The Journey Home - 2012-11-12 - Convert from Judaism - Marcus Grodi with Dawn Eden

good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program every week EWTN allows me to interview a variety of folk as they talk about the different ways that the holy spirit open their hearts to the beauty of the church every one of us has a different journey we come through different challenges many of which were not our choosing but they're often ways as we look back and we recognize that God used those to awaken us to his love to his grace and His mercy question is are we able to receive that and that's a part of our journeys and that might be a little bit of our journey tonight as we and welcome to the journey home program dawn Eden a convert from Judaism hello dawn it's great to have you on the program I know that my producer said you've had a couple other of opportunities to be on EWTN right yes thankfully I've been on life on the rock and I've also been on faith and culture oh great great and each of those different programs has a different perceived audience but it's good to have you here particularly to talk about your spiritual journey and you've written a couple books that deal with some of these issues but on our program we'll give you a chance to especially your journey from Judaism but that wasn't your it wasn't a one stop for you right that's that's right I go to school now studying theology at a seminary the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at Dominican House of studies and many most of my school mates are seminarians who go through a period when they're a transitional Deacon so I like to joke that there was a period when I was a transitional Protestant all right even before that on but you if you would dawn to take a long step back and give us a little glimpse of your early spiritual journey thank you well I was born into it Jewish household I have one sister five years older who is now a rabbi oh yes yes that's right my parents divorced I also have a brother from my dad's second marriage who now a doctor in Tel Aviv yes my parents split when I was five and I was raised by my mother we were living in Texas at that time although we're from New York and I had always as far as long ago as I can remember I always had a longing for God I remember when I was about five writing a letter to the rabbi of our temple I wish I still had a copy of his letter I don't but I have the rabbi's reply and I can pretty much remember what I wrote to him I was writing to him about a dispute that I had had with my know-it-all older sister because my sister said that when she grew up she wanted to be president of the world and I told her the five-year-old me that she couldn't be president of the world because God is president so my my rap I wrote this to a rabbi and a rabbi wrote back and he pointed out that wall I was correct theologically that my sister had apologized to me for I guess taking a heated tone arguing with me and and he said that in doing so she had acted very Jewishly now there are a variety of streams of Judaism the the one that you were brought up and was it an act of faith it was reform and the faith had been fairly watered down by the time it got to us now you know even beginning to discuss this I have to be sensitive to the fact that my parents are watching sure each of my parents has their own very deep emotional and spiritual tie to the Jewish faith so when I say that the faith had been watered down I'm really speaking in terms of practice and ritual at how really shaped our lives and I didn't have a strong sense as a child that it shaped every aspect of our life it was something that we did on Shabbat and on holidays I did go to Hebrew school which was which was on Sundays so I was taught about the faith but in terms of everyday life the impression that I got of God was more a deist kind of God a blind watchmaker it wasn't God who was very intimately part of us sustaining us in being and guiding all things through divine providence okay not one that you might pray to on a day-by-day basis to ask to intervene in your life in some way he's there but he's there that's right I mean I certainly knew that I could pray but I thought of Prayer more in terms of asking favors and not in terms of really growing in holiness and becoming more like God now there are Jews who are who are more religious in the conservative and particularly in the in the Orthodox branches of Judaism who who make God more of an intimate part of their their lives and really concentrate more in holiness with me certainly I was taught right and wrong but it was from more of a kind of ethical basis like what CS Lewis calls the Dow the kind of ethics that's the foundation of all religions rather than something that was distinctively Jewish in terms of in terms of challah ha though the walk towards holiness all right so you you family experience as a break up and you end up in Texas yes yes that's right that's right and so my mother was raising myself and and my sister and my father I married a year after the divorce and a few years after that he moved away he was not very present in my life when I was young and my mother at that time was searching and tried to find herself in different ways it was the 1970s the Me Generation as you know it was the time of self-help movement such as Werner Erhard and asked my mother was a psychologist and social worker so she was very much keyed into those those things and I experimented with various New Age movements and at the same time my my mother was seeking love and looking back as I have hinted at in my first book the thrill of the chaste and as I speak more about in my latest book called my peace I give you healing sexual wounds with the help of the saints I realized that as a child in my mother's home I was in a sexually porous household there weren't clear boundaries that I can remember I wasn't well shielded from adults nudity sex talk or substance abuse I and as rubies so from an early age I suffered sexual abuse in particular from one of my mother's boyfriends and I although as I mentioned to you I had a sort of natural faith over time my personal dialogue with God diminished I did become a bat mitzvah at 13 but after going through that right of passage becoming an adult I in the Jewish faith I fell into agnosticism and looking back I'm able to see that it's because of being unable to understand why God would permitted such evil in my life so you mentioned CS Lewis is identifying a kind of a ground-level morality that's within us but it seems that your your early life also addressed the issue of formation of conscience you have this ground-level but if you have an environment of ideas and examples that are challenging that conscience that can make a confused conscience yes that's right that identify what you were going through yes it does very much so and that lack of a well-formed conscience affected my decisions as an adult when I wrote the thrill of the chased back I was right I was writing it in 2005 I had yet to confront my own wounds from abuse but I was aware that I had failed to learn as a child what chastity was what was the true value of human sexuality as God had created it and because of that lack of understanding I acted out as a teenager and young adult now with the benefit of of understanding better the wounds of abuse I also realize that I as a teenager and young adult was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and so I when I was acting out sexually as a teen and young adult I was dissociating inside I'll explain what that is inside I felt like this wounded child that people weren't going to protect me the disassociation is the separation from one's true self to create a false self out of a desire to protect one's self so I thought as a teen and young adult that since people were going to abuse me since men were going to objectify me I might as well control how they were going to do that by presenting myself and very sexually provocative an aggressive way and you know of course that the terrible irony is that in doing so I was attracting just the sort of people who would be predators yeah all right well the problem there you talk about an inside and outside the discrepancy beaten into I guess of the majority of people don't know that they're doing no no they don't know it all they just think that they're trying to protect themselves and I think that very often not always because certainly there are young people who simply wish to follow the styles in the crowd but I think that very often when you see young people who are covered with tattoos or wearing spikes or or women having crew cuts or trying very hard to look aggressive and hard it's because there's some kind of some woundedness we can't be for sure but there's no no you can't be but but woundedness takes a lot of difference yes it does flavors really does so we don't know what that woundedness could be so you're moving on into agnosticism yes that's right at that point in your life much cognitively I mean you really were choosing that or you were just not taking time for God I always felt that if there were truth there would be one truth I felt that deeply inside I do believe that that is thanks to having been exposed to the Old Testament at an early age I always loved the the Bible from childhood you know there are certain moments in one's life that one looks back at and thinks that's got to be divine providence and one of them was at the reception following my sister's Bat Mitzvah I remember there being a little girl there younger than me with her father I was seven at the at the time and I don't remember really knowing this little girl or her father but they were somehow friends of the family and they were Christian and the father I remember saying that his daughter had something to give me since my sister was getting so many presents for her Bat Mitzvah you know some people took pity on me and wanted to give me something so I remember this very shy little girl you know it's sucking her thumb two-shot even say anything handing me this this large package and I opened it and it was Barbara Taylor Brad Bradford future romance novelists children's stories from the old and new Testament I remember that there was an image of the Last Supper on the cover and even at the age of 7 I knew enough to know that that wasn't from our Bible and I thought is this father stupid doesn't he realize he's how about mitzvah reception and this is the wrong kind of Bible to give me but I loved reading and I found myself reading all the way through that that book and one thing that I noticed at that young age was that there wasn't a radical divide between the Old Testament stories and the New Testament stories but it was really the same God now I knew from my parents that we said that Jesus was a good man he just wasn't God so so I couldn't really believe in being a Christian but I could believe that Jesus truly was a good man and there's something else that I would love to share with you which is that you know it's very common for children after a divorce to have fears phobias because their world has been upended and now they feel like any other kind of disaster could strike so at the age of 7 a couple of years after my parents split you know at school they would have the fireman come in and show us the film showing how quickly children's pajamas burn in a fire if they're not flame-retardant so you know I got these images in my head thinking you know what if the house burns down while I'm sleeping and I'm not able to get out that sort of thing so I made a deal with kajada at the age of seven and I you know feel like crying when I remember this I told God that I would read from these children's stories from the old New Testament every night before bed and if I did this that he had to protect me and so I realized that exactly that Here I am and that even though on the one hand I wasn't protected from from certain bad things during my childhood in the larger sense I have been protected because God used all of these things including the evils to draw me well and that's one of the keys which you mentioned in your books is that God whenever those evils were there and doesn't mean God wasn't that there was a mystery of his the way it works in our lives there's a real mystery there that we have to accept that's right so you're into agnosticism is this their high school years yes College yes high school and into college and here's another moment that I remember when I was in college I was going to New York University living in a dorm right on Washington Square Park and I have to tell you it ain't Mayberry that's that's right and so this was during the late 1990s and I remember one day this young woman standing on it must have been Waverly Place right up at the corner of the park saying free Bible free Bible and you know I thought for a moment nice was like okay and I took one and it was one of those little green Gideon's Bibles of the Psalms and New Testaments and I I took it because I just thought that it was something I should own and it stayed on my shelf for many years and it's um nearly fifteen years later when I finally started to be open to grace it was that Bible that was given me on the streets of New York City that I turned to so I want to really encourage people who are watching to keep planting those seeds because because one plants the other waters God gives the increase and you just never know you never know well that's how I feel about this program we never know when one person story will be just the story for the right person it's really true it's really true Owen there was another important moment that I should share with you which is that when I was in eighth grade there was a social studies teacher mr. Owen Snyder this was at the South Orange Middle School in northern new jersey we had moved back up north by then and this this teacher said since it was an advanced class I was a smart kid he said that if we were going to truly understand Western civilization we had to study the Gospels it was a largely Jewish class it was New Jersey suburbia but somehow and this was you know 1981-82 goodness knows that this could happen today but somehow he was able in a public school to go through the Gospels with us and among the things that he showed us was something which you will know is such an important interpretive key to understand which is that he asked the question now what do we make of the fact that there are conflicting things in the Gospels when relating the events of Jesus life and he said we have to remember that these are based on eyewitness testimony and we know that eyewitnesses see different things now as a graduate student theology I know that there are people who became atheists because they didn't understand well because perhaps they were brought up very fundamentalist and when they started to read the Bible they couldn't understand how this one gospel this other gospel could both be true if they conflicted so to have learned that at a young age and have absorbed that even though I didn't yet have faith I take that as a real a planting seed of God yes so what was it and when when you started moving on your agnosticism well this was a really amazing thing you know God meets us where we are and if we just have even the slightest crack open in the door of our hearts God will find that entrance in my case I was 27 years old and I was a mu journalist interviewing rock musicians and that was my life and I and I loved it and I was also suffering from a cyclical suicidal depression which I now realize was from the post-traumatic stress disorder it was not diagnosed accurately at the time and I also was living this lifestyle of looking for love through giving myself away and that too was very unhappy I was doing the telephone interview with a Los Angeles rock musician from a band called the sugar plastic his name is Ben s Bach and that's the sugar plastic we're not a Christian band so I wouldn't have expected a Christian answer to a question but I asked Ben what was he reading lately and he said that he was reading a book by G K Chesterton called the man who was Thursday a novel I had never heard of GK Chesterton so I just thought I'll pick up this book just so that I can read it and impress mr. Ashbaugh the next time he comes to town and so I had no idea that Chesterton was this great convert to the Catholic faith from Anglicanism who would himself gone through a dark the night of near atheism I had no idea that he was the man whom CS Lewis credits with converting him from atheism and so I picked up this book and started reading it and I first of all thought it was a great novel but secondly I started to get an impression of Christianity because I realized as I was reading it that there was this whole subtext of of the journey toward the towards Christ seeking his face and I realized that according to Chesterton Christian faith was a rebellion Chesterton in the book has this character who considers himself a poet of Anarchy and he contrast this with a poet who's a PO of law and order and I myself thought that in order to be creative and individual I had to be against whatever Christians were for but Chesterton presented the truth rebel as the one who's rebelling for truth for beauty for a law and order against a world that's fallen into darkness and this intrigued me particularly one line that Chesterton has in the voice of the poet of law and order he is arguing with the anarchist poet about what constitutes true poetry and he says the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick and I read that and I was very touched by that because I longed for that kind of poetry the poetry of not being sick I it awakened this longing in me to have my life ordered from the top down and so I couldn't really believe that there were other salty Christians like Chesterton I still thought that Chesterton's were this kind of amorphous conformist moral majority mass and I still thought the only way I could be individual and have my own identity which I desperately wanted was to be not Christian but I was curious enough to read more Chesterton and over the course of four years of reading a lot of Chesterton that eventually praise God brought me to taking that the Green Gideon's and New Testament Psalms off the shelf so it wasn't the apologetic of GK Chesterton because it isn't really an apologetic you get when you read him but it is a it's almost a culture it's a it's a concept of Christ it's that you were catching in the process yes well the man who was Thursday although Chesterton does have other apologetic works that particular novel you're you're right is not an apologetic it's just an exciting novel it's a spy novel but in reading it as a friend of mine who's Jewish who loves that novel put it it's you learned that that that which you are seeking with fear and trepidation trepidation is actually seeking you so G K Chesterton made the step to the church did he cause you to make the step of the church at that point I was fighting it Marcus because I was at that time in a state of codependency with my mother which is again something that not always but can often happen with people who have suffered sexual abuse in a in a home where they had someone who was supposed to be protecting them they can develop a kind of Stockholm Syndrome where they have an unhealthy bond with the person who was supposed to be protecting them because they feel like well if this person wasn't here then I'd really have been hurt so as part of this bond I identified with my mother and one of the ways that identified with her was in her in her sort of suspicion towards her distaste for Catholic faith she had actually when I was a teenager come to the Catholic faith and oddly enough this was through me because when I was 16 and looking at colleges we were at Rutgers University and there was a table of good news Bibles there and at this time my mother was going to weekly meetings of a guru named Hilde who was and these meetings were at the Cathedral of st. John the Divine in New York totally new age environment and I was uncomfortable with my mother following this guru and my mother Saudis table of good news Bibles at Rutgers and she picked one of the books up and she said tongue-in-cheek what do you think Don should I read this and I said oh yes mom we read it in school it's good you should read it because I thought just anything to get her away from this guru and at least here she'll be getting something that's ethical and that might introduce some stability to her life so she read it and she got converted and she entered the church but she didn't remain in the Catholic faith long she within a couple of years had drawn to a Messianic Jewish temple Messianic Judaism is really a form of Protestantism that uses Jewish prayers and she i I can't really speak for her but she felt that she was being fed in a way there that she wasn't being fed at the Catholic Church so by the time I received faith which was 15 years after my mother she was thoroughly Protestant and she had a sort of laundry list of reasons why the Catholic Church was unbiblical so I thought entering the church for about five years let's pause there dawn will come back from the break because you didn't go right from Judaism to agnosticism into the Catholic Church you had a little pause in there yourselves and come back from the break let's look at that all right okay you welcome back to the journey home our guest tonight is dawn Eden we took a little pause in your journey and during the break we both remembered an old line from an old Beatles tune from a song called rocky raccoon where the the line was only to find Gideon's Bible yeah that's right in the song that was the turning point yeah was that your turning point it was because after four years of reading Chesterton I wanted to read what had influenced Chesterton so I started reading the Psalms the New Testament and I and I have to say that my mother was very much a part of my journey because first of all my mother had been praying for my conversion for a long time and and during the time when she identified as Catholic she was particularly asking st. Monica's prayers for me st. Augustine's mother who prayed so fervently for her son to enter the church and during a time when I was in a situation at work where I was being mistreated I was working as a writer and editor for a entertainment website my mother advised me to read Psalm 27 every day which I did and I started to feel strengthened by that and then there came one one night when I had what is called there's a fancy-schmancy name for it a hypnagogic experience it's just one of those experiences where you wake up during the night and your mind hasn't yet told your body that it can move so you feel kind of frozen in bed but you're conscious and I remember having this experience during like the wee small hours and being very frightened at not being able to move for a moment but then hearing this voice which was a woman's voice and the voice said very clearly and distinctly some things are not meant to be known some things are meant to be understood and I was able to sort of shake myself away again I was really you know distressed and just wondering you know what could what could this mean I wasn't used to supernatural occurrences and of course when you're on medication for depression you wonder you know is this the meds but I had to say if it was the meds then God's providence was in the meds because I'm far happier now than I was ever but on when I was on any medication because that day as I was contemplating what could this mean some things are not meant to be known some things are meant to be understood I felt moved in my heart to open up the Bible to Romans 5:1 not knowing what was there you're smiling you know it's there and I read therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ and the verse goes on to talk the chapter goes on to talk about suffering and how and and how we have hope who are suffering because of the love that the Holy Spirit pours into our hearts and as I read that I can contemplated it I realized that I had been trying to get to know God through external knowledge through thinking well if I have enough evidence that faith is real then I will believe it but what God was calling me to do was to get the understanding which comes through faith and that if I trusted him then the knowledge would be added to me so and again here I have to thank my mother she was an instrument of divine providence I asked my mother what do I do now because she was she was the only Christian that I was close to and she said that I should get down on my knees before bed and pray the sinner's prayer which is a Protestant prayer very much like the act of contrition admitting being a and asking Jesus Christ to enter into your heart so I got to had on my knees feeling a very stupid and foolish and and and and pray praying it you know it's it's so interesting years later I would read st. Thomas on why it does God choose to work through physical things in the sacraments and he says that man in disobeying God put physical things above spiritual things so God uses physical things to Humble us to draw us back up to spiritual things and I realized that now and looking back at the act of kneeling and and praying this prayer and then I woke up and the first thing I felt when I woke up was that I no longer had permission to be suicidal to think about any kind of self-harm because God loved me and God had a plan for me and therefore I had to learn to be happy and as I like to say I've been learning to be happy so that was where the beginning for me and I had that experience which I'm sure many people have told you of the experience of having read the Bible before and it just seemed like words flat on a page once I read Romans 5:1 that was the first time when the words came alive they were no longer black and white they were Technicolor and it became not just flat words but a person the voice of God speaking directly to my heart and and that that remained now you have this awakening yes as a gift of God's grace but you're still not connected to any community yet that's right so I found the first Christian community that I could find which was a local seed church planted by the Adventists but the thing was that I was still very determined not to be a joiner I thought of myself as this great nonconformist so I thought well I'll get baptized but I'm not going to be an Adventist I'm still gonna search you know for where I feel most comfortable and I don't want to be tied to this one denomination so I asked the pastor there if he would give me a generic baptism not making any Adventist vows and he did and I can tell you Marcus I know it was a valid baptism you know Father Son Holy Spirit because it took place in a tank and I was done three times i baptize you don in name of the Father I was uttering the early baptized and from there I began church hopping and you know the the verse that had really converted me was that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ I wanted that peace in my heart and so I would go to different churches trying to get worked up in the Holy Spirit and find that peace and you know there are wherever the baptized are together God is with them as so I was able to define in different places the presence of the Holy Spirit but there was no real ground from which from which I could find the peace that lasts so I would have peace on Sunday but then by Tuesday I think I'd be an see I I was suffering from anxiety which I now know it's one of the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder from the childhood abuse which wasn't diagnosed until later but at the time as a Protestant I thought that the remaining xiety showed a lack of faith because I thought I know in my faith that God created me in love I know he doesn't want me to harm myself or entertain suicidal thoughts ever again so therefore God doesn't want me to be anxious I shouldn't be anxious if I had enough faith I could move mountains I should pull myself up by my bootstraps you know these are the kind of things that one that one thinks without a you stick understanding of a faith and redemptive suffering so I can't and I would say that I want to miss make a little just correction because I remember for my own background I would I would have been hesitant to say as a Evangelical Protestant that I was called to pull myself up by my bootstraps because I would have said no I'm I'm just surrendered to Jesus yeah you know it's faith in Jesus but what you were also hearing I'm guessing is that there was this kind of floating theology that says that if you're still having this lack of peace this all these other bad thoughts it's because you don't believe enough there's what you need to do you need that's right surrender mortis and it is very important to say that that not every Protestant denomination at all has that that idea but even the idea that one is not sufficiently surrendered implies that there is a certain kind of work that is more than just a turning of the you you haven't given yourself enough yet you're still holding something back yeah there's there's the reason you're going through this stuff you haven't given given left exactly I mean people talk about Catholic guilt but I had Protestants and the way that that I found that piece was actually through the communion of saints I was working at the New York Post I'd manage to get out of the music business because I have found that that that was a dangerous environment for me as a new Christian I was starting to to live chastely and I was becoming very pro-life I had started a blog called the dawn patrol and I had joined the New York City Chesterton society meeting a lot of Catholics through that my catholics used to try to get me to ask the intercession of saints and as a Protestant I thought well that's a very slippery slope because even if Catholics say oh it's just like asking a friend to pray for you I thought well you know you know it's it's so close to idolatry that there's a danger that I might put too much power and the saint and you know the Protestant you know you believe that you can go to hell for that and actually you know if you if one were idolatrous that be something for which one could go to go to hell so I was very wary of Saints but I was in a situation at work one day in January 2005 where I felt that I really badly needed a friend in heaven I was about to get fired from the New York Post because as a copy editor I had made a change that was not in my power to change I was given a story that was very anti life to copy edit and it was not an op-ed it was a hard news story and it was so biased against life that I without anyone's permission changed it made it a pro-life story and then you know when it came out the reporter was furious insisted that I be fired and so there there was this time and I was waiting for the axe to fall and I decided okay I've failed everyone I failed my employer and I've failed God because it says right there in Ephesians serve your employers you would serve the Lord so I thought if I'm already on the outs with God I can't get anymore on the outs with him by asking a Saints help so I went online to the patron saints in index and I looked up patron saint journalists I found st. Maximilian Kolbe oh well Franciscan friar started a publishing operation in the first half of the 20th century a spreading devotion to to Jesus through Mary and was sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis when they invaded Poland at the cause of his writing about truth and the Nazis were not in favor of Christian truth and so I at Auschwitz st. Maximilian offered to take the place of another inmate who was condemned to death and as I was reading his story I got to the end of the story and I saw that the prisoner whose life st. Maximilian saved was present at st. Maximilian's canonization by john paul more than 30 years later and I just broke down crying and I started finally doing what my Catholic friends have been trying to get me to do I just started talking to st. maximun like I would to a friend saying dear st. Maximilian I'm in trouble I'm about to be fired please pray for me and at those words whoosh I felt the Holy Spirit come down and I felt this grace flowing from heaven as though I were at the eye in the middle of the storm in this place of calm and I found this great peace and I realized that no matter what happened to me I was going to be okay because just in asking st. Maximilian to pray for me I've been brought in line with God's will whereas I hadn't been before it just opened up the communion of saints for me and I feeling God's peace through the communion of saints I chased that peace into the Catholic Church the did you share this with in your evangelical friends I mean what did they think about this at this point with your family this awakening the exterior because of Maximilian I mean what a what a great saint to have God leads you to at that point my evangelical friends knew about it but since I'd really not stayed very close with evangelical communities I didn't have a lot of people sort of coming up with intervention to try to get me away from the Catholic faith I didn't have a lot of blog readers and actually I heard afterwards from for more than one of them that they had since entered the church and I wasn't the only one they were reading other blogs people who either were Catholic or had converted to Catholic so again you know you can we plant these seeds we never know where they go so you read Chester ten and you you ask a kolbe for his intercession but you really had entered a Catholic Church had you at this point no I hadn't I went into our CIA and was received at the Church of notre-dame back when it was run by Polish Dominicans in the New York City near Columbia University and as a new Catholic I I rejoiced in being able to live in the sacraments and in the communion of Church but I still felt anxiety but I knew now that it had to have some kind of meaning and I was asking God what did he mean by leaving me with the store and as he did for st. Paul and the answer came to me a couple of years ago on a retreat and this was the kind of image that came to me that inspired my new book my peace I give you on healing from the wounds of childhood sexual abuse it was when I was on this Ignatian retreat two years ago praying before the Blessed Sacrament that I had this mental image come to me of the Eucharist and the tabernacle is being like the center of a great bicycle wheel with Ray's going from it through throughout the world taking up the entire world in it in its embrace and bringing everything back to the Eucharist and as I meditated on what that could mean I realized that the Christ we receive is the in the Eucharist is the resurrected and glorified Christ the Christ who suffered who was wounded for us and whose wounds are now glorified st. Thomas tells us that the Eucharist has the effect of healing us because Christ has always had this will to suffer for us he has suffered and now he's in some sense the product of his suffering and I realized that when I am really present for Christ in the Eucharist I in some sense and the product of what I suffered and that was what made me realize that it's not my wounds don't separate me from Christ it's not in spite of my wounds that he heals me it's just the opposite when I am really present for Christ then my wounds become the cracks that his light gets in and it's through my wounds that I can draw on a closer union with the wounded and resurrected Christ I can still ask him for healing and I do but at the same time I can rejoice knowing that he uses all my suffering to to gain merit for myself and for and for the those I love you described I'm sure you're just grabbing a little bit of yourself but you describe people who have this this protective false image that had they were they've erected around themselves that they may be blind to themselves it's an image that let people see that protects an insight from great wounds of the past what would you like to say if anyone's watching that is if they're becoming aware of this because of wounds of their past how do they move forward towards healing I would say first of all if you foon's from the past it's very important to open up about them to someone close to you whom you trust if there's no one in your family or among your close friends to whom you can speak to seek out a good spiritual director they're also therapists I would highly recommend a Catholic therapist I have bad experiences with the secular the therapist so first of all speak to someone second of all realize that nothing is wasted with God I know now that whatever suffering I have undergone whatever we remnants of suffering of the path effects of the past evils remain in me and whatever new suffering I may experience God can use all of this to open my heart towards others and it's it's very important for us to not focus so much on our woundedness as on the fact that there must be something in us that's good that enables us to even have a wound you can't have a wound in something that's blank there has to be something there some goodness and the key is to ask God to show us how to stop acting from our woundedness and stop acting from our pathology and how to start acting from our wellness because if it's when we do that that we are able to be a light to others and grow in grace yeah you you mentioned and and one of your books as I I didn't get a chance to read it all yet but the point of Dorothy day and others and and I'm reminded of a a Greek Catholic spiritual right from about 200 years ago father Gro who was a Jesuit priest during the French Revolution have kicked out of France and he wrote some spiritual wonderful spiritual books I think that I think they're available on EWTN s website and the in the texts in the library but I remember one point he was writing about people that were so absorbed and whether they're saved or not am I saved it's get saved am i justified and and he was saying you know when you think about all that that's all self-centeredness yes you're so absorbed and the stuff you think you're really all about God but you're really all about yourself you said there's three things they're important one give glory to God number one that's what it's about yes focusing on the glory of God number two is being like him holiness that's what it's about thirdly salvation leave it to him I mean really even the people that are struggling with the issues in the past we could so inward on them the really part of the journey out is giving glory to God absolutely and that's why in the book that you mentioned my peace I give you healing sexual wounds with the help of the Saints I focused towards the end of the book on the with the Second Vatican Council called our universal call to holiness showing how there are Saints who were wounded in childhood including Saints who suffered childhood sexual abuse who do it closer to God and became lights for others not in spite of their wounds but because of their wounds because they sought from from God to have their have their wounds draw them into closer union with it with his passion got an email Terry from Omaha writes in a culture that doesn't seem to think anything is wrong with living together before you are married or having multiple sexual partners how can I present Catholic teaching on morality to my young adult friends in a way that they would understand and relate to I don't want to come across as prudish but I'd love some ideas for how to educate the importance of chastity to my friends who don't know any better it's a great question and I think we all want to live in the truth John Paul the second in his catechesis on human love also known as the theology of the body speaks about the importance of of using God's gift of our being embodied to show his lightness truth to others and we can only do this by living truly to engage in what is a marital act and act that God designed to take place within marriage outside of marriage is to lie it's to pretend I'm making this self gift but to really be withholding the gift of permanence and the gift of being willing to be present for someone when they're old when they're not able to take care of themselves it's withholding the gift of being willing to to not only love but to suffer with it with the other as Christ has suffered with and for us so I would definitely encourage Terry to tell young people about living in the truth and when I think about your whole story and and what you've written it it seems to me that one of the issues is you there could be a wounded person that's just so caught up in their wounds maybe even suicide and then there's the the positive development where people might see that person say there's a person that's really got themselves together and maybe they've the person that's got faith and it's a person that's that's given themself to God but in the end the what we want them to say is when they look at us they see Jesus festival they don't see us they see a person changed by Jesus it's about you know and the people I know who are most like Jesus and here I think of a dear Jesuit I knew Father Francis Canavan SJ professor emeritus at Fordham who passed away a few years ago the people who are most like Jesus were the people who showed their vulnerability father Canavan was very involved with his local chapter of calyx CA Li X which is a Catholic Society for people who are struggling with alcoholism and he wrote books of essays tapa talks for Kate calyx he was willing to show his own woundedness and his own journey of healing through Christ a journey of spiritual healing that was ongoing and and so it people were able to look at him in his own vulnerability and his own seeking holiness and see Christ in that Wow real quick email might be a quick answer Kari from Massachusetts what are Dawn's thoughts on the role of Catholic women in society today how can we work to affect the world while being true to be ours Catholics by seeking to win over one piece of turf for the Lord this I got from father Daniel a Lord SJ a great devotional writer the one piece of turf that we each must win for the Lord is our own soul I we we are not to be self-centered as as you said but to seek to be grounded in Christ as Pope Benedict tells us so often and to and to live in and through Christ that is the best way that we can admit it in bought embody our created sex whether we are a woman a woman or a man all right you have a website dawn Eden dot blog spot.com that's in case anyone the audience wants to get in touch with you the dawn patrol I got the dog are you still fighting the dawn patrol after all these events all right very good you're still writing no journalist yes a little but mostly focusing on my graduate studies I'm studying towards a Pontifical licentiate in theology and hoping to become a professor one day and also hoping to enter a form of life in vowed chastity and obedience in the world I would ask viewers to please pray for my vocation do that very much so thank you for your witness dog thank you very much for joining us on the program for your writing and for being open with cow how God has brought healing in your life through the mercy that he has for all of us right even in the midst of our sufferings well thank you very much thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I pray that Dawn's story touched you especially some of you that truly God was calling to hear this program to hear her may God fill your life with His grace god bless you see you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 45,568

Rating: 4.7866669 out of 5

Keywords: Convert, Judaism, Catholic, JHT01374

Id: GDep1lqPDs0

Length: 56min 25sec (3385 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2012