After 🔁

Jesus, I trust in You. Even five minutes after I didn’t. A Divine Mercy meditation for anyone who keeps falling and can’t explain why the prayer keeps coming back.

Everyone warns about the fall. The moment of weakness, the giving in, the white-knuckle battle and the losing. There are books about that part. Podcasts. Accountability groups. Twelve steps.

Nobody talks about the five minutes after. The 24 hours after. The silence that follows. The temptation of despondency. The way shame doesn’t knock, it just walks in and sits on your chest like it’s been waiting outside the door with its arms crossed the entire time.

This is the moment I am most certain God has left the building. Not during. During, insert your vice, drinking, fits of rage, indulging, lusting, pouting, rage-baiting, doom-scrolling, swiping, any number of things, I’m not thinking about God at all, which is part of the problem and part of the point. But after, in the silence that follows, I am utterly convinced that whatever thread connected me to mercy just snapped. That the sacraments were wasted on me. That the years fingering my beads and reading my books produced nothing but a more articulate hypocrite.

And then the prayer starts in an inaudible rhythm.

I don’t start it. I need to be clear about that. Or hope I am. I’m not reaching for it. I’m not offering it up. I’m not doing anything. I’m lying in the dark, marinating in self-hatred, and the prayer just fires. Like Someone older than me keeping tempo to a refrain I can’t quite perceive. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Not on my lips. Deeper. At my core. Underneath the sorrow, running on some circuit I didn’t build and can’t shut off.

It doesn’t clean me up (at least not like a car wash). It just sits. It doesn’t make me feel better in the moment. It doesn’t resolve the tension between what I just did or failed to do and my conviction of what’s true, good and beautiful. It just stays. The way a mother stays in the room with a sick child who got sick from eating something he was told not to eat. She doesn’t lecture. She doesn’t leave. She’s just there.

I should probably doubt this. I’m aware of prelest, spiritual delusion, the counterfeit mysticism the elders warn about. The monk who mistakes his own emotional noise for the voice of God. I am not a monk. I am a scattered-minded, burned-out daddy who just failed at the thing he’s failed at a thousand times, and now he’s claiming the prayer of the heart showed up uninvited in the wreckage. That sounds like exactly the kind of story a whitewashed tomb of a man would tell himself to keep from drowning in what he sees in the mirror.

Maybe it is.

But I don’t think self-deception comforts you the way this does. Self-deception numbs. This doesn’t numb. It burns. It burns the way antiseptic burns, the sting is proof it’s touching something real. The prayer arrives and I feel more exposed, not less. More seen, not less. As if someone just walked into the room I thought was empty and I can’t cover up fast enough. But surrendering to the vulnerability brings a deep peace. It leads me to compunction, not shame.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. The prayer doesn’t come before the fall. If it did, I’d call it prevention. Maybe one day, God willing, it will. It doesn’t come during. If it did, I’d call it resistance. Again, God willing, one day it will. No, it comes after. Only after. At least tangibly anyway. In the minutes when I am the least presentable version of myself. Not dolled up, ready for Mass. The version I don’t put on social media. The version my wife doesn’t fully see. The version that makes me wonder if I’m my failed father all over again, different substance, same structure, same child left in the collateral.

And in that exact moment, the prayer starts, as if mercy was calibrated not to my repentance but to my need for repentance.

I’ve been whispering Lord Jesus, come into my heart since I was a child. I didn’t know what I was asking. I just knew I needed something bigger than what had happened to me to come in and stand guard.

Thirty years later, it’s still standing guard. It never left. Not after any fall. Not once.

I don’t know if that’s neurology or grace. Why not both? We are composite beings. The metaphysical doesn’t bypass the natural. It moves through it.

I don’t know if fifteen years of repetition just carved a groove so deep that the prayer runs on autopilot, the way a song you’ve heard ten thousand times plays in your head without effort. Maybe it’s just muscle memory. Maybe the chest-deep pulse is nothing more than a well-worn circuit firing in a moment of distress, and I’ve dressed it in theological language because the alternative, that it’s just my brain coping, feels too small for what it does to me. And if it is, who cares? God loves my nature. Nothing is more natural than the supernatural.

But I do know this. The prayer is older than my passions, vices, and habitual shortcomings. The prayer was laid down first. Before I was stitched in the womb, the Spirit whispered it to me. Before the wiring got hijacked. Before I learned to reach for mercy substitutes in the dark.

Whatever it is, reflex or grace, neurology or the Spirit interceding with groanings too deep for words, it has never left me.

The prayer reaches in. The sacrament of penance reaches back. They belong together. The prayer doesn’t push me coldly into the confessional. It leads me there the way the Spirit led Christ into the wilderness.

I’m trying to let that matter more than the fear of being unlovable.

Most nights, it does.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​