Scrupulosity causing me to avoid the sacraments

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gloria87

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I would like to request your prayers and advice. I am having the hardest time going to confession and communion. I just don’t like going to either because it is always an experience of deep guilt and anxiety. I really want to overcome this and I am sure God knows my heart and how I want to partake without feeling guilty afterward. Lord have mercy on me!
 
Gloria, the Lord loves you. Of course you’re not perfect, of course you see all your faults but He no more expects you to be perfect than you would your own little child!
May He help your the realise this!
I’ll be back to you, Love, but I need to join my husband to share a coffee with him just now. With love and prayers, Trishie
 
Gloria, I’m sorry to hear about your trials. Jesus loves you so much. He died to forgive your sins. His mercy is incomprehensible and knows no limits. You have been to confession and are forgiven your sins. Do not let scruples stop you from going now to receive Love Himself in Holy Communion. That is the enemy talking. Satan doesn’t want you to go to Communion. That is the greatest thing you can do to fight Satan is go to confession and receive Communion. He hates Jesus in Communion. Quite possibly more Satan hates us mere mortals receiving Jesus in Communion because he can’t and because that takes us farther away from him than anything. We become one with Jesus when we partake of Communion, we are healed and forgiven and saved. We are made new and made ready for the kingdom of heaven. Also, from what I’ve read scrupulosity is caused by obsessive compulsive disorder. You may wish to seek counseling from a psychologist in addition to counseling from a priest. Those things may help you. I will pray for you.
 
Trishie said:
Gloria, the Lord loves you. Of course you’re not perfect, of course you see all your faults but He no more expects you to be perfect than you would your own little child!
May He help your the realise this!
I’ll be back to you, Love, but I need to join my husband to share a coffee with him just now. With love and prayers, Trishie
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Trishie, this is beautiful. I will use this own analogy in my meditation on God’s love. Thank you for sharing. God bless you.
 
Lord, the confusing thing is that when we are scrupulous we need to pray for humility along with trust and wisdom regarding God’s love, because humility is a genuine balance of the truth about us and the truth about God and God’s merciful love for us. For when we attack ourselves unmercifully for every failure and imperfection and our unworthiness, this isn’t really humility but self-flagellation and even unknown to us, a kind of self-absorption…we are judging ourselves instead of trusting in Your merciful love and Your complete understanding of human nature.

Please help us to allow You to draw us out of self-blame and scrupulosity into recognition of our actual sins, and into simple contrition for our actual sins, without descending into fear and self blame and even of denying ourselves the sources of grace that You offer us.

Be kind to those whose consciences are intricately sensitive and guide them to Your perspectives, and into recognition and acceptance of Your forgiveness. The truth is that we will never be perfect and blameless, and always human. As we human beings are created in Your image, then to be human is not a fault, but to be fully, wholesomely human is what it is to be holy.

Our God, I pray and trust that You pray powerfully in me for the salvation and welfare of each person throughout time as if I loved him or her unconditionally. Through Jesus and through Heaven, I offer to God all good thoughts, acts and achievements, all grief, anxiety, frustration, discomfort of each person, of each creature throughout time.

Our God, You know that I deeply regret my sins and failures. You know that I am often saddened by my mistakes and inability to achieve much that might please You or bless others. Yet You know my resurgent desire to live Your commandments of love for God, for others and for myself as You love me. I know that You pardon my sins and heal the damage they cause.

I know that, in response to my prayer, You love and delight Yourself in me who seems intrinsically unimportant, one of countless billions of average persons throughout time. I know that in Your merciful love, You give me true faith in You and true knowledge of You; You make me a living tabernacle, an overflowing chalice of Your love, a powerhouse of prayer, and an open doorway to God for others.

I know these things…for “God is asking me, the unworthy, to forget my unworthiness and that of my brothers, and to dare to advance in the love which has redeemed and renewed us all in God’s likeness…to laugh, after all, at the preposterous idea of ‘worthiness’” Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton. I know these things of Your great LOVE in whom “everything is possible”.
 
Contrition
Father, I have sinned against others, against myself, and against You. I am unworthy to be Your child. I have offended Your goodness and Your dream of who I really am. I may have denied You the joy of blessings that You wish for me and for others through me.

You alone know the entire consequences of my failure. Yet Jesus assures us that You joyfully celebrate my return from sin, and run to welcome and reclaim me as Your own. I want to value myself as Your child, knowing that all worth and holiness comes from You.

In trust, I will not accuse myself for sins already forgiven and absolved or for temptation if I have not actually sinned. I believe that temptation can be overcome by Your grace, inspiring greater faithfulness to the Gospel and the Sacraments.

Look on those tasks of love and service that I fail to undertake or to complete, and bring them to completion. Please bring out of my failures, such fruits of these new opportunities enhanced beyond all previous expectation, for from our human betrayal of Your divine plan of Creation, Your mercy wrought the magnificent plan of redemption that reverberates through time and eternity!

In Your mercy, please transform into good all that in weakness or ignorance I may spoil. Please give blessing that is abundant beyond original possibility, to anyone I ever harm or deprive.

May I so belong to You, may I be so transformed by Your love, that my faults no longer are sin or offence in Your sight and can foster nothing that impedes Your will. This, my soul in trusting confidence implores.
 
Appreciating others

Jesus, I honour others for their goodness. Yet, help me to share Your compassion, respect and delight in those who seem ( to themselve or others) to reflect Your face poorly. Grant me the gift of conveying to each person, the beautiful, glimpsed vision of self, as You love him or her, a fallible human with entwined faults and virtues.

**One sometimes glimpses another’s discouraged self-judgement, for she fears that Your plan of salvation builds upon some unlikely ‘ideal self’. **She perhaps hopes that to others, only the good is evident. Her fears that were others to sense the extent of his unworthiness, they may reject her—as indeed she fears You may.

Jesus, please extend Your hand to her through those who see herefforts and who have faith in the secret, unique miracle of her. **Let her know that You love her as she is, and that You plan her holiness around her actual self. You fulfil Your dream of her and serve others through her flawed personality with its abilities, gifts and virtues, along with its faults and scars. Assure her that her efforts to live the Gospel are more precious because of her temptations and flaws, so that she is encouraged to faith and self-acceptance. **

God let me see and share Your beautiful, unique, creative vision of each brother and sister, regardless of ‘apparent’ flaws. In my warm acceptance of him or her grant to each person that restoring, blossoming fruitfulness of love—which the image of her cherished and accepted as she really is—produces in the most barren and bleak heart. 1982

My sister, “Do not be afraid, you will not be put to shame.” [Isaiah 54:4]
 
In my weakness You are strength

Jesus, thank You for those who see my faults or misunderstand my motives and who thus reveal my need for conversion and healing.

I repent my unworthiness, and ask that You offer me as gift to God in each broken moment restored.

Gather up my lost moments, Jesus! Cleanse and shape them with my sorrow merged with Your sacrifice. Burnish and set them with Your forgiveness, and illuminate them with Your love as treasures of witness, intercession, and atonement! Thus, make my flawed life into a gem of praise, service and delight for You in the Communion of Saints.

Praise to You, Jesus, who make treasure out of ordinary and fallen human beings! March 1982

“I live in a high and holy place, but I am also with the contrite and humbled spirit, to give the humble new life…I will heal and console him.” says the Lord God.” [Isaiah 57:15, 18]
“In my ‘little way every thing is most ordinary; all that I do, little souls must be able to do likewise. (Saint Therese of Lisieux) Her little way “is the way of Spiritual childhood…of trust and absolute self-surrender.”

Saint Therese of Lisieux encourages us in our attempts towards holiness in our vocation to love and serve. Of her own response to the call, she wrote,
“This desire could certainly appear daring if one were to consider how weak and imperfect I was, and how after seven years in the religious life, I am still weak and imperfect. I always feel, however, the same bold confidence of becoming a great saint because I do not count on my own merits since I have none, but I trust in God who is Virtue and Holiness. God alone, content with my weak efforts, will raise me to Himself and make me a saint, clothing me in His infinite merits. I didn’t think then that one had to suffer very much to reach sanctity, but God was not long in showing me this was so and in sending me the trials I have already mentioned.” Therese remarked that such holiness may “not be evident to the eyes of mortals.”

…and even, I think, to ourselves.

Darling girl, Jesus is waiting for you in the confessional and in Communion. I’m sure you don’t want to keep Him waiting long. 🙂 He understands why so don’t be sad about the past just go with the present and future, for as He said, “today has enough problems of its own”!

Love, Trishie
 
I seem to remember that even if you didn’t remember a specific sin, all sins are forgiven in confession.

I remember when I finally went back to confession after 20-25 years… yes, 20-25 years. I tried, and he kept asking me, to remember as much as I could. But in this case I couldn’t remember EVERYTHING. So what’s a priest to do? He still gives you absolution and it covers everything.

Now, if you are thinking of things that you’ve done between the act of confession and the Eucharist, I have some more adivce from a priest for you. In the first part of the Mass, there is a point where we all begin to say: " I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters that I have sinned through my own faults. In my thoughts…etc" We were told by a priest that this “confession” covers venial sins.

My God give you the graces you need to overcome your fears and concerns.
 
gloria87 said:
I would like to request your prayers and advice. I am having the hardest time going to confession and communion. I just don’t like going to either because it is always an experience of deep guilt and anxiety. I really want to overcome this and I am sure God knows my heart and how I want to partake without feeling guilty afterward. Lord have mercy on me!
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I have struggled with this, too. The sources that have helped me a lot are scrupulous anonymous and the book by Fr. Thomas Santa, Understanding Scrupulosity. They are both great helps for the scrupulous person.
 
Gloria, I sometimes have this sort of trouble, too. May the Lord give you the courage to approach Him in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, so that He may grant you all the graces He so desires to give. If you want to talk about it further, PM me. 🙂

J+M+J

May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May He turn His face to you and be gracious to you.
May He look upon you kindly and give you His peace. Amen.
 
Praying the August Queen Prayer for you.

August Queen of the Heavens, heavenly sovereign of the Angels, Thou who from the beginning received from God the power and the mission to crush the head of Satan, we humbly beseech Thee to send Your holy Legions, so that under Thy command and through Thy power, they may pursue the demons and combat them everywhere, suppress their boldness, and drive them back into the abyss. Who is like God? O good and tender Mother, Thou will always be our love and hope! O Divine Mother, send Thy Holy Angels to defend me and to drive far away from me the cruel enemy. Holy Angels and Archangels, defend us, guard us. Amen.
 
I’m praying for you Gloria and don’t forget that God loves you. 🙂
 
Hail Mary,
Full of Grace,
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the Fruit of Thy Womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary,
Mother of God,
pray for us sinners now,
and at the hour of our death.
Amen
 
Thank you all. I have resolved to go to confession and tell the priest about my scrupulosity and put it all into God’s hands because obviously God’s way is better than mine!
 
gloria87 said:
Thank you all. I have resolved to go to confession and tell the priest about my scrupulosity and put it all into God’s hands because obviously God’s way is better than mine!
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Our prayers go with you, too!🙂
 
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