Transcript

Speaker 1: We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained. Perplexed but not driven to despair. Persecuted but not abandoned. Struck down but not destroyed. Welcome back to Scripture for your inner outcasts. It's Saturday, July 25th, the feast of Saint James the Apostle. I'll be joining you today. I'm Elizabeth, and I'm the producer of this show. Today's first reading comes from Saint Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, chapter four. He writes, we are afflicted in every way, but not constrained. Perplexed but not driven to despair. Persecuted but not abandoned. Struck down but not destroyed. In these verses we have four different phrases that share a negative felt experience and then the positive twist on it. And I'd like to share how these verses resonate in my own system, and in particular with my own exiled parts. To me, the negative first part of every phrase we are afflicted in every way. Perplexed, persecuted, struck down seems to describe the experience of my exiled parts. And then the second part, the more positive part of each phrase. We are not constrained. We are not driven to despair. We are not abandoned. Not destroyed. To me, seems to describe the militant white knuckled counter-proposal of my spiritual manager parts. Now, I'm not saying that Saint Paul was driven by spiritual managers here. I'm sure he was not. I'm sure he was very integrated. And of course, this is the Word of God.

Speaker 1: But to my reading, this is what these verses make me think of in my own system, the dichotomy between the felt experience of my exiles and then the intellectual determination of my manager parts. Perhaps my exiles are afflicted in every way, but my manager parts are determined not to be constrained. Perhaps my exiled parts do feel persecuted, but my spiritual manager parts are determined to tell them we are not abandoned. And when my spiritual manager parts take on such a determined role to To convince my exiled parts that, hey, we're not abandoned. We're not destroyed. There is hope in Jesus. Well, those manger parts are acting out of an agenda. They are trying to convince and cajole and manipulate my exiled parts without entering into relationship with them. Because the relationship would suggest that despite the truth of the good news, some of my exiled parts do still feel afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down. And today, because it is the feast of Saint James the Apostle, I am reminded in a special way of an experience that I had nine years ago in the summer of 2017. I got to hike El Camino de Santiago, which is the way of Saint James. It's a very famous walking pilgrimage in northern Spain, where the final destination is the city of Santiago de Compostela, which is the burial place of Saint James the Apostle.

Speaker 1: So I hike over a hundred miles over the course of about a week and a half. I arrived at my final destination, Santiago de Compostela, today, July 25th, 2017, the Feast of Saint James the Apostle. And this memory comes up to me in a special way, because while I was hiking El Camino, I realized in hindsight that my exiled parts were very present to me during that journey and that I was in many ways hiking with my exiles. And so these verses of saying, we are afflicted in every way, perplexed, persecuted, struck down. My exiles were feeling all of those things as I was hiking. And so I just want to share these little memories, these little reflections from my own exiled parts, in the hopes that it might inspire further reflection and for the relationship in the parts of you, the listeners. If you listeners are new to the concept of internal family systems, I'll put a link in the description of today's show to another podcast that gives a great overview of what internal family systems modality of psychology is. With that, we'll end with our invocations Our Lady, our mother, Untier of knots. Pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist pray for us. And Saint James pray for us.