Apr 7 Tue
How can I pursue happiness?
By controlling your desires.
In the soul’s coaching and in Confession, we are given guidance to combat our evil inclinations and overcome our weaknesses. However, we will receive God's grace only when we put this advice into practice with faith and obedience.
Our senses are like the doors of the soul. Our spiritual powers are fed by what the senses give them. Therefore, we must guard our senses so as not to admit into our souls anything harmful.
If you slake your senses in whatever pool you meet on the way, you will feel the results: unsettled purpose, scattered attention, dead will, and accelerated concupiscence. Subject yourself once again to a serious plan of life that will make you lead a Christian life. Or you'll never do anything worthwhile.
We must fight against our passions by having a daily life of piety. If you abandon those means, you will fall. It's a clear symptom: when the energies of someone's soul are habitually weakened, when they are dull or their life is lazy, you can be sure that they already abandoned the fight some time ago; that their hearts are empty of God and filled instead with selfishness, love of comfort, and the flesh ...So feed your soul on God's love. Give God to your heart!
Some want to be humble without being despised. They want to be happy with what they have, but without suffering need. They want to be chaste without mortifying their body ... They fly from any effort. They hoped to win a war by living comfortably at home. Of course, they cannot win in that way.
How are we to keep our hearts and our senses for God alone? By loving the virtue of temperance, that renews us in God, to put aside the pleasures of the body and human praises, and direct all our love to the things of God.
“Temperance is self-mastery. Not everything we experience in our bodies and souls should be given free rein. Nor need to do everything we can do. It is easier to let ourselves be carried away by so-called natural impulses, but this road ends up in sadness and isolation in our own misery."
Some misuse the faculty of generating new life - a great and noble faculty, a participation in God's creative power - and make it a tool for their own selfish ends.
“Temperance does not imply narrowness, but greatness of soul. Life then takes on again shades and tones which self-indulgence had tended to blur. We find ourselves able to care for the needs of others, to share what is ours with everyone, to devote our energies to great causes. There is much more deprivation in the unrestrained heart which abandons self-dominion, only to become enslaved by the first caller who comes along."
The conquerors are those who remain awake and vigilant, those who battle with the enemy, those who regularly mortify themselves. And these people are precisely the happiest. Because you need a heart that is in love, not an easy life, to achieve happiness.