Addendum: Stress and Virtue

After I wrote the post below, I thought to myself, "My heavens, anyone who reads that needs to know at least a part of, what Paul Harvey used to call ,'the rest of the story'".

Well, the abriged version is this: stress takes such a huge toll on our ability to live virtuously. In my family, on many occasions, we have fallen into the three-pronged enemies of good living -- the world, the flesh and the devil. Whether Catholic or not, it is not easy to be good. In fact, one of our family mottos is "Be good, even if it is hard". And, that is not from the Latin <:

I feel so passionately that the Catholic Church is the fullness of the Christian faith and, really, the easiest way to holiness, because I am so weak, not because I am so strong. Read: I have "tried everything else" and Mother Church is balm for the soul; She is the eternal means of our salvation. So many other spiritual "remedies" (from secular self-help to psychoanalysis to much of modern medicine to a too big part of American politics to New Age to Socialism to Masonic lodges to Scientology to pseudo-Christian churches to lots of U.S. Academia to lots of journalism to much of television to some diets and sundry workouts and on and on and on...) are weak solutions at best, and, at worst, deceptions.

P.S. I have not tried all of the above "remedies"; but, in some way, being a citizen of the US of A, I have knowledge of them all. Clearly, the above mentioned vary in degrees of error and vice.