the Church. The passion of Christ is a most powerful bond of union between the Head and Body. It follows that the laiety exercise their priesthood by voluntary co-operation with the Passion of Christ, as it works itself out in them in the form of suffering. There are, of course, other ways in which the laity co-operate with Christ. They can assist in the furthering of the fruits of Christ's sacrifice by the lay apostolate. But their primary apostolate consists in the donation of their hearts as altars for the adoration of God by Christ . If this principle be accepted there are numbers of ways by which it can be brought into practice. In this chapter attention is drawn to one or two ways by which pcoplc can lighten the cross of those who walk behind Christ in the Calvary of the mind. Let us stress that this is a conscious application of a fact which is present, whether known or not, in all who are actually members of the Mystical Body. That is to say, once one is a member of the Mystical Body, Christ docs adore in the heart, whether one rcaliscs the fact or not. What we proposc hcrc is to take this principle and offer various ways of putting it into practice consciously within the scope of the book. First, there are a number of people whose occupations 140 ·THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE LAITY 141 bring them into contact with persons rather than with things: schoolmasters, doctors, those who are engaged in vocational guidance, bus-conductors, waiters, people who adopt children, people who have children, nurses, and so on. All of them will quite frequently come into contact with nervous, or highly strung, or neurotic people. The doctor will have his quota of hypochondriacs, whom he may cross the street to avoid if he sees them coming; there will be the busy waiter who has the fussy diner; the railway porter who is maddened by the anxious traveller; the nurse who has a difficult woman patient; the parents who have a black sheep in the family; the schoolmaster who has a problem boy. Our attitude towards such types is usually governed by our amount of available patience and the return they give us for the extra attention we often unwillingly give them. Now this is good, but there is a better and even a best approach, namely, the approach of the sharer in Christ's Priesthood. This attitude abstracts from the personal character of the person approached. This does not matter; what does matter is that Christ may adore the Father in him. What does matter is that Christ may offer the prayer of sacrifice through your approach. If you wish to offer, for example, your time, your services, your alms, to an old and cantankerous woman-you may be repelled and abused and rebuffed. The amount of unpleasantness and pain you receive is the measure of the sacrificial prayer of Christ within you. The response, if any, of the persons you serve is the degree to which Christ is allowed to adore within them. The service which we try to give may, on occasion, make us feel self-contented. Yet the service is a privilege. Christ is allowing you to partake of His Priesthood. It is necessary to emphasise this point of not counting returns from the objects of our charity. Within the frameworks of many social services and civic acts of kindness ·142 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS there is often the feeling of wanting gratitude in response to charity. The natural reward of the good teacher is the responsive affection of his boys. The natural reward of the good doctor is recognition. These are good. But they are not good enough for Christ. We are talking about a framework in which we love our enemies. There is no return from these. But Christ will wish to adore God in our cnemies. This is the only criterion. Perhaps a special word is not out of place for fostermothers, and what applies to them applies also to mothers. A foster-inother and a mother can be in a special relation towards their charges. The basis of their relationsluip is the relation of Mary to Jesus. We have said many times that the thought of God towards men was always through the thought of the man who God the Son was to become. But God the Son did become man only through Mary. From all cternity God destined her to be the mother of His Son. She was to clothe Him in His humanity. Not only, then, is the first thought in the mind of God, Christ, but Christ as coming through Mary. It follows that the special and uniquc relationship of woman is that Christ is bound up in the mind of God with being born of a woman. On this depends the whole dignity of childbirth and the dignity of womanhood. Men are in the likeness of Christ and women are in the likeness of Mary. But without Mary there would have been no Christ, so great is God's respect for the freedom of the will. The vocation of every womali is to be the mother of Christ whether she be in the fainily or in the convent, whether she be marricd or unmarried, whether she be a mother or whether she be a virgin. Foster-mothers, it is true, do not have the privilege of furnishing the humanity of their charges as Mary furnished the Son of God with humanity. Nevertheless they can bear Christ in the souls of their charges . They can, by their special affiliation to Mary in the Mystical Body, labour ·THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE LAITY 143 that their charges should be living altars for the Infinite Adoration of Mary's Son. “Thy mother and Thy brethren wait for thee,” they told Mary's Son while He was speaking to the crowd. “Who is my mother and my brethren?' answered Mary's Son, and, pointing to the crowd, He said, “These are my mother and my brethren.” We of the crowd are called to be the mother of God and to bear Christ in our hearts. The women in the crowd may be called to bear Him in their bodies as well. But Mary was a mother and a virgin. The virgins and the mothers alike are led by the Virgin Mother to the crowning of the Infant King in their little ones. Summary: Our attitude towards people who need our help should be the measure of the charity of Christ towards any and each of His members of the Mystical Body. All that matters is that the Christ Priest should be allowed to adore within His members. We do not ask for returns, especially if we are women. Then we are caught up in the selfless love of our Model, Mary, the mother of the Priest.

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·PÁRT VIII
The Final Comforting
Summary:
The last comforting is our sacramental insertion into
the dying Christ.

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·CHAPTER XXXV EXTREME UNCTION IT is hard to define precisely the moment when people begin to think about death. The familiarity of other people dying has taken the sting out of it and the mind has the happy quality of not dwelling on the unpleasantly inevitable. The psychological attitude of the young and strong is equivalent to regarding themselves as bodily immortal. However, when decline begins to set in and contemporaries are dying, the thought becomes more deeply a part of consciousness and with it often comes fear. This is natural enough, but for some the fear is harder to bear than others, especially if they are at all melancholic. Bad heart and high bloodpressure take on a more personal meaning and people begin to have a mildly neurotic preoccupation with death. If one has sought paradise on earth and rejected God as the Last End, mortality begins to have an unpleasant smell. The grinning skull appears below the chaplet of roses. Things become rather more precious: the fields a little greener, music sweeter, the need for the wife more urgent, memories of boyhood more nostalgic, each dawn more welcome. The last stress of reality is approaching. What are we going to do about it? Wait for our friends to tell us how well we are looking, bury our heads in patent medicine, force ourselves not to think about it? Fortitude, or courage, our gift from the Spirit, and the strength of Christ can assist us here in facing up to the business and quite definitely making up our minds about it. We will die as our Model died. Our death-bed can be our final identification into the Passion of Christ. It is the 147 ·148 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS Cross we are sharing with Christ. His Passion applied to us in the Sacrament of Confession should have already restored Hiin to us. We are about to enter into the ecstasy of union with Him when Hc, our Elder Brother, presents us to His Father. If that were not enough, His final Sacrament of Extreme Unction strengthens us, the final comforting of the mind when He remembers us as He remembered the penitent thicf and promises to us the Day of Paradise. The oil is laid on the members of the sick man. It is placed on his cars, his lips, his nostrils, his eyelids. He heard, he saw, he spoke, he tasted after the manner of Christ. He, too, has scen the lilies of the ficld and the falling sparrow; he has tasted the bread and drunk the wine and seen and sinclled the fields white with the harvest. On his lips have been thc kiss of Christ in Confession and the Body of Christ in Cominunion, on his cars have come the words of the Mass. The oil anoints his hands and fect. His hands have worked as did the hands of Clirist. The wonderful symmetry of tendon, bone, nerve and muscle he has shared with Christ who worked through them and in them. All the things he made, the jobs he did round the house, the letters he wrotc, the hammering, the repairs, the drawer he filled with odds and cnds—all of them he made and wrought after the fashion of the Carpenter. His feet, too, have followed in the footprints of Christ, along dusty roads, through brief triumphal arches, up the long hills of sorrow. Hc is about to dic, but not alone. When he was born, he was a commonplacc aniong thousands of newly born babies, a decimal point on the registrar's statistics, and now that he dies he only does the commonplacc. He has red-tape interest, statistic value among the daily population deaths, a paragraph in the paper if his death was of interest value. A candle has gone out ·EXTREME UNCTION among a forest of searchlights. Some sales top hat and assumes his professional mask. A sabates gats a will out of a file, a treasury oficial works cucai-cuses. distant relatives grow interested in the leçaces. The mourners think out the sad little trite parases cēcondolence. In a month it is all over. But no man's death is a commonplace to God. When he was conceived, God loved him because lis embryonic hand was held fast by the hand of the ubon Corist. God loved the Christ-baby in him when he was born and the Christ-man when he grew up. And now God loves him in his death because such was once the lot of His Christ. God loves him in his agony because this was once the Third Hour of His Son, and now by Extreme Unction the Son has made room on the Cross for the dying man. When the end comes Christ consummates His Death in the death of the dying one. Along the endless corridors comes the echo of the voice of Christ in the last and lonely second, whispering to the Father, Into Thy hands I commend this spirit.

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·PART IX
Reflections on Man
Summary:
Our external environment is full of minor stresses
competing with the major stress of the Last End and
many of us are unsupported in the struggle by grace
(chapter xxxvi). Those who are integrated in their
lives by the Sacraments of Christ achieve peace of
mind (chapter xxxvii).

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·CHAPTER XXXVI THE BACKGROUND TO NEUROSIS NEUROSIS, we have agreed, is due to a complex of factors. One of these factors we have analysed, the spiritual one, man's unmet need for his Last End, the ultimate goal of his being and his action. We have suggested that a neurosis is an individual's misguided effort to solve his personal equation, in so far as it is his faulty attempt to balance his instability against the demands of environment. The word stability implies mental balance, and the true balance we have defined as our relation of lesser ends and minor stresses to the Last End and supreme stress. With such mental armament we are competent to grapple with our environment. Without it we find that a number of external strains will be competing with the internal stress of the Last End. In fact, many aspects of reality become stresses only because people do not recognise the primary one of their Last End. Only a single end which is so worth while that we need not look beyond it, satisfies the definition of a Last End. Only God meets such requirements, and in pursuit of Him through the Sacraments the many powers of the individual are welded together and integrated into the unity of love. It is worth while, however, to glance at our environment and see what stresses it is putting on us. First of all there are the Theological stresses. The main stress here is that God is a fading vision. People know of Him in the same way as they know of the Battle of Hastings. They know vaguely that He exists, but the conception that they depend upon Him for their continued 153 ·154 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS cxistence and for the satisfaction of their spiritual and boundless if known, of love is an unknown conception, or, powers it is no more real than a mathematical symbol. The Last End loses its importance in proportion as God is banished from the heart. Those who do accept that there is a basic relation between God and themselves often attempt to resolve that relationship in terms of the natural virtues. The conviction is so often that we arc all Nice Peoplcmall Pelagian Men going the same way home; the cult of the Common Man and the Dcccnt Chap. With no sacramental brakes on our concupiscence we are not nice people. We make atom bombs and we drop them; we need policemen; we culture bacteria for our neighbour nations; we are caricatures of Christ. The Common Man is a very poor specimen without grace. He has no brakes and he cannot pull up. He has no awarcness of an ultimate end, and so he does not progress. He simply moves as a pony in the circus moves, round and round the ring, not going anywhere. The natural man has a conscience but it is not enlightened hc has beliefs but they are not illumined by faith; he has society but not the Mystical Body of Christ; he has guilt and no Sacrament to rclicve it; he has the cloudy vision of politicians and no bcatitudes. He has knowledge and no wisdom, and in place of Christ he has the great god Pan, "half a devil and half a man”. On thic Man who is Common without the support of grace come a number of intellectual stresses from his environment. His fading vision of God is challenged by the strength of scientific materialism. The scientist has a restricted approach to reality for as a scientist he studies only that part of it accessible to the scnscs. In this field scicntists have accomplished many things and conferred grcat, but mixed, matcrial benefits on mankind. No onc minds the scicntific approach by grace;

·THE BACKGROUND TO NEUROSIS with this restriction of reality as long as scientists say the framework which they liave defined. Some of thes, however, depart from the sense framework and strive : * cover with their hypotheses spiritual rcalitics which *** beyond their province. Outside their own frame they have as little authority as you or I in the world science, but some people are complctcly taken in by this pronouncements. Other contemporary stresses are that the mind is highly fallible and to reach the truth must be supported bya kazi of statisticians; or by the intricacies of symbolic loads that the intellect must be ignored completely :: irz 1 extreme forms of existentialism. As a result, the man n. street has a genuine doubt about spiritual realities. He:- ders if God exists or if there is such a thing as a soul o: . Last End. He feels backward and uncnlightened or accepting the Book of Genesis or even the Gospels. The weakening of man's vision of God through intellestual stresses works out also in his moral actions. People liare no sacramental strength to withstand moral stresses. Tinuts the divorce figures soar; the family as a unit is weakened; iis members are too few; their bond of charity is too wel; intercourse is so ordered as not to produce children; fertiliz is a joke; and what children there arc arc reared in : Pelagian atmosphere of a secular school withour adque religious teachings or even the adequate training of..! moral habits . If people have a dim vision of Gaia 1.5 supreme value, they do not direct their actions to Hinata the moral Order. There are, too, a number of political sciasse 2 act with the theological, moral and it can. Ti. gross effect of having no concepuono e LE-::::. freedom to work towards that end time on atrophies our sense of liberty. We cannot be und there is law, for law and libcroyana Sara ·156 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS over, we all have a natural inclination to obey the moral lay within us. The inclination remains although we banish the moral law, and it needs to be satisfied, but now it can be satisficd only by civil laws coming from without. This mcans, in effect, that many countries are substituting the civil law for the moral law and the state for God. In this state-worship the priests are the statc planners and they are rcaving the misguided obedience of their citizens who, instcad of accepting the law of God written in their hearts, are accepting, by way of compensation, more and more mcaningless law from the unquestioned authority of the state. There is no backbone to resist the planners. They promote the cult of the Common Man. We have only to tunc in on the short-wave bands to hcar the old ficrcsics in new Marxian words. They sell him the idca that they are sweating for state Utopias and tractor paradises and the solidarity of the workers. The only solidarity that cincrgcs is the solidarity of the dominant ruling class. Their first principle is, Give us power, and the power drive is bigger than sex. They will strip your soul to strengthen their little fingers under the excuse of enriching your body. They will camouflage themselves under the might of the law and perhaps deceive you as they deccive themselves. Let us bewarc. The pharisees arc amongst us. People are called on, additionally, to face social stresscs. Under the conditions in which most of us live, the tempo set by the big citics robs us of the opportunity and inclination to rcflcct. There are few moments when we can call our soul our own and bend back upon our inner selves and discover thic cmptiness which only God can fill. Demands arc made upon good will, which too often has no supernatural charity to reinforce it. We arc lcrded and crowded and besicged by external things, and their glitter liides the loncliness of the soul without its Beloved. Wc arc rcgimented and rationed and red-taped, and we grow in the ·THE BACKGROUND TO NEUROSIS IS7 conviction that we are ciphers in the infinite bureaucracy of a finite and secular state. Most of the time we spend in work which is divorced completely from God. We go into the factory or the office and shed our souls with our overcoats. We go to the bench or to the desk and lose our personality as cogs in the rationalised machine of production. Big business amputates our hands from the hands of the working Christ. The worker solders the same joint and pulls the same lever, sprays the same chassis, adds up the same figures, sells the same sets of underwear, turns the same nut, day in, day out, does the same job with maximum productivity and minimum creativeness. Where is the conception that work should be a sharing in the craft of the Carpenter in His shop at Nazareth? Where is the joy among the angels of God when the millionth tractor comes off the assembly lines? Boost your production figures, steepen the efficiency curve on the graph, keep the machines rolling off the lines, but do not allow the Carpenter to work out His Craft among the workers. Teach them, cheat them, cheapen them, show them how to agitate, smooth them with bonuses, stimulate them with music while they work, but make them forget, or forbid them to remember that their labour is the prayerful work of Christ. Everything good comes out of the factory, nothing good comes out of Nazareth. And now the biggest part of our day is over. The siren has gone and the ant has been allowed to leave the antheap. The day has not been integrated with the day of the working Christ. It has been allowed to count nothing towards the Last End and it is empty in itself. It is as empty as a vacuum and about as stimulating. Now, into the void, stream the thousand stimuli of the neon world; and the multiple cheap stimuli of the advertisers flood the emptiness, weakening the mind's deliberative choice and robbing symbols of their meaning. The evening papers keep us busy ·158 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS till we get home; home like thousands of homes, like the cells in the ant's nest. Dozens of mean little streets wait for us in their hypnotic monotony. Dozens of cinemas wait to stifle our thoughts. Our sight is soothed with television, our emotions are warmed by the cinema, our cars are lulled by the radio, but there is still the inner emptiness. We may belong to the collective body of the workers, but we are. not individuals we are specialised worker ants, and there is no difference between us. Only Christ will make us individuals and bring diversity to the sameness. Otherwisc we inove in a vacuum, the Nirvana of the natural man. In the face of such stimuli is it any wonder that the more unstable of us should go to the wall? Summary: Our background is the unsettling conditions of artificial life divorced from Christ. We are State Man, Economic Man, Advertisement Man, anything but the Christ Man. And that is our trouble the absence of grace.

·CHAPTER XXXVII PEACE OF MIND Peace of mind is the gladness of Christ when we are one with Him. Oneness with Christ is the thing in life we should most strive toward. Once we are one with Him we share His sanity and feel His serenity. All our many personal activities dovetail into each other and whatsoever we do, whether we sleep or drink or are merry, we do with Christ, and know that this great Priest offers our doing to the glory of the Father. There is no room for frustration or unhappiness, because suffering and pain are now the finetions of joy. The glad fire of Christ glows in our soul. Our pain is our bond of union with Him and is thc fire of our love. We need not envy Adam or linger in the misty memories of Eden. Adam in Eden felt no pain. Qur pair is the mark of the Passion, the mark of the King of Calvaryi man, the stab of the lance of Christ which heals while pris it wounds. Our suffering is our oneness with Christ. Is allows us into Gethsemane to share in the torture of llis mind; it allows us, like Simon of Cyrene, to start in the torture of His Body. Our hardness, our bitterness ***** neuroses melt in this crucible of His lovc. Thus no matter how dark and cold we are withour, w* know that His love burns and lights within. Our body; cum emotions, may not be touched, but upon our spirit (laviss lies. We are in peace. In this definition peace docs not coase with momentary disturbances. The door-bells ring when you will it up somebody's radio blares when you want to read; choluby cries when you are playing bridge-mathese are surlice stimula 159 ·160 NEUROSES AND SACRAMENTS which do not trouble your tranquil depths. Deep within, you know that your spirit rests on the bosom of Christ. Dccp within, thc grcat Adorer worships the Father, and froni Their love proceeds the Holy Spirit. By the Sacraments you are more closcly united to Christ than your soul is united to your body. In this sacramental union you exist at the highest level that is possible for you. Integrated with and by Himn you venture beyond the veil into the uncrcated rhythm of the life of God. God is charity and Christ is love. He Himself, says Angela of Foligno, is the love with which we must love him. The love of Christ for His crcation cxpressed itself, perhaps unsuspected by them, in the marriage and love of your parents, who by their act of love brought you into being. The love of Christ followed you in cvery stage of your life in your mother's womb, when your unborn hand was clasped in the land of the cmbryonic Christ. At your Baptism Hc planted the sced of love. The warmth of the Holy Spirit at Confirmation hastened its germination, and in the Eucharist His love began to flower. That love catches you up into itself in the sacrifice of the Mass and tcaches you the charity of sorrow by transmuting suffering into love and making of pain a bond of love. Should thic frost of your sin kill the flower of His love, Hc Himself will bring it to life in the Sacrament of Penance. By the Sacrament of Extreme Unction death itself becomes the life of the spirit as in thc agony of the body it strains for the cmbrace of its Beloved. By the Sacraments you are integrated with Christ. From this central integration of your bcing, peace flows to the outermost rim of you, like luminous radii straining to the rim of a circle. Whether the world is too stimulating or not stimulating cnough, it no longer troubles you. You have balance. You havc Christ. Under the shifting emotion and the changing fantasies, beneath the shuffling ideas and the ·PEACE OF MIND 161 mobile decisions, is the Timeless One who waits to reign. In the kingdom of His love alien symbols lose their meaning. Around you people are chasing symbols of themselves. They chase after the power they see in money; after the pride they see in leadership; after the opulence they see in after conquest over women; after legacies from dead men; after incense from their friends; after politics; after divorce; after opinion and a place in the social queue. They are chasing themselves and they will never catch up. You are not chasing anywhere. You rest like John, on the bosom of Christ. cars; Summary: Peace follows integration. In the integration which follows from sacramental life, one rests on the bosom of Christ. SUMMARY OF THE BOOK CHRIST IS LOVE ·APPENDIX INSTITUTIONAL CASES IN GENERAL, mcdical treatment of those suffering from the ncuroses pursues the purpose of altering the individual. With the psychoses, however, medical trcatment follows the aim of changing and simplifying their cnvironment in institutions. Latcly some physical methods of treatment arc being used, such as prefrontal leucotomy, electro-narcosis, drug therapy, clectro-convulsant therapy, ctc. Individuals suffering from mental defcct arc also given institutional carc. The terin mental defect is really a legal concept which covers a group who are dealt with by the law under relevant Acts. The law recognises three groups idiots, imbcciles and the feeble-minded. Of the three conditions idiocy is the most scrious. All of them are characterised by a low deficit in general intelligence, and as a result they are poorly adjusted to the social cnvironment. There might be a tendcncy to think that thesc mentally low-grade people arc incapable of understanding the Faith. In some cases this inust be so. But in others patient instruction may enable them to grasp the minimum cssentials of doctrine. Christ's kingdom is based not on intelligence but upon love, and if defectives can be instructed in the Sacraments, and reccive them, so much the better. There would seem to be a casc for special instruction here on grounds similar to thosc for special schooling. They receive the latter and also the former, but the instructors in matters of faith at Icast nccd the same specialised training as the instructors in specialised schooling. The psychoscs fall into two main groups--the groups of the schizophrenics and of the affective psychoscs. 162 ·*** INSTITUTIONAL CASES 163 Two-thirds of those suffering from schizophrenia incur the disorder between the ages of sixteen and thirty. In fifty to sixty per cent of cases there is a family history of mental disorder, though, essentially, schizophrenia is the outcome of progressive lack of adaptation to environment, a classic definition being “the end result of accumulation of faulty habits of reaction”. Parents who know of past family histories in this connection are surely bound both to keep in touch with a medical psychologist and to do all they can to safeguard the child's environment. This especially applies to neurasthenic parents who tend to bottle up not only all their own instinctive drives, but those of their children. If the children are highly strung, disaster may follow. The affective psychoses are further sub-divided into the manic depressive group and the involutional melancholias. In the manic depressive group there is, as the name suggests, either the predominance of a depressive phase or a phase of aggressive mania. Heredity is again important in at least sixty to eighty per cent of cases. Involutional melancholia is a depressive state found in people approaching old age, obsessed with the fear of death, of disease and of poverty. They need the Sacraments very much and as much patient instruction as a harassed and busy chaplain can give them. They will sometimes be found like abandoned lumber, in a rented room or a garret. Those who have the charity might visit them in their institutions or homes and offer them the charity of Christ which they need.

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