Sunday, March 20, 2022

On Becoming Embittered

Thus saith the Lord: Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord.  For he shall be like tamaric in the desert, and he shall not see when good shall come: but he shall dwell in dryness in the desert in a salt land, and not inhabited.  Jeremiah 17:5-6.

St. Augustine, commenting on the above passage from Jeremiah, says that when we trust in our own selves, we are also ensnared in the chain of this curse, since we too are human.  If we trust in another person, that is the wrong kind of humility, but if we trust in ourselves, that is dangerous pride.  

A few verses later, Jeremiah says: "The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it?"  When people are deprived of some crucial good for long enough, in the absence of a special and completely gratuitous grace, they'll stop wanting it and even stop regarding it as something desirable.  This is one of the disordered ways that our fallen, perverse heart copes with being subjected to evil over protracted periods.

How do I know this?  It happened to me.  When I was a kid, peace and tranquillity were rare and fleeting things in my home life.  Emotional abuse, quarrels, passive-aggressive behavior, unrelenting criticism, manipulation, constant turmoil and general negativity are a daily way of life in a family where alcoholism looms large.  I used to dream of a home life where the tranquility of order reigned, and gazed longingly and not a little enviously at families who appeared to have that blessing, like a kid gazing longingly through a store window at toys his parents can't afford to buy him.

But then, after years and years of the turmoil, there came a moment where I just stopped wishing for peace in my home.  I didn't merely give up on the possibility of getting it: I ceased wanting it altogether.  The worst thing of all is that I actually looked upon it with scorn.  I viewed everybody who had it as a bunch of saps and suckers.   I can't lay my finger on the exact moment when this change happened, but I know it happened.  I know that beforehand, things were one way in my heart, and afterward, they were another way.  If, after that point, I had been offered what I had always wanted, I would have not only turned it down but sent it off with a flea in its ear.  The long and the short of it is that I became bitter, and took it upon myself to trust only in myself and my own judgment, since it seemed clear to me that I could not trust anybody else.  It's taken a lot of years of removal from the situation -- now more than half my lifetime thus far -- and a lot of help from long-suffering friends to overcome it, and it's still an ongoing process.  Letting go and trusting in God, and not making things a hundred times harder than they have to be, is still a wrench.

Now I look upon the wasteland of social media and Catholics scorning and deriding and minutely criticizing the upcoming and long-awaited consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart, and I think I see the same thing at work.  We Catholics have been so long abused and trampled and experimented on and tyrannized over by those who were supposed to look after us as shepherds, that we have become embittered.  Now that the abuse has continued for multiple generations, we actually think that this state of affairs is normal, and we fear to have it disturbed, even while we hate it.  We see our shepherds not leading us as they should, and so we take it upon ourselves to rely on our own judgment even about the Catholic faith.  Out of our judgment comes a detailed script for how things ought to be -- like, say, the consecration of Russia -- and we expect this to be followed to the letter.  But, since what we see so far doesn't conform precisely to our script, we reject it before it even happens.  

Has Pope Francis been another Gregory the Great?  Nope; but if you delve a little into the history of the Popes, you find that he is far from the first Pope to sow confusion and error, even in matters of doctrine.  Is he the true Pope?  A moral unanimity of the cardinals and bishops think so, as well as the Church as a whole, which peacefully (if apprehensively) accepted him as the Pope upon his election.  Does it matter that he "invites" rather than "orders" the bishops of the world to join in the act of consecration?  An "invitation" is very often an "order" under the guise of diplomacy; and from a Pope as authoritarian as Francis, we can safely take "invite" to mean "do it or else."  Does it matter that both Russia and Ukraine are to be consecrated?  Surely, the consecration of Ukraine takes nothing away from the consecration of Russia, as long as Russia is specifically consecrated; besides which, Ukraine has historically been a part of and closely bound up with Russia.  Is Pope Francis motivated by selfish considerations in doing this consecration?  Maybe, but so what?  Our Lady of Fatima did not specify what internal dispositions the Pope is to have in making the consecration.  Has Pope Francis earned our skepticism?  Yes, but this can be carried much too far.

It seems like the red-pilling of the world that started in 2020 continues to the present day, as we see people even in the trad Catholic world coming out into the open with every appearance of wanting this forthcoming consecration to be a failure.  Some who claim that Francis is not the true Pope are even saying it will be a curse on humanity that will bring on a nuclear war.  What a horrible thing to even think.  It appears there are those who fear being proved wrong more even than the prospect of committing blasphemy.

What we ought to be doing is spending the rest of this week praying that the consecration finally be done as asked, and that we not become the tamaric in the desert that shall not see when good shall come.

2 comments:

  1. I personally am grateful that this Pope is finally doing the consecration as Our Lady requested so long ago. He is the Pope we have been given for these times. Hopefully this act will help with the salvation of his soul.

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    1. Those are my thoughts too, Shirley. I pray the consecration will finally be done as asked, and that the good effects start with him.

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