Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

On the Vanity of Protest

You can’t carry your cross if you’re carrying resentment.

 
HENEVER children are hurt, for whatever reason, some part of them cries out, “Stop, or I’ll die!” Then, through the tears, a desire for some form of recognition and compensation takes shape. A piece of food, a piece of candy, a piece of money—whatever it might be—brings the teary, blurred world back into focus. Death fades away and life resumes.

That’s the way it works for children.

Therefore, even as adults, there will always be a child-like part of us that seeks some recognition of our pain and some compensation for any hurt we suffer. We will say, “Why me? This isn’t fair!” We will feel like innocent victims being persecuted by the world. We will point our fingers in blame. 

Like Hamlet holding a mirror up to his mother,^[1] the person feeling victimized will seek to show the world its own face as “evidence” that, he hopes, will condemn the world for its own injustice.

Hamlet appealed to his mother, lost as she was in her own vain deception, hoping that she would recognize her sin. But where was his father? Dead, and seeking revenge. Receiving small satisfaction from his mother, Hamlet therefore took matters into his own hands. And so a play about revenge ends on a stage littered with corpses.

And so when we march in the streets and in picket lines, whom do we hope will see us? Whose gaze do we seek psychologically? Just as Hamlet appealed to his deceived mother, perhaps we, frustrated with the injustices of the world, unconsciously appeal to our own deceived mother—to Eve herself? And all the while we wage our futile protest, holding up a mirror to the Mother of Disobedience, the devil snickers in the background.

Where, then, is our Father? Well, unlike Hamlet’s dead father, our Father is everywhere, a living God, witnessing everything. What injustice can occur that God has not already seen? And in His Passion and death, did not Christ experience personally every injustice known to humanity? And did He not endure all injustice with prayer, forbidding us to take revenge?

A child copes with life by trying to get others to change their behavior, so as to make things more manageable for himself. Persons of mature wisdom, however, cope with life by patiently enduring suffering—without hatred and without anger—for the sake of love itself: to be filled with love and to sow seeds of that love in the world around them. The agents of evil, therefore, choose protest—and terrorism—as their choice weapons, but the humble and the just can say, “My help comes from the LORD, the maker of heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:2).

Therefore, if we choose to listen to a living Father, rather than a dead one, we will learn to pray, rather than protest. We will pray in faith, trusting in divine justice, rather than take matters into our own hands only to die in a world littered with corpses.

	How long, O LORD? I cry for help but You do not listen! I cry out to You, “Violence!” but You do not intervene. Why do You let me see ruin; why must I look at misery? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and clamorous discord.   Then the LORD answered me and said: Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that one can read it readily. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late. The rash one has no integrity; but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.
	—Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4

If you end up in hell because you try to fight the devil with anything other than love, you will have no one to blame but yourself.

Questions and Answers: About human rights and the U.S. Constitution

 
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1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV.