Oct 12, 2010
I was blessed recently to attend a conference on “discernment of spirits.” What do the actions of God in a soul look and feel like? How do we experience them? How can we tell which of our thoughts to accept and which to reject?
After two talks detailing how to recognize which movements of the soul come from God and which don’t, we held a round-table in which participants were invited to share their own experiences, so we could "see" what we’d been studying in practice.
A woman I’ll call Joan revealed an amazing story which she gave me permission to re-tell anonymously.
As sometimes happens, the birth of one of her children brought distinct memories of childhood abuse she'd only vaguely dealt with to the fore in a powerful way. She entered depression and deep spiritual darkness, during which she was consumed with two thoughts: hatred for her abuser and deep rage against God for abandoning her. "I was helpless and innocent," she scolded Him, "and where were You?"
This condition persisted for some time, her faith life plunging to nothingness (though she continued to attend Sunday Mass).
One day, during a routine visit, her mother-in-law (knowing nothing of these difficulties) asked Joan to go to mass with her, casually mentioning that the priest who would celebrate was battling depression and needed prayers.
Joan approached the priest afterward to say that she had empathy because she was suffering from depression too.
"You need an anointing," he said. She tried to demur, but he insisted, so she received the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, and felt one degree better.
One degree from black is still black though, so she remained in spiritual darkness. The thought occurred to her, "Whatsoever you do to the least of these, that you do unto me." She knew that this was somehow the answer, but she was furious with God and refused to pray or "unpack" this idea.
Shortly thereafter her husband said on a Sunday, "Hon, let's go to mass together this week. I'll hold the baby part of the time and you hold him part of the time, and we'll both get to pray."
When her turn came, she knelt in the pew, relented, and said to God, "Fine! Whatsoever you do to the least of these, that you do unto me. What the hell does that mean?!"
...And suddenly it dawned on her what it meant.
She had never been alone, Christ had been with her the entire time, and her abuser had hurt not only her but Jesus himself.
As she spoke these things, her eyes filled with tears of joy recalling her liberation.
"When you have been used as an object of degradation and filth, that's what you think you are, so I had been carrying around this spiritual tar, as if I were nothing, just a piece of trash. Now I almost physically felt all that tar lift off me and land where it belonged: on him."
"In an instant I understood God’s love for me and my own worth.”
God was not done, however.
“Then I saw my abuser, whose face I had wanted to rip off, covered in this tar. I remembered what it felt like to carry that –and it had never belonged to me, and did belong to him.
“Awful! I felt such compassion for him. The hatred disappeared and I felt a strong impulse to make sacrifices and pray for him so that he could be saved."
"And then in my head I heard the Lord say to me, " ...and if you did that, this evil would be made a good."
"I had in a short period of time a complete healing of myself, the total transformation of my hate into compassion, and a profound experience of God's capacity to transform any evil into good. That is what He does."
Every woman sitting at that round-table had such a story. Not all were as dramatic, but each revealed the tenderness and intimacy and specificity with which God touches each individual soul with just exactly what it needs.
As St. Julie Billiart says, “How good is the good God!”