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

Are You Looking for Healing?

There are so many ways we need healing.  Our bodies are a mess, our minds are in chaos, our souls are in tumult.  As Saint Paul put it: "For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do." (Romans 7:15)

So we look for healing.  We go to doctors, try to fix ourselves by eating the right foods and avoiding the wrong ones, and by taking a cornucopia of vitamins and medications and whatnot.  We go to therapy and psychologists and read self-help books and obsess over wounds from our past and ways we have been victimized.  We may even go to every retreat and healing prayer service and beg God to heal us.  When none of these paths work, it is easy to grow discouraged.

Now I would never denigrate the necessary taking care of oneself body, mind, and soul.  I would never deny the goods offered in the practice of medicine, psychology, and healing prayer.

Yet sometimes we need to look deeper.  Sometimes we need to question our motives.

I am reminded again and again how the devil's tactics turn us back towards ourselves.  The devil wants us to look at what we are doing, whether it is our virtues or our sins, and not at what God is doing.

Healing can become as much a part of those battle tactics as anything else.  We can get so focused on trying to achieve healing that we forget the purpose of it all.  After all, we are called to know, love, and serve God in this life and to be happy with Him in the next.  How important is it that we receive the healing we desire in order to be able to do that?  We can certainly fulfill this vocation to the fullness of our capacity regardless of how much healing we receive.

Now you can argue that it would be easier to love and serve God if you were healed.  However, if it were easier, would you grow as great in virtue?  Also, if healing increases your capacity to love and serve Him, then there is the old truth: the greater the capacity, the greater the responsibility.  Do you really want that much responsibility?

You can also argue that your lack of healing causes you to act in unhelpful patterns or even to sin.  Now clearly I would not argue that these are goods, but what if God allows these evils that you see in order to prevent you from giving into worse sins?

Certainly God wants you to be healed.  He wants it more than you do yourself, for He loves you more than you love yourself.

Therefore, if He has not yet healed you, there must be a reason—perhaps many reasons.  Or perhaps He simply is healing you, but not in the way that you expect.

Or perhaps your focus on healing may even be part of what is preventing Him from healing you.

So today I want to propose to you a question to ponder, a question that I hope you may allow to shake you to your core: what if you stopped looking for healing and looked for Christ instead?

"Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you." (Matthew 6:33)

What if you forgot about trying to heal yourself and sought Christ instead?

It is a radical question not because it means throwing health practices out of the window, but rather because it means shifting your mind, referred to in the Greek as metanoia, or in English as conversion.  You could abandon every doctor and medication and healthy practice in your life and still be looking for healing and not for Christ.  Or you could carry on with each good duty to care for yourself body, mind, and soul and there look for the presence of Christ, who is with you.  That would be a true transformation—a true conversion.

So again I ask you: what might happen if you turned your mind from seeking healing to seeking Christ?

Are You Clinging to Your Teddy Bear?

Have you ever seen the above image or one like it?

It is quite a good illustration for how God works in our lives.  Although sometimes it seems like He is not quite so gentlemanly about asking us to give Him whatever teddy bear of comfort we are clinging to in our lives.  Sometimes He simply takes things away from us, leaving us in confusion and doubt.  Then we feel lost and abandoned.

He could of course show us the bigger teddy bear first to win our confidence.  Yet He rarely does.  In fact, He rarely even gives us the greater gift immediately after taking something from us.  Perhaps He gives it sooner if we surrender readily to Him whatever pleasure or security He is asking us to give Him.  Perhaps it is only because He is forced to take away the teddy bear that has become a danger to our spiritual health that He waits for us to turn to Him before He gives us the bigger one lest it should become an idol as well.

So many times I find myself wondering why He seems to deprive those dear to me (and myself as well) of things that seem necessary.  Surely if He truly wanted us to live life more abundantly He would provide us with the support and healing we need in order to be able to do so?

It is easy to allow the enemy to work here—so easy to believe the devil's dastardly lies that seem so much more consonant with the reality we experience and to believe them in such subtle ways that we scarcely even realize it.  We end up relying on our own strength.  We believe that God does not wish to answer our prayers and therefore we must accept His will—a truth certainly, but one that so easily becomes rather a lie lived in bitterness because it taints our view of the Father's love and goodness rather than uniting us with the passion of Christ.

"God alone suffices," said Saint Teresa of Avila.

Is that not the only answer to the taking of our teddy bears?

We think we need them.  We think we need to hold something to give us comfort and security and we can't bear the thought of facing Him with empty hands.

Yet His hands were empty as they hung on the cross for us, as He poured out His love for us, a love that would soon be transformed into glory in His resurrection.  He had no teddy bears.  Everything had been taken away from Him by the Father's will to which He surrendered absolutely.

God alone sufficed for Him as Man because He wanted us to know that it is true for us as well.  He really will give us everything we need.

Of course it may mean we need to change our hearts.  We may need to change our prayers.  We may need to quit telling God what He needs to do and asking Him what we need to do and how we can fix things and simply enter into His presence open to receive His love.  Why not come before Him with empty hands and empty hearts and say to Him: "Lord, here I am; I come to do Your will.  Heal me in whatever way you wish."

Flesh to Flesh

In the afterglow of that great solemnity of the Annunciation in which we celebrate the singular most important event in the whole course of history, the Incarnation, it is the flesh that provides food to ponder (no pun intended).  For it is to our mortal flesh that Christ draws our attention by the hypostatic union—God uniting Himself with mankind.

It is so easy to forget what a good thing the flesh is.  However, when God created the world, what He said of it was that it was good.

Yet we experience such suffering in our flesh that we forget its goodness.  Whether we suffer the emotional pain of the loss of someone dear to us, the physical aches of growing old, the daily weariness of our monotonous work, or simply a seemingly source-less depression, we naturally fall back on a response of hope.  We are made to be creatures of hope.  Thus we long for the day when we shall no longer suffer these things.  We may thereby begin to look condescendingly on this mortal coil that keeps us from the glories of heaven, especially if we struggle with the concupiscence of the flesh.

Despite a hatred of the body that can arise subconsciously in a thousand different ways, one startling fact remains: God waits for us physically in the Blessed Sacrament.  We may forget the great privilege of that Presence with us when we cannot see Him face to face as we long to.  Yet so blessed is that Sacrament that the angels envy us for being able to receive It.

God didn't become man so that He could fill the gap between now and heaven.  He became man because He wants to be united with us now, today, through our bodies and His body given up for us upon the cross, but first given to us through the Eucharist at the Last Supper.

Henri Nouwen speaks beautifully of our desire for that meeting of God through our flesh: 

You are looking for ways to meet Jesus.  You are trying to meet him not only in your mind but also in your body.  You seek his affection, and you know that this affection involves his body as well as yours.  He became flesh for you so that you could encounter him in the flesh and receive his love in the flesh.

Somehow I am finding this message come to me in so many different ways lately. Its ubiquity inclines me to consider its importance for a society so pleasure-oriented as ours, for pleasure is focused ultimately on satisfying the needs of the body. Of course no pleasure satisfies. Always we need more. The desire remains and grows for more and more and more and more.... Because the desire is for something deeper. The desire is for God. It is a desire to meet Him in our flesh.

But something remains in you that prevents this meeting, Henri Nouwen continues. Somehow there is always something that keeps us back. We throw up all sorts of walls to avoid that encounter.

Several weeks ago, I went with a friend to an empowering workshop for prayer leaders. The workshop leader demonstrated the power of intercessory prayer by asking someone to come forward who wanted healing. A man came forward who had one leg shorter than the other. As they prayed over him at first nothing happened. Then it was that the leader asked whether there was something that might prevent him from receiving that healing and so they prayed for his intentions for spiritual healing of pride for which he had asked initially. Then—I heard, although I did not see it with my own eyes—his leg became as long as the other.

So often we want healing. We go to doctors wanting to be cured, trying every treatment. Even if we come to the Divine Physician we may not receive the healing we desire. The question is always: why?

I found an answer at that workshop. I can't say that it is always true, but it may very well be so. For we mortal creatures are not mere bodies like cars to be fixed at the mechanic but a complex union of body and soul with the physical and psychological impacting the spiritual and vice versa. Every act has its effect for better or for worse.

There is so much to say on this subject, but I will end with a simple injunction from Nouwen:

Do not despair, thinking that you cannot change yourself after so many years. Simply enter into the presence of Jesus as you are and ask him to give you a fearless heart where he can be with you. You cannot make yourself different. Jesus came to give you a new heart, a new spirit, a new mind, and a new body. Let him transform you by his love and so enable you to receive his affection in your whole being.

Open the Doors of Your Heart

"Beauty will save the world," said Dostoevsky.  His words may be taken in a general fashion or referring to the Creator Himself.  Either way, he speaks to a deep truth.

Gregory Wolfe supports the power of this statement in his beautiful essay titled "The Wound of Beauty" in which he defends the need for beauty.  He also writes of the power of beauty to strike us to the very depths of our being: "Beauty itself wounds us, pierces our hearts, opens us up."

If beauty wounds, then where shall we find healing?

Ultimately the source of our healing can only be found in the Incarnation.  For there the great rift between God and man is healed by the Creator becoming His own creation.

All of us are called to participate in that great work of healing through incarnating truth in our very selves.  Those of us called to be artists must take that incarnation a step further, revealing the depths of God through various mediums that reflect the core of our very selves.

Yet we artists are no less broken.

Unless we participate in the great work of redemption—the great work of healing—we fail in our vocation.  Our art becomes worthless, a merely shameful display of our talents and self-worth, an excuse for pride and vainglory.  Yet when we allow ourselves to collaborate in Christ's redemptive sacrifice, our handiwork has power beyond what we can imagine.

The question I would propose for you to ponder is this one: how does healing come through art?

I would argue that it comes through much the same way as when Christ healed.  He looked for an open heart—a heart of faith.  When He healed a man who was deaf and dumb, He said: "Ephpheta, which is, 'Be thou opened.'" (Mark 7:34)

It is through being open that we are healed.  Returning again to the theme of the wound of beauty, you can understand how it ties in here: the act of wounding is a means of making an openness.  Whether we allow that wound or whether beauty strikes us without our awareness, opening up our brokenness, we find ourselves in a perfect position to be healed because we have that openness—that vulnerability.  In so doing, we may find ourselves becoming channels of God's grace as well.

Sometimes I think our greatest challenge as artists is to embrace that vulnerability and not to flee from it.  We are often masters of flight.  We disguise our cowardice as perfectionism or scorn or pride or any manner of things.

In the end, when we allow ourselves to be powerless, we experience the freedom of true creation.  That is the paradox.  As Saint Paul said: when we are weak, then we are strong.

That experience of freedom—whether through creative work or through some other means—touches the very depths of our being.  It fills our restless hearts and we want nothing more.  For where we open ourselves to His working, we become one with Him, and He brings healing.

The presence of God hurts.  Beauty wounds.

Yet just as sometimes a bone must be re-broken to set aright or a wound opened to be drained, pain precedes healing—it opens the way.  So God sometimes hurts in order to heal.

All we need to do is open the door of our hearts.  When we have the support of those around us and see their own battle-wounds, we may find the courage to choose the glory of what feels to us like death.

For ultimately the battle for openness lies within the boundaries of our own hearts.  We must go into the desert there and wrestle with ourselves.

A seed must die to bring forth fruit.

That Secret, Lonely Place

A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive.  When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identification, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than as friends with whom we share the gifts of life.

In solitude we can slowly unmask the illusion of our possessiveness and discover in the center of our own self that we are not what we can conquer, but what is given to us.  In solitude we can listen to the voice of the One who spoke to us before we could speak a word, who healed us before we could make any gesture to help, who set us free long before we could free others, and who loved us long before we could give love to anyone.  It is in solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the results of our efforts.  In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared.  It's there we recognize that the healing words we speak are not just our own, but are given to us; that the love we can express is part of a greater love; and that the new life we bring forth is not a property to cling to, but a gift to be received.

-Out of Solitude, by Henri Nouwen

~

Nouwen's words on prayer are so powerful and I find his reflections on loneliness as it relates to prayer all the more piercing.  For truly loneliness does divide us, making us feel as if the whole world is against us, as if we must fight against a tide that never turns, and as if there is no loyal friend to stand beside us.

Yet instead of clinging to that feeling of loneliness, if we can turn it instead into solitude, we will encounter the healing love of God.  We then can learn to love ourselves that we may in turn love others.

In that solitude, in that radiant peace of God filling the depths of our being, we can slowly learn to trust Him, for only when we trust Him can we begin to abandon ourselves to Him and His working within us, just as only when we trust others do we open our hearts to them.  When we know that He is God and loves us more than we love ourselves, then not only shall we be able to trust Him wholly, but we shall rejoice in that love.  We shall know that we are made great because He has become small and come to us.