[Adapted from What You Take To Heaven]:

Ridding ourselves of negative traits we “inherited” is to do the Will of God. It doesn’t mean isolation. It doesn’t mean separation. It certainly doesn’t mean antagonism. It means moving forward with one’s chief focus and affinity: God. To break chains is to do the opposite of what binds us; it is to reconstruct; it means diligence. It means self-honesty. It also means right loyalty. You break bonds when God is your key relationship.

“We face the choice every day,” noted one author. “In every difficulty we can choose to create something new and healthy or to recycle the poison of generations past. We can send our children on to their own children with backgrounds of love and kindness and patience, or we can deliver them over to the same hells we may have received from our own parents.”

We face this choice every day. Never mind yesterday.

Every day, start fresh (with that joy). As another preacher advises: where there is sin, repent; where bitterness has taken root, forgive; where there are lies in the fabric of your life, seek truth; where there are poor examples (and bad traditions) start fresh. (Bad traditions. Mull that over.) What’s the most hurtful emotion or habit you have? Do you keep it close to your chest even though it’s a “hot coal”—
anger, guilt, impatience? Few chains are as strong as guilt! Were not saints chain-breakers?

Monk and spiritual writer Albert Holtz related a story of wandering the streets of Toledo, Spain, and encountering an interesting sight at the monastery church of San Juan de los Reyes: way up there on the outside wall, in neat rows, were curious ironwork objects about a foot-and-a-half long. They were ankle chains taken off of Christian slaves freed from their Moslem captors who ruled this Spanish city for over 360 years. As Holtz himself said, “What more appropriate trophies for Christians than the broken chains of their former captivity? Andwhat better place to display such trophies than on the side of a church? After all, God became flesh, suffered, died, and rose again to free humanity from all that enslaved us. We are no longer slaves to evil, doubt, and despair, because God has loosed our bonds.”

“God is in the business of breaking chains,” says the preacher.

What chains are in your life? In your family’s? Why not list them. And why not bring that list to Confession and the Eucharist. Why not Plead the Blood of Jesus to break them when the priest elevates the mighty chalice?

If you go to the Holy Spirit, He will enlighten you as to whether a block in your life is His way of turning you in another direction or it is from a personal defect (or spirit) that stymies you on the way to happiness. When you have done all that is possible, He will come to do the impossible.

You stray from your mission when you’re selfish, when you do something for show (instead of to serve others), when you have the wrong kind of ambition. This brings a darkness that can be detected even on earth around people who need our prayers. The darker they are, the more they must draw power. Their own energy has been blocked. A “well” has been plugged. They drain us. The connection to the Living Waters, to the manna of God, has busted; they must sap energy from others. There is no Light.

In the afterlife, this becomes totally obvious.

We wear our darkness.

Great darkness comes when there is indifference to Him Who created us.

“In Heaven, they love Him very much, there He is compensated,” said that nun in the French revelation called An Unpublished Manuscript on Purgatory.

“He wants to be loved on earth, on that earth where He annihilates Himself in every tabernacle, in order to be approached more easily and yet He is refused.”

“Alas, how many lives seem to be filled with good works and at death are found empty. This is because all those actions that appeared to be good, all those showy works, all that conduct that seemed irreproachable—all these were not done for Jesus alone. Some will have their eyes opened when they come to purgatory. On earth they wanted to be made much of, to shine, to be thought very exact in religious  observances, to be esteemed as perfect religious. This is the mainspring of so many lives. If you only knew how few people work for God and act for Him alone:

Alas, at death, when they are no longer blinded, what regrets they will have. If only sometimes they would think of eternity. What is life compared to that day which will have no evening for the elect, or to that night which will have no dawning for the damned? On earth, people attach themselves to everything and everyone except to Him, Who alone ought to have our love and to Whom we refuse it. Jesus in the tabernacle waits for souls to love Him and He finds none. Hardly one soul in a thousand loves Him as it should.”

[resources: What You Take To Heaven]