According to the book, The Soul Also Keep the Score, the author quotes a prayer by St. Ignatius of Loyola called the Suscipe. Many people, not just the Jesuits, pray this prayer daily in their attempt to become the people that God calls them to be. Here goes.
“Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will-all that I have and possess. You Lord, have given all that to me. I now give it back to you, O Lord. All of it is yours. Dispose of it according to your will. Give me love of yourself along with your grace, for that is enough for me.” What a wonderful prayer!
I, along with many of my patients, have traumatic memories of experiences that keep us from enjoying love and intimacy to the fullest. In The Soul Also Keeps the Score, Father Robet W. McChesney, S.J. suggests that we who have these crushing memories ask God to take them and be the Lord of them as we surrender our past, present and future to his loving wisdom, kindness, and gentleness.
Father McChesney writes of these past experiences as moral injury trauma (MIT) in which we were the victims, perhaps perpetrators, witnesses, or maybe we could have kept something evil from happening but didn’t. Maybe we could have done some good and feel guilt and shame, because we didn’t. In his way of putting it, we become frozen by the memories of these events and can’t progress until these memories are healed. He says that we become wounded in our ability to make choices(will), in our memories to see things clearly, and in our understanding of the meaning of these traumatic experiences. We lose the narrative of our lives.
By surrendering our will, memories, and understanding to God, we walk with Jesus, and together begin the healing process. This surrendering allows us to once again experience openness and trust, which are necessary to being healed. Putting the past, and our memories of it, in God’s hands, and asking God’s forgiveness, perhaps by going to confession, frees us from the guilt and shame that keep us frozen, perhaps to move along the path to enjoying greater love and intimacy.
“May the Lord bless and keep you. May he let his face shine upon you, be gracious to you and give you his peace.”
