All such inveterate grudges, which one simply leaves alone instead of dissolving them in Christ and sublimating them into a mood of calm and serene melancholy, continue eating one’s heart and destroying one’s peace of mind, and inevitably conjure up certain aspects of egocentrism. Our consciousness of every wrong we have suffered and have not truly forgiven before Christ forms an obstacle to the unfolding of supernatural life within us. An inward inhibition extending far beyond the sphere of our relations with the perpetrator of that wrong is created. The deeper the insult has wounded us, the stronger is the inhibition it produces.

In order to lift that paralyzing effect, a mere formal pardon on our part does not suffice. We must forgive really and truly, dissolve all bitterness and resentment of the wrong endured, and make an end to all sulking, retirement into ourselves and hardening of heart that has issued from it. All this must be expressly eradicated before the face of Christ: nothing less than our immersion in the stream of His inconceivable, all-conquering love will restore our inward peace.

Self-indulgence is a form of unfreedom

Another mainspring of unfreedom, one of a very different kind, lies in the various forms of self indulgence. This is easiest to recognize when manifesting itself in the form of an inordinate attachment to this or that pleasure or urge-gratification. In one case, food and drink are the object of that excessive and tyrannical attachment; in another, it is sleep; in a further one, smoking; again, it may be certain kinds of entertainment or certain comforts.

Any one of these pleasures may, by becoming so indispensable that missing it makes us preoccupied and restless, maim our inner freedom. Such bodily ties are apt to prevent our souls’from attending to all values in a free and unhampered way, according to the will of God. With this form of unfreedom we are all familiar; indeed, to free us from these inordinate attachments is an elementary task of asceticism.

However, the unfreedom implied by certain other types of self-indulgence is often less clearly recognized; or, rather, it is the presence of self-indulgence itself which in such cases escapes recognition.

Here we refer to the tendency displayed by many people to yield to certain obnoxious natural dispositions, which may be of various kinds and which are less patent to the observer’s eye than the need for such concrete pleasures as those listed above. We shall examine, in particular, two antithetic types of such psychic dispositions, both fairly frequent and both fraught with dangers. One is the cramped character, revealing what we may call, a spastic disposition; the opposite type, again, is afflicted with an inordinate propensity to relaxation.

A “cramped” character reflects a subtle form of self-indulgence