Living a Balanced Life in an Unbalanced World

By Anthony M. Coniaris

The author demonstrates, through many powerful examples, how true balance occurs in life when we prioritize God, seeking first His kingdom and His righteousness. By exposing the many imbalances in contemporary life, Fr. Coniaris points out the need for a vital balance in prayer; love; work; play; etc. and exposes the dangers of living outside of such a balance. Choosing to pursue the virtue of (temperance) balance produces a more sane and healthy life in all its components.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781933654478

Book preview

1.

THE CHALLENGE OF LIVING A BALANCED LIFE

The wise of heart is called a man of discernment…

Proverbs 16: 21

Teach us to number our days, says the Psalmist, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. According to Joseph Griffith from King’s College in NYC, when we come to understand that time is our scarcest resource, we turn to what’s most important. Leon Kass, a bioethicist explains, ‘To number our days is the condition for making them count.’

Some years ago, the Mayo Clinic hoped to discover what caused the much talked of tired feeling in American men and women. They discovered—much to their surprise—that the basic cause of exhaustion lies in unbalanced living—a case of too much of one thing and not enough of another.

Dr. Karl Menninger, an eminent psychiatrist, wrote a book in 1963 appropriately entitled The Vital Balance. Balance is indeed vital to good living. We have inherited many proverbs about the importance of balance in life. For example, Nothing in excess, Moderation is the chief good, Avoid the extremes. G.B. Shaw said, A perpetual holiday is a good definition of hell. All sun and no rain makes a desert, says another proverb. The early Church Fathers commented: All which exceeds limits is from the demons. Certainly, the devil loves extremes. Of course, the challenge is indeed to make ‘a balanced life’ a priority, and to choose and pursue it within our multi-faceted lives. A tall order but one that brings rich rewards when lived out well.

2.

THE DELICATE BALANCE

For everything there is a season, and a time for every

matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to

die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is

planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to

break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and

a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a

time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones

together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from

embracing; … Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

Life is as delicately fashioned as a sensitive instrument. If water penetrates your smartphone, it might be ruined. Remove the ballast from a ship, and it flounders upon the waters. Place clothes in a washer improperly, without balancing them, and the washer will start dancing on the floor. Disturb the pistons in a motor, and your car behaves like a bucking bronco. Neglect to balance the wheels of your car and it will vibrate terribly. Life is like that. It falls apart when the balance is disturbed.

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin is an example of what often happens in life when a person who is usually accomplished on one level of reality, i.e., in the intellectual realm, becomes so absorbed, so unbalanced in that one level of reality, so fixated on that one dimension of human experience, that he or she becomes blind to other equally real and valuable dimensions of life. Darwin deplored the fact that he had lost his taste for music, art, and God. His mind had become, in his words, simply, a machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. Whole segments of his mind had atrophied. If he were to re-live his life, he wrote, he would have set aside time at least once a week for poetry and music. It seems clear that what Darwin is regretting is the same thing Jesus urges us to avoid, namely, rendering ourselves deaf and blind to the call and knock of God on the door of our hearts. Though he was a great scientist, Charles Darwin admits that he had neglected to strive for balance in his life - so much time for work, so much time for play, so much time for God.

The Law of Balance

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his

hand and marked off the heavens with a span,

enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and

weighed the mountains in scales and the hills

in a balance? Isaiah 40: 12

The law of balance is written all over God’s world. When God created the earth, He gave it perfect balance, so that it could turn its 25,000 miles in 24 hours without tremor or vibration. When He created us, the law of balance was strictly observed. In the blood stream, for example, there is a ratio of white and red blood cells. That balance must be kept. One of the first things the doctor looks at when we are ill is a sample of blood to see if the balance has been disturbed. There is suspicion today that excesses in the consumption of certain types of food may cause various diseases. Too much of one thing and not enough of another. Imbalance!

Balance on the Environment

Through the study of ecology we have discovered the existence of an amazing balance in our environmental habitat. The late Patriarch Demetrios brought this out in a landmark message he delivered in 1989 on the protection of the environment. He wrote:

The variety of species is essential to the process of God’s purpose in creation… Humanity is wiping out species so fast, creation is unable to recover and replenish itself. When there are too few of a certain species, that species cannot reproduce. The links between species are so vital. To remove one species for human need or comfort may mean that other species are put at risk… Biological diversity – the sum of God’s creation now on earth – is an intricate web of interdependence, with no single part more important than the whole. Like a chain, the severing of even a single link, such as the destruction of a habitat or the extinction of a plant or animal, can have untold consequences for the links which remain.

As Orthodox Christians, the patriarch goes on to say, we are called to preserve, maintain and protect the beautiful, God-given balance that exists in the environment. In fact, one contemporary monk of Mt. Athos expressed what our attitude toward the environment should be when he said, We kiss the robe of St. Nektarios because it was worn by the saint. How much more should we kiss the trees, flowers, the grass, and everything else, since within them flows the energy of God.

Balance in the Universe

Dr. A. Cressy Morrison, former president of the New York Academy of Sciences wrote about the delicate balance that exists in the universe. The earth rotates at just the right speed to support life. If instead of one thousand miles an hour it whirled at only one hundred miles per hour, days and nights would be ten times longer and this planet would alternately freeze and dry. No vegetation would survive. Likewise, the sun’s surface temperature is just what it should be to give the earth the right amount of heat, preventing it from scorching everything on earth. The 23 - degree tilt of the earth’s axis is just right to contrive four annual seasons and prevent piling up continents of ice. The ocean’s depth is just right to maintain the proper balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The moon is at just the right distance to prevent the ocean from flooding the earth. These delicate balances, says Dr. Morrison, could not happen by chance.

According to Nancy Pearcey, in her book, Finding Truth:

The fundamental physical constants of the universe are exquisitely balanced, as though on a knife’s edge, to sustain life. Cosmologists call this the Goldilocks dilemma: Why are these numerical values so precisely calibrated that they are not too high, not too low, but just right to support life? These mysterious numbers… are like the knobs on God’s control console, and they seem almost miraculously tuned to allow life. As physicist Paul Davies says, "It’s almost as if a Grand Designer had