“Then Job answered the Lord: ‘I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted…I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:1-6).
Over the last several years, I have been forced to watch a dear friend destroy her life.
She became caught up in her career to the neglect of her husband and children, and frequently stayed out late to party with her worldly friends and coworkers. She became fascinated and obsessed with New Age theories and practices, like astrology and the Enneagram. She experimented with drugs. She began rejecting important teachings of her Catholic faith, such as those on sexuality and marriage, a male-only priesthood, and the existence of hell, eventually abandoning the Church altogether. Now she is divorcing her devoted and distraught husband, living with another man, and breaking the hearts of her adult and adolescent children. And she has decided to do all this at the age of fifty years old.
Despite this horrific domestic devastation, she proclaims incessantly that she is now “living her best life.” It is hard to believe that only ten years earlier, this woman was once a devout Traditionalist Catholic, whose faith and family were the most important things in her life.
This could easily happen to you, or me. In fact, it should sound eerily familiar (if it doesn’t, go and read the Book of Jeremiah). It follows a consistent pattern of human brokenness, and is symbolic of the drama that takes place between our soul and God whenever we sin.
What is the root cause of this evil in our lives? What is the root of all moral evil?
Self-love.
Now, this is a kind of misnomer in English, because an authentic love of ourselves is a requirement of our holy religion, the foundation and reference point for our love of neighbor. What I am referring to is actually hatred disguised as love, like the relationship of an abuser to their victim, except in the case of self-love, you are both abuser and victim.
Our Lord once appeared to St. Catherine of Siena and asked her,
“Do you know, daughter, who you are, and Who I Am? If you know these two things, you will be blessed. You are she who is not; whereas I Am He Who Is. Have this knowledge in your soul and the Enemy will never deceive you and you will escape all his wiles; you will never disobey my commandments, and will acquire all grace, truth and light.”
There is so much profundity in this revelation to St. Catherine, we could spend the rest of our lives plumbing its depths. It is only by the knowledge and acceptance of who I am not in relationship to God that I discover who I am. There is no happiness or peace for us apart from Him; this is why St. Augustine said that our hearts are unquiet until they rest in Him.
Many of you may remember those beautiful waves of peace and freedom that rushed over you when you set aside the self-centered private judgment of Traditionalism, that amazing feeling of finally knowing exactly who you were, who you were not, and what you were a part of. For me, it was an life-changing encounter with the healing power of Christ: spiritually, I had been blind, and could now see; deaf, and could now hear; lame, and now I could walk and run! What joy!
Although these times of healing and conversion are wonderful, until we reach heaven we cannot become complacent, we have not “arrived”. Each one of us can fall back into evil, like my poor friend, usually different than before, but no less deadly. She had actually returned to full communion with Church right before she began her sad trajectory. There are two principal ways the Enemy gets us to fall: either by laxity, which we can fall into by carelessness or distraction, or scrupulosity, where we become so fearful of falling that we eventually throw ourselves into sin just to relieve ourselves of the growing dread. Both laxity and scrupulosity are forms of self-love rooted in pride.
We have to not only accept our brokenness and nothingness, we have to embrace it. “My power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). Humility is the only way to escape the self-obsession of self-love that drives us into sin, separation, and disintegration. Entropy is as much a reality in the spiritual order as it is in the natural world. Left to themselves, our bodies and souls fall into evil, that is, back into the nothingness whence they came. United to God in Christ by his Church, we become one with Being itself, and His Love makes us immortal and glorious.
In Him and to Him, we are everything.
“But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.’” (Is 43:1, 4).
Veritas et Caritas
such a great post!! though it is a bittersweet one. I will certainly pray for your friend. Such thoughtful words on self-love. Also for me it was a great reminder scrupulousity is a form of pride.