IIC 23: Sinning, God Images and Resilience

We dive into how our God images impact us, and how they compromise our deep, abiding confidence in God, with practical suggestions to begin correcting those God images through experiencing God in a new relational way in prayer.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, your host and guide with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 23. It’s released on July 6th, 2020, and it’s called Sinning, God Images, and Resilience. I am excited to be here with you today. We’ve got a great episode coming up, and we’re going to be bringing together all this conceptual information from the last three sessions, and we’re going to see how it all works together in real life and real adversity, all from a Catholic worldview. Let’s start with a brief review. We’re going to spiral back to the critical concepts that we’ve been studying about resilience from a Catholic perspective. So if you’re new to this podcast, first of all, welcome. I’m glad to have you. I’m glad you’re here. All you need to know conceptually, we’re going to cover in the next few minutes or so. You can review the last three episodes if you want to. That’s episodes 20, 21, and 22. If you want to get into more detail about the concepts in this brief review, let’s start though, with the definition of Catholic resilience.

[00:01:45] You will see how it’s really different from secular understandings of resilience. For our purposes, I’m defining Catholic resilience as the process of accepting and embracing adversity, trials, stresses and sufferings as crosses. Catholic resilience sees these crosses as gifts from our loving, attuned God, gifts meant to transform us, to make us holy and to help us be better able to love and to be loved than we ever were before, and to ultimately bring us into loving union with him. That is what I want for you, for you to transform your suffering into a means of making you holier, more peaceful, and more joyful. I’m not here to take away any necessary suffering from you. I’m not here to take away the crosses that God has marked out for you, that he’s given you. But I am here to help you reduce and to eliminate psychological impediments to not only accepting those crosses, but embracing them and transforming your suffering into the means of salvation. You have to be resilient to do that, not as the world sees resilience, but resilience firmly grounded in a Catholic understanding. So do you remember from the last episode how we need a deep and abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s providence, in order to be resilient? That resilience is an effect. It’s a consequence of the deep, abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s providential care and his love for us.

[00:03:29] If you have this deep, abiding confidence in God and His providential love for you, for you specifically, you will be resilient. Let’s say that one more time. If you have the deep, abiding confidence in God and in his providential love for you, for you in particular, you will be resilient. Remember how the main psychological reason why we don’t have that deep, abiding confidence in God is because we don’t know Him as He truly is. We have problematic God images. Our God images fluctuate. They can be unstable as water. These God images are the subjective, emotionally driven ways that we construe God to be in the moment. These God images are automatic. They emerge spontaneously and they are not necessarily consented to by the will. These God images stand in contrast to our God concept, which is the representation of God that we profess, that we intellectually endorse, that we have come to believe through reading, studying, and discerning the God concept is the representation of God that we endorse. It’s the representation of God that we describe when others ask us who God is. Now, when our problematic, inaccurate, heretical God images get activated, they compromise whatever confidence we have in God, whatever childlike trust that we’ve developed in God. So just to review, this is the key causal chain. Bad God images and our response to them can lead to a lack of confidence in God, which leads to a lack or a loss of resilience.

[00:05:27] Psychological factors contribute to these bad God images. All right, here’s the idea. Think about a little child, 12 months old, 18 months old, looking at his father. To that toddler, his father seems like a god. Really huge. Probably ten times his weight, more than twice as height, so much stronger than he is able to do. So much more in the world. That toddler, as he comes into awareness about God, is going to transfer his experience of his parents and other caregivers into his God images. And that all happens before that toddler has the capacity for symbolic language. So those assumptions about God are not even encoded in words. They’re encoded nonverbally. They’re held outside of the capacity of language to represent them. And so they can be particularly difficult to access at times because of the developmental stage that that toddler is in. Now, here’s an important point for you to know as you wrap your mind around God images. God images are always formed experientially. God images flow from our relational experiences. They flow from how we construe and make sense of those relational experiences when we are very young. And that’s critical. We shape our first God images in the first two years of our lives. Those first two years of life have a huge impact on the formation of our initial God images. And that makes sense because our first two years of life have a huge impact on how we experience and understand relationships generally.

[00:07:03] Our experience of important caregivers, especially our parents, but also grandparents and other relatives, shape our psychological expectations of what God is like. And often we’re not aware of those expectations. We may not be able to put them into words, at least initially. Our assumptions may be unknown to our intellects, to our conscious minds. Simply put, our God images are often non-verbal and unconscious. Our God images may be unconscious, right. They might be in that unconscious zone, but they still affect us. They still impact us, and they still exercise influence on us. We can choose to accept that we have these problematic God images and we can deal with them directly, or we can deny that they exist and we can try to shove them away. We can try to ignore them, suppress them. We can try to drive them into the unconscious. Okay, now for a little speculative Malinoski theology. But first, you need to know that I could be wrong about some of the concepts that I’m discussing. I’m really serious about this. As a professional who teaches publicly and who speculates publicly about the intersection of psychology and Catholicism, I’m acutely aware that I could be wrong about things. So if any of you listeners, particularly those of you who are well formed theologically and philosophically detect that I’m ever teaching anything that contradicts the faith, I want you to tell me.

[00:08:30] This is really pioneering work that we’re doing together. For more than a decade, I did not teach this kind of thing publicly. I worked with my clients on it, but I did not teach it publicly because I wasn’t sure about getting into God images and God concepts publicly. What if I was wrong? What if I started leading people astray? How could I be sure that I’m not making mistakes? And then I realized that by not discussing these things publicly, I was making the bigger mistake of burying my talent. The mistake of omission. I needed to become more resilient and to become more resilient, I needed to have a deeper and more abiding confidence in God. I needed to know at a deep level that whatever public teaching I did wasn’t happening in a vacuum with God millions of miles away, leaving me to my own devices, letting me persist in my errors. No. God is near. God is minding me. God is minding this store. And if I fell down, if I went astray, he would come looking for me, like the shepherd who lost one of the hundred sheep and left the 99 behind to find the stray. So here’s the thing we hear about the first commandment still from time to time, right? You know the first commandment, the first one from the Ten Commandments. I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no strange gods before me.

[00:09:53] You might recollect from Exodus 32 that Moses, he was bringing down the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, newly inscribed, you know, by the finger of God, had the tablets there. The Israelites, though, were busy dancing around the golden calf. Bad news. Truly terrible. Okay, we know that God really does not like the worship of idols right now. I have to say, I have never been tempted to melt my wife’s jewelry down and make a golden calf and dance around it. I mean it. I mean, that never happened. I’ve struggled with a lot of different temptations in my life. I’ve had my ups and downs, but this calf making business. In all seriousness, this calf making business, dancing, all that, it’s never been on my radar. And also, I listen to people a lot about what their struggles are, and this whole creating and worshiping molten idols, it just doesn’t seem to come up that much nowadays in Catholic circles. It’s just not a thing right now. And not many confessions lead off with, you know, forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last confession. And I did it again. I stole some of my father’s bling. I stole his favorite gold Saturday Night Fever medallion and some cufflinks and some stuff. I melted it into a calf and I was glorifying it. I was dancing around it. I did it again. I did it twice. I did it last Thursday, and I did it the Sunday before that.

[00:11:09] I’m really sorry. No, you don’t usually hear that, right? So we’ve got, you know, we’ve got some teaching on this that comes out now, about false gods. Right. What what are the idols that practicing Catholics struggle with in the present age? So it’s common in Catholic circles to hear about how money could be our god or fame or power or career success. Maybe popularity is your God, or our carefully curated images on social media, or our physical health, or a sense of security, or a mansion in Martha’s Vineyard or something like that. Right. Yeah. Okay, I get it, I get it. These are things that people can pursue with an intensity of religious fervor. But do they really mistake them for God? I mean, really, like the Israelites did with their calf idol. We go back to Exodus 32. The Israelites were saying to each other, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” All right, so does anybody really say that about money or power or health or social image or security or mansion in Martha’s Vineyard? No, they don’t say that a mansion in Martha’s Vineyard brought you out of the land of Egypt. No. Now, I’m going to share with you what I think is the number one most prevalent modern day offense that serious Catholics commit against the first commandment. The worst thing that modern Catholics, the ones that are serious, these are ones that are actually serious, practicing the faith. The sin that they commit against the first commandment. What is that?

[00:12:48] Here it is that sin against the first commandment that we commit is allowing our problematic, heretical God images to dominate us, to exert influence on us in subtle and powerful ways. What I’m saying is that that most prevalent sin against the first commandment among us serious Catholics is defaulting to our negative God images, letting those negative God images rule us, acting as if those negative God images were actually true, not resisting their negative pull on us and letting those negative God images draw us away from God. What I’m saying is, is that it really harms our relationship with God when we give in to those problematic God images, and when we don’t resolve those problematic God images to reduce their pull on us. It’s not that we create a physical idol and worship our God images directly, but we let them sort of hang around. We give them space. We give them time. We don’t seek to resolve them. We might not even know we have God images. We may not even think about them, or we may try to ignore them, or we just chalk them up to being temptations, or we just deny them or suppress them. So how does that all happen? Let’s go into an example. So let’s just say that your dark place is feeling alone and abandoned by other people.

[00:14:15] And when that happens, your mood is depressed. That’s really common in this dark place. You don’t feel like anyone understands you. You don’t feel like anyone cares about you. And suddenly you generalize this feeling to God. Your deistic God image is activated. Your image of a God that’s distant, uncaring, a God who made the world but then left all of us, or at least just left you to your own devices. So now let’s say that you give this deistic God image some room and space to grow, right? Since you’re feeling that God is distant, uncaring, unkind, disinterested, disconnected, and you go with this feeling, right? You go with this God image rather than your God concept, right? Your God concept knows that God is loving and caring, but you let that fade, right? You let that go. You let this distant, uncaring, deistic God image drive your behavior. You don’t resist it, right? And you know what? You begin to drift away from God. Maybe you don’t pray as much anymore or pray at all anymore when you’re in this dark place, right? Because what’s the point? Doesn’t feel like God’s listening. You’re rolling with your feelings. You’re letting that apathy get a tighter and tighter grip on you. And now things seem even worse. You ask yourself, see how God doesn’t love me? See my sorry plight? That God image is starting to creep into that God concept in the moment.

[00:15:53] But you may not be giving God a chance to reach you. You might not be letting him find you. You might not be letting him in anymore, even though he is there. That’s happening. God’s not separating from you. The opposite is true. You’re separating from God. And here’s the kicker. It wasn’t primarily your negative God image that separated you from God. It wasn’t the God image itself. The God image itself is disordered, right? But it’s not sinful, right? Because it comes up spontaneously. It’s not something that you’re endorsing it. Just it’s sort of there as a first, what they call a first moral act, right? It’s not something that carries a moral weight until you act on it. Right. So what’s actually morally problematic, what’s actually sinful is if you respond to it by giving in to that deistic God image and letting yourself get carried away from God by it, by not seeking God, by acting as though God were indeed uncaring, distant, and uninterested in you. You distance yourself from him. You gave him the worship that it felt like he was due, if indeed he was an uncaring and distant God, you actually worshiped him as though he were that God image. And the worship that a distant, uncaring God deserves is almost nothing. Or indeed, maybe nothing. The more we give in to our negative, heretical God images, the more they color our God concepts, the more they lead us to entertain doubts in our intellect about God’s love, his power, his mercy, his goodness.

[00:17:39] And once we abandon our God concept to the notions of a heretical God, images look out! We are headed for blasphemy. Now let’s go back to Genesis three. We started that story last time. We’re going to pick up where we left off. “Then the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of thee in the garden. And I was afraid, because I was naked and I hid myself.'” After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened, but those opened eyes were still not seeing God accurately. Adam and Eve allowed them to be dominated by their natural response to their problematic God images, and we’re not absolutely certain what those God images were, but perhaps they had images of a wrathful God, a God seeking vengeance, a God focused on punishing them for violating the one law he gave them.

[00:19:06] This was not how they had known God to be in their original God concept and their original God image. After the fall, Adam and Eve let fear drive their behavior. God was looking for them. He was looking to reconnect with them. He was reaching out to them. He was even letting them know he was coming so as not to surprise them. Think of the tenderness. Think of the consideration in that. God knew exactly where they were, but he calls out to them to let them know, to not surprise them, to not stun or shock them, because he already knows the condition that they’re in and their wretchedness right? In spite of all of that, they’re hiding. They’re not seeing God anything like he really is. God reached out to them as a tender, loving, firm Father, and they hid from him. They wanted to get away. They wanted to flee. They were trying to save themselves from a God that didn’t exist, a God image that didn’t reflect who God really was. Now, these God images that trouble us usually correspond to the difficulties we have with relational bonds with other people in our attachment style. Our attachment style is basically how we relate, how we connect in close relationships with other people. And there are a variety of psychological factors that influence it. Brown and Elliott describe five conditions for secure attachment and secure relating. And I reviewed those a couple episodes ago.

[00:20:37] Now, I’ve modified these to describe the issues that people experience with their negative God images. If there’s a problem with the God image, it’s always because one or more of the following conditions for a secure relationship with God are not met. And I’ve, like I said, I’ve retooled these attachment related conditions, these attachment conditions, to look at the attachment that we have with God, right? So here are the five conditions we need to feel seen and known by God for secure attachment. Seen and known by God. Number two, we need to feel safe and secure with God. Safety and security. Absolutely essential for having a good attachment connection, a good bond. Number three, a sense of being comforted and reassured by God, especially when we’re anxious. Number four, having a sense that God cherishes you, rejoices in you, and delights in you. A sense that God cherishes you, rejoices in you, and delights in you. Number five, knowing at a deep level that God wills what is best for you. Note that these do not include dimensions that are spiritual. We’re not including the theological virtue of faith in here. We’re not getting into the spiritual dimensions or how faith impacts this, but the grace of faith is still going to perfect nature. It’s still going to work with your human nature. So even though these psychological factors are obviously not the whole story, they are still important. They still exert an effect because they provide the foundation upon which grace works.

[00:22:24] Now, in the last episode, you did a dark place exercise where you reflected on your God image when you were in one of your own particular dark places. You can go back to that God image from that dark place, or you can choose another one for what we’re going to do today experientially. But I’m going to ask you to really go into that dark place, whether that’s a place of anxiety, a place of depression, a place of anger, a place of loneliness, a place of jealousy, disappointment, whatever your dark place is, isolation, abandonment, whatever, really, when you’re down in that dark place, when you’re in that dark place. You know, it could be more of a psychological dark place, could be a spiritual, dark place. I’m really not talking about the dark night of the soul. This is totally different than the dark night of the soul. I’m talking about when you are in your psychological dark place, emotional dark place. Can have you write down how you feel God to be? And we’re talking about the God image that gets revealed when you are in this dark place, this God image that gets activated when you’re in this dark place. What are the images that you have of God when you feel abandoned or isolated or lonely or whatever it is, angry, whatever it is that you struggle with, I invite you to write that out, get specific about it.

[00:24:04] And if there’s other ways that you’re trying to express it, because remember, a lot of these things might not be very verbal, might have some difficulty putting them into words, especially if they go back to those first two years of life. It may be something that you draw, maybe something that you model in some other way. There may be a song that captures this in some way or some other way that you represent it. And what we’re going to do then is we’re going to take a look at these five conditions for a secure relationship with God. Let’s look at that God image from that dark place, and let’s see how these measure up. Evaluate that God image against these five conditions. First one, feeling seen and known by God. Now, in some negative God images, this isn’t a problem at all because God’s looking right at you, right? And he is just disappointed with you, or he’s disgusted with you or whatever. It’s not a question of being seen and known, right? Others, though, if God’s a million miles away in another quasar, seen and known could be a huge deal, right? So we’re actually kind of taking a profile of your God image. You know, where is it hitting these things? So first one, feeling seen and known by God. Second one, feeling safe and secure with God.

[00:25:25] All right, here’s where Adam and Eve were not feeling safe and secure with God after they ate the forbidden fruit. No longer safe. No longer secure. Hiding in the bushes. Right? And for lots of people, this is a huge one, right? They’re not feeling safe and secure with God when they’re in that, when they’re caught up with their problematic God image. Third one, sense of being comforted and reassured by God. The interesting thing is here with Adam and Eve, even when God’s reaching out to them, even when he’s calling for them, even when he’s seeking them out, they’re not feeling comforted or reassured initially by that at all. Right. That’s also a frequently a problematic one. Fourth one, having a sense that God cherishes you, rejoices in you, and delights in you. I don’t know of a single problematic God image that actually doesn’t impact this one, right? This is a really difficult one. I’m going to venture to say that there are relatively few people, relatively few practicing Catholics, that have a consistent sense that God cherishes them, rejoices them, and delights in them. This is a particularly tough one. And then number five, knowing at a deep level that God wills what is best for you. That is, that he’s desiring your good, and that anything he’s offering you, anything that’s coming your way is actually oriented to your highest good. All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.

[00:27:05] Right. So as you profile the attachment conditions of your problematic God image, now, now, now you can reach out to God. You can reach out relationally to God in prayer with the specific ways that you are in need, with the specific issues that you need to resolve in order to develop a more secure attachment to him. All right. You can come out of the bushes. You can come out and experience being seen and known by God, for example. Now, I’m going to say that sometimes, especially when there’s been trauma, it can be really too much for some people to start relating, especially with God the Father. Sometimes it’s too much to relate with God the Son, with Jesus Christ our Lord. So we might start with our Blessed Mother Mary. We might start with Saint Joseph. We might start with another saint, maybe even our guardian angel. When I work with this, when I work with this clinically, I’m going to find some person that this person can at least begin to feel somewhat comfortable with. All right. So that’s what you’re going to be doing. You’re going to be going back looking at one of these God images from when you’re in your emotional or psychological dark place, you’re going to profile that with the five conditions for secure relationship with God. And then you’re going to take that to your prayer. And it’s not just praying for, you know, dear God, please just grant me that I’d be seen and known by you.

[00:28:51] Better. Thanks. You know, but actually, God, I’m here. Help me to know that you see me. What do you see in me? Help me to know that you’re seeing me. Help me to know that you, maybe it’s this one, right, maybe help me to know that you delight in me. That I actually am a beloved child, a beloved son, or a beloved daughter of yours. If this is the kind of thing that you really want to get into more of, because I spend a lot of my clinical work is around people working through these problematic God images. Because I’ll tell you, if you don’t get the God thing, right, if you don’t have a deep and abiding confidence in God, if you don’t have that resilience, it’s going to be hard to have any kind of enduring sense of peace and of joy. It’s going to be hard to bear the crosses. It’s going to be hard to suffer in a redemptive way. So that’s what I think our whole focus on this first commandment is all about, I am the Lord thy God. I think that’s what this focus on the great commandment is, you know, you shall love the Lord thy God with thy whole being, is basically what that boils down to with all of you, right? Not just your mind, not just your God concept, but to have this like, accurate understanding of God integrated throughout all of you, all your emotions, all your memories, all of your impulses, all your desires, all your attitudes, all of your internal positions, all of this integrated.

[00:30:33] That’s what we need. We don’t just want a God concept because I’ll tell you that that’s going to get severely trite. And you already know this. If you have any experience in the spiritual life, you know how our God concepts get challenged. And so the more that we can get this deeply integrated into the core of our being throughout all of us body, soul, mind, heart, all of us, the better off we’re going to be. In the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, we get into this stuff in more detail. We have discussions about this like like for example, this upcoming Friday, July 10th, 2020, we’ve got a 7:30 meeting Eastern Time. It’s going to last 75 minutes where we’re going to discuss this episode and last episode. I’m going to get into all your questions. We’re going to share experiences. We’re going to talk about God images. We’re going to talk about how to overcome those God images. All that kind of stuff is wrapped up in, and it’s part of the package that you get when you join the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. Check that out at soulsandhearts.com.

[00:31:35] It is free for the first 30 days, $25 a month after that. You got any questions about that community? Go ahead and email me. Crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Drop me a text or a voicemail, at (317) 567-9594. I love to hear from people. So glad to hear from, I want to shout out to Ryan who really helped me out with some advice about the, about the podcast from the last time. I also want to shout out and say thank you to Beth. She helped me understand how people can be activated by the word resilient. She really got into how that is often like a trigger for folks or for children, right, who are expected to be resilient in the face of divorce, for example. So we had a great conversation about that. Thank you, Beth. Just want to let you know that that community is there for you. So check that out at soulsandhearts.com. Check out all the other wonderful things we’ve got going on there too, as well. There’s all kinds of things happening at Souls and Hearts. We want you to be be able to take advantage of all of that. So without any further ado, we’re going to wrap this episode. I hope to see many of you on July 10th, that Friday evening. And we’ll invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist. Pray for us.