https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uEfTOpBmspA
Good evening and happy Sunday everybody. It is the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Next Sunday will begin for us the season of Advent, which is the first Sunday of the liturgical year. So next week we’ll be celebrating the liturgical new year, and I’m sure you’ll all be very excited for that. Now I want to tell you a little bit about a discovery I made this morning at breakfast. And it all started when Hornbockers, the local grocery store chain, doesn’t stock whey protein powder. That’s just annoying, right? So, you know, part of one of my job benefits as a priest is that the church will pay for my groceries, we’ve got a grocery card to Hornbockers. I thought this was just going to be so slick and easy. Just go there, get my protein powder so I can, you know, be really muscular or whatever, and this was all going to be great, but no protein powder there. So we’ve got a woman who does most of the shopping and the cooking, cooks us one or two meals a week. And I thought, well, she’s got to have a Costco card, right? Of course she has a Costco card. So I’m like, hey, when you’re at Costco, can you pick me up some protein powder? And she was like, sure, sure, I can go ahead and do that. She texted me a picture of the protein powder. It’s like, is this what you want? And I said, yes. I said, yes. I gave her the confirmation. Go ahead and buy it. And so this is all on me. And I finally used up the last of my whey protein powder yesterday, and I moved on to the new protein powder from Costco today. And yeah, it was pretty special. It was organic plant-based protein powder, and it tasted kind of bad. Now, initially I had mixed it up with 12 ounces of milk just to make sure it wasn’t vegan anymore. No, I mixed it up with eight ounces of milk and it tasted really bad. And then I look at the packaging and it says it should be mixed with 12 ounces of fluid. And so I put some more milk in my cereal bowl and then it tasted less bad, but it still really, really didn’t taste very good at all. And so my first thought was any rational, normal, insane human being would do like, I’m just going to throw this stuff out and go to Walmart and get protein powder like I had previously. But then I had a thought. I had a thought. And I thought back to a conversation I had on this very live stream with Adam, Adam from Ireland on Wednesday. Adam, being from Ireland, he can’t make it most weeks, but I had this midweek stream that you might have caught. And he was talking about the desire to bulk up himself while also doing penance. And I had this vision. It’s like, oh, maybe we can turn the fact that this protein, this plant-based protein powder tastes bad into a, into a plus. We could turn this into a penitential breakfast shake rather than seeing this as a bad thing. Maybe this can actually be a good thing. So I think that’s going to be my plan. I think I’m going to go buy a tub of regular protein powder. And I will keep this plant-based protein powder as a Wednesday and Friday thing that I’ll do to do a little bit of extra penance with my bulking. So that’s what I came up with. So somebody makes sure Adam sees this so he can go buy plant-based protein powder himself and join me in the world of penitential bulking, which I just invented as far as I know. So I hope everybody, all of my fellow Americans had a good Thanksgiving. My mom made four pies. So obviously that’s a great Thanksgiving for me. My new brother-in-law apparently is a fan of blueberry. And so my mom, for the first time ever made a blueberry pie. Apparently my mom is a fan of the new brother-in-law. So there we go. Protein powder. Yeah. Costco will take back anything and refund you with no issues, even if you’ve used most of it already. Tempting, but I need to be able to do penance instead. And Philip Nickerson, you have to mix it with fruit loop milk. I don’t know. Is that a Canadian thing? Never heard of fruit loop milk before. Usually my breakfast cereals are plain shredded wheat for its health benefits. And if you Catholics out there should have had some pretty apocalyptic readings today at mass. For the ordinary form, it would have been the last judgment. Sheep on the right, goats on the left. And in the U.C. Antique, we are the extraordinary form, the traditional Latin mass. It was kind of the apocalyptic prophecy over Jerusalem. So that’s what I ended up preaching on today. And next week we start with the purple. Next week we start with the purple. Mmm. Yeah. Costco also had nonfat Greek yogurt that is high in protein. I’ll have to keep that in mind. That could be a good option. What else is going on? Yeah, there’s a funeral for a priest tomorrow. Father Al Bitz. He was about 80 years old. Yeah, I don’t know. Everybody had good things to say about him. So we will go ahead and yeah, 1943 to 2023. And yeah, tomorrow 11 a.m. in St. Phil’s Community Church in Napoleon. So we will drive out there tomorrow. Napoleon’s about a two hour and 15 minute drive. I’m back. I’m back. North Dakota has frozen. Well, while that may be true, I’m not frozen enough. And I have come back. I’ve returned at the turn of the tide. Sorry about that. Yeah, 100 percent. It was the vegans. The vegans. And they’re definitely not my VPN acting up. Hmm. All right. So I’ve run out of what I was planning on talking about. So what do you guys want to talk about? All I had was the protein powder. That was the only thing I planned. Snow fell this morning. Began late in the night. Not sure how much we got. Was a decent snowfall, though, enough where I actually had to get the shovel out. Oh, Andrew’s getting baptized on December 16th. Very cool. So congratulations. Why don’t you drop your confirmation saint in the chat here so we can all ask his or her intercession for you on your baptism day. So very cool. Very cool. Yeah, just under an inch of snow here in Fargo. And we’re gonna have a little bit of cold weather tomorrow and then things will warm up a little bit. It’ll be over freezing daytime size. So in case you’re wondering what was going on in North Dakota. Sandy just finished work and it’s raining slush. Yeah, pretty gross. That’s time of year, though. You’re gonna get slush. Okay, don’t have one yet. The father’s been sparse with details. Still trying to confirm whether or not my father-in-law is going to be my godfather. Okay, well, you’ve got a little bit of time to figure that out. Any recommendations? I could certainly say that Saint Eric of Sweden, he’s one of the greats, so you could go with him. Actually, when I was doing RCIA last year, I found this quiz you could take. Yeah, I’ll drop this in the chat here. What saint should you choose for confirmation? And it was really funny. We had, I think we had 14 candidates and two catechumens come into the church on Easter last year. And all of the 14 candidates, they had been baptized in some other church. They all picked pretty standard, you know, saint names. And then my two people who were baptized, they somehow found these saints that I’d never heard of. One of them was an electrician, and he picked Saint Elegius, who’s like a sixth century craftsman, and he’s a patron saint of craftsmen. And the second guy picked Saint Devasahayen Pillai, who was a 19th century or 18th century Hindu man who converted to Catholicism was martyr. They’re like, where did you guys find these saints? I mean, they’re cool, right? They’re all canonized saints, they’re all right there for you. But yeah, Saint Philip Nickerson is recommending Saint Philip Neary here, the Apostle of Joy. And he’s a great saint. And I believe Andrew is living in, are you the Andrew that’s in Korea? You could always go with the Korean martyrs. There aren’t any bad choices. Yeah, Andrew Kim Taigon. And companions, you could choose Saint Andrew Kim Taigon. Oh, Saint Barbara. Yeah, that’d be a good one. I wonder how she became the patron saint of artillery. Yes, yes, our friend Andrew B is getting baptized and confirmed and receiving his first of all, the communion here soon. And so we’re trying to find him a confirmation saint. So yeah, go Saint Barbara, go with Saint Andrew Kim, Saint Philip Neary, Saint Eric of Sweden. Saint Philip Neary, Saint Eric of Sweden. Hard to go wrong. If you’ve got any other recommendations for Andrew for his confirmation saint, go ahead and drop that in the chat. And I do believe that I did post the link. So one of you should jump in here. Also, there’s no, you know, Laura chose Saint Claire. There’s no rule that you have to have the same gender as your confirmation saint. They’re a spiritual patron. So if you wanted to have a girl as your saint, there’s no rule against that. Saint Genesius, very good. Moses, Moses is a great saint. You could do that. There’d be zero problems with choosing Moses as your confirmation saint. Mark wants me to say something about the utility of the saints in Catholicism. So I guess we could look at two things. The first utility that they have for us is their intercession for us in heaven, in the heavenly court, that they bring our prayers before the throne of the father and offer them there. And since they were known to be friends of Christ and his father while on earth, we certainly think that their patronage would continue in heaven. And the saints give us the story of Christ in, you know, tens of thousands of different ways, breaking it up into smaller pieces, so like a prism, breaking up pure white light into many, many colors, such that we can see different aspects of the Christian story shining out through each and every single one of them. And then also, you know, the saints have a great amount of utility while they’re here on earth, while they’re polishing their halos, you could say, in that they do great things for God and the church, glorify him and bring people to Christ while they are here on earth. So that’s three great things that the saints do. And so I am a saint fan. I recommend the saints. And yeah, we could ask for their intercession and all sorts of things, not just St. Anthony, when you lose your car keys. And you know, you can always add patrons as you go on. You’re not stuck with your confirmation saint. So I chose St. Francis of Assisi as my confirmation saint, but I’ve kind of along the way added St. Augustine and St. John Vianney to the thing. Okay. Quiz gave you St. Joan of Arc. She’s awesome. No complaints from me. I wouldn’t object to that at all. You’re choosing that one. God even loves the French, huh? Very fractal, much fractal. Yes. Yeah, well, he’s like my teacher. He’s not like a patron. St. Thomas Aquinas. I do end up talking about him the most. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just add him on the plate. We can have four. There’s no reason why you can’t have four. Should add, the Acustodian and the Aquinas just to fill out the whole of all theology ever because they both took care of it. They don’t have to worry about it anymore. Yeah, we’ll just add Aquinas on there. I talk about him all the time. You may as well get the honor due to him. That’s how easy it is, Jacob. You can just add another patron. Shake my head. The local parish has mass at 7 p.m. on Sundays. That’s why I can’t pray in the sanctuary right now. How inconsiderate. Joke’s on you, Charlie. The mass is a prayer. It’s actually the best possible prayer. It’s actually, there’s no higher prayer than the holy sacrifice of the mass whereby Jesus himself offers up the perfect oblation in the sight of the Father and we join him in his perfect eternal worship. So there, go in there and pray, Charlie. Yeah, but you weren’t expecting that. It’s actually a pretty easy to expect answer. Don’t I at least have to buy an icon for my icon corner? No, I don’t. I could. Maybe I should. I don’t have an Augustine. I don’t have a Saint Francis. I only have a Saint John Vianney and Our Lady watching everything that I do on the internet. So also from that angle as well. And Saint Hubert’s on the calendar right now. So yeah, no, you don’t have to, you don’t have to, being a Christian, the elites don’t want you to know this, but being a Christian’s free. What area of canon law do you find the most interesting? Right now, right now it’s the papacy. I knew the canon. I think I’m going to end up writing my JCL thesis on the papacy. And it’s, so I wrote a little paper, just a little 1600 word paper this semester. Yeah, on the papacy, just a tiny little research paper and I thought it was very interesting how right around the 9th and the 10th centuries, the Pope’s start citing forged documents to bolster their authority, which I don’t think they have to, they had to do that. They didn’t know they were forged either. They weren’t very good at detecting forgeries in the middle ages, but they would start citing things like the donation of Constantine and the pseudo Isidorean decradals, decradals of pseudo Sylvester and another pseudo synod. And a lot of that got taken up into the medieval, the medieval golden age of canon laws, they call it. Gratians Decredal came out in 1234. Where was it? 1134. I really need to have that down cold. Anyway, yeah, a lot of that stuff that came from forged documents ended up being there. So yeah, the papacy is what I find most interesting. And maybe I’ll continue to find interesting things. It’s really sad that the chapel at the convent where I’m interning is always empty. Nobody goes there ever goes there. It’s a great place for Charlie to go. He can go there and be the one to pray in there. If a recent Christian concert asked you advice about spiritual maturity, what advice would you give to people who are interested in the Holy Spirit? I would need to know the person a little better to actually give really in-depth advice, but I would say that that is primarily a work of God that you are cooperating in, not something that you have to accomplish according to your own work and according to your own power. So what I would say is just try not to worry about it so much. If you’re going to church, if you’re saying your prayers, if you’re trying to be loving towards your God and your neighbor and picking up and bearing your cross, then that’s enough. That’s enough right there. And your spiritual maturity will come through doing those sorts of things, just like your moral maturity doesn’t come magically. It comes from you productively engaging in the world. Anything more than that, I would need to know a little bit about the person that I’m actually talking to. But there’s just kind of the generic advice for spiritual maturity. That’s something that God’s going to do and you just do your duty. Does Justinian’s Code have any authority in the Roman Catholic Church? No, it does not. All previous ecclesial laws were repelled first with the 1917 Code of Canon Law and then again at the 1983 Code of Canon Law. So on the offhand chance that anything might have had authority, it would have ended there. But Justinian’s Code, that would have been a piece of civil law. And even in the day, they had at least some idea about the distinction between the power of the emperor and the power of the church. Even though that the emperors as patrons of the church sometimes did make laws governing church affairs. You can remember that Constantine was the one who ended up organizing the Council of Nicaea. So no, Justinian’s Code would not currently have any authority in the Roman Catholic Church. That’s a piece of civil law. Now, the basic structure and principles of Canon Law and the Church come from the Roman tradition. So insofar as Justinian’s Code tells us about the Roman continental law tradition, might give us some interpretive principles and how to interpret law. Now, some of that, those kinds of interpretive principles have made it explicitly into the Code of Canon Law, but there is no direct authority that Justinian’s Code would have over any Catholics today. Everybody’s shy today. They must have put on weight over Thanksgiving and not want to shy up on the camera. That’s fine. That’s fine. I’ll just sit here and talk to myself for two hours. That’ll be fun. Yeah, the only people who have legislative authority in the Catholic Church right now is the pope and the bishops. So Jacob has a cold and is coughing a lot. How could you get a cold in Los Angeles? That sounds impossible. Although tis the season. Your brain is fried. Yeah, okay. William Branch says, we like you, Father. Okay. It is a little, I don’t know how Rush Limbaugh would do it. That guy would just show up and talk for three hours into a camera. At work. I do that five days a week. It’s like, oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, somehow people do it. Much snow. Yeah, we got about an eighth of an inch of snow today and that’s about as much snow as we’ve got. Alrighty. Four weeks of Christmas break is coming soon. Alrighty, that should be good. Mark’s driving. Everybody’s got an excuse. Why they can’t hop on the street tonight. That’s fine. That’s fine. Shoot my stream on good parenting. I would be interested in your feedback. It is based on my presentations at the convent. I did not, I did not. Ah, I did not. I did not. Ah, yeah. Yeah, what kind of sources did you use for the stream on good parenting? Yeah, yeah, I actually, I got sick on my birthday back in September. So hopefully that’s all I got. When I was at my, oh look, Emma’s coming to bail me out. Hi. I was talking a lot to myself for a while. Yeah, I’m sorry. I had to eat dinner first. You got to eat dinner. I got to eat dinner. Yeah, it was very good. I made an eight dinner and I decided to not do that on stream. Yeah, that’s actually probably a good deal. Nobody comes on to see people consume things on stream. Nobody you want there. Fair, fair. Yeah, the internet’s got all sorts of, all sorts of people on it. Piaget cognitive behavioral therapy and common sense with a pinch of 12 step. All right. Okay. That’s what, yeah, no, I’m not sure what you do with cognitive behavioral therapy and parenting, but. I mean, there’s a lot of senses in which cognitive behavioral therapy is just reparenting yourself better to get what you need. Because it’s like because it’s like dealing with negative thoughts and like learning good habits and stuff that some people don’t need to do in therapy because their parents were able to give them that. Or at least 80% of it. Or at least 80% of it and they can hack the rest of it. Yeah. Parents often fall into cognitive distortions in their relationship with their children. That’s true. You know, these Oedipal complexes and all sorts of things, they don’t come from nowhere. Yeah. I mean, personally, I’d say people often fall into cognitive distortions in their relationships. But we can narrow it down if you want. Yeah. Yeah. You can look at that children. They reinforce their cognitive distortions in their children. Yeah. Speaking of someone three generations deep in social anxiety. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. I feel like with the world we live in today and just, I’m going to say this and we’ll see if I get into any trouble for it, but all the diversity that you encounter, which, you know, the 14th century French peasants wouldn’t have to encounter that much diversity. Anxiety is not a surprising response to that. Response. No, that’s a good point. Our cities are just big and they’re full of all sorts of people and you don’t really know them. So that can certainly be anxiety inducing. Inducing. There’s, it’s a very weird thing because I’ve never lived somewhere that actually worked like this, but there’s something that feels deeply wrong to me about being able to walk around my town and go to the grocery store and go wherever without running into anyone I know. And I don’t know where that came from because I’ve never really lived somewhere where I’m like guaranteed to run into someone I know. But maybe it’s the fact that it never happens. It just feels deeply unnatural. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you’re basically correct on that. I tend to go places and people know me. So I went and donated blood on Friday and there was somebody that was like, hi father, you know, I was in civilian clothes. I was like, hi, you’re going to have to remind me of your name. Because you’re the guy standing up at the front of the church. I’m the guy standing up. Whose name is in the bulletin. Yeah. Yeah. This was in Wapiton though. So Wapiton is the sort of place where you can have a fighting chance of actually knowing everybody by reputation. You know, it’s a town of about a thousand people. One of those little North Dakota towns. I’m not in a small town anymore. She’s in the big city now. Yeah. Fargo. Fargo. I don’t think it’s certainly that big, but it’s big enough where you can’t really know everybody. I wonder what the latest census data is. Do you know the music man? I do. I was in the music man. Of course you were. I was salesman number one. Oh, nice. In the train song at the beginning. You can talk. You can talk. You can bicker, bicker, bicker. You can talk. You can talk. You can talk, talk, talk, talk, bicker, bicker, bicker. You can talk all you want, but it’s different than it was. I’ve never been in it. I don’t actually know it. I just want you to know that every time it comes up that you’re in Fargo, I want to sing Wells Fargo wagon. Wells Fargo wagon is a coming down the street. Yeah. And I mentioned it to my sister and she immediately started saying Wells Fargo wagon. So you just need to know that that’s like in Transylvania. So you just need to know that that’s like intrinsically linked to you for my family. And that’s just the way it’s going to be. Hey, Philip. Hi. Doing great. I just want everybody to know that Fargo is a real town with 131,044 people in it. And that’s not counting West Fargo or Moorhead. So there we’re a real town. Can I do something really depressing? Um, how does that compare to the number of students at University of Illinois? I guess we’re doing a little more research. I can smell. Is this the one you’re looking for? Yeah. 53,000 students in the spring of 2023. Not as many as I feared. Okay. That’s still a big load. Holy mackerel. We’ve got from famine to feast. We’ve got Ted and John. John, you must be back in the United States. I am because it’s not the midnight hours. Yes. Very good. Very good. Ted, how are you recovering from the conference? You know, I went from an intellectual and relational feast to an actual feast of like three days of Thanksgiving. And frankly, I’m exhausted and I’m looking forward to a nice, relaxing day of tree work tomorrow. Yes. You’re the guy who can climb up into a tree and hack the limbs off and find that relaxing. Yeah. No, I, that is great. Like, um, I can’t believe this was only last weekend. It feels like it was a month ago. I know. Honestly. But it’s cool. You know, it’s like, when you have some time, you start to realize what sort of things like really mattered. And so, you know, it’s just, it takes a little while to figure out what was important and it’s cool to get to do that. So. Yeah. I’m looking forward to getting the recordings, you know. Me too. I need to show my mom. So Jess is, Jess is working on those, cleaning them up and like putting in a little intro sequence and stuff. So I would rather wait a little bit longer and have something a little bit nicer. So. Right. Right. That doesn’t, so you’re behaving very well. You’re behaving very rationally. I have no criticism of you. I’m still impatient. Me too. I’ve been, I’ve been communicating that to Jess. I’m like, hey, I know you’re doing this for free, but I’m still really excited. So can you just tell me what’s going to be done? So, yeah. Yeah. But it was, it was a blast and I was just really rich. It was really fun. Like one of the things I didn’t really, you know, I should have seen coming, but it was like getting to kind of bring some, some different worlds of my, in my own life, some circles that are, that don’t previously, you know, interconnect and having to be interconnected and like, you know, like having my mother get up and read poems like that, that she had written. Like that was really fun. Yeah. And she read it mass. Oh, did she? That’s wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. You didn’t tell us that we were going to your mother’s parish for mass. We all had to see her get up to do the like introduction and be like, is that Ted’s mom? That’s Ted’s mom. Lovely little parish though. I had a great time saying mass there. That was great. Fantastic. It’s just like, Oh, Oh yeah. I’ve we have churches this size in North Dakota. Yeah. Yeah. This is nice. It feels just like home except everybody’s got a Southern accent. Yes. Which means it’s better, but anyway, we don’t have to talk about that. Yeah. It was, it was, it was pretty wonderful to, you know, just like my mother being the way that she is. And then she got up and read these like, just like gritty, I was telling her, I was like, when she was getting in the car to leave that afternoon, I said, I didn’t realize until the day that like you’re so Gothic, right? Like, this is like never clicked with me before that. Like my mother’s writing is like totally in the vein of Southern Gothic. It’s like, Oh, you would have been friends with Flynn or O’Connor if she had been alive. And so yeah, I was just like, I enjoyed the kind of the funny like a lot there. It was cool. So anyway, yeah, Philip, I don’t see you all very often and John, I’ve never met. So I don’t want to dominate things. So you guys hopped on right when I did. So I don’t know. I don’t have a whole lot to talk about, but I was kind of curious about what you guys thought. Think about closed Catholic communities, like the pros and cons of them. Like Catholics, I don’t know much about this at all. But like even some place like we’re, where’s that place? Matt fraud lives. All the Catholic student bill, student bill. It seems, it seems to me this from the other side, looking in when you get like a close knit Catholic community like that, there’s like, there’s some pros that they can grow together spiritually and like be comfortable and being a neighborhood of all Catholics and like this feel comfortable that way. But they also seem to get very inward looking, in my opinion, and a lot more conservative when they withdraw from the world. I’m just wondering if anybody else sees that it might be an unfair. Yeah, it’s so I don’t know if Steubenville would be the best example of that. There’s just a really solid Catholic university there. There’s a lot of non Catholics in town. Yeah, but the town is the town itself is just kind of a rust belt, you know, nightmare. So then going in and kind of taking things over is not that hard for them because there’s just nothing and and there’ll be, you know, 11 to the community, I’m sure. I see this sometimes with traditionalist parishes. I am a genuine Latin mass enjoyer and you know that all about that said the traditional Latin mass this morning had a great time. But this is like a problem churchwide is that we’d have cars now. And we don’t have, I think, uniformity that would help us out a lot. And so we’re missing is is we’re missing having the whole body of Christ together in one place, which you get a little more of in a more I’m just going to say normie parish and all I mean by that is where the majority of United States Catholics go for mass on Sunday, because you’ll have like the young priest there and he’ll be like, you know, really, you know, it’s up, you know, and then he’s got to learn how to interact with somebody who’s like, Yeah, I kind of, you know, show up for this on Sundays and I go to yoga on Tuesdays and it’s like, Okay, here we are, you know, I don’t like yoga. I think it’s bad. But never mind that. But you do get the whole body of Christ there. And what the normies do for the body of Christ is they prevent you from getting too weird. You don’t get so insular that you can’t interact with people. I have to interject that I think that normies are kind of weird. Okay, I totally another base take from john, tell us a little more about that, please, I want to hear this. I say the things about knowing but I think that I think that what we consider normal and weird is relatively arbitrary. And so I agree with the benefits of having a whole big broad cross section that can have in a whole lot of different kinds of people. But like the idea of like this set of people is normal. And then that set of people is weird is I think an arbitrary imposition that we collectively decide upon. It’s, I mean, it’s almost largely like a statistical thing. Nor any. Yeah, because there’s like, there’s two senses of the word normal. One senses, you’re talking about something like a mean or an average or a mean or a what’s the most frequently occurring one mode mode, you’re talking about manner mode. There’s a philosophical notion of normalness, which is like at the end of that hit his strength with Mark is like clinging to the notion of normal in the objectification room. And that’s like, normal is like families and sunshine and sandwiches. And that’s not really arbitrary. And that sense of normal is like, yeah, you should, you should go for that normal. But I’m going to push back. Look, I don’t make an action picture. I’m going to push back and father on father Eric’s point. And I take take this the best way possible because right the whole yeah, but like I show up for mass, but yoga, and it’s like, okay, there’s some healthy balance that on the other hand, like, if you think about what’s being said, and say, the Nicene Creed, I think that the the, and then the notion of the miracle of the Eucharist at every mass, and you’re like, and that doesn’t affect the way that I think about exercising my body. I’m like, well, hold on a minute, like, you’re making some like really radical, metaphysical statements here by saying God became a man, and then he died, he’s going to come back and judge us. And that like, the Triune creator of the universe is the ground of being and the first and the last like, somehow in dwells in you ontologically. And that like, isn’t going to work out into all this other stuff. That’s the part where I’m like, not not not to like, disclose any person from being on a journey, being in a process, moving somewhere. But like, man, I’m really going to fall down on the side of yeah, it’s gonna make you quote unquote weird, because what you’re saying is deeply weird. In those. Well, and so, you know, the, for my language, the normies help the, we’ll say the more intense types connect with the rest of the world. And the more intense types can correct the normies when they’re being lazy or incorrect about something. So the whole body, right. And I bring up specifically, you know, some of the, kind of your biggest, most average parish is because you don’t have that leaven that you would get with the sort of people who prefer the Latin mass or extremely reverent liturgy, which you would have gotten that I think just as a statistical roll of the dice when everybody was just walking to whatever parish was nearest. Yeah, I think, yeah, we’re just certain. Sorry, a certain kind of selected. A certain kind of wisdom and the capacity to hold things together, and especially the whole personality types together. And there’s what we’re seeing in our world is kind of fracturing of like different personality types self select themselves into these different kinds of churches. But I think that there’s a kind of wisdom of an institution that is able to hold everything together. And I think I was, I was talking about this, I think like maybe a month ago, in the Catholic channel on the bomb about the Bishop Strickland thing. And it seemed like Rome wasn’t able to hold East Texas into its thing, because I felt like Strickland was an expression of the will of East Texas, not just him being a crazy person off by himself. But then a lot of people in Thailand loved him. They’ll love it. But like around. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so like I felt like Rome’s condemnation of Bishop Strickland was a condemnation of East Texas itself. And that that refutes the Roman Church’s claim to be universal. If Rome can’t hold hold find a way to keep East Texas into its hold without overriding East Texas as it is, then like it, Rome can’t really claim to include that that land in it. And it’s in the thing that it is. Yeah. Yeah. And also, you know, a bishop shouldn’t be removed from office without due process. So we can we can look at a number of even if it’s just an administrative process that says, hey, you incited hatred for the apostolic see across on Twitter, you know, like even an administrative process like that would be better than just raw papal will. So anyway, listen to the earlier part of the stream where I talked about how interested in the papacy that I was. See, this is this is the world I long for. Maybe the Jews have this figured out. The prohibition of cars and microphones on the Sabbath has been a blessing on Orthodox Judaism that nobody could have predicted because you have to go to your neighborhood synagogue. There’s no synagogue shopping for Orthodox Judaism because you have to go whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to make I’m going to I’m going to make a claim that’s probably even more what the Internet people call based, which is basically that almost any kind of agreed upon sort of constraints, is it going to be a benefit for a community? Like, basically anything. I mean, I mean, my friend made this point this spring, and it’s been like rattling around my head ever since that the etymology of the word community is not with unity. It’s not like calm unity. It’s calm, Eunice. It’s with walls. The community is the thing that’s rolled off. Not a thing that has unity together. And we were having this discussion. I’ve had this discussion many times. I mean, like, you look at all sorts of things like there’s the culture of the world, the culture of the world, there’s the cultural perception, the Amish, and then you look at their actual demographics, and they’ve been growing up to 3% annually since the for a long time, or at least half a century. Like, those are just cranking out the life and the culture. And, and what’s interesting is you can dial in on and like they’ve got all sorts of different restrictions. I mean, there’s actually some more Wikipedia, there’s a there’s a spreadsheet that shows all the different sex of Amish, just a Mormon Amish spreadsheet of all the different these Amish sex and all the things that they like prohibit and don’t prohibit and sort of doesn’t matter. Like, on some level, you should decide, yeah, these are good things. And these are bad things. But maybe even more importantly, it’s like, look, we’re all just because we all have such an insane capacity, like economic, technological, all of these things, like we’re we could just access anything, anytime, anywhere, basically. And so then it’s like, well, what are you going to do? And it’s like, the only way to not spin out into total disunity is to put intentional, you know, bumpers on things, you know, so yeah. I was chatting with a guy who had deconstructed from Assemblies of God. And this was like a serious, like, full of muffles and motorcycles and type A and lots of energy and doing things and being a radical person in the world. And like, I was talking about him and like, like deconstructing early in his 20s. And I had this sense that his church wasn’t able to hold his personality type within itself. There wasn’t a space for him to be himself. And in order to continue to participate in this church, he would have to fundamentally change himself and fundamentally change his destiny and change his way of being. And he agreed with that. He said, except there’s one exception, I could have been like the pastor. And if I were the pastor, I could have like done that and then like done all my crazy stuff with like booze and girls on the sides and stuff. But like that was the only path that he could have followed to be in that church. And he didn’t want to do that. And so he left the church. So like, there’s this thing of orienting around personality types, and there’s the necessity of having rules and structures that pull people in. But then those rules and structures, can you pull people in? Or does it, does it break people out of your thing? Well, I don’t think you can contain everything. So I don’t want the church to be like, no, no, this is a big debate that’s going on in the church. Yeah, I totally agree. It’s like, yeah, we’re not going to accommodate sins. And, you know, like, obviously, we’re going to have sinners. And obviously, these sinners are going to commit sins and they should be going to confession. And but we’re not going to sit here and hold up sin and like, oh, that’s not sin anymore. You can go ahead and do that. And the churches that have just kind of fallen into terminal demographic decline. So a certain amount of this, I don’t know your friend, he was talking about booze and women, though, it’s like, well, like, you got to cut back the booze to a limited amount and stick to one woman. You know, and that’s the Christian way. And if you can’t do that, then we’ll maybe we’ll try and catch you when you’re dying. And I’ll give you the last rights and that’ll work. Because there’s some people, there’s some people, there’s some people who I’m only convinced that that’ll be how I ever get them. How much does charisms play a role in the community together? Like if people discovered their charisms, if they were developed, and it was like, OK, we all have different personalities, different gifts. Now, here’s how you can use your terrorism. Yeah, because there’s like, I’m not a very confrontational person, but I really am a confrontational people. And like, even the guy I’m not sure, mass like he like he’s different than me. He’s very much like, this is the rule. We follow the rule. And I’m like, I want to put a chair in that aisle because like people are really squeezed together. It’s against the fire rules. We can’t do it. So I put the chair there. I walk around to do something. I come back and the chair is gone and the guy squeezed into the pew again. So I’m like, OK. For me, it’s also a learning process, too, because he’s been doing it for 60 years and I’m going to do it for like a year. Wait, that’s actually eight months. So but just like that, how different personalities, different gifts can work together. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s what unifies us has to be strong enough to keep the different personalities, temperaments and gifts together. Yeah. You know, one of the interesting things is, you know, the recent convert that fascinated me is the whole notion of like these confraternities and these special devotions. And it’s just like it’s a level of diversity within unification that I just couldn’t. Everything that I was encountering in the sort of non-denominational ecumenical Protestantism that I was in, that diversity was held together by like ignoring actual difference and pretending that it wasn’t important. And there’s this whole other level in the church where it’s like it is all well and good for you to just like be totally about this thing. The only thing you’re not allowed to do is say that everyone has to be like that. You can’t leave communion with Rome. You can’t be above the sacraments and the liturgy. But otherwise, like, yeah, just like knock yourself out and don’t say that everyone else has to be like you. And I guess it’s a really cool thing. I mean, you can see that on like the low level, right. So these various devotions, but I think on the higher level in terms of like all the religious orders that are there, like, let’s be honest, like if those religious orders were forming in the U.S., they would all be different denominations that all were like at each other’s throats. Like, you know, they kind of were at each other’s throats anyway in the middle ages. Sure. But they didn’t, but they’re still together. Like that’s actually astonishing is that like 800 years later, the Dominicans and the Franciscans are still in the same church. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, they’ve got these great traditions where on the feast of St. Dominic, the Franciscan priest will give the homily and on the feast of St. Francis, the Dominican priest will give the homily. When is the feast of St. Dominic? Oh, I guess something. Okay, I’ll look it up. Now you’ve now you’ve nerd sniped me. Oh, it was recent. It seemed like it was very recent. Francis was last month. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And more people notice the feast of St. Francis because a lot of American parishes will bless pets on the feast of St. Francis. So you like hear about it? Oh, my goodness. I have a story about that that I’m not going to share on the Internet. But if you ever find me in person, ask me about the blessing of pets. August. Yeah, August. Never heard of the pet thing before. Heard of the car thing, not the pet thing. Yeah. So you can bless pets. It’s fine. So people get pretty much anything. Can you? Sepsin. Sepsin. Like like physical things. Yeah, unless it’s cannot be used for a good purpose. And then we’ll bless it. That’s that’s fair. There’d be sorted items set there. I’m not going to bless that. You know, yeah. Want me to bless your gun? I’ll bless your gun. That’s fine. Nice. On behalf of that, that that one guy in the Catholicism channel earlier, what is the deal with indulgences? Oh, we want to go on with indulgences. Okay. No, I got a whole that we can click this and send it to. Yes. Yes. Let me just indulgences. So I want you to imagine under what circumstances a good father would punish his children. Okay, I’ve set the garbage on fire and like there’s like all of the things, the plastic thing that holds garbage is all melted over the driveway. Yeah. Huge fire. It’s just unbiographical. No, I’m just imagining it. Okay, right. So so your father, little little John has set the garbage can on fire. He did it on purpose. He kind of knew that throwing lit matches into the garbage can was a bad idea. He’s 12, right? You should know that. He should know better. So why would you want to punish him? Well, the fundamental thing you want from your children as a good father, and I mean this, not I’m not saying a legislator punishing criminals. I’m saying a father with his children now, but that’s what I’m using is for your child to learn that that sort of thing is wrong and to become the kind of person who not only doesn’t do that, but isn’t even tempted to do that. Now, that’s a high bar right there. And human fathers often over or under react. And that’s just life in a veil of tears right there. But the goal for a just father is to only inflict this punishment in order to make his children good, to make them morally upright people. So I want to watch the garbage and not even think about setting it on fire. Yes. Yes. That’s what you that’s the sort of person that you need to become. So that’s the way that our father in heaven treats us. He does punish us for our sins. And there is a certain aspect of justice to that. But the I think probably the overriding concern even over the restoration of justice is so that we can become worthy of his presence, that we could become morally upright and achieve divinization or theosis, if you like to go for it, go at it from the Eastern perspective. What does what does this phrase mean worthy of his presence? Yeah. Yeah, if you are not properly prepared, if you have not put on your wedding garment, then you won’t be able to stand in the presence of a holy God. You have to be prepared in that. As it says in the book of Revelation, nothing unclean will enter in there. So now, so that’s that’s what punishment from God is supposed to accomplish to make us holy to correct our faults. If you live the Christian life well here on earth, there’s no need for purgatory. If you take advantage of all of the opportunities that the Lord gives you, that you avail yourself of the grace that he’s made available through Jesus Christ, through the sacraments, through the whole Christian life, you don’t need purgatory. You can go straight to heaven. Who is the sort of person who doesn’t need purgatory? Are we talking like the great neighbor down the road who’s a fantastic person? Are we talking about Francis of Assisi? Are we talking about Jesus Christ? Like where are we at in terms of? Certainly Francis of Assisi. Okay, he doesn’t need purgatory. Yeah, yeah. I’m rather convinced that there’s more in the church than we would know about who got to that place where they wouldn’t need purgatory. Isn’t that what all saints do? That’s what all saints do. Well, I think the ones who pass through purgatory into heaven would also be included in all saints. Oh sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All righty, so purgatory. The whole point of purgatory is to make up for what you didn’t accomplish on earth. You didn’t bear your cross with enough love in order to perfect yourself from your moral failings and be worthy to enter the presence of God. Now here’s the thing is that God is absolutely in charge that he can create whatever he wants wherever he wants. So God could allow you, he could remove any obstacles from your soul immediately if he wanted to. He could just do that. He could like go to go past go and collect your $200 or something like that. He’s got it, isn’t he? I mean I think he would want your consent for that, right? He wouldn’t do it without your consent. But you know what? If Gabriel, the angel Gabriel, came to me and said, hey Father Sites, how would you like all of your sinful dispositions taken away? All you have to do is say yes. I’d be like, okay, yeah, we’ll do that. I feel like there’s a whole lot of people who would say yes to that that haven’t been given the option to do that. Yes, and then we get to indulgences. Indulgences are precisely this, right? Works of prayer and fasting held up by the church, designed especially to separate you from the things of this world and get you to think more about the things of heaven. And by the merits of Christ that you participate in, you can you can gain these indulgences from the treasury of graces that the church has in order to either protect yourself or to apply that to one of the souls in purgatory because they’re still a part of the church as well. And so it’s the same thing, right? But God is in his mercy instead of making you sweat it out, however you do in purgatory, can just immediately lift you up. As it’s an indulgence, right? It’s not justice anymore. It’s indulgences. Free sweat. Yeah. Somebody sweated on your behalf. Like, okay, so there’s the ladies in the convent who are doing the sweating for the rest of us. And they’re adding things to. Emma could do this too. She could get an indulgence. Even Emma and Ted and Philip and even Father Eric could do this. Yes. But they’re like adding to their account in what do you say the treasury of grace? Yeah. The church’s treasury of grace. Church has the treasury of grace. Which is, you know, it’s like it’s it’s funny because it’s one of those infinities that’s bigger than another infinity. So the treasury of grace is all of the merits of Christ that he earned on the cross, which is infinite, plus the merits of the saints who have participated in that. So it’s one of those infinities that’s bigger than another infinity, you know, but it’s still not greater than just Christ himself. So anyway. So I got a question. Can you separate God’s punishment from God’s mercy? Because I don’t see how you can. No, no, no. Even even his worst. Yeah, no, no, they’re one thing in him. They’re one thing. Yeah, like would not want to enter God’s presence unless I was however, whatever this means, pretty sure about I was ready for that. Yeah. What would it mean to enter God’s presence without being ready for it? I don’t think you do. You don’t. Well, I think you’re repelled if you’re not ready for it, if you’re not worthy of it. Yes. So, you know, my my Catholic imagination is so deeply formed by Dante, but I just like he just hits it on the head so many times. When Dante gets down into hell, he’s asking the exact same question. And the answer is that the souls who have not become friends of God in this life actually cast themselves into hell, because they don’t want to be near God. And worse and better than that, the entrance to hell has an inscription that says divine love made me. Right. God’s love made a place for the souls who want to flee from his presence. Like, okay. I was traded by love. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, when you start to, I don’t know, for me anyway, this stuff starts to get a lot clearer when you, the more that I think about this, that the good being is good, right? The union of the transcendentals, right? That being and goodness and truth are the same. And these are thinking about, so what’s not, what’s moral evil? Let’s take a movement away from existence. Like anti-ontology. And so, like, if you’re predominantly defined by evil, you’re actually not the kind of thing that can exist in a relationship to goodness and being. Oh, okay. It’s not a question of you. Like, it is a question of you wanting to. To be evil, I mean, to be evil, to be morally wrong is to, like, by definition, it’s to not love God, like, or to love his attributes. Like, that’s all you’re saying. Like, if God is actually good, not in the sense of, like, God holds moral qualities, but God is goodness, then to say, like, yeah, I just like things that are evil. I mean, you’re just saying, like, I just don’t, I don’t like God. And so then why would. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I don’t know if this makes sense, but it’s also could be, I’m not worthy of God. So I reject God first, but I guess that’s also saying I don’t like God. Oh, I mean, that’s the thing is, he could, he could make you worthy. He’s inviting you to be made worthy in his grace. And so it’s actually kind of an act of pride to be like, oh, my sins, you know, my sins, my sins, father, let me tell you about my sins. You know, you meet guys like this, sometimes they’re just joking. Other times they’re a little more serious. They’re like, you don’t want to hear my confession, father. It would really blow your mind. Like, yeah, come on, man. I just, I just pay attention to my own imagination. That gives me a pretty good idea of what darkness is within man. Yeah. That’s pride right there to say that your sins can actually negate God’s mercy. That’s just pride. I know they can’t. Are you dumb? Yeah. That can be difficult when you’re first coming to Christianity, because I mean, I had a priest tell me like, mercy is just like a shower. All you got to do is just, you know, walk underneath it. Not as looked at him as like, what are you talking about? It’s not easy to walk towards that shower, because if you’re paying attention, you know, that shower means death. That means death itself. I’m not dying in that. Like you see it as, oh, it’s all, you know, unicorns and ponies. What? Sorry about the unicorn part. But anyway, you know, it’s like, father, that is death. That is death for me to do that. So I mean, there’s freedom, not the old man to death. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s that. Oh, shoot. I don’t have that Hopkins book with me. He’s got a great, he’s got a great poem about exactly that. It’s a carry in comfort. Oh, no, it’s right here. Awesome. Hold on. If you guys will just give me your attention for like another couple more seconds. I think this, I think you’d appreciate this. Okay. And comfort to what serves mobile beauty. I’m sorry. I should have just had this right in front of me. And ask Emma what she’s making. What are you making, Emma? I’m making a sock, but I think I need to pick out a couple, a little bit of it, because I just made a mistake. Okay. I like knitting well on these, because if my hands don’t have something to do, my brain stops paying attention. Here it is. Yeah. So this is, I’ll just read the whole thing because it’s beautiful. Because, you know, no one’s on a schedule. Not, I’ll not carry in comfort, despair, not feast on thee, not untwist, slack, they may be these last strands of man in me or most weary cry. I can no more. I can, can choose something. Hope, wish they come, not choose, not to be, but all but oh, thou terrible. Why wouldst thou root on me, thy ring of birth, right foot rock, or lay a lion lamb against me, scan with darksome devouring eyes, my bruised bones, and fan, oh, in turns of tempest, me heaped there, me frantic to avoid thee and flee. Why, that my chaff might fly, my grain lie, sheer and clear, nay, in all that toil, that coil, since seems I kissed the rod, hand rather my heart low, lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. Cheer whom, though, the hero whose heaven-hand handling flung me foot-trod? Me, or me that fought him, oh, which one, is it each one, that night, that year, of now done darkness, I wretch, lay wrestling with, my God, my God. But I’ll, that, there’s several things in here, but you know, why is, why is God, basically why is God apparently playing rough with me, it would be one way to put it, and he says, me, or me that fought him, oh, which one, is it each one. Like, Philip, it’s like, exactly that, you’re like, which, you say, oh, that, that shower of mercy is death, and it’s like, yeah, right, but the entire question is death of what, like, which me, you know, which me is dying when I get in the shower, yeah, also I love that, that line, I can, can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Choose not to be. Not choose not to be. It’s like, well, I mean, there’s this beautiful, I mean, there’s this wonderful thing, and, and actually, I think this ties in really well with indulgences, Father, because I’m thinking about those passages in the New Testament, when people, you know, the Lord, I believe, help my unbelief, and the apostles come to him, and they say, like, Lord, increase our faith. There’s this weird sort of, like, thing about these virtues, like, hope, or faith, where there’s, like, if you can just have enough to ask for it, like, more of it will come, like, you don’t even have to hope, you just have to, you just have to try to not stop, you just have to, you don’t even have to want to exist, you just have to not want to not exist, like, you don’t have to believe, you just have to believe that you could believe. It’s like, it’s a very weird thing. I don’t want to, I wish that I wanted. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s an indulgence, as are basically like, like, that’s, I mean, that’s kind of what I’m hearing Father say, and it’s lined up with those things that I’ve heard. It’s like, how would you, how would God go about giving you access to this, these things that would bring you into his presence, if you are a creature who’s incapable of the acts of charity, well, then you do something that’s like, looks like here’s a button, like, I know you can’t walk all the way to the top of the mountain, but here’s a button that’ll, like, if you could just get enough will to push that button, that’ll take you in the elevator all the way to the top, you know, like, oh, I could push that button. I could pray that rosary, you know, I could go on that pilgrimage and so on. So it can be really hard to even want those things to. Well, boy, that’s when you learn some things about yourself. It’s like, it’s so easy, but still. There’s another, I read this one on the, in the airport on the way back from Arkansas from Hopkins. It’s kind of brutal. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this one before, but I’m going to read it now because we’re in a poetry sharing mood. Yeah. More Hopkins. Thou art indeed just Lord, if I contend with thee, but sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners ways prosper and why must disappointment all I in Denver end? Wirt thou my enemy, O thou my friend, how wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost defeat me, thwart me? O the sots and thralls of lust do in spare hours more thrive than that I spend, sir, upon thy cause. See banks and breaks now, leave it how thick, how laced they are again with Freddy Sherville, look and fresh wind shakes them. Birds build, but not I build, no but strain, times eunuch and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain. Hmm. It’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know if you’re, if you haven’t been following God for very long, maybe you don’t feel that one, but if you’ve been going at it for a while and you notice how sinful you still are, you kind of feel it. And that’s what God has to work with. So that’s why he has to give us indulgences in order to actually get us to a place where we can be worthy of him, his unmediated presence specifically. Indulgences. I’m Jean Cavalier. I have burned down this garbage can and the green plastic has melted all over the driveway. I’m not going to be able to get it out of the car. And the green plastic is melted all over the driveway. To me, because I’m Protestant, the process of indulgence is I go grab five American dollars and I go hand it to my older sibling. And then the older sibling gets me an indulgence, which does what and how does that work? Like why is the indulgence process by the five dollars to my older sibling? So first off, I don’t think that is the indulgence process. Let’s just take money out of business. We’ve got a bit of trouble with money and indulgences. It’s a bit of a sore spot still, even 500 years down the line. So is it specifically the sibling’s intervention that’s rattling you? Okay, so I’m gathering distant memories of my childhood and being taught about the Reformation and why we did a Reformation. And it has to do with these things. And we talk about corruption in the Catholic Church where we go and we pay priests all these money that we’re purchasing righteousness with money. And then the priest walks away with a big pile of money. And then we’re saying, no, that’s not right because there’s no mediator between man and God. Yeah, yeah. So in response to the Protestant Reformation, the Church, so there’s three traditional acts of satisfaction which are designed to separate you from the love of this world in order to help you to love God more. You’ve got prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. All right, it’s right there in the Sermon on the Mount. We’re not making up anything that separates you from the love of, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. We stopped doing indulgences for almsgiving specifically because we were abusing that. And it was making things worse and not better. But we still have prayer and fasting. So you no longer can get indulgences for almsgiving. Or does it make almsgiving- Wait, who’s giving the indulgence? Is it the Roman Church or is it the throne of the Father? The Roman Church with the authority of the Father. Okay. Because he has the keys. Right. Right. Right. Does the Father grant indulgences outside of the structure of the Roman Church or not? I don’t think so. But he certainly, well, it seems probable that he would still give children who are not in full communion with the Church grace. But indulgences are specifically- It’s sort of like the Church attaches rewards to certain pious actions that you can do in order to encourage you to do them. But they would probably, if you were to do the exact same thing without intending or knowing that there was an indulgence attached, it would probably do you just as much good. Why would it do you just as much good if you’re not interacting with the Roman Church who gives it to you? Well, I’m imagining, like, let’s say Philip doesn’t know that if you piously meditate on scripture for 15 minutes, you get an indulgence. I didn’t know that. Yeah, right? He didn’t know that. Maybe he did that. Right. I’m pretty sure I’ve done that at some point in my life. You know, it might not be a plenary indulgence. It might just be a partial indulgence. But yeah, that little thing right there. Something good happened when he meditated on the scripture. Yeah, right. And so the indulgence is a bit of just like an incentive. The Church specifically holding this up to you and saying, hey, with our authority, do you do this? We’ll give you time out of purgatory, you know. But here’s the fine print, John. Here’s the fine print. Is that one of the conditions for attaining a plenary indulgence, full remission of all temporal punishment in purgatory, is not being attached to sin. What does attached mean? Yeah. Yeah. And so if you do meet the conditions for a plenary indulgence, but just like, oh man, I still like getting hammered, but only on Saturday nights. I only ever get drunk on Saturday nights, you know. It’s like, well, you get the indulgence except for the bits on the Saturday nights, or you get drunk, you know. Okay. So I’m grasping, I’m not being provosted by grasping this, but I’m grasping the concept of purgatory and that we sweated out and we’re being brought into the theosis. And then the way indulgence plays a part of that, there’s a grace that comes upon us, that negates, that separates us from our sin and unites us with the Father. But then the role of the Roman Church in all of that is fuzzy to me. So like, I’m imagining this, like the Roman Church, like it has access to the bank account of the indulgences. And so it like, it goes and makes withdrawal and hands out all these indulgences to all these people. But then does, is the Roman Church, are they the only name on the account or are there other other holders of that account? Like, is God on the account? Are there angels on the account? Are there like, who else, who else can hand out these graces? Indulgences are a sacramental, they’re instituted by the Church. So they’re not, meaning, so at what point there wasn’t such a thing as the miraculous medal? There were no miraculous medals, people didn’t bless miraculous medals. And then our lady showed up to somebody, I can’t remember who, and said, Margaret Mariella Copley? Yeah. I thought she was the most, the one who had the vision of the most sacred heart. And so the Church has the authority to do things like, okay, guess what? We’re blessing miraculous medals now. That’s my final guess. You know, at some point we had to come up with a blessing for holy water. I imagine that was pretty early on. But that wasn’t of divine foundation. And so these indulgences are instituted by the Church. And so just like the Orthodox don’t have miraculous medals, neither do they have indulgences. Because, but it’s like they still have, you know, we would recognize seven sacraments that they have. They have all sorts of blessings that we would think are probably about as efficacious as anything I could pull off. So does that help? Not, not really. Maybe if I listen to it again. No. Yeah. No, the Church has the ability to institute certain things. And yeah, if you- Like the church invented this idea of giving grace to whom he wants. Okay. And there would be ways of getting grace that aren’t via indulgences or sacraments even. Well, it seems like indulgences, it’s a very general term and a very general idea. And it seems like a restating at the idea of giving a grace. And I don’t really see the distinction between an indulgence and a grace. Yeah, that’s the point. They’re supposed to communicate grace. The Church is basically holding this up and say, hey, you do this, it’s guaranteed. Right? Assuming you actually go at it with a sincere heart. You know, it’s like, no, no, I mean, you know, these metaphors are sometimes crap, but like, you know, it’s like a teacher at the front of the classroom when they’re like, look, someone, there’s all this candy at the front of the classroom. If anyone wants a piece of candy, raise your hand. If you don’t raise your hand, you’re not getting the candy. Like the indulgence is basically like raising your hand for grace. You’re like, yes, I would like that grace. I’m going to raise my hand. Because it’s not made it the difference between like what you’re doing and what you’re receiving are just so absurdly out of proportion. It’s like, go pray rosary in a group. It’ll take you about 15 minutes and there’s a plenary indulgence attached to that. It’s like, okay, most people can do that. Everyone can do that actually. And so really like that’s it’s just basically saying like, here are the things like if you would like to engage your will to receive grace, here you go. These are all things that you can do that are like saying yes to grace. I think it’s like 80% catechetical. How I would put it in my own meathead way is that I’ve been working out since I was 12 at different stages and I do the same workout every day on the same weights. I’m not going to grow. I got to constantly be changing it up. And it seems to me from very naive perspective is that when Mary appears to somebody and says, okay, here’s the Catholic medals or whatever, like that’s just a change up that’s needed. I’m worried. It’s St. Bernadette actually, but early to board. Yeah, sorry. I was just gonna throw that in. I don’t know if Laura’s throwing up. Catherine, you’re born. Okay. Sorry, my meathead is not in the room. I’m so sorry, Philip. I really did not mean to interject. I like it. Thank you. I’m all for it. I could read a poem now if anybody wants. It’s not on the subject of indulgences. And I’m not like a real poet, like a reading poetry guy. And I haven’t read this for a long time. So it’s not gonna be that smooth. But it’s a Wendell Berry. And it’s called the I think it’s called the manifesto. Anyway, love the quick profit, the annual raise vacation with pay, want more of everything ready made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something, they will call you. When they want you to die for profit, they will let you know. So friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance for what man has not encountered. He has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of hummus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion. Put your ear close and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself, will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is niest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail. The way you didn’t go. Be the fox that makes more tracks than necessary. Some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. Yeah, become ungovernable. That’s what it is, right? That was a call to freedom right there. Yeah. Yeah. I have a 187 doc. That’s a good one, Philip. I haven’t read that one in ages. I like that it’s, for me, it’s about humility and freedom and adventure. The freedom to say no, the freedom to be weird, the freedom to say the things that you want to say but still be careful about it. And the freedom to embrace people that irritate you and agitate you. Because, man, there’s gold there. There is gold there. When somebody just agitates you, sometimes you got to walk away and sometimes you got to go back to it. And it’s like, let’s go. No. Which is why I need to reread Wendell Berry. Because he agitates you? I had to read him in high school. And I don’t even remember exactly what it was about his writing that I didn’t like. But just everything I’ve read by him comes off as so sanctimonious and kind of self-righteous. And it drives me crazy. Or it did in high school and college. There’s totally some of that, especially in his poetry. His novels. It was all essays, too. I’ve only ever read essays by him. Jaber Crowe. Jaber Crowe is wonderful. That’s what I’ve heard. Interesting. You know, there’s like four or five stories that every other story is an echo of. And I know which one that, I think I know which one that one’s an echo of. And so if you read it, I’d be interested to hear what you think. It’s been a while. Okay. I’ll put it on the list. I do need to come to read Jaber Crowe. And I should read his fiction before writing him off entirely. Because I’ve only ever read essays by him. And a lot of people come off as kind of obnoxious in essays. I wonder if the whole trusting one’s from a friend thing is what the Peterson sphere, this little corner stuff is about. We want people who will irritate us. I can do that. I can do that. You were talking about charism earlier. That’s my charism. My charism is sanctifying other people. Oh, that’s a good one. Yeah. No, Philip, I like that. I like that poem that you read, because it just holds up the value of doing things with no utility. Yeah. Praise God for that. Oh, man. Like the most important things in life have no utility to this world. So awesome. This is Catholic philosophy professor at Christendom College in Virginia, Dr. John Kudabek. Our paths keep crossing over the last seven years or so. He was at the pilgrimage this year, and gave a really, really wonderful talk on fatherhood that was just astonishingly good. I heard a talk he gave maybe two years ago, and which is the title of the talk was animating the household through leisure, which I’d always thought leisure like leisure class and petite bourgeoisie stuff. He always does this. He comes in and he’s just like a classical philosopher in the sense of being incredibly sharp and organized. There’s nothing sloppy about his thinking. It’s just a delight. He’s a great speaker. But he broke down human action into three principal categories, work, which is to do something for a future goal, amusement, which is to recover from work. It’s the things that we do to recover from the work, and then leisure, which is the things that we do for their own sake. I like that because it makes amusement not automatically bad. Yeah. Well, right. Amusement has a proper place. And actually, my friend who just came through a couple of days ago, he’s my baptismal sponsor. He brought up the virtue of utropalia, which is basically like virtuous recreation. It’s like the capacity to have fun with people in a good way. What does it mean? It’s the golden mean between buffoonery and sanctum and basically being overly solemn. At any rate, I’m kind of wandering off. But his whole point is that no, it’s completely my fault. His notion is that leisure is like, basically, we work as much as we have to so that we can have leisure, and we have amusement as much as we need to so that we can work enough to have leisure. Because in the category, obviously not all leisure activities are of equal value. Going to mass is a leisure activity in that schema. Prayer is a leisure activity. Although prayer could be work as well. But the whole, most like what makes a human life flourish, a family life flourish, is actually the leisure. Everything else moves towards the support of that. And there’s these interesting ways in which they start to blend together. You’re like, is cooking the Christmas meal, is that work or leisure? Well, decorating the Christmas tree. Oh, that starts to really blur. Camping feels like a lot of work. Camping is not work. It shouldn’t be work unless you’re an outdoor. Well, if you’re an influencer and you’re getting paid to go camping, something like that, then yeah, then it’s work. But a family going on a camping trip, despite that it might be toilsome, deeply toilsome. And what’s weird is when he said that, one of the first things that clicked with me is that like no one, almost no one has any leisure in their life, actually. For all that we say about the world, it’s like we’re just work amusement all the time. We’re just constantly doing. And I feel like what the poem Phillips just read is totally a cold pleasure in that sense. And Dr. Kudabeck’s schema, he’s saying, do things that don’t fit into the schema of work amusement. Do things that are valuable just because you did them and you don’t have to justify them to any man. So I like it. Having children is the ultimate leisure activity. Existing is the ultimate leisure activity. Existing is the ultimate leisure activity. That’s right. I am practicing unlicensed existence right now. I have not paid my existence permit in a while. Cross the border, buddy. You cross the border. I don’t want to. Americans have guns. Paintball with Mark was leisure, as painful as it was. It was painful in his heart. It was toilsome, but that was 100% leisure. There’s exactly plastering Mark with Paintball does not need to be defended as being for some higher purpose. So if you do it for the vine, that makes it not leisure. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. It does. 100%. If you’re doing those things to gain social clout, it’s easy to be true leisure, according to Dr. Kudabek. There’s such a thing as type two leisure though. I want to know. Is that too sweet? So there’s type one fun, which is just like, yeah, that was such a good time. And then there’s type two fun with, actually in the moment, it really stunk and you were miserable. And then when you look back on it, you’re like, oh, I’m so glad I did that. Like hiking is type two fun. So the core is inventing type two leisure here. Yeah. Yeah. If you’re going like a really, like a hike that really sucks. And I’ve been on those where I’ve been lost up on the side of a ravine and thinking, okay, I climbed my way up here. I can’t see a way down. This is horrible. And like making like starting to go down and then like, no, I’m going to die. Go back up. I just can’t stay at the top. I have to make my way down. And then after that, you know, after like hours later, I get to my car. It’s exhilarating. And I was just alone. And if you do it with other people, it’s even more fun. Like this. Man, that sucked. That was awesome. Yeah. Getting lost in the woods was awesome. Wasn’t it? Mark? Yeah. Well, this will be a great story. You know, it’s interesting. I feel like what you’re asking about, you’re asking about when I think about convivial, like that totally felt like a leisure thing for me. And it took a lot of work. But like, that’s why I was absolutely pleasure. Yeah. Like, I don’t need to explain like why I did this or how it’s going to benefit things or like, I just, I did it because it was worth doing. And like a walking pilgrimage. And Philip, you’re totally right. All those things, man, I’m so, I’m such a sucker for that stuff. And the moment it’s over, I’m like, I want to do it again. Like I did a hot wings challenge with my brother for his birthday last year. He did, his wife did a hot wings challenge for me and two of his other friends. And it was excruciating. And then the next day I was like, I want to do it again. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Corey, we got you finally. We roped you in. I saw so many of my favorite faces. I couldn’t say no. It was the prospect of some type two fun, wasn’t it? Yeah. That’s the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. Oh man. Sounds like a real marine to me. I’ve been recruiting for your monastery village. Say what? I’ve been recruiting for your monastery village. I got two siblings on board. So I was just with my parents this past weekend for a little bit and my brothers, and they were like asking me about it. It’s like, so like your compound, is this like going to be open to other, it’s not a compound. It’s not a commune. I don’t even know what it’s going to be, but it’s probably not that bad. It’s going to be an intentional community. Intentional community. In northern Maine, right, Corey? In Wisconsin. No, that’s too far. Northern Maine, there’s so much land there. There’s moose. You should just come join us. I’ve been learning in the book that Paul and Mark told me about, American Nations. Like, Philip, you’re in Yankee Dome. You’re basically one of us already. You should just come down. Well, the Nickersons got kicked out of Yankee Dome like a long time ago. We went from Yarmouth to Novoscochitln. It ain’t the same. We renamed it the same thing. It was like, nope, that’s ain’t Yarmouth. Sorry. It’s okay. Philip, was your family like, were you guys like whiskey or something? For me? How’d you guys get kicked out of the state? Oh, this was back way back when we were like, Did they just redraw the borders? Like the American War of Revolution. Wow. We sided with the British like our family did and then they skated all our land and everything else and put us on a ship and sent us up to Nova Scotia. That’s literally what I just read about in American Nations. Wow. And also I found out something cool. Another thing that was, I mean, not that that’s cool, Philip, I’m sorry for your family. Sorry, wrong side. I just found out that when my grandfather emigrated from Ukraine in 1930, they set foot in North America and Halifax. How cool. Yeah. How long ago was that? 1930. Oh, Pier 21 then. The name would be at Pier 21 in Halifax. They have all the people that landed there, the names of them. Oh, cool. I’m gonna have to go check that out sometime, see if it’s there. Cool. Did you say, sorry, John, I don’t think I’ve met you. John Jean, is that how you say it? John. Were they Ukrainians or Volga Germans? Ukrainian. Ah, okay, cool. My family were Volga Germans and they came to North America at about the same time. Cool. Yeah, technically it was part of Poland at the time, but they were, you know, they were living on a plot of land that had been part of Austria, Hungary, and then part of Poland and part of Russia and, you know, it was Lithuania a few hundred years ago, but they were ethnically Ukrainian. Yeah. Now it’s part of Ukraine. Yeah, no more Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yes. I also, yeah, apparently my great grandfather fought in World War I with the Austrians against the Russians. So that’s interesting. That sounds like the most miserable possible place to be fighting. Anytime I hear about any war that Russia’s been in, it’s like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, like the Eastern front of World War II was horrible. Yeah, they don’t really do that. They just die in this cool war. Like maybe the closest thing they came to was like the Crimean War or something. Yeah. Any war with Russia is just not going to go well for anybody. Especially the poor Russian peasants that get drafted into the army. Yeah. I’d rather go to war in South Florida in the Keys where they had the Conch Republic Revolution. You guys know about that story? They had a legit revolution in the Conch Republic and it consisted of a group of people getting together and hitting a policeman over the head with a piece of bread. That was the focus of their revolution. The Florida Man Revolution. That’s what it is. Look it up. This is a real thing. That sounds kind of Canadian if it was a baguette or something. You know what would be a cool stylish war would be like an island hopping campaign across the Caribbean that includes Florida. You know, like a bunch of air and sea stuff, just like lots of drones and zipping around and doing things and then no mud, no snow, no ice, like just like speed boats, speed boats everywhere. Yeah, island hopping warfare involves mud. I mean, like maybe not now, but like if you read anything about the Pacific front, especially for the Marines, it was like, get the last pieces by artillery shells and then hike through waist deep mud in these Pacific atolls like Okinawa. They did it in the Korean school. Oh, man. You hear these stories like, yeah, we hike 15 miles and two feet of mud and you think, okay, yeah, and then you go and cut a walk in three inches of mud. Not happening. That’s not a good thing. There’s no going home to take a shower after that one, at least not for a few years. Oh, man. Y’all have a good night. I’m going to clip out of here. So, nice talking to you. Phil, I feel like I haven’t gotten to talk to you in so long now because I don’t do our Wednesday night estuaries anymore. Yeah, it’s been a while, obviously a lot to catch up on. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if here’s the right place for that or not, but Is there something interesting happening? I don’t know. Well, I can say well with Cory, but I don’t know if it’s not my place to mention anything that he said in the. Oh, yeah, we can. Yeah, I can say I gave my testimony again yesterday at the Sycamore retreat at the church and it was the first time I went with I mean, speaking in front of a group was the first time I went with no notes, no outline, no nothing and I was kind of on a time limit like I had to be done by quarter to 12 before we broke for lunch. And I started around 25 or 25 after 11. So I went for 20 minutes and it felt like a minute and a half. And there’s not a whole lot I can remember of what I said. But everybody says I was smooth and it felt good. But I don’t know. That’s kind of gross when I said smooth. But anyway, it felt right. It felt like the right things to be coming out of my mouth. So it was good. And it was so funny because for like usually I’ll make out like an outline like two weeks before and then I’ll start filling it in and then I’ll put all the stuff in I shouldn’t say just down on paper and then I’ll basically burn it or rip it up. So, okay, that’s not going to enter my mind. I have a whole process for it. And every time I went to make something formal it was like, nope. Am I being lazy or am I being told something? Because I can be lazy at times but I’m a planner on this stuff, right? So I’m like, okay, guess the answer is no bonus. So I think that was interesting. That’s awesome. Yeah. The longer I’ve been ordained, the less I’ve used notes for preaching. So for the past couple of years I just go, I go free handing it on a Sunday mass. Do you ever forget what you say, Father? Like after a mass, kind of like the details? After the day of it’s usually pretty fresh but like by the next week somebody will be like, oh that point you made last week in your homily, Father, it was really good. And I’m like, what did I say? I just want my own ego to just feed it back to me. Talk slowly. Yeah, what was that? Tell me, how did that improve your life? Yeah. It’s just, yeah, it’s just funny. It’s just funny, you know. The best is when somebody comes up and says, oh yeah, you made such a great point in your homily and then they go and tell you something that you know for a fact you didn’t, like that wasn’t a point you were trying to make. That’s always fun. Yeah. Glad God is talking to you while I’m talking. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, I guess you did just need to grow in gratitude. Like that was something the Lord wanted to do, but that homily was not about gratitude at all. Yeah. I’m one of those people that I don’t usually hear the same homily other people are hearing. I don’t know why, but yeah, I have confused priests before just like I did. Huh? Oh, God bless you. Thank you. Hope you’re muted, Father. We’re going to get. Good night, guys. Oh, John. Good to have you on. Good to see you. Tune in again. Awesome. Help me with more questions. Okay. Okay. I’ll bug you from time to time. Good night. Good night. Good night. Nice to have somebody who isn’t just raw rock Catholicism on here every once in a while. Not all the time, but just just a little dose of an exterior perspective. Yeah. Keep us from getting too insular. Although Mark’s here all the time. Yeah. Look, if Mark were to become a Christian, it would be Catholicism. Sure. That doesn’t. He definitely does not let us stay insular. That’s for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I had a similar experience to what you were saying, Father Eric. So if Dr. Jim ever sees this, don’t take it in the wrong way. But when he was doing his talk with T.S. Eliot, I was, oh, man, Mark, don’t don’t betray us. Betraying us like all the others. I hope he wears the eye patch when he goes ortho bro. But I’m really going to poke up my eye. Have you seen his navigating pattern videos, Corey, with the hat and the eye patch? I saw him wearing the eye patch. I confess I have not watched any of the full videos. I’ve watched like one of them. But yeah, when Dr. Jim was talking, I was it was hitting me so hard that I was kind of like going in and out of like present consciousness of actually listening to him because it kept striking things that I had already kind of been reflecting on. And it was it’s a compliment, though. It’s not like it was boring to listen to him. It’s like every time I came back to listen to him, he punched me in the face again with something amazing and had to recover for like two minutes. Yeah. Bookie can sit down when that happens. When somebody’s talking, you’re just. You’re just stuck. Yeah. Who has those recordings, by the way? They are on their way. They actually talked about that with Ted when he first jumped on. They are being processed and made pretty. And both Ted and I are quite eager to put them out there for general perusal and enjoyment. So. So, yeah, just we just all have to practice a little bit of the virtue of patience and the videos will show up and. Yeah, right. Right. You could say, look, mom, I’m not an occult. All right. Well, we were actually talking about how on her leadership team at work, because she works at a Catholic school, they each take turns like leading the prayer. And she did like praying with the Psalms when it was her turn, because she likes the Psalms even more than the gospel some days. So then I was like, ah, I can’t wait for Father Eric’s talk to be ready because you need to watch it. All right. Yeah. Well, I hope she benefits from it. Yeah, I was at a house party tonight and I did a really bad job of explaining the convivium retreat. It just got worse and worse. Finally, I said, I just want somebody to talk about the intersection of Jordan Peterson and Christianity with. And they were like, oh, OK. Why did you just say that? And it’s like, oh, yeah, and he just he just. That fits. That makes sense, Father Eric. That sounds like you. It’s not a commune, mom. Seriously, when I went to Chino, it was like, man, you’re going to what again? And who’s going to be there? Oh, yeah. Now imagine you’re flying across the country alone as a 25 year old woman. They can’t. There’s going to be this priest who’s going to pick me up from the airport. There were some details that I told my mom about. I’ll admit there were some details that I told my mom about after it happened. Staying out of campsite with a bunch of wild young men and Sandy and Sandy and Sandy. I would not want to mess with Sandy. I’m just saying right now. I don’t want to mess with you either, Emma, but I really wouldn’t want to mess with Sandy. Sandy pays. She does. I had the privilege of having breakfast with her at LAX when we were flying out, like this waiting for our planes. Man, that woman, one on one, man, she listens. She’s a beautiful soul. She is. She is. Awesome. I really wish she could have made it to the kingdom, because that would have been fantastic. Her poem was beautiful, too. I hope I did it justice. You did. I think you did. All right. Well, I’m going to head to bed now, but I’m glad I got to see you all. Good to see you, Cory. I’ll go back and catch up on the first half of the video. Very good. Take care, Cory. See you. Love you, buddy. Love you, too. See you. Does anybody else have any burning desire to talk about anything? We got what, four minutes left? Yeah. I can say for the first time yesterday, and I think I’m going to get this right, we were led in a St. Francis of Assisi, like, imagination prayer kind of thing. It was about imagine Zacchaeus in the tree, like, kind of be like in the crowd when Zacchaeus is trying to get Jesus’s attention, and then he gets up into the tree and Jesus’s reaction, and it was with, like, classical music playing, and then the narrator’s saying, and now this happens, and now this happens. It was just beautiful. Like, it was the first time I ever, like, closed my eyes and used, like, imagination like that. And it was, it was something else. Interesting. Yeah, that’s a, yeah, that’s a venerable tradition in the church. I’ve never heard it associated with St. Francis of Assisi, though. Maybe I’m wrong on that. So, I mean, anything I say with that. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s often associated with St. Ignatius. I don’t know. That could be correct. I don’t know. Yeah, yes. Most commonly associated with St. Ignatius, but it predated him, you know. Yeah. He didn’t, he didn’t make it up on his own, and I think that was something that even the Desert Fathers had talked about. And, you know, I have a YouTube video that focuses on that. Second of my parish mission talks, Unlock Your Baptism Goes a Fair Bit into the Imaginative Prayer. Oh, that’s great. So anyway, yeah, and Zaccheus, that’d be a good story for it, too. There’s a lot of, a lot of action you can paint the scene with and the Lord cannot use. But it doesn’t, it isn’t necessarily for everybody, so. Yeah. If you don’t have much of an imagination, something better might work out for you. Yes, yes, he says. Until you read more poetry and develop better imagination. Yeah, yeah. Well, you didn’t get left alone tonight, Father Eric. People can’t appreciate it. I was getting worried. I was getting worried it was going to be two hours of just rambling into the microphone alone, but rambling into the microphone with friends. That’s much better. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, I got an early, early day tomorrow, so I think I’m just going to go ahead and call it. But thanks for signing on. Happy Sunday and God bless you all. Happy Sunday. Thanks for hosting, as always. Yeah. Good to see you. Thank you, Father. Peace. Bye-bye.