https://www.facebook.com/100044283077147/posts/487489399403825/

Absolutely not what I was expecting from Fr James Martin! He was in my good books insofar as the willingness to stretch the conventional boundaries of how to show compassion goes. Which is why now I am in shatters over this one….

He, unlike Alice von Hildebrand, Fr Benedict Groschel or Fr Ronald Rolheiser, effectively says that being chronically wounded, heartbroken and emotionally traumatized, i.e. being rawly remorseful and living out of an interior conviction that deeply & unceasingly begs God for His forgiveness and mercy following having sincerely repented, never having gone back on the repentant word, and despite so earnestly wanting to and trying all manner of approaches in the effort to recover and fully heal from the life-dilemma of having committed so many sins against the holiness of God and the sanctity of humankind and/or the wider creation is a sin in and of itself ?

This surely begs the question what has ever happened to Fr James Martin’s own sense of seemingly unwavering compassion?? It appears to have got swallowed up in the ether of a tendency to overemphasize the ‘right’ of people to an excessive reliance on their own self-confidence, self-assessment of what constitutes the right to participate on the basis of one’s own self-assured notion of relational satisfaction just because these people do not consider themselves to be personally “troubled” on an individual level so much as on a collective level, socially stigmatized, exclusively by a certain doctrinal faction within the Church.

Inasmuch as Fr James Martin’s pastoral role has tended to centre around helping those who have a reuptation for being contraversial in relation to their collective social status in view of their sexual or gender orientation vis-a-viz the Church staus quo, he should also be showing his heartfelt sympathy for others who struggle with a different kind of problem. Namely, that of wanting to know God’s love for them on an intimately personal level and who at the same time are striving within themselves against some seemingly insurmountable odds insofar as acceptance by other people goes on a general day-to-day basis, which in the manner of a vicious circle, leads them back to questioning in no uncertain terms, in a not-too-dissimilar manner or fashion to the often-times despairing David of the Psalms, why has God abandoned me? It pans out like this for such people all too often because they are so used to hearing it preached to them, whether from the pulpit or elsewhere, that if you cannot find a community niche or a sincere ear who will faithfully be there to listen, and support you no matter what, there must be something seriously wrong with you to the point that such an extreme form of rejection by humanity is accutely symbolic of God turning away from you. How many times have you heard the almost hackneyed phrase “you cannot do Christianity alone”, or “you are not an island, therefore if you claim to follow Jesus, then you have to be all about “community”? These statements are well and good for those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to “connect in” with others by and large without much difficulty but they are as hell and high water to those who struggle immensely with the pain and sheer burden of being outcasts no matter what. And “no matter what” means irrespective of how hard and sincere their efforts have been in trying to find somewhere to belong, be accepted, grow, and be loved, thereby enabling them to love more earnestly in return.

And this is precisely why I am driven or compelled to challenge such unsympathetic views on how “to confidently do life through a faith-shaped prism” because they sorely lack the one thing that Jesus Himself exuded in abundance and tirelessly went about exhorting people to either gain if they didn’t have it already or gain more of it if they already had a little. At this stage you might be tempted to guess that here, He is talking about faith. However, as it turns out, He is talking instead about mercy.

And since mercy or compassion as it’s otherwise known as is at the centre of the Christian faith, and because God is love and Jesus is the “fully human” reflection of that love in all its divinity, we need to become habitual searchers of our own hearts insofar as the depth of our own compassion goes. This is what some may call an “examination of conscience from the heart” rather than from the mind or intellect. For it is honestly not enough to look at what is in our heads. We earnestly need to examine thoroughly the condition of our hearts for the heart is the seat of the soul and the murmurings of the spirit speak into its midst. So when our spirits are centered on finding God in the experiences life brings our way, we need to be open within the deepest parts of our heart so that we can clearly discern what God is wanting us to hear through the voice of our spirit seeking to encounter God’s love. This practice is nearly always a process steeped in the passage of time in conjunction with our spiritual growth. But the more willing we are to be attentive, the more attuned we will become to the stirrings of mercy speaking tenderly to us from within.

And it is from this vantage point that I will now turn to the all-too-often overlooked notion that despair, far from being the sin that it is time & time again trumped up to be, is actually the heart-cry of the seeking soul in desperate need to find God’s consoling voice in their lives in the midst of their turmoil & struggles, and more especially so when such souls are chronically without any authentic form of human solidarity or camaraderie. It will do well to mention here that Fr Ronald Rolheiser in his timely book Bruised and Wounded: Struggling to Understand Suicide,* refers to despair as a “weakness” rather than a “sin”. For one who is in such a great travail and who has become so downcast, despondant, and heartbroken is not, it must be emphasized, “deliberately sinning” by being forced through their (often involuntary) internal state of distress into such a dysfunctional emotional state of utter abandonment to grief. Our unconditionally loving Creator knew us from before we were born, before we were knit together in our mothers’ womb declares the prophet Jeremaiah. Further, we are told through the Biblical narrative that God spurns not the brokenhearted, and a smoldering wick He will not quench.

Fr James Martin on the other hand tends, like the author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whom he quotes within his post, to confuse despair with final impenitance when the two are actually miles apart from each other as the East is from West. And it must be said that what Jesus was acrually referring to by the unforgivable sin was not the despair of a broken heart crying out for God’s forgiveness and love but the danger of final impenitance, that is, remaining so utterly convinced of the authority and sufficiency of your own condition that you persist right up until the very end, in believing you have no need for God’s mercy or forgiveness.

While I have much admiration for Merton who inspired my own contemplation at the outset of my journey in discerning my vocation, there are just some (thankfully rare) instances where his writing lacks the understanding or appreciation about the depth of mercy and tender-heartedness of a God who is much much greater than our weaknesses, and who ultimately longs for us to know Him everso intimately in this way. Fr Martin quotes Merton as saying: “Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that he is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny ourselves.” I must be frank here, what Merton is confusing with despair is actually the arrogance of a final impenitance that repudiates God’s mercy in favour of presuming “on God’s mercy” in the presumption that self-righteousness is sufficient to get over the line as opposed to having a raw contrition coming from a sincerity of heart relative to needing God’s mercy and forgiveness. Therefore such a position of impenitance is in direct contrast to one of despair, the latter being a sorrowful disposition, heartily remorseful about one’s failings concomittant with a desire to be redeemed from the bi-products of such failings since a despairing heart going through the throes of emotional distress and an unfathomable crises of faith is not necessarily consciously or willingly choosing damnation! Not at all. Rather, often-times, the afflicted soul in such a state of extenuating inner pain is desperately seeking and begging for God’s mercy. That is a far cry from someone wishing hellfire and condemnation upon themselves. How exactly such a warped interpretation of decrepid heartbrokenness became popularized as ‘equivalent to choosing damnation’ and popularized at that to the point of almost being taken for doctrine is just beyond my understanding!

For the scenario which Thomas Merton alludes to in the quotation above speaks more about the kind of attitude you would not wish anyone to hold at that point between this earthly life and the transition to the next: the hypothetical of an abject state a soul consciously chooses knowing full well, with the full force of its will, that to wilfully choose such a position is to choose to remain seperated from God forever. This is not the poor state of a soul crying for God’s tender mercy to be shown at that final hour but the haughtiness of a heart so hard that it thinks it will never so much need God’s love in the form of tender mercy for all it can think of and bask in is an illusiary fantasy-world of being in total and unrelenting control, the kind of control that looks down on the precious gifts mercy and compassion as only for ‘weaklings’ but not for the likes of souls such as itself, those that have ‘ascended’ by ‘virtue’ of their own merits. This is a kind of stoicism that believes it only has need of its own self-made strength rather than that of an all-loving and all-knowing God to pull it up out from the depths of it’s own self-made misery that it is not willing to declare as misery for it is in complete and utter denial. I can’t help but think of that contrasting illustration of the divergent attitudes held by the Pharisee and the tax collector in the Gospel account from Luke 18 : 9 – 14. Where the Pharisee went to the Temple and thanked God not out of humble gratitude coupled with compassionate spirit of wanting wholeheartedly to come alongside those who were downtrodden by life’s woes but out of a smug sense of superiority and what inevitably turned out as the “moral of the story” to be a false sense of security in God’s favour for ‘having done all the right things all life long’, ‘having never ever stuffed up’ and of being in a “privleged position”, (like how the brother of the Prodigal Son also thought himself to be), of thankfulness that he never went down that immoral road, the tax collector standing in his midst on the other side of the Temple was beating his breast and crying out to God to save him from the misery of the woes caused by his problematic way of life. In this story, the Pharisee does an equivalent of presuming on God’s mercy, (although not at death’s door but during the context of earthly life – and perhaps for him that’s just as well….) whereas the tax collector is of the opposite countenance, he is begging God for His mercy because he has become interiorly convicted of the need for God’s help. The self-righteousness of the religious leader signals an overconfidence in his own status as a leader, as if that in and of itself is enough to secure his redemption. Because of his official status in conjunction with perceiving himself ‘as a result of it’ to be automatically free from blame regardless of how he treats others, he thinks he has a ‘clear conscience’, that he has no need to show contrition for anything he might have done wrong or to be sympathetic for the plight of others undergoing hardship and tribulation. Hence, his heart is hard and that makes it difficult for him to look at life through the feelings of his heart – the place where compassion resides – as he is caught in the clouds of his head where his mind, instead of being raised up to God as the tax collector’s is, instead it is puffed up with his own overinflated sense of self-importance. Talk about like chalk and cheese these two juxtapposed attitudes.

Fr Benedict Groschel did very well alongside Dr Alice von Hildebrand in the wonderful EWTN educational series Suffering and What to Do with It* at explaining the difference between despair as an earthly condition of being chronically heartbroken, in need of God’s healing & mercy, and the eternal condemnatory position of final impenitance, whereby the heart refuses at all costs to repent and willingly receive God’s mercy. Fr Groschel also mentioned that the Church has no evidential proof that anyone in the history of the entire world since the Fall of Adam & Eve has ever succumbed to the ultimate disaster of final impenitance. The Church does not teach that anyone has ever actually succumbed to this worst case of worst case scenarios but it does teach that we are to be on guard against the temptation to fall prey to attitudes of copious self-sufficiency that can lead us down that dreadful road to perdition. In fact, Jesus warned the Scribes and Pharisees about it as their hearts were exceedingly hard. They were not heartbroken or contrite to the point of being unable to pick themselves up. They weren’t exactly begging God for His mercy were they? No! Quite the contrary. In fact, they believed they were 👌 A-Ok. In other words, they self-righteously, everso super self-confidently presumed on His mercy.

Summarily then: Big difference there – between begging God for His mercy because you are so downtrodden with grief over your sins and the effects they have had on the spiritual fabric of your life with the additional deep-seated desire to have this changed, transformed, healed so that you can live according to the plans and purposes of God AND presuming on God for His mercy despite the fact that you still go out of your way to sin and yet refuse to believe you have sinned because you are so confident in your own ‘ability’ to handle whatever life throws at you and at the same time you do not care how your hard-heartedness hurts others. Therefore, we can therefore rightly conclude that the former state is one of despair, a despair equivalent to that undergone by the Psalmist while the latter is an impenitance that can either take the form of outright rejecting God’s mercy or it can presume over-confidently about one’s self-sufficiency without seeing the need for contrition or for God to show His mercy and love in view of our weaknesses and failings.

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References:

* EWTN educational series Suffering and What to Do with It, with Fr Benedict Groschel and Dr Alice von Hildebrand. Available from: https://www.ewtnreligiouscatalogue.com/suffering-and-what-to-do-with-it-dvd/p/HVFBG00SWDD (Item No: HDSWD)

* Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Bruised and Wounded: Struggling to Understand Suicide, 2018, Paraclete Press, Brewster, Massechusetts.

Key Words: Despair, Mercy, Examination of Conscience, Psalms, Psalmist, Scribes and Pharisees, Final Impenitance.