Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

"Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying, 'The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach, but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to carry, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.'"

You are listening to Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. It's March 3rd, 2026, Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent. Today we are joined by clinical psychologist Dr. Peter Malinoski, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts and host of our sister podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics.

So good to be with you again. And this is Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent. And I'm focusing in on the beginning of our Gospel today, Matthew 23, verses 1 to 4. "Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying, 'The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach, but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to carry, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.'" And what really caught my attention today in this Gospel passage was the word burdens. "They tie up heavy burdens, hard to carry and lay them on people's shoulders." That really got to me. You exiles are, by definition, burdened. Because there are basically two qualities that any exiled part has. First of all, each of you exiles carries a burden and that could be of pain, distress, anger, shame. It could be disappointment, grief, could be any number of things. Each exile carries a burden. And then each of you exiles is also isolated, excluded, banished by the protectors in your system. Those are the two qualities that each exile has. And in this case, I know from Jesus' words, that there was malice on the part of these Pharisees, that their hearts were hardened, that they were hypocritical. And people can definitely get to a place of malice, right, through hard heartedness, that kind of ossifying of their love, really. Most managers are not there. Most managers are not so hard hearted. Evil can come from a lot of sources that are not malicious.

It can come through fear, it can come through ignorance. And that's often what's going on in a system. The managers do not understand exiles, and so much of this is just parts coming together and recognizing each other for who each part is. I want to draw your attention, exiles, to what this Gospel says. Jesus was concerned. He was really empathetically moved by the burdens that the Pharisees and the scribes were laying on people's shoulders. That really troubled him deeply. And it troubles him deeply that you have these burdens. I'm just going to invite you to see if that can register or sink in at all. Maybe that's a really strange concept, but again, we don't go just by our subjective experience because exiles when you're not in right relationship with the innermost self. If that's not allowed, your vision is going to necessarily be limited, and you might have difficulty imagining this because you might not have great access to your faculty of imagination, in your isolated space. But if you're listening to this, your managers have at least allowed that to happen. We're grateful for that. And your managers are likely not to be so hard hearted. There's just a lot of ignorance to be overcome, a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of history, a lot of baggage. Managers have their burdens too, and their extreme roles. But let's remember that Jesus is not just speaking to individuals as unities. He's also speaking to individuals as multiplicities. He's speaking to their parts. So I'm going to invite you to take in what you can take in of that, his concern about people being burdened and by extension, then his concerns about parts being burdened.

To learn more about the internal family systems concept of unburdening, check out our sister podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics episode 115.

And with that, we'll draw this to a close by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.