KEEPING OUR SENSE OF BALANCE
Catholic Homily/Sunday Reflection 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C) February 14, 2010 One of Maslow’s so-called “self-actualizing characteristics” that separate the men from the boys, the mature from the immature, has to do with a sense of interior stability that makes a person stand his ground, as it were, and resist the sway of external influences. Said mature character trait enables a person to retain his “sense of inner truth,” his personal conviction, despite the powerful suggestions that come from the environment around him or her. Such a person, to use the famous Biblical phrase, at the risk of reducing its meaning somewhat, is one comparable to a “house built, not on sand, but on rock.” Without in any way being rigidly fanatic, the mature, flexible person knows his or her boundaries, or limits. Said limits are not like a cut and dried “demarcation line” like the Berlin wall of old, but a permeable area of flexibility and balance between two extreme poles, without rigidly stay...