IIC 48: Shame and Repentance: St. Dismas

St. Dismas, “the Good Thief,” through word and deed shows us an amazing example of how to work through shame and turn a horrible, shaming experience to our advantage.  Join us for a deep dive into Dismas’ heart, mind and body and understand his crucifixion in an entirely new way.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth, right now, in these days, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. This podcast is all about transformation, a radical, fundamental transformation of ourselves, overcoming anything that gets in the way of us loving God our Father and Mary our Mother with the trust and dependance of a little child. This podcast is all about real love and real relationships, and it’s messy. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski. I am here with you to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up the natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life. It’s all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God, our neighbor. This is episode 48. It’s released on December 28th, 2020, and it is entitled Shame and Repentance: Saint Dismas. It’s the 12th episode in our series on shame. I want to thank you for being here with me. This episode stands alone, but if you want to get more of a conceptual understanding of shame, go back to episodes 37, 38, and 39. Those contain the overview of what we’re talking about when it comes to shame from a conceptual level. Now we’re into the stories. Two episodes, we looked at how shame can lead to tragedy in the story of Judas Iscariot.

[00:01:55] Last episode, we looked at shame and redemption in the story of Saint Peter. We’re going to continue to illustrate shame and related concepts through stories. And now we’re going to look at a story of intense shame and magnificent, glorious repentance. We’re going to look at the story of Saint Dismas. He’s known as the good thief, the one crucified at Jesus’s right. We’re going to look inside his heart, his mind, his body, and his soul when he went through his passion and death. We’re really focusing on what happened in Saint Dismas’s life. We want to understand him in terms of his parts. You know, these different modes of operating, these subpersonalities that I keep bringing up, that I’m working into our conversations together. We want to make sense of Saint Dismas’s decisions, his choices. Because in our suffering, in our trials, in carrying our crosses, we can learn from Saint Dismas. His story is incredibly hopeful. It’s a story that offers us so much more than immediately meets the eye in the few verses devoted to him in the Gospels. All right, so brief review of shame before we continue. Remember, there are five elements to shame. Shame is a primary emotion. It’s a bodily reaction. It’s a signal. It’s a judgment. And it’s an action. So it’s a primary emotion. There’s an emotion of shame. And a primary emotion means that it goes back to being one of the most basic primitive emotions, if you will.

[00:03:41] One of the first emotions that we can experience. A bodily reaction, all kinds of changes happen in our body when we experience shame. There’s psychophysiological responses. You can observe them through the endocrine system. You can observe them through observing the electrical patterns in the brain. Shame is a signal to us. It’s a warning to tell us when we’re violating social norms, when we’re running into the problem of disappointing or displeasing those who are important to us. Shame is a judgment. It’s a judgment of us on ourselves. And then shame is an action. Shame, as in shaming somebody else. Episode 38 has a lot on this. Episode 37 and 38 have a lot on this, so you can review those if you want to get more detail. We want to go on to a couple of qualities of shame, though, and that is that shame is hidden. It’s often hidden from God, from our therapist. We can hide our shame. It’s hidden from ourselves as well. And shame inhibits positive emotions. So that’s enough of the review on shame for now. We want to get into the story. We want to get into the story of Dismas. So first off, Dismas is never named in the Gospels. If you go back to the Acta Pilati and the Latin Gospel of Nicodemus. So this was an apocryphal gospel, there you find Saint Dismas named.

[00:05:16] His name is derived from the Greek, meaning sunset or sundown. Some renderings also could mean death, but sunset or sundown are the ones most commonly named. This is the name that’s traditionally assigned to the repentant thief who was crucified beside Jesus. That’s who we’re talking about, Saint Dismas. The Roman Martyrology places his commemoration on the 25th of March, together with the feast of the Annunciation, because there’s an ancient Christian tradition that Christ and the penitent thief, Saint Dismas, were crucified and died exactly on the anniversary of Christ’s incarnation. That’s the backstory there. That’s why Saint Dismas’s day in the Roman Martyrology is March 25th. According to Saint John Chrysostom, the good thief, Saint Dismas dwelt in the desert and robbed and murdered anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. Pope Gregory I also said that Saint Dismas was guilty of blood, even his brother’s blood. So he committed fratricide. He murdered his brother. There’s all kinds of fascinating stories about Saint Dismas. And Anne Catherine Emmerich had much to say about Saint Dismas and the whole history. Saint Anselm, in a letter to his sister, had a whole elaborate story about how Saint Dismas met the Holy Family on their flight to Egypt. Outside, just outside the borders of Egypt. And there was all kinds of interactions that happened there.

[00:06:46] We’re not going to get into that whole story. There is a book on the life of Saint Dismas at Amazon that gets into 200 pages of this. We’re not going to get into all of that because we don’t know how certain it is. And it’s actually not critically important to what I really want to get across to you today, which was Saint Dismas’s repentance and his experience of Christ on the cross. So let’s talk a bit about crucifixion, because this is how Saint Dismas died. This is how our Lord died. So let’s talk about what happens with crucifixion. There were four major empires that used crucifixion as a way of punishing criminals: the Persians, the Seleucids, the Carthaginians, and the Romans. All of these were major empire builders. These were not small outfits. These were huge dynasties that lasted hundreds of years, from the sixth century B.C. To the fourth century A.D. What’s interesting about these four dynasties, or these four empires, is that they conquered populations, and they did it with very limited resources. They used fear and shame in very powerful ways to subject alien peoples under their rule for decades and decades. Crucifixion was one of their primary weapons to instill this fear and shame in their conquered peoples. So let’s understand this from the Roman perspective. In Judea, as in many other places in the Roman Empire in the first century A.D., their troops were spread very thin.

[00:08:23] There were probably two legions, maybe about 10,000 soldiers to cover all of Judea. Now, Tacitus estimates that in 66 A.D., at the time of the Jewish revolt against the Romans, that there were probably 600,000 people in Jerusalem, just in Jerusalem, not including any of the outlying cities, villages, just in Jerusalem. Josephus, the historian Josephus, estimates that there were 1.1 million Jews that died in the Jewish war. These estimates are likely to be high, according to the opinions of most historians. But nevertheless, there were hundreds of thousands of Israelites to be managed by maybe 10,000 soldiers. So one of the things that the Romans developed was this form of psychological warfare, this form of psychological control, this idea, this threat of crucifixion. Crucifixion primarily was used to punish enemies of the state. Enemies of the state had to be shown that Rome would not tolerate criminal acts. Crucifixion was reserved for those who resisted Roman military power. If you were caught, for example, attacking Roman troops, if you plotted to overthrow any kind of local Roman government, boom, you’re going to expect crucifixion. Crucifixion was a particularly strong statement when it came to enemies of the state. So it was reserved to punish political or religious agitators, and it was used for those who had no civil rights. The Romans didn’t usually crucify other Romans unless there was high treason or something like that, where an example had to be made.

[00:10:16] Crucifixion was considered a most shameful and disgraceful way to die. There’s evidence of this in the Gospel, right? When Christ starts talking about picking up your cross and following me, that must have just landed like, you know, like an explosion in his listener’s ear. A cross. And when Jesus was describing how he would be lifted up on the cross, you can remember the reaction of Saint Peter. We talked about it in the last episode. No, no, not for you, Lord. Not to die in this incredibly shameful and painful way. So it was a dishonorable death. It was reserved for the lowest of the low. And the goal was not just to kill the criminal, but also to mutilate and dishonor the body. Now, Richard Holoman discusses how the most common and expected form of crucifixion by the Romans involved total nakedness. So it was likely that Saint Dismas was stripped entirely naked. When he was on the cross, when he was hanging there, all of himself was exposed in the most shameful way possible. There’s a huge debate as to whether our Lord actually did have like a loincloth on. There’s arguments pro and against that, it’s not really clear. But from what we’re looking at today, Saint Dismas almost certainly was entirely naked. How did the death happen? Well, first of all, most of the criminals were nailed to the cross.

[00:11:46] Some believed that there was a tying of criminals to the cross. But the condemned often took days to die. There were a variety of ways to die from crucifixion. Suffocation because the blood supply was slowly draining away from the central organs leading to organ failure. The typical cause of death was probably suffocation, asphyxiation, because the whole body was supported by the outstretched arms. It’s extremely painful, needing to pull yourself up or push yourself up, if you could, by your feet, and pull yourself up by your arms in order to draw a breath. That’s how one died. So suffocation, loss of bodily fluids, multiple organ failure. This is what was going on for Saint Dismas on the cross. Body absolutely tortured by the pain in so many different ways. Your mind knowing that you’re in a hopeless situation, you are not going to survive the crucifixion. Your heart, you know, where is the love, right, is there someone that cares for me? And then of course, all of the spiritual aspects of this. What is the meaning of this? What’s the purpose of this? So let’s just review real quickly what goes on in Scripture regarding Dismas. What’s going on at the time of the crucifixion, because that’s where we first meet him. There’s no earlier reference to Dismas in the Scriptures.

[00:13:22] So Matthew 27:38. “Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left.” That’s also echoed in Saint Mark. Luke also discusses that, and John does too. All four are consistent that there were two robbers, one on the right, one on the left. Now, we often say that he was the good thief, but there’s a real important distinction between a robber and a thief. A robber uses violence in the stealing. A thief does not. A thief comes in, in the night, steals things, but it becomes robbery when you are actually accosting people. And that’s what was probably going on. It’s possible that Dismas also may have flouted Roman authority in other ways. Regardless, there was a long history, according to some of the Fathers of the Church, that he had been engaged in these kinds of activities. And we know from his testimony on the cross that he knew that the punishment fit the crime. He was not protesting his own innocence. So we know from Mark or from Matthew, we know from Matthew 27 and Mark 15, that the robbers who were crucified with Jesus reviled him along with the other bystanders. So there was this mocking of Jesus, people deriding him, wagging their heads, condemning him, making fun of him. And the two robbers were doing this as well.

[00:14:59] The two crucified robbers were doing this as well. And so Jerome, for example, said that this is not at all inconsistent with Luke. Right? Because what happened was that Saint Dismas had a conversion experience on the cross. Basically, that’s what many of the Early Church Fathers say about this. Saint Jerome says, “At first each thief blasphemed, but after the sun had fled, the earth shook, the rocks split apart, and darkness fell, one of the thieves believed in Jesus and recanted his initial denial by subsequent confession.” So imagine what Dismas is going through in terms of the psychological aspects of this. He’s on the cross. There’s no hope for him in terms of preserving his earthly life. He’s naked. He’s in excruciating pain. He is experiencing intense shame. And one of the things that we can do when we’re experiencing intense shame is to distract ourselves by pointing at the shame of another person, right? So here is someone who’s fallen further in the eyes of the world than Dismas has. There’s somebody else to point to. There’s somebody else to mock. There’s somebody else to deride. There’s somebody else to humiliate in order to distract from his own pain and his own shame. And that is to mock Christ, the King of the Jews, right. Here is a harder fall in the eyes of the world. So Dismas joins in. It’s also possibly an attempt to connect with some of the people that were still around, to join with them in some way, to try to connect relationally with them in some way.

[00:16:41] Not that he would have necessarily thought about that deliberately. It can happen automatically as a way to try to maintain some relational connection when he’s in the final hours of his life. This is from Luke 22:39-43. “One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, ‘Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us.’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly. For we are receiving the due reward of our deeds. But this man has done nothing wrong.’ And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingly power.’ And he said to him, ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.'” Let’s let that scene really sink in. Jesus mocked, reviled, or mostly naked on the cross himself there, feeling the weight of the sin of all of us through all time, bearing it in his broken, battered body. There Jesus is hanging, you know. And if we go back to Isaiah, how despised by men. How ugly, how torn, how wretched he looks, right? Beaten, crowned with thorns, you know, mocked, reviled. And they’re, the criminals, initially both of them, mocking him as well, adding to his torment as his heart is filled with love for them.

[00:18:38] Right? He is begging graces to come down on them and on everyone because he’s God. He’s God on the cross. He is true man and true God, and he’s looking for the salvation of Dismas. In spite of how wracked he is in his own pain and in his own suffering, in his humanity, he is reaching out and begging for the soul of Dismas. That’s what’s going on in that moment. This wasn’t Dismas just pulling himself together by his unaided human strength. This is Dismas responding to grace. This is Dismas, who is having his perceptions sharpened and focused by his pain and by his own humiliation. Dismas has hit rock bottom here, and he’s able to perceive things because of his own cross, because of his proximity to Christ, because of his connection with Christ’s suffering, because of grace. There are three responses to the cross. Three general responses to the cross. One is to hate it, that is, reject it, avoid it, rail against it, you know, distract from it. Basically repudiate the cross and avoid it as much as possible. It’s the first. It’s the most common by far. The second is to accept the cross. It’s to acknowledge the reality that we have a cross. It’s to look at the cross and to say, okay, this is mine, I accept it.

[00:20:22] That’s the second. And the third is the most rare. The third is to embrace the cross. I’m going to ask you, as you visualize and sort of connect and see in your mind’s eye, Dismas hanging on his cross, right? Hearing the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of heaven and earth, hearing the promise that Jesus made to Dismas, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Whoa! Whoa! Romans 8:28. “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” Right? All things. God used all of Dismas’s life, all of his mistakes, all of his sins, all of his vices, his murders, the robberies, the countless iniquities that he committed, all of that, all of his crimes, and his punishment, which was to be crucified and nailed to a cross. God used all of that, orchestrated all of that to bring him into proximity with Christ in his extreme pain and suffering for his salvation. That is how God works with our suffering. We almost never understand it. We almost never try to understand it. We go back to a very worldly approach to crosses, which is to reject them, to repudiate them. Sometimes we grudgingly accept them. Right? But what do you think Dismas thought about his cross, in his pain, in his suffering, as he hung there, having just heard that promise? Do you think Dismas, receiving the grace of God that inspired him to reach out in this way, do you think Dismas thought that his cross was worth it? Do you think Dismas would have traded his cross for anything else in the world in that moment? Because it was the means of his salvation. That’s how God works.

[00:22:37] Rarely, though, do we open up our mindset. Rarely do we open up our heartset to really grasp on to that. Dismas was the only man who spoke up for Jesus before he died. He’s the only man that we have recorded in Scripture defending our Lord. The centurion Longinus, he did so after Jesus died. “Truly, this was the Son of God.” Right? That’s what Longinus said, the centurion. He was a righteous man. He affirmed that. Dismas did it in the midst of his pain and his suffering. God was so pleased with him. God the Son, Jesus, think about the comfort, right? Think about like how consoling that would have been to Jesus’s human heart, to know that this suffering won him a convert in the last moments on a cross right next to him. In art, you’ll often see the crucifixion rendered with Jesus looking to the right if he’s still alive. If his eyes are open, he’s still alive, he’s almost always looking to the right. Why? Because that’s where Dismas is. Jesus is looking with love at Dismas. All of that pain, all of that suffering, all of that is temporary.

[00:24:11] It lasted a few hours for Dismas. The rewards are eternal. This day you will be with me in Paradise. It doesn’t make sense to our minds, unaided by divine revelation, unaided by grace. We need divine revelation to explain this to us so that we can even begin to grasp it and even begin to seek it. We need grace to help us carry that out in terms of the will. Dismas responded to the promise. His heart soared even as his body was wracked with pain. Remember what our Lord said right in Luke 18:8. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Dismas found faith in the darkest moment of Jesus’s life. He found faith. And in the darkest, most unrecognizable moment, in a human sense, right? Jesus nailed to a cross, the worst thing that possibly could have happened, God’s grace trumped that, warmed his heart. Dismas chastised the other thief, trying to get the other thief even to see. There’s an evangelical outreach here that Dismas is doing on the cross. He repented of his own sins. It’s there implicitly. He owns them. Right. It’s hard to talk on the cross. Do you realize how much effort it would have taken Dismas to get those words out audibly as he’s suffocating? Think about that. He got a substantial speech out while he was suffocating.

[00:25:54] It was longer than any of our Lord’s passages and the seven words that Jesus uttered from the cross. Dismas made the distinction between guilt and shame. It’s often a difficult one, right? A lot of times people go to confession and they actually don’t confess their sins. They confess their shame. Right? They say, forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It’s been three weeks since my last confession. I’m such a bad person. I just let everybody down, you know, I’m just such an unworthy mother. I’m an unworthy wife. And it goes on, right? There’s no sin in any of that verbiage that I just offered you. He wasn’t thinking of himself as a bad person. What he talked about was his deeds. He was discussing the guilt for his deeds. He was repenting from his deeds in the midst of the worst shaming ever possible. He was still within his window of tolerance, again, by grace, right? He had shifted. There was this major, major shift that happened from when he was mocking and deriding Christ to that openness and receptivity. He had to consent to that. He had to make that shift within him. He had to see Christ as he was. His own cross sharpened his vision because there was no one else in that moment that was going to have the kind of window into what Jesus was experiencing as Dismas was in his own crucifixion.

[00:27:44] Here’s another thing. Dismas was with our Lady. Dismas was with his mother. Dismas sensed how much his mother loved him, how much she attended to him while he was on that cross. Dismas was her son. Dismas is her son too. She is his mother. There he was in need and she was there. Even though Mary was experiencing the most intense grief imaginable, she comforted Dismas as well. I’m convinced of this. She comforted him as well. And her heart leaped with gratitude to see Dismas defending her son, to see Dismas witnessing to who Christ really was. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Acknowledging him as king, confirming what was mockingly written of him in the inscription above his head, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. She was there for him, and he was there for her. Think of the bond between Dismas and Our Lady. So there are a few takeaways here for us. One is that the situation is never too grim, and sometimes the grimness of the situation is exactly what’s needed. I can see Dismas rejoicing on that cross. I can see him looking forward to his legs being broken, to hasten his death so that he can be with Jesus in Paradise, starting that day forever.

[00:29:40] All right. So a couple of exercises here. I want you to consider which part of the story of Dismas on that cross, relating with our Lord, relating with Mary. As you put yourself in that scene, which part of the story did you resonate with most? Maybe there’s a part of you that really resonates with Saint Dismas’s experience. And his experience at different times. There are parts of us that do not understand God, that misunderstand God, that can rail in our pain and in our suffering. Makes perfect sense given how divided and how unintegrated our systems can be. What kind of resonance is there for you with Saint Dismas? Is it with him when he’s mocking Jesus, when he’s not understanding? He was so humble. He did not ask for anything other than a remembrance. Jesus, remember me. He’s just asking Jesus to remember him. Jesus wants so much more than that. He wants Dismas with him forever in heaven. And that’s what he wants for you too. This isn’t something unique to Dismas. His situation was certainly unique. But he wants that for you, too. The worst things that you’ve ever experienced, your worst traumas, your worst experiences, the horrifying things that may have happened to you. Those are crosses. And those crosses are meant to bring you closer to God than you ever would have been otherwise. This goes back to the one thing that separates my clients that do really well, and that recover from those who really don’t.

[00:32:08] And that is how much can they believe that whatever they experienced, however awful, however horrible it was, that all things work together for good for those who love the Lord. If you love the Lord, if you believe in his promises. Dismas was in a horrible way, nailed to a cross, shamed, humiliated. The worst punishment that the Roman mind could devise. He was there. He was experiencing it. And in that he found his salvation. What crosses are we rejecting? Are our hearts not open enough to asking our Lord, why? And waiting for an answer. Are our minds are not open enough to let God reveal to us, because we’re not going to necessarily figure it out on our own? How about our souls? Are we willing to move away from our parts’ simple explanations that often condemn God when it comes to our traumas and comes to our sufferings? And our bodies. What do they carry? The first experiential exercise is really to spend some time sensing Dismas on the cross, recreating the whole scene on Calvary in your mind and in your heart and in your soul, and finding out what’s resonating, what’s going on between you and Dismas. That’s the first experiential exercise. The second one is, what’s your experience of suffering on the cross? And maybe I shouldn’t say the cross.

[00:34:09] Maybe I should say your cross. It usually doesn’t take people very long to figure out what their crosses are if they ask the question sincerely. Most of us are much more familiar with our crosses than we are with he who gave us our cross. Because all those crosses were at least passively willed by our Lord Jesus Christ, by God our Father, by the Holy Spirit. What is your cross look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? Your cross is not just an abstraction, and it may not actually look like two pieces of wood. But there is a way that your parts represent it. And you may not be able to get in touch with it yet, because there may be protectors that are just like, we can’t go there. It’s not safe enough. Okay, let’s respect that. But let’s also look about how we can make it safe enough so that you can experience your cross, so that you’re not separated from your cross, so that you can work through your cross, and so that your cross can become your glory, because you’ve turned to Christ on your cross and loved him. Sometimes this takes help. It generally takes help. Generally, God sends people to help us while we’re on our crosses. In Dismas’s case, he was there in the flesh himself.

[00:36:01] Dismas also had our Lady, also had Saint John. There are people in our lives that God sends to help us on our crosses too. And then can we embrace our cross? Can we find out what it looks like, tastes like, smells like? Can we find out what it feels like? Can we enter into our own experience, or are we going to skate along the surface of our consciousness, never addressing it and fleeing from our cross, which is tied to us anyway. You don’t get away from it that way. Sometimes you need help. Might be therapy, right? That’s an ordinary means of overcoming trauma. Could be something like the Resilient Catholics Community as well. We deal with this kind of thing all the time in the community. We’re really working on human formation, which is about overcoming these obstacles. A lot of times that’s in partnership with therapy. I’m going to do a bonus podcast on how to relate with Saint Dismas and connect back to your parts for community members. The Resilient Catholic Community, it’s really about transformation. It’s really about preparing the way for love in our souls. It’s really about learning to love God, especially God as our Father and Mary too, Mary as our mother, to overcome whatever healing we need to have from whatever negative experiences we’ve had in our lives. So if you’re not in that community already, you can get on the waiting list.

[00:37:42] soulsandhearts.com/rccd. And you’ll get information before the general public does. We’re going to, on December 29th at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time, we’ve got a social hour. We’re going to celebrate Christmas together because it’s just great to hang out with people in the community, people that understand about this whole human formation thing, understand about having a solid natural foundation for the spiritual life and want to focus on that. So we’re all going to get together, 7:30 p.m., there’s a Zoom link up on our social networking app, our Mighty Network. We’ll be great to be with as many of you as possible there. And then I’m just going to invite you to share this podcast, you know, send it to people that you think might benefit from it. Do those exercises though, especially that second one about getting in touch with your cross. Now, if you get uncomfortable with that, if it gets to be too much, reach out for help. See who our God is sending to you to help you through those moments. Saint Dismas consoled our Lord on the cross. Jesus’s heart went out to him. It leapt at his profession of faith. His response to the graces was an amazing redemption. All right, so with that, let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. And we’ll also include Saint Dismas. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us. Saint Dismas, pray for us.