Amazing Catechists

Teaching and learning the faith together

Healing After Grief Through Divine Mercy

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By now, most of us have been inundated with information about the Divine Mercy devotion popularized through St. Faustina’s Diary. But have we learned about how divine mercy itself aids us through grief as a healing balm for our wounds? Probably not.

It’s easy to take care of yourself in the immediate aftermath of loss: you make sure you are fed, clean, and get adequate rest. You drink enough water. You might take a walk or sit down to read a book. But what about the condition of your soul? Certainly we are a composite of mind, body, and soul, which are all intricately interconnected.

But we cannot neglect our souls. In fact, I strongly believe that, when we don’t face our deepest inner turmoil from a spiritual perspective, we will not ever be completely healed.

How does divine mercy give us the grace to experience lasting peace and permanent healing? I am not implying that grace alone will solve all of your suffering, nor that it’s not important – necessary at times, even – to seek medical or professional help in addition to turning to your faith. What I am saying is that if you truly wish to be deeply healed, you simply cannot overlook the value of sacramental grace.

Here is a way for you to understand how divine mercy plays an integral role in grief healing:

Divine mercy is the only means by which we can be fully restored and made whole after we have incurred grave losses. It’s not His obligation, but He cannot deny us this because of love. Mercy is the way God reaches our torn and tattered hearts after betrayals and breakups (p. 125 in my book, From Grief to Grace: The Journey from Tragedy to Triumph).

If you need some practical ways to experience the power of Divine Mercy, start with these:

  • Frequent the Sacrament of Mercy – Reconciliation. Better yet, frequent the Sacraments of Healing together – Reconciliation and the Eucharist.
  • Read about God’s incredible mercy in the Psalms.
  • Pray to St. Faustina for a deeper understanding of how much God’s love envelops you in your pain.
  • Offer your misery to Jesus as a gift. His mercy will transform your heart.
  • Be merciful to both yourself and others. This means being more patient and kinder than necessary. Remember the quote, “Be kinder than necessary. Everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle”? Keep that in mind regarding the message of mercy.
  • Practice the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. Pray about which one or two God is inviting you to try rather than committing to all of them. Base your selection on your specific gifts, talents, personality, lifestyle, and the time you have.

Consider this quote from the Diary of St. Faustina (no. 1273). Read it as if Jesus is speaking directly to your heart. Ponder it throughout the week. Ask the Lord to reveal to you what it means for your particular cross right now:

There is no misery that could be a match for My mercy, neither will misery exhaust it, because as it is being granted, it increases. The soul that trusts in My mercy is most fortunate, because I Myself take care of it.

Friends, faith alone will not solve all of your ills. Neither, though, will prescriptions and therapy. Remember that your soul is the center, the wellspring of your existence. From it flows the Spring of Eternal Life. Access this spring so that you might discover true and lasting healing through mercy, as well as the other ways you care for your health.

I believe if we “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” then truly “all these things will be given to you besides” (see Matthew 6:33).

Adapted from my book, From Grief to Grace: The Journey from Tragedy to Triumph.

Text (c) Jeannie Ewing 2018, all rights reserved. Photo by Fischer Twins on Unsplash

 

The Freedom to……………….Shoes: Reject The Comfort of Sin

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St. Teresa of Avila once stated, “We always find that those who walked closest to Christ were those who had to bear the greatest trials.”

Shoes, Comfort, Sin, and Appearances

I recently saw a woman wobbling down the street and having great difficulty walking. The other woman she was with kept pointing to this woman’s shoes and shaking her head. Ultimately, the stumbling woman simply took off her shoes and began to walk barefoot.   From what I could decipher from a distance, it appears that the woman had been sacrificing comfort for appearances. While the shoes looked great and clearly fit the rest of her outfit, they did not fit her feet and proved more trouble than they were worth.

This recent Lent provided me with many opportunities to think about comfort, sin, and appearances.

Comfort is a Relative Thing

According to St. Paul, “For there shall be a time when they will not endure sound doctrine; but according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.”  (2 Tim 4:1-4)

Our world tells us that we can never have too much comfort.  After all, what rational person would ever reject a more comfortable chair in favor of an uncomfortable one? Comfort is often equated in this world with money, such that most see having a lot of money as the way to find greater comfort.  In the sense, many of us would question the sanity of someone like St. Francis of Assisi, who turned his back on a great fortune to live a life of poverty and want.  Having too much money or too much comfort will not get anyone in this society any sympathy.

However, comfort is a relative thing.  We probably all need at least some of it to function on a long-term basis.  On the other hand, too much comfort may do us as much, if not more, harm than good. Comfort tends to slip us into the mentality of forgetting God and His blessings. Comfort tends to make us complacent and lukewarm in our faith. Comfort even fools us into believing that our happiness is wholly our own doing.

Comfort is a vicious cycle into self-obsession.  The more comfortable we feel, the more selfish and self-absorbed we tend to become.  Content in our own convenient abundance, we tend to forget the need and suffering of others.

We need only look at Christ to remember that comfort and Christianity are often polar opposites in this world.  Our Lord was born into and regularly faced poverty, rejection, and inconvenience. If we aspire to follow Christ, we must likewise aspire to, and even embrace, discomfort as the price.

Tolerance for Sin as Compromise for Comfort

Fulton Sheen said, “Tolerance applies only to persons, never to truth…or principles. About these things, we must be intolerant.”

Psychologists tell us that people tend to seek stability and consistency in their lives while instinctively pulling away from discomfort and chaos.  It would be wonderful if this all meant that everyone lined up in neat lines marching toward heaven and salvation and away from the chaos of sin. However, human nature is an arrogant fool. Sadly, we find that this world increasingly views sin as sanity and rejection of sin as chaos. Charity and mercy call on us to be tolerant of the sinner, but intolerant of the sin—most especially our own.

Increasingly surrounded and enticed by sin, we often find it much more comfortable to accept, rationalize, and even embrace sin as the path of least upheaval and greater acceptance by this world.  We wear the distorted shoes of sin so often that we soon see our limp as the accepted way to walk.

Reject the Appearances and Moral Fashions of this World

This society immerses itself in the notion of tolerance as a universal good without accepting the reality that not all tolerance is a good thing.  What would happen if we tolerated murder, rape, and other violent crimes?  Is it even rational to be a Catholic who supports abortion? Obsessed with appearances and superficial morality, we too often stumble along in shoes of sin we got in the habit of wearing.

We cannot be tolerant of sin in our lives. We must foster a personality and nature that rejects the sin that will surely come across our way with each passing day.  Being weak and inconsistent human beings, we will often fall in some way during this year. Rather than spend all of our time and efforts avoiding the falls, we must dedicate a good portion of our preparation and fortitude to constructively dealing with the falls that will surely come.

Conclusion

As members of this society and world, we can all fall for the lure of acceptance, popularity, and group pressure. If we get too used to wearing the warped shoes of sin, we will eventually become so accustomed to their fit that all confession, contrition, or remorse will seem useless and unnecessary.

Lukewarm compromise and those who sold out their morals become increasingly tepid in our faith. The greatest evil and lie is feeling hopeless under the weight of our sins. Divine Mercy reminds us that Christ will always reach out to us if we reach out to him. We reach out to Our Lord by frequent confession and Communion, prayer, and good works for others.

Stop stumbling along in the distorted shoes of sin just for acceptance or the sake of appearances.  Do not seek the comfort and convenience of this world over the struggles of following Christ. Embrace the discomfort of your sin as the sign that you have not compromised your faith and values.  Likewise, embrace Divine Mercy as Our Lord’s promise to reach out to you as long as you find sin uncomfortable in your life. Above all, love God so much that you will always see sin as an intolerable and uncomfortable pair of shoes you simply refuse to wear.

2018  Gabriel Garnica

What is Grief?

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Popular counselors tend to affirm the common definition of grief in our western culture: that it is a period of designated mourning following the death of a loved one. While this is certainly true, it is a narrow and limited understanding of what grief encompasses. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard for most of us to recognize when we are grieving.

What I have learned, both from personal experience and in my professional background, is that grief includes any significant and devastating loss. This could be the death of your beloved pet; the sudden loss of your job; a child born with a genetic condition or disability (as in our case); a spouse who has left you; caring for an elderly parent who is suffering from dementia; struggling in the aftermath of sexual assault; recovering from PTSD as a military veteran; making ends meet as a single mother; healing after abortion; hidden sorrow from a miscarriage or stillbirth.

There are countless life circumstances that trigger our grief experiences. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does help to get us thinking – or rethinking – about what grief is and how it affects us when life goes in a direction other than what we’d imagined.

Here are some points to remember when you are grieving:

  1. Any loss that is significant in your life can cause grief. You might feel sad, lost, lonely, or angry. These are some of the normal feelings associated with loss.
  2. Change can provoke a sense of loss, too. Every change in life – moving, having a baby, getting a new job – entails both good and bad, the possibilities of what is in store as well as the loss of what is left behind.
  3. There is no timeline for grief! Despite what others may believe, or what you might also think, grief happens on its own terms. You can neither predict nor hasten how you will experience grief.
  4. Be gentle and patient with yourself when you are grieving. There will be days or weeks that seem more “normal” to you, but you may have what you feel are setbacks – moments of frustration, longing for what once was and is no longer, a crying spell after hearing a song.
  5. Grief involves physical and emotional changes in your life, but don’t neglect the spiritual dimension of grief. Our faith tells us that suffering is not lost upon God when we hand it to Him with humility and sincerity. Suffering is redemptive in this way.
  6. Find ways to process your pain. For some, this includes journaling memories or perhaps creating visual art. For others, it might be taking a walk, talking to a trusted friend or pastor, Eucharistic Adoration.

My hope is that we will shift our focus from eschewing suffering to embracing it. A wonderful devotion for those who are suffering is the Divine Mercy chaplet and novena. We would all do well to extend mercy to ourselves and others who are grieving a loss.

(Note: I will include a separate post about Divine Mercy related to grief at a later date.)

Paraphrased from my book, From Grief to Grace: The Journey from Tragedy to Triumph.

Text (c) Jeannie Ewing 2018, all rights reserved. Photo by Francisco Moreno on Unsplash

Got Plans? No, God Plans

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hand of Christ

“For I know the plans that I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11

I once saw a painting of a man throwing his hands up in despair, eyes fixed on the sky in a mix of supplication and frustration. The image was jarring if only because it demonstrated the irony of faith.  On one hand, one demonstrates faith in believing that God can reach out and help.  On the other hand, however, that very same faith is immediately tested when God seems not to reach out at all, at least to one’s perception, expectation, and satisfaction.

The one who has no faith in God does not bother to even ask for help from Someone whose very existence is deemed a fanciful myth.  Such a person ultimately claims to have faith only in himself, and not much faith in anything else.  Eventually, such thinking ends in the total despair of firmly grasping on a falling tree limb.

The reach of Christ is an invitation to release that limb, either before it falls or, just as significantly, after.  Releasing the limb before its fall is the admission that the limb is a pathetic substitute for the firm grasp of a loving God.  Conversely, releasing it just after the fall is the admission that, when all else is lost, there will  still be a loving God’s reach.

The proud embrace their limb all the way down to the darkness of their own self-obsession.  The doubting face a worse fate, holding the falling limb with one hand while waving a questioning, free hand that is anything but free, trapped in its own ambivalence.

Divine Mercy is the promise that God’s reach will far outreach one’s own, so mired as it will usually be by a mixture of guilt, doubt, pride, and a desire for self-punishment.  We all grasp that limb for all of these reasons, yet God’s love constantly invites us to let go and grasp His Hand instead.

Even when we do reach out, do we hesitate as Peter did in the sea or do we go all in? Do we see God’s answer as our own, or are we truly open to let God answer our prayers His way?

Ultimately, faith is all about trusting that, regardless of how bleak and pathetic things may seem to us, God has a plan for us.  It is believing that we will get lost as God offers a roadmap back home. It is closing one’s eyes to the marketing of this world’s values and walking in God’s path as best we can.  Ironically, it is refusing to embrace the highs and the lows of this world too tightly, knowing that they merely represent the waves of a sea that only God can calm.

People constantly ask us if we have plans, for the summer, for the fall, for the holidays, for next year, and for the rest of our lives.  More and more, the closer we get to  God, the more our answer should be “Yes, but God is the one who has them.”

2016,  Gabriel Garnica

Divine Mercy : Antidote to the Self-Hate of Sin

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As many of us know, this year has been declared a Jubilee Holy Year of Mercy by Pope Francis, which should remind all of us that Divine Mercy is a game plan we should follow every day, and not just near Easter.

Many otherwise devoted Catholics know little about this beautiful devotion.

The message and devotion are based on the writings of Saint Faustina Kowalska, an uneducated Polish nun who, in obedience to her spiritual director, wrote a diary recording the revelations she received about God’s mercy. Its message is both simple and profound, and stands as the perfect antidote to the self-hate that is sin.

The Message

The Divine Mercy Message is simply that God loves all of us more than we hate ourselves. The reason we can make the above statement is that God is all perfect and all love, and His love transcends our weakness and sin.

God created each of us with a sacred purpose, a special and unique mission in this life. It is our job to discern, discover, develop, and implement that purpose and mission in our lives. As Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos once stated, “No one was ever lost because his sin was too great, but because his trust was too small.”

Because God’s love is so great, so is His mercy, and because that mercy is greater than our sins, we should always approach Our Lord with trust. Trusting God will allow us to receive His mercy.  Finally, we must return that mercy to others. In fact, this message is as simple as ABC:

A….Ask for His Mercy through constant prayer, repentance, and petitions for that Mercy.

B….Be merciful to others by extending love and forgiveness.

C….Completely trust in Jesus in that the more we trust in Him, the more we will receive.

Sin as Self-Hate

We know that the devil is the embodiment of hate, lies, and disobedience.  He threw away all that God gave him out of greed for power and independence.  Having rejected God with ingratitude and betrayal,  the devil wants nothing more than to entice us to do the same. Nothing enrages him more than the fact that we have each been given the ingredients, and the mission, to become saints in the service of God.

Consequently, the last thing that Satan wants us to remember is that we can achieve great things in the name and service of God. He wants us to find ourselves incapable, hopelessly lacking in the “impossible” task of ever doing any good.

At some level, we know that God’s love and mercy for us is so great that it makes no sense to our simple, human limitation. This love and mercy contradicts satan’s lie that we are worthless and pathetically ill-equipped to make any difference in God’s plan.

Since satan does not want us to be in God’s loving embrace, he will do anything and everything to get us to surrender to the ultimate lie that we are merely God’s misfit toys, not meant or fit to aspire to holiness, much less sanctity.

Since God’s open arms in the face of our defects make no sense to us, sin becomes our unique opportunity and strategy to sabotage ourselves. If God is all love, then it follows that sin becomes the singular and collective expression of self-hate, the self-fulfilling prophecy of a doomed eternity in despair that we deserve as fallen followers of a fallen leader.

Divine Mercy as The Ultimate Antidote to Sin

If the gap between God’s goodness and our defect is so great, so seemingly insurmountable, then the direct, simplistic response to that perceived gap is to surrender, to stop wasting our time trying to be something we can never be.

Why try to be more like Jesus, when we are a lot more like the devil? This is hell’s propaganda for perdition, but we do not have to buy that propaganda.

Therein is the ultimate twist of Divine Mercy. Namely, that we are not called or expected to grasp for a perfection of which we are innately incapable as defective human beings. Such a misguided effort will merely lead to frustration, defeat, desperation, and surrender, not to mention the inherent self-obsession of those wrapped up in their ups and downs.

Rather, Divine Mercy lovingly and patiently asks us to admit our limitations, seek forgiveness and forgive in return, and love God so much that we dare to offer our defective selves in His service despite the fact that our self-appraisal of our own value, worth, qualification, and merit for that service is so apparently pathetic.

At the end of the day, following Christ is not about happily skipping on some cloud without faltering or falling. If we have learned anything from this world, it is that following Our Lord is more about getting up from the falls and stumbles than pretending that we can always avoid them.

Christ never promised us that we would never fall while following Him, but that He would always be there to help us get up again. In fact, did not Christ Himself fall on the way to Calvary? It is curiously ironic, I think, that the word “sin” in Spanish means “without”, for sin is truly choosing to be “without” God.

Let us recall that Peter loved and trusted Jesus despite his betrayal, and that the good thief humbly gained salvation at Calvary as well. Whether we swallow our hollow pride and reach for Christ as Peter did, or follow Judas by wrapping that pride around our necks,  is our eternal decision to make.

In this beautiful year of Divine Mercy, let us resolve to love God with enough trust, obedience, and dedication to overcome the self-sabotage of sin.