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Tag: Meditation
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Married to the Daughter of the King
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, for my insight for this week I want to talk a little bit about the feast just yesterday on the Traditional Calendar: St. Elizabeth of Portugal. The readings for this feast were from Proverbs 31:10-31 and Matthew 13:44-52.
These readings talk about how the Gospel is this treasure we could never pay too high of a price for, right? If you found this treasure, you would sell everything you own and you would rush to buy it. Then you would preserve it, take care of it, safeguard it; you would be thinking about it all the time, and so forth.
This is what the Gospel and this is what salvation, redemption is all about. But on this particular feast, we’re also seeing that our wives are these pearls of great price. And it occurred to me thinking about St. Elizabeth of Portugal, a queen, that our wives are daughters of a king- the greatest King in the universe. I’m just the steward of my wife.
So in every thought and word and deed, how will my life reflect at my individual judgment in terms of my marriage?
If you married a daughter of a king, you would take that very seriously. You would recognize, esteem, and honor her position. But being married to the daughter of the greatest King, it’s a pretty extraordinary thing for me to think about from that perspective and to consider: Am I safeguarding her? Am I treating her, at all times, with the proper respect? Am I acting in a way towards her that at my individual judgment, when I’m held accountable for everything, I will be proud of myself and how I’ve conducted myself?
This is a standard I’ve not always lived by in my life, but it’s one that I’m now committed to, and I hope sharing this concept with you is helpful- in some way- in your marriage.
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How To Have A Successful Marriage
TRANSCRIPT:
My insight for this week: I’m celebrating 26 years of marriage this month, and I’m thinking back to before I was married. My dad who, at that time, had himself been married for about twenty-five years told me that if I always put my wife first in my life and she always put me first in her life, then we would get along well and we would have a good marriage.
And you know what? That’s true. The times when we’ve had trouble in our marriage has been when one or the other struggled with putting the other person first. Whether that was forgiveness that was necessary or patience or humility, it was always that challenge with self.
And of course, it gets back to the Golden Rule. If we treat other people in our lives the way we want to be treated in all circumstances- in good times and in bad, when we’re healthy, when we’re sick- things won’t be perfect, but you will survive and, even better, you’ll have the chance to grow.
So, my insight for this week is thinking about this simple but powerful statement shared with us by Our Lord and put into simpler, maybe practical words by my father about twenty-six years ago. I hope this has been helpful. Have a great day, and God bless you.
TRANSCRIPT:
In my insight for today that I wanted to share with you- talking about meditation. So, meditation can be difficult for all of us. Some days you’ll do great with meditation, other days, it just seems impossible with constant distractions coming in your mind. Some of those distractions may be worthwhile thoughts, but some of them are just mindless distractions.
So, here’s what I do. Here’s what I recommend: Have a piece of paper next to you when you’re doing meditation, maybe even a Google document, maybe your phone. And when those distractions come into your mind, immediately write them down or put them in that Google document. They might be worth coming back to later; maybe it’s a good idea for work, maybe it’s an inspiration- something you need to work on- maybe it’s a suggestion for your relationship with your spouse or children.
So, write it down, and then give your mind the permission to forget it and then return to the point of your meditation. And after the course of thirty minutes or an hour of meditation, you might have a dozen different things you’ve written down. But by putting those ideas on paper, you’re no longer trying to force a negative. You’re no longer trying to say to your mind: “Don’t think about this idea.” That’s impossible. You’ve made a note of it, and you’ve freed yourself to go back to meditation.
Now the other thing from this week’s call that we were talking about and I was thinking about was the difficulty of meditation for the beginner or the difficulty of extending your meditation. That first five minutes can be very difficult. How do you ever get to twenty minutes or an hour?
Well, the way I would recommend doing it is just focus on five or ten minutes. And if you get to that point and you’re just done, you can’t force your mind to meditate anymore- nothing’s coming to mind, it’s just all distraction- stop and go back to the material for your meditation. Maybe it’s a mystery of the Rosary, maybe it’s something from Scripture, maybe it’s the readings of that day- whatever the case may be. Go back to that source, read the next sentence, read the next paragraph, re-read what you’ve already read, and then start over again for another five minutes.
So, if your goal is meditation for twenty minutes, then maybe it’s four different five-minute meditations. That’s perfectly fine. So, that’s what I would recommend, and I hope that that’s been helpful for you. This is what I do in my own life. 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.
TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning gentlemen. My insight for this week has proved to be very troublesome for me and this is because I was reading the words of our Lord about how we must forgive one another basically in the way in which we hope to be forgiven. And of course, we’re supposed to love one another in the way that our Lord loves us.
And I realize that this means we must sacrifice for others, we must do penance for others, we must suffer and perhaps even die for other people, and not just the people that we love, not just the people who we get along with, that we enjoy, not just our family and friends, but even the people who hate us. We’re called to literally imitate Christ in this way. And the degree to which we love others is basically the degree to which we’re hoping that God would love us. And if we fail at that, what is the message that we’re sending to Christ?
So, this is my insight for the week, something that I’m going to be thinking about and applying to my own life, and I hope it’s helpful to you.
TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning, Jeff here with some insights for the week. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this holy hour and all the things that Christopher’s been sharing with us about mental prayer and spending that time every day- first thing in our day- showing God that we want to give Him those first minutes of our day, the very best that we can, before our minds are cluttered with everything else in the world.
And it occurred to me that this holy hour, this time of mental prayer that we do every day is really us opening up our souls to allow Christ to fill them with the fire of His divine love and grace. And whenever we stray away from that, if we take the day off for a so-called ‘vacation’ from our prayers and if we make it a habit of delaying our prayers or abandoning them all together, it’s kind of like when we stray away from the bonfire. You know, you’re at a great bonfire in the fall and it’s cold outside and you stay close to that fire to stay warm, and the further you get away, the colder you become. And to the extent that this analogy applies to our spiritual life, what we’re really talking about is that the more often we stray from that fire of mental prayer in the holy hour, the less we resemble the saint that God created us to be, the less of the divine life that He’s given us we have within us to the point where we get completely cold. We’re totally unrecognizable to God when we abandon these things.
I hope this analogy has proven fruitful to you. We need to think in terms of our prayer and our fasting being as important to us as our sleep is, as our food is; most of us probably never go a day without sleep or without food. We need to have that same approach to prayer. I hope this meditation has been helpful. This insight has been helpful to you. I look forward to your feedback.
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Know Your Enemy and When You Must Flee
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey gentlemen, Jeff here, and my insight for the week is this: Habits that we have acquired slowly and over a long period of time can be quickly lost if we abandon them. I thought about this when I was giving a talk to some fellow men about the problem of sexual temptation and lust and dealing with pornography and sexual sins. And one of the things that I told the men that I think is critical when dealing with this kind of temptation is just to flee from it immediately. As soon as that thought comes into your mind, as soon as that temptation, that illicit desire, pops up- as soon as you recognize it, that very instant- you have to flee from it.
And we have the example of the saints who have run outside and thrown themselves into the snow or the saints who ran and threw themselves into a great big bush of thorns as a way of combating the sins of the flesh. But after I gave this talk and I was reflecting on some of those principles, it occurred to me that we need to have the same kind of revulsion and the same kind of instant rejection of any temptation, whether it’s pride or laziness or a lack of charity or intemperance towards food or drink or greed (and greed doesn’t mean that we’re a billionaire trying to acquire more greed, it could be just the desire for anything that’s really not necessary for our state), or it can be jealousy or envy or anger.
So, whatever our prominent faults are, whatever those vices are that we struggle with, we really need to develop this instant revulsion so that as soon as we see that gossip pop up or we’re talking about someone and we don’t need to be- and the person we’re talking to has no legitimate need for that information- as soon as that happens, you need to flee from that. And so this is something I’ve been thinking about and trying to develop this sensitivity to it in my own life- this immediate revulsion for our vices.
I hope that sharing this with you has been helpful in some way, and I hope you have a great day.
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There Is No Accidental Greatness
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi gentlemen,
This morning we had a great call, and I wanted to share with you this insight that Christopher was so kind to share with us. It was the idea that greatness does not come by accident. It comes by intentionality, and oftentimes the repeated intentionality of making wise choices every day instead of the decisions that we could make that are possibly more attractive in that moment, whether it’s choosing not to have seconds at dinner because we need to lose weight, whether it’s choosing to do that holy hour first thing in the morning so that we give our first and best to God, or whether it’s treating our marriage with the same intentionality, planning, and commitment that we do our business life with scheduling, with preparation, and with sacrifice to achieve the goals.
I found that to be very profound- that making sure we are evaluating our investment in our personal relationships as much as we do perhaps business or personal development. I hope that this has been helpful for you, I know it has been for me to reorient my priorities.
God bless you.
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Saint Stanislaus and Accountability
TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning! Today is the feast of Saint Stanislaus. He was a very pious Polish bishop who oftentimes was confronting the king at the time who was a very cruel and tyrannical man. Saint Stanislaus was killed while he was offering Mass. The Tradition says that at the moment that he raised the host to consecrate it, the king struck him from behind, killed him, and then his soldiers chopped up the body and threw it out into a field. Quite the way to go.
So, this morning on our talk, we were working through this new questionnaire, digging a little bit deeper into what’s going on behind our lives, what’s contributing to the success or failure of what we’re trying to do with our lives. And I got to thinking that we are doing this to better prepare ourselves for God, not just to grow or improve in some measurable way, but actually to better prepare ourselves for that individual judgment, and none of us knows when or how that’s going to happen.
Saint Stanislaus died facing our Lord; actually in the middle of the highest act of his life. He was a very pious man, he did great works of charity and service to the poor, and so forth. He’s a saint, and so he was clearly prepared for that moment. He didn’t know how it was going to happen, when it was going to happen, but he was prepared.
These sheets that we work on- this little plan of life that we have that we check in every day or several times a day- Christopher is helping us to prepare ourselves for that individual judgment. So, if we were to go to sleep tonight and not wake up in the morning, how would our sheet look? How would the sheet of our life look when it’s time to be judged?
And so, in some way we’re getting a little insight. It’s like a little cheat sheet, if you will, for that final, end-of-life review of the sheet. How well did we do? What were our goals in life? Were we approaching God as we came to that moment in our life where our life is going to end? Or was our back to God, and maybe we were focused on something else?
So, I’m going to take kind of a different look at my sheet going forward and ask myself, “Does this sheet show today, and this last week, that I’m actually preparing myself to meet God? Have I turned away from the things of the world and turned myself towards God so that I’m ready to meet my Maker?”
That’s what I’m going to think about this week. I look forward to reviewing your videos.