Read
War and Peace at some point in your life.
Pray. If you feel like you don’t know how, just ask God to show you and he will. Trust me.
Go to India and visit the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta.
Always turn to Jesus. Especially in the Eucharist.
Read lots of
good books. They are like health food for your heart, mind, and soul.
Read Matthew 25 (the parable of the sheep and the goats) and Matthew 5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount) and take them literally and seriously.
Get 8.5 hours of sleep.
Exercise every day, even if it’s just for 20 minutes or so.
Whenever you are tempted to watch TV, try really hard not to. Try to read a book instead. Television weakens your mind by lulling it into a lazy, passive state. Reading, on the other hand, exercises your mind by asking you to form ideas and images from little squiggly marks on a page. It stimulates your imagination, one of your greatest gifts, to create your own amazing worlds, to think for yourself, to come up with your own ideas and adopt your own convictions. Television does the opposite; it conditions people to avoid thinking for themselves by allowing them to be passive consumers of images, information, entertainment, and opinions. When people watch TV, they accept other peoples’ ideas, and they can therefore be easily controlled. TV producers take advantage of this fact by using deceptive advertisements to convince people to buy products that they don’t really need. They use crafty news shows to manipulate peoples’ opinions. Through sitcoms, reality shows, etc., they convey views of life that are opposed to the view of life we should have as followers of Jesus. The people who run television do all of this because it makes them billions of dollars. Most of them are not interested in the eternal wellbeing of your soul, which is the most important thing in the universe. They are interested mainly in profit, and they are using you to make money every time you turn on the tube. [An addendum on 6-16-14: Visit
this site or read
this book review for some solid arguments against the tube.]
Use music sparingly and wisely, like a strong medicine, and only listen to the stuff that fills you with light and joy. Most of the popular stuff is emotional candy at best and
spiritual pornography at worst. It short circuits our ability to feel and overstimulates our souls with somebody else's fabricated sentiments. It gives us a quick rush, but then leaves us desensitized and unsatisfied. Good music, on the other hand, ennobles the soul by conveying virtues like courage, temperance, and self-control in a fashion commensurate with our ability to absorb and assimilate them.
Email me at the address printed in my book gift with any questions. About anything. Or just to say “hi."
Know that I will be praying for you, by name, almost every day, probably for the rest of my life.