How can trying to grow in holiness be anything other than good?
I grew up reading stories about the saints. When I was older I read the writings of saints. Catholic apologetics, spirituality, theology, philosophy - when I was in my twenties I read as much as I was able and took university level courses whenever I could. Whatever credits I had leftover from fulfilling my program and degree requirements I used to take courses to learn about my Catholic faith.
I became fluent in Catholic intellectual "lingo" and immersed in a certain spiritual culture where to be holy was to be "other-worldly", docility and humility were prized virtues of a soul being made holy, and detachment from self-will out of love for Christ was the hard-sought goal of a disciple. I was zealous in pursuing these attributes of a good Catholic disciple, following after the example of the saints, at least as much as I was able to. I thought I already had the map through the Church's sacramental life, teachings, and the examples of the saints and that THAT would be sufficient. I believed this without any doubt throughout the "first half" of my spiritual life (which made me insufferable to many, I'm sure!). And then, when it was time, God made it all tumble down so that I could no longer in good conscience be certain of all these things I had put my faith in.
That was my "spiritual midlife crisis" which I have shared about in previous posts and podcast episodes. Part of the movement from the first half of our spiritual lives to the second half of our spiritual lives is becoming utterly undone by God, losing our earlier certainty and being ushered after a time in "limbo" into a new way of relating to God, to Self, and Neighbour. Richard Rohr OFM has called this process "Order - Disorder - Reorder". My own preferred term for this experience comes from Monty Williams SJ who calls the process "Closed Myth - Broken Myth - Open Myth".
I was in the 'Broken Myth' part of this process for about a decade (the breaking of our Closed Myth takes place over time because there is so much to break open!). As I navigated the broken pieces of my once 'Closed Myth' about becoming holy, I realised how much of the myth I had believed in negated my embodied humanity, the very humanity that God chose to be incarnated into! It was during my time in the limbo of the 'Broken Myth', when the old stories and scripts I used to live out of no longer made sense of my relationship with God, that I realised this: the powerful forces which had distorted my human development had also limited how I understood the Catholic faith culture, and how I saw God, myself, and the world.
I'm not saying that I no longer believe in the pursuit of holiness, or that docility and humility aren't virtues, or that it is an incredibly beautiful thing to be able to freely give up my self-will for the love of Christ and neighbour. I STILL believe all these things but how I understand them and how I see the path of living them out is now completely different.
In my latest podcast episode I share about how the cultures that formed me (including Catholic culture) and complex trauma played a role in me having a disembodied (intellectualised and spiritualised) faith and how all these factors set me up in such a way that I was primed to be blind to spiritually harmful and abusive dynamics. In this I know that I am not alone because I have witnessed and heard from so many people who became easy victims to spiritually abusive cultures and practices because their understanding of faith and spirituality was similarly disembodied and distorted.
I invite you to listen to (or watch) this episode, and to perhaps reflect on how the cultures that formed you and your own history of woundedness may have set you up for spiritual abuse or set you up to be complicit in spiritually harming others.
Journeying with you as always,
Responses