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Some of your connections had to do with going home, and the first person you saw was your mama, and she gave you a big warm hug.
Sr. Miriam James Heidland explores the deep human need for union with God, healing, and authentic connection through faith and grace.
Key Takeaways
- We are created for union with God, not just forgiveness.
- God’s love is freely given, unconditional, and desires our freedom.
- Healing our image of God is crucial for spiritual growth and restoration.
- Authentic connection with God and others fulfills a deep human longing.
- Mary, the Mother of God, exemplifies perfect connection and intercession.
Summary
- The video reflects on moments of connection and disconnection experienced during Christmas and everyday life.
- Sr. Miriam emphasizes that humans need not just forgiveness from God but union with God.
- God’s connection with humanity is unbreakable, unearned, and lavishly given.
- The healing of our image of God is essential for spiritual restoration and freedom.
- God’s love is unconditional, free of coercion or manipulation, and calls us to freedom.
- The talk highlights the significance of Our Lady and the Solemnity of the Mother of God as a source of connection.
- Authentic love involves being seen deeply and truthfully, which can both attract and frighten us.
- The speaker invites listeners to open their hearts to God’s love and healing presence.
- The homily of Pope Leo is referenced to illustrate God’s disarming and unconditional love.
- The video concludes with a prayer for healing, union, and eternal connection with God.
Chapters
- 00:00Moments of Connection and Disconnection
- 01:30The Need for Union with God
- 02:57God’s Lavish and Unbreakable Connection
- 04:18Healing Our Image of God
- 06:59God’s Unconditional Love and Freedom
- 07:59Reflection on Our Lady and Pope Leo’s Homily
- 08:28Invitation to Open Our Hearts to God
- 14:05Prayer for Healing and Eternal Union
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Or maybe it was your grandpa who wasn't expected to live another Christmas, but he did.
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And he sat right next to you at Christmas Eve Mass, and you couldn't believe it.
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Maybe it was a beautiful confession that you had or some friends that you saw, or maybe on Christmas morning it was just watching your family open gifts, and just for a moment you stopped, and the house, the house was full of a scent of coffee
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and bacon, which is the eighth and ninth sacrament every Catholic knows that, right? And the sunlight in the morning just filtered in your living room window, and everybody was at rest.
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And at peace. And there's something that happens in those moments of connection that's like this temporal experience that we had that just makes us ache.
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And you, like me, had many memories of that. We've had many experiences this last week or so, and I think we've also had some experiences of disconnection or a lack of connection.
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And maybe for you it wasn't your mom coming to give you a big hug when you got home. It was you've been praying your whole, this whole Jubilee year, hoping and praying for your dad that he would stop drinking.
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And the first thing that you saw when you got home was not your mom, but it was your dad sitting on the couch watching football, drinking a beer.
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And you know every single time how that story ends. Maybe it was your brother who didn't show up to Christmas this year because he can't stand your family.
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Maybe it was your old friends that you saw, and you promised yourself when you saw your friends you were going to do the things that you guys used to do, and here you did all the things that you
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guys used to do, and now you're sitting at a Catholic conference, and you're like, I don't belong here. I feel like a hypocrite. I feel like a fraud.
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And what happens in our hearts in those experiences that we have? Because that's an experience of something temporal that's telling us about something eternal.
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And one of the homilies that I heard this last week was a beautiful priest, and he said, "We don't need—I loved it.
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I pray about it every day." He said, "We don't need just forgiveness from God.
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We need union with God." We don't need just forgiveness. We need union. And even the word union just helps, it just expands our heart, and it makes our hearts ache because you and I know that that's what we're made for.
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Which is why the connections that you thought of even this evening probably made your body even feel relaxed, your heart was warm.
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And the places of sorrow, our sorrowful mysteries, cause us to tense up, and we push away, and then many times we say, "Well, I don't—I don't really need anybody. It's okay. It's not a big deal.
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I'm just going to—I'm going to just continue on my way." And we know that's not true.
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We don't need just forgiveness from God. We need union with God. We know that in Genesis, the very first book of the living word of God, that it says that God created man and woman in his image and likeness.
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So, he creates man and woman in a state and a being of connection. And his connection is very different than our connection. His connection is unbreakable.
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And it's unearned. And it's just lavishly given. God is so lavish. The very first paragraph of the catechism, it says that God infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness, in a plan of sheer goodness. I love this
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quote. Freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, that every time and in every place, God draws close to man.
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He calls man to seek him and to know him and to love him with all of his strength.
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The God infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness, freely creates man. Like he—he just freely creates us. And I speak a lot about healing, restoration of hearts, and the healing of our sorrowful mysteries, and I
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It never ceases to amaze me just to look at a crowd like this, just the beauty of your uniqueness.
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This is where we as Catholics come to understand the dignity and the beauty of life, that every life is sacred.
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That every single one of you made in the image and likeness of God, that from the beginning of time, Adam and Eve, God creates into the end of time. If God ever stops creating and he says creation is
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consummated, it is finished, he will have never recycled, cloned, or recreated a single person.
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It's stunning. And it's a free gift. God just freely, lavishly gives his life to us and his heart to us and his love to us, and there's something in that that we ache for that, and we also tremendously fear it at the same time.
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If you've ever experienced the authentic love of somebody in your life who loves you deeply and who's going to tell you the truth and they're there for you and they call you out when you are not living in the truth of who you are,
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there's something so deep in our hearts that we so want to be seen, or we ache to be seen, and at the same time we fear it.
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At the same time, we'll turn away and we'll avoid it. And so often in our life, that's how we look at God.
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It's a magnification of how we experience life on Earth. We take that and we project it onto God, and we say, "Well, God must be the same." Because when everybody is—when somebody in our hearts or in our lives is too
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nice to us or too kind to us, we begin to get suspicious. And for that person in your life who's doing that, maybe there's a good reason why. Maybe there's a history there of you being used.
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But God isn't like that. And in the beginning it was not so. Dr. Bob Schuchts, who's the founder of the John Paul II Healing Center, he'll often say that the biggest healing that you and I need in our life
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is the healing of our image of God. And not just theoretical. It's God here and God here. It's God as you walked into the door and saw your dad drinking. It's God when you were in the midst of your sin. It's God when you
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got in an argument with your spouse on Christmas Eve. It's God, the things you've been praying for.
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It's God here and here and here and here and here. And we just project all these things onto God, and we think that we already know him, and I—I just—I can only imagine what it's like for him to gaze upon this
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tiny little creation, which is you and I, and to hear our hearts and to hear our wrestling and to give us back nothing but love.
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Nothing. Which means that God doesn't have any ulterior motives. He's not trying to force you to do something you don't want to do. He's not going to manipulate you.
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He's not going to talk you into doing anything you don't want to do.
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Because that would be a coercion of your will. And a coercion of your will isn't freedom.
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And his heart is for your freedom. And how fitting it is today that we sit here on the brand new year in 2026, but we come on January 1st on the Solemnity of the Mother of God, and I was not even going to plan to
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share any of this with you today, but I was listening to the homily of—and you heard a video from Pope Leo. I was listening to the homily of Pope Leo for today's Mass in Rome.
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When he spoke so beautifully about Our Lady. And how can we not begin this time without talking about our mom, our mama?
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'Cause you and I don't begin this week alone. We don't begin this week trying to muster something up or conjure up some sort of connection. The connection, the eternal life, eternal belonging that's already—it's already present.
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It is already present. You and I in our life many times we turn away from it, and we live in isolation, but that is not—that is not God's heart for us.
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And it's not Our Lady's heart either. And just in her beauty and her goodness and—so just today Pope Leo in Rome, he said this in his homily, and I'm just going to read you an excerpt of it.
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And just notice what happens in your heart as you hear this. He says, "God presents himself to us as unarmed and disarming,
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as naked and defense—"
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Rather, the world is saved by tirelessly striving to understand, to forgive, to liberate, and to welcome without calculation and without fear.
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To welcome without calculation and without fear." And isn't that so hard for us? I see I see it in my own heart.
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You know, I've been in my religious community 27 years. I I I've been on a 20-year very intense healing journey, recovery from addiction, all kinds of things, you name it.
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And there to this day is there's still these little parts of my heart that live in fear.
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There's parts of my heart that receive God with a bit of a calculation, like, okay, what do you what do you want from me? What What What What's going to happen?
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And so from that just desire that you and I have, this aching desire to be in communion and longing and to give ourselves freely and to be received freely.
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Pope Leo speaks beautifully. And this is what he says. He says, "This is the face of God that Mary allowed to take shape and grow within her womb, completely transforming her life.
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It is the face she proclaimed through the joyful yet delicate light of her eyes while bearing him in her womb.
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Her face, the face the face whose beauty she contemplated daily in her home as Jesus grew as a child, as a boy, and as a young man.
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The face she followed with the heart of a humble disciple as he walked the paths of his mission all the way to the cross and the resurrection.
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To do so she too had to lay aside every defense renouncing expectations, claims, and comforts as mothers so often do.
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Consecrating her life without reserve to the son she had received by grace so that she might in turn give him back to the world.
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And this is the call in your life and my life. That you and I receive Jesus.
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The most important thing that's going to happen to you these next few days is you're going to receive Christ.
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And you're going to receive him body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist. You're going to receive him in the sacrament of confession.
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You're going to receive him in the impact sessions and the talks. You're going to receive him at lunchtime just hanging out and talking to one another.
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You're going to You're going to receive Jesus. And his heart is for you. His connection is for you. His life is for you. And I would say Christ even fully embodies the definition of relationship because he literally is the one that brings us back
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into connection. But he is the one who takes on our sin and our brokenness and he brings us back into relationship with the Father.
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So that means that these days, my dear friends, there is nothing There is nothing off the table for you to bring into communion and to connection with God.
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And I know that some of us here have been holding some pretty deep things for a long time.
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And something that I often share with audiences if you if you've ever been to a 12-step meeting, one of the best things you're going to hear in 12-step meetings is this we're only as sick as our secrets.
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We're only as sick as our secrets. What are your desires these days? What are your desires to be encountered by the one who loves you, to be brought more deeply into union, not just forgiven, but brought into union?
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Where have been the aches of your heart this last year? What have been your desires? Where are the places where you find your heart hard and turned away and isolated?
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What are the places that even now as you're listening the Holy Spirit is speaking to you and just gently speaking with great warmth and opening your heart?
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And that might be really scary because a lot of us have a lot of places that we've been living with for a long time that are pretty hard of heart.
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[crying] And it takes a lot of courage to say, "Lord, I don't I don't know what to do here. I don't know how to proceed forward, but I want to." Would you please help me?
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And that's really ultimately all we do as children, we ask mom and dad for help.
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And we have a mother and a father who gladly help us, who are not in a hurry, who will not be overbearing or unkind.
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But who just delights to help. So, if it's okay with you, can I just Can I just pray with you just for a couple minutes before we just conclude this time on stage?
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And I'm just going to ask you, if you would like to, you're welcome to close your eyes and just to invite you within the interior world of your own heart with the Lord.
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Into the wine cellar, into the inner room. Into the place where God is present to you, where there's nothing that you could do or anybody that could ever do to you that would remove that place of union with God.
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That he is present to you even now. And I'm just going to invite you, if you'd be willing, just to express to Jesus this evening, what do you want him to know about you?
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And about your connection with him, what what do you want him to know? And I just ask you Jesus, you who the one you are the one who brings us into communion and connection, Lord.
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You who take on our sin and transform us, who bring us into eternal union with yourself, I just ask, what do you want us to know about your love for us right here tonight as we sit, however we are,
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whatever's happening in our hearts right now. Jesus, what do you want us to know?
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And Lord, I pray that your face would shine upon us these days. I just the beauty and the gentleness of your love would come upon every place of our heart, mind, body, and soul.
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Lord, I pray for places especially that seem hopeless or overwhelmed. Lord, I pray that the hopes and the desires that we have in our heart would be found in union with yours for us, that you would purify us, that you would
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heal us. That you would bring us to life. Lord, we thank you for your connection to us, a connection that is unbreakable, that is eternal, that has existed from all eternity, Lord.
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A love that never ends. Our mother Mary mama, we we commend these days to you. We commend our hearts to you.
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As your little children that we could gaze upon the beauty of your face. And that your kindness and your love would bring us home to your son.
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And we commend everything to you mama as we pray together Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.
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Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Good Saint Joseph, pray for us. In the name of the Father and of the
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Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. You are so loved. God bless you. Hey guys, it's Jose, one of your hosts from the All In podcast and I've got something special for you today. Focus just dropped a brand new mini-series
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Topics:Sr. Miriam James Heidlandunion with GodCatholic faithhealingimage of Godauthentic loveOur LadyPope Leo homilyspiritual restorationFOCUS Catholic
