Pints With Aquinas - That's NOT The Point! Pt 2 w/ Mthr. Natalia

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

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Glory to Jesus Christ. I'm Mother Natalia, a Byzantine Catholic nun from Christ the Bridegroom Monastery, and this is Pines with Aquinas. Today, I'm giving my second part of the two part series on That's Not the Point. Last weekend, as I was already kind of having this topic in mind, I gave a I spoke at a retreat for Roman Catholic women out in La Trobe, Pennsylvania. And I was there on the day that for Romans was the feast of St. Matthew the evangelist. So we had the readings for the day.

I was praying with them as I was preparing for my talk. And this was, they just fit so well in with the topic that I was planning on presenting, which is the same topic that I'm presenting today. And the first, the epistle was from Saint Paul's letter to the Ephesians. It's from the beginning of Ephesians chapter four. And I want to share just the first couple verses. St. Paul

says, I therefore a prisoner for the Lord beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called with all lowliness and meekness with patience for bearing one another in love eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. And I was really, the reason I was struck by this as I was praying with it is because St. Paul is talking about how we need to be lowly and meek to be patient and forbear one another in love.

and forbear one another in love. But then we know from Jesus that the second greatest commandment is to love one another as ourselves. And so if St. Paul is saying that we need to forbear one another with love, then we're called to do the same with ourselves. In other words, we can't expect ourselves to be perfect.

So I'm going to make a statement now. This is my that's not the point statement. And I'm going to really ask everyone to bear with me and hear me out as I go through this because what I'm gonna say might sound extremely scandalous. Not sinning is not the point. Not sinning is that the goal of our life as Christians, the goal of our existence is union with God, communion, relationship. But we get this backwards in sometimes thinking, I want to be a saint. I want to be holy so that I don't sin.

We get so focused on the not sinning that I think that we can get stuck on like the not sinning is the goal. We mistake the means for the end. So, of course we should avoid sin. I'm not saying that's not part of reaching the goal is avoiding the sin. But the not sinning is not the end in and of itself.

The reason we don't want to sin is because sinning injures our relationship with the Lord. Not because the sin in and of itself is something that we want to avoid apart from the fact that it injures our relationship with the Lord. I often think of, and I've probably shared this before, maybe even multiple times, but I often think of this line that a priest friend of mine shared. He said, we want resolution, God wants relationship. We want resolution, He wants relationship.

The gospel reading on the feast of St. Matthew for the Romans, the gospel reading was the call of St. Matthew. And in that passage is when Jesus says, those who are well, have no need of a physician. We want to be perfect. But often we don't want to be perfected. We want to be saints, but we don't want to be sanctified. Right? We just want to jump to the end.

We don't want to look at our sin in the moment. And that's really just pride. Because this is, you know, we're very good actually. I do this all the time in podcasts. We're very good at sometimes, very willing to talk about our weaknesses, our struggles, our sin, once we're past it, when we have it kind of in this like neat little package and it's all tied up and we can present it as, look what I learned from this

and how I've grown and what I, you know, what the Lord taught me through this and and that's beautiful. But are we able to see the Lord in the present moment in the midst of our sin and our brokenness and our weakness? midst of our sin and our brokenness and our weakness. On Sundays when we have, when we're in Sundays of tone eight, which it doesn't matter if you don't know what that means, that's fine, but we in our Byzantine tradition, we pray the third antiphon on Sundays. tradition we pray the third antiphon on Sundays, it says something like, purify me before you take me from the earth, purify me before you take me from the earth. And I love that line because

that pride is absent of I'm not saying I need to be perfect now. I'm not saying I need to be sinless now. What I'm saying is, Lord, work in me. Keep working in me and do what needs to be done so that when I die, I'm with you." Now, before you all call my bishop and say, Mother Natalia is saying that not sinning doesn't matter and that sin is not important. That's not what I'm saying. And I want to remind you of what St. Paul says in Romans chapter 6, right after he says, where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. He then says, so does that mean we should continue in sin?

Of course not. That would be absurd. I'm paraphrasing. Those are not the exact words of St. Paul. But my point is this. Don't wait for relationship with the Lord because of your sin right now. He wants you now. I just think we need to adjust, myself included. I become so discouraged when I look at my own sin that it can get to the point that it's debilitating.

And that's not good, that's not healthy. We need to adjust our thinking when we see our own sin instead of looking at it from the perspective of, I don't want to need a physician, which is what we're saying when need to run to the physician. You know, we can just like, we can just get caught up in this mindset of I've sinned and so now I need to fix myself and cleanse myself in order to then approach the Lord. But that's not what he wants and that's not how it works because you can't cleanse yourself. You can't fix yourself. Then we're just adding the sin of self-reliance. fix yourself. Then we're just adding the sin of self-reliance. We need relationship with him to be cleansed. We need him to heal us. And so if we can, if we can see our sin as opportunity to receive healing, then God can use even our sin to draw us closer to Him.

And I'm not, again, before you call my bishop, I'm not at all saying we don't need confession. What I'm saying is, don't wait until confession to start talking to Jesus. Confession should not be the first time that the Lord is hearing you say your sins. We should be running to Him, engaging in conversation with Him,

reaching out to Him for mercy and for healing the moment we see our sin. And then we also bring it to confession, because the Church, God through the Church gives us the mystery of repentance, the sacraments of confession. But confession is not the only place of encounter with the Lord in the midst of our sin. He wants that encounter immediately. I think I'll end with an analogy that one of my sisters shared with me when I was kind of sharing with her these reflections. She was talking about how when she first started riding her bike here in the area, so we live, our community is right in the middle of Amish country. And the reason that's important is because the Amish use horse and buggies. And the reason that's important

is because the horses leave their poop all over the road because that's what horses do. And so when this nun was starting to ride her bike around the monastery, she was having to, this happened when I first started running as well, is you're kind of like, it's like an obstacle course and you're trying to avoid all the horse poop. And she said she realized very quickly that when she was first riding her bike, she's looking at the

horse poop in order to go around it, in order to avoid it, but then by looking at it she ends up hitting it when she's trying to avoid it. And then she realized she needed to change the focus of her gaze to look at the space between the poop in order to aim for that. Right? If you're, and the same is true if you're driving. Like if you're driving and you're passing a car, you're not just looking at that car that you're passing the whole time you're passing it. You're looking at the road, the open road where you're driving. And this is the focus that we need to have in our relationship with God. The focus is not on we can't just be looking all the time

at the sin that we want to avoid. The focus is not on, we can't just be looking all the time at the sin that we want to avoid. We need to look at Him. And if we're looking at Him and we're walking towards Him, then we avoid the sin. You know, sin means, it's an archery term, probably most of you have heard this before, that means to miss the mark. Because we're looking at him, we're walking towards him, and sometimes we miss the mark, and then the focus of our gaze. We need to be living for something, for someone, as opposed to against something.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Heavenly Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for the gift of this use of technology. I ask that you give those who are listening a spirit of discernment that they may hold fast to that which is from you and to discard anything else. Please grant those who are listening and myself the graces that we need to turn back to you, our divine physician, for healing from our sin, to not be debilitated, to not fall into despair, to not panic, but to run to your embrace.

Help us to keep our minds, our hearts, our gaze fixed on the loving gaze of your son, our bridegroom, as opposed to focusing on the evil of sin. Help us to walk towards you and in doing so to walk away from sin. I ask all of these things and thank you for these things through the intercession of St. Nathaniel, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Paul, St. Matthew, the Most Holy Theotokos and all the Saints and through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.