Vida loca and peace of mind

  • When I fin­ished look­ing at e-mail this morn­ing, I decided to put the com­puter into Sleep mode, and it asked me a funny ques­tion: Are you sure you want to sleep?

    Boy, am I. I was up till 1:30 this morn­ing fin­ish­ing one project and I’ll likely be up later than that tonight. Yes, I’m sure I want to sleep.

    But Greg and I were won­drously blessed a cou­ple weeks back with an absolutely enor­mous amount of work we’re entrusted to do for the fore­see­able future. It came about quicker and more pre­cip­i­tously than we would ever have imag­ined and is — in some ways — an answer to prayer. In other ways, it’s down­right crazy — at least for now.

    This is all just my way of apol­o­giz­ing for not keep­ing up with my blog­ging, if apolo­gies are needed. I enjoy doing it too much to stop, but I’ll have to learn how to get by with fewer posts and shorter. I may still find win­dows of time for the more prodi­gious out­pour­ing of all my wool-gathering, but I prob­a­bly will never know when those win­dows will appear until they do.

    So less blather, more brevity and more good quotes from the morning’s read­ing. I wanted to para­phrase this morning’s bit of wis­dom from Fr. Jack Spark’s re-tooled ver­sion of St. Theophan’s “Unseen War­fare” tril­ogy series — this one’s from “Vic­tory in the Unseen War­fare.” It’s a quick four-point primer on pre­serv­ing inner peace, which seems par­tic­u­larly per­ti­nent to me right now. Enjoy!

    1. Keep our five senses in order and our exter­nal con­duct calm, col­lected and under con­trol. Our inner life takes its cue from our outer life.
    2. Estab­lish in our­selves an inten­tion to love all peo­ple and to live in har­mony with everyone.
    3. Keep our con­science clean so that it doesn’t gnaw at us and doesn’t reproach us. In rela­tion to God, to man, to our­selves, if our con­science in clean, it will pro­duce, deepen and strengthen inner peace.
    4. Accus­tom our­selves to bear unpleas­ant­ness and insults with­out becom­ing upset or agi­tated:

      Until we have acquired this habit, we will have to grieve and suf­fer a great deal in our heart through lack of expe­ri­ence in con­trol­ling our­selves in sit­u­a­tions of this kind. Once we have acquired this habit, how­ever, our soul will find great com­fort in the very trou­bles we encounter. If we are deter­mined, we will learn day by day to man­age our­selves bet­ter and bet­ter. And we will, in the process, reach a state of spirit and heart in which we will know how to pre­serve the peace of our spirit in all storms, both inner and outer.


    Related posts:

    1. Inward peace
    2. Fast­ing and peace
    3. Other quotes
    4. “The Mind of the Maker” by Dorothy Sayers
    5. On silence (again)

    May 22nd, 2008 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • DebD 05.22.2008

    These were won­der­ful. I’m get­ting sim­i­lar advice in the spir­i­tual book I’m cur­rently read­ing — espe­cially con­cern­ing #2

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