IIC 29: Magic Genie Gods and Party-Pooper Gods

In this episode, Dr. Peter Malinoski covers the final two problematic God images. He uses stories as well as Church teachings and psychological explanations to help us see how they incorrectly reflect God’s true image.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up to 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 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 29, released on August 17th, 2020. Episode 29. We’ve been at this for a long time, since March now, and we are heading into the middle of August. We’re in the middle of August, so it’s been some time. I suspected that this pandemic was going to be around for a while. I suspected back in February, actually back in January, that this was going to be hanging with us. And by March we put this podcast together. So I am pleased to be here with you. Thank you for being with me in this whole endeavor. We are we are now talking about magic genie gods and party pooper gods. And I want you to hang in there with me today through this episode till the end. And I will be walking you through an experiential exercise to help you identify your God images. So stay tuned for that. Stay with me. We’ll get there.

[00:01:37] All right, so let’s circle back and review what are God images again. What are God images? All right. So just briefly, my God image is how my heart feels God to be in the moment. My God image is who my emotions tell me that God is in this present moment. My God image is very subjective. It’s often driven by factors that are outside of my awareness at the moment, and it can be miles away from who I know God to be when the sun is shining and the birds are singing and all is well with me in the world. So it’s critical to understand that your God images are not at all necessarily who you profess God to be with your intellect and your will. These are the subjective, unfiltered, spontaneous, passion-driven representations of God that can vary wildly, sometimes even from moment to moment. All right, so we also talk about self images here. And my self image is who I feel myself to be again in the present moment. It’s who my passions are telling me that I am in this present moment. My self images are much more driven by emotion. They’re much more intuitive, subjective. They also vary a lot from moment to moment. My self image in the moment fits with my God image in the moment. And sometimes a self image can drive the God image, sometimes the God image drives the self image, so they’re reciprocal that way.

[00:03:00] If you want to know more about God images, check out episodes 22, 23, and 24 of this podcast where I go into the concepts of self images, God images, in much more depth. I compare those to self concepts and God concepts. All right, so let’s move on to questions from our listeners. All right. Jessica from Texas has been intrigued by this whole discussion about God images. She’s going to take us another step with her question. This is her question. Jessica from Texas asks, how do God images affect our relationships and our reactions to others? How do God images affect our relationships and our reactions to others? Great question, Jessica. Our God images and our self images impact how we see others in the moment. This is easiest to see with an example. All right. So let’s just let’s just get a little vision of what’s happening here, a little story. Let’s say that I’m struggling with an elitist aristocrat God image. All right. My passions are telling me in the moment that God doesn’t need me. He’s too good for me. He has other people that he prefers, others who are much more in his favor. These are the people that he bestows his graces upon, his love, his gifts. Leaves little left for me, right? So if that’s how I’m seeing God in my God image, this elitist aristocrat God, and my self image is that I’m left out, excluded, denied, and deprived of good things from God, this God image and this self image combination is going to have an impact on how I see others.

[00:04:39] So if I’m struggling with this elitist aristocrat God image, I’m feeling left out. I’m feeling neglected. I might experience jealousy toward my brother Phil, whom I consider to be in God’s favor. I can come to resent Phil if I give in to this image of of God, this false God image. I’m going to treat Phil out of that jealousy by holding back good things that I could give him, because I feel like he’s already getting so much from God. Why should I give him anything? He already has so much and I get so little from God. I need to keep what I have. I’m not giving it to Phil. All right, I actually don’t have a brother named Phil. I just made that up. But it’s just an example, right? Let’s take another example. And we’re going to stay with the elitist God image. Let’s say Ian, who’s 24 years old, he’s got an elitist aristocratic God image and he feels inadequate around Tina in their Catholic young adult group in their diocese. Ian sees God favoring Tina in so many ways, and Ian feels unworthy of being around Tina, and therefore he refuses to engage with her. He doesn’t want to exacerbate his sense of shame.

[00:05:48] So even though he’s romantically attracted to Tina, he doesn’t ask her out because of the inhibiting effect of his God image and the self image that goes with that elitist aristocrat God image. God images and their corresponding self-images impact the way we see all aspects of our lives, not just our relationships, but all aspects of our lives. Our perceptions of reality are profoundly influenced by our God images and our self-images. This extends not just to how we experience others, but it reaches to the furthest corners of our minds, and it impacts all our internal impressions, not only of God and self, but of everything. So our God images and our self-images create filters that color our perceptions of everything that has happened, of everything that’s happening, and of all that will happen in our lives. Many of these perceptions and impressions do not enter into our awareness, but they impact us just the same. It goes further than this. I argue that we build an implicit religion around each of our individual God images. All right, let’s slow this down now. Let’s take it easy because this has got some conceptual depth to it. The Catholic Dictionary defines religion as, “The moral virtue by which a person is disposed to render to God the worship and service he deserves.” Let’s say that again, because I want to get this definition of religion down.

[00:07:27] “Religion is the moral virtue by which a person is disposed to render to God the worship and service he deserves.” Let’s think about that for a minute. Each warped God image demands certain things from us and informs us about how God is to be worshiped and served. For example, the demanding drill sergeant God, we talked about that before. That God image always wants more and more. He always wants me to strive harder, to exhaust myself in prayer and service to others. So in my religion, to that particular God image, I put in long hours of volunteering. I push others to do the same. I treat myself and others harshly. You can see how there’s a whole religion that forms around how that God image is to be worshiped, how it’s to be given service. What are the dispositions? What do I think that that God image deserves? What is it requiring? There’s a whole way of serving, of worshiping, of rendering to God what this God demands or what I think this God requires. Let’s use another example, the vain Pharisee God image. That God image demands that I grovel before him, that I humiliate myself in order to give him constant homage and credit for all success. Therefore, in my worship and service to the vain Pharisee God, I’m extremely stringent. I’m down on myself. I degrade myself in my prayer.

[00:09:07] I cut myself down in my Bible study group. That’s because that the religion to that God, to the Pharisee God image, requires that. That’s what I believe in. When I’m in that God image space, that I believe that that’s what he requires. Okay. So that all constitutes a religion, right? The out-to-get-you police detective God image insists on perfection and enjoys catching me in sins of commission. Therefore, part of my religion to that particular God image is to be very cautious, very conservative, to only take on what I feel I can do without any mistakes. So I avoid the messy business of relating to others in a deep way, and I stay on the periphery of my parish community, for example. I don’t want to create, I don’t want to cause any sins of commission. So I wind up much more omitting things from my life. So this is helpful. This whole idea of implicit religions based on our God images and our self images. This is helpful because sometimes we can infer our God image from the religion that we appear to be practicing. For example, if I notice I’m not praying, what is that saying about recently activated God images, right? If I don’t want to engage God in prayer, if I notice, for example, that I haven’t been to confession in three months or six months or 30 years, what does it say about my God image? There’s something in the behavior that’s reflecting the religion to a distorted God image in situations like that.

[00:10:46] So, Jessica, I want to thank you for this question of, how do God images affect our relationships and our reactions to others? The short answer: how we react to our God images and how we react to our self images in the moment colors our perceptions of everything, including our relationships. Now, it doesn’t mean that we have to go along with those God images. When they’re activated, we can resist them and we should when they’re distorted, when they don’t reflect who God really is. But that requires us to stop, to recognize what’s going on and to engage the intellect and the will in a deliberate way. We cannot go with the flow if we are dominated by a particular negative distorted God image. Okay, so in the previous four episodes of the Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast, we have covered 12 God images from Bill and Kristi Gaultiere’s 1989 book Mistaken Identities. I’m adding a lot more color. I’m adding a lot more background to these God images than is in the book, because I want them really to come alive for us Catholics in our present day, especially with the challenges of the coronavirus. So with a little imagination, you can see how these God images impact everything if we let them, if we give in to them. There’s no corner of our lives, no detail of our lives that will escape being affected when we default to our problematic God images.

[00:12:10] So the final two God images we will cover in this sequence are the magic genie God image and the party pooper God image. So let’s go ahead and get into those God images. Now the magic genie God image. The magic genie God image is a really interesting one. In this God image, God gives me what I want if I do what he wants me to do. Basically, God and I make deals with each other. If I follow the right steps, if I follow the right formula, I get what I want from God. God is like a divine vending machine. I provide the right inputs. I insert my spiritual quarters, and I get the spiritual and material merchandise that I desire. The implicit religion with the magic genie God image is very transactional. I do what God wants me to do and he bestows the blessings I want upon me. I scratch his back, he scratches my back. The implicit religion with this magic genie God is reflected in the Protestant prosperity gospel movement. It’s also known as the health and wealth gospel. You may have heard of it. The prosperity gospel message or the health and wealth gospel message is that financial blessings and physical health are the will of God for his followers, and that if you have greater faith, if your speech is upbeat, if you make donations to religious causes, that will increase your material wealth. In the prosperity gospel, Holy Scripture is seen primarily as a contract between God and man.

[00:13:42] If I deepen my faith in God, he will deliver security and prosperity. So you can see how an implicit religion, such as the prosperity gospel, derives from a magic genie God image. That’s what we were talking about before. Okay, what about the Bible verse? The Gaultieres always choose a Bible verse and what they chose for the magic genie God image was from the fourth chapter of Job when Eliphaz the Temanite, when he speaks to Job. Now in chapters four and five, Eliphaz is chiding Job and he’s promoting a very transactional understanding of God. Eliphaz follows what Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch call the “traditional doctrine of retribution, which holds that a man reaps from God whatever he sows by his actions, that sin brings him suffering and righteousness brings him rewards.” Okay. So chapters four and five, Eliphaz is essentially telling job that he must have sinned. Job must have offended God because of all the misfortunes that Job has suffered. So let’s read a couple of verses here. Job 4:6. “Is not your fear of God your confidence, and the integrity of your ways your hope?” This is from 5:8. This is Eliphaz suggesting to Job what he ought to do.

[00:15:08] “As for me, says Eliphaz, I would seek God and to God would I commit my cause.” Now here Eliphaz is implying that Job has not been seeking God or committing his cause to God because of the misfortunes. Eliphaz is looking at all the terrible things that has happened to Job, and he’s saying, you must have screwed up, buddy. You must have not been loving God. You must not have been doing what you need to do to get the blessings that God gives everybody who follows his way. And then 5:11, this is Eliphaz again, hammering away at Job. Eliphaz says, “God sets on high those who are lowly and those who mourn are lifted to safety.” Again, the implication here is what’s wrong with you, dude? Like, what aren’t you doing right? It’s got to be something. God doesn’t treat people this way. Why? Because it’s a very transactional way of looking at God. You can actually see the health and wealth gospel here, the prosperity gospel message being conveyed by Eliphaz to Job. What happens to the self-image of people that struggle with the magic genie God image? Well, for people with a magic genie God image, there’s a strong sense of needing to be in control of the relationship with God. If I have this magic genie God image, I feel that I’m not worth being loved by God just for me.

[00:16:31] I have to do certain things. I have to perform in a certain way in order to get God to love me, in order to get God to help me. But along with that, there’s this curious sense of entitlement. If I do what I believe God wants me to do, then I’m entitled to the blessings that I so desire. I have a right to claim those blessings because he has promised them to me in our transactional relationship. So if things seem to be going my way, I can get all inflated with a sense of self-satisfaction and mastery. But if I experience challenges and difficulties in life, I will look to see if I failed in any of my contractual obligations to God, following Eliphaz’s recommendations. Suffering has little redemptive value to me, and in fact, I have a deep assumption that it could be avoided altogether if I merely do the right things in the right way at the right time. After all, my magic genie God wouldn’t want me to suffer. It wouldn’t be fair. Okay, what about the attachment history? What about the relational history of people that struggle with the magic genie God image? What does it look like? Well, not surprisingly, children who grew up with a very transactional relationship with their parents frequently develop such assumptions about God. Some parents are very adept at quid pro quo relationships with their children. These parents know how to give desirable things to their children, but they generally see that frustrating their children is undesirable and negative.

[00:18:05] Right. Parents who overemphasize the importance of material possessions, or who are preoccupied with health concerns at the expense of other existential concerns, can also give rise to the formation of magic genie God images in their children. Also, children and adults who have experienced success in transactional relationships, who have thrived in a worldly sense in their environments, can bring this into their spiritual lives as well, hoping in some way that God will engage with them in similar ways, ways that they have found gratifying and profitable in the world. All right. What about the coronavirus? How might the coronavirus crisis impact magic genie God images? Well, first, preoccupations with health and material possessions are running much higher these days, as both of these can be threatened by the coronavirus and its effects. This can cause those who have magic genie God images to believe that they are failing on their end of the transaction. It can lead to resentment, and it can exacerbate questions and concerns about being loved by God. Our present coronavirus moment is an opportunity to break free of magic genie God images. People may have their magic genie God images activated when they criticize others who have suffered misfortunes that they themselves have not suffered. They may assume that those who have had health compromises, or those who have lost their job, or have lost their income, or have lowered their standards of living.

[00:19:35] They may assume that those folks have violated their contractual agreements with God and their deserving what they get. These critics, like Eliphaz, may be openly critical of those, like Job, who have suffered, and these critics do so without understanding the actual spiritual realities, without understanding God’s mysterious ways. All right, let’s pull this together with a story. Let’s really have a story here to help us understand what’s going on with the magic genie God image and the corresponding self image that goes with it. We’re going to tell the story of Vivian. Vivian was raised by very successful, career-oriented parents. Her father was a lawyer, one of the best patent law attorneys in Missouri. He was highly accomplished. Her mother rose to be the charge nurse at the ICU at Missouri Baptist Medical Center in Saint Louis. Success seemed to come easily to both her father and her mother. They seemed to have led charmed lives, and both of them wanted their children to be successful in the same ways as they were, achieving status and influence, both in their professional communities and in the Saint Louis Catholic community. Both her parents were active in the pro-life movement and were major donors to various Catholic causes. When Vivian wanted things from her parents, she knew how to get them from a very young age. The terms of the transactional way that her parents worked were not hard to discern.

[00:20:59] Because Vivian was talented, she was willing to be molded into her parents’ image, more so than most children would be. She readily accepted the perks that her parents status could grant her. Her parents were well connected at Saint Louis University, and it was decided that she would go there. Vivian attributed much of her worldly success to her prayer life and to her connection with God, neglecting to see how privileged her upbringing had been and how many natural gifts had been bestowed on her. She believed that she could make good happen out of just about every situation by her own efforts and her special relationship with God. When Vivien met Paul, who was studying at a local culinary institute, she was intrigued by him. He was handsome. He was tall, physically strong. She liked the fact that he grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and seemed a little rebellious. Vivien wasn’t fully conscious of how she saw him as a challenge, a man that she could reform, a man to be made over in her own image, to be rescued from his own darkness. And when she married him at age 24, against her parents’ wishes and against the recommendations of some of her closest friends, she really didn’t know what she was getting into. She wasn’t prepared for the rough ride that marriage would be, the ups and downs and how focused her husband would be on his career.

[00:22:14] She railed at God from a position of entitlement, demanding how he could have let her marry Paul, and she chafed under the responsibilities of married life and motherhood, she racked her brain to try to figure out, what have I done wrong? She doubled her prayer time and it seemed like nothing was working. Vivian knew that her parents were disappointed in her choice of spouse, but she was still surprised when they cut off financial support for the couple, expecting them to make it on their own. Now, due to her husband’s financial decisions, they were in a lot of debt, relying on her income to float them through this era of the coronavirus. Vivian was angry at God, feeling like he had defaulted on his end of their arrangement, and she was becoming more and more rebellious, which further alienated her from her parents. Her parents, for their part, suggested in a variety of ways that, had she listened to them about Paul, she would be having none of these difficulties and that her life would be wonderful like their lives are. All right. So there we’ve sort of set the stage. We’ve got a grip on what the magic genie God image looks like. Let’s go to the party pooper God image. Now, the party pooper God, he’s a real downer. He’s depressing. He’s downbeat. He’s pessimistic, disapproving. He’s unhelpful. He keeps giving me the message that my efforts won’t work, that I won’t succeed, that I won’t make it, no matter how hard I try.

[00:23:43] This God tells me that my hopes and dreams are foolish, that I am but dust and ashes and that I won’t amount to anything. God seems unconcerned about the effects of these messages on me now. The Gaultieres chose a verse or two out of Psalm 39, but I’m going to read almost the whole thing. So let’s listen to this party pooper God image right from the lips of David, King David. This is from Psalm 39. “I said, I will guard my ways that I may not sin with my tongue. I will bridle my mouth so long as the wicked are in my presence. I was dumb and silent. I held my peace to no avail. My distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned. Then I spoke with my tongue. Lord, let me know my end and what is the measure of my days. Let me know how fleeting my life is. Behold, thou hast made my days a few handbreadths and my lifetime is as nothing in thy sight. Surely every man stands as a mere breath. Surely man goes about as a shadow. Surely for naught are they in turmoil. Man heaps up and knows not who will gather. Deliver me from all my transgressions. Make me not the scorn of the fool. I am dumb, I do not open my mouth. For it is thou who hast done it. Remove thy stroke from me. I am spent with the blows of thy hand. When thou dost chasten man with rebukes for sin thou dost consume like a moth what is dear to him. Surely every man is a mere breath. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry. Hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am thy passing guest, a sojourner like my fathers. Look away from me, that I may know gladness before I depart and be no more.”

[00:25:46] Did you catch the end of that? David is saying to God, look away from me, that I may know gladness. He’s saying, leave me alone so I can be happy. That’s the intensity of the passion here that David is experiencing. He’s experiencing God as a party pooper, taking things away from him. That’s intense. That is intense. Well, what what self-image goes along with this party pooper God image? All right, well, the self-image of those who have a party pooper God image is characterized by hopelessness. I don’t feel worthy of having a God-given purpose in life. I don’t feel worthy of having a special plan. I don’t understand why God wants to shut down good things when they seem to start happening for me, and why life has to be so hard for me. I can feel singled out for being dumped on. I feel very disconnected from God, like he doesn’t really see how his negativity affects me. I have low motivation, low levels of hope. I’m also afraid to hope for fear of being disappointed yet again. And nothing works out the way that I want it to. Well, attachment history, relational history, what’s going on with those that might bring about a party pooper God image? Well, it’s not uncommon for this God image to develop when there is significant depression in the family of origin, either in the parents or in the child himself or herself. Those with a melancholic temperament are more prone to develop this kind of God image than those with other kinds of temperaments. It’s also not uncommon when children have struggled at different points of separation and individuation, such as when you’re six and you go off to school for the first time and you have to make the adjustments not only to all the academics, but you’ve got to adjust to the social climate there. Retreat into this kind of God image can help children make sense of their experience of failure. I failed, not because I didn’t give my all, but I failed because God didn’t want me to succeed. Those who have had difficult adjustments can externalize responsibility by blaming their party pooper God image for their troubles. All right. What about the coronavirus? How does this how does this impact the party pooper God image? Well, for those who felt like they were struggling and who were downcast and felt downtrodden prior to the coronavirus and its effects, the coronavirus can make things seem ever so much worse, right? They can have a sense, like in the lyrics from Roy Clark and Buck Owens, that, “if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”

[00:28:20] And the present era, bitterness and resentment can rise up as those with party pooper God images feel like God continues to strip away the remaining good things in their lives, almost in a nonchalant way, regardless of their cries and pleas. And that’s what we were hearing from David in Psalm 39. All right, how about a story for this one. Paul. Paul had always considered himself a survivor. He grew up in a home with a very depressed mother and a father who was almost never around, and his father spent the family income profligately on himself, leaving Paul and his siblings in second-hand clothes. Paul always felt like he had to work three times harder for one third of the benefits that others got by not even trying. He made it through high school, and then he paid his way through training at the Culinary Institute of Saint Louis with the dream of one day owning his own restaurant. He went through life with a chip on his shoulder, leading him into unnecessary conflict with chefs and restaurant managers.

[00:29:19] Some of that got him fired. Sometimes that was fair, sometimes it wasn’t. But Paul felt like he never got his big break. He did pray to God with dogged persistence, though, for his dream of owning a restaurant someday. And in January of 2020, at the age of 32, married to Vivian for the past eight years, he’s got two young kids, he believed that finally God was smiling on him. By using all his savings and cashing out his wife, Vivian’s, 401K, by taking on considerable debt, he bought a little restaurant on the outskirts of Jefferson City that he intended to change from a small town local diner to something much more upscale. Just as he was about to open in April after extensive renovations, Missouri was locked down due to the coronavirus. His restaurant, shut down, no revenue, no established reputation, and his cuisine was not amenable to takeout orders. Paul was devastated. He felt like things had finally come together. But then God came along, popped all the balloons, pulled the plug on the music, and shut off the lights on his party. As Paul became more desperate, more preoccupied about his restaurant and his financial situation, he had more and more difficulty seeing the beautiful things that he did have in his relationship with his wife and with his children. His spiritual field of vision narrowed to just focusing on the failure of his restaurant.

[00:30:42] He felt beaten and battered by God’s careless disregard for his situation, and he blamed God. All right, so there we have an example of someone developing a party pooper God image. Okay, so now we’ve come up on the experiential exercise that I promised you at the start of this podcast episode, right? So I’m going to invite you to create some space and time for this. You need some quiet where you’re not likely to be disturbed for about ten minutes. Right. So in order to create this space, you got to shut your phone off, close your email, have a pen and paper ready, handy. Or you can also do this by recording it onto your smartphone or some other device. Right? So no pressing engagements here. We don’t want any hurry. And this is an experiential exercise to help you learn about your God images. So I use these kinds of things in therapy, but they are not therapy in the way that we’re doing them here. Right. So this is the point where you should shut off the podcast, right? So you can have that space and that time. About ten minutes at least, better to have 15, maybe even 20. And you know, no distractions, no interruptions if possible, and really kind of protect that time and space to really start to enter into yourself because I’m going to ask you two important questions.

[00:32:07] All right. So when you’ve got all that set up, you know, come on back. Pick it up at this point and we’ll continue. Okay. So, you set? Are you in your quiet place? You got that silence, you’ve got the lack of distractions. Get your phones off, emails off, no alerts going off. No binging. Right, phone shut off. Great. All right. So as part of the preparation, I’m going to invite you now, we’re going to slow things way down. I’m going to invite you to really have a big open heart towards yourself. A big open heart. This is an opportunity for you to get to know yourself and for you to love yourself. I’m going to ask you to really find the willingness within yourself to know yourself, to know the secrets of your own heart. Let that willingness increase through God’s grace. Let that willingness get bigger, the willingness to accept whatever you find in your heart, whatever you find in your soul, whatever you find in your mind, whatever you find in your body. As we do this exercise, we really want to have the willingness to hear what you might not have been willing to hear before, what you might not have been able to hear before. And with that willingness and openness to being surprised and openness to learning about yourself. All right. So I’m going to ask you two simple questions. And as I ask them to you one at a time, I want you to write down the first things that come to mind, unfiltered, uncensored, right.

[00:33:57] Stop the podcast recording after each one of these questions to write your responses down as fast as they come to mind, whatever your responses are. Or if you prefer, you can record your responses into your smartphone or your device. The important thing is to put your initial, uncensored, unfiltered responses into words so that you can be able to work with them in an entirely different way. All right. If at any point this feels uncomfortable, you can stop. I encourage you to stop, right? But if you’re in a place where you feel like you can go on with this, then we’ll go ahead and take the next step. So this is question number one. Question number one. Remember you’re going to put down unfiltered uncensored responses as fast as they come to mind. Here’s the question. Who is God? And the second question. Who am I? Okay, so at this point, you’ve written down, you’ve stopped the podcast, you’ve written down or you’ve recorded your raw, unfiltered, uncensored responses to those two questions. And I’m going to invite you to look at the parts of your responses that stand out to you. There are reasons for each one of your responses. Now, some of these reasons may seem really obvious to you, but others may seem to have come, like sometimes these responses seem like they come out of the blue.

[00:35:41] We might not be very in touch with the things within us that drive these responses. Here’s the action item now. All right. I want you to reach out to somebody about what you wrote down in response to those questions. Share your responses. Discuss them in relationship with somebody else. Somebody that you trust in the mystical body of Christ. Could be your confessor, your spiritual director, a friend, your spouse, somebody. Share it with me if you want to. You can reach out to me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. You can call me, leave it on my voicemail at (317) 567-9594. If you’re in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, our RCCD community, you can private message me or you can include your responses, your reactions in our discussion of this podcast episode. This is episode 29. We’ve got a discussion board up for that on our app, on the Mighty Networks. And we’re going to continue to work with these responses to the questions, who is God and who am I? Brief pitch for the RCCD community. The RCCD community brings together people like you, people who are really interested in growing more and more resilient, both in the natural realm and in the psychological realm, who are seizing the day, who see this moment as an opportunity for great spiritual and psychological growth.

[00:36:58] We’re always adding features to the RCCD community. And today, this is August 17th, we’re launching our first polls within our community to be able to connect better with our members. All right. We’re going to be asking questions of various kinds, getting feedback to make the community experience even better for the people that are joining us. So membership in the RCCD community is free for the first 30 days, and then after that, it’s just $25 a month. It’s less than a dollar a day. There’s a whole host of resources there available to you, including the God Image Questionnaire, which you can take to help you sort out which of the 14 God images that we’ve just reviewed in the last five episodes, which of those God images are most relevant to you. So the God Image Questionnaire is up. It’s up both on our app and it’s also up in the exclusive resources section on our website, soulsandhearts.com. Go to soulsandhearts.com. Click on the tab that says all Courses and Shows and register for the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. And again, if in this age, somehow the money is not there, it doesn’t seem like it’s there, let that not be an obstacle. Contact me, crisis@soulsandhearts.com, (317) 567-9594. We don’t want anybody left out because of financial reasons. All right, so now a quick sneak peek into next week’s episode.

[00:38:17] All right. Ryan from Texas, he asked the question, how do we connect with Mary? Why do some Catholics seem to have a really strong connection to Our Lady and others don’t? Is it related to biological differences between men and women, or is it more experiential and related to relationships with our earthly mothers? What other psychological factors impact that relationship? That’s where Ryan from Texas is coming from. He really wants to get into what psychological factors impact our relationship with Mary. I really love this question. So in the next and the next episode, we’re going to be addressing Mary images. We’re going to be looking at how our internal representations of our spiritual mother are initially formed, and what psychological factors influence change in our Mary images over time. You’ll want to be there for that. Don’t miss that. All right, so I’m really looking forward to connecting with you next week. And in the meantime, for those of you in the community, it’s going to be great to have a discussion with you about this episode on our app. And if you’re not in the community, join. And if you don’t want to do that yet, you can also reach out to me via email or via phone. I really want to hear from you. All right. With that, we’re going to call it a wrap. We’re going to invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Mother, Our Lady, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.