A Good Friday Confession (I Don’t Feel Anything)

There has been a truth that I have avoided, denied and suppressed my whole Catholic life until recently – I feel most distant from God during Holy Week, and especially on Good Friday. This is my sharing as a self-professed “recovering pharisee”.

I have always been concerned about what I should understand and believe about my faith. I wanted to believe the RIGHT THING, I wanted to understand the RIGHT THING. I prided myself in learning what the “right thing” is supposed to be because I wanted to be Catholic in the RIGHT WAY – in a way that could not be faulted so that I would be SAFE.

I prided myself in learning what the “right thing” is supposed to be because I wanted to be Catholic in the RIGHT WAY – in a way that could not be faulted so that I would be SAFE.

That tenuous sense of security – that I would be safe with God if I could do everything right – was measured by how I believed others skilled in teaching others what “the RIGHT WAY” of being Catholic was would evaluate me. If I could be good enough in my practice of faith for the leaders and teachers of the Church, perhaps that would mean I would be good enough for God.

What I described in the preceding paragraph was never what I was consciously aware of – because intellectually I KNEW that God loves me unconditionally and that I did not have to earn his love. I knew what I was supposed to believe. I knew what the RIGHT belief was. And consciously, I willed myself to believe this truth. But my heart and my body continued to live in insecurity and fear – so I used my intellect and understanding to suppress their pleas for help.

I knew what the RIGHT belief was. And consciously, I willed myself to believe this truth. But my heart and my body continued to live in insecurity and fear.

In my heart I always had a problem with rejoicing that God so loved the world that he sent his son to pay for our sins so that we could be reconciled with him. My intellect could grasp the concept, my will chose to assent to it in belief because that was the right thing to do – but for most of my life as a Catholic, I could never draw near to God the Father in trust or love. Because – how can I trust a Father who would send his son deliberately to suffer and die in order to save others – even if it was to save me?

But I never even allowed myself to articulate this question because I felt that it was wrong to have this question. If this was a tenet of my faith, and I was to be counted as one of Christ’s disciples, then surely I must accept it without question. So I didn’t question it. I avoided my doubt. I avoided God the Father. I could draw near to Jesus and surely that would be sufficient?

If this was a tenet of my faith, surely I must accept it without question. So I didn’t question it. I avoided my doubt. I avoided God the Father.

Only it wasn’t sufficient. Because Jesus’ whole mission is to draw me to the Father. He wanted to open my eyes to the Father’s love. He wanted me to experience the truth of how much the Father loved ME. Jesus wanted me to trust the Father as much as he did. That was why he came – to reveal to the world and to me the true face of the Father’s mercy and love.

And Jesus succeeded with this mission of convincing me about the Father. It didn’t happen because I studied more theology or became more diligent in prayer. It happened because I began to learn how to let God love me as a whole person – body, mind, heart and soul. It happened because I began to let God reveal to me the truth of my interior life and let him heal me.

Jesus’ whole mission is to draw me to the Father. He wanted to open my eyes to the Father’s love. He wanted me to experience the truth of how much the Father loved ME.

To live what I believe is infinitely more challenging than to just make sure I knew what to believe because God revealed to me how fragmented and wounded I am in myself. He showed me that my lack of capacity to receive and give love was not due to an inability to understand intellectually, or an inability to will myself into some kind of brute submission to what I believe was right, but because to love requires ALL OF ME – it needs my heart, my body and my soul as well as my mind.

The two greatest commandments according to Jesus were all about LOVE – they were not about understanding or even belief. They were about loving God and loving our neighbour as we love our self. And LOVE requires not only freedom, but also trust in the first love of God for me. So it wasn’t a small wrinkle that I had problem trusting God the Father – it was an existential problem.

LOVE requires not only freedom, but also trust in the first love of God for me. So it wasn’t a small wrinkle that I had problem trusting God the Father – it was an existential problem.

Over the years, my relationship with God the Father healed and I have come to experience a deep embodied trust in Him in a way I never thought was possible. I have come to know Jesus anew and the Holy Spirit too – and now I know the Trinitarian God not just intellectually and experientially but also affectively – I have begun to know what it means to be attuned to God attuning to me, loving me – so that I can attune to myself.

And so it was only recently that I have built up deep enough trust in God, and in my love for him, for me to admit simply and honestly that I have always dissociated (numb out, feel nothing, go out of my body) during Holy Week. For the most part, my experiences of the liturgy of Holy Week consisted in my mind telling me what I’m supposed to think/feel, the rest of me being numb, and then my mind thinking that there must be something very wrong with me that I don’t feel anything about Christ’s sacrifice.

And so it was only recently that I have built up deep enough trust in God, and in my love for him, for me to admit simply and honestly that I have always dissociated (numb out, feel nothing, go out of my body) during Holy Week.

It is a great sadness for me that on what is the holiest week of the year for my faith, I feel the most disconnected with God and with myself. But it is with deep gratitude that I write this blog post because I am no longer ashamed of it, nor am I worried about it. I am neither ashamed nor worried about it because my embodied trust in the Trinitarian God is now greater than my shame.

Over the last several years I have been learning about and healing from complex trauma (if this is a new term, google it!). I have gone through enough of this process that I intuited that my dissociation (which is an automatic protective mechanism) has something to do with trauma as well. Trauma’s presence in our body is often marked by a kind of “frozen layer” that is impenetrable where neither deep emotion nor genuine understanding can reach.

Trauma’s presence in our body is often marked by a kind of “frozen layer” that is impenetrable where neither deep emotion nor genuine understanding can reach.

In my most recent session with my therapist I shared about this dissociation and she suggested that we begin to look at the possibility of religious/spiritual trauma in my life in our next few sessions. Perhaps in the future I may share something about what I have discovered – when I have healed more. But for now I just wanted to share this “confession” because I know for a fact that I am not the only one who suffers from shame about my reaction (or lack of it) to Christ’s suffering and death on Good Friday.

If you also happen to struggle secretly with your inability to come close to God during Holy Week, I am praying for you! I just want to say that each of us have our unique stories and reasons why we struggle even if we don’t know what they are (yet). May the presence and love of God grow larger and more real in your life too, until you know that you can look at anything at all within you without shame because God who is Perfect Love stands with you in victory over sin and death!

May the Paschal Mystery that we celebrate this triduum come to life in us – and may we be unafraid of the joyful mess it makes!