SELF-ESTEEM

WITHOUT
SELFISHNESS

INCREASING OUR CAPACITY FOR LOVE

Rev. Michel Esparza
Originally published as Amor y autoestima © Ediciones Rialp, S.A. Madrid, 2010.
Translated from the Spanish by Devra Torres
This translation published by Scepter Publishers, Inc., © 2013
P.O. Box 1391 New Rochelle, NY 10802 www.scepterpublishers.org
The total or partial reproduction of this book is not permitted, nor is its transmission by any form or by any
means either electronic, mechanic, photocopy or other methods without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Scripture texts from the New and Old Testaments are taken from The Holy Bible Revised Standard Catholic
Edition © 1965 and 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in
the United States. All rights reserved. All copyrighted material is used by permission of the copyright owner. No part
of it may be reproduced without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Cover and text design by Rose Design
ISBN: 978-1-59417-189-5
Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4

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 CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE: PRIDE AND ITS DIFFICULTIES

1. In Search of Dignity
Self-esteem and Humility
A Grave and Ancient Problem
Pride is Competitive and Blinding
Maturity: The Work of a Lifetime
The Lifelong Search for Love

2. Making Progress in love

The Necessity of Trust
Ideal Love and Its Attributes
Pride and the Quality of Love
Dependence and Independence
The Heart’s Energies
Voluntarism
Learning to Communicate
Desire, Knowledge, Ability

3. The Ideal Attitude toward Ourselves

Humility Does Not Mean We Undervalue Ourselves
Self-forgetfulness and Self-deceptions
Humility and Personality
Two Attitudes toward Ourselves and Others
Pride Puts Mental Health at Risk

PART TWO: TOWARD A DEFINITIVE SOLUTION

4. Conversion to Love
The Root of the Problem
A Dignifying and Healing Grace
The Greatest Dignity
Love and Loves
 Confronting the Truth about Ourselves
The Elder Brother
Purity of Intention in the Christian Life
Reciprocity: In Tune with the Beloved

5. The Love of God Made Clear to Us

Divine Sonship
Mutual Friendship with Christ
Our Redemption

6. Merciful Love
What Does It Mean to Be Merciful?
Justice and Mercy
Wretchedness and Greatness
Taking Pride in Our Own Frailty
Spiritual Childhood

Epilogue

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 Introduction

I’m writing this book for ordinary Catholics who struggle day by day to increase the depth
of their love. But it’s useful for non-Catholics too. Who doesn’t want to learn the key to inner
peace, self-esteem without delusions, and an increasing capacity for love? More and more people
find themselves immersed in a world so stressful that they have to resort to medication to help
them cope. More and more are convinced that the time has come to seek a new solution.
I’m writing especially for those men and women who are easily discouraged when they
become aware of their flaws. They live uneasily with themselves because they don’t know how to
be patient with their own mistakes. Even in success, they never seem to be good enough to
overcome the bad opinion they have of themselves. They know how to suffer, but happiness is
something they don’t seem to feel they deserve. And since they can’t be happy and at peace with
themselves, they can’t be happy in their relationships with those around them, either.
My goal is to help these people see that these imperfections and failures can be transformed
into reasons for gratitude. God loves us! He loves us as His own children. He understands our
flaws and failings even better than we do, but that doesn’t stop His love. Truly knowing that we are
beloved children of God is what enables us to live at peace.
In every human being there is some wretchedness and some beauty. We all can learn to
reconcile our own imperfections with the greatness of being children of God. God’s love for us
helps us to take pity on our own flaws and develop a good relationship with ourselves. Then, that
kindness to ourselves allows us to take pity on the flaws of others. To love others and be happy
with them, flaws and all, we must first feel inside us God’s deep and compassionate love.
It is one thing to think about being children of God, but just thinking about God’s love is
insufficient. We need a living experience—to feel the warmth of God’s love. For this, we need a
special grace from God. But God, Who respects our freedom, will not force that grace on us. He
wants us to work with Him through our efforts to improve and learn to be humble. Then we will
begin to feel, little by little, a transformation within us. By allowing God to work in our imperfect,
damaged hearts—by working with God to learn to love ourselves as we truly are—we learn to let
go of our selfish disgust of ourselves and see ourselves through our heavenly Father’s merciful and
loving eyes.

LOGROÑO, NOVEMBER 28, 2008

 PART ONE

PRIDE AND ITS DIFFICULTIES

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 1. IN SEARCH OF DIGNITY

SELF-ESTEEM AND HUMILITY

“Self-esteem” means we have a positive attitude toward ourselves. And encouraging self-
esteem is fine—unless we do it by any means and at any cost. For example, some teachers don’t
want their students to feel guilty, so they try to convince their students that they have no defects
and make no mistakes. These teachers try to create self-esteem at the expense of the truth.
But that doesn’t work. Reality doesn’t just go away! The truth will come out, sooner or
later, and will only lead to deeper frustration.
Self-esteem has to involve accepting the whole truth about ourselves. That doesn’t mean
thinking that everything we do is perfect. It means refusing to treat ourselves badly because
everything we do isn’t perfect.
Now, pride isn’t always a bad thing. We can be proud of our country or our family, or even
of our own achievements. But unhealthy pride leads us to despise those who are different from us
or who disagree with us. And pride can even lead us to despise ourselves because we’re less than
perfect.
When we let unhealthy pride control how we react to our flaws, we have two basic choices.
One choice is to imagine that we have no flaws at all. This is classic arrogance, a naïve optimism
doomed to clash with reality: we hide our flaws from ourselves (but usually not from everyone
else!) The other choice is to exaggerate our weaknesses and hate ourselves for them. This is
inverted arrogance, or false modesty, an obsessive pessimism that feeds our self-pity and poisons
our mental health.
Someone who exaggerates his good qualities is too proud. But so is someone who
exaggerates his flaws.
Instead of letting pride control us, we should just acknowledge our flaws and then calmly
learn how to deal with them. This truthful and realistic attitude is the virtue of humility. Humility
helps us form a healthy relationship with ourselves and peacefully accept our flaws. The humble
person is ruled by the truth. He avoids feelings of superiority and inferiority.
Can a humble person have good self-esteem?
If we think self-esteem just means feeling satisfaction with ourselves, we might think that
it’s the same thing as pride—the opposite of humility. And if we think humility just means
humiliation, then we might think humility is harmful to self-esteem. But real humility isn’t the
inverted arrogance that makes us hate ourselves for being flawed. And real self-esteem isn’t the
prideful arrogance that makes us pretend we’re perfect.
In fact, humility and self-esteem are related. “Humble self-esteem” leads us to calmly
accept the truth about both our talents and our flaws.

A GRAVE AND ANCIENT PROBLEM

Understanding pride is the key to understanding many of the difficulties we create for
ourselves—difficulties that can damage our relationship with ourselves and destroy our
relationships with others. What is at the root of all this wretchedness? Where does pride come
from?
 The fact is that we’re born with pride. It’s a flaw that’s already inside each and every one of
us. Even tiny children feel envy and crave attention: they want to be the center of the universe. The
sickness of pride and its effects are with us from the very beginning of our lives.
How can we explain this? Are we designed badly, or did something happen to damage our
nature? According to Catholic teaching, our very first parents committed a grave sin of pride at the
dawn of human history, and as a punishment, pride has been damaging our human nature ever
since.
This means each of us is born with pride, a tiny tormenter inside our minds, watching
everything we do. If we let that pride rule us, we will never be satisfied with ourselves. Pride never
stops wanting us to be more, have more, and do more. Even if we achieve every one of our goals,
pride will keep pushing us. It will whisper that we could do better, or that others are doing better. It
will whisper that we used to be better before, but now we’ve gotten worse.
Pride doesn’t let us be happy in our relationship with ourselves. We’re never satisfied. But
pride is even worse when it comes to our relationships with others. Pride pits us against our
neighbors and never lets us win. As long as someone somewhere is better off than we are, pride
won’t let us rest.

PRIDE IS COMPETITIVE AND BLINDING

When we let pride rule us, everyone around us becomes a rival. We size them up,
determined to make them admit how superior we are. Meanwhile, we believe that they are sizing
us up, determined to humiliate us. We want to be the boss, compared with everyone around us—
even compared with God.
Because we are full of pride, we think God is full of pride too. We imagine Him looking
down at us with disgust and scorn. We think He wants to put us in our place, determined to make
us bow down as slaves before Him. But we won’t bow down: nobody can tell us what to do! (It
was this very idea that, according to the Bible, led to the very first sin.)
But that isn’t Who God is at all. It’s only our own pride, speaking for Him.
The fact is that love, not pride, is God’s only reason for creating us. He wants to be a loving
Father to us, and He wants us to be His loving children. Each and every one of us is the beloved
child of an all-powerful, divine Father. Nothing else in our lives—no amount of achievements or
money or fame—is as amazing as the dignity of being God’s child.
To defeat pride and its poisonous effects in our lives, we have to learn to see God as He
really is. We have to learn to see the world and ourselves as the products of love, not pride and
shame. We have to learn how to control our own pride, or else it will damage every relationship we
have. If we don’t do this, we will never be happy.

MATURITY: THE WORK OF A LIFETIME

We are born with that tyrant of pride inside us, but we aren’t born understanding our own
dignity as children of a loving God. If we don’t learn this essential lesson at home, as children, it
is much more difficult to learn it later, outside the home. Sadly, many of us grow up never learning
what it is like to be loved unconditionally. Perhaps our parents struggled to teach us security and
love. Perhaps they tried, but they had never felt unconditional love themselves.
So we grow up and live in the adult world, using those behaviors that got us through our
difficult school years. Instead of seeing our own self-worth, which comes to us as children of God,

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we let other people judge us, and we worry about what they think. We may be afraid to stand out
from the crowd. We may still act the role of the bully or the shy, introverted child we used to be.
How can we avoid this slavery to the opinions of others, either craving or rejecting their
judgment because we’re afraid of what they will think of us? We have to learn to see ourselves
through God’s eyes instead. Children depend on their parents’ approval. Adolescents depend on
the approval of their friends. But those who have reached true maturity don’t worry about the
approval of others. They see themselves as their loving Father in heaven sees them.

THE LIFELONG SEARCH FOR LOVE

We are all born with a hunger for approval and respect, and what satisfies this hunger best
is love. If we know someone else loves us, we think, “There is something in me worth loving.”
And that automatically makes us feel better about ourselves.
Falling in love can produce a sort of enchantment that makes us think we have finally found
true unconditional love, and this can help us to establish our self-esteem. The more love we
receive, the more our self-esteem increases. And if we suppress our pride and develop humble,
realistic self-esteem, that helps us to increase the depth of the love we can give in return.
But human love can change or vanish. It often brings disappointment.
Only God’s unconditional love can satisfy our deepest longings. Only the love of God can
wholly fulfill us.
 2. Making Progress in Love
Nothing offers us more happiness than true, genuine love. And the more perfect the quality
of the love, the more happiness we receive from it. The egotist seeks to “own” and control the
loved one and remains dissatisfied even by love. But if we try to act for the good of our loved one
instead of for our own satisfaction, we receive unexpected joy each time we succeed. And if this
deep love is mutual, a surprising upward “spiral” can occur, giving rise to unsuspected heights of
bliss.

THE NECESSITY OF TRUST

The first condition for beginning a relationship of love is trust: we place ourselves in the
hands of the one we love. To open ourselves up like that involves a risk that only trust can
overcome, so in a way, trust itself is a form of giving. We surrender ourselves to love and to accept
love: we give ourselves generously and yield ourselves trustingly. We give, and our loved one
receives; then the loved one gives and we receive, back and forth between two people who love
each other. Our trust is absolute.
In a good love relationship, there are no secrets. Our faith in our lover and our faithfulness
to our lover go hand in hand. On the other hand, if trust fades, our relationship becomes paralyzed.
Where does mistrust come from? Some of us have trouble with trust simply because of how
we were raised. Sometimes we don’t trust others because we project our own insecurity onto them:
we assume we aren’t lovable, so why would someone love us? It seems suspicious. We begin to
suspect that our lover has some ulterior motive or has some flaw that makes him or her inferior.
We suspect that our lover hasn’t chosen us but has had to settle for us.
If we are suffering from the problem of pride, we may suspect that the person we love is
mocking us or is looking to gain some advantage over us. We may even feel humiliated by the
simple fact that someone has offered us help and love. These feelings may keep us from being able
to trust anybody enough to experience real love. Pride and fear prevent us from giving ourselves
fully or accepting love fully, so we force ourselves to become self-sufficient instead, convinced
that we don’t need love from others.
Our inability to reach the point of trusting others can stunt our growth. We are weak inside,
but we hide it behind a hard shell of pride. Without humble self-esteem, there is no truthfulness
with ourselves or with others. We play a role for the world: we don’t let anyone see our true selves.
If we cannot overcome this pride and fear, we will suffer without even realizing it. This attitude
causes tremendous loneliness.
If we knew the love of God more deeply from childhood and lived continually in His
presence, we wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about seeming weak or trying to play a role
for others.

IDEAL LOVE AND ITS ATTRIBUTES

What does the best kind of love look like, a true, healthy love that strengthens us and
strengthens the ones we love? Let’s look at the nature of love more closely. Our answers to the
following questions can help us see the quality of our love:
How much are we willing to sacrifice ourselves for the other person’s happiness?
Do we respect the other person’s freedom, even if that means he or she leaves us for
someone else or makes a decision we don’t like?

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 What is our motivation? Do we sincerely want the best for the both of us?
Are we in this relationship of our own free will, or do we sense that we are being forced or
manipulated into staying?
Sacrificing for another
We demonstrate true love when we perform solid actions that contribute to our loved one’s
wellbeing, especially if those actions are hard for us or cause some trouble for us. Good intentions
aren’t enough: it’s actions that matter. And that holds true when we are trying to determine if we
are truly loved in return. Never mind what the person says—what does the person do to show us
his or her love? Someone who genuinely loves us will be ready to face hardship if it is necessary
for our happiness. (It’s important to remember here that we are talking about things necessary for
our happiness, not just a selfish behavior on our part, like jealousy or possessiveness, that causes
our lover trouble or difficulty.)
“How much do you love me?” lovers ask each other. That’s not the most practical question
to ask. Instead, we should ask, “In times of hardship, what would you be willing to do to help me?”
It’s often only in difficult times that we discover whether or not we are truly loved.
Respect for Freedom
In true love, we should be free to give our love and choose our own sacrifices and our own
way to show that love. And we certainly should respect the freedom of the person we love. Lack of
respect can show up in countless ways, from sulking and childishly insisting on something the
other person doesn’t want, all the way up to violence, threats, or emotional abuse. But the point of
all of these techniques is the same: to get our own way when we know our loved one doesn’t want
to give in.
Forcing love out of someone else isn’t love. We can give selflessly to someone else, but we
have no right to make our own selfish desires the test of someone else’s selfless love. And no one
has the right to force us to give selflessly either, just to prove our love. If we are the one always
taking, always trying to control those we love, that isn’t love—that’s selfish desire. And if we are
the one always suffering, always giving without receiving what we need in return, we may feel
love ourselves, but we are not in a loving relationship. In a relationship where someone always
takes and the other always gives, real love can’t exist because respect and freedom and trust don’t
exist.
Instead, love is give and take, in turns. In the best kind of relationship, neither person gives
orders, but each one carefully watches what might add to the happiness of the other and then works
to bring that about. “Your wish is my command,” they say to one another, and they mean it.
In order to reach that kind of love, we have to be free to love, free from any unfair pressure.
We love because we choose to love, and we give because we want to give, not because someone
else is forcing that sacrifice out of us by putting us into impossible situations.
If we are mature, we will not allow ourselves to be pushed around, but we are capable of
surrendering our own liberty out of love since we are masters of ourselves. We are beyond the
reach of external pressures like bullying or sulking. It’s not that we do whatever we feel like doing.
It’s that we make the free choice to do good things for our loved one.
To love is to freely belong to another. The egotistical lover seeks to possess the beloved,
but the ideal lover desires to belong to the beloved. But before we can give our freedom through
love, we have to be master of our own freedom. If we just tie ourselves down through some
misguided sense of dependence, blindly following someone else’s orders rather than taking the
trouble to make our own decisions—that isn’t love, and it isn’t freedom either.
 People who love each other forge common goals and work together for a common good.
Their desire for the other’s happiness leads to compromises where both can be happy together. In
other words, they “share a horizon.”

PRIDE AND THE QUALITY OF LOVE

Humble self-esteem is indispensable for progress in love. Pride can damage our respect for
our beloved’s freedom. Possessiveness, that desire to control not only the actions but even the
feelings of a loved one, often comes about because we doubt our own self-worth. If we don’t
control this thirst for appreciation (which is really just sensitive pride), our affection can
degenerate into oversensitivity and then into downright abuse.
If our pride has turned us away from others and made us distrustful because we don’t want
to experience rejection, we may know how to give but not how to receive love. Then even our
generosity has an element of vanity to it: we are helping others in order to feel comfortable in our
own superiority, not because we really care about those who need our help. If we think like this,
we may think that letting others give to us in return is a kind of humiliation because we suspect
others of feeling that same feeling of superiority when they help us. That makes us angry: we
won’t take charity from anyone!
But real love requires both generosity in giving and also humility in receiving. It allows
love to flow both ways. So it’s not as simple as saying that the generous person is the one who
gives, while the selfish person is the one who receives. In fact, receiving a gift or accepting a kind
action may involve the greatest sacrifice of all, the sacrifice of our own proud mental image of
ourselves and the humble acceptance that we need kindness from others after all.

DEPENDENCE AND INDEPENDENCE

It is one thing to say that we know ourselves and no longer worry about the judgment of
others. But it is quite a different thing to have a lack of interest in others. That isn’t independence.
It’s indifference, or apathy. There are two extremes here, both formed by pride: there are fragile
people who require constant attention and reassurance to build them up, and there are arrogant
people who refuse to be influenced by any emotional tie of love and who pride themselves on not
accepting help or love from anyone.
False dependence leads to a servile frame of mind. We see this in insecure people who, for
fear of being disliked, are afraid to say no to anybody. False independence, on the other hand, is a
kind of egotism. We see this in certain arrogant people who refuse to get involved with others. The
insecure, submissive attitude comes from a lack of interior freedom, a fear of what others will
think. But the desire to preserve one’s independence at all costs comes of a wrong notion of
interior freedom too. What good is freedom if it keeps us away from love?
The balanced person is sensitive and strong. If we are balanced and mature, we have the
kindness to say yes; but if necessary, we can also calmly say no. We can allow our affection for
others to make us vulnerable, but our sense of dignity still keeps us strong. We can gladly accept
the dependence love creates, tying our happiness to another. But at the same time, our humble self-
esteem allows us to preserve a wholesome independence, and we will break away from that
dependence if it starts to lead us into an unhealthy or abusive relationship.
The greatest loves are the ones between mature persons who love each other deeply. They
are wholesomely independent, comfortable in their own self-esteem. But they are also lovingly
dependent, each wishing to make the other person happy. Thus, in an ideal marriage, both spouses

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can say to each other, “On the one hand, I will do what I think is right, even if you strongly oppose
it; on the other hand, I’m filled with the desire to make you happy.”

THE HEART’S ENERGIES

Nothing makes us more dependent, in the best and the worst sense, than affection. At its
best, warmhearted affection can spur the heart to be more generous. At its worst, poisoned
affection can be unjust and possessive. This happens because in affection, the heart leads the head.
It can lead us to empathy, to share the feelings our loved one is feeling. But it can also lead us to
blind, irrational passion.
The goodness that can radiate from the heart is astonishing. A good mother’s love is the
perfect example of this. At first glance, we might think that an insensitive person is the strongest
kind of human because no matter what happens, nothing bothers insensitive people. But when we
really learn about character, we realize that a generous, loving heart can show the greatest strength
of character we humans can display. Mothers show this strength of character when their children
are in great danger. Jesus’ Mother showed this strength of character when she stood under His
cross.

DETACHED AFFECTION
Because of the strength of the human heart, affection is a very strong force in our lives. It is
important that we learn how to control that strong force and use it to help ourselves and others.
That is why real love requires detached affection.
What do we mean when we say affection is detached? This is the understanding that just
because we love someone, that doesn’t mean the other person has to love us back. Detached
affection understands that trying to force someone else to love us is senseless and even cruel.
True love, with detached affection, leaves the beloved free to give love or not. At the other
end of the spectrum is possessiveness, which is nothing but prideful self-interest. We may indulge
in possessiveness because we are insecure, because we are morbidly uncertain we even deserve
love. We may be terrified of rejection. Possessiveness is a puzzle, interwoven with legitimate fears
but also the damaging effects of pride.
In order to tell good from evil and to give the best love we can, we have to learn to tell the
difference between a wounded heart and wounded pride. If someone we love despises us, that hurts
us, not only in our heart but also in our pride. The heartache is fair, and it’s not a bad thing. It
doesn’t make us angry, it simply warns us that we should break from that person and look for
better uses of our time and energy.
But wounded pride makes us angry and indignant. We feel that the person has deliberately
humiliated us. We may try to force that person to change to please us, or we may even try to take
revenge.
Our self-love may damage our ability to give and receive real love. When we are overly
sensitive, we suffer from an excessive need to feel loved. This can expose us to painful
disappointments. As our sadness and wounded pride gnaw away at our self-esteem, our desire to
feel loved only increases, until we are caught in a trap between the excessive love we feel we must
have and the ordinary love others are willing to offer us. This can lead us to become possessive or
even abusive.
 Faced with the danger of being rejected and unable to avoid the flaw of possessiveness,
some of us end up distrusting our hearts. We feel overwhelmed by our own unsatisfied emotional
needs and by the unhappiness of our loved ones who struggle against our possessive abuse.
Uncertain how to control our own feelings and unable to control the feelings of others, we may
give up on love entirely. We “shrink” our hearts and force them not to feel love.
It’s not wise to be led by the heart alone, but we shouldn’t try to silence it either just to
make our lives easier. That way leads to loneliness and an empty life. Instead, it’s best to make the
most of the heart’s riches.
Once again, humble self-esteem is the answer. Only with its help can we increase our own
ability to love and break down our sensitive pride. We can learn that we are rich when we give
love, not just when we receive it. Our mind is our own: we aren’t excessively worried about the
judgments of others, not even of the person we love. And our heart is steady and full of love, not
desperate, shrill, and needy. Our affection grows respectful and detached, leaving our beloved free
to give affection freely in return.
We can only find the right balance between loving affection and overly sensitive
dependence when we conquer our pride and practice humble self-esteem. The dreaded fear of
rejection, which so hurts our pride, will then disappear, and we will be able to give love sincerely
but also walk away with our head held high when our love is not returned. The ability to be
intensely loving and passionate but also detached and respectful is like the ability to be
independent but also deeply interested in the wellbeing of our beloved.

VOLUNTARISM
If our heart “shrinks,” and we force ourselves to live without the love of others, then we
may end up in the trap of voluntarism. This means we are determined to live and love based on
willpower alone, ignoring the suggestions from our mind or our heart. Those people who aspire to
a high level of moral or Christian perfection are especially prone to this trap. They try to force
themselves to live a good life and love others not through genuine affection, but through sheer
strength of will.
There is nothing wrong with having strong willpower. But the will alone shouldn’t
overpower the rest of our being, especially when it comes to love. Our heart, mind, and will should
work together in every aspect of our lives. Particularly in the aspect of love, our mind and our heart
have important parts to play. The best thing of all is to keep all three elements of ourselves healthy
and in balance at once: the sensitivity of a poet, from our heart; the reasoning abilities of a
philosopher, from our mind; and the drive of a champion athlete, from our willpower. Then we,
and the love we give, will be in harmony.
However, since the heart, mind and will always have to work together, any one of these
three can become overbearing, and we can wind up being thrown out of balance. We can suffer
from sentimentalism if our heart takes over. Then we become excessively emotional. If our mind
takes over, we can suffer from intellectualism, and this can cause us to be emotionally cold. But if
our will takes over, voluntarism is the result. Then we try to force ourselves through life, making
ourselves do things our heart and mind have no interest in, simply because we are convinced that
they are best for us.
In the Christian life, when we overemphasize our own will, we can wind up trying to
depend entirely on ourselves to do good works, ignoring God’s grace and help. This can lead to
frustration and bitterness. It’s important to let the heart play its part in helping us learn to love God
and our neighbor. And it’s important, too, to let the mind become curious about and interested in

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God and our neighbor and come to good works that way. Then we can lean on God’s grace, and He
will help us do the good works He inspires us to do.
Trying to depend on our own strength of will, rather than on God’s grace or on a generous
heart, can also mask that old enemy, pride. This sneaky form of pride can turn a wonderful goal
like self-sacrificing love into a quest for the admiration of others. But who will admire us if we
make love seem like a chore just to impress those around us? Won’t our loved ones just wonder
why we make loving them look like so much hard work? It’s better to be honest with ourselves and
others and let our heart and mind help guide us. Otherwise, our grim efforts to love others just in
order to seem like we’re doing the right thing will exhaust us, draining love of its meaning.
Against this form of pride, humble self-esteem can help us again. Are we trying to do good
works just so others will marvel at our strong character? Or do we genuinely want to please God
and help our neighbor? Pride is pride, even when it seems to be leading us to do good things. If we
go on this way, sooner or later we will realize that pride has spoiled everything we hoped to
achieve. It can turn our good works into monuments to our own arrogance, and it can alienate the
very people we are trying to help.
Just because voluntarism isn’t the best thing for us doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to
become better people. It’s better to try to do good “incorrectly” than to be apathetic and stagnant.
We just need to search for ways to love others and do good without exhausting our mind and our
heart.
Every great goal requires effort—sometimes heroic effort. This is true of love, and it is true
of the Christian struggle for holiness. All the saints have lived the virtues to a heroic degree. But
they knew that holiness, the perfection of love, is not the same thing as heroism. The saints knew
that they were little children of God, so they weren’t impressed at their own strength. Their puny
human willpower seemed laughable compared to the greatness of God, so they didn’t count on
willpower alone. Instead, they let God draw them to Himself and relied on His strength and love to
inspire them. They were in love with God and let the love God gave them strengthen and
encourage them. The great and heroic things the saints achieved in their lives seemed small and
insignificant to them because they could see and feel the immense Love of God flowing back to
them. They let this great force flow around them and guide them, like small boats swept down a
great river.

LEARNING TO COMMUNICATE
This portrait we are drawing of the best kind of love would be incomplete if we didn’t
spend a moment on problems of communication. The success of a marriage, for instance, doesn’t
just depend on how much or how well we and our spouse love each other. We must also learn to
understand each other. Poor communication often tears marriages apart in spite of genuine love on
both sides.
According to a study, eighty percent of women think that the level of communication in
their marriages is not sufficient, compared to just twenty percent of men who think this. But further
generalizations are risky and often inaccurate. In spite of the stereotypes, we all know men who are
very sensitive and women who place their professional work above everything else.
When it comes to communication, though, it’s important to make a few distinctions, even at
the risk of raising stereotypes. In general, and recognizing that this can be very different person to
person, many men are satisfied with knowing they are loved, whereas many women need to feel
that love. Many conflicts could be avoided if these sorts of women tried to place more importance
on knowing than feeling, and if their spouses made a greater effort to express the love they felt.
 When we consider the stress of raising a family today, it’s understandable that couples have
little time and energy left to care for each other’s emotional needs. And when we are stressed and
hurried, minor quarrels can lead to major problems. For instance, a husband may complain that his
wife is trying to change him, or a wife may complain that her husband won’t listen to her. This can
lead to endless daily battles. And then, there are the people who can’t leave their spouses to settle
anything on their own. A person like that will interrupt constantly with suggestions and solutions
when all the spouse wants to do is tell a few stories about his or her day.
Other misunderstandings are major problems from the beginning—especially those
involving trust. If trust breaks down, everything falls apart, and we can feel as if we’re living in a
nightmare. But if trust can be reestablished, things can run smoothly again.
Empathy has a big part to play here. If one spouse is unhappy, both spouses ought to be
able to feel the pain because they know how to put themselves in the other’s place. If empathy can
happen, we will have a chance to work toward a solution. But if we and our spouse both feel
alienated from one another, both of us will feel unjustly treated. Both of us may think we’re
unloved; both may believe that the other doesn’t value our efforts. And unless we can take a step
back and try to be humble and empathetic, we will each believe that only our own input is valuable
and only our own opinion is correct.
Once the crisis has developed into a day-after-day battle, we will need ample empathy,
understanding, and humility in order to forgive each other and acknowledge our own mistakes. It’s
possible to turn the situation around if both we and our spouse understand that, after all, we still
love each other. Some people argue because they love each other: it’s precisely because they still
care for each other that they each have hurt feelings. If they didn’t still care, they wouldn’t still be
fighting for appreciation.
Indifference is the final stage in a relationship’s decline. If we can’t find a cure for day-to-
day misunderstandings, a moment may come when all empathy has vanished, either in us or in our
spouse. Faced with such a sad conclusion, we still should try to examine the facts. We should ask
what went wrong, how it could have been avoided, and whether it is morally right for us to break
free of this person whom we may have vowed to love and cherish for life.

DESIRE, KNOWLEDGE, AND ABILITY

To succeed at any relationship, we use three things: our desire to achieve success, our
ability to achieve success, and the knowledge or experience we have that will help us achieve
success. Willpower alone won’t succeed if we simply don’t have the knowledge or experience to
handle a complicated relationship, or if we don’t have the mental health (the ability) necessary to
hold a relationship together. But we can work to gain that knowledge. That’s what marriage
counseling is for. And we can make every effort to stabilize our mental health and develop our
ability to care for another’s happiness. We can grow to meet the challenges of our relationship.
Marriage should be a once-in-a-lifetime commitment. We should think long and hard
before entering into marriage, and we should think even longer and harder before taking steps to
break this bond that should be for life. Sometimes, new information comes up that shows that a
marriage wasn’t valid in the first place: deep mental illness, for example, might make the marriage
vows invalid. This is why it’s important to spend time before marriage learning skills to help the
marriage work and getting to know our future spouse very well.
To hold every possession in common and to establish and raise a family is a major
undertaking, but it’s one that nobody forces us to take on. A marriage between two persons who
are capable of taking on such a commitment can only fail through lack of will or through ignorance

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—and both of these can be fixed with the right hard work. Feelings have little to do with this work.
Steady, daily effort is what’s needed. Unless our spouse is dangerously abusive, we shouldn’t just
give up, saying, “I don’t love you anymore.” Instead, we need to say, “I will work day by day to
learn to love you.” Like a mother learning to deal with a child through all the stages of
development, we have to learn to work with our spouse through the changes brought on by year
after year of marriage.
Anyone enduring a marriage crisis deserves the greatest compassion. But we freely took on
that commitment, and we have an obligation to do everything we can to keep it. In such painful
circumstances, we tend to look for a quick way out, but solving a marriage by breaking it isn’t
necessarily going to solve anything. If we don’t fix the problem at its root, it’s very possible that
the same problem will destroy any new relationship we try to form.
I once knew a man who was married five times. He finally realized in his old age that he
was the source of the problems in his marriages and that he could have been happy with any one of
his wives if he’d put in the work to make things right.
Society nowadays encourages us to think of marriage as a kind of trial run, something to
drop at the slightest difficulty. In many countries, marriage contracts are the easiest kind of
contract to break. But many children grow up in poverty because a single parent can’t bring in
enough money to raise them in comfort. And many responsible adults are stressed and
overwhelmed by the financial burden of trying to care for children in several different households.
Abandoning a marriage just because it becomes difficult is no guarantee that there won’t be greater
difficulties to face later, after the marriage is dissolved. We shouldn’t let ourselves be blinded to
the heartbreak and difficulty that this kind of solution can bring about—not just for others but for
ourselves as well.
 3. The Ideal Attitude Toward Ourselves
It’s clear from the previous chapter that pride endangers every quality of love. We’ve
observed that a poor relationship with ourselves keeps us from giving our love freely and from
receiving love with humility and gratitude. We’ve also seen that pride damages our respect for our
beloved and that our low self-esteem or fear of rejection can make us possessive or cold and
unemotional.
Since conquering pride turns out to be so important, both in avoiding difficulties and in
making possible the joy of deep love, we will now explore the ideal attitude toward ourselves so
that we can use that attitude as a foundation to build up an ideal relationship with others.
To determine just what that ideal attitude is, we’ll need to address some misunderstandings
about humility.

HUMILITY DOES NOT MEAN WE UNDERVALUE OURSELVES

Some people think that if pride is bad, then low self-esteem must be good. That’s
absolutely wrong. If pride inflates our ego falsely, low self-esteem deflates it falsely. It’s not good
for us to overvalue or undervalue ourselves.
If we mistakenly believe that humility is the habit of undervaluing oneself, we risk falling
prey to the pride of false modesty. This is a sneaky kind of pride that says we should be more than
the ordinary human, so our extraordinary humility should push us lower than the ordinary human.
No, we should just be ordinary—and we should be glad to find out that we are ordinary. There is a
dignity in being ordinary because we are all children made by God.
Humility is positive and realistic. It’s an encounter with the truth. It isn’t just a false
modesty, putting ourselves last and everyone else first. That can lead to depression. We’re not
meant to relinquish our good opinion of ourselves out of cowardice or feelings of inferiority.
To have a healthy mindset, we need to accept the truth about ourselves with calm,
confidence, and good humor. This happens when we are humble. Then we live in harmony with
ourselves and those around us, conscious that we have a dignity which nothing can take away.
While we strive to improve, we also love ourselves as we are, and we permit others to correct us to
help us become better.

SELF-FORGETFULNESS AND SELF-DECEPTIONS

In everyday life, the sign of real humility is a spontaneous self-forgetfulness that results in a
disinterested giving way to others. We don’t claim to be worthless, and we don’t stubbornly defend
our value. We just don’t bother about esteem one way or the other. We forget the whole question
entirely.
But if we try to force ourselves to think we’re worthless, we never stop thinking about
ourselves. No wonder this can’t lead to humility!
We have to be open to finding out the truth about ourselves in everyday encounters. We
have to be willing to give up those little lies we tell ourselves to deceive ourselves into thinking
we’re better than we are: “I’m a very peaceful person—she just made me so angry! It’s her fault I
lost my temper because I don’t have a temper, not really.”
Is this true? Or is this just what we want to believe about ourselves? The truth is always the
source of real humility.

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HUMILITY AND PERSONALITY
If we don’t understand what humility is, we may think that it means we have to give up the
distinctive traits that shape our own personal “style.” We may think that we need to bury our own
lively personality under a meek, boring, downcast exterior. But this isn’t true at all. Humility
means living peacefully with ourselves as ourselves, as children of God who are called by Him to
be the best people we can be. God doesn’t want us to lose our personality. He gave us our
personality! He knows us inside and out, and He calls us His children.
Jesus Christ asks us to deny ourselves, but this doesn’t mean to deny who we are. It just
means we should deny the selfish and prideful tendencies that can get in the way of who we truly
can be. God loves us as we are, and He wants us to be at peace with who we are. Only then will we
be free from the torment of pride and ready to grow and mature as human beings. Only then will
we be able to rejoice in the full measure of our dignity as children of God.
A proper understanding of Christian humility is crucial in helping us develop a balanced,
happy personality. Humility protects us against self-deception and fosters peace. It’s a source of
maturity and inner freedom. It enriches our personal identity.
When we deny ourselves and surrender ourselves to God out of love, we don’t lose
ourselves. Rather, we find ourselves in God—we find that vision of ourselves as our best selves
that He very much wants us to be. This is also true when we deny ourselves (that is, deny our own
pride and selfishness) and surrender ourselves in a relationship to someone who loves us. We don’t
lose ourselves. Instead, we see the best version of ourselves in the loving eyes of our spouse.
The importance of “being yourself,” which we hear so much about these days, is not only
possible but necessary in Christianity. God is the first person Who desires that we not betray our
own identity since He gave it to us in the first place. Christianity is an inexhaustible source of
greatness of spirit—and of freedom, too, since it helps free us from the anguish of pride. If it’s not
experienced this way, that’s because the Christian message has been misunderstood, sometimes
even by people who are trying their best to be good Christians.
Some people can’t understand how to reconcile the ideas of freedom and surrender: how we
can be free but also subject to Almighty God, or even to a human spouse? But God doesn’t want to
rule us as a slave-owner, He wants to guide us as a loving Father. And a spouse who truly loves us
also wants us to be free to be the best person we can be. If we insist on being free from these
loving guides who only want to help us live our best life, are we truly free? Or are we just isolated
and lonely?

TWO ATTITUDES TOWARD OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Our ideal attitude toward ourselves gets rid of self-deception and focuses on the truth. It
fortifies personality, self-acceptance, self-forgetfulness, and inner peace. This is what we call
“humble self-esteem”: we accept ourselves as we truly are and help ourselves become the person
we want to be.
St. Thomas Aquinas explains that the love we feel for another comes out of the love we feel
for ourselves. Loving ourselves isn’t the same thing as loving temporary pleasures like alcohol,
ambition for power, or drugs. Since these things destroy us in the long run, we can’t say we love
ourselves if we spend our days chasing after them. Egotism, too, as we have seen, comes from
excessive pride and isn’t actually loving ourselves at all. Egotism can cause us to feel secretly
inadequate and disappointed in ourselves as well as others—which, in turn, causes all sorts of
friction in our relationships.
If God loves all His creatures, then it makes sense that He loves us. And if He loves us,
then it makes sense that we should love ourselves too. We can’t give what we don’t have, and if we
don’t know how to be kind and forgiving toward ourselves, we will have difficulty being kind and
forgiving toward others. A humble and patient approach to our own weaknesses helps us
understand the flaws of those around us.
If someone rubs us the wrong way, it may simply be because we’re tired and not ready for a
challenge. But if we go deeper, with courage and sincerity, into our knowledge of ourselves, we
may sometimes discover serious motives. Maybe we secretly envy that person for a virtue we lack.
Or maybe we share a character flaw with that person, and our pride makes us feel ashamed about it
and therefore short with him or her. Or maybe we’re impatient because we’ve overcome our own
similar defect and think the other person ought to do the same, forgetting all the flaws we still have
that may be annoying to others.
To look for and accept the truth humbly, in spite of the pain or discomfort it may cause us,
is vital for resolving conflicts, both with others and within ourselves.

PRIDE PUTS MENTAL HEALTH AT RISK

Susceptibility, or “touchiness,” is a common sign of pride. Sometimes our touchiness can
come out at the slightest hint of blame, and we may flare up and become upset even though we
know the other person didn’t mean to cause offense. Intellectually, we know it’s all a
misunderstanding and there’s no reason for hurt feelings. But we storm around or cause an
argument anyway, just because our pride is hurt.
In some cases, if our touchiness is extreme, we may not simply have a moral problem but
some type of mental illness. We may need a doctor to give us medical guidance, as well as
consulting someone who can give us good spiritual guidance.
But what if we ourselves do not have this problem but live with someone who does? If we
love someone who is mentally ill in this way, how can we help that person? We must combine the
most exquisite understanding with the most loving demands. We should feel compassion and try to
understand this person because only those who have experienced such disorders can fully
understand the suffering they cause. But we also need to make concrete demands that the mentally
ill person make progress toward recovery as well as he or she is able. Otherwise, such patients may
remain caught in a vicious cycle of self-pity and bitterness, trapped in hopelessness and self-
destruction.
The truth is that we all have only so much psychological pressure we can bear. Too much
stress can leave any one of us unbalanced. According to mental health experts, we each have a
“reserve” of strength against stress. We can think of it like a car with its fuel tank: some cars have
a larger tank, and some have a smaller one; in the same way, each of us has our own reserve
against stress. But if we try to do too much without stopping to build up our reserve again, we will
all end up on empty.
The art of preserving mental balance consists of learning how to build up our reserve
against stress. We “fill up” each time we enjoy ourselves and relax, or when we get enough sleep
and “disconnect” from whatever is overwhelming us. And those of us with a tendency to anxiety
and nerves need to optimize our “fuel management” since we have a smaller and leakier “tank.”
We need to solidify our inner peace by conquering the demands of our pride and attaining humble
self-esteem.

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 PART TWO

TOWARD A DEFINITIVE SOLUTION

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 4. Conversion to Love
So far, we’ve brought to light all sorts of difficulties: immaturity, egotistical love,
possessiveness, voluntarism, marriage problems, self-deception, insecurity, and touchiness. The
problem in every case is pride—the difficulty of building from pride into genuine self-esteem and
happy relationships. We have to find practical ways to get to the root of this problem and solve it
so that we can build on a firm foundation of maturity. Then love, the chief source of happiness,
will enrich our inner life and the relationships that surround us.
Willpower helps, but willpower alone can’t solve this problem. We have to purify our heart
of pride and fill it with God’s love. Fortunately, God is ready to help us with His grace. Our own
efforts are crucial, but we can’t do the work without God’s help.
Pride is like a chronic illness: it’s incurable but manageable. It never vanishes altogether,
but it can be kept under control with the right treatment.
We have to find the right treatment to manage pride.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

First of all, we have to admit that pride isn’t just a problem for humans in general, it’s a
problem for us personally. We all suffer to one degree or another from this evil and its
consequences. Just admitting this is half the battle.
We’re all born with a certain sickness of soul that needs treatment. This is why we so often
experience those “I want to, but I can’t or won’t” moments. For example, we don’t want to feel
resentment toward someone who’s offended us, but we feel it just the same. Or we’d like to forget
some long-ago grievance, but we can’t manage to put it behind us.
When we work actively and consistently to control our pride, we don’t just deal with the
superficial effects of pride. We actually modify our attitudes entirely as time goes on. These
attitudes are like a pair of glasses that change our view of everything and help us see the world in a
new way.
For instance, if someone offends us, we don’t just try to control our angry outburst. We
look deep inside ourselves to learn why we took offense in the first place. Was it all just a
misunderstanding or an innocent joke? Then, with humility and good humor, we remind ourselves
that there’s no reason to be offended after all, and we go about our business. With practice, over
time, the angry outburst doesn’t even occur to us anymore. We first look inward, and our reformed
attitude helps us see beyond our annoyance.
But what if that offense wasn’t just a harmless joke? What if it really was hurtful?
Willpower may crush some of pride’s problems, but it can’t heal our injured hearts. Only God’s
grace, with our cooperation, can heal us. A virtuous life allows us to live in harmony with God,
with ourselves, and with others. We rest secure in God’s deep love, and the harmful words or
actions of others lose their power over us.
Our own evil acts—our sins—can destroy that inner peace because they put us at a distance
from God. God never withdraws His love from us completely, but our decisions can move us away
from Him and His friendship. It is important to our peace of mind that we make decisions that will
allow us to draw closer to God and return His love. Decisions that take us away from Him only
damage us in the long run.
 Sin is an act of deliberate evil. It can be a major act, like murder, or it can be very minor,
like playing on our phone when we should be working. Whichever kind of act it is, sin changes us
and damages us. It is an act against the truth about us, against who we truly are and what God has
created us to be. Because of this, sin affects us in the depth of our human nature, causing deformity
there. Every sin wounds us, disturbing the balance of our body, mind, and soul. It brings disorder
into us.
We must retrace sin’s path, straightening out its twists and turns by turning back to God
and telling Him we are sorry for pushing him away through sin. This is called repentance. To live
at peace here and to enter heaven upon death, we have to purify our souls through repentance. We
have to convert and turn to God, through the help of divine grace and the cooperation of our own
good will. Only by “emptying ourselves” of our own selfishness and pride can we “fill ourselves”
with God’s love and grace.
God can easily heal a bodily illness, but the illnesses of the soul, generally speaking, are
healed only with our cooperation. The cure tends to arrive in a time of crisis. Moments of crisis are
moments of complexity, when it becomes easy to shift the foundations of a person’s whole life.
Some people are angry with God for allowing these painful times to happen to us. But all too often,
our wounds are the only doors to our souls that we leave open for God. It is in pain that we
experience need and reach for something more than ourselves. It is in crisis that many souls turn
back to God.

A DIGNIFYING AND HEALING GRACE

We can count on God’s grace, which is another word for His special help, to enable us to
handle the profound inner change of repentance that we need to carry out. Christ’s redemption on
the cross has bought us a grace that can restore our dignity as God’s children. Christ’s grace, by
freeing us from our slavery to pride and by establishing our humble self-esteem, allows us to
experience the joy of profound love. Without the gift of this grace, we wouldn’t be able to imitate
Christ. We wouldn’t even be able to love at all.
This supernatural gift of grace transforms us from within and enables us to love as Christ
loves. To bring about this mysterious transformation, God enlightens our intellect to understand
His love; He inflames our will to ignite the desire to respond to our new understanding; and He
purifies our heart to bring our affections and desires more and more into line with the affections
and desires of Christ Himself. This special grace is called “sanctifying grace.”
As we let grace penetrate us and as we cooperate with the transformation in our lives, we
can reach that happiness that comes from giving and receiving God’s great love. Holiness then
becomes possible, and so does a profound peace. The example of countless saints, most of them
anonymous and ordinary, confirms that we can all reach true holiness and peace no matter what
our circumstances may be.
Grace helps us in our fight to cultivate good habits and fight evil tendencies. The more
grace we accept, and the more we use that grace to help us become holy, the more God’s grace will
come to us. We need to seek out the sources of that grace in order to heal our defects. Christ gives
us His grace mainly through the sacraments, especially the ones we can receive frequently:
confession and the Holy Eucharist.

THE GREATEST DIGNITY

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 To support the action of sanctifying grace, we must examine our life, accept our limitations,
and find our remedy in God’s love. God’s love isn’t just a generic love given to all of creation.
God has created us personally: God has thought of us and formed us exactly as He wants us to be,
with our talents and weaknesses and our own unique personalities. If we acknowledge our
relationship with God and try to turn to Him with humility and sincerity, God will share with us
His infinite treasures. Through the guidance of Christ, His divine Son made man, we can even call
God our Father.
The love of God brings to us an immense dignity. To combat our human insecurities, we
need to exchange “human respect” for “divine respect”: we need to see ourselves and value
ourselves as God values us. Then God’s love and regard for us becomes real to us, and the opinions
of others stop bothering us. Even our own difficult circumstances don’t matter if we truly
comprehend God’s great love. A priest who was paralyzed completely in a car accident expressed
this reality when he said, “I believe an immense Love presides over my life. And over everyone’s,
though many people don’t realize it. To sum up my problem, I’d say I’m like a multimillionaire
who has only lost a few dollars.”1

LOVE AND LOVES

God’s love easily surpasses the best of all possible human loves. Only He can give himself
with no limitation whatever. We can only give as much as we have, and we human beings are
limited. But God is infinite. His love is infinite, and His capacity to give is infinite.
In order to fulfill our deepest longings, we all need the absolute, enduring, and
unconditional love that only God can give us. St. Augustine puts it best in his famous exclamation,
“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Other
people’s love can help us—after all, human love is gratifying and tangible. But it cannot offer our
restless hearts a lasting solution.
The love of God allows us to harmonize our human loves. Family, friends, and professional
work are all valuable sources of self-esteem, but they all have to stay in their proper position.
When God has the first place in our hearts, our self-image and self-esteem improve, and we retain
a sense of independence and perspective, keeping everything else in a healthy balance. But when
God isn’t our main source of self-esteem, our other loves can become distorted and unbalanced.
Work may take up too much of our energy, or we may become frustrated and unhappy in our
marriage or friendships. Trying to obtain everything to satisfy our restless hearts, we may become
possessive or touchy regarding our spouse, lover, or friends, or even seek romantic love outside our
marriage. And no amount of professional success will fill our empty hearts.
God’s love also ennobles other loves. Every human love contains something divine: it’s a
pale but real reflection of the love of God, Who has created us all. If we put all the passion of our
restless hearts into a human love, we set ourselves up for frustration, disappointment, and
heartache because after all, human loves, like humans themselves, come to an end one day. But
again, if we put God first, no single human love becomes the source of our self-esteem. Only by
resting secure in God’s love can we love others better—with a wisdom and an emotional
detachment that sees ourselves and others as the loving children of God. Then, even if our human
love is rejected, we can turn to God with confidence and peace. We may suffer pain, but we don’t
suffer the loss of our sense of self-worth because that rests with God. A human lifetime will not be
long enough to explore every aspect of our close connection with God’s divine love.
In short, we will be truly happy only if we depend on God’s love. Otherwise, we’ll never
experience that peace and joy which no one but ourselves can take from us. Many make their
happiness a future event: “No, I’m not happy now, but once I get that diploma, or marry that
person, or start earning that paycheck, then I’ll feel fulfilled.” They are disappointed to discover
that fulfillment never seems to arrive, so they set their sights on bigger and bigger goals. But why
pin our hopes on an uncertain future and put off our happiness and peace until “someday” when
God loves us right now just as we are?
Jesus Christ, God made man, forms an intimate bond with us whenever we receive Him in
Holy Communion. Under the appearance of bread and wine, Jesus becomes our living and divine
food. This bodily and spiritual fusion is the deepest of unions, and if we could truly understand it,
we’d be left breathless. Christ gives us His own living body, blood, soul, and divinity, giving us
new life without losing His own. He gives Himself to us in a manner so astonishing that our human
minds can’t even grasp it. “Take,” he says at the beginning of the consecration of the Mass, and
then He waits humbly for each of us to accept His offering of love. Our senses can’t perceive these
marvelous realities.

CONFRONTING THE TRUTH ABOUT OURSELVES

Turning to God to seek His love means making a real examination of ourselves, not
avoiding uncomfortable questions nor living in fear of the answers. We need to acknowledge the
reality about ourselves and our life, both the good and the bad. Then we need to make the firm
decision to turn away from selfish habits and keep to what really deserves our loyalty and our
energy. Accepting the reality about our lives and how we should live them allows us to turn to God
and rely on His friendship. We can do this again and again, even daily: reorient our life and
abandon ourselves again to God’s unconditional love.
If we don’t know about God’s love or choose to ignore it, we have two options when we
look at our flaws: we either admit them to ourselves and set ourselves up for depression, or we lie
to ourselves and keep our self-esteem intact. Deception may be more pleasant than depression, but
the lie interferes with our inner peace because our intelligence always reminds us of the truth.
But we don’t have to live like this. God can free us from both depression and deception
because He can wash away our sins in His overwhelming mercy. We can stay open to the whole
truth about ourselves and work confidently to improve ourselves and draw closer and closer to
Him, not allowing ourselves to worry when we slip up but bringing ourselves back into harmony
with His friendship each time. In that way, faults and all, we enjoy the fullness of life God intends
for us, and everything becomes a stepping stone to take us closer to Him.
Naturally, changing the course of our whole life is no simple matter. If we’ve gotten used to
those little lies we’ve told ourselves to make ourselves feel better about our bad behavior, we may
feel “dizzy” when we try to face the truth. We’ve functioned so long with one way of behaving that
it can be very hard to change. But if we remember that our lies don’t really give us security—that
they don’t really hide the truth from ourselves or (especially!) from our loved ones—then we can
find the courage to make this change. The truth belongs to God; it is the reality He has created.
Only when we stand in the light of God’s truth can we find peace.

THE OLDER BROTHER

Maybe the problem isn’t that we’re afraid to face the truth because we’ll have to change our
whole lives. Maybe we’re lifelong Christians, and our problem is that we’re already a little too
familiar with God. We may even feel a little smug in our superiority. But superiority isn’t
friendship with God either. That’s pride again—the very thing we’re trying to learn to conquer.

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 We can see both of these obstacles, the running from the truth and the living smugly in
spite of being close to the truth, in Christ’s story of the Prodigal Son.
As Christ told the story, the younger of two sons—the prodigal son—asked his father for
his inheritance before his father was even dead. Then that rude and thoughtless son “went abroad
into a far country and there wasted his substance, living riotously.” That’s what made him a
prodigal son: prodigal means “wasteful.”
After spending all the money his father had given him, in a time of great need, this prodigal
son decided to return home to beg his father for at least a simple servant’s job to keep him from
starving. But his loving father, who represents our loving Father in heaven, didn’t get angry at his
lost child for coming home penniless. He ran to meet his boy, threw his arms around him, and
ordered his servants to prepare a feast.
The older brother’s reaction, though, was very different. He wasn’t glad to see his lost
brother come home. He was upset with his father and envious about the feast because he said his
father had never spent that kind of money on him. But his father, again, didn’t become angry. He
reminded his older son—the “faithful son”—of his love and care for him: “All that I have is thine.”
But the father told his older son that it was right to celebrate the return of the younger brother
because “this thy brother was dead and is come to life again; he was lost, and is found.”
This parable illustrates the Christian journey by two different paths. The younger brother’s
return is the dramatic repentance and turning to God that some of us experience, but many of us are
like the older brother instead. The older brother, blinded by pride and self-interest, paraded his own
merits to try to win praise and grew irritated when attention was given to someone else. He may
have seemed more virtuous at first glance, but his bitterness and resentment were not the emotions
of a person at peace. He, too, needed to realize just how well his father took care of him and how
ungrateful he was to be angry at his father’s joy. He, too, needed repentance and conversion.
But see how kind our loving Father in heaven is. He also has compassion for the older son.
The loving father in Christ’s story, rather than scold or humiliate his proud son when that son
wouldn’t come into the house, went out to talk to him and console him in his wounded pride. “Son,
you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours,” he assured the faithful son. We don’t know
the end of the story, but hopefully the older son too turned to his kind father and accepted his
loving embrace. This trusting surrender is what he needed in order to free his soul from its slavery
to self-respect, envy, and pride.

PURITY OF INTENTION IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

We can see in this story that pride contaminated the careful performance of the older son’s
moral duties. Instead of doing his work through love and gratitude toward his father, he worked to
feel his own superiority over his younger brother. Then the younger brother’s enthusiastic welcome
offended the older brother’s pride.
In the Christian life, we too can fall into this same perfectionistic trap, doing the holiest
actions not out of love for God but out of pride in ourselves. There are certain symptoms of this,
such as a feeling of oppression or resentment when it comes time to do those holy actions we’ve
promised, but those symptoms can be hard for us to notice. Only a keen and courageous
examination of our conscience—and a humble, realistic attitude toward God and ourselves—will
help us realize that we are being holy not for God’s sake but for the sake of our pride.
Pride creates an obstacle to understanding what holiness even is. Holiness isn’t a set of
perfect behaviors, although that can be part of holiness. It’s doing everything out of love for God,
not to satisfy ourselves. We have to humbly allow God to love us with all our faults. Rather than
proudly showing off our favorite virtues, we have to submit to God’s plan and allow His love to
change and mold us. This doesn’t mean we don’t try our best to be holy—we do! But we do it as a
small child tries to make his parents smile: out of love, not out of grand ambition.
Holiness is not achieved. It’s received. It is an abundance God grants to those who
acknowledge their emptiness and allow God’s grace to fill them. The Virgin Mary is the best
example of this: her answer to the angel, “Be it done to me according to thy word,” is the most
sublime expression of loving surrender to God’s will. This “be it done” is not a passive
indifference but an active cooperation with the Holy Spirit, Whose grace sanctifies us through
inner transformation. The Virgin Mary understood this “active passivity,” this cooperation with
God’s love, perfectly. This is why the Lord was and still is able to work wonders through her.
But if our virtue rests on a foundation of pride, we aren’t trying to cooperate with the Holy
Spirit but only working to fulfill our own ambition. Then we forget that we’re supposed to be
pleasing God and cooperating with God’s grace. We remain unfulfilled, impossible to satisfy,
annoyed at the hard work we have to do in order to be “holy” and even more annoyed that others
don’t praise us often enough for that hard work. We feel no peace. We feel that God is asking
impossible burdens of us. But God isn’t part of this bargain at all: it’s our pride that is demanding
great sacrifices from us. It’s our pride that is never satisfied.
If we practice humble self-esteem, we stop the bad habit of comparing ourselves with
others and patting ourselves on the back for being so “holy.” Free of this bad habit, we’re no longer
preoccupied by our own merits, and nothing prevents our rejoicing at others’ success. But this
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work hard at holiness. We should do our best to do great things for
God, even though our efforts will be faulty. We just need to keep watch over ourselves so that we
don’t end up like the Prodigal Son’s older brother.

RECIPROCITY: IN TUNE WITH THE BELOVED

Pride isn’t the only reason the older son didn’t welcome his brother. He also failed to
understand the love and worry his father felt for both his sons. This young man was happy that his
poorly behaved brother was gone, but he didn’t think about the constant pain his father suffered at
this loss. If he really loved his father as his father loved him, he would have been glad when his
brother returned because then his father’s worries were over.
Love demands a give and take. We can love someone who doesn’t love us back, but it’s
impossible to have a relationship. The same is true of friendship: we can’t be friends with someone
who doesn’t want to be friends with us. And the same is true of God. We know God loves us, but
to truly love Him in return, we have to learn to love what He loves. We have to be in touch with
God’s loving heart and want to make Him happy.
If we don’t learn how to be in touch with God and think of His feelings, we will live a
superficial Christian life. We will be like the two sons in the parable, only going to our loving
Father to ask for a favor or complain about something. We will follow the Christian life out of
some vague idea that this is how we should act, forgetting Who gave us those commandments.
But the first commandment of all is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” And this isn’t just a law,
or even just a good idea. Loving God is the fountain of grace that brings us into a loving
relationship with our heavenly Father. It fills us with the desire to please God, to avoid making
Him suffer by the pain we cause ourselves and others when we sin. Christ in the Garden of
Gethsemane wept over the burden of sins He had to take on to ransom us. In God’s view of eternal
timelessness, Christ is still there, weeping over each one of our sins.

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 All of us are called to a life of holiness, to love God and others as much and as well as
possible. But if, like the older brother and the prodigal son, we don’t stop to think about the pain or
the joy we give our Lord, we can fall into indifference, just going through the motions and not
really thinking about God at all.
Some will say here that God cannot suffer, and this is true: strictly speaking, God has no
needs, so He cannot suffer from a lack of fulfillment of those needs. The loving father of the
prodigal son also lacked nothing: he had wealth, servants, and a grand house, and even another son
who served him faithfully. But that loving father worried over his lost boy not for his own sake but
for the sake of the boy himself, wanting what was best for his son even when his son didn’t want
that.
Love leads us to identify ourselves with the joys and sorrows of those we love, and those
who love expose themselves to experiences of joy and sorrow through their loved ones. God, too,
in creating us out of love, has made Himself vulnerable in a way to the sorrows we cause ourselves
and others. Of Himself, God cannot suffer, but Christ wept over the grief of Mary Magdalene at the
loss of her brother Lazarus, and He wept and suffered so much over our sins in the Garden of
Gethsemane that He actually sweated blood for our sakes.
This loving Heart of God is beyond our comprehension. We cannot get over our
amazement if we realize that we, who are worth so little even in our own eyes, matter to God so
very much.
1. L. de Moya, Sobre la marcha. Un tetrapléjico que ama la vida (Madrid: Edibesa, 1997), p.
68.
 5. The Love of God Made Clear to Us
Since God loves us so deeply and unconditionally, why are we still so often full of worry
and unrest? It may be that our knowledge of God is too theoretical. It’s easier to love God when we
really understand, with our whole mind and heart, the depth of God’s love for us.
We forge this profound awareness of God’s love throughout our lives. It’s the mysterious
effect of God’s grace together with our own cooperation—an invisible, peaceful conversation that
takes place deep inside our hearts. Over time, as we respond to grace, we start making daily efforts
to look for, converse with, and love our loving God. If we are faithful to the little routines of daily
duties to God and pray to Him and talk with Him frequently, He ends up stealing our hearts. Then
His companionship becomes a necessity, and we find ourselves “resting” in prayer with Him,
leaning trustfully on His strength and grace.
To assist this wonderful union with God, we will look at the aspects of God’s love that can
make the biggest impression on our human hearts: God’s adoption of us through His love for His
divine Son, Jesus Christ, as well as Jesus Christ’s becoming a human for our sakes and His dying
for us on the Cross. One and the same love led God to create us, to make us His children, and, after
our rejection of Him through sin, to become a man Himself in order to bring us back to Him.

THE DIVINE SONSHIP

The best way for us to understand our dignity as human beings is to understand our
adoption through the divine sonship of Christ. If God is the great King of the Universe, then we are
princes and princesses because we are truly His children. Even as familiar as St. John was with
Christ, living with Him for three years, he still couldn’t stop marveling over this. In his first epistle,
he exclaims, “Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be
called—and should be—the sons of God.” As St. John points out, this isn’t just an empty title. It’s
a joyful reality. We can never meditate enough on this blessed truth.
God doesn’t force our free will. We can reject this magnificent gift. But if we use our
freedom well and accept the divine offer, we receive the greatest dignity imaginable: that of being
made the children of God.
Like Little Children
Our adoption as children of God is the foundation of the Christian life. If we know we’re
the children of such a kind Father, we will treat Him with trust and abandon ourselves confidently
to Him. Then each and every one of our actions will be filled with meaning because we are
children playing under the gentle glance of our loving Father.
Thinking of human fatherhood helps us deepen our understanding of our heavenly Father.
A child’s first drawing, for instance, is nothing but a scribble, but in the eyes of a loving and
attentive father, it seems priceless. In the same way, even our smallest actions, undertaken for
God’s sake, are significant in His eyes because the value of our little gifts is multiplied by the
greatness of God’s love for us.
Without Fear
Some Christians think of God as an angry bully, always looking to find fault with us. These
Christians fulfill their religious duties out of fear of punishment. Some are so overwhelmed by
their efforts to improve themselves without asking God for help that they finally give up entirely
rather than maintain the effort. Others keep trying, but their efforts are motivated mostly by an

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excessive desire to “get on the right side” of God. This fear comes from thinking of God’s love as
something small and stingy, but that isn’t God’s love for us at all. It is true that the Bible speaks of
the fear of the Lord, but that fear is the kind a son feels when he has displeased his father, not the
fear of a slave for a dangerous tyrant.
Gratuitous and Unconditional
Above all, God’s love for us is gratuitous. In other words, He gives His love freely to us
even before we learn to love Him back. God doesn’t love us because we have somehow earned His
love, but because He is good and chooses to love us. He’s not expecting us to measure up and
impress Him; He’s waiting instead for us to give up our prideful self-reliance and lean trustingly on
His love. In fact, God doesn’t need our love at all. He asks us to love and trust Him because he
knows that we will be happy if we do. He asks this for our sake, not His.
God loves us unconditionally, as a parent loves an only child. We might say that God only
knows how to love only children because He loves each of us, at each moment, as if we were His
only child alive. Even if we became a hundred times better or a hundred times worse, He wouldn’t
love us any more or any less because already, right now, He loves us with all His immense
capacity to love. Even if we were to work at offending Him, we’d never succeed in making Him
stop loving us. But we can prevent His love from reaching us and helping us. He gives us the right
to reject Him, even though He knows we will never be happy if we do.
Knowing that we are loved so much confers on us an extraordinary dignity. God’s love
frees us from our own vanity. It makes us capable of doing all things for love of Him and for love
of His other beloved children, our fellow humans. We learn to do everything for Him in order to
give Him pleasure. This mutual love between us and God is a little taste of what heaven will be
like when we reach it.
In the end, God’s love seeks to be requited. Like any great Lover, God wants to belong to
us, His beloved—not for His sake, since He needs nothing, but for our sakes because He knows
this is what we need very badly. This is why Christ says, in the Book of Revelation, “Behold, I
stand at the gate, and knock. If any man shall hear My voice, and open to Me the door, I will come
in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.” God doesn’t just wait for us to find Him. He
comes and knocks at the door of our hearts.

MUTUAL FRIENDSHIP WITH CHRIST

To help us really understand God’s love for us, God became a human being Himself, as the
Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ. He realized that we couldn’t understand the love of an infinite and
invisible God, but He knew we would find the sentiments of Jesus perfectly understandable. This is
why Christ calls Himself “the way” to the Father: He is the way to learn about God’s love.
True God and True Man
The Blessed Trinity is three Persons in one God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Our human minds can’t grasp this mystery at all. We wouldn’t even know about it if Christ
Himself hadn’t revealed it to us. Twenty centuries ago, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity,
the Son, took on our human nature, making Himself a man like us “yet without sin.” Christ is thus
true God and true man. His two natures are distinct, but they subsist in one and the same Person.
Jesus Christ is not less God for having become man, nor less man for being God.
Since Christ’s two natures are neither mixed nor confused, it’s possible to treat Him as a
man without forgetting that he’s also God. And it’s fitting for us to do just that since, as a man, He
shares our feelings. This allows us to speak to Him with simplicity and familiarity, as we would
with any good friend.
In Harmony with Christ’s Sentiments
It’s easy to love Jesus Christ if we understand the feelings that inflame His heart. When we
get to know Him in the Gospels, we see that He hugs little children, loves His friends and defends
them vigorously against the scorn of others, cares about those who seem “lesser” in the eyes of
society, and helps many people even before He is asked. Christ is deeply moved when Lazarus
dies, weeping with Lazarus’s sisters even though He knows that He will shortly bring Lazarus back
to life. In a thousand small ways, Jesus considers the needs and the feelings of those around Him.
Most especially, He has tremendous compassion for those who suffer.
“Abide in me, and I in you,” Jesus says to us, and He never ceases to love us. If we really
absorb the depth of this close attention and warm affection, we will want to offer Him little gifts of
prayer during the day to cheer Him and console Him for the pain sins cause His sacred Heart—our
own sins as well as the sins of others. If we grasp the weight of His sorrow over sins, we will feel
great sorrow ourselves.
From Friendship with Christ to Contemplation
Jesus wants to establish a close friendship with each one of us. No one understands us or
loves us as He does. We might object that it’s not easy to establish a friendship with someone we
can’t see, but to chat with Jesus is not so difficult if we get to know Him. After all, we don’t see
Jesus yet, but He sees us. Our whole life plays out under His gaze.
We’ve seen how reading the Gospels allows us to get acquainted with His wisdom and
feelings. Also, He is always present in the tabernacle of our local Catholic church under the form
of the Holy Eucharist, waiting patiently there to spend time with us. And in daily conversation, we
learn to recognize His voice in the deepest regions of our soul.
It’s a great consolation to have one good friend who can wordlessly grasp all our
experiences, even our unspoken thoughts. This is what friendship with Jesus is like. In times of
anguish, having such a friend helps us to bear even the most painful burdens.

OUR REDEMPTION
Christ’s Passion (suffering), death, resurrection from the dead, ascension into heaven, and
glorification at the right hand of the Eternal Father make up the nucleus of the Catholic Faith.
These truths of Faith illuminate the deepest meaning of our dignity, our sufferings, and all of our
actions.
Pointing to our value before God, St. Paul affirms that we have been “bought with a price,”
and he also states that “Christ has redeemed us.” The word “redeem” means to pay a ransom in
exchange for a prisoner’s freedom. The price Christ paid to redeem us was immeasurable: His own
life and the shedding of His own blood, down to the last drop. Each one of us is worth all the blood
of Christ.
The Deepest Love
In His Passion, Christ manifested a clear will to suffer the unspeakable, although this was
not strictly necessary and He could have avoided it. As a careful reading of the Gospel reveals, He
could have shortened His agony and died sooner: “I lay down my life,” He said in the Gospel of St.
John, “that I may take it again. No man taketh it away from me: but I lay it down of myself, and I
have power to lay it down: and I have power to take it up again.” The Roman centurion was very

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surprised by Jesus’ death because the usual death of a man losing that much blood would be first a
loss of consciousness, then a state of shock, and finally death. But Jesus never lost consciousness
for a moment, and He gave a loud cry at the point of death, as if He had to force His soul out of His
body. This caused the centurion, who was a foreigner and a pagan, to say, “Indeed this man was
the son of God.”
Christ not only suffered exactly as long as He chose, but His suffering in the first place was
entirely His choice. He made no attempt to defend Himself from the baseless charges brought
against Him, and He mentioned twice during the course of His suffering that He could call angels
to defend Him whenever he wished. So we can only conclude that Christ wanted this suffering so
that he could show His heavenly Father how much He loved Him and show us, too, how much He
was willing to suffer to free us from our sins. Only a great love could make this possible. The more
we desire to make someone else happy, the easier it is for our love to overcome our pain.
The Christian Meaning of Suffering
The Passion also offers us a magnificent opportunity to contemplate the horror of sin. If no
one on earth had ever committed a sin, Christ wouldn’t have had to shed His blood at all. Every
new sin we commit seems even more repulsive because now we know how much suffering those
sins cost our dear Lord. In the Garden of Gethsemane, He wept over each one of our sins.
After studying the history of Christ’s Passion and death, we can understand that our sins
increase the weight of Christ’s cross, and also that we can lighten His burden if we unite ourselves
in love to His great sacrifice. For those of us who are Christians, suffering is not only a chance to
mature and build character; instead, Jesus teaches us to transform our suffering into an occasion of
great love, as He did. This led St. Paul to say to the Colossians that he rejoiced in his sufferings for
them, which “fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ.” In other words, if we
suffer patiently and offer our sacrifices to Christ out of love for Him, we unite ourselves to Christ
as He suffers for sinners on the cross.
But why does suffering have to happen in the first place? Why can’t God save us from
suffering?
According to Sacred Scripture, evil appeared in the world because of sin, and all the
suffering that happens in the world happens because of sin too. God does not desire our suffering,
but He permits it out of respect for our freedom. He allowed the sin of our first parents to happen,
and that sin brought suffering and death down on the whole world. He allows us to sin, too, even
though each sin demands its own punishment somewhere on earth in order to satisfy the justice of
God. Christ’s Passion liberates us from the worst consequence of sin: the loss of God’s friendship.
But the punishment that sin brings into the world still remains, shared randomly among the guilty
and the innocent.
Everyone suffers. It’s inescapable in this world. But the chance to show our love for Christ
and help Him save souls by joining our suffering to His opens up unsuspected horizons for us. If
we unite our sufferings—even little inconveniences and annoyances—to the sacrifice of Christ on
the cross out of love for God and other souls, then we know our suffering has a purpose. It isn’t
just going to waste.
Coredemption
The mystery of suffering, then, is tied to another great mystery: coredemption with Christ.
Only Christ, the Eternal Son, can mediate between God and man, but He wishes us to be associated
with His redemptive sacrifice. As Simon of Cyrene did in the Gospel, we can help Christ carry His
cross and participate actively in the Redemption. In this sense, St. Paul says to the Galatians, “With
Christ I am nailed to the cross. And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me.”
 Our little crosses of suffering can acquire an enormous dignity when we offer them up to
God in patience and love. Then they become transformed into the very cross of Christ. Thus, every
time the Lord asks a sacrifice of us or allows us to pass through hardship or pain, He is inviting us
to carry His cross. Once we know that our crosses help Christ as He carries His cross, our sorrow
can be turned to joy.
Understanding the pain that our sins cause Christ helps us to grow in the spirit of
reparation—the desire to repair the harm caused by our sins and the sins of others. If our mother
were ill, the happiness our visits brought her would make us want to visit her often. But if our
brothers and sisters never came to see her, we would feel the need to visit her even more often, to
try to repair the heartache their neglect was causing. This is what we learn about Christ’s own
suffering, both in His Passion and death and in our own modern time. Not a day goes by when He
doesn’t suffer outrages, indifference, and ingratitude on all sides. Christ says, in the words of the
psalmist, “I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none: and for one that
would comfort me, and I found none.” If we offer our suffering up to Christ, we can walk
alongside Him as He carries His cross, and we can grieve together with Him to soothe His broken
heart.
When we suffer patiently with Christ, we also help the souls of others—even people we
don’t know. Our suffering, patiently accepted and carried with love, joins with Christ’s suffering to
obtain the help sinners need. Of course, our sacrifices would mean nothing without Christ’s mighty
sacrifice on the cross, the sacrifice of the Eternal Son of God made man. But Christ encourages us
to join our little sacrifices to His to help others, and He listens to our prayers for them. So, with this
goal, we can offer prayers and sacrifices to Him for the sake of poor sinners, especially for sinners
in the agony of death who will be lost unless they repent of their sins and make their peace with
God.
Over 150,000 people die each day and stand before God in judgment. If we care about
Christ’s love for all of us and His mighty sacrifice on the cross for the whole human race, we will
also care about every single one of these dying sinners. We will want to pray for them so that they
can be prepared by grace to humble themselves before their Creator and ask for forgiveness.
The Holy Mass
Christ suffered and died on the cross only once to redeem us. This is a real event that
occurred in our history. But through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, this event is renewed again
and again in an unbloody manner. In God’s eternal sight, the sacrifice of Calvary is always
happening; at the holy Mass, the words and actions of the priest, that “other Christ,” make this
sacrifice happen again in our own time-bound world. At Mass, we step out of time and into
eternity, where Christ once again shows His wounds to His Eternal Father and begs for salvation
for poor sinners.
The holy sacrifice of the Mass has an infinite value, but each time it is celebrated, it is
offered to help different people. We too, by our active cooperation at Mass, can beg for graces for
sinners who are alive and sinners who are dead and in the cleansing fires of Purgatory. These holy
souls have been saved from hell, but they still must pay their debt to the justice of God and perform
penance for their sins. They are helpless, but we can help them by praying for them at Mass to pay
some or all of their debt.
If we unite ourselves to Christ’s redemptive sacrifice in the Mass, we participate in the
most remarkable undertaking in the history of humanity. We can place all of our daily actions—
even the most ordinary—on the altar with the bread and wine which the priest will transform into
the living body and blood, soul and Divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then God, looking down on
His beloved Son’s sacrifice from heaven, takes our little gifts of effort and suffering and turns them

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into a kind of heavenly gold to help poor sinners everywhere, on earth and in Purgatory—even us
poor sinners. We help carry Christ’s cross, contribute to the consolation of God the Father for the
horrible offense of sin, and beg for the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit to come into the
world to save poor sinners and bring them to repentance.
 6. Merciful Love
A deep love requires us to look past ourselves, forget our own needs, and focus on the
needs of others. We succeed in this to the degree that we overcome self-centeredness and learn to
pay attention to our loved ones.
God’s love helps us learn to deepen our own love. Christ’s suffering encourages us to join
our little and big sufferings to His, and God’s merciful love for us helps us to forgive and accept
our own weak, flawed nature without shame since, flaws and all, we are still His own beloved
children. This perspective helps us understand better how our sins pain our loving Father—but also
helps us understand His immense joy when we return to Him, contrite and trusting. We promise to
amend our lives, and every time we don’t manage to do so, we repent and return to the house of
our Father again, knowing that He is ready once more to rejoice that His dear child was lost but
now is found.
We should be very grateful for the sacrament of penance, of confession. The tenderness of
the father in the parable, running to his prodigal son and kissing him, is the tenderness with which
our loving Father comes to us in confession. What’s more, God doesn’t offer us this glad
forgiveness only once. If we’re truly sorry, He forgives us for the same fault with the same joy
over and over again. This is why the sacrament of confession brings such peace to our souls. Every
time we hear the priest give us absolution, we can exclaim, in the words of the Easter liturgy: Felix
culpa (Happy fault)!

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE MERCIFUL?

The Bible speaks of God as compassionate and merciful over three hundred times. But
what are compassion and mercy? Mercy means not only kindness but also a fondness for the
neediest of people and a heartfelt identification with them. We see this quality in loving mothers,
who often have a special affection for their weakest, most worrisome child. This is how God loves
us. We should go to confession with the same attitude we would have if we were asking
forgiveness from a good mother who has suffered for us.
Every heart that has compassion on another’s wretchedness is a generous heart: it feels that
wretchedness as if it were its own and wants to help in any way possible. “Do you not know,”
asked St. Augustine, “that to have mercy means to make oneself wretched, to feel the pain of the
other?”1 The term misericordia comes from miseria (“misery”) and cor (“heart”). As St. Thomas
Aquinas explains, “A person is said to be merciful as being, so to speak, sorrowful at heart
[miserum cor]; being affected with sorrow at the misery of another as though it were his own.
Hence it follows that he endeavors to dispel the misery of this other.”2
Our humble repentance calls down the mercy of God, and His generosity knows no bounds.
God’s infinite power is at the service of His mercy. Knowing that He has compassion on our
wretchedness helps us to accept that wretchedness ourselves.
When we sin, we may feel real anger and annoyance with ourselves. Then we might make
the mistake of projecting our own angry feelings onto God. We don’t dare look Christ in the eye,
imagining that He is staring at us with a severe expression. We forget that He never distances
Himself from us, even though we may try to avoid Him. This is why it’s good for us to remember
the merciful glance Christ gave St. Peter after St. Peter had three times denied even knowing Him.
Christ’s look was a mixture of tender compassion and loving reproach; when St. Peter saw it, “he
went out and wept bitterly” with sorrow for the evil he had done. And the next time St. Peter saw
his risen Lord, Christ didn’t even mention his betrayal. All was already forgiven.

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 “Learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your
souls,” Jesus tells us in St. Matthew’s Gospel. We should often say to Him, “Most sacred and
merciful heart of Jesus, grant me peace!”
Our neighbor needs our mercy, too, just as we need God’s mercy. Christ’s love for His
eternal Father’s justice led Him to absolute perfection in His duties. But at the same time, Christ
was deeply merciful to weak sinners and felt great compassion for their misery. If we imitate Him,
we will learn to combine a demanding approach toward ourselves with a compassionate approach
toward others. In this way, we will grow in maturity and in God’s love.

JUSTICE AND MERCY

There is no contradiction between divine justice and divine mercy. Not only are they not
opposed, each requires the other. St. Thérèse stated that when the day came for her to stand before
God, she would take refuge not in His mercy but in His justice since He would not demand
anything of her that would surpass the abilities of a weak little girl. She concluded, “I expect as
much from God’s justice as from His mercy.” 3
The kindliness of God’s mercy does not take away the fact that His justice is exact. He is a
loving Father to us when we turn to Him in sincere repentance, but He will not let us abuse His
divine goodness with carelessness and lack of respect. Focusing only on God’s justice can
disfigure His goodness and lead us to discouragement. But focusing only on this mercy can foster
irresponsibility and presumption.
God wants us to save our souls because only then can we be happy with Him in heaven.
But this union requires that we love Him. Only those who do their best to return God’s love can
join Him in heaven. Jesus made this very clear in His repeated calls for conversion and repentance:
“Not every one that saith to Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven: but he that
doth the will of My Father Who is in heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
After all, it would be very unjust if God did not reward good actions or if He failed to
punish evil actions. If we trust in God’s mercy without making an effort to improve our lives and
return His love, that isn’t love for God at all, and heaven is the home of souls who love Him. But
this doesn’t mean we should cower in fear of our loving Father. God is not a capricious, evil tyrant
who wants to catch us off-guard.
The saints teach us that the best way to grow in God’s love is to detest our sins because
they are what pulls us away from our heavenly Father. Just because God forgives us when we
repent doesn’t mean He doesn’t take our sins seriously: Christ carried our sins all the way to His
death on the cross. Christ’s death overcame the evil of our sins, but only those of us willing to
admit our guilt humbly and try harder to avoid sin will obtain the benefit of Christ’s death.
If we have ever committed a truly horrible sin—a sin with consequences that cannot be
repaired afterward no matter how much we might try—we can only succeed in forgiving ourselves
if we understand the depth of God’s mercy and love. Our own conscience stands in horror against
us. The only remedy is God’s mercy, which we must beg for since we have no right to demand it.
Coming before the tribunal of mercy in the sacrament of confession, we accept our guilt. Aware
that we can’t undo the evil we have done, we turn to Jesus to be our advocate. In the confessional,
we ask Jesus to beg pardon for us from His heavenly Father and remind His Father that He died on
the cross for that very sin.
The result is astonishing. God forgives us as readily as the loving father forgave his
prodigal son. Moreover, He shares with us His great joy at our repentance. We know this from
Christ’s own words in the Gospel of St. Luke: “I say to you, that even so there shall be joy in
heaven upon one sinner that doth penance, more than upon ninety-nine just who need not
penance. ... There shall be joy before the angels of God upon one sinner doing penance.”

WRETCHEDNESS AND GREATNESS

If we repent, ask God’s forgiveness, and try to change for the better, the reality of our
wretchedness can no longer torment us. We know that we are loved as children of God, and even
our worst moments of evil cannot destroy that love as long as we confess those sins humbly and do
our best to change for our loving Father’s sake. Then we understand that we can be wretchedly
worthless in our own eyes but enormously precious in the eyes of God. Our faults and flaws can no
longer disturb our peace of mind.
The saints know this. They know how to accept both their wretchedness and greatness. “I
am not a saint,” said St. Thérèse; “I am a very little soul whom the good God has covered in graces
…”4
The saints are especially aware of the dignity of being loved by God. Understanding their
weakness, they lean on God and are able to take on the most daring projects. St. Paul, in his epistle
to the Philippians, said, “For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, to be content therewith. I
know both how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. ... I can do all these things in Him
Who strengtheneth me.” St. Paul’s great sense of peace came from knowing that God’s power is
made perfect in our weakness, as he himself told the Corinthians. We do not need to be powerful
and perfect ourselves; we just need to lean on God’s power and perfection.

TAKING PRIDE IN OUR OWN FRAILTY

Are these thoughts enough to reconcile us fully to ourselves? Yes and no. For some, they
will be sufficient, but others—especially those of us afflicted with low self-esteem—will need to
dig deeper into the effects of God’s merciful love. What we’ve learned so far can help us to accept
ourselves, but it won’t be enough to help us love ourselves with all our flaws so much that we
wouldn’t change places with anybody.
A positive view of our flaws makes it much easier for us to benefit from God’s merciful
love. We have said that we’re like a car that needs gas to function: to preserve our mental health,
we need to optimize our “mileage.” Those of us suffering from mental imbalances tend to have a
tank that’s small and “leaky.” Medical remedies are very important for us, but they may not go far
enough: prescribing drugs to someone with chronic low self-esteem can be like pouring gasoline
into a leaky tank. We need to learn to love ourselves—truly love ourselves as God loves us—in
order to heal our low self-esteem.
But this isn’t just a problem for those with low self-esteem. To some extent, we all must
solve this same basic problem. Our self-esteem won’t really be robust until we understand the true
reasons for being content with ourselves just as we are. We think that God loves us despite our
defects. But God loves us, not despite our flaws, but because of them, and even thanks to them.
God’s merciful love is most attracted to us by the ways we need Him most. It is our littleness that
attracts His greatness.
St. Thérèse understood clearly how her littleness brought down God’s mercy, so she turned
every small opportunity into a way to please God through her littleness. Nothing was too
insignificant for this “Saint of the Little Way.” As she wrote in a letter:
I have seen by experience, when I feel nothing, when I am incapable of praying and
practicing any virtue, that this is the time to seek little opportunities, little nothings

37
 which please Jesus more than the dominion of the whole world and even more than
martyrdom borne generously. For example, a smile, a kindly word, when I feel like
keeping silent or showing an annoyed expression, and so on. Do you understand? It
isn’t to work on my crown, to gain merits: it’s to please Jesus …5
We can apply St. Thérèse’s “Little Way” to our own daily struggle. For example, the effort
to smile in adversity: If we examine our conscience at day’s end and find that we have managed to
smile like this only two times out of ten, we can first offer God these two victories done for love of
Him and then humbly ask Him to love us in our eight defeats. In this mutual relationship of love,
both He and we can end the day with two joys, plus eight more. Then the sight of our flaws and
littleness won’t hurt our pride anymore. We can throw ourselves into God’s arms and let His
greatness take care of everything.
As St. Vincent de Paul explains, “Only when we renounce self-seeking completely, when
we fling ourselves, truly convinced of our nothingness, upon God’s heart, and when we abandon
ourselves without reserve to His will, only then will we see that the Lord has long been standing at
our door, to bring us His peace, His light, His consolations.”6
This doesn’t mean that we allow ourselves to become lax and careless about our defects. If
they lead us to commit even small sins, we will fight them because those sins offend our loving
Father, Whom we love. God doesn’t love our littleness because we commit sins; He loves our
littleness when we struggle not to commit sins—but fail, and then turn to Him for help and
reassurance. If we didn’t try to do the right thing, there would be no struggle to attract His mercy.
We might think that if the Lord is so delighted to forgive us, He doesn’t care whether we
sin or not. But that isn’t true! He cares about our efforts, even if we fail many times. As St. Thérèse
says, “One must fight! Fight to the end! Even with no hope of victory. Even in total defeat. To the
death! Combat without ceasefire! Even with no hope of winning the battle. What does success
matter?”7 Because God doesn’t expect us to succeed. Like any loving Father, He only expects us to
try our best, and it is those efforts from us that win His heart completely.
In the end, it is the same love for God that leads us to offer Him generous sacrifices and
that allows ourselves to be loved by Him even when we fail. We might compare this to a hug.
Hugging and being hugged unite in a single gesture: to receive is to give. The same thing happens
in our love for God. We embrace Him each time we offer Him a victory over a temptation or a
fault, and we allow ourselves to be embraced when He forgives us or helps us. The joy, in both
cases, is mutual.
Pride demands nothing but victories, but God is easier to please than our own pride. God
only expects us to allow ourselves to be loved in our failures and to show our love in a sincere
effort to win victories. Over time, this love can heal those wounds in us caused by pride.
To understand how this healing love works, imagine that we’re acutely sensitive about
some defect that has tormented us since childhood: the size of our ears or shyness about public
speaking, for example. It may even have become a serious obstacle to forming happy relationships.
But if someone we love loves us back, then we can realize that we have given the defect an
exaggerated importance in our lives. We might even be able to laugh about it. Love doesn’t alter
the reality, but what seemed like a crushing humiliation can become completely insignificant.
Each of us can place before God a whole series of shortcomings like this: weaknesses,
imperfections, limitations, wounds from the past, ineptitude, incompetence, wretchedness,
littleness… but seeing His Sacred Heart burning for love of us and seeing Him reaching down to
shelter us in our littleness can allow us to put these shortcomings in their place. They don’t go
away, but they cease to cause us pain.
SPIRITUAL CHILDHOOD
St. Thérèse called her “Little Way” the way of spiritual childhood. She taught that God
especially loves those weak souls who persevere in their efforts to love Him but who acknowledge
their weakness before Him. Why would He love these souls best? Because He can gain great
victories through them, and they will be grateful rather than proud. St. Paul taught this, too, in his
first epistle to the Corinthians: “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may
confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the
strong.” St. Paul counted himself among those weak things when he said to the Corinthians,
“Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”
Thanks to our own infirmities, we can recognize God’s power working through us
whenever He helps us to succeed. Then, rather than be vain about our success and take all the
credit ourselves, we can be grateful and love our loving Father even more.
It’s good, then, for us to think of ourselves as little children who aren’t shocked or surprised
at their own weakness. Children are used to accepting help, and God will help us to conduct
ourselves with fortitude as long as we remain in this humility that attracts His gifts. The “child” is
the one to whom God can always give something; it’s the “adult” who begins to think that he can
manage things by himself. St. Thérèse tells us that she had a very insecure personality, but when
she discovered the great advantage of her own weakness to win God’s loving heart, then her spirit,
freed from its tormenting insecurities, was finally able to soar.
Spiritual childhood can color our whole relationship with our Father God; it can lead us to
imitate the simple prayer of children and the limitless confidence they have in their parents. As St.
Thérèse insisted, “To be little … is to not be discouraged by one’s own failings. Little children fall
frequently. But they’re too little to hurt themselves when they do.”8
The way of spiritual childhood protects us against a self-righteous mindset. It helps us to
understand that holiness consists in a perfection of love, not in titanic achievements. When we start
taking ourselves too seriously, pride makes us feel uncomfortable about approaching our loving
Father, and spiritual childhood seems silly. But that very feeling of discomfort is an important clue
that it’s time to run like little children to our Father’s merciful arms again and let ourselves be
filled with His joy.

4. Thérèse of Lisieux, in M. van der

1. Augustine, De moribus 1, 28, 56.
2. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 21,
a.llamamiento al amor, C. Cat. Salesiana,
Madrid
3. Thérèse of Lisieux, letter of May 9, 1897
to P. Roulland in Divine Intimacy, Vol. 3,
by Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, no. 250
(“The Lord is Just”) (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1987).
Meersch, Santa Teresita (Madrid:
Palabra, 1992), p. 140.
5. Thérèse of Lisieux, quoted in Manglano,
Orar con Teresa de Lisieux, p. 61.
6. W. Hünermann, El Padre de los pobres.
Vida de San Vincente de Paúl (Madrid:
Palabra, 1995), p. 209.
7. Thérèse of Lisieux, in Van der Meersch,
Santa Teresita, pp. 133.
8. Thérèse of Lisieux, in Van der Meersch,
Santa Teresita, pp. 134-135.

39
Epilogue
We’ve addressed all sorts of problems in this book, from insecurity and excessive
sensitivity to apathy and even abuse. The good news is that the answer to them all is the love of
God. God’s love makes the harsh rule of our own pride clear to us, and we realize that we no
longer need to act from vanity. As we learn to return our loving Father’s love, we work to improve
ourselves but also learn to accept ourselves when we fail. We discover a great interior freedom.
The possessiveness that formerly grew out of our insecurity and fear of rejection vanishes,
and we lose our fear of loving others. The affection we receive in return is gratifying, but we no
longer crave it at all costs because in God’s love we already have the only affection that can truly
satisfy our restless hearts. This is a great discovery for us, and it increases our self-esteem and
inner peace.
A growing awareness of God’s love transforms our attitude toward Him. We are no longer
motivated by the fear of “getting in trouble” with God, and we can enjoy a close and mutual
friendship with Him that grows deeper every day. Our deficiencies and flaws, which used to hurt
our pride so much, are now a cause for relief and humility because we know that God loves us
most of all because of our flaws. Every pain or aggravation we experience brings us to our
suffering Savior so that we can help Him carry His cross, and every moment of wounded pride or
weakness or sin brings us back to His loving arms like a prodigal son. Every trouble we undergo
and offer to our loving God turns into a reason for joy.
Thanks to God’s merciful love, humiliations cease to torment us. Nothing and no one can
humiliate us when we remember that we are the beloved children of God. Once we exchange
human respect and admiration for Our heavenly Father’s love, all that matters is whether others
will allow themselves to be loved or not. If they do, we can form a happy relationship with them; if
not, we can let them go their own way. We live at peace with ourselves, with God, and with other
people.
So let’s not delay. We already know how unhappy our relationship with our own pride has
made us. Let’s trade that cruel master for a kind and loving Father. He made us, and He knows us
better than we know ourselves. If we turn to Him in our littleness, He will turn to us in His
greatness. He will never be the one to send us away.
Christ says, “I stand at the gate and knock.” How long will we keep Him waiting?