Month: November 2020

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Meditation

Go On Offense Against Self

TRANSCRIPT:

Something I’ve been thinking about is the need for us to develop a real horror for venial sin. Most of us have probably spent, at some point in our life, some time trying to fight a mortal sin. And then we get to the point where maybe that mortal sin is no longer a part of our lives, but these habitual venial sins that kind of eat away at us like termites might in your home. And so we really need to make sure that we’re waging a war against that habitual venial sin, the things that we’re just accustomed to confessing all the time. And maybe we don’t respond to them with the violence that we would a mortal sin, and we might even fall into a habit of just confessing them all the time. It’s like, “Oh I always do this,” right? Maybe it’s sins against charity or maybe it’s sins against temperance with food or drink or sloth or whatever the case might be.

And if we really love Our Lord and we want to imitate Him and be like Him, it’s not enough for us just to be on defense against these sins, right? Just trying to avoid sin. That’s a starting point, but it’s not really what we’re called to. After all, the greatest threat to our salvation is ourselves; it’s not the world, it’s not other people, it’s not Satan, it’s ourselves.

So we have to be on offense against ourselves. We have to recognize that that’s the greatest obstacle to our salvation. How do we do that? How do we go from being on defense against venial sins to being on offense against our self and our will and our pride? And the answer- the saints and the Church have given us the answer- is that we need to fast, we need to engage in acts of mortification, and we need to abstain from things. This is why traditionally the Church has taught abstinence on Wednesdays and Fridays, just to reinforce that war against our will and our desires. And of course, we need to do corporal and spiritual works of mercy because by serving others, by doing things for others, putting them first in our mind and in our hearts and in our practices, we are, of course, fighting that temptation in all of us to put ourselves at the center of everything. I hope that this has been helpful to you and will encourage you along the way.

Categories
Meditation

What Kind of Friend Was Our Lord?

TRANSCRIPT:

I’ve been thinking recently and meditating about the life of Our Lord and what He was like every moment, all of those hidden moments in His life. He was a son, He was a cousin, He was a worker- perhaps a stonemason or a contractor. And how he lived every moment as a young man in all of His roles, how He fulfilled His duties in life. And reflecting on that, trying to know Him better, to understand Him, to become more like Him.

I thought about what He would have been like as a friend, and He would have been the perfect friend, the most charitable, kind friend you could ever imagine. And that would have manifested itself in great ways, of course, but also in the simplest of ways. And I ask my guardian angel to help me to identify opportunities to do little acts of charity for the people in my life, principally my spouse and my children; not great big heroic acts of charity that would be noticed, but tiny, simple, little ways that I could grow in charity by doing an act of charity every day. And it was very profound. What I discovered was that throughout the day there were these tiny, little things that I could do that would be unnoticed, probably, but were acts of service for me.

For example, I have a narrow driveway, at one point, and my wife doesn’t like to back up her car up the driveway between the house and the fence. And so one morning, I realized she was preparing to leave, and I went out and got the car for her and backed it up. Now this is, you know, an almost embarrassingly small act of charity, but doing this kind of thing every day- putting something away for a person, picking up an item that you know they’re going to misplace or they’re going to go looking for, or some other small act of charity- helps to form our will and form our body and mind to be more like Christ. I hope this is helpful to you. God bless you.

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Meditation

Yes, Time Travel is Possible

TRANSCRIPT:

Fulton Sheen talked about how for God there are no multitudes, there is no crowd. There’s just you. There’s just me. And thinking about this, I thought that every moment of His life on earth, Our Lord was thinking about me. We know that God the Father in Heaven is omniscient, He’s thinking about us all the time. He knows our thoughts and every moment better than we know our own. He counts the hairs on our head, right? But God become man, Our Lord and Savior on Earth, was also in that divine union thinking about me every moment of His existence. And to the extent that we can give him human emotions, He was loving me, desiring the best for me, planning for me, and so forth.

And of course, that’s kind of an extraordinary thought. I mean, it’s mind-boggling for me even to think about that. That not just when He was dying on the cross, not just during His passion, but in those random unknown secret moments of His life, the 30 years that we don’t have a play-by-play for while He was learning to be a carpenter, while He was in the desert, while He was attending at his foster father’s bedside, He had me on His mind and was loving me. And of course, He has invited us- through this gift of mental prayer through meditation- to join Him in His life on Earth, to be a part of that life, to be there with Him like a best friend not just at the foot of the cross, not just on the way of the cross or in the garden, but in every moment of His life. And He has given us this gift of meditation so that we can join Him in that. We can cross the boundaries of time and space to be with Him, to be His best friend, to love Him, to listen to Him, to learn from Him, to hold His hand as if we were a child, and to spend time with Him in that way right now in this life.

And the extraordinary thing, of course, is that the whole point of creation is that He has created us solely so that we could spend eternity with Him and yet even in this interim journey on earth, He is giving us a means to spend time with Him right now. And that’s extraordinary to me, and it gives a character to our understanding of the Divinity that maybe has been a little bit out of our grasp before- certainly for me. I hope this is helpful.

Categories
Meditation

Your Guardian Angel or Your Guardian Demon?

TRANSCRIPT:

You know, I was thinking today about the war in Heaven and how that war continues to rage today for reasons we really can’t understand. God permits Lucifer’s rebellion to continue, mostly through us, and we were baptized into that war through our baptism, right? Our joining of the war- maybe on the word of our parents at our baptism, if we were children, or as adults. We became part of that army. And those of us that were confirmed are now adult, full members in that war, right?

We’re part of the army of God. And most of the time the war we’re fighting is against ourselves. Because of our diminished intellect and our dulled will, our biggest enemy usually is ourselves. So, we’re always fighting against that. And of course, our daily prayer and our fasting and our acts of charity and penance are part of the way we’re training for that battle, and it’s also part of the way that we are waging the war.

But we’re also at war with the world and all of those temptations that come to us through our engagement with other people, the things we consume with our eyes and our ears, and even the food that we take into our bodies, the drink and so forth. And then finally, we’re at war with the devil. And you know, there’s a tradition that just as our Lord has assigned to each of us a Guardian Angel, that Satan has assigned a demon to each of us. So that third of the Angelic hosts who fell from Heaven, they have an active role in our lives, right? They are there to oppose our Guardian Angel, to tempt us, and so forth.

And so when we look at the world and we look at this war and we realize that there really is a battle between good and evil- and we’re on, hopefully, the good side- it helps me to reflect on that kind of militaristic, warlike sort of thinking to remember that these things that were supposed to be doing every day, they’re not just desirable things, they’re not just good things we should be doing if we’re serious, they are actually the duties of a soldier. And to the extent that we fail at any given moment or any day, we’re actually derelict in our duty, and the one who suffers- principally- is us. God doesn’t really suffer when we fail to do what’s in our best interest, we do; and maybe our spouses, maybe our children, and those that we’re responsible to. And the Church Militant at large fails.

So, thinking about these things in this way helps me to have an urgency about them. It helps me to remember that it’s not just, “Oh, I want to be a saint one day.” We’re in a battle, and some battles are won and some battles are lost. Every day is a battle, and at the end of the day, the battle is concluded. Will we win the battle today? Will we have done our part in the overall war? Or will we have lost the battle and, in a sense, been a traitor? Something to think about.