Greg Camacho LOVES “Broken Gods”

Posted on October 6, 2015 by GREG

Greg Camacho at the Pilgrim Center of Hope has a lovely review of one of my newest books, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart.

In this great new book, Dr. Popcak contends that “when God looks at you, He sees a god” (with a small g). It might seem crazy or even blasphemous, but that’s only because we’re used to seeing ourselves as broken, struggling, failing and frustrated. Subtitled Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, the book demonstrates how the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues relate to one another.

In Broken Gods, a work that is both practical and inspirational, Dr. Popcak explores what our deepest desires — and even our darkest desires — tell us about our ultimate destiny and reveals a commonsense approach to fulfilling our true purpose.

This book is a “must” for everyone seeking to integrate his or her emotions, doubts, and feelings of failure, with a true, joyful spirituality.

Thanks Greg! And many blessings on the great work of the Pilgrim Center of Hope!

My Talk with National Review’s Kathryn Lopez on “Broken Gods.”

Posted on June 10, 2015 by GREG

National Review’s Kathryn Lopez recently interviewed me on my most recent book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart. Take a look!

What does God see when He looks at you? That’s a main question Gregory K. Popcak asks and answers in his new book Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart. Popcak, executive director of the Pastoral Solutions Institute, talks below about the book and some of the prospects its raises for a beautiful life. — KJL

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Do you want to be “perfect, whole, healed, and, yes, even immortal”? These seem high promises for a book!

GREGORY K. POPCAK: Well, of course! Because it’s a great book! No, look, in all seriousness, I know it sounds like hyperbole, but I’m simply reiterating the promises Jesus himself made to all of his followers; promises that were echoed by every single one of the Church fathers. Jesus says, “Is it not written you are gods?” and “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly” (John 10:34, 10:10). What is that abundant life, exactly? Nothing less than our “divinization” — that is, the process by which we become “partakers in the divine nature” (Peter 1:4). As Saint Thomas Aquinas shockingly put it, “The son of God became man so that men might become gods.” Saint Justin Martyr said it even more jarringly: “He who listens to the Lord, and follows the prophecy given by Him, will be made a god going about in flesh.” Of course it’s true that there’s only one God — and we’re not him. But early Christians were unanimous in asserting — up through the Reformation — that the entire point of the Christian life was to allow God to transform us into “gods” in the classic sense — perfect, whole, healed, and yes, even immortal — and destined to be loved by God and united to him eternally.

LOPEZ: How does this idea that we are “broken gods” change things?

POPCAK: When Christians say that “we are broken and in need of salvation,” it prompts the question, “We are broken what?” Most people think we are broken in the same way that the occupants of the Island of Misfit Toys are broken — hopeless, absurd, and more than a little pathetic. Of course, the appeal of this idea is lost on a lot of people, especially non-believers, who tend to reply, “What do you mean ‘I’m broken?’ Who do you think you are anyway? I have a good job. My family loves me. I do nice things for people. I’m fine just the way I am…CONTINUE READING

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

Posted on June 9, 2015 by GREG

Image via shutterstock.

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

Posted on June 2, 2015 by GREG

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

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 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

Discover The Hidden Truth About Your Ultimate Destiny in Christ.

Posted on May 28, 2015 by GREG

Psalm 82 states: “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you”

St. Clement of Alexandra says: He who listens to the Lord, and follows the prophecy given by Him, will be formed in the likeness of the teacher – made a god going about in flesh.

St. Augustine: If we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods.

BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

Pete Socks at Catholic Book Blogger answers, “Gregory Popcak does a fine job explaining all of this in his new book Broken Gods: Hope, Healing and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart.

How can this be? It almost sounds blasphemous doesn’t it? Gregory tells us it all goes back to the Garden of Eden. You see we were meant to be gods. Adam and Eve, our first parents, walked with God in the garden. They carried on a personal relationship with Him. The ease of that relationship was ruined when sin entered the picture. We must bear in mind that though they were punished, God still loved them, and us, so much so that He has never given up on the desire for a personal relationship with us.

Here is where Broken Gods gets good. Greg takes a chapter by chapter, deep dive look into the seven longings. These longings are ingrained into each us by our Creator who wants nothing more than to love each of us as He wanted from the beginning of time. By contrasting these seven longings with their opposing seven sins Greg effectively gives us a mission manual for success. And what is the successful end goal?” READ THE REST AT CATHOLIC BOOK BLOGGER!

The Divine Human: New Age Blasphemy or Christian Destiny?

Posted on May 21, 2015 by GREG

Image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

(The following is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart (available in stores June 2, 2015). Pre-Order your copy TODAY!)

There is an ancient, yet still surprising and little known Christian doctrine that asserts God’s intention to make each of us a god; perfect, immortal, and partaking in his very own divinity for all of eternity. This teaching, known by theologians as the doctrine of theosis or divinization is the ultimate destiny for the Christian. That’s right. As Christians, we are not merely called to become the best version of ourselves. It is not enough for us to be merely “good.” Instead, our true destiny is, ultimately, to be transformed into gods through God’s grace. As St Thomas Aquinas put it, “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.” (For more supporting evidence of this claim, see my previous post on this topic here).

Divinization is a gift that we receive as we run with abandon into the loving arms of the God who made us and who longs to complete his miraculous work in us. But how is this different from the common claim by the New Age/Neopagan movement that all humans are divine? There are three important points that popular theologian, Peter Kreeft, says separate the Christian view of divinization from the New Age pretense of a quasi-divine humanity; piety, objective morality, & worship (1988).

Piety

Piety compels the Christian to proclaim that there is something greater than us. For the most part, New Agers and neopagans believe that humans are divine on our own merits (Zeller, 2014). But the Christian view of divinization recognizes that we do not claim divinity as an essential dimension of humanity. “If you, Lord, keep account of sins, then who could stand” (Ps 130:3)? Christians recognize that especially in light of the Fall, humanity is deserving of anything but deification. It is only through Jesus Christ, Our Savior, that we are able to achieve the greatest of heights, daring to look God in the eye and see him, not as our Master, but as our “friend” (Jn 15:15) with whom we can rightfully expect to enter into a total union through his infinite, divine mercy.

Objective Morality

Second, Christians acknowledge an objective morality. The New Ager believes in many moralities and a multiplicity of truths. The moral reasoning of the modern neopagan represents a polytheism of “many gods, many goods, many moralities” (Kreeft,1988). In the New Age model of human divinity (or divine humanity) I am the author of my own truth, not God. It is my self-anointed right to pretend that I am capable of making reality whatever I say it is simply by closing my eyes and wishing on myself.

By contrast, the Christian acknowledges that there is a natural, objective order to the world, which was ordained by God, and to which his children are obliged to adhere, not out of a sense of slavish devotion to alien rules, but so that we might fulfill our incredible destiny to become gods through God’s grace. Our ability to accomplish this awesome task depends in large part in our active participation in this divinely created moral order because “nothing unclean can enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Rev 27:21).

Worship

The third point that distinguishes the Christian notion of deification from the New Age notion is that the modern neopagan, fails to worship anyone, ultimately, besides himself. He takes his de facto divinity for granted and demands that you acknowledge it too despite all appearances to the contrary. He believes he can do what he will–even if it hurts you–because he is divine, the master of his own destiny and responsible only to his own personal sense of self-fulfillment.

In contrast, the Christian approaches the notion that he is destined to become a god with a sense of wonder, awe, amazement, gratitude, and not a little bit of fear born from the recognition that there are serious forces at play within this promise. And yet, even that understandable fear is cast out by the perfect love (c.f., 1 John 4:18) that flows from the heart of the God who calls to us, runs to meet us on the road and wraps his finest cloak–his divinity–around us (c.f. Lk 15:22).

The Christian call for each person to participate in God’s plan to make men gods is not an exercise in narcissism, or wish fulfillment. It does not serves as a get-out-of-morality free card. It is an invitation, rooted in the love of our Heavenly Father for each one of us and extended to all of humanity through the saving work of Jesus Christ. To discover how you can more effectively cooperate with God’s grace to fulfill your ultimate destiny in Christ, check out my latest book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart. (Pre-order today. In stores June 2, 2015)

Kreeft, P. (1988). Comparing christianity and the new paganism. Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian apologetics. Ignatius Press.

Zeller, B. (2014). Ultimate reality and divine beings. Patheos Religion Library: New Age. Retrieved 5/24/14 at http://www.patheos.com/Library/New-Age/Beliefs/Ultimate-Reality-and-Divine-Beings.html