Pints With Aquinas - Christian Poverty, Vocations, Wolves, and Beet Burgers w/ Fr. John Burns

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

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Is an American phrase? It is. Is it really? The Australians say that? That's funny. Well, in Rome, I lived with a couple of Australians who always made fun of us for saying that's funny. They're like, you Americans, you'll say something and then I'll say something back and we run

out of conversation and I might add something and then they'll say, that's funny. It's like, it's just a conversational take it like it doesn't really mean anything. Yeah. Like that's interesting. And I think I said, no, that's funny. Like, oh no. No, but what does it mean? Like it's, it means something.

I mean, even if you're only doing it to be polite. I think his point was like, it's not a funny thing. Like you could say something else like fascinating or a good point. So if you're saying that's funny when it's not something that's I see, it's more like that's an insightful thing. Maybe. Yeah. It bothers me when people write lol in the comments section.

I did you yesterday. Maybe I did you could have. Well, what bothers me is when people are like snarky and say something just that they think is clever, like, oh, what a friggin loser lol I think that's their way of showing this they're mocking and scoffing at you yeah and the DMAO and all that yeah did you really laugh your ass off it's also like how do you finish a comment like that or like the okay you were saying this and you don't even put the period it's like you really want to get on purpose there was when these technologies were first coming out

Somebody was like we should put a smiley face the end of things when we mean them sarcastically and that'll be like a symbol Oh, I think lol has become there it is. Yeah or whelp Well, also very American Speaking of American we talk about Australian stuff? Yep. I asked you earlier if you're a fan of Australia or if you're like happy that you left. I need a really important question for me.

Okay. What's your stance on meat pies? Oh, the greatest thing I could possibly think of. I miss Australia. I miss the food. I miss the humor. But I do miss meat pies. When did you have one? I spent three months in Australia after college and I ate a meat pie every day and sometimes twice a day. As soon as I found them I was like this is the greatest junk snack food on the earth. And it was only like a month in when I told an Australian about that. They're like oh yeah those are not for every day. That's like when you're at the footy, you're at the bar. It was twice a day at times. The Ned Kelly with an egg on top.

Oh yeah. The packet of tomato sauce as you guys say like squeezes by hand. It was twice a day at times the Ned Kelly with an egg on top Oh, yeah, the packet of tomato sauce. Yes like squeeze is by hand. It's amazing, but we can't really do I've tried to bring that to America. We have like the chicken pot pie Yeah, which is like comfort food and it's like you kind of eat that alone or when you're at home I gave I remember when my wife visited Australia. She was my girlfriend at the time But I got her a meat pie thing and she'd love it. She thought it was the worst thing. She's like, she's dog food and she's never had dog foods. I don't think so. I don't know how she would know that. Now I brought up an eight pack home when I flew home. I went to the store on the way, frozen 420s, wrapped three jackets around it and flew home. It was my carry-on

because I was going to California to see friends like they need to try this. It was like 24 hours of travel, you know. So I got home like that's not we're not going to eat that. Oh yeah, it was frozen. It's still good. Cooked it up. It was delicious. But they were disgusted. So like Cameron, no one was interested. Do you think like, I don't know, like America seems to ruin food by trying to feed as many people as possible and maybe ruining the ingredients or choosing cheaper ingredients. He is what I mean.

I remember when McDonald's came to my hometown. I was about 15 or 16. If you go to McDonald's in Australia, the quality is significantly better in Australia to hear. And I would imagine it's because you can't just bring the food. That's crap that you've been cheapening over the last 20, 30, 50 years. However, McDonald's has been alive. I don't know. 80.

I don't know. And then just drop it on a country. I think it's probably like a do you think it's a gradual? Well, at least the uptake in other countries is fascinating. So like in Australia, the fact that you can get an egg on your burger at McDonald's or have beets on it. Yes. That both of those things.

Even things like what's that brie cheese. You have brie cheese on a burger in Australia. They have a whole like McDonald's. Yeah, that's fascinating. And apples. It's like different. It's not like it is here. But I wonder if that's because like the kind of capitalist mindset of like we're going

to like as cheap as possible for as much as possible. Although it's quite cheap here. It's also like baseline food is like burger and fries in America. But why isn't that as good as the meat pie? That's what I'm saying, because you can get cheap meat pies in Australia. But I feel like generally speaking, people get to get a like a snack food, like a meat pie or a pasty. It's better quality than the crap people buy here from a gas station.

That's true. Why is that? You think I don't know the main my mind moves straight on to another question, which is like, what exactly is the sausage roll? And where does it fit in the kind of gambit of great, I mean, it's like, it's in the meat pie section, but it's not really sausage. So you've got, yeah, pies, pasties, and sausage rolls. You said pasties,

that was the trigger of the thought. I don't know if you would say pasties, but it's funny. It's like when I try to say Savannah, I'm like, I'm pretty sure I'm saying that wrong as an Australian, anyway. Yeah, but sausage rolls, that would be like, it's just like, it's a, you know what it is, I know, but for those at home, it's like a sausage type,

it's not a sausage. Not sausage, that's what I don't understand. It's like ground meat with other things inside of a crust that's long, gosh, and puts ketchup on. Like anyways, these are things about Australia that I think are genius and we can't get them in America and they don't there's no uptake you could buy frozen meat pies can you Australia in America or in Australia let's have a look yeah well see this is the genius of me not having a boss this

is really not about anybody but me so we can do it everyone alright let's see meat pies USA oh man I can smash one of these bad boys for and 20 let's see your home of meat pies in the USA we shipped to every state alright is it Australian well has a big Australian flag on the top and that looks really Aussie alright I'm out of fine and it says wait a bloody sec orders take around seven business days We bake each order from scratch so plan on a week till it ships. Oh my gosh. I'm gonna get some of this Hey, you know here's what I do Neil. I'm gonna send you a link in the description and If you can put that please in the description on YouTube people should go buy and get on it by yours I'm sure it's an Aussie company, support the Aussies.

God knows they need it. With ketchup. Oh, you gotta have ketchup. Is there a difference between tomato sauce and ketchup? We call ketchup tomato sauce. I think when Americans say tomato sauce, they mean like tomato paste or something. But your tomato sauce is our ketchup.

It's not like a different food. The nickname for tomato sauce in Australia, do you know what it is? Dead horse. I don't know why they call it you want some dead horse yeah my dear Wow where did I for it was the footy the Australian was your old yeah I was your rules footy what an ad I think yeah you I'm from it I'm from the red lead that the blackbirds crows the crows they are blackbirds so to be a simple less less intimidating, I guess. Black birds. It was amazing. That's a confusing game to watch if you've never seen it and don't know the rules.

But it's fun. It was a blast. Do you think it's as confusing as NFL though? NFL seems far more complicated. When you grew up with NFL, that's one thing. But if you didn't, it's... I mean, every single European that I was... So I lived in Rome. Everybody's watching football, soccer, and they couldn't understand why there's so much stopping. Like, why do you keep stopping the game? game like well, that's kind of the chess game That's the coaches trying to figure each other out But if you don't see that or understand that then it's really confusing four downs and who's calling what I still don't understand it

I appreciate sport and I'm glad that people love it. I just don't care to try at this point in my life You know you get to it you get get to a certain age. You're like, I'm done trying to pretend I like Brussels sprouts. I want to like football. I want to want to like football., I'm done trying to pretend I like Brussels sprouts. I wanna like football, I wanna wanna like football, apparently I'm not going to, so I'm just gonna let that one go. There you go. Do you have something like that in your life?

Brussels sprouts. Yeah, you can get good Brussels sprouts. No, Cameron served me last night, I love him. I should have. That's good. Yeah, it's sport in general. I love sports, but I've also realized I used to love them too much.

I held college football. I remember I went to a school where football is really big in undergrad. And when we would lose, I'd be down for like two days and the whole campus would be. I've heard people say that I was like, this can't be good. Even a depressing effect on a city. Oh, yes. If the team lost in Wisconsin, it's anecdotal, but they talk about the rise in violence and drunk driving after a Packers loss for the day and a half that follows. I mean, it's, you hope that's not true,

but you can see it too, because there's just a tone that falls. When that's your highest good. I mean, what are you going to do? That's the problem with idol worship. And you go into Scotland. Yeah. A couple of weeks. What are you doing? Retreat for the missionaries of charity. Mother Teresa's sisters. How humble do you feel? I know. How does one get an invitation to spiritually direct the green berets or the Navy Seals of the Catholic Church? By not knowing anything. Really? Frankly, I mean like the first, so I've been giving retreats to them every year since the first year my priesthood.

And the first year my priesthood, I was back in Rome and I'd gone it was Christmas time. So at the seminary in Rome They're like 40 priests who don't need to do anything for Christmas. They're all gonna concelebrate a Christmas Mass So buddy of mine and I called up the sisters and said hey Anyone of your houses in Europe where you don't have a priest for Mass in English We'll go there because we've got nothing to do but concelebrate at the seminary. So they sent us to Romania in English, we'll go there because we've got nothing to do but con-celebrate at the seminary. So they sent us to Romania to the edge of a gypsy camp and we just spent the week on the edge of this gypsy camp, like an actual gypsy camp, doing ministry with the sisters.

It changed my life. I mean, really, at one point one of the sisters, this is where I knew I was weak, really weak, and like had no idea how to be a holy person of like serving the poor. A man came in, it was New Year's Day, a man came in who had burned his house down. He was drunk on New Year's Eve and he came in, had to go back into his house to get his papers and he's all charred and covered in soot. He wasn't burned but he was just covered in soot. We're cleaning the house as the Gypsy children are coming over for kind of a day with their Santa Claus. And as he came in, sister's sweeping,

I'm talking to her, we're doing a bunch of stuff, and she goes, father, I'm doing this and this, can you give him a bath? And I was like, yeah, a bath. And she saw this pause, where I was like, I don't know how to give a man a bath. And she looked at me, it was in all charters, she goes, oh, could you sweep the floor?

I'll take care of that. And I immediately was like, I am bad at the gospel. Like I didn't even know what to do. Anyway, the things that changed my life on the trip, came back to Rome, gave a couple of talks to the sisters in Rome. And afterwards, I just was, I was looking at the sister, the superior, I said, you know, anything you ever need if I can help you, you know? And I was meeting like confessions or sweep the floors or help give baths.

Cause I got to figure out how to do this. And I don't know how she's like, oh, yes, father, we need retreat. I was like okay, yeah I live with a bunch of priests I can probably find someone for you and she goes no no father we'd like you to give her treat. I'm like oh yeah she's European, I'm American. I was like you probably don't know but I just was ordained like seven months ago. You don't want me to give her treat. And she straight up paused. She goes father you will not give her treat, you will pray, and the Holy Spirit will give a treat.

Come back to me in one month with your answer. Just a little tiny Italian woman. Like I just got told, when I'm praying, the sermon took me to my spiritual church, I was like, all right, I'm going. So anyways, brand new priest sent to Nairobi to give a treat, and ever since then, I do at least one or two a year with them.

And so this is just kind of the evolutionary. The next step was they brought us into London and they brought us into Scotland and downtown Edinburgh. We'll spend 10 days with the superiors, the whole UK region doing retreat. I still don't know what I'm talking about, but I, they somehow keep asking me back. Wow. Have you done work with them ever? When I lived in Ireland, in Sligo, there was a little house there.

And I, not real, not much work. I heard somebody say about the missionaries of charity, like you'll know pretty soon whether you're called to this, because if you're not, you'll become depressed very quickly because it's that hardcore. Yeah, no, totally. Tell us about that. What do you know about the missionaries of charity?

Well, I mean, they live, I've learned more from them, I think, than anybody else in the church after my own parents. Like, they live the gospel. I can't find a better example of someone straight up hearing the gospel mandate and getting out there to live it, but doing so not in just like the social justice only avenue, like direct to the poorest of the poor, but flowing out of hours a day in front of the Eucharist, mass, adoration, holy hour, meditation on scriptures. So they carry like the whole thing of a deep interior life and a crazy radical apostolic life. And kind of the linchpin for the whole thing is their radical poverty.

Like they live a poverty like you've never, you couldn't even, you wouldn't choose for yourself ever. They all sleep in kind of a common dormitory They rotate beds kind of on a monthly basis So they can't even get attached to sleeping in the same place because the homeless don't have a so they don't have their own cell They're all in one room and common switching beds every month or so they have what we moved one when we're in Armenia Which was Easter just after Romania. We moved a sister. She was trans transferring locations She came as like 430 in the morning,

and we were giving her a ride to the airport. She came out with a duffel bag, and I grabbed that. I said, sister, let me get your suitcases, tell me where they are. And she goes, oh no, that's everything. I'm like, but you're, are you moving, or are you just going on a trip? She goes, no, I'm moving.

I'm like, everything is in this little blue bag. And she says, yeah, that's all we're allowed to own. And she showed me then, later in their constitutions, it's like two habits, one pair of sandals, one pen, one pencil, one blue bag with wooden handles, one ruler, one toothbrush, one plate, fork, knife, spoon. It's like one of everything and only that. And it's only the essentials. So like on the first retreat, I remember an MC, she was taking notes with like a little Bic pen,

while we were visiting and on the side of the pen, I saw like a piece of paper. I was like sister what's on the paper on the side of your pen? She goes oh it's my name and she had like this you know it's an octagon or whatever. She'd cut out a piece of paper as large as one of the sides of a Bic pen written her name on it in tiny letters. I'm like why did you? I mean it's a Bic pen it's like ten cents. She was well this is my pen father. Like I'm only allowed to have one if I lose this I can't take notes I can't write letters I have to request a new one And so it's it's my pen and I remember like even that moment being like I have a lot of pens like metaphorically

Literally like pens all over my car my desk and I remember thinking myself like I don't know Simplicity at all and the type of poverty that they're living So it's your question when a, especially from America or Australia, Europe, Western Europe, when she enters with them, no matter where she's coming from, she's coming from a more prosperous setting than the lifestyle that the MCs choose. Mother Teresa's vision was like,

you should be as poor as the poorest of the poorest. You can come at their eye level and look at them and say you have as much as them and you can raise them up and say, like, let's step upward in accepting the lord and living out this life They aren't allowed to eat in public because the poor don't have food if they're eating, you know And you don't have food like what am I doing eating in front of you?

So there's all these little disciplinary moves they make that are just like a constant one of them described as a constant crucifixion for an american because you just grew up even if you were poor in america You had a lot compared to what the MCs have on a daily basis. So it's really radical and that's a sifting that happens very quickly for a woman who believes she's called. She goes in for a few weeks and she might not be able to sleep, eat, pray, laugh, and she has to leave. But those who are called to stay, especially those from Western Europe, like they become saints because they've really mortified a lot of comforts because there are not a lot Of comforts in that life. I could go on about the MC's because

They're my formators. Love you, too I remember someone walking into a Franciscan friary and we know how they started with the Ideal of poverty that st. Francis set for them and they said to the priest. Whoa, if this is poverty show me chastity Because there was it just looked better than most houses. So what do you think? And obviously there have been people trying to recapture that poverty in an appropriate sense, perhaps, although I don't know if that's the way to put it. But do you suspect something like that could happen with the emcees that they might?

Become luxurious? Yeah. I don't. They're, they're allergic. I was giving a retreat in Memphis and there was a Chilean sister on the retreat and I know their life, right? And I've seen the constitutions. I blessed the convent. So I've seen all the rooms and and there's other stuff about their poverty that like you wouldn't even believe. She was complaining that they're too

rich and I was like, what do you mean too rich? She's like well we just here like we can get nice food, the donations that come in you know there are all these pre-packaged snacks that are really luxurious and I'm like luxurious it's Costco or Sam's Club stuff that you kind of throw into your kids lunch it's not luxurious but this innate sense of like this is way too comfortable and she was disturbed by it and was as a young sister trying to get back to a simpler way. So I do think I'm optimistic about how Mother Teresa ingrained a radical sense of material poverty to,

to ground the spiritual poverty that makes their apostolate so effective. If they lose that, they lose the whole thing. And I think it's really what makes them so beautiful. There's nothing wrong with orders advertising their order or having an online presence, but there's something super bad ass about the fact that you don't hear about them online. They refuse. You don't have like a MC, Twitter star or a YouTuber. How cool is that? It's amazing. No, they won't even let, they won't do vocational promotion. They only recently have started letting

people take pictures with them. It used to be Mother Teresa was like no pictures but with special permission which she would do for like Time magazine, things like that. But they know they're almost allergic to attention because they want to be poor. They want to be hidden in the heart of the church to serve the poor. And that the reason they do that is because they want to be totally dependent on divine providence. Like they won't tell you what they need and they won't ask you. They'll just expect God to provide through you. Like a buddy of mine had gone to Calcutta, he's a priest actually from Pittsburgh, he'd gone to Calcutta before he was a priest, he came back and his dad was over visiting in Rome and he's like,

I gotta show you the sisters, their life is amazing, let's go to the soup kitchen and the food pantry and took him to the Apostolate. His dad was pierced as well by the beauty and the simplicity of their life and he's kind of a successful businessman who's got a lot of other successful business people. He's connected to he said sisters I'd really like to Bring your group in to talk to my friends and put on maybe like a dinner and these guys, you know They're always trying to give money away They'd really like to support you and sister straight-ups like oh, thanks so much No, and he's like no no like I know you've got to be, no, my friends are very wealthy and they'd love to support this.

She goes, no. And this guy, my buddy, the priest, he said, my dad got mad. He's like, what do you why are you saying no? Like, I'm giving you money. He said, you know what? We trust God to provide. And if you feel called to provide, make make a donation, but please don't organize anything for us and don't talk about it.

Just just make your gift and let it be between you and the Lord. This guy, it took like weeks for this guy, his dad to like come back to understanding that that's well ordered because we just don't live that way. Like this prosperity mindset, this need to provide her the self provision. Um, why would you pass up someone who wants to give you thousands and thousands of dollars? But to them it's like, no, no, no, God will provide. I insist. And that's been your experience all around the world with them.

It's not like, well, yeah, that's the case in Calcutta and wherever else, but not in New York City or... No, everywhere. Everything just comes together for them. And if it doesn't come together, they presume it's not God's will. So they might have a beautiful plan or a hope for the day. And if it falls apart, they're able real quickly to receive that as like, okay, it wasn't God's will. So I'm fine. Rather, we'd be like, I spent all this time planning. I invested in this. I invited all these people. Nobody came. And what did I do wrong? Is it my fault? They're like, just God didn't want it. So we'll try again tomorrow. One time I was with them at their soup kitchen and my buddy and I were celebrating birthdays. And one of the sisters said, my buddy said, hey, it's Father John's birthday coming up.

Like it's his too. So go, we'll have a party. I'm like, yeah, that's cute. We're cutting, you know, like they make you pray the rosary while you're cutting food in the kitchen. And so you can't have your beads, so you're counting with your fingers while cutting. And it's this like very risky, you don't want to lose count and embarrass yourself from the system.

You also want to cut a finger off into the beef. Anyway, we're cutting food and she's like, we'll have a party. I'm like, yeah, thanks. That's cute. No, no bother. You know, we serve the men clean up. And as the delivery truck is coming, she goes over to unload and she pulls out, we'll have a party. I'm like, yeah, thanks, that's cute, no bother. We serve the men, clean up, and as the delivery truck is coming, she goes over to unload,

and she pulls out a couple boxes. At the top of one of the boxes, a huge birthday cake that says happy birthday in Mary's colors, white and blue. And she goes, see, Father, we'll have a birthday. I'm like, okay, where'd you get that? She goes, I prayed to our lady. She brought a birthday cake, so it's for you. And it was like a scolding, like, why did you mock me? And why did you believe that God couldn't do something really simple and small,

like in the day's donations when I offer a prayer, it happens that a cake gets in there. And, you know, I wanted to rationalize and be like, well, maybe they always get a cake. No, maybe it's just that simple that actually if we surrender to God, he shows up in profound ways. And if he doesn't show up, it's because we asked for the wrong thing. Punto Basta. up in profound ways and if he doesn't show up it's because we asked for the wrong thing. Punto Basta. How have you tried to change your life after living with them and how have you failed? Because if I went and did something like that I would come back super idealistic. I'd be like Cameron, unfortunately we cannot sleep on the

purple mattress anymore. No that's it. But also knowing me I do that solidly for three days and then buy a better purple mattress. How has your life changed? Yeah, it's the one of the things they said to that priest who went to Calcutta was, when you get home, do not begin to sleep on the floor. And it was an interesting sort of anecdotal a bit of advice to him, but she understood that like your world is being changed, but you have to integrate our life with your life. And the Lord may call you to sleep on the floor eventually, and that would be like an

offering of penance for sure and holy. But don't jump in too radically right away. Let the Lord show you what's happened and then integrate that in the life He's calling you to. So I had to carry that. So I came back the first couple of times I came back, I shaved my head. I was fasting all day. And you do have these pretty radical responses because you see how rich you are,

even if you don't have much. Over time I've learned that it's actually learning to simplify my my spiritual or my interior attachments. So I'll regularly test if everything was destroyed, if my house burned down, or if I lost everything today in a flood, what would I miss the most? And then I'll hold that up and be like, Lord do I have to give this to you? Like the pen thing, you know? Like am I treasuring a pen? Is there anything that I'm interiorly attached to? Because I have to have a lot of possessions, you know? Like my Bible, I've got my phone. I can't really subsist in the way they do. So learning how to carry that profoundly inspiring life of radical poverty for the sake of the gospel into also being a human

being who can relate to the world around them is a kind of attention we all have to walk. So I'm still walking that out. One thing I thought about doing, they don't have mirrors in their houses. They cover them with like a brown paper bag. So you remember there was a mirror, but you can't look at yourself. And I've thought about different things like that. Like strip out. It's really simple. You know, it's like, oh, I do look in the mirror every time I wash my hands and then check if I got a booger Yeah, my hair standing up straight, and they're just like you don't you just don't deal with that so little things like that I'll look at ways. I can pull things out of my life that I are luxurious or unnecessary I give things away most lengths

I'll put out a box in my room one thing a day has to go into the box And it can't be like something stupid it's got to be something that I would use but I'm probably not using so two weeks of that is easy you trim the fat but after that it's like well I kind of wear this sweater a lot or sometimes but do I need it I guess not and you give it away and so he's in a buying something you gave away later like I didn't need that but but it's the activity of like disciplining your attachment that is the MCs are always calling out in that. So yeah, that's a roundabout answer to say like I'm still working on it. I'm still

too rich interiorly and I like to be comfortable. I don't sleep on the floor. I have. I've tried. I'm not good at it. I'm working on it. What about you? How do you engage the, I mean you have to live a different life than I do. How do you guys navigate that? I mean well it's funny I imagine as a priest you sometimes look at family life and and and the natural part of you pines for it or sees the beauty in it and and maybe longs for it. Not even in inordinate sense but just like that's a good that I could have had that I don't. Sometimes I'll hear you people priest like you.

You talked. I'm like, ah, I wish I were a priest. It were like one cassock every day. And. But this is this is Thomas a campus. Right. I don't know if you remember one of the first few chapters. The priests say, if only I were a friar, the friar say, if only I were a monk, the monks say, if only I were married, we keep thinking that holiness is not within our reach and circumstances have to change. Yeah.

And you touch on a really cool principle that I've been thinking about and praying with is just like the charged field of polarity. It's been called usually it's Gertrude von Laforte who talks about this in this book, The Eternal Woman. She's talking about the relationship between man and woman as a field of polarity that's charged with energy that's potentially creative. But I think we can apply, and we can talk about that maybe, but I think we can apply that to the different vocational states in life too. That there's like a attention between our states that we look at each other. We're like, man, what you have is beautiful.

And you're looking at me like, man, what you have is beautiful. And there's a temptation to go into something that's not yours. Yes. And also in that to like resent or regret what is yours or wish to change it. But when we can kind of settle down into where we are, when we're sure that we've said yes to the Lord, we're in our vocational state and then that tension creeps in, there's a creativity that arises across the states in life that they mutually inform each other to be like, well I need you guys to be holy. Like I need you and Cameron and your kids to like rise up and show me how a man loves a woman and woman loves a man.

And you need to call me out and like, if I'm not calling you to a higher level as a man who's trying to lay down his life for his bride, and I'm not showing you how Christ is out for the church, call me out and let's not desire to shift roles, but let's like, see that desire as something that like, can lead me to challenge you and lead you to challenge me. And all the states in life, I think, need to challenge each other in that way. And then this field of polarity becomes creative and not divisive or dead. That's really profound. That's funny.

That was funny, though. Yeah, you know, I think one of the things Catholics often struggle with is looking at picture books of saints or icons of saints and having an unrealistic view of what it means to be holy or an unhuman view of what it means to be holy and then trying to do that. One of the beautiful things about married life is you very quickly realize you cannot make that work because there's diapers and there's sleepless nights and there's mess and there's misbehaved children and your own frustrations with people who are always there. And I know that the Lord is using that to make me a saint, a trust that he's doing that. But I think in the beginning

of marriage, I found that very much a stumbling block. I thought that was the enemy, that messiness, that humanness. But as the Lord's leading me, I'm trying and learning and failing to just like lay into that more just the beautiful messiness of family life. But I would imagine as a priest, maybe and you correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't know, it might be more of a temptation for priests because sometimes you don't live with others and you, you can distance yourself in a reasonable way from other people and live kind of two lives. Yeah. Let me come back around. If I live two lives in my own marriage,

then my marriage would die. Like if I'm a, if I mean, it means spirited and harsh and and anal, I'll just have a very unhappy house. Like I'll get immediate feedback. Yeah. In a way I don't know, you tell me what's that like for a priest? Well there's like you prompted a thought, I'll come back around to the question about the ease that we could have with drifting because we often live alone as priests. But what you're raising up in that kind of dynamic about sacrifice and the grittiness and the messiness, everything you were saying there, I was like,

oh, that's exactly what my experience with the priesthood was for the first few years. And I do a lot of work with religious sisters now, that's exactly my experience in coming sort of behind the front, the facade, and doing like spiritual direction and retreat work with sisters. What you named is exactly the same thing that happens to priests and to religious. Those who you'd look at and be like, oh maybe they have it all together.

Like in the grit of the day-to-day, like living at our vocational states, like we're still humans and that's beautiful and messy. And you know, like sometimes I remember thinking like, well once I get to this point then this will be gone. Like once I'm ordained, I'm gonna be really holy like the grace of orders and there's a real thing there for sure in the grace of orders but you bring with you your story and you bring with you your vices you bring with you your fallenness and so priests sisters just like you guys we're kind of going through this reality of like okay this is this is what it is it's not really

all flowers and clouds and lights from on high, there are those, but it's also just like a human reality living in communion with the divine. And we're actually working out the same grittiness. We don't have the diapers usually, praise the Lord, because I think that would destroy the grittiness that we do have to carry,

but we're working out this tension in the same exact vein, which is like the ideal drove me or drew me to this, because the ideal of a life lived in marriage, priesthood, religious life is very attractive and beautiful. The reality is often not there, doesn't feel saintly at all, but it's also that's where the saint is made. The saint who doesn't know that they're holy but they're persevering, you know. I remember watching as visiting a priest who's dying. He had heart cancer, diagnosed with heart cancer on the feast of the Sacred Heart, a tumor on his heart so he couldn't operate.

And he said, you know, I spent my whole life planning to make this glorious offering on my deathbed for the church, the bride, and offer all my sacrifices for the salvation of souls. And he said, here I sit, I got tubes come out of my whole body, I fall asleep during Mass, I can't pray the Breivary anymore without drifting off. I'm a misery, John. And I remember looking at him, Father Dick Tomasek, I remember looking at him and being like, man, he has no idea, but he's actually living out exactly

the thing he dreamed of his whole life, because he is faithful. It's not a beauty that he anticipated, but he is living out this sacrifice for the Church. And I remember as a young priest being like, that's what it is. Like, when you're living it, when I'm living it, by God's mercy, we often don't really see it. And that probably protects us from sort of pride or a comfort in sanctity. But it's gritty and it's messy and it's kind of ugly in all the states. Anyway, back to your concrete question. We do, Diocesan Priest,

especially we live alone, like we can very easily fall into like the bachelor mindset. We can have a kind of a hidden life, a secret life, a second life, and we've seen that rear up in some of the scandals. It's horrible. We don't have to, and we're not supposed to. And so, if a man's living faithfully, if he's really praying, coming out of prayer is a deepening spirit of presbyteral unity and fraternity and he's going to look for brothers that he needs and he's going to make himself vulnerable enough to ask input from a brother. It's easier not to do that and so we've got a lot of opportunities to become, as it were, rich in things of the world because we don't think about poverty. Like we have to supply our lives because we don't live in a community

that does. So we aren't really materially poor and so to navigate that spiritual poverty is really tough but that's where families friends like are supposed to call each other out and uh yeah along the way it's been some of my lay friends who've been like you think you should do that or you think you need that or isn't that a little flashy you're like yeah could you give us an example or is that too close no but buying cars so we have to buy a car you know and um I could have afforded the car that had a number of, you know, like a sunroof and like the nice trim package and the heated seats. I live in Wisconsin. It's freezing cold.

And I bounced it off of my friends. I'm like, this isn't by any means out of my price range. But we had a good conversation. Like, well, that's not like a poor man's car. It's a decent car. It's an SUV and you need it because you're moving around new vocations work but maybe you don't need the fancy one with the cool rims and the nice features and like a good call because that's gonna look different it's gonna look a person with

more money buys the nicer trim package I'm like okay thank you so I bought like the bottom line trim package and no one really notices but I notice I'm like man I'd really love heated seats right now. I'd really love a heated steering wheel. I don't have it. And that's like constantly giving me a chance to offer a little sacrifice. Even if I bought the car that is a decent car.

So little places of those conversations. And I'm comfortable with some of these people to ask, you know, I think that's the key is you need to have friendships across the States in life. We are comfortable asking like, hey, as a priest, as a married man, how does this look to the Lord and other people like should I should I not? Anyways, I imagine it would be difficult for nuns Especially in the beautiful habits to reconcile their own brokenness with the fact that they actually look exactly like st

Teresa of Lisieux and everyone presumes like they dress up like Teresa of Lis Liz or whoever it may be you you look like that But then maybe you're struggling with masturbation or maybe you're struggling with hatred towards another sister And what the hell do you do with that? juxtaposition or that Seeming that contradiction. Yeah So prime place to encourage everybody else in their states in life to understand what sisters experience the shame that often comes with being Not perfect in religious life, when the world looks at you and presumes you're perfect, everybody

who interacts with them is like, wow, you know, little kids call them the queen or the princess or like someone recently called a sister a unicorn. Like they point out like, look it's a unicorn mom, a unicorn, that's a unicorn, it's a sister. Anyway, this is this kind of elevated stance toward perceiving what these women do and how they live. And when they're not living that well, when they're struggling with something, the accusation interiorly and the shame is profound, profound.

And so it's just a good reminder for all of us that there's no really one state in life where someone's got it all figured out. We're all carrying our stories and our brokenness into these vocations and inviting the Lord to kind of straighten it out. The type of struggle the religious woman often has is another degree of shame, deeper than the ones that you're ideal with, because the presumption on most of the rest of the church

is like, well, at least the nuns have it figured out, even if I don't as a priest and you don't as a married man, which is they're no different than us. There's a certain grace to the vows, but they're also human beings. Are we seeing a resurgent towards female religious? Yes and no. I just put together a chart, actually I do a lot of work with this stuff, vocations, and I put together a chart of the numbers of priests and the number of sisters since the 60s. And the priest line kind of goes like this. There's a drop-off, which we know and we call that the priestly shortage or the crisis in priestly vocations. The religious sisters line drops off on like a 45 degree angle from in the

60s when there were three sisters to one priest in the church in America down to almost even now. And in that stat I think it was 70% of those sisters are over 70. So the line is going to keep dropping. So macro scale, no way. We're losing religious really quickly because these huge orders that haven't had a lot of vocations in the last couple of decades are reaching retirement and are dying. We are seeing a resurgence in a number of these very rich traditions that are kind of pulling on a longer line of fidelity to like older founders. So like Dominicans.

And then a number of new traditions popping up, like the Handmaids of the Heart of Jesus in Minnesota, this small, really beautiful order that attempts to be the complement to the Diocesan priest in the parish setting. So to offer the Marian complement to what Christ is offering, the Christological through the priest. These orders are growing and they're taking in to what Christ is offering the Christological through the priest. These orders are growing and they're taking in at a percentage wise, a high percentage of women, but it's nowhere near the numbers macro

or hard numbers that we used to see. So there's gonna be a major sifting, but these orders, there is a growth. It's not what it needs to be, nor is it what I think it's supposed to be. I mean, you've done the Stephenville conferences, the vocation call, like what's your experience of watching that at the end of the mass on Sunday?

I'm always surprised at how many men and women come up. It's obvious. It seems to be the case that there's far more men who come up saying they're open, becoming a priest than women who come up saying they want to be a religious. Is that your experience? Well, yeah, actually, I was just thinking back to one I've experienced more women than men. Oh, really? That's because as the priest I usually pitch it in a different way with a great fervor. I'm convinced that the church is suffering until she has religious in every parish, every diocese throughout the world. Religious sisters?

Religious sisters. The woman, the consecrated woman, a compliment. What do you say to the woman who's discerning religious life? But she says, you know, really what's the big deal with religious sisters? I don't get to celebrate mass, I don't get to hear confessions. Wouldn't it be better in a time of crisis just to get married and have a bunch of Catholic kids? Totally. Yeah, that's the number one. That and the desire for marriage drives the question, like, why would I be called? And parents especially, like, why would I let my little girl go if she's not going to have this prestigious, or at least visible position if priest is not prestigious anymore? It really, that mindset comes out of like a reduction to function that we see in a pretty sick way in the church. It's really what led to the actually

atrophy of the priesthood too, is this thought that the priest is a functionary. He's defined by what he does and what he does is celebrate the sacraments. He may run the meeting. He may organize the parish's finances with the help of the finance committee. But to identify him by his function, finances with the help of the finance committee. But to identify him by his function, it reduces him to a set of doings that then are substitutable. Like, it's not essentially flowing out of who he is, it's just what he does. And so a woman could do that, a lay person could do that. So what's the essence of the priesthood? And so when we elevate those duties and we're like, well, look, the priest celebrates mass, has an authority, I want my little girl to have that. Or as a woman, I want to have this authority. There's a misunderstanding

of like the deep core of what the calling is, which is conformity to Christ through holy orders, out of which flows the function. So, adjure, sequitur, essay, right? Well, action follows upon being, or what we do flows out of who we are, and not the other way around. So when that's in place, then you can't be functionalistic in your understanding of the church or vocations. And then you look at the religious woman and say, well, what's the being? Who is she conformed to and what is she doing? She's living a very different type of consecrated love. The priest is conformed to the heart of Jesus to love the church, as John Paul II said, the way the church longs to be loved as a bride. The religious woman is not conformed to the heart of Christ to love the church as a bride. She's conformed to the heart of Mary,

binding herself to Christ as bridegroom. So she is united to the church as a witness to the compliment to the Christological outpouring and the receptivity she's demonstrating or revealing the receptivity of the church in her fertility. So I can't be a religious woman, she can't be a priest. And to confuse that is actually to skip over the impact of biology on spirit and the fact that like irreducibly celibate loving is tied to an engendered offering that is rooted in our biology. So the woman who wants to be a priest, she just hasn't come into understanding the essence of the priesthood. And that's our fault for not articulating well what the priesthood is.

But for the woman who's afraid of religious life, because what will I do? I won't celebrate mass. She's missed the fact that like if God's calling, God's asking her to conform her heart and her life to Mary, to show the whole world who the church is as bride. And I'm a bride and you're a bride qua being in the body of Christ. So we're part of the bride. I don't know how to do that. I don't know what that looks like. I don't even know how to explain that. But when I look at the religious woman, I see the bride personified and I start to understand the church. And then I start to understand a little bit about how I could be more receptive to the outpoured grace of God and how to understand myself as a member of the bride. So tons of themes to kind of draw out of that. But at the core, it's a misunderstanding of what consecration does

to the heart of the woman and who she's conformed to and how she's cleaving to Christ in a way that the priest actually doesn't. He's conformed to Christ by holy orders. How did you put it? You said the church is going to be poor or until we have a resurgent? Gravely impoverished. Why? Because of that, like we. Why can't just religious brothers carry the torch and the few sisters that are out there? Precisely because of the, so let's kinda go big picture, right? Ephesians 5, Revelation 21 and 22. We see in heaven there's a

dyad that reflects the created order. What does that word mean? United two parts. Two parts, dyad. Christ and the bride. So all of creation, all of vertebrate creation is dyadic, right? God took the power to generate and divided it into two and turned them toward each other in a mutual reliance.

Like you can't generate alone. So generativity and generation is, as it were, divided. And then, when the two come together, especially rationally, human love, they're drawn up into creativity. That is a reflection of the divine and community with the divine. So, in heaven, we know it's Christ and the church, the wedding feast of the lamb. He's prepared a spotless bride, and they come together ultimately for this grand feast. Here on earth, so that's the supernatural dyad or the ultimate dyad. Marriage is supposed to be an icon of that, right, in Ephesians 5. Like, it's a great mystery, but I speak as he's describing marriage, I speak in reference to Christ and the church.

The celibate states are meant to pass over the gift of natural communion with a supernatural blessing and matrimony, skip over that and share in something ultimate, not just to be like a neutered adorer of this grand God, but to participate as a human person created as one half of existence and not the other half, and to let all of one's powers and potencies turn toward that worship and demonstrate something ultimate here. So because there's the ultimate dyad of Christ in the church, or it's like Christ in the church, I can, and I do, testify to half of the ultimate story. I'm meant to bring the heart of Christ down into the world, but I can only tell half the story. I tell it to marriage, you know, as marriage needs to look like, well, what is it

like for Christ to love a bride? I should look to the priest to see that ideally. I look to marriage, like, what does it look like for a man to love a woman? And what does it look like for a woman to love a man? And help me understand what is ideal, be the icon for this. But I've only got half the ability to demonstrate that ultimacy. I do the Christological piece, which is essential for the church, celebrating the sacraments and structuring and ordering hierarchically the goods. But I can't witness to the other half, but by expression and explanation. I can't testify in an embodied fashion to the bridal dimension of heaven, which is the ecclesiological dimension of heaven. And so, if we only have priests living in the celibate state, we actually only have half of the ultimate story. And yes, it's

the ultimate peace, it's showing God here, Christ's heart. But it's not showing the feminine ultimate, the ecclesiological and the Marian ultimate. So when you take that out of the church, the whole church is kind of missing something and doesn't quite know. Like the priest becomes a single parent and he also, his heart has kind of gone asleep because he's not thinking in, as it were, dyadic terms. He's not thinking about the church as his bride. He's thinking about church as this people to tolerate and navigate and order around and deal with until he can get a day off. Instead of having a heart that's alive as a bridegroom conformed to Christ the Divine

Bridegroom. Wow. I'm ranting because I love this. Well if you are ranting, it's very articulate. Have you heard of the wolves? This is people who have ever heard me speak. I talk about this. The wolves in Yellowstone. This is like, I'm going'm gonna go off stop me as soon as this becomes uninteresting promise

So Yellowstone National Park was established to mark off a section of the country. That's really important to preserve. Okay At the beginning of the park parks establishment There was preceding nature like there was just wilderness and they organized it into a park or they boarded it off In like the 1920s and the 30s the farmers Around the park decided that the wolves are in nuisance and they began to hunt the wolves because they were taking you know Harming their cattle etc. So they hunted out all the wolves by I think the mid 40s The wolves are gone from Yellowstone National Park as the wolves left the park adjusted to the absence of what's called an apex predator And the park sat as it were, and as it is,

until about the 90s. And in the 90s, a group of conservationists started to say, look, ecosystems theory says when a system is integral and balanced, all the parts fit together and balance each other out and inform each other. Something's missing from the park that's been here from the beginning.

If we actually want to see nature flourish and reveal to us the order of nature, we the wolves back so they met all these obstacles people didn't want to bring wolves back who was the apex creature after the wolves went I don't well bears they're still bears there you don't have another predator but they're not as aggressive a carnivore they're also get a lot of the black bears just eating berries grizzly would be a full carnivore but they didn't have the presence like wolf packs you know there's kind of like a bear behaves and predates very differently than the wolves, which are very mobile.

So 90s they start bringing them or they pass legislation, which was opposed by a lot of people. Eventually they got permission to bring the wolves back. They brought in a very small group of wolves, put them in the southern end of the park. And ecologists look at this as one of the best examples of what's called a trophic cascade. It's amazing. You can look at videos on YouTube about this. It's really beautiful. Trophic cascade. Trophic cascade. An apex predator's effect trickles down through the entire ecosystem and its

effect is felt from the ground up past just the animals. So what started to happen? I love it. It's so cool. Nature's amazing. All of nature instructs us about super nature, right? So nature here tells us so much about the church. As the wolves came back in, they started to hunt the elk. And the elk had been herding along the floodplains at the edge of the river, because there's water, there's grass, there's open space,

it's all safe, you can see any dangers. So the wolves started to hunt them right on the floodplains immediately, picked off a couple of the calves and some of the elderly. The elk adjusted very quickly, moved into the uplands or to the forest, stopped frequenting the floodplains immediately, picked off a couple of the calves and some of the elderly. The elk adjusted very quickly, moved into the uplands or to the forest, stopped frequenting the floodplains. What that meant was this grazing force that had been there for decades stopped grazing the floodplains to the ground.

So a wildflower population immediately sprung up that had not been able to grow, which brought in an increase in songbirds, as well as ground rodents, squirrels, rats, mice, which increased the population of foxes and other kind of rodent carnivores. But what also started to happen was along the banks of the river, the poplars and the aspens began to grow that had been grazed also the grounds of very soft wood and the elk. It's one of their favorite kind of grazing foods. So these poplars sprung up really quickly and along the riverbanks.

And what that did was two things. One, it fortified riverbanks that had previously been subject to erosion. And it put a shade canopy over the edge of the riverbank, which increased these sub-aquatic ecosystems, like micro ecosystems. Fortifying the banks was one factor in the significant change.

The other factors is the beavers came back up the river. They'd been outside of that park since pretty much the wolves left, but they found new trees to harvest. New dams could be built right there. So the fortified banks and the new beaver dams actually changed the course of the river. It didn't erode as much. It became narrower, stronger.

And they say the course of the rivers was modified slightly, but you can see a difference in the rivers over that time. So the point being the entire park was as it were suffering in the absence of a key member. And the shift affected everything. And I, the, the, the one to one, I draw the analogy, that's the religious woman and like, they don't like to be called wolves, but like they're at the, they're the top. I mean, they're conformed to the bride in,

in what's called the supreme or perfect state of conformity to God by the vows. When you take that out, everything has to adjust. So think about how we adjusted the church. We lost our teachers, we lost many of our health care professionals, but also we lost the witness, the eschatological witness of the bride who informs the church visibly as an icon, and everything adjusted. Priests became single parents, if you will, or didn't understand again or lost a sense of that. The other, the bride whom they serve,

embodied in Mary, embodied in the religious woman. We shifted the way we do schools. Our stewardship campaigns in the average parish is driven by a very large budget, significant portion of which is a school that's full of lay teachers, which have to have a salary and have to have benefits and We didn't need to supply those things before because the religious community sustained their sisters and they had a vow of poverty

So the the shifting functionally is massive, but I argue metaphysically Ontologically the the poverty is so profound and raw that we've forgotten who the church actually is We've lost the the shimmering the glimmering Marian testimony Which is eschatological in the religious woman the church actually is we've lost the shimmering, the glimmering Marian testimony, which is eschatological in the religious woman. And so we actually don't know ourselves and we're like the park. We're kind of breathing on one log or kind of limping along. We don't even realize it. No, because we grew up without sisters. I mean, did you see sisters growing up? I saw there's a couple of sisters, old unveiled. Yeah, which is two or three

on you. Yeah, two or three, two or three. That's all. Yeah, two or three. What two or three? That's all you have two or three nuns not veiled. Yeah, not living a vibrant life at that time because they're trying to adjust a lot of they're trying to become more relevant or meet the culture and understandably they made some decisions that in hindsight looks silly but back then look good but we never bounce back my argument is we never bounce back and it's until the sisters are back it's the concern of the entire local church to be doing this work because there aren't sisters doing it. Like up until the 80s probably, maybe the 90s, there were always religious

women taking care of girls who were discerning and the priests taking care of the guys and marriage taking care of the families. We all kind of worked together. As the sisters dropped off, we kept going with marriage, kept going with priesthood, but nobody was encouraging the young women to think about it because there was nowhere to point and no one to walk with them. And so we just stopped encouraging religious vocations and almost started to act like it's supposed to be gone. And like really we need a paradigm shift in which we like refuse to imagine the future of the church without religious sisters, even if we don't even know what that

would look like if we accept that the metaphysical, the ontological account of the church as a system, as a body, as an ecosystem, we're sick and we're missing something that we don't even know what that would look like, if we accept that the metaphysical, the ontological account of the church as a system, as a body, as an ecosystem, we're sick. And we're missing something that we don't even know what it would look like to have because we grew up in a church without it. But it's been there since the beginning. There've always been women consecrated to Christ in an exclusive loving spousal bond.

So how do we bring the wolves back? Dude, that's the best. How do we reintroduce the wolves?. That's my full-time assignment. I'm literally assigned full-time to work for the Renewal of Women's Religious Life. I'll go on Tuesday. That's crazy. I didn't know that. Not crazy, but you advise as a priest. So is the bishop asking you to do this on behalf of the diocese or is it larger than that?

It's sort of national for now with a preference for Milwaukee. But it came about because I went to him and said, Bishop, there's a problem in the church that we're not talking about. It came out of a Steubenville conference. I did the vocations call in Rochester, and we had a third of the girls come forward to say they were open to a religious vocation. And as I'm sitting up there, you know, giving the exhortation, about to hand it off to the bishop to give the blessing, I'm trying to find a sister in the room, to be like, could you come up here and talk to the girls, or at least show them what it looks like to give your life to Jesus,

and to be a visible witness to the bride. Tell me you found one. There was a single one in the house. And I got really mad. I was like, well, this is a local church issue. The local church wasn't thinking about the fact that hundreds of girls are gonna express something that's very hard to name in high school.

And they didn't get ready for that. And so these girls are going back home to be like, okay, you know, something weird happened at the conference. No idea what to do about it, but anyways, leave that behind. So I went to my bishop and said, bishop, I think there's a problem we're not talking about. It's that nobody is concerned for the fact that Jesus is calling these young women and we don't have a framework to accompany that because we don't have sisters.

And the sisters that used to take care of that aren't here anymore. So I think these vocations are slipping through the cracks and we're staying sick because of it and I said at the end of the day this kind of comes back to you because you're in charge of administrating the temporal goods and the care of souls within this region and he's like well now it comes back to you yeah so there's no long-term there are plenty of solutions to propose short term we just got to bring this back into the conversational landscape and be like hey Jesus is not done calling women to give themselves to him forever as bride to witness to heaven

How do we cultivate that in our families conversation the dinner table? How do we bring sisters in periodically if we don't have them? How do we go out and visit them? How do we talk about this? Please find me a beautiful religious sister to come on the show? If only if only there was. You were just talking about that show. If only there was Sister Miriam, didn't you say that was like one of the shows that just blew your mind? Yeah, that was amazing. I want more. She there are. Oh, yeah, I can connect to them this way.

I feel awkward calling up a convent. I mean, like, I just need a sister to do it. No, but there's so like a number of these communities have have teams now assigned to evangelization and vocations. They're waiting to be invited to go out. But we often don't know, like, I can call a convent and ask them to come to my parish or my school or on my podcast. Tons would be open to it. Tons.

You got to know a few sisters would be who do a really good job speaking to the heart of women. I can say we had to do that to of course. Yeah. Yeah. Now easily. Let's make sure that happens. How do we encourage it in our daughters? I love my daughter so freaking much. This so beautiful Avila and Chiara and people joke here in

Steubenville that we have this sort of apostolate because we show up at church and my girls flock to the babies and bring them to the pew. So my wife's holding someone's baby and I'm like, come on, like there's only so much room. That's that they that's why they want to go to mass. My daughter, Chiara, has she took three pieces of paper. I love babies. Fifteen exclamation marks stuck on her wall.

Father Jason invited me to go back to Ukraine. I might be going soon, but the only condition that my wife and her have is that I need to bring back babies. She just always random stories about my daughter's love and babies. And my and Chiara is like, when I get married, I'm going to have 12 babies or five babies. Like she's just thinking things through. That was when she was like seven, maybe six.

It's glorious. Yeah. Maybe there's this this false idea that if I'm attracted to motherhood, then I couldn't be being called to be a sister. How would you like to see parents encouraging their daughters in a way that's helpful and beautiful? Oh man, thanks for teeing that up. That's the question. First off, it's got to be an openness on the parent's part to be like, Lord, I will let

you call my child to whatever is their whole life. And for parents to let go of a little girl to the convent is a very different thing than a priest to the priesthood. It's really tough on parents. So there has to be a parent has to have a really I'd be thrilled. Oh, yeah. And I'm not special. I imagine there's a lot of people like me who like, are you kidding? Beautiful. Yeah. I said to my daughters once you're allowed to marry a man only if you can find a man who loves you more than Jesus. And if you can't, then any religious order with a full-length habits fine with me. You can choose. That's a good word. No, no, that's the way. And you're cued into it though, Matt. Like it can't be... I think there's a principle we also have to kind of

insist on here. Non-use does not signify negation. Like just because a person doesn't use their biological potency to generate doesn't mean it's negated if they're called to a supernatural way of life by a consecration or ordination. So there is a properly masculine way of generating supernatural life, of generating children, rearing them in the life of the church. There's a properly feminine way of supernaturally generating and rearing offspring in the order of grace. And we have to be able to kind of articulate those not to our middle schoolers, but to say that like the desire to be a mother, a wife and a mother, is holy, it's in your nature, and God wants to sanctify it. If he's going to ask you to give your life to him, he's going to ask you to do it as a bride who is going to bear life with and

because of that love that He gives to you. And you will be charged with rearing that life, raising it, instructing it, and pointing it out in the ways of faith, hope, and love with and on behalf of Christ, the husband and father of the church. So it's by no means a castration or a neutering or a sterilization. The life of the consecrated is fertile and potent. But we have to be able to relate the natural to supernatural orders here and see that like God doesn't do violence to nature. If he made you with a capacity to generate qual man, he, if he's going to call you to celibacy, he's going to teach you to do that on the order of grace with the love in

the heart of the church. Same for the woman. So, to encourage the desire for marriage and children, and then watch what the Lord does with that. Because if the Lord really is inviting her, He's going to show her how that comes up into the love of Him and how He's going to meet those desires just in a way that totally surprises her. Because it's hard to believe that you could actually be fulfilled doing something that nature says. You'd be fulfilled not doing something nature says you have to do. Like nature says you have to have sex. You have to have a spouse have to have children.

These drives are animal eventually brought up into the rational. But nature says you won't be happy if you don't. Supernature says, oh, you will be and there'll be another way of living it out. If if if the Lord is placed is calling upon your life and structured you for fulfillment by the foregoing of natural potencies in favor of the supernatural. Why is this such a long preparation to become a sister and such a short preparation to become married? Partly because we're running out of time and need to make kids probably. Yeah, my wife and I had to wait nine years but yeah. You've thought about a number of

questions. Yeah, I have. One, I think we need to do more and can do more for marriage. Preparation, accompaniment, those things, which is, that's supposed to be holy courtship. It's supposed to be a culture that encourages men and women to date well. It's, sorry, just real quick. I know I said that, but then I realized the problem is people are taking nine years to get married.

So it's like. But it's not formation years, right? It's like delay years. Yeah, defamation usually. Yeah. If it's that long and you're living that intimately. For the religious, it's like you have to test the calling because it's so fragile and nuanced. You have to test it for a long time and see if the Lord continues to fan a very small and delicate flame into a fire. You have to test and see if there's fruit born by the living.

So in religious life, you don't take final vows until like seven years or sometimes more from the beginning of the journey. And what you're doing is living the apostolate and you're practicing the life before you even take vows. And then eventually you just take temporary vows, like one year at a time you live these things to observe the very subtle response of God by like a supernatural flourishing of heart and then even a natural joy at living this life Because to commit yourself to something like heaven forever Now this is a pretty big step Like committing yourself to marriage is a pretty big step

But marriage brings with it the ability to act upon one's natural impulses and to do so in a proper setting Including the desire to to have a sexual relationship that eventually bears life. The foregoing of that with its complexity requires like a certain degree of certitude on the heart of the woman or the man and the priesthood that like this is actually God's call. Because if God is calling,

he's going to be able to perfect and fulfill their own heart and their desires. But that's hard to, you can't just like do a quick interview and find out like, oh, looks like your heart is structured with the charism of celibacy, so why don't you take vows tomorrow. It's a long journey of formation, of testing and receiving the churches and the Lord's affirmation. So it's just meant to be like a growth upward in perfection to ensure that this

is the way God is asking to give your life permanently when final vows come. It's a beautiful process because man you can't avoid, I wish marriage had to go through some of this, you can't avoid your story. In formation like all your mess comes up, all your brokenness if you choose to confront it but it's coming up and and the type of healing you undergo in preparation for orders or for vows is potentially very beautiful. Whereas all my stuff came up strongly within the first few years of marriage and continues to come up, but I mean, it was,

it's amazing, it's, all your junk comes to the surface, I tell you that. It's funny, man, because you date, and when you date, like, you don't fart in front of each other, you don't, you know, you're not rude. You're attentive. You're superficial in some sense. And I'm saying farting is what it takes to be a non superficial person. But I mean, there's a sense in which you're putting the best self forward, right? Yeah. And then all your stuff, as you say, all

your history has, it has to come out. It's like a whack-a-mole thing. I mean, you can try to suppress it in one obvious area, but it'll come out. Maybe that's how we can universalize the question, is like, our stories are just going to come up. Whatever state in life we're called to, like you can't get away from what's shaped your heart.

It's up to you when you deal with it. Are you gonna confront it on your own terms or the terms, you know, onto which God's inviting you? Are you going to deal with it when it's damage control? And usually the latter is the vocational crisis, the crisis in marriage, the midlife crisis, because it's unconfronting stuff that is easier just to keep going, especially for men like I'll just keep going. I kicked in a trash can in our kitchen when I first called a therapist.

It was only after that. I'm like, okay, maybe I need to see somebody. A few years ago, several years ago, but it was like that. It was like, just keep going, just keep going. Like, you've got this. I just found myself getting angry and I had no idea why. And it was only after I did that, I'm like, all right, maybe it's starting to cool down. Andy Bernard from the office punching a hole on the wall. That was an overreaction. What was the scene? I think it was in Band of Brothers.

One of those may have been brothers were like the one of the guys in the squad is injured gravely. I haven't watched it, but so he's he's not. I think he's the sergeant. He receives a pretty bad injury during battle, but the medics all over the place are kind of bleeding out everywhere. So he just kind of stitches up his own arm with a quick, well, like a couple stitches and a tourniquet. Nice. And then there's a ceasefire. He gets back to town. He's checking on all his men.

And he's throwing like a new jacket on. He doesn't want to confront what's wrong, you know, because he's trying to be generous in a way. He's like looking around. He's trying to find everybody. But he's moving through the crowd and somebody just bumps him and hits hits the arm and he flies off the handlebars in a rage At this person who's like whoa yikes like what happened and I remember as I watched I was like that's that's the story It's like we there's deep stuff that we often don't want to deal with and so we'll do quick stitch bends it up cover Put a new jacket on but then when someone pokes that spot like we overreact Gravely and that's to us if we're if we're honest and mature,

that's we make the call to the therapist, like, OK, this maybe is not an ordered way to live. And I'm actually quietly dying. I'm scared to confront it, but I'm not doing well. And man, as men, especially we have a really tough time saying I'm not doing well and I need help. So if we could, how would we like, what's your advice for marriage prep or to young couples, you know, how do you get someone to the place where they're willing to see that the

things they hate about each other or the triggers for their fights aren't so much about the other person as like something within? How can you provoke a 20 something into the, I don't know, I don't either. Go on a Dr. Bob shoots retreat. That's a start Read his book on marriage Be devoted takes a while. Yeah, it takes a while to really believe that this person loves me Like it's taken me about 15 years to finally believe that my wife loves me. Wow, you know Like I'm sure there were glimpses and maybe I just never looked at the question It wasn't like I was walking around my wife doesn't love me wife doesn't love me But just like really really when you see all of it. You really love me. You're not leaving Oh, and and there's something lovable there, too

That's the other thing like you won't love me because I'm not lovable if you do love me. It's not cuz you're stupid It's presumably because there is something lovable in me. So having to believe that Yeah, and how do you get that idea into a teenager's mind? I have no idea. I think for me, if you had have tried to tell me all these things when I was 22 and getting married, I would have nodded sagely to all of it. And I would have given great comebacks.

And I would have, everyone would have thought I understood what I was saying, I guess. Maybe I'm doing that now, I don't know. But it was like trial by fire. It was just throw me into this relationship with another human being. I think part of what's weird is you don't know. But it was like trial by fire. It was just throw me into this relationship with another human being. I think part of what's weird is you don't know that the dysfunctions of your history are dysfunctional.

Like you grow up in a family that acts a certain way and you just either justify it or think it's normal. And then you start acting in ways with this other human being who has a different history. Well, I remember when we got married, I've been like, all right, let's clean the apartment. So when I say clean, what I mean is tidy. Let's just make everything neat. Um, when my wife hears clean the apartment,

she's like pulling boxes out of cupboards and like organizing things. Just makes things less clean, you know, like, I don't know, things like that. Yeah. Things like like the sexual relationship. Wow. Talk about talk about a place for your wounds to be poked. We desire desperately to be wanted to be desired, desirable, pleasing. And when that happens, great. But what about when it doesn't happen or when you're not wanted or when there's conflict there? Maybe then you realize that you were using sex as a sort of quick fix,

quick new jacket, but you realize, wow, there's this sea of doubt that I am actually lovable here that I was trying to have fulfilled here. It's just so much man. Humans are so beautiful. Yeah. And maybe that's what you're pointing out. The beauty is like, maybe that's our optimism in the midst of like, we can't really get this across to the 22 year old.

Maybe you can't get it. You can try. You give them the ideas and the principles, but it really does come out in the grit of living the life over time. And yes, marriage perhaps important, but maybe like real friendship in the Lord is equally or more important so that there are supports, ideally in the spouse, but also in peers to be like, you know what, how do I get through this? If I had have given my 20, because I was 22 when I got married, I'm glad, I wish I was 19, but I was 22. And I think I'm glad I wish I was 19 but I was 22 and

I think I would have said to me like if I could like if I could go tinker with my Surroundings in my life knowing that I wouldn't have heard the advice. I would have given me Yeah, what would have I done like into what situation would have I chosen to place myself? I don't even know see I was about to say something that would have made us safe, but Myself I don't even know see I was about to say something that would have made us safe, but so here's what I was gonna say like plug yourself into a community of people who love Jesus Christ and become friends with those people and You know Just just that'll be good if you do that

Then when you start to break down and when things start to come undone you'll have a community of people I think that's right. But what do we do? Well, we moved to Ireland. We moved to Donny Goal. We had no friends and no family and a child who was very colicky. But maybe that was the fire I needed. So I don't know what I if it would have it would help me. It's kind of like these time travel stories where you go back and they say, don't tinker with anything. Like maybe it's just about sort of submitting my life and my history to the providence of God, knowing that he does good and brings out good for those who love him, you know? Yeah.

What would you have done to your early priesthood if you could go back and either tell yourself something or arrange things such that you could have better been open to what the Lord wanted to do in you, you know? Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm like you, you know, I really, I cherish where I am as a fruit of what I've been through. And I do believe the Lord has worked through my weakness and my failings to bring me to this. I think one bit of advice I'd give is like, your intuitions or your interests,

things that kind of pop, even if you don't want to pay attention to them, often there's something more there So for example humility, I've always been attracted to humility We went to a seminary our lady of humility is the patroness. We pray the litany of humility all the time I've sought humility for years as A as a young priest I can looking back I can see that humility hadn't quite settled in I still cherished knowing that the homily was a grand slam and I wanted to know if my priesthood

was bearing fruit for the people. And that led me sometimes to, yeah, be judgmental and to be proud in ways that are really clear now. And so I see that the desire for humility and the interest in it, even academically, was there and that was from God and he was provoking an interest in me that he knew would be really important. And so kind of learning to trust those little places that my heart was drawn or things were fascinating or captivating to me. The Lord usually wants to go deeper than we're willing to go in those places. And I'm like going through a new phase of like accepting humility and realizing

that I, I really have very little to offer anyone, but especially the Lord. But my yes, and I couldn't have said that early on, even though I wanted it and it was there. So like just to observe, you know, what interested you in your spouse or what did you struggle with? What was drawing you? What saints were you reading? What books were captivating you?

I bet there's more there. I bet that was the Lord actually trying to feed into a number of things He knew were going to be really messy, but you just kind of skipped over the surface and there's probably a bit more He wants to say. So, but that's just a real time processing. I also, yeah, I don't want to change the past. I love where the Lord's brought me. Like, this is awesome. Life in Christ is awesome. Even if it's really hard. Yeah. Yeah, I remember after we had a few kids realizing I don't like this. That was my experience. I don't like it. You know, like and this I find unless people are lying to me,

this doesn't tend to be the experience of Catholic dads. When I speak to people and ask them, how are you doing? They're like, I'm living a great life. This is amazing. And I'm just like, ah, I didn't feel that way. We had kids and it was like me and my best friend Cameron on this huge adventure praying together, making love, going to movies, going to dinner. And then there's this incredible imposition of another human being who I'm called to love,

who doesn't sleep. And now my best friend's attention is divided between me and this kid. So a lot of selfishness for sure. Took me a long time to love it. A long time. And it was felt very alone when I would speak to other parents who were just like,

this is the greatest. I don't know what you're talking about. Let's just keep going. I'm like, oh man. But, you know, it's funny. Like I would miss the times we would potter about a bookstore, picking up books from the saints, again, nodding sagely at their advice on how to grow in humility.

And when what was happening that night with my child screaming was like the equivalent of a thousand spiritual books, if I would just accept it. But I felt so hard to accept. Interesting. So hard, man. Yeah, that triggers a comfort.

It reminds me of a conversation I just had with a buddy who same sentiment of like I Didn't realize there was grace in the moment and that I was actually a good spot even though I felt kind of messy He's he had just sold a large business Bartered the sale made a huge profit was able to move had a gorgeous house three kids Life is really settled. He's young and and he's set. And he's got the thing he pointed out, I was like, I've got all the nice drinks I want, I've got the nice cars,

I've got everything here. And I was like, okay, so what's your advice to the 24 year old self who was just getting started, you know, first kid? And he said, you know what, I would say do not rush out of where you are. He said, I've got all this stuff and I love it. It's beautiful. and I'm sitting with his wife. We're sharing all this thing and he's like I kind of miss the days When there's like a screaming kid, I'm exhausted She's trying to get through school and we're drinking a cheap bottle of wine You can't tell you can't make a 20 year old hear that like it's the same thing with us like we lived in Canada We were beneath the poverty line living in Ottawa couldn't afford meat I remember we had a party for one of our kids and we had friends over and I asked Cameron

like can I go get like a couple of six packs we couldn't afford beer it sounds romantic now but it sucked then and I remember my mom sent me a card and it had a 50 Canadian bill in it and rather than being responsible my wife and I we went out and bought cheese and wine and just had a date night it was terrific looking back that's terrific and I, we went out and bought cheese and wine and just had a date night. It was terrific. Looking back, that's terrific. Remember someone came over and brought us a turkey. She must have known we were hot up and she left. I started crying.

I was just so moved by her generosity. Whereas now, if somebody brought me a turkey, I'd be like, what the frickin' hell are you bringing me a turkey for? How am I gonna fit that in my fridge? What do you think? Yeah. But,

yeah, maybe it's just like that anxiety that things won't be okay, and I need to make them okay. Like that's probably the anxiety that your friend was talking about with the 22 year old self, and he'd now say slow down. Well, he's only saying it's okay to slow down because he knows it'll work out well. But when you don't know it'll work out well, you're incredibly anxious. Yeah. To make it hurry up and click. Yeah. Maybe the principle then for rearing children is like to live in the grace of the present moment. In other words, what's anxiety, right? I think it's it's defined as like a fear that is rooted in

a tension about the future that seems irresolvably evil. So like a fear of future evil with a sorrow that you can't get around it. And in the present you ruminate on that. You're like, well tomorrow is going to be really hard to deal with. I'm scared of that and I'm sad that I can't get past the obstacle that seems insurmountable. So you churn and you become anxious. Or what's the gospel tomorrow, Saturday of this week, is you know, today has enough words for itself. Like let tomorrow take care of itself. And that's not a trite tautological like hobby lobby thing to put on your wall. Jesus is saying, if you live now, your father will provide for you. And so like that simple principle of like grace in the present

moment, grace in the 24 year old, the 22 year old, if you're able to, by the time you get to those places have been formed well enough to be like, okay, I'm just going to stress about the future. I regret the past. However, the only place I'm gonna meet God is here. If we can cultivate that in our kids and in our friends, anxiety is gonna go down because we're not gonna have to spend all this time planning for a future that very well likely may never come. But even if it does, like, I don't want to rush past what's happening now, the way God's trying to get me to the future by giving me his gift and grace right now so maybe I don't know maybe we can optimistically think about that in our families and

then eventually a few kids get to the point of anxiety and realize like I'm thinking about things wrong I don't need to be afraid of a future that's not here and sad that I can't get around it Julian of Norwich or Norwick do you know how to pronounce it I'll say Norwich has this line that all will be well and all things will be well and all manner of things will be well. In my prayer experiences, I just have our lady just saying this to me. And I feel like her words are settling into my soul. And I'm just getting to a place where I believe it and I live from it.

So good. The new this new. Last year or so. What opened the way to that? Dr. Bob shoots. Really? When people have heard this story, maybe. But when I showed up at Steubenville, I was doing really bad. My wife was super sick, hospitalized multiple times. And Dr. Bob was asking me to write an endorsement for his book. And he was texting me and I'm like, yeah, I'll get to it.

You know, he texts me, how are you doing? I was just honest. I said, I want to smoke pot endorsement for his book. And he was texting me and I'm like, yeah, I'll get to it, you know? And he texted me, how are you doing? I was just honest. I said, I want to smoke pot and listen to Radiohead. Like that's how I'm doing. That's all I want to do. Like I'm angry as shit. I just can't deal with things.

And he said, why don't we meet together? So for the last year we'd been meeting, well, we've ceased over the last few months, but we were meeting weekly and praying. So, you know, Wednesday mornings, 10 a.m., I'm crying in my office, encountering our Lord. It's glorious. Oh, it's glorious.

So that happened. And then just abandonment to Jesus, just abandoning all to His providence. You know, like what happened, it was funny, when you said something about speaking to the missionaries of charity, I thought, well, that makes sense. Like, you you're a cool guy and you're not just cool but you seem put together and you're well spoken. Yeah meanwhile I say shit on my podcast no one's going to invite

me to do a thing like that and I was embarrassed about that and I but that abandon that to Jesus. Yeah. I give it all to him and how glory what a beautiful thing for people to speak ill of me or to think worse of me. I don't know the half of it. Glory, you know, so that abandonment to Jesus has been a huge thing. And then if I don't know how to abandon to Jesus, then abandon that to Jesus. Just submitting to him. Realizing that self-hatred doesn't work. Like it's not actually conducive to holiness.

How did you get to that? Is that through Dr. Bob? Yeah, that was my ancestor Miriam who I call mother Miriam, by the way. I asked her, say, can I call you mother Miriam? Because you've become my mother in the Lord. She said, yes, when good cause I was going to do it anyway. Yeah. Just learning to abandon everything and just believing that people aren't stupid when they see something beautiful in me. Same thing with you, right? And when someone and they're like, man, you're beautiful.

I don't know, why is our first inclination to think, well, they're wrong? Well, maybe they're right. What the hell do you know? I know. You know, I've been pondering that too. I noticed in kids, like my sisters are having babies, and from age less than one, when they're holding their baby, you go look at the baby and like you're talking to it Sometimes you'll notice like the kid will just start to like point at stuff once they learn pointing and I'm like, oh, yeah What do you got and like I look and then he'll point at something else and I'm like, okay, what's that?

And then a third time like okay He's actually just trying to get my attention off of him because the the gaze is hard to receive and I was like interesting I remember as a kid like my mom one time walked into playing, I was playing with my Legos. And I remember noticing she walked into the room and was standing at the doorway. And I turned and looked at her and I looked back and kept playing and then I looked at her and I was like,

what? And she goes, oh nothing. Like, what are you doing? She's like, I'm just watching you. And I remember inside, I'm a little kid, I'm like, stop looking at me. Like, why are you looking at me? It's making, I'm just watching you. I remember inside, I'm a little kid. I'm like, stop looking at me. Like, why are you looking at me? It's making me uncomfortable.

And as a kid, I was like, I have a hard time receiving the loving gaze of my mother. And I see that in these babies, this like tension around the gaze of another and how hard it is to stay in the gaze. I think that's rooted in the fall, right? Like, we were in the gaze of God. We saw God face to face. We walked rooted in the fall, right? Like we were in the gaze of God. We saw God face to face.

We walked together in the garden. Sin, we looked away and sort of looked back at God or anyone who represents the face of God, which is the unceasing love of one who doesn't judge us, but wants to bring us back. That's hard to receive, man. Like that's hard to receive. So I think when we have people speak truth to us us for like yeah, yeah, I wanted to hear that I really want that but I also deep down know that if you could see who I really am You'd be out of here And so I have to cloak or cover up some of those deeper spots because it's just dark in there

I have a hard time believing in the deepest place of my in my lovability and the fact that even the Father isn't gonna reject me Jesus says it my will I reject no one who comes to me but deep down I'm like, yeah Yeah, but I'm also a dirty mess What you just said is song of songs chapter 2 and I think the Lord is really would use this in my life, too To bring my heart closer to him. I'll just read through it. Maybe we can comment on it. Oh, yeah So first there's this this awareness of of the beloved. But I don't see him and I don't hear him, but there's something the voice of my beloved.

This is song song, chapter two, verse eight. Behold, he comes leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills. I just think of the freedom of the Lord, the freedom of knowing that all is well, the freedom of God being supreme. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag and now this bit right behold there He stands all right so now I've known of the Lord and now here He is but notice what it does it says three things behind our wall Gazing through the windows looking through the lattice so if you think of a wall windows and lattice

There's a removal so a wall, windows and lattice, there's a removal. So a wall is something solid. I cannot see through it. Maybe I can hear, but not very well. The window is something that I can see through, but still can't hear you very well. The lattice, it's even closer. There's like a break. There's holes. I can see you and hear you better. And then what does he say? Oh My beloved speaks and says to me arise my lovely one my beautiful one and come away And I just want to give him the finger at this point. Well, that's how I've been in the past in my prayer I'm like Peter like get away from me Lord You have no idea what you're saying or I don't trust you

Nothing's ever been this good in my life and it's not gonna be this good now and I'm not gonna get my hopes up But he says beautiful things to me right yeah The winter is past the thaw ring thaw ring of my heart has begun the rain is over and gone The flowers appear on the earth the time of singing has come the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land Now there's this one line here, and I'll let you comment on it I land. Now there's this one line here and then I'll let you comment on it. I love this line, oh my dove in the clefts of the rock, in the crannies of the cliff, let me see your face. So what I imagine is as the Lord comes to us and we hear his voice and experience his lights and inspirations, we do what this bird does.

We bury our head in the clefts of the rock because those words of affirmation are too beautiful. They're too painful because I know me. I know the sewage of my own heart, my own wretchedness. How could you possibly say things like this? But he continues. Let me see your face. Let me hear your voice. Your voice is sweet and your face is lovely and I'll close on this

catch the foxes for us the little foxes that spoil the vineyard for our vineyard is in blossom obviously there's much that we could think here but I think of the lies of the enemy in revelation 12 10 he's called the accuser of our brethren right those false things that we believe about God and others and ourselves Right God is not for me. He's against me. The other cannot be trusted. I am beyond redemption Right. I think of these as the foxes that are spoiling the work The Lord wishes to do in the vineyard and he wants to join me in this great quest of catching the little bastards My beloved is mine and I am his. Yeah, you hit it.

Like the Song of Songs, I'm convinced this is the most important book in the Bible because it stands as like this linchpin understanding of how God is toward the bride, toward his people. It summarizes all of Jewish history and it points us to the king, which is what's coming in the whole new covenant. And you hit that one line, let me see your face.

Like the bridegroom is asking the bride to turn back to him, which is what God was doing to Israel all through the old covenant. Like come, return to me with your whole heart. Look at me, not your false lovers, the world out there, like come back to me. But what I want to point out actually, as a consolation to us who struggle with that gaze is how the song begins. And this was a commentator point of this. I, this is not my own insight, but in the first chapter, when, when she,

she speaks out this desire for the kiss of his mouth, which to sale says is the pouring of one soul into another. It's not a material kiss. It is our to share souls or to share being existence. Um, when the Bradgroom says, um, looks at her and is beginning to love her, she kind of protests. She says, I'm dark but lovely or I'm sunburned. It says the sun has scorched me. Do not gaze at me because I'm swarthy. So she has a hard time, this archetypal bride receiving the attention and the gaze of another because she believes she's not worthy to be beheld

So this commentator pointed out to me like look put the Palestinian context around this in Palestine at the time And surrounding regions wealthy people did not have to work outside they had slaves who would go out and do the work and They would stay under the awning or in the house. So fair skin was a sign of riches, dark skin a sign of poverty, your son burned, your tan. So she's saying I'm a laborer, I'm a worker, I was out in the vineyard, I'm tan, I'm dark, I'm swarthy, I'm not pretty, I'm not wealthy, I'm not elegant, I'm not noble. So she's protesting all the reasons why this king shouldn't be interested in her because and she has good reasons to say like this and this and this I'm ugly I'm

filthy I'm poor I'm lowly I'm broken and what does he do with it completely disregards it and presses right through and all the chapter 2 is this like incessant like outpouring of the bridegroom we're like he just disregarded her critiques and her protests. He didn't reject them. He didn't correct her. He's like, I'm choosing myself. Yeah. And that's the whole covenant.

That's a whole new covenant. I'm just choosing you for myself. Yeah. You're sunburned. You're poor. You're lowly. You're not royalty. You don't deserve to be in this bond with me that is forever, but I love you.

And you are mine. And Christ is consummating that whole reality by just coming to Israel Coming to this sinful woman coming to the wandering the lost sheep all these places the song Playing out and Christ down to today. The Lord is trying to express himself to us in these terms My main work with sisters is to get them to pray with the song of songs Because a lot of them don't believe in their own beauty Much bigger project is to move out from that and get the whole church to be able to pray with the song of songs. Because we don't believe that we are beautiful to God. We have every protest and we feel unworthy and so we don't turn our face back

to Him and we stay out in the wilderness wandering around or behind our walls believing that we just deserve to be alone. There's a great line from the book I Believe in Love where he says, I'm not telling you, you believe too much in your own Wretchedness we are far more wretched than we can ever imagine what I'm telling you is you do not believe enough in merciful love That's important to hear otherwise it sounds like maybe we're making excuses for our wretchedness Or we're minimalizing it or that the disparity between the divine and me isn't so great, but that's not what we're doing. Right.

Yeah. No, no, it's humble. What we do when we refuse the love of Christ, it seems to me is, and I'm drawing this from that book, I believe in love, is we apply the same measure of our own mean, narrow, critical hearts and we anthropomorphize God and say, God must be like I am. Yes. When he said, call me Father, when he shed his blood for me, and we fail to realize that

we are a delight for Jesus. I wonder if some of this has to do with the fact that we're seeking control. And what I mean is, the times that I've gotten angry, lost it, lost my temper. I remember when I was about 18 years old, I was driving a car and I just, I couldn't find where to go. And this was before the time of iPhones. This is even before the time of MapQuest where you print out the directions. Legend. I was lost.

And I was so frustrated that I punched my windscreen and it cracked. So it was pretty cool. That was that strong, but that's not the point. But the point was- It's a windscreen? Yeah. Well, do you not call it windshield? Oh, windscreen windshield. And why did I punch it? And I think it's cause I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed cause I didn't have control and I got angry.

And I sometimes wonder if, you know, we as Catholics sense a lot of dissension in the church, a lot of heresy being tolerated in the church, a lot of abuse, a lot of scandal, a lot of pulling away from the beauty of the tradition that was ours, a lot of innovation that we find frightening and offensive and is offensive to the Lord. We hear of pride masses and these sorts of things. And I sometimes wonder if there is not a new inordinate fixation on hell in order to bloody well control things again, like who's in and who's out. And in saying that, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be an appropriate fear of hell, that people don't go there, I'm not saying that. But I'm wondering if if due to the chaos within the church

and without, if we're putting too much of an emphasis in some more traditional quarters on hell in order to sort things out, control things, say things will, you know, Joe Biden will be bloody in hell on judgment day, this and that. What do you think? No, that's a beautiful set of insights there, I think I haven't thought all that through, but I do. I think you're onto something. And what I would add is maybe that the driving force of fear behind all that was so around control. Like I fear not being in control for all of the reasons.

Like if I don't have control, I may cease to be. I may make a mistake. I might be rejected. So I have to have some kind of control to feel safe. I don't have to. I seem to think that I need to have some control for safety. Because in safety I flourish and in security everybody's a risk. I don't know how to survive. So needing security and safety, control. Don't go over this too quickly because these are profound insights and I'd love you to feel free to wax on them.

Yeah, well just move me along if I need to. Control seems to provide us with a sense of safety within which we can flourish, anchored in the Bible. Every time Israel knows she's safe, her crops expand, her herds are livestock, her families. When she can settle down and be in a place of knowing there's no enemy affliction, she flourishes, she expands. When she's wandering insecure, unsafe, and assaulted on all sides, her fertility dries up. The crops, the land, the enemy's pillage. So there's a thematic of safety underneath the human heart, the desire to be safe. And God's promise to make her safe over and over again, we want to be safe or secure. We don't want to be insecure. Insecurity, and not just like the pedantic term, but like really feeling

insecure is terrifying. And out of that place, we start to want to assert ourselves to shore up safety. And however we can have a leg up or control or even just put people in the boxes, so we understand what box we fit into a box we don't fit into. It's this kind of horizontal competitiveness that's coming out of fear. Like I'm afraid that I don't have enough. I'm not good enough. I don't have what it takes. I may cease to exist, I may be rejected and out of those fears is when I assert control and attempt to to bring other people down or to understand how I'm doing okay. Like some of our judgment of other people there are things to judge, there are things that are broken, but sometimes when I look at

myself I'm like I'm just afraid that I'm not okay and if everybody else is not okay or if they're worse than me then I'm doing fine, I'm like, I'm just afraid that I'm not okay. And if everybody else is not OK, or if they're worse than me, then I'm doing fine or I'm doing better. And so I'll push or judge for the sake of like just trying to feel better or feel safe, feel secure. So that kind of competitive mindset. But even the stuff on hell, like when I mean, the catechism is clear, right?

And the tradition is that like fear is the first motive of conversion. Love is the more mature motive of conversion. Then when we're passing out our teachings, our traditions, if we're doing so in a fear mindset, my own fear or attempting to inflict fear, there's a mode of conversion there. But there's not the fullness of conversion, which is actually love. This might not seem related, but I think we see a little bit of this in the liturgical back and forth over the years, a movement toward kind of imminence in the liturgy versus transcendence. Like when we notice a liturgy that's really

horizontally oriented and community is the main point, even in the hymns or the preaching or the the way that the priests praise or the way the people worship, this imminent idea meant to make things relatable took away the transcendent. And so we by liturgy, lex rani, lex credendi, we kind of invited ourselves into a, well, let's live horizontally. And that works in the church. Sometimes we're trying to be brothers and sisters. But if you're used to kind of living this way, and Christ is coming here to help me go there, I'm going to carry that out into the world. And eventually in less communal places, I'm going to slip into like, well, I need to compete and rise above them. So I'm going to carry that out into the world and eventually in less communal places I'm going to slip into like well, I need to compete and rise above them so I'm going to judge a Transcendent approach with just a simple fact of God's primacy and the liturgies meant to point us to that puts God first

topples any idols including idol of the self and the other even in marriage and gives me the security of all the biblical promises even in marriage, and gives me the security of all the biblical promises, principally, which is my goodness and the love of God despite my darkness, my swarthiness in the songs. And that becomes my security and the framework through which I can then evaluate all my other relationships and move into even things like marriage, priesthood, communal bonds, friendship. So, if we live in the kind of fear mindset or the judgmentality mindset, I can often admit that I'm coming out of place in security. And the only real solution to insecurity is the security that God offers. Everything else is passing. This is why the principles of our faith

are so obnoxiously simple. Like we said, like you just have to pray. You actually do just have to pray. And that will solve everything. Because there, God's gonna teach you who you are, and that's gonna give you the framework to navigate everything not on your own but if you're not like deeply praying if you're not at home in your heart and tree survival like you know like how are we gonna find peace out there if we can't find peace in here in the heart that's her words paraphrased but if we're not able to come before the Lord in deep raw vulnerable authentic prayer we're gonna end up needing to take care of a lot of stuff on our own because we're not actually

inviting him all the way into behind the wall, through the door, behind the lattices. And so we end up kind of in a partnership with God instead of in like a totally surrendered posture out of which he invites us, he sends us forth to preach and proclaim the gospel. So it's, that's a meandering point about security, insecurity, the promise of God and the fact that if God is not really our number one, there's a form of idolatry often itself or control or power or pleasure or wealth, whatever else Aquinas talks about wonderfully in those sections in the Summa. But if we're operating in that level, in the end,

we're staking everything on creatures and we have to acquire the life that we think is going to make us happy. And that is dreadfully exhausting. I can't lift myself up. I can't make myself happy. But underneath a lot of my sinful activities, even as a priest, I'm often pursuing things. I'm living alone. This thought came to me recently at a retreat of Grace, one of the sisters shared with the whole community. She realized she was living her life as a single woman. Now that's a consecrated woman, but that informs all of us. Like, are you living as a person alone or are you living with God? And like, is God really a first and foremost? Are you relating everything to God? And if you aren't, there's a lot of stuff you're doing on your own by the

perception of your own ability to do so, your Conception of your own powers you have nothing you are nothing without the breath of God You can do nothing but from what God prompts you to do in terms of goodness and what he completes in you by his grace When you get that basic principle that actually changes everything and you can find your way into security because you realize you are not out there wandering on your own I Could go on. Amen. Yeah, you wonder, like, how, how, imagine, imagine a scene. There's a house. There's a man inside of it.

He can't get out. All the doors are somehow barred. The house is on fire. How does he act? It seems like the perfect analogy, like, he acts appropriately, like frantic. Like, right? Frightened, frantic like right frightened frantic violently and it seems to me that if you believe that you have you are under the gaze of an old wrathful God who hates you and is looking for a reason to send you to hell that you would act like that mmm and the things really aren't okay they're really really not yeah and so don't tell me to live as if things are well or to live with peace because

it doesn't make sense to live at peace in a house that's on fire. And then that's the end. Like no good comes after there is no afterlife or there's only hell. Like this is the, this seems to be the, how radical faith is. Right. I see my own wretchedness and I'm told to believe in the love and care and providence of a deeply tender, all merciful God.

And I can and I can't. He is you can't like because I'm told to believe it's outside of me. I have to figure out how to make these attractive truths somehow mine. And that's a leap. But it's possible like it's possible. This is what I love about the way Aquinas summarizes hope, right? The bone and futurum arduum possibile. It's a good barons get it.

What does that mean? What does that word? What is that phrase? Good. Yeah, I know. But what's that sentence meant? The object of hope is is some. Yes. Good. That's right. That is not yet attained. Turum, a good that's in the future. Arduum, it's arduous, it's difficult to attain, like shattering the lie that life is supposed to be perfect and comfortable and easy. Abbonum futurum arduum, a good that's in the future that's hard

to obtain, but it's possible to obtain it, posibile. And that possibility, that's the entry point of grace, when like all the cool ideas and all the great teachings and the little quotes from the saints, they might attract you, but they might feel a million miles away from where I am. But it's possible, it's actually possible that I could step into that. And that's the place where the man in the burning house tilts his face away from the problem and actually acts just like the son who's always looking at the father. Like we wander out from the divine embrace because we're looking around and trying to resolve and rely upon ourselves. Self-reliance is the core.

The Son is always looking at the face of the Father. And even biblically, like when you see him praying sometimes, you can imagine this upward tilt of his human face, which reflects the constant upward tilt to the heart toward the Lord like father what is this that has to be the posture of the human heart in order for the posibulae the possible to actually become actual otherwise it's just a nice idea that's really hard it's off on the future and I'm not sure that it's possible because I don't know how to get out of the burning house I don't know where the doors or which doors too hot and which part of the house is gonna fall on me I can't navigate all this stuff and I'm not sure that it's possible because I don't know how to get out of the burning house. I don't know where the doors are, which door is too hot and which part of the house is going to

fall on me. I can't navigate all this stuff. And I'm frankly trying to because I'm not really welcoming the gift of faith to do what it does, which is that I could walk. I could walk not by sight. I could walk my life out in a way that doesn't make sense to my five senses that transcends my ability to perceive fully But it's also here because of grace It's crazy to walk by faith not by sight Hmm yeah so many directions to go You know This might be boring so change the subject if you want, but I do sometimes

wonder if we try to sound like saints from the past or we don't let the Lord behind the wall as you say. Why? You know, it's almost like we're trying to do the same thing with our prayer life that we're doing with our worldly life. We're desperately trying to order it, desperately trying to control it, so that it's acceptable to the Lord. It, not me. It, you know? Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, where my mind goes there, Matt, is like, again, a belief that's hard to maintain, which is that God tabernacles with us, right? Like, He takes up His dwelling in our midst. He wants to live with us, and He wants us to live with Him. And that's not just an extrinsic dwelling. That in Matthew's Gospel, in Matthew 6, that section is often called, Do Not Be Anxious, and He's teaching about all this stuff that we're talking about. But then when he preaches on prayer, it previous to this passage about anxiousness,

he says, when you pray, go to your inner room and shut the door and pray to your father who's in secret. And then we have the other pastors like, my father and I will come to dwell with him. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. This desire that Christ's expressing to come into some space within our lives and to share life with us, not here on the earth, but here in our hearts. That's why Elizabeth the Trinity,

this indwelling, like a revival of an awareness, the indwelling presence of the Holy Trinity, is really anointing the church right now. But simply, Matthew 6, Christ is saying that your heart has an inner room. Like this is not trite, pietistic, simplistic, again, little quotes that make us feel better. Where are we looking here? Matthew 6 verses 5 and following. When you pray. Okay. So like, do you, do I know what the inner room is like? Or let's layer that with the Song of Songs, where the bridegroom says, my beloved is an enclosed garden, a fountain sealed. She's behind the wall.

Maybe that wall is actually there to protect an inner sanctuary, but it has a door. Augustine, or Ambrose later commenting on Psalm, I think it's 118, will say the heart has a door and the door is faith, and it is secure from enemies when the door, when faith is strong, but we decide when to open this door. The inner room, are we willing to believe that exists? Are we comfortable there? And are we willing to let the Lord there? Have you ever heard someone talk about the E format of houses in the Holy Land? This is kind of a crazy thing that another priest explained about a pilgrimage, about the inner room. He said the way that the house was designed, is that there typically was like there's the street

and then there's an entryway off of the street onto like a little courtyard on either side of the courtyard or two different rooms, different utility rooms, a dining room, a storage room. Those rooms all would have windows for ventilation, but there were no, there wasn't glass back then. And so it was maybe a barred window or just an open space. So it was permeable Not protected the next room in off of the courtyard was the back room off in the back of the cave if you were built Against a cave like we see in some of those homes at the holy sites But even if it was in the street It would not have windows for the sake of heat and security like there had to be a room that was protected from the outside

World where you could take refuge in bad weather But also privacy and that when the man and the woman needed to be a room that was protected from the outside world, where you could take refuge in bad weather, but also privacy. And that when the man and the woman needed to be alone, it would be the inner room that they would go to and they'd close the door to be intimate, because they had to be alone for their love to be manifest to one another appropriately. And so this language of the inner room is a safe place that Christ says is in you, and you can go there, but it's also a place of intimacy, where you can unveil the stuff that otherwise stays really covered up,

and often for good reason out in the street, you don't need to unveil all your junk in the street. But before the Lord, there's no point. The fig leaves, he looks at the fig leaves, he's like, you guys, I could, with one breath, I could blow those away. I have x-ray vision. I made you.

I can see through that. I know it's there. But this inner room, it's like a, I mean man, it is a profound invitation and there really should be a test for us. Like do I know the inner room of my own heart? Do I go there? Do I know how to turn to the Lord there?

What is divine intimacy? What is it to like pull back the layered, protected stuff I built up over my heart and actually let the Lord see me and notice that he doesn't flee. That the words of the Song of Song are actually all true and he's speaking them to me. As hard as it is for me to believe that, receive that and stay under it instead of fleeing. Turn your face from me, I can't handle it. That's my reflex.

St. Augustine says of this passage, By our chambers are to be understood our hearts, of which is spoken in the fourth Psalm. What things you utter in your hearts and wherewith you are pricked in your chambers. The door is the bodily senses without all worldly things which enter into our thoughts through the senses and the crowd of vain imaginings which beset us in prayer. I didn't know if that was going to be relevant or not. I'm just looking up the Aquinas's

container aureus. What's so fascinating though, right? It's like, if I think I'm only acceptable God to God when I'm praying for my prayer book and using these and those which have merit, surely I understand what he's actually seeing. It's like the fig leaf. It's like it could be the fig leaf.

I'm not saying it is. I'm a big fan of beautiful prayers and praying them beautifully and appropriately on your knees or you know Something like that But the point is we can use that stuff as fig leaves if we're hiding our mess before God and he sees through it Anyway, totally. So how do we how do we how do we unveil ourselves before the Lord? without falling into some sort of blasphemy or, you know what I'm saying? Like people say, well, look, if I really wanted to tell God how I felt,

wouldn't be appropriate. Yeah. Is there a balance? Is there a line or what's the? Well, first off, on the point about devotional prayers, like the devotions, the history of the church, the traditional devotions, like, thank God they're coming back, they are stunningly gorgeous. Poetic, the singing of the heart at its apex, often in this devotional life. And that's amazing. It has to match, it has to be sincere.

That it can't just be words and deeds. If it is a pious external set of practices, then it's a bunch of fig leaves or like fancy garments that we've crafted for ourselves. What is behind all of our piety is an acknowledgement of the divine and our distinction from or our difference from and our distance from God and our need to call out to God that he would bless us, clothe us, heal us, save us, help us. So behind all pious devotion is the expression of the soul's great need. Man is a beggar before God said St. Augustine. All we can do is beg. So if our every pious expression is sincere, we would be able to say underneath that I admit of my grave need and I'm not saying that

because it's the right thing to say out loud. In me, I know I'm a beggar. I'm desperate. I cannot do it. I can't solve the problem. I can't make myself happy. I can't fix this situation And I'm going to stop trying on my own power that that's the vulnerability. That's the big shift from saying all the things I believe I need to say and running through my daily list of things the big shift from just doing that and Being in the posture that all of that expresses like does my deep heart match what I'm expressing by my life of liturgical prayer, my life of devotion? The move there is really profound because it's, when we talk about surrender in the history, the traditions of the church, that is what's happening. It's like the real surrender is a cessation of the attempt to live alone and to provide for oneself,

which is what we've been doing since we left the garden, we were wandering the wilderness. So piety, devotion, all these things, they just have to match our hearts. And we have to be honest about like, when I pray these things alone, what's happening within me? And how can I, Lord, give me the grace to see me as you see me, beloved, but gravely in need, and give me the grace to cry out.

And sometimes my prayer isn't gonna have words, it's gonna have like just a deep sense of like, I'm so lost, God. But then to move into being able to express that, not only in like, God, please help, but like, God, I'm really upset with what you did, or God, I hate this situation. Because often those are like cloaking layers of the heart when we when we're mad at God, or sad about what's happening in our lives, but we think that, I don't want to curse God, I don't want to really like lash out on God, because then I may put myself into a state of sin and damn myself. We can't curse God, obviously. But to be dishonest with God is in itself its own conundrum that we could argue might

even be sinful in certain cases. But it also puts up a layer of self-protection between us and God, because we think that God might reject us if we let him see what's going on in our hearts, which just isn't true. But also it's not healthy. Like you talk about the angry man, like when you hit the garbage can and kicked it, you realize there's a lot of anger that had been pent up. We've got that before God all the time about all the things that haven't gone well. There's an entire book in the Bible called Lamentation. Like the point most of his, a third of the Psalms, whatever the number is, are Lamentation Psalms where like we cry out and be like, God, this sucks.

I am so pissed off and I can't believe you did that. But underneath that is the admission. When I'm lamenting to God, I'm still acknowledging that he's God in that I'm saying he could have done it a different way, which is actually admission of his omnipotence and his omniscience. Like you could have set this up a different way. I'm pissed that you didn't, but I'm actually making an act of faith. I'm not cursing you. I'm not rejecting you. I'm not pulling myself out of your life. I'm just expressing how hard it is to live under what you've done or what I've brought upon myself and you didn't stop me from it. But if I

don't express that, if I don't lament, if I don't cry out, then I'm always kind of keeping God at a distance because I'm not sure if he's safe or if he might reject me. And so I may not be safe before God. So that, that, that place of lamentation crucial for vulnerability and honesty. Yeah, that really helps. That's what I was getting at. Like how do we be vulnerable for the Lord without just you know Cursing him. Yeah, it reminds me of Job's wife's

Advice to him remember that there's a man says worst advice ever It's actually a line from the Bible where she says curse God and die nuts really bad idea All right. Well, hey, how about we take a quick break and then come back? So, cool. Matt, Matt, we're live. We're live. Welcome to the intermission, everybody. Well, let you know about a few things that we got going on. First, I've started a brand new channel called Victory. It's a people who want to over, that's not real whiskey.

I feel like I have to tell you that. I'm about to talk about like how to overcome porn. That's water or it's whiskey. So it's called Victory. This is the new channel and it helps people overcome pornography. And we hope that you will go and subscribe. My goal was to get 5,000 subscribers by July 1st.

We've almost got 9,000. So let's make it 10,000 by July 1st. 50,000 by July 1st. We would absolutely love that. Click the link in the description below, go check that out. Second, I want to tell you about the greatest app on earth. It's called, no it's not called Victory. We don't have one yet.

Then that'll be the greatest one. It's called Hello. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Hello is the best Catholic prayer and meditation app on the market. You didn't even know you needed it, but once you download it, you'll realize that you did It's absolutely fantastic. If you go to hello

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Did I tell you that it was super weird when I saw him at mass the next day? It's an intimate thing. I had him laying on my pillow, not him, you understand, but the phone laying on my pillow and he's reading soft words to me. I love you, Scott. And then I saw him the next day and blushed.

Also, I wanna invite you to become part of our free speech community over on locals. Locals as I say, free speech community. It'll be there long after YouTube has maybe they won't ban me, but I wouldn't put it past them. Did you know that Tik Tok just gave us an official strike? So if Tik Tok bans me, I'm not even making this up. It will be part of my official bio. And we should probably have t-shirts banned on TikTok.

Yes, because honestly I lost respect for myself when I joined TikTok. Anyway, point is if Big Tech censors me and censors these conversations, we're not going to be censored over at matfrad.... And also follow us on TikTok. Yeah, matfrad.locals.com, matfrad.locals.com. We are releasing a bunch of stuff that's gonna be available over there. For example, Dr. Ed Faser, who is the leading expert, I would say, on Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways, has just recorded a very substantive

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Welcome back to the channel. Click subscribe. Click the bell button. We're almost at quarter a million subscribers. Which sounds way more than 250. That's what Coram's doing. It's a lot either way. It's amazing.

So people should get on this thing though. You've got a hundred thousand. It is kind of weird. They I think they send you like when you get this trophy from YouTube, if memory serves they you get one for free and you pay for shipping. And then I wanted to send one to my assistant and I did and it was like a hundred bucks. Maybe that's why the next trophy is 1 million.

You would think it's like 500,000. 250 be nice. All right, let's look at some questions. First of all, are you excited about this youth conference you're about to speak at? I am. As if I have a son that's old enough to go First Yeah, he's never been on a youth conference before or like a big event. I mean he went to Damascus Oh, yeah, Cam and it was terrific for him, but I guess it's just shocking to me because I used to speak to high school students

Still do sometimes, and the fact that he's going to be there. So cool. Yeah. Are you going at all? Are you going to be around? No. Let Liam be Liam.

Oh yeah, no, I don't want to go at all. I have no desire. I'm glad for y'all and I'll be praying. The conferences are pretty amazing, actually. They really are. I didn't grow up going to these things. We didn't do anything like this in high school. I don't think we even to these things. We didn't do anything like this in high school.

I don't think we even had them around in Wisconsin and uh, just, I didn't even occur to me to go to something like a, an event for Catholicism. It's edifying actually to see in high school, I would have been like, if it was offered, I'd been like, no way, get out of here. Like that's dumb. I love it though. I mean, at least you would have went for the ladies. That's what I would have done. Cause there's like 2000 teens that come. Isn't it? I don't even know this last because of Covid hangover. Yeah, I guess I think I'd be looking for girls in other places in high school.

It wasn't really a cool kind of guy. No girls get a youth conferences conference as cool as it gets. Um, Marcus James, who supports us on Locals, says, Father Burns, you spoke earlier about the identity of a priest being reduced to a mere functionalist role in the church and as a result many people don't see the value of fostering priestly vocations in their kids. What are some ways we can remedy this? How can we encourage parents to be more supportive of religious and priestly vocations in their children? Before you answer that, when I came to Christ at the age of 17 and said I wanted to be a priest,

my mom said, why don't you just become a social worker? I think her point was like, it's like a priest who has sex and gives me grandkids. Exactly. And is that not like the exact image or representation of the functional mindset? Like the priest, you don't have to do the things the priest does, you can do those in other lives. That's a great question. And you know, the answer really, which is elusive in practical terms, but the simple answer is like, we need to help priests be men in love. Men in love with a bride sharing in the heart of Christ. So Cardinal Willette wrote this beautiful book, Friends of the Bridegroom. He wrote it when there was this

question about whether or not the Amazon Synod was going to suspend or modify our discipline of priestly celibacy. And so he published a bunch of talks he'd given and wrote a couple new ones. And in there he said, though the title of Christ the Bridegroom belongs to scripture and the tradition, it has been little used in the West as a mode of understanding of the priesthood and the sacrament of orders. So Christ is a divine bridegroom evident from sacred scripture. We haven't woven that into how we approach the priesthood and our theology of the priesthood.

And you can see a little bit of a line like Vatican II, Presbyterum Ordinance talked about the need for the priest to be kind of united to Christ, which didn't yet make like kind of an engendered expression of like he's a man who has to love as a man. John Paul II and Pastorus Dabo Vobis started the talk, that's the formation document for seminary, started to talk about the fact that no, the priest actually also has to love the church as a bride, sharing in Christ's love of that same church. And the church desires to be loved with the same love of Jesus Christ by the priest.

So there's a little bit of a development in even recent theology toward acknowledging that like celibate love is irreversibly and inseparably tied to an embodied person. And there's a way that men love differently than women. So men who are priests and men who are discerning and formed for or being formed for priesthood, we have to help them be men in love. Because when we fall out of love or we stop, I mean, like back to the charged field of polarity

or the dynamism of the dyadic structure of nature, it's the other that's always calling us forth. We see that in teenagers, adults, like men and women, like the tension which Freud would reduce to sexual tension. But a metaphysical, a real theology would say like, no, that's creative. The alterity, the mystery of the other provokes in me a pursuit of something I don't understand. Why would that not exist on the supernatural plane? Why would the priest just have to sort of forego all of that? That same dyadic potentiality remains on the supernatural

plane. It's lived out in a chaste and celibate way. But the church is, we talked about before, the bride of Christ. The priest has to learn to love the bride of Christ as a man who's conformed to Christ the Son and loving as a divine, sharing in the divine bridegrooms love the church. When he falls out of that and falls into functionalism or just having a set of duties and jobs, he's not a man in love and so he's not going to fight for the bride, he's not going to uphold her, defend her, he's not going to sacrifice and suffer for her, it's just a job. And as soon as the job's not fulfilling, he's going to be like, well, I hate this and so

I'm going to go through the motions. And he falls asleep at the wheel. So awakening in priestly hearts a real love and provoking that calling that forth inviting that principally through priests need to marry a really deep devotion to Our Lady. They need a relationship with Our Lady. I would argue it's essential to the flourishing of the priesthood because she's the woman who awakens the heart of the man in a chaste love. What's like Joseph is such a help to us as well. So these are kind of devotional ideas that have to come into the inner room and help us realize like, no, I've got to be alive in my love.

And so that's important for priestly formation in terms of talking about with parents and stuff. Again, like the woman you asked about before, who's thinking about being religious, but doesn't quite want to forego childbearing and a husband. The priest also has to see there's this correlate to fulfillment and celibate living and loving. That is, that falling in love and staying in love lived out supernaturally. But to help young men and young women see that like God is not asking you to leave behind your dreams. If he's calling you, he's not asking you to... the desires that are from him. He puts holy desires into us. He's not going to ask you to just like set all of that aside and make some

radical sacrifice someday of total self denial and give up your life for the church. He's going to raise up in you and expand in you the holy desires he's put there and he's going to perfect and fulfill them. What do you say to people who are open to becoming priests, but think I I'm not, I'm putting this in their words, the church is just cesspool, bishops are cowards. I don't like Pope Francis, who the hell knows what he's doing with the church. The last thing I want to do is bind myself to a bishop in a corrupt church. And maybe a lot of parents feel that way too. Yeah, maybe 15 years ago they would have been happy if their son became a priest. Now they're like, this is just ridiculous. No, don't get involved in that corrupt institution.

Yeah. And amen to the fact that that comes from a place of seeing major problems, like a real sickness in the church and not wanting to hurtle your life or let your son hurtle his life into something that's really sick. We back in the first wave of the scandals breaking, you know, oh, two or three, like we saw this huge real reticence about priestly vocations and the priesthood. We kind of dug out of that. And then twenty eighteen came and there's like another wave and see like, well, will it ever stop?

You know, and like I was talking to a bishop about it and he was like, you know, we have to be very good bishop, like real holy man. We have to be very careful about how we frame our solutions to the sickness in the church, especially the sickness in the clergy. If we over-present a solution, for example, the reform of the seminaries or cleaning up the Vatican, we will fail to account for the fact that concubiscence cannot be remedied out of the human condition. We remain fallen. And so virtue, holiness, out of the human condition. We remain fallen. And so virtue, holiness, the type of community that supports virtue and holiness as well, is the ethos that we have to strive for in the church. And we're going to constantly, there's going to be another scandal, there's

going to be another crisis, there's going to be another fall. How do we live in the midst of the fallen reality? And then when we see it, how do we put our lives at the service of the solution instead of just wailing, lamenting and going the other way? Um, that demands a creativity that's anchored in a, again, a surrendered, uh, I've never heard of that before. And that just, that, that's excellent. It's sort of like parents and I think all new parents are like this. We spoke about this before the show where you think if only I do the exact right thing for my children, they're not going to watch TV and they're only

going to be homeschooled and they're never going to gonna play with somebody I don't know and you know, Beethoven for kids or bait whatever that baby Beethoven thing was that we made our children listen to and they'll be brilliant. So if I just create the right environment, they'll be essentially perfect. Obviously that's talking about some little things, but whatever they will be essentially perfect. That doesn't happen because your kids have concupiscence, right? And they are drawn, so yeah. So that's kind of an analogy there,

I guess is what I'm saying. We can't create the perfect environment for children, where we can try and we should try. We can't create the perfect environment for seminarians such that they won't be scandal. It's a great, obvious point. It's not to permit the scandal. I mean, there's no excusing.

Any single failing on the part of a priest in particular in scandal is grave, and there's no room for it. But I can't stop another man. All that I can do is stop myself from moving further down the road that my sinful inclinations are pointing, and strive to place my life ever more fully into the life of God and receive the life he's trying to put into me for all Christians, not just priests. So it's crucial. The pursuit of sanctity is fundamental with the humble and constant acknowledgement of our fallen state and the power of concubisence. So when we propose solutions or look for answers to those questions, we just have to also remain anchored in a realist stance toward the human condition and our grave need for God. stance toward the human condition our grave need for God.

Emma says Father John, excuse me, living in Wisconsin. Do you use the word blubber to describe what the average person calls drinking fountain or bubbler? Do you? Yes. Do you know I do that as well in Australia bubbler. That was the word in Australia. Dude, really? Do you know about you?

Oh, the dream found bubbler. I that was the word in Australia dude really do you know what comes from it you oh well the dream found bubbler I almost like fell over yeah we say can I go to the bubbler that's a different connotation in lots of parts of the country oh really yeah it's a term for those who utilize marijuana and its implements okay that's more appropriate bubble bubble we couldn't a bubble that's why do you know why it's called a bubbler? No. The Kohler foundation or the Kohler company,

which makes bathroom implements. When they branded their own water fountain, they called it the bubbler because the water bubbles up. And at least in Wisconsin, it was all Kohler water fountains. And so they were advertised and marketed as bubblers. It's like Kleenex or Coke,

a brand name that becomes an identifier for the category when in fact it's not. So outside of Wisconsin I never say Bubbler just because nobody knows. That is hilarious. I think it's a South Australia thing too where I'm from. I wonder if you guys had Kohler products? Yeah. That's weird. All right we get a question that's a little longer. It comes from somebody who's a patron and asked to be anonymous. Father, I've wanted to be radical since I was a young boy, but it seems to me that were I to live radically, I would be betraying the desires of people I love.

My temporary fix has been hide when I do small good acts, but I'm hiding my tiny lamp under a bushel basket and it feels limiting. At the same time, my pining for something more feels like thinking the grass is green or elsewhere how would you counsel someone who is attached to people and avoiding testing a vocation to avoid conflict it's a good question without a lot of without a context so that the broad level the broad level approach would be like the sales, St. Francis sales who encountered

a lot of spiritual direction and his directees noticed a desire for holiness that started good and holy because it's from God. At times it drove people to want to live a life that wasn't their own and outside of the confines as it were or the clarity and the structure of what is clearly God's calling. So it's fault the other saints have said the same thing for the married man to attempt to be a monk or for the nun to strive to be married to a material, a natural man. There's always an attraction to a higher state or to another state and so the grass is greener languages there. state or to another state and so the grass is greener languages there. If a vocational commitment is already made and it's you've consented to the Lord in

your vocation then that's the framework within which the radical call has to be lived out and that's the criterion for evaluating what does and does not fit. If you're a married man charged with providing for a family you might be able to get up and go and be a missionary with your whole family. People do that but there are a lot of considerations that have to like flow out of your primary commitment. It sounds more like maybe in the question there's not a life commitment yet made vocationally, and yet there are relationships that make that tense. So one example would be someone who's deep

into a dating relationship, but they're still carrying a question like maybe I'm called to be a priest, but I've given two years this relationship I can I bring that up? Would I break up with her would God ask me to break up with her and that's a tense place Obviously, he's talking about like being bound to someone to some degree and you don't disappoint them But there is a call to radicality you want to carry that carefully And really ask the Lord about what's happening. Like, Lord, what's going on inside? What's happening? What's your call on my life?

If you want me to be a priest, for example, or a religious sister for a woman, I'm open to that. And just to not fear the question, not avoid it, because when we avoid it, it remains un-confronted. And one of the greatest sorrows in my own journey of pastoral ministry is walking with men and women who are deep into marriage Who come into a secondary or a deeper conversion and start to wonder like oh my gosh Was I called to be a priest or a sister? I'm married now. I've got kids. I can't like what's happening And when they're honest about it and I've happened at least a dozen times men and women when they're honest about it What's happening a lot of the time is underneath? their own heart,

there was a phase, maybe high school or college, where they knew the Lord deeply and wondered, like maybe I'm called to a radical self-gift. Out of fear or out of a lack of a supportive community, they kind of shut that down and move on, and it was never really a confronted question, and they tend to carry it with them into marriage, which is just a haunted looking over their shoulder

wondering, which is not a healthy way to live. You talk them out of it, obviously. But then as a result, I've changed the way I approach talking to people who are not yet committed, which is to say, marriage is by far and away, statistically, the most likely state you're called to. There's a possibility that God's going to ask you to forgo that. This is also back to our question about why there's such a preparation for priesthood versus religious life. It's because it's unusual for someone to be called to the priesthood or religious life. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it should be usual for everybody to ask. I think that's the biggest and simplest question. So if the calling, if there's like a desire to live more radically and one's life is not committed to a state in life that that would contradict go like live more radically or at least pray like Lord What is this desire in me to live more radically? temper that though with the fact of The reality that we're on pilgrimage here like we're never home. This is the pilgrim church on earth. This is the valley of tears We're going somewhere and we have a city exactly

So you're always in any state in life like you can be like, I should be holier. There might be more. Where should I go? That's right. How is your voice? I don't want to keep you if you're starting to get dry. I just need the water. You sure?

Yeah. All right. You'll tell me to wrap up though. I don't want to. Sure. I know you got a big gig this weekend, but I don't want to ruin it for everybody. Anna says, could you ask Father Burns about the role of monastic life, especially in women in the church?

I'm interested in his opinion as he spoke more about women in parishes with apostolates. You know, that's a great question, Anna. I am one of my best friends as a Carthusian monk, which is the most radical order on the face of the earth. Do you have time to tell us about them? Yeah. Because I hear about Carthusians, you hear stories, you don't know if they're true.

I hear that if you're a Carthusian monk, they just throw you in the ground and there's no actual graveyard or anything to signify that you were the one buried there. Tell me that's true. That'd be so cool. No, it's true, it's true. At the center, so I got to visit,

he just got ordained last year and I got to go visit and he gave us a tour of the whole charter house. It's a really small, there's like 17 guys in the whole of the US, but in the center courtyard there's a line of I think it was like seven little tiny basic crosses, just like two pieces of wood tacked onto each other. And he said you're literally placed on a plank because I asked him that. Placed on a plank, the brothers pray you out to the courtyard, there's a whole dug, dropped in and buried fricking so cool only I it's like How do you know who's who though in case you need is like the prior keeps a record of which in the line is who?

But there's no name. There's no other mark, but the cross so they don't even know unless they can remember You know over the years who was buried where? Because they attempt to not exist In any visible fashion if they publish a book. it's always a Carthusian, the author. It's never in the name of the Carthusian who published it except for Bruno and then a couple of their major superiors who have had a big influence. Anyways, they're so, do you want more about the Carthusians? Yes, if you want to give it.

Well, so you know, the silence thing, I've seen into grand silence. Yeah, I need to read that. I need to watch that again. So they live this radical silence wherein only one day a week do they interact communally they go for a long walk and they speak but otherwise they just live in silence like they just they're on their own in a cell so their hermits in community slightly different from monastic community that would be like a monastery of common life they actually have their own hermitage their own apartment square cell with a garden and they're in charge of producing something from the garden that benefits the community. So like my buddy

was saying the first couple years he was there each year they order seeds from the kind of the guy whose house job is to order the seeds and you put down the number for what you want and it's supposed to contribute in some way even if it's flowers for the chapel. One, one of the guys had to buy carrots and he mis-entered the number on the sheet and he put down the number for spicy radishes. So he bought a year's supply of what he thought would be carrots,

but all spicy radishes. And so as stewards- As the problems of the Carthusian. Yeah, and they're like, we can't throw these away, so plant them, grow them and contribute. And they get their lunches from the refact, like someone brings lunch to them each day, one guy's house job, one of the brothers.

And he said, you are receiving radishes every day for like weeks. The guy's like, sorry. But they could only do that once a week because they only talk once a week. So you'd spend the whole week trying not to grow bitter. Oh my. The spicy radishes are back for the love of God.

When are they finished brother? And he's like, I'm sorry, there's so many more. There was one monk who loved spicy radishes Come the Lord in fact provides That is funny so presumably he's telling you this on his one day he can communicate he This was he came out. He can't talk to the outside world This is after his one long retreat like two two six month long retreats He came out to test his vocation in the world.

When they go back in, they don't leave and they only communicate with the outside world. He can write seven letters per year only at Christmas. And so like the first year he wrote a letter to me with like 25 other guys names, like dear father Johnny at the time and all these people. I was like, I don't know if, know if you know if that's obedience 25 guys to my friends if you want to so anyways yeah now he only writes a letter once a year and I don't

always get one because he has to only you know since seven but it's a radical life what I'd say about it he was one of my three best friends in seminary and he left after a year and a half to go join them I feel and I believe that I am closer to him now Than I was while we were in seminary together because I think of him and I pray for him daily I cherish every communication that we have Seeing him at his ordination. I was really like that's the most remarkable man. That's the most beautiful man I've ever seen. I don't call men beautiful ever, but I was like looking at him, I'm like he is so radiantly alive because he stepped into what he's made for. And he tells a story about another Carthusian who tells

a story about a greyhound. This is a guy from New York. The monk had a brother in upstate New York and he was a big fan of dogs. That's a true story. Big fan of dogs and he found out you can get a greyhound, a retired greyhound from the racetrack but you know they retire them early because of arthritis. They don't hurt themselves. Yeah, they run them until they're not really well but you can adopt them because they're not old dogs and he got on the list, got this dog, was was super stoked lived in Manhattan in a flat He was guaranteed that the dog was trained and you know, maybe not as all the things

gets the dog home and is all pumped up about it and The dog doesn't have a lot of personality kind of mopes around the apartment when he takes it for a walk Leashes are required in New York. So it's kind of pulling on the leash. Is it really obeying the commands? They said it Until he went to upstate New York to visit another cousin where the backyard, he got a big yard fenced in. He said, hey, can I just let the dog out? Like we live in the city, it's hard to let him run. I said, let the dog out. And the dog like made up a straight beeline

all the way across the yard, hit the fence, turned 90 degrees and just started to crank a perimeter course at full speed for like six eight rounds before he's like oh this thing's not gonna stop so he called the dog in so it wouldn't hurt itself he said the dog came in and was completely transformed it was jumping around it was like kind of like dogs smiling it was playful obeying commands like a personality grew up or flourished that had otherwise been suppressed and he said it's beautiful to have the dog that

he wanted but he realized that he couldn't keep the dog in the city because the dog is made by nature to run and when it does not do what its nature dictates it needs to do it is unfulfilled. And this monk told that story about use that to illustrate the calling of occasional calling but in particular to the monastery. Like if you live in a life that you can't live, you're going to be unhappy. When you come into the life that you are meant to live, you will flourish and be free, even if it doesn't quite look like you expect it. So this guy, Rob, his now name is a dumb Maximus. Smartest guy in my class of 46, for sure. Hilarious, great cook, good athlete, very affable,

had all the gifts for a very effective apostolic priest. And so we like, when he said, I'm going to the monastery, not just the monastery, the hermits, the Carthusians, we're like, now way, man, there's no way that could be your calling. Like, look at your gifts. And like, we resisted as seminarians, we got in the way and he's like, I can't, all I can do is be faithful

to what's happening within and I have to go and test it and he tested it and tested it over those couple of years and he wrote me after two and a half years he said, you know, I would choose this life a thousand times over given the choice. I know I'm where I'm meant to be. So to fast forward it was 12 years before he was ordained and covered was part of that but they take a long time. But to see him like fully alive, it was like a better Rob than I ever knew, even though I knew him and loved him deeply. And I felt after a decade of not seeing him, a much stronger love for this brother who's been praying for me and for whom I've been praying all these years.

When he explained the life to us, he said we go way, way back from the front lines to uphold everybody, the whole world by our prayer intercession. Yeah. So, it's like the place of these monastic communities, they are withdrawn from the world to be out on the front lines, the spiritual front lines. Like they're holding back things that we couldn't even see or understand.

They are upholding things that we don't even realize need to be upheld. They're sustaining the life of the church. So if it's God's calling to that life, it's not the visible presence of the bride. But again, metaphysically, spiritually, theologically, it's one organism, one body. And we are all, we have a different state with a different mission. And that mission is crucial to the advancement of the kingdom in the midst of a culture that is very much hostile. I took an eight day silent retreat a couple of years ago in Wisconsin actually at those the Byzantine monks what are they called? St. Nazians? Yeah that's right that was really cool those are some characters totally I love them. Yeah they're living it. But it's funny I

found like after the second day I was craving Communication oral communication. It's like not cold. I just really wanted somebody to talk to me. Hey, you're a chat No, you don't make up sins. Got a confession. Yeah Yeah, he said that that first couple years is what's most purifying Because you can't just talk to someone when you want to and that means you're stuck with yourself Yeah, and he said it's like looking in a mirror and having nowhere to turn. And you stare at yourself so long that you realize it's just you and your sin. And you can't escape your sin. He realized like out in the world, I used to just move away.

When my sin became too much to deal with, I would go have a beer. I'd go call someone up. I'd go out walking around, whatever. He said, you can't change the subject anymore. have to score off and you alone yeah oh my gosh Kathleen Corey says love that guy he was on a mission trip with us called him father flip-flops oh boy that's right that was I think we're in Rochester wow that's a long time ago and I did that war flip-flops all time Joe Connolly 19 says father John is a wonderful priest I've met him a few times at core yet. Yes, who at st. Roberts Parish

Thank you father John for start starting it and helping it flourish. I Know what that means you can fill us in a second What would be a good way to inspire other lay Catholics to take their faith seriously and especially with regard to the Eucharist? Huge shout out to that Milwaukee crew core. Yes, is a ministry we founded about 10 years ago now, and it's super simple. It's not even a ministry, it's just an event. It's adoration with praise and worship and confessions, and then a very traditional mass celebrated at Orientum

with high liturgy and chant, polyphony, bringing everything together in one place, making the sacraments available, insisting on good preaching and reverent liturgy. It's fed our young adult community for a decade. So a huge shout out to all of them for just the beauty of what it is to be faithful together without a budget, without a plan, but just being totally committed to what the church says we need.

So advice? The sacraments. I mean, the genius of this program, ministry, apostolate, it's borne so much fruit. All of our priests and seminarians have come through it and women have entered religious communities, but so many people meet their spouses there or they date there or they bring their like newlyweds will come in the first couple years of marriage just to pray together. So all we were doing is making available to the church what the church

says you need to live well, which is especially prayer and sacrament. So anywhere, anywhere that there's a Catholic who is feeling like they're not kind of living it or they're not where they should be, like you got to ask like am I frequent with the sacraments, especially am I getting to adoration around my confessions and my mass? Am I praying? And am I praying with friends? So obnoxiously simple answer, but what we did was obnoxiously simple and it's been the most fruitful apostolate probably in our archdiocese. It has no budget

We don't spend any money. Nobody's employed. It's just people praying together. So like just do what the church says Let it flourish and you'll actually be converted Vic asks father John I've struggled pretty much all my life with understanding what being quote poor on poor in spirit ain't quote means for understanding what being quote poor in spirit end quote means. Is this like the interior poverty you spoke about when talking about the missionaries of charity and how can we foster this? What does it mean to be poor in spirit? Yeah, De Bae wrote a great book, Happy Are You Poor? It's a terrible book actually because you'll read it and realize you're not poor. And he's not writing to religious necessarily, he's writing to everybody. But to be poor in the world is a disposition of heart that's very complicated to acquire and maintain. And it's an act of grace whereby the Lord helps you to detach

from creatures in order to attach correctly to the author of creatures so that no creature would surpass or displace the ultimate, the Lord. To do that, I mean, fasting, penance, every form of discomfort that we experience, the unavoidable discomforts, learning to let those be moments of prayer that sculpt our soul to turn toward the Lord instead of being just like things that are in my way and I have to tolerate, like letting everything become related to God in prayer. So relating our lives to God helps me to recognize my state, my posture before the Lord. And then I can choose in prudence, material discomforts, you know, like wearing a sweater

that I don't like, that is uncomfortable, but not getting rid of it, but choosing like kind of like the hair shirt principle of the monks, like prudently and in the midst of the world. Little tiny things like curbing one's comforts, like often at restaurants, I'll, uh, I'll pick the thing I want to order and then I'll say, that's the one I'm not ordering. What's the second thing I'd order. And if I want to, I'll go to the third and like, man, to move from the second to the third, you'd think I was dying. But then I'm like, but this is awesome. Like I'm getting a great plate of food. I'm getting food that's paid for. I have money to pay for it.

But I'm noticing myself, like I really wanted the bacon cheeseburger with the barbecue sauce. That's what I always get here. It's my favorite thing. To discipline there is a tiny act of poverty. It's not that hard, but when I rebel against it, I notice I'm not super good at living simplicity inside. But when I rebel against it, I notice I'm not super good at living simplicity inside. So we got to spy our attachments and then target those very directly. Perpennance, abstinence, and then letting the rest of life's discomforts be related to the Lord as offerings. That teaches us the way of inner simplicity or inner poverty. That is so great. It's not very complicated, but it's super hard.

It's not, isn't it? Father, what did you get instead of the bacon barbecue burger? Do you remember? Well, it's always the bacon barbecue burger for me. So often I'll go to like a chicken sandwich. Couple times it's been a veggie burger. One time it was a beet burger, which was disgusting. Like it was purple and red inside, just made with beets.

It was not a substitute. So disgusting, yes. Like not favorable to taste. Was I nourished? Did I go home full? Yeah, I was fine. I didn't die by not getting the bacon cheeseburger, but boy, I felt like it. Yeah, those are, those are great penises because you can't brag about them. No, and if you do, people will laugh at you because as you say, it doesn't sound like a big deal and it is, and in the moment you're aware of your own attachment yeah it's like that second

slice of pizza that third cup of coffee like disciplining yourself in those areas seconds even like condiments sometimes for lentil give up like salt and pepper which is really small but it is hard when you eat something like this is not salted like all I need is salt and this will be perfect yeah and then to choose not the salt. Well, this is a mess. I love what you're saying, too, about choosing to sacrifice in those small things that just will inevitably come your way.

Like, how often we just we don't do that. This is the path to happiness. I mean, just you go to the coffee shop, there's eight people in front of you. There's one barista. Thank you, Jesus. Yeah. What a joy. Don't change anything. Jesus. Yeah, what a joy don't change anything Lord, dude Thank you for this. Yeah, I'm gonna fighting its life as it's coming to me It's like you see this in a lot of world religions, frankly But like not resisting but moving with the current is like a kind of an Eastern principle. Mm-hmm

Is a principle right Shinto I think yes, so isn't but like especially I've discovered it in reading about Sh principle, right? Shinto, I think. Yeah, stoicism, but like, especially I discovered it reading about Shinto. Tell me about Shinto. I don't know much about it, except for this great principle from one of these teachers, which was like, go stand in the river and decide whether you move upstream or downstream and how much more work it is

to move upstream than downstream. So it's obviously a very secular idea of like moving with the flow of time. But if God's plan is always unfolding around us and his will is sustaining us in being and is also, he's able to conduct the masterful symphony of life all at once by ordering causes and effects and bringing things together in a fashion that is suitably reflective of the divine, is there not a way for me to always either be moving with or against the current or the flow of God's plan for my life? Isn't God, because he's sustaining me in being, also always prompting me toward the good in the in the sanctuary of my conscience

and away from evil. Is there not a way to breathe in the Holy Spirit? And then does that not mean then that God is actually interested in the details, not just the big moments of my life? And so isn't there a way, could there be a way in which I move with God or against God in the small details, not just the big ones? And if I'm moving against God, if small details, not just the big ones. And if I'm moving against God, if I'm, if God's allowing a suffering and I'm resisting that suffering, I'm resisting what God is allowing to occur. And so I'm only making it more, I'm moving against the stream to turn with God and

look along the lines of his own providence, along the lines of his sacred heart and his will. Is it going to be easier? He might ask me to suffer a lot, but it's gonna be a suffering he chose because he knows through the cross how to take sufferings he chooses and make something out of them that was not there before. St. Augustine. Yeah, go Lee. It also makes our prayer authentic if we're doing that sort of thing. It also might show you that you're not praying at all times if you're not willing to surrender these things and take joy and delight in them.

Even your own, even in your own idiosyncrasies and annoying habits that may be annoying other people, just to like be in your own poverty. Fiat volontas to a, just to surrender to the providence of God in that. And that's different to fatalism, that's different to quietism. That's totally... Father Bern,, we read that one. Cameron says, I'm new to the Catholic sphere and I don't really know what vocation is. Oh, good luck. Yeah. Well, it comes from the word Vox or voce in Italian voice.

A vocation is a calling. And when we say it as Catholics, we don't just mean like a trade, like the vocational trades. We mean a calling from God or the voice of God within us calling us to heaven, calling us home. And there's like some people talking about big V small v, like big V vocation, state in life, callings, marriage, religious life, priesthood. And then within that, God will specify the calling. But really, there's one main vocation for each of us. There's one best pathway to heaven,

which is God's calling on our lives. Discernment of that is really just learning how to like listen for the voice of God and be unafraid to go wherever He asks, which demands a lot of us. But when we say vocation, we mean the calling of God to come home, to return, to go to heaven, and to be with him forever. And each of us has a calling. Like God is not just disinterested and say like, do your best, here's all the options. Like, no, there's a best way for each of us. If we miss it or we reject it, there are other ways too that will make us holy.

But at the level of perfection, there's one best way that God is going to sanctify us and call us to Himself. that's our vocation. Anything else you want to, I don't know, you have a website, books, anything else you want to push or that's it? I'm trying that humility thing. I'm on social media I don't use it much but Father John burns at most of the platforms but no, just pray for me. It's great to be with you on here. It's really great, it's really nice to meet you. I met you once before, you remember? Yeah well in Milwaukee you were at... Sister great to be with you on here. It's really great. It's really nice to meet you. I met you once before. You remember? Yeah. Well, in Milwaukee, you were at Sister Miriam was with you. Oh, that was at Focus. I met you twice then, because in Milwaukee

you were at on the lake, I think, Steubenville. And I came down here, Confessions, and I just quickly by I think Father John Parks was there and I quickly bumped into all you guys. Because that's where you gave an amazing talk there on the Trinity, the father's pornography, like you pulled all this stuff together in a half hour. I was like, that's the best 30 minute presentation of the full tradition on morality that I think I've ever heard. Thank you. Father John Parks, what a guy.

Yeah, it's amazing. Oh, I like him very much. He'll be here this summer. He's the most hilarious priest I've ever met. And just his insights and intelligence take you off guard because you like wait I thought you were the funny guy. I know and he's continually funny why he's blowing your mind Yeah, thank God for guys like that and guys like all this stuff. Yeah, we got to remember that I mean, I think I usually wring my hands as I look at what's happening in the world The Lord has overcome the world like that's a simple thing that we forget and like this age this battle like he sees it God doesn't need to have raised you in the 1940s America for you to be a

saint. Yeah. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. We should expect greater saints in this generation than we did a few hundred years ago. Why not? I'm so glad I live now. Totally. Yeah. No better age for us because God didn't choose a different one. He chose this one for a time such as this. And if there's a new trial, you know, like if there's something in this age that really is worse than any other age, which I think every generation claims, but if there really is something super messed up now and it seems like there might be, God's foreseen that. And so there's a new grace. Like there's something, some way he's provoking and calling forth holiness that's going to meet

and surpass the challenge of a gravely fallen world And like we need to be creative enough and open enough to search that out and receive it when it pops up right in front Of us like I'm asking you Radically to be a saint like I need to be not unafraid to offer my fiat over and over again because there's gonna be a New way that he calls for saints as he said in this age Well, thanks everybody God bless you. Have a great day. Yeah