The Happy Catastrophe

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A fire broke out backstage in a theater on opening night of a new comedy production. A clown realized the danger and pushed through the curtains to alert the audience. 

They applauded.

The clown repeated his warning more urgently. By now he was center stage, flailing his arms, his eyes wide with panic. 

The crowd went wild. Whistles. Cheers. Raucous laughter. Never had they seen such a routine!

Is this how the world ends? The human race stands in thunderous ovation, calling for an encore, convinced it’s just another happy joke.

Abandoned by God

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Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to Him then with praise,  you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting an double bolting from the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.  -CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

Living on Past Victories

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Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue into the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different and you cannot assume what worked before will work today. You must cut yourself loose from the past and open your eyes to the present. Your tendency to fight the last war may lead to your final war.

Robert Green, The 33 Strategies of War

Progressive Inhibition

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As John Mazziotta the neurologist at UCLA said, “People don’t realize that the brain is really an inhibition machine.” Mazziotta pulled out a neurology textbook with pictures of a woman kneeling and praying next to a man who was also kneeling and praying. The woman, Mazziotta explained, had suffered brain damage and could no longer inhibit certain actions. She had not the slightest interest in kneeling and praying at that moment, but she could not stop herself from doing what brains want to do, imitate the action they see, like a monkey behind the glass at a zoo, making faces back at you. 

Another thing to remember, Mazziotta said, is that many of the brain’s systems are running all the time. “Think of an airplane,” said Mazziotta. “Most people think that when it lands it has its engines on low and it’s just floating in. But that’s not always so; in landing, an airplane often has to be at full throttle in case it has to react quickly if something happens.” The brain, too he says, is set up to be whirring all the time. Even when we think of it as resting, its neurons are often firing at a low level, ready and waiting, so it can react in time before, for instance, it’s eaten by a bigger, quicker brain.

The brain is working constantly, and one of the tasks it works at is to inhibit itself from a variety of actions. It is striving to resist the urge to raise the coffee cup like the guy across the table, and striving not to do a number of things that might not be in its best interest. As the brain develops- in children and, science is now learning, in teenagers- it is this very inhibition machinery that is being fine-tuned. 

“Development,” says Mazziotta, “is progressive inhibition.”

Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen

The Standard

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The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. 

Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something-some Real Morality--for them to be true about. 

If the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply 'whatever each nation happens to approve,' there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse.

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

A Peaceful Mind

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 Frequently, I find that people who are lacking in inner peace are victims of a self-punishment mechanism. At some time in their experience, they have committed a sin and the sense of guilt haunts them. They have sincerely sought Divine forgiveness, and the good Lord will always forgive anyone who asks Him and who means it. However, there is a curious quirk within the human mind whereby sometimes an individual will not forgive himself. 

He feels that he deserves punishment and therefore is constantly anticipating that punishment. As a result he live in a constant apprehension that something is going to happen. In order to find peace under these circumstances, he must increase the intensity of this activity. He feels that hard work will give him some release from his sense of guilt… Peace of mind under such circumstances is available by yielding the guilt as well as the tension it produces to the healing therapy of Christ. 

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking