Interiority, Psychology, and Several Recommendations

For as long as I can remember, I have had an attaction for the personal depths of human beings. Just like some people love symphonies or nature hikes or bright colors or fast-paced cities with lots of culture, I have always been fascinated by the interior depths of individuals. I suppose it is telling that I majored in English, with a literature and writing focus, but that I had originally thought of Psychology instead. Sifting through character motivation and pulling out my own reactions in the face of various world views was my chosen path into my own educational formation.

But I quickly learned that most people don't like mucking around inside of themselves, that I didn't have the tools to actually deal with the stuff I found in myself or others, and that modern life can be seen as an endless variety of ways to avoid interior realities. Also, that without grace, interior dwellers can become morose, delusional, and/or weird.

We aren't made to be strictly interior dwellers of course, any more than we are created to be exterior dwellers. St. Teresa of Avila's famous image of the Interior Castle makes it clear that the interior life is about union with the King, with God who dwells in the soul. Union with God entails loving neighbor as God loves. So interior life is no place for escapists who just want to snap judgmentally at others for being shallow. The interior life is a place from which life springs up and flows forth, for the good of all.

So what do we do when the spring isn't springing? When channels are blocked up? Do we simply and only need to pray more? 

If "pray more" means "keep trying to get God to fix what's wrong with me," I think we now stumble upon a key problem. Prayer is about communion with God. When prayer becomes focused on my problems and not on God, it might be a sign that we are not so much dealing with a spiritual problem as a psychological problem. If we stay in that place, what we call prayer and our relationship with God is laid open to a lot of undue stress and deformation, and it can become a barrier against reality instead of the doorway into it.

I heard this point articulated recently in a podcast I heard on Souls & Hearts, a unique platform dedicated to helping Catholics overcome pyschological barriers towards intimacy with God. I recommend it. 

And while I'm making recommendations, here's another. A few years ago I was hired to edit the English translation of a Polish book on this very topic. The English version is called Personal Development: How to Cooperate with Grace? The authors are Monika and Marcin Gajda, who have had years of clinical and Catholic ministerial practice in Poland, helping people to develop a true, contemplative life of prayer, to die to a false self, and live a new life of love, focused on the pursuit of the true good. The paperback book is now in print. (Hey, if you get a copy and read it, leave a review on Amazon, ok?)

It's been said that St. John of the Cross was an extremely astute psychologist, before psychology was even developed. He was, of course, operating with a 16th century scholastic understanding of the human person, and to a large extent this is so unfamiliar to modern readers as to make him almost unintelligble. So, one more recommendation. I have to give one more round of applause to Fr. Iain Matthew's book The Impact of God. In January I listened to three seminars Fr. Iain gave on faith, hope, and charity, and I was once again blown away by his presentation of St. John. If ever you've wished you could grasp him but his writings were just too scary, please get a copy of Fr. Iain's book. He makes St. John of the Cross and his teachings come to life in such a life-giving way.

Let  us not get stuck in mucking around in interiority as an end in itself. Let us not flee from the thought of self-confrontation for fear of the beasts we shall encounter! Let us be drawn to the King, the Lover, dwelling in the center of the castle, and finding Him, be empowered to bring His love and that taste of freedom to others who will set out on this same journey.

Ego and Conversion

I'm probably not the only one.

As I was sorting out adulthood, faith, and what it meant to hear God's call, I regularly got tripped up over Scripture passages like "deny yourself and follow Me [Jesus]." (Mt. 16:24, Mk. 8:34, Lk. 9:23, Jn. 3:30)

In looking back at that, I believe it was because of having a strong yet unconscious formation in annihilation as a positive value. (Is that what nihilism is all about?) What I mean of this is I had an underlying diabolical belief that my personal existence is a fault, an error, the bad element in the equation of what is. That it would be better if I were not.

And there were reasons for that, but this post isn't aimed there. This is aimed at how this affects the workings of ego.

And by ego, I mean the self. Self at the center. Self as Lord. Self as master.

As a young Christian, I knew that self wasn't supposed to be master. Literally, the essence of the gospel invitation had been presented to me as a promise of Jesus sitting on the throne (the place of determining courses of action and thinking) when the self gets off the throne and invites Him there. These gospel passages of self-denial mentioned above seemed to take this dethronement even further, into a kind of required self-death or self-hatred. I figured, what else would it mean to "deny yourself" or to "hate your life" in this world to keep it for eternal life?

Because I already had this latent self-annihilation wish gnawing at me, I found myself pretty good at self-hatred. This became a twisted religiously-decorated ego-delight: how much I could castigate and hate my selfish self. And when I came up for a breather from self-loathing, I smiled up into an imagined face of God who clearly took delight in me for doing this.

In reality, however, I was stuck. I thought I was deeply religious, but I was not making significant spiritual progress, even to the minimal extent I understood spiritual progress could or should be made. While I lived a normal looking life, in my interiority I mostly hardened out a path between these two points: feeling deeply unloved, and trying to impress God with how hard I was on myself. And being rather an intense sort, that path was trodden down rather firmly.

When I encountered Jesus on my way into the Catholic Church, He beckoned me off in a completely new direction. Significantly, the first big episode here happened at a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. The message came through loud and clear: I, Jesus, entered your human reality. If it shocks you that becoming a human being was good enough for Me, it is because you are grossly mistaken about the value of your own human creation. You are not an error. You are not a mistake. You are not a problem or a curse. Your being is not a blight on this world. You are loved. You are here on purpose, and it's My purpose.

Allowing myself to be loved, all the way down into my depths, took a long time. But knowing that Love was the trajectory of reality helped tremendously in reshaping my thinking about God, about myself, and about everything in between. I came to realize that having Jesus seated on the throne of my heart does not start with a hateful kicking and beating of myself, like so much evil garbage. The pleased face I sought out in my attempts at self-annihilation was not the face of God, but of the father of lies. Bowing in worship before the Lord Jesus Christ is an act that brings right order. I, a beloved creation, limited by nature, bow before the Creator who gives Himself to his creation. This is not a relationship of domination and subjegation, of conqueror and conquered, of the All and the obliterated. God is Love; Love gives Itself. I open; He infills. I become a son, I share the divine nature, I am brought into union (2 Pet. 1:4; Jn. 17:23; Eph. 1:23).

This is the sense in which one must understand the self-emptying, the self-denying. As St. John of the Cross would put it, the nada, nada, nada we embrace as God becomes all for us. By faith I can move out to receive from this supernatural transcendant reality.