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Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: I Can Love Myself Better

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“I Can Love Myself Better?”

Certain things are just obviously ridiculous. It’s hard to fathom how anyone could believe them.  Yet today, there are so many examples of people believing patently false ideas that you wonder how they have become so estranged from the truth.

If someone showed up seriously promoting the idea that The Encyclopedia Britannica was created by the random explosion of a typewriter, most people would laugh.   Yet people readily accept things much more ludicrous than that.  Many people believe that there is nothing greater than ourselves, that the universe in all its infinite, delicate, micro and macro details just happened, and that one day we (or “Science”) will figure it out, but that basically, there is a human explanation for it.  God is not necessary.  Man is the real measure of things. 

This kind of atheism allows for the unbridled reign of the ego. It effectively relegates God to the realm of superstition and religious fundamentalism, which may be the main reason people embrace it.  It allows them to override the voice of their own conscience and its warnings so that they may pursue the attractive lie at the heart of our own history of existence, which is that if we disregard God and “eat” whatever appeals to us, we will be like gods ourselves. We will be happy.

Even believers succumb to this when shopping around for a Church that will allow them to live the life they want without complete adherence to the laws and counsels of the Gospel.  One woman openly admitted this when she left her more traditional Church to become Unitarian.  She explained that in the Unitarian Church, she was free to divorce without question, and it was not a big deal. 

From the beginning, the struggle has always been to subordinate our ego to God.  In its fallen nature, the ego is an incredibly tenacious force powered by a kind of arrogance and selfishness. It makes itself the reference point for everything, usurping God’s sovereignty and right to be honored and revered as the source of all that is good, beautiful, and true.  One of the ill effects of pride is blindness.  How often we lament over those who can’t see.  How can it be, we say, that they can’t see how ridiculous their position is?  Pride.  It takes away our vision.

So, how does God break through our obstinate and exaggerated self-sufficiency?  He humbles us.  Through sickness, failures, suffering of various kinds, and seemingly irresolvable challenges and difficulties.  He shows us over and over again that we have no power of our own, that we need Him, and that the control we convince ourselves we have is an illusion.  He doesn’t do this to dominate us or control us.  He does this to liberate us from our own arrogance and blindness so that He can take care of us and introduce us to the deeper mysteries of His love for us, the unveiling of our real identity in Him, and all that He so impatiently wants to share with us as Our Creator, Lord, and Savior.

It will be important to remember this during times of great suffering when God will seem to abandon us even as a people.  St Augustine reminds us that “…God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.”  Anything that increases our humility is efficacious for us because it brings us back to Truth.  And Truth is incarnate in the Person of Jesus Christ.  Everything aligns itself in the light of His gaze, which is why Eucharistic Adoration is so powerful.  You submit yourself to the greatest power on earth when you humbly, simply, and confidently come before the Lord and allow Him to love you as He so much desires.

The healing of the world will come when enough people return to God and allow His love to blossom in them.  At his core, the atheist basically does not want God to love him.  His attitude, like the popular song, is:  I can buy myself flowers…I can love me better than you can…”. That’s the miserable life we choose until and unless we give up the pretense and surrender to the One who truly can love us better than we can.

1. Have you ever had the experience of God humbling you so He could free you from something in your life at the time?

2. Pope St. John Paul II pointed out several times that there is a connection between love and obedience.  We obey, yes, because of love.  But also, in obeying, we are actually allowing God to love us.  When we surrender to Him, when we comply with what He asks, He is able to increase His gifts in us; He is able to give us His gifts and to love us to the perfection of union with Himself.  Why do you think we struggle with obedience even when we know it’s good for us?

3. People talk about the rise of narcissism in the culture today.  In light of these considerations, what do you see as a major contributing factor?

4. What examples of pride and blindness do you see today?  This can be personal or from a broader scale.