Pints With Aquinas - The Miraculous Proof of Catholicism is Undeniable (Fr. Seraphim Baalbaki, C.F.R.) | Ep.516

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Fr. Seraphim Baalbaki, C.F.R. is a member of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. He earned a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Cornell University, an M.A. in Theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, and an M.A. in Catholic Philosophical Studies from St. Joseph’s Seminary. He also began a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Fr. Seraphim's intellectual formation is paired with a deep commitment to serving others, particularly through the friars’ work at St. Crispin Friary, where they provide food for the needy and support the St. Anthony Shelter for Renewal, a sanctuary for homeless men in need of healing and recovery.

From the exterior probably most people in my life would have thought things were going pretty well But from the inside the experience on the inside I knew that I wasn't actually a very dark place We're sitting on the couch I turned to my friend and said I want to go to church and I walk in and I just I felt like a wave Hit me sounds started to come out of my mouth. I started speaking in tongues I didn't even know tongues was a thing my perception of time and space completely changed it was it was as if there was a veil that was removed from my eyes and suddenly I could see what is always all around us but under normal circumstances is hidden from our eyes. When I

later read the account in Acts of the Apostles about Pentecost and the apostles' tongues of fire come and rest upon them, when I later read that, I was like, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I experienced. Hello. Hi, Matt. It's good to have you on the show. Great to be here. We have to begin by you explaining how this morning went for you and the joys of poverty,

right? The joys of the reality of embracing the Franciscan lifestyle. Amen. Yeah, I was staying at a place just down the road, about a mile down the road. And I expected, I didn't know how else to get here, so I had a cab that was going to come to pick me up. And I came down a few minutes early, kind of waiting,

and I was ready to go. And then suddenly I realized, I'm not actually sure that this guy's coming. So I went outside and looked, walked around the building, came back, and the lady at the front desk said, actually, he came and left. And so in a moment of panic, I just thought,

oh, how far is this? So I got a very nice scenic tour of the neighborhood here as I came down. I'm so glad that we got a hotel close by because I was talking to my assistant this morning and like, does he have a number? No, he doesn't have a phone. He has an email, but I'm not sure how he would check that.

So I'm like, well, I guess we'll see what happens. Yeah, thank God everything went well. That's awesome. So are you technically allowed to take phones on trips like this, but just don't have one or choose not to or what? You know, we generally, we choose allowed to take phones on trips like this, but just don't have one or choose not to or what? You know, we generally, we choose not to have phones. We do have some brothers that need a phone

for various things. Some of the brothers in our administrative, with different administrative capacities, they need to have a phone. I help with a young adult program in the Bronx and we do actually have a simple flip phone for our ministry. But yeah, I would never typically travel with it.

And so it makes things more complicated, but actually there are very beautiful encounters that sometimes come from not having a phone, from kind of relying on the goodness of other people. If you have to borrow someone's phone to do something and you end up in a conversation, something like that. Yeah, for me it's almost like a wash because I used to give up and I might do it again,

we'll see the internet for a month every year. So starting 1st of August to the end of August and there are definitely complications. I remember getting a taxi, like who gets a taxi? Everyone gets an Uber. Or I went to the airport but I didn't have a phone and so I missed the notification. I relied on my notification saying you're boarding now.

And I thought that my, yeah, the boarding time was actually my flight time. So I missed my flight. There's definitely hassles like that, but then I don't know. I think it's kind of a wash because things seem to be a lot more calm and slow when you don't have a phone yelling at you and buzzing at you all day long. Sure. Yeah.

It allows you to be a bit more attentive to people in situations around you. Yeah. What's it like? I always ask this whenever I chat with a friar or someone wearing the kind of thing that you're wearing. And maybe you don't see it anymore, but what was it like traveling on an airplane?

Do people have questions about what you are? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there is something, the kind of visible witness of wearing the habit, it draws all sorts of different reactions. And there is something about being in airports that for whatever reason, I guess because people are going to a different place and so they're maybe a little bit more open. There's some really beautiful encounters actually that have happened in airports specifically. A couple of years ago, I was in, I believe I was in South Carolina.

And I was walking. There was this kind of big open space. And I'm walking. And it was kind of a bar restaurant, an open bar restaurant to the left. And I could see these guys kind of drinking and looking out over where we were. And I'm walking towards this door.

And I see this woman kind of walking towards me. And I'm walking towards this door. I see this woman walking towards me. And I notice the guys noticing the woman. And so I'm walking. And so I'm taking this all in. And then I'm looking at them. And then she sees me and walks directly up to me. And so she comes up and engages me. And she puts out her hands.

And I go to shake her hand. And she takes my hand. She leans in. And basically, she knew what I was and she had been going through some kind of difficult situations with her family. Anyway, she confided a few things, shared a few things, asked for some prayers. It was a very quick exchange, maybe 20 seconds. And then she looks up and I said, I will pray for you. And just kind of a quick affirmation and just of her vulnerability. And then with kind of tears in her eyes, she's like, thank you so much. And she keeps walking. And so I keep walking. And I look over at the guys,

and it was funny, the one guy was like mid drink and just had this dumbfounded look on his face. But she happened to be a relatively attractive woman. And so I think they were kind of like looking at this and looking at me thinking, what is happening here? What is this? How did that? And what is... How do I get myself one of those robes?

Actually funny, on this trip just yesterday, there was a gentleman that came up to me and piercings all over his face. And he came up to me and he said in a slightly more crass language, but what he basically said was, you know, I love your outfit. Not using those words, I won't repeat what he said, but I love your outfit, essentially where can I get one? And so, and that kind of thing happens a lot, you know? And it was, so I said, you know, I, so I said,

I started with, I'm a Catholic priest actually. And I was a bit surprised. He was like, oh, wow, that's amazing. And so then we just had a beautiful two minute conversation and then I was on my way. But it's really just kind of beautiful privileged moments of allowing the Lord to maybe have a conversation that I wouldn't be able to otherwise have with someone. Yeah. Conservative Christianity is the new punk rock. So it doesn't surprise me that you would have got that reaction. Yeah, that's awesome. It's such a shame that after the Second Vatican Council, that there was this movement to get rid of religious symbolism.

Rosaries just became things Madonna wore, or that you put around a windshield. Or the habit. I remember in my youth, discerning different religious orders. It was almost like they wanted just to be bachelors. They wouldn't wear the habit or the collar, and they'd say things like, call me Frank. I'm like, why am I joining you?

Why would I? Yeah, that's true. So thank you for wearing the habit. And a big shout out to all of our priests who are watching. I also think the cast needs to make a comeback clearly. It's just clearly more attractive. It's a very masculine thing, actually. You look like Neo from the Matrix.

But I think it's probably tough for diocesan priests to wear it, because I think they probably get some side eyes from their fellow confreres. So I just want to say, big fan. And I think all Catholics should thank our religious and priests when they dress like they are. Amen. Thank you. Yeah, you know, it's really, it's meant to be a visible witness of the reality of our consecration, but also of the life to come. It's really a sign pointing towards the fact that we're all here, we're on pilgrimage, we're on a journey, but our destination is in heaven. And it's meant to kind of be a visible witness of that reality.

How so? Well, so the life in heaven, as Jesus tells us, life in heaven, there's no marriage. And so all of us in... Oh, celibacy, you mean, is meant to be... I thought you meant the religious habit, especially, wearing that is a sign. By such you mean a deep sign. Yeah, just a sign of the fact that we're only here for a time and that, you know, that religious are called by the Lord to give up very good things, right? Marriage, children, family, all very, very good things. Some people are asked by the Lord to give those up for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, and as a sign that, you know, just not to get too hung up on the

things of this world, because we're, again, we're only here for a time, and there are many good things here, but if they become obstacles to our relationship with God, then oftentimes it's best that we forego them. Cut them out, yeah. And so just the reality that there's more than this world. Amen. And you live in the Bronx? I do, I do. How long did it...

Where were you from just before that? We'll get into your story in a moment, but... And then how long did it take you to get used to oh, yeah the noise and the smells and sights of the Bronx Oh, yeah, well I just before the Bronx. I was in Yonkers actually our Seminary formation houses in Yonkers, New York. Okay, so it's only about 20 minutes. Yeah Yeah, I just hear that when people go to New York City. They're like why this is loud Yeah, oh, yeah, it is at first and And it's funny, most of the guys in my community are not from big cities.

They're not from New York, certainly. And so there's certainly an adjustment period that it takes to get used to all that. It's something that it's a little bit, at first, it can be kind of off-putting. Especially in the summers, we don't have air conditioning in our friaries. And so the friaries get really hot in the summer.

And so all the windows are open. And so you're sitting in holy hour and we happened in the Bronx, right across the street from us, there are houses right across the street. And one of our neighbors has this habit, I'm not sure why, but he has a really nice stereo system. And- He wants you to know about this.

Well, what he does is he doesn't, when he's having a party, he wants to share it with the neighborhood, so he puts the speakers in the window pointed outwards. And it's like, and you know, the buildings on both sides, the sound just kind of bounces back and forth. Oh my goodness. And so it becomes, yeah, it's, to say the least,

it can be rather off-putting. It's not my favorite style of music either. But basically, when you're in holy hour especially, sometimes you're sitting there trying to pray and you're having these kind of pious sentiments and then suddenly it's like, how am I supposed to pray? But the beautiful thing is, and this has taken many years of kind of learning how to kind of be a little bit disposed to this, is to kind of bring the reality that I'm experiencing in my heart and outside kind of into my prayer, you know, to kind of a quick discernment, okay, is what

I'm experiencing now, is it a distraction and just put it away, or is it something that I should really bring and talk to the Lord about in this moment and to allow the Lord to maybe speak a word into it, something going on in the neighborhood or in my own heart that needs to be brought to the Lord. That's really great. I think it was Thomas Acampus who made the point in Imitation of Christ that the married man wants to be a priest and the priest wants to be a friar and the friar wants to be a hermit and thinks if only, if only, if only then finally I could. Oh yeah. I find as I'm getting older, my pet peeves are increasing. It's ridiculous at this point.

And I'm pretty sure I need to be offering some things up. I don't know if that just starts coming with age naturally unless you fight against it, but I can't imagine being in a holy hour and having that kind of stuff blasting through the neighborhood. Oh, yeah, yeah. It really...

It's an opportunity, I find, to allow the Lord to expand your heart a little bit, which requires suffering, right? And so it's funny, suffering is something that... We all talk about suffering as, oh, this beautiful thing, oh, I wanna suffer. But when suffering is very concrete, when it becomes like, the suffering today is sitting in holy hour while this thing is blasting, it's like, I don't want that kind of suffering.

I want... I want to... The kind that makes me feel pious. I want that kind. Exactly. A much more romantic kind of suffering, where I can follow something that's much more pious and beautiful. Yeah, stigmata, stigmata.

I'll take that over this. Yeah, it's true though. And I often remind myself, especially when my heart is kind of grumbling or when I'm complaining or I feel like woe is me, I often try to remember, okay, Lord, in this moment embracing this suffering is what you're asking me to do. And so I don't need to run off somewhere to find other kinds of suffering, right? The suffering can be... that poverty of the moment. It's so true.

It's true in marriage. It's true with children. We keep wanting a different kind of suffering, as you say. Because theoretically, it sounds nice. The annoyance, just the daily annoyances to be able to, that's hard. I want to get into your story annoyances to be able to, yeah, that's hard. Yeah, absolutely. I wanna get into your story,

but I also wanna ask you, how many, I mean, have the Friars seen an upsurge in men seeking vocations over the last 10 years, or has it been pretty steady? Yeah, it's been, so I entered in 2011, and my class originally was five guys. Some of the previous classes had been bigger. The biggest class I think we've had was 17.

We had a couple of classes about that size. So around my, when I entered, we had a few years of smaller classes, but there's been an uptick in the last 10 years or so, where we back to classes of 10 or 12 guys, and for various reasons. But it seems like the Lord... There are many men who come and visit us.

I think it sounds like about 100, maybe about 100 guys a year come and visit. And of those, about, it seems like somewhere between eight and 12 end up entering postulancy. And so, yeah, you know, the mystery of how the Lord calls and when he calls and why he calls certain men and it's always mysterious, but thankfully he has been calling, it seems more men to our community recently. It's been really inspiring to see that the friars have been pretty consistent by the friars, I mean, y'all, CFRs, of not embracing things like air conditioning and cell phones and internet in the house.

Because all these things you could easily make a case for. You know, like, well, hey, if we're refreshed, we'll be better able to serve each other, serve the poor. And isn't that what matters? And if we had internet, we could be more responsive. And if we bring a cell phone with us, we won't have to walk 15 minutes through a neighborhood to get to a podcast studio, right?

There's legitimate arguments that can be made. But I'm so thrilled that you don't. So who is the one? Or is it written into your constitution somehow why this has to remain the way it is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a general principle that we as a community try to abide by that is in

our constitutions that we generally strive to make use of the minimum necessary, not the maximum allowed. And so the maximum allowed would be trying to push, okay, can I take on something else? Is it legitimate to do so? Whereas the opposite approach would be, do I really need this thing? Do I need it or would it be better for me to not make use of it? And maybe to be inconvenienced or to have to work a little harder to do something, but to allow the Lord to work in that. And so we do have a discernment generally in our community that if there is a genuine need, say, so most of our guys either sleep on the floor or sleep on a

simple mattress on the floor. That's kind of like just the way that our constitutions lay out our way of life. But that's great if you're 25 or 35, but what if you're 75? And so there are exceptions that are made, but it's all kind of discerned prudently and communally. And there are, when our constitutions, if the community feels like there's really a movement towards something that maybe we do need to begin to look at this thing, right?

So cell phones is an example where at some point, none of our guys had cell phones. And we were very clear that we don't have cell phones and we explain the reasons why. But then when there's a reality that, okay, in this situation for this guy, I think he actually does need, it's not a convenience, it's not a, you know, just because he wants one.

He wants to play Candy Crush or something. Exactly, exactly. Most of our guys probably don't know what that is. Yeah, I mean, because Father Mark Mary was here and because of his work, he had a flip phone. Yeah, I'll play Candy Crush on a flip phone. Yeah, but to be honest, I had a cell phone before I entered and I wouldn't want one now.

I really wouldn't. I know myself well enough to know that it actually is better for me to not have a cell phone. And I experienced that reality very, very tangibly. And so I'm grateful. If I was told, listen, you know what, forget all this. You can have this and this and that you can have, I would be, I wouldn't want it.

Yep. I really want to encourage people to do this. I try every weekend. I don't do it every weekend, but I do it quite a bit to have like a digital Sabbath, right? Where I'll get rid of my phone and computer and Apple Watch for the entire weekend. And it's amazing to me how much time there is in a day.

Wow. And it's only during those times really that I pick up a book and start reading. Yeah. And I'm like, like, that's what this was like So I think it is. Yeah, you know, we I think as Christians we often Rightly realize that our life needs to look different. Let's say in regards to sexual ethics sure But then when it comes to the Internet It's almost like the only litmus test for am I using the Internet properly is do I look at porn or not again?

Back to sexual ethics. Shouldn't our life look different in every respect? As I say that I feel accused because it isn't, you know, but I think we need to, yeah, our lives need to look different. Yeah, and there are obviously legitimate needs. There are things that, you know, depending on your state in life, depending on your job, there are things that are necessary, of course. But I do think what you're saying is very true, which, you know, for... A real test is, do we have a Christian, a Catholic worldview? Do we see the world in terms of the realities that the church proposes to us, right?

Do we see the world through a Christian lens or do we see the world through kind of a more or do we see the world through a more secular lens with Christian icing on top? Yeah, that's it. And that's the real question, I think. Do we live our life with this reality of heaven and the journey that we're making towards it and the reality of Christ's presence in the Eucharist and just, you know, just how unexpected and mind-blowing that is, you know, is this something that reorients our priorities? You know, when you think about the kind of the hierarchy of the things that I value, you know, and something just very practical,

I sometimes will recommend to people to look at their week and just kind of do an inventory of how many hours they spend on the various things they spend. And then to say, okay, so if I'm spending twice as much time on something that should be lower on the hierarchy of goods in my life, you know, if you're spending an ordinate amount of time on this one thing, you know, how does that compare? Can you really do that legitimately when this other thing you even admit is much more important? And so it's not to have people freak out about it, but just to say, can you make adjustments?

Can you make a small shift? Yeah, I think that's great and kind advice, right? Because to freak out about it is just to probably immediately give up upon it. When things feel too overwhelming, I tend to get sort of idealistic about things. And then I crash in on myself and forget that I ever made a decision to use the internet less.

But if we can make small adjustments, and I think today it feels like there's a lot of people who just feel the absolute weight and anxiety inducement that the phone produces in them. How can I, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and small changes tend to last much longer. And it's like, if you make a small change

and say, I'm going to make this change for a month and see how it works. And then after a month, reevaluate. How was that? And then can I make another small change, maybe pressing in a bit more? And these are the types of things I think that can actually lead in the long run to authentic deepening conversion with grace, as the Lord continues to guide and inspire, rather than kind of throwing everything away. And then a month later, taking it

all back. Okay, so I gotta tell you this funny story. I watched Brother, Son, Sister Moon back in my like ideological driven days. And I was so, I mean, I don't know what you think about that movie. I know some people hate it and whatever, but it hit me at the right time. I went into my closet and I threw all of my clothes in a black bag and then walked barefoot to this second clothes.

But I actually broke my phone in half and threw it out into the wilderness. I was living in the outback at the time in Australia. Yeah, that felt great. And then about a week later, I think I was looking for another phone and new clothes. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's like, all right. Yeah. So I think like today, I think this is much, much better thing to do is last night when I went home, I left my phone in the car and turned it off. And so this morning when I woke up, I left my phone in the car and turned it off. And so this morning when I woke up, just like, I'm going to take an hour. Again, it sounds so pathetic and maybe it is, right? Wake up, make my coffee, say my little prayers, you

know? And the problem is when none of it feels holy. Like it's one thing to say what you did and it kind of gives the impression of sanctity. But when you're just exhausted and you kind of have a headache and you feel groggy and you get on your knees and you say a couple of prayers that you feel like, I don't even know if I paid attention to them. That's when I think the temptation is to reach out to something that will give me a feeling. Like the phone will give me a feeling, a podcast will give me a feeling. But it is those daily little rituals that if you can be consistent with, I think, you reap fruit from. And even to be deliberate in your heart and in your mind about why you're doing this, right?

It's not primarily for self-mastery. It's not primarily to reorder my life. It's primarily as an act of love for the Lord who gave Himself for me, right? It's like, okay, Lord, You came and You offered yourself, You suffered and died out of love for me, You gave Your life for me, and what is me giving my life for You look like, right? And yeah, for some people, it looks like being, giving up your life in martyrdom. For some people, it looks like that. For most of us, it looks much more basic, kind of more simple. And in these little acts of love that we do for the Lord, those acts of love, if done for Him, can be tremendously fruitful, even if it doesn't feel that way in the moment. Therese of Lisieux, right. And it's so true. I mean, none of us who

are watching have been martyred and probably have never been in a situation where we were almost martyred, but we do know what it's like to, yeah, sacrifice in small things and how painful that can feel. The child who wakes up in the middle of the night crying and you get up and let your wife sleep instead of pretending not to hear it.

I know that I've ever done that. You know, that kind of stuff, you know, or not grumbling. Holy moly. Just not grumbling. Just not whining. I was with my beautiful bride in Australia for two weeks and it just occurred to me how much I'm complaining. Not even complaining in a negative way, but just in a like, don't you resonate with this? Like, oh, look at that person. What are they wearing that for? Look at this. Look at this coffee shop. Don't you resonate with this? Like, oh, look at that person. What are they wearing that for?

Look at this. Look at this coffee shop. Where's it like? They're just whining, you know? It's like, well, wouldn't it be different if I tried to be like, how beautiful is that tree? Or, you know. The power of speech, huh?

Amen, yeah. I've been thinking a lot about that lately, the power of silence. Actually, I was reading a book. I think, I wish I, Father, mm, Nozak, Rosak, Jozak. Doesn't matter. Sorry, Father, I've forgotten, Rosak, Josak, mm, doesn't matter. Sorry, father, I've forgotten your name. But I'm reading this book right now,

and it's just struck me how I have never in my 42 years of life intentionally tried for a consistent amount of time while around other people to speak when it was beneficial and to withhold when it wasn't. Maybe I've done it for an hour, but I'm all even now. I'm just talking. Any thoughts on silence?

No, listen, this is a struggle that I, I mean, for myself, it's something that I've always struggled with as well. So I'm very sympathetic. Actually, one of the things, religious life for me has actually been very good in this regard. Because when you're kind of with friends or with family I actually, one of the things, religious life for me has actually been very good in this regard. Because when you're kind of with friends or with family and everybody's kind of very like-minded, very,

you know, you're all kind of, you know each other very well, you get along very well and you're kind of just sharing. And I'm Lebanese, mostly Syrian, Moroccan. So my family tends to be very dynamic, very animated. And so, you know, very, my friends would come over sometimes and be like, your family's all talking at the same time. How are they listening to each other? And among friends, too, you're just very comfortable.

But what I realized early on in religious life was that there are guys with many different temperaments, many different dispositions, many different family backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds. And I started to realize that there are this kind of, I think American culture tends to hyper value the extroverts, right? There's this kind of valuing of people who are kind of extroverted and kind of dynamic. And but what I realized very early on was that the guys that were kind of more quiet, that

kind of didn't say as much, very often when they did speak, it was like, oh, that's actually way more profound than what I had to say, you know? And I wish I had given you a moment before this. And so I kind of learned in that situation to kind of, just because I have something to say that could follow up from what was just said, doesn't always mean that I need to say it, especially because I know this brother. I want to give him a little bit of space because he's not going to talk over me. He's not going to interject. And again, it's a tiny, tiny little act of love, tiny little act of suffering that I've

seen really beautiful things come out of it. And so again, just a full admission, it doesn't come naturally to me at all. It's very difficult and I still don't do this all the time as I know, in moments when I know I should, but it's something that certainly religious life, living with other brothers, some of whom you love and are friends with

and other guys that you in other circumstances maybe would have never chosen to live with. It's something that has come up just through being with brothers. Yeah, I mean, what St. James says, what our blessed Lord says about being judged by your words, I mean, that should make us nervous. And yet, apparently it doesn't,

because here I am just yabbering on. And there's been things I've said lately that I've regretted and it feels all the more magnified, because I have a large podcast and it's been things I've said lately that I've regretted. And it feels all the more magnified because I have a large podcast and it's out there. And you're like, oh my golly. But yeah, and then just real quick, Faustina, she said something to the effect of the importance of silence, but she clarified, right?

Like not a gloomy kind of melancholic silence. Like we're not using our silence to punish people. That's not the point. The point is just to, if it would be more beneficial to speak than not, that's a great time to speak. Yeah. Kind of melancholic silence. Like we're not using our silence to punish people. That's not the point. No, no, no, no. The point is just to, if it would be more beneficial to speak than not, that's a great time to speak. Sure.

And that can be in conversation and being jovial. Yeah, yeah, sure, absolutely. Certainly. Yeah. You know, silence to me, authentic silence is always receptive. It's always, there's a disposition of receptivity. So it's not, you know,

cause silence can be used as a weapon as well, right? Silence can be the silent treatment, quote unquote, that people talk about. And so if someone says something to me and I remain silent, it can be actually much louder than anything that I would choose to say. But authentic silence, I think, is silence that is in a posture of receptivity before the person in front of me, whether it's my brother or my wife or the Lord who I'm before. And it's a posture of receptivity that admits that I don't have all the answers, I don't know, there's way more that I don't know than that I do know. And so it's an admission and humility that there are moments where I need to just be here

with open hands before the mystery of the person in front of me. And I need to receive them and to allow them the space both in my words and also in my heart to be able to receive them. It reminds me of the distinction between rest and dissociation, right? Because rest takes effort actually.

And it's sort of receptive in the way I think you're speaking of silence. Because often we don't rest, we dissociate, we scroll, we tweet, we listen while we're watching, while we're talking. And we call that like chilling, just like just having some downtime. And you go away from that experience more exhausted,

more fragmented, and tired. And I think that's partly why, perhaps, is that it actually wasn't receptive rest. It was active, not wanting to be with myself or something. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, you can be, you can, silence can be incredibly distracting as well. So yeah, meaning that the wrong kind of silence,

the silence where you can fill silence with things that actually make you more exhausted and less receptive for sure. Yeah. So, I mean, how can we better practice silence? How can we fast from speech? Because I don't think I'm particularly interesting or different to anybody else.

So I would suspect many people who are watching are like, oh, yeah, no, I've never thought about fasting from speech. I heard it once or twice, but no, I've never. I mean, is that something we should try to do? How should we think of our speech, perhaps? Sure. You know, it can start with something. So particularly if it's often easiest

to start closest to home. And so if in your family or among your friend group, if there's a particular maybe person who you get the sense like, okay, I wanna be a bit more deliberate in allowing some space for this person, because again, different personalities, different temperaments, right? They approach things in different ways. And so first to pray, Lord, in what situations can I be more willing to have this kind of receptive silence, right? Whether it's, again, a member of my family or one of my friends, and Lord, give me the

grace so that when I'm with this person to kind of remind me, okay, the next thing that I want to say, I don't necessarily need to say, or at the very least, I don't need to say it yet. And sitting and just giving a couple of seconds of maybe an awkward pause of just kind of, where there doesn't need to be something, noise filling that space to just allow it there, because very often there are people who until there's that pause, they won't come forth, they won't. And so, but once they do, then it becomes, okay, now, maybe there's the follow-up exchange, or maybe they took it in a direction that I didn't expect at all, and maybe this is actually much better. And I think, first of all, it's the desire,

the desire to kind of recognize that, Lord, I don't have all of the answers. There are other people that I'm gonna be with that know way more about many things than I do, or just can contribute to something, a conversation in a way that is actually very good in life-giving, but won't do so unless I'm willing to leave a space. And so Lord, give me the grace to recognize it and to be willing to do it.

Yeah, that's a really good thought. I haven't actually thought about that before, that in a conversation, if I choose to be willing to do it. Yeah, that's a really good thought. I haven't actually thought about that before, that in a conversation, if I choose to be silent, that's like a way to give birth to an idea that someone else could express that would never have come about if I was just yammering on. Absolutely.

To think of it almost like in a selfish way. It's like, well, if I don't talk, I might get to hear what they say. But even what you said there about kind of being attentive, right? Like, man, I don't need to say that right now. You know, that disposition, I think is sort of, it reminds me of John 15, just sort of abiding in the Lord, like being present to him

and through him being present to myself, if that makes sense. I don't know if I said that right. But just to be, yeah, to be, if I'm here and now, then I'm able to think clearly about what I'm about to say or whether I should say. Sure, yeah, absolutely. But I think so often we just rush into things. We don't think about it.

We're not even present to ourselves. And so stuff just starts happening, the magic. Yeah, well, I think it's driven also by the fact about it, we're not even present to ourselves, and so stuff just starts happening. The magic. Yeah. Well, I think it's driven also by the fact that the online world is basically just people yelling at each other, and who can yell the loudest very often, right? And who can make the last point that wins the day. And so to carry that into relationships,

I mean, online, because things are very often anonymous, anonymous or at least removed from the personhood of the people that I'm attacking or that are attacking me, I think very often we can kind of carry that kind of disposition into our relationships. And it becomes this kind of almost one-upsmanship that can happen. Whereas allowing a space, actually this quick funny story, early on in formation as a friar, there were a bunch of us that were all very close, that were all kind of in a room having a conversation.

I think there were five of us, and four of us were a bit more towards the extroverted kind of side, and one brother is very introverted. I forget what we were discussing, but there was this probably a 20-minute volleying of ideas, right? So the four of us were kind of, you know, this is what I think, no, because of this, no, because... So we're going back and forth in this kind of very lively, spirited conversation, and the more introverted brother was just kind of sitting there, didn't say anything for like 20 minutes. And in the interim, all of us are trying to volley

and jockey for position, right? And so after the whole thing kind of dies down and we all feel pretty good about how insightful we were, whatever, this brother, after a few moments of silence, says kind of like a couple of sentences. And I looked at him and internally it was like, oh no, he's totally right. So he had been sitting there and listening and receiving

and kind of processing and kind of digesting. And in the end, there was this really beautiful moment where it's like, you know, because I think very often in our culture, that kind of disposition is seen as weak. Right? Like if you're just sitting there and you're not jumping in, you're not contributing. Exactly.

You're not asserting yourself. It's seen as kind of weak. And the truth is that I remember this exchange. I remember it 14 years later, how much I was struck by it. Because the beauty of being willing to be docile, and silent, and receptive, and not to need to assert yourself in a way that is trying to win the day. And in the end, the light that's shown

in the darkness of our conversation came only because he was willing to sit and receive and be silent. And at the same time, we shouldn't, I know you're not saying this, but it's not like we're silent so that we can be brilliant at some point in the conversation, right? Because that again would be the wrong disposition, it would be about exalting the self. But it's so true that poverty is about dying in a way.

It's almost like the opposite of every one of the seven deadly vices is a form of dying, but a form of dying that leads to life. Anyway, man, I hope I can get better at that. And I suppose maybe the disposition isn't, how do I speak less? Kind of like what you were saying earlier about the disposition of like, no, it's about, it's not about how do I become more self-controlled stoic.

It's about how do I love the good Jesus who gave himself for me? And maybe likewise, if I can try to be attentive to the good Jesus who I'm told is inside me, I don't even know what that means, but it's no doubt more profound. His relationship with me is more intimate than I can guess at. Then to be attentive to the divine guest within will perhaps make me more, we'll see. Yeah. amen. It's something we all need to grow in, 100%.

Now you said you were Moroccan, Serbian? Primarily Lebanese, but Lebanese, Syrian and Moroccan. Okay. Where did you grow up? I was born actually in Greece, in Athens. My family lived in Athens for many years. My dad and mom had moved from Lebanon. There's kind of a long journey before that as well, but they had moved from Lebanon and ended up in Greece.

And so I lived in Greece with my family until I was six, and then Saudi Arabia. We moved to Saudi Arabia for a couple of years, yeah. How old were you in Saudi Arabia? Seven, it was only about a year and a half, Yeah, we moved to Saudi Arabia for a couple of years. Yeah. How old were you in Saudi Arabia? Seven. It was only about a year and a half, but I think I was six and a half, seven through, yeah, maybe just turning eight.

Were your parents practicing Christians? So my mom, yes. My dad actually is non-practicing Muslim. Yeah. And so in Saudi Arabia, it was very interesting. Even as a seven-year-old, I could tell how different Saudi Arabia and Greece were from each other. And actually, my dad as a Muslim would have been...

In Saudi Arabia, for us to be raised Christian would be illegal because if the father is Muslim, the children need to be raised Muslim. But my dad very graciously, when my parents got married, basically told my mom that she was kind of more Catholic than he was Muslim. And he recognized that it would be good for the children to be raised with faith and praying and practicing. And so he said he was very willing to let her raise us as Catholics. And so even in Saudi Arabia, I remember we had to have, we had a Christmas tree in the house,

but we had to have the blinds drawn because if anyone outside saw that we had a Christmas tree, my father would have probably gone to prison. So it was a very, it was a very, yeah. Yeah, it's one thing to let your wife raise your kids in a faith that isn't yours. It's another thing to do that when you could get in trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, again, very reasonably on the part of my father who saw the good in that and was willing to take the risk. So when we had friends come over, I remember it was just... It was a very different experience living there. And it wasn't long, but even going to school, I remember I went to a school that was kind of half Arabic and half English, and just kind of everything that went with that.

I think... I'm pretty sure we were not allowed to tell them, or that we didn't tell them that I was Christian. Yeah, I'm sure we didn't because of, again, of the problems that would have caused. I remember going to mass, there was kind of an American compound not far from where we were, and there was... I believe they were actually Franciscans, now that I think about it. I'm not sure, but these kind of missionaries that were undercover in Saudi Arabia, and they would celebrate mass on this American compound, like in a gym, like a basketball gym. And we would go there for mass every week. Yeah, I met these Saudis. I was with Father Stan Fortuna, actually. We went to Abu Dhabi. Oh, wow.

Got to evangelize there. And I met this group from Saudi and they were telling me, the priest was there, you know, and I said, well, he's from the Philippines. So I said, how are you in Saudi? He says, as a mechanic. I said, oh, wow, you're a mechanic. And he laughed and said, no. I'm like, oh, OK, so we're lying to the government. Great. And he would talk about how they would always have a birthday cake in the fridge where they would celebrate

Holy Mass in secret. And there were always people around the perimeter with cell phones such that if somebody came, they would pull out the wedding cake, and there would be a story about his birthday or was agreed upon ahead of time. Wow. Yeah, they asked me, do you want to come to Saudi Arabia and speak at the, you know, we

did this thing at a barn recently, but people got arrested because all of our shoes were outside. I was like, if I were cool, I'd say yes, but I don't think I want to do that. I certainly don't think my wife would let me. Yeah. Yeah, that. Yeah. Wow.

So why did you leave Saudi? We were always my mom's family. Many of them were here in the States, some in California, some in Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. So was your mom like American at all? No, she was born in Egypt. So how were you going to this American compound if neither of your parents, I guess they didn't have to be?

My dad's friends, I'm not sure, through my dad's business, I think. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure. I mean, I was seven. Yeah, right. Yeah, it was a very, I just remember thinking years later, looking back and realizing kind of how strange some of the things were, right?

The fact that like, I couldn't say some things when I was at school. I had to do some things, even though I wasn't... I was just told it's easier to just go ahead and... When they go pray, just go pray with them, because if you resist, then there could be questions asked and things. And the compound, I remember we would go

and play tennis there, There was a swimming pool. So there was other things happening. But we would also go to mass. And yeah, even as a kid, you recognize, there's something not right about this. You know, it's not the, or I should say, it's not the typical experience of a seven-year-old. But yeah, the whole time we were moving

towards coming to the States. And so we moved to Pittsburgh when I was eight years old. And then so practicing Christian your whole life or? Well, so up until that point, so my family was, my mom was practicing throughout. And so my mom, my sister and I were, you know, we'd go to mass. My dad would come with us sometimes. But as I got older, you know, especially as I got to high school, I started to ask a lot of questions. And, you know, I remember I had these funny experiences of being in school. And I went to a Catholic grade school. And generally it was a very good experience. But

there were, as I got more and more curious and had more and more questions, there were, I remember particular instances of asking questions of either a teacher or a priest, kind of a difficult question about the faith and being told something like, well, don't worry about that, or that's not important. And, you know, and for the 12-year-old me at the time, I remember thinking, well, if I have a question that's important to me and it's not important to you, then how concerned should I really be about what you're telling me is important, right? Because these are questions that I have and I'm not being kind of received in a way that honors that. And so as I got older, I basically thought that the faith was irrational.

And I thought that you didn't need to be a Christian to be a good person, which was my... I started to meet many people who were not practicing anything or who were different religions. And I thought, well, these are great people. And I had friends that asked me difficult questions that I couldn't answer either. And so more and more, I was just really involved in my kind of worlds were academics and friends when I was in high school.

And so by the time I was, I graduated from high school, I pretty much was, I would say, teetering on agnosticism. And really just, I mean, a practical agnosticism, because it really wasn't informing my moral life. My moral compass was kind of slowly sliding in a negative direction. And so that by the time I graduated from high school, I was in a pretty different place than before. And just, I think internally, faith and God and going to church at very least meant not much to me. And probably more than that, I just started to realize, like, I don't really want this that, I just started to realize, I don't really want this to be a part of my life. I don't really see the value.

And I don't know. I started to think that religion was something that was probably invented in order to control people at some point by some monarch who wanted his people to behave. And so he kind of, you know. And so that's kind of where I got to by the end of high school. Did you stop going to mass at some point? And how did your mom respond?

In high school, no. I mean, we would go every Sunday. And so I would go with her. But when I got to college, the first year in college, I kept going mostly just to make her happy. But then at some point, I realized I'm being inauthentic. And I have no desire to go. And so there was a point where I just kind of made the decision.

And I stopped going. OK, so you're agnostic in college. Then what happens? Yeah. So I, well, by the end of college, I was pretty much, I studied computer science and math. And so I was very kind of, I loved the academic world. I loved studying.

I had great friends. And so by the time I graduated, I pretty much wanted to make a bunch of money and retire by the time I was in my late 20s. That was my goal. And it was during the dot com explosion in the late 90s. And so it was when if you were even moderately competent, you could make a ton of money very quickly.

And my experience, so I moved down to Austin, Texas. And I started to work at a startup that was kind of blowing up. And this would have been 1999. And it was, I mean, I had just turned 21. I was getting money thrown at me hand over fist. I couldn't, you know, it was like more money than I could spend.

And I remember I was called into my boss's office once and I thought, you know, oh no, like what did I do? And he basically sat me down and said, we wanna give you more money. And I thought, I've been here six months. Why would you possibly wanna give me more money? You know, and it was a very strange time. But I, I did.

He wanted to give you more money. Well, I think there were, they were recognizing that they, the people that they had brought on, they wanted to, to retain and there were other options and other things going on. And so they didn't necessarily want you to do more work for the more money. No, it was just, it was just, It was just people that were doing, again, a halfway decent job. They wanted to make sure that they held onto. And yeah, so I worked.

And when I was in Austin, I kind of, so my life was, I loved working in software. And I had good friends. But I basically started to realize at some point that I loved academia. I really loved academia. And the whole making money thing was good, but I recognized the emptiness of being driven entirely

by that. And especially, there's something about computer science in the business world looks very different than computer science in the academic world. There's something about computer science in the business world looks very different than computer science in the academic world. There's something more pure and true about it in academia, whereas in the business world, it's like the bottom line is money.

And so while I was wrestling with that, I also just bought in completely into a party lifestyle. And so it was just working super hard and then partying. And it was going back and forth between those two things. And I reached a point where I think I was just very, I kind of recognized this emptiness in kind of my clearer moments. I recognized the great emptiness within myself and recognized that, you know, I was just, I was living a life very far from where I should be, but

I also was just kind of caught up in it and just really enjoyed living that way. And so, so I did that for a few years while I was in Texas, just this kind of work hard, party hard kind of thing. And if someone had said to you, do you believe in God? Oh, yeah, no, I didn't. At this point, I was so I actually a friend of mine who I actually met through partying, he ended up... He was someone who's very interesting who had had an encounter with the Lord, who had had a profound experience, who he would tell me, we would have conversations, and he would tell me that he knew that God was real. But at the same time, it was a little bit of a St. Augustine disposition of, okay,

Lord, I will follow you, but not quite yet, right? I'm kind of working towards these things. I know you're real. I know I need to give my life to you, but I'm not quite there yet. And so because of that, he was in a very particular situation where he was still partying. And so I encountered him through that. And but a very bright guy, very capable, and also very convicted that the Lord is real.

No question. Not just God in the generic sense, but Jesus Christ. He'd had an encounter with Jesus, yeah, and he knew. And so we would have conversations, and it was funny, because at first he would kind of try to talk to me, and I was just frankly just very annoyed by the whole thing, right? I'm thinking, why are we... We're running around doing various things, and it's like, why are we... You keep bringing up this God thing. And so for a while, I really tried to argue against everything that he was telling me. But I looked at him as someone who...

I knew him well enough. He's one of my dear friends. I knew him well enough to know that he's a very bright guy who was authentic and honest. I knew he wasn't lying, I knew he wasn't crazy, but I also knew that I disagreed with the fact of his conclusion that God is real, that the Lord is real. And I couldn't reconcile those things, but I kind of just for a while just let them kind of sit to just live in that tension. And so he ended up... We just had these conversations over the course of a few months, and until kind of one day, everything changed. So I was in Austin, and I had reached the point where I think that... I had been really wrestling with a lot of the inauthenticity in myself, but I kind of didn't really... I didn't believe in God, I didn't believe

in the Christian, the kind of Christian message generally. And I was with a friend of mine actually in somewhere in Austin, and we encountered this kind of like really dark situation. There was this kind of a series of events that happened that made me realize, okay, up until this point I had been a materialist and just kind of thought that anything outside of what we can see, anything positive that is not material that you can't touch and see, it just doesn't exist, right? It's something that's kind of, that is made up in order to, for whatever purpose. And I had an encounter, which I encountered darkness that convinced me that that was not the case.

So are you able to go into that or would you rather not? I can mention it, sure. I wanna say a big thanks to the College of St. Joseph the Worker based in Steubenville, Ohio. You'll recognize many of their faculty and fellows from the show, people like Dr. Andrew Jones, Dr. Jacob Imam, Dr. Mark Barnes, Dr. Alex Plato. Listen to this, their program combines the rigor

of an elite bachelor's degree with the practicality of training in the skilled trades. And their tuition model is structured so that students graduate without crippling debt. If you're a bright young man thinking about what college to go to, apply to a place where you not only learn the good, but gain the power to do it. Apply to the college of St. Joseph the Worker. If you're a parent, look into this college for your children.

And if you're not in either category, just consider supporting the mission. Go to collegeofstjoseph.com slash mattfrad to learn more. That's collegeofstjoseph.com slash mattfrad to learn more. There will be a link below. Thanks. Yeah, I had, I, so we were going to this part of Austin called the Green Belt, which is this kind of, it's a little bit like what Central Park is to men,

to the New York City, which is this kind of oasis within the center of the city, just trees. There's a little river there and just kind of hills, just kind of a nice nature preserve in the middle of the city. And we were going there, a friend of mine, we were kind of chatting. It was on a Sunday.

And we went there and we parked the car. We crossed. There's this little kind of stream. We climbed up the side of this mountain and went up and we're sitting on top and we're just kind of talking about various things that were going on. And this guy who, again, I don't know, I don't know, first time I ever met this guy and I never saw him after this, but he came and was kind of walking around, and he came and sat down with us. And he just started talking to us about various things.

And at some point I started to realize, like, this guy's a little bit strange. You know, like, he was talking about these kind of powers that he had, and just these various, these abilities. And I remember looking at my friend like, okay this is... I know this is Austin, but this is weird for Austin. This is strange even for Austin, exactly. And he was rather earnest and he didn't seem like

he was crazy, but I remember thinking at some point, okay, like we gotta get out of here. And he was just, he was talking about all of these things and I remember thinking, there's no way that this is true. I don't know what's going on, but, and I think he could tell that about all of these things. And I remember thinking, there's no way that this is true. I don't know what's going on. And I think he could tell that we were a bit skeptical. And so at some point, he says to us, so we were, just to go back a little bit,

to get to where we were, we had crossed this little stream. And as we walked up this hill, it was kind of a wooded area, a thickly wooded area. And so where we were sitting on top of this hill, all you could see in front of us was woods. There was nothing besides just a thicket of woods. And all the way down, maybe a quarter mile away, was the, was this kind of stream. And so he tells us to, to kind of look into the distance and to kind of blur our vision, to allow our eyes to kind of, our vision to get kind of look into the distance and to kind of blur our vision, to allow our eyes to kind of, our vision to get kind of blurry.

And so we did. And then when our vision snapped back into focus, what I saw was as if, so the forest in front of us kind of, it was as if it kind of melted away. This is going to be very strange, I recognize, but this is what happened. As if the forest in front of us kind of melted away

and I was able to see, zoomed in, that stream down below. And I could see a family, like parents and kids playing down in the stream. When we had crossed, there had been no one down there at all. And so I remember thinking, and I could see it as if it was right in front of me. It was as if I could see far away right in front of me. And I, to say the least, I was completely terrified.

I was thinking, what is happening? I've never had an experience like this in my life. I didn't know what was going on. I looked at my friend and he had this look on his face, like what is happening? And so we both kind of just at this point were like, we need to get out of here. I don't know what's going on.

But there was a moment where I thought, oh no, like, is this guy gonna kill us? Like, I didn't know what was happening. I was really scared. I was really, really scared. I didn't know what was going on. And so I go with my friend. Was he seeing what you were seeing?

I don't know. I don't know exactly what he saw. But we were both, I mean, we looked at each other and we're both like, OK, let's go right now. So we run down the hill. And when we got to the bottom of the hill, where the through the woods, where the stream was, what I saw in front of me was this family that I had seen.

It wasn't like a hallucination. When we came, the family had not been there. Suddenly now the family that I saw in my vision at the top of the hill were right there in the stream. And it was like, well, how is this possible? How is it possible that I, so we get back in the car and we drive back to his house and the whole way there, it's just like, I'm trying to wrestle.

Again, as I mentioned before, I had been a materialist for the past several years. How is it possible within a materialist framework that I was able to experience what I just experienced? What kind of scenarios did you try to entertain? I was I drugged. I was. Yeah, I tried all of these everything, the whole spectrum, just thinking, okay, could it have been a hallucination? Well, I mean, how would I have possibly known that there was a family? I mean, there was nobody down there when we were there.

The same people that I saw, as if they were right in front of me suddenly there. And so I was, yeah, at this point, I remember, so we went back to his house and I'm sitting there and I'm just, my mind's doing back flips. Like, how can I reconcile this within my materialist framework? And suddenly it was like there was a moment of grace, right? Because I think the Lord gives authentic gifts to people. I realized this much later, but the Lord gives authentic

gifts to people and the enemy can twist some of these gifts. In other words, giving gifts that seem like a kind of, they're like a false copy of these gifts that the enemy gives. I'm thinking of pharaohs, stewards doing what Moses and Aaron did. Exactly, yeah. And so when the Lord gives a gift, the fruit is always, first of all, he gives the gifts to someone that can handle them, and for a particular purpose, and for the good of the kingdom, etc. But this was something totally different. I mean, my experience was just, I mean, it was a real experience of darkness. I can't really convey the feeling. How is it that you didn't talk to your friend about it? back to... I was so mortified, terrified, that I was just sitting there and I wasn't

talking to anyone about anything. And actually, when we went back to my friend's house, he ended up going somewhere else. I don't remember why. The person I ended up sitting with was the friend who had been talking to me about God. So, sorry, just to clarify, at this place in the green belt was not the friend who had been talking to me about God. So, sorry, just to clarify, at this place in the green belt was not the friend who had been talking to me about God. It was not him, it was a different friend. We went back, and so now when I was sitting there, my mind doing these kind of backflips, it was with the friend who had been talking to me about God. And I'm sitting there, and suddenly it was this moment of grace where the Lord was able to use this kind of rock bottom experience to kind of wake me from my slumber, if you will, that I suddenly saw where I had come to this

kind of point where kind of the interior disposition of my soul at this point. And just to say, from the exterior, probably most people in my life would have thought things were going pretty well, right? I had a tremendous job, great friends, you know, doing, making more money than I could spend, you know, kind of like in this seemingly great place. But from the inside, the experience on the inside, I knew that I was in actually a very dark place.

And so I turned to my friend, we're sitting on the couch, I turned to my friend and said, I want to go to church. And so this was probably the first time in my entire life that I actually had a desire to go to church. I didn't know why. I didn't know what I was expecting to have happen, but I just knew whatever was going on that I needed to go to church. And my friend, so this is the friend who, he didn't know what had happened, right?

So we're at this, he hadn't been there. So he looks at me and he says, now? He looks at his watch and he said, it's like four o'clock, like I don't know if there's any masses now or anything. So I said, I don't, I just, I'd want to go to church. I don't know why. I don't know what to find there, but I just want to go. So we drove to the nearest Catholic church, which was St. Louis Catholic Church in Austin. And we pull up and we look at the, there's a sign outside that says that the, there was a mass going on, but it was in Spanish. I don't speak a word of Spanish. And he said, are you sure you want to go inside? I said, yes,

please. And so, as I'm walking inside the door of the church, I'm experiencing this kind of like, this interior kind of disgust with the place that I had come to. But again, I don't know what I'm expecting. I know that I just want to walk inside. And so as I cross the threshold of the door, as I come in, I see in front of me all of these kids. Again, it was Spanish Mass, so kids running around everywhere. There's just lots of people, and it packed all the way

to the back. And I walk in and I just, I felt like a wave hit me. I don't know how else to describe it, but it was like a tangible experience of something hitting me. And I fell to my knees and started to weep. And I was just in the back of the church kneeling, just weeping and all, it must've been quite a sight for people to kind of see this happening. But I'm just kneeling there weeping, and my hands are folded, and I'm experiencing in my hands this kind of warm, peaceful vibration, like a...

That's just, yeah, a very... A tangible, peaceful vibration that kind of was just very comforting. And I didn't even know the whole... You would think that I would have known this, but the fact that Jesus of was just very comforting and I didn't even know the whole you would think that I would have known this but The fact that Jesus himself was in the tabernacle, you know, not very far from me The fact that I had walked into his house I didn't you know I had no idea that the real presence was not something that I somehow Through a few years of Catholic school that I ever and it sounds crazy. crazy, I know, but it was not something that I had recognized. And so I walked in, I fell down, I'm weeping,

and I was there for a few minutes, and then we get up and get back in the car and go back to his house, to my friend's house. Is he in the church with you while you're weeping? He was, he was, yeah. Is he just worried about you, wondering what's going on? He, no, I think he kind of recognized there was some, that the Lord was doing something. And on the car ride home, I just kept, I remember I was, I was alternating between laughing and crying because I just, I felt like there had been this tremendous weight lifted off of me. And, and my friend was just kind

of, again, he didn't know the full scope of what was going on, but he was just happy for me. And my friend was just kind of, again, he didn't know the full scope of what was going on, but he was just happy for me. He just knew that the Lord was doing something. And so we get back to his house, and that's when things went from amazing to... So this is the best day of my life, by the way, this entire, this evening to this day is the best day of my whole life. What happened was I sat down and I'm laughing and I'm telling my friend, how could I have not known? How did I miss this reality that God is real and how could I have... And so he goes and grabs a Bible and he brings it to me and he puts it in front of me. He opens it. I found out later, he opened it to a random passage and he just says,

I think you should read right here. And he points. And he doesn't even know who he's pointing at. He just opened it and I thought it had been a passage that he had been reading, but when we talked about it later, he said, I opened it and I just pointed. I had no idea what I was pointing to. We landed on Philippians 3, but all these things that I once considered worthwhile, I now consider worth less than nothing when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake But all these things that I once considered worthwhile I now consider worth less than nothing When compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things that I may know Him and the power of his resurrection. Yes, and I remember as I'm reading these words. It was just like

It's like what the power of his I remember I when I hit those words the power of His... I remember when I hit those words, the power of His resurrection, I stopped and I went back and I reread the passage again that I would know Him and the power of His resurrection. As I'm reading these words, that feeling in the church of this warm vibration in my hands came back, but so much more intensely, so much so that it was like... I felt like electricity started running through my hands and it started to kind of go up my arms and it was so intense that my hands kind of curled back in this kind of like, there was no fear, there was no, it was all a very,

again, a very peaceful experience, but also very intense. It was kind of both living simultaneously so that I remember at some point, the feeling was so intense, it was like I could hear it. It was like I could hear the vibration in my body. I don't know how else to describe it besides that. But as it was going through, this kind of feeling started, the electricity started coursing through my entire body. And I later realized that this kind of,

this feeling of electricity, like a current running through you is a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. I didn't realize, I had no idea up until this point. And so I had this experience of all of this happening. And there was a moment where I felt the Lord was giving me a choice, a clear choice. And the way that I would accept

this call that He was giving me was I would take my hands and just put them on the Bible. And so as all this is happening, sounds started to come out of my mouth. I started speaking in tongues. I didn't even know tongues was a thing. I had no idea. I'd never heard of tongues. I didn't know tongues. But I started all of these sounds start pouring out of my mouth and I take my hands and I put them on the Bible and at that point, well, so basically, when I did that, it was as if time and space, my perception of time and space completely changed. It was like I suddenly was, it was as if there was a veil that was removed from my eyes, and suddenly I could see what is always all around us, but that I could not, under normal circumstances, is hidden from our eyes.

So what I saw was the presence of the Holy Spirit all around me. When I later read the account in Acts of the Apostles about Pentecost and the apostles' tongues of fire come and rest upon them. When I later read that, I was like, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I experienced. It was like there were tongues of fire, but it wasn't fire. If I were to try to describe it in other words, I would say that it was maybe like a pink haze, but it wasn't pink and it wasn't a haze. It was, it was, there was, there was, the veil was drawn back and I could see the presence all around me. It was like the, this recognition that the infinite God is all around us at all times. I felt like I was engulfed in a sea of love, like I was being wrapped in a blanket

of love, like a tangible experience of love being wrapped around me. And when I later read the story of the prodigal son and the father wrapping this mantle of love around his son, that's what I experienced. And so I'm there and I'm seeing this and everything that I saw around me, like this kind of, again, tongues of fire, pink haze, all of it was infinite, as if, I don't know how else to describe it. It wasn't like very long or very far, it wasn't anything like that. It was actually infinite. It was as if I was peering into eternity, and I don't know how else to describe it. I've tried to describe it at different times, and I just, there are literally no words.

But during this whole experience, I was flooded with a joy that was unlike anything I've ever experienced, so much so that I felt like I was going to explode with joy. And I remember in that moment, I having an absolute conviction that there were angels in heaven rejoicing at that moment, even though an hour before that, I didn't believe in heaven, I didn't believe in angels, but suddenly I knew that there were angels in heaven rejoicing. And I saw the Lord gave me kind of a series of... When I later read about infused knowledge, of this kind of... This knowledge that comes from not from our own reasoning process but from a gift from the Holy Spirit that gives us this knowledge that comes

with a conviction it comes along with a conviction of its truth that again is not reasoned to but is given as a gift. So one of the things that was as clear as clear as day to me was that to back up a bit I had been accepted to and I was moving towards getting a PhD in artificial intelligence and computer science. And again, because I wanted to leave the business world and kind of move more into the academic realm. And the Lord showed me as clearly as I've ever known anything that I was not called to go and get a PhD in artificial intelligence. And I could see as clearly as anything how, so I actually saw an image of myself wearing something,

which is funny now, because at the time I didn't know what it meant, but wearing something very similar to a Franciscan habit and preaching. And I remember thinking, okay, and I'm just, I'm, this is all kind of happening one thing after another, and I'm just, I'm, I'm taking, this is all kind of happening one thing after another and one, one experience after another. One of the most beautiful things that I saw was I could see as if right in front of me,

my sins, the state of my soul, not through my own eyes, but the way the Lord, it was like, it was like an illumination of my conscience, right? Up until this point, I had been a relativist. So I would say that there was things that you might consider wrong, that, you know, maybe they're wrong for you, but for me, I could kind of come up with reasoning why this might be okay for me. Well, I could see for the first time in my life, as clearly as I've ever seen anything, how certain things that I had been doing were objectively wrong. And it was like, it was a little bit like what I think happens at our judgment when we come before the Lord,

because it's a moment of absolute peace. There's no fear, right? Because you're in the holy presence of God, you recognize His infinite love for you, but you also see yourself in the light of His revelation so that you can see, and there's no debate, there's no argument, there's no kind of like, well, yeah, exactly.

Well, let me explain. I mean, because in that moment, it was like I was completely at peace. I was filled with joy. And I knew in the depths of my being that I was a sinner. And I could see it as clearly as I've ever seen anything right in front of me. And it was like, and I could see it as clearly as I've ever seen anything right in front of me. And it was like, and I could see how particular things that I had done were objectively wrong

without any shadow of a doubt. And I remember it was, but again, there was no fear. I wasn't, I just, it was a, it was a profound revelation and acceptance of that reality. Something else that happened during this time, I picked up the phone and actually called my sister who had been praying for me for years. After the experience? In the midst of all of this. This whole thing lasted about 10 minutes maybe,

five to 10 minutes, but in the midst of it, there was a phone there. I grabbed it and I just dialed her number. And the stuff that I said to her over the phone as this is happening, she, because there had been no precursor to this, in her mind, she didn't know anything that had been going on. So in her mind, she thought I was actually

making fun of her, she thought I was mocking her, the stuff that I was saying. And so she responded kind of viscerally and very kind of negatively to what I was saying because she thought I was, and it's funny because you know siblings, when you have, siblings can get kind of under your skin more quickly than

anybody on the planet, right? One word and suddenly you're having a great day and you go to like... But what was beautiful was when I later read about Saint Paul saying that God's love is poured into our hearts and that our hearts filled, we love with the love that fills our hearts, that He pours into our hearts. It was like in that moment, I was so filled with the life of God that I was loving her not through... It was almost like God was loving her through me. And so she was, when she said these things to me that normally would have elicited a profoundly negative and kind of cutting response from me, all I could say to her was, I love you so much. All I could say to her was, I love you so much. And it was like I was experiencing how much the Lord loved her through me. And at that moment, based on how I responded, she just started weeping because of how convicting that was. Because, I mean, she knows me better than just about anybody

else. And she knows that that was not something that... That was not my response. That was the Lord loving her through me. And some other graces that the Lord gave in this experience was, I saw clearly how possessions, everything in the material realm is passing away, how this whole world will eventually pass away. Again, this is something I had never... This came as a direct... This was directly from the Lord. I could see how everything in this material realm is temporary and how anything lived apart from God really means nothing. How in the end, all these good things that he gives us are good in themselves, but if anything kind of... a life apart from God is empty and meaningless. And again, I just...

it was... I could just see it as if it was right in front of me. I had this profound desire to give away everything, to give away all my possessions, to give everything to the Lord, to give to the, sorry, everything to the poor and to follow Him. And yeah, there are a few more things. Oh, I had had, I'd been wrestling with an addiction to cigarettes for years. I had, I was smoking like a pack a day of cigarettes and I had tried to quit probably 50 times, maybe a hundred times. I would, I would quit and then within three days or a week I would start up again. After this experience, my desire for cigarettes completely went away, completely taken away.

It was like, I suddenly remember thinking, like, how could I have ever, how could that have been a desire of mine? Like how, it was just, it was completely, it was like the Lord just reached in and kind of took it. And so this was, this experience kind of reoriented, as you can imagine, the course of my entire life. And I remember going to my advisor in grad school shortly after, and I told him that I was dropping out, that I was leaving grad school. I'd had a full

fellowship and it was a seven-year PhD, and I loved it. I love computer science, I loved artificial intelligence. But I had the strong sense. Well, he said to me, if you ever decide to come back, we'll take you back, but you're going to lose your fellowship. And I was like, I hate to tell you, I'm not coming back. And he said, if you don't mind me asking, what are you going to do? Where are you going?

And I said, if you don't mind me asking, what are you going to do? Like, where are you going? And I said, I don't know. But, and again, this is, you know, second, this is University of Texas at Austin to a computer science professor. And he said, I said to him, I don't know, but I think I'm going to go study theology and I'm just going to follow Jesus. And he was like, all right, well, all the best. Why anyone would study theology is completely beyond me, but okay, and best of luck to you. And I left. Did you know Jay Budziszewski at the time? Was he teaching? No. He's a philosophy professor, convert from atheism, who teaches there. At UT Austin? Yeah. Oh yeah, no, I didn't. Yeah, I don't atheism who teaches there at UT Austin. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I didn't Yeah, I don't know if he was there at the time. Okay. Yeah, this would have been

2001. Wow. Yeah, my conversion was in 2000. Oh, wow. So I was praise God So what you the friend who had this experience with you by the thicket of woods of trees Have you not followed up with him? What happened to him? You know it's funny, he's um, so we, after this, I ended up on a kind of on my own journey. We still, I haven't talked to him in years unfortunately. You know he, I don't know, he kind of went a different direction. I think he had an experience, it's funny that you, now that you mention that, we never really talked about, I never really asked him what he experienced. I assumed it was something similar to what I experienced. The look on his face certainly indicated it was it was something in the same

realm. But, but no, we kind of we kind of lost touch. I went on my own journey after that. And yeah, so we never really unfortunately discussed it. If I see him, maybe he and I will have a longer conversation about it. Yeah. So what next? You walk out of the classroom or out of your... Well, so I left and I packed up all my stuff in a U-Haul. And I basically, you know, it's funny at this point, I called my dad, who was in Dubai.

My dad was working in Dubai at the time. And I called him before I left and I said, Dad, I just want to let you know I, so to back up for a second, when I got accepted to this program and got a full fellowship, it was one of the best days of my dad's life, because he recognized that I had been,

this is what I'd been working towards and I kind of had this tremendous opportunity and just he you know, just he was very proud of me and very happy for me. And so I called him and I said, Dad, I just wanna let you know that I dropped out of grad school, I'm packing up my things, and I'm moving back up north. And I didn't, I didn't, thankfully, he's, I think he might have had a heart attack. I didn't say anything about priesthood or... Because at the time, again, I didn't know anything about religious life at the time. So what I interpreted when I saw myself wearing something like this, I figured it was priesthood. I figured it was like some indication of being called to the priesthood.

And so my dad, all I said was, I'm gonna go study theology. And it was like dead silence on the other side of the line. And the next thing my dad says is, listen, I'm gonna get on a flight tomorrow, I'm gonna come and see you. Please don't do anything, don't make any decisions, like let me come, let's sit down and talk about it. Yeah. And I said, Dad, it's done. I already withdrew, my stuff's all packed. I'm moving and, you know, and so he was like, I mean, my poor father. He must have been, oh, I know he was. He was just completely, you know,

it was like everything that I'd been working towards, everything that he had been so happy was kind of ripped away. Because it doesn't sound like your personality was such that you would make rash loose cannon decisions. Absolutely not. I mean, you're a mathematician. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So this was, it wasn't just a here he goes again, was it?

No, no, absolutely not. I had, I mean, I, when it came to studies and school and career, you know, even, even amidst all the partying, it's like I was, and looking back, this was a very immature way to approach life, obviously, but I recognized that the first, my goals were in the academic and the business, you know, the kind of career realm, that I was going to do nothing to compromise those things. I was going to, I was driven, I was zealous, and I was going to succeed and do the best that I could. But then I was also gonna have as much fun as I could

on the side without compromising those things, right? And so it was never like a totally irresponsible, like let's throw it all away kind of thing. Like I knew what I was doing and I knew how to, it was kind of like, you know, the, what was the minimum amount of work I could put in to get the grades that I wanted? What was the minimum amount of work I could put in to excel at the job that I had while also having as much fun as I could possibly have? That was kind of where I was

at. Again, very immature. I was 21. But no, but there was nothing that I had ever done up to this point would indicate that I would do something like just leave grad school. Yes, your dad was flabbergasted. How many days after your experience were you, you know, packing a U-Haul? And then you're quitting packing a U-Haul, calling your dad. Is this within a month? No, no, because I did, I didn't know what else to do. At the time I kind of was like, well, you know, I saw that it would have been irresponsible of me to leave grad school until I knew that I,

like I knew what I was doing. And so, no, I kept on, but amazingly, the whole time after my conversion experience, and while I was in grad school, I was having daily migraines. I had never had a migraine in my whole life. But the whole time that I was in grad school after my conversion, I was having daily migraines

that would last most of the day. And I was taking actually prescription medication for them, and it wasn't really helping. And then as soon as I dropped out of grad school, the migraines completely went away, and I haven't had a migraine since then. So it was a span of a few months. Yeah, I want to get back to your story.

But it is interesting, too, just like Christians are sometimes accused of and sometimes commit the God of the gaps fallacy. There is a counterpart to that, like the materialism of the gaps where everything that doesn't fit can be made to fit through a sort of materialistic interpretation. And there's nothing that you can show a committed materialist who isn't open to the evidence to convince him of the supernatural. Even something like the stigmata can be explained of religious obsession that plays in physiologically. If someone were to hear a voice, maybe it's alien speakers that are invisible. There's just nothing that can be given at all. Yeah, yeah. This is the, unfortunately, some of the philosophers of the last few

hundred years have, I'm thinking specifically of David Hume, who has kind of, has, if I can use the word, infected our world with a sort of skepticism. A thousand percent. Right? Where suddenly it becomes, well, you know, and especially there's, there are various types of certitude that we can have about reality, right? Like there are, there are things like mathematical certitudes and metaphysical certitudes that are, you know, that have, have, that are certain at the highest level, but there are, and unfortunately Hume would basically say that anything other than a mathematical or metaphysical certitude

is not certain, right? It becomes, well, how sure are you? Or could it not be possible that, I mean, if I take this pen and I drop it, you know, oh, you say it's gravity, but are you certain that there's not an, as you said, an alien ship out there that actually has a tractor beam that's pushing your pen down? Are you certain about that?

And it's like, well, Hume would say, no, you can't be certain. And it's like, okay, so when you push certitude to a place where unless you're mathematically certain about something, you're not certain at all, that leads to all sorts of potential and irrational skepticism. You are singing from my sheet of music. I'm, there's nothing. And I'm almost at the opinion, you correct me if you think I'm wrong, that I'm not even sure that knowledge understood lately is even a helpful concept. I don't even know if it's possible

in the way it's currently defined as a justified true belief, given the Gettier experiments and things like that, if you're familiar with them. Yeah, I mean, if you were to press me right now on how I know my wife's name is Cameron, or how I know I was just in Australia, or how I know I'm in a studio right now, and you would oppress me hard at some, like, three questions deep, I might actually look stupid. Like, most of the things, every single thing we believe, we do not believe with a Cartesian certainty.

Right, no, exactly. It just seems more probable. Exactly. And this is why most people believe in God, which is why it's so unfair that when people are pressed on their belief in God, all of a sudden in this area of life, they need a Cartesian certainty that they're not expected to have for why they hold this political view

or why their parents are who they think they are, et cetera. Yeah, exactly. And so I think the Christian is hard done by because someone comes along and says, but are you sure? That emphasis on the sure seems to me a trick question. And I can say, yes. A trick emphasis. Yes, no, I, 100%.

I, you know, there's, during my conversion experience, I was, when I, the certitude that I was talking about, that I was being given, it's a supernatural certitude that I was talking about, that I was being given, it's a supernatural certitude that is not reason to, but at the moment there was a certitude, and I remember very clearly at that moment,

my certitude that God exists was as certain, more certain than that two plus two equals four. Like the certitude there, and actually what's remarkable is that, so I later later when I read St. Augustine had said that he wanted to be as certain about reality as that he was that seven plus three equals 10, right? He wanted that kind of certitude, which kind of leads to another part of my journey to try to reach greater certitude about what religion is mostly true. So that was

a whole journey that maybe we can get into. But just to say that that type of supernatural certitude that is given from on high that has no potential for any kind of wiggle room for argument or anything, that type of certitude, we don't have that on a daily basis for just about anything. No, anything. I would say anything. You think of anything?

I can't think of anything. Yeah, I mean, I saw it again. Maybe the past was created five minutes ago with the appearance of age. And the problem is, again, you can always, there's no kind of doubt or skepticism that a person who's intelligent enough cannot kind of manufacture to kind of inject into a particular situation.

But at some point it becomes, and this is why, by the way, something like, how can people deny, there are people that deny that the Holocaust ever happened. And so the problem is that, by the way, something like, how can people deny, there are people that deny that the Holocaust ever happened, right? And so the problem is that they say, look, when you look at these pieces of evidence, you look at this evidence, you look at this evidence, you can cast doubt on this or on this or on this,

but what happens is when you look at the whole picture, there's a convergence of evidence that happens. When you look at the whole picture, at some point, as you accumulate evidence, it's like, okay, okay, there's more and more credibility here, right? And at some point, as you accumulate evidence, it's like, OK, OK, there's more and more credibility here, right? And at some point, it becomes more likely that it happened than that it didn't.

And then as the evidence continues to accumulate, if you come to a place where it's like, no, this absolutely happened, even though one piece of evidence or two pieces under determine the conclusion, all of the evidence together way over determines their conclusion, right? And this is how, in a court of law, this is how we approach legal cases. What's the evidence that this person did this thing?

Well, okay, so the evidence, this piece of evidence is not conclusive, but once you have enough evidence, a preponderance of evidence, you become more convinced. And eventually it's like, okay, I wasn't there, I didn't see it, but this person committed this crime. Yes.

And so we hold a standard that is so much higher for faith than we do in any other aspect of our life. Any, 100%. And back to Hume, his quote that the wise man proportions his belief to the strength of the evidence. I think that's exactly right. But it is wild that you've got Descartes who's

trying to rebuild epistemology from the shambles he now believed people were in. So he uses it, I think, as a way to arrive at truth, which he thinks he finds. Not long later, you've got Hume denying the self traditionally understood. So forget the Holocaust. You can get to a point where you doubt you exist,

traditionally understood, the bundle theory, right? Causation. And you're familiar with the term phenomenal conservatism. This seems to me to be the solution to Cartesian certainty, right? So Cartesian certainty would say, I mean, depends who's defining it and how, but one might say, I will not accept something is true unless it cannot be doubted. Phenomenal conservatism says, I'm within my epistemic rights to go and believe something that seems true to me, unless I'm given evidence against it. I love that. And that's just how we live. I love that. Yeah. Like I have evidence to think you are, I had no idea what you'd look like

this morning. I didn't, I've never seen a photo of you, we've never spoken before. You could be an imposter in a religious habit who has this manufactured story. But I don't have any evidence to go against what seems to be the case. And so I'm within my epistemic rights to go on believing it. And I would say even, so for me, the way that I've experienced it is I have a hunger for truth. And I'm willing to hear from anybody about anything.

And so we should never have a hunger for truth and I'm willing to hear from anybody about anything. And if I, so I'm never, we should never have a fear that some new information that we get will somehow lead me astray, right? Meaning that the truth of the Catholic faith, and this is a much bigger conversation, but it's something that if you want we can get into. The truth of the Catholic faith is not something we need to be afraid that there's going to be some new scientific discovery where suddenly it's like, oh, okay, well, based on that, suddenly, well, we can all go home, pack it in, because, you know, this is no longer true. The revelation that we have from God,

we shouldn't be afraid of engaging anyone on any particular thing, on any viewpoint or anything, right? So if I meet a convinced Muslim or a convinced Jew or convinced anybody, I have no problem saying, convince me to convert to whatever it is that you want. Because for me, it just, I don't want to run away from the possibility that, if I ever became convinced, and I know now that it couldn't happen, but if I ever became convinced say that Islam was the truth, I would convert. I have no desire to... There's no clutching to something because I prefer it or because... For me, it's entirely about the truth. Wow. Following the truth wherever it leads. My first love being math, for me,

math is... In a certain realm, math is truth. And the truth of God in Revelation, I don't... I never wanted to you know, I never wanted to be Catholic because I was raised that way. And this is kind of the intellectual journey that I went on was to try to understand what is it about reality? Like, can we know based on reality where the truth lies? And in our contemporary culture, which is totally pluralistic, which doubts entirely that you can have any firm grasp on the truth, the religious truth, certainly, that making a claim that one religion could have a fuller claim on the truth than any other one, to most, to many modern people, seems ridiculous, right? Seems that... And so there was a particular

grace the Lord gave me after my conversion, where because of my background in math, He allowed me to approach the quest for truth, religious truth, spiritual truth, with as much rigor and analysis and kind of as much of like an unwavering desire for truth as I would have in any other domain, the math or the sciences or anything. I believe you. I'm not sure if I'm like that. I would like to say I'm like that, because it sounds really objective and open-minded. I think if there was a faithful Muslim here who could convince me that he was right and I was wrong, well, convince is an interesting word, right?

Because it implies that my will is now turned towards his worldview. So let's just say if someone was to hit me with a barrage of arguments that I couldn't respond, I don't think I'd convert. And I hope, and I think it's just because I'm sure it has something to do with how biased I am. Like my whole world would be upended if I accepted Islam.

This is me looking at me critically, cynically. And that's really honest. Yeah, it's like, I don't know if I would, because that would ruin my marriage, it would ruin my life. I think I would. I think I would if I was convinced. I just don't know what that would take, and here's why.

I am not terribly intelligent. I'm not an idiot, but I'm not brilliant. And I think I would always, here's how I think I would, let me sum this up, sorry. Here's how I think I would always, here's how I think I would, let me sum this up, sorry. Here's how I think I would convert. If someone could convince me that Islam or Mormonism was true, and I'd be scared, right? And I think I would just not even engage it for a while.

And then if the questions bugged me such that my own worldview started to feel increasingly fragmented and contradictory. I would then seek the opinion of people smarter than me on my team as it were to help me refute those things. Yeah, I think, yeah, so and then I think either eventually I would go along with the Muslim or the Mormon or something. But my I guess my constant fear is and this is what's so difficult about living in the age of the internet, there's always somebody else who can refute that person's point, it seems to me.

Well, so thank you for your honesty. No, I mean it's a... I want you to respond to that, but I guess I just want to... I know I'm not speaking very clearly, and it's my hope that people are understanding me. So let me just sum it up. If I lived, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, how much easier to grow up in a country town where you've got the town atheist and the Baptist pastor and the Catholic, right? And you can decide between the three or something

and then you know. But now, how many of us could win an argument against chat GBT, for example? Maybe we could. But I think most of us, if our position went up against someone who knew more than us, and there's always someone who knows more than us, we would feel ourselves swamped.

And I think most people who feel swamped when their position makes sense to them are more likely to just turn away and busy themselves about something else. Absolutely. Yeah. So there's a lot that I want to say. to just turn away and busy themselves about something else? Absolutely. Yeah. So there's a lot that I want to say. So I think first of all, there is a, at the core of this, there is a conviction that God

is who He is, and it's impossible for God to contradict Himself. It's impossible for God to... It's impossible... So if different religions assert different things in the same way, right? And they contradict each other, it's impossible for both of them to be true, right? Maybe they're both wrong, but it's impossible for A to also be B, right, in the same way, in the same sense. So fundamentally, there needs to be a conviction that the truth, ultimately, that we can depend on the fact that there is truth and that we shouldn't be afraid. If there's a new argument that comes, I might not have the answer to it. So, full disclosure, there are many... It's a constant... The disposition

that we should have as Catholics is faith-seeking understanding, right? Faith being that once I become convinced of the truth of Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church as revealed by God, once I become convinced, I put my faith in Him and I seek to understand, but just because I don't understand doesn't mean, oh, well then I need to go do something else, right? It's not this kind of erratic, kind of immediate... There's a stability, there needs to be a stability, but if there are questions that come, well then there can be a pursuit of understanding that follows upon that. And so, if I get challenged by someone and I get, you know, the emotional kind of turbulence that comes from that, okay, well, take a few deep breaths. I don't have the answer, but as you said,

let me try to find the answer, right? So, there can be... But I think what I was saying was that there's a conviction that the truth ultimately sets us free. And if God, if I ever had become convinced, because at this point I've thought enough about it and have researched enough that I'm entirely confident that there's no other place that I would ever go. I mean, I would, there's no argument that I could encounter at this point that I'm convinced would sway me to go somewhere else. But that's why I'm happy to hear anything because in the end, my experience of doing that is just kind of deepens and reinforces the faith that I already have in Jesus Christ. But you mentioned how if you were to convert,

it would upend your life. This is why, by the way, I'm so moved and edified by people whose whole families, whose whole world is in a particular faith. They encounter the truth of Jesus Christ, and then they wrestle with it for a time, and then they end up coming to a place where it's like, no, I need to convert. They lose friends, they lose family, people never speak to them again, and they do so to stand firm in the truth. They're willing to sacrifice all of these

other things at great cost to themselves, financial, relational. I mean, they've spent years building something and then suddenly it becomes, okay, but I need to follow the truth. And so it's especially... I mean, you talk about suffering and the good the Lord can bring out of suffering. I mean, there is a, whenever we follow the truth wherever it leads, the Lord always rewards that, right? He always brings about, in the end, maybe not today, maybe not next week, but in the end, when we suffer, when we follow the truth, and when we're willing to suffer for the truth, the Lord in the end will always be there to draw us closer to Himself through it.

And so, I don't think we need to be afraid of the truth. I don't think we need to worry. But this comes from a place where, for me, because of my desire, my hunger to know truth, I went on this journey after my conversion where I spent years kind of scouring the evidence, the evidence for, the supernatural evidence for, from not just the Catholics, but from all different religions. I wanted to look, there are all these different kind of avenues that you can take to kind of come to a place of understanding which religion, which revelation is most fully true. The way that I thought would be kind of quickest and easiest in a sense was to look at the supernatural experiences of people in all different religions and to see what were they experiencing, what was happening, and what does that, what does it mean, mean? What is the meaning of supernatural experience?

And so when I first started this after my conversion, when I first started looking at this, I really had no idea what I was going to find. I just thought, okay, I know my experience, my own conversion experience was, especially later when I looked at scripture, it was like, oh my gosh, the Holy Spirit, Eucharist, Jesus, you know, like all of these, the infused knowledge, St. Paul's letters talking about, you know, being taken up into the third heaven. I mean, all of these things were just kind of flying off the page at me. But during your experience, you weren't sure if this was specifically Christian. Oh, I hadn't, no. I mean, well, I- I mean, you went to a church.

Yes, I was in a, it was, No, I knew 100% that it was God, but again, I didn't know that the Eucharist was a thing. I had no idea. Oh, interesting. And so, actually, so later when I kind of reflected back on the experience, shortly after I wrote down everything, I mean, like a 10- page, just everything that I experienced, because I didn't want to forget, and so I wanted to hold on to all the details of it. So I kind of fleshed everything out, everything that I experienced from top to bottom. But then going back and looking at that and comparing it to what the Lord revealed through the scriptures, it's like, oh my gosh, the, you know, Pentecost and all of these things just started flying off the page at me.

So I knew my experience was that, but my authentic question at the beginning was, well, what about, I mean, aren't there Protestants that have experiences like this and Jews and Muslims, and if they have experiences, what do their experiences look like? And I had already begun to learn about people like Padre Pio and John of the Cross and Saint Francis, and it was like, okay, so I have, so I know these experiences that these people are having, they look very Catholic, but then what about other people in other faiths? Like, are they having mystical experiences? Are they, do the mystical experiences of a Hindu look like, you know, what you'd expect

for a Hindu, right? Are they having visions of Vishnu? Are they, you know, are they experiencing things in a way that is understandable in a Hindu framework? And so this was an honest question. And I didn't, does God reveal himself to Christians a certain way? And does he reveal himself to Muslims

and Jews a different way? Right, kind of like how the blessed mother reveals herself in different dress, different look to different people. So maybe these, so there kind of religious indifference is a little bit maybe? Yeah, that basically that would identify any religion, would say, well, it's all, it's all,

and they're all different paths up the same mountain. And so, you know, and so you kind of are able to fudge any kind of differences as like, well, you know, it's a watering down of truth, essentially, is what that would be. And so, and at the beginning, I did not know what I would find. And I thought, well, maybe if I find that all of these other people and other religions have these various experiences that are profoundly Hindu and profoundly Muslim, and okay, then maybe I'll evaluate things

from there and figure out where, you know, kind of where I should go. What I found... Yeah, I want to hear about this. Go slow. Talk about how you began this research, quote unquote, or I don't know how you did it, but... So I started to read about more and more experiences of... One of the beautiful things about our church is that the church spends so much time and effort analyzing the lives of saints, for the canonization process, that there's so much documentary evidence, there's so much, you know, the devil's advocate position, right,

where you basically, you know, we're going to assume from the get-go that this is, you know, false, essentially, right, until you can kind of... And so there's so much painstaking, kind of a critical look at the lives of these saints. And so there's a lot of information. There's eyewitness testimony, there's recorded documents, there's signed affidavits, there's all this stuff, right, in the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, other religions tend not to have the same level of to have the same level of systematic critical approach. But still, there's a lot that we can know by reading the testimony.

And so it's a little bit like in a court of law, right? When you establish a witness, you establish them based on their credibility, right? You look to see, do they have ulterior motives? Is there any other reason why they would be here except to try to be honest about the truth, right? You make them swear an oath, but also you ask, you know, are they, is this person an alcoholic? Like, are they, you know, is this person, you know, in bankruptcy and they're trying, like, you look at all the things, right?

And you try to establish, okay, they don't seem to have an ulterior motive, so they seem like a credible witness. And so when they say that they saw Bob doing this thing, you know, on this day, okay, we're not going to convict Bob because of that one piece of data, but okay, there's some kind of credibility there, right? And so what I started to look at with people in other religions who claim to have had experiences with God, supernatural experiences, I wanted to understand, first of all, let's try to find ones where people... It's very clear that they have some level of credibility, right? In other words, that there's no ulterior motive, they're not profiting from this, they're not getting famous from it, right? And so one of the really fascinating examples that I found were the Sufi mystics within Islam. These are people

who live very simple ascetical lives. They're typically poor. They live chased lives. They're living in ways that are very virtuous. They're devoted to prayer and they end up, some of them, end up having, you know, through a life of prayer and penance and growth, they end up having experiences with God that when you read their writings, they sound remarkably similar to, say, John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila. In other words, they're talking about this communion with God that they're experiencing. They're talking about the oneness they experienced with God or, you know, the divine

guest of my soul. Like, they're a very intimate, beautiful, kind of loving relationship with God. And what's remarkable is that the Sufi mystics writing about this in their experience, right, this is what they're actually experiencing. Well, this sort of an understanding of God is not permissible within Orthodox Islam, right? In other words, an understanding of God is not permissible within orthodox Islam. In other words, the understanding of God as a tender, loving presence that I can have a relationship with, that's not Islam's understanding of God. Islam understands God as a master, and we are servants. God is infinitely above us. We don't have a relationship with God. In other words, we serve God, we submit to God, but we don't have have a relationship with God, right? In other words, we serve God, we submit

to God, but we don't have an intimate relationship with God. That's incomprehensible within Orthodox Islam. And so, which by the way is why in the Muslim understanding of heaven, for us the beatific vision, we understand it as an immersion into the life of God and profound communion with each other, but also with God. This is the beatific vision. For a Muslim, heaven is nothing like that. Heaven is filled with natural goods. There's no communion with God. It's filled with natural goods that are in the life after. And so there's no kind of proportion between us and God where you could even have something like this, right? And so the Sufi mystics, when they started to write in this way of their actual

lived experience with God, they were persecuted from within orthodox Islam. They were persecuted because Muslim theologians say, you can't talk about God in this way, this is blasphemy. Because Muslim theologians say, you can't talk about God in this way, this is blasphemy. God is not a loving father. God is a distant master who we need to serve and be obedient to. And so these people ended up at great risk to themselves being like, well, listen, this is how I experienced God. God is this tender, loving presence that I experienced with it myself. And they talk about communion with God.

That communion with God is completely antithetical to a Muslim understanding of God. And so these Sufi mystics who have these authentic experiences sounding like, say, John of the Cross, some of them were even put to death for what they were saying. And so what you have then is, from a theoretical standpoint, you have the Muslim doctrine, their theology, which says this is how God is. But in the lived experience of these people who are experiencing God, it contradicts the teachings of Islam. Like Islam, the framework of Islam is not able to understand these experiences within

its own framework, whereas their experiences are totally comprehensible within a Catholic understanding. This is one example, but what I, so there's a lot more that can be said here, but to kind of give another example, well, let me just, let me back up a second and say, at some point in looking at these experiences, I realized it would be very important to come up with a sort of systematic categorization of various types of experiences. And so, when someone has an experience with God, what does the experience say about who God is? Right? And so, for example, if someone in prayer levitates, right, which has happened a lot in the Catholic tradition, which has happened, there have been other religions who claim to have

people levitate in prayer. If someone levitates, what does that say about God? Well, it seems that, at the very least, it's saying that there's some kind of a supernatural power that is kind of at work, right? It doesn't go so far as to talk about a personal God or even Jesus Christ or the saints or our lady or anything, but it's really just about kind of like there's a power at work here, right? And that is a person levitating could be understood within the framework of many different faiths. But if you take it further and you start to look at something like a communion with God, where people are experiencing God as a loving, tender

presence, then that becomes something that says a lot more about who God is. And so, as I mentioned before, if someone experiences God in this way, it contradicts any religion that does not understand God to be a tender, loving presence, or potentially a tender, loving presence in this way. Another level kind of further on is revelations of Christ, right? Whereas if when someone has a vision of our Lord or our Lady, an authentic vision of our Lord or our Lady, that is clearly understandable within a Christian framework, but within a Hindu or a Muslim or other frameworks, it's not. And so the question, one of the questions I had was, do you have, for example, Hindus

who are having visions, revelations from Vishnu, Krishna, Lord Chaitanya, et cetera, right? Like, are you having, and Or do you have, you know, are Muslims having visions of Muhammad, right? Like for example, or, you know, in some other way, are they seeing God in a way that is commensurate with Islam? It's a big question, right? And so I started to scour everything that I could find.

And what I ended up finding was that there were no, there was not a single credible, again, credible, because there were some instances where people saw things, but it was based on either sleep deprivation or drugs or some mental illness, schizophrenia. There was something at the root of it that was, that seemed to be the primary cause. And so, so in those instances, and it's really hard to know

because again, there's no systematic process of analysis of these claims, right? I mean, people can write claims about whatever they want and they can say whatever they want. Maybe they're lying, maybe they're after money, right? So I didn't find one in all of my research, I didn't find one credible, and I tried to be as objective as I could

in looking at these, not one credible instance where someone in another faith had an experience of the divine in a way that contradicted anything in a Catholic understanding of the world. Not one. I mean, there were some where, you know, again, for example, if a Hindu levitates, and again, reserving judgment, because I think many of them were, many of the ones that I looked

at I was incredibly skeptical about for various reasons. But even saying that maybe these are authentic, if that's the case, even then, that doesn't mean, okay, well, a Hindu levitates, that must mean that Hinduism is true, because again, it's at this basic level of all it's talking about is an impersonal power that could come from the Christian understanding of God or the Muslim understanding of God, right? But kind of the higher you go up this pyramid, till you reach the point where there are things that happen in reality, there are things like, for example, Eucharistic miracles, right? If you think about Eucharistic miracles, So there's been what, 50 or 100 Eucharistic miracles in history? If even one of them is true, What does a Eucharistic miracle say? You have this man, this priest, who prays over this piece of bread.

I mean, if you look, 30,000 foot view, you have this person who prays over this piece of bread and then because of that, it ends up bleeding, and it ends up turning into actual flesh, and it ends up, when you look at it under a microscope, it is actually, and there's been all these studies done, right, on the various Eucharistic miracles. There's, without going into the weeds and all of that, if one Eucharistic miracle is true, it confirms the doctrine of the priesthood, of the Eucharist, of apostolic succession, of Christ, of the church. All of these doctrines suddenly are in one Eucharistic miracle, right, based on the kind

of interconnectedness of the teachings of the church. All of these suddenly have evidence in support of them, right? Or as how does any other faith explain one Eucharistic miracle? Forget 70 or whatever, right? One Eucharistic, how does any other faith explain them? I mean, it's incomprehensible, right? So the evidence within the Catholic Church just says a lot more than the evidence of

any other faith. There's a lot more that, you know, the questions of like, well, what does it mean when a Muslim has these experiences or a Jew has experiences? And I think there are God, God does not withhold his gifts from anyone that seeks him with a sincere heart, right? And so he has when someone in their own tradition approaches Him, there are... We ourselves as Catholics, we are bound by the church and bound by the sacraments. God Himself is not bound by anything. God is not bound by... If a person

approaches Him with their whole heart, God can do whatever He wants with that person. with their whole heart, God can do whatever he wants with that person, right? So again, treading lightly and humbly and approaching this from a very kind of open standpoint, it's like, are there people in other traditions that have authentic experiences with God? I think we have to say yes. Do any of those experiences undermine the truth of the Catholic faith? In all of my research, I would say absolutely no. But the evidence within the Catholic Church, a tremendous amount of it, is incomprehensible

within the framework of any other religion. Right, so the miracles purported in other religions can be made to fit with the claims of Catholicism. Absolutely. But many of the miracles that are experienced in Catholicism are not commensurate, do not add support. That's really interesting. Exactly. And so it was this kind of, it was helpful for me to have these kind of different levels.

Yeah, that pyramid, I like that analogy, that helps, that image. Right? I like that analogy that helps that image. Right, so if you have, you know, and there are, I mean, there are what, 3000 or so purported apparitions of Our Lady, right? I mean, the church has only put its full stamp on about 15 of them, right? But there are lots of other ones that the church says, I don't know, right?

They're either non-constant or they're, right, the three different levels of, right? So there's lots of different, but again, if Our Lady appears, and again, when she appears, you can think of Fatima, right? The way that the miracles that happen that are experienced by thousands and thousands of people, the miracle of the sun I'm thinking of, the fact that Our Lady of Guadalupe,

that there were like 9 million people that converted shortly after that revelation or that apparition. Yeah, that the Tilma is still around today. And all of the studies that have been done there. Yeah, so again, these are things that if you look at them, if you try to look at them objectively and with an open heart, because again as you said earlier and someone who doesn't want to believe can always can always raise some minute unlikely potential objection that can allow them to kind of discredit something right you can do that forever but going back to the convergence of evidence right this is again why I kind of it kind of a similar approach. You know,

you look at someone like Padre Pio, who, who seems like this man in himself kind of brings together like all of them, the potential for the miraculous, right? That's wild, isn't it? Didn't he live during the time of the Beatles? He died in 1968, if I remember correctly. So he... He's levitating, he's bi-locating... Bi-locating the stigmata. What's amazing is Padre Pio's stigmata, there were, I think, 12 different doctors that examined him, and some of them were Catholics, faithful Catholics, some of them were atheists, some of them were hostile to him. They were out to disprove, they thought he was a fraud,

that he was a charlatan essentially. And they wanted to disprove his phenomena as a fraud. And so if you look at the studies and the reports of what they saw, what they did when they studied him, there are many details that varied from time to time, but the one thing, the one kind of thing that they all agreed on well one of the things they all agreed on all 12 Of them was that his wounds were so deep That when they examined him that they went through both the the epidermal layer and the dermal layer of his skin, right?

And so in other words, they weren't just kind of a superficial wound But that that they went deep enough that they penet just kind of a superficial wound, but that they went deep enough that they penetrated not just the surface layer, but the deeper layers as well. When that happens, and when a wound heals up, it always leaves scars. But Padre Pio, a week before his death, his wounds completely healed up after being open for 50 years, right? He had the stigmata for 50 years. His wounds that bled copiously, right? We have all these gloves of his that are soaked in blood because of his wounds that just were perpetually bleeding.

But yet a week before his death, the wounds completely healed up and his hands looked exactly like as if he had never had wounds, even though he had had these profoundly deep wounds for 50 years. Which, I mean, is impossible. It's miraculous, right? This is a miraculous healing of his hands. So you look at that and say even the doctors who were trying to undermine Padre Pio in their reporting,

they were saying like, yeah, there's no doubt. I mean, these wounds, some people, I mean, you can, there were, at certain times you could almost see through his hand the wounds were so deep, right? And so, all this to say, so someone like Padre Pio, he himself, is really strong evidence, right? But someone can say, well, okay, Padre Pio, maybe I can come up with all these reasons why, right? So, see, if you only had Padre Pio, you would say, okay, well, that's one data point, maybe that's not. But then you also have all of the other saints, you have Saint Joseph Cupertino levitating, right? You have 70 different witnesses, 70 different instances with signed affidavits from tons of other people who say they witnessed him levitating, right? Saint Joseph Cupertino, so you look at him and maybe you could say, okay, well,

maybe there's some... so you keep doing that over and over and over again with apparitions and Eucharistic miracles and and in the same as when we talk about the Holocaust historically the same as when we talk about within a court of law frankly the same way that most scientific theories are established. The theories established by this convergence of a variety of evidence in different domains that all kind of converge upon a truth, right? That at some point it becomes possible, then plausible, and eventually it becomes, okay, this is more certain than not, right? And so at some point, if you again look at the evidence within the Catholic faith with an open mind and heart, you see that God has given us such an enormous wealth of evidence. It's not

like, you know, he didn't leave us orphans, meaning like if we, if you have the eyes to see and you're willing to go look, he gave us so much evidence in support of the truth of who he is and who we are in his eyes, the truth of heaven, the truth of hell, the truth of purgatory, the truth of the saints and the Eucharist and all of the various elements of our Christian life, he gave so much evidence that again, as you said earlier, you know, you can always say, well, I don't want to believe it because of this. He's not going to force anyone to believe it, but if you look at it with an open mind and heart, it seems very clear.

And so for me, I came to a place where it was like, okay, there's nothing like this anywhere else in the world. And it became what I... There was a quote by Cardinal Newman, he said, "'You can neither worship, love, or trust in a merely probable God. You cannot worship, love, or trust a merely probable God.'" Meaning that if you think, well, you know, maybe God's real, it seems, I don't really know,

but maybe God's real. Can you really give your life to something that you think is possible or likely? So in other words, if we're willing to follow the truth where it leads, if we're willing to pray and ask the Lord to guide our steps, to shine the light, and I'm not saying that everybody needs to follow this path, right? Meaning like, the Lord works differently with different people. Some people, there's a much simpler kind of grasp on the faith, where they're able to... They've just never doubted it, they know that it's true, and the Lord confirms it for them in a way that is much simpler. And for them, they have no doubts and they know, and that's beautiful.

But the Lord works with each of us wherever we are, according to our dispositions, according to our needs, according to our sinfulness and our wounds. And so if someone is authentically seeking and they're willing to press into the truth and to pray and ask the Lord to guide them, there's nothing the Lord can't do to bring them to deeper and deeper faith in Him. I want to tell you about Hallow, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Halo.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com always quit. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. I use it, my family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music including my lo-fi. Hello has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine

and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. Hello.com.slash.mattfrad. The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com.slash.mattfrad. That might not look like the journey. I mean, the journey that I was on in this particular way was very kind of important for me because of the need to have the certitude of what evidence,

the authentic evidence means. And I had the time and the willingness to do this. But for many people, I think, the Lord works very differently and can bring them to a similar certitude through a different channel What was one of the most compelling evidences other than the ones you've spoken about Fatima Padre Pio Joseph Corpettino? Within the maybe Eucharistic miracles that you encounter you thought or that you now think we've got really good reason to think this is

True, even though it sounds very strange. Yeah Gosh, there's so much. Well, in terms of the other kind of... And maybe this is outside of your question, but let me know if it's not. In terms of the infallibility of the magisterium of the Catholic Church, maybe that's a slightly separate thing. Because that was also one of my huge questions, was basically what's the evidence that the magisterium of the Catholic Church is actually infallible? And by evidence, you're not talking about supernatural

at this point. No, I'm talking about historical evidence. So this was actually a big- Just, I don't wanna take you off topic, but I just wanna reiterate what you've been saying. Sure, sure, sure. I think it's excellence. So it's like the fact that we see Orthodox icons

maybe weeping or oozing oil, that there are healings. Again, all of it commensurate with the Catholic faith. Right, exactly. And you can go down that list and they'll become more vague as they go down. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I wonder, would there be a Orthodox miracle, let's say,

cause they're the closest to us in one sense, which is why I'm picking them. Could there be a miracle with an orthodoxy or Coptic Christianity that would in theory be evidence against Catholic faith? Do you think? Nothing that I found. I mean, there are within the Orthodox, there are apparitions of Our Lady that are approved within the Orthodox, one of the various Orthodox churches, the Coptic one for example, that the Catholic Church has not approved. Okay, okay. But even then, when you look at the nature of it,

there's nothing in the nature of that apparition that contradicts any church teaching. Right, okay. And so, yeah, I mean, there's, again, I reached a point where I had looked at so much that it was sort of like, I didn't need to look at 100% of all of the pieces of evidence in reality, right? You reach a point where it's like... That'll do.

Yeah. I mean, it just... But again, I'm willing to look at anything. I'm willing. If there's a new piece of evidence, great. But everything that I've seen, there's a symphony, there's a harmony of truth within the various doctrines within the faith and also within the evidence that the Lord has given us. So it's like, yeah, it's like you can see how the truth of God's revelation, God existed from

eternity, he creates the universe, and his truth is kind of like There's this there's a Bonaventure talks about the Semin of Verbi, right? In the in reality the kind of the seeds of the word that permeate all of reality And so, you know if however we ended up, you know How are humans the Genesis story of God taking the dust of the earth and blowing his? Spirit into us whether that happened in that way or whether that happened through a process of billions of years of evolution, right? However that happened, in the end, it's not this kind of random process that is unguided. It's a process that originated in the love that the Trinity has, and that is guided through the truth, beauty, and goodness that God has permeated in the universe in

which we live. Don't you think though, to get on a totally different topic, it would be more commensurate with the Catholic faith if we discovered that evolution, macroevolution was false? We don't have to go down this road too deeply if you haven't thought about it a great deal. But it seems to me that one of the reasons Christians want evolution to be false is that if it were, then that would seem to lend more support to the Christian faith. If it is, then it's difficult to explain, at least prima facie, why there's a great period of time where there's death and pain well before the fall of Adam. Yeah. Yeah, I would say that the... At least from my understanding, there are unguided evolution,

point blank, with no just kind of... If there's no God and it's only that God, the reality of kind of the complicated beings that we are, arose from a purely materialistic, unguided process. It seems like the possibility of all of these things coming together in a way where you don't have kind of a lot of these false starts, right? You have this kind of seemingly kind of continuous process by which we arise with these incredibly complicated systems within ourselves, right? Whether it's the eye or the digestive system or the various things within ourselves that

are each independently would do nothing for us, but they all kind of work in harmony, right? And they come together. It would seem like it would take much, much longer than the age of the universe for us to have come about. together, it would seem like it would take much, much longer than the age of the universe for us to have come about. There has to have been some kind of a guided process, meaning that it's not the truth of God, God's truth, the way that God, again, how God does it, how God did it, we have no idea, but that God has the capacity to, again, whether it's through the truth, beauty, and goodness in the world, or through some other way, God has the capacity to guide this process to bring about, again, like this scooping up of the dust could have been something that He did over the course of billions of years.

Could He have created us, you know, in a moment? Absolutely. That could have happened. I don't think at this point, I think that anyone who says they're certain about one way or the other, I think it doesn't seem like we can really say that. I have Stephen Maier coming on the show soon. Not sure if you're familiar with him, but I look forward to talking to him about that.

Yeah. Have you heard of Plantinga's argument against atheism based on naturalistic premises? I haven't, no. Okay, so I'm gonna butcher it, so apologies to everybody who knows more than me. But the idea is if naturalistic evolutionary theory is true, then every part of us has evolved solely

for propagation and survival, including our cognitive faculties. So our cognitive faculties do not exist primarily to attain truth, but they exist so that we can procreate and survive. And if that's true, then we have a sort of undercutter, defeater that would lead us to not trust our cognitive faculties, including when they tell us about atheism. Okay. Oh, interesting. Yeah. He lays it out for a lot longer and a lot more sophisticated than that, but I think

it's interesting. No, that isn't. Yeah, no, it's the first time I've heard that. So in other words, if naturalism is true, then we have no good reason to be convinced of it. Okay. Interesting. Yeah.

No, I think we sometimes have to approach these things with a lot of, well, with a lot of humility, right? Meaning that there's a lot that we can know about our history and about, you know, science can tell us a lot about reality, but there's a tremendous amount that we're still... There's a lot... There's way more that we don't know than that we do. So not to kind of say, oh, well, we can't... But just to say that there is a... I think there can and should be, ultimately, a conviction that there will be no future discovery in the scientific realm that eviction that there will be no future discovery in the scientific realm that will say that will undermine the revelation of God, right? Because

All these things in the end. There's a symphony of there's a harmony in all the different truths, right? Yeah, 100 100. Um, yeah, yeah, it'd be like if someone I don't know called me right now and said that my wife had done such and such, you know, like like murdered the next-door neighbor or something or or I would know that she didn't do that, even if they had evidence, or I would say, okay, then she was drugged. And someone said, no, it was premeditated. She's been playing in this for months.

And no matter what evidence they would present to me, I would know it wasn't true. And they go, that's interesting. How can you dismiss evidence? Because I got better evidence. Yeah. I know who she is, actually. And I know her relationship with me and the children.

So whatever that is, it can't be this. It can't. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like that's kind of what you're saying. There should be this stable underlying belief, even in the face of questions, which this sounds like a cop-out.

It sounds like something Christians say to maybe get around not knowing how to answer certain tough questions. But we are finite creatures. And no matter what worldview one adopts, one has to live with unanswered questions. I remember, I don't know if you've heard of Jen Fullwiler, lovely woman. She was an atheist, converted to Catholicism., she was an atheist converted to Catholicism. But she was an atheist and she had her first child and she's looking at her first child going, I don't know how to explain, but I know this isn't just like a collection

of a bag of chemicals. And she had all of her kind of atheist objections to why she ought to feel maternally towards this creature, which was leading her to think that maybe this creature had intrinsic worth. She's like, I know it's false. That's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. There's um, I think once we discover that we are, that we have a Father in heaven who loves us, that who created the universe,

who created us out of love, who has adopted us into his family, who has, we've been, you know, through our baptism that we've been conformed to Christ, that we've been brought into the life of the Trinity, has adopted sons and daughters of God, that God loves us with a love that is incomprehensible and definitive, right? Once we recognize that, that He destines us for heaven, that He, you know, there are a million questions in life, there are always going to be questions. There will be, as questions arise, right, whether it's questions of reality or

questions of my own sinfulness, my own weakness, my own, the things that I don't understand within myself that are happening, right? There's like, there are these two kind of streams, one being that a conviction of that God, that I'm a beloved son or daughter of God the Father, and then this other kind of reality of like the ways that I fall short and all of my weaknesses and all of my questions and things. And we live in the tension between these two things, right? And so it's trying to understand how can I live these two realities at once? And I think a lot of many of the ways in which anxiety and things that arise in people very often

that where they're, they kind of experience this kind of dissonance within themselves is because the reality of their sinfulness or their weakness or their unanswered questions all of that that reality Ends up becoming the primary reality in their life and in their heart and it and it and it can almost drown out Right. It's not couched in the reality of a loving father who knows all things exactly. They're good. Exactly You're saying exactly So I think all of that if we if you if when, if when you know that you are loved, when you know

that you are definitively loved, that you are, you know, the comfort and the, the, the stability and the, the, the context, the context of relationship from which living from that place, everything else becomes contextualized within that. Right. I mean, I'm sure you could think of your own children, right? If you, you know, if, oh my gosh, great analogy. Yeah. Like if one of them was to suddenly think that dad hates them or to think that they're gonna starve. Imagine if you had a child under circumstances

where you're in a world where food isn't scarce or something like that, like my child. If right now woke up every day and was so afraid they were gonna die of starvation, there's a reality you haven't encountered yet that you need to, namely, all is well and you can trust me. And yeah, so I mean, in that context, like how irrational is scrupulosity? Now we should, I think, and you can tell me what you think, but we need to distinguish scrupulosity, which we shouldn't have from a tender conscience, which we ought to have. Right? Absolutely. But this fear

that I'm committing evils when I'm not is not a cross we're being called to carry. Yeah. Yeah. It's something to be refuted and rejected in the name of Christ. Absolutely. Yeah. No. What do you think? No, 100%. I mean, when you know that you're loved, I mean, as you said, we need to... All of us are sinners. We need to accept the fact that we're sinners humbly and repent of our sins, work towards conversion, pray for conversion, do whatever we need in order to work with the Lord, to draw closer to Him. Absolutely. But to do so from a place of peace, knowing that it's within the context of a loving relationship, right?

It's like the son or daughter who, you know, the four-year-olds who kind of makes a mess of something, right, and their mom or dad walks in the room and they can see from their mom or dad's face that this is just a disaster, right? And maybe they're upset, maybe they're frustrated. And you can imagine the four-year-old gets up and says, Mom, I no longer deserve to be called your daughter.

I'm gonna get my stuff and I'm gonna go. And like picks up her stuff and starts walking out the door. And the mom is just, no, come to me, right? Like, it's, I love you, let's work on this together. Let's, you know, first of all, let me reaffirm that my love for you transcends everything else that you've done. Any disaster that can happen, anything,

no matter how bad it gets, my love for you is greater than all of these things, right? And so from the context of this love, let's together work on cleaning this mess, right? But it's the idea that I can sin so grievously that God will reject me, or this idea that, you know, I think parents... So obviously, parents aren't perfect, right? And there's a huge spectrum based on the fall, based on our sinfulness. But I think parents, the love of a parent for a child was intended by God to be the privileged place in this reality of where we can best see the unwavering, unconditional love that God has for each of us, right? The experience of being good,

of being loved, of being affirmed, of not being good because of what I've done, right? Because every three or four-year-old knows that, you know, mom and dad don't love them because of how productive they are, or how successful they are, or how, you know, qualified they are, right? It's entirely, it's an unmerited gift. The love that God has for them, that their parents have for them, is an unmerited gift, right? You love them because they are. And I think seeing our life of sin and our life of weakness and all of our questions in that context allows us to, yes, we need to labor and we need to repent and we need to work towards being more fully the sons and daughters of God that we are intended to be. However, doing so from a place of great confidence in His love and providence and mercy, and that we

are, as St. Josephine Bikita says, who I really love, despite all of the horrors that she went through, she can say, I'm definitively loved, and so no matter what happens to me, I know that I'm awaited by this love, and so my life is good. My life is good. I'm my there is whatever suffering and there's real suffering in this life. There's real difficulties and people people suffer a lot they suffer and there are many reasons to potentially be anxious But if you know that you're definitively loved, that God is with you, that He can transform your suffering, He can and does transform your suffering, to bring greater good out of it, if you know that, if you're convinced of that, then even the most difficult days can become moments of grace and moments where you can still say my life is good, right? In the grand scheme of things, the trajectory moving towards heaven,

the fact that we're moving towards heaven and that God will never, even when it seems like He's far away, that He'll never abandon me. That is the place from which we can say, all right, God, I'm so sorry that I did this. I'm so, like, I repent of my sins. I repent of these things that I've done.

But I also know know and I'm confident in the great love that you have for me. Amen. Preach. I'll share this with you, but only because you shared a supernatural experience you had. Mine wasn't supernatural, but it was close.

I was sitting on that couch a couple of nights ago and I was praying with the good John Eldredge, who wrote Wild at Heart. We were just praying and I had this strong sense of the Blessed Virgin Mary saying this to me, and it was so beautiful. I shared and texted it to myself so I wouldn't forget it. My sweet boy, things are far better than you think they are. And I think that's a message that we need to hear today. Beautiful. That despite everything, despite your own wretchedness, despite your own limitations, the horrors of the world,

all is well. And all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. Because the Father is love. He's not the enemy. There is an enemy. Yeah. It's just not Him. Yep.

And so it's sort of like in the natural sciences, right? Like we want to live in accord with reality. So it's good that we accept the fact that this mug is hard, and if I throw it against my face, it will hurt and act in accordance with that truth. But so too with the supernatural mysteries, eh? Amen. Amen. Yeah, that in whatever we're going through, that God... St. Thomas says that the reason that God allows suffering, it's one of his... Why does God allow suffering? Couldn't he just take it away? And he allows suffering because he's able and he can and does bring greater good out of our suffering than if we had never suffered. And so just to say, the reality of suffering is

tremendous and people do... Some people suffer horribly for a long time, but that staying close to the Lord in our sufferings, the Lord can and does bring about in this life or in the next greater good from our suffering. And you know, even if you have no way of understanding that in this life, I think this is another kind of argument against the problem of evil. It's a roundabout argument against it, which I think really is the only argument there is you could put within that sort of the argument from the hiddenness of God, which it seems to me is also a subset of that problem, but is, okay, if I've got reasons to think that God exists, and they're more compelling than the argument

from evil, especially given that evil and God don't contradict, I think based on, again, back to Plantinga, he had this response saying that God might have morally permissive reasons, or might have morally sufficient reasons for committing evil and so on. And that if that's even possible, not that it's probable, but that it's even possible it shows God and evil aren't contradictory.

Point is, if I have arguments for God, then I can go, well, I don't know. Like, I don't know why. Just like I don't know the evidence that my wife murdered my children or something in this horrible example that I decided to use because I hadn't thought it through ahead of time. Right, like, I don't know why I didn't think

of something else. They could have went to a theme park. They could be in Australia, but no, she murdered my children. That's gonna go great. Yeah, it's like I have evidence, and therefore, even though I don't understand this counter evidence, it's not enough

to overthrow the evidence I do have. Amen. Yeah, absolutely. It's approaching the evidence from a place of peace and stability, and not from a place of fear. But, you know, I mean, not nor from a place where I need to figure this out today, right? I mean, because there can be there, you know, it's not running away from it, but it's saying, okay, that's an interesting thing and I will consider it, but let's, you know, in due time, I'll talk to the people I need to to try to figure this out.

So I mean, we could be, we should do like five more episodes because I'm so enjoying talking to you and I don't want to rush at all, but how did you find the friars? How did you go, I'm going gonna be a priest with these guys. Wow, yeah, that was quite a journey as well. When I left grad school for computer science, I ended up going to Franciscan University of Steubenville to study theology. And while I was there, it was the first time I really...

I grew a lot in the practice of the Catholic faith and just kind of learned... I mean, it's an amazing place, as I know you know. Just a great place of growth. And so I met the friars there, but originally I didn't... So my original call was... Well, where I thought the Lord was calling me was actually to a different community. And I did an eight-day silent retreat, and the eight-day silent retreat was entirely geared towards discernment of vocation. I did it with a really holy priest, and it seemed through it that I felt the Lord calling me towards actually this hermit community in Omaha, Nebraska. And to make a long story short, I was about a month away from entering, and my spiritual

director at the time, a very holy diocesan priest in South Jersey in Camden Diocese was, oh man, this is, I don't, there's a lot here. Take you to him, I'd love to hear it. Okay. Do you know who Maria Esperanza is? I've heard of her. Okay, she's the visionary in've heard of her. Okay.

She's the visionary in Betania, Venezuela. She was one of Padre Pio's spiritual daughters. She's a woman who felt a call to religious life when she was very young. And she... I think it was St. John Bosco who came to her and told her not only that she was not called to be a religious, but that she was called to marriage and she would meet her husband in Italy at this particular place on this particular day

and he would be dressed like this and he would have... So... Wow. Discernment over, right? Yeah. And so she went to Italy and met her husband. I actually ended up meeting him. She's since passed away. Her husband?

Her husband, yeah. Maria, I think she passed in 2005, I believe. I met her husband a couple years after that. Anyway, I'm not sure if he's still alive. But my spiritual director was very dear friends with her family. They would come... When they'd come from Venezuela to the United States, they would stay with him in his parish and they had a house on Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore and he would often go stay with them. There's a lot there, but to keep things kind of simple. Maria was one of Padre Pio's spiritual daughters. There are all these amazing stories of her. He was calling to her amazing stories of her.

He was calling to her in one of her dreams and she went to San Giovanni Rotondo and she went up to one of the guards. This is like in Padre Pio's like heyday when there's thousands of people everywhere. She goes up to the one of the guards and says, I need to see Padre Pio. And he was like, you know, take a number lady. There's like, you know, thousands of people here. And she says, no, no, he's been calling me. And the guy's like, yeah, you and everybody else.

And then he sees her, and Padre Pio sees her from the back, from the front of the church, and he calls out to her, ah, my Esperanza. And he calls her, and she comes. So she had seen his picture on one of, somewhere in Italy, and was like, who is this? This is the person who's calling out to me. And people were like, that's Padre Pio.

You don't know Padre Pio, you know, anyway. So she became one of his spiritual daughters. She ended up having many of the same gifts as he did. So she had the stigmata, but they only were visible on Fridays and they would bleed from 3 p.m. They would start bleeding at 3 p.m. And all her kids, so she has like eight kids or something,

or seven kids, and all her kids know, there are these amazing stories of like, there'd be like a plumber over the house on like a Friday to work on something, and it was like 2.50, and the kids are all like, should we tell them? Like, should we? Because they knew in eight minutes,

their mom would start bleeding from her hands. So the kids, not a typical household, obviously. Anyway, so I never met Maria, but her, one of her daughters had similar gifts to her. She reading hearts. And so my spiritual director, when their family came to South Jersey to Jersey to spend a few days with him, he told me to come. They were having a prayer meeting and he asked me to go talk to her.

And this is when I was going to go to Omaha, Nebraska to join the community out there. So I go, I'm speaking to this woman who is the daughter of Maria Esperanza and her, I think her kids were there. There was like maybe 10, including Maria's husband, who was like 80 at this time. So again, he's probably deceased now. But so anyway, I'm talking, so I'm talking to her and she says, Oh, Father Maz mentioned that you're entering religious life, what community are you joining? And I told her the intercessions of the lamb. And she said, I've never heard of them. Who are they? And so I kind of described to them,

I described them to her briefly. And she said, oh, were they founded by this particular woman? And I said, yes, actually, that's her. And she said, oh, my mother met her. She's a very gifted woman, yes. And then she kind of pauses and she says, you have a Franciscan heart. And I'm like, excuse me? And she says, you

have a Franciscan heart. And I said, uh, maybe you didn't hear me, but I just, I'm gonna be a hermit in Omaha, Nebraska. And she says, don't worry, the Lord will be very clear with you. Okay. We talked a little bit more about different things and this was on a Thursday. And so the next morning I call my spiritual director and I say, I was praying with her, this is what she said. Is she saying that I should go join a Franciscan community? Like, what am I supposed to do? And very wisely, thankfully, he said, listen, don't make any changes. Continue on the path that the Lord has been calling you. I know her well enough to know that if she said, the Lord will be very clear with you, it means the Lord will be very clear with you.

I don't know what that means. I don't know when. I don't know how. You know, and me, I'm thinking, OK, well, if should I do this, should I do that? He said, just don't change. Don't make any changes. Just continue again, very wisely. So that night, Friday. So Thursday, I had prayed with her Friday, um, called my spiritual director that night. I got on a train from South Jersey to come up to New York city because I had friends who were all dear friends, but none of them are Catholic. They're all various things. Um, uh,

don't really believe in God. And I was coming to be with them, to tell them, explain to them that in a month I was going to move out to Omaha, Nebraska, to join this hermit community, the Intercessors of the Lamb, and to explain all of this to them. So as I'm on the train going up to Manhattan, I realize I typically, I'm always reading multiple books at the same time. And so I had the books that I had been reading over the last like few weeks and I'm, so I have them with me and I pull them out and in hindsight, this sounds kind of funny, but at the time it took me a while to process this. I'm looking and the three books that I had been reading that I brought with me were The

Life of St. Francis by St. Bonaventure, a biography of St. Padre Pio and a biography of St. Anthony of Padua. And again, I'm not always super, things sometimes take a while to kind of sink in for me. So I'm like, oh, that's funny. I wonder why I'm reading three different Franciscan biographies, right? So-

And I still haven't clicked. No, again, it seems ridiculous now. But I didn't put it together when she says, you have a Franciscan heart. I mean, I didn't. There was sort of like this part of me that wanted. There were this kind of like duality between kind of what my heart was doing

and what my mind was doing. So I go up and I spend the whole night telling my friends, explaining to them about this community. And I'm going to be an intercessor and what the deal, you know, all this stuff, right? The next morning, Saturday morning, so Thursday night I'm praying with her, the Lord will be very clear with you.

What does that mean? Friday, I'm up here, these Franciscan biographies, Saturday morning, I get a text message from my spiritual director. Go online, there's something going on with the intercessors. So I go online and I look. They had been suppressed the day before. Why? It's a bit of a complicated situation. It was nothing to do, there was nothing with the actual hermits themselves.

There had been kind of a board of directors that had kind of too much influence, that were kind of, there were people kind of all over the country, there were some things that were happening that, again, the men and women who were part of the... There was no internal scandal. No, there was nothing like that. No, it was merely a, the bishop was, had asked questions, and part of the board of directors unfortunately had pushed back and there were things that were really unfortunate that happened. And the bishop, looking back, yeah, it was very unfortunate because I experienced things through that community that were remarkable, miraculous. Part of their charism was that you would send them prayer intentions,

you would write them a letter about someone you were concerned about, and you would describe to them what was happening, and they would, as a group, come together and intercede, and they would get images and scriptures and etc., and they would send them back to you. Well, I sent them a letter for someone that I was very concerned for, and... Yeah. Go on. Sorry, I know this is super far field, but I do it. I, I, this, this woman who was a friend of mine had had so many moral issues from, you know, kind of promiscuity drugs, Wicca, like all the like, and the goes on, just to say, so there was all these various things.

I sent the letter to them, they responded back with kind of what their prayer had been, and they had prayed for her on a particular day, I forget what day it was. Well, and then I kind of just forgot, because I didn't live in the same city as this woman. I later saw someone else who, kind of a mutual, who knew both of us, and she said to me, hey, by the way, have you talked to this person recently? And I said no. And she said, well, you won't believe this, but when I was talking to her, she had given up, she decided she doesn't want to do drugs anymore. She decided that Wicca went somehow against God's law, that down the line,

there were all of these unbelievable transformations, and it was like, when did these things happen? And I went, and so it was like right around the time when they basically prayed for her. There was this kind of miraculous transformation in these things that, I mean, she had been living this way for years, right? So again, for what it's worth, and there were many other types of examples like this, of these kind of profound changes. So I saw a lot of fruit in their community.

There was this unfortunate situation, and so the community unfortunately was suppressed. So all this being said, when I later recounted to one of my friends, I didn't see this as the Lord being very clear with me, by the way, at the time. I later was recounting to one of my friends the story, and he said, oh, I guess the Lord was pretty clear with you, and that was pretty quick. And that's the moment when it hit me. Oh, okay. And that's the moment when it hit me. That was, isn't it? Yeah. So, but that really, that reoriented, but then I started to really pray with this, like, okay,

I saw beautiful things in this community, and I saw things that remain with me today in terms of intercessory prayer and things, but I thought, okay, what do I, you know, I need to press into this reality. Why am I reading the biographies of three Franciscans? I mean, of all the things that I can be doing, right? And I started to realize that there was a way, my heart, I tend to be very driven by my mind. And it takes a long time, very often, for me to be,

the journey from the head to the heart. And again, to keep things simple, I realized that in the end, the Lord authentically was calling me that the deepest sense of the call... So at this point, I had already discerned religious life and priesthood more generally, right through my time at Steubenville. And of course, my conversion experience, which initially I saw as a call to priesthood, I later realized like, oh, what I actually saw, priesthood, but also, you know, there was, it was, it was essentially not a Franciscan habit, but it was, it was a habit of some

sort. But it was more the, it was more the, the fact that when I went on this discernment retreat, the Lord was just very clear in my prayer about this call to be consecrated to Him, to give my life to Him in this way. And He just confirmed it in many different ways. But the discernment of which community, obviously took a little bit longer. And so the Franciscan call, once I became convinced of a Franciscan call, I just started visiting Franciscan communities and I visited a bunch of them.

And with my community, I think the thing that really struck me right from the beginning was just the great joy that I experienced in the brothers. I recognized right away that I just loved being with the brothers, that there was a real spirit of fraternity, of joy. I encountered men of prayer, men who were authentic, who were humble, who were striving for holiness, men who, you know, many of whom are tremendously gifted in many ways, but that are kind of... It's often very hidden from the beginning, that there's kind of a...

There's a humility and a giftedness, you know, again, whether in the academic world or in the music world or sports or craft, there's all these... There's this beautiful tension between a humility and a recognition of one's own poverty and also of just authentic giftedness from the Lord. And I've been really taken just, yeah, with the fraternal life of the brothers and the life of prayer. And so as I started to visit, it was like, it became pretty clear, like, this is what, this is where, this is home. This is where the Lord is calling me. The community is, there is a depth of prayer

and life and experience and apostolate, the work with the poor, all of it is just joyful and beautiful. And so it became pretty clear as I was praying with it over those years. And so I ended up entering in 2011. Did you, well, you would have got to meet Father Benedict Rochelle? I did. He actually, in our first year, he gave us classes. So, you know, for those at home, he's your founder since deceased. Tell us a story or two about him. Oh, man.

Wow. So he, towards the end of his life, Father Benedict, I never really got to meet the Father Benedict that the brothers who knew him from the beginning got to meet. I saw a couple of videos of him online of like, kind of more in his heyday, probably in the late 80s, early 90s. Just a forceful and charismatic preacher, just brilliant. I mean, if I can speak this way about him, I was just so impressed and moved with him

as a priest, as a friar, as a man, just really just a powerful witness. And he suffered a lot. I mean, a lot of his, the journey from, you know, the journey of kind of founding our community was a very painful one for him. And so, but the man that I met in 2011, he had already been in a serious car accident. He was towards the end of his life. He passed in 2014. And so his memory was already faded or fading.

And so, so just to say that I, he, it was great to be with him for a year, but he was not the same person that I saw, you know, this kind of dynamic, zealous, you know, force, I think, in religious life in the 80s that he was. So one of the beautiful things that I encountered with him, if I can tell a quick story about the, he was, the last couple of years of his life, he couldn't really take care of himself. And so, you know, for us, we want to rally, we rally around the brothers. When brothers are in difficult situations, when they need help, we first do as much as

we can to rally around them and to support them. And so, he did need some medical care and there were people caring for him in that way, but every day there would be brothers that would come to take care of him, to kind of be with him, to pray with him, to just be a presence with him. And so Father Benedict was, when I was a novice, And so Father Benedict was, when I was a novice, so I guess it was my second year as a friar, there were two of us that went to take care of him, to kind of spend the day with him. And so we were with him in his room, and he said, let's go visit my, so he has a sister who kind of had a nursery school or like some kind of a school for kids in the area. And so he said, let's go visit my sister. And so he had been to this place hundreds,

thousands of times. So we're in the car and we're driving towards there and towards the place. And suddenly he completely forgets where it is. He has no idea where it is. So we're driving around. This by the way, well, so we're driving around, we're looking for this place and we don't, he's, you know, and again, he's been here hundreds, hundreds if not thousands of times. So we're driving around and it's like, okay, well, I don't know where we're going.

He's like, pull into this place up here. And so we pull into this random restaurant and I parked the car and I'm walking from the car towards the restaurant to go inside and ask them, is this place, do you know of this place? Is there anything? Because we don't have phones, we don't have anything, right? So this is, so interestingly, this is an example of one of the amazing things not having the reliance

on technology can bring about. So I'm walking in. And as I'm walking in, a woman is walking out of the restaurant. We cross paths. And I just kind of smiled at her. She smiled at me. And so I went in. I asked the people, and all the people inside

are like, no idea what you're talking about. I'm like, there's this nursery school, or it's something with a, the name of the, and they're like, I don't even, sorry, man. We just work here. What do you expect with that information? We just work here, buddy. And nice dress, by the way, kind of thing.

And so as I'm walking out, I'm walking towards the car. And the woman that had been out there stopped. She was waiting for me. And so she's like, I'm so sorry to bother you, but are you a Franciscan? I said, yes. And she said, what Franciscan community are you with? And I said, I'm a Franciscan Fire with a Renewal, a CFR. And she said, oh, can I please talk

to you for a second? Can I please tell you? She said, my son is in this really difficult situation. She kind of described the situation. And I've been praying and asking the Lord to give me a sign that He's gonna get better. And so I've been asking if there's any way that I could... I've wanted to ask Father Benedict Groeschel if he would pray for my son. Is there any way that you can get a message to him? Like is there any way? And I said to her, well actually turn around and have a look in that car there. You can tell him yourself and she's like what do you mean? And I said he's sitting in that car right there and so she turns around and she looks at the car and she kind of slowly walks up to the car and I kind of hung back a little bit and she walks up,

he rolls down the window and they talked, she kind of poured out her heart to him and whatever they talked about. And then I get back in the car and I start driving away and I look in the rear view mirror and this woman, you could tell it was like a beautiful and necessary encounter for this woman. It was just remarkable.

And the moment we pull out of the parking lot, Father Benedict goes, oh, I know exactly where it is. Go over here. Go to the right. Go this way. And he immediately knew exactly. And we went directly there. And so it was just a very, for me, it was a very beautiful moment of seeing

how the Lord works in our weakness and our powerlessness. Where we are weak, there the Lord is able to be strong. He was able to do, you know, I reflect on the fact that had we had, you know, had we had a GPS or a phone, you know, it would have been... Less frustrating. GPS or a phone. Yeah. You know, it would have been... Less frustrating, but... Much less frustrating, but this kind of...

I mean, what led him to say turn into this parking lot? I mean, right? It was just a docility to the promptings of the Holy Spirit that allowed him to do that. And in his weakness, the Lord was able to touch this woman. And so it was just, again, even towards the end of his life, this would have been two years, a year and a half before his death, the Lord still working and still bringing about amazing things through this servant of his. Praise God. All right. You want to take some questions? Sure. Katie says, finding a spiritual director feels like finding a needle in a haystack.

It's something reserved for the Catholic celebrities. How can the little guy find a spiritual director when our priests are overworked and there aren't any religious nearby and our Catholic peers are all looking as well? That is a great question. You're a spiritual father to many, aren't you? I am. I do meet with a good number of people. Listen, first of all, let me just acknowledge that frustration. I've heard that frustration many, many times.

There are really good kind of schools for spiritual direction that where many priests are kind of beginning to go to, to kind of learn. Because I think, unfortunately, for what it's worth, there are... It's sad to say that there are many priests that don't feel competent to do spiritual direction, or they're just so overworked, they're just... They have so many, so many responsibilities. I especially feel for the guys in diocesan life who are... Who know, who just have a huge amount to do. So just to say, so first of all, just to acknowledge it, but secondarily to say that

there can be something where doing something, if you live in a place where there's no one who's able to meet with you, one thing that you can do is perhaps reach out to religious communities that are further away or priests that are further away and try to do something over Zoom, something like that, or just over the... Just kind of virtually. It's not ideal and you can't, for example, go to confession or things like that, but certainly at least having

a conversation. So reaching out, so people will call our community different friaries and will ask, is there anybody available to be a spiritual director? And many or most of our guys do spiritual direction, and so there's that. There is that possibility. And so just to say not to lose hope, but to first of all, pray and ask the Lord to bring the person because the first thing, if you pray and continue to ask to ask the Lord he will bring someone eventually but it might not look exactly like what you think. That's what I do I mean I have spiritual direction with Father Boniface tomorrow at well tomorrow the next day. Like I was gonna

tell you the time like that mattered to the story sorry like oh eight oh good I mean I'm gonna say nine. It's a great time for direction. Yeah, but I think, you know, if we continue in this relationship, I think what would be helpful is to continue to doing that because it's helpful over Zoom or whatever, but then maybe to make a trip up once a year or. Sure, absolutely.

Yeah, cool. All right. Marty asks, why does the heat of conversion settle down after a while of being Catholic? Is it a good thing that the excitement of conversion settles or is it a sign of complacency? Great question. Great question, yeah. The initial zeal of conversion is a gift from the Lord for a person to overcome maybe patterns of a former way of life, patterns or just whatever it is the person needs to

overcome, the Lord is very willing to provide an abundance of grace out of the gate in order to help the person to form habits, to develop dispositions, and to experience some of the joy of living a Christian life, a zealous Christian life. And that's beautiful, and it's a gift. And then at some point, the Lord pulls back some of that grace, and that too is a gift. Because I think there can be an illusion early on in a conversion that I'm making all of this tremendous progress, and of course there's progress, but there can be either a kind of very overinflated you know, kind of expression of progress, like you think you're making a lot more progress than

you actually have, and there can also be pride that can settle in, right? Like pride of like, look at all the great things that I'm doing, you know, look at how patient I've become, look at how you know, charitable I've become, look at all these things, right? And so I think what the Lord does is at some point, He begins to pull back some of the grace. It's almost like removing the training wheels to allow us to feel our own poverty, to allow us to realize that, okay, I need the Lord to be in this place with me. This isn't like a one-man show,, I'm gonna just muscle my way to heaven.

It's like, when you fall, when you have a fall, and you humbly recognize and repent and acknowledge your sin, you come back and take the Lord's hand in a way, in a new way, in a deeper way, with a further recognition of your need for Him. Because in the end, it's all about relationship. It's about relationship with Jesus and being faithful to Him.

And so when He pulls back that grace, He does so. And when we fall, if we fall and we recognize that, it's far better for us to humbly recognize our weakness than for us to have pride in our overinflated version of ourself. And so as we continue to soldier on and to try to continue to grow, there's this kind of tension between our own weakness

and the Lord's grace. And we kind of, of course there's growth and of course there's, but you know, but that first kind of fervor necessarily needs to die away. You know, it's, but not die away in the sense of like, it's like it's a bad thing. It becomes a more mature and kind of a more authentic version. You know, you, you can think of a married couple who've been together for 30, 40, 50 years, right? I mean, in on their first date, the kind of

the things that happen on your first date, or maybe even after a year of marriage, look very different than, you know, when you've been together for 30 or 40 years and you're sitting next to each other and you look in each other's eyes, it's like, it looks, there's a depth and a maturity and a beauty that was not possible 40 years ago, right? And so it looks different and but to say both of them are gifts, the initial zeal is a gift and the drawing back and the going deeper is also a gift. And so what can feel sometimes like backsliding is not necessarily at all backsliding.

It could be, but very often, even if you had overcome a pattern of sin and you hadn't sinned in a particular way for years, just because you fall into a sin does not mean that you're backsliding. It can be that the Lord is pulling back some of the grace and allowing you to take His hand one more time more deliberately. A question adjacent to this that people sometimes ask is, how can I be enthusiastic about my faith when it feels so dry?

Every time I try to pray, I mean, it's really great for you. You had that awesome experience. No wonder you're so convicted. So number one, I never have. So why? And number two, I don't even have any kind of comforting emotions when I pray. So how am I supposed to keep going? Great question. So first of all, there's a perennial temptation in the life of prayer, which is to evaluate our prayer based on our feelings. And it is something everybody falls into this. I fall into this all the time. When I have great feelings and I feel the Lord is close and things are, you know, I feel zealous, you know, that's good prayer, right? That's what you think.

And then when things are dry and you have no desire to pray, which happens to everybody, or when you're very distracted, you think, oh, well, I must be doing something wrong or this must not be good prayer. The truth is that God doesn't evaluate our prayer based on how we feel. God evaluates our prayer in a very different way. When we have these good feelings, these consolations, this kind of zeal, that's something that God is producing in us anyway. And so it's something that is not... it doesn't mean that we have good prayer. If we look at prayer as a relationship with the Lord, even when we're not feeling anything, when we're feeling dry or we don't want to pray, the act of will to actually go to prayer, or the act of will to, if you're distracted, you know, you should

be thinking about Jesus instead you're thinking about dinner, right? And the act of will to say, even though I'm not feeling anything, okay, Lord, I don't need this, I need You. So to continually turn your attention back to Him, when we do that, it's an act of love that is helping us to show to ourselves and to the Lord our fidelity and our love for Him. And so I would say, first of all, don't evaluate your prayer based on how you feel, Because some of the times when we feel the best, quote unquote, the Lord, that's a gift to us from the Lord. But that doesn't mean that it's the best kind of prayer. Sometimes the best prayer, in the same way

that loving your child, sometimes the best can be when they need to go to soccer practice, and the last thing in the world you want to do is take them to soccer practice. And so you get in the world you want to do is take them to soccer practice, right? And so you, but you get in the car and you say, I love you, and you, you know, and you take them there, and that might be a more authentic and greater sign of your love for them than throwing them a birthday party, right? So again, just be careful in evaluating your prayer, and the Lord will give glimpses and moments of greater consolation and greater kind of zeal, but in the end, those are just helps along the way, that in the end,

fidelity and seeking Him is really much more at the core of it. It's really helpful. Thank you. We have a lot of questions on vocation, but I really like this one. It's short to the point, and I think it's something everybody has dealt with. How can we deal with anxieties when discerning our vocation? And so by that, I mean, they might mean a number of things. I think one of them, and then if there are other strands to draw out, is what if I'm wrong? Like, how do I know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What if I make a mistake and choose the wrong one? Yeah, sure, absolutely. So there's something that I found very helpful. You know, there can be, especially I think in this day and age where we have everybody is bombarded with choices and ways that you can live your life and things you can do. And, you know, it's like there's an overabundance of paths that you can choose.

And so there can be this kind of sense of like, well, how can I commit to this one thing? You know, like, okay, say that you have a... You sense maybe that you have a call to religious life. Can I really discern making final vows in this religious community from... I mean, how can I... There's all these other things. So first of all, I think a really important thing that maybe doesn't get talked about enough. When you... If you discern that the Lord may be calling you towards religious life, in the initial stages of discernment, you are not discerning, is God calling me to make final vows in this community?

That's not what you're discerning. What you're discerning is, is God asking me to become apostolant in this community? It's one step. It's like, can I make a leap of faith? Can I feel the Lord drawing me in this way towards this community? Has He given me the light on this path where I don't need to have certitude, I don't need to have all it is, can I trust Him enough to take a step and to enter postulancy in this community? And when you do that, so what I would, again, my own recommendation is for the first, say, six months, don't discern anything, just live. Live the life that is before you. Commit to,

okay, I'm going to live this way for a year. If nothing else, I'm going to experience prayer, I'm going to experience sanctification, I'm going to experience some degree of suffering, but I'm going to experience good things within the context of this community. And I'm going to live this way. And at some point down the line, say, six months, I will reflect back on my experience. Lord, where have you been? What have you been doing in my heart during this time? And noting things as you're going through, keeping track of the good things, the bad things. What is my heart doing? Does this seem good? Where have the joys been? If you can keep track of these things and begin to pray with them at some point, your next question is not, Lord, should I make final vows with this community? It's, Lord,

are you calling me to become a novice with this community? The next step in formation, right? And so that way, it's much less anxiety ridden if you're able to give the Lord, to be able to take the next best step in the journey. Right. Yeah. It mustn't be easy because I'm sure everyone in your life doesn't see it that way. They're like, oh, he's becoming a priest. Exactly.

Like, no, I got nine years here. Yeah. I mean, I entered in 2011. I was ordained 2022. So, I mean, now our runway is a little bit longer than most, but still, just to say that... So first of all, there needs to be a conviction under all of it that the Lord Jesus wants good things for me in my life, right? And if He... I sometimes hear people say, well, what know, what if I get called to religious life and then I'm just miserable, right? People will say that. And it's like, okay, so first of all,

the Lord wants to bless you and to bring good things into your life. And if you're able to trust Him enough to take the next best step, whether that's the next best step in dating or the next best step towards religious life, you do what you can in discernment and then take a step. And we have guys that have joined us that have spent three or four years with us and then they discerned out.

Some of my classmates who now are married, have beautiful families, they have children and it's wonderful. And every time though, they look back and they say, the time that I lived in a religious life helped me to become a better husband and a better father Yeah, right. And so it's um, you know the formation and the it's never time that's wasted and so so just to say if you look at it from the standpoint of it originates from from Jesus Christ who loves us who's drawing us who wants to draw our hearts and draw our hearts and to offer us a path of fulfillment and joy in this life, and to take one step at a time, not to run ahead of grace.

You can't look at a fork in the road like five miles down the line. Should I make a left or a right at that fork? You don't have the perspective to understand that fork. By the time you get there, if you're walking with the Lord, the light shines on the next few steps of your path. So by the time you get there, by the time you get to final vows, it's like, okay, at every step, it was like, yes, the next good step is good. And so trusting the Lord at each juncture to continue to lead you and guide you in that way. That's such great advice. I don't think I've ever heard that. I guess I would have thought,

if I was in someone's shoes right now, going with that advice, I guess I'd have thought, if I was in someone's shoes right now going with that advice, I guess I'd feel bad kind of using your order to figure out what I'm doing, if that makes sense. I don't know if I'm like a burden to the order or how many men just come in, they get a bunch of formation and leave. Oh, yeah. Thanks a lot. We put all this money and time into it, and now you're out. Yeah. Well, listen, when someone calls us up, there's always a, we have wonderful men friars who are a part of the vocations team. And they will have lots of conversations and kind of walk with guys. And listen, it's, discernment is not a one-way street.

There's a two-way process. So the person seeking to enter as well as the vocations team. And there are lots of conversations and visits that come. So I guess what I'm trying to say is you don't need to have absolute certitude about the end game in order to enter a religious community. That doesn't need to, that's not the case. And it's not that you're using them for formation. It's that, listen, there are many guys, I mean, St. Teresa's father was a seminarian

and her mother was in a religious community, as I recall, right? And they're both canonized saints. Yeah, I think that's right. So it's not that, now listen, it's because the question is, some people the Lord gives absolute certitude. For some people, he does.

That's a very small percentage. For most people, it's like, I have a sense that the Lord is drawing me in this way. I'm not sure, but I think it seems good. It seems like I'm being drawn. Okay, so are you able to take a step in faith? And it's much less scary when you realize that there are lots of little steps in faith,

that it's not like you walk in the door, they throw a habit on you, you make final vows, and then you're done for the rest of your life. It's that you take a step in faith, there's lots of growth and conversation and prayer, and then you make another step in faith. And the Lord shows you over time, like, yes, this is actually a really good thing for you, right? This is not just so that you can serve the church, it's so that because this is for your own good as a human being created in the image and likeness of God. All right, final question. Lifting Disciples says, I have had a few years of research

and prayer to prepare for a conversion in the Catholic Church. However, my wife has only recently opened up to the possibility, currently attending both Mass and my family's church. Would it be wise to convert without her or wait for next Easter? It sounds like from the question, wait for next Easter? Hmm. It sounds like from the question, wait for next Easter

means that there's approximate conversion one way or the other is what it sounds like. That it's not, yeah. I mean, so it's hard without more information, I think, is that the nuance of a particular situation is difficult. What I would say is that you do have a responsibility, because I mean, if you're a single man and you feel called to convert, then praise God. But when you have a wife, and it sounds like potentially kids, I didn't catch that.

Yeah, he says family church, which led me to think that maybe he did. Yeah, I would hesitate to pronounce definitively, just because there are particularities of the situation that could potentially go either way, I think. And what I would say is, in the same way that communication and compromise are necessary for a successful marriage, this is not like, I'm going to run off and do this because Jesus wants me to and you better follow along. This is, you know, I would recommend to be intimately united with your wife at every step of the way and to share vulnerably from your hearts in order to have this be a journey that you can make together. And it doesn't mean you have to agree on

it on everything, but you need to honor the fact of this is the person that you are walking with for the rest of your life and to have an attentive and listening and vulnerable heart to receive her and to walk with her. And that may mean waiting, it may mean not. And it depends on, again, the particularities of the situation. Glory to Jesus Christ. Would you like to close us in a prayer? I feel, I think we are, there are people who are watching

who wanna give their life to Christ, and I just thought it would be beautiful if you could lead maybe them in a prayer. What do you think? Do you feel comfortable with that? Sure, absolutely, absolutely. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Good and gracious Father, we come before you as your children,

grateful for your love and your providence, for the many ways that you lead and guide us, for the ways that we're aware of, and even more Father, for the ways that we are totally unaware of. We thank you for your your Holy Spirit, for your Son Jesus, to whom we're being conformed more and more into his image and likeness. Lord, we ask you to shine the light in our darkness, to help us to have open minds and hearts to receive your call in our lives more profoundly, to help us to be docile, attentive, to be courageous in

following you in a world that offers so many competing options, or that you would help us to have the clarity we need, the conviction we need, the courage we need to follow your call, to be faithful, to be open to your grace. Lord, that you would continue to guide us along the way, that you would send your holy angels to guide us, that your son Jesus would be with us, especially in the Eucharist, Lord, that we would fall more and more deeply in love with his Eucharistic heart, and that our lady mother of the church would continually intercede for us along the journey. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Amen to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Amen. Praise God. Thank you, Father. Thank you so much. Good to be with you.