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I’m
terrified of hell. I grew up terrified of hell and because of the abusive
situation and growing up feeling like I was evil, I was certain I was headed
for hell. Then I grew up and stopped believing in hell. I stopped believing
because the whole thing just doesn’t seem fair, considering all the
child abuse in the world. . . .
Then I found your website and everything makes sense to me. Because what
you say makes sense based on my own experience of myself, I now believe that
you must know what you’re talking about. . . .
This puts me in a state of fear: fear that I’ll go to hell if I don’t
follow these rules, fear that if I do follow the rules and refrain from sex
my marriage will suffer severly (my husband would not tolerate no sex), fear
that if I do keep getting pregnant I’ll be even more overwhelmed than
I am now. And I fear how all of this will affect the kids I do have.
The fear I’m feeling over this is intense. . . . I’m terrified
of hell and I’m terrified of having more kids and I’m terrified
of my husband being unhappy.
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 o matter how much you
worry about going to hell,
it won’t prevent you from going to hell. Souls end up in hell because
they reject God’s love and mercy, and,
in so doing, they fail to repent their
sins. Those who end up in hell, then, have no one
to blame but themselves for rejecting God’s mercy.
Worrying about what might
happen will not do anything to change it. Furthermore, the act of worrying
about the unknown is itself a rejection of God’s merciful
providence.
So try considering a different
strategy. Instead of fearing hell, which is characterized by selfishness and
hatred, think of its
opposite—love—and let love
motivate you to change your behavior.
Love
God is love.
But only Christ can tell us what
love really requires of us. And only Christ can tell us what offends love.
And He did tell us, as is recorded in the Scriptures and through the
Tradition of the Catholic Church. Christianity
therefore teaches us to purify ourselves of whatever offends love because no
soul committed to offending love can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Because God is love, He wants us
to seek purification. God is not like an arrogant emperor who demands adoration
and praise from everyone around him to satisfy his
inflated ego. Souls who love God don’t serve Him because He demands their
obedience like an irrational parent; souls who love God love Him in love
for the sake of love, and, through His grace, they become
love.
Sexual Activity
is Not Love
Now, when speaking about love,
we have to become very clear about something very important:
sexual activity is not love. Those who pursue sexual
pleasure apart from its reproductive meaning—that is, those who pursue
erotic pleasure to gain someone’s attention, to avoid feeling abandoned,
or just to feel good about
themselves—reject love. Erotic pleasure pursued for the mere
sake of your own emotional needs is lust; that’s a rejection of love
and a grave sin.
Furthermore,
children conceived in lust will be
emotionally and spiritually crippled throughout their lives. Anyone who
inflicts such a burden on a child has rejected love. Thus it’s an act of
love to refuse to cooperate in any act that rejects love and willingly inflicts
grave injury on a child.
Those who love God, despite the
malevolent social consequences, declare their desire for heaven. But those who
reject love have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. Their only place is
hell, because hell, with all its selfishness and
hatred, is the place of those who reject love.
Sexual Abuse
in Childhood
Those who have been
sexually
abused in childhood almost invariably get caught up in the illusions
of sexuality. In order to survive, abused children
will learn to use sexuality as a way to appease others, to gain their attention, and
to avoid being abandoned—or killed. These illusions,
which keep children alive in childhood, will persist unchanged, as
unconscious
defenses, into adulthood unless they are brought to conscious awareness and
healed. Thus you, too, can be healed from the abuse inflicted on you in the past.
Healing: Imperfect
and Perfect
If it’s an option for you,
psychotherapy can help your healing from abuse and fear. But unless the treatment is
with a Catholic psychotherapist, most likely
it will be imperfect, because most
psychotherapists are themselves still carrying
their own illusions about sexuality. Through Catholic psychotherapy you can
face the emotional pain you have kept hidden most of your life, and you can
learn emotional
honesty,
but if your psychotherapist has not overcome his or her own illusions about
sexuality, you will remain stuck in your illusions. It will be like the blind
leading the blind.
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It would be a
disaster if anyone became a psychotherapist without having first overcome
his or her illusions about sexuality. Without knowing what love really is,
a psychotherapist cannot teach clients to love. And the psychotherapist will
be held responsible by Christ for leading those clients astray, because not
teaching others to love is a defilement of love. |
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Perfect
healing can occur through genuine surrender to
Christ in love. When you surrender your needs for
attention, surrender your fear of abandonment, and
surrender your desire to satisfy your ego through bodily pleasure, you will
have died to yourself. Having overcome the
selfishness of your ego, you will be capable of growing in love.
The cure for Terror:
Love
Therefore, your immediate need is
to learn love. Dedicate your life and prayer to loving God, not to fearing
hell.
Commit yourself to living a
chaste and holy life
in love. Then you can trust in Christ to take care of you and protect you.
Then you won’t have to worry about hell—at least, not for yourself.
But you will have to pray constantly for all the other souls in danger of
hell—including your husband who demands your sexual
service—because they still cling to their childhood illusions, and,
in so doing, commit themselves to offending love.
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If, after you
explain these things to your husband, he continues to place his desire for
bodily pleasure above the welfare of his soul, the welfare of your
children’s souls, and the welfare of your soul, then he has openly renounced
his baptismal vows for the sake of
lust. His state of
spiritual blindness and
mortal sin give you full justification to distance
yourself from him physically, to protect your own soul.
And if he tries
to claim that you have forced him to seek relief elsewhere, well, that’s
just a lot of horsefeathers. That’s victim talk;
it has nothing to do with Christianity, and it’s further evidence of
the depth to which he has sunk into spiritual blindness. |
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Pray earnestly, then, for your
husband, your children, and yourself. Remember Christ’s own words, repeated
throughout the Gospels: Do not be
afraid.
Recommended
Reading
A treasure of a resource for psychological and spiritual healing. Information
gathered from my websites (including this webpage) is now available at your fingertips
in book form.
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Healing by Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D. explains how psychological
defenses help to protect us from emotional injury. But if you cling to the
defense mechanisms that were created in your childhood and carry them on
into adulthood—as most everyone does unconsciously— your quest for spiritual
healing will be thwarted by overwhelming resentments and conflicts. Still, God
has been trying to show you that there is more to life than resentment and
conflict, something so beautiful and desirable that only one thing can resist its
pull: hate So now, and in every moment until you die, you will have a profound choice
between your enslavement to old defenses and the beauty of God. That decision has to
come from you. You will go where you desire.
Ordering
Information |
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