Categories
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.

Categories
Meditation

What Vigilance is Required of a Father

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning. A few days ago, I was reading Proverbs 31:10, and this is the passage about the valiant woman; we’ve all heard that passage before. But one of the commentaries from the Haydock commentary talked about how this is really speaking to all of us and our duties and life.

Cato said that the master is “first to rise and last to go to bed”. And I got to thinking about the extreme vigilance of those of us who have responsibilities for others, our need to be intentional about their lives just like we are about our own, whether it’s a spouse, children, employees, or even just colleagues and friends.

Those of us that have responsibilities- are we thinking about those who are in our care on a daily basis? Are we seeking out what their needs are, what their wants are, their hopes and fears? Are we trying to understand them? Are we planning for their greatest good to support them in the way that we are obliged to? Do we care for them and act in support of them the way our Lord would if He were here?

If you’re anything like me, you’re not doing a very good job at these things. But at least thinking about them a little bit more, starting to put into practice some things that would help us to get to that place- to that intentionality, that vigilance that’s necessary in our lives- that’s something I’m going to work on.

Categories
Meditation

Sampling Abandonment

TRANSCRIPT:

Good afternoon. I wanted to chat today about habits. Now, we focus a lot- as men and as businessmen- on forming the right habits because those then drive the outcomes. But sometimes even the outcomes themselves are not really the point. And when we’re talking about our relationship with Our Lord, sometimes habits can become mechanical; we do a certain thing at a certain time, we say certain words that a certain time. And all of that is right; we want to drive our body to conform to our spirit. But even those prayers- even those recollections, those examens- can become mechanical.

And of course, what Our Lord really wants from us is an interior conversion. So, how do we make sure that the interior conversion that Our Lord desires is really what’s happening by embracing these habits? Well, I haven’t figured out a way to do it for myself, but I have figured out that Our Lord has a built-in method in this world that we live in for helping to make sure that that happens, and that is suffering. He allows us to experience the suffering that perhaps we would never imagine for ourselves, whether it’s deprivation like a friend withdrawing their interest in us or a family member that hurts us or some humiliation that happens or a betrayal. 

And it’s not the suffering and the pain that Our Lord desires from this. It’s the opportunity for us to respond to that like He did; not by a doubling down on our own strength, not by relying on friends and family and comforts, but, rather, by completely abandoning ourselves to God and trusting in Him just like Our Lord did in His human person when He was going through his passion, right? There was no reliance on His human strength, His friends were gone, there was humiliation, there was unbearable pain, but it was His complete abandonment to trusting in the Father and doing his Father’s will that really set the example for us.

So, as we think about our sufferings, our humiliations, the little inconveniences of every day or the extraordinary things like the death of a child or a suicide of a close friend or the betrayal by a family member, and we experience that pain and suffering, remember that it’s Our Lord giving us the opportunity, permitting us, not so much punishing us, but permitting us to respond to that and prove to Him that the desire in our heart is not just to avoid suffering at all times, but to be conformed to His will. I hope this is helpful for you today. God bless you.

Categories
Meditation

It’s Not Suffering That’s the Problem

Categories
Meditation

The Most Favored Generation

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi there. A few days ago, the Gospel reading was Matthew 16. And as I went to meditate on it, I somehow- like in a dyslexic way- pulled up Matthew 13:16 instead of Matthew 16:13. And in that portion of the Gospel, Our Lord is saying “Blessed are the eyes that see, blessed are the ears that hear,” and He’s referring to the Apostles and the disciples of that time who were able to see the Messiah, to hear His words, to speak with God directly, and to have that experience.

And what was extraordinary about this, of course, was I was on the wrong page, but I was thinking, “The Old Testament prophets, they knew the Messiah only very dimly, very darkly. They really had no concept of the Triune God. They did not really know Jesus. And yet, they were so favored that we call them the ‘prophets’. And yet, in comparison even to the apostles, we have been favored by God in an extraordinary way where most of us, for the entirety of our lives, have had the sacraments on demand.

In my own parish here, we have confession available four days a week. We have adoration five days a week. There’s daily Mass. The pastor is more or less available constantly. So we literally have the ability to spend five days a week gazing on our Lord, to be in conversation with Him at adoration.

The Apostles only had him for three years, and then He was gone for the rest of their lives. Most of us- I’m 45- have lived the entirety of our lives having close, easy access to our Lord, and it just made me think of how blessed we are. And I’m ashamed to say that before this year, before the COVID lockdowns affected access to the sacraments, I’d never really thought about how grateful I should be for having that kind of access to God and with the clarity that we now have because of the development of the Church’s teaching and the refinement of our theology. I hope this has been helpful to you in some way. God bless you.

Categories
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.