If you’ve been taught that it is okay to be in this self-sacrificed type of environment and stay away from relationship, you will never — ever — grow. That is not spirituality.
That spirituality that says, I’m going to be on my own — read, pray, do whatever, and I don’t care about anybody else — you are not part of the body of Christ. You are dismembering yourself from the body of Christ.
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How many of you feel like you on the inside have so much pain? You have so much pain because you have no one to share your pain with. You feel so alone even though you have people around you, but you feel so alone. You will never be your true self until you connect.
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So when we fail to bond…what happens when we fail to bond? We go through three stages of isolation. People who can’t make emotional attachments to others—they live in this perpetual ongoing state of hunger, and they don’t know what’s going on inside of them. People who cannot make emotional attachments—what happens? You have a crying need within you that’s not being met, and these are the stages of isolation: First one is, you deal with protests. You start to protest. What does that mean? When you have inner angry feelings or sad feelings that there are no relationships…I want you to think of a lonely child that sits in the corner, and a lonely child that says, “I’m all by myself and nobody wants to play with me.” I’m protesting. I’m in this stage of isolation. I’m staying back and nobody wants to play with me. We get like this as adults.
Next one is depression and despair. Depressed people are at least in touch with what they want—they just feel that they will never get it. They know that they want relationships, but they become depressed because they’ve lost hope that they will get any connection.
The third is detachment. When you detach both from your own need for others and from the outside world, you get to a sense of meaningless and you start to isolate. And there are people within your congregation, within your age group, within your college class, or whatever it is that are actually detaching. And we are ourselves are allowing people to isolate.
When you become isolated and you fail to bond, you begin to suffer from something called emptiness. It’s the most painful emotion a human can feel [emptiness]. Empty people cannot feel their own need for love and they can’t feel others love for them. There’s times when I feel empty no matter what people tell me. People might show me love and I just can’t accept it. I have sometimes distorted thinking that might have led me to emptiness and people are around me encouraging me, building me up, and I just feel like can’t accept it and I feel this sense of meaninglessness.
Although some people feel that someone else is going to fill them up, it’s impossible. You could be loved perfectly, but unless they feel the need for love and respond to this love, you’re going to feel empty. If you do not respond to people’s love – no matter who it is – you’re going to continue with this empty feeling unfulfilled. You know why? Because you were meant to be in relationships. When you fail to bond, emptiness is a direct result of it.
Only when a person owns his or her need and responds to another’s love will this bond begin to fill the emptiness inside.
What are your barriers to bonding?
Barriers to bonding come from past injury. Because of past injury, you can’t bond with others because you’re driven by fears. You’re suffering from fears.Another result is addiction. Addictions aren’t real desires. Maybe you have an addiction to eating. Maybe you have an addiction to sexual addictions, addiction to drugs, to alcohol. What you are doing is you is you are offering yourself a substitute for real bonding. Because I’m isolated, because I’m alone, because I have nobody, i’ve indulged and I’ve self medicated. You are medicating yourself away from relationships.
—Fr. Paul Girguis, Redeeming the Time: Setting Boundaries
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In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding: no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me–naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken–nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something.
—Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers -
“There is nothing more freeing in life than when a friend forgives you. There is nothing that feels quite as liberating as knowing you’ve wronged someone that you love so much and, feeling it — feeling it in your chest — and they graciously forgive you. They graciously let it go. It’s the most liberal. It’s it feels like you were in jail and you were taken out of jail. It feels like, it feels like you were in despair, and they lifted you out of their despair. And it’s a unique position where only they have right, only the friend you’ve wronged has the ability to graciously forgive you. So let’s do that with our friends. Let’s model the good behavior. Let’s do this. Let’s do this with our friends.”
—Fr. Mark Eskandar -
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen, to. the doctor.
—C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity -
Humility is not losing your true personhood. It is losing the false self that is exhausting you.
—Fr. Elijah Estafanous -
When it comes to a question of our forgiving other people, it is partly the same and partly different. It is the same because, here also, forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or no bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. They keep on replying, “But I tell you the man broke a most solemn promise.” Exactly: that is precisely what you have to forgive. (This doesn’t mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart-every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.) The difference between this situation and the one in which you are asking God’s forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough. As regards my own sins it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are not really so good as I think; as regards other men’s since against me it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are better than I think. One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other man was not so much to blame as we thought. But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine per cent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one per cent of guilt which is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life—to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son-how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.” We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves.
There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says.
—C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory -
The second remedy is really and truly to believe in the forgiveness of sins. A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it, from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour. But that would not be forgiveness at all. Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.
—C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory -
4. Brother and Sister
Try to blame yourself, yourself only and not your relations, for all. Be certain that none can offend or hurt us without God’s permission; and whenever God permits it, it is always for our good. Punishments, tests, temptations, are all equally good for us.
You may ask your brother for help; but do it courteously, gently, without insistence. Besides this, pray, have faith, and abandon yourself-and the whole pattern of your life-to God. Pray fervently that peace may be restored in the family.
Although I have not the honor of knowing you personally, I have heard so much from your distressed townsfolk about the exemplary life your family led during your father’s lifetime and of the bitter enmity which now divides you, that I am writing to beg you to come to your senses.
Stop these endless quarrels and bitter insults! Do not provide the enemy with this delight: he enjoys nothing better than the distortion of family life, the mockery of it.
Remember that you are pupils of Christ; of Christ who teaches us to love not only our friends, but even our enemies, and to forgive all who trespass against us. But if you forgive not mere their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matt. 6:15). What a frightful prospect!
And so, I beg of you, leaving all recriminations, make peace among you and strive for the greatest boon of all: strive for the inner peace.
SO GOOD QUOTES 