Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

True Love
True Wisdom
True Healing . . .

Thoughts and Sayings about the Psychology of Spiritual Healing

THIS WEBSITE, along with A Guide to Psychology and its Practice, has so much information on it that a person could spend hours reading all the various web pages.

Therefore, I have started to collect here many short sayings and thoughts from both websites to provide an overview of the entire work.

Click on the initial letter of any quote to go to the web page from which the quote originates.

 
Anger | Competition | Culture | Despair | Depression | Evil | Family | Fear | Forgiveness | Hate | Healing | Honesty | Hope | Humility | Identity | Love | Peace | Prayer | Romance and Eroticism | Self-sabotage | Sin | Spirituality | Spiritual Purgation | Suffering | Suicide | Trauma | The Unconscious | Victimization

 
Hate

The spiritually negative emotion of hate does not necessarily mean a passionate loathing; it can just as well be a quiet, secret desire for harm to come upon someone or something. Hate can be a subtle thing, therefore, and it often is experienced more unconsciously than consciously. Consequently, it will often be very easy to deny that you feel any hatred for anyone at all.
     Note also that hatred and anger are theologically synonymous. Christ Himself taught the crowds, “But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:22). And Saint John the Evangelist reflected this sentiment when he said, in one of his letters, “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15). The theological implication of these texts, therefore, is that any desire for harm to come to another person—whether through active loathing or through passive resentment—is, in its spiritual essence, an evil desire to remove the fullness of life (with its possibility of love and forgiveness) from that person.

When you fight fire with fire you run the risk of getting burned yourself. And have no doubt that Satan knows this. If he cannot destroy you directly with an attack, he will try to make you destroy yourself in sin through the hatred and hostility you feel for being attacked.

And it’s just a shame that so many persons, even many who call themselves religious, who haven’t learned their psychological lessons about loving—and praying for and forgiving—their enemies, rather than hating them, become terrorists in their own hearts, in their own communities, and, ultimately, in the world at large.

Trying to change the behavior of others will only cause stress, along with physiological complications such as high blood pressure, when others refuse to do what you want them to do. Moreover, the obstinacy of others will be a wound to your pride, and that can drive you right into the snares of hatred and spiritual murder.

Whether your dysfunction be extreme—such as suicide, drug addiction, alcoholism, and personality disorders—or more subtle—such as perfectionism, chronic procrastination, or a lack of success in a career—it all has an unconscious intent of hating and hurting your parents (especially your father in regard to his lack of guidance, protection, or emotional involvement) by hating and hurting yourself. And, because this intent is unconscious, it can be maintained right into adulthood—even after your parents have died!

In psychology there is an axiom that anxiety and relaxation cannot both exist in a person at the same time; this fact has become the empirical basis for systematic desensitization, a procedure for treating phobias. The spiritual realm has a similar axiom: you cannot hate a person and pray for him at the same time. And so, if you train yourself to pray for the repentance and conversion of anyone who insults or offends you, then it becomes impossible to hate that person—and all of your primitive rage therefore dissolves.

 
Healing

Many people enter psychotherapy hoping to get rid of pain. Some people even manage to use psychotherapy to hide from their emotional pain. But a good psychotherapist won’t let you hide from your past or your future, and you will be encouraged to take up the “cup” of your destiny, however much you might wish it would pass from you.

No unconscious problem deserves to be gotten rid of. All problems need to be treated with compassion and respect. In fact, the part of you caught up in today’s problem probably served to keep you alive in the past. Once you come to terms with its unconscious “message” it can quietly retire, or it can find a new, healthy protective role in your life. But if it is “killed off” its wisdom is lost with it.

Unlike medical surgery, psychotherapy must be performed without anesthetics. You have to be aware of the process, you have to feel the pain, and you have to look directly at the ugly gore inside of you. It’s no wonder that most people are afraid of it all.

You will find many claims out there for an easy way to achieve physical and mental healing. But I predict that if you follow such a path—a path not grounded in discipline and hard work—you are likely not to find anything more than self-indulgence. True, one part of you might find something resembling health, but other parts will remain unhealed, angry and fearful. The only escape from the darkness of the easy way is to seek the light and pay the price of genuine healing.

Psychotherapy should be serious business. It shouldn’t be about getting rid of problems; it should be about making peace with your problems, taking responsibility for your life—even if you didn’t ask for it—disentangling yourself from the desires of the world around you, and discovering something about a human potential you didn’t even know you had. But you have to want psychotherapy as much as you want to breathe.

Peace of mind—or mental health—doesn’t come from physical practices. Nor can you “buy” it. You can pay a shaman to adjust your energy fields, you can wear crystals, and you can fill your house with all the aromatherapy scents in the world, but it won’t heal you of the inner anger and loneliness that torment you. These unconscious wounds can be healed only by facing up to their origins and making peace with them.

Just as the Dark Night strips away all human illusion and pretension, so psychotherapy must strip away everything that hides the deepest ugliness in our hearts. For only by recognizing the perversion in his or her own heart can the individual then recognize the sin that stains all of humanity. And in that community of universal sinfulness will grow the seed of compassion and true love.

Politics is an adversarial system in which individuals obstruct their opponents’ goals with the hope of eliminating the opponents altogether. Psychology, however, must be based in the hope of making peace with your internal “enemies” so as to find healing; it’s not about “getting rid” of pain or blaming others. Therefore, nothing in psychology needs to be expressed in political terms because psychology is about helping you find out what you want to do, not about telling you what to do. Or, to say it another way, whereas politics tries to dictate the behavior of others, psychology helps you willingly change your own behavior.

The task of teaching the general public the difference between happiness and mental health has all the satisfaction of trying to fill a sieve with water. And yet, to paraphrase Saint Francis of Assisi, if we accept the world’s injustice, cruelty, and contempt with patience, without being ruffled, and without murmuring, then we have found the path to perfect joy.

Unless a person asks for help and is willing to listen to it, there’s nothing you can do. This is the pain felt by family members watching an alcoholic, for example, on the path to slow suicide. You can only pray that such persons eventually hit bottom—and that the the force of the impact won’t be fatal, but that it will be sufficient to crack open their hardened, angry hearts to let in the light of truth.
     And when that hard heart does crack, the first thing it feels is sorrow—sorrow for all the injury and pain it has inflicted on others while stuck in its own blindness. It no longer blames others for its own misery; instead, it sees the ugliness of its own behavior for what it is.
     And so it can be said that the only basis for lasting psychological change is sorrow.

The simple fact is that, just as psychological change begins with painful remorse for one’s behavior, the soul, in looking at the corruption of the world and feeling deep sorrow for it, can freely turn to God and, like Saint Catherine of Genoa, say, with a cry of inner anguish, “O Lord! no more world, no more sin!” But without divine grace the soul can do nothing about its sorrow; nor does it even know what to do. Yet its initial, tearful cry will be heard, and its journey into the holiness of pure love—and the profound gift of tears—will begin.

You have to promise to remedy your lack. Note that this is not a promise that you will “never do such a thing again,” because that would be a wild promise that could easily be broken. No, you must go deeper; you must promise that you will do whatever it takes to get to the roots of the behavior itself and alter things for the better.

You can’t bring the dead back to life. You can’t change the past. These are both true and accurate psychological statements. But with true sorrow you can learn from the past and change your behavior in the present so that you don’t “kill” again. No matter what “evil” you have done in the past, the heaviest penalty you can pay for all that damage is to make a true psychological change and dedicate yourself to doing good from now on.

True healing involves two things: (a) to see clearly what is wrong and (b) to have the compassion to call it to change. This means, first of all, that unconditional acceptance of anything gets you nowhere. If you take no responsibility for the world around you, and if you’re unwilling to call error for what it is—that is, if you’re always missing the point—then you contribute nothing of any healing value to the world. And that’s not love. On the other hand, if you treat error with hatred, condemning it to hell, the bitter poison in your own heart will end up condemning you to hell. And that’s not love either.

In the end, psychotherapy is all about the adult part of the personality finally listening to the the frightened child part tell its story—and taking adult responsibility for the healing process that the child part cannot manage on its own. For the psychotherapy, then, “Do you believe me?” is not a question about facts but a question about inner, emotional respect.

What if it is the devil tripping you up, rather than God intervening for your instruction? How do you tell the difference? Well, you don’t have to know the difference. Just accept everything gracefully as a glorious act of obedience to God. If the devil trips you up and discovers that his efforts result in glorifying God, he will get tired of you very quickly and leave you alone.

In contrast to depression, in willingly accepting our spiritual purgation and confronting our own darknesses—however oppressing it may feel—we experience love, not anger. Nor does spiritual purgation cause us to feel self-hatred, because the sorrow we feel for our sins and inadequacies, rather than being an obstacle to our progress, is the first step on the path to divine love.

Only by accepting the spiritual and psychological death of your worldly identity can you step outside the victim role. Only when you stop desiring to get anything from the world, and only when you start giving to the world what you don’t really “have”—pure, divine love—will you stop being a victim. Only by breaking bread and giving it away can you multiply it.

How many of us, religious and laity alike, attempt to follow Christ without making any effort to deny ourselves? How many so-called Christians want the satisfaction of believing they have God’s approval and yet turn Christianity into a sort of hypocritical complacency? How many of us have been deceived by New Age liberalism into “feeling good” about ourselves by believing that we can enjoy the glory of the resurrection without seeking the cross?

Many persons today talk of developing “Christ consciousness” or of making use of “Christ energy”—as if these were commodities of some sort—and they see Jesus as a man who achieved the highest level of humanity, just like Buddha or other wise teachers. But, quite frankly, in Catholic doctrine, Jesus didn’t achieve anything of his “own,” really—his life in this world was an act of God. And that makes all the difference in the world.
     As an “act of God,” Christ doesn’t come into our hearts through meditation or ascetic practice—or through political acts of social justice. He comes to us as a result of our giving ourselves to him in love. It’s an act of surrender. A devout Christian doesn’t seek Christ to get something but instead simply offers Christ everything.

You can coast into hell on an empty tank of gas, but an uphill climb is required to attain “justice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17). So what more can be said? Christ gave His life to save you from your sins, and the payment that He demands is simple: everything you have.

The choice is simple: will you freely and totally accept the redemption from your own emptiness that is being offered to you, or will you reject it for the sake of your own convenience? If you fail to approach your salvation with fear and trembling (see Philippians 2:12b) because you aren’t willing to sacrifice everything for it—as in the parables of The Treasure Buried in a Field and The Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:44–46)—then you probably don’t want it that much to begin with.

We refuse to deny ourselves because the world seems too real, too much of a good thing, too close at hand, too accessible, too comforting in our loneliness.
     But Christianity is something else entirely. Christ does not numb our pain—He heals it, if only we believe in Him. He quenches our thirst for real life if only we turn away from the water of the world—water that has to be drawn again and again—and seek the living water that quenches our thirst forever.
     If only you would believe.

Healing, you see, is simply our return to God in humility and obedience. There is no healing for our brokenness except the broken bread of the Eucharist. There is no healing except through him who accepted all pain, quietly, peacefully, without grumbling or murmuring—for our sake. There is no healing except in forgiveness.

This may sound a bit ascetic, and it is. But it is not a matter of masochism or self-punishment. And there is no room in it for hatred. Asceticism actually comes from opening your eyes to see the fraud of the world around you. Asceticism is grounded in pure love for the very truth that human vanity obscures and defiles. It simply means that you willingly surrender all your worldly defenses against your essential vulnerability in order to face that vulnerability with no protection other than true love.

Now, you might ask, “Can this be done without becoming a hermit? Can one continue to conduct business, or other worldly activities without this desire?” Well, yes it can be done. In short, it means that you do everything you can to develop your talents as fully as possible, but that you put those talents to use in service to others, not for the sake of your own personal pleasure, wealth, status, honor, or prestige..

 
Honesty

Everything in psychology has a price. If you open your mouth to speak the truth, you pay a price. If you keep your mouth shut in fear, you pay a price. Psychology, therefore, teaches us that we cannot “opt out” of life. Even those who choose life-styles counter to the prevailing culture still live a cultural life-style. Even those who commit suicide do not reject culture; they very clearly make a cultural statement about their lack of hope and their unwillingness to face up to the truth of their unconscious past.
     So if you want to make psychological changes in your life, you have to pay a price. No matter what anyone has ever done to you, you—and you alone—have to take personal responsibility for your healing. It will cost money, and time, and suffering. But the reward of liberty from cultural illusions is priceless.

We are all liars and hypocrites, and we all make excuses for ourselves. In our legal and political systems, “truth” is nothing more than what we choose to believe in the moment. Our culture is all a fraud. But hardly anyone wants to admit it.
     Now, if you call someone a liar, you will get one of two responses. If the person is wise, he or she will say, “Yes, I know.” Being aware of the extent of his or her unconscious motivations, this person has the healing option of emptying the self of pride in order to find true honesty. But persons who are psychologically unaware and bristling with defenses will angrily blurt out, “How dare you! Take that back or else!” And the sad thing is that in defending themselves against the reality of their lies and hypocrisy, these persons become liars and hypocrites all the more.

You cannot have meaningful and honest interactions with others if you persist in clinging, deep in your heart, to psychological defense mechanisms that shield you from that very pain. How can you be genuine with another person if you’re always protecting yourself with your own wits? In the past, particularly as a child, blame, resentment, and anger may have served to ensure your survival by masking your hurt and vulnerability, but in reality these things are totally opposed to integrity and true love.

Those who have the most to gain have the greatest desire to deceive. Those who have the least to gain—and who want nothing, and who give everything, like the saints—can love perfectly. And this perfect, real love is no illusion.

 
Hope

We watch television and sports and we read newspapers and magazines in the hope of seeing something that will make us feel good about ourselves. We play sports and video games in the hope of accomplishing something that will make us feel good about ourselves. We listen to music and chat on cell phones in the hope of hearing something that will make us feel good about ourselves. We make food into an addiction in the hope of smelling and tasting something that will make us feel good about ourselves. And we strip sexuality of its reproductive responsibilities and make it into the most pervasively sought-after entertainment of all, in the hope of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and accomplishing something that will make us feel good about ourselves.
     So where in the Bible does it say that the mandate of Christianity is to feel good about ourselves? Isn’t real hope—a living hope—a hope in “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,” because it is based in “the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3)?

Lest our spiritual battle seem hopeless, Christ offered the solution: deny yourself. Stop seeking personal satisfaction from life and you will be immune to the unholy desires of the world around you. As you take up the healing of your darkest wounds by surrendering your pride and defensive identity, your will can become aligned with God’s will. To do this, though, you must submit to psychological purgation through your own dark night of soul.

Not only can we beg the Blessed Virgin to carry our prayers for others to her Son—even if we ourselves are not completely pure—but also we hope that our prayers in her honor, such as the Rosary, will somehow crack open our own hardened hearts to let in a tiny ray of divine grace that can then take root and start to grow within us.

 
Humility

To live in humility is to live always in total confidence of God’s love, protection, and guidance and therefore to have no concern for yourself when others insult you—or praise you.

Humility, therefore, is actually a sign of great courage and deep spiritual understanding. In humility there is no fear. In humility there is no timidity. In humility there is only confidence—confidence, not in the self, but in God’s loving protection.

Consider the nature of water, a weak and lowly substance that flows freely around all obstacles. If you live a life of the same “humility” as water, even the jaws of hell cannot bite into you. But the more solid you become in the pride of your own strength to avenge yourself against insult, the more those jaws have to grasp onto—and once they have you, you can’t fight free, no matter how many bandoliers you have draped over your shoulders.

Three aspects of humility: a) to set aside your attempts to feel good about yourself; (b) to overcome your repugnance to being emotionally hurt by others; and (c) to seek the good of others in all things, even at your own expense.
     Still, let’s be careful that this is done in a psychologically healthy manner.
     It’s good when our work is recognized and appreciated; the spiritual point is that we shouldn’t crave this admiration as an aspect of a personal identity, but that we endeavor to accept all benefits of our work in praise of Christ, who emptied Himself for our sake, who suffered for us, who died on a cross for us, and in whose service we do our work. But may I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ (Galatians 6:14).
     Similarly, we all feel hurt when someone insults us; still, the spiritual point is that we shouldn’t build up defenses to protect ourselves from the pain of being insulted, but that we always, even in our deepest hurt, endeavor to trust in Christ, who alone will protect us from all danger. Be not afraid, as Jesus says repetitively throughout the Gospels.
     Finally, “placing others first” runs counter to natural self-preservation; still, the spiritual point is that we shouldn’t compete with others to satisfy our pride but that we endeavor to set down our pride in the hope that others might be saved from damnation because of their own desperate obsession with self-preservation. Moreover, our setting aside our pride must not be done as a form of masochism or self-defilement; in all of our charity to others we must never relinquish the responsibility of developing our talents to the fullest, so that we can serve Christ effectively and joyfully, in pure love.

You can see visions, hear locutions, and pray in tongues, but what good are these things if they do not lead you into ever deeper humility and ever greater acts of suffering and self-sacrifice for the sake of mercy to others?

You will find many priests today who fail to preach the truth. They might preach about Christ, but they fail to preach Christ. They might preach about patience and peace, but they are failing in patience and peace because their minds are everflowing with intellectual arrogance while their hearts are lacking in humble charity. And it will break your heart.

Knowing—that is, anticipating—what might happen next is a characteristic defensive desire of children in dysfunctional families. After all, if they can guess an irrational parent’s next move, they might be able to avoid an ugly family scene.
     To such children, then, it’s a loathsome thing to admit, “I don’t know.”
     This explains why, if you offer some piece of information to a person who grew up in a dysfunctional family, his or her response will likely not be a simple “Thank you” but will be a quickly retorted “I know!”

Those who find their “knowing” in the secular world are too arrogant and self-sufficient to look beyond humanism, and for that very reason they are always being deceived. But for those who aren’t deceived, God—the epitome of what’s hidden from human eyes—resides beyond the veil of human knowledge. In fact, to push past one’s weakness and admit frankly that there is something more beyond “knowing” is a confession in its own right: a confession that we aren’t deceived by the veil, a confession that what we are looking for is profound humility before God, and a confession that, without God, we are broken and wretched creatures, no matter how much we know about the world.

 
Identity

From all the things that appeal to us in the world, we create images of how we want to see ourselves, and then we set about making ourselves “seen” in the world so our images can be reflected back to us through the desire of others. Whether it’s purple hair and pierced lips or Armani business suits, an image is an image. Some persons desire to be desired with such desperate intensity that you can see in their eyes the inner emptiness they seek to fill.

You might go to great expense to project an image into the world. You might explain yourself in endless detail to others so they will get the “true” picture of you. You might offer your identity to the world as if it were a bowl of jewels. But you’re offering only a plate of stones.

In other words, many persons “give” in order to advertise an identity and to maintain a position of power. This is pride, not love, because love empties itself of worldly desires through service, in order to give selflessly. Pride, however, makes “giving” into a form of bribery, in order to get something bigger in return.

As long as you derive your identity from the world around you, you have to be concerned about losing it. Like a dragon sitting greedily on its hoard of treasure, your entire being will be caught up in defending what you are most afraid to lose.

As infants, we are just a jumble of diverse biological processes over which we have no authority, and our first task in life is to develop a coherent identity which “pulls together” this fragmented confusion. This identity may give the appearance of a unified personality, but it really is just a psychological illusion that hides our essential human vulnerability and weakness. And so, when anything or anyone threatens us with the truth of our essential fragmentation, the quickest, easiest, and most common defense available—to hide the truth of our weakness and to give the illusion that we possess some sort of power—is aggression.

Remember—an event is traumatic because it disrupts your previously secure sense of self. Consider that wild animals live with a sharp awareness of perpetual danger, yet most people live with a naive—and deceptive—sense of safety and security to the point of denying their basic vulnerability and fragmented sense of self. So when something disastrous happens, the psychological damage from the shattering of one’s illusions about life and identity may be more problematic than any physical damage.

In fact, all the “pieces of the world” that we use as identifications to construct our own identities are, in the end, nothing but illusions. That’s why PTSD is nothing but the shocking and painful awareness of what we already know but prefer to hide. The trauma that has brought us just inches from death shows us with shocking clarity that all our defenses against death are just empty illusions.

Right now, with all your illusions wrapped around you, you are dwelling in blindness, even though you deny it. Of course you can’t see it. Who could?

The best way to develop psychological insight is to turn away from social “outsight”—that is, attachment to social identifications that merely cover over our inner confusion and turmoil with a surface feeling of acceptance by others. So, considering that unconscious psychological conflicts more often than not lead us away from complete trust in God and right into spiritual disobedience, and considering the consequences of disobedience—all the temporal misery of purgatory, or, even worse, the unending misery in hell—it would be prudent to err on the side of too much detachment from social “outsight”than too little.

Psychology cannot heal us, but it can help us overcome our resistance to total surrender to Christ. Once we make that surrender, our healing begins.

Psychology, at least in the U.S., has too often been preoccupied with the pursuit of happiness, and it has missed the point about helping individuals understand life and find a personally meaningful—and practical—sense of direction. Psychology in itself, of course, cannot offer any meaning to life, but it can help individuals disentangle themselves from the snare of illusory social identifications that keep us trapped in blindness and pull us backwards into self-destruction.

Those who fail to preach this truth about our human brokenness and the absolute impossibility of healing ourselves through our own social identifications do no service to anyone.

Do anything you can to disentangle yourself from the social illusions of the ego. Personality disorders have their essential basis in defending ego satisfaction and protecting it from interpersonal threat, so you will benefit much to learn, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan taught, that “I” is an illusion. Instead of filling yourself with repetitive assertions of what “I want” and what “I need” and what “I deserve” and what “I fear,” turn your attention to what you can give to others—that is, to all the emotionally wounded individuals in this world—through personal sacrifice and prayer. This, after all, is what true love is all about, and personality disorders, in one way or another, do their psychological best to maintain your fear of love.

Maybe you will say, “Wait a minute. What can I give? I feel like mush inside. I’m already empty. I feel barren. It feels as if I have no identity. I have nothing to give.” Well, there is always something to give up, something that everyone holds on to as a final defense: you can give up the pride of being a victim, along with its hope to taste revenge for all the hurt and abuse you have ever suffered.

True love, therefore, forsakes the prestige offered by the culture in its illusions. And, when we have been taught from childhood to covet this prestige as our very identity, is it any wonder that we fear love?
     Far easier—and safer—isn’t it, to hide behind illusions and games of wealth, power, violence, intrigue, and seduction?

Violence . . . is nothing more than a fear of love. And when you fear love, where do you turn? To pride. The pride of your own self-defense.

Life, on the other hand, is an embracing of all the uncertainty of your unconscious, an acceptance of your essential vulnerability, and a willingness to risk everything to trust in something far greater than what you “think” you are.

So the more you let go of your “identity”—the more you die to yourself in perfect humility—the less you have to defend; and the less you have to defend, the less reason you have for anger.

In fact, it’s our desperate need to find a sense of “self” through identification with the secular world that keeps us enslaved to the fear that the fraud of our “selves” will be discovered. Only when we die to ourselves in Christ do we experience the peace and security of His real presence that can never be lost.

 
Love

The common, or popular, view of love involves an element of receiving something. “I love chocolate” really means that “I enjoy getting the experience of the taste of chocolate.” Similarly, “I love you” commonly implies “I enjoy touching your body,” or “I enjoy believing that you will give me security or protection,” or “I enjoy having sex with you” (or “I want to have sex with you.”

To most persons today “love” means satisfaction. It means happiness. It means having one’s emotional emptiness filled with, well . . . just about anything, as long as it’s filling. It means “I’m OK, you’re OK.” In all its meanings, “love” means self-indulgence. And so, in this definition of “love” cleverly constructed to suit popular culture, sin does not exist. And that’s precisely where everything goes wrong.

As shocking as it might sound, most of us who claim to be “loving” are not giving selflessly. Instead, we are addressing a covert psychological desire to avoid being abandoned. Sad to say, the apparent generosity of common “love” is more an act of bribery than of real love.

You could program your computer to say, “I love you” every morning when you turn it on, but that synthesized message wouldn’t be love, would it? A computer simply does what it is told to do, and, philosophically, if you cannot say “No” your saying “Yes” is meaningless.
     Therefore, love must be a free choice—an act of will.
     And so, when God created us to share in his glory, he gave us free will, so that we would be capable of love. But with free will comes the ability to renounce love. That is what sin amounts to: it’s a renunciation of love; it’s a turning away from moral responsibility to others that ultimately results in a separation from God.

We love God because He created us to share in His love. God is love. He is not some deluded emperor who demands adoration from everyone around him to satisfy his inflated ego. Souls who love God don’t serve Him because He demands their obedience like an irrational parent; souls who love God love Him in love for the sake of love, and, through His grace, they become love.

I’ve seen it over and over again, in church and in my office: people are all smiles and devotional behavior on the surface, but once they are pushed the slightest bit against their own will they become very hostile, very quickly. For most people, love is just an intellectual concept—a surface scratch. So understand that love doesn’t get real until, as an expression of sacrifice, obedience, and prayer, it rips right into your heart.

Love is an act of will, not something that you “fall” into. You can fall into desperate desire, and you can fall into fatal attraction, but you can’t fall into love.

This all goes to show that it’s easy enough to “love” those who “love” us: parents who protect us, “partners” who make us feel received, animals who never threaten us. But can we love those who annoy us . . . irritate us . . . obstruct us . . . scorn us . . . hate us? Can we love our enemies? That’s the real test of real love.

True love, therefore, is not about getting noticed or feeling accepted. True 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.

Christ Himself told us, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
     Now, you can lay down your life in several ways.
     You can lay down your life literally by dying a physical death to protect someone from a physical death. You can also lay down your life literally—as a martyr, for example—in order to save someone from the scandal of a loss of faith.
     You can lay down your life figuratively by sacrificing something dear to you—money, time, or labor, for example—in order to help others in the struggle for their own salvation.
     In all of these cases it can be seen that true love is a matter of seeking the good of another, even at your own expense.

It was out of a true understanding of the difference between common “love” and real love that a man such as St. Francis of Assisi was led—led right to the point, actually—to pray that he might seek “not so much to be loved as to love.”

Understand that mystic Christianity is not a matter of knowledge for its own sake. It is not a matter of intellectual prowess or of philosophy. It is not a matter of arguing with others. It is not a matter of displaying your holiness for others to see and admire. It is not a matter of visions and ecstasies. It is simply a matter of emptiness of self and pure love.

When Christ and the Apostles found themselves with only a few loaves of bread and one fish, in the midst of thousands of hungry people, Christ could have said to the Apostles, “Just enjoy what you have; the others can fend for themselves.” But no. Instead, He proceeded to give away what He had and, in the process, multiplied it. In a similar way, when you make sacrifices, you don’t deprive yourself of anything; instead, you multiply love.

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? Or, instead of really loving Him, 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 the church, they hear about horrific tortures inflicted on the martyrs—beatings, stabbings, bodies torn apart and burned. They pray to find strength from the martyrs’ courage and to rejoice in the martyrs’ triumph. Then, no sooner have they left the church than they experience a tiny pin prick of an insult or inconvenience, and they fly into a rage. What happened to the prayers that were on their lips just moments ago? Where have all the martyrs gone? Where has love gone?

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

Keep in mind this analogy: fire does not burn itself—only that which is not fire is burned by fire. Thus, in the spiritual realm, God’s love burns and torments whatever is not love. The fire of Purgatory is God’s love purifying and burning out of repentant souls every worldly attachment that is not love, until they become pure love. And the fire of Hell is God’s love that burns and torments unrepentant souls who are “not love” because in this life they have chosen lifestyles defiant of love, thereby refusing the opportunity to become love.

 
Peace

At the birth of Christ, the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest and, on earth, peace to men of good will” (Luke 2:14). Now, who are “men of good will”? Well, the only good will is God’s will, so “men of good will” are those persons, both male and female, who do God’s will, keeping His commandments in reverent obedience and living a holy lifestyle. They are a special sort of people, the ones who pray to the Father, “Thy will be done”—and really mean it in their hearts. And because they really mean it in their hearts, there isn’t anything they fear and there isn’t anything they envy, and so their hearts are at peace even in the midst of a corrupt world.

The text in terra pax homínibus bonæ voluntátis (“on earth, peace to men of good will”) tells us that peace is given only to those of good will; that is, those who will to do God’s will. Peace isn’t something that God can just hand us on a silver platter simply because we are all his “people.” After all, if God made us do something against our will it wouldn’t be a genuine act of love.
     Therefore peace—mental, spiritual, or social—really depends on freely willing to do God’s will.
     We cannot have peace by trying to build it as an end in itself.
     We cannot have peace by trying to follow a conscience uninformed by the Magisterium of the Church.
     We shall have peace only through obedience to God by using our free will to empty ourselves of all that is not God’s will.

To love is to be giving, and to be giving is to act with patience, kindness, mercy, compassion, understanding, and, ultimately, forgiveness. Activists, by definition, don’t love—they demand.
     And so we have to accept the fact that peace cannot be attained through lawsuits, protest, or terrorism. The only path to peace is through the purification of your own heart.

Ironically, the very fact that so many people look for easier—and contradictory—ways to “make” peace through human effort is the reason there isn’t peace in the world in the first place.

Christian peace is not the comfort of having everything go smoothly, just as you would like it to go; Christian peace is the confidence—the peace of heart and mind—of believing that no matter what happens, no matter how much a trial it may be, Christ will give you the courage and strength to do whatever needs to be done to fulfill God’s will.

 
Prayer

Christ told us to pray constantly (Luke 18:1), so that the lovely garden of the Spirit He planted in you at Baptism receives careful cultivation and does not go to weeds.

Prayer should be a continuing act of purification, not dry intellectual superstition and pride. Trying to pray without first detaching yourself from the world is like trying to drive a car with four flat tires.

Saint Augustine, in one of his letters (Letter 130 to Proba 8, 15.17–9, 18), raised the question, “Why do we pray if God already knows what we need?”—and then he answered it: we pray to stretch our own desires.
     That’s a good answer, but a more perfect answer, I think, comes if you read about the apparitions at Fátima. “Pray, and make sacrifices,” Mary told the children, making it clear to them that many souls go to hell because they have no one to pray for them. Imagine that. Pray, she warned, pray not just for ourselves, not just to stretch our desire to see God, not just to inflame our love of God, but pray also for the souls of others who might be lost without our prayers and sufferings on their behalf.

Beginners often become discouraged because they don’t feel anything when they pray. Some beginners even take this as an indication that they aren’t “worthy.” And some persons seek out charismatic groups in an effort to create their own ecstatic feelings. But prayer is not a psychological process, and genuine Catholic mystics have consistently told us that we aren’t supposed to feel anything in prayer. God works His graces silently in the soul—unseen, unfelt, and unheard by the bodily senses. Persevere, though, and the benefits of prayer will become apparent.

Many persons who seek to live a holy life, and who therefore want to make prayer a more important part of their lives, wonder how they can tell if their experiences in prayer are truly inspiration from the Holy Spirit or whether they are mere psychological delusions.
     Well, the best approach here is to look to the “fruits” of the prayer—that is, the effects that prayer produces in your life—and ask if those fruits are the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
     So, what are the fruits of the Holy Spirit? In Galatians 5:22–23 Saint Paul names them: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

For some persons—especially those wounded by childhood abuse or neglect—the greatest obstacle to prayer is the irrational (that is, unconscious) belief that they are such despicable and evil persons that God has totally abandoned them and refuses to hear any pleas for help. Although this belief is refuted by the Bible itself (e.g., 1 Timothy 2:4), such a belief derives psychologically from a confusion of God with the “Other” (i.e., the social world around us). In truth, the social world, at its best, is completely indifferent to our welfare, and, at its worst, it “sees” us only as objects to be manipulated for its own satisfaction. In other words, it is not God’s rejection of you but sin itself—the rejection of God by the “Other”— that has abused you.

Continue to the next topic . . .

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