HEALTHY HAPPY LIVING

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 6, 4 December 1937, Page 2

HEALTHY HAPPY LIVING

By T. E. Ruth

(Copyright Reserved.)

Man is made for radiant health and happiness. Health is wholeness—jiliysical, mental, moral. Happiness is so real that there is no reason why men should not, as of old, “dance before tlie Lord.” The body.is equipped for joy-

The gay and the colourful is not foreign to” life. Flesh is something that the Infinite Word can become without losing any of its wonder. No mail knows where humanity ends and divinity begins. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, formed of the dust and indwelt by divinity. The body lias inconceivable affiliations. The mind exhausts all the categories of time and sense. We thrust our roots deep down in the soil of eternity. And we send our thoughts winging high up into the heavens. Sometimes we are profoundly conscious of our infinite background. On rare occasions we are thrilled with joy unspeakable.

And if we don’t “dance before the Lord” it isn’t the divinity that prevents us. Perhaps it’s the dust. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and the spirit of God dwelleth in vouf There is the secret of every lovely thing in life. The Bible account even of a man who is old is almost like that of a human cathedral in ruins lij; up sometimes for evening service. It gives the old man something better than Shakespeare’s “lean and slipper’d pantaloon”—

The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose, and pouch

on side: His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world

too wide For liis shrunk shank;

Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history Is second childishness, and mere oblivion— Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

This is how the book of Ecclesiastics speaks of the arms, the legs, tile teeth, the eyes, the ears of man when he is old and when he leaves the house of dust—“ When the guards tremble in the house of life, when its upholdez-s bow . . . when maids that grind are few and fail . . . and ladies at the lattice lose their lustre . . when the doors to the street are shut and the sound of the mill runs low, when the twitter of birds is faint, and dull the daughters of song—” (This tottering, toothess, nearsighted, hard-of-hearing old man doesn’t need our pity. He is moving in a minute or two into a new house). “When the silver cord is snapped and the golden lamp broken . . .when the dust returns to earth once more and the spirit to God Who gave it.” There is what Paul explains a “house not made with hands eternal in the heavens.” That is the ultimate wonder for which the temple of the body was designed by the Great Architect of the Universe, and the body built—with its foundations of dust; its basement of brawn; its kitchen and dining room; its 1 with-drawing room for the imagination; its observatory for the lirain; its inner, secret place for the soul.

, The greatest romances, adventures, discoveries explorations of modern times—and I am not forgetting .antarctic expeditions, aeroplanes, and bombs—-are associated with the hotly, the brain, the blood, and with such names as Harvey, Lister, and Louis Pasteur.

And. this body—sometimes maligned, sometimes despised, and, even by saints, called “Brother Ass”—is one of the most perfect things God has ever made—and I am inclined just to whisper “And He hasn’t finished making it yet.” St. _ Teresa thought of the soul as “an interior, castle.” It is a roomy mansion, with various floors and apartments from the basement upwards, not at all devoted to exalted uses, not always in a satisfactory state. The body is the house of the soul for the health and wholesomeness of which we are responsible. No parable is perfect. All imagery leaves something to the imagination. If you are of a philosophical turn of mind you may want to argue with me —and I should agree quickly—that the Spirit does not exclusively inhabit detached residences, that the soul oelongs to a community, that’ as cities which have health weeks, recognise, health is of civic importance. In practical life there is a great deal of intellectual lumber in the attic and not a little moral rubbish in the basement that the life insists should be cleared out. There are words which once throbbed with life which are now as dead a j Queen Anne. The vitality, the vision has gone out of the ancient vocabulary in which we speak about religion. And religion is tlie one thing iu life that ought not to become archaic. Ideas once influential are now nothing but dumb idols. Some of our hymns and songs have no sense in them and no soul. They are words without wings. And, after all, it is a Living God "Who claims us. It is a contemporary Christ "Who companions us. He knows that “the letter killetli.” His words are spirit and life. Perhaps the meaning of all our mental perversity, our moral delinquency and spiritual distraction and the actual source of our most influential temptations may be found in tlie animal remainders that take up their abode iii the basement of our being. "We may need something more than a dust bin to got rid of the rubbish. A moral incinerator becomes a necessity, the cleansing fires of Gehenna, and the grace that consumes the dross and saves the gold of character. But we need not malign the house of life o\' minimise the ministry of the body to the soul.

The house of life is meant to be indwelt by God on every floor. The devil has no claim to any part of our nature. "VVe are made for Life. Light, Love, not death, darkness and lust. It is true that the body is the basis of all men’s activities as far as the earth-plane is concerned. It is true that man has an animal nature, that the body must be fed, that the hungers of our nature must be met. But it is not true that man lives by bread alone. The most influential lie in the world is that man is essentially an animal. There is a lien-rnn philosophy of life which breeds vice and tyranny, poverty and disease, war, and waste. About that I shall write next week.