Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

Dr. Gerry: "You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians, and how I bore you up on eagle's wings and brought you here to myself."

Elizabeth: You are listening to Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. Today is June 14th, 2026, the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today is a special Sunday episode of Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts, as we are joined by both Dr. Gerry Crete and Dr. Peter Malinoski, the co-founders of Souls and Hearts. They will be offering a joint reflection on today's readings.

Dr. Peter: Dear exiles, welcome once again to Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. This is our episode for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And as always, on Sundays, dear Dr. Gerry, here we are together. Welcome. It's great to be with you.

Dr. Gerry: Yeah, great to be with you, too.

Dr. Peter: So, the 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time. I was just thinking to myself, that sounds like a very ordinary Sunday in Ordinary Time. But when we get into these readings, we start to see things that are more than just ordinary. So I'm just curious, what struck you out of the readings for today's Mass?

Dr. Gerry: There's so much. I'm not sure where to begin. Maybe I'll just work my way through some of them. So first of all, we're still seeing the Israelites, we're in Exodus. So there's this whole idea of the wilderness once again. So when they're in the wilderness, you know, this is, to me, I immediately think, in our interior world, of the unconscious mind or those places in our heart that are like, not always in conscious awareness, that's where our exiles live. And so there's this journey that our exiles are doing, hopefully, or we're calling them to a journey from exile back home. And so, but what strikes me is that God isn't scolding them for being in the wilderness, right? It's just where they are. And this is true for our exile parts, right? And so he's calling them like, he sees them where they are. It's this dry, often, you know, featureless place in the Exodus. And this might be, for exiles, childhood humiliation, relationships that have collapsed. It might be violence or neglect. Who knows like what our exiles have experienced. And they're basically, you know, feel like, oh, I'm not welcome here or anywhere. So they're not really there because they're being punished by God. Maybe they were sent there on some level to be protected for a time, right. And so I guess what moves me the most though, is that line in Exodus 19:4 where he says, God says, "You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians, and how I bore you up on eagles' wings and brought you here to myself." Now I'm not going to start singing the 1970s song. So yes, I do have a place for it in my heart. But I love, I mean, to me, this is possibly the most important passage that I can think of off the top of my head in terms of speaking to our exiles, because I know that our exiles are, not just our exiles. Almost all of my parts, and when I'm working with clients, almost all of their parts, struggle believing that they have to fix themselves before they can make themselves presentable to God. And here God is literally saying, I will carry you, I carried you, you know, you don't have to do anything. I will hold you. This is self-energy for exiles. This is God supplying grace, our innermost self having self-energy and meeting the exile, you know, and saying, I am here. You don't have to carry this alone anymore.

Dr. Peter: When we get that reflected in the Responsorial Psalm too, because he says, "Know that the LORD is God; he made us, his we are; his people, the flock he tends." You know, like, and that includes all of us, like all of our parts, all of our parts were created by God. And I think sometimes, you know, you exiles don't have a sense of being fearfully and wonderfully made by God. I think sometimes you might see yourselves, I hear this a lot with people I accompany, and I've experienced in my own system, that exiles feel like they were the off scouring, like they were just the rejected ones, that they were the ones where all the badness was piled up and dumped on.

Dr. Gerry: Yeah. And then look at what Jesus says like, or what it says in Matthew about Jesus. He says, "Jesus's heart was moved with pity." I actually didn't remember that. I thought it was so beautiful. "It was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned." That's God's disposition toward our exiles.

Dr. Peter: That's right, that's right.

Dr. Gerry: Oh, man. So important.

Dr. Peter: And he validates the experience, right? It's not that they just felt abandoned. It wasn't just that they were misperceiving something. They actually were abandoned by those who actually were charged with their care, the shepherds of the nation of Israel, right, that had abandoned the sheep, right? So now Jesus is coming to be the shepherd himself, not just delegate that to the religious leaders of the day.

Dr. Gerry: Yeah. And he felt it, you know, he did have empathy. I mean, that was so, so powerful. But he's not just that he feels it for them. He actually does want to, as you said, accompany. He does want to take care of them and bring them essentially the Promised Land. But I just want exiles to really, really hear this message, that you deserve the same pity, if you will, the sympathy, empathy that Jesus felt for this crowd. It's not a kind of pity that diminishes. It's not a looking down. It's, I see your suffering and it moves me and I will not look away. That's Jesus's disposition here. And then it, you know, it gets into the whole lost sheep of Israel, right? "Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Right. So he is not sending Jesus to perfect people, right, happy people on Facebook. He's sending them to his lost ones. That's who he cares about.

Dr. Peter: Yep, yep. And you see that he takes action right away. He sees this and he just doesn't deliberate or he just doesn't shake his head and say, oh, that's too bad. He moves immediately to commission the disciples to go out and to care for these sheep, for these lost sheep.

Dr. Gerry: Well, and he says, you know, he describes curing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, driving out demons. Like what is all that from a parts perspective? Curing the sick is healing the wounded parts that carry pain. Raising the dead, restoring parts that have gone dormant or numb. Cleansing lepers, unburdening the shame-laden parts, cast to the margins, driving out demons, releasing the extreme beliefs and behaviors parts adopted in order to survive. Like, you know, obviously there's different levels and layers you can take this on, but it speaks so loud and clear to what is happening in a positive therapeutic parts approach.

Dr. Peter: Well, this is beautiful, Dr. Gerry. And as always, it is great to be sharing these insights and to be connecting with each other and then with all of you in our listening audience, all of the parts. And that's a blessing for us as well.

Elizabeth: If today's episode resonates with you, you can find similar content at soulsandhearts.com/content. Thanks for joining us and we hope to see you again tomorrow.

Dr. Peter: Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.