Month: April 2020

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Meditation

Saint Stanislaus and Accountability

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning! Today is the feast of Saint Stanislaus. He was a very pious Polish bishop who oftentimes was confronting the king at the time who was a very cruel and tyrannical man. Saint Stanislaus was killed while he was offering Mass. The Tradition says that at the moment that he raised the host to consecrate it, the king struck him from behind, killed him, and then his soldiers chopped up the body and threw it out into a field. Quite the way to go.

So, this morning on our talk, we were working through this new questionnaire, digging a little bit deeper into what’s going on behind our lives, what’s contributing to the success or failure of what we’re trying to do with our lives. And I got to thinking that we are doing this to better prepare ourselves for God, not just to grow or improve in some measurable way, but actually to better prepare ourselves for that individual judgment, and none of us knows when or how that’s going to happen.

Saint Stanislaus died facing our Lord; actually in the middle of the highest act of his life. He was a very pious man, he did great works of charity and service to the poor, and so forth. He’s a saint, and so he was clearly prepared for that moment. He didn’t know how it was going to happen, when it was going to happen, but he was prepared.

These sheets that we work on- this little plan of life that we have that we check in every day or several times a day- Christopher is helping us to prepare ourselves for that individual judgment. So, if we were to go to sleep tonight and not wake up in the morning, how would our sheet look? How would the sheet of our life look when it’s time to be judged?

And so, in some way we’re getting a little insight. It’s like a little cheat sheet, if you will, for that final, end-of-life review of the sheet. How well did we do? What were our goals in life? Were we approaching God as we came to that moment in our life where our life is going to end? Or was our back to God, and maybe we were focused on something else?

So, I’m going to take kind of a different look at my sheet going forward and ask myself, “Does this sheet show today, and this last week, that I’m actually preparing myself to meet God? Have I turned away from the things of the world and turned myself towards God so that I’m ready to meet my Maker?”

That’s what I’m going to think about this week. I look forward to reviewing your videos.

Categories
Meditation

Going to Meet Our Lord

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey guys. I used to think I was pretty special for getting up at four o’clock in the morning once a week to join the calls with Christopher and the rest of the men in the Padre Pio group. I thought it was a great sign of my dedication.

And then this morning I heard a story about this guy who got up at two o’clock in the morning to do his holy hour and drove for six hours to go to Mass. This guy was so hungry to be with our Lord, he was so hungry to have that intimate connection with Our Lord that he was willing to get up at two o’clock in the morning and drive six hours to go to Mass in another state.

And if you think about that, it’s not just the getting up early and the sacrifice of sleep, but it’s the time in the car, it’s the travel, it’s the expense, it’s the unknowns that will happen along the way- the unknown of getting to a strange parish and maybe they won’t let you in, maybe the parking lot will be full, maybe they’ll run out of Communion. And yet this man took all of these risks on joyfully and without a thought for anything except for being there with our Lord.

Now, do we have that kind of passion? That devout recklessness in our hearts for the Lord to put everything else second and worry about nothing else but just coming into a meeting with the Lord?

I’ve got a lot of work to do. I hope this has been helpful for you. Think about divine, devout recklessness.

Categories
Meditation

If Today Was Your Last Day

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey guys, good morning. I was privileged to be on a call this morning with Christopher and the other gentleman in my group, and a great takeaway about living each day as if it was going to be our final day. This insight comes from this wonderful book, which many of you are familiar with, My Daily Bread.

There’s the notion that even though we might be young, we might think that we’ve got a long time to live, but we have no idea, and our life could end in an instant. And so, if we conducted ourselves in that way, what would we do with our time today?

If we went to bed tonight and we never woke up, would we be happy with how we spent those final twenty-four hours? What would those twenty-four hours look like if you knew that they were your final ones? How much time would you spend in prayer? How much penance would you do on that final day?

And that’s how we want to live our lives. And if you’re not living your life that way, then look and examine; use your chart, use your tracking to really identify what the gap is between what that ideal twenty-four hours would be and where you are right now. Because remember, our entire life is just made up of a series of days, and the days are made up of a series of snapshots of how we’re living. I hope this has been helpful to you.

Categories
Meditation

The Gift of Forgetfulness

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning, guys. I had a great call, and I wanted to share with you this insight that I got from the call that was really extraordinary.

So, one of the men on the call told this story of a guy who had a really interesting habit. He would frequently travel, and when he would go to the airport, he would leave his car in the parking lot, as many of us do. But, unlike many of us, he would be so engrossed in what was going on in his head and in his heart and what was on his soul that he would actually leave the car running and then presumably take the bus into the terminal and then make his flight and go about his day.

And it occurred to me that obviously, there could be only one thing that would be on his mind and in his heart that would be so engrossing that he would completely forget his surroundings; that he would leave his keys, that he would leave his car running.

Obviously, this was a man who was deeply in love with our Lord, who was meditating on the mysteries of our Lord and His Passion, and had so detached himself from his worldly surroundings that he didn’t even care about his keys, about leaving his car behind.He didn’t care that it might be a stolen, that it might run out of gas. None of that was on his mind because of the things that were so important to him.

And it occurs to me that all of us need to have this kind of attachment to God, that we literally have what some of the Saints have called ‘the gift of forgetfulness’. Now, I think they often talk about being forgetful when it comes to the injuries we’ve suffered from other people, whether it’s being called names, whether they’ve done things to hurt our reputation, or whatever.

But I think that there’s also something to be learned from this example; that if we go about our lives with the same forgetfulness that that man had, the same passion for following the will of our Lord, for serving others, for loving one another, and we let the things of the world just kind of pass us by, there might be little inconveniences along the way- there might be times where we have to call somebody to bring us a gallon of gas or jump start our car or bring us an extra set of keys whatever the case may be- but those are minor things compared to giving ourselves over completely to the will of God.

I hope this reflection has been helpful for you. Have a great day.

Categories
Meditation

Full Circle With Christ On Good Friday

TRANSCRIPT:

Happy Good Friday afternoon. I’m sure, like all of you, I’ve spent the afternoon involved with our liturgies and spiritual reading, looking at all of the meditations that we’ve got, all the information that we have to allow us to make this day special.

My insight today was really profound for me. You know, you read the same stuff over and over again every year, if you’re a cradle Catholic like I am, probably for forty years now. And so you’ve heard these stories, you see these things, but something really jumped out at me today that I wanted to share with you.

We all know how we got in this mess to begin with. It started in the Garden, and Adam and Eve were tempted by the devil, they violated God’s law, and they did so by taking something down off the tree and consuming it. And this was their path to death and the path to original sin for all of us.

How extraordinary it is, then, that God has deemed to bring about our salvation by taking Himself and putting Himself back up on the tree. Just like Adam and Eve took something off the tree and it was death, our Lord has put himself on the tree for our life. And of course, just like they were partaking of a forbidden fruit and they consumed it, our Lord has inverted that and made it good, and we partake of something- His body, His blood- which would normally be forbidden, right? But He has made it available voluntarily as a sacrifice, and we consume that.

So these are the remarkable parallels, these extraordinary echoes and rhymes that our Lord has given us, and also, it’s a complete circle. It’s a full satisfaction for the wrong that they did in a way that anybody can understand. Even a simpleton who would not get all the high theology could look at this parallel, look how it’s come full circle and made everything right.

It’s really extraordinary for me; I hope it’s beneficial for you to think about it that way, also. Take care.