TRANSCRIPT:
Boy, that was kind of embarrassing. So, like many of you all, I’ve been spending most of my time working from home lately, and I’ve got a pretty great setup in my basement. It’s kind of like a man cave, but it’s ‘Dad’s office’, right? And I keep it pretty dark down there because I do some filming occasionally, and I like to create a kind of an ambiance for creative thinking, and stays kind of cool in the basement. And I’ve got my primary computer that I do most of my business work on, and then I’ve got my laptop, which is off to the side, that I use when I need to be mobile and stuff. And occasionally when I’m doing my holy hours at home, I’ll even light a candle or two in my office there and sprinkle some holy water around.
Why am I telling you this? Well today, I left the office, and I took my laptop out with me, and I went to go see a friend and a client. And when I walked into his conference room- beautiful, brightly lit, and so forth- and I pulled my laptop out onto the table to set up for our conference, I realized that my laptop was filthy. Not just the outside that had dust and stuff that had accumulated over weeks and months, but as I opened it up, I was looking at it under these really harsh bright lights in the conference room.
The keyboard was dirty. I hadn’t cleaned the keyboard in forever, and you could see the keys that I use all the time with my fingers- they were kind of polished clean, and where I rest my hand is clean. But the rest of it was dirty with dust, accumulated dirt, there was a splotch of something- probably tea or something. But the screen was so dirty on this laptop that in the glare of the lights I couldn’t even see. I could just barely make out, behind all the filth on the screen, what was there.
I was standing there. It was so embarrassing. And then it hit me. I realized that this is like doing an examination of conscience for the first time in a long time or switching up your examination of conscience and trying a different technique or reading one of those old-style examinations of conscience that goes by the sacraments, that goes by the Commandments, and asks, “Have you done this?” or “Have you failed to do this?” And not being in that same routine that you’re accustomed to where you kind of think, “Oh yeah, maybe I committed this venial sin today,” but you’ve probably forgotten a lot of things. And I was standing there, and it was so embarrassing.
But in that moment, Our Lord and my Guardian Angel gave me this opportunity to just be reminded of why we have to measure things, why we have to be so vigorous in our self-examinations; because we get into our own little world that we’ve created around ourselves. In my case, it’s dark downstairs and it’s kind of cool and I don’t take the laptop out of there very often, I hadn’t seen it in a long time. I certainly hadn’t seen it with fresh eyes. It’s kind of like when you have sunglasses or glasses and if you’ve got them up close, you’re looking through them, you’re not looking at them. You can’t see how dirty the lenses are.
And that’s what happens to our souls. That’s what happens when people have a routine, and that’s great, but what if your routine needs to be changed up a little bit? What if the things you’re measuring aren’t all of the things you need to be measuring? What if the things you’re tracking and you’re so proud of aren’t all of the things that you need to be tracking in order to become a saint? That can be kind of embarrassing. That’s where I was today.