The first gaze at myself {during a very stressful and heartbreaking time}was critical, negative, and demanding, not helpful at all, to me or to others.

I am convinced that such guilt and shame are never from God. They are merely the protestations of the false self as it is shocked at its own poverty – the defenses of a little man who wants to be big man. God leads by compassion toward the soul, never by condemnation.

If God would relate to us by severity and punitiveness, God would only be giving us permission to do the same (which is tragically, exactly what has happened!).

God offers us, instead, the grace to “weep” over our sins more than ever perfectly overcome them, to humbly recognize our littleness rather than become big...it is a kind of weeping and a kind of wandering that keeps us both askew and awake.

---Richard Rohr
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM is a Franciscan of the New Mexico Province and founder
of the Center For Action And Contemplation in Alburquerque, NM.