Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [169]
There are, further, those who lapse into a state of inner discord as a consequence of having repressed a number of deeply stirring experiences instead of dealing with them in the clear light of consciousness and thus disposing of them as a source of trouble. Such persons often suffer from inferiority complexes or psychic spasms of various kinds. Their souls are caught in a state of disorder; they are full of inner contradictions. Their interior is darkened with unfreedom, lack of peace, and painful tensions. They torment themselves with unnecessary problems or fears. They feel, as it were, ill at ease with themselves; they are at odds with themselves. As a specific factor of disharmony we may recall here that excessive self-observation—which has been related in Chapter 4—a reflective over-concentration on one’s self, which prevents all true contact with the object and destroys the power of experience. Persons of this type can never stop looking at themselves; they always contemplate themselves from the outside, as the central object in their field of vision, which they restlessly scrutinize now from one angle, now from another. Sufferers from hysteria furnish the most characteristic cases of this kind of disorder.
Only surrender to God can heal lesser discords
This psychic lack of peace, too, can only be healed by forces derived from our surrender to God. To be sure, one can be originally free from the illness described above without being religious. There exists an unreflective, uncomplicated, “natural” kind of man, who, blessed with a happy disposition and fortunate conditions of life, goes his way unhesitatingly without ever becoming a prey to that habitual psychic disintegration—although, adhering to a purely human plane he cannot (as we have seen) possess metaphysical peace.
But his is a harmony of a merely accidental kind, apt to collapse in the face of any serious test; nor can it, in a qualitative sense, be called true harmony at all, for the latter implies more than a mere absence of psychic disorder This relaxed, healthy flux of life reveals at best the breadth, not the depth of true harmony. Such persons are mostly childlike, deficient in consciousness; they are far from knowing the positive peace of an inward order and true simplicity.
Above all, there is no possibility for them to overcome inner discord, once it has arisen on a mere natural plane. There is no way back to a lost ingenuousness, childlikeness or naturalness.
The disturbance evoked by conflicting experiences cannot be overcome except by their confrontation with God (from which, as we know, results their effective confrontation with one another, too); by an attainment of full consciousness before the face of God, which renders even the most hidden chambers of our heart penetrable to the light of Christ—the serene light that clarifies and brightens up all things.
Whatever is cramped, repressed, entangled, unsettled in us must be spread out before Christ and put up to His judgment, and hence receive its valid solution from His spirit. Our failure to examine and set right these things must be made good; whatever works mischief in the obscure corners of our soul must be brought to light and, as it were, be “shattered against Christ,”
In the humble attitude of a surrender to God animated by supernatural love, all inner discord finds its solution. Then will not only all disharmony vanish but true positive peace become free to take up its home in the soul. It is the supernatural peace which flows from our “sharing