Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent

Readings of the Day

As someone with chronic anxiety, one of most liberating moments in my spiritual journey was, paradoxically, the day I realized that I would never, once and for all, prove my own belovedness to myself.

For as long as I can remember, I had battled with clinical anxiety that manifests as gnawing self-doubt and a pesky commitment to a belief in my own unbelonging. Like so many in our throwaway culture, I have often been my own worst critic. I've worn myself out trying to prove that my greatest fear—that I do not belong or deserve love—is untrue, only to surface a new piece of evidence of my inadequacy as soon as I settle into some sense of peace. It is a wearisome, thankless treadmill, trying to convince myself of my own righteousness while swimming in awareness of my every misstep.

And so it came as a liberation when one day I realized that I could simply step off the treadmill. I was never going to reason my way to a sense of trust in my own belovedness: my anxiety would always find a way to sow doubt before even the most tightly reasoned argument. I understood that the fact of my own irrevocable belovedness by God was something I was just going to have to take on faith. Importantly, that meant that I could stop trying so hard to convince myself that I was worthy of love and belonging—and I could just start living as though it were true.

How might we live differently if we trusted our own belovedness and took it on faith that “the Lord remembers his covenant forever?" How might this free us to make a "return of love," as St. Ignatius put it? We might begin to answer this question by considering its opposite. How does our doubt in our own belovedness hinder our ability to love? 

I have to wonder about the naysayers in today’s Gospel who, so brazen in their self-righteousness, seek to stone Jesus: did they truly trust in God’s love for them?

Then as now, there are many in the world who feel they have cornered the market on righteousness, convinced that God’s love is too small to reach those with whom they disagree. Some, like the naysayers of today’s Gospel, are so attached to their ideas of what righteousness looks like that they would stone those who deviate from it. I must admit, I carry my own stones at the ready, heavy tokens of my doubts and fears that I long so desperately to be free of. Too often I can feel my own hand closing around such a stone, gripping at proof that I am loved. This, I have learned, is a sure sign that I have forgotten that I am inextricably cradled in God’s belonging.

What stones do you carry at the ready? Today, notice the moments when you can feel your hand closing around those stones, and take the opportunity to ask yourself: how would it change your life to start living as though it were true that you are completely and irrevocably loved by God? How might this free you for love?

Anna Robertson is Director of Youth and Young Adult Mobilization for the Catholic Climate Covenant.

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