Today is a birthday, never meaning that much. Another year gone past. My laptop is being repaired, forcing smart phone documentation and posting. I have distanced myself from posting personal revelations, enjoying a marvelous vacation. Effervescent, thoughts bubble and burst. Prayer roots itself as a grounding. In discretely, lacking concrete form, ideas from Healing the Eight Stages of Life settle upon consciousness, including the subconscious

Besides being divided into thinkers and feelers, we are also divided into intuitives and sensates. Intuitive people dream, live in the future, and have considered all the possible questions even before the teacher ask one. They are ready and can respond quickly. In contrast, sensate people live in the present, taking in all the data. A sensate is considered not about the question the teacher is going to write on the blackboard, but that no one has erased the blackboard well and that the chalk is too short. It takes an intuitive person only one second to answer the teacher’s question, but even if a sensate knows the answer it takes three seconds to give it–three times as long. Many teachers won’t wait three times as long, but instead label the student as slow and therefore will ask another student….

We can be hurt not because we don’t have gifts, but because we don’t have the gifts that school rewards….Hurts in this stage, especially those which lead us to earn love by working harder, may lead to a Type A personality striving, always obsessed with achievement and duty regarding God’s love..

While Type A people often succeed and learn to earn love by trying hard, other less successful people learn not to try at all. You might call them Type Z. The Type Z person learns that he will fail at whatever he tries, so he tends to say, “Let them do it. I don’t want to try anything new because I will probably fail”.  Both Type A and Type Z need to discover that they are good and their worth doesn’t depend on success or failure. They both need GK Chesterton advice that “if something is worth doing at all, it is worth doing poorly”.

We can also relate to God with the perfectionism of Type A or the sloth of Type Z. We can mistakenly feel God is reacting like a teacher or parent, loving us more if we do well and less if we fail. We go to mass or do good works to earn God’s love rather than his grateful responses to God loving us so much. But God’s love doesn’t turn on and off like a water faucet. God is a father who sun rises on the just and unjust (Mt 5:45) and a mother who loves us whether we are competent or incompetent, whether we have worked a full day or an hour (Mt 20:1-17). God’s love doesn’t fluctuate but rather we fluctuate in our capacity to receive God’s love. Sunday mass and good works are not to convince God to love us. Rather, they open us to receive God’s ever-present, infinite love and enable us to share it….

While the Type A person is tempted to Pelagian earning of God’s love by trying to work and pray more perfectly, the Type Z person is tempted to dismiss the value of any work or prayer. The Type Z will dismiss her ability to pray, to listen to God in Scripture, to have a personal relationship with God, or to learn more about God. In contrast, the true mystic doesn’t rely on her ability to pray well, nor does she give up because she can’t pray well. The true mystic knows that God’s love is an unknown gift and she longs to pray even when she can’t pray.