I have been a Catholic for my entire life. I have also, for a specific and humbling season of it, been wrong about what faithfulness required of the people who lived with me. The distinction between holding truth vs. wielding truth is one I had to learn the hard way – and it cost more than I expected before I finally understood it.
That is not an easy sentence to write. It is an easier one to write at 50 than it would have been at 37. Or at 30. Or at the summer of 2011, when I wrote a piece for Austin Catholic New Media called Lighten Up – cheerfully, almost triumphantly – about the three years I had spent convinced that pursuing true orthodoxy meant giving up my sense of humor.
I thought I was writing about coming out the other side of that season. I wasn’t. The humor came back. The grip did not.
The Road I Thought I Was On
The piece I wrote in 2011 begins with a description of the road I’d traveled – the pendulum swinging, the years of apathy, the drifting. And then the catching fire. The dutiful student of the Faith who had questions, loads of them, who started showing up to Pastor’s Talks at St. William, who discovered that all that online studying might actually have a home in a local parish community and was, as I wrote then, stoked.
What I described in that piece was the version of the story I could see at the time: a woman who had been too serious for three years in pursuit of how she thought orthodoxy was lived, who eventually found her way back to laughter and discovered you could be a faithful Catholic and still be funny. Relief. Resolution. Lesson learned.
But here is what I understand now that I didn’t understand then: the humor was never really about humor.
It was joy. Joy trying to make itself known in a spiritual life that had gotten too tight to hold it.
Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit – listed in Galatians 5 alongside charity and peace, goodness and gentleness, as one of the signs that the Spirit is actually moving in you. St. Thomas Aquinas connects joy directly to love – it is what happens, he says, when love rests in its object. When you are genuinely in contact with the God who loves you, joy is what that contact produces. Not performance. Not rigor. Not the grinding effort of maintenance. Joy.
The three years I spent being soopah siweeus were not just an absence of wit. They were something more telling – a suppression of the very fruit that should have been most evident in a woman on fire for God. The humor kept pushing back to the surface not because I was irreverent but because something in me knew that the God I was pursuing was not a God who required that kind of gravity. Joy was making its argument. I just didn’t have the ears yet to hear what it was saying.
The deeper problem – the one that took considerably longer to name, the one that would require a priest and more time than I would have liked – was that the suppression of joy wasn’t staying interior. It radiated outward. Into the household. Into the marriage. Into the faith life of the children who were watching their mother pursue God with everything she had and feeling the weight of it rather than the warmth.
That part I did not write about in 2011. I couldn’t see it yet.
“Joy was making its argument. I just didn’t have the ears yet to hear what it was saying.”
The Chokehold We Don’t Like to Talk About
The Pride That Wears Faithfulness as a Costume
There is a particular flavor of Catholic pride that disguises itself so completely as faithfulness that it takes a very trusted person to crack the disguise open.
It is the pride of the self-appointed orthodox.
Not the person who is genuinely formed and gently witnesses to what she believes. Not the woman who holds convictions because she has wrestled with them, paid a price for them, and found them worth it. That woman exists and she is a gift to the Church.
This is the other woman. The one who has studied enough to be dangerous, who has found the right answer and cannot rest until everyone around her has found it too, who experiences another person’s different choice as a personal affront to the truth she is standing on. The one who corrects – constantly, reflexively, in the name of love – without ever pausing to ask whether love is actually what she’s expressing or whether it is something closer to control.
I was her. Not entirely, not always, but enough. Enough for my husband to feel it. Enough for the household to feel it. Enough for the children growing up inside it to absorb a version of the Faith that was correct in its propositions and exhausting in its application.
“The children absorbed a version of the Faith that was correct in its propositions and exhausting in its application.”
When Correction Becomes Reflex
The reflexive correction is the part of this conversation Catholic circles tend to skip. We talk a great deal about laxity – about people who don’t take the Faith seriously enough, who let things slide, who make peace with the culture at the expense of the Gospel. We talk considerably less about the opposite error. The overcorrection. The spiritual chokehold that comes from a woman who loves God fiercely and has decided, somewhere along the way, that her job is to be God’s quality control in her own household.
Correction has its place. The Church has a whole theology of fraternal correction rooted in Matthew 18 – we’ve written about it here – and the standard it sets is demanding, specific, and worth knowing. But fraternal correction is a last resort reached after prayer, discernment, and genuine love for the person. It is not a reflex. It is not the first thing out of your mouth when your teenager makes a different choice, or your husband doesn’t respond to the Faith the way you think he should, or your adult child’s practice looks different from the one you raised them in.
When correction becomes reflex – when it is the automatic response to any deviation from the standard you carry – it stops being charity and starts being something else. It becomes the air in the house. The people breathing that air either perform compliance or quietly withdraw – not from the house necessarily, but from the interior space where faith is supposed to take root. They learn to manage you rather than encounter God through you.
That is the chokehold. It tightens so gradually that the person doing the tightening is often the last one to feel it.
Joy cannot breathe in that atmosphere. Neither can trust, or tenderness, or the kind of honest conversation a marriage and a family actually need to survive. The fruit of the Spirit requires space. It does not grow under pressure. A household where the orthodoxy is constantly policed is a household where the fruit withers before anyone notices it’s gone.
“They learn to manage you rather than encounter God through you.”
What the House Felt
The Version From the Outside
There is a version of Catholic motherhood that looks, from the inside, like faithfulness – and from the outside like pressure. I lived in it for a season and I didn’t know I was living in it because it genuinely felt like love. It felt like caring enough to hold the standard. It felt like taking heaven seriously on behalf of the people I was responsible for. It felt like exactly what a faithful Catholic wife and mother was supposed to do.
What it felt like to the people inside the house was something different.
Children absorb what a household communicates about God before they can articulate what they’ve absorbed. They don’t primarily learn faith from what you teach them. They learn it from what they watch you do under pressure – from whether the standard you hold has room in it for their humanity, from whether love in your house is conditional on compliance, from whether God feels like a father or an auditor. Those impressions form early and they are stubborn.
At 50, looking back across thirty years of mothering, that is the thing I carry most carefully.
I will not inventory what my children took from that season. That is theirs to name, not mine. What I will say is that I am watching the long arc now – watching the ones I’ve already released live out their faith lives in their own particular ways – and I am still learning to hold what I see with open hands rather than a correcting instinct.
What Father Dean Said About Holding Truth vs. Wielding It
The Correction That Required Trust
The correction didn’t come from my husband. It came from a priest.
Father Dean Wilhelm was our pastor at St. William – the man at the center of the adult faith formation program that reshaped my understanding of the Kerygma, that reoriented my entire approach to what the Faith actually asked of me. He had standing in my life in the way that matters most: he knew me. He had watched me serve, facilitated alongside me, seen the fire up close. He knew enough to say what needed to be said in a way I could actually hear it.
That matters. The 2011 version of me – the one who wrote cheerfully about reclaiming her sense of humor – would not have heard this from anyone who didn’t have that kind of relational standing. The correction required trust. It required someone who had earned the right to say a hard thing.
I won’t reproduce a private pastoral conversation. What I will tell you is that Father Dean named the distinction I hadn’t been able to name for myself.
Holding truth means remaining convicted of what is real and good and worth your whole life. It means knowing what you believe and why, and refusing to pretend otherwise when it costs you something. The Church needs this. Your household needs this. Your children need to watch you hold something real even when it is difficult.
Wielding truth is something else. It is using what you know as an instrument – a measuring stick, a pressure device, a standard imposed rather than an invitation extended. It is love expressed as performance evaluation. It damages the people it aims at in proportion to how close they are to you – because the closer someone is, the more they feel the weight of the standard and the less they feel the warmth of the person holding it.
Father Dean didn’t say I was wrong to love God the way I loved Him. He said the way I was carrying it was getting between me and the people God had actually given me to love.
That landed differently than anything else I had ever been told about my faith. Because I knew, the moment he said it, that he was right.
“Father Dean didn’t say I was wrong to love God the way I loved Him. He said the way I was carrying it was getting between me and the people God had actually given me to love.”
What the Church Actually Says About Holding Truth vs. Wielding Truth
The Theological Frame
I want to give you the theological frame because what Father Dean named pastorally, the Church has named doctrinally – and if you are the kind of woman who needs the Catechism to confirm what your confessor has already told you, here it is.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is precise about the formation of conscience: a well-formed conscience formulates its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the Creator. Critically, conscience is ordered to your own concrete acts. It is not a monitoring system for other people’s choices.
St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa distinguishes carefully between precepts – things binding on all Catholics – and counsels – things that belong to the particular path of particular souls called to particular heights. His word for the goods that go beyond what is morally required is supererogation. Aquinas is insistent: imposing those goods as universal obligations is a category error. What God has laid on your heart is not automatically what He has laid on the hearts of the people living in your house.
Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia puts it plainly in a line worth reading slowly: “We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.” That is not a permission slip for relativism. It is a structural principle about what our authority over another person’s interior life actually extends to – which is considerably less than the woman gripping the standard tends to assume.
If this terrain is familiar and you want the full theological treatment – the Church’s teaching on scrupulosity, the difference between a delicate conscience and an erroneous one, what happens when the personal pebble becomes a communal boulder – I wrote about it in detail in When the Pebble Becomes a Boulder. That post is the theological foundation for everything this one is asking you to examine. Start there if the ground feels shaky under you.
What Holding Truth With Open Hands Actually Looks Like
Conviction and Mercy Are Not in Competition
I want to be careful here because this is where the post could tip into something it is not trying to be.
Holding truth with open hands does not mean holding it loosely in the sense of not caring. It does not mean abandoning your convictions, pretending everything is equivalent, or going quiet about things that matter. The saints held truth with open hands – and some of them died for what they held. Open hands is not weakness. It is the opposite of control.
What it means in practice – in a marriage, in a household, with children who are forming and growing and eventually leaving – is this:
Your conviction and your mercy are not in competition. The firmest thing you believe can be held with the softest hands. The standard you keep for yourself does not have to become the standard you impose on everyone around you. You can know what is true and still trust that God is working in your husband, in your children, in your friends – that He is not waiting for you to complete His formation work on their behalf.
It means the register you lead with is invitation, not evaluation. Come and see. Here is what I love. Here is what has cost me something and been worth it. Come and see.
It means you can be corrected without collapsing – that receiving a hard word from a pastor or a spouse is not a threat to your faith but evidence that it is alive enough to grow.
It means joy has room in your household. Real joy – not the performed cheerfulness of a woman managing appearances, but the fruit-of-the-Spirit kind that comes from a faith life genuinely at rest in the love of God. The kind that was trying to break through all those years ago in the form of jokes about chip monks and gold-brick pavement and a class clown who used to torture substitute teachers.
That joy was always trying to tell me something. At 50, I am finally fluent enough in its language to hear it.
It means your children, watching you, see a woman who holds something real and holds it with enough mercy that they might want it for themselves someday rather than spend their adult years quietly running from it.
That last one is the one I am still learning. Still working. Still bringing to confession and to God and to the fallow seasons that keep teaching me to open the hand.
“The firmest thing you believe can be held with the softest hands.”
The Long View
What 50 Can See That 37 Couldn’t
At 50, straddling the tunnel – with children ranging from 30 to 6 and three babies I’ll meet on the other side – I can see things I couldn’t see at 37. Or at 30. Or at that July morning in 2011 when I wrote cheerfully about getting my sense of humor back and thought the hard season was behind me.
I can see which things I held that were worth holding and which things I held that were worth releasing. I can see the difference between the convictions that bore fruit and the ones that produced compliance. I can see which season my children most needed my standard and which season they most needed my mercy – and how often I gave them the wrong one at the wrong time.
The correction Father Dean offered me was not a diminishment of my faith. It was a deepening of it. The woman who came out of that conversation was more Catholic, not less – more rooted in what actually matters, less burdened by the performance of what doesn’t. The loosening of the grip was not a defeat. It was a conversion.
The 2011 piece ends with a joke about gold bricks being pavement in heaven. I love that piece. I love the woman who wrote it – the earnestness of her, the relief in her voice at finding her way back to laughter after three soopah siweeus years. But she didn’t know yet what she was still carrying. She was writing about the symptom. The root would take more time, and a priest, and a husband who had been patient long enough to deserve the version of her that was finally beginning to open her hands.
If you are in the season I was in – if you can feel the grip even as you read this, if some part of you is already composing the rebuttal – I want to say to you what I needed someone to say to me:
The fire is real. The truth is worth holding. The people in your house deserve to feel the warmth of it, not just the heat.
“The fire is real. The truth is worth holding. The people in your house deserve to feel the warmth of it, not just the heat.”
Are You Holding Truth or Wielding It?
A self-assessment for the Catholic woman who loves God fiercely and wants to love her people well
Read each question and choose the answer that most honestly reflects your first instinct – not the answer you wish were true. Score each answer using the number in parentheses, then add up your total at the end.
When someone in your household – a spouse, a teenager, a grown child – makes a faith or lifestyle choice you wouldn’t make for them, your first internal response is:
- A. Genuine curiosity about where they are and what they need (1)
- B. A quiet concern you try to hold without expressing (2)
- C. A strong urge to address it, correct it, or at minimum name it (3)
- D. A certainty that it needs to be fixed and that you are the one to fix it (4)
When you learn something new and beautiful about the Faith – a devotion, a discipline, a teaching – your instinct is:
- A. To sit with it, let it form you, and share it only when invited (1)
- B. To share it with a few close people who might benefit (2)
- C. To wonder why more Catholics don’t know about this and feel some urgency to tell them (3)
- D. To feel frustrated when others don’t receive it with the same conviction you feel (4)
When a personal standard you hold – a fasting practice, a media rule, a liturgical preference – isn’t observed by someone in your home, your interior peace:
- A. Remains mostly steady – it’s your standard, not theirs (1)
- B. Dips a little but you can release it with prayer (2)
- C. Takes a real hit and stays disrupted longer than you’d like (3)
- D. Doesn’t recover until the standard is observed or the conversation happens (4)
Your confessor or spiritual director gives you latitude on something you’ve been holding tightly – tells you it isn’t sinful, that you’re free, that you can let it go. Your honest reaction is:
- A. Relief. You receive it and move on (1)
- B. Tentative relief, but you revisit it a few times before it settles (2)
- C. You receive it outwardly but continue feeling uncertain privately (3)
- D. You wonder if he fully understands the situation and consider asking someone else (4)
When you are with other Catholic women and a devotional practice or discipline comes up that you hold personally, you:
- A. Mention it if asked and leave it at that (1)
- B. Share it naturally but don’t track whether it lands (2)
- C. Feel a low-level disappointment when others don’t seem interested or convicted (3)
- D. Find yourself returning to it, reframing it, wondering why it isn’t more obvious to them (4)
A Catholic friend makes a choice – about her children’s schooling, her Sunday observance, her media consumption – that you would not make. You:
- A. Trust that God is working in her differently than He’s working in you (1)
- B. Note it privately and let it go without much interior weight (2)
- C. Find yourself returning to it, wondering if you should say something (3)
- D. Eventually say something – framed as concern, but you know it’s really a correction (4)
When someone offers you a correction – a spouse, a pastor, a trusted friend – your first instinct is:
- A. To listen, sit with it, and genuinely consider whether they’re right (1)
- B. To feel defensive briefly but come around when you’ve had time to pray (2)
- C. To explain your reasoning at length before you can hear what they’re actually saying (3)
- D. To feel certain, even before they’ve finished, that they don’t have the full picture (4)
When you talk about the Faith with your children, the emotional register you most often operate in is:
- A. Invitation – come and see, here is what I love about this (1)
- B. Formation – here is what the Church teaches and why it matters (2)
- C. Urgency – I need them to understand this before they leave this house (3)
- D. Pressure – the standard is the standard and I need to know they’re meeting it (4)
When you look at another Catholic woman’s faith life – online, at parish, in your circle – the first thing you tend to notice is:
- A. What is beautiful and fruitful in her (1)
- B. What she is doing well, with occasional note of what seems missing (2)
- C. The gaps – what she isn’t doing, what she seems unaware of (3)
- D. Whether her standard matches yours and what it means if it doesn’t (4)
Honestly – sitting with this quiz right now, your interior response is:
- A. Open – genuinely curious what it might surface (1)
- B. A little uncomfortable but willing to stay with it (2)
- C. Defensive in places – some of these questions feel pointed (3)
- D. Certain that this applies more to someone else you know than to you (4)
Your Score
Score: 10–18
Truth lives in you loosely and generously. Your conviction is real and so is your mercy. The faith you hold has room for the people around it. This doesn’t mean you’re without standards – it means you’ve learned, or are learning, to carry them without gripping. Keep going. The Proverbs 31 woman the Church holds up is a woman of strength and clemency – “the law of kindness is on her tongue.” If you want to go deeper into what that integrated faithfulness looks like, the Ode to Feminine Genius Examination of Conscience is a beautiful place to bring your whole self before God, and the full Proverbs 31 Catholic Woman series is worth sitting with slowly.
Score: 19–26
You hold truth well in most spaces – but the grip tightens under stress, in close relationships, or when someone you love seems to be drifting from something you hold dear. That tightening is worth paying attention to. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s a signal. The question is what it’s pointing at – and whether the anxiety underneath it belongs to God or to you. This is a good season to bring to a confessor, to read When the Pebble Becomes a Boulder slowly, and to ask honestly: whose peace am I protecting when I hold this tightly?
Score: 27–33
The pebble is becoming a boulder in specific places – probably the ones closest to home. You likely already know which spaces those are. The gripping often comes from a genuinely good place – you love God, you love your people, you want heaven for all of them. But love and control can look identical from the inside of the person doing it, and the people on the receiving end can tell the difference even when you can’t. The correction is close, available, and survivable. Read When the Pebble Becomes a Boulder for the theological frame, bring it to your confessor, and sit with the Proverbs 31 woman’s particular genius – she opens her hand to the poor and her mouth to wisdom and the law of kindness is on her tongue. All three. At once. The full series is worth exploring with fresh eyes from this score.
Score: 34–40
You probably knew before you finished question three. And some part of you clicked through anyway – which means something in you is ready to look at this honestly. That is not a small thing. The truth you carry is real. The conviction is genuine. The love underneath it is not in question. But truth wielded as a standard, a pressure, a corrective instrument aimed at the people closest to you – it damages what it was meant to protect. The reckoning this score points at is hard and holy and worth every bit of what it asks of you. You don’t have to do it alone. If you want a companion for the interior work this surfaces, Flourish exists for exactly this kind of season. Start with When the Pebble Becomes a Boulder – it is the theological foundation for everything this score is asking you to examine.
For Your Reflection
- • Think about the truth you hold most tightly right now – a conviction, a standard, a practice. When did you last ask your confessor whether you’re holding it or wielding it?
- • What would it look like in your household this week to lead with invitation rather than evaluation? What would have to change?
- • If your children were describing the emotional register of your household’s faith life to a friend, what words do you think they would use? Are those the words you’d want?
- • Is there someone in your household – a spouse, a child, a grown son or daughter – to whom you owe an honest conversation about this? What is keeping you from having it?
- • Father Dean could see something I couldn’t see from inside it. Who in your life has that kind of standing – and are you letting them use it?
- • Where in your day does joy actually show up? Is there room for it in the way you practice your faith – or has the seriousness crowded it out?
If this resonated, the theological foundation lives in When the Pebble Becomes a Boulder. The Lighten Up piece from 2011 is where the story starts, if you want to see the before. And if you’re in the Wielding or Gripping zone and want a companion for the interior work it surfaces, come meet Flourish. That is exactly what it exists for.
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About the Mom So Hard Series
Mom So Hard is a Catholic Sistas series that tells the truth about motherhood – not the sanitized, highlight-reel version, but the real, hard, holy, worth-it version. Browse the full Mom So Hard series here.
