Liking someone isn’t a sin. It cannot be, must not be. But here I am, wallowing in my own pain, and that is where I veer close to sin.
Why must we Catholics wrap our every action up in shame? There must be some root for some bad thing in my life. If I am depressed, it must be for some reason, for something that I have done, yes? If I struggle this much for liking someone, clearly there must be something shameful about that, yes? That sense of dread, that sour, ashen taste in the mouth, that is a sign from God that we have strayed from the path he has set before us, yes?
I’m a therapist. I should not be thinking this way. It’s not just wrong, but it reeks of hypocrisy.
-Even as a Christian, there is little enough reason for me to think this way. I have read my Ecclesiastes. I have read my Job. I have buried myself in those words, in Job’s speeches and of those of his friends’. I have dug through the arguments on theodicy, I have written my essays, taken my tests on the reasons for bad things happening to good people, how not every terrible experience has its roots in sin. I know these things.
+Even as a Christian, there is little enough reason for me to think this way. I have read my Ecclesiastes. I have read my Job. I have buried myself in those words, in Job’s speeches and of those of his friends. I have dug through the arguments on theodicy, I have written my essays, taken my tests on the reasons for bad things happening to good people, how not every terrible experience has its roots in sin. I know these things.
At least, I thought I did.
I don’t know. I’m spinning my wheels, talking in circles. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go from here. To name a feeling may be to understand it, but understanding has gotten me nowhere, has purchased me nothing but a deeper ache in my gut, and now I must feed my desires all over again.
You all know that I’m a very awkward person. It takes a lot of energy for me to have a conversation with more than one person and to engage with those that I am talking to in an interesting way that doesn’t leave one or the other — or both — of us frustrated. Can you picture a priest struggling with something like that? I may have had a mind for theology and all that goes into the bookish side of being a priest, but I don’t have it in me at all to do all of the other work, most of it based around social interaction, that goes into the calling.
This is what I mean by discernment. In the context of the church, you take a long time to settle into a path that you will stick to for the rest of your life, whether that’s a pastoral role, as a member of an order, or simply as a parishioner, but the same can hold for just about any other long-running decision-making process.
My advisor at St. John’s told me that one could think of it like dating. The process of discernment is one of figuring out the relationship between yourself and a potential outcome of that decision before committing to what may be a mistake.
-That can even be very literal. My parents dated for about two years before they decided to get married. In the context of their social lives and their families, this was an absurdly long period of time, but something about each other just made them want to be extra, extra sure that they were ready to be together forever. It’s not that they were at each other’s throats or constantly frustrated with each other, either. They were some of the most in-love people I’ve ever known. This year would have been their fortieth anniversary, and until the day they died, they were still holding hands and giving each other these little fawning glances.
+That can even be very literal. My parents dated for about two years before they decided to get married. In the context of their social lives and their families, this was an absurdly long period of time, but something about each other just made them want to be extra, extra sure that they were ready to be together forever. It’s not that they were at each other’s throats or constantly frustrated with each other, either. They were some of the most in-love people I’ve ever known. This year would have been their fortieth anniversary, and until the day they died, they were still holding paws and giving each other these little fawning glances.
Where my decision to join the clergy failed, that’s an example of a decision that worked out well in the end. Extremely well.
Neither my client nor I know where it is that he will wind up. That is still a decision that is underway. But ever since having that session with him and making the connection between what I had gone through in the past with discernment and the idea of slower decision-making processes, I have made a conscious effort to keep this in mind when working with all of my clients who are struggling with big changes in their lives.
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