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A parts-informed reflection on John 10:27, "My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord; I know them, and they follow me."
Saturday of the thirteenth week in Ordinary Time
Presenter: Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and co-founder and president of Souls & Hearts
To discover more content from Dr. Peter, listen to his podcast, "Interior Integration for Catholics," or subscribe to his semi-monthly emailed reflections.
Questions or comments? Email scripturepodcast@soulsandhearts.com
Share your thoughts via this episode's YouTube comments at youtube.com/@ScriptureForYourInnerOutcasts
Creators and Guests
What is Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts?
In the Gospels, Jesus reaches out to the outcasts, the most marginalized and rejected members of His society. In this very brief podcast, we take His approach inside – to reach out to your inner outcasts, the parts of you who are walking in darkness and gloom. Listen in and invite the Good News in the daily Mass readings to shine on your inner lost sheep, your inner prodigals, your inner lepers, your lame, deaf, and blind parts, your inner tax collectors, and your inner prostitutes – all those parts of you deemed unworthy and unacceptable by your protector parts.
Why? So that you can integrate inside, heal, and grow to flourish in accepting being loved, loving yourself in an ordered way, and then being able to love God wholeheartedly, with all your parts, and your neighbor as yourself. All informed by Internal Family Systems and other parts work approaches, and all firmly grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person. Join us in seeing Scripture through a new lens, coming alive for those parts of you that may have experienced spiritual neglect and need healing.
This podcast is produced by Souls & Hearts, an organization dedicated to human formation from a Catholic lens. Learn more at soulsandhearts.com.
Transcript
Speaker 1: My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord. I know them, and they follow me.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Scripture for your inner outcasts. Happy 4th of July to our American listeners. It's Saturday of the 13th week in Ordinary Time. Today, we're joined by Doctor Peter Malinoski, a clinical psychologist and the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts.
Speaker 1: Okay. It is good to be back. This is Doctor Peter. It is July 4th, 2026, Saturday of the 13th week of Ordinary Time. It's also Independence Day in the United States. And I want to focus in today on sheep. Sheep. There is no animal more helpless and ill equipped to make it on its own than a sheep. There's just utter dependance of sheep on the shepherd. I know this by experience. I've raised sheep. I've had sheep for about two decades now here on the homestead at Nourishing Acres. And one of the reasons why I got sheep is because I wanted to see what they were like. And again, like even chickens do better on their own than sheep do. When our Lord said in John ten, verse 27, my sheep hear my voice, says the Lord, I know them, and they follow me. There's something that the ancients who were listening to him back in the day, they all would have understood. But many of us have not had any direct contact with sheep at all. Sheep will not follow anyone that they don't trust. Sheep will not follow a shepherd out of fear doesn't happen. So what? This means what this means is that there's a relationship of trust between the shepherd and the sheep.
Speaker 1: Now, sheep, it's a really interesting image, right? Because in a flock of sheep, there's a unity and a multiplicity. It's one flock of sheep. A lot of individual sheep. So there's a multiplicity in that. There's a lot of sheep. There's one unit, right? One system. And the flock. And I sometimes think about my own system with my innermost self. Petrus, I call my innermost self Petrus, which is Latin for Peter. And then all my parts are my sheep. And Petrus is kind of like the sheepdog, right? Helps round up the sheep, helps the shepherd out. There's a hierarchical relationship. One of the things that happens in a flock is that if even one of the sheep is distressed, is untrusting, it actually has a contagious effect on the entire system. It's amazing how much unity there is in a flock that's calm, and how much disorganization and cast There is an A flock where even one sheep doesn't feel safe. And so I just wanted to offer you this, this imagery that our Lord is inviting us to receive him as the good Shepherd, to bet everything on him, to push all of our chips onto that one, bet on him being the good Shepherd. And that can be terrifying for our managers.
Speaker 1: That can be terrifying for our firefighters. It can be, and sometimes easier for our exiles who really want a secure attachment figure, who really want to be able to trust, who are sometimes prevented from being able to approach the Lord. But sometimes some of our exiles, some of you, can be really afraid of Jesus, really afraid that he's not a good shepherd. I wonder if we can be humble enough, if we can be docile enough to take him at His word across parts in order to to try the experiment of seeing what it's like. If we do trust him. And trust is something that's built up by experience. It's by testing a little bit and seeing how it goes. Little bets. So we may not be able to push all of our chips all at once across all parts onto the Jesus bet, right as the good Shepherd. But let's bet a little more. Let's work up to that. What would be getting in the way of that? What would prevent it from happening? What would lead parts of us to not feel safe doing that? Let's take that seriously. And if it feels right and good, let's actually bring those things to the good Shepherd.
Speaker 2: Listeners are invited to find more content from Doctor Peter by subscribing to his Semimonthly email reflections in the description of today's show.
Speaker 1: Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of knots. Pray for us, Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist pray for us.