Pints With Aquinas - 146: The unnamed evil of our times (and how to overcome it) With Fr Chris Pietraszko

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? In today's episode, we're joined around the bar table by Father Chris Prochaszko to talk about the sin of sloth. What is it? What isn't it? How do we avoid it? How do we overcome it if we're stuck in it? A very practical and spiritually enlightening episode today. Here we go. Yes, welcome back to Pints with Aquinas. This is the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. So wherever you are, I hope you're well.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Maybe you've got a beer, right? Pull in a barstool. Good to have you with us. Listen in to this fantastic discussion. A very practical one where we look at the text of Aquinas from the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologiae. See what he has to say about sloth. We talk about how it applies to our lives. You're going to really love it.

Starting point is 00:01:08 Hey, I just interviewed a guy that maybe you've heard of. His name's Michael Knowles from The Daily Wire. It was a great discussion, about an hour long. We talked about everything, you know, American politics, his Catholic faith, socialism, capitalism, all those things, which I don't know much about, but he got to educate me on. And it was a really fun chat. Now, you can listen to this chat if you support me on Patreon or if you support me directly at Pints with Aquinas. So if you're a patron, go and check it out. You're going to love it.

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Starting point is 00:03:17 I'm pretty good. Just, you know, doing some transubstantiation and priestly duties. Awesome life. Do you ever get bogged down in the life of a priest and wish you could, as the apostles talked about in the book of Acts, I believe, devote yourself to prayer and the Eucharist? Yeah, it's really important to carve out time to pray. I know St. Francis de Sales says if you're too busy to pray an hour a day, you should be praying two hours a day.

Starting point is 00:03:46 So I think that it's crucial and that we don't become social workers. A lot of people go through crisis and they're looking for good spiritual direction. But we can't really give it if we're not first helping ourselves in the spiritual life of things. But I think I've've at least right now found that balance. So it's interesting you say that because when I was about 17, 18 discerning the priesthood, my parents who were terrified of the idea said things like, well, why don't you just be a social worker? Doesn't that just go to show, Hey, hey, how we've reduced Catholicism to this sociological good? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Or a political movement. and the horizontal aspect of life, the natural, and just kind of leaving out God in the process, which is really our ultimate source of happiness. One of the things I've found disturbing lately is I've become painfully aware of how little I hear our bishops speak about the supernatural consequences of our actions. speak about the supernatural consequences of our actions. So regarding the New York governor Cuomo's, just, you know, what do you call it, piece of legislation he passed that would allow a mother to pay somebody

Starting point is 00:05:14 to kill their child, you know? Yeah. Those very few bishops that I've seen, I've seen more talk about why we can't kind of excommunicate him than I have heard bishops talk about why he should repent or he'll go to hell and why we can too if we don't repent and the only kind of bishop I'm hearing and this could just be because I'm not that familiar so I'm not accusing

Starting point is 00:05:38 all bishops are not addressing this I'm just saying anecdotally I haven't heard it the one bishop I'm hearing talking about hell and and the supernatural ramifications of our actions is Vigano. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Christ spoke more about hell than any other figure in the Bible. It's charitable. And I think canon law says, especially in regard to educators, that our role as teachers is to call to mind people's last end, right? And that is eternity, our life in heaven or in hell. And that's our chief responsibility.

Starting point is 00:06:15 And I think sometimes the church gets caught up in secondary ends, things like PR, trying to obtain honor or trying to make the gospel palpable for people. And I think sometimes that's one of the reasons we don't excommunicate is because we're too afraid that it's going to make the church out to be some sort of elitist group that plays politics. politics, but in reality, the excommunication can be one of the most medicinal, charitable things we do for a person, regardless of their politics, regardless of, you know, the structures that we live in today. I think excommunication can be a way of teaching people, you know, that this is gravely immoral, that this is mortal sin, that this is something that can take away any sense of hope in your life. And I think it's uncharitable for us to do that. It's uncharitable for us not to allow the law to teach people.

Starting point is 00:07:17 Mm-hmm. I think we have a lot of power as Catholics today online, and it might be more effective to praise those priests and bishops who are courageously speaking the truth than to criticize those bishops that we see as maybe not doing that. Because I have to think if I were a bishop and I were really afraid to speak the truth, and then online, I see all these Catholics praising great bishops, you know, like, is it, I think it's Joseph Strickland from Tyler, Texas, I believe, and other bishops who are doing powerful, you know, speaking courageously. That would encourage me and motivate me to kind of speak my mind as opposed to just receiving letters about not, you know, myself not doing a great job or whatever.

Starting point is 00:08:07 Yeah, I mean, it requires its own discernment. Sometimes we do have to challenge, but we should always be encouraging what's good in the church as well. So we have to kind of discern that on our own, I think. Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of the good and maybe being sorrow in the face of the good. Do you like my transition there? I loved it. We're going to be talking about the sin of sloth today, what it is, what Aquinas has to say about it, how we can avoid it, and maybe some ways that we're guilty of the sin of sloth.

Starting point is 00:08:38 And perhaps prior to this podcast, we had no idea that we were. Yeah. So let's begin perhaps with a definitional question. What is the sin of sloth? Okay, well, St. Thomas Aquinas in question 35 of the second part of the second part begins to speak about what is sloth, whether it is a sin. And he begins in the I answer that he says sloth, according to Damascene, is an oppressive sorrow, which to wit so weighs upon man's mind that he wants to do nothing. Thus, acid things are also cold. Hence, sloth implies a certain weariness of work, as appears from the gloss from Psalm 106, 18, their soul abhorred all manner of meat. And from the definition of some who say that sloth is a sluggishness of mind,

Starting point is 00:09:34 which neglects to begin good. Now this sorrow is always evil, sometimes in itself, and sometimes in its effect. For sorrow is evil in itself when it is about that which is apparently evil, but good in reality. Even as, on the other hand, pleasure is evil if it is about that which seems to be good, but is in truth evil. Since then, spiritual good is a good in very truth. Sorrow about spiritual good is evil in itself. And yet that sorrow, also which is about a real evil, is evil in its effect, if it so oppresses man as to draw him away entirely from good deeds. Hence, the apostle in 2 Corinthians 2 verses 7 did not wish those who repented to be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. So, accordingly, since sloth, as we understand it here, denotes sorrow for spiritual good, it is evil on two counts, both in itself in point of its effect. Consequently, it is a sin,

Starting point is 00:10:49 for by sin we mean an evil movement of the appetite, as appears from what has been said above. moment to say a big thanks to our sponsors, Exodus 90. Exodus 90 had been really terrific, actually, in helping us get the Matt Fradd Show off the ground. I also did Exodus 90 a while back with varying success, but it was an incredible endeavor. It is an ascetical program for men where for 90 days, you and your fraternity give up things like alcohol and snacks between meals and TV, and you take on things like extra prayer and cold showers so that you can be free to love. We cannot love if we are not free, and most of us, or many of us, are distracted by a million different things which sort of hold us back from the life God wants for us. That's why Exodus 90 is incredible. If you go to exodus90.com slash Matt Fradd, put in your email, we'll let you know when it begins. We want to start around Lent. It'll tell you all the details there. You also get three exclusive videos that you can't find anywhere else on the web, where I'll kind of prep you for this journey.

Starting point is 00:11:59 That's exodus90.com slash Matt Fradd, exodus90.com slash Matt Fradd. If you use the slash Matt Fradd and put your email in that way, they will know that I sent you and they will like me more and they will continue to support me. That's how it works. So, when I read this for the first time, two things came to my mind. One is how incredibly attuned St. Thomas was to the spiritual life. In order for him to write any of these reflections, I can't help but think that he's either observed in others and in himself this temptation. And so I can almost like intuit a sort of humility coming from him as he's reflecting on the very psychology or spiritual nature of these temptations. And the second thing is that sloth is not actually what we generally

Starting point is 00:12:53 think it is today. I find a lot of people think that sloth has to do with just a physical, fleshy kind of exhaustion. But he uses the word mind a couple times here. And it's really about an attitude towards a spiritual good. And I think that's hugely important today when the statistics are so evidently demonstrating that the vast majority of Catholics don't attend mass, which is supposed to be a day of rest. We're supposed to go to church with the spirit of rest. I think it's a really important qualification is that that rest is a spiritual good. And so that ability to say no to all sorts of activities like sports, like working around the house or traveling on vacations or working at the office and all those kinds of things. People don't think of themselves as lazy because they're constantly busy bodying themselves

Starting point is 00:13:53 with all sorts of tasks. And what we've become as a culture unable to do is rest and rest in a healthy way. So I actually think a form of sloth is the inability to rest in a spiritual good. And I think that's where we have a kind of a superficial understanding of sloth as just laziness, as just the kind of exhaustion of physical exertion. But there's something much more pernicious and deep going on here. Yeah, I definitely agree that I, in the past, thought that sloth was just being lazy. And what's interesting is that I think many of us look to how busy we are and actually say to ourselves, well, I can't be committing the sin of sloth because I'd never stop to rest, which is just to perhaps accuse ourselves of the sin of sloth that we thought we had avoided.

Starting point is 00:14:51 Yeah, inadvertently, I think we are guilty of that. And Aquinas goes into it a little more deeply. And I think this is something, this is a way that we can relate to it a bit better. this is a way that we can relate to it a bit better. He says that first, that man shuns whatever causes sorrow. So he actually explains, I'm trying to find the actual article where he says this, but he says that sorrow, the sorrow for the spiritual goods is what sloth is. So we know what is good. Let's say we know what is good or we perceive what is good to be evil and it makes us sad. So the idea of, let's say, something as simple as going to confession. We know that we should go to confession. the truth and it may be going through this humiliating experience of, you know, being vulnerable before another human being, a priest and before God also involves this is the point

Starting point is 00:15:53 in which I have to change. This is the point in which I have to be ready to commit myself to avoid the sin again. The idea of that makes us sad. And that is what sloth is. Sloth is the sadness in our spirit, passion, if you will, that's ordered towards a spiritual good and ultimately the divine good. What I find interesting is this idea that sloth is an oppressive sorrow for what is good in and of itself, which weighs on a person's mind in such a way that he chooses to do nothing. But this idea of oppressive sorrow, I find interesting. Not just a sadness, but an oppressive sadness that actually results in us not beginning the good? Yeah, it's like a heaviness that's weighing on us. He says it weighs upon man's mind. And so there's this, I often, when I experience sadness, there's often this sense of heaviness, right? There's this powerlessness that we feel,

Starting point is 00:17:03 and maybe sometimes the weight of the world feels like it's crushing us and that there's nothing that we can do. And so we're swallowed up, you know, with this sorrow. And it's a type of despair in a certain sense. You know, I think of a person that wants to be holy, but on the other hand knows what's required of that and is unwilling to do it. And what a contradiction that division in their own heart that is that rubs up against itself constantly, exhausting the person so that they're emotionally unable to just process things. And so they can lead to a type of depression, a type of indifference, shutting off our emotions to avoid kind of feeling that sadness and confronting it and changing our minds about it.

Starting point is 00:17:54 What does Aquinas mean when he says, thus acid things are also cold, do you think? I have no idea. I read that and I have no idea. I don't either. I was trying to figure it out as you were reading it. Yeah, I don't know. It must have been like one of those popular phrases back in the day. The way I'm interpreting it, which might be 100% wrong, is just this idea that even hot things appear cold. So even like things that ought to be, that ought to move my appetite, do nothing for it. Yeah. I think that, that would make sense because, um, we're, if there's a type of despair, it's like, how can we find delight in anything good? Right.

Starting point is 00:18:39 There's a sense of it's ultimately meaningless. It ultimately doesn't have any value for us. It's all vanity. So I suppose that a person who can't find delight in spiritual goods is a person who is sorrowful at them, who resents them. What do we mean by spiritual goods? I know there are the obvious things like the sacraments and prayer and scripture reading, but I presume Aquinas means something even broader than that when he says spiritual good. It's anything that orders us towards the ultimate good or the divine good. So Sloth here, he clarifies as different than other vices because it specifically is a sadness towards the ultimate

Starting point is 00:19:29 or towards God himself. So doing God's will and being in union with him is something that makes us sad. And that can manifest itself in particular temptations like going to mass on Sunday or going to confession and so on. But it's ultimately tied to doing God's will or being in union with Him. I'm trying to apply this to myself. I think sometimes I will waste time. I'll be intentionally dissociating, say by clicking through YouTube videos videos and it becomes apparent to me that that's what i'm doing and that i ought to stop but there's a sluggishness or almost like an oppressiveness that just wants me just to kind of wave that oppressing thought away and to continue yeah there's like an avoidance perhaps yeah yeah and i think that i think there's a bunch of

Starting point is 00:20:26 different symptoms that can come from sloth um one is a resentment towards god's law so we find lawlessness or it being preoccupied with fantasizing about a life of lawlessness um of turning away from god's law or being curious about it. There's an indifference. You think of the apostles in the garden as their Lord is suffering intensely, sweating blood, and they're sleeping. You know, what had to happen to them spiritually for them to be indifferent towards the Lord's suffering that they couldn't stay awake and pray? That's pretty significant. So they had to turn something off there. There's an interior conflict, perhaps living a double life, a failure to pray, even when it's not delightful. And this is my biggest one,

Starting point is 00:21:16 is a failure to be committed. I think today I see this so prominently is this whole term ghosting. What is that? Ghosting, I think today is where people are, they'll commit to something and then they will not follow up with it. I've never heard that. Yeah, so there's people, you know, they'll go for jobs and they'll apply for them and then they'll get another job and they just won't even tell their their new employer and then they'll just not show up to work um same thing i found even with programs that as a priest i might start in the parish um that you'll start something and people will be very excited about it at first but then when it requires a commitment um they'll they'll kind of it'll phase out when the passion is gone there's no endurance and I think that's

Starting point is 00:22:06 actually what what is lacking is a zeal which is a is not just understood as a passionate yes but is also this long committed endurance to be willing to go through something and be faithful to it all the way to the end and And I think we all struggle with that, to, you know, like, things come up that we don't expect, you know, the sun shines on us at noon, and it tires us out. And we have to deal with that and our limitations. But on this big scale, I think this inability for us to commit is actually a resentment of letting go of some of our freedoms, our liberties, if you will, to do whatever we want. And, you know, if I commit to something, that means I have to say no to so many different things that might come up. And so therefore, we are spiritually slothful at the

Starting point is 00:22:59 spiritual good of being committed to, you know, God, being committed to serving him through our neighbor and so on and so forth. I've been reading Aesop's fables to my kids lately. And one of the short stories in there is the one about the fox and the grapes. Are you familiar with that story? No, no. Tell me about it. I got to read it. It's a couple, it's not even a paragraph and it's, it really speaks to what we're doing here. If people are humble enough to kind of receive wisdom from such a simple story. Here, I just pulled it up. It says,

Starting point is 00:23:38 A fox one day spied a beautiful bunch of ripe grapes hanging from a vine, trained along the branches of a tree. The grapes seemed ready to burst with juice, and the fox's mouth watered as he gazed longingly at them. The bunch hung from a high branch and the fox had to jump for it. The first time he jumped he missed it by a long way so he walked off a short distance and took a running leap at it only to fall short once more. Again and again he tried but in vain now he sat down and looked at the grapes in disgust what a fool i am he said here i am wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes that are not worth gaping for and off he walked very very scornfully so this idea that we we know something to be good and therefore we desire it rightly

Starting point is 00:24:31 but when we when we when we perceive our own supposed impotence to attain it or perhaps just the energy involved to attain it we can fall into the trap of despising it. So that oppressive sorrow that comes upon us can lead us to disregard the good. So perhaps we've heard of people who love Jesus Christ and pray, who read the mystics of the church and talk about the importance of prayer. And our desire kind of rushes up within us and we think, I want to be that sort of person. And so the next day we set our alarm for 5 AM, you know, and, um, you know, but, but just the, the work that's involved causes sorrow and, and there,

Starting point is 00:25:17 and at that point we have a decision to make when we, when we experienced that sorrow, is it our fault or is it the thing's fault? And we don't like things being our fault. And so we can tend to, as it says here, walk off very, very scornfully of that thing we once perceived to be good. Do you think this in some way applies to sloth? 100%. Because we recognize the sacrifice that might be involved in pursuing the divine good. And it makes us sad that we have to be doing that sacrifice. So our pride comes into play where we get to define for ourselves what is good and what is evil. That tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Starting point is 00:26:02 And we eat from it. that tree of knowledge of good and evil and we eat from it and we rewrite the narrative so that we can do what we want and therefore say we're righteous at the same time and we're kind of deceiving ourselves in the process and as we're rewriting what is good and what is evil rationalizing we develop a hatred towards what we now have fooled our is as evil, but is in fact good. And so that's the perniciousness of sloth, because now our reaction to what is good is that we become sad at it. And what is evil becomes delightful. So Eve looks at the fruit and she finds it appetizing. She finds it attractive, desirable. So this whole pride is at the center of every deadly sin, every capital sin, such as sloth. And it's that redefinition

Starting point is 00:26:54 or defining reality around what we would prefer it to be. And I think it's with sorrow, especially sorrow especially, it often is the desire to avoid sacrifice for the sake of some divine good. And it's interesting because, you know, in some cases in terms of the gospel, how many times was Jesus or St. John the Baptist turned into the bad guy, right? You know, Jesus is a glutton and, you know, St. John the Baptist is this radical he's possessed, or they accuse the Holy Spirit of being beelzebul by Jesus casting out, you know, demons. And so we turn what we don't want to listen to or what we don't want to do into something evil. We vilify it so that we don't have to surrender to it and do the work that's necessary to obtain it. That reminds me of the story in the gospel where the rich young man asks Christ what he must do to be saved. Christ tells him to go

Starting point is 00:27:59 and sell everything and he walks away sad. Yeah. And it would be interesting to know what he did or how he rationalized his walking away three days later you know was he was he rightly accusing himself of sloth or was he talking about that crazy over the top radical guy who isn't in touch with, you know, the practical reality. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Unfortunately, scripture is silent on that, but I could see it going that way. Just with myself, you know, like sometimes when, when my parents would tell me things I didn't like as a little kid, I'd say, why do you hate me? You know, we just, we just try to spin the narrative in such a way that that's beneficial to us. But sometimes, you know, the other thing happens is that we go away disagreeing, but sometimes

Starting point is 00:28:57 we have those honest conversations with ourself that no one sees. And, and we, we say, Oh, you know what, maybe I was wrong. And we do change our minds. And that's always the possibility too. It takes time sometimes for the truth to really lift us. Now, one of the things I found interesting about what Aquinas says is that sloth is almost contrary to charity in that charity rejoices in the good, while sloth finds it an occasion for sadness. I thought that was interesting. I wanted to ask you about sloth being a capital sin.

Starting point is 00:29:38 So I guess by capital sin, that is in reference to the head from which the members flow, capital. So when we say that sloth is a capital sin, when Aquinas says this, he's talking about the fact, I suppose one of the things that makes a sin a capital sin is that other sins flow from it. Is that right? Yeah, he says that a capital vice is one which easily gives rise to others as being their final cause. So there's that sense of the capital vices encompassing what all sorts of other vices do. And so one way is we're putting a category on a bunch of different vices and saying these belong to generally this negative or evil attitude. Yeah, back to that point about us thinking that sloth means essentially just doing nothing. If someone were to seriously believe that, I would say to them, okay, try and do nothing.

Starting point is 00:30:32 You know, go into your bedroom, sit on your bed, turn the lights off and do nothing. And this is very Pascalian. You know, I think your inability to do that is a sign of sloth, actually, not the other way around. Yeah, in some ways, resting is actually work. You know, it's self-denying. But, you know, the interesting thing is that it can become joyful through virtue. It just takes time to get there sometimes, you know. through virtue, it just takes time to get there sometimes. We know that when we're building the virtue of doing God's will, it'll eventually lead to an effective consolation. But sometimes we have

Starting point is 00:31:13 to go through that period of the desert to get to that enjoyment of what we're supposed to be doing. So I think that the rosary is actually a great tool to kind of help us overcome these temptations to sin. Because if sorrow is the problem, if sorrow towards the good is the problem, then joy towards the good is one way of contradicting that. And also sadness towards evil is also a way of contradicting that. The way that my spiritual director always puts it is we have to hate what Christ hated from the cross and love what Christ loved from the cross. And the sorrowful mysteries and the joyful mysteries, for instance, can really give us the opportunity to submerse our mind into the delightful and good things that God can give us that are joyful.

Starting point is 00:32:12 The joy that the goodness of God himself becomes our joy and the evil that our sins have weighed upon him. We can regret and we can become sad about those things. And the sorrowful and the joyful mysteries, they're connected to each other because if you're sorrowful about evil, then you'll be joyful about the good and same vice versa. You can't have that kind of converse nature, contrary nature without one or the other. So I think allowing our mind to enter into the rosary, to the meditations that are there is really, really important. Not only that, but you know, the rosary, it doesn't take long to do, but it does sometimes, it is very tempting to look at as a chore, as a difficult thing to do, that I'd rather watch Netflix or

Starting point is 00:33:06 watch TV or play video games or scroll through YouTube videos. But really, we're submersing our mind in what, right? Are we putting it in the things of God that he loves and that he hates? Or are we, you know, so I think the rosary becomes a very practical way to put effort forward towards the good and sorrow towards evil and set things right in our mind as a result. That's really interesting. I like how Pope Benedict talked about the rosary. He said that it creates a sort of rhythm into which we can rest. So that's the point of the words. It's not like we're thinking about each word of the Hail Mary as we pray it, but rather saying it creates a sort of rhythm into which we can then rest. Yeah. So in that sense, I can definitely

Starting point is 00:33:58 see how it would be a antidote for sloth. How in your own life do you combat this? How do you see it rear its ugly head in your own life? And what do you do to find ways to overcome it? Well, Aquinas says that, and when I say Aquinas, I try to apply this to myself. He says that certain sins require certain responses. So lust, for example, is something that we should flee from, whereas sloth is something that we need to endure. And so being mentally prepared for that. When I find myself falling into sloth, I try to upgrade my penitential lifestyle. So on Wednesdays and Fridays, I might take a lukewarm shower. I just pause you a moment and ask you, how do you detect that you're falling

Starting point is 00:34:46 into the sin of sloth? So you say you up the ante when it comes to the penance you take upon yourself, but what is it that you experience that you say, ah, these are signs of sloth? I start complaining. I generally will complain about things and therefore I'm not enduring with others as patiently as I should. You know, I might be tempted to end my hour of prayer five minutes early or something like that. So, you know, little things pop up and all of a sudden, like venial sins, I'm pretty sincerely believe that they lead to mortal sins. They are seeds that grow into something worse. And so once they pop up, they chip away at your internal freedom. And that's why regular spiritual direction, especially for priests, is so essential because you're held accountable to your way of life and where you're failing and where you're succeeding.

Starting point is 00:35:45 accountable to your way of life and where you're failing and where you're succeeding. And you're reflecting constantly on how you're doing in a healthy sense. You're trying to maintain the life of grace. So when I find myself, you know, like sometimes just a feeling within myself, well, I don't want to do that. But it's something that I should be zealous about doing. That's when I know that, oh, I must have been giving into this slothful impulse, maybe not, you know, fully consenting to it, but chipping away at that consent. And that's a real grace that you have there, to have that internal recollection. Because I think for many of us, we experience that subconsciously, but we're not in tune with ourselves enough to recognize it.

Starting point is 00:36:35 So I think I did this this morning. I woke up and my habit is to wake up, walk to the wall where my icons are and to pray. And today I didn't do that. And now as I reflect, I can see how I rejected it. You know, I was tired. I needed water. The kids needed to get up. But my point is I didn't consciously reject it, which isn't a virtue. It's a vice that I'm not that in tuned with my interior life that I didn't recognize it. So I think that's a real grace that you have to be able to see that in yourself. Well, I give the credit to my spiritual director because I don't think, I mean,

Starting point is 00:37:14 I go every month and our bishop, in fact, insists that he says that priests go off the deep end, generally speaking, things, problems arise when we're not going to direction. And if I am going to be held accountable to someone every month, then I have to be constantly thinking about what I'm going to present to him in the truth. And so just, you know, going to bed, doing the examine prayer, reflecting on my day, and then doing an examination of conscience, going to confession regularly. And these things can be conducive to being aware of those impulses in our life. And yes, we're going to miss some of those things, which is why later on in our day, we have to reflect on them. But I also think that it speaks well of our role that as disciples, whether we're priests or the laity, we can't do this alone. We need to be held accountable by someone else. And so Jesus sends them out two by two. And so practically speaking, I think we can't

Starting point is 00:38:20 live our spiritual life in isolation unless we're uniquely called to the life of a hermit, which is very rare. So I think that we have to really be honest with others about what we're struggling with and also have others to encourage us and hold us accountable to living up to that life of grace. to that life of grace? I think for myself, the way I recognize that I have fallen into sloth is that I'm perpetually distracting myself. And it gets pretty bad. Like I'll, you know, I'll be working. And so I'll walk downstairs. And as I'm walking downstairs, I put on a podcast and I listened to it kind of while I'm cleaning the kitchen and and i'm continually busying myself with different activities so even as i'm listening to a podcast i'm checking email or even as i'm checking email on my computer i'm responding to somebody on a marco polo and or i want to watch something on netflix and it's this it's this gorging of of my appetite in order to kind of sort of shut down i

Starting point is 00:39:28 think like the the good desires that i have for union with our lord and and it says during and it's those times where the idea of silence is oppressive to me so the idea of why don't you just turn everything off right now and not actually look at a screen or listen to anything that I find oppressive. And sometimes that gets to a point where I'm like, okay, I just have to. This is why I tend to have the habit of giving up the internet for the weekend. But that for me, at least, is something that I recognize as a sign that I've fallen into sloth. I need to catch it earlier, clearly. Yeah, that's a good insight.

Starting point is 00:40:09 I'm kind of having a flashback to driving in the car. You have the radio on or you're listening to Christian music or whatever. And all of a sudden, you're just like, this is just noise to me. Even though it's good, there's good edifying things in it um i'm not really listening to it for that sake it's just filling up noise my life with distraction and then you you just hit the button that turns everything off and all of a sudden there's just this wave of peace that comes over you and and it's just this natural relaxation of the mind that's not trying to escape and just putting ourself into a contemplative, you know, being in the presence of God, practicing his presence. But I think even more importantly is this question that we have to perpetually ask ourself is what does God want me to do right now?

Starting point is 00:41:07 that we have to perpetually ask ourselves is what does God want me to do right now? And just even if we don't know the answer to that, even asking ourselves that, being willing to do whatever he wants, which might be contrary to what we'd prefer to do, I think there's a way of we're building this sense of the divine good is the ultimate thing that I'm pursuing is his will. And that question I constantly, you know, we can be tempted to do all sorts of good things, but they may not necessarily be what God is calling us to do. And we may be doing them to avoid the one thing that God is asking us to do. Are you familiar with 21 Pilots? No. Well, they're a terrific band, and they have this song called Car Radio, and I got to read some of these lyrics because it really speaks to what you just said too. And

Starting point is 00:41:56 it's going to sound weird, me reading them, because I ought to be rapping them. But since I'm Australian and a dad, it wouldn't come out cool if I tried that. But the chorus is, I have these thoughts. So often I ought to replace that slot with what I once bought because someone stole my car radio and now I just sit in silence. He says, I ponder of something terrifying because this time there's no sound to hide behind. I find over the course of our human existence, one thing consists of consistence and it's that we're all battling fear. Oh dear, I don't know if we know why we're here. Oh my, too deep. Please stop thinking.

Starting point is 00:42:33 I liked it better when my car had sound. That's so true. That is Pascal. Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah. And that's all Pascal's thing that we distract ourself as we're walking towards the void. And it's too much to bear. And it's too much to take in. And we don't know why we're here. And we feel no tremendous purpose in our life. And so we have

Starting point is 00:42:57 to fragment our interior life so as not to be able to rest on that terrifying thought. life so as not to be able to rest on that terrifying thought. You know, just to speak to what you're saying is one of the things as a person that was being trained to become a priest as a seminary, and we had to do these silent retreats. And, you know, you talk about driving in your car. That's perhaps, it depends on how long it is, but try doing, try being in perpetual silence for an entire seven days. See, maybe I'm wrong, but I would imagine that after the second day, it would get easier. Well, that wasn't the experience that I had. When I first did this retreat, my first couple of days, they said, okay, just rest.

Starting point is 00:43:46 You just finished your final exam. So just, you know, if you need to take an extra nap, do that. And I was like, hey, that sounds great. And then I, you know, I slept. And then the next couple days, all sorts of things that I hadn't been dealing with or looking at, all of a sudden started to come up to the surface. And so like the lyrics of that song, all the fears, all of those demons that maybe have been working overtime and on a secret level in our psyche, in our spirit, all of a sudden, those things started bubbling up to the surface. And praise God that that was happening, because

Starting point is 00:44:25 if it wasn't, then they would still be there hidden and acting in my life. But they needed to come up to the surface. And the only thing that was allowing them to be named and to be known and to be confessed and to be brought into the light was silence. And without God, I think that none of us can confront those things. We would hide like Adam and Eve did. But with God's generosity and mercy and goodness, we can be courageous enough to let them bubble up to the surface and bring them into the light and not fall into despair. But in order for us to do that, I think we really need to be formed in our faith that God is good and that he is loving and merciful and just and that he's all of these things and that we don't need to be afraid to be spiritually naked in front of Him. But if that faith that God is not the divine good isn't in our mind, we are just going to be like Adam and Eve, clothing ourselves and hiding

Starting point is 00:45:34 ourselves from Him. And I think hiding ourselves from Him is what noise is, like that song was saying. Yeah, that's a really interesting insight. I think for many of us, we like to tell ourselves that we listen to podcasts, not music. And we say this like it's a virtuous thing. We like to think of ourselves as constantly inquiring and learning new things. And therefore, when we're in the car car we're not just listening to music no we're listening to pints with aquinas so we're listening to something else it's actually like being a blessing for our spiritual life and i just want to question that for a moment because i don't doubt that that's can be a good thing if i if i didn't believe that i wouldn't be doing this podcast

Starting point is 00:46:21 clearly podcasts can be a good thing but i think it's time that we all took a step back and questioned how many podcasts we're imbibing and whether or not that's a good thing. Because again, it can just be a means of distraction. And the fact that we cannot sit in a car and listen to something beautiful, sit in a car and listen to something beautiful like 21 Pilots or Puccini or Bach or Gregorian chant, but that we have to be stimulated in a different way to kind of get out of ourselves. Because sometimes it's a lot easier to have our mind, as you put it, have things bubble up to the surface as we have some beautiful music in the background. It's a lot easier for that to happen often than if we're actually listening to information being given to us. So I think in some ways, even though we like to tell ourselves that we're really wonderful human beings

Starting point is 00:47:14 because we're educating ourselves instead of listening to music, it might just be an easier way to distract ourselves from those good things bubbling up within us which need to. Yeah, and that's where us, which need to. Yeah. And that's where I think we need to be aware of our, the real nature of our motives and not just be focused on external goods, right? Because the external life, external goods, we can live the exterior locus of ourselves. So we can be feeding the poor we can be clothing the naked we can be worshiping and kneeling and and praying the rosary but if the motivation underneath all of those things is to edify ourselves to put ourselves at the center of our own life to do what we

Starting point is 00:47:59 are comfortable and prefer to do they're all done in vain. And that's where Aquinas really highlights the importance of, you know, the moral act is not just the object of the act, it's the intention, it's the circumstance. And we have to really be attuned to what's going on internally. And that's why I said, you know, we have to ask that question, but what does God want me to do? have to ask that question, but what does God want me to do? What, what is as his servant and friend, where is my will oriented towards preferring his will over to mine? And I don't want to go outside of the Thomistic tradition, but I found a lot of wisdom from St. John of the cross. Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up. I love him so much. I've been reading so much of what he's had to say. He says in his Mount, what is it? Carmel. Yeah. Ascent to Mount Carmel. I want to say climbing it. But he says that oftentimes what we fall into the trap of is seeking myself inside God,

Starting point is 00:49:10 of his seeking myself inside God, where we want to be delighted and consoled and fed and all sorts of things by God. And he says that this heart, he says very harshly, but truthfully, that this is this makes us enemies of the cross of Christ. And I remember the first time I read that, I was like, I am an enemy of the cross of Christ. I didn't know that. And it was, you know, probably at a difficult time in my life. So I had to be a little more patient with myself. But at the same time, he was saying that you are an enemy of the cross of Christ if your relationship with God is only to make you feel better. And he said, rather, what we should be seeking is God inside ourself. So he's reversing the order. So our ultimate end, our ultimate motive is to seek God's will rather than our own. And he said, this leads to love itself, whereby we would prefer desolation, like affective desolation, difficulties, suffering,

Starting point is 00:50:08 all for the sake of Christ, where we get to love him. And that has to be at the root of our motive. And I think he's nailing on the head what sloth is when he says that, even though he doesn't use that term, but that we are delighting in the spiritual candy, but not the spiritual divine good itself. God has become our servant and rather than we becoming his. One of the things I love about the ascent of Mount Carmel, which I think also applies to what you're saying, is that a person can... What does he say? I'm thinking of that poem, He who is sick with love.

Starting point is 00:50:53 This is John. He who is sick with love, whom God himself has touched, finds his taste so changed that they all fall away, like a fevered man who loathes any food he sees and desires I know not what a desire for heavenly things. And so this is why he says the ascent to Mount Carmel is nada, nothing. It's nothingness the whole way up. Mount Carmel is nada, nothing. It's nothingness the whole way up, um, that we don't rest upon other creatures, but that we have a longing for the father.

Starting point is 00:51:31 And that, that is the most direct route to climb the mountain of ascent. Um, and, and for him, uh, that's not for everyone. Like sometimes it takes time to be able to really, really get that and grace, right? We can't do it without that. But yeah, that's that total detachment from honor, power, pleasure, and wealth. And just saying, I want nothing but God is ultimately what we're working towards in this life. And that's definitely not easy to do. But to apply it to what we're working towards in this life. And that's definitely not easy to do. But to apply it to what we're talking about right now, when we distract ourselves by things in order to fragment our interior life, that at least can apply here. Because then when it comes to what we ought to pray and read good spiritual books and take the direction of our spiritual

Starting point is 00:52:24 fathers and long for the Holy Eucharist. By that point, we're just kind of exhausted. Our mind is exhausted. I'd like to look to one more article, if you don't mind, in this same question. And that is whether or not it's a capital sin. question, and that is whether or not it's a capital sin, because here Aquinas is talking about what you referred to earlier about having to endure sloth as opposed to fleeing from it. And I'm looking to Objection 2, where it begins, Gregory fittingly assigns the daughters of sloth. That's such a great paragraph.

Starting point is 00:53:04 Yeah, should we look at that? Yeah, sure. Do you want me to read it yeah go for it okay um so first of all the the objection itself is objecting to the idea that it's a capital sin so further capital sin is one to which daughters are assigned so daughter sins or subsequent sins now gregory assigned six daughters to sloth malice spite faintheartedness despair sluggishness in regard to the commandments wandering of the mind after unlawful things isn't that most of us i mean that's what that's what that's what youtube spiraling is you know it's wandering of the mind after unlawful things we just keep clicking into this vortex of yeah yeah there's no discipline so now

Starting point is 00:53:46 these do not seem in reality to arise from sloth for spite is seemingly the same as hatred which arises from envy as stated above and so basically this person that's objecting is putting this category under envy rather than sloth so that's just a summary of the objection. But here's what Aquinas says is Gregory fittingly assigns the daughters of sloth for since according to the philosopher, quote, no man can go can be a long time in company with what is painful and unpleasant. It follows that something arises from sorrow in two ways. First, that man shuns whatever causes sorrow. Secondly, that he passes to other things that give him pleasure. Thus, those who find no joy in spiritual pleasures have recourse to pleasures of the body, according to the philosopher. Now, in the avoidance

Starting point is 00:54:39 of sorrow, the order observed is that man at first flies from unpleasant objects, and secondly, he even struggles against such things as cause sorrow. Now spiritual goods, which are the object of the sorrow of sloth, are both end and means. Avoidance of the end is the result of despair. While avoidance of those goods, which are means to the end in matters of difficulty, which come under the councils, is the effect of faint-heartedness and in matter of common righteousness is the effect of sluggishness about the commandments. The struggle against spiritual goods that causes sorrow is sometimes with men who lead others to spiritual goods, and this is called spite. And sometimes it extends to the spiritual goods themselves, when a man goes so far as to detest them, and this is properly called

Starting point is 00:55:38 malice. On so far as a man has recourse to eternal objects of pleasure, the daughter of sloth is called wandering after unlawful things. From this, it is clear how to reply to the objection against each daughter's. For malice does not denote here that which is generic to all vices, but must be understood as explained. Nor is spite taken as synonymous with hatred, but a kind of indignation as stated above, and the same applies to the others. Yeah, I mean, I just love that first sentence because it's just stating what we all know to be true. You know, if we're experiencing sorrow or something unpleasant, we do one of two things. We get away from whatever the heck is causing that unpleasantness, or we seek out pleasure to sort of counteract the painfulness or the unpleasantness of what

Starting point is 00:56:29 we're experiencing, which is what Aquinas elsewhere suggests that we do if we are in a state of sorrow, that we seek out pleasure. Because what does he say? Something beautiful. Pleasure is to the mind what kind of rest is to the body. Yeah, and of course, it's pleasure in good things, right? The divine good. Because we don't want to... Yeah, and Aquinas' point here, I think, is that sloth is the result of not being able to take pleasure in what we ought to take pleasure in. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I just find, like, I don't understand how anyone can say

Starting point is 00:57:09 that Aquinas was just intellectual. When you read something like this, there's just such an awareness of the very nature of the spiritual life on such a deep level. I mean, I think this could really inform a lot of psychologists today in terms of our faith. It's pretty deep stuff. How so?

Starting point is 00:57:29 How could it inform or help therapists? Um, well, I mean, first of all, I think like virtue is something that we're returning back to modern science, like neuroplasticity, this idea that the mind can change based on working and developing virtue. But there's this real sense of awareness of the subjective and the objective in Aquinas, where he's saying, you know, this person perceives something to be evil, but it is in fact good. And there's an objective criteria given to us about where our mind should be ordered whereas today a lot of psychology is my understanding is it's very subjective with

Starting point is 00:58:13 no objective criteria so it's you know there's this sense of if you think that you are a woman but you are you have a male sexual nature then we'll just go with what you feel like and so there's this no objective criteria but here Aquinas is just saying here's how our mind needs to be formed and here's how it needs to be ordered so in this paragraph you know he's talking about despair he's talking about malice he's talking about hatred but none of these things are meaningful if they're not assigned to something objective, right? How do we know that hatred is bad unless it's assigned to evil and that evil is real and not just subjective? So Aquinas, I think, is very healthy for the spiritual life because it holds the psychology accountable to some sort of standard, specifically God's standard, and to the natural law. But it's deep at the same time,

Starting point is 00:59:08 because we all relate to it. We all relate to self-deception. We all relate to not being honest with ourself about the narrative of our life or the lives of others. And that's, I think, that sobriety of truth is what we really need to see develop more in our psychology today. Well, as we wrap up today, give us some spiritual direction. We've spoken about this a little bit, but for all of us listening, I guess two questions. How do we recognize the sin of sloth in our own life? And what do we do to counteract it? What are some real practical takeaways?

Starting point is 00:59:44 First of all, don't live the spiritual life by yourself. Have someone else journey with you and hold each other accountable because that will just naturally make you aware of where you're lacking. You can be inspired by the other person's life of virtue and inspire that other person in the process. in the process. Um, and then furthermore, um, I think praying the rosary is a great way to, um, meditate on the mysteries and allow your heart and affect to be assigned to the objective good and, uh, be sorrowful at the objective evil that we see in our world today. Um, see overcoming, uh, sloth as a matter of endurance and commitment. And this is sacrificial love that we have to do for the sake of God. So if you're going to say yes, let your yes be yes and your no be no.

Starting point is 01:00:33 Commit to what you're going to do and make sure that that commitment is known publicly so that you're held accountable to it. Like if you're going to go to the gym, tell people you're going to go to the gym. If you're going to go to the gym, tell people you're going to go to the gym. And that way it makes it more easy for you to stay committed to that if you're struggling with that. And finally, to be more aware, I think getting spiritual direction or going to confession regularly is very crucial. And learning to adopt more silence in your life so that you can really be aware of what's going on underneath the surface is incredibly crucial. And don't be afraid of that. God is with you when you do that.

Starting point is 01:01:13 That's good advice. Yeah, I think a big part of it for us in our day and age is to put away the noise so that we can better concentrate on things that are genuinely good and substantive. Yeah. And one last thing that I would be as a priest who loves our Blessed Mother, zeal is the way to overcome the sin ultimately. And when Mary heard the Word of God spoken through the angel Gabriel, she went with haste to share that message with her cousin. So I think being an intentional disciple, recognizing our role to evangelize and share that divine good with others is an incredible way of building up within ourself an avoidance of this sin as well. All right, that does it for today. I hope you really enjoyed it. Hope you learned a lot. Thanks so much for listening to me and Father Chris Prochaszko. Do us a favor, if you haven't

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Starting point is 01:03:01 and not through Patreon. Okay? God bless you. Chat with you next week. To carry you To carry you And I would give My whole life To carry you To carry you

Starting point is 01:03:35 To carry you To carry you To carry you There were birds in your tears Falling from the sky Into a dry riverbed That began to flow down to A cross tower and high up above the water And maple trees surrounded it leaves caught flame

Starting point is 01:04:10 with golden embers

Pints With Aquinas - 146: The unnamed evil of our times (and how to overcome it) With Fr Chris Pietraszko

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