For the soul’s full functioning, we need a Catholic intellect as well as a Catholic will. We have a Catholic will when we love God and obey God, love the Church and obey the Church. We have a Catholic intellect when we live consciously in the presence of the realities that God through his Church has revealed. A good working test of a Catholic will is that we should do what the Church says. But for a Catholic intellect, we must also see what the Church sees. This means that when we look out upon the Universe we see the same Universe that the Church sees; and the enormous advantage of this is that the Universe the Church sees is the real Universe, because She is the Church of God. Seeing what She sees means seeing what is there. . . .

Consider what the Church does see when She looks at the Universe. For one thing, She sees all things whatsoever held in existence from moment to moment by nothing but the continuous will of God that they should not cease to be. When She sees anything at all, in the same act She sees God holding it in existence. Do we? It is not merely a matter of knowing that this is so. Do we actually see it so? If we do not, then we are not living mentally in the same world as the Church. What is more, we are not seeing things as they are, for that is how they are. . . .

[Upon this realization] self-sufficiency is annihilated, and all those customary ways that the illusion of self-sufficiency has made for us. The first effect of realizing that one is made of nothing is a kind of panic-stricken insecurity. One looks round for some more stable thing to clutch, and in this matter none of the beings of our experience are any more stable than we, for at the origin of them all is the same truth: all are made of nothing. But the panic and the insecurity are merely instinctive and transient. A mental habit has been annihilated, but the way towards a sounder mental habit is at least clear. For although we are made of nothing, we are made into something; and since what we are made of does not account for us, we are forced to a more intense concentration upon the God we are made by. . . . Material beings--the human body, for instance are made up of atoms, and these again of electrons and protons, and these again of who knows what; but whatever may be the ultimate constituents of matter, God made them of nothing, so that they and the beings so imposingly built up of them exist only because He keeps them in existence. . . .

Therefore if we see anything at all--our self or some other man, or the Universe as a whole or any part of it--without at the same time seeing God holding it there, then we are seeing it all wrong. If we saw a coat hanging on a wall and did not realize that it was held there by a hook, we should not be living in the real world at all, but in some fantastic world of our own in which coats defied the law of gravity and hung on walls by their own power. Similarly if we see things in existence and do not in the same act see that they are held in existence by God, then equally we are living in a fantastic world, not the real world. Seeing God everywhere and all things upheld by Him is not a matter of sanctity, but of plain sanity. Because God is everywhere and all things are upheld by Him. What we do about it may be sanctity; but merely seeing it is sanity. To overlook God’s presence is not simply to be irreligious; it is a kind of insanity, like overlooking anything else that is actually there.

It is part of the atmosphere in which we live--and which therefore we too must breathe--to take for granted that these considerations are edifying, and possibly even relevant if one happens to be of a religious temperament: but not otherwise. It may be a first step towards a fumigation of the atmosphere if we see the fallacy of this too easy view. If you were driving in a car, saw it heading straight for a tree,and called out to the driver to swerve or he would hit it; and if he answer “It is no good talking to me about trees: I’m a motorist, not a botanist,” you would feel that he was carrying respect for the rights of the specialist too far. A tree is not only a fact of botany: it is a fact. God is not only a fact of religion: He is a fact. Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything, which includes being wrong about one’s self. It does not require any extreme of religious fanaticism for a man to want to know what he is: and this he cannot know without some study of the Being Who alone brought him into existence and holds him there.

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F. J. Sheed, Theology and Sanity (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1946), 4-7