Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

"Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning. Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord your God."

Welcome back to Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. Today is Ash Wednesday, February 18th, 2026. Today's guest is Lisa Barrett, a psychotherapist in private practice based in Sydney, Australia, and a member of Souls and Hearts' Resilient Catholics Community and the Formation for Formators Community.

"Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, weeping and mourning. Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord your God." Now I'm going to speak directly to the inner outcasts who are listening right now, but always with the permission of your protector part. So please just check if this feels safe and okay for your managers. First, God says to you that he doesn't want you exiled ones to despair about the state of your heart or the depth of the pain or brokenness you feel. He wants to hold you. He wants to hold you in all of this, to help you to let go and to live your life more fully. He can change your pain to joy, and he wants you to show him what it is that you are weeping or mourning, to show him your pain, your grief, your powerlessness, and he will show you love. When I read and prayed this passage, God was speaking to me and my exiles about their tendency to reach for connection and healing outside of him and how they can look towards others to heal their pain.

And he was saying, I don't want you to rend your garments, to wring your hands, to agitate and distress with the pain of what has happened to you and what you have taken on. Instead, he was inviting my exile parts to show him the hurt that has been caused to them, the way that they try to align themselves with the people that they perceive as strong, the pull from my exiles to merge with the seemingly confident grandiosity of who they perceive as strong or charismatic, even as other parts of me are horrified. God was showing me that he sees the other's shame that these exiles take on as they identify themselves with the other, with the burden that gets laid on me when they go towards others in this way, hopeful for connection. He sees the knots that they get tangled and as they repeat familiar patterns, and he was reminding my yearning exiles that he can hold that hurt along with my inmost self, that he and I together can hold them in their pain if we return to him.

The Resilient Catholics Community is open to new applications for our latest cohort, the Saint Luke cohort, for the entire month of February. Listeners are invited to apply by visiting soulsandhearts.com/rcc.

Mother Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.