Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

Does not all sin come from woundedness? It seems that each time I self-examine for sin, what I find is tied to my own woundedness. So, is it really to be guilty over or simply to be healed?

 
ell, to be clever I could say, “No—and Yes. Because there is sin and there is sin, and there is woundedness and there is woundedness.” Anyway, we should forget about being clever—the point is to recognize that the whole issue can be very confusing.

A good place to begin is with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, especially with §§386–412.

Notice that everything begins with the concept of Original Sin. To keep it simple, Original Sin refers to the fact that we live essentially blind to the presence of God. How and why this is so is anybody’s guess—the Bible tells the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall to explain it. But you can just feel it with your heart: we are separated from the direct vision and knowledge of God. Any knowledge we have of God comes from revelation, when God reveals himself to us—as in Scripture, through the prophets, and, ultimately, through Christ.

OK. Original Sin is the state of human nature into which we all are born, a kind of spiritual blindness. But notice that none of us is personally responsible for this state. As §405 says, “it is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it; subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death; . . .” I’ll break off from the text here to point out that at this point we could say that our woundedness is the result of sin and that it is nothing “to be guilty over.”

But the text continues, “. . . and inclined to sin—an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence. Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ’s grace, erases original sin and turns a man back toward God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.” This means that because of the concupiscence we tend to do things with our lives that are personally corrupt. This is how we constantly injure others by our self-centered behaviors and how we, in our hearts, defile, mock, and execute divine love in every moment of our lives—and this IS a cause for true sorrow.

Often an adult will scold a child, saying, “You’re bad!” But that’s a big psychological mistake. A child may do something bad, but that does not make the child bad. So to hear someone say, “You’re bad!” only makes the child feel deep humiliation and shame.   And the same principle applies to sin. The fact that you commit sin—that is, do bad things—does not make you a bad person. Catholic theology teaches that human nature is essentially good, and that the proclivity to sin can be overcome by divine grace when we repent our bad behavior—that is, see it as a true offense against God’s love, feel sorrow for it, and turn to God for mercy.

Read an excerpt from a letter about repentance by Saint Clement, pope

This personal sin, therefore, is the result of woundedness. So do you get it? That’s what I meant earlier about the “No—and Yes”: original sin causes our woundedness, and this woundedness leads to personal sin. So woundedness is caught in the middle.

And there’s the connection to psychology.

Psychology can look at the ways in which we cope with our woundedness—our essential brokenness, fragmentation, and vulnerability that lead us to dwell in self-pity and to neglect the good of others. Either we accept the woundedness by recognizing our blindness, embracing our weakness, and listening to its pain—i.e., healing our wounds through real love which binds us together in Christ—or we hide from it, seducing the despair with impiety, creating more and more woundedness, and more and more guilt.

Sadly, in spite of all that psychology has to offer within the Church, many persons today prefer to believe that because “God created me the way I am” they don’t have to scrutinize and change their personal behavior. Instead, they concern themselves with what they “know.” Some take up the Protestant idea that salvation comes from knowing that Christ is your “personal savior.” Some take up non-Christian religious practices in which spirituality depends, for example, on knowing how to meditate properly.

But none of this “knowing,” in itself, is sufficient to motivate you to accept the suffering, sacrifice, and prayer which the Bible, the Church fathers, and the Catholic mystics have consistently said are absolutely necessary to purge you of the imperfections of sin.

	When I beheld that vision in which I saw the magnitude of the stain of even one least sin against God, I know not why I did not die. I said, “I no longer marvel that Hell is so horrible . . . . since I have beheld the terrible stain caused by but one venial sin. And what, in comparison to that, would be a mortal sin? And then so many mortal sins?”
	—Saint Catherine of Genoa The Life and Doctrine of St. Catherine of Genoa, First Part, Chapter XXII

So it’s very simple: You can’t commit sin and love God at the same time—you have to choose one or the other because, in essence, sin is anything and everything that offends love.

	Whoever says, “I know Him,” but does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps His word, the love of God is truly perfected in him.
	—1 John 2:4-5

And it’s very sad that some persons, despite all they “know,”—even knowing that God is love—will spend their entire lives avoiding that fundamental choice: sin or God.

What the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

1855  Mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God’s law; it turns man away from God, who is his ultimate end and his beatitude, by preferring an inferior good to him.
 
1861  Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back. However, although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God.
 

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