Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Love

Be gentle with the sinner, But be firm in your refusal to condone sin.

 
Love’s Opposite: Sin | Forms of Love | Charity Raised to the Divine: Real Love | Sin’s Antidote

 
OME people claim that the Church puts too much emphasis on the concept of sin, and that, if parents didn’t scare children with talk of sin and focused more on love, the world would be a better place. This argument can even lead to the idea that we should accept everything in the name of Christian love, and that we lack charity and are being judgmental merely to speak about sin. “It’s offensive to another’s individuality,” they claim, “to say that something that ‘does not really hurt others’ is morally wrong.”

Well, it’s a great sadness that most parents do not teach their children how to love. Love is hard work, and most parents shrink from that work. When children do something wrong, for example, it’s far easier to tell the children they will go to hell if they misbehave than to show them consistently, by example, that all behavior should be motivated by love for God. And so the children grow up being afraid of hell and understanding nothing about true love.

 
Love’s Opposite: Sin

Still, sin is a reality. In psychological terms, sin can be described as a sort of infatuation with the vanity of our personal desires. That is, most people are narcissistically preoccupied with their immediate desires and have little, if any, altruistic awareness of anyone or anything else around them. Psychologically, this behavior allows you to feel good about yourself (that is, to feel strong and “in control”) by using, hurting, or neglecting someone else. Sin therefore leads you away from true love and compassion, and it sends you right into all the predicaments of self-indulgence. Sin really does hurt others because sin defiles love.

Sin, as an act of free will, defiles the very love that created free will. God created free will as an act of love so that we would be capable of sharing in His love. But when we abuse our free will to seek our own self-satisfaction, we spurn divine love.

To see what is required to overcome this abuse, then, let’s look more closely at the meaning of love in general and charity in particular.

 
Forms of Love

Love, in its purest and most divine meaning refers to something so far beyond our comprehension that it is, well, incomprehensible. Christian theology says that “God is love,” but most us can grasp that concept only intellectually. Many Catholic mystics through the ages, however, have had an immediate experiential encounter with divine love, and they all end up saying essentially the same thing: I thought my heart would burst and that I would die right there.

	But by reason of this secret and intimate union with God, there remains in the Soul a sweet impression, so firm and assured a satisfaction, that no torture, however cruel, could overpower it, and a zeal so ardent that a man, had he a thousand lives, would risk them all for that hidden consciousness which is so strong that hell itself could not destroy it.
	—Saint Catherine of Genoa Spiritual Dialogue, Part Third, Chapter X

This sort of love is what Roman Catholic mysticism is all about: a love for Christ so overwhelming that a person would risk anything and give up anything to get close to it.

Read about the martyrdom of love by Saint Jane Frances de Chantal

 
In order to understand this divine love, however, let’s consider love’s other meanings commonly accessible to general secular human experience.

•	A child’s love for a parent refers to a natural emotional bond every child must make with a caretaker in order to survive the helplessness of infancy and childhood. This childlike love for a parent aptly describes the love we commonly feel for God as well—that is, when we are not in mystical ecstasy experiencing a taste of love in its most profound possibilities!
•	We also naturally love our siblings within our families; this is called brotherly love, and it is necessary for peace and growth in families—although sibling rivalry often manifests in dysfunctional families.
•	What we commonly call romantic love, or erotic love (from the Greek eros), is just “common love”—a politically correct distortion of real love. Romance—in all truth, and contrary to popular sentiment—is actually a mixture of two things: a dependent, infantile attachment to a caretaker, and desire.      Now, infantile dependence needs no further explanation.      Desire, in the psychological sense, refers to our attempts to fill ourselves with things that feel pleasurable or soothing, so as to hide from ourselves the reality of our essential human emptiness and brokenness. When you look at another person with desire, you do not see a soul enrobed in chaste beauty; you see only your own exuberant fantasy that your aching throb of loneliness might be alleviated.      Romance, therefore, is the desire to fill your bodily emptiness with an attachment to the body of another person—a person as broken and empty as you are.       Desire isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. Although Buddhism, for example, teaches that all desire must be avoided,[1] and although Christian theology teaches us that misplaced desire can lead us straight into sin, desire can be raised to the level of the divine. In fact, that’s the essence of the Catholic mystic tradition: to desire union with God as the supreme desire. As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God (Psalm 42:2). In this mystical desire for God we turn away from the illusory social attractions of the world around us and turn only to God for strength and refuge. That’s what it means to “die” to the world. And that’s a necessary step toward holiness for everyone—clerics, religious, and the laity.    Read an excerpt from a writing about love by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
•	We can naturally love our neighbors, too; this is called neighborly love, and it, too, is necessary for social survival—although aggression and war often stain all societies.

 
Charity Raised to the Divine: Real Love

Our natural human capacity for charity is but a faint reflection of the divine love by which God created and redeemed us. Yet when human charity is raised to the level of the divine through Christ, it enters into a true mystery. In regard to charity, or real love, then, Christ told us something very important. Listen to what He said.

	No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
	—John 15:13

Now, think about this. Why would someone lay down one’s life for anyone except to save that person from something?

Well, this brings us right back to the topic of sin.

 
Sin’s Antidote

The Hebrew word for sin, hata’a, means to “miss the mark.” Consequently, to save us from the emptiness of self-satisfaction into which we have wandered and to bring us back to the point—the river of life—God gave us his only beloved Son. In true love for us, God knew that only through his Son’s freely willed Passion and death can the free will of a hardened sinner be brought to sorrow and contrition.

Jesus loves everyone, and He calls everyone into His love. But to accept this call we must give up everything that is not love. That is, we must give up sin.

Thus our task in life is to accept God’s love—the loving gift of redemption that God, in His great mercy, offers us. We have only to do as Christ commanded us—“As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (John 13:34)—by sacrificing our pride and desire for personal pleasure in order to repent our sins and help save others from their sins.

This, then, explains the Christian meaning of suffering. Just as Christ suffered and died for us, so we must “die” to our natural desire for self-satisfaction and then offer our suffering for others, in the hope that they might be saved from their sins. As Christians, we are called to “pray and make sacrifices” for others (as Our Lady of Fátima told the children), freely offering our suffering as the price it takes to bring hardened sinners to contrition. Remember, this capacity to suffer derives from a love of such a firm and assured satisfaction that no torture, however cruel, could overpower it.

As long as you are concerned about what you can get from life, you will always be dissatisfied. Everything material—food, entertainment, drugs, erotic pleasure—passes quickly only to leave us overpowered by cravings for more. True love, however, endures every insult peacefully and so it can never be overpowered by anything.

Real love—or true love—therefore, is not about getting noticed or feeling accepted. Real love is a process of giving—not the giving of material things that merely bribe others to like us, but the giving of qualities such as patience, kindness, compassion, understanding, mercy, forbearance, and forgiveness, qualities whose ultimate purpose is the salvation of other souls.

Now, many persons today claim to love Christ. But do they really love Him? Are they willing to do anything it takes to purify themselves for His service? Are they willing to love their enemies—that is, to endure peacefully the suffering caused by their enemies and to offer it as a prayerful sacrifice for the repentance and conversion of those very enemies? Or, instead of really loving Christ, do they simply take satisfaction in the idea of loving Him and let real love wither and die in the darkness of their hearts?

In order to love others in the way of true love, though, we have to see sin for what it is, in all its pervasive, ugly reality. This isn’t at all depressing—in fact, it should be a cause for joy, because seeing sin for what it is opens the possibility of mercy. What greater charity is there than this?

But if we can’t see sin for what it is, then we aren’t loving our neighbor, we’re loving his sin—and that is depressing.

Notes

1. Buddhism, an atheistic natural philosophy, denies the reality of God. And consequently, even though some of its followers may acknowledge Jesus as a “good man” or a prophet, they deny the divinity of Jesus the Christ.
    Buddhism teaches that all suffering is the result of desire. Suffering has no value in such a philosophy, so it teaches a deadening of all desire as an escape from suffering.
    Many individuals, therefore, are drawn to Buddhist practices because they seem to offer an esoteric “spirituality” while making no moral demands on a person beyond the ethics of non-attachment and acceptance.
    But genuine spirituality must embrace the redemptive purpose of sacrifice and suffering when endured in love for others, as Christ demanded, and this true love, therefore, can be understood properly only in the context of Christian theology. Without God, there can be no love, only self-indulgence—and without a proper understanding of love in the first place there can be no meaning in God sending His Son to redeem us, and no meaning in suffering as the only means to overcome sin: that which “misses the point” about love.
    Considering all of this, it’s ironic that atheistic Eastern philosophies have so many techniques for achieving self-restraint and self-discipline, and yet they know nothing about love of God. Yet so many Catholics, who possess, through the Church, all the graces necessary to dwell in God’s love, scorn the discipline necessary to make efficacious use of those graces.