Jesus loves you. He will accept you. Just as you are.

Never to pay attention to the vessel in which I send you my grace … all (your)  attention should be concentrated on responding to My grace as faithfully as possible.  Jesus, speaking to Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska

I am writing this post for people who sometimes feel alienated from the Church because of its indifference to them and their suffering. I am writing it for the victims of sexual abuse and rape, of discrimination and prejudice; for the ignored, the despised and for those trapped in the loneliness of hiding who they are, denying how they feel every time they walk through the doorway of a church.

There are two things I want to say to you. The first is simple. But it is profoundly important that you know it and believe it. This one thing can give you the dignity and strength to stand up straight and stop hiding. 

No matter who you are or what you’ve done or what has been done to you, Jesus Christ loves you and will make you whole. 

No one — no priest, preacher, rabbi, imam or politician — can change that with their narrow interpretation of God and the limitations they try to put on His love. 

You do not have to earn God’s love. You can not earn God’s love. Nothing you do, nothing that is done to you — no matter how great or how ignoble it may be — can make God love you any more or any less. God loves you with an everlasting love. 

All you have to do is say “yes” to Jesus from your heart. That’s it. Just say “yes” to His love from the depths of your heart.

You don’t have to get perfect first. You don’t have to stop sinning first. You don’t have to understand theology or go to classes or bow down before any church or clergy. He will accept you just as you are. 

If you open your heart to Him. If you turn to Him in humility and trust, He will do the rest.

I’m not talking about a hard hearted and arrogant “I’m going do what I want and God is going to save me and forgive me anyway and I demand it,” approach. That, attitude, if it’s backed with worldly power and money, often overawes people in this world. But it will not open the doors to eternal life and it is not acceptable to God. 

The simplest, poorest, least respected, most broken and broken hearted person on the planet can enter into His Kingdom  just by saying “yes” to the love of Christ.

Jesus loves honesty; honest sinners, honest damaged, hurting, lost people. Jesus accepts the broken hearted who know they need Him. He loves you, and He will accept you just as you are. All you have to do is have the humility to know you need Him and say “yes” to His love. 

No matter who you are or what you’ve done or what has been done to you, Jesus Christ loves you and will make you whole. 

That is the first thing I want to say.

The second thing is an outgrowth of that. I know so many people who are staying away from the Church, or who have abandoned the Church altogether because there is no place for them.

There are many good priests, and there are also many good preachers and pastors in the Protestant churches. But whole Protestant denominations and a large number of our Catholic priests and bishops have stopped following Christ crucified. 

They’ve taken the cross out of their preaching and teaching and replaced it with harangues about political issues and a bizarre worship of the Church itself and of its rubrics. 

In their zeal to serve their political masters and their own narcissism, many of our clergy in both Protestant and Catholic Christianity have not only abandoned their calling to reach out to the lost sheep of this world, they have turned on those lost sheep and attacked them and made them unwelcome in their churches.

I know quite a number of people who stay away from church even though they are hungry for Christ because they feel unwelcome and alien there. I understand how hard it is for them to walk into a church. I’ve had long discussions with some of them about their fears, their anger and their soul-shattering hurt. 

It is a horrible lie for clergy to tell people that God doesn’t want them, doesn’t love them; that they are too sinful, too ruined, too unimportant for their sorrow, pain and shame to matter to God. 

That is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing for clergy to do. And our churches are doing it more and more. 

Never pay attention to the vessel in which I send you grace … concentrate on responding to my grace as fully as possible.

Which leads me to the second point I want to make, which in turn leads me back to the quote I put at the beginning of this post. I am not writing this post to tell anyone who is suffering and in pain when they enter a church that they must go there to find God. That would be a lie. 

I know from personal experience that not only do you not have to be perfect or important for Jesus to love you and save you; you don’t have to go to church. I know, because I have experienced it. All you have to do is turn to Him with an honest and broken heart and He will answer you and pour love such as you’ve never felt before into your heart. 

If you can not stand to go to church, then just turn to Christ right where you are. If you are sincere, He will do the rest. 

Ignore the priest. Ignore the whole Church if you need to. And think about Jesus, on the Cross, naked, deserted, mocked, beaten, shamed, tortured and dying. He understands you. He loves you.

But the graces of the sacraments in the Catholic Church are real. Communion and confession heal you, strengthen you and help you. The priest doesn’t have to be a nice guy, or a good guy, or even a Christian guy for those graces to flow through him and into you. 

If you’ve reached the point in your hurt and alienation that you can barely force yourself to walk into a church, and then you have to force yourself not to walk back out throughout the whole mass, remember what Jesus told St Faustina, 

Never pay attention to the vessel in which I send you grace … concentrate on responding to my grace as fully as possible. 

Ignore the priest. Ignore the whole Church if you need to. And think about Jesus, on the Cross, naked, deserted, mocked, beaten, shamed, tortured and dying. 

He understands you. 

He loves you. 

Accept the grace of the sacrament. Accept Him. 

Because, no matter who you are, or what you’ve done or what has been done to you, Jesus Christ loves you with an eternal love. 

And you are good enough for Him. 

Just as you are.