Reflection on the narrow path to life – St. Teresa of Avila

O my Lord, how obvious it is that You are almighty! There’s no need to look for reasons for what You want. For, beyond all natural reason, You make things so possible that You manifest clearly there’s no need for anything more than truly to love You and truly leave all for You, so that You, my Lord, may make everything easy, It fits well here to say that You feign labor in Your law. For I don’t see, Lord, nor do I know how the road that leads to You is narrow. I see that it is a royal road, not a path; a road that is safer for anyone who indeed takes it. Very far off are the occasions of sin, those narrow maintain passes and the rocks that make one fall. What I would call a path, a wretched path and a narrow way, is the kind which has on one side, where a soul can fall, a valley far below, and on the other side a precipice: as soon as one becomes careless one is hurled down and broken to pieces.

They who really love You, my God, walk safely on a broad and royal road. They are far from the precipice. Hardly have they begun to stumble when You, Lord, give them Your hand. One fall is not sufficient for a person to be lost, nor are many, if they love You and not the things of the world. They journey in the valley of humility. I cannot understand what it is that makes people afraid of setting out on the road of perfection. May the Lord, because of who He is, give us understanding of how wretched is the security that lies in such manifest dangers as following the crowd and how true security lies in striving to make progress on the road of God. Let them turn their eyes to Him and not fear the setting of this Sun of Justice, nor if we don’t first abandon Him, will He allow us to walk at night and go astray.

They aren’t afraid to walk among lions (by which I mean whatever the world calls honors, delights, and similar pleasures) where it seems each lion would want to tear off a piece of them; and here on this road it seems the devil makes them afraid of field mice. A thousand times do I marvel and ten thousand times would I like to find satisfaction in bewailing and crying out to everyone my great blindness and wickedness so that doing this might help them to open their eyes. May anyone who can, through God’s goodness, open them; and may He not permit me to become blind, amen.

Saint Teresa of Avila
The Book of Her Life, Chapter 35

Is “Catholic guilt” bad? What about those who use it to criticize the Church?

Q: Father John, I know more than a few people who are fallen-away Catholics. They make fun the Church sometimes, or they make fun of me. But my question has to do with “Catholic guilt.” They mention this sometimes and smirk, like it’s some kind of inside joke on me. I am not sure what they mean by this, but I have a sense that it’s holding them back living their faith. I would like to be able to help them. Can you give me any direction?

A: This is not uncommon, and I think your instinct is right; their joking about “Catholic guilt” may actually be a providential opportunity. I will share some thoughts, hoping that you can use them to spark a fruitful, healing conversation the next time one of your friends takes refuge behind this rhetorical shield.

A Critique of the Critique

Some people who have left the Church (actively or passively) use the concept of Catholic guilt to help justify their exit. They explain that as they grew up in the Catholic Church, they were constantly badgered about sin, and were taught that God is angry and vindictive, watching over our every move, just waiting for a chance to catch us doing wrong and condemn us. This negative view of God and religion stifled their spiritual growth, they go on to say. They didn’t think it was healthy, or fair, and they didn’t like it, so one Sunday they walked out the doors of their parish Church after Mass and simply didn’t come back.

In one sense, this evaluation of the Church’s view on sin is correct: the Catholic Church is energetically against sin. We believe that sin is real, destructive, and to be avoided at all costs. Jesus even said we should cut off our hand or gouge out our eye if they caused us to sin (see Mark 9:38-50). (By the way, he didn’t mean that literally – after all, how can our hand or eye “cause” us to sin? Sin is always a free choice of our will against God’s will, and those choices stem from our heart.) Sin is the number one enemy of God and the human race, and so it is also the number one enemy of each one of our lives, the biggest obstacle to the happiness and fulfillment we crave.

But the next part of the fallen away Catholic’s critique isn’t so obvious – the part about God being constantly angry and our spiritual lives being stunted by guilt. In fact, that critique comes from a misunderstanding of what the Church teaches about guilt. If we can have in our minds the right understanding of guilt, we may be able to avoid straying off the good path ourselves, and help our wandering brethren come back into friendship with Christ.

Good Guilt

Basically, there are two kinds of guilt: good guilt and bad guilt. To use a rather clumsy analogy, good guilt is like a spiritual nervous system. Our physical nervous system is designed (at least in part) to help us recognize and avoid physical danger. So, for example, when we touch a hot piece of metal, our immediate reaction is to pull away, so we don’t get burned or damaged by it. Or, to take another example, if smoke from a fire seeps into a room, we start finding it hard to breathe; we start coughing. These are signs from our physical nervous system that we better get out of that room before we suffocate. Imagine if your nervous system was malfunctioning, and it wasn’t able to warn you about these kinds of bodily threats – you would be in an extremely dangerous situation.

Well, good guilt, healthy guilt, performs this same function for our souls. Physical health is good for our bodies in the same way as moral health is good for our souls. And moral health means doing good actions and avoiding evil actions. If our conscience is in good condition, it will register guilt when we commit, or toy with committing, evil actions. That guilt is a warning against performing or persisting in evil actions, because committing evil strains or breaks our friendship with God and damages our interior peace and integrity, just as a hot piece of metal will damage our skin and breathing smoke will damage our lungs. In this sense, the Bible’s and the Church’s warnings against sin are not the expressions of an angry and vindictive God. On the contrary, they are a sign of God’s infinite love; he knows that committing evil, even though it sometimes appears to give us a short term benefit, is destructive, both for ourselves and for others.

In fact, the “punishment” for sin isn’t something that God adds on, the way a judge in a court of law sentences a criminal. Rather, it consists precisely in the pain and misery caused by the sin itself; it is the result of the sin – just as the child who plays with knives even when his parents warn him not to suffers pain and misery when he cuts himself. It would be a mean and selfish God that didn’t warn us about the destructive consequences of evil actions. But it is a good and wise God who has given us the gift of a conscience, which helps us experience good guilt to warn us against committing sins, and to move us to repent if we have committed them.

Bad Guilt

The second kind of guilt is bad guilt. This occurs when we feel guilty without having done anything wrong. This is the kind of unhealthy guilt that can stifle our spiritual and emotional maturity by leading to moral confusion. Unhealthy guilt makes us blame ourselves for things that are not blameworthy, or for things outside the purview of our responsibility. When we do that, we become emotionally and spiritually tangled up, almost paralyzed, because escape from this feeling of false guilt is impossible: we cannot be forgiven for something we were not responsible for, or for something that wasn’t a sin.

Bad guilt becomes like a cul-de-sac; we go round and round in our minds trying to find mercy and a fresh start, but we can’t. It drains our energy and inhibits us from growing in our friendship with God and others, because we don’t feel worthy of their love, and so we keep them at a distance.

Bad guilt can come from at least two sources. First, it can come from not distinguishing between sins and simple mistakes. For example, if I sincerely forget to send my mom a mother’s day card, I may have strong feelings of regret, but I shouldn’t feel morally guilty about it (even if she tries to make me feel guilty) – it was just a mistake, an oversight, not a morally evil act. If, on the other hand, I purposely avoid calling my mom on her birthday because I’m nursing resentment about something she said five years ago and I actually want to make her suffer, then I should to feel guilty; Christians honor their parents, they don’t hold grudges against them.

Second, bad guilt can result from experiencing a defective authority figure (authority figures are supposed to help form our consciences, our ability to identify moral good and evil). This happens often in families that go through a divorce. The pain and conflict between the parents inhibit them from giving proper love and discipline to the children. As a result, the children begin to feel responsible for the problems their parents are having; they blame themselves for the neglect they are experiencing.

Or take the example of an unhappy, angry priest who is in charge of teaching the faith to the children of his parish. Every week he rants and raves about how sinful and evil people are, and how painful the punishments of hell will be. He never speaks about the unlimited mercy of God, which is always ready to forgive us. He never speaks about the goodness of our heavenly Father, who has prepared a place for each one of us in heaven. He never speaks about the wonderful mission that each one of us has received in this life, a mission that only we can accomplish. Instead, he focuses over and over again, week after week, on the fires of hell and the selfish tendencies of our hearts, drilling into the children a lopsided and distorted conception of God, and of themselves. Over time, that can feed bad guilt, an unhealthy feeling of guilt simply for being alive, as if our existence itself were some kind of sin. Nothing is worse for our relationship with God than that. And if someone leaves the Catholic Church because of this kind of experience, it would be unwise, but understandable.

Seeking a Solution

In either case, whether we are dealing with good guilt or bad guilt, the remedy is the same: returning to the loving embrace of God our Father and Christ our Lord. If we are experiencing good guilt, we need to repent and ask for forgiveness and mercy, which Jesus Christ won for us by suffering on the cross. God never runs out of mercy; he is always eager to dish it out. In fact, he invented the sacrament of confession in order to make dishing out his mercy as tangible a thing as possible. If we are experiencing bad guilt, then we need to go to God in prayer, reading and reflecting on the Bible, God’s own Word, which assures us, over and over again, that we are infinitely valuable in God’s eyes, that he is always thinking of us, that we have nothing to fear. Sin is real, and it matters; but God’s mercy is even more real, and it matters more. As the Catechism puts it, “The victory that Christ won over sin has given us greater blessings than those which sin had taken from us” (#420).

I pray that the next time a friend or acquaintance jibes you about Catholic guilt, these ideas will help you speak to them about what they really need to hear: the transforming power of Christ’s saving grace.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

Are you worth the time? Why would a priest take time for me?

Q: Why would a priest spend time with a nobody like me?

A: In the past year I have talked with a number of good Catholics interested in spiritual direction. Almost all of them expressed a feeling of being unworthy of a priest taking time out just for them. One woman said, “Why would a priest spend time with a nobody like me?” Now, mind you, this woman recently fought through some very difficult challenges and converted to Catholicism in spite of them. She is an exemplary woman who is actively seeking and submitting to God. However, she still feels unworthy.

Her struggle reflects things within her that are good, and some that are obstacles to her spiritual growth. The good is the honest recognition that before God and holy men and women, we rightly feel a bit unworthy. We are fallen creatures after all. On the other hand, the worst of us still bear the image of God. Each person on this planet was specifically brought into existence by God (For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb – Psalm 139:13). He desires a relationship with each and every person – this includes you.

If we struggle in a similar way, it would be well worth our time to meditate on the parable of prodigal son (St. Luke 15:11-32). We should see ourselves as the prodigal and God as the loving father. He longs for us and regardless of the level of depravity to which we have lowered ourselves, He eagerly awaits our return. The second He sees our hearts turning His way, He opens His arms to receive us. He not only offers us forgiveness, but heaven and earth begin to rejoice with Him.

Turn to Him and those whom He has consecrated to serve you to Him. He has provided priests and consecrated in order to help you come to Him. Don’t deny Him when He has given so much for you. He is eagerly waiting for a deeper relationship with you.

Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him

In Christ, Dan

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25. Forgiving for Real (Mt 9:1-8)

“We ought to pity and love our enemies rather than hate and detest them, for they heap up evils on themselves but deserve well of us; they provoke God’s anger against themselves, but adorn us with the crown of eternal glory. We ought to pray for them; we should not be overcome by evil.”

- St Antony Mary Zaccaria

Matthew 9:1-8

He got back in the boat, crossed the water and came to his own town. Then some people appeared, bringing him a paralytic stretched out on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘Courage, my child, your sins are forgiven’. And at this some scribes said to themselves, ‘This man is blaspheming’. Knowing what was in their minds Jesus said, ‘Why do you have such wicked thoughts in your hearts? Now, which of these is easier to say, Your sins are forgiven, or to say, Get up and walk? But to prove to you that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,’ – he said to the paralytic – ‘get up, and pick up your bed and go off home’. And the man got up and went home. A feeling of awe came over the crowd when they saw this, and they praised God for giving such power to men.

Christ the Lord 

Jesus has just exhibited his power over the effects of sin (sickness, natural adversity) and the instigator of evil (the devil). Now St Matthew completes the grand slam by showing how Jesus absolves us from sin itself.

The other miracles could be taken as signs that Jesus is merely a great prophet, but by forgiving sins Christ leaves no room to doubt that he claims to be much more. In the Old Covenant, only God could forgive sins, because every sin was a rebellion against God, a conscious refusal to adhere to the truth of life’s purpose as established by God. Furthermore, in the Old Covenant, this forgiveness could only be obtained through the ritual sacrifices in the Temple stipulated by the Mosaic Law.

When the paralytic comes before Jesus to be healed, the Lord goes to the root of the man’s true need and assures him that his sins are forgiven. The Jewish scholars observing the encounter are immediately suspicious of such a divine claim being made so unceremoniously by an upstart rabbi. Jesus acknowledges (but doesn’t validate) their suspicion, and then performs the miracle to show that instead of being blasphemous, his claim is true. He can’t make the actual forgiveness of sins visible, but he can make the paralytic walk, which certainly shows that he can do what he says – more than enough proof to allay their doubts.

Once again, Christ shows that he is much more than a wise philosopher; he is Emmanuel, God among us – the Lord of life and history.

Christ the Teacher 

St. Matthew points out that Jesus saw the faith of the people who brought the sick man to Jesus, not the paralyzed man’s faith, and this triggered Christ’s saving action. The paralyzed man was unable to come to Jesus on his own power. Others brought him to the Lord, and the Lord honored their selfless, faith-filled deed. How many people whose souls are paralyzed by sin and doubt need the prayers and charity of faith-filled Christians to bring them into contact with Christ’s saving grace!

St. Matthew also subtly explains why the Jewish leaders didn’t recognize Christ as the Messiah (notice that it is precisely here, at the crescendo of the series of miracles, where the opposition between those leaders and Jesus begins). They had already formed an idea of what the Messiah would be, and they left no room for God to outdo their expectations by coming himself. They had closed their minds; they were attached to their own ideas, their own standards, their own limited understanding – they thought they had God all figured out. It is a common failure among people who seem to be experts in religion. They think they know it all, and they end up missing God’s most wonderful surprises. But the humble folk who recognized their own limitations and God’s greatness were open to the awe-inspiring glory of Christ. The arrogant scribes went home angry and unhappy; the humble crowed went home rejoicing.

Christ the Friend

Jesus calls the sick man “my child,” and then happily and generously relieves the greatest burden of his life – the gnawing guilt of his violated conscience.

How glad Christ is to welcome us into his family! How eager he is to forgive us, to renew us, to enlighten and strengthen our anxious and tired souls! All we have to do is come to him with faith and admit our needs, our helplessness, our sins. The Tabernacle, an ongoing appointment that Christ never misses; the confessional, a failsafe loving embrace and perpetual fresh start; the Gospels, a fountain of truth and grace that flows without respite – a Christian can find peace of heart wherever he turns, if only he doesn’t turn away from Christ.

Jesus: Come to me and I will heal you, I will set you free. Come to me in the Tabernacle, in all my sacraments, in the inspired word of the Bible! Come to me when you are filled with joy, as well as when you are crushed with troubles! When you turn to me in your weakness and acknowledge in all humility your need, then my mercy can make you walk once more, can make your heart resound with true peace and joy. Let me reach into the deepest recesses of your soul, bringing light to the hidden crevices carved by sin.

Christ in My Life 

The world is full of so many promises, Lord. So many gurus and life coaches and therapists promise to show the way to peace and wholeness. But can they forgive sins? Only you can reach into the depths of my soul; only you can see even deeper than I can; only you can heal me and cleanse me and give me a new start. Thank you, Lord, for coming to forgive my sins and for giving me a new start, as often as I need one…

Certainly you have more that you want to do in me and through me. I don’t want to hinder you by stubbornly sticking to my own desires and plans if you are leading me along new paths. Your will, Lord, is beyond my comprehension; your plan is greater than I can imagine. Guide me, as you have promised to do, in spite of my selfishness and arrogance. Teach me to be humble, so I can be filled with awe and joy in the face of your wonderful deeds…

What do I enjoy most and value most about being a Christian and a member of your Church? So many things, Lord. Let me savor them… Thank you for those gifts, Lord. I know that your love for me is as vast as the heavens, though at times it’s hard for me to accept. I want to use your gifts and rejoice in them. Teach me, Lord, to do your will…

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

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