My third and final installment of “What Must I Do to Be Saved” will come next week. As we are only a few days from the month of June, here is an earlier Ad Rem that might make for timely reading: “On Loving and Hating in June: the Sacred Heart vs. Depraved ‘Pride.’” Below are my thoughts on the subject of unworthiness, in reply to a question I was recently asked. God bless and Mary keep you! —BAM
WHILE engaged in my Sunday morning routine before High Mass in mid-May, someone handed me a question, hoping that I could include it in that day’s Q&A session. On a small piece of paper was handwritten, “Is it possible to take the ‘unworthiness’ thing too far in the spiritual life?” After thinking for a bit, I came up with a negative answer to the question, but there is too much involved in this issue to leave it just at a simple “No.”
If one were to read passages from good books on the interior life in isolation, especially books from the Counter-reformation era, one could walk away with a lopsided notion of one’s own unworthiness that works to the detriment of the spiritual life. For instance, Saint Louis Marie de Montfort encourages us, during the week of self-knowledge that forms part of his thirty-three-day preparation for Total Consecration, to look at ourselves “as nothing but snails, slugs, toads, swine, snakes, and goats.”
Now, if one were to isolate that passage from the works of the great French Marian Apostle and build a spirituality around it alone — as some Protestants form a sect based upon a single verse from the Bible (e.g., snake-handling Pentecostals in Appalachia from Mark 16:18) — one would have a spiritual starvation diet, and a toxic one at that. Thankfully, Saint Louis Marie himself does not leave it there — even if meditations on our lowliness, pondering especially what we have made ourselves by sin, have an important place in a solid spiritual life.
Today, we live in a time of heightened mental illness in society at large. The anti-human death cult has made many lose their grip of what man is as a being created in the image and likeness of God. The materialism of the Enlightenment has climaxed in an atmosphere in which man has made himself god and thinks he can remake himself in any number of unnatural ways. Ironically but predictably, the end result of this monstrous dethroning of God has not been the enthroning of man, but the denaturing and degrading of man. As a result we are, as a society, mentally ill. And, generally speaking, the first remedy one gives a mentally ill man is not to tell him how unworthy he is. Children that have been brought up in abusive homes have often been made to feel entirely unloved. Telling them how unworthy they are will likely have the effect of feeding into the noxious self-loathing that has been imposed upon them by abuse.
By the way, when I speak of mental illness, I am not, in principle, exculpating anyone from sin; for, in addition to trauma, sin, which darkens the intellect and weakens the will, also makes us mentally ill. Either way, people thus afflicted need pity, compassion, correction, and love — even if that later is sometimes in the form of “tough love.”
When I say that “the ‘unworthiness’ thing” cannot be taken too far, but it can be misdirected or isolated from necessary countervailing thoughts, convictions, and virtues, what I mean is that our unworthiness is a fact that cannot be ignored or disregarded; we are, after all, not worthy to be elevated by divine grace into being a child of God and Mary, a brother or sister to Jesus Christ. To say that we are worthy of that gratuitous elevation is actually heresy (Pelagianism).
What are those “countervailing thoughts, convictions, and virtues” that must be integrated, along with a genuine humility, into a solid spiritual life?
For starters, we should list the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. By praying to God the beautiful “acts” of those virtues we all learned from our catechism, we will get at the root of the supernatural operations that God infused into us at Baptism. By acknowledging that Sanctifying Grace actually beautifies the soul (making it “graceful”), we reckon with a dogmatic truth of our religion that is unassailable. When we admit that we were born in Original Sin and were not worthy of that elevation, we state a similarly undeniable teaching of our Faith. Acknowledging that mortal sin shatters that divine elevation and that venial sin weakens it is also a frank embrace of reality — and the spiritual life cannot be solid if it is not firmly based upon reality.
We also must believe that Sanctifying Grace gives us worth in God’s sight, making us “heirs indeed of God, and joint heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17).
What else helps to balance the necessary consideration of our own unworthiness?
Gratitude. To be truly thankful for divine gifts freely given and to live out that gratitude is the stuff of saints. Think of the Gospel episode of the ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19). One can hear the Sacred Heart ache when Our Lord says of the one man who bothered to thank Him, a Samaritan, “Were not ten made clean? and where are the nine? There is no one found to return and give glory to God, but this stranger.” This man, by contrast, “fell on his face before [Jesus’] feet, giving thanks.”
Saint Felix of Cantalice, the Capuchin lay brother, was so habituated to thanking God that he was called, “Brother Deo Gratias”! While I have no right to canonize my mentor, Brother Francis showed us by word and example the importance of gratitude, which I would say he practiced heroically.
Another necessary balance is confidence in God. Saul of Tarsus was of the same tribe of Benjamin that produced King Saul, who was so tall that, “from his shoulders and upward he appeared above all the people” (I Kings 9:2). As a sign of his self-confessed lowliness, the Christian Benjaminite changed his name from Saul to Paulos — meaning “little” or “small” in Greek. He also declared himself “not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor. 15:9). But the little one also wrote, concerning the challenges he faced, “I can do all these things in him who strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13).
Consider also the Syrophenician woman of Mark 7:25-30. Note her behavior when Jesus rebuffed her as she besought Him for the relief of her possessed daughter: “It is not good to take the bread of the children, and cast it to the dogs,” Jesus said to this Gentile lady. “But she answered and said to him: Yea, Lord; for the whelps also eat under the table of the crumbs of the children.” In the parallel passage in Saint Matthew, we are told two additional things: first, that the Apostles wanted to send her away, and second, when she gave the reply quoted above, Jesus praised her: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it done to thee as thou wilt” (Matt. 15:28). She humbly acknowledged her own unworthiness, picking up on Our Lord’s canine metaphor and repeating it, making herself a little dog begging under the table of her Jewish “masters.” She was humble, confident, and persevering, trying the patience of the Apostles but touching the Heart of God. Aware of her unworthiness, she prayed with great trust, and, like the Samaritan leper, “fell down at his feet” (Mark 7:25).
The Gospels are full of accounts of people who knew they were unworthy, but who were nonetheless faithful, hopeful, loving, grateful, and confident recipients of God’s gifts. Our Lady at the Annunciation, Saint Elizabeth at the Visitation, Saint Simeon at the Presentation are three examples from the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. Saint Peter, at the miraculous drought of fish, felt so unworthy that he said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Like 5:8), but Jesus, stirring up the Fisherman’s confidence and courage, replied, “Fear not…” (Luke 5:10).
I would like to give the last word on this matter to the little French Carmelite that Saint Pius X called “the greatest saint of modern times.”
Our own Sister Marie Gabrielle penned an article on Catholicism.org called “Theresian ‘Littleness’ — What Is It Really?” After giving various answers from approved authors, she quotes Msgr. Vernon Johnson: “For her, being little meant admitting what she really was.” Then, our own little Sister concludes by quoting the Little Flower herself, who said that this is what she means by “remaining a little child”:
It is to recognize our nothingness, to expect everything from God as a little child expects everything from its father; it is to be disquieted about nothing…. To be little is not attributing to oneself the virtues that one practices, believing oneself capable of anything, but to recognize that God places this treasure in the hands of His little child to be used when necessary; but it remains always God’s treasure. Finally, it is not to become discouraged over one’s faults, for children fall often, but they are too little to hurt themselves very much.
That is a clear and balanced approach to the dilemma presented by my Sunday-morning questioner. Saint Thérèse knew she was unworthy, but that did not bother her a bit. Rather, it was an impetus for her to take in all the strength from God that only little children can receive.
A Landscape with Christ and the Canaanite Woman (detail), by Esaias van de Velde (1587–1630). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
