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When I first came to Madonna House, in fact during my first week, I had an encounter with a Madonna House priest named Fr. Jim Duffy.
He was a very Irish priest with piercing blue eyes, and he came up to me in the basement by the coat rack and looked me in the eye and said, “Did you know that you are a princess?”
I was slightly taken aback and said, no, I didn’t. He said, “You are a daughter of God the King, and that makes you a princess.”
I said, “Yeah, I guess it does.” And then he left, but his words stuck with me, and I would think about them every so often.
In my head, I understood what he said and believed it, but I didn’t feel like a princess, and in my heart I couldn’t believe it.
But even though these words didn’t penetrate my heart, they did stick in my mind all these years. I now realize that these words are a central truth of our faith. I am a princess, a child of God.
How does this truth influence how I live my life?
God gave us parents and caregivers not only to physically nurture and care for us but also to teach us who we are.
By loving us, they show us we are lovable. By accepting us, they show us we are acceptable. By caring for us, they show us we are worthy to be cared for. They honor and respect us and show us we are honorable and respectable.
But just as important, they are meant to teach us through their love about God—how he created us good and how he loves us even more than they do. And how God is our father and we are his children, which is our true identity.
This is the ideal, and many people have received this from their parents and understand that they are children of God and what that means.
But there also many of us who just didn’t get it. Maybe our parents didn’t know it themselves or because of their own wounding were unable to pass it on to us, or for whatever reason we were unable to accept it or realize it.
This becomes a big wound in our hearts and causes us to believe lies about ourselves, such as: I am bad. I am not important. I am unlovable. No one cares about me. Or any other number of similar lies.
We start living and acting as if these lies were the truth, instead of the real truth of our identity as beloved children of God.
This is what happened to me. I was sexually abused as a young child. I had no way to speak about the pain, confusion, and conflict that this caused, so I stuffed it down into my heart and covered it all over with concrete.
I had no way of dealing with the strong, hard emotions that came from this experience, so I turned off my heart and lived out of my head. I told myself that everything was fine, I had no problems, life was good.
In addition to that, my parents were both very positive people who didn’t seem to have negative emotions, so I never learned from them how to deal with these emotions.
I never learned that negative emotions such as anger, sadness, pain, etc. were as normal and acceptable and as much a part of being human as positive emotions such as joy, peace, and contentment.
When I came to Madonna House 25 years ago, I really believed that I had had a good childhood. I saw myself as a happy, nice, fine person who had no problems. I was living from my head and only touching the surface of my heart.
After I was at Madonna House for a couple of years and was starting to feel safe and loved, my heart started to thaw. That’s when things started to get rough.
All those negative emotions I had stuffed so far down, those emotions coming from the abuse I suffered as a child, started to rise up, and these feelings didn’t match the belief that I was clinging to—that everything was fine.
I went into a major depression. In order to try to deal with the inner pain that was welling up inside, I started to hurt myself physically.
I wanted to die in a major way. Obsessive thoughts about ways to die filled my days, but in my mind, thankfully, I knew that killing myself was not an option.
It was a very dark and hard time for me and for those helping and supporting me. The anguish I was feeling made life almost unbearable.
They say that one of the longest journeys in our lives is the 12-inch drop from our heads to our hearts. This was so true for me. I knew many truths in my head such as: in Genesis it says that there is a God, and he created all things, and God saw what he created and it was good.
In my head, I knew God had created me so that means that I am good, but in my heart I still believed the lie that I was bad. And I knew in my head that God is King and that I am a child of God, but in my heart I didn’t feel or believe I was a princess.
I knew in my head Psalm 139 that says I am fearfully and wonderfully made, but in my heart I did not feel wonderful. I felt unworthy, unacceptable, and unlovable.
God is amazing in that, at any point in our lives, he can heal us and give us what we didn’t get when we were younger. Through the love of this family of Madonna House and through the gift of prayer counseling, slowly over the years, God has done tremendous healing in my life.
It has been a long journey and has taken a lot of work by both myself and others, to change the lies in my heart to the truth.
I have learned how to let myself feel the emotions that were coming up, how to identify them, and how to speak about them to others. I learned how all emotions, both negative and positive, tell us something about what’s happening in our hearts.
I eventually stopped hurting myself, and my wish to die has finally turned into a wish to live.
God has built the foundation that I didn’t get from my parents deep in my heart and has shown me my true identity as his child. I am a daughter of the King.
Just a year ago, I had an immense grace, an experience of deep healing. After years of only believing the truth of my identity in my head, God finally took me and dropped me down those 12 inches from my head to my heart and helped me exchange the lies in my heart for the truth that I am his beloved child.
Wow! What a gift this is to know in my heart who I am. It is, for me, the difference between night and day.
If I live from this truth, then what have I to fear? What can man do against me? I am a child of the King and that will never change. It stands firm forever. Alleluia!
So I ask myself, how does a daughter of a king act? When I look at princes and princesses, the sons and daughters of earthly kings, I see how they move and act—at least in public.
They have a dignity and air about them. Because they know who their father is, they know who they are. They know they should be treated with respect and with honor.
And because their father is the king, they are loved and accepted by everyone. If someone doesn’t treat them right, they have to answer for it to the king.
By the grace of God, I now know that’s me. I am a princess and that’s how God wants me to treat myself and how God wants others to treat me.
I now know that if someone doesn’t treat me right, it doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t make me bad, unlovable, unacceptable etc. It is that person’s problem, not mine, and they have to answer to God for it.
But guess what, I am not the only princess in Madonna House or in Canada or in the world. We are all princes and princesses, and we need to treat each other as such.
If a person isn’t acting like a child of God, he or she might not know it yet or he might have forgotten and need reminding. In this way God can use each of us to help heal the hearts of others. So let us strive to treat each other and everyone we meet with the honor, dignity, respect, and love that is due to the children of the King.
