Am I beloved? Your story and why life isn't going like you planned
You are beloved, whether or not you can "feel" it. Engage your story and embrace the Lord's inner healing with Be Healed and Healing the Whole Person.
Happy Feast of the Baptism of the Lord! On this the day when the waters of the Jordan river trembled and a dove hovered over our Lord as a sign of witness, the heavens parted and the voice of the God of majesty echoed over the waters:
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Of this the great Church Father Saint Gregory of Nazianzus writes, “Christ is bathed in light; let us also be bathed in light…[for] Jesus rises from the waters; the world rises with him”, and the prophet Isiah (61:1-2a) writes:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to announce a year of favor from the Lord.
It’s in this light we hit some real talk as we slide back into your DMs: 1) where did this newsletter disappear to for the past 17 years and 2) why is it surfacing now?
To quote the Blues Brothers, we’re on a mission from God. He wants you to know:
As Christ baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fire (Luke 3:16), it’s time to talk about your story and where you’ve been, because your past isn’t only weighing you down, it’s crushing your future prospects and keeping you chained in darkness.
Little intense for you? That’s ok, because you’re not alone in it. All of us are the lowly, the broken hearted, the captives, and the prisoners — of sin, death, darkness, and division — and it’s time to break free.
Jesus’ name means “God saves”, and he desperately desires for you to know Him so that He might too say of you: You are my Beloved; with you am I well pleased. Of Jesus it is written, “he went about doing good works and healing all who were in the grip of the devil, and God was with him” (Acts 10:38). Jesus wishes to heal you, proclaim your liberty to you, and release you from your bondage. This is the new life of our baptism we are promised.
If you’re still not convinced, how much of this resonates with you?
You feel pressured to “discern” your vocation but don’t know how because all your efforts seem to die on the operating table (ok, not literally come on)
You’re stuck in a vicious cycle of work-eat-sleep (never enough sleep) just to get by to the weekends, which go by too fast and leave you dreading work Monday morning
You get frustrated when people tell you to just “develop a personal relationship with God”, as you never hear him say anything to you anyway, or feel that he doesn’t really care about you
You’re plagued by anxiety, depression, resentment, run on a short fuse, or feel like you have to always keep moving or else everything catches up to you
You’re just not firing on all cylinders in life
None of those sound like ancient Church Father Saint Irenaeus’ notion of “man fully alive”, who lives, breathes, and walks vivified with the “engrafting of the Spirit” and who basks in the fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-23).
We thus exhort you to exercise your agency to engage your story and use existing supports to be healed by the Lord.
Step 1: recognize you need to engage your story
Alright, time for a key change to first person (this is Chris writing now…feels like breaking the fourth wall).
tbh, I truly felt all of those things above for pretty much my entire life at various points until the Lord orchestrated the means for me to experience a deeper conversion (makes for a great story after having gotten through the bulk of the darkness, the rest of life’s growth and challenges notwithstanding).
It took *a lot* of humbling and learning to grasp that I needed to engage my story, i.e. interiorly explore where I’ve come from; the wounds I’ve been dealt; the sins I’ve committed; and how to encounter the Lord in all of it to transform my life for the better.
Ok, cool bro, don’t care really because these words mean nothing to me. Real easy for you to say right now. I have free will and haven’t experienced anything but rejection, despair, and isolation from my attempts to figure this all out or make it go away. Stop talking *at* me and give me something I can actually work with. How do I “engage my story”?
I *do* hear and see you, really. But this process comes with a disclaimer: engaging your story is literally the hardest thing you will encounter to-date. Full stop. This is the most daunting, holistic, scary, and uncertain thing I have encountered in my entire life thus far, and that’s on the heels of over a decade of hard-hitting and high-risk military experience including deployments to combat zones in the Middle East. That said, engaging my story is also absolutely the most beautiful, rewarding, life-changing, and transformational thing I could do to change both my life and the lives of countless others around me. And the Lord is front and center of it all — it has nothing to do with "vocational discernment” here, and seriously everything to do with one human’s search for love and meaning. You don’t get one without the other.
The lovely Sr. Miriam often speaks a fundamental truth of suffering, hurt, and trauma: if it’s not transformed (by the Lord), it just gets transferred to others.
How much hurt or suffering are you transferring to others right now?
I, for one, transferred a lot of hurt and suffering to others, and would be absolutely crushed by that if not for the beautifully transformative nature of redemptive suffering found by following our Lord. And that’s the good news we’re sharing today: if you’re sick of not feeling fully alive; if you need help getting to the root cause of why your relationships are failing or not blossoming; if you actually want to experience the reality of Jesus’ healing power; and if you want to have your life transformed by love, your story is the place to start.
Step 2: use existing supports to engage your story
Two great supports we’re here to talk about today are the best-selling book “Be Healed” by Dr. Bob Schuchts, and the John Paul II Healing Center’s Healing the Whole Person retreat featuring Dr. Bob and Sr. Miriam.
Over the years (yeah, this takes time) I’ve read the book and attended the retreat, and now attest to their anointed impacts teaching me to better understand — through the light of faith — what happened to me and who I really am. Be Healed and this process helped me notice and articulate the many layers of complex human emotion bound up in life, and in it I discovered a great truth — there’s a beautiful and supernatural ordering to all of this: before you can fully experience the love of espousal to your beautiful wife or husband, you need to be a brother or sister to those around you; before you can more perfectly love others as the Lord commanded us to do, you need to know who you are in His eyes; and before you can fully recognize your own belovedness, you need to ask for help removing the obstacles that prevent you from receiving the Father’s love for you. Try it any other way and it won’t work.
Both the book and retreat are powerful tools for engaging your story in a way that helps you finally become the person God created you to be. Seek self-knowledge, learn your identity, share that love with others, and mature through purity to your espousal. Read it again. It’s all about engaging your past and present story and all the spiritual, emotional, or sexual wounds that are literally impeding your ability to know, recognize, receive, give, and become the Lord’s love.
It is thus we offer this more precise exhortation:
If you earnestly pursue the Lord from a true place of vulnerability and trust, you will experience inner healing and transformation. The Lord literally promises it.
The Lord desperately desires for you to know Him and to receive His love as He speaks to you and heals you as He does for any who seek Him:
I am the light in the darkness. Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. I have remembered my promise of mercy. Arise.
Other tasty tidbits
It works for religious sisters.
This material is the exact same stuff Fr. John Burns employs to preach healing and forgiveness to any number of women’s religious orders across the country, including Saint Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, the Sisters of Life, the Handmaids of the Heart of Jesus, and many others. This is literally what the Lord has ordained.
Jesus spent His entire ministry healing people.
As is copiously illustrated in Be Healed and shared by Sr. Miriam and others through podcasts such as Restore the Glory, Abiding Together, The Place We Find Ourselves, and others, Jesus literally spent his entire ministry casting out demons, healing the sick, and restoring people to life. What we speak of is that very same ministry.
This is your life on the line.
We don’t have that much time to live, memento mori and all that. Jesus desperately desires for you to know and behold His infinite love and mercy for you, that you may become fully alive and mature through purity into the unique and unrepeatable son or daughter you were made to be. Just remember that because of our free will, He will only advance as far as you let Him. Encounter Him with trust, vulnerability, openness, and a genuine desire for change and transformation of your life and it will happen. No mistake that there’s a picture of children playing in our opening pic. Be like the children we are in the Father’s eyes. Ask and you shall receive.
The deets and other resources
*Healing the Whole Person retreat, 7-9 April 2022 at Holy Apostles parish in New Berlin AKA COMING TO MILWAUKEE
**Be Healed, book by Dr. Bob Schuchts
Loved as I am, book by Sr. Miriam James Heidlund
The Place We Find Ourselves, podcast by counselor Adam Young (we recommend episodes 24-26 on “How Healing Happens”)
The Body Keeps the Score, book by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Following attendance at Healing the Whole Person, there are opportunities available for continued prayer support as you work to engage your story. Email coradcor@pm.me if you’d like more info on the effort to help build or receive support from local prayer teams certified by the JPII Healing Center to help people along their journeys.
Dudes: stay tuned to updates from Duderonomy for a group of dudes who are gonna get after this stuff by talking about the book and emotional/spiritual stuff that impedes us from becoming men fully alive. Email duderonomymke@gmail.com for details or to be added to the always-entertaining Signal chat. Ben is in charge.
Ladies: hit up Emily at davenportemily96@gmail.com for a group of ladies who are answering some of these same questions. There’s also a group meeting on 17 February at the Mother Teresa house at 7p to discuss what it means to be a bride (brides=beloved=winning). They’re also reading Fulton Sheen’s “The World’s First Love (Mary, the Mother of God)” every Monday at 6:45p. Do it!
*Note: retreat registration opens tomorrow, Monday, 10 January 2022, don’t miss it! We’re definitely going. If you need help with financing, email us at coradcor@pm.me. The Archdiocese has funds for this kind of thing. You’re not missing this due to insufficient funds, that’s ridiculous.
**Note: if you’d like a copy of this book, please email coradcor@pm.me as we may have a few free copies available in the coming weeks…waiting on a funding question to see how we can help spread this word to those who need it!
Peace from the Cor ad Cor team.
PS: Cor ad Cor is now 9 months old, that little hiatus notwithstanding ;) Share with all your friends. Or don’t. We’ll be here either way.
PSS: We are soliciting more editorial staff to keep up with Matthew K’s relentless editorial demands. jk but if you’d like to get involved, please do reach out, it would be great to have you!