To a Soul Steeped in Shame

Dear Soul,

Is there some weight upon you?  Are you ashamed of something from your past that keeps resurfacing to drag you down into the depths of hopelessness?  Or perhaps something about who you are causes you shame?

Shame is a heavy burden to carry.  You are not meant to carry it.

Think of the woman condemned for adultery.  Jesus bent down and wrote in the dust—tradition says He wrote the sins of those who wished to stone her—and told her accusers that the one without sin should cast the first stone.  Each knew the burden of his own sin and departed, leaving her alone with Jesus.  He rose and looked at her with love, saying to her: "Neither do I condemn you." (John 8:11)

Jesus says the same thing to you today.

Saint Paul reiterates that point in his letter to the Romans: "There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8:1)

Who is it then who condemns you?

Another name for Satan is the accuser.  What your enemy wants is that you focus on yourself and your sin rather than looking to Christ and His mercy.  Every sin is the same old story: it begins with temptation, a draw toward the pleasure and immediate gratification, but as soon as you have given in, the devil turns on you, asking how you could possibly have been so stupid as to fall into that sin.  Frankly, he hates you and wants your destruction.  It is so easy to believe those lies of condemnation.

Think of the story of the man who had been lying near the pool of Bethsaida.  For thirty-eight years he had lain there, paralyzed, hoping someone would carry him to the pool when it was stirred up that he might be healed.

When Jesus comes to the man, He asks: "Do you want to be healed?"

Why does He ask that?  It seems obvious that a paralytic man lying near a pool of healing wants to be healed.  He has spent thirty-eight years of his life lying there hoping for that very thing.

Or has he?

It is easy to want healing, but not be willing to pay the price.  That paralytic said he had no one to carry him down to the water.  Could he have asked a complete stranger?  Was it only his pride that kept him from receiving what he needed?  Scripture does not tell us, but the question of Jesus makes me wonder.

All the paralytic does in response to that question is to make excuses.  Yet Jesus merely tells him to pick up his mat and walk. (John 5)

Similarly, He tells us: "Deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow Me." (Luke 9:23)

Sometimes—more often than not I would say—that cross is ourselves with our sins and flaws and imperfections.  We desire so much to be good—to be perfect.  We want to make ourselves holy, as if we could achieve heaven by our own effort.

Stated in such explicit fashion that idea is clearly folly.  Yet it hides within us beneath layers of lies woven by our clever enemy, especially the lie that says our mistakes have ruined the plan God had for us.

Do you truly believe you are that powerful?  Could you, a mere mortal, possibly interfere with the plan of an all-knowing, all-good, all-powerful God who is Being Itself?

I sincerely doubt it.

If you have ever believed that your life is ruined because of any action or sin of yours, you may have fallen for that subtle lie of believing in a weak and powerless god who is certainly not the God who came down from heaven and died on the Cross to set you free.  When you choose to believe in His sacrifice for you—when you accept Him as your Savior—that truth will set you free. (John 8:32)

Often something stops us from truly believing and accepting that truth, however.  Often that obstacle is our own pride, disguised perhaps from our own eyes.

For many years, my idea of holiness was of being perfect.  Reading about saints who were perfect from a young age (at least according to their biographers, for they would never have described themselves thus) further cemented an idea forged in my own inner vicious cycle of believing that I had to be perfect to be loved.  In terms of relationship with God that would mean that my relationship with Him would depend upon what I did--i.e. what I call NeoPelagianism, or the idea that I could earn my way to heaven without grace.  Clearly untrue.

My intellect absolutely knows its falsity.  To convince my heart of that fact, however, is an entirely different matter.  Is it the same for you?

Consider the following phrase: "There is nothing you can do that will ever make God love you any less or any more."

Do you believe that?

It is true in a more profound way than you will ever know in this life.  It speaks to the mystery of God's overwhelming love for you.  Yes, His love for you, not merely for the you-that-does-the-good-things or the you-that-you-wish-you-were or even the you-that-you-will-be-someday-if-you-can-ever-get-your-life-together.  He loves you just as you are.

He loves your brokenness even.  Can you love it?

Whatever you have done, whatever you regret, He has allowed.

Think about that for a moment.

It can be a hard truth to accept.  It is far easier to embrace the active part of God's will: the part that wills good things and works miracles and brings healing.  It is far harder to embrace the passive part of His will: the part that allowed the Crucifixion and that permits all the sin and suffering in the world and in your own life.

Believing in the Crucifixion necessitates believing in the Resurrection.  So too does belief in the sin and suffering in your life demand belief in Divine Providence.

God allowed the Crucifixion to conquer sin and death that we might share in His divinity and one day see Him face to face in the glory of Heaven.  Saint Paul says that "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love Him." (1 Corinthians 2:9)  The greatest evil possible—that men should kill God—leads to an unimaginable good.

If He can do that, He can surely bring great goods out of your situation, whatever it may be, beyond your imagination.  Trust means choosing to believe that truth.

Surrender to God and accepting His will often requires us most to embrace our own selves with all of our flaws and mistakes and sins.  Can these separate us from the love of God?  Only if they lead us to pride and self-sufficiency—to a rejection of God.  If they lead us instead to repentance and we cry out for God's mercy, we become more able to love.

Do you remember what Christ said about the woman who anointed His feet and wept over them and whom the Pharisees condemned?  He said that she loved much because she had been forgiven much and that if she had been forgiven less--—i.e. if she had sinned less—she would have loved less.

Have you ever considered that your sins might be the price for being able to love?

"O happy fault!  O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!" we pray in the Exultet at the Easter Vigil Liturgy.  Those words speak of the fruit that came from God's response to original sin: Christ becoming Man to be our Savior.

What if each of us could take those words to heart after we have been reconciled to the Lord?  "O happy fault that has led me to the foot of the Cross!  O necessary sin that has purified my heart of self-love, washed away my pride, and opened my heart to the mercy of so great a Redeemer whose love is poured out into my heart?"

I pray that you are able to believe these words.  I pray that they can be the foundation of a new understanding of who you are in the sight of the Lord.

This truth shall indeed set you free.  Then the path that you are on will bear fruit, for your vocation is love.  And what is love except what Christ has shown us in letting Himself be nailed to the Cross and giving Himself breath by breath to bring us to life?

Whatever path you have left behind no longer matters.  Your loving Father calls you to respond to the new and changing reality before you.  His love meets you not on the roads you have not taken, but on the one you walk.  It is there He is doing something new.  The Lord says to you now, as He said through the prophet Isaiah:

"Remember not former things, and look not on things of old. Behold I do new things, and now they shall spring forth, verily you shall know them: I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. The beast of the field shall glorify me, the dragons and the ostriches: because I have given waters in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people, to my chosen." (Isaiah 43:18-20)

You are His chosen one.  Out of all the pain—out of all the darkness—He shall bring you to life again.

Be not afraid!

You have His promise:

"Behold I am with you all days,
even to the consummation of the world."

(Matthew 28:20) 

and

"Behold I make all things new." 

(Revelation 21:5)

Our Lady too is with you on your journey.  As you give to the Lord your fiat, receiving Him in His miraculous fullness given to you in every moment, she is interceding for you, obtaining for you all the grace that you need to hope in the Lord and in His promises.

Love and prayers,

+Jac

Broken

It used to bother me that my statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary—which is quite lovely for being made of plastic—has part of the mantle chipped off on one side of her head.

It never bothered me as a child when my mom first gave me the statue to grace my little altar on my nightstand.  At least I have no recollection of it bothering me then.  It was only in more recent years that I found that imperfection annoying and considered finding a better statue.  Perhaps if money had been in greater abundance I would have done so; or perhaps it was more for sentimental reasons that I never sought another.  Either way, I kept the statue.

Then I ended up with a crucifix with Christ's left hand broken off.  I think the idea was that I might find a way to fix the fingers.

I never did.

Instead, the conjunction of the two broken religious items turned my mind reflecting upon my own brokenness.  Facing my imperfections has also left me frustrated.  Somehow I have an expectation that I must be perfect.

Scripture doesn't exactly help in that regard: "Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48)

Yet there lies the problem with translation.  If we read the text in Greek we would understand from the word τέλειος (teleios) the sort of perfection that means essentially achieving its proper end.  Therefore we are called not to lack brokenness (as we wish we could; at least I do and something tells me you shan't mind my including you in that statement), but rather through it to achieve the end for which we have been created: to know, love, and serve God in this life and be happy with Him in the next to use the words of the Baltimore Catechism.

So the two broken items remain as a constant reminder to me of that fact.  Both still serve their purpose of reminding me of Christ's death and of our Lady present there at the foot of the Cross.

Were their imperfections gone they could not do more to achieve that purpose.  Yet because of their brokenness they have given me a deeper reflection on the nature of reality and through this profound insight drawn me deeper into the mystery of God's love and providence in the most ordinary of circumstances.

The Weight of a Decade

Nearly a third of my life ago it was.  My mind orbits much around the singular event of that epic pilgrimage and therefore you, my dear readers, must bear with me as I indulge myself once more in reflection upon it.

Ten years ago today I set out with my companion, my heart uplifted in joy of abandoning everything to God's Providence.  I felt in that moment that I was free—that I was who I had been created to be.

The feelings did not last long.  They never do.

Today it is gratitude that fills me: gratitude to my past self for having the courage to undertake something so crazy as a three-hundred-odd-mile pilgrimage relying entirely on God to provide; gratitude to my friend for being crazy enough to go with me; and gratitude to God not only for bringing us through the joys and trials and loneliness of it, but for teaching me so much through it.  Now I have gratitude even for those darker moments.

It is gratitude that has begun to unpack the rich gifts of that experience—gifts that continue to unfold in my daily life without my even realizing it.  That is how it seems to be with those defining experiences of our lives no matter how great or how trivial they may appear.

How strange is the wandering course which we mortals follow.  Somehow a steady routine of tutoring, studying psychology, and handling the minutiae of daily life seems as far as possible from what I imagined for my path as I stepped forth on the first few miles of that pilgrimage.  I was young and dreamed of adventure and daring deeds in witness to the Faith as we journeyed.  I expected that God would do amazing things if we gave ourselves up to be entirely at His disposal.  Perhaps these thoughts were not fully conscious, but still I thought that marvel after marvel would unfold.

There were certainly marvels here and there.  Mainly, however, there was the steady routine of walking, reciting the rosary to keep our spirits up amidst the tiredness and discouragement and inner assaults against our hope.  Perhaps it was not so very different from my life now after all.  Perhaps it was not so very different from your own path.

For we are all pilgrims.  Day by day we walk, moment by moment we step forward, following the narrow path toward the Eternal City.

It is very much an inner pilgrimage—a pilgrimage of heart and mind and soul.  The marvels are not the miracles we expect, but rather those poignant moments when we crave our own security and our own comfort and want to shut out a God who demands we give up everything and follow Him, and yet we choose to invite Him in to our suffering.  Our deeds of daring are enacted in the quiet corners of our hearts.  Hope flames up a little brighter each time we abandon everything to the God who holds everything in existence.  Joy ignites every time we listen to His still small voice within.

Coraggio, dear pilgrim, courage!

"We hold these truths..."

As I reflect upon life, psychology, and our modern society, I realize more and more how much we are influenced by the culture around us without our even being aware of it and without our willing it.  So also the past shapes our thoughts and feelings.

Today we celebrate some of that past: we celebrate the history of our country, the courage of our founding fathers, and the risks they took to secure our freedom.  Their choices then—more than two hundred years ago—inform our lives today. We are very much who we are today because of who they were.  That bold Declaration of Independence announcing to the world the formation of the United States of America still bears fruit in the little ways we too declare our independence from those in authority.

We like to think of ourselves in isolation from others.  We like to believe that we are unique individuals (as we are) with no need to credit anyone else for who we are (which is of course foolish).

For instance, I have in the past ten years developed a strong devotion to Divine Providence.  Now it is quite tempting to want to own this devotion for myself, to consider it almost as if it were my own conception, my own special revelation, my own gift to the world.  Yet it is, contrarily, something I have received, not only by virtue of my Catholic heritage, but also by being born into this great and free nation we call the United States of America.  For what are the ending words of the Declaration of Independence?

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor."