by Dr. Gerard McNicholas
A few months back I sat down with Dr. Greg Bottaro on the Being Human podcast for an episode called “Stop Preventing the Saints From Doing Their Job.”
The premise was simple but, I think, quietly radical: the saints are not statues to admire from across a room. They are meant to be friends, actively working on our behalf, which means letting them close will stir things up: grief, longing, old family material. That surfacing is usually a sign that something real has finally started, not a sign that something has gone wrong.
There was a nuance we didn’t have time to fully unpack, though, and it turns out Dr. Greg went on to name it directly himself, in a later episode focused specifically on spiritual bypassing. Taken together, the two conversations tell a more complete story than either one does alone, and I want to put them side by side here.
The Danger Hiding Inside a True Devotion
Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual ideas to avoid facing psychological wounds that still need attention. The spiritual truth being reached for is not false. It is that it gets reached for prematurely, as a way of skipping the slower work of grief and integration.
Dr. Greg’s own example gets right at it. He talked about wanting a greater devotion to Our Lady as his mother, but not at the cost of losing the actual person he is when he enters that relationship. His own mother has passed away, and he was honest that if he doesn’t grieve that loss, he risks pretending it isn’t there simply because he has a Mother in heaven. He named what that would look like with someone he was accompanying: if a person came to him freshly grieving their own mother, and he had not done his own grief work, he might be tempted to say something like, don’t worry, we have parents in heaven. As he put it, “That’s not gonna be real accompaniment.” It is not how Christ actually meets us either.
That is the nuance. The same devotion that can be so reparative can also, quietly, become the very thing preventing the grief underneath it from ever being named.
Where This Hit Home
There was something about the plainness of Dr. Greg’s honesty, about the risk of saying the comforting thing instead of the true one, that did not just illustrate the pattern for me. I recognized it in the exact shape of my own story, except the parent was my father, not my mother, and the saint standing on the other side of the grief was Joseph, not Mary.
I lost my own father several years ago, in that same season of life when I was becoming a father myself. Grieving a father while trying to become one has a way of making a devotion to St. Joseph feel less like an idea and more like a lifeline. There was real comfort in bringing that grief to him, in letting him father the parts of me that were still, in some sense, a son who had just lost his dad. That comfort was legitimate, and still is.
What I have come to see, slowly, is that Joseph was not simply comforting that part of me. He was inviting it somewhere. The part of me that still needed a father’s steady, loving presence was not meant to stay hidden inside a private devotion. It was being invited to trust that same need into the relationships around me, into real friendship, into community, into the kind of support that spiritual bypassing had convinced me I should not need. Joseph’s fathering was not a replacement for that. It was training for it.
John Paul II explores something like this in his play The Radiation of Fatherhood. Before a man can father anyone, he has to be willing to become a child again himself, to receive rather than only give, to let himself be fathered before he tries to father. That is exactly what Joseph seemed to be walking me through, one relationship at a time, long before I had words for any of it. It was not a detour from my grief. It was the actual path through it.
What Devotion Is Actually For
We are made for communion, and that communion is meant to be incarnate: real, embodied, lived out with the people actually in front of us. Friendship with the saints participates in that communion and points toward it. It is not meant to replace it. A relationship like the one I found with Joseph only finishes its work when it travels outward, shaping how a person enters into the relationships and communities that God has already blessed them with. That is what it means for a healing relationship to actually heal, and it is also what it truly means to be a child who is fathered and mothered well: it gets tested and lived out in other relationships, not kept inside the one place it first felt safe.
A few honest questions can help surface whether your own devotion is doing this quiet work:
- When I think of the parent I actually had, do I feel anything, or does my mind reroute straight to the heavenly parent instead?
- Has anyone, a director, a therapist, a spouse, heard the human grief underneath this devotion, or only the saint?
- Has this relationship made me more capable of vulnerability and presence with the people in my life, or made me need them less?
None of this is an argument against turning to Mary as Mother or Joseph as father. It is an invitation to ask what your devotion is actually doing with your heart, opening it so it can be tended, or sealing it so it never has to be. Real devotion does not end in feeling comforted and close. It sends you back out, able to receive love and finally able to give it, because you first let yourself become small enough to be fathered, or mothered, again. That is what devotion is for. Not a detour around grief, but the path through it, and back to the people who have been waiting for you all along.