EPISODE 128 | EMBRACING COMPLEXITY: REDISCOVERING FAITHFULNESS IN THE HEALING JOURNEY
[00:00:00] I've learned that faithfulness is not so much about what we can see at any slice of our journey, measured against some perfect, unchanging checklist with some kind of uniform expectation of what it should look like. Faithfulness includes all the falls, all the struggles, all the tears, all the times when we say no, when our heart really also still longs to be with God.
[00:00:25] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me.
[00:00:54] Hi, hi, good morning to those of you who might be catching me live here in Singapore, and good evening if any one of you from the other side of the world happens to pop by while I am live. So, in today's Live, I want to talk about faithfulness, actually. So, in the last couple of weeks, I have several new people that I, well, say strangers in some sense, people that I don't know, but people who have come across my podcast and maybe is listening to my podcast - they have written in and told me a little bit about themselves.
[00:01:41] Some of them have shared quite a bit about what they're going through. And the one theme that keeps popping up is faithfulness, is that these individuals share with me that, you know, they are really striving to be faithful to God, to the church. They want to be, but at the same time they feel like they're failing in some way.
[00:02:08] And this is something that they carry inside them and it's not really safe for them to share widely, I suppose, right? And then some of you, perhaps, celebrated All Saints Day, right, in the Catholic Church and as it was in some of the other churches as well.
[00:02:25] And when we celebrate All Saints, we are thinking about the canonised saints. These are people that, you know, traditionally we celebrate, we admire, we ask for prayers from because we think or they've been deemed to be heroically faithful to God and to the Church.
[00:02:44] So, in this sharing today, okay, if you're catching this on replay on YouTube, or maybe on the podcast, it may not be anywhere near All Saints Day, but I think faithfulness is something that is always relevant for those of us who wish to make the interior journey. So, I'm going to share three things that I use to think about, what it means to be faithful, what faithfulness is.
[00:03:13] And then after that I'm going to share three things that I have since learned about faithfulness that is different from what I used to think it is. So, this before and after kind of thing reflects my ongoing journey. Okay, and I just want to say that depending on where you are on your journey, you may find that what I share really resonates, or you may find that it could be triggering because both things, whether it resonates or it's triggering, says something about you. Or it's an invitation for you to go a little deeper, okay, and see what perhaps God is trying to reveal to you. I just want to say that in the last 15 years or so, perhaps of my life, I have made a journey that has made me unfamiliar to my old self. And I'm finding that sharings from different parts of my life or different seasons, different stages of my journey can really speak to different people.
[00:04:22] And that says something about the struggles that you are going through, right? So, what I'm going to offer today is kind of like an overview. It kind of captures the journey that I've been on. And I just hope and pray that it helps you to make some sense of perhaps your own struggle with faithfulness.
[00:04:39] MY "BEFORE" PERSPECTIVE
So, in the first place, I want to say, this is not an abstract, conceptual, philosophical or theological discussion just for the sake of it. I am not interested either in having debate or argument about this just at a purely conceptual level, alright? But I am always open to engage and respond to those of you for whom this is something you are living, this is not something that you're just interested in discussing or debating, but you are wrestling with, okay, at some level in your own life, trying to make sense of what it means to be faithful - then I really welcome your engagement and your questions and your sharings.
[00:05:28] FAITHFULNESS IS (NOT) BINARY
So, starting with the three things that I used to think about faithfulness. Okay, so, the first thing that I used to think about faithfulness was that faithfulness is binary. Okay. So, by binary, I mean like that it's either one or zero, you are either faithful or unfaithful.
[00:05:46] Okay, so, I used to think that faithfulness is either or that. You're either completely faithful or completely unfaithful. I know at some level, intellectually, that's not necessarily true. But that's how it felt to me. And that's how I often thought of myself. Am I faithful or am I unfaithful? It's like one or zero, right?
[00:06:06] And I used to think that faithfulness was only about what I was able to do successfully. So, it's like if I was able to express or exercise some action something that I thought counted as faithful then then that counted towards me being faithful, right? If I can't do something successfully, even if I tried then I would see myself as unfaithful. So, I would give an example like, for example, maybe going to mass, right? Sunday mass.
[00:06:35] There are some days, some weeks when maybe it's a bit more of a struggle, whether I was ill or, you know, whatever it was. And there are times that I would struggle, that have been in a struggle. And if I managed to go, I would then think that I was faithful, right? If I didn't end up going, then I would think that I was unfaithful.
[00:06:53] So, that's just an example of when I say it's like one or zero. It is what I could ultimately do that counted. And the struggle that was part of the process of my engagement, even though there may be the fact that I cared enough to try or struggle, that said nothing or counted nothing towards being faithful or not.
[00:07:16] Okay, so, the problem with this, of course, is that I was constantly judging myself, constantly evaluating and deciding if I was being faithful or unfaithful. And inadvertently, that's how I saw other people too. It's not that I wanted to judge them. I knew I was not supposed to judge people. But on another level, it's like almost, it's an automatic thing because I was doing it to myself.
[00:07:39] So, instinctively, I would always assess whether people, other people were being faithful or unfaithful. And I always thought that part of being faithful was also helping to remind people to be faithful and correcting them when they're not, okay. And other than me doing it to myself and others, I also constantly thought that was how God looked at me too, that He was constantly watching me and evaluating whether I was being faithful or unfaithful and that He was doing that to other people as well. Okay, so, the first thing I used to think that I'm sharing today at least is that I used to think faithfulness is binary. One or zero.
[00:08:22] FAITHFULNESS IS (NOT) INDEPENDENT OF CONTEXT
The second thing that I used to think was that faithfulness is uniform and independent of context and nuance. Again, I used to think that faithfulness is uniform and independent of context and nuance. What do I mean by that? Well, because I thought that faithfulness was a one or zero thing, then I think quite naturally I tended towards believing that Faithfulness was about propositional truths, which are generally one or zero, and whether or not I could completely fulfil them.
[00:09:05] Alright, so, in that sense, it was about living out propositional truths in a very black and white, perfect manner that did not take into consideration the messiness and complexity of unique life situations. So, it was a rather cold approach. It was a very perfectionist approach, right? So, I thought I would be trying to cut myself slack if I paid attention to the fact that maybe I was struggling with something, I was really tired or that I was being hurt by someone and I reacted badly.
[00:09:39] I couldn't really take into consideration things like maybe even abusive relationship, even though, in my head, I would know that this should mitigate somewhat, right, my response or somebody else's response. But I would still judge myself harshly because ultimately it should be uniform. It's almost like this understanding that everyone should be exercising faithfulness in almost like a uniform way.
[00:10:05] That's how it can be easy for us to tell if we have been faithful or not, right? I mean, if there's no template, how can we tell if we're faithful or not, especially if faithfulness is a binary thing, is a one or zero thing. So, that meant that the way I thought about faithfulness couldn't really go hand in hand with a lot of compassion because it was really about hitting the mark and it was about hitting the mark in a very uniform way that didn't take into consideration context and nuances.
[00:10:38] So, in real life, there are so many situations that are not so easy to fit into a box. So, many of us are struggling with failed marriages, regardless of whether we are divorced, separated, or we're still intact in our marriage. We could be really struggling in our marriage. There are so many hidden sins and compulsions and addictions that we have.
[00:10:58] And If we only see these failures, so to speak, as a black and white matter of missing the mark and therefore being unfaithful without taking into consideration all the things that have led us to that point of not being able to hit the mark, okay, whatever we may imagine what the mark should look like, how can we be compassionate?
[00:11:21] It's almost impossible to be compassionate that way, right? So, so that was me. When I thought that faithfulness was uniform and independent of context and nuance. And I think when I was still thinking that or presupposing this about faithfulness, as much as I loved people in my life that, you know, that I really cared about, I couldn't help hurting them.
[00:11:47] Because I think they couldn't experience compassion and understanding from me as much as always, the sense that maybe that they had about me that I was making a judgment, right, that they were faithful or not because they failed to meet some uniform, independent measure of fidelity.
[00:12:06] THE FAITHFULNESS 'CHECKLIST'
Okay, the third thing that I used to think about faithfulness is that I used to think that faithfulness is measured by some kind of universal checklist.
[00:12:16] Okay, it's a bit platonic - that's going into philosophy a bit, but it's almost like there is a standard out there and there's a list and you know, faithfulness is about being able to check off the items on that list. And every time I can check off item - so, this is related to what I shared as my first point, thinking that faithfulness is binary and it's about what I can do successfully.
[00:12:42] So, if I can check something off a list and I was being faithful, but it almost felt like as long as there are some boxes that I couldn't check off, that meant that I wasn't faithful because I wasn't perfectly faithful. And if faithfulness was a one or zero thing, then if I can't meet all the criteria for faithfulness, then I was not faithful and I was unfaithful, right?
[00:13:04] So, subconsciously, like I kind of had my own personal checklist, which I think it's thought or intuited was part of or reflected the universal checklist. Okay, so, I just want to say a lot of this was not fully conscious. It's the way I operated. It was operating in my subconscious. It's just the way I lived my life.
[00:13:26] These presuppositions and assumptions guided how I thought about myself, how I responded to myself, how I made choices and how I thought about myself. So, I'm going to share with you this checklist that I have; kind of like my own personal checklist, my faithfulness checklist, okay? As it was relevant to my life as a Catholic.
[00:13:48] So, item one, regular mass attendance every Sunday and preferably on weekdays as well, right? If I miss the Sunday mass, no matter what the situation or reason may be like that marred my faithfulness, okay, then I would think of myself as I failed to be faithful. Second, regular confession. The church teaches at least twice a year, but for me, really for many, many years in my life, it was practically a monthly or every couple of months kind of thing for me.
[00:14:18] It wasn't a real struggle for me with regards to confession because I think I had a good experience in my first confession, and I've been blessed to have had some really wise and compassionate confessors in my life. But it is also something that I did regularly precisely because I had such a binary understanding of faithfulness that every time I felt I failed, I would run to confession. Okay, so, that was not an issue. I was very regular in my confession. So, regular mass attendance, regular confession, and then serving in parish or church.
[00:14:56] That was something that I didn't do equally well, so to speak, throughout every season in my life, in the decade or so that I was living abroad, less so. But all the years that I was in Singapore, preceding my university studies, and then, you know, after I came back, shortly after I came back, I always thought, that I had to be involved in parish somehow, that was part of being faithful.
[00:15:23] And if I wasn't involved in ministry - so, all those years I didn't really have an understanding of what an apostolate being a lay apostolate meant, right? That there's a difference between ministry in the parish and living out my faith and service in the larger world, which is actually the primary call for lay people like myself.
[00:15:41] I didn't have all the understanding before so, I used to think that part of my faithfulness checklist had to include serving in parish or in church organizations and then being faithful also meant seriously considering religious life, right, or having, becoming married or having children. I when I was younger, I really didn't think of being single as a positive choice. That would be more of like, okay, maybe if the Lord really called me to be single but deep down I would I think, when I think back, I would always feel like that's kind of like being left on the shelf, you know, and not just because no one wants to marry me, but like God didn't even want me to be in religious life, didn't want to choose me for religious life.
[00:16:24] I'm just being really frank here. I labour underneath a lot of many, many distortions of, God, many, many distortions of the image of God, many distortions of what love was. And my younger self, when I was in my late teens, and maybe early twenties, that's what I subconsciously thought of, right? So, to be a faithful Catholic, really faithful, the best it would look like being in religious life. For me, as a woman, or being married, and being fruitful, meaning many children, the more the better.
[00:17:00] And of course, if you know, not using contraception as a married person, giving to the poor, not harbouring any unforgiveness, not harbouring any grudges against others who have hurt me, and also following all church teaching. That for me was like my checklist, okay, of being faithful. And if I failed in any of this, I failed in being faithful.
[00:17:26] It's one or zero for me, okay. So, that was kind of like how I used to think about faithfulness, right? It is binary. It is about what I can do successfully. That it was uniform and independent of context and nuance. And there's like a checklist that would tell me and measure whether I am faithful or not.
[00:17:45] MY "AFTER" PERSPECTIVE
Okay, now, I'm going to segue into sharing what I learned about faithfulness since my healing and integration journey had begun. All right, so, I've said in some places and I've written and shared in my posts on social media that my interior journey has been a lot about unlearning. I think the earlier part of my life and when I was younger, when I was taking my faith seriously, it was a lot about learning, picking up things and reading and studying about God, about the church, about apologetics.
[00:18:16] THE BROKEN CHURCH, THE BROKEN ME
I really wanted to know what I'm supposed to believe because it mattered to me that I was faithful. So, I needed to know what faithfulness should look like so that I can strive to be faithful and so that I can know if I'm faithful or not, right? So, that was the younger me. And then, at some point, the nature of the journey changed and it began to change when there was a retreat that I went to and I know I've shared this in an earlier podcast episode where I was given this image during prayer of a church under construction, like a building that was under construction.
[00:18:57] And so, you know, there was scaffolding all around and you could see the structure of the church going up, the walls were up, but there was no roof yet, right? So, there was no roof. So, the building was incomplete. The church was still being built. And after seeing this image, I felt the Lord tell me, I felt God tell me, and this church, we cannot finish building this, we can't complete this project, and I knew that that image of the church was actually me.
[00:19:26] He's talking about me and Him, my relationship with Him. He's saying we can't complete and bring this journey of a relationship into union because there is something that is wrong in the foundation. Okay, He said, there is something wrong in the foundation. So, the only way we can really complete building this church is to take down everything that you've seen, or everything that you can see from the ground up that you see, all the walls and everything that's come up.
[00:19:55] Everything has to be taken down and then even more than that. We're going to have to excavate the foundation. We're going to have to go underground, we're going to have to clear everything that has already been laid in the foundation and we're going to have to do it again from scratch. And this time He said we will do it right. We will do it stone by stone and we will lay it right we'll take our time. And then we will be able to complete this Church, right.
[00:20:19] And again, I knew that was an image for my interior journey and He was saying that if I trusted Him, I will let him dismantle what I have built all those years in my attempts to be faithful, in my attempts to understand what it meant to be Christian - who He was, how I'm meant to be in relationship to Him, and let Him show me from scratch. In a sense from even the foundational dimension, what it meant to be in relationship with Him.
[00:20:49] Now this incident happened back in 2016? 2016. And so, that was still some time before I understood that the foundations that He was talking about was referring to my emotional wounds and the complex trauma that I brought into my understanding of faith and into my relationship with Him. And in the context of today's sharing, into my understanding of what it meant to be faithful.
[00:21:18] When the foundation is, well, I guess when there's something wrong in the foundation, if the foundation is not properly laid, it's going to affect everything that comes up above ground. Everything else is going to be shaky. And so, without my knowing, as I strove to be faithful, I was operating on shaky foundations, right?
[00:21:41] REBUILDING FROM THE GROUND UP
My insecure attachment, my lack of self-esteem, my assumptions that I've learned through the lived relationship in my family of origins and society, for example, had made me believe certain things about God and what it meant to be faithful, like what I shared earlier. So, now, after that journey began from the moment I had that retreat and that image that came up in prayer, my interior journey, shifted gears into a lot of unlearning, right?
[00:22:12] So, earlier on my journey had a lot about learning and reading. Now, it was a lot about unlearning because He was going into the foundations and excavating the foundations of my heart, of my soul. And along the way I had to be okay with giving up what I thought I had built in my relationship with Him.
[00:22:36] But now several years on - so, that was 2016. So, that's about 7 years since that retreat. This is what I can share with you about what I've learned about faithfulness. So, I'm just sharing three. There's certainly more than three, but I think it's easier to talk in threes, right?
[00:22:53] GOD DOES NOT EVALUATE ME
So, now I know, first point, God is not constantly evaluating my performance, right? How can I feel safe with someone if I feel that they're constantly evaluating my performance? How can I be in a secure relationship with someone if I constantly feel that he is determining whether I am worthy or not? And that that worthiness is dependent on whether I was successfully faithful or not.
[00:23:25] So, now I know, through my interior journey, God is not constantly evaluating my performance. In fact, He is much more interested in my genuine, authentic response to His love for me. At every moment, right, He is loving me and I may or may not be able to really receive that love that He has for me, that He is offering me.
[00:23:47] But to the extent that I am receiving it, how am I able to respond to that? Authentically, not just performatively doing or saying things even in prayer because I think that's what He wants to hear. Or that's what I think other people will deem as a faithful response from me, but what is real and what is authentic, right?
[00:24:08] He's more interested in my genuine authentic response to His love for me, no matter what that looks like at the present moment. So, if at the present moment my authentic and genuine response is I can't take up that invitation I think God is asking me to do, or at this moment, my authentic general response is I'm still angry. I'm still too angry to be able to forgive or to be even be able to want to forgive someone. For example, if at this moment that is the truth of my reality, then God is happy that I can be real with Him and that I can be honest with Him and say that, no, right now, I'm just too angry. I can't forgive this person. I am mad.
[00:24:54] And that's made such a huge difference, right? For someone who used to think that faithfulness is a one or zero binary thing and with who thought that God would be looking at me and going, "ah, wrong answer, Ann. That is not being faithful. Too bad", right? What a relief to know that's not how God looks at me.
[00:25:15] And it took so much unlearning and so much like deeper encounter of God having first been willing to surrender what I thought I knew about Him to discover this side of God. Oh, that this truth about God, right? That He really genuinely meets me where I am. And that He is not, at every moment in time, waiting to, like, mark my exam paper and, you know, grading me.
[00:25:46] RELEARNING WHO GOD IS
Okay, so, that's the first thing I learned. That God is not constantly evaluating my performance. In fact, He's not even, I would say, He was not even evaluating my performance. He's not like judging me in essence. He's an attuned parent. He is a loving spouse. He is an intimate friend, who first and foremost wants me to know He receives me and loves me no matter what I'm able to offer him right now.
[00:26:13] His is truly an unconditional love. And that is the foundation and the groundwork for anything else that I could possibly offer back. It's like the more I learned to recognize His unconditional love and to receive that love, the more I was able to respond, like the greater capacity I began to have to respond more unconditionally as well, in very, very slow increments, right? Very, very slow increments. But that was a big, important breakthrough I needed first, that God is not constantly evaluating my performance.
[00:26:50] MY UNDERSTANDING OF FAITHFULNESS IS DISTORTED
And the second thing that I've learned about faithfulness. Okay, is that my understanding of faithfulness is distorted, right? We don't often question our presuppositions. We just know what we know or we know what we think we know. We take on a lot of the assumptions and presuppositions that were handed on to us from our parents, from our families of origin, our culture, society, as we know it, as we experience it, right?
[00:27:19] And we pick all that up from a very young age. And it's only when we're much older that we can even have the capacity to start critiquing it, to start reflecting critically on, you know, what are my presuppositions? Where did they come from? Are they really true? Are they really true, right? And I think many of us may not even reach that point where we begin to critique it because even the thought of thinking critically or reflecting critically about the presuppositions that we have been given about something like faithfulness, for example, may itself already feel dangerous or unfaithful.
[00:27:58] But that is the truth and I've realized that all of these influences from my Asian-Chinese culture and from my particular family culture, my family of origin, from the way that my parents had experienced or been taught what fidelity virtue looked like, that influenced the way that they talked about it, the faith to me, right?
[00:28:22] And that when I go to church and I have catechism, when I was a young child, the culture and impressions that my catechist had about what faithfulness meant was also then imparted to me. Same for what was heard, what I hear from the pulpit. Same from even the books that I read. You know, it goes all the way up because every dimension of our human life, you know, even let's say in our church life is interpreted, influenced by human beings.
[00:28:52] So, there will always be some kind of distortion there or some bias there that we may not be aware of. And the closer it is to what seems native to us, the more right it may feel. Which is why I think the notion that cultures also need to be redeemed. Seems so foreign to us if we include our own culture, right?
[00:29:14] Because I think for much of church history, that phrase that cultures need to be redeemed may even have been exploited to, you know, in a very colonial way, where some nations then feel that they have justification and right to colonize other nations because maybe Christianity is part of their culture and they see that as more civilized and as more healed.
[00:29:40] But I really find in my own experience that the Lord leads me to question my own culture as well. Like the cultures that I have taken for granted, that I just assumed was the standard of what was right and what was wrong. So, that's an example of you know, the second thing that I learned in my interior journey was that my understanding of faithfulness is distorted.
[00:30:06] So, that meant that I needed to be open to the Lord showing me new things about what faithfulness might be that could be very different from what I had always understood. And in all the things that I mentioned, whether it's in family of origin society, church, a lot of times there is more emphasis put on the expression of the outward expression of how faithfulness is lived than the internal interior disposition of the person.
[00:30:36] I think it's probably just natural when we talk about community or society, what impacts people is how we interact with one another, right? So, that's kind of external and not so much the interior disposition. But when it comes to our interior journey, when we're talking about relationship with God, I found that it's really not so much the external expression that God is more interested or even really interested in.
[00:31:00] He is interested in my interior disposition and you know, and really genuine wholeness, how interiorly and exteriorly I can become more integrated, right? So, that's the second thing that I learned.
[00:31:15] FAITHFULNESS IS DYNAMIC
And the third point I wanted to share in the last one for today about what I have learned about faithfulness is that faithfulness is dynamic. It is not static. It's certainly not binary like the one and zero and never changing like the what faithfulness looks like. It is multi-layered. So, it's complex. It's multi-layered and that it and it's also diverse in expression. Faithfulness is dynamic, multi-layered and diverse in expression.
[00:31:44] This is such a huge difference, right, from what I shared in my first three points about what I used to think faithfulness was, that it was binary, that it was uniform, there was one way of being faithful, everybody had to be measured by that one way, right? My interior journey, my experience and encountering of God in that interior journey has made me realize that with God, and with our own selves in a sense, it's a process.
[00:32:11] We always I think so often lose sight of the process when we think about faithfulness. We always think of it as if it's flat. Like, it's again, like I said, it's binary. It's one or zero. How can we forget? Using the example, let's say of, you know, on an Olympian, which I always like to use the example, a figure skater, right?
[00:32:29] When you see a figure skater performing at the Olympics or one of those, you know, world championships and if they're able to execute a flawless routine, it's like, wow, that's incredible. And we all applaud them and really in competitions, you really are judged by that performance, right? But we don't see, usually, all the spills, the falls, all the mistakes that they make in training and practices. What about those times when they are injured and then they're out for a whole season and they can't even skate?
[00:33:02] When we treat our faithfulness to God in that way, as if our whole life was just that performance in front of a panel of judges that it would, you know, like where we expected to execute a flawless routine. I think we really, really miss the point that this whole thing, this interior life is about being in love with God, learning to love Him more truly. But that comes from learning to receive His love more deeply.
[00:33:38] And also more truly, not because we're worthy of his love or we have made ourselves worthy by being faithful, but precisely by learning to let Him love us in our unfaithfulness. That's how we learn to be faithful. And that's a journey. It's like letting God be with us, and I really stress on letting God, because we have to let Him.
[00:34:03] We can run away from Him. We can refuse to let Him come close. We can refuse to let Him watch us, you know, like be with us unless we are executing a flawless routine. I know it's so ridiculous because whether we let him or not, He sees, right? He knows better than us the exact state that we are in. He sees all the falls all the mistakes that we make.
[00:34:26] He knows when we are injured. He wants to be with us through every part of that journey. But so many of us refuse to let Him come close unless we feel like we can put up a good show for Him. Because we think that faithfulness is about flawless execution of some idealized notion of what it means to be a good Catholic, a good Christian perhaps, a good husband, a good wife.
[00:34:55] That is not what life is like at all. And that is not at all what the interior journey is like. And that's what I found, right? That faithfulness is dynamic. It's so multi-layered. It takes into consideration all the flux and changes of the seasons in our life, the, the stages of our development.
[00:35:16] When we are having greater capacity or when we are really crippled by a lack of resources and capacity that faithfulness, really, it's like the moon in that sense. It seems it can seem to wax and wane but it is the same moon. The moon is not less of a moon when it's crescent than when we see the full moon It is the whole moon, right?
[00:35:42] And I've learned that faithfulness is not so much about what we can see at any slice of our journey, measured against some perfect, unchanging checklist with some kind of uniform expectation of what it should look like. Faithfulness includes all the falls, all the struggles, all the tears, all the times when we say no, when our heart really also still longs to be with God.
[00:36:09] OUR HONESTY WITH OURSELVES AND WITH GOD
But our honest answer is, I can't do it. And I can't do this anymore. I can't come close to this person anymore. Right now, I can't come to church anymore, whatever that may be. It doesn't mean we stop being faithful. That's why I think sometimes labels and categories can be so unhelpful.
[00:36:29] Because you know that person that we may label a lapsed Catholic because he or she has stopped going to church they could, beyond what you can see, be wrestling with and engaging with God more intensely than they ever had in their lives, maybe in all the years prior when they used to go to mass regularly. They may not have been as engaged with God then and maybe whatever it is that they're going through in their life right now, where they're not coming as regularly or maybe stop going to church, they may be wrestling with God much more intimately.
[00:37:04] And if they think that faithfulness is also being judged of them from God, let's say, by all this external criteria, that's going to make it so much harder for them to continue their interior journey. And I just want to say that in the same vein, those of us who measure ourselves our faithfulness by a checklist of external expressions can be really led astray by ourselves as to thinking that we are okay when interiorly we are really lost and where we may not be engaged with God at all.
[00:37:42] We could be completely numb and dead and in need of life being breathed into us, right? Faithfulness it's not binary when we understand that faithfulness is dynamic and that actually in some real sense regardless of what's going on the outside of our life that thread with God never breaks in the sense that God never stops walking with us never stops loving us never stops sending us love and pouring out graces to us so that we can respond and if we miss one grace, He will give us another and he will give us another and there is nothing in our life that we can do.
[00:38:19] No matter how bad, no matter how sinful, there's no tragedy that can befall us in our life that can prevent Him from offering grace after grace after grace. Because He never gives up on us. You see, God's fidelity to us, His faithfulness, in a sense, it's always there.
[00:38:39] And our faithfulness is actually a response to that invitation from Him. And no matter how imperfect and how flawed our responses may be, for as long as there is even that spark of longing and desire, even when we cannot name it yet, to respond to God's love, I'm finding, I'm learning now that it's all part of that big story, that ongoing story, ongoing journey of faithfulness.
[00:39:11] See how different that is from thinking it's a 1 or 0 thing? It's so different from just trying to take one slice out of our story and saying that we're faithful or not. We do that so often with other people, right? We just look at their best moments or their worst moments and then we think that extends to their whole life and that defines who they are. That is so not true.
[00:39:34] And I have found also why I say that faithfulness is in a sense, diverse in expression because it changes as we grow, as we mature, and it changes depending on the resources and the capacity, capacity that we have right now. There are some days when I can do maybe more things, more acts of service for my husband, right, than other days when I'm really tired.
[00:40:00] Some days I spend more time you know, we both spend more time talking to each other and there are some days that we're just more preoccupied with work because there's just a lot of our own work that we have to look after and we can't check in with each other as much.
[00:40:15] Does our faithfulness to one another change, like, increase on those days that we can spend more time with each other and decrease in those days that we don't? No, all of that, the ups and the downs and the changes of every day is part of our faithfulness to each other and on some days the expression of faithfulness could just be, you know, telling the other person, like, I'm going be working late tonight, you know, why don't you go to bed first?
[00:40:46] And that would be the expression of love and faithfulness for that day, even though there was no opportunity for deeper conversations or for acts of service, right? Or it could be as simple as my husband telling me or deciding sometimes even without telling me, you know, bringing down all the recycling so that I don't have to do it.
[00:41:08] THE IMPACT OF A PERSPECTIVE CHANGE
So, the expressions of faithfulness can change. And I really have come to learn that that's the same thing between us and God too. And when we are so laboured and so, so heavy laden by this burden that we can't be faithful enough because we think faithfulness is a binary thing and it's a performance or achievement thing. And I think we actually miss out on really making the journey that is faithfulness. Since I now have learned that faithfulness is so different from what I used to think it was, it has really made an impact on my life.
[00:41:54] It has made an impact on the way I see myself. It has made an impact on the way I look at others, right. One big, big area of difference is that with those whom I disagree with deeply, like really disagree with, in some ways I have to say like, I judge, like I can't help but still judge, let's say their lifestyle.
[00:42:12] You know, it's not how I would live my life. It's not what I think is a good life. For example, I can disagree with them deeply. I may even see, I may even consider, in my own judgy self, because I still am, I mean, in a sense, judgy. That, oh, that's immoral or that's lack of authenticity, for example, right?
[00:42:31] But I can at the same time believe that it is possible that God sees them as faithful too, just as I am faithful. Because I realized that faithfulness is not a binary thing. And I don't know how many expressions of faithfulness there are. I don't know what the hidden context and nuances, influences there have been in another person's life.
[00:42:55] So, even if they and I cannot see eye to eye, even if I cannot be friends with them, like I may not want to spend any time around with them, at the very least now, I can believe in a sense that in their own way they're trying to be faithful to God too and that God delights in that. Okay, and I've got to say that for me, that's a huge game changer.
[00:43:14] That's like, oh my gosh, I couldn't possibly have done that in the past, right. And then to make it even harder, like to offer you an example, that's even more challenging for those that are hurting me or hurting those that I love. So, and that I'm angry with, I can still be angry with, I will still be angry with them, right.
[00:43:36] But even now I can work through my struggles, my process, my emotions, and eventually arrive again at the realization that these people who are hurting me, that are making life difficult for me, or hurting the people that I love, and hurting others, that they too are trying to be faithful in their own way, and that God loves them as much as He loves me, and that God delights in their responses to His grace as much as He delights in my responses to His grace, no matter how imperfect they are.
[00:44:15] So, what Christ, what Jesus has said in the Gospels, "judge not and you will not be judged". It makes so much more sense to me now. Because no one, apart from God, can see into the deepest depths of our heart.
[00:44:31] And look at, in a sense, contextualize everything, all the nuances, all the situations, the contingencies, the specific different difficult circumstances. He knows all of that and, you know, as a matter of fact, I mean, He loves in spite of all of that anyway, but that is why only God can judge.
[00:44:51] At least that's how I've come to understand why that makes so much sense, right? Only God's justice and mercy can be perfectly one. So, for me. When it comes to any discussion of faithfulness, or maybe not even discussion, when people share with me that they are really struggling, they're trying so hard to be faithful, but they're also struggling in other areas, I have come to think that a lot of times it may be because their presupposition reflects a bit of what my presuppositions were about faithfulness, that it had to look a certain way.
[00:45:31] It had to fit or meet a certain fixed standard, maybe there's some kind of checklist and that maybe if we all just really went deeper, not just look at what's on the surface of our lives and what we can do and how we can express it, we will find that actually we're more faithful than we thought we were.
[00:45:55] Because as long as we're still in the game, as long as we're not giving up, as long as we, we're still striving so hard to love God, hey, that's faithfulness too. Even if we are still sinners, even if we are, there are habits and issues that we can't get rid of yet, there is some amazing paradox to faith and mystery to faith that propositional logic and black and white dualistic kind of a thinking cannot capture propositional logic and black and white thinking and distinctions and definitions.
[00:46:34] They have a place. They are important. But in context, but there are many, many more aspects of this journey to God that those things, propositional logic, right, black and white thinking, dualistic or definitions or that kind of thing, they can't capture. That's just the way reality is.
[00:46:59] And so, that's where I find the mystics and the contemplatives so helpful because when you think about beauty and poetry and music and art and mystics, there is nothing binary about any of those things. They penetrate reality and somehow capture and encapsulate all opposites, you know, and there is an underlying sense of oneness and unity.
[00:47:27] And if we can begin to experience that faithfulness is part of that oneness, how different our journey will be. So, for those of you who are struggling with faithfulness, striving for faithfulness, I hope that my sharing has given you something different to think about, and that maybe it will help you bear the burdens you carry a little better, and find that I think even that this journey of faithfulness, a lot more joyful, even in all its complexity.
[00:48:03] Well, that's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed the sharing. Take care. And until the next time.
[00:48:08] ANNOUNCEMENT
That was the last episode for season 8. Thank you so much for being with me on this journey on the Becoming Me podcast. I will be back with new podcast episodes sometime in mid-July. In the meantime, if you really miss listening to Becoming Me, I invite you to catch up on episodes you may have missed before, especially if you're new to this podcast. Or if you really can't wait and you would like to check out new episodes, you can go to my YouTube channel, Ann Chats, where there are new recordings that will only become podcast episodes in probably a few months’ time.
[00:48:49] So take care, God bless, and until the next season, happy becoming!
[00:48:56] CONCL USION
Thank you for listening to Becoming Me. The most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive.
If you like what you hear on this podcast, would like to receive a monthly written reflection from me as well as be updated on my latest content and offers, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter Begin Again. You can find the link to do that in the show notes. Until the next episode, happy becoming!
