I hate myself. How can I find comfort in God when I feel so unworthy?

Q: Dear Father John, I thought I once heard you mention that quite often a hatred of oneself runs parallel with a hatred of God. My problem is similar, but while I hate myself quite a bit I do not in any way hate God. God is, in fact, my longest and most faithful friend, always at the back of my mind. And I know it probably hurts Him to see me revile myself the way I do, but I feel unable to improve the situation. I compare it sometimes to my relationship with my husband. He understands that I earnestly believe myself selfish, evil and ugly, but his patience runs thin the more times I mention it. I find myself asking for God’s patience more than any other thing, and I do want to please Him, but I’m not sure if I’m able. My question is how to best be pleasing to God when I foster a deep-seeded belief that I am unworthy of any sort of salvation or comfort?

A: First, make sure you cement into the very foundation of your understanding of the universe one extremely important truth that God has revealed to us so frequently and so forcibly that he has removed any room for doubt: “…but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). I would highly recommend that you memorize that verse of inspired Scripture, and that you repeat it to yourself, using it as a prayer, throughout the day. God’s love for his – his personal, all-knowing, passionate, tender, and determined love for each one of us – does not depend on our being worthy of it, being perfect, being selfless, being a model Christian… On the contrary, it is only as we continue discovering God’s love for us that we open our hearts to be touched by his transforming grace so that we can actually love him in return and begin to experience life as he calls us to live it – selflessly, generously, joyfully, humbly. Our journey through this Valley of Tears that we call earth is not primarily about what we can do for God, but about what God has done (and still wants to do for us): “This is real love–not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins” (1 John 4:10). So, keep reminding yourself of this, over and over again. Make it the theme of your daily prayer. Ask God to convince you of this more and more every day.

From that perspective, I think you can answer your own question. How best to please God, even though you know that you are unworthy? Throw yourself into his arms. Dive into his mercy. Trust him when he tells you that he loves you just as you are, and maybe even MORE because you are so much in need of his grace. Remember the parable of the Good Shepherd, who left the 99 sheep who were in good shape in order to go after the one sheep that was lost and in need. And he rejoiced when he found it. Your mere desire to follow God, to know him and love him better, gives him immense pleasure. Every time you turn back to him after a fall or a failure, you fill his heart with joy. He longs not for our self-perfection, but for our presence, our friendship, our desire to walk with him. This is what pleases him.

You may be confusing God’s being “pleased” with his being “satisfied.” God loves us so much that he is never satisfied. He knows we can grow, and so, like a good coach how really cares about his players, he never gets tired of demanding more from us and inviting us to give more. He loves us too much to let us vegetate in our personal comfort zone, spiritually speaking. But even though he is hard to satisfy, he is extremely easy to please. The slightest effort delights him! He knows better than we do how hard it is for us to live a truly spiritual, truly Christ-like life. So, he is like the dad witnessing his little baby take her first steps. The steps are clumsy, jerky, and unsteady. But how the dad rejoices over them!

Okay, now for a hard truth. Whenever you get drawn into a personal pity party and find yourself discouraged or tense or preoccupied about your own weakness and spiritual neediness (selfishness), you are actually falling into dangerous territory. Discouragement is not something that comes from the Holy Spirit – not ever. Discouragement is a subtle, very subtle, form of spiritual pride, which is one of the seven capital sins. Discouragement, when we give into it and revel in it instead of turning it immediately into a prayer and throwing ourselves into God’s loving arms, says to God: “O Lord, look at how evil I am; I am so selfish that not even you can love me or help me…” Oh what a nasty trick of the Devil that thought is! Oh how it hurts our Lord when we say that to him! His mercy, his love, his goodness, his power – they are IMMENSELY greater than our misery! Our Lord revealed to St Margaret Mary that even if all the sins of the world were on her soul, compared to his burning love for her, they would be like a drop of water thrown into a blazing furnace. So, whenever you feel like turning in on yourself and being drawn into the pit of self-deprecation, simply make an act of humility and then turn your attention back to whatever it is God wants you to be doing at that moment, even if it’s something as simple as washing the dishes, “Lord, you know what a mess I am, but you love me. Give me the strength to forget about myself and do what you want me to do. I am in your hands, and they are Very Good Hands…”

I suggest that you take for a personal motto what St Paul said about this very struggle, and follow his example of rejoicing in your weaknesses because they force you to depend more and more on God, which is what it’s all about: “I am well content with these humiliations of mine, with the insults, the hardships, the persecutions, the times of difficulty I undergo for Christ; when I am weakest, then I am strongest of all” (2 Corinthians 12:10).

Struggling with overwhelming sorrow during Lent – How do I deal with it?

Q: Dear Catholic Spiritual Direction: We are but days into Lent, and, after being to our church’s Way of the Cross tonight, I’m overwhelmed with the “low” that Lent is already. Are we to embrace the low to make the joy of Easter even greater, or is there still joy to be found in the 40 days of the Lenten journey? If it’s intended to be 40 days of all low, how do we prevent ourselves from being overcome with the grief and depression that accompanies our reflection of what Christ endured for us sinners, especially when our focus is on his suffering rather than his resurrection during this season?

A: These are important questions; let’s take them one at a time.

First, embrace the lows of Lent to make the joy of Easter greater? Absolutely. This is the wisdom of the Church. Without suffering it is very difficult for us, in our broken state, to fully experience the joy that God has for us. Kahlil Gibran echoed this thought when he said, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain… When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you will see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” So it is with Lent. The deeper we allow the sorrow to carve into our being during Lent, the more joy we will experience when we celebrate his resurrection!

Second, is there any joy found during Lent? Without a doubt. When Mel Gibson was making The Passion of The Christ, he ran into a problem. He recognized that the scenes of Christ’s sufferings were too much to take in any one sitting. He came up with the idea to intersperse flashbacks into the story. This gave just enough relief without totally leaving the theme of Christ’s horrific suffering and death on our behalf. Similarly, during Lent, every Sunday we have a time where we can set aside our fasting and remember not only his suffering but also his resurrection and provision for us in the Mass. Beyond this gift, we maintain our composure through all this because we know the end of the story. Those of us who suffer from lifelong illnesses sometimes are overwhelmed because in the midst of our suffering we don’t know if it will end in this life. With Lent we not only know the end of the story, but we even know the exact date when it it will end. This should give us the courage to persevere through the challenges and purification this season brings to our souls.

A few more points about grief and depression. It is one thing to feel great sorrow over our sins and to thereby enter into the deep sufferings of Christ, and another to enter into anything like clinical depression or any other unhealthy spiritual or emotional state. With respect to the former, St. Teresa of Avila, after meditating on Christ’s sufferings on her behalf, would often become overwhelmed with grief and weeping for lengthy periods time. The harm done? Absolutely none. In fact, she attributes a great deal of the work of God in her soul, and the souls of other holy men and women, to this kind of affective meditation. How can you tell the difference? The difference is that someone who is truly experiencing union with Christ and his sufferings will experience two things:

1) Peace: Even with intense suffering of this kind, if we maintain peace in the depths of our souls and feel a greater compulsion to love him for what he has done for us, this is a good indicator that our sorrow is truly godly sorrow rather than an unhealthy state of depression.

2) Virtue: If  our heightened sense of his love for us and our corresponding love for him leads us to deepen our prayer, expand our acts of charity, or further intensify our mortification, then, again, our suffering is likely sourced in God’s real and active presence in our meditation.

St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians clearly echoes these truths (emphasis mine):

As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting; for you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death. For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, what eagerness to clear yourselves… what longing, what zeal …!

Finally, if you find yourself with a sorrow that does not meet the test of “godly sorrow” you can do two things about it. First, go absorb yourself in service to others – particularly those less fortunate than you. If the enemy is behind the anxiety in your heart, responding with love toward God and others will drive this oppression away. If you continue to struggle, make sure you talk with your spiritual director to get more specific insights into how you can make this season one in which you grow in your love and knowledge of Christ and in the virtuous life.

He is real, present, and good… may he always be so to you,

Dan

Do you have to know you are committing a sin in order to actually commit one?

Q: Dear Father John, Do you have to know you are committing a sin in order to actually commit one?

A: You would think this simple question has a simple answer. But it doesn’t. We have to get a little theological here to unravel it, but I’ll try to be brief anyhow.

First of all, we have to remember what sin is. Sin is rebellion against God. It is saying to God, “I don’t want to do what you want me to do.” (For more on the nature of sin, you can you seen the posts on scrupulosity and bad thoughts) Right away, then, we can see that every sin has two poles.

Evil Effects Follow Evil Actions

In the first place, there is the action itself. As human beings, our actions can be conscious thoughts, words, or deeds. (Digesting lunch isn’t really a human action, because we don’t do it consciously). So a sin is, in the first place, a (conscious) thought, word, or deed that goes against God’s will. Now, we know that God’s will is as full of wisdom as the ocean is full of water (see Psalm 36:6). And his wisdom is intrinsically connected to his limitless love, his overflowing goodness, and his absolute omnipotence. To go against his will, then, is not a smart thing to do. It’s like going against the manufacturer’s instructions – like putting sand in the gas tank of our car, or drying out a wet cell phone by putting it in a hot oven for a couple of hours. It does damage.

It’s important to have that clear. Any thought, word, or action that goes against God’s will (that violates the natural moral law, the Ten Commandments, the teachings of his Church…) will cause some kind of damage to one’s own person, and to the world around us. We may not always see it right away, but it is there, and it will show up, sooner or later. God doesn’t make up a random list of sins out of thin air. Disobedience to God is disobedience to God’s wise plan for human life, for our life; it’s trying to fly without wings. To describe this first aspect of sin, we can use the term “evil action.”

To Blame or Not To Blame

In the second place, sin involves the conscious choice to perform such a rebellious action. This is why, for example, someone who is driving drunk and causes a fatal accident is not necessarily guilty of the sin of murder (they didn’t consciously intend to kill), but they are guilty of the sin of drunkenness (they chose to abuse alcohol). This is also why a criminal who forces a banker at gunpoint to unlock a safe doesn’t make the banker guilty of the sin of theft – the banker opened the safe against his will. Where there is no free choice, there can be no moral responsibility.

But our distinctions don’t end there. The conscious choice to perform an evil action can itself be culpable or not culpable. In other words, we can be responsible for the evil choice or not responsible for it. If I am responsible for it, then I become morally guilty for the evil committed and its consequences. If I am not responsible for it, then I am morally innocent.

For example, if a little boy grows up with parents who are thieves and who teach him to follow in their footsteps, that child may grow up convinced that stealing from non-family members is not an evil action. In that case, whenever he steals from non-family members, although he is freely committing an objectively evil action, he is not aware that it is evil (he doesn’t know that it is a sin). So, the damage is done, both to his soul (he deepens his habits of deception and dishonesty) and to the world around him (the pain and suffering caused by injustice), but he is not morally culpable for it – not guilty.

On the other hand, if a little boy grows up in a normal family environment, his natural, God-given sense of right and wrong will be nourished by the words and example of his parents and education. In this case, he will know that he shouldn’t take anything that doesn’t belong to him. And so, when he goes off to summer camp for the first time and discovers that his roommate has a collection of candy bars, he knows that taking one of them without permission is an evil action. And so, if he takes one anyway, he is responsible for the evil – guilty.

The Hazy Days of Sinners

This all seems obvious. But in real life the line between culpability and non-culpability often gets hazy. As the first little boy grows up, for example, at some point he will realize that other people don’t live like thieves. At some point his natural, God-given sense of right and wrong will flash a thought into his mind: “What is this person going to do if I steal their credit card and max it out at the cash machine?” It may be a very quiet qualm of conscience, but at some point, unless he has become psychopathic or sociopathic, the qualm will surface. At that point, doesn’t he become culpable, even though he had such a twisted upbringing?

A classic example of this haziness in the realm of moral responsibility is the case of the guards in charge of exterminating prisoners during the Nazi holocaust. Was it truly possible that they didn’t realize, at some level of consciousness, that they were destroying fellow human beings? Are the guards morally innocent because they were simply following orders?… When we start to wrestle with tangled cases like that, it is relief to remember that God is the perfect judge.

Here is an example of haziness (uncertainty about what’s right or wrong in a specific situation) that’s a little closer to home. Imagine that the government makes a mistake in my favor and sends me an extra $1000 on a tax rebate. That money really doesn’t belong to me, which means it belongs to someone else. So, shouldn’t I send it back to the government? But wait, doesn’t the government charge too much money in taxes anyway, and wasn’t it their mistake? Is taking that extra rebate (which I may really need) stealing? Some good Catholics would keep that money without batting an eye, thanking God for it. Others would send it back immediately, convinced that it was a temptation from the Devil. On rare occasions, then, knowing right and wrong is tricky business, business that keeps moral theologians busy.

Getting Down to Brass Tacks

Now we are ready to answer your question. To be guilty of an evil action, I must be aware that it is evil, that it is morally wrong. That awareness may be clear or fuzzy. The clearer it is, the more guilty I am. To be guilty of an evil action, I also have to freely make the evil choice. The greater the degree of freedom, the great the culpability. If I commit an evil action without awareness of the evil or when my freedom is impaired, however, the evil is still committed; damage is done. This is why ignorance is NOT bliss. Fornication still wounds souls and societies, even if the fornicators have never been taught that fornication is wrong.

The spiritual consequences of this long answer to your very short question are pretty obvious. We need to make a decent effort not only to do what’s good and avoid what’s evil, but also, to know what’s right and wrong – it’s much easier to walk quickly and surely in the daylight than in the dark. We have to inform ourselves about what the Church teaches and why, going beyond the Google News sound bites about the Pope’s latest encyclical. That’s why you are reading this Q&A, and that’s why faithful Catholic resources like www.ncregister.com and www.faithandfamilylive.com are so invaluable to us.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC