5 Steps To More Joyful Living

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Image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

Image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

Today on More2Life Radio, Lisa and I revealed what our Catholic faith and the latest studies from positive psychology have to teach us about living more joyfully.

Does God Want Us to Be Happy?

A lot of Christians question whether God wants us to be be happy.  I’ve even heard people say, “God doesn’t want us to be happy.  He wants us to be holy.”  But as I argue in Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, the two are far from mutually exclusive.   To be holy is to dedicate ourselves to pursuing a closer relationship with God.  Drawing closer to God helps us to discover God’s plan for our life and when we function according to that plan, we are are happy to be functioning as we were designed to function.  Authentic happiness does not stand in opposition to holiness.  It is made possible by it.  As Pope St. John Paul the Great put it. “People are made for happiness. Rightly, then, you thirst for happiness. Christ has the answer to this desire of yours. But he asks you to trust him.“

5 Skills for Increasing Happiness in Your Life

Using the acronym STAGE (Savor, Thanks, Aspire, Give, Empathize), here are 5 skills to practice that can help you increase the joy in your daily life.

Savor–refers to our ability to pause, reflect and live life more mindfully.  To savor our day mean to both recognize the blessings of the day and to reflect on the direction of our life and relationships.  Savoring life allows us to really connect and be present in the moment,to enjoy each moment for what it is, and make conscious decisions about the direction of my life.  Research consistently shows that the ability to be mindful is directly related

Thanks–contributes to joy by helping us be grateful.  Ample research shows that simple gratitude-based activities, like keeping a daily list of 3-5 things we are genuinely grateful for, can increase our “happiness set-point” by at least 20%.

Aspire–refers to our ability to set goals and meet them.  Whether setting and keeping larger life goals, or setting simple goals for the day, the more we are confident in our ability to set and meet goals the more “self-efficacy” we have.  Self-efficacy refers to our capacity to know we can do what we set out to do. It goes to our sense of personal power which contributes to our experience of joy because we are less likely to feel we must simply be dragged along wherever life wants to take us.

Give–reminds us that being self-donative–being generous with our time, talent–, and treasure is an important way to remember that we have the power to contribute to the well-being of others which, in turn, makes us feel good about who we are and what we have.   In Broken Gods (see chapter on The Divine Longing for Trust) I walk readers through several studies that show how  generosity is a key component of joyful living.

Empathize–the more we can make true heart-to-heart connections with those who share our lives the more joy we will experience.  Research consistently shows that the stronger our relationships and social networks are, the happier we will be.  Empathy is the quality that transforms a host of causal acquaintances into true friends who care deeply for us and about whom we can care deeply in return.

Everyone wants to be happier.  With these five skills, you can set the STAGE for greater happiness and real joy in your life.  For more tips on increasing the happiness and joy in your life, check out Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart.

 

 

Good Without God? (Part 1 in My Patheos Head-to-Head Debate with John Mark Reynolds of Eidos Blog.)

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This article is Part 1 in my Patheos Head to Head Debate with John Mark Reynolds of Eidos blog. The question: is a deity necessary for morality?

“Is a deity necessary for morality?”  At the risk of sounding Clintonesque, it really depends on how you define “morality.”  Even so, the answer is by and large, “no.”  To explain, I want to first look at why many Christians struggle with the idea that one can be moral without God but then I’ll reveal why it’s possible–at least to a reasonable extent.

The Moral Christian: Not (Mainly) About “Getting Along”

As I note in my book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Christians tend to think that people can’t be moral without God because, for Christians, (SURPRISE!) morality isn’t primarily concerned with regulating our relationship with ourselves, our community, and creation.  These are essential, but secondary, considerations.

Rather, for a Christian, being moral is really about conversion and transformation; that is,  conforming my inner longings and outward actions to the divine order so that I can fulfill my ultimate destiny in Christ. Christianity believes in God -given, objective, constant, immutable, moral laws by which the universe is governed.  We call this, Natural Law, “the law written on human hearts and minds” (Heb 10:16).  Christians believe we must learn to conform to these laws, not out of slavish devotion to a taskmaster God, but out of the belief that following the Natural Law leads to both earthly and eternal fulfillment. Christians often struggle to conceive of a morality without God because, for us,  the actual goal of the moral life is not just getting along with others, but ultimately,  becoming “divine” (c.f., 2Ptr 1:4) ourselves. (As  St. Thomas Aquinas put it, “The son of God became man so that men might become gods.”)   People can’t achieve divinization (aka, deification/theosis) by practicing an earth-bound morality that is interested merely in going along to get along.

Theory vs. Reality

That said, believing in an objective morality that leads to divinization is one thing.  Actually making moral decisions according to this process is another.  In fact, research shows that most people–theists or no–rely on more mundane modes moral reasoning that, practically-speaking, have little, if anything to do with God.  Most moral decision making–even for theists–is almost universally non-theistic.

Morality without God:  2 Approaches.

Psychologists who study moral development note at least two general, non-theistic approaches to moral reasoning; emotionally-based morality and socially-based morality.

Emotionally-Based Morality (e.g., “Eww…Gross!” & “Tit for Tat” Morality)  —For people who have a more reaction-based morality, anything that seems disgusting,  strange, threatening to my development, or hindering of my goals is considered morally “bad” while things that seem palatable,  familiar, encouraging of my development, and supportive of my goals is considered morally “good.” Developmental psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg, called this,  “Pre-conventional morality.”  At its root, it is childish (literally), selfish, and narcissistic, but it still enables people to be at least basically pro-social, because it benefits them to do so.

Socially-Based Morality (e.g, “Coffee Klatch” & “Legal Eagle Morality”)  —Those who display more socially-based morality are willing to sacrifice what their reactions tell them is good or bad based on what their social circle (friends and family) consider “good” or what the law says is “right.”  Kohlberg considered this “conventional” morality because this person considers social conventions (e.g., social mores and laws) to be at least as important, if not more so, than his or her own personal feelings.

While social morality is a somewhat more reliable moral guide than reaction-based morality, it too, can change on a dime and tends to be somewhat rootless.  You can see what might be called “coffee klatch morality” reflected in a person’s instantaneous reversal of her opinion on the morality of, say,  abortion or gay marriage because she suddenly discovers that her best friend had an abortion or her cousin is gay.  Similarly, a good example of “legal eagle morality” might be when a community that previously opposed gambling suddenly polls more favorably toward it once an ordinance allowing a casino to open in town is passed.  In either case, the morality of the thing, itself, hasn’t changed, but the view of whether supporting it or opposing such an act is “sociable” or “lawful” has changed.  People want to be considered agreeable or lawful,  so they adjust their opinions to correspond with the circles in which they run.

Mercy Me

These are, by far, the most common approaches to moral decision making for all people–theists and non-theists–and neither has anything to do with God except that, perhaps God, in his mercy, recognizing that many people will struggle to find him, gives humanity a way to at least somewhat peaceably get along without him in the meantime.

As I mentioned at the beginning, there are certainly more complicated approaches to moral reasoning that may, arguably require belief in God.  But that isn’t the question I was asked to debate.  Based on the data, the fact is, people can be at least basically moral without having any sense of a deity at all because the vast majority of moral decisions are rooted not in our sense of transcendence, but in our reactive and social consciousness.

This week’s question was inspired by Patheos Atheist blogger Peter Mosley’s story on Theism’s Morality Glitch.

Green With Envy: 3 Steps to Rediscovering Your Worth in Christ

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The following is adapted from my newest book, Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart

“Human personhood must be respected with a reverence that is religious. When we deal with each other, we should do so with the sense of awe that arises in the  presence of something holy and sacred. For that is what human beings are: we are created in the image of God.”     ~USCCB,  Economic Justice for All

The Source of our Dignity

Do you have any idea of what you are worth in the eyes of God?  Words can barely describe it.

The modern world has a skewed view of what gives a person dignity. We tend to think that our dignity is tied up in our possessions, our status, our accomplishments or our position in society.  But none of these things is powerful enough or stable enough to convey the innate dignity that each of us has in the eyes of God.

A friend of mine is caring for his elderly father.  His father can do little for himself. He is weak and sickly and it is difficult for him to get out of bed.  But my friend loves his father.  He visits him daily in the nursing facility.  He brings his father little treats and tokens of his affection.  He tells the staff stories of his father’s younger days, the adventures he had as a young man and the kind of father he was.  My friend’s love shines out for his father.  Thanks to my friend’s dedication, even the staff treats my friend’s father with a little extra respect.  They don’t know him.  They don’t have any reason to consider him in any different light than any of the other patients in the nursing home.  So why do they take a little extra time with him and speak to him more gently?  Because he is loved.

A baby can’t do anything for herself.  She can’t bathe or feed or dress herself.  She can’t help pay the bills or clean the house.  Despite all this, strangers see her and say how beautiful and precious she is.  Why?  Because she is loved.

Our dignity and value as persons is not found in what we have or what we can do.  It is anchored in God’s undying, perpetual love for us.  As the quote at the top of this article asserts, each person is sacred and worthy of awe because of God’s miraculous love for us.   Even if the love of others fails, God’s love never fails (1 Chron 16:34).   God loves you so much that not only has he made you in his image, but he was born, lived, suffered, died and rose again so that you might know how much you are worth to him.  And if that wasn’t enough, he loves you so much that he wants to transform you into someone who is perfect and immortal and can be intimately united to God–so that you can spend all of eternity being loved by him.

Envy:  The Twisting of our Dignity    

When we forget that God’s love for us is the root of our sense of worth and dignity,  envy takes hold.  Envy represents the twisting of our Divine Longing for Dignity.   It tells us that our dignity is not rooted in God’s love for us, but rather in having, doing, and being everything that the people around us have, do, and are.  Envy chains us to a treadmill that makes me run after everything that everyone else has so that I can feel “as worthwhile as” they are.  The problems is, no matter what I acquire or achieve, either someone will always be further up the ladder or I will always run the risk of losing what I’ve accomplished and, by extension, what sense of dignity those accomplishments have afforded me.  The more I give into envying someone else’s life, marriage, family, money, position, or anything else, the more I have separated myself from the experience of God’s love, which is the only true foundation on which my dignity can rest.

So when I am tempted to give into envy, how can I recover?

3 Steps to Beating Envy and Reclaiming my Dignity in Christ.

1.  Recenter the Battle.    When we give into envy we tend to beat up on ourselves. “Look at how pathetic I am?  What’s wrong with me?  Why can’t I just be grateful for what I have?”  None of this works.  The only way to beat envy is to identify the threat to my divine longing for dignity.  Ask yourself, “Why do I feel my dignity is threatened?”  “What is making me feel unworthy of God’s love?”

For instance, “I feel that God doesn’t love me because I am not successful like so-and-so.”  Or “I feel that God does not love me because I don’t have the family that so-and-so does.”   If we can identify the perceived threat to our dignity, we can identify the idol that is separating us from God’s love.

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7 Ways to Free Yourself From Guilt

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FaithStreet.com published an article on overcoming guilt and learning to forgive ourselves which is taken from my latest book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart which is available in stores as of today!   I hope you enjoy the article.

It’s practically impossible to underestimate our capacity for making the same mistakes over and over again. We commit the same sins. Repeat the same patterns. Fall down in the same place. We often respond to this tendency with guilt, shame, and disappointment in ourselves.

But what if there was a way to not only leave this tendency for self-condemnation behind, but also to experience freedom from our own destructive habits? Would you take it?

Understanding the trap

Classically, the Seven Deadly Sins — pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust — represent the most common ways we disappoint ourselves and others. Each is a habit we hate to love and whether or not we acknowledge it, every one of us wrestles with one or more of them.

Whether we fight and fall or freely indulge in these destructive habits, few of us can deny their attraction or our struggle to resist falling under their influence. As Oscar Wilde famously put it, “I can resist everything but temptation.”

We think that the only way to free ourselves from the grip of these struggles is to make ourselves feel bad enough that we don’t want to go down that path ever again. Ironically, it is just this strategy that tends to set us up.

The worse we make ourselves feel about indulging these sins, the more we gravitate toward them to seek relief from the pain of our guilt. It is a cycle as depressing as it is familiar.

Finding the way out

Broken GodsThe reason so many of us get stuck in this obsessive cycle is that we try to address our problems in ways that entirely miss the engines that drive them. In Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longing of the Human Heart, I argue that hidden behind the seven deadly sins are seven divine longings — desires given to us by God that have been twisted because of the Fall.

While our natural attempt to fight brokenness involves trying to avoid our flaws and failings, the only way we can be delivered from our pain is to discover the hidden longings behind our sins. Then, not only can we identify ways to satisfy those deeper desires and set ourselves free from the obsessive sin-guilt cycle of sin and guilt, but we can also discover God’s plan for our ultimate fulfillment.

Uncovering our seven divine longings

Hiding behind the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust are divine longings for abundance, dignity, justice, peace, trust, well-being, and communion, respectively. Let’s break them down a bit.   READ THE REST AT FAITHSTREET.COM

Silencing The Inner-Critic: 4 Keys to Loving Yourself

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Image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

It can be hard to love ourselves.

Many of us are afraid that loving ourselves will make us narcissistic and selfish.  Many others of us have too hard a time getting past our inner-critics to even try to figure out what it means.

Despite popular fears to the contrary, loving ourselves is an essential ingredient in being a truly moral person.  As Jesus, himself, observed, the Golden Rule states that we must love others as we love ourselves (Mk. 12:31). Perhaps the reason the people seem to struggle so mightily to love one another is that most people don’t have an adequate sense of what it means to properly love themselves

Love Defined

To love someone means that we are committed to working for their good.  To love ourselves is to be similarly committed to working for our own good.   St. John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body teaches that authentic love must be free, total, faithful & fruitful.  This usually refers to the love between man and woman, but I think these terms can also be applied to a healthy love of self as well. The following description of the four keys to loving oneself properly are taken from my new book, Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart (in stores June 2, PRE-ORDER TODAY!).  I hope you find them helpful in your journey toward greater self-acceptance.

4 Keys To Loving Yourself

I will love myself freely.  I commit to working for my good without reservation, without grumbling.  I will not hold back in my efforts to challenge myself to open my heart wide to receive the transformation God wishes to give me and to cooperate to the best of my ability with his grace at all times.

I will love myself totally. While there are parts of myself that are hard to like, I will not turn away from them.  I will celebrate the fact that I am fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps 139:14), that I am good (Gen. 1:31), and that God has great things in store for me (1 Cor 2:9).  I will fearlessly cooperate with God’s grace and strive for greatness so that every part of me, especially the parts of me I like the least, may be transformed and bear witness to the wonders God can do.

I will love myself faithfully.  Even on the days I want to give up on myself I will continue to fight the good fight (2 Tim 4:7).  I reject self-criticism and false guilt and any movement of the spirit that tries to separate me either from the love of God or his ability to  fulfill the incredible plans he has for my life (2 Cor 10:5).    On the days I can no longer believe in myself, I will cling to the knowledge that God believes in me.  On the days that I cannot count on my own strength, I will rely on his.  I will not beat myself up for my weakness.  Rather,  I will boast in the power of God (1 Cor 1:31) to raise me up from weakness to glory.

I will love myself fruitfully.  I will rejoice in the good things God does in and through me.  I will look for ways to be a blessing to others.  I will share the blessings God has given me and I will proclaim the good he has done for me (Ps 116:12) that others might be inspired by the wonders God is working in me.

 Be Not Afraid!

This is the attitude we aspiring mystics must adopt as we face even the darkest parts of ourselves and our frustrated efforts to heal.  Not fear, anger and condemnation, but the free, total, faithful and fruitful Love that enables us to rejoice in our failings because of God’s immeasurable mercy and love and, in turn,  be transformed by the power of his infinite grace.    To learn more about how you can learn to love yourself as God loves you, check out Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart.

Popcak masterfully reveals how even our darkest desires ultimately point to something beautiful, to a destiny beyond our wildest dreams, and he offers a powerful, practical plan for readers to fulfill God’s ultimate vision for their lives.  A must-read for anyone who wants to live the redemption Christ won for us!”  -Christopher West, Founder & President, The Cor Project  Author, Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, & the Universal Longing

Be Not Afraid: God’s Plan for The Fulfillment of All Your Deepest (and even Darkest) Desires–REVEALED!

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The following is adapted from my forthcoming book, Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart which looks at the longings that drive our deepest and even darkest desires and how God wants to use those longings to reveal his plan for our ultimate fulfillment.  It is available NOW for pre-order!

Christians have a complicated relationship with desire.  We desire many things, but so often our desires get us into trouble.  They can wreck our lives, ruin our relationships,  lead us into sin, and cause us no end of misery and regret.   Because of this, we Christians often treat our desires with suspicion if not outright fear.  This tendency is, perhaps, understandable, but what if there was a way to stop being suspicious or afraid of your desires?   What if I were to tell you that even your most neurotic and destructive desires could be transformed into an engine of divine actualization that propels you down the path toward both a more joyful life in the present and the fulfillment of the ultimate destiny God has in store for you?  And what if I told you that this truth about the authentic Christian relationship with desire was affirmed again and again by the most orthodox traditions in our Catholic faith?

Love & The Re-Orientation of Desire

Falling in love with my wife was a transformational experience for me.  Suddenly, everything was about her. Love has a way of radically re-orienting us away from ourselves and toward the other. We find ourselves by losing ourselves.

In a similar way, when we make an authentic response to God’s invitation to enter into a relationship with him, something amazing happens.  Suddenly, everything is about him.  Our  hopes, our dreams, our relationships, our desires become re-oriented.  They don’t go away, but they take on a new significance.  They point, not to themselves, but to new ways we might come to know God better, and draw closer to him.  Directly or indirectly, our desires become entirely about him.

The Three “Ways” of Desire

Christian mystics over the centuries have discovered that divinization (theologians’ term for the process by which God leads us into total union with him) refines our desires through three distinct stages or “ways.”

First, in The Purgative Way we experience a rehabilitation of desire as God shows us to satisfy our earthly desires in healthy ways.

Next, in The Illuminative Way we experience the enlightenment of desire as we discover that God has been reaching out to us through our longings and wants to reveal himself to us through them.

Finally, in The Unitive Way we experience the unification of our desires with the very heart of God.  In each stage, both our flawed desires and the flawed ways we try to satisfy them undergo a transformation that allows us to achieve ultimate fulfillment by propelling us toward our divine destiny.  Through this process, we learn that God is not the enemy of our desires, but rather he seeks to satisfy our desires to a degree that we didn’t know was possible.  He longs to meet the deepest needs of our heart–even needs beyond our awareness.

Entrusting Your Desires to God

The three “ways” of desire teach us that our desires are not to be feared and extinguished, but blessed and transformed.  Whatever your desires are–no matter how disordered they may seem or how much trouble they may cause you–you can only find happiness by surrendering those desires to God and boldly asking him to teach you, not how to destroy or ignore your desires, but how to fulfill them in ways that will give him glory and lead to our ultimate satisfaction in this life and union with him in the next.

Indiscriminate indulgence in our desires or the relentless persecution and condemnation of our desires both ironically produce the same miserable outcome.  Both false responses to desire facilitate our brokenness, frustration,  and separation from God.  Only by discovering and embracing the godly longings driving our desires and asking for God’s instruction on how to fulfill those desires in ways that are pleasing to him can we hope to achieve true peace and ultimate fulfillment.  In the words of Pope Benedict XVI,

 …we must not forget that the dynamism of desire is always open to redemption….We all, moreover, need to set out on the path of purification and healing of desire.  We are pilgrims, heading toward our heavenly homeland.  The pilgrimage of [desire] is not, then, about suffocating the longing that dwells in the heart of man, but about freeing it,   so that it can reach its true height (2012).

To learn more about how to reclaim the divine purpose behind the deepest and even darkest desires of your heart, check out Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart.

7 Surprising Ways to Free Yourself from Guilt (And Discover God’s Plan for Your Ultimate Fulfillment)

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The following is adapted from my upcoming book Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart.  It is a book that explores the seven divine longings that hide behind our deepest and even darkest desires and those longings point to God’s plan for our ultimate fulfillment.  Coming out in June, it’s available for pre-order this week!

It’s practically impossible to underestimate our capacity for making the same mistakes over and over again.  We commit the same sins.  Repeat the same patterns.  Fall down in the same place time and again.  And we often respond to this tendency with guilt, shame, and disappointment in ourselves.  But what if there was a way to not only leave this tendency for self-condemnation behind, but also to experience freedom from our own destructive patterns and habits?  Would you take it?

Understanding the Trap

Classically, the Seven Deadly Sins–pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust–represent the most common ways we disappoint ourselves and others.  Each is a habit we hate to love and whether or not we acknowledge it, every single one of us wrestles with one or more of them.  Whether we fight and fall or simply freely indulge in these destructive habits, few of us can deny either their attraction or our struggle to resist falling under their influence.  As Oscar Wilde famously put it, “I can resist everything but temptation.”   We think that the only way to free ourselves from the grip of these struggles is to make ourselves feel bad enough that we don’t want to go down that path ever again.  Ironically, it is just this strategy that tends to set us up.  The worse we make ourselves feel about indulging these sins, the more we tend to gravitate toward them to seek relief from the pain of our guilt.  We create an obsessive cycle where the things we do to comfort ourselves cause a wound that makes us want to wound ourselves further, which forces us to return to the thing that wounded us in the first place in a flawed effort to seek relief.  It is a cycle that is as depressing as it is familiar.

The Way Out.

The reason so many of us get stuck  in this obsessive cycle is that we try to address our problems in ways that entirely miss the engines that drive them.  In Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longing of the Human Heart I argue that hidden behind the seven deadly sins are seven divine longings–desires given to us by God, himself, that have become twisted because of the Fall.  While our natural attempt to fight our brokenness involves trying to avoid our flaws and failings, the truth is that the only way we can be delivered from our pain is to discover the hidden longings behind the sins the trip us up.  When we discover these divine longings, we can not only identify ways to satisfy those deeper desires and set ourselves free from the obsessive cycle of sin and guilt, but we can also discover God’s plan for our ultimate fulfillment.

The Seven Longings

          Hiding behind the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust are seven longings that God has built-in to every human heart; longings for  abundance, dignity, justice, peace, trust, well-being, and communion respectively.

The Longing for Abundance is the divine longing hiding behind pride.  We all want to feel that our lives have meaning, purpose and significance. Pride tells us that the only way to fulfill this longing for abundance is by figuring things out for ourselves.  Pride tells us that other people are just a distraction or a threat and have nothing to teach us about living a more joyful, fulfilling or abundant life.  The only way to leave behind our prideful tendencies is to remind ourselves that our desire for fulfillment can only be achieved through humility, which is not a tendency to run ourselves down, but rather, a willingness to learn what others have to teach us and to commit ourselves to working for the good of others with what we have been given.   We can’t escape pride by criticizing ourselves for being prideful.  We can only escape pride by pursuing true abundance by opening our hearts to the things others can teach us about life and sharing what we have learned in returned.

The Longing for Dignity is hidden behind the sin of envy.  We call want to feel like we matter,  that we are unique and unrepeatable.  Of course, in God’s eyes, we are, but envy tells us that the only way we can be confirmed in our specialness is by having everything that those around us have and achieving everything that those around us have achieved.  Unfortunately, this never-ending quest leads to perpetual dissatisfaction.  The only way to satisfy our diving longing for dignity is to practice kindness.  Kindness is love’s little sister.  It is the virtue that allows others to flourish in our presence. It is our ability to make other people feel special when they are around us.  When we give that gift of kindness to others, they affirm our dignity through their gratitude and the joy they express when they see us. Kindness kills envy by showing us that we truly are God’s gift to the world and that our worth lies in who we are not what we have.

The Longing for Justice lies behind the deadly sin of wrath.  We ache to see that the wrongs in our life are righted, offenses addressed, and injuries healed.  Wrath tells us that the only way justice can be served is for us to hurt others as much as or more than they hurt us.  Of course, this simply feeds the cycle of injustice and increases our ache.  The only way out of wrath–the temptation to destructive anger–is by practicing patience.  Contrary to popular opinion, patience is not the virtue that tolerates offenses without ever saying anything.  Rather, Christianity teaches that patience is the willingness to let our good efforts to resolve injustices mature instead of trying to force hasty, half-baked “solutions” that hurt others and only serve to make things worse. Patience cures wrath by empowering us to seek real answers and allow those answers to take root in God’s time.

The Longing for Peace can become twisted into sloth.  Sloth is not mere laziness.  Rather, it tells us the best way to satisfy the longing for peace is to close our eyes to the problems around us, keep our heads down, and avoid any potential conflict–even conflict that involves working for justice, our good, and the good of those around us.  Of course, this just makes us feel oppressed as the problems pile up around us.  True peace only happens when our lives are in order and when we know that we’re doing what we can to address the problems around us. The only way to defeat sloth is to practice the virtue of diligence.  Diligence defeats sloth by helping us ask what small things we can do each day to set things right so true peace can reign in our hearts.

The Longing for Trust hides behind our tendency toward greed.  We all want to feel safe, to trust that “everything is going to be OK.”  Greed tells us that the only way to achieve this feeling is by accumulating enough stuff that a catastrophe could never harm us.  Of course, all we have to do is turn on the news to know we could never acquire enough to makes us truly safe.  The only way to defeat greed is by practicing charity.  When we are generous to others despite our fears, we acknowledge that God is the only true source of our security.  We cannot protect ourselves. Only God can protect us.  This knowledge frees us from our tendency to grasp and to hoard and allows us to share our gifts with others as we defy our fears of want and rest in God’s ability to provide for us instead of trying to trust in our own.

The Longing for Well-Being is obscured by gluttony.  True well-being, that sense of inner-satisfaction we all seek, comes from living a life in balance.  Gluttony tells us that the best way to feel fulfilled is through an obsessive relationship with food.  Although for most people, this means eating too much (stress eating, especially), for some, it can mean developing orthorexia that is, an obsessive relationship with eating right.  Nutrition is important, but we cannot save ourselves either by how much we eat or how correctly we eat.  Only by practicing temperance can we defeat gluttony.  Temperance, helps us achieve true balance between our physical, psychological, emotional, relational and spiritual selves. Temperance allows us to make the small adjustments we need to make in our lives to achieve and maintain the harmony that allows us to experience authentic well-being.

The Divine Longing for Communion hides behind lust.  We were made to be intimately united to God and others.  We crave union.  We long to belong. But real relationship is hard work.  It is so much easier to settle for the illusion of connection that physical hook-ups can give.  But we know that this feeling doesn’t last.  Lust can only be defeated, and the divine longing for communion fulfilled, by practicing chastity.  Contrary to what most people believe, chastity is not about repressing our sexuality.  It is actually the virtue that governs all of our relationships and gives us the ability to determine what it means to be fully and appropriately loving to every person we meet.  Sex may be the ultimate connection, but it is not the only connection and it is often not the most meaningful connection we can make with others.  Chastity allows us to ask ourselves “what kind of connection would it be best to make with this particular person in this particular context” and then make that connection fully and meaningfully.  Without chastity, it is too easy to be too generous or too stingy with our love and to treat others as objects instead of persons made in the image and likeness of God.

God’s Plan for Ultimate Fulfillment

            When we stop beating ourselves up for our failings and instead recommit ourselves to satisfying the divine longings behind our bad habits and sins, God not only sets us free from the obsessive cycle of guilt, but he sees to the fulfillment of our deepest desires–the seven divine longings of every human heart.  More importantly, he draws us more deeply into union with him.  This process of embracing the grace that flows into our lives when we work to satisfy the seven divine longings is known by theologians as theosis,  the means by which we mere humans become “partakers in the divine nature” (2 Ptr 1:4).  When we allow God to set us free from the chains of guilt and sin, he does more than make us good, he makes us godly. He fills us with his own divine light that enables us to fulfill both our earthly and our ultimate destinies, achieving authentic happiness in this life and eternal life in the next.

Dr. Greg Popcak is the author of many books including Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart.

Father Forgive Me, For I Am Angry: Further Reflections on “The Furious Mysteries”

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Image via Shutterstock.

Image via Shutterstock.

It seems like anger is the topic of the day.  Earlier, my wife and I were discussing the Christian response to anger on More2Life Radio.  Shortly after I got off the air, I came across an article titled, The Furious Mysteries  in which America’s Fr. James Martin reflects on what we are to make of Jesus’ displays of anger in Scripture.

It’s a terrific question.  What does Jesus’ anger teach us about how we should manage ours?

Anger, Wrath & the Divine Longing for Justice

Many people think that anger is a sin.  There’s a lot of confusion about what constitutes anger, which is a gift from God, and wrath, which is anger’s more diabolical cousin.  In Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing and the Seven Longing of the Human Heart I argue that wrath is a distortion of the divine longing for justice.   What do I mean?

At the dawn of creation, God created within the human person a bone deep desire to see that God’s plan for life the universe and everything was fulfilled.  This divine longing for justice, which is one of the seven longings of every human heart, was given to us by God to to help us keep and protect–and, later, restore–the balance that God created at the beginning of time.

Anger is our bodily response to the experience of injustice–it is the God-given, gut-level reaction that says, “This is not right!”   What many people refer to as “righteous anger” represents God’s call–through our body– to prayerfully seek solutions that allow his will to be done, justice to be established and proper order to be restored.  Righteous anger always leads to an intentional, proportionate, appropriate response that seeks to heal the injury and build up the body of Christ.   In each instance, Jesus’ anger in the Gospels presents an example of just that. I believe this is the key to unraveling with Fr. Martin cleverly refers to as “the Furious Mysteries.”

The Furious Mysteries–Jesus’ Anger in Scripture.

Jesus  sometimes got angry, but  he was never wrathful.  He didn’t overturn the money-changer’s tables because he was having a bad day and lost his cool.  He did it to see that God’s intentions for the temple would be respected.  He knew that any lesser attempt to demonstrate that his Father’s temple was not a shopping mall but a place of reverence would have simply been ignored.  As dramatic as it was, his behavior was an intentional, proportionate, and appropriate response to the merchants’ attempt to rob God of the honor he was due. Jesus’ display of righteous anger was an intentional effort to restore right order to the temple where His Father, not commerce, was to be the main attraction.

Likewise, when Jesus referred to the scribes and pharisees as “You snakes!  You den of vipers” (Mt 23:33) he wasn’t calling them names to be cruel like some internet troll.  He knew that using such colorful language was the only way to shock them out of their prideful belief that they could save themselves with their obsessive-compulsive adherence to the rules.   He knew that they were so convinced of their own righteousness that the only way he could shake them out of their complacency and open their hearts to the message of repentance was to compare them to the things they would never want to be, the exact opposite of what they thought they were trying to be; “whitewashed tombs”  filled with “death and dry bones” and “snakes”, representing the personification of Satan, the ultimate example of pride, himself!   Sometimes, Jesus anger was shocking, but in every instance, Jesus’ anger represented a conscious effort to see that God’s will would be done and it was always ordered to the godly good of the person/people on the receiving end of it.  His displays of anger represented an intentional, proportionate, appropriate attempt to work for the good of people whose behavior would be their undoing.

Wrath:  Anger that Wounds

But unlike righteous anger which is always intentional, proportionate and appropriate, the deadly sin of wrath represents a response that is reactive, disproportionate, and out of order.  Rather than responding to God’s call to restore justice, wrath makes us behave in manner that makes the existing offense even worse!

While I generally like Fr. Martin’s article,  I would gently disagree with his somewhat fuzzy distinction between wrath and anger.  He argues that Jesus anger wasn’t sinful because “Jesus is never angry on behalf of himself”  while our anger  “is more frequently of the selfish type, the result of an offense to ourselves.” He supports this idea by pointing out that when Jesus was being tortured and crucified, he did not express any anger. Indeed, he went “like a lamb to the slaughter” (Is 53:7) and even forgave his executioners.

The problem I have with this interpretation is that it suggests people are “selfish” when, for instance, they stand up to an abuser.  I’m sure Fr. Martin didn’t mean this.  In fact, he says as much when he writes,  “Of course we need a healthy love of self and a care for the self. So sometimes a strong response to injustice is justified.”   But I counsel too many people who are confused on this point exactly because of fuzzy distinctions like this.  If the only difference between righteous anger and wrath is that righteous anger serves others and sinful anger serves me, then when, exactly, is it OK to offer “a strong response to injustice?”   There is an unhealthy attitude among too many Christians that says that if I set boundaries of any kind or stand up for myself in any way, I am being selfish–after all, look at how Jesus dealt with his abusers!  

I would argue that this view, though well-intentioned, almost fatally misses the point.  So, what is the real difference between anger that is sinful and anger that is not?

Why Didn’t Jesus Become Cross on the Cross?

Remember that anger, properly ordered, is a God-given, gut-level response to an experience of injustice.   We can think of injustice as a situation or relationship that is “out of order” (i.e., not in line with God’s plan). Seen in this light, Jesus did not express anger when he was being tortured and crucified because he knew he needed endure this suffering to restore the right order that existed between God and humankind.   Although it was not right that we should cause him to suffer, he willingly submitted to that suffering so that the Father’s plan could be fulfilled and the order between Heaven and earth could be restored–a task no one else but him was able to accomplish.   By contrast, the suffering of an abused wife, for instance, is unjust because it represents a disordered relationship between man and woman, a relationship that directly contradicts Gods plan for marriage.  Moreover, the wife’s anger at her abuse and her attempts to either stand up to her abuser or escape him represents a just response to abuse because it attempts to call the marriage to godly order.

In short, what makes a display of anger either righteous or sinful is not whether I, personally, benefit from it but whether or not the way I am expressing that anger represents an honest, intentional, proportionate, and appropriate attempt to see that God’s intentions for a particular situation or relationship would be fulfilled.  While wrath offends God’s plan by making a bad situation worse with our reactions, righteous anger seeks to heal wounds, restore relationships,  and re-establish godly order.  To discover more ways our deepest desires–and even our darkest desires–can reveal God’s incredible plan for a grace-filled life, check out Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart.

 

Just Wait a Minute! (Why Patience Isn’t What You Think)

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We were talking about patience on More2Life Radio today.  What it is, what it isn’t, and how to get more of it.

Patience, of course, is the virtue we all love to hate.  We all know we need it, but we sure as heck don’t want to ask God to give it to us.  And yet, perhaps some of that reluctance is due to the fact that we don’t really understand what patience is.

Patience—> Happiness

Psychologists refer to patience as the ability to delay gratification and we know from research that this ability is essential for a happy life.  In his famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiments, psychologist Walter Mischel studied a group of kindergartners.  He placed a marshmallow in front of each kid in his study and told them they could eat this marshmallow now or, if they could refrain from eating that marshmallow for 15 minutes while he stepped out of the room, they could have 2 marshmallows when he came back.   He recorded their responses and then continued to check in with his participants periodically into adulthood.  He found that the kids who were able to patiently wait for the second marshmallow, in high school, had better academic success and better SAT scores than the kids who ate the marshmallow right away.  As they entered adulthood, the kids who were able to patiently wait for the second marshmallow had lower incidence of addictions and obesity, and reported higher scores on multiple measures of life and relationship satisfaction.

The ability to practice patience is key to living a happy life.

What Patience Is and What It Isn’t

Most people think that patience is the ability to endure an injustice without getting upset.  But that’s not really what it is.  In fact, passivity is Satan’s plagiarism of patience.  To witness an injustice and feel nothing and do nothing isn’t a virtue, it’s the sin of sloth!   In reality, patience is the virtue that allows us to respond to an injustice in a thoughtful, measured, proportionate and responsible way.   Patience is the virtue that allows us to experience an injustice and, instead of lashing out and merely reacting in ways that ultimately make the problem even worse, step back and consider the best way to respond and then allow that good effort to germinate and blossom and bear fruit.

As I observe in my upcoming book, Broken Gods:  Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, patience is an active virtue that allows us to respond in an appropriate way and then allow that response to mature and take effect.  It allows us to make appropriate adjustments along the way and wait to see how those changes effect things before we make additional changes.  True patience does not require us to disengage from the problem.  It challenges us to engage in a more thoughtful  and intentional manner.

Cultivating Patience…Painlessly.

It can become easier to practice patience when we stop seeing it as the call to simply grit our teeth and suffer without complaint.  “Practicing patience” is really not about suffering gleefully.  It is about responding to suffering and injustice in a way that allows you to be thoughtful and intentional and then, instead of complaining about it, stepping back and thoughtfully shepherding the good efforts you began to a fruitful and just conclusion.  Yes, patience involves restraining ourselves from  excessive complaining, pouting, and misery-making, but only so that we can save that energy we would waste complaining and instead be able to respond in a mature, productive way to the challenges we face, that God’s will might be done in our lives, that our needs would be met, and the injustices that plagued us could be resolved by his grace.

Seen in this light, perhaps we can allow patience to take it’s place in our lives as a key to happiness and well-being.

 

Big Announcement #1: You CAN Balance Baby, Marriage, Family, & Your Needs–Here’s How!

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We mentioned a few big announcements this week. The first is the launch of my latest book with my wife and co-host of More2Life Radio, Lisa Popcak titled, Then Comes Baby:  The Catholic thencomesbabyGuide to Surviving & Thriving in the First 3 Years of Parenthood.  

The biggest parenting question we get is, “How can I balance it all?  How can I attend to  baby’s needs without losing my mind or my marriage?”    Then Comes Baby:  The Catholic Guide to Surviving & Thriving in the First 3 Years of Parenthood shows you how to do this an a whole lot more!

In Then Comes Baby: The Catholic Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the First Three Years of Parenthood, Lisa and I lend readers the benefit of our twenty-five years’ experience in parenting and marriage and family counseling to help them navigate the earliest years of parenthood.  Here are just some of the things we address…

~How to meet your baby’s needs fully without neglecting your own needs or your marriage.

~How to manage feeding, fatigue, and finances.

~Managing common questions about baby and mama’s sleep.

~How to protect yourself from The Mommy Wars.

~How to overcome the self criticism that can undermine your confidence as parents.

~How to deepen your spiritual life by discovering the grace of each moment with your child.

~How to establish rituals and routines that will serve as the foundation of a joyful, faith-filled family life!

~AND SO MUCH MORE!!!

We coach Catholic couples as they adjust to their new identities as mom and dad and help them face the inevitable challenges of parenthood–all while seeing these everyday experiences through the lens of Catholic teaching on the purpose of family life.

They Like Us!  They REALLY Like Us!

“Then Comes Baby provides solid, hands-on help and rich Catholic guidance for parents on how to love their child deeply as they strengthen their love for each other. This book will help them become holy families.”   Most Reverand Joseph E. Kurtz.  Archbishop of Louisville President, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

“Then Comes Baby is a delightful book for new Catholic parents, full of personal anecdotes and wonderful insights. But most of all, the advice and encouragement you will find is extremely useful in learning how to be the parents God has called you to be. What we like best about this book is that it addresses the new mom and the new dad with equal emphasis. Husbands and wives are together called to build a healthy Catholic family by having a strong faith walk. This book tells them what works when both parents, together, are uniquely aware of the design God intends for families when Baby comes.”  Dr. William and Martha Sears,  Co-authors of The Baby Book and The Attachment Parenting Book

“God wants to fill the hearts of families with the fire of his love. Greg and Lisa Popcak show you how to open to that love through all the joys and challenges of welcoming a new baby. If family life is a gift, Then Comes Baby shows you how to unwrap and celebrate that gift in all its forms.”  Christopher West.  Author of Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing

“Greg and Lisa Popcak remind us that in spite of our fears, God invites us to do the most important work in building a good and holy world: raising children. This wise and practical guide will help parents navigate the sometimes challenging, often uplifting work of parenting babies. More importantly, it will remind them to love every minute of it!”  Tim and Sue Muldoon.  Authors of Six Sacred Rules for Families

“Then Comes Baby will help every parent rejoice in both the gift of new life and all the blessings and changes that come with it. The Popcaks articulate a practical vision of family life that is deeply faithful, extravagantly loving, and incredibly joyful. You can create the family your heart desires. This book will show you how.”  Damon Owens  Executive Director, Theology of the Body Institute