Dear Souls and Hearts Member,
Happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (transferred)! I hope you are having a blessed and holy feast day.
Today I share with you the final reflection in our six-part series on personal values statements. We had such a great discussion in our fourth Zoom workshop on the actual writing process of a personal values statement on December 2, 2024; you are invited to check out the video or the audio recording to hear stories of how it’s going for readers of these reflections.
I wanted to share with you my personal values statement and my process of how I arrived at this point in my journey. I also will share some of the values that previously were very prominent for me on my leading edge, but have receded in recent years.
Review of my current personal vision statement
I recommend writing your personal vision statement first, as the vision statement is the guiding star for your aspirational values (and it is much easier to write for many people). Guidance on writing personal visions statements is provided in the August 12, 2024 reflection titled Writing your personal vision statement as a Catholic. In that piece, I shared how my personal vision statement, modeled after St. Therese of Lisieux’s is:
I will become love.
All of the values in my personal values statement should point to and support my vision, at least indirectly. Remember that in the personal values statement, we defining our aspirational values, not the actual values; check out my reflection from August 26, 2024 titled What Are Your Personal Values? for a discussion of the difference.
My personal values statement:
So without any further pre-ambling, here is my statement:
Dear Lord, I value:
- Partaking of Your divine nature – Divinization/deification
- Loving my neighbor with all of me
- Interior integration
- Trusting in Your Providence – ROTATE the PIECES
- Drinking in the PHOD-CA
- Caring for my body as Your temple, Holy Spirit
- Joy, peace, and play
Let’s take a closer look at each of my personal values and expand on them.
Partaking of Your divine nature – Divinization/deification
Last September, inspired by Dr. Gerry’s Kingdom Within reflection titled Man’s True Nature, I began to explore this (to me) radical idea of partaking of God’s divine nature – participating in His divinity. What did that mean? Dr. Gerry’s article reminded me that I had purchased the book Called to Be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification by Fr. David Vincent Meconi and Carl Olson, an edited book on the topic, published by Ignatius Press.
I got the book out and read it. Cover to cover.
The book rocked my world.
Why?
Because it fit so well with my vision statement – but it didn’t just fit the vision statement, it expanded my understanding of my vision. It helped me to understand what St. Athanasius meant when he said “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”
I had always assumed that line was a little “sketchy.” Didn’t Adam and Eve commit original sin because of their aspirations to become gods? You know, serpents and apples and banishment from the Garden of Eden, and a whole host of evils now entering the world?
But it turns out the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 460, uses that exact quote, among other similar quotes, in discussing the reasons why the Divine Word, the second Person of the Trinity, took on human flesh in the Incarnation and became our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ:
The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature” [2 Peter 1:4]: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” [St. Irenaeus] “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” [St. Athanasius] “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.” [St. Thomas Aquinas]
Catholic Answers’ Karlo Broussard provides a well-articulated discussion on this Catechism paragraph in his article titled What “So that We Might Become God” Means; it’s worth the read.
In their tour of Sacred Scripture, the Greek Fathers, the Latin Fathers, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, St. Augustine, and more modern sources, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Fr. Meconi, Carl Olson, and the other authors showed me that if I were to become love, as my vision statement asserted, I had to partake in God’s divine nature, for God is Love (cf 1 John 4:8; 16). This provide necessary intellectual formation I needed to distinguish between Adam and Eve’s inordinate, illicit grasping at divinity versus receiving the gift of adoptive sonship in God, sharing in His divine nature.
To be honest, some parts of me shrank back from elevated this goal of “becoming divine” by participation in God’s nature – how could I ever achieve such a thing? But the answer is in Scripture, in today’s Gospel reading, when the Archangel Gabriel said to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “And behold, Elizabeth, your kinswoman, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.” [Luke 1:36-37].
And this partaking of God’s divine nature should include all of me – every part of me, every fiber of my being. Not just a few parts, every single part, so that I engage with God and love him back wholeheartedly. I discussed this at greater length in my reflection from November 8, 2023 titled Wholehearted Prayer in Humility.
Loving my neighbor with all of me
In the past, I looked for ways to find what was gratifying and rewarding in others, so that I love them for those qualities; I searched for ways to engage in reciprocal connections that were mutually rewarding and satisfying. Over time, I shifted to loving my neighbor because he or she is intrinsically good, made in the image and likeness of God. From there, I moved on to loving my neighbor because God loves him or her.
Once I got to that point, I focused on love as an act of the will; it didn’t matter if I liked the person or not. What was important was to will the highest good for that person. But gradually, it dawned on me that my will not anything like all of me – it was an important faculty, to be sure. However, I noticed that my psychotherapy clients who I liked, the ones who I could engage emotionally, relationally, got better much quicker than the ones whom I loved solely with my will and not the rest of me.
After encountering IFS, I first focused on loving others with my innermost self; but in the last few years, I’ve come to see how important it is to include my parts in the loving of others. I’ve come to see that each part of me has something indispensable, irreplaceable to offer in loving others. Parts of me can resonate with and connect to parts with similar burdens or roles in others (I call these “counterparts”). For example, my former inner critic understands at a deep level some of the dynamics of the inner critics of other people, and can have compassion and connection with them in ways that go beyond what my innermost self alone could have for them.
So now, I focus on loving others more completely. And I’ve grown more aware of the importance of a hierarchy of love obligations – starting with my nearest neighbors. There is an adage that says, “Charity begins at home” which I take to mean: You should take care of your family and other people who live close to you before helping people who are living farther away or in another country.
So for me, that means, after God and the Blessed Virgin Mary, I love my Pam (my wife of 28 years) first, then my children, their spouses and children, and my parents first. It can be very tempting, as a public person, to get swept away in relating to you, my readers, my podcast listeners, the members of the Resilient Catholics Community and the Formation for Formators community, and I need to set limits to make sure that I am loving my neighbors in an ordered way.
Finally, I have a deep sense that in loving my neighbor, I am loving Jesus himself, as He said in Matthew 25:40: “And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’”
All my parts included – not all have to be active in the loving. Not just the will.
Interior integration
Essential to a deep union with God and a deep love for neighbor is interior integration, an inner recollection, where my parts are in harmony and in right order inside with my innermost self and my body. Interior integration is what Souls and Hearts is all about.
Much of the reason that I am so interested in Internal Family Systems and other parts-based approaches is because these conceptualizations contribute to reducing inner fragmentation and chaos and improving internal relating on a natural level, helping to shore up the natural foundation for spiritual formation and intimacy with God. I discussed this at much greater length in the reflection from October 12, 2022 titled Why Is Interior Integration Crucial for Union with God?
To live out this value, I connect with my parts in a deliberate way multiple times per day.
Trusting in Your Providence – ROTATE the PIECES
In this value, I focus in on embracing God’s Providence with all my parts. In my November 30, 2022 reflection titled How and Why We Reject God’s Providence, I discussed the PIECES of our lives. The PIECES acronym stands for the Persons, Institutions, Events, Circumstances, Experiences, and Systems that we find challenging, unpleasant, adverse, even overwhelming or tragic in our lives. Our PIECES are the thing in our lives that we reject, resent, even hate about our existence.
In my December 7, 2022 reflection, titled Moving from Rejecting to Embracing God’s Providence, I introduced the concept of how to ROTATE your PIECES. ROTATE is an acronym that stands for the process of moving through a continuum of Rejection, Openness, Tolerating, Acceptance, Thanksgiving, and Embracing for any one or more of the PIECES of your life.
In this value, I remember Romans 8:28, where St. Paul tells us that We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.
Everything means everything.
No exceptions.
In this value, I commit to looking for the good, the gift God is giving me in all adversity, all trials, all the PIECES of my life that trouble and distress me.
Drinking in the PHOD-CA
PHOD-CA is an acronym that stands for these virtues:
- Patience
- Humility
- Obedience
- Docility
- Confidence in God
- Abandonment to God
The order of these virtues is highly significant to me. I’ve noticed that for the first four, I can’t exercise the virtue very well unless I have the previous one in the list. No matter how hard I try to be humble, if I’m not patient (with my own parts and with others) it just doesn’t work. If I am trying to be docile without having obedience well in hand, I’m going to fail.
So I think of those first four virtues as gears in a manual transmission. If I notice that I’m stuck in neutral, or even worse, backsliding in reverse, I need to shift into first gear, really valuing patience with myself in my parts, and patience with others, including God. If I can re-establish a sense of patience, I can shift into second gear, focusing on humility. And so on.
Confidence in God is a bit of a wild card for me. It helps when I focus on confidence in God, regardless of where I am in the moment. However, I absolutely need confidence in God in order to make an attempt to abandon myself to Him in all things. Some of my managers have really manhandled other parts of me, trying to force them into abandoning myself to God. That doesn’t work for me. I can only abandon myself to a God in Whom I have great confidence.
So, depending on where I am in the day, I will cycle through and along these virtues. Rarely am I focusing on abandonment; I am still working up to that more regularly.
Caring for my body as Your temple, Holy Spirit
For decades, I have been telling myself that I need to exercise more regularly, and take better care of my body, but I always seem to lack the motivation. Some of the demands of farming life have forced me to exercise, but as I’ve gotten older, and my kids have taken over more of the responsibilities, I do less of the physical labor.
I tried “offering up” exercise for particular intentions, suffering through workouts as a way of putting an exclamation point on my petitionary prayers, but that didn’t work out very well either. It was only after I began working on embracing my body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, working that into my identity as a Catholic man that things began to change, and this was relatively recently. In the past month, I’ve started working out at a gym with a trainer.
I also have also put off getting my shoulder imaged and evaluated, as I’ve had intermittent shoulder trouble for about eight years. Now, especially with the gym workouts, I’m realizing how I’ve lost some range of motion, and some strength in that shoulder, and I’m motivated, as a temple of the Holy Spirit, and also to be able to better play with my grandchildren, to have my shoulder issues resolved. I also would like to resume playing pickup Ultimate Frisbee with my sons, aged 24 and 14 in the spring.
My wife Pam is particularly pleased about this, and now I am even taking the supplements that she has carefully chosen for my health, which a skeptical, snarky part of me had previously dismissed as only causing me to yield more expensive urine than otherwise.
Joy, peace, and play
As part of trying to become more like a parvulo, a little child before God, I am valuing play much more than I used to. I also am reminded of St. Teresa of Avila’s admonition, “God save us from gloomy saints,” so I am looking to actively cultivate a greater sense of joy within me, including a delight in others, seeing them as beloved little sons and daughters of God as well. Delight is one of the primary conditions for secure attachment, and perhaps the one that is least frequently met.
Also, highly influenced by Fr. Jacques Philippe’s book Searching for and Maintaining Peace, I am looking to cherish and treasure a sense of internal peace. This represents a shift for me because in the past, I have sought a kind of hypomanic euphoria to drive me to greater levels of productivity, but while that could work in the short run, it led to burnouts, and a lack of being centered and grounded.
My process
Originally, when I envisioned writing a values statement, my manager parts thought this would be a much more linear process. Instead, as you know, I’ve worked on this in fits and starts, with inspirations and periods of no apparent progress, over the last three months. Sometimes things would just come to me, and I would write them down in a little notebook I carry with me. It has helped so much to be able to share them with you, especially in the third Zoom workshop I hosted, which helped me to articulate more clearly the values I was trying to identify as my foci right now.
“Past” values
These values represent where I am after decades of focused work on personal formation – in all its dimensions, human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral. I thought it might be useful for you to see where I’ve come from, so I’m going to list some of the values that would have been in my personal values statements in years past.
Some of these values I have discarded because they were inappropriate, actually disordered, such as attempting to be self-sufficient, and rely solely on myself. Others represented attachments, such as in overinvestment in the Green Bay Packers, which did not help me pursue my vision of becoming love.
Other, more ordered values, simply became more natural to me, a part of my identity, and I no longer had to struggle to remember them and work toward them, so they were no longer a growing edge or focal point to be included in a personal values statement so the focus on different values changes, as my circumstances changed. A homeless man in Minneapolis might cling to and greatly value his quilts, as his life may depend on him staying warm enough to survive the winter. However, as his housing situation improves he may not value the quilt so much, but may need to focus more on continuing to pay the rent and his utility bills, so he can stay warm in his apartment.
So, depending on where you are in your natural trajectory of maturation in the natural realm, and in your spiritual formation, there will be different values to focus on at different times. This is abundantly clear in St. Teresa of Avila’s Seven Mansions for example, or the sequence of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways within our Faith, among many other examples of growth in the spiritual life.
So here are a list of “past” values
- Being highly competent
- Being highly innovative, a pioneer in Catholic human formation
- Financial security
- Seeking mutuality and reciprocity in friendships
- Following the Green Bay Packers
- Chastity/purity
- Self-sufficiency and self-reliance
- Independence
- Setting better boundaries and limits with others
- Setting better boundaries and limits, but now with kindness and gentleness
- Exercising greater agency and autonomy
- Professional achievement
- Fearlessness (instead of courage – see my story of that in this PDF)
- Making a name for myself (a kind of “pragmatic immortality”)
- Loving with the will
- Establishing spiritual plan of life, with regular prayer throughout the day
“Future” values
I am considering some potential values to work into my value statement, including a more consistent sense of awe and wonder, and child-like-ness. I’m also considering more about rest activity and responsiveness to touches and inspirations from the Holy Spirit. There are some relationships in my life that need work and healing; I’m not sure quite were to put those in the value statement.
The point here is to just let you know that the value statement is of work in progress. The individual virtues are lanterns to help guide you on your way as you live out your mission (we will start discussing mission statements next) toward realizing your personal vision.
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New Interior Integration for Catholics podcast episode released
You loving you. You bringing each of your parts closer to God, in a gentle, merciful way. Dr. Peter Martin shares his insights on how we can love ourselves toward God, informed by attachment theory and Internal Family Systems, and grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person. He presents on “Internal Evangelization Therapy” – bringing in safe havens, secure bases, the “Circle of Security,” spiritual intercessors, the discernment of spirits, and how to “bypass the spiritual bypass.” This episode focuses on how to bring home to God the “lost sheep” within us – the outcast parts, the inner lepers, the blind parts, the lame, the tax collectors, the parts condemned by other parts as sinners. Check out this episode, You Evangelizing You – “Internal Evangelization” (99 minutes) Video Audio
Join psychologist Peter Martin and me on Thursday evening, December 12 from 8:00 to 9:30 PM Eastern on Zoom
Join Dr. Peter Martin and me for IIC episode 156, Thursday evening, December 12, from 8:00 to 9:30 PM Eastern time to discuss anything and everything from the previous two podcast episodes:
- Episode 154 Attachment and Learning How to Love with Dr. Peter Martin (91 minutes) Video Audio
- Episode 155 You Evangelizing You – “Internal Evangelization” (99 minutes) Video Audio
Registration is free – sign up here for the link to join us; I would very much like so many of you to be present. We will record that episode and release it on Monday, December 16.
Conversation hours
Ordinarily, I host conversation hours every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Eastern time on my cell phone at 317.567.9594 – it’s a time for any of you who follow my work to get in touch for a 10-minute phone call about any of the topics we discuss.
Just a note that on Tuesday, December 10, I won’t be in conversation hours as I am planning to record a podcast episode.
Catholic formators working on their own human formation…
Catholic priests, spiritual directors, therapists, counselor, coaches, and other who accompany others in formation – check out the Formation for Formators Community where you have a unique opportunity to work with me, my FFF staff, and other formators in small groups on human formation.
Learn about how to apply IFS concepts to your personal life, all in a way that is grounded in an authentic Catholic understanding of the human person. Find out more here. New groups start in February and March of 2025, and are filling up. Put a deposit down now to hold your seat.
Also, save the date… from August 7-11, 2025, Marion Moreland and I will be hosting an in-person human formation retreat for Catholic formators. More details to come soon, as we finalize our plans.
Link for meetups
If you would like to be informed of Souls and Hearts’ in-person meetups coming to your area, be sure to let us know where you are! Here’s a link to a brief form to help us learn where our members are so we can plan local events.
The Resilient Catholics Community
For years, my Souls and Hearts team and I have been working on finding the best ways for you to work on your human formation, informed by IFS and grounded in a Catholic worldview, to overcome the natural impediments to flourishing.
The result is the Resilient Catholics Community.
We have more than 400 current and onboarding members right now, all on a pilgrimage to better human formation. Working in small companies of 5-9 people, meeting weekly, connecting with your companions – the elements are here to help you connect with and love your parts, so that you can better love your God and your neighbor.
The RCC is changing the lives of so many Catholics – not only its members, both those who its members love. Check it out here and see if you might be called to join us. The Church needs Catholics with excellent human formation, to transform the world in love.
Our next cohort, the St. Ignatius of Loyola, opens for registration from February 1-28, 2025. Get on the interest list for ongoing updates.
Pray for us
Please pray for us. On our own, without grace, we can do nothing good. We rely on your prayers. Please pray for us. We are praying for you.
Warm regards in Christ and His Mother,
Dr. Peter