IIC 31: The One Essential You Must Have to Be Resilient

In this episode Dr. Peter explains the one thing you need to be resilient.  If you have that one thing, you get the rest of the things you need.  If you don’t have that one thing, your resilience will be limited.

[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 secular 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 31, released on August 31st, 2020, and it is titled The One Thing You Must Have to Be Resilient. The one thing that you need, the one prerequisite, the one thing that you must have to be resilient. And what that is, is absolute childlike trust. Absolute childlike trust. That’s the one thing that you need that you must have to be resilient. And we’re going to get into that in far more detail in today’s podcast. To have that absolute confidence, to have that absolute childlike trust, to have that confidence in God’s providence, you have to be like a little child, like a little child, an infant, a toddler, a parvulum if you’re a guy, or a parvula if you’re a gal. Jesus told Saint Faustina, “The graces of my mercy are drawn by means of one vessel only, and that is trust. The more a soul trusts, the more it will receive. Souls that trust boundlessly are a great comfort to me because I pour all the treasures of my graces into them. I rejoice that they ask for much because it is my desire to give much, very much. On the other hand, I am sad when souls ask for little, when they narrow their hearts.”

[00:02:27] Trust. That’s what we’re getting into today and in the next couple of episodes. We started with it in the last episode, childlike trust. And not just the trust of a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old or an 8-year-old, but the trust of a little child, a parvulum. All right, so up until the last episode, I’ve done these more like a formal presentation. There have been a few moments when I broke out of that and riffed a little and was a little more natural and didn’t stick to the script and so forth. But I’m now trying to do this in a much more natural and a more conversational way. I like this better, being with you. It’s a little uncomfortable for me, I gotta say. I’m getting used to it. I’m getting used to not seeing my audience physically. I’m working on seeing you in my mind’s eye. I’m also learning to trust in this process, to trust that God and Our Lady are present, that they’re guiding me. I’m working on being small with this, right? Having fun with it, being able to play with it in a childlike way. So with that, the episodes don’t have to be perfect, right? It’s better to leave room for spontaneity, for inspiration.

[00:03:41] And also, frankly, it saves me some time. I’m not going to fret so much about the wording so that I can put the time back into the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community in other ways. So I want to thank my RCCD community members for the feedback they gave me on the last episode and my presentation style, and how they like the more freewheeling style than the more formal and sort of set and staid presentation style that I’ve been doing before. So thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Martha. Thank you, Anne. Thank you, John. Thank you, Karen. It helps me with my growing edge to keep trying new things and sorting out new things, experimenting in new ways with the podcast. All right. So as we get into this absolute childlike trust, I want to talk about the best book chapter title, the best book chapter title that I’ve ever read for a spiritual reading. All right, so this is for spiritual reading. The best book chapter title ever is chapter two of the book Life of Union with Mary by Father Emil Neubert. And the chapter title is this: “Take only what applies to you.” And this chapter was like life-changing for me in this book because it really helped me to be free to just, to not try to absorb everything that everybody was doing in the spiritual life, you know, all the Catholic writers, all the saints.

[00:05:04] But really to focus on the things that are helpful to me in this moment, in my journey, in my state in life, in this time for me. So I’m going to encourage you all to look at what’s helpful to you in this podcast and in the exercises and so forth and what’s not, and take only what applies to you. Let’s follow that advice from Father Emile Neubert. So let’s go ahead and spiral back to just the last episode, episode 30, and why we have so much difficulty with that absolute childlike trust in God. Why is it? Well, in the last episode we talked about, it’s because we’re too big. It’s because we try to be too grown up. And we reviewed what psychoanalyst Erik Erikson said. He was born in 1902, died in 1994. He emphasized social development rather than the resolution of sexual issues. He really focused on the developmental tasks that children needed to have completed in order to make a successful transition and adaptation into adulthood. And he really emphasized as the most critical period birth to 18 months. Why? Because that’s when the main conflict gets resolved, and that’s what we covered in the last session: trust versus mistrust. That’s the central conflict that needs to be resolved and that shapes the rest of our lives. If that’s resolved, then the infant has hope, according to Erik Erikson, and develops this sense of trust, which forms the basis in the child for future identity development. And failure to develop that trust results in a deep, pervasive fear and a sense that the world is inconsistent and unpredictable.

[00:06:52] We also briefly mentioned John Bowlby, who lived from 1907 to 1990, really a contemporary of Erik Erikson. He was also a psychoanalyst, but he was also a psychologist and a psychiatrist. He said that infants and toddlers instinctively turn to their parents when they are in distress, unless there’s some kind of real relational disorder going on. And he actually, with his colleague Mary Ainsworth, they actually tested that in the lab. They actually had what they called the Strange Situation where they looked at what happened when children, toddlers, were in different situations with their mothers present, with their mothers absent, and so forth. The bottom line is that the formation of early, healthy emotional connections to father and mother is central to identity development, and the rest of natural development as a human being. Relationships are crucial. And these two were challenging Freud’s ideas about the primacy of psychic energy. They were talking about relationships, they focused on relationships, and they focused on how security is dependent on us having those healthy relational bonds from when we’re really teeny tiny small. So I argue by analogy. Okay. So if the great task, the first and greatest challenge, the first and greatest task in the natural realm is to learn to trust, and you got to get that straight.

[00:08:21] And that’s what’s going on in the natural realm. I’m going to argue by analogy that it’s the exact same thing in the spiritual realm. I argue that the first and greatest task, the first and greatest challenge in the spiritual life, is to trust God, and to trust God in that absolute, childlike way, to have that confidence in God’s providence. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a clinician, as a psychologist for almost 20 years, that there is one thing that separates those who are resilient from those who are not: that childlike trust in God’s providence. Clients that have that childlike trust in God’s providence, that are developing that, that are working with that, that are wrestling with God with that, they get better. People who don’t have that childlike trust and who avoid the kinds of things that would be needed in the relationship with God to be able to trust him, those experiences that they need to learn that God is not who their God image is, their problematic God images say that he is. If they don’t do that, then they don’t get better. They remain symptomatic. We are resilient in the Catholic life, not because of our own efficacy, not because of our own ability, not because of our own strength, our own intelligence, our own resources, our knowledge, our skills, our talents, our money, our possessions, or any of that. Catholic resilience depends on connecting to and sharing in the love of God.

[00:09:58] It’s about coming under his wing and being protected by his power, by his omnipotence, by his omniscience, and by his fatherly love. If we’re spiritually small in our relationship with God, we can approach God. If we’re too big, we can’t get near God, and God can’t be near us. The other benefit of this is that when we’re small and we fall, we don’t have that far to go before we hit the ground. You know, kids, their bodies can handle those falls much better than, say, my middle aged body, right? They’re not going to break a hip. They’re going to be able to bounce back. So if we can be small spiritually, we can bounce back as well. Sometimes I get this question from Catholics that will say, you’re a psychologist, I get it, everything has to do with your mother. All of your problems are because of your mother. But what if your mother was pretty good? Like, what if your parents were really good? I’m going to argue that parents are always going to disappoint their infants and their toddlers. They’re not perfect. Mom is not perfect. Dad is not God. There’s going to be disappointments. There’s going to be wounds. Some of them are going to be intentional unfortunately. Some of them are, lots of them are unintentional. And I wanted to read you a little paraphrase. This is a paraphrase from Nancy McWilliams from her 2011 book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis. It’s now in its second edition. It’s a good book.

[00:11:34] And she’s talking about the relationships between fathers and daughters. And something that I think fathers really need to know. So I’m just going to read this brief little paragraph. Nancy McWilliams, who is also a psychoanalyst, says, “Men may easily underestimate how intimidating they are to their young daughters. Men’s bodies, faces, and voices are harsher than those of either girls or their mothers, and they take some getting used to. A father who is angry seems particularly formidable, especially to a sensitive girl. If a man engages in tantrums, harsh criticism, erratic behavior, or even sexual violation, he may be terrifying. A doting father who also intimidates his little girl creates a kind of approach-avoidance conflict. He is an exciting but feared object. If he seems to dominate his wife, as in a patriarchal family, the effect is magnified. His daughter will learn that girls and women are less valued than boys and men.” So what McWilliams is getting into here is that men often grossly underestimate the power of their presence, especially to their daughters, I would argue. It goes for their sons, too. Let me give you a little personal, you know, a little sense, to get this into perspective, because this was an issue for me and my oldest daughter, Grace. It was a huge adjustment to have my first child. That was the most, I’ve got seven children, and the most difficult transition for me in all of my parenting was from 0 to 1. Like that first child was like, totally, totally mind blowing.

[00:13:28] Just there were so many adjustments I had to make. And so my oldest daughter, who just got married earlier this month, she is 22, my daughter Grace, we kind of joke in the family about her being “the practice child.” And there’s humor about that, but there’s a lot of truth in it, too. She was the child. She was the child that really broke my wife and Pam in as parents. But I want to give you a perspective of how Grace experienced me when she was 24 months old. So when Grace was two years old, 24 months old, she was about 26, 27 inches tall. She weighed 25, 27 pounds, something like that. All right, and now I am 6 foot 2 and I’m about 220 pounds. Right. So when she’s interacting with me, I want to give you a frame of how that would be if I were interacting with somebody that was that much bigger than me, right? If I was interacting with somebody that much bigger than me, that man would be 12 feet tall. Actually, more than 12ft tall. Would be about 1,800 pounds, almost weighing a ton, and able to lift a ton. So if I were to get into conflict with that huge, huge man who outweighs me almost, you know, 8 to 1, 8 times my weight, twice my height, that would be worse than getting into the wrestling ring with Andre the Giant.

[00:14:58] That would be worse than coming up against Goliath, far worse. That’s somebody that could pick me up and squash me like a bug. So for kids in that position to see their father angry, to see their father misbehave, right, in various ways, even if it’s not particularly outrageous, you know, in terms of what the father would think or the mother would think, it’s still, like really frightening for little girls. That contributes to daughters having the sense of fear towards their fathers, which they therefore can take into their God images. It doesn’t involve any necessary malice on the part of the father. But, you know, I have a temper. There were times I yelled at Grace. There were times where I got down in her face and reamed her out. We didn’t do a lot of corporal punishment with Grace. That wasn’t a thing. We didn’t spank or anything like that. But there were times where she was very clearly afraid of me. And that has impacted her God image. So, for her, you know, that’s going to have an impact. And that’s an example of how we can, as adults, then want to meet God on my own terms, on my own conditions, you know, within my own vision, within my understanding. I want God to be my copilot, to sit next to me and to behave very predictably so that I can fly my plane, you know, and not be troubled too much.

[00:16:24] Right? But that totally reverses the roles because existentially, we are utterly dependent on God more so than infants are on their parents. An infant can draw a breath without his mother. We cannot draw a breath without God’s sustaining grace. The existential dependency that we have on God in every millisecond is far greater than an infant or a toddler on Mom and Dad. All right, so I want to get into this question of trust a little more. What is trust? What do I mean when I’m talking about trust, right? So I’m going to define trust in this way. So this is important. Trust is faith enacted in relationship. Trust is faith enacted in relationship. Trust is faith in action. This is faith, but it’s faith that’s moving, faith that’s in motion, faith that is active in the relationship. Well, what do we learn from the Catechism about this? So the Catechism of the Catholic Church, number 150, defines faith this way. “Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time and inseparably, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed. It is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God, and to believe absolutely what he says.” Okay, that’s a good. That’s a good definition. It’s a little wordy. It’s a little conceptual. It also tends to seem to me to sit too much in the realm of belief, just in terms of the sort of ideas or concepts.

[00:18:18] That’s not what it actually says. It says that it is, you know, that it is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God. So there’s that trust, that’s that word coming out, that equivalency. But I like trust because it seems to somehow just grip on to more of the emotional and behavioral aspects of faith. And Saint James tells us that, “Faith without works is dead.” I’ve always loved that little passage from James. Faith without works is dead. That means that faith has to be animated. And when we’re talking about our relationship with God, which is what faith is all about, it’s got to be animated by that trust. And that trust has to be lived out in the way that we relate with God. It’s about this personal relationship with God. We don’t want to just leave that to our evangelical brothers and sisters, you know, who have a personal relationship with Jesus. We need that. We need that as Catholics. So let’s look at an example from Scripture about this whole internal conflict about trusting Jesus. Right? So this is from Matthew 9. “And one of the crowd answered Jesus, ‘Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit. And wherever it seizes him, it dashes him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. And I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.’ And he answered them, ‘O faithless generation! How long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.’

[00:19:59] And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, ‘How long has he had this?’ And he said, ‘From childhood. And it has often cast him into the fire and into the water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘If you can, all things are possible to him who believes.’ Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, ‘I believe. Help my unbelief.'” All right. Enter into that scene, you who are parents, right? This is your child. This is your child who has come close to death because of this horrible malady, this demonic possession. And by the way, when it says demonic possession in the scriptures, it’s demonic possession. I don’t, as a psychologist, I don’t say, oh, that’s just some sort of grand mal epileptic seizure, blah, blah, blah. No! It’s not. I hate it when people naturalize these phenomena. If the Scripture says that it’s a demonic possession, it’s a demonic possession. We don’t question that. We don’t like somehow naturalize all that. That’s you know, that’s the opposite of spiritual bypassing. That’s psychologizing the spiritual phenomena, right? So, okay, a little rant there. I can do that because I’m freewheeling now and I’m way off my script.

[00:21:33] Right? So trust is faith enacted in the relationship. The father of the boy possessed by the demon is asking for help to enact his faith. He’s reaching out in faith, in the faith that he has, which is sufficient for him to ask for more faith. It’s sufficient for him to enter into relationship with Jesus in a way that increases his trust. And you know what happened after Jesus healed his son, after the demon was cast out and never allowed back in? What do you think happened to that father’s trust? I bet it went, right, way up, right? Why? Because he had an experience of Christ. He had an experience of Jesus. He had an experience of God that taught him something new about who Jesus really is. Val Conlin writes this. “Trust in the Lord and in his mercy is the key to open the floodgates of his mercy. Trust is an act of our free will, which gives the Lord permission to act freely according to his will. Our trust gives God the freedom to act mercifully. By our trust, God can fulfill his plan and his desire to have mercy on us all.” Think about that. God needs our trust in him in order to act. If we don’t trust in him, he’s handcuffed. Why? Because that trust flows from our free will. It’s an act of our free will. What did Jesus say to Sister Faustina? This is what he said.

[00:23:17] “Most dear to me is the soul that strongly believes in my goodness and has a complete trust in me. I keep my confidence upon it and I give it all it asks.” Think about that. That’s the central thing is this trust in God. If we have that trust in God, all kinds of things open up to us. That allows God to work with us in so many different ways, in ways that only he can imagine, that are way beyond our limited abilities to see. “His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts.” All right, so that leads us to a question. All right. And I, you know, I want to encourage people. I want to encourage people to send me your questions. Email them to me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Text them to me or leave me a voicemail. That’s even better. You leave me a voicemail, I will get that voicemail integrated into the show, and we’ll get your voice up here on the air. Wouldn’t that be great? Right. So that number, (317) 567-9594. Really want to hear from you. Well, I have a treat for you. I have a listener that has been following the Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast for many sessions now. And she has a question. I’ve known this young lady for several years, and since she lives in Indianapolis, I invited her to come into the studio to ask her question and make her suggestion. So without any further ado, would you care to introduce yourself, please?

[00:25:02] Lucy: I’m Lucy Malinoski, and I’m seven years old. And you’re my daddy.

[00:25:08] And you’re my Lucy. That’s right. Lucy is my daughter. And since she’s been listening, she has a question. And so what is your question or your suggestion, Lucy?

[00:25:19] Lucy: Why can’t Dad do some happy God images instead of all the nasty ones like the party pooper God image?

[00:25:28] So why can’t Dad, why can’t I do some happy God images instead of all the nasty ones? All right, well, I definitely want to talk about that. Do you have any other questions? No, no. Well, I want to thank you, Lucy, for coming into the office. And I want to say, and you’re my Lucy.

[00:25:49] Lucy: And you’re my daddy.

[00:25:51] I love you, Lucy girl.

[00:25:52] Lucy: I love you, Daddy.

[00:25:56] Lucy, you bring up an excellent point, one that I have neglected really to mention in this whole series on God images and that we can have happy God images. We can have happy God images in our bones. In fact, we’re supposed to. You know, that’s the goal. The goal is to get that absolute childlike trust in God and that experience of God throughout our whole being, through every fiber of our being. That’s an experiential process that comes when we know who God really is in prayer and in the sacraments. We can’t think our way there. We can’t study our way there. I’ve had clients that have had, you know, doctoral degrees in philosophy and theology. They’ve tried to study, they’ve tried to learn, you know, academically, you know, who God is and so forth. That doesn’t work. That’s a defense that we call compensation, compensating for the experiential aspects that are missing by trying to go there academically and conceptually. It’s not going to work. What we know about God in our bones, to the degree that it’s accurate, are going to be happy, a happy God image. Now, I would say that there’s maybe just one happy God image because that’s who God really is. But it may take different forms. It may seem in different ways because of the different ways that God’s with us at different places in our lives, at different points in our lives.

[00:27:20] Now, I want to say that it pleases God very much for us to work with these God images. This is really counterintuitive, though. It’s really counterintuitive. Most people are really frightened about dealing with their God images. And it makes sense because their God images are kind of terrible, right? Lucy really doesn’t like a lot of these God images that she was hearing about, right? You know, but it pleases God for us to work with these God images. He wants us to struggle with them. Why? Because they’re getting in the way of the trust. They’re getting in the way of our childlike trust of him. Right? So if we give him a little room for him to show us more of who he really is, there’s going to be a really positive cycle that happens. An upward spiral, right? A virtuous circle instead of a vicious circle. That helps us to know who God really is. Let me use an extreme example. All right. For those of you that are parents, I want you to imagine something that’s actually kind of horrible. If this is freaky, don’t, you know, don’t do it. But just imagine that you had a son or a daughter that was kidnapped, you know, at age, let’s say five, right? Kidnapped at age five and missing, missing for seven years. Right. And then, by the grace of God, the child is found, 12 years old, right? But in that seven years of being gone, you know, had some terrible traumatic experiences.

[00:28:57] But your heart’s overjoyed. The child is found. They found him. Somebody got a tip on the missing persons hotline. They were able to connect him. The cold case got hot. They found the perpetrators. Child restored, right, to the home, to your family. Right. Now, let’s say that that child had been told some terrible things about you. Let’s say that the perpetrators wanted to really drive a wedge between that child and you, and told that child all sorts of lies about you. And the child was five. You know, your son was five when he was taken away. That’s still really malleable, right? Would you be upset with that child for bringing you things and relating with you and bringing to you the things that he’s struggling with in the relationship with you at 12? Would you be upset with that child? Would you get offended? You know, would you say, I can’t believe that you believe such things about me, you know? No. Absolutely not. You would be patient with that child. You would understand what that child went through. You would know that there’s reasons why that child has such a terrible image of you, right. Given the history that that child has had and the things that that child’s been told and the terrible experiences that child has had at the hands of adults, right. You’re gonna understand why there’s going to be trust issues, why that child is going to be really reactive.

[00:30:30] You know, why that child might not want to hug. You know, and so forth. Well, if you, as a limited human being, as a limited parent, an earthly parent with all the foibles, with all the imperfections, with all the history and so forth that you have, if you can be that good to a child in that situation, how much more will our Heavenly Father and our Heavenly Mother be patient with us as we try to work through the distortions in our God images and in our images of Mary? It pleases God very much for us to work with these God images. Why? Because it’s what we need to do to develop that trust in him. Right. From the beginning of time, God knew all the mistakes our earthly parents would make. He knew all the sins of commission that they would commit against us, all the sins of omission, all the imperfections, all of them great and small, every failing, every shortcoming, all of that. He knew what the impact of all those things would be on us. He knew all the details that was going to happen in our in our upbringing. Every trauma, every attachment injury, every relational wound from the most minor pinprick to the greatest harm that we would experience.

[00:31:41] He knew what all of that would be. And in his permissive will, he didn’t actively will these sins. He didn’t actively will these harms to come across to us. But he allowed it in his permissive will. He allowed others to fail. He allowed them to have their free will and to exercise it. He has a plan to make up for every one of those injuries, every one of those wounds, great and small. He has a way of turning all of those things to greater good than we would have had if they didn’t happen, right? That’s Romans 8:28. “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” And how is that going to happen? That’s going to happen through our spiritual parents. Our spiritual parents are going to make up for all the deficiencies of our natural parents, and not just in the spiritual realm, right, which is really important, but also in the natural realm. Now, I’m talking to you as a Catholic psychologist here, as a psychologist, that God allowed these things to happen. You know, these deficits in our natural upbringing, in our parents, in our earthly parents, because He Himself as Father and the Blessed Virgin Mary as Mother were going to make up for them in the natural realm. You know, just in the purely human realm, not just our souls, not just our spiritual selves, but in our natural selves, you know, all of the things that happen in our bodies and our minds and our hearts, right? What does our Lord say in Isaiah 49? But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.”

[00:33:27] And here’s the response from God, right? “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? But even if these forget yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” Engraved us on the palms of his hands. We have no idea, people, of the depth and the breadth of the love of God for us. We really don’t. We’re finite beings attempting to try to understand something about the infinite. All right. So two quick book recommendations. These are ones that I recommend a lot. The first one is to help us really understand, this is a book that opened my eyes to how much Mary is my mother, my mother not just in the spiritual realm, but in the natural realm. Right? And that is My Ideal Jesus: Son of Mary by Father Emil Neubert. And Neubert is spelled NEUBERT. My Ideal Jesus: Son of Mary, by Father Emil Neubert. That’s Mary as our first mother, our spiritual mother, our real mother, our primary mother, right? Our earthly mother, our natural mother, she’s our secondary mother. Mary is our primary mother. On God the Father issues, Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence by Father Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure and Saint Claude de la Colombiere.

[00:34:58] Oh boy. French names. All right, so Father Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure. All right. And Saint Claude de la Colombiere. One of the things that really comes out of this work by Erickson, and especially by the more experimental work by Bowlby and Ainsworth, that a lot of the developmental work that children need to do is actually done by their parents, especially from 0 to 24 months. The child is actually receiving things from father and from mother. The child is not actually initiating this growth. The child is in a very receptive mode. Right? And let’s go back to this. Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. Right. The little children, the itty bitty children. Parvulum, parvula. Right. The little children, itty bitty, small, infants, toddlers, not four-year-olds. No self-respecting four-year-old is going to call himself a toddler. Any self-respecting four-year-old is going to know that he’s a preschooler, and he’s not a toddler anymore. And he’s getting big, like my cousin Ryan. You know, he’s gotten too big already. And this isn’t to say that we’re supposed to be like infants and toddlers all the time, right? You know, if we’re, you know, carrying on at work, you know, we’ve got to, you know, we’ve got to teach, you know, we’ve got to teach because we’re a teacher and we’ve got a class of 30 sixth graders.

[00:36:30] We can’t act like we’re six months old or a year old. But in relationship with God. Yes, we need to be that small, that young, with regard to the heart, with regard to the heart. So it’s really important. Erickson, Bowlby, Ainsworth, they’re saying the parents are doing the developmental work for the child, right? And that’s what we need to allow God to do. And that’s totally backed up. That’s totally backed up by Saint Therese of Lisieux. That’s totally backed up by Saint Faustina, right? It’s God that’s working in us. It’s God working in our hearts. And our Lord showed us this, right. He allowed himself to be small. He allowed himself to be an infant. He allowed himself to be an infant in duress. Right. The flight to Egypt, right. So here’s Jesus. Right? He’s only a few weeks old, right? And he’s got the local king wanting to murder him. He’s got problems, right? He’s got, you know, a dangerous situation here. And this this king will do it, right. He actually did it. He murdered dozens of innocent children, the murder of the innocents, right, infanticide. So what do his parents have to do? They have to take him 429 miles, as the crow flies, to Egypt, where they are strangers in a strange land.

[00:37:50] Right. But is Jesus worried about that? No. He’s in the arms of the Blessed Virgin. He’s safe. We need to be small. This quote from Psalm 138:6. “The Lord is on high, but he cares for the lowly, and he knows the proud from afar.” All right. Why does he know the proud from afar? See, for most of my life, almost all of my life, I believed it was because he didn’t want to be with the proud. Right, he was rejecting them. He was like, you know, get out of here. You suck. I don’t want you. Right. You’re proud. I don’t want any proud people. I don’t like proud people. That’s not it. It’s because unless we’re small, unless we’re humble, unless we have that childlike trust, he can’t be near us. We don’t let him near us. It’s not God’s fault that he’s far from the proud. That’s not his choice. He’s forced to be far from the proud because the proud won’t let him near. Because you can only be near God if we’re small. All right, so the one thing you need, the one prerequisite, the one essential thing that you need to be resilient as a Catholic is this absolute childlike trust, absolute confidence, absolute childlike trust in God’s providence. But in order to have that absolute confidence, you have to be like an infant or toddler when you relate to God, right? So one more one more quote here from Saint Faustina, right? Jesus said to Saint Faustina,

[00:39:31] “Your duty will be to trust entirely in my mercy. My duty will be to give you all that you need. I am making myself dependent on your trust.” Think about that. God dependent on my trusting him. That’s why this trust thing is such a huge deal. I don’t want you guys, I don’t want you ladies, going off and working on virtue or working on some sort of self perfection plan, you know, within the spiritual realm and not focusing on what’s really important. There are life and death consequences here. There are eternal consequences because if we don’t trust God, if we don’t trust him, and we don’t work on trying to trust him, we’re not going to be in relationship with him. We’re going to be far away from him. It doesn’t matter why we flee from God in the final analysis. If we flee from God for whatever reason, right, and we don’t turn back, we’re going to wind up eternally separated from him. That’s why hell exists. It’s not because God is up there angry, sort of dyspeptic, you know, kind of grouchy and, you know, kind of overly sensitive and bitter about how badly people treat him on earth, you know, and so he’s going to take it out on us, you know, and he’s going to enjoy sending us to hell because, you know, he’s just kind of cranky and crotchety that way.

[00:41:02] No. The reason people wind up in hell is because they give in to these God images. They default to them and they die that way. And there’s a lot of psychology that goes into that. And they will have been given lots of chances to overcome that. But I don’t know how many people are going to take advantage of that. I really don’t. I’m haunted by, you know, Matthew 7:14. Right. It’s a hard road and a narrow gate and few are those that find it. You know, but it’s not because God, God is doing everything he can to help us. And you know, when you have somebody that makes the decision that they’re going to trust in God and that they’re going to enter into that relationship, and it scares the living daylights out of them, but they’re going to do it anyway. They’re going to be all right. God loves that. And those are the clients in my practice that get better. And the more they can do it, the faster they get better. And I’m already seeing people doing that within the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. I’ve been hearing stories, I get private messages. There’s posts that come up about the things that people are struggling with in this community and the things that they are doing that are so inspiring.

[00:42:21] And they make me really want to continue with this. So I am really proud of that. I’m really proud of the work that people are doing in community. I’m not going to talk about it out here, right, because we got to keep that stuff in the community and keep it private. But really, it’s amazing. And now we’re coming together, right? Those of us that really want to ground psychology in the faith, that really want to shore up the natural foundation, to work through the psychological issues that get in the way of us trusting, all of this stuff that Erikson and Bowlby and Ainsworth are talking about. And also, you know, all the other psychological findings that we can bring in to help us work through the natural realm, because a lot of times people have worked through so many things spiritually and the spiritual means didn’t really work. Why? Because they’re dealing with something in the natural realm, right. If it’s something that’s really in the natural realm, if the problem of trusting in God is something that’s stemming from a natural issue, a psychological issue, then we want to use psychological means. We want to use ordinary means, not rely on miraculous means. All right. So reach out to me. Tell me what you think. You know, crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Call me, (317) 567-9594.

[00:43:41] If you’re in the RCCD community, don’t hesitate to private message me on our app. We’re going to give up the free introductory 30 day thing on September 18th. September 18th. That’s the last day you can get the first free 30 days. We’re going to go just to $25 a month at that point. And at some point in the future, I haven’t decided exactly when. Sometime late October, November, something like that, I’m actually going to be closing the community to new members for several weeks, maybe months. I’m not sure, because I really want there to be the gelling of the people in the community. So if you’re thinking about, like kind of on the fence about whether you should join the community or not, you know, I’m going to tell you that time is short. September 18th, there’s no more free 30 day introductory thing. You’re going to have to pay the $25 in order to get in. Now, the case is always that if you are in financial need, we’re going to take care of you. You know, so if there’s ever like a financial need. Dr. Gerry and I are very committed to making sure that the fees are never the tail that wags the dog. If you can benefit from something that Souls and Hearts has to offer, we’ll always make it possible financially to do that. We feel very strongly about that.

[00:44:52] But I really want you to know that we’re going to be tightening up that community, bringing together some greater cohesion. We had a great Zoom meeting last Saturday. Lots of us got together. We’re able to really focus in on the 0 to 24 month period. That was a private meeting. We didn’t record that one. And that’s so that people have a chance to really kind of be freer to be able to say what they need to say. Okay, so this is going pretty long. All right, I gotta wrap this. This is what happens when I start free wheeling, right? I start making these really, really long episodes, but I get very excited. Oh, there’s one more thing I want to tell you. I forgot this. And that is, I’m going to start scheduling some 15 to 20 minute phone calls with the RCCD community members, and I’m putting together this template of questions because I really want to see where you guys are at and what you need, how you’re responding and reacting to the things that are going on with the podcast and within the community. That’s only for community members. So you got to join the community in order to be able, for that to be happening. But over the next 4 to 6 weeks, I’m hoping to be able to contact all the community members and really kind of have a space here, 15 to 20 minutes, to go over what you guys really need.

[00:46:07] That’s to help me in the discernment as to what kinds of things do we need to be offering in the community. And then once we close the community, you know, we’re going to be actually doing some program development for the people in the community. When we reopen the community, it’s going to be more than $25 a month, I can tell you that. But anybody that’s been in the community for the $25 a month, we’re going to grandfather you in. We’re going to make sure we take care of you. You’ll be able to stay at $25 a month all the way to the end of 2021, at least. So we’re going to make sure that we take care of the people that kind of started with us as pioneers. Okay. So that’s a lot of talking, talking, talking, talking. Okay. We got to stop. All right. So we’re going to invoke our patroness. Oh, one more thing. Pray for me. I pray for you. Please pray for me. I know many of you are praying for me. I really can feel the benefit of those prayers. This is really palpable for me, especially in this moment right now. Really grateful for that. We’re going to invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, our primary mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.