Our Divine Longing for Well Being

January 16, 2024


SlideShare Living a life of wholeness and integration

Hi!  How is each and every one?  We have started the New Year with the feast day of our Mother, Mary, Mother of God, her divine motherhood. Before that Jesus was born in a stable, a shepherd came to adore the child, Jesus and then followed the Three Kings, Three wise Men, the Magi guided by a star, by an angel, by the Holy Spirit. They came to visit and pay homage to the child Jesus in the manger, dressed in swaddling clothes with his mother, Mary and father, St. Joseph. You and I with our families also prayed in front of the Belen we had prepared in each of our homes during the entire Christmas season up to the baptism of Jesus on January 7.  Reflecting on those days, from Advent, four weeks of solicitous anticipation and preparation for the birth of Jesus, and one week of family tradition celebrations, rejoicing in the coming of our Savior and Redeemer, the only begotten Son of God, refreshes me and makes me smile and thank God for His abounding goodness, selfless love and compassionate mercy.  Pondering on those days to the present just fills my mind, body, heart, spirit and soul with overflowing hope, trust and security on Divine Providence.

Following is the continuation of the previous post (From Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 2).

Gluttony the sixth of the capital sins


Gluttony is a distortion of the divine longing for well-being, that is, the desire for mental, physical, and spiritual integration.  Jesus bore witness to this divine longing for well-being through his extensive ministry of healing both body and soul.  In this life, the divine longing for well-being empowers us to live a healthy and whole life in balance.  It facilitates our divinization by seeing to the development and ultimate perfection of every part of ourselves—body , mind, and spirit.  Gluttony distorts the divine desire for wholeness in two ways.

 

Crux Now

First, gluttony tells us that feeling full of food and /or drink is an adequate substitute for living a healthy, balanced life.  Stress-eating, overindulging with drink or drugs, or using other things to fill up our senses—all of this is an attempt to anesthetize ourselves against disorder and chaos in other parts of our lives.  It convinces us that “treating” ourselves or indulging ourselves is the same thing as caring for our lives and ourselves. 

Habits of Well Being

 The second way that gluttony can distort our divine longing for well-being is by leading us to seek to achieve wholeness by obsessing over the kinds of foods we eat or being overly particular about the way our food is prepared. St. Thomas Aquinas called this second type of gluttony studiose, the tendency to be overly fussy, particular, or precious about what we eat.

Good nutrition is important, but the belief that we can be saved by how, how much, and what we consume can become seriously problematic.  The divine longing for well-being can be satisfied only by practicing the heavenly virtue of temperance, which is the ability to pursue and use all good things—not just food—in a healthy way that promotes the wholeness and balance for which we all ache.

Too much of anything, whether it be food, drink, work, play, study, entertainment or exercise, nights out, sleep, whatever it may be, works against balance.  Do and live life in moderation and you will satisfy your divine longing for well being even in this life on earth.  There is a time for everything.

Eclesiastes 3:1-12 on the unchanging Order of Events:  There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.  A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to tear down, and a time to build. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.  A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them; a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.  A time to seek, and a time to cast away.  A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak.  A time to love, and a time to hate; and time of war, and a time of peace.

What advantage has the worker from his toil?  I have considered the task which God has appointed for men to be busied about.  “He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without men’s ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has done.  I recognized that here is nothing better than to be glad and to do well during life.”

See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”

Affectionately,                    

Guadalupinky   

 

 

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