The Deacon

As a psychotherapist, I discovered that many of my patients had what I would now call an unhealthy memory. These patients remembered traumatic events from their developmental years, that is, before their prefrontal cortex had fully matured, which happens at about age 25. These trauma memories were intrusive, destabilizing, confusing and seemingly meaningless to them. A deep healing was required to restore them to stability, understanding and freedom. Healing occurred slowly as they re-experienced the trauma memories. I needed to accompany them as they did so. My presence and understanding helped them to safely discover meaning in their pain and understand their ability to create a healthier memory. Indeed, they could re-create the past; they had power over it.

Now, as a spiritual director, I am coming to know the importance of a healthy memory in the spiritual life. So much of this I owe to the writings of two Carmelites, St. John of the Cross and Father Wilfrid Stinissen. St. John wrote in “Ascent of Mount Carmel” that the devil produces all his evils in the soul through the ideas and discursive acts of the memory. St. John thought that all of the difficult, heavy and burdensome memories we carry around with us can be transformed and transfigured into positive memories filled with light and hope when we begin to remember that God loved us in them. God’s love meets us in everything, even in the most difficult moments of our lives. We cannot escape God’s presence or his love in the most painful events of our lives, nor in the memories of those events that we carry within us. It is in those memories, and in those wounds, that we can find our freedom, for in them we find God’s love concretized, incarnated in our own flesh.

This is very difficult for us to accept when trauma and sin are real. The incarnation of God’s love on the cross has always been difficult to accept by so many. Our wounds are Jesus’ wounds. Our pain is Jesus’ pain. Our memory can become Jesus’ memory. Just as in psychotherapy an unhealthy memory sees pain as a victory of the perpetrator of that pain, so, too, in spiritual direction an unhealthy memory sees the crosses of life as meaningless burdens needing fixing before love can be found. Just as in psychotherapy a healthy memory sees in the trauma of life a beginning of new stability, understanding and strength, so, too, in spiritual direction a healthy memory sees wounds as the very places where God’s love was most evidently given.

Father Stinissen reminds us that a healthy memory does not mean that we forget the difficult things and remember only the happy events. Most assuredly, our memories become healthy only when they begin to coincide with God’s memory, when we begin to see with his eyes, feel with his heart and understand as he understands our past. We must begin to fathom this reality: Our past is more his than ours. In our wounds we find God’s incarnate love.

Brothers, I again implore you to seek out a competent spiritual director who will accompany you through all this. May God bless you!

DEACON ROBERT T. YERHOT, MSW, is the Director of the Diaconate for the Diocese of Winona-Rochester. He is a core-group member of the Institute for Diaconal Renewal in Steubenville, Ohio. A spiritual director for clergy, he has published articles on diaconal spirituality.