My Amazing Journey

For the last six months or so I've been on an amazing journey.  I'm watching God do so much to restore me to the person I should be.  It has all been hard at first.  Moving out on my own and making my children do the same.  That was tough and is still tough.  It has forced them to make choices that I wish I could have had more influence over, but it has been good for them to have to make choices and to make their own way in the world. 

Entering back into a therapy situation was a hard choice, but one of the best I've made.  The steps of obedience in forgiveness, confession and attempted reconciliation with my family were very healing.  That dull ache inside that never let up from my first memories of abuse to the last finally stopped and left me with a sense of wholeness and peace. 

But the life I had been forced to live through my formative years taught me to think in ways that were crippling and twisted.  The ripple affect in my psyche and in my understanding of God created a whole false religion dominated by a false god that continued to torment me until the true God began to reveal Himself to me.

John 14:21 says that if we have His commandments and obey them, He will reveal Himself to us.  First of all we need to have the right commandments.  I was raised in the "don't smoke, don't drink, don't cuss, don't hang out with those that do" fundamentalism that teaches people to watch other people and judge them by their habits rather than their character and their charity.  That is just plain unbiblical.  We will be judged on our obedience to the two greatest laws according to Jesus, since they sum up the law.  We will be judged on our "yes" to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and our love of our neighbor.  So frankly, I don't give a damn if you smoke or drink, but when you take pleasure in hating someone who you feel has wronged you or if you live your life looking down on others rather than seeking to lift them up you are trampling on God's commandments.  If you present yourself as a person of great faith and harbour lust and self gratification and the objectification of another in your private life, you trample on the commandments of Christ.  If you live your life alienating others because they don't measure up to your standards or you are impatient with a weaker brother and cause him to lose his faith, your trample on the law of God. If you exalt yourself over others rather than taking the lowest place and perfering others, you ignore the commandments of Christ.

So for the last sixteen years, I have come to know the true God; slowly, gradually.  First as Abba, my Holy, uncorruptable, pure Father who loves me and has my best interest in mind.  A Father who can be trusted.  Who I do not need to protect myself against.  One who is faithful to provide and protect me when life gets rough. 

Then, as I began to trust Him enough to follow Him no matter what others thought or said, I began to investigate the Catholic Church.  I learned as a Catholic convert about the love of Christ.  I learned to see the crucifix as a constant reminder that nothing and no one on this earth will ever satisfy me or love me like Christ does. 

I learned to love as He loves.  To see Christ in every human face.  To care for those who I used to reject as "unelect" and worthless.  I learned that some who care for the poor entertain angels unawares.  I learned that Divine Mercy flows from the heart of Jesus like an everlasting river.  That the heart of Jesus calls to every sinner from the time of their birth to their last breath and that He does not will any to be condemned to hell.  I learned to love those who disagree with me.  To cry for those who have no idea how much they are loved by the Holy Trinity.

I came to know the True God.  The God of the Bible and the God of the Saints from Ignatius to JP2 (soon, very soon).  I learned from them that this god I grew up with was an imposter, a demiurge. He sounded righteous now and then when he spouted decrees about morality but He was devoid of the true character of God. He could not love, he could not forgive, he could not protect, he could not redeem, he could not lift a soul out of the mire and give it life because he was too busy finding fault and condemning humanity to hell. He cared not if his actions caused destruction and pain. He felt glorified in taking precious things like innocense and security from his children and accepted no blame since he was god and everything he did was right!

But I struggled as I grew as a Catholic because though I knew the true God and loved Him with all my heart and soul, I was plagued by the god of my youth.  Since my infantcy I had been taught that he was the god we must serve.  Any time something painful happened in my life I assumed that this god was again taking pleasure in toying with his helpless daughter and still maintaining his blamelessness because he was god afterall!  I struggled to trust the True God because I was afraid He was really the imposter.  I confessed my lack of trust over and over.  It was the theme of every confession for the past ten years that I've been Catholic.  Why could I not truth the God who had come through and sustained me over and over and had never abandoned me? 

My therapist helped me understand how the brain developes and how things we learn in our childhood become a reflex reaction to life because of where in the brain those things are stored.  So when we experience trauma, we draw from those things that were stored away in our brains as children.  You could say we resort to our lowest level of training. 

Then, once we calm down and come out of our "fight or flight" state of mind, our mature brain takes over and we process the problem with the adult wisdom we have gathered since our brains matured. In other words, when I get a flat tire three days before payday and have $2 in my checking account, I resort to the heartless god who loves doing stuff like this to me because he can.  Then later, when I get a grip and tap into what I have learned as an adult, I realize that God has been faithful to supply my needs and provide a way to cope with any difficulty that has come along and that he will do so again. 

This might seem elementary to some, but for me it is truly a battle of between the True God and the imposted of my past.  So I have been faced with a choice.  Which one to believe?  Which one to serve.  Which one to tell to jump in the lake?

What has made this even more complicated is that I have been hanging on to the hope that someday my family would realize the truth; that my father would come clean and tell the truth and that all would be well and we could all be family again.  You see, the imposter is tied into my family because the imposted in the god of my family.  He and my brother and my father are all one package. 

So I've come to realize in just the last few weeks that as long as I hang on to my family, I will never be free of the imposter.  So my task now is to once and for all let go.  To allow God to pry my fingers off what I knew before and free my hands to wholehearted embrace Who I have come to know.

I'm standing at the railway station so to speak, packing them on to the train, shoving the imposter on board and sending them off for good.  I know it is what I have to do.  I'm excited about having my hands free.  I grieve the death of a family.  I say goodbye to clinging and begging.  I throw my arms open and leap into the arms of my Divine Spouse and bask in the glow of His Sacred Heart.