IIC 26: Dictator, Pharisee, and Scrooge God Image

We examine how we can have multiple negative God images, and go into three more kinds of problematic ways of feeling about God — the Unjust Dictator God Image, the Vain Pharisee God Image, and the Critical Scrooge God image.

[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 26. It’s released on July 27th, 2020, and it’s called Dictator, Pharisee and Scrooge God Images. Dictator, Pharisee, and Scrooge God Images. That’s what we’re going to be getting into. And the last episode, episode 25, we looked at three different negative God images proposed by Christian psychotherapists Bill and Kristi Gaultiere in their book Mistaken Identity, published in 1989. Last week, I decided to reach out to the Gaultieres and let them know that we were discussing their book on this podcast, so I emailed them. Sometimes I do that. I just reach out to people. Who knows what’s going to happen. And Sue, their representative from their ministry, their ministry is called Soul Shepherding. Sue, she got back to me. She said, “What a blessing to hear from you and to learn of the good work that you are doing for the kingdom. It was such an encouragement to hear that you are able to use our resources in your ministry.”

[00:01:54] Isn’t that cool? I think that’s cool. But wait, there’s more. I made a request of the Gaultieres in their ministry for something I wanted to give to the members of the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. I wanted, I wanted permission from the Gaultieres to be able to pass something special on to those of you who listen to this podcast. And they said yes. So at the end of the episode, I will tell you what that something special is. So stay with me till the end. Okay. Ooh. Very exciting. All right. Good. So now in the last episode, I put the question out to you, all of you, my audience members. Are you interested in this stuff? Do you want me to cover more of these God images, this problematic God images? And if so, which ones? I really want this podcast to be interactive. I really want to hear from you. I want us to be able to have an exchange. I don’t want this to be, you know, some podcast that I just broadcast from some ivory tower in Indianapolis or something like that. I want it to be connected. I want it to be with you. So I got some responses. Jane in Indiana, she emailed me and she said, “I want you to do all the God images. They are fascinating!” Now that is enthusiasm. Thank you, Jane. I just love it. I really want this podcast to not just be transformative, not just to make a big difference in your life, but to be interesting.

[00:03:26] No, not just interesting. I want it to be fascinating. Like what Jane said. Fascinating. So good. I’m glad that it is. So I think this stuff is fascinating, along with Jane. It’s also vitally important not just for our spiritual well-being, but also for our psychological well-being. You can’t have abiding peace or a deep joy or a solid sense of well-being if you are dominated by negative God images. It’s just not possible to give in to wretched God images and to be happy. This is so vitally important. This God image issue is so important because how we respond to God images is really going to determine our peace and joy and well-being, both in the natural realm and in the spiritual realm. This is something I really want you to know, something I really want to share with you, my people. Right? God images, how we respond to them, they’re going to impact the the question of, will we approach God? Will we give him an opportunity? Will we give him an opportunity to show us that he’s not like our images of him are? Will we flee from God? Will we fight God? Will we refuse to follow him? Will we refuse to believe in him? All this stuff is impacted by our God images, negative God images. We have two ways of overcoming negative God images.

[00:04:57] One is to recognize our negative God images and to respond to them in a positive way consistently. In future episodes, we’re going to get into how to respond to negative God images. I promise. We’re doing a lot of conceptual work now. We’re doing a lot of explanation. We’re doing a lot of diagnostics of the problem right now. So that first way to handle negative images is to recognize them and to respond well to them. The second way to handle negative God images is to resolve them. I mean it. To actually resolve them, to heal them. And we’re going to discuss how to do that in future episodes as well. And we are going to get into that, especially in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community that has grown up around this podcast. And we’ll talk more about that later in this episode. We’re going to review three more problematic God images described by Bill and Kristi Gaultiere in their book Mistaken Identity. All right. But before we do that, let’s just circle around one more time and review what God images are. That way, if you’re new to the podcast, you don’t have to go back anywhere else. You can just stay with us here. These brief explanations about what God images are, what are we talking about with God images. So my God image is my emotional and subjective experience of God. It’s who I feel God to be in the moment. This is my experiential sense of how my feelings and how my heart interpret who God is.

[00:06:30] God images are heavily influenced by psychological factors. And different God images can be activated at different times depending on my emotional states and what psychological mode I’m in at a given time. God images are always formed experientially. They flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those experiences when we are very young. My God images can be and usually are radically different than my God concept. You know, my God concept is what I profess about God, what I choose to believe about God, and what I endorse about God. It’s my intellectual understanding of who God is. Self images are more driven by emotion. They’re much more intuitive, they’re much more subjective. They vary a lot more from moment to moment. My self image is who I feel myself to be at any given moment. It is who my passions are telling me that I am. Self images go together with God images. They impact each other. And if you want to know more about this, I cover God images and self images and a lot more detail in episodes 22, 23, and 24 of this podcast. So check those out because there’s a lot more conceptual information. There’s a lot more background information on God images, and that might be interesting to you if you haven’t listened to those episodes. All right. I want to be really responsive to listener feedback.

[00:07:56] So I had a question from a listener, Martha, in Indiana, who wondered if it’s usual to say yes to many God images. Martha is essentially asking if we can have more than one God image. Can we have different God images at different times? Now, if you actually read the God image literature in the professional press, it generally seems to assume that there’s one primary God image that each of us has. And that makes sense because we are often in our standard mode of operating. However, as time has gone on over the last 30 years, there’s a greater awareness that because we have multiple modes of operating, we may also have multiple God images. Sometimes we depart from our standard mode of operating. And clinically, I have no doubt that each of us has several or even many God images. So, my dear Martha, I absolutely believe that we have more than one God image. Now, over the past several years, I have identified in myself 11 different modes of operating. I have 11 distinct and identifiable ways of being. And what am I talking about with that? Well, I’m thinking of modes of operating as like parts of me, kind of like in the Pixar movie Inside Out, where the main character, Riley, has different parts of her portrayed in the film, right? Each part of her has a primary emotion. Like the red character in that film was anger and the blue character, the round blue one was sadness.

[00:09:34] That’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about modes of operating or parts. So each part of me has a mode of operating. Each part of me has characteristic feelings and desires and impulses, attitudes and assumptions about the world and each of my modes of operating. Each of my parts has its own God image and its own self image. So I have 11 God images and 11 self images that correspond to different parts of me. So, Martha, do you see what you opened up with that question? I wasn’t going to go into all of this yet. I wasn’t going to get into all this self-disclosure about having these 11 modes of operating. But your question sort of brought it up for me. I thought, I’ll go into that because it’s relevant to what Martha asked. So that’s important to know now, that there are these different God images that we have, because I really do want you to pay attention to God images that I’m describing that might not immediately resonate with you in this moment. You might not resonate with a particular God image, but when you are in one particular dark place, perhaps a kind of dark place that you don’t go to very often, but you do go to once in a while, you may find a negative image there that exists in you, but it’s just not activated very often.

[00:11:01] Right. So I asked you for feedback on which God images you wanted me to cover next, and I tallied up all the responses that came in that you texted me or that you emailed me. And out of the remaining 11 negative God images that Bill and Kristi Gaultiere describe in their book, you wanted me to cover these three particular ones. These are the unjust dictator God, the vain Pharisee God, and the critical Scrooge God. So we’re going to dive into those three particular God images today. Just a quick comment before we do. And that is that these particular God images, like the unjust dictator God image, these are just templates. Everybody’s got images of God that are a little different. So today we’re discussing three more boilerplate templates of common God images. But there’s nothing that says that you have to have this particular God image or that particular God image, or not have this image or not have that image. These are all going to be different in certain ways for different people. So for example, the 11 God images that I have, they don’t map exactly onto the 14 God images that Bill and Christy Galtier propose. And so when I work clinically, I’m trying to understand what a person’s God image is, what those God images are. I’m not really trying to just find a particular God image. I’m not looking for an unjust dictator God image because I know everybody’s got one.

[00:12:27] It doesn’t work like that. So I just want to make sure that we’re all clear that these are templates. These are examples, but they’re not like chiseled in stone. And I believe that there are as many God images essentially as there are modes of operating in all the people in the world. So with that said, we’re going to move on to the unjust dictator God. In this God image, God is very powerful, but he is unjust. He is unfair. He seems arbitrary in the way that he blesses and punishes. Good people suffer misfortunes. The innocent are burdened with many problems, trials, traumas, and other people who seem to make no effort to love God, they seem to profit. They’re not following his will, but they are getting great gifts. Sometimes God even seems to shower good things on people who had acted badly, seems to actually reward them for poor behavior. He doesn’t seem to punish those who hurt me. He doesn’t protect me or take care of me when I’m being persecuted. In fact, he sort of leaves me isolated and alone. So the Gaultieres have a Bible verse for this, and I’m actually expanding a little bit more than what they actually put down for the verse. I’m going to give a little more context. So they bring up Psalm 119, and I’m going to read verses 81 to 86.

[00:13:56] “My soul longs for your salvation. I put my hope in your word. My eyes long to see your promise. When will you comfort me? I am like a wineskin shriveled by smoke. But I have not forgotten your statutes. How long can your servant survive? When will your judgment doom my foes? The arrogant have dug pits for me, defying your law. Help me. I am pursued without cause.” So you can see this imagery of a wineskin shriveled by smoke, right? Questions of survival. When will your judgment doom my foes, right? All this evil is happening and it seems like it’s not being attended to. So what is the self image look like for someone who’s struggling with an unjust dictator God image? Well, a person who’s suffering from that unjust dictator God image is going to feel like I always get a raw deal from God, no matter how hard I try to love and obey God. It just doesn’t seem to matter. It must be that I deserve to be punished by God. Maybe, maybe I don’t deserve God’s care and protection. Maybe I’ve done something wrong or bad that I don’t know about. Something that would justify the mistreatment I have had at the hands of others. God loves others. Why doesn’t he love me? What’s so bad about me? Those are the kinds of thoughts and questions that go through the mind of someone who’s suffering from an unjust dictator God image. So what’s the attachment history? What’s the relational experiences of someone that might generate such a God image?

[00:15:40] Well, the unjust dictator God image can emerge when I have experienced others in authority as capricious, arbitrary, or random in the way that I was rewarded or punished. This is often expressed in feeling like I was not the favorite child. No matter what I did, my parents preferred my sister or my brother to me. Some of us are old enough to remember the old Smothers Brothers routines, in which comedian Tom Smothers always felt like their mother always loved his brother, Dick Smothers, best. You know, they did this comedy routine, and part of it was Tom Smothers saying, mom always loved you best. Yeah. I always found that a little sad, because I suspect there was a kernel of truth in it somewhere in the Smothers family life. What about the coronavirus crisis? How does that exacerbate an unjust dictator God image? Well, the way the virus strikes can certainly seem arbitrary, capricious, and random, can’t it? Right? Why do some people get to keep their jobs, their incomes, their health? And why is it that I’m suffering consequences? Why are some people who are careful with masks and social distancing and other precautions and they catch the virus, right? And other people seem totally immune, no matter what stupid things they do in terms of exposing themselves. Right? So this whole virus thing can seem very capricious, very random. And it can seem like there’s not a lot of cause and effect about who gets it and who doesn’t, depending on their behaviors.

[00:17:10] Now, that’s not actually true. There are, there is reason to believe that our behaviors do really matter as far as our likelihood of catching the disease. But in individual cases, sometimes it strikes when there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. So let’s have a little vignette. Let’s get a little story to like, exemplify what this kind of unjust dictator God image and its corresponding self image look like. So we’re going to talk about Brenda. Brenda is a 32 year old middle child of three sisters. She always saw herself as the not pretty one and the not smart one of the family. She always had a sense of not fitting into her own family. Her older sister, Victoria, Victoria had a personality that was just like her mom’s and her younger sister, Claudia. She had a personality that was just like Dad’s. And so mom really seemed to understand Victoria. Dad really seemed to understand Claudia. Nobody seemed to understand Brenda. She felt like she was the odd one out. She felt misunderstood. She tried to be as pretty as her older sister. That didn’t work. She tried to be as smart as her younger sister. That certainly didn’t work. So she just didn’t seem to be understood by either of her parents. No matter what she did, her achievements always seemed to be second best, garnering little praise from her parents.

[00:18:31] So she decided that if she couldn’t be pretty and she couldn’t be smart, at least she could be good. At least she could grow in virtue. So she worked hard on that. But that didn’t seem to get her any attention either. She has continued to try to be good. She has continued to try to hope. But oftentimes her theme song has become Bony Fingers by Hoyt Axton, especially that line, “Work your fingers to the bone. What do you get? Bony fingers.” Bony fingers. Right. So that’s kind of how she’s seeing the world. She sees her older sister, Victoria. Victoria has a handsome husband. She’s got two of the cutest kids in the world. The whole family looks like models. She married that handsome, stable guy after ten years of promiscuity with no apparent consequences. Victoria still looks like a model. Brenda feels that Victoria has always looked down on her as being ugly. Now Brenda’s younger sister, Claudia. She is a great academic position, and she’s already published two books, and she’s got many professional articles. And even Claudia, even Claudia has a bookish boyfriend now who dotes on her. Brenda saw her sisters as getting all the good things in family life when they were growing up. Victoria was able to travel to beauty pageants and to have most of mom’s attention.

[00:20:01] Claudia was valedictorian, and even though Claudia was younger than Brenda, Brenda knew that by the time she was 12 and Claudia was ten, Claudia was already smarter than her, and there was no looking back. By age 30, Claudia was highly respected in her field, garnering a lot of attention nationwide. And Brenda herself, Brenda, single, no boyfriend, no romantic prospects. Brenda in a dead end retail job in a department store that’s probably going bankrupt because the virus is forcing closures because of the lockdowns, and she sees herself as an old hag. She sees herself as aging out of the youth group. You know how the youth group, you get to mid 30s and you’re no longer like, welcome at the youth group at the parish. She still goes to church, but she’s got bitterness in her heart. She feels she can’t give up being good because then what would she have left? Like, what would her identity be if she didn’t try to keep being good? Why? Why, oh Lord, did you leave so little for me? If I had what my sisters had, I would be happy. She feels her prayers are ignored. Her virtues are ignored. She’s still a virgin. And what has that gotten her? Nothing. No husband. Not even a boyfriend. God is powerful. But he’s not just, let alone being merciful, let alone being kind. Right? 

[00:21:22] You can see that unjust dictator God kind of bringing out that bitterness within Brenda. And she’s got that self image in which she’s always feeling like she’s getting a raw deal from God, no matter how hard she tries, no matter how much she loves, no matter how hard she tries to obey. That is the unjust dictator God image and its corresponding self-image. Let’s go on to the vain Pharisee God. All right. What’s going on with the vain Pharisee God? Well, in the vain Pharisee God image, God is so absorbed in his own might and power, in his own goodness and beauty, in his own knowledge and strength. He’s just focused on himself. He expects me to grovel before him, to give him constant praise. He takes the credit for everything that I do. Only goodness comes from him, and only badness comes from me. That’s the God image, the vain Pharisee God image right there. All right, so let’s take a look at the Bible verse that the Gaultieres chose for this. And again, I’m expanding this a little to give you a little more context. It’s from Job chapter ten, verses 14 to 17. Here’s Job’s lament. It’s his fifth lament. “If I should sin, you would keep a watch on me. And from my guilt you would not absolve me. If I should be wicked, alas for me, even if righteous, I dare not hold up my head, sated with shame, drenched in affliction. Should I lift it up, you would hunt me like a lion. Repeatedly you show your wondrous power against me. You renew your attack upon me and multiply your harassment of me. In waves your troops come against me.”

[00:23:09] Job is feeling it. He is feeling a negative God image in chapter ten. There is no doubt about it. All right, so what’s the self image? What’s the self image that goes along with this, with this vain Pharisee God image, right? Well, in the self image, I feel like I’m expected to humiliate myself before God in order that his glory be magnified. I’m not worth any esteem from God. He would not praise me. I don’t have any merit. I don’t have any credit in the eyes of God. I am just dust and ashes. I am just worthless. He’s not that invested in me as a person. I am important to him in how I can give him glory and honor. My function is to praise him. That’s what he expects from me. But in relating with God, I always wind up with the short end of the stick. He’s always right. I’m always wrong. He must always increase, I must always decrease, until I perfectly serve him in his needs. All right, so how does that kind of God image come up? The vain Pharisee God image, how does that come up from our relational histories or our attachment histories? And how does that impact our self image? Right.

[00:24:22] Well, this God image of the vain Pharisee God, it readily forms when the parent uses the child to boost the parent’s own fragile self-esteem without consideration of the child’s experience. Some parents really look to their children for affirmation, admiration, support, and validation. When the parent has a strong narcissistic streak, it increases the likelihood of a vain Pharisee God image developing in the child. The child is constantly trying to meet the unreasonable demands of the parent in the vain hope that the child can please the parent. The child doesn’t frequently feel loved or accepted just as he or she is. All right. So how does that play out? How does that get exacerbated, this vain Pharisee God image, during these times of the coronavirus crisis? Well, let’s take a look at that. In this crisis, it’s easy to feel powerless and helpless in the face of the virus and its effects. I might have prayed and prayed, and those prayers may seem to be falling on deaf ears. I might be very troubled by the problems I face because of the virus. I may be trying and trying to admire, praise, and honor God, but he just seems to be letting me twist in the wind as my situation deteriorates, with my income reduced, my anxieties unsoothed, my social connections compromised, and now I have to wear a mask everywhere. All right. It’s like I’m not even being seen as a person, but just as a potential disease vector.

[00:25:56] This can activate the vain Pharisee God image. All right, so how does this play out in the story? Right. Okay. So now we’re going to address Victoria. Remember, Victoria is Brenda’s older sister. She’s 34 years old. Everyone said when she was growing up that she looked just like Mom, she acted just like Mom, that she was just like a little miniature copy of Mom. Mother was a highly respected lady with an aristocratic air. She was also highly self-absorbed. From a young age, Victoria was entered into child beauty pageants, and she won some of them, and her mother took the credit. Her mother saw Victoria as a narcissistic extension of herself and took it personally if Victoria faltered during the pageants. Mom berated Victoria for minor flaws and imperfections because somehow that reflected negatively on Mom. She took it personally. Victoria, in an attempt to connect with her mother, also berated herself in the same way. When others attributed Victoria’s beauty and success to her mother, her mother seemed to glow, but Victoria felt a great emptiness in the attention. Her mother showed her the beautiful clothes that she bought for her, the trips that they made together, the flights, the hotels to the pageants, all of that, just the two of them for those competitions. All that just seemed empty. At the present time, Victoria has little interest in God, seeing him as mighty, powerful, and heavily self-absorbed. That’s the God image.

[00:27:32] That’s the vain Pharisee God image. She had made a number of men into little idols in her 20s. She sacrificed herself to them in the hope of being loved by them in return. She married the least worst of them and is now in a loveless marriage. She feels trapped at home with her cold, arrogant Ken doll husband who can’t go into the office because of the lockdowns. She hates always feeling like she is in the wrong, and she feels that God wants her to grovel and humiliate herself, which makes it hard for her to repent from the real sin she has committed and come back to him. She doesn’t pray, sensing that there’s no point in it because God would gloat over her admissions of wrongdoing. She also feels that honoring or worshiping God would violate her sense of integrity and dignity, because she would have to, like again, grovel or humiliate herself. Her children are not baptized. Okay, so there’s a little story about how the vain Pharisee God may play out. That leaves us the critical Scrooge God. All right, so what is this critical Scrooge God image? What is that? Right. This God doesn’t extend himself to help me. Instead, this God is highly critical. He cuts me down with disparaging remarks. He’s got a condescending tone. He seems to ride on my shoulder, telling me that I won’t make it, that I won’t succeed, that I just won’t be able to rise to the challenges or even be minimally acceptable to him.

[00:29:06] God is constantly dissatisfied with me. God never praises me. He never looks for the good in me. He’s cold. He’s stingy with his graces. He’s stingy with his help. All right. Bible verses here. Now, you remember how I told you that you can have different kinds of God images? We’re going to go back to Job chapter 19, verses 2 to 11. And these are the verses, we’ll expand it a little again, what the Gaultieres chose to illustrate the critical Scrooge God image. Here we go. This is what Job is saying as he describes his God image. “How long will you afflict my spirit, grind me down with words? These ten times you have humiliated me, have assaulted me without shame. Even if it were true that I am at fault, my fault would remain with me. If truly you exalt yourselves at my expense and use my shame as an argument against me, know then that it is God who has dealt unfairly with me and compassed me round with his net. If I cry out violence, I am not answered. I shout for help, but there is no justice. He has barred my way, and I cannot pass. He has veiled my path in darkness. He has stripped me of my glory, taken the diadem from my brow. He breaks me down on every side. And I am gone. He has uprooted my hope like a tree. He has kindled his wrath against me. He counts me as one of his enemies.”

[00:30:40] Hmm. Difficult. Difficult. This is very difficult. So what does the self image that corresponds to the critical Scrooge God image look like? Well, in that self image, I’m never good enough for God. I never satisfy him. I feel like I’m no good. I struggle with shame, feeling really inadequate. I feel like God sits on my shoulders and sometimes whispers his criticisms in my ear. Sometimes he yells those criticisms. God gives me the minimal amount of help so that if I did things just right, I might succeed. But I’m never able to succeed. My efforts are always never enough. It feels like God just tolerates me and that he’s invested in me doing better, but I’m just an unprofitable servant and he never lets me forget that. So how does this attachment history come about? Well, so let’s take a look at an attachment history or relational history that might generate a critical Scrooge God image. All right. Let’s take a look at that. So as you might expect, it could start with critical parents, parents that are hard to please and that, you know, don’t give a lot of praise, don’t give a lot of gratification to the child, don’t appreciate the child’s efforts. It can also happen in families where the parents are kind of disengaged, right? Feeling as though I have to do it on my own.

[00:32:13] I’m going to harbor a fantasy that if only I achieve enough, then I’ll get their attention. But I keep coming up against this idea that my parents aren’t really willing to put themselves out to help me, and that they may think internally critically of me, or maybe they express that externally. At any rate, if I, as a child, have a sense that I’m not measuring up and that I can’t meet their expectations, then a critical Scrooge God image is likely to develop. All right. So how can that be exacerbated in the coronavirus crisis? Well, the coronavirus, this whole thing is forcing us to make difficult decisions with limited and often changing or incomplete information. Much is in flux, and it can feel very easy to make incorrect decisions even when we try hard. The stakes are also high, with consequences that are potentially lethal. People can also be more irritable with each other. They can be more critical of each other because of the stresses involved with this. So when supervisors or other authorities are critical of me, it may activate a critical Scrooge God image, exacerbating feelings of being not good enough, of not being able to satisfy others, including God. All right, so let’s look at this in a vignette. And now we have Claudia. She’s the youngest of the three sisters. She’s 30 and she’s extremely self-critical. Academics, that was the one area in which she felt she might excel, or at least where she could get close to excelling.

[00:33:54] So in grade school, she berated herself for anything less than a perfect score on her tests. She harbors a deep assumption that she has to prove God wrong, that she can succeed in spite of his distance, in spite of him not helping her. Her unconscious anger about this has undermined her relationships with teachers in the past who have experienced her as perfectionistic but also as critical of them and even condescending. So some of her teachers, they appreciated how hard she worked and how intelligent she was, but they felt like she was kind of critical of them or condescending to them. She was displacing some of her anger at God onto them. Because of her impressive academic successes and her publishing record, she is one of the youngest assistant professors at her liberal arts college, but she derives little satisfaction from that, and the college is now in a precarious financial situation because of the virus and the fact that many students are considering a gap year or not coming back to campus or working or other things. Because she never feels good enough for God, Claudia never feels good enough for herself, and she also feels that others are not good enough for her either. Right? This all has this. This sort of, all this is sort of woven together. Nothing is good enough. Nothing is good enough for me. And I’m not good enough for anyone else either.

[00:35:23] When she conveys that others are not good enough for her, this imposes a huge burden for her codependent boyfriend, Fred, who is trying to do everything he can to please her. Claudia is minimally gratifying in return, just enough to keep Fred engaged. Fred’s the one that has the greatest tolerance for the chip that that Claudia carries around on her shoulder and she keeps him around. But she is unlikely to marry him because of the subtle contempt that she feels for him. All right. So that’s kind of where Claudia is. She’s tired of God, and she doesn’t pray much either. So those are the three God images we have today. We have the unjust dictator God image, we have the vain Pharisee God image, and we have the critical Scrooge God images. All right. So one of our Resilient Catholic Carpe Dcommunity members, Jonathan, Jonathan seized the day, and he grabbed the initiative to begin a chart that lays out all of the different God images and their corresponding self-images and the Bible verses from the Gaultieres and the attachment histories and the impact that the coronavirus could be having with those particular God images. And he took all of this, and he laid it out in a chart, and he emailed it to me, just for the first three that were from the last podcast episode. And I think that’s great. I think that is absolutely great. And Jonathan and I agreed to work on this chart together, to continue to develop the chart, adding the different God images as we roll them out over the course of the next few episodes.

[00:36:54] And he and I are just collaborating together on that. So he’s taking the information from the podcasts and from the show notes. He’s filling in each of the sections of the chart, and I’m checking them over and making minor alterations to them. So the chart is available for our RCCD members. If you’re in the RCCD community, you can see that in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem exclusive content section at Souls and Hearts. And six of those 14 problematic God images are all filled in. Those are the ones that we covered in the last episode and those that we covered in today’s episode. I really appreciate Jonathan’s work on this. It’s a gift to me. It’s a gift to the other RCCD members. And it’s a great example of how we can work together in the RCCD community. So also, we had two open meetings, one on July 22nd and one on July 27th. And those are either up by now or they soon will be. Those are from the open forums where we could just talk about anything having to do with psychology and Catholicism in the RCC community. So check those out. And you know, if you weren’t able to be present, take a look at what we were talking about. I’m sure it’s going to be of interest.

[00:37:59] And that was a great time to hang out together and be in community. All right. So I mentioned at the top of the podcast about the big news from Bill and Kristi Gaultiere and their Shepherding Souls Ministry. Bill Gaultiere created an instrument called the God Image Questionnaire. It’s 28 items long, and it’s going to help you determine which of the 14 negative God images might be burdening you. Which ones? Now, I’ve used this in the past. I found it helpful. Shepherding Souls has the God image questionnaire up on their website, but they’ve agreed to allow me to make it available to the members of our community at Souls and Hearts. And so we took it to another level. We formatted it. We put it in a PDF. We took all the scoring directions. We put those in a PDF so that you can download this easily, print it out, and you can score it and find out which of the 14 problematic God images might be troubling you. I think it’s interesting. Now, this is not a scientific test. This is not a psychological test. But it’s an instrument and it can really be thought provoking. So I’m going to encourage you to take that. Let me know how it goes. So in order to do that, though, you’ve got to join the RCCD community. All right. Go to soulsandhearts.com.

[00:39:19] Click on All Courses and Shows and you’ll see the RCCD community, the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community come up. Go ahead and join that. First 30 days are free. No risk. Right? And then after that, it’s $25 a month. And all kinds of good things are happening for people that are in the community. So go ahead and take a look at that. I think it’d be really interesting for you. And after we finish all 14 God images in the next three episodes, we’re going to have discussions about them in the community as well. That’s where we can be really interactive. We can really connect with each other. We’ll go into questions and answers in greater detail, and we can start talking about some more experiential aspects of this as well. So one more thing. I had a request from one of our community members to have some meetings that are not recorded, right? Some people are wanting to be able to go into a little more detail about their lives and the things that they’re struggling with, and they don’t really want the meetings recorded. They don’t want them posted on the RCCD section of the Souls and Hearts website, even for just other community members to see. And I’m going to honor that. I think that’s really important. I think that was a great suggestion. So we’re working right now on scheduling when we can have a next meeting. Might be at the end of the first week of August where we can get together and not record it.

[00:40:38] And just for people that prefer that as well. So all kinds of things happening in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. Free for the first 30 days. I really, some of you have been thinking about it, some of you have been thinking, yeah, should I do that? Should I not? Try it. Come on, take the leap. It’s going to be good. And if you don’t like it, you can always leave. And if there’s any ever any financial issues with it, I know sometimes money’s tight, sometimes incomes have been compromised, especially in this coronavirus crisis. It’s okay. We’ll work with you on it. Just let me know, okay? Email me crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Call me (317) 567-9594. There are ways to get ahold of me. You can get through. You can get ahold of me through the Souls and Hearts website. If you want to write in the comment section, you know, if you want to contact us, you can get ahold of me that way too. But, but definitely, definitely consider joining the community if you haven’t already. And so with that, we’re going to wrap it up. We’re going to invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.