https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NW7k5Z__baE
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Unfalling the Soul. I’m here with Father Eric. He’s been the Catholic representation on this little corner of the internet. We found out that submission has been a big part of his life. We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to start off with having a definition of submission. How would you define that? I guess what I’m thinking about is just placing your own desires and plans underneath some other purpose. Maybe another person’s purpose or maybe another organization’s purpose. Placing yourself underneath that and allowing the purpose that you’ve submitted yourself to become more important than, let’s say, exactly what I want to do according to my own desires. Is that a definition that somebody told you or is this something that revealed itself through participation? That is, I guess it just revealed itself through participation. I didn’t look at a dictionary and it’s not, I don’t know, I guess it’s just a word that nobody ever bothered to define for me. Yeah, I think a lot of people have trouble understanding with the submission. There’s this element of being beneath. Then that brings conflict because now you’re lesser and people don’t like that. I hope we can kind of set that straight, how that works and how there’s a beneficial aspect to the submission as well. What does it mean to you, submission? Well, I could go back to a very early memory that I have. I was maybe three or four years old at this point and I was in church with my family on a Sunday morning. Now, if you’ve never been to a Catholic church, you’ll find that you spend a lot of time kneeling during the Catholic Mass. When I was real little, the way I would kneel is I would kind of have my butt sticking out so that it would hit the back of the pew. Then I’d just be kind of hunched forward, a very comfortable position. I think my dad let me get away from it when I was really little. But then I got to a certain point and he started making it clear to me that he didn’t want me to do that anymore. I pushed back a couple of times and he continued to like, no, no, give me that little look. Then I’d do it again and then I’d try it again and then look again. I went back up until I got to the point where I decided I wasn’t just going to bother with it anymore. I was just going to kneel up straight and try and be good. I think that was actually a certain amount of submission right there, giving up my own desire for comfort. I think what it was was that I didn’t understand why this was important. In the middle of the church service, my dad wasn’t going to give an explanation as to why bodily posture actually affects spiritual movements. Because a four-year-old is not going to be able to handle that. He just said, this is the way we do things. Now that I’m a little older and now that I understand things, it’s like, yeah, you want the kids being upright and reverent while they’re in church, because that’s how they learn that this is important, even if they’re not able to fully understand that. It sounds like you’re talking about surrender a little bit there, right? Because you didn’t fully understand what you were participating in at that point in time. A four-year-old is not going to be able to handle very much in terms of understanding what’s going on. You have to spend a lot of time leading them, I think. But just because I’m curious, do you see a difference between surrender and submission? Well, yeah. So the surrendering is in relationship to the authority. In a sense, it’s like, I’m my own authority. I’m my own authority. I’m my own authority. You’re like, well, I guess my dad is going to be the authority right now. But then you have to commune in order to submit. Because submitting is not only pointing towards your dad, it’s pointing towards something higher with your dad. Obviously, it’s really fuzzy with that. And obviously, there’s something like you could sit there and be prideful of your participation as a family in the church, right? And then it would be submission. It’s really fuzzy. But I think it’s how you internally relate to that, right? Is whether it defines surrender or submission. And you need to surrender in order to submit, right? We had this discussion on the Discord and we came up with the word yield, because you can also yield, which is like unwillful surrender or whatever. Right. I’m only doing this because you’re pointing a gun at my head. Yes. Look at me strange. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. It might have been yielding early on, but sometimes yielding yields to surrender. So, yeah, sometimes it’s necessary, especially as a man. So, yeah, I’m just grateful that my dad was persistent, that he didn’t give up. And he also I don’t think it was overly harsh in any of this. It was just kind of ordinary sorts of corrections for everything. But it did stay with you, right? So where did that salience, you mentioned gratitude, right? Like how did you get that relationship? Well, maybe we can move on to another incident. All of these are going to be church and God related because I got this thing on. So that’s what tends to happen. I want to go fast forward to when I’m not a four year old, but when I’m a fourth grader. Our family had moved to Stavanger, Norway, because my dad was in the Air Force. We had got assigned, he had gotten assigned on a NATO station there. And we started attending the one Catholic Church in Stavanger, Norway, because there aren’t a whole lot of Catholics up there. And my dad noticed that the altar servers were all kind of in disarray. And so he offered to help the new priest there, train the altar servers to get them kind of in shape. And since he was bringing five altar servers with him, we started serving a lot. And I remember one particular incident. I had been serving maybe a couple months at this point. But I got lots of reps because it was a small church and, you know, we were there every Sunday. So we got a lot of practice. So I was starting to figure out how it works. And I was starting to get a little bit good at it. You know, I wasn’t just what happens now. But I was like, oh, this happens and then this happens and then this happens. This is all how it’s supposed to work out. I noticed another server make a mistake. Right. And I was like, oh, no, he messed that up. I literally like did that kind of gesturing at the altar, you know. And so after mass, I can’t remember if it was my dad or father radar or both of them. But they they said, you know, when somebody makes a mistake up on the altar, we know that happens. It’s actually much more important that you just remain reverent yourself rather than expressing your disapproval. And they pointed out that most of the people in the congregation probably didn’t notice the mistake, but they would have noticed me behaving in an unbecoming way up on the altar. I was like, oh, well, that is a new way of understanding this. And so I was as far as I could tell, I began to submit this myself to this ideal of of reverent worship. Right. And that that was much more important than my desire to see everybody do everything correctly and my desire to to just express myself when something went wrong. I was like, oh, no, you just kind of you got to kind of can that and just look holy there. And so that was actually, I think, a really important lesson for me. You know, it was nice that our church had standards and that it expected me to like kind of step up to these standards instead of just, oh, he was fine. He’s just a fourth grader. He can’t really he can’t really understand what’s going on. But I also think that that was, you know, this young priest, the associate there, he he had just gotten back from seminary in Rome. And I was in his like his first year in seminary. And I really looked up to him on account of what he was embodying his kind of reverent presence in the liturgy and all of that. And so part of that was submitting myself to this spirit of the liturgy of this reverence and. Yeah, that that reverent attitude. Yeah, so like it sounds to me that you’re you’re not talking about a conflict between the ego and and the needs of the group, right, or the spirit of the group and the submission is in in recognizing how to put yourself back right and letting something else manifest. In contrast to your personal spirit, right, like your personal needs and interests. So yeah, that’s real beautiful. So did that. Besides that, did that have any changes in the way that you were reliving your life like to manifest some new insight in the way that you were being a goodness has like back to fourth and fifth grade, huh. That’s, you know, I think that probably was planting a seed that I wasn’t going to fully appreciate what that meant for a while. I think that changed the way that my week or my month. I don’t really. But I think it was kind of the implicit lesson of, you know, worshiping God does demand a certain level of excellence. And a certain amount of self control. What we do here is important. And so we need to behave as if that is important, not how you might on the playground, or at home. You know, so, and did also give me I think a sense of the sacred. That this is holy that this is set aside. And it literally, you know, it forced me to actually embody that instead of just thinking about it. So, so I think those are all kind of long term things that, you know, maybe didn’t affect me much immediately but but set set myself up on a on a different pathway. I want to touch a little bit about the forcing to embody, because the way I envision your, your trajectories, is that you’re, you’re being cut into shape, right, like you’re being put in a set of constraints, and you’re yielding to the constraints. Right. So it’s like, and then that allows you to engage differently right allows you to have a new form of experience and so so what what what is this, this thing that’s building inside of you like this, this new way of participation. I think I started to love going to church at that point. All right, prior to becoming an altar boy. I really didn’t like going to church. And I think it’s, it’s a certain certain unavoidable thing where it’s hard to participate. Sometimes, it’s hard to participate especially for young children, because there’s just all this stuff happening. It’s not play. It’s not the play like you’re accustomed to. So what that. And, and I think, with it Romano Guardini, early 20th century theologian on liturgy. He described liturgy as serious play. Right. So you’re acting out all these different sorts of things and it’s very serious but it’s still is, it’s got this, it frees you. It draws you out of yourself into communal activity. And so once I started getting, you know, a little better trained at all to serving and started embodying that spirit. I found myself connecting with what we were doing at church in a way that wasn’t merely obedience anymore. Was it merely yielding to my dad who made us go every Sunday, but it was like, oh I’m a part of what’s going on here. And that’s something that the adults do upfront, while I have to sit still for some reason. And there’s a draw in the, in the being a part of right so it’s pulling you out into, into the participation. So yeah, then, then I was able to see it as good. Yeah, right. So, I assume that that happened in the background right like you don’t really have a way to understand that or to articulate that so. So when we are like how does that evolve over time. Well, so what happened was is that we moved again, because we were in a military family and military families move a lot. So we moved to the tobacco the United States, and started going to a different parish. So the, the young priest who helped my dad train the altar boys, he did actually kind of change the way they were doing it up in Norway, and kind of like tighten things up, you know it was all a little more, a little more ceremonial a little more straight up, you know, straight up. And I got to really love that we also used incense, every Sunday mass. And just like, oh, it’s priest goals right there when they’ve got enough servers where you just, and everybody just knows there’s going to be incense and the people who are allergic to it they sit in the back and everybody’s happy. And I started to notice that when we went to a different pairs for things were not like that. And I was still a faithful alter server I was on the schedule that was a bigger parish so I wasn’t serving quite as often, but I still enjoyed it but uh, you know I had gone from the. It’s called the cassock and surplus so we would put the black robes underneath, and then put kind of a white coat on top of it is probably a cassock and surplus, I went from that to just a white owl but I didn’t like that as much. There weren’t as many servers and the servers didn’t have quite as much to do. And the standards you know I had these standards baked into me. In the two years that I was in Norway but they weren’t, they stayed in me but they weren’t like held up to the same way. I was just like, I miss being at my old church. I liked the way we were doing things here even though I still, you know I still had that new attitude towards towards the mass and the new appreciation for it and finding it important. So, how’s that how’s that connecting to the service like, I can some sense seems like you have this standard, right and you got let down continuously, but you still continue to participation and did that. Yeah, so I think that’s how that’s where the transformation came in, is that I had gotten to a place where I appreciated going to mass on Sunday. It’s like this is now important to me. And even if you know you know you’re dedicated to something when even when a particular instance of it doesn’t go all that well. You will think that it was worthwhile that you did it, and you’re still going to commit to coming back to it again. Right. So even though, even though I wasn’t enjoying serving mass, as much as I’d had a Norway. I was still enjoying it, and I still found it important enough to, to not only show up when I was scheduled but also you know be one of the ones where somebody didn’t show up they could call on me I could do it. If in the middle of the school day they needed a server for a funeral, I went to a Catholic school so I got to get out of school every once in a while for a funeral, that sort of thing. And remaining pretty loyal to that. So, So, you think you think the submitters allowed you to cultivate a sense of loyalty. Yeah, yeah. Right. And so I think, I think the thing that needs to be highlighted is that this is all having a positive affect right because you can have a sense of Judy, which, which is bound within responsibility and not so much in loyalty, which would be like freely giving. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, like, where does that take. Well, you know, takes me into high school. It takes me getting kind of near the end of my junior year of high school. And at the end of my junior year of high school, people began asking me a very irritating question. What was I going to do after high school and it’s like, Oh, golly, do I have to figure that out. It’s just. But I had it in my head that I needed to explore being a priest. Like that was was very much on my horizon. You know, I had never I’ve never had an experience of losing my faith entirely, which, you know, high school is the time where that starts to happen. I had my religion classes at my Catholic high school. It’s like, that was so sticky easy, like I could just, I had it all down, I never had to study for any of those tests. It’s like I knew all this stuff already, you know, it’s just listening to the religion teachers and the priests and all that. And just absorbing it and still having a passion for it. I wasn’t serving quite as much. I’d actually switched over into music ministry during high school because I also had a love for choir at that point. There is an unfortunate sense. If you don’t give the servers enough to do, especially as they get older, they lose interest in it. And so, you know, an ideal alter surfer program would have it where like the kind of your late middle school, early high school guys are going to be put with a fair amount of responsibility for for instructing the younger ones to. And that wasn’t fair at by parish. So I moved on to music ministry. You got to build that responsibility because I think that’s an important aspect, right? Like, because that’s in some sense the thing that that buys you, but it also allows you to grow into and reestablish your relationship to what you were doing. Because if you’re, you’re not teaching what you were doing now, that that brings a whole new kettle of fish on board. So, so you didn’t get that. And you, you dive through it, but then you have this sense of being a priest and I kind of want to like, connect it to your experience right now. So, like, what’s your anticipation mapping or what you’re really going to do? Like, did you have a proper understanding of what that would entail? Like as a high schooler? No, but that’s okay. So some of it does, right, like, I enjoyed preaching as much as I thought I would. I had enjoyed public speaking in high school. I got the work in to give a classroom presentation or speech and it always went well. And so it’s like that part is still love the liturgy still love incense. My relationship to it is a little different now. It’s much more regular. It’s like, I’m doing it every, every day. I say a mass every day. And it’s now, you know, I get genuinely excited when I’ve got an opportunity to teach one of the older, older kids how to how to do the incense or how to do something a little more complicated. I find that very enjoyable. Well, there’s large aspects of priestly ministry that I just had no awareness of in high school because I didn’t. But maybe share some of those with the public. What’s behind the closed doors? Yeah, sure. So I spent a fair bit of time preparing people to get married. So they’ll, they’ll end up doing three meetings with me, various, various things to go over various topics to work with. The experience of the confessional wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I had underestimated how boring listening to people’s sins is, you know, and in my imagination, it was always me with the wisdom coming in and fixing people’s problems. And, you know, you get actually get out into the field and it’s like, oh, it’s actually a little more complicated than that. Because, you know, I did get some wisdom from priests when I would go to confession. And as it turns out that didn’t fix all of my problems. So, the, probably one of the things that I’m coming to appreciate about Catholic seminary is, it’s still got like a very much master apprentice, sort of, sort of. That’s how it’s designed, right? So, you know, there are, there is lay faculty at just about any seminary, but the people who are running the show are priests, right? So you’re being, you know, it’s, it’s more education with the training, rather than it just being pure training. So I now appreciate that a little bit more. It’s not just take these classes, learn these procedures, but it’s like, look up to these men, see how they do, listen to them and learn from them. And so that, that started filling in a lot of the gaps that I didn’t know in high school about what being a priest was going to be like. You know, I remember hearing some of these crazy stories of like, you know, I was trying to carry my groceries into, into the rectory there and this woman came up and asked me for confession and, you know, I wasn’t going to hear her confession in the rectory. So we did the confession right there in the driveway and, and it took half an hour. And I like, oh, that’s the kind of stuff that happens, right? That didn’t happen to me. That happened to me. But that was a story I kind of remember hearing. Yeah, not gonna, not going to take this attractive young lady into the rectory by myself. So even though it’s like 40 degrees out, we’re just going to, we’re going to do it right here, you know. So, so some of it’s the same, but a lot of it, I had to grow into because the church won’t ordain anybody under the age of 25 to the priesthood. And that is really a good policy there, because I look at myself as 22, at 22 after, after four years of seminary and like yep, that guy wasn’t ready. What makes me say it was a, I’ll tell the whole story. There’s this Catholic Extension Society in the United States. They do like scholarships and grants and contributions to fundraising activities. And so they sponsored me to go on this nine week program in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a spirituality program, right? And so they, I think they sponsored a fair number of guys to go on it. It’s a good program. Still benefit from it today. They did an interview with me, right? 22 year old, Father Eric, still has lots of hair up here, you know, clean shave and sideburns, all that. You can still find it, I’m sure, in the, like a September 2015 edition of the Catholic Extension magazine. And they were asking me why I was excited to be a priest. And if you read between the lines a little bit, because they edited it nicely, but I was basically excited to be a priest so I could tell people how to do things right. Because, you know, that’s where I was at. And they kept me in the seminary a little bit longer. So it’s like, ah, maybe the love of God and love of neighbor should actually have something to do with this, right? Like maybe, maybe it isn’t all about you being correct, huh? Yeah. Still have to cure myself of that every once in a while, but I still needed further submission to the ideal of Christ at that point. Yeah, so you were talking about this idea of educating in the seminary. Do you think your experience with submission helped with the education, like your ability to be educated? Yeah, I think so. So it’s an institution, right? And it’s a, it’s kind of a controlled institution and it’s kind of a tight institution, a seminary is, where you’re put under, like they start putting you under the sort of things that you’re going to be expected to do as a priest, right? You’re going to be expected to, you know, show up for an early morning mass, right? Because it’s on the schedule. You’ve got the 7am mass, you got to be there early enough to get everything ready, got to be early enough to make sure everything goes well. So what do they do? They give you morning prayer at 7am. So, that part was easy for me. I could just get out of bed, get to morning prayer, and I was rarely late, and I didn’t really miss it for most of the seminary. So it’s like, hey, this guy, he shows up to morning prayer just because we put it on the schedule, right? So that’s, you know, it’s like it just showed up to morning prayer because it was on the schedule, showed up to evening prayer because it was on the schedule. So, alright, he just, he sees what’s on the schedule, and he just goes for it because that’s how, that’s what’s expected to him. That wasn’t the case with every seminarian that I had ever encountered. Some of them, they really struggled with the whole morning prayer thing. And you, you know, you might be sitting there thinking, well, gosh, it’s like, you know, once a week he just sleeps in. Is that really so bad? And it’s like, well, he’s not really submitting himself to the calendar of the seminary. When the bishop asks him to take an assignment that he’s not terribly excited about, is he going to be able to do that? Because that’s one of the things about being a priest is that you make promises of respect and obedience to your bishop and his successors. So that’s kind of the really interesting part because I really like my current bishop now but I have no idea who the next bishops going to be. So you’re like submitting yourself to the whole burrito there. And you were talking about a memetic element in the education, right, like that they were performing and that you would embody that in some sense. Like, do you think submission also has something to do with that? Does that help with the empathy required to see what they’re doing, for example? Yeah, I don’t know, I’m thinking about it. What I saw, I went to Good Seminaries, from my own perspective they were Good Seminaries, and my bishop sent me there so he obviously agreed. And I think they were able to embody the best aspects of the priesthood, at least consistently enough to where I wanted to be a part of that, right? So I would see the way they would live their lives, see the way they would preach, see the way they would interact with us, right? Because, you know, it’s like, this was an experience for me in seminary. I went to seminary at about the, I went to that seminary at the age of 18, right after high school. And I went to a seminary that was mostly older than right out of high school. I went to a seminary that had a fair number of guys who already had some college or college degrees so I was like very much the youngest, or one of the youngest guys there. And all of a sudden, you know, it’s like I wasn’t a child anymore. I wasn’t being treated like I was in high school. I’d be like sitting at the lunch table, you know, and there’s Paul on my right and Paul’s my dad’s age, you know, and he’s like coming to seminary as a second vocation and there was Father Battersby, you know, and like, we were having a conversation about this, that or the other thing and I was expected to like show up like an adult. And so I just started doing it, you know, and I had, thankfully, enough humility in there where I did was it usually like fighting against the consensus of these older and wiser men, you know, it’s like okay, I’m learning I’m listening. And it was just kind of that, you know, they do all these like programs, and these evaluations and those sorts of things in a in a Catholic seminary and you need those sorts of things you need to have some kind of standard you can point to but as far as I’m concerned, most of most of my actual formation would have really come in interactions with the priests and interactions with the other men in the house and And the what they like they propose the ideal of of living in Christ charitable living together that sort of thing. And then expected us to go underneath that and treat each other, according to that, no matter how you happen to be feeling about this that or the other thing, you know, So it’s Saturday afternoon, and you don’t want to do your chores in cleaning the bathroom, right, because we had these we had communal bathrooms and all that. And everybody had their bit for that week, and you just had to do it because otherwise the toilets didn’t get cleaned. So You mentioned this this aspiration that you got inspired with. Do you have a sense of how, how you lived up to that like like is there a way that you try to embody your aspiration. Yeah, so I could think of one year. My job was to be the guy. This was at least part of the job the person who set the schedule for cleaning the bathrooms on my hallway. Ready, that’s an unenviable job right there. I happen to be a clean bathroom enjoyer, especially when it’s a communal bathroom. And these are the sort of things that will not get cleaned unless they are paid time and attention. And the results can be bad so basically What I did was, I would be very intent on following up with people, try to be as gentle about that as possible. Well, well, you know, like, by x time every week this needs to be done. And something I would do is I would personally take on the responsibility of the midweek touch up. So in addition to, you know, the showers and toilets, the sinks or the floor, whatever it was I was doing that week, I would go around and just wipe things down and take care of any spot cleaning that needed to be done in the mid week. So that wasn’t strictly speaking a part of my job description but I was like, that’s going to be the way that I’m putting extra effort into this and not asking for more than I should be expected. Okay. So, what’s, what’s the next episode where submission is relevant well you actually jumped over an episode. Yeah, it’s okay we can go back to me in high school there. We can we can back it up a little bit. So I’ve got a junior in high school, school year ends, and my mom convinces me to go on a discernment retreat right retreat five day retreat for young men, considering the priesthood. And I was worried about that. I didn’t initially want to go on that because I’d be missing the first week of the strength and conditioning program at my high school, and I was worried more about the conditioning, and I didn’t really have to worry about that because we prayed played ultimate frisbee or football every day on this discernment retreat so I got plenty of conditioning that way. So there was a submission to my mother there. After this retreat. I knew I really had to take this seriously because I was like, kind of thinking this might be the way things are going. It started on thinking. And it eventually moved beyond just thinking about it but that’s where I was as a junior going into being a senior in high school. And what I remember happening over and over again was me begging God, just, just tell me, just show me the answer just reveal your will to be. And, and that’ll be enough. That’ll be enough, you know. And, you know, there was kind of in the background here the thing that I wasn’t saying is, and do it right now. Don’t wait. I’m busy, I’ve got to get on with it. And what the Lord refused to do was to just tell me right that. And what I rather suspect was is that the Lord in his kindness and his mercy towards me knows that if he had actually told me that, like that. I probably would have just said no I’m not doing that. As I wasn’t ready to actually receive my vocation. So, the Lord knew that I know I had been given enough to ask the questions and begin enough to go. First key thing he did for me was tell me through the mouths of other priests and my vocation director that you don’t go to seminary. Initially to become a priest, you go to seminary to discern that vocation as to whether or not you’re supposed to be a priest it’s like oh. I’m blocked into day one. That’s good. That’s a good thing to know so that got me out of my mom’s basement and into the seminary. While I was in my first year at seminary. I happened to cross a biography of St. John Vianney, big thick book there. I would read St. John Vianney he’s a 19th century French priest lived a very ascetical disciplined life and went to he got sent out to a small town in the middle of nowhere because people didn’t think he was ever going to amount to all that much. His life went absolutely as serious and as tense as he could manage in this tiny little town in France for like 20 years, and he, he basically eliminated poverty in that town, because he closed all the taverns down and the taverns were where the guys would drink all their money away. And so like once he had nobody drinking all their money away there was like no more poverty in that town. And people began to talk about him because he would have these insights into their lives during a five minute confession, but he would basically and and the gift is called the gift of reading souls during confession. And so he would be reading souls, or word gets around that you’ve got this priest that could read souls and all of a sudden, thousands and thousands of people were coming every year to this tiny little French village in the middle of nowhere to get five minutes with the holy cure to ours. After a considerable portion of his life he was spending 12 to 16 hours a day in the confessional. And after about an hour, I’m like, I’m kind of like, this can wrap up anytime. And after two hours I’m like, I’m done. Let’s wrap this up. I would do 12 to 16 hours a day. And I noticed about myself that I had to be careful when I would crack open St. John Vienny biography, because if I did it before going to bed, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, because I was just so fired up that I was going to be just like St. John Vienny, which hasn’t turned out to be the case but what that told me what that told me was that actually, Eric, I have. I have formed you to be a priest. That is who you’re supposed to be. And you actually desire this. I was like, Oh, once I actually noticed that right. It’s like oh this isn’t just something that’s being spacked down on me. But this is something that like I’m growing into it. This is actually what I want. So that at my fourth year of seminary. When I was sitting in the chapel, and I was praying with Isaiah chapter 35 where God speaks about the desert place, becoming watered and the plants and trees blooming out there. And I just I had this image of renewal in the church the fact that you know maybe the Catholic Church looks positively dead in some places but our Lord is the Lord of Life and can cause life wherever he wants. And so I was just, yes, Lord you’re you’re doing this you’re doing this, even in my lifetime. And they just said to be and you’re going to be a part of that as my priest and by that point it was like, already. Let’s do it. I still had another four years of seminary left after that but at that point there really wasn’t ever much question in my vocation so getting back to the topic of submission I had to submit to God’s timing, because he did answer my prayer. He did tell me that I was supposed to be a priest, but he didn’t do it under the conditions that me as a senior in high school expected of him. And looking back on that, you know, I did eventually submit to God’s timing. I did eventually submit to his will. And that was way better than anything I could have come up with. Okay, so there’s. So you get you get this vision of your life and in some sense, you’re now seeing the through the submission you see an extension of yourself, and there you find yourself again in a way right and then, like, it requires you to transform into what is required of you. So yeah, that is quite, quite beautiful. So, so now you’re living that out. Yeah, like maybe, like, are there more examples of submission or, because in some sense, you’re, you’re less on the lower part of the hierarchy and you’re more. Yeah, well, at a point where you’re directing. Yeah, but. So when you’re a new priest, you’re not given your own parish to be in charge of. So right now I’m what is called a parochial figure, which basically means that I’m working at a parish but under the direction of a more seasoned pastor. And so I’ve been a priest for two and a half years now. And that entire time I’ve been working at parishes running somebody else’s program. Now, it’s not like the program that there’s running is a Catholicism, and I can’t find my faith in it, because both of my bosses so far have been good faithful men and I haven’t had any sort of like serious conflict with them. But, you know, I’m kind of an opinionated dude, and I kind of have lots of my own opinions and maybe there would be things I would want to be doing differently. Right. And I just find it’s a little bit easier to say, you know, someday, maybe you’ll be able to try that. But right now, it’s Father Phil’s program right now it’s Father Dale’s program, and you’re just going to, you’re going to run their program the way they expect you to. And that’s how it is. And it didn’t take me four years to come to peace with that you know it’s like, No, that’s that’s kind of where I’m at at this point, I am, I’m letting the priorities of my pastor be more my own priorities, rather than insisting on introducing incense onto every Sunday mass. Is there an element that you recognize submission and the people that you hold responsibility for? Like, like, is there a relationship that you’re having with their submission or you’re trying to cultivate that in a way like, like, how does that work? I guess I more have an experience of my own responsibility that comes with the authority. So, marriage preparation, I’ll just give that’s an example because it’s something I do regularly. The church has a fair amount of laws and expectations with marriage, because we consider it an important thing. We have it kind of regulated we’re not just letting people go. And sometimes it’s a little bit complicated. In fact, it’s it’s complicated enough, where most of the time, I’ve got to explain, ah, really, this is actually pretty important. And you gotta, you gotta do it this way. And, not that I’ve particularly had a temptation to do this, but it’s it’s complicated enough, and most people are unaware enough of all of the details and intricacies and all of these sorts of things. Where, you know, if I wasn’t being supervised, I could probably just make stuff up and people would go with it. I don’t really have any desire to do that but I do I do have the sense it’s like, okay, okay, these, you know, I think that for this guy, doing this process would be the best way of doing things and I don’t know how to explain. Like I’ve had to figure out how to explain why having your marriage done in the church is important. And, you know, some people have an instinctive sense of that other people if they’re farther away from the church, they don’t understand why that sort of thing is important. And why am I insisting on this before this that or the other thing. I don’t know if that really helps but but I do, I do feel kind of feel the weight of my authority and most people are kind of like, you know, okay, how do we make this happen, you know, so, so like they’re trusting me to trust to be that I’m not jerking them around as far as this goes. Yeah, so what you were contrasting that as an element of rebellion, like, not so much necessarily rebellion towards you but rebellion to something different than themselves effectively right. That that interferes with submission, right, like, because I guess we want to contrast, like, okay, if you’re not submitted, you’re, you’re rebelling, right, like, because there’s this higher thing outside of you and you’re not willing to conform to it. And I think I think that example of wanting to be marrying in church is is one of those because like, why are you sitting in the office or wherever you’re talking when you don’t want to do that like that. They don’t, they don’t understand why it’s important. Why I’ve got to do all this paperwork, why all these this that the other thing, and it’s just sort of like, yeah, I’ve got to figure this out. But usually by the time they’re actually in my, yeah, but usually by the time they’re actually in my office they’re actually kind of playing ball, right, that they’re, they’re ready to cooperate but I’ve got to, I’ve got to carry that, you know. Well, yeah, usually I, I go, I go towards the future. So we can touch on that a little bit. How do you, how do you think your relationship to submission will evolve like is there an aspect where you’re like, oh yeah, like I’m, I’m really wrestling with this still. Yeah, well, I’m in a hierarchical church, and I’m in a hierarchical church that actually has maybe more diversity than it looks like on the outside. And sometimes I run talking about, say, eighth ethnic or racial diversity. That’s usually not a problem I’m talking about diversity of opinions about the best way forward. And sometimes I look at people who are above me in the hierarchy and their opinions, and I think it’s ludicrous what they’re promoting. And so how do I, how do I navigate that. It’s not local as much. Like I said, my own, my own pastors have been great to work with honorable men treated me very well. So it’s it was easy in those circumstances to run their program and my bishop is, he’s doing good work, and I’ve got a great relationship with him. And I see things happening and it’s just kind of like, what is what is going on, you know, and, and I, I have to remind myself of where I’m at, and I’m at Holy Cross Church, and I’m the parochial vicar here. And my role is to assist the pastor in the work of, you know, saving souls and glorifying God here. And so continually reminding myself that I should be. Yeah, every time I’ve submitted myself to God’s timing. That’s been great. And that’s been the right thing. And if he wants to call me out into some of these bigger debates in the church. And he’s been answering me there in his own time, and it is a way. But for now it’s, I’m, I’m always happier when I’m focused on what’s happening here, and the work that I’ve been given here, rather than when I start speculating about Bishop so and so and Cardinal so and so, and what they did and what they said and, and how I’m going to fix that. I get the sense that that this submission right like it’s, it’s connected to an aspect of humility right on the way that I understand the humility is knowing your place right like so that you’re not too high but also not too low right. So, so has your fate, or like afforded you connections or understandings to these different ways of being humble this diff, like, what are these ways in which you have to know your place. So where I guess I see the most of this is, I do spend a decent amount of time in prayer every day, and try to trying to practice mental prayer. I just note my distractions I know what my distractions are that they, they tend to be me in a position of influence and attention, and I am telling people just how it is, and they, and then everybody claps. And, and then I’m like, Oh, wait a minute. None of that happened, and I’m sitting in my pajamas in our house chapel, and I should actually be praying right now rather than patting myself on the back for having such keen insight that I’ve literally received from other people. So, so I guess that’s the way I see it. Yeah, that that’s where the faith part comes in because, because I get that little reminder that little whisper from the Holy Spirit that hey you’re actually supposed to be meditating on scripture right now and then do you haven’t done that for like five minutes. Oh, yeah. I guess I’m really not all all that spectacular I’m still an easily distracted sinner, and I need to, to be attentive to just the little patch of God’s garden that I’ve been given. And if I’m going to be given more responsibility that’ll come on somebody else’s timing not my own. It’s probably every time I’ve gone up in responsibility it’s like oh this is actually more complicated than I thought. And so you you are there that that’s like okay like that path is just, it’s gonna lay it out for me and I’m just walking with my eyes open. And so what really really faith affords is a strong sense of prophets, a strong sense that, you know, I have my own contribution to what God’s doing but I’m, it’s not all on me that he’s got the big picture that he’s laying that all out. And so, I could submit myself to the Lord, and that it’s just going to work out. And so if my entire life is just being parish priest in North Dakota, and like I’m not like some big YouTube celebrity or a bishop or cardinal or the Pope, and that’s what God wants that that’s almost certainly better than me, trying to claw my way into power, ambition, ambition just got to be ambitious for the right things I guess. Ambitious in relationship to yourself so that you can be the person that can make the next step. Yeah, do you still want to add something like you. Well those were kind of the, the incidents in my life that I wanted to talk about. And, yeah, so I think, I think I’ve said my piece, happy to answer any more questions that you might have. Did you gain insight as a consequence of having this conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re. You’re, you’re interrogations and your willingness to allow me to talk has actually got me a little bit of insight, they, you know, just talking these things out. You’re not going to share it. This is a private one. Yeah, yeah. Good. Well, I’m going to ask all the viewers to share their insights and the colon section, so that Eric can have more private insights. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. And he also has a YouTube channel that you can follow his, his, well, his quest to glory. That’s right. Yeah, I’ve got the main highlight is Sunday nights, I live stream on stream yard. And sometimes we’ve got some really interesting conversations. So, you’re invited into it, you’re invited to participate. It is always good to do these explorations communally. So I definitely advise you guys to hop in, especially if you have questions about the Catholic busyness. So, thank you for Eric it was really nice to have you here. I think it’s also a great subject because I think it’s surely needed that people reflect on all these aspects that are not often highlighted in people’s lives. Thank you everybody for watching. See you guys next time.