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 ES, this church
is cold,” the priest admitted at the beginning of his homily. The priest
was referring to problems with the building’s furnace, but I knew from
years of Lacanian psychoanalytic training
that another meaning hid behind his prophetic words. I looked at the huge
drop cloth covering the chapel of the Blessed Virgin. “Some sort of
renovation,” I thought, but I didn’t miss the message that on that
day in particular Mary’s chapel was closed. So I considered the deeper
meaning in the priest’s words.
The
Chill
While the priest gave his homily
about social justice, my thoughts wandered off into a consideration of what
he wasn’t saying. Just as I must be careful not to be misled by what
my clients say to me and have to listen carefully for what they
don’t say—and are therefore trying to avoid—I thought
about his words. Yes, social justice is admirable. But what about devotion?
What about prayer? What about the total submission
of self to God that has to occur internally through divine grace, especially
with the aid of the Sacraments, before one
can even think about social changes? In the midst
of these reflections I heard his voice again. “This church is cold.”
And so I understood. On that particular day, with the Blessed Virgin’s
presence covered up, as I shivered in the cold draft blowing through the
pews of that parish, the chill of neglected devotion bit my heart.
And that chill, like the misty
rain, lingered through the day.
At a dinner later that evening
I met a nun who worked with a rehabilitation program for prostitutes. She
clearly had the hard-nosed features of a shrewd administrator. I wondered
if she had the spirit of Mary in her heart.
During the course of the evening,
the nun told us about a prostitute who, as a young child, had been physically
and sexually abused by her father and who was struggling
to forgive him. “I don’t think I could forgive someone who abused
me like that,” she concluded.
I winced. Doesn’t the capacity
to forgive point out the difference between the
Blessed Virgin and a feminist? No wonder she didn’t
wear a habit. No wonder she had been talking earlier about waiting for the
day when there would be women “priests.” Here was a nun admitting
that her furnace, too, had been shut off. I felt the chill in the
air.[1]
Seduction
If there were no lust, there
would be no prostitution. If men were
not roaming the world—after the example of the devil, “like roaring
lions, looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8)—preoccupied
with the desire for self-indulgent pleasure, there would be no money in
prostitution. If women were not willing to use their bodies as goods to be
bartered for wealth and power, the flame of lust would die out. If we, men
and women, did not trust so much in psychological
defenses against our emotional wounds, we would
trust in God and wouldn’t be so vulnerable to
seduction.
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Make no mistake:
God is not mocked, for a person will reap only what he sows, because the
one who sows for his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one
who sows for the spirit will reap everlasting life from the
spirit. |
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—Galatians 6:7–8b |
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Forgiveness—and
Transformation
Certainly, women have received
many wounds from men throughout history. And with this sadness comes the
danger of temptation to fall bitterly into an obsession with
revenge. Granted,
politics is based on revenge. But Christianity
isn’t. In order to receive refuge and forgiveness, one must
forgive.
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But if you do
not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your
transgressions. |
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—Matthew 6:15 |
Every personal injury has to
be carried and healed within one’s own heart, through an inner
transformation by Christ’s real presence. To bear all injuries through
surrender to God is the basis of any sanctuary in God. And sometimes, when
we recite words about forgiving others, as in the
Lord’s Prayer, we really don’t
understand what we are saying.
How often do we recite prayers
as if they were just a string of words? In our psychological impatience,
we end up endowing our reverence with all the murk of split pea
soup—“Elemeno P” soup, we might say, if you remember your
childhood alphabet recital.
So we all too often miss the
reverence of slow, prayerful submission, and in this loss we miss the
seven distinct petitions of the Lord’s
Prayer. And one of them is Thy will be done.
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To say that we
abandon our will to another’s will seems very easy until through experience
we realize that this is the hardest thing one can do if one does it as it
should be done. |
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—Saint Teresa of Avila
The Way of Perfection, ch. 12, no. 5 |
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Yes, “as it should be
done”: through true inner transformation with devotion and
prayer.
The
Goddess
When a person grows cold by
neglecting true inner transformation through devotion and prayer, he or she
may as well be a pagan devotee of the goddess through New Age
“spirituality” where
sin has been “deconstructed” into a mere
patriarchal invention that “oppresses free-spirited souls” who
take delight in their “wicked” disobedience.
And who is this
goddess?
Let’s just say the goddess
took on all comers without discrimination. But not for money. In her time,
in the days when her natural cycle of birth, initiation, consummation,
repose, and death was worshipped solstice after solstice, year after
year, she demanded only one thing: recurring human sacrifice—the death
of her current king and consort. It was a gruesome reality hidden behind
the allure of being non-judgmental and able to feel good about yourself by
basking in all things
“natural.”
So what does this goddess want
today?
Maybe, like Shylock claiming
his pound of
flesh,[2]
she wants the destruction of the one King who wouldn’t give her what
she wanted and instead told her to “go and sin no
more.”
Hell hath no fury like a goddess
spurned.
The Real New
Age: the New Spiritual Dark Age
When the Roman Empire collapsed
as a result of barbarian invasions and the destruction of Rome, all of the
technological expertise of the Roman culture was lost as well. In the following
centuries, the Dark Ages of Western Europe were dark because of the loss
of secular learning. But there was no loss of
faith. In fact, during the Middle Ages, the Catholic
Church provided western culture with its only light, its only source of human
dignity and hope.
Today, we are awash in technology.
We are so overly dependent on trust in gadgets—and the glorification
of the self that they buttress—that most
persons have lost any sense of trust in God. And so we are on the brink of
a new Dark Age—a spiritual Dark Age of ingratitude, insolence,
and atheism, lost in its own spiritual
blindness.
New Age Healing
Practices
Christianity teaches us that
all of us, through a fundamental disobedience and lack
of trust, have lost the place in divine life for which God created us.
Christ, the only Son of God, came into this world, like a shepherd looking
for lost sheep, to lead us back into the divine presence. In his flesh he
manifested
faith: “Whoever
has seen me has seen the Father”(John 14:9). And in the shedding of
his blood he manifested love, the willingness
to sacrifice oneself for the sake of saving others from their own
self-destruction.
Thus Christ told his Apostles,
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father
except through me” (John 14:6). Therefore there is no healing, no truth,
and no path to divine glory except through the Cross, the way of
sacrifice, obedience, and prayer. So, if we want
truth and life, we have to follow Christ in the Way of the Cross.
Still, many persons
fear the cross. Beaten down by abuse and
hypocrisy, they
desire only to be accepted and validated. Like
that nun in the story above, casting forgiveness from their hearts, and angry
with the Father because of the sins of their own
fathers, they want an easy way to feel good about
themselves.
And so a multitude of lost and
wounded souls seek out healing practices that, within an offer of easy
acceptance, covertly oppose fundamental Christian faith.
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All these
non-Christian practices, in denying or subverting the reality of sin, hold
out the expectation that we can set aside our dependence on receiving divine
grace through the Sacraments, and, like an angry, spurned goddess, they seduce
us into taking matters into our own hands so as to attempt to heal
ourselves of our separation from the divine life. |
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Buddhism.
Buddhism is not a religion; in its purity, it is an Oriental, atheistic
philosophy whose goal is to escape human suffering. Because the philosophy
is an ethical system, based in a natural philosophy with nothing in it that
must be “believed” (as opposed to a theological system based in
supernaturally revealed truth), its ideas are often taught in the West for
their value in achieving a sense of psychological relaxation.
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Many individuals
who have turned away from God—especially because of
anger at God—turn to Buddhism precisely because
the system holds out nothing to believe in. But
in the psychological sense, what does it mean to believe in? Well,
in the words of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we
“ believe in beings in so far as they are
able to say
something.” [3]
And what is Christianity all about but the Word of God speaking to us, saying
something very, very important? That Word is the core of all belief—and
the core of all love. So, with nothing to believe
in, you put yourself in a wasteland where there is no real love, no God,
nothing at all. You can call this emptiness Nirvana or anything else you
want, but it has nothing to do with Heaven. |
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Centering
Prayer. This type of prayer is a form of meditation, similar to
Transcendental Meditation (TM). TM was popularized by a Hindu guru in the
US and Europe during the latter part of the 1960s, just as the new Age of
Aquarius began to billow into the world on clouds of marijuana smoke. In
Centering Prayer a person spends a half hour or so once or twice a day focusing
on his or her breathing to establish a sense of relaxation. A
“Christianized” form of this prayer instructs practitioners to
meditate on the name of
Jesus.[4]
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Simple forms of
meditation can be helpful in teaching a person how to relax and focus attention.
Similar practices based in pure physiology, such as
Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) and
Autogenics (both of which I explain on A Guide to
Psychology and its Practice), can also facilitate a healthy state of
mental and bodily relaxation. All of these psychological practices
can serve as a prelude to learning more complex forms of prayer and contemplation
in the context of the Christian worship of the Triune God. |
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The danger with centering
prayer (and all other similar practices), for a Christian, is that a person
is tempted to follow just simple, easy practices (such as spending only a
half hour in meditation a day) and neglect other
prayer (such as the Celebration of the
Eucharist, Eucharistic Adoration, the
Liturgy of the Hours, the
Rosary, and the Chaplet
of The Divine Mercy) as well as the moral
obligations of a holy lifestyle. In this neglect of worship, devotion,
and morality, the psychology of the self becomes raised to the level
of the mystical, and Christianity becomes reduced to a form of
“Christian” Buddhism. |
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Reiki.
Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that allegedly
promotes healing. It is administered by physical touch (or near touch), as
a sort of “laying on of hands.” Reiki is based on the idea that
it can stimulate and direct an unseen “life force energy” in such
a way that facilitates “spiritually-guided” physical healing.
Practitioners claim that Reiki is not a religion, but they advocate “simple
ethical ideals” that supposedly promote peace and harmony.
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Peace and harmony
sound nice, don’t they? Well, the danger is
that those “simple ethical ideals” are a watered-down
version of Christian morality that, like a Trojan Horse, will attack genuine
Christianity from within. Just remember that if you follow the way of
sacrifice, obedience, and prayer, your
“energy fields” will be guided by Christ Himself.
What greater healing is there than that? |
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Spiritism.
Some forms of healing are claimed to have been received as teachings directly
from angels or as “channeling” from spirits.
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In his letter to
the Colossians, Saint Paul warned against anyone who advocates
“ the worship of angels, taking his stand
on visions” (Colossians 2:18). Let us not forget that not all
angels are holy beings; the fallen angels are
demonic. A Christian who dabbles in spiritism is
playing with fire—hell fire. |
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Wicca.
Wicca is another name for witchcraft, though Wicca tends more often than
not to be practiced as a form of “white” witchcraft—a worship
of the White Goddess—rather than outright Satanism. Wicca can be traced
back to Neolithic and Bronze Age fertility cults that included human sacrifice
as a fundamental component of the natural cycle of the seasons.
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In today’s world,
especially because of the fascination with fantasy
literature, Wicca tends to be popular with those who seek a
“natural” spirituality. But the spirits of nature are fallen
angels—that is, demons. Wicca also tends to be
popular with school girls who are completely ignorant of the demonic dangers
with which they dabble. In fact, many girls are led into Wicca by feminist
teachers (and nuns!) trying to reclaim some sort of mythic “lost
femininity.” But Wicca is fundamentally opposed to Christianity, for
the White Goddess wants nothing more than the destruction of the one King
she couldn’t seduce. |
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Yoga.
Yoga, an ancient Hindu practice, has two basic forms. Raja
yoga consists of meditational practices based in
polytheistic religious beliefs. Hatha yoga consists of body movements
that purport to enhance the flow of body energy forces.
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If practiced purely
as a form of self-discipline and physical exercise to keep the body limber,
hatha yoga can be helpful even to a Christian. Its danger derives from the
anti-Christian spiritual beliefs that underlie its physical practices. |
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___________
1. One reader, a Protestant woman, has actually
demanded that I remove this story. And yet in making this demand she only
proves the psychological point of this entire web page. That is, in hearing
that this nun—indeed, any person—is subject to God’s judgment,
the reader’s fear of punishment for her own
unconscious anger is aroused, and so she reacts
by demanding that the truth be suppressed. Therefore, we can say that a fear
of punishment is the psychological basis for the New Age denial of sin.
So please remember that neither in protesting God’s justice nor in
attempting to hide from it will you be saved from it. Your only hope is to
reconcile yourself with God the Father through the
mercy offered to us through Christ His Son.
2. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of
Venice, Act I, Scene III.
3. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar of 21 January
1975.” In Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality:
Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (New York: W. W. Norton
[paperback], 1985). See p. 169.
4. The Jesus Prayer was popular with the desert
monks of the Eastern Church who practiced
hesychasm (from the Greek
hesychia, stillness). The prayer has many variations, from the basic
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me” to a shorter
“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy” to an even shorter “Son of
God, help me.” If the prayer is practiced properly as a way to pray
constantly (see the writings collectively known as the Philokalia
for more information) it will lead to an understanding of Christianity as
an all-encompassing lifestyle of mind in the
heart, and it will draw you into true detachment
from the world. Many persons today, however, make
the unfortunate error of using the Jesus Prayer as a quasi-Buddhist meditative
practice where the words themselves, rather than their heartfelt meaning,
drive away distractions. Still, the Jesus Prayer
can be used today by the laity as a sort of background prayer to maintain
a constant awareness of God within the silent spaces between and behind all
of our work activities. Think of it as a “mortar” that binds together
all the other work and vocal prayers of the
day.
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Discover a Catholic relaxation
recording
Huh? Freewill website?
What’s this about? 
