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The Lack
of Success at Personal Change | Conflicted
about Faith |
Taking God for Granted |
An Example |
Belief | Believing
In Something |
You Cannot Fix Yourself
 AYBE you have
wanted to change your behavior but, despite your seemingly best efforts,
you just cannot succeed. Maybe you have found that no matter how hard you
tried, you just can’t fix
yourself.
Conflicted about
Faith
This lack of success at personal
change actually derives from deep
unconscious
conflicts,[1]
originating in childhood, that prevent individuals from taking
responsibility for their lives, despite their
consciously wanting to change things they don’t like.
It all starts when parents
fail to raise children in an atmosphere of devout
holiness, and fail to teach them to
love and to fear God
and to trust always in His guidance and protection. Lacking clear
guidance—and often suffering outright abuse—the children become
conflicted about Faith itself. They might accept
“faith” intellectually, but it means
nothing to them in any practical sense. Instead of learning to
sacrifice themselves for Christ, children
inadvertently learn, through parental game-playing and manipulation, to seize
whatever satisfaction they can get from the world.
Taking God for
Granted
And so, claiming to value peace
and love, your parents actually sought out pride,
self-advancement, and aggression. In the midst of this
hypocrisy, then, and in your failure to learn
to trust in an unseen God, you essentially learned to believe only in what
you can see. Instead of taking God seriously, you
end up taking God for granted.
Here’s an example to help
explain what I mean.
An
Example
Have you ever noticed some people
in church who are so overweight that they cannot kneel? If you ask them,
they will tell you that kneeling hurts their back. But why do they have back
pain? Isn’t it from overeating and failing
to
exercise? [2]
Now, I’m not going to argue with anyone about who is really disabled
and who is just using feelings of vicitmization to get sympathy or be treated
as “special.” The point is this: Take one of these people crying
“victim” [3]
and put a gun to her head and say, “Get down on your knees and give
me all your money or I will kill you!” She will be on her knees in an
instant, begging you to let her live. To save her life, she will forget her
pain and kneel. She will give up all the money she has with her, and all
her jewelry, to save her life.
And what does Christ tell us
about this? “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill
the body but after that can do no more. I shall show you whom to fear. Be
afraid of the one who after killing has the power to cast into Gehenna; yes,
I tell you, be afraid of that one” (Luke 12:4-5).
In case you’re not clear
about this, who is “the one who after killing has the power to cast
into Gehenna”? Well, it’s God himself, who, as our creator, has
power over our bodies and our souls.
And so we will kneel before a
gunman, but before God—our creator and judge—we refuse to kneel
or genuflect, saying it’s too
inconvenient, too painful, or just not necessary.
So why should this be? Well,
it can be summed up in one word: belief.
Belief
We can easily believe that a
man with a gun can kill anyone. But many of us don’t really believe
that God cares about our every thought and action. Many of us don’t
really believe that the theological concept of sin
is relevant today or that our sins separate us from God’s
love. Many of us don’t really believe that
hell, the antithesis of love, exists. Many of
us don’t really believe that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist
as evidence of His love for us—or if we do believe it, we believe it
only intellectually. And so many of us don’t really believe that our
salvation depends on giving up everything contrary
to love in order to serve God in total purity
and
humility.
Believing
In Something
Many of us don’t really
believe any of this because we are too preoccupied with “believing
in” [4]
the world around us, chasing after every
illusory self-satisfying pleasure it shows
us in the promise of numbing the emotional pain of childhood victimization.
We refuse to deny ourselves because the world seems too real, too much of
a good thing, too close at hand, too accessible, too comforting in our
loneliness.
But Christianity is something
else entirely. Christ does not numb our pain—He heals it, if only we
believe in Him. He quenches our thirst for real life if only we turn
away from the water of the world—water that has to be drawn again and
again—and seek the living water that quenches our thirst
forever.
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 Blessed are those
who have not seen and have believed. There is here a particular reference
to ourselves; we hold in our hearts one we have not seen in the flesh. We
are included in these words, but only if we follow up our faith with good
works. The true believer practices what he believes. But of those who pay
only lip service to faith, Paul has this to say: They profess to know
God, but they deny him in their works. Therefore James says: Faith
without works is dead. |
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— From a homily on the
Gospels
by Saint Gregory the Great, pope,
Office of Readings,
July 3: Thomas, Apostle |
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If only you would
believe—in Jesus.
“Now Jesus did many other
signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.
But these are written that you may come to
believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of
God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name” (John
20:30-31). And what did Christ say just before that? Blessed are those
who have not seen and who have believed (John
20:29).
You Cannot Fix
Yourself
And so, in the end, there’s
only one thing left to say. You cannot fix yourself. Numbing your emotional
pain heals nothing and only keeps you enslaved to unconscious feelings of
victimization. Only Christ can fix you, if you
really believe that Jesus is the Messiah,
the Son of God—and if you are willing to do everything it
takes [5]
to kneel before Him in awe and
love.
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