Archives for October 2026

(This is a three-part post. Here is the Introduction. Here is the First Thought.)

The second thought is that God’s attention is elsewhere, on people He likes for some hard-to-fathom reason. And for other inscrutable reasons, He’s not that taken with me. I’m left out in some way. This is the product of a parental figure whom we perceived to be neglectful or absent. This might not have been the parent’s fault. He or she might have been sick, away on military duty, or distanced because of a divorce settlement. But what we internalized is that someone who is supposed to love us unconditionally instead mysteriously ignores us or is absent. We go on dutifully trying to love this inexplicably distant person, and we long for his or her love—for that easy acceptance—but it’s simply not there.

This hampers prayer in predictable ways. We will almost certainly pray with a perfunctory sense of it being the right thing to do. But we suspect that God has more important things to do than to listen to our concerns or to share whatever joys we’ve had today. He might offer me a surprising consolation, a moment of insight and connection, but when He is silent, we resolutely slink back into a kind of self-abnegating obscurity, a sad loneliness, resigning ourselves to the sense that “this is just how things are.”

And again, the good news here is that this set of thoughts is every bit as false as the thought that we can win God’s favor by hard work and never making a mistake. The proof of this is found most directly in Psalm 139 [138]:

O Lord, you search me and you know me,
you know my resting and my rising,
you discern my purpose from afar….

For it was you who created my bring,
knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I thank you for the wonder of my being,
for the wonders of all your creation.

We simply would not exist were it not for God creating us out of love. Each human being is a masterpiece of God’s, however opaque that reality appears at the moment. And each of us, in receiving the life of the risen Christ in baptism, is beheld with special love by God the Father, Who says to us, “Here is my beloved son (or daughter), in whom I am well-pleased.”

This is our battle, a battle to internalize the reality of this love. This is the love that, in Dante’s words, “moves the sun and other stars.” And it is very much meant for you.

(This is a three-part post. Here is the Introduction.)

I begin this post by briefly characterizing the two thoughts. The first one is:

“God will love me when I have proved that I am lovable.”

And the second one is:

“God’s deepest love is meant for other people. I’m certainly hoping to get into heaven and avoid hell, but heaven will the continuation of life in the Church now, which is to say, it will be ecstasy for the right sort of people and pleasant enough for me.”

We can speak of these thoughts as having a demonic origin, but the demons also pay attention to our strengths and weaknesses, and because of certain patterns in our early lives, we can be more susceptible to certain types of thoughts.

These are both varieties of vainglory and pride, oddly enough. I realize that will be difficult to hear from someone struggling with these thoughts. I mention this because I believe that we will be able to use the tools given by Evagrius and Cassian to fight them off, if we understand their origins correctly. Their origins are in the shortcomings of our parents and others charged with our upbringing. Our job is to redeem our parents’ shortcomings through a clear-eyed assessment of the truth of our situation, through God’s love and forgiveness, and through a resolution not to blame them for our own struggles, and rather to trust God’s powerful help in untying these knots.

So again, the first thought is that God will love me when I have proved that I am lovable.

This takes a variety of forms, often hidden deeply behind more acceptable thoughts.

So for instance, I can see myself as a hard worker, or I can be invested in a self-image that is strong, or unusually intelligent or thoughtful. These seem to be plausible aspects of ourselves, and these traits are often rewarded by the appreciation of others. But they are precarious because they are driven by a root fear that we are not lovable.

If I can prove that I am special in some way, then I will be lovable, and then God will be alright with me. In the end, we don’t quite believe it. There’s an absurdity in there. We can’t ever arrive at a place where we will have earned God’s infinite love.

Behind this is a parental figure who himself or herself struggled with self-acceptance and therefore projected expectations onto us. A devout parent might be very anxious to make sure that we were properly raised and put extra pressure on us to live up to unrealistic expectations. Perhaps it’s a parent who had a dream to be an athlete or musician or academic and who saw in us a chance to achieve the goals that were denied in his or her life.

The fact that this usually comes from a situation in which the parental figure is struggling with self-acceptance gives us an insight into the intractability of the problem, since to understand the dynamic fully (which is not necessarily for healing, by the way), we would need to see the circumstances under our parent was not able to arrive at self-acceptance, and this produces the infinite regress that we call original sin, ultimately arriving at Adam and Eve’s estrangement from God and its effects on Cain and Abel. And so on and so on.

Sadly, we often discover the truth of our predicament precisely when we fail, and we begin reproaching ourselves. Our own lack of self-acceptance re-emerges with a vengeance. “There you go again! You’ve blown it! When will you finally get it right and stop being such a klutz!” But this is not God’s voice and, in point of fact, it is not your voice. It is a false thought, and one that causes intense pain and shame. What would it take to let go of it?

The truth is that God is not waiting for us to clear any bar at all to approach Him and be loved by Him. The worst sinner is loved by God and welcomed by God when he turns to Him for mercy. Think of the father of the prodigal son, watching for his son, running out to meet him without any reproach at all!

But admitting our neediness can be very risky, when we’ve spent many years crafting a persona of competence. It requires real faith to let go of that self-image. But it is worth it in order to shed that false thought that we must live up to some arbitrary standard before God will show us His acceptance.

For freedom Christ set us free, and we will experience freedom to the extent that we live the life of the Spirit of freedom in Christ. This necessarily means that we will need to be men and women of prayer.

It is important to note that in the monastic tradition, prayer is always a battle.

It’s a peculiar type of battle, however, as it’s a battle to believe and interiorize the reality that God is every bit as great as His reputation among the saints. That His love and mercy are real and meant for us, no matter how undeserving we feel. That no matter how dry prayer is, it is the path that will eventually put us face to face with the God Who is calling us out of darkness into His own marvelous light.

We also know that the battle is with the logismoi, those thoughts that obtrude themselves between our hearts and God. Part of the difficulty in identifying these thoughts is that they may have become so deeply engrained in our awareness that we confuse them with reality or with our own true assessment of reality.

These thoughts will almost certainly affect all of us at one time or another, and some of us will be affected by them profoundly for much of our lives. They are doors into greater self-knowledge and greater faith and love of God. But we must understand them properly to find the key to this door.

So, I would begin this meditation by having each of us ask himself, “How do I feel when I kneel down to pray?”

Do I feel like I am approaching a Father Who loves me, accepts me, is even seeking me out to share life with me? Do I feel like I’m sharing my concerns, hopes and dreams with someone who really cares about them?

Do I feel like prayer is an obligation, and one that I’m not really up to? That I would put off praying if I could, to get myself in better shape spiritually, to be “presentable” to God? Do I attend common prayer dutifully, but struggle to enter into it because it seems to be about someone else? That is for those better qualified than I am to pray, perhaps someone whom God loves more than He loves me? When it is time for lectio divina, am I eager to hear what God has to say, or do I fear that it will just be more criticism and guilt-tripping? Or more high-flown sentiments that seem meant for those blessed to be saints, but in the end not applicable to me?

These distracting thoughts, which are, in fact, false, fall into two types which I would like to unpack over the next two posts.