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Psychological Healing
in the Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

I am quite comfortable without marriage. What do I need a husband for? I can still have children with my partner.

 
I am quite comfortable, you say. So now listen to what you are really saying unconsciously.

When the gang of thugs came to arrest Jesus in the garden, he declared to them, “I AM,” and they fell to the ground in reverence and fear (John 18:5–6). This concise statement defines Jesus as divine, according to the name God gave for himself to Moses (Exodus 3:14). But Judas didn’t bring the soldiers to Christ in order to worship him; he brought them to betray him and have him arrested. Thus in his act of betrayal Judas essentially refused the name of Christ’s divinity by reducing its I AM to a descriptive statement: “You are.” You are a body to be seized and bound. And so Jesus responds again, this time descriptively: “I told you that I AM” (John 18:8)—that is, I am the one you seek, the one pointed out to you by my betrayer.

In accepting the betrayal, Jesus raises its descriptive element to the level of divine description, as he does throughout John’s Gospel: I am the one you seek because I am the way, I am the truth, I am the light. . . . All the implicit meanings of the I AM from Exodus are made explicit in Christ.

Notice that our proper response to the I AM is worship, for in worship we accept and adore divinity. That’s why in our baptismal vows we answer “I DO” to the questions about rejecting Satan and sin. And it’s also why, in the ceremony of Holy Matrimony, we answer “I DO” as our acceptance of the sacrament. With each “I DO” we turn away from the sins of the flesh and the world. With each “I DO” we turn toward the spirit. With each “I DO” we cease treating each other as mere bodies. With each “I DO” we sacrifice the comforts of the body in order to revere the spirit.

Which brings us to your I am. “I am comfortable,” you say. Thus you refuse the “I DO” of Holy Matrimony—and divinity with it—to make yourself into nothing but a descriptive statement. A body for recreational stimulation. A body to produce a baby. A body to be seized and bound by sin. A body to defile the Body of Christ. And sadly, in all of this, you betray Christ as much as Judas did.

 


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Recommended Reading
 
A treasure of a resource for psychological and spiritual healing. Information gathered from my websites (including this webpage) is now available at your fingertips in book form.

 

Falling Families, Fallen Children by Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D. Do our children see a mother and a father both living in contemplative love for God with a constant awareness of His presence and engaged in an all-out battle with the evil of the world? More often than not our children don’t see living faith. They don’t see protection from evil. They don’t see genuine, fruitful devotion. They don’t see genuine love for God. Instead, they see our external acts of devotion as meaningless because they see all the other things we do that contradict the true faith. Thus we lose credibility—and when parents lose credibility, children become cynical and angry and turn to the social world around them for identity and acceptance. They are children who have more concern for social approval than for loving God. They are fallen children. Let’s bring them back.

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Where Catholic therapy (Catholic psychotherapy) is explained according to Catholic psychology in the tradition of the Catholic mystics.