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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been listening to Father Gallagher’s podcasts on the Examen- St. Ignatius’ approach to the evening examination of conscience. And in particular, Father Gallagher was talking about gratitude. I’m ashamed to say that sometimes it’s late at night, I’m doing my examen, and I prompt myself to think, “Well, what am I grateful to God for this day?” and I don’t necessarily always have that immediate answer right at the tip of my tongue.
So, what I’ve done is I’ve developed this approach to what I call ‘radical gratitude’ where I start to just list the basic material things that I enjoy: my lifestyle, indoor plumbing, hot water, electricity, heating and cooling, water that’s been treated that I know is not going to make me sick, and so on and so forth, right?
And as I’ve shared this with some men, I found that for some of them even that is as difficult. Maybe they’re just not living a life of gratitude. And so just thinking, “Wait a second, hot water? I mean, the Romans had that, right? Everybody enjoys that today, essentially, in the developed world.”
And so my response to that is to think about all the luxuries that you’ve enjoyed in your life that Our Lord never had: indoor plumbing, a mattress to sleep on, exotic foods from all over the world, pain medicine. Basic things. And hopefully this gap between the luxury of your own life and Our Lord’s will help to foster that sense of gratitude; at least, that’s the approach that I have taken in my personal life. And this begins to form the basis of a life of gratitude in just our material things that will allow us to become more grateful when it comes to the spiritual things and foster that lifestyle of gratitude. I hope this has been helpful to you.
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.