Month: September 2020

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Meditation

What’s In Your Chalice?

TRANSCRIPT:

Good afternoon, and happy feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.

This week I’ve been thinking about unity with the Divine Will, and we all know that that’s only really possible through detachment from things of this world. But it also means detachment from internal things. So, it’s not just material goods- my truck, my car, my house, my golf clubs, whatever. It’s also detachment from internal things. And that means our passions, the things that we love, we enjoy, but also our preferences, and that can manifest itself in many ways.

And I’ve also often thought about our spiritual life as sort of a chalice, right? We have been given this beautiful chalice by God: our soul. And it’s our job to keep it clean and to enlarge it through corporal works of mercy, spiritual works of mercy, prayer, fasting, penance, but also to keep it full of the grace that God bestows on us, because he’s pouring out more grace on us every moment of the day than we could ever imagine.

And so, we want to enlarge that chalice and we want it to be full. And when we sin, of course, it’s like we’re dumping everything out and we’re filling it up with muck. But it occurred to me this last week, thinking about detachment, that it’s not just a question about keeping it free of filth, but it’s also keeping it free of all sorts of other things. All of those attachments that we have to the things of this world, whether it’s a love for food or drink or things that are by themselves not sinful, but that we become attached to. It could be human respect, it could be getting our way, it could be having people treat us the way we always want to be treated. 

Whatever that attachment is, it’s like when you see those science experiments where they fill up a glass or vase with rocks, and then they fill it up with gravel, and then they fill it up with sand, and you keep putting more and more in, and then finally you’re able to pour a little bit of water into that chalice. But it’s a tiny amount of water compared to what it would be if it were just free of all of those external things.

So I’ve begun looking at myself and saying, “I want to get all those big rocks, all that little gravel, all of that sand that, yeah, I’ve crammed it in there, but I want to get it out so that there’s more room for the grace of God, so that I have more capacity to absorb what it is that He’s trying to send me.” 

Maybe you’ll laugh at this, maybe it’s a simplistic sort of thing, but it’s a visual that’s really helped me to understand the degree to which my attachment to things of this world- even my own preferences for things that are not necessarily evil- poses an obstacle in my relationship with God. Have a great day.

Categories
Meditation

What I Learned This Week From a Drug Lord

TRANSCRIPT:

Every week I reach out to other Catholic men on LinkedIn- men who are professionals, business owners, entrepreneurs- and we talk about life, faith, family, business, whatever’s on their mind. It’s just a kind of personal apostolate that I’ve done to get to know other men who are like me, who share things in common with me, who have a similar world view.

And this week I had an extraordinary phone call. The man I was talking to was a founding member of the Medellín Cartel in 1976. He, along with Pablo Escobar, made a million, two million dollars per month moving cocaine in the United States. And of course, eventually, he was caught and arrested, convicted, did 10 years in federal prison. He got out, returned to the same life, got caught all over again doing the same thing, and he got another five years in prison.

Imagine doing fifteen years in prison by the time you’re forty, and the only thing you’ve ever done and been successful at was being a drug kingpin. This guy got out of prison, turned his life around, went and got a master’s degree, then got a PhD from Loyola and devoted his life to prayer and evangelism. He wrote books, he did speaking, he was a best-selling author, he was an in-demand speaker; he built a business, raised six children, and returned to the Catholic faith.

And as he was telling me this story, I was just blown away not just at the depths of the sin, but at the degree of redemption and how far he had climbed out of that pit of sin. And you know, it got me to thinking about how God permits our sin because of free will. He permits it, but He also can use that, and we are to work through that sin to achieve an even greater good than otherwise we would have. And we can look at the Life of Saint Paul as an example of this. We can look at a life like that of the man I spoke to this week, Jorge, who had done so much so wrong for so long and yet had then grown through that to achieve even greater things.

So sometimes I think it’s helpful for us to get outside of ourselves. We spend so much time kind of navel-gazing everyday, thinking about ourselves, thinking about our interior life. Sometimes I think it’s helpful to step back and talk to other men and learn from them about their failures, how they’ve overcome things, and the things that they’ve gone on to achieve in their life, both in the material world as well as the spiritual. I hope this has been helpful to you. God bless you.

Categories
Meditation

Why Your Holy Hour Should Come First

TRANSCRIPT:

I have a great insight from this morning’s phone call with Men Living For Greatness, and Chris shared something that I thought was very simple but very profound. And I’ve experienced this myself, and I wanted to share with you. And that is that when we put our holy hour first in the day- the very first thing- and we have that sense, maybe, if you’re like me, that “I’ve got so many things to do, maybe I’ll push it to later in the day when it’s more convenient.”

But if we resist that temptation and we make that holy hour first, it’s an act of faith, right? It’s an act of trust that we’re making in God to give him the first moments of our day. And that act of faith that everything else in the rest of the day will fall into place and be taken care of is a great opportunity for us to learn and to grow and to enter into that area where maybe (in secular thought) we feel like is a risk, but it’s actually faith in God.

And if you’re the kind of business person who maybe thinks about ‘ROI’ like I do, I think you can also rationalize it. “Hey, if I give God the first moments of my day and I delay everything else and I trust in him, He’s probably going to take care of me and solve things that I couldn’t solve on my own.” 

I hope this has been helpful for you. I know it’s a simple thing, but it’s a meaningful thing. And it might be a way for us to help share with other men who have not yet made that commitment to a morning holy hour of why they should. Have a great day.

Categories
Meditation

The Cross and Your Greater Good

TRANSCRIPT:

So this last week I was struggling with insomnia as a result of having the coronavirus, having pneumonia and strep throat, all sorts of medication, and tons of supplements. And I asked for a lot of prayer, and that was ultimately successful, but something really extraordinary happened. Just yesterday I had a phone call with a man I’ve never met before. We were just networking; a Catholic guy from New York talking about life, faith, business, that sort of thing.

Towards the end of the call, he just mentioned offhand that he’d been really struggling with insomnia. And it was extraordinary for me to listen to him share how he had been suffering in the same way that I had just a few days ago. And he tried medicine and that it failed, he had even talked to a psychiatrist. He was kind of at his wits’ end about what to do with this going to bed, waking up in the middle of the night, and not being able to get back to sleep.

And so I shared with him what I had been doing to try and get something good out of this misery, this pain and suffering in the middle of the night. And you know how difficult it is if you’ve ever suffered that. It’s not just the difficulty of that experience overnight, but then the following day, you’re exhausted, you’re terrible, you’re short-tempered, maybe you’ve got a headache, it’s difficult to concentrate, all of those things. 

And so I shared with him that when you wake up at two in the morning and you can’t get back to sleep, don’t toss and turn in bed, don’t be frustrated. Just get out of bed immediately and pull up the readings for the Mass of that day- the Introit, the first reading, the Gospel reading- and use that time to practice your mental prayer; to meditate on whichever readings from Scripture really jump out at you and grab you, and practice your mental prayer for two minutes at a time, five minutes at a time, whatever it takes. And now you’re no longer just kind of wasting away, frustrated and angry and tired in the middle of night. Now you’re actually doing something good with that time. And like St. Therese, maybe the mental prayer will help you get back to sleep. Maybe not. But the point is that you’re actually doing something good with that time; you’re growing in the spiritual life, growing in your practice of the mental prayer.

And here’s the thing: I realized that that insomnia was a cross for me to bear, to give me the opportunity to face that challenge in the middle of the night. And I thought, “You know what? That’s good enough. God has given me this cross. I’ve embraced it. I can spend some time in the middle of the night praying.”

But the really profound thing came to me on that phone call, realizing that had I not been suffering in just the previous few days, I may not have had it top-of-mind to share with this man, who I’d never met before, who was struggling with insomnia. And now he’s realized that this is an opportunity for him to use that time to grow in mental prayer.

And I got to thinking that it was a wonderful, real life, practical example that the suffering we have He permits for our good not because He hates us, not because He wants to punish us, not because He wants us to suffer, but for our own good so that we can overcome that suffering and grow. And in this case, not just overcome the suffering and grow, but pass that along to somebody else who is suffering and who heard these words for the first time. He certainly would not have heard them from his physician or his psychiatrist. He heard it from another man, a sinner, but who he can learn from about embracing the cross and growing from it. I hope that this has been helpful to you in some way. God bless you.