Poop in The Brownie

My friend Greg likes to describe things with vivid, picturesque imagery in order to drive home a point.
Case in point: he will often describe an attractive idea that contains ‘‘mostly’’ truth, but a little non-truth, as having ‘‘a little poop in the brownie.’’

‘‘Oh, the brownies are soooooo good,’’ he would say sarcastically, ‘‘even if there is a little poop in them.’’

Nobody likes poop in their brownies, and no one likes being duped into believing an attractive truth, only to discover later that it is a lie.

Lingering in the back of many men’s minds is the idea that God is after us, out to get us, and if we make one false move, either to the left or to the right, we’re gone.
Others believe that it is not that God is as much against them as that he is simply not for them; He is absent, uncaring, remote.

We often think something like this:
God is perfect.
I am a sinner.
He is the judge, and I am guilty.

This guilt tends to haunt us and secretly accuse us.
In fact, at a very subconscious level, we may believe that because of this guilt, this sin, God is not really for us.

Often, there exists within the shadows of our heart this idea that God is actually out to make our lives miserable.

Sometimes the idea manifests itself as a subtle feeling of guilt for experiencing pleasure, or perhaps a belief that God doesn’t want us to succeed, or perhaps we have caught the idea that we should not be too happy, lest we forget that we are scum of the earth sinners who deserve to be blown off the face of the globe into eternal oblivion.

But at least when we are feeling like this, we can be thankful and trust that God the Father sacrificed His Son so that we don’t have to experience the divine wrath.
Right?

Wrong.

This is the attractive ‘‘truth’’ that we have not been taught as much as we have caught.
This is a big fat, demonic lie.
This is the poop in the brownie.

We may not have been taught the idea that God the Father sacrificed His Son, but we have caught this idea, and it has slithered its way into our subconscious.
And while the proposal appears to have the same promise, hope, and relief as blaming my own father for all my disorders, it is simply poop in the brownie.

Perhaps the reason so many men believe that God is out to get them is because they believe, somewhere in their mind, that God killed His own Son, and if He is willing to kill His own Son, what is stopping Him from killing us?

God the Father, however, did not kill His Son.

We did.

Our sins cost him His life.

God desires to heal our woundedness.
And He accomplishes this by becoming the most wounded—the crucified Son.
God became man to offer Himself for us that by dying as a man, we men might live for God.
It was not God who killed the Son, but rather the evil one, through men, who killed the Son.

God the Son freely offered Himself to God the Father, on behalf of men, so that men would be empowered by His grace to freely offer themselves to God.

Many of us operate from a disadvantage.
Many of us have inherited a type of spiritual blindness, and this condition is often the result of the father wound.
But what is the father wound?

In the beginning, Adam and Eve, our first parents, lived in harmonious communion with God.
God gave them dominion over and access to all things, with the exception of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
From this we learn that God the Father is generous and desires for us to have all that He has.
But in order to give us the choice to freely receive that divine generosity, He gave us an option: to love God as He loves us, or to love ourselves above God.

God did not give us the tree of knowledge of good and evil as a dirty trick, but rather as a means of giving us the freedom to prove our love.
Without freedom to choose, God would be coercing us into loving Him.

But God is a ‘‘gentleman’’ in that He does not force us to do anything, just as He did not force His Son to offer His life.
God simply gives us the freedom to choose to love.

But we voted, and we lost the election.
We chose selfishness instead of selflessness.
We chose slavery to sin, instead of freedom to love; we chose to make ourselves god rather than allow God to make us like Him.
The serpent tempted the woman, saying, ‘‘You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’’ (Gen. 3:4–5).

It was in that moment that Satan cut deep into the heart of the human person, inflicting the ever-haunting father wound.
Satan attempts to convince us, as he did our first parents, that God doesn’t want us to succeed, that He is ‘‘keeping something from us,’’ and that He is ‘‘out to get us.’’

As St. John Paul II said, ‘‘Original sin, then, attempts to abolish fatherhood.’’

Even if your father was an absent, neglectful, even abusive man, the father wound was inflicted by the father of lies through your father.
The evil one is constantly attempting to mix the messages that God is transmitting to us.

The enemy continually attempts to aggravate the father wound, to reopen it, to ensure that it never heals.
Because if it doesn’t heal, then he can be assured that we do not become icons of God the Father.

This is precisely the satanic agenda. Interestingly enough, it is God’s agenda that we ‘‘shall be like him’’ (1 John 3:2).
Recall that our understanding of the identity of God determines our identity, and our identity determines not only our destiny but has tremendous influence and impact upon our family’s destiny.

To defeat the evil one and his minions, we must strive to overcome the father wound and the sense of insecurity, inadequacy, doubt, mistrust, and discouragement that it causes.
We need the Word to heal the wound.
In order to overcome the devil’s tactic of intimidation, we need to do as St. Joseph did, embrace the first pillar of his spirituality—silence—and train ourselves to hear the God the Father’s encouraging voice.