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Psychological
Healing
in the Catholic Mystic Tradition
The
Psychology of Desire
Do not talk about
Jesus Christ
as long as you love this world. |
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—Saint Ignatius of Antioch |
Fear |
Guilt |
Fantasies and Distractions |
Books |
About CSF
Acknowledgment
and Regret |
Forced to Act |
Psychological Motivation |
Pushed by the Drive |
Pulled by Desire |
Levels of Desire |
Understanding Hidden Needs |
Triggers for Impulses |
Desire for the Holy |
The Hidden Desire for Self-destruction |
A Personal Conversation |
Putting It All Together |
With Trials as a Teacher
 OU tend to go in the
direction you are looking. That’s a common principle of the psychology
of sensation and perception. According to a similar principle of the
psychology of the unconscious, you will go in the direction of your
desire. If you desire success, you will likely achieve it, but if, somewhere
deep in your heart, you desire failure, all your attempts to achieve success
will fail.
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In the spiritual
sense, this means that if you desire holy things, you will be drawn to heaven
and everlasting life, but if you desire self-serving, transitory things such
as social acceptance, entertainment, sensory pleasures, and material happiness,
you will be drawn into corruption and death. |
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Now, when some persons perceive
that they are being drawn into a spiritually dangerous place, a combination
of the acknowledgment of what is wrong and a regret for having
done something wrong is sufficient to change their behavior. Once they
know what is wrong they repent it,
confess it, and stop doing it. It’s that
simple, because the change is motivated by their love for the
good.
Some individuals, however, persist
in doing things even though they know these things are wrong,
and—surprising as it might sound—even though they don’t want
to do these things. In these cases, something more than acknowledgment and
regret is required. An understanding of the psychological concept of
desire is required.
Forced to
Act
To begin to explain what this
understanding might entail, let’s consider the curious statement that
you can persist in doing something even though you don’t want to
do it. In some way, that sounds ridiculous, right? If you don’t
want to do something, then why would you do it?
Well, consider what would happen
if you encountered a robber. The thief puts a gun to your head and says,
“Give me your money or I will kill you.” Even though you don’t
want to give him your money, you do it anyway, for
fear of the consequences of refusing. Therefore, we
can say that someone might do something he doesn’t want to do simply
because he is forced to do it.
Psychological
Motivation
Now, “being forced to do
something” doesn’t have to be taken in just the literal sense of
coercion under threat of punishment. It can also be understood in a psychological
sense—and this leads us to the psychological concept of
motivation. To comprehend this concept,
let’s use a practical example.
Imagine that you are a child
with a small wagon. To move the wagon—that is, to cause it to enter
into motion, or to motivate it—you have two choices: you can
get behind it and push it or you can stand in front of it and pull it. In
this example, pushing and pulling are literal, physical actions.
Pushing and pulling also can
be psychological actions. Psychology describes the motivation that results
from pushing as the psychological concept of drive and the motivation
that results from pulling as the psychological concept of
desire.
Pushed by the
Drive
In psychology, a
drive is something very primitive and
fundamental in the human psyche, something that works to ensure our physical
survival. We are all governed by drives for acquiring food, for finding shelter,
for reproduction, and even for staying alive. These drives push us into doing
certain things necessary to stay alive. That’s partly why, when a thief
puts a gun to your head you will most likely give him your money: you have
a drive that pushes you to stay alive.
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Have you ever
had a dream in which you are a passenger in a car
while someone else is driving? That’s an
unconscious
way for you to realize that, in terms of your current behavior, you are being
pushed—that is, “driven”—by some hidden emotional issue.
The dream may not tell you exactly what the issue is, but it does give you
the clue that, just as you can be driven like a passenger in a car, so your
life is being driven by something outside your conscious awareness. Finding
out what that “something” might be is the conscious task of
interpreting
that dream. |
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Pulled by
Desire
As I said, a drive is
something very primitive and fundamental in the human psyche. But as we grow
up and develop the ability to think and act independently, we begin to attach
symbolic meaning to our drives. We have a drive
to eat, yes, and that keeps us alive; but we can also relate to food according
to how it looks, how it tastes, and how it smells, and so we can crave food
because of its pleasing characteristics, rather than just as something eaten
for survival. As a result, we begin to experience
desire.
Desire derives from aspects
of our environment located outside the realm of our immediate survival. Desire,
therefore, has a social origin, rather than a natural origin. The look, taste,
and smell of food, for example, derive from social conventions of cooking.
When we smell an agreeable food odor, we don’t really desire the food
itself, we desire the social aspects of that smell. These aspects are usually
outside our conscious awareness, and so desire functions as an
unconscious
process.
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A very old
advertising slogan was, “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.”
Well, this explains how advertising works on us unconsciously, through the
principle of desire. |
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When we come under the influence
of a desire, we are drawn to it, like someone following a delicious smell
right into a restaurant. Thus desire pulls us forward.
Moreover, this fact that desire
is an unconscious process explains why we can desire something we don’t
even want. A want is a desire that has
attained some conscious awareness and has been given conscious approval.
If you see an advertisement for a steak restaurant, not only might you desire
to eat steak, but you might decide to go to that restaurant that day. Thus
you have decided that you want to eat steak at that
restaurant.
Not every desire attains conscious
recognition, but some desires make themselves known through the behaviors
they cause; therefore we, finding ourselves acting thus, might say, “But
I don’t really want to do that!” In other words, the desire acts
on us unconsciously—that is, outside our conscious awareness—and
we recognize it only through the behaviors it causes, even if we don’t
even want to do those things.
Levels of
Desire
Desire can take several forms.
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The
highest level of desire is the desire
for God. This is a desire that, when properly nurtured, can overrule any
other desire. Evidence of this can be found in the Bible in regard to the
life of Saint Paul, who went from being a murderer of Christians to a missionary
for Christ. In essence, Saint Paul’s desire to serve Christ overruled
his desire to puff up his pride with cruel power over others. Similarly,
Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis of Assisi both allowed their desire
to serve Christ to overrule their desire for military glory.
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Remember the
previous story of the robber? As I said before, part of the reason for your
giving him your money was that you had a drive to stay alive. Now
we can see that another part of the reason for your giving him your money
was that you desired your life more than you desired your
money.
Well, let’s
say now that the man with a gun is not a robber but someone who tells you
that unless you deny your faith he will kill you. Now what would you do?
If you had the same desire for God as countless martyrs of the past, you
would let him kill you rather than deny your faith. But if your desire for
material things exceeded your desire for God, you would deny your faith in
order to save your life. |
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Consider, now, that both Saint Ignatius
of Loyola and Saint Francis of Assisi had the ability to take up the supreme desire
for God and were able to die to themselves and start serving Christ.
Many individuals, however, will
experience severe impediments in trying to surrender their lives to God in the way
that many saints have done. Why? Well, let’s see.
Saints Ignatius and Francis had the
ability to take up the supreme desire for God precisely because they previously
had the experience of pursuing other lower forms of desire; that is, they both
became soldiers before they became Christians. This illustrates the psychological
point that once you have attained something, you have the ability to let it go.
Because they knew how to serve their own pride so well, they both were able to die
to themselves and start serving Christ.
Therefore, now that you know something
about the highest level of desire, let’s look at some of the lower levels of desire.
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The
lowest level of desire is the desire
to fulfill natural needs. Infants, for example, need to be
fed, but, as they grow, they begin to want to be fed. They need attention,
and, as they grow, they want to be given attention. They need to sleep, and,
as they grow, they want to sleep.
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A second
level of desire is the desire to fulfill acquired needs.
We can see this sort of desire in regard to alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and
sexual pleasure. These sorts of desires do not exist for an infant, but they
can be acquired as psychological defenses that
attempt to provide a physical satisfaction to compensate for unfulfilled
natural needs from infancy.
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Note here that
having natural or acquired desires does not provide any help to someone seeking
to develop a desire for God. Natural desires come, well, naturally, and acquired
desires are, well, acquired passively and not attained through dedicated
effort. In neither of these desires is anything attained; thus neither of
these sorts of desires fits into the paradigm of “being able to let
go of something once you have attained it.”
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Consider, then, a
third level of desire—the desire
for accomplishment. This desire is illustrated by wanting to get an
education, wanting to plant a garden, wanting to redecorate a room, wanting
to learn a language, wanting to play a musical instrument, and so on. This
sort of desire requires an active dedication to work and practice. Saints
Ignatius and Francis, for example, became soldiers because of this
sort of desire.
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Children from
dysfunctional families, however, often stifle
this sort of desire. Exposed to the chaos of their family environments, these
children quickly discover that bad things—such as criticism, punishment,
or humiliation—will happen to them if they allow themselves any desires
of accomplishment, and so they learn to exist at the lowest level of desire
only.
Such children
might even get educations, plant gardens, redecorate rooms, learn languages,
and play musical instruments, but they do these things more to satisfy the
desire of their parents than for the sake of their own desire.
If this has
happened to you, you might find it extremely difficult to develop the desire
for God. Consequently, it will be necessary for you to develop a desire for
accomplishment before you can fully pursue a holy life. So find good and
productive—not sinful—things that you want to do and, with prayer,
set about accomplishing them. Discover how it feels to do something because
you really want to do it, rather than just do something because you
have to do it or because someone is pushing you to do it.
As you do this,
though, be careful not to dwell on resentment for what you don’t
have. Such resentment will only poison your ambitions and keep you stuck in
self-defeating behaviors. To overcome this resentment, as you look forward
to what you want to accomplish, at the same time work on nurturing gratitude
for what you do have. At the very least, at the beginning and at the end
of every day thank God for all that He has given you; even better, make prayers
of gratitude constantly throughout the day. |
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Understanding
Hidden Needs
and Misdirected Desires
I said before that an understanding
of the psychological concept of desire is required in order for you
to stop doing sinful things and start living a holy life. Well, now that
we have defined the terms, we can say that, for you to stop doing things
you don’t want to do, you might endeavor to understand the lower
levels of desire that motivate you to do sinful things.
Most likely, as a child, you
did not receive healthy nurturance and guidance from your parents, and so,
as an adult, you could now be starved, so to speak, for emotional experiences
such as attention, respect, admiration, soothing and so on. Your current
sinful behavior carries with it a yearning to fulfill these hidden
needs, but your current sinful behavior is not an authentic
fulfillment of what is actually missing.
In more psychological language,
we can say that you have sinful impulses. In theological language,
these impulses are called temptations. Either way, these things are
desires created unconsciously in the hope of fulfilling natural or acquired
needs.
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Note that in
her writings, Saint Teresa of Avila also spoke about impulses. She used the
word impulse, however, in a very specific theological sense. For her,
an impulse was not a psychological urge to do something; rather, it was a
sudden, overwhelming, divinely inspired feeling of
love. |
Sinful impulses, then, are
misdirected desires; that is, instead of desiring the true fulfillment
of all needs in divine love, we deceive ourselves
into desiring the partial fulfillment of needs through sinful
behavior.
Triggers for
Impulses
To understand your impulses,
then, it will be important to examine very carefully the psychological
experiences that occur before—i.e., that “trigger”—them.
Rather than merely act on an impulse, teach yourself to understand
the subtle mental images, thoughts, and feelings that occur to you just
before an impulse begins its work of temptation.
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Learn to
recognize
those images, thoughts, and feelings as soon as they occur. As you begin this
learning process, there might be a long delay between your falling into
a temptation and your discovering its triggers, but with practice you can shorten
the delay; eventually, you will be able to recognize your particular triggers
almost immediately. In any case, sooner or later, notice how they manifest in
your particular circumstances. Are they a matter of your being overwhelmed with
obligations, without proper guidance and assistance, so that you feel weary
and lonely? Are they a matter of your being obstructed and hindered by others,
so that you feel insulted and neglected? Are they a matter of your
own inner confusion and lack of confidence (which often result from some
lack in your father), so that you feel
frustrated and stuck? Or are they a matter of something else? |
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Put the feelings
into language; that is, consciously
explain
to yourself how these feelings connect to similar feelings from your childhood.
Remember the actual childhood events that precipitated the feelings and describe
them in detail. |
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Whatever the
circumstances that trigger your feelings,
remind yourself
not to take it personally. For example, even if a store clerk is rude to
you, and even though you may feel that the rudeness is directed at you
personally, struggle to remember that all rudeness
is a sin inflicted on Christ, not on you directly. Yes, the insult passes
through you, and it cuts deeply as it passes, but the fuming rage you feel
(and the violent tantrum you are in danger of throwing) is really a reaction
to the times when your parents wounded you with their failures to perceive
your childhood needs. And even then, your parents didn’t neglect you
because you “deserved” it; they neglected you because their parents
neglected them. Thus, a lack of healing
was passed down from parent to child, generation after generation. But it
can stop with you, if you desire to be the one to stop it. |
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After you have
identified the real pain tormenting you, do not try to push it away—i.e.,
to “get rid of it.” Moreover, do not merely tolerate it stoically.
Rather, endeavor to
endure it
as Christ Himself endured His pain: willingly, not as a
victim. With a full understanding of how much
you don’t want to do something, do it anyway, for the love of
God—for the love of Love. For the love of
Love, we make sacrifices for the sake of our neighbors’ salvation. For
the love of Love we work out our own salvation.
For the love of Love, all needs are fulfilled. For the love of Love,
suffering is given meaning. |
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Recognizing and overcoming triggers
to impulses is hard work, and you may
need a psychologist to help you. But the point is that all the mental images,
thoughts, and feelings that occur to you just before an impulse carry profound
clues as to what your desires really are.
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Note that certain
forms of meditation, such as in Buddhism, tell you to let your mental images,
thoughts, and feelings pass before you without your taking any interest in
them. But Christian meditation relies on developing a desire for God. Rather
than ignore your mental experiences, or try to get rid of
them, in Christ you are called to notice and embrace those mental
experiences—your psychological “enemies”—so that you can
understand and learn from them in the hope of growing in holiness. |
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Desire for the
Holy
To do this work of mental
examination, it will be necessary to nurture a state of mind that is receptive
to understanding. That is, do anything it takes to increase your desire for
the holy. But—and see if you can follow this logic now—you
can’t push yourself into increasing your desire for the holy. Do
you see? You can’t push yourself to be pulled. Only desire itself can
increase your desire.
So what can you do?
Well, you can do what it takes
to remove whatever in your life obstructs your desire for the holy.
Because ordinary distractions of the world such as social media, TV, movies,
video games, sports, newspapers, magazines, and so on not only block any experience
of the holy but also infect you with desires for self-indulgence,
immodesty, lust, sensuality,
irresponsibility, rudeness,
competition, hate,
and revenge—pernicious desires that drive holiness
away from you—endeavor to begin a lifestyle of
detachment from the sinful
world around you. Learn to see sinful impulses for the
illusions they really are.
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Conceptualize
this detachment from the world not as an attempt to show others that you
are better than the world around you but as a private, prayerful understanding
that God offers you something better than what the world offers
you. |
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So even if your sinful impulses
are about sex, alcohol,
or
anger,
for example, and you keep falling back into them, pare away everything
else in your life that does not nurture a holy lifestyle. Aside from
your need to work for a living, focus your attention on
prayer, confession,
Mass attendance, holy reading,
and mental examination.
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Let the prayer
underlying all of this be for enlightenment, wisdom, understanding, and courage,
rather than preoccupy yourself with asking God to change somebody
else, fix something,
give you something, or make something
happen.
Just keep your
heart focused on your destination. It doesn’t matter if you’re not
there yet. It doesn’t matter how far you have to go. Just keep your
heart focused on God, and let hope guide your progress. |
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A
Psychological-Spiritual Hitch:
The Hidden Desire for Self-destruction
Even though you might say that
you want to love God more than anything else, there can be a powerful
impediment—a hidden desire—working against you. Whether you come
from a dysfunctional family and, as a child suffered the emotional chaos
of outright criticism, punishment, and humiliation, or whether you suffered
more ordinary childhood experiences of
“not-knowing,” a
lack of guidance, and feelings of loneliness, you
could have developed a hidden desire to punish, sabotage, and destroy
yourself.
Similar to parasites that can
ultimately kill the host, this self-destructive desire can lurk in the
unconscious as a constant background suicidal wish. Infected with this secret
desire, an individual, even though wanting to live a holy life, will constantly
encounter an obstruction that overrules the desire for God.
Moreover, it’s at this point
that victim
anger emerges, for the desire for self-destruction is really a veiled
attempt to get revenge on the victimizer(s). With every self-destructive
act, with every failure, you say to the Other, “Look at what you made
me do to myself!” Thus you can fall into the trap of
sending yourself to hell in order to prove
to others how much they have hurt you.
Some
Examples |
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SOME
individual’s lives are plagued by stuckness, self-sabotage, and a lack
of success. Now, where does this desire for self-destruction “come
from”?
Well, consider a
woman, newly married to a man who turns out to be irresponsible; she is now
despairingly pregnant with a child she, or her husband, doesn’t want. Right
in the womb that developing fetus will be “infected”
psychologically with the belief that “It would be better if you were
dead.”
Or maybe a mother
is too emotionally immature to be attentive to her infant’s needs. As that
infant struggles with the dark terror of its neglect, it will be
“infected” psychologically with the belief that “It would
be better if you were dead.”
Or maybe the
child is a living “accident,” the unanticipated result of raw sexual
pleasure stripped of any responsibility to reproduction. As that child struggles
with lonely isolation, it will be “infected” psychologically with
the belief that “It would be better if you were dead.”
However it may
originate—in the womb, as an infant, throughout childhood—the
child’s unconscious desire will be to destroy itself in fulfillment
of the rejection it feels from its parents. And that desire will persist
even into adult despair, where it will wreak its own secret havoc, unless
it is recognized and healed. |
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In cases like this, two things
will be necessary for spiritual growth.
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Once you understand that you
have desires and how they function, work on nurturing desires for
accomplishment. Find good and productive—not sinful—things
that you want to do and, with prayer, set about accomplishing them. Discover
how it feels to do something because you really want to do it, rather
than doing something because you have to do it or because someone else is
pushing you to do it. You will find that these desires for accomplishment
will be able to overrule lower desires. |
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Rather than keep the desire for
self-destruction something secret and feared, explore it
therapeutically. You may need professional help to do this, but learn
to think about it (in prayer) and talk about it openly (with a psychologist
or spiritual director), not with the intent to dwell upon it for morbid
satisfaction but to discover its
unconscious
meanings.
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What does it
mean to explore a desire? Well, consider how someone would explore a park. Walking
through it casually and thinking, “That’s nice” is not
exploring. To explore the park it is necessary to make repeated visits
and note carefully how things are related: where the various trails lead,
what vegetations grow in various locations, and what wildlife lives in
various habitats. In essence, you make a map of the park in your
imagination, so that you can navigate the terrain of the park.
In a similar
way, when dealing with psychological matters, you map out the terrain of
your memories and desires. You can do this by noting the various associations
that arise unconsciously when you are willing to speak about a particular
problem, repeatedly, over time, until its meaning becomes clear to you. |
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Putting It All Together
Saints are not born holy, they are
simply individuals who have made the heartfelt decision to live holy lives.
Therefore, even the saints were always subject to temptation. When they encountered
temptation, though, they were able to assert to themselves, with heartfelt truth,
that they did not want what was tempting them. This means that they (a) understood
the impulses that were being triggered in them; (b) knew that they were being pulled
by lower-level desires (or even self-destructive desires); and (c) were able to
overcome the lower-level desire with a desire for the holy.
You, too, can do the same thing—if
you practice.
If you practice with all your mind and
heart and strength to increase your desire for the holy, you, too, will be able to
look temptation in the eye and say, “However attractive you appear, I don’t
want you.”
A Personal Conversation
Jesus, I want to come
back to You. I wish I trusted You and found comfort in prayer rather then feeling as
though I need to masturbate and eat junk food to cope. It must be so offensive to You
to watch me treating my body in an animalistic way and stripping it of all dignity and
forcing the Holy Spirit to flee. A part of me is sorry and a part of me is like, well,
what else do You expect me to do? This is all I’ve known my whole life. . . .
I am still infected with my parents’ influence, and I can clearly see that I am
angry with them and with You. I’m vulnerable to falling into sabotage and I blame You
for allowing it to happen. How could you let it? why didn’t You give me the graces I
need to overcome them? You keep letting me fall. It makes me think, what is the point
in hoping in You? In trusting in You? You just let me fall. I’m deluding myself in
thinking You will protect and save me. I have to save myself. If I have to do this
myself then what do I need You for? . . . You know that this is what
I have done since I was 2 or 3 years old. It was the only way I knew how to cope, and
because of my family’s influence I’m still vulnerable to it. You did nothing to
protect or enlighten me. You let me fall into my childish ways. I blame You for
it.
It’s like
driving a car. You have to drive it yourself. You have to plan the route, you have
to be alert to traffic, you have to make decisions. Yes, it’s all you. But what
about the fuel? Without the fuel you would go nowhere. Did you make it yourself? Did
you create it from nothing? No, you had to buy it. But even with a full tank of fuel
you can still make a wrong turn or lose your way. The fuel doesn’t prevent you
from making mistakes. It’s your desire to get to your destination that allows you
to get there. Well, fuel is like grace. Without the Father’s grace you go nowhere.
You have to buy it. And how do you buy it? With prayer. But even with grace you can still
fall. It’s your desire to get up even if you fall that keeps you safe on course.
Knowing this is protection and enlightenment. But remember: without the Father’s
grace there is no desire.
That’s the thing; I
don’t desire to be healed. I don’t care about myself. I hate them for hating me and
I hate myself and want to destroy myself.
If you don’t desire to be healed, that’s
proof that you really can’t do it all yourself. That’s proof of your need for God.
With divine grace, you can be inspired to desire healing. But if you have never learned
to care about yourself, you don’t care about much at all—and when you don’t care about
much at all, you end up desiring failure. You can remain in this place of not caring and
just keep on walking to your destruction. Or, if you were to notice that God has been
trying to get your attention, you would know that there is more than destruction,
something so beautiful and desirable that only one thing could resist its pull: hate.
So now, and in every moment until you die, you will have a choice between the ugliness
of hatred and the beauty of God. That decision has to come from you. You will go where
you desire.
With Trials as
a Teacher
You might wonder why some persons
grow to such great spiritual heights and why others make so little progress.
Well, Saint John of the Cross explains it.
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 And here it ought to be pointed
out why so few reach this high state of perfect union with God. It should
be known that the reason is not that God wishes only a few of these spirits
to be so elevated; He would rather want all to be perfect, but He finds few
vessels that will endure so lofty and sublime a work. . . .
There are many who desire to advance and persistently beseech God to bring
them to this state of perfection. Yet when God wills to conduct them through
the initial trials and mortifications, as is necessary, they are unwilling
to suffer them and they shun them, flee from the narrow road of life [Mt.
7:14] and seek the broad road of their own consolation, which is that of
their own perdition [Mt. 7:13]; thus they do not allow God to begin to grant
their petition. They are like useless containers, for although they desire
to reach the state of the perfect they do not want to be guided by the path
of trials that leads to it.” |
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—Saint John
of the Cross
The Living
Flame of Love, Stanza 2.27 |
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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.
 |
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Healing by Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D. explains how psychological
defenses help to protect us from emotional injury. But if you cling to the
defense mechanisms that were created in your childhood and carry them on
into adulthood—as most everyone does unconsciously— your quest for spiritual
healing will be thwarted by overwhelming resentments and conflicts. Still, God
has been trying to show you that there is more to life than resentment and
conflict, something so beautiful and desirable that only one thing can resist its
pull: hate So now, and in every moment until you die, you will have a profound choice
between your enslavement to old defenses and the beauty of God. That decision has to
come from you. You will go where you desire.
Ordering
Information |
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A booklet containing
this article is available 