Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

Speaker 1: Each of you forgives your brother from your heart.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to sculpture for your inner outcasts. Today is September 13th, 2026, the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Like every Sunday, today's episode is a joint reflection featuring Doctor Peter Malinoski and Doctor Jerry Crete, the co-founders of Souls and Hearts.

Speaker 1: Dear exiles, it is so good to be back with you. Thank you for tuning in. And as I was reading through these readings, some things were really coming up that might provide some comfort and some solace to our exiles. And some things in here might might be frightening in some ways to our exiles. So.

Speaker 3: You know, I this is a really interesting reading in the gospel. I'm going to just jump right over to the.

Speaker 1: Jump to the gospel. All right, here we go.

Speaker 3: Because it's the one where Peter says, Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times. Right? And so we get the seven, seven times seven. But which really means there's no.

Speaker 1: No, no limit, right?

Speaker 3: There's no limit. Because when Peter asks about it, Jesus gives him this parable of this guy that that is forgiven by the king. He gets forgiven a vast amount, right? And then he turns around and doesn't forgive someone under him. Right? And then so now he gets tortured for that, right? But I'm sitting there with that. And, and I'm wondering, okay, well, what does this mean for my parts? What does this mean for me and my heart? And, and I'm really thinking about this notion that we can live in a world where we are just transactional. And in a way, like this guy was forgiven by the king and he, he just took that and kept going and, and then moved on, you know, when he was confronted with someone that needed forgiveness, he just was transactional with that guy, right? Mhm. So what didn't happen for him and his system and his parts, like he didn't metabolize that mercy.

Speaker 1: Well, it goes to this very last verse in here in the in the gospel. So this would be Matthew 18, verse 35, where our Lord and joins us. Each of you forgives your brother from your heart.

Speaker 3: Mhm.

Speaker 1: So what this tells me, you know, it's not just something that resides in the will. It's, it's from our hearts. Like, like I think our Lord was looking for there to be an emotional response, for there not to be just an act of the will of forgiveness, but that the forgiveness that we're called to involves more of us. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Because that's what I mean by metabolizing. Like unless the forgiveness is owned and penetrates, it's not going to transform us. Right? Right. And so mercy has to land deep inside of us. It has to reach our exiles, and it has to be believed by our protectors. And before it can flow back out to others outside of us. So this guy received it in a way, but it didn't actually penetrate him when he was forgiven. And since it didn't penetrate his whole inner system, he didn't have it to hand out.

Speaker 1: So there is sometimes this concept of forgiveness, which sort of papers over things. It's not taken in, it's not metabolized. I really like that word. It's not infusing the heart. Uh, and I think sometimes that's, that's offered and received is a kind of spiritual bypassing. You know, as a kind of like avoiding the work that our Lord is very clearly calling us to with forgiveness. And you've seen people do this. Like I, I just, I just forgive, I just forgive that person without like wanting to go there.

Speaker 3: I've done that. Right. But it's really, I love the way you just put that because that spiritual bypass another way maybe to say that is like, that's white knuckling forgiveness. Mhm. Right. You're just. Oh, yeah, I'm just going to let it go. But real forgiveness is what Jesus is describing here, right? It is, you know, it has to happen. Um, the way healing happens really in, I think in ifs, right. Or parts work like the, the self, the innermost self accompanying an exile until the old debt no longer defines it. It's until the part that's been, you know, that's been choking someone else right out of its own fear, finally feel safe enough to lay that grip down and just like, no, I'm not doing this anymore. And, and can actually receive in here God's love. So in mercy, this amazing divine mercy in such a way that, oh, the whole system receives it. And therefore I don't, I can give that to others.

Speaker 1: Right. I think that it's so, so critical because so often what I think happens in forgiveness. Is that a spiritual manager who knows that it's really important to forgive, wants to carry that out, has good intentions, drives the forgiveness thing, and without even knowing what the impact or the experience of the harm was, because an exile is carrying that. But the spiritual manager a lot of times has no real awareness of the burden of that exile. And so the forgiveness is offered, but it's not an integrated forgiveness. And so it has this element of being incomplete, uh, and, and, and not, and not really attending to the reality of, of, of what happened, you know, and that's, that I think is really important. Uh, that's an important reason why we need this integration that we at souls and hearts are really invested in because otherwise they, we can be doing these things kind of like piecemeal, you know, in, in an incomplete way.

Speaker 3: Well, and just to link, because we spend our time in the gospel and we're not going to probably have time to look at a lot else. But in Sirach, which is, you know, the deuterocanonical book that doesn't always get as much traction as others. It's, but it's a, it's a book about wisdom, ultimately. And there's a line, it says wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight. Well, I would say the sinner in this case, like is a part. A part holds on to those things tight, right. And and therefore doesn't forgive. So even when it is forgiven, it, if it's hugging tight, it isn't able, it isn't softened enough to be able to give forgiveness. It really ties into the gospel in my mind in such a powerful way. So how do we reframe that for our exiles? Right? Of course, our exiles are going to hold certain things tight, right? Because, you know, like maybe anger here, it's not because it loves to suffer, right? It's hugging anger because it doesn't trust that letting it go is safe, right? Right. Releasing the grip might feel like releasing the last bit of protection that an exile has, you know? Or that some hurt part that has maybe even a protector. So to stop being angry, right, is not exactly, you know, isn't so helpful so much as could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? No. Right. Because it's not even good for you to do that, right?

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 3: Right. And God wants so much more. He wants to give mercy to us in such a way that we receive it and offer it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's really where we need to be focusing in that. And that involves some trust that involves some trust. And again, it is so much easier to do that when there is some integration happening, when there's some recollection and you know that, then we can see that God is not like our blended parts. You know, we have this in the Responsorial Psalm, right in the in the response, the Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, rich in compassion. And one of the things that, um, that I think is important distinction here is that our Lord is not condemning anger in Sirach, anger as an emotion. It's the nourishing of the anger. It's the harboring of it. It's the fostering of it which involves some choices inside. Uh, but to feel anger that's not in and of itself a sin. It's Saint John of the cross talks about first moral acts and second moral acts. First moral acts are those experiences that come up inside that are just spontaneous, and they don't carry a moral weight until they're acted upon in some way.

Speaker 3: So yeah, and I would just say like, there's so much mercy in all these readings this weekend. And, and like the idea that, you know, our transgressions are as far as the East is.

Speaker 1: From the west. Just love that.

Speaker 3: So beautiful. Yeah. What what what how amazing is mercy is so far.

Speaker 1: Has he put our transgressions from us? So that's what our Lord wants to do. That's what he wants to, to, to offer us. And that's what he hopes that we'll receive. It's a question of whether we're going to hang on to and nourish our anger. And you know who that reminds me of, actually, is Saruman. You know.

Speaker 3: Lord of the rings.

Speaker 1: Lord of the rings. Yes, yes. Lord of the rings. Saruman, you know, gnawing on the ends of his plots, you know, and, and, and being offered redemption at the, at the at, at the very end, you know, but still refusing it. So that actually is such a tragic scene. Um, because I think it's so clearly lays out someone who invested and nourished anger and allowed it to take over his, his entire being.

Speaker 3: Mhm. Yeah. I have to agree.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, with that, we've made it to, uh, to the Lord of the rings.

Speaker 3: You made a Lord of the rings reference, and I'm not going to keep going because we're out of time.

Speaker 1: We're out of time.

Speaker 3: We gotta draw this to a clip. This could be an entire podcast episode on Saruman.

Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us for today's episode. If you're enjoying these Sunday joint reflections between doctor Jerry and Doctor Peter, you might also enjoy their Be with the Word episodes. Back when they founded Souls and Hearts, they had a podcast similar to this one called be with the word, in which they reflected on the Sunday mass readings. That podcast is no longer active, but you can still listen to the archives of it, which is linked in the description of today's show.

Speaker 1: Our lady, our mother, Untier of knots. Pray for us, Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist.

Speaker 3: Pray.

Speaker 1: For us.