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Tag: Grace
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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.
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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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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.
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It’s Not Suffering That’s the Problem
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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.
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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.
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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.
TRANSCRIPT:
Good afternoon. Today I want to chat about diabolical disorientation. Now, I first heard this term when I was very young, probably 30 years ago, and it was used by Sister Lúcia of Fátima fame and some of her writings.
I never really understood what ‘diabolical disorientation’ might mean until very recently. I was thinking about our world that we live in today in 2020 with the Wuhan virus, with the economic collapse, with the shutdowns that have affected everything from school to work to church, the situation of our Church with poor leadership and mass apostasy. Even now, churches are shut down, in some places communion is not available or people are even banned from kneeling. So there’s enormous suffering, confusion, and an overwhelming sense of fear in our world. It seems to me that this is diabolical disorientation.
So what do we do when we are disoriented? Well, I think the first thing we do is ask for help. We ask for help from someone near us, someone we trust. “Help me out, I’m disoriented.” And so in a spiritual sense, we’ve got to go to our guardian angels first, we’ve got to go to our patron saints, to Saint Joseph and, of course, to Our Lady and ask for help constantly throughout the day as we’re feeling the effects of this disorientation.
Secondly, when we’re disoriented, we flee to safety. We want to go back to some place that we are comfortable and we know is safe. We might need help getting back there. So in our spiritual life, what does this mean? We’ve got to flee from sin and temptation- even of the most minor kind- and we’ve got to get back to the basics of our prayer life and to fasting and those disciplines.
And the final thing, it seems to me- if we’re truly disoriented, if you’ve ever been sick, if you’ve ever been nauseous and you get dizzy and so forth, what do you do? You go find that favorite chair that you’re comfortable in, and you just want to sit still and just regain your senses. And it seems to me that in this time where we might be tempted all sorts of new and exotic things, especially if we’re trying to grow in our spiritual life, if we’re dealing with that anxiety and fear, we’re starting to feel that pressure, then maybe it’s just time to get really simple go back to our mental prayer. Perhaps even just meditate on the words of the Our Father one word at a time, like St. Therese did, and spend that time in that simplistic, quiet prayer, opening ourselves up to the grace and influence of our Lord. We’ve got a double down on the simple stuff during these difficult times, and let’s regain that piece of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in our souls and our lives so that we can be a good example to others.
Have a great day.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, gentlemen. My insight for this week is based on a meditation from the parable of the talents, and I know you’re all familiar with this. Our Lord describes a parable in which one man gets five talents and goes and invests them and doubles the money, and another man gets two talents and invests and doubles the money, and another man gets one talent and, out of fear, he buries it in the ground.
Now, there are a lot of layers, theologically, to this parable; you can ask Christopher, I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell you about them. But as I was meditating on this and I was thinking about how we will each be held to account for all of the graces and blessings that we’ve received from the Lord, it occurred to me that one of the ways in which we will be judged is how we have used our time. And just as every moment and every thought that we have will be judged and considered, every moment of our time that we have been given by God- it’s like the grain of sand that passes through the hourglass. That is an opportunity that our Lord has given us to repent of our sins, to develop a love for virtue, to spread the Gospel, to show mercy to others, to help others, to form our wives and our children and the people around us.
Every moment of our lives that is not spent in a good way that builds up the kingdom of God, that gets us closer to Heaven, is a moment we’ve wasted, and that’s a terrifying thought for me. So, my insight to share is a deeper commitment to look at every second, every minute of my life and asking myself: “Is this consistent with the mission that God has given me [given you] on this earth?” I hope this is helpful and conducive to your salvation.