Our Conscience Needs Therapy Too

This joke came to my mind last Thursday while waiting for news about my wife, Queenie’s visit to a physical therapy clinic. I realized later that I was just trying to amuse myself because in reality I was worried about her and anxious to find out how her consultation turned out. Ever since the preceding Sunday, she has not been able to raise her right arm or move it without causing her serious pain on her shoulder joints. Even when she was not moving her arm, painful spasms would shoot down from her shoulder down her arm and was causing her much discomfort.

It all started while we were eating in a restaurant that Sunday together with our children to celebrate the graduation of our second son. All of a sudden and without much of an indication that it would happen, she started feeling pain while moving her right arm and moving a dish across the table. It then continued to worsen and by the end of the day has totally rendered her right arm practically immobile because even the slightest of movements would send pain shooting from her shoulder down her arm.

We tried different remedies from hot compress to muscle relaxant, pain killers and liniment but each provided only temporary relief and did not do much to improve her condition. And so on Thursday she decided to go to a physical therapist recommended by her sister and after a combination of medicine, therapy and exercise was greatly relieved to have a marked improvement in the mobility of her arm and a significant reduction in her pain. As I’m writing this, Queenie has just come back from a second session with hopeful indications that after several more sessions and a follow-up regimen of therapeutic exercise, she will soon completely recover from her “frozen shoulders”.

While contemplating on this experience, albeit vicariously, of the intricacies of physical therapy, I found myself thinking along parallel lines and mulling over the equivalent necessity of therapy for our conscience.

Just as a good dose of exercise can restore our ravaged physical body to good health, a “frozen conscience” that may already have been desensitized to the dictates of morality and acquired a twisted interpretation of ethical precepts, may also be thawed by observing a daily routine of working out our spiritual muscles.

In the Catholic Church’s Daily Roman Missal published by the Midwest Theological Forum, the section on evening prayers includes a brief examination at night where we are asked to “make a brief examination of conscience before going to bed at night.” It even says that “two to three minutes will suffice”, a time much less than what we would normally give to a physical exercise.

There are six steps to this nightly exercise:

1. Place yourself in the presence of God, recognizing his strength and your weakness. Tell him: “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.”
2. Ask your guardian angel for light to acknowledge your defects and virtues: What have I done wrong? What have I done right? What could I have done better?
3. Examine your conscience with sincerity: Did I often consider that God is my Father? Did I offer him my work? Did I make good use of my time? Did I pray slowly and with attention? Did I try to make life pleasant for other people? Did I criticize anyone? Was I forgiving? Did I pray and offer some sacrifices for the Church, for the pope, and for those around me? Did I allow myself to be carried away by sensuality? By pride?
4. Make an act of contrition, sorrowfully asking our Lord’s pardon.
5. Make a specific resolution for tomorrow:
To stay away from certain temptations.
To avoid specific faults.
To exert special effort to practice some virtue.
To take advantage of occasions for improvement.
6. Pray three Hail Marys to the Virgin Mary, asking for purity of heart and body.

In the end, what it all boils down to is an examination of how well we have reacted to our Lord Jesus Christ’s summation of the two greatest commandments, loving God with all our being, and loving our neighbor as we love our self. It is an assessment of specific circumstances that happened within the day where our response to God’s commandments has been tested. It is a reckoning of how well we have loved God and neighbor.

One time I was buying medicine in a drugstore. When the saleslady gave my change, I noticed that there was a piece of candy with it and I asked her what it was. She said, "We ran out of change." I paused for a moment then asked her, "Miss, what if next time I buy I realize that I also lack change, can I use this to pay?" referring to the candy in my hand. Of course she said no and so I said, "Well then I’ll start accepting your candy as change only when you’ll also accept it as payment."

It is sad to note that our human frailty makes us predisposed to do unto others without even thinking that it is something we wouldn't want done to ourselves. If we don’t make a deliberate and conscious effort to monitor our treatment of little things, it can very well escalate to more serious breaches of Christian behavior without realizing that we are doing unto others what we wouldn’t want done to ourselves.

Just as we exercise to keep our body fit, may we also strive to flex our spiritual muscles daily to prevent our developing a “frozen conscience”.