https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WTLaCtK6tCk
Well, good evening and happy third Sunday of Advent. Before we get into it, I want to make a little announcement. We will not be streaming next Sunday night. So you can find our next stream. It’s going to be Saturday, December 23rd at 9 a.m. Central. I imagine on Christmas Eve, very few of you will be interested in listening to some Weirdo from North Dakota talk. Now, today is the third Sunday of Advent, and I would like any of the Catholic listeners in the chat to drop whether they saw violet colored vestments today or rose colored vestments today. This is important market research here. And if you attended a Novus Ordo Catholic Mass, I can almost guarantee you that you had an explanation of Gaudete from an antiphon that you probably didn’t hear, that being rejoice, the Latin imperative plural for the word rejoice there. This third Sunday of Advent, the entrance antiphon in both the extraordinary and ordinary forms is Gaudete. That’s the end of it. Rejoice. You’re being ordered. You’re being solidly ordered to rejoice. That’s kind of an interesting thing to think about here. Whether or not you can be ordered to rejoice. Obviously, St. Paul does it. I think it’s in the letter to the Philippians. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice. Didn’t seem to have any trouble giving that order to the Philippians. Now, if we look at other parts of the writings of St. Paul, you will find this list in Galatians chapter five of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Fruits of the Holy Spirit. Galatians chapter five, verses 22 to 23. We’ll go ahead and put these up here so that we can take a look at it. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And so it’s not hard to see the connection between joy and rejoicing. And I think both in Greek and in Latin and in English, rejoicing is just sort of the verb form of joy. Or perhaps joy is the noun form of rejoicing. I’m not sure which would have ended up coming first. And so we can tell a little story here. We go back in time to the far distant land of 2013. This is a solid decade ago. And that summer, I was in a program called Young Disciples. What Young Disciples was, was going around to a bunch of different parishes in North Dakota and putting on vacation Bible school for little kids. But ours was a very Catholic version of it. So our entire curriculum was designed around the different mysteries of the Rosary. And that summer, we were doing the Glorious Mysteries. And I had a lesson on the fruits of the Holy Spirit. And I was really frustrated by this lesson because the lesson plan seemed very vague and imprecise to me. There was no explanation as to what the fruits of the Holy Spirit are, actually. Like, what does it mean to have a fruit of the Spirit? You know, we can look at these individually. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. We can look at those individually and have a pretty good idea of what they mean without a whole lot of explanation. And so I did what any normal person would do. I looked it up in the Summa. And maybe I could have just figured this out by thinking about it, but I looked it up in the Summa anyway. And what St. Thomas Aquinas described the fruits of the Holy Spirit as being kind of dispositions that come from cooperation with the Holy Spirit. There are things that are produced in you, things that happen in you, because you are cooperating with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Now, when I first looked at this list, I just thought that St. Paul was just throwing out at random a whole bunch of just nice sounding things. But he actually has, St. Thomas actually has an article on the enumeration of these 12 fruits of the Holy Spirit and why they are in an appropriate order. He says that when you begin cooperating with the Holy Spirit, in addition to having the act of love of God above all things, you also have the fruits of that love. And so that obviously comes first. And love, love is a matter of possession, love is a matter of having achieved something and being brought into union with it. So when you are in union with the beloved, that leads quite naturally to joy. And our joy in the Spirit isn’t joy in something mean, something low, but it is joy in the most profound thing that we have available to ourselves, that being the Lord himself. And so this love, achieving union with the Lord leads to joy, and that leads to internal peace. And it’s from this internal peace that all the other fruits of the Holy Spirit flow through. So if you have this relationship with God, if you have this union with the highest in your heart, leads to the joy, leads to the peace, which means you’re now in a position where you can be patient, where you can be kind, where you can be good to others, you can be faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. All of that flowing from your relationship with the Lord, your relationship with the highest. So, not quite sure how that actually works out though with being ordered to rejoice. And what I suppose that means is, first off, if you’re not in a position where you’re rejoicing, you need to be able to get back into that frame of mind, back into that place. Maybe you need to reconcile with the Lord, which will almost always involve repenting. And maybe you just need to be in a position where you’re not going to be afraid to show the joy that you have, to manifest the good gifts that the Lord has given to you through his son, Jesus Christ. And so, along with St. Paul, I will just go ahead and say, rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say, rejoice. That’s some quality water there. Alrighty. That’s all I’ve got for an opening rant. Just a little reminder, next stream will be on Saturday, December 23rd at 9 a.m. Central. Link is up. Link is pinned. Y’all come in here and keep me company. Who is Joyce? James Joyce. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about here. Priest gave a homily about joy today as well. That’s what I want any of my Catholic listeners. I want to know what color was the vestment. Did they wear a rose vestment? And if they wore a rose vestment, did the priest make a joke about it being rose and not pink? That is a very common thing that we see here. Alrighty, Casey’s got the rose going on. And yeah, yeah, yeah. Wonder if your priest made the joke there. So Bishop and I were on the road today. Color pink was not mentioned. We don’t actually have a travel rose vestment for him, so we just brought violet. The places we went did not have high quality rose vestments, so we wore the violet today. But the rose candle was lit at the church, and so that gave us that coloring there. Mark coming in with a strong opinion. That’s a real shocker. They would wear salmon but never pink. How about rose, Mark? What about rose? All right, Andrew, mine wore purple, but it was Saturday evening, and it probably meant he was going to wear purple tomorrow as well. Your priest was in rose. Tell me if you made a joke about it being rose and not pink. Laura, we had rose, but I don’t think there was a joke. Okay, glad to hear it. I think the jokes are awful. I get tired of them. You know what? Just walk out there, wear your vestments, and just be like, hey, guess what? This is me. This is what I look like. My very first mass as an ordained cleric, I actually wore a lovely rose dalmatic. I might have that picture lying around here somewhere. So yeah, that rose is a festive color, but it is acceptable to not wear the rose on Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent. Also an interesting year because we have the shortest Advent possible. My baptism in Christ’s Communion was Saturday. I have to wait one month for first confession and six months for confirmation. Oh, that’s odd. That’s very odd, actually. Okay, congratulations. Congratulations. Good job on the baptism. Big fan. According to the law of the church, you should have been confirmed immediately. But waiting one month for the first confession makes a lot of sense because baptism forgives all your sins. So yeah, asserting that Catholic masculinity. That’s what we do. Asserting that Catholic masculinity. That’s what we do here. I would judge a priest who chose not to wear rose on that day. There is, you know, sometimes you go to a parish and they just have really cheap rose vestments. It’s just like a piece of polyester with a hole cut in it for your head. And, you know, no judgment for not wearing that. I’m actually going to see if I can find that photo of that Dalmatic. I might be able to find it pretty quickly, actually. B, 2018. Somebody wants to. Yes, yes, here we go. I. The idea why countries have these different rules. My wife thinks the Korean bishops want to make sure you’re serious before confirming you. I. Let’s just take a look at that. Basically, there’s a candidate that says that any adults who are baptized should be confirmed immediately unless it’s an emergency and there isn’t actually a priest there. So. Yeah, because it’s one of the sacraments of initiation. So you’re Korean bishops are confusing me right now and I’ll just let it go. Try and find this photo. On the Internet. Here it is. Yeah, so this was the day that I was ordained. And. Yeah. Yeah, lovely rose vestments right there at St. St. and Joachim. So that was the first liturgy I had as a as a ordained cleric. And speaking of not ordained clerics. Hello, Mark. Hello, Father Eric. How are you doing? Doing well. Why a traveling tour on this fine, whatever day till Advent, whatever, whatever. You know, it had probably been five years since Bishop had visited these little parishes. And so. Wow. It was time. Yeah, it was time, you know, it was. So there’s a bigger town, bigger for North Dakota in the middle, and then it might have eight or nine thousand people living there and then two smaller parishes. And we went and visited the smaller parishes today. Yeah. Hey, anybody want to talk about that PVK Friday Convo? Cory does too. Can I? Can I? Oh, go for it. Go for it. But first, first you have to tell me what do you think of joy as the fruit of proper participation? That’s got to be something that you give me a thumbs up on. I’d have to think about that. You know, I’ve got my, you know, life is struggle, right? Suffering is inevitable. Struggle is the middle condition. Middle out, right? All right. Third way, you can turn your, you know, your struggle into joy or more suffering up to you. Right. And so. Yeah, I mean, I it sounds OK at first blush. I’d have to really think about it though. Yeah, it’s Thomas Aquinas has already done the thinking for you and he’s defined it as a fruit of the Holy Spirit. So is St. Paul, you know, there you go by the Holy Spirit. So you want my thumbs up on I’ll give you my preliminary thumbs up until I have to think about it more. But yeah, I was talking with with Bruce about this whole PVK stream, in fact. So it’s been it’s been on it’s been on the minds of those in Peterson’s sphere. Hey, Sandy. Hey, there was a little bit of chatter about it on Bridges of Meeting yesterday. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, I’ll come in. I’ll come in with my first thought. I think Cale’s elder needs a little bit of joy. He just seems kind of, you know, beat down. And it’s like, do you believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Supreme Lord of History or not? So repeat your question for me, because obviously he didn’t answer it right. No, no, no, no. Something about joy. Yeah, so I as far as I can tell, reading the Holy Scriptures and wise doctors who have commented on it, I think that joy is something that comes from participating with the Lord. Well, basically, you’re striving to be his disciple. You’re striving to live in communion with him. And the fruit of that, right, something that doesn’t that comes at the end and not at the beginning, is joy. So, yeah, and then I just think it’s kind of funny that St. Paul elsewhere orders people to rejoice. Is that the same thing as simply experiencing joy? As far as I can tell, rejoicing is just the verb form of joy. And joy is just the noun form of rejoicing. Yeah, pretty much. In like all three languages that I could think of, Greek, Latin and English. Yeah, that’s really the same thing. It’s just a different form. And I think that’s that’s well, your reading is one thing, Laura, focusing matters. And I think like I was I was actually a little surprised so that there is a pattern where, you know, I’ll make a comment and my comments don’t always get any attention from PVK or at least not public attention from you get just fine. I’m not not upset about it or anything. It’s been going on for years. I want to colonize PVK. I’ll be upfront about it. Well, I mean, I can colonize them anytime I want. That’s not the issue. The issue is, you know, I was I thought raising some very prescient points that maybe given the topic of your discussion and the way your discussion was going in the moment, because I was actually listening, you might want to address. And I was actually surprised this time, even though it’s a very common pattern, that he didn’t address any of that. And I know like I can tell when people read my comments, they’re like, oh, I’m going to tell when people read my comments, because my comments tend to be of the type that elicit a response. And I think that that is, you know, it was clear that some people were like reading going, whoa, and still went unaddressed. But it’s really important. You don’t have a lasting, consistent tradition past a generation or two, literally just before this on the discord talking to Bruce about this, who is a Protestant, by the way. And you’re surprised that if you try to build one, a Catholic will come along and help you. And who else is more qualified? No one, because Protestants don’t know how to do any of that. It’s not a magic trick. It’s like you’re not familiar with somebody who is familiar with it is going to come along and do it. And hierarchy is one of those things in Protestant land. To sounding different than what I loved about how you first said that, because you said, if you’re trying to do this, a Catholic will come along and help you. And I like that you phrase that. Well, that was the thing. Like there’s this huge difference. It’s absolutely huge difference between how Protestants talk about Catholics and how Catholics talk about their Protestant brothers in Christ. That’s how they do it. And it’s always shocking to me that the Protestants are like, oh, the Pope did this and the Jesuits did that. And like, look, man, fair enough, the Jesuits have done some bad stuff. And some popes have done some bad stuff. Okay. But A, that’s not Catholics. It’s not Catholicism. They’re humans and they do bad things because humans do bad things. Protestants do bad things too. Well, yeah. Well, and they just don’t seem to have an appreciation for there is something there that isn’t the Pope and it isn’t the Jesuits or isn’t the sum total of the order or isn’t sum total of the people attending the church that is long lasting, that has a deep hierarchy. And therefore you shouldn’t be surprised when people with that skill set that you need to do your thing, come along and do your thing. And you shouldn’t treat it like some crypto or conspiracy or something. Look, your incompetence is not someone else’s fault. Okay. Like I just, and if somebody’s trying to help you take the win, accept the help. Don’t go, you’re only trying to help me because the Pope has a secret plot to burn all the Protestants. I don’t know what the Protestants think. It’s so weird. It’s just deranged. And then Zini, who I love, Nick, but wow, dude, like, no, you go to a Catholic school, they do not denigrate Protestants ever. I’ve been to one. Like, no, they don’t. They don’t make you write essays on why the Pope is evil. But the Protestant public schools do. There isn’t an equivalency there. I don’t think about them at all. You don’t think about them at all, right? Like they don’t come up until you get to history class. And then it’s like, yeah, Martin Luther had some good points, but ultimately, you know, the heresy, that was kind of a bad look. Right. And they’re like, we still hope our brothers in Christ, you know, change their mind or decide differently or come back to the church or, you know, they’re not busy saying, Protestants are bad because they did the heresy and now we must, you know, you guys come back anytime you want, man. LESLIE KENDRICK Protestants have that covered for themselves. Yeah, well, and it’s good talking to Bruce because even though he’s a Protestant, like recognizes all this and he agreed. Yeah, Protestants, most Protestants have been killed by other Protestants, not by the Catholics. Not that the Catholics didn’t do bad things. Look, that definitely happened. But also most Protestants are killed by other Protestants, guys. Like, I don’t know what to tell you. Yeah. Hi. If you can’t admit to that mistake and instead you double down with, but this happened, you’re nowhere near getting the repentance that you need to improve. Hey, Corey. Good to see you. CORY DODDS Good to see you, too. Just as a differing opinion here, it definitely depends on where you’re at because I have seen some homilies in Catholic parishes that will go on in an anti-Protestant way. And I grew up in a Protestant, actually, all the different Protestant churches I had. I don’t think I ever heard complaints about Catholicism. Now, you were in a big box evangelical church, right? CORY DODDS For my first church, yes. And I’ve been in like six or seven since then. I will say they probably don’t do that just because they don’t have like the depth of thought to do that. CORY DODDS Right. They don’t know. CORY DODDS In a church, yeah. And I agree with that. And I have been to Protestant churches where they’ve said sad things about the Catholics. But that wasn’t the example. The example is what you’re teaching your children. Like, that’s kind of important. Like, oh, we’re Protestant. We actually own the public school and you should. And I’m not saying people in the community shouldn’t run the school. Yes, they should. Right? Yes, they should. LESLIE KENDRICK You think Protestants own the public school? CORY DODDS They do down here, for sure. LESLIE KENDRICK I mean, technically, if you look at history, technically, yes, it was Protestant schools and Catholic schools. But realistically and practically? CORY DODDS No, not in the US. In the US, it’s totally different. And look, yeah, most of the wars, you know, the smaller wars, because there were a lot of small wars in the US around this, were around schooling for children. Like, schooling for children drives a hell of a lot of history, especially US history. Because when Catholics came into a neighborhood, they were pretty… Yes. Thank you, Cory. LESLIE KENDRICK On your recommendation. They were pretty hell bent on making sure Catholics could not serve on school boards for that reason. CORY DODDS They’re not Catholic schools? LESLIE KENDRICK And the Catholics were like, we’re okay with that. We understand your position, and that’s why we have Catholic schools. That’s where the whole idea came from. It came from the Protestants locking the Catholics out of the school system and not allowing them anything. So down here, the public school, right, they got… One of the guys I was working with told me, because I asked him, we were in a building across the street from the beautiful Basilica in downtown Columbia, South Carolina. And I said, have you been to that church? It doesn’t look like much on the outside, but on the inside, it’s absolutely gorgeous. And he said, oh, yeah, I remember the first time I went to that church. I was chasing a girl, which is just, you know, funny. And he says, the reason why I remember it so well is because the day before, I had to write an essay for school about… And I forget the exact… Protestants have a number of touch point issues where they go, the Catholics did this evil thing, and it’s all at least highly exaggerated. And I was like, what? And that’s not the first, second, or third story. I’ve heard somebody went to a public school and had to write something bad about the Catholics or took a course on something bad about the Catholics or was taught something bad about the Catholics in public school. Or they were free to choose a topic for the essay and were curious about something they heard at church or heard from their pastor or heard from their parents. And like, you know, it’s a high school essay. You’re not going to get that great of research out of a high school or nothing personal. Any high schoolers who might happen to be listening. So, yeah. Yeah. So they’re just basically parroting what their old man says, which is what I would have done in high school. So like, you know, no judgment there. We thought about sending my younger son to the Catholic school because they had way better programs for special needs and stuff. And he wasn’t allowed to… Like, only the deaf could go to the provincial deaf schools, so siblings weren’t allowed. And my sister, she had her kids in the Catholic school where they were because she didn’t want to send her kids to public school because it’s pretty much just you don’t learn anything about religion or faith or God. And so they opted to send their kids to the Catholic school, which meant pretty much… Which was really surprising considering the fact that her husband’s a Protestant minister. But, you know, it’s a small town and everybody knows each other. And they wanted their kids raised in a Christian environment. So they sent them to the Catholic school. That’s actually been a really common thing too. Like, I know quite a lot of people and, you know, in all the different states that I’ve lived in of Christian parents wanting to send their kids to the Catholic private school. A lot of times it’s the only, quote unquote, Christian school around. And they tend to be very reputable in some ways. I think in other ways, you know, that’s an interesting topic by itself. But I’ve heard of that a lot. Protestant parents sending their kids to Catholic schools. Yeah, with transferring our taxes over, taking them out of public taxes and into the Catholic taxes. And it would have been cheaper than sending them to private Christian school because that was 10,000 per student at a go. And that was kind of like their post-year entire income. You know, so yeah, but. The whole way that happened is because of Protestant public schools in the United States. That’s how we have Catholic schools at all. And when that turned fully secular, we’ll say, right, which I still don’t like that frame, but you know, it’s useful in this case when they took the religion out completely. Right. Now, people are looking for a way, right? It just turns out that you can’t teach history without teaching religion because almost all of history is driven by religious events in some sense. Like, you know, I mean, you can look at something like the Crusades, but the Crusades drove a bunch of trade and political change that couldn’t have happened without the Crusades. And so you kind of have to talk about these things. And that’s partly why there’s a link between schools that teach, that have good educational program and the fact that they’re religious schools. Like the education gets better. And I’ve actually been asked to do more on education. And I think that’s one of the things I want to do is talk about the poetics in education. And, you know, education versus training is not enough to really flesh out what makes a good educational sort of environment. I think you’ve got to be able to manage when you’re trying to educate somebody is why are we doing this? For the wise, right. And religion is all about wise. And also it’s about the poetics. And if you’ve been listening and everybody should be listening to the convivium talks because they’re excellent and I get to hear them again, even though I was there, they’re fantastic. You know, you really start to get a sense of the importance of that. Like when Dr. Jim breaks down poetry there, you know, he’s talking about these different ways of looking, new perspectives and different ways of connecting. You connect this this way or this way or this way. And it doesn’t matter that you can’t connect it this way because there’s other ways of connecting. That’s the sort of thing that is the difference between something like education or mere training. And it’s good to see you, Josh. Good to see you, brother. Are more of the videos out now? I haven’t seen anything other than Father Eric’s. I put the playlist in the chat. We have four videos live. Just go ahead and give you a little a little show there of. My way. Where are we at? Yeah, we got my talk there that we’ve got Dr. Jim’s first talk on T.S. Elliott’s proofrock. Dr. Jim’s second talk on the four quartets. And Tim, Jim Ted, Ted’s talk on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the notion of in escaping. All of that is for your perusal over on on the Internet, on YouTube, the YouTube part of the Internet. Yes. So follow up question, was I the only one that was mildly annoyed during the Paul VanderKlay conversation that everything was in the frame of politics and there was like no wider spiritual discussion? That’s great. I’m glad you noticed that. I kind of am often annoyed listening to those kind of talks from him as even I don’t know, did I imagine like even while he was complementing the Catholics, he was also kind of laughing. And I have a hard time with that. You mean Kale or Paul? Oh, Paul’s always laughing. I never quite know how to. Well, the tension release. That’s a good laugh. It’s just like. I never feel like he’s denigrating. Not actually. He I don’t know if any of you listen to his Bible study on Romans 14 this morning or yesterday, whenever it was. It was actually it was quite good. And he said a lot of I like his perspectives. He has a very open minded perspective with respect to all of those things. He had a lot to say about Protestants stealing things at the present moment from Catholics. And he’s you know, he engages very honestly and very I like listening to him. I think sometimes he’s such an observer that he like we expect him to have a side or something like that. I’m sure he does. But I think he’s so practiced as a as a pastor. Like he has this ability to just observe. I think that’s why when he’s laughing, I think he’s honestly just like I think he just kind of overviews the whole religious scheme of Protestant, Catholic, you know, probably even all the way to the Mormons and everything like that. He just observed it all from a kind of a back, you know, an observed like a spectator side. I think he just generally finds it interesting. And he does like I mean, he he definitely. Like you said, just he has he’s so open minded that I’ve just generally been impressed with him as a pastor, like I’ve never come across that. I’ve interacted with a handful of pastors and and gone to a couple of conventions and stuff. I was really following RZIM ministries for a long time. I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with that. That was Robbie Zacharias International Ministries. He got himself into a decent amount of trouble, right? At the last part of his career, he was dying of cancer, if I remember right. And some things came out in his career ended pretty, pretty bad and things like that. But he was well known in the Protestant spheres as a as a he was an Eastern Indian and Eastern Indian man. And he had a lot of Eastern thought and he was very open minded. Kind of reminds me a little bit of Paul in a way. He was just very open minded and and had some he’s still philosophical too. And and what you don’t find a lot of in the Protestant spheres, everybody’s well educated about philosophy is almost something that’s like, like, oh, yeah, don’t mess with that stuff. It’ll get you confused. To be fair, you know, like, handled with care. Yeah, it will. And look, I mean, it’s like Paul’s a genius. Like he’s smart. And he’s really sharp. And he’s fairly quick thinker. But I like that Corey saw like that’s what stuckness looks like. When someone’s stuck, they keep even though they’re not talking that way and they can use other language and economic component and there’s a spiritual component. But they always go back to that political thing or that economic thing, whatever frame they’re stuck in. There’s lots of things to be stuck in. And I don’t know why. Like for me, it’s very easy to hear. But for a lot of people, they’re like, what do you mean? And I’m like, yeah, no, no, no. That was 100 percent the way that Zeldin was talking about bishops. It was all political. I’m not going to, you know, like you get three people in a room together, there’s going to be politics, but like they have ideals, too. Right. Yeah. And he gets this sense that like, like there’s this managerial climber class of bishops from him. And there’s definitely some of that. Right. You know, there’s there’s the lavender mafia, you know, some of that going on there. But like, really, honestly, most guys don’t want to be bishops. Like it’s a thousand times the responsibility and maybe a five percent increase in pay. Like totally not worth it. Hundred percent. Just just horrible. Yeah. So it’s so when you when you look at it all through that political framing, you’re not getting a clear view of what the men who are bishops are like. And then and that’s probably why Zeldin likes PVK, because they’re both stuck in that political framing. And that’s why they like profelicity. So weird. I was thinking of that on the drive. I was driving home today. We were out visiting some friends and I was like, yeah, the problem with this profelicity idea is that it just doesn’t work. Like a lot of people like like charity doesn’t work. Like profelicity as a driver means anonymous charity can’t exist because you’re not signaling to anybody in the way, you know, in a way that boosts your profile. Right. And profelicity is really just the statement of narcissism. Or egoism or however you want to frame it. It’s not a good way to think about the world. And look, I like Hans-George Mühler. I actually like his summaries of philosophers. Excellent work. Really excellent. When he talks about modern, like his dissection of Jordan Peterson is just weirdly wrong. Like, where did you get that from? Like, this is weird. You’ve been weird, dude. Like, I don’t know how Peterson talks. I don’t get it. So it’s weird that they like him, but then it’s like, oh, politics is all profelicity. It’s all appearance. All of it. Right. That’s how we sort of conceive of it in, say, recent times is that people are popular and so they get elected and that’s how it works. It’s also understandable, though, right? Like, it was very helpful while we were in the process of going through our CIA in Virginia. Being inducted into the Catholic Church, we became good friends with an elderly couple. The woman sponsored my wife into the church. So, you know, and she’s like the most stereotypical Catholic grandma. Like, all the trinkets. Like, she traveled to Rome and when you talk to her, she says she knows every cardinal who ever existed. And like, you know, she gives us all sorts of gifts that have been blessed by, you know, so-and-so and whatnot. Wonderful, wonderful woman. Talking to her husband and her, they have a very interesting history just to begin with. But they’re in their 80s and they lived through the whole Vatican II thing and now they’re living through this. And like, I was talking to another Catholic guy who’s about my age, a little bit younger, and we’re both fairly traditionally minded. And we were talking also with this older guy there. You know, we’re complaining and doing our thing. We’re talking about our travels. We’re talking about our trad lives and, you know, trad problems and so forth. And he just kind of made a comment that made me just stop in my tracks and go like, oh, paradigm shift. He mentioned that he had lived through these two gigantic upheavals or lived through one and is now living through another one where he doesn’t even feel like he has a home anymore. And I was like, this means a very, very, very different thing to different generations who feel like their entire mode of existence is collapsing around them. And so, you know, I have a lot of for both Cale and for Paul, who are kind of suffering through a very similar collapse. I think that’s what they have in common. And that’s, you know, a collapse of what? Collapse of their. Yeah. Yeah, that’s why they’re like for Vicky for Vicky explains what they’re going through beautifully. Now, I think a lot of what he says is actually incorrect, but but like his description and explanation of what’s happening and why is bang on. If you move domicide out of the material and back where it belonged, which I was hoping Tina would go into better, right, which is his spiritual domicide, because that’s what’s important because home can be where you hang your hat. So long as you have a spiritual home, your material home doesn’t matter quite so much or doesn’t have to matter quite so much. And the way for Vicky talks about it is, you know, Alexander the Great and a lot of his history here is wrong, by the way, but whatever. Alexander the Great opens up the world and now nobody knows where they live. I was like, well, that doesn’t even make any sense. But that relates back to joy, doesn’t it? Yeah, it does. So it’s like joy is something that comes from having a spiritual home where the material doesn’t maybe in a way doesn’t matter quite as much. Well, and how do you do joy? I would say joy is joy can only be done with reciprocal opening. I would say that’s a good way to think about joy is reciprocal opening. It’s like, well, that’s interesting, but you can’t link it to joy, right, without linking it back to religion and Christianity and all that. So for Vicky’s never going to make that move. And that’s what I was trying to get out last time when we were arguing a little bit about the flow state. Like to me, like optimal joy is kind of like leveraging, you know, our mechanism of flow state and on a much greater scale than like the specific, you know, getting into a specific moment to moment thing. Stop it with the flow state. You’re obsessed with the flow state. Don’t stop it. You guys are talking about something that is outside of my linguistics, you know, in the everyday. So I’ve heard some of the terminology you’re using, but I’m not really connecting it to thought and event in terms of like, Mark, some of your language is yes, I don’t listen to enough of your podcasts, but it’s also because I already don’t understand them. So when you’re making the point that Corey was arguing with you the other week, how does that relate? Like, what does that mean? And how does it relate to why he was pushing you on flow state? Because I’m thinking about something and you had just mentioned spiritual domicide as being a topic you wish was discussed. So my I’m kind of a couple of things going around in my head, but I’m curious if I’m on track. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, you know, to push back a little on Corey, which I hate to do, actually, actually, he’s so good. Like he’s so on it and he’s so close to everything. And he’s and he’s, you know, he’s right on the on the bleeding edge. There is an aspect to the state of joy that looks an awful lot like flow. I can totally acquiesce to that. Like I had a boss years ago and I actually asked him once because it was kind of bothering me because I was just like, he was happy. I’m sorry, he wasn’t happy. He was joyful all the time. And it’s like I actually had to ask him, like, how are you doing this? And he’s like, doing what? You know, it’s like, what are you doing? What? You just did the thing. How do you do it? Right. And so I said, you know, you’re you’re you’re always seeming happy. I didn’t have a I didn’t have a good way to talk about it back then. Right. You always seem so happy. And he’s like and he used the word joy. He said, no, no, I’m joyful. He said, I wake up every day joyful and I try to do that. And then I try to stay joyful all day. And I was just like, I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude. I I got servers to fix. I’m out of here. You know, I can’t I can’t even can’t process what you’re what you’re saying. And so I think I think, yeah, there is something that looks an awful lot like flow state in that in a person like that. And he was an exceptional person. Like I think I’ve met maybe three other people like that in my entire life. Just run into people who like exude joy 24 7, no matter what the hell is going on. So I think it’s fairly unusual and it looks like magic to me. Still, like I, you know, like I apply all the fancy for big keywords I want. And I have no idea how these people are doing this. And I’m I’m jealous. Quite honestly, I’m jealous. So I like I get it. And I’m not the I’m not a wake up angry person. I never have been. So like I kind of get some of that sort of but like this ebullient joy. That’s a whole thing to me that I’m just like, oh, I looks looks real enticing, you know? But but to loop back around, Sandy, I think the idea that you feel like you don’t belong is a very pervasive idea. And when Verbeke invoked it by saying drama size, your loss of home, roughly speaking, he touched on the you don’t belong. And I think that the way that manifests is if you are in a situation and you go, oh, well, obviously, the person who runs my country isn’t going to order a bunch of bank accounts shut off for people who are protesting with trucks. And then that happens. Sure, your prediction is wrong. But when enough of those things happen, and when enough predictions like that happen, where you think you know how the infrastructure around you, how the world around you, how your government or your country works, when enough of that happens, that’s your domicile right there. Like, it’s not just that your predictions are wrong, but you don’t belong in this world because your predictions are wrong. So at a certain point, it’s not just the predictions are wrong or my worldview is wrong, even though probably your worldview is also wrong. But before you get to, oh, my worldview is wrong, existential crisis, you get to this mini domicile crisis where you’re like, I don’t belong here. And the reason why you don’t belong there is because you can’t predict what’s going to happen next. Do you analyze that ever on other in other contexts than a person making predictions or a person like that step by step or have you ever? And have you well start there? Have you looked at that in other contexts? Other contexts other than people? No, then a person kind of walking their way to the edge and then letting themselves topple over based on, you know, I’ve made so many wrong predictions. I’m obviously. But I mean, I don’t I don’t think of it that way. I mean, I just think that that’s one descriptive. It’s one description that provides an explanation for why. Verbeke can say domicile and magically everyone goes, oh, yeah, I know exactly what domicile is. Verbeke never provided definition of domicile like almost ever, like very late. I think it was two years after the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis series. I mean, it’s a big topic of discussion on the Awakening Discord servers. What exactly is domicile? And of course, Manuel and I are really interested in answering questions like that. The other other people would just come in and ask the question and and and they’d feel embarrassed that they didn’t know because clearly Verbeke told them because he said domicile a bunch of times. And then we’d be like, no, no, dude, no, no, you shouldn’t feel bad about that. He didn’t he didn’t tell you what it was. He did give you a sense for it, though. And then those are the interesting points. Why do you have a sense for something that actually was never defined clearly enough for you to grasp it? And and and so I and I try not to like analyze sort of in the way I think you’re implying is fine. Like most people do. I just see things right. I just see things. Right. And when you brought up spiritual domicile, is there a distinctive overlap between what he would define as domicile in general and spiritual domicile? No, I think he has since come to accept that spiritual domicile is at least a thing and totally related to the description that he gave in his series. I think that’s part of what Chino sort of exemplified was that he had an understanding now that there is a spiritual domicile or a need for a spiritual home. Right. And so I think he’s updated his thinking with that idea for sure. I don’t I don’t I don’t think that’s unclear at all. I don’t again I don’t think he’s ever going to get to the point where you realize there’s no such thing as material domicile doesn’t make any sense. It’s silly. Your example is there’s a point to his example. It’s not entirely wrong. Right. But also it is wrong. It’s historically inaccurate and it’s a little silly. But but but it’s because spiritual domicile is all that matters. Right. And then when you fall out of the church, you know, you’re through a crisis of faith or if you’re stuck in a meaning crisis. And I’ve got some examples of meaning crisis now. Some more examples from from talks, for example, Manuel’s channel where people are describing meaning crisis. They go, I never had any church. Right. When you’re stuck in the domicile because of that and those may be slightly different experiences that may be the same. I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s the same problem when you feel separated from the ability to connect with the world around you. You feel like you’ve been kicked out. Or you feel like you don’t belong. You feel like an outsider. And maybe maybe the problem is you’ve been stuck in the wrong body and you actually should be a girl instead of a boy or a boy instead of a girl. Like I like all this stuff flows from the same place to me. And the fact that you guys don’t see that is really frustrating. But so I kind of tossed a bunch of like a series of weird questions out there, but it kind of relates to joy in the fact that what? Sorry, Protestant brain just kicked into gear. I was going to say it’s going to stay past her anyway. What father, Eric? I know I’m spending too much time on this DRC server. But it also ties into the it also plays into the topic I was going to mention. And what you guys are discussing and why I was curious about what is flow state? Flow state is basically what happens when you’re really engaged in something physical. So I always use the example of playing basketball because that’s what I like doing is playing basketball when I can. And so you’re not thinking about anything but basketball. You’re engaged. You’re kind of intuitively running up and down the court. Positioning yourself on the court, setting picks, all those sorts of things. And it it’s it could be quite joyful in the well, I don’t know about joyful. It’s it’s it’s definitely relieving, right? Just to to get away from your constant thinking and to just be embodied for a while. You also hear people say like rock climbing does that for some people. Music does that for people. I love singing. So here’s my weird question for you, Father. In terms of what they’ve been discussing and that when you mentioned joy, the first thing that came to mind was the fact that I have trouble with dissociation occasionally and panic attacks. And so a few years ago would have been was it must have been pre covid maybe just before probably that that Christmas before. I have friends who I know through Guitar Circle and they go to various nursing homes, you know, like one every week for throughout the month in our area. And I got I had one of the nights free that they were going to to one down near where you know over my side of town. And I went, yeah, sure. I’ll meet you there. You know, come in. I don’t play guitar because I don’t practice. But the one friend of mine, she was raised she’s Dutch. She was raised in the CRC. She doesn’t go to the CRC anymore, but she she knows the old songs. So I said to her because she said, well, why don’t you sing something and I’ll play. And I said, well, OK, but it’s like the pre Christmas. I said, do you know how to play it as I thought? And she said, I’m not sure, she said, but I’ll give it a go. And she said, but there’s a there’s a lady just moved in here. She’s so good at knowing all the people and she’s Dutch. And I bet if you go over and you ask her to sing with you that she will remember, you know, the order of the words and everything. And I did that because my mother-in-law died when I was 31, 31, 32. Joshua was a year old, my youngest. And she had encouraged me vastly to learn ASL for Jacob, talked about growing up with the Dutch Berlin Hall and blah, blah, blah, lots of story. And when I when we first moved back to, you know, their town, my ex and we went to church with them a little bit because, you know, they’re Dutch. And you know how that goes. I loved it. She made me sing this song with her because she said, don’t be afraid if you don’t know what the words are. And that used to remind that reminded me of how my parents would sing in the car. My mom would say that. Just sing the words will tell you what’s coming. And that’s the, you know, the tune will kind of it teaches you on its own. You know, if you sing, you’ll learn how to sing it. I’ve always done it that way. So that was Thursday night. I went to work on the Friday morning and I got partway through the morning. And it was really stressful work that day. And all of a sudden I said to somebody in my area, I said, I kind of go and throw some water on my face. I feel kind of weird. And the next thing I know, I’m in the bathroom and I’m practically passing out on the floor. And actually there’s a massage therapist there and she’s like, will you freak out if I, she says, I just want to put my hand on your back. I think you’re having a panic attack. And I went, sure. Okay. At which point I went, oh crap, you’re right. And I need to sit down. Well, when my manager came in, the first thing I said to her, because by that point, I was mad at myself. So I was crying and she said something about what triggered this. And I said, nothing should have triggered it. The only thing on my mind was singing this song last night and you’re not supposed to have panic attacks to joy. I still think about that and it’s about four years ago. So when you mentioned that, I’m like, oh, that’s what popped into my mind. Cause hey, it’s almost Christmas time again. And I’m not going to go anywhere. They’ll sing that song because the Dutch people are all trying desperately not to be too Dutch. Yeah. I don’t really know what to make of that, Sandy. It’s really, it’s a really gorgeous song. Look it up sometime. Well, so a panic attack, I mean, just, just so we all kind of know what, what we’re, we’re all saying and stuff, a panic attack would be like an anxiety attack, right? Like you would have, you had a buildup of anxiety and it resulted in almost like a paralysis or like a, like you just get locked up. Yes, but no. I didn’t have ed gradual buildup. That’s why I was checking with, with Mark on some of his, how, how are you describing this step-by-step thing? Cause no, I was perfectly fine. And suddenly I wasn’t perfectly fine. Which relates more to the dissociative component of it, as in it sort of stays under the radar. And I’ve had a couple of those moments this year too, where don’t see anything coming. And I’ve gone to the, to the doctor and to a couple of people and they’re all going, well, you had a panic attack. And I’m like, to what? Yeah. But that’s the problem with, with memory, right? Like you remember things that you don’t consciously remember and nobody ever talks about that. Like we’re in the age of post Freudian. Everything’s conscious. It just turns out that most of our stuff is not conscious. It’s probably, but I do know for a fact that I do guilt. I learned guilt really well during my marriage and my time in that church. And I feel guilty about joy. I really do. Probably. I am very rebellious and still adamantly insist on feeling joy. Well, and that’s, but that’s, but that’s what I mean. Like, like, yeah, joy can cause you panic, right? Because either it’s gone or it came with, with a high cost, right? Or it reminds you of a sad event and people get confused because they think things are linear and discrete and memory is perfect and everything’s conscious and they don’t understand. Yeah. It doesn’t really happen here. Well, yeah. Like I get depressed after my birthday sometimes. And then I can remind myself, yeah, you stepfather killed yourself the day after your birthday. And that precipitated a bunch of things around your mother’s cancer treatments and her eventual death, right? So it’s like, well, yeah, you know, so the time from, from June until September is, you know, not as okay as it used to be at the end of the day. And thank you for saying that. That sounds really stupid to thank you for saying that, but that’s how I am from November through January. Birthday, like several birthdays, Christmas, wedding anniversary, birthday. And I’m like, I hate those three months. They just take it right out of me. Yeah. Well, and we often, we often don’t know why. So I was, my friend who’s living here, she was eating at the table here and she’s like, just shoveling food down. And I’m looking at her like, what are you doing? She’s like, what are you trying to do? I’m like, slow down. Like, my goodness. Now I had to train myself to eat slow because when I got sick initially, it was all stomach related. So I paced myself. I’ll go all these little rules like take a bite, put your fork down, stupid things like take a drink every two bites, you know, things like that. Just little stupid rules. Just slow myself down because I used to eat very fast. And then like a week after that, and she came up with some story like, oh, you fast because you know, there was never enough food in my house. It was nonsense. Upper middle class. Like, no, that definitely didn’t happen. So we went out to a restaurant and she ate at a normal speed. And I was like, well, that’s weird. And then I didn’t say anything. She noticed. And then she thought about it and she goes, I know why you fast at home. Because when I was living with my parents and she, when her parents were older, she went back to live with them. They used to yell at each other and throw things at the dinner table. And so I would eat fast to get out of there. And I was like, well, that makes a lot of sense. She didn’t know. That would do it. At first. So we don’t know what we’re responding to when we get sad. We don’t know what triggers panic attacks. We actually don’t know because what triggers it might not be conscious. Yeah. I think it’s probably very, very unconscious. Like, I mean, anxiety in general is like, well, and Peterson talked about that a little bit recently about how anxiety that that means there’s something not being attended to. Like, you know, you have something in the back. Like we could use the cell. I mean, not trying to relate the computer too much to our human brain, but like your cell phone or your computer can have background apps running. And that you’re not looking at, you’re not paying attention to them, but they’re running. And that, and so like, you know, Mark was talking about his childhood traumas and, you know, like you were saying, and yeah, this time of year, like I have a throughout my life, I’ve had a hard time not over drinking at certain times in my life. If I get too stressed out, I tend to over drink and it’s something I’ve battled with for a long time. And in the winter, yeah, I have to be very careful of it. It’s something that’s very easy to overdo for me, like just get carried away and not want to return to reality and just be like, go on a bender. And, and yeah, no, the winter months are strange and I work outside a lot. And so like I’ve always associated it with like lack of sunlight, like all of a sudden my skin’s covered up in the winter. I’m not, you know, I have hoodies on, I’m, you know, the cloud, you know, clouds come in and stuff like that. So I go from this, you know, being sunburned all the time to where all of a sudden I have no sun, you know, very little sun exposure. I’ve always tried to say that it was that, but I think there’s a lot of stuff in the winter that in my life has probably not been that fun to deal with. And yeah, it probably is residual app or, you know, apps running in my head, you know, that I just haven’t dealt with. You know, I should, but you know, that’s, you know, life, that’s the journey. So it’s also worth talking about that there are people who are very directly trying to confront their stuff and who are aware of what caused it and are still not able to get over their anxiety. Right. So trauma isn’t necessarily like, I think. That’s definitely, that could be a thing. Like there’s something that’s unconscious that you’re not aware of, but there’s another type where you’re fully aware of it and still not able to do anything about it. And I want to differentiate it. I’m open to being corrected on this, but the way that I was taught about what joy means as distinct from just like an emotional response, you know, like happiness or contentment or something, even that word isn’t really an emotion, but joy is more like a state of being that can include feelings of positive regard. They can include happiness, but it’s more like, I don’t want to throw out wrong, vervekey words, so I’m not going to try, but like it’s, it’s, it has to do with your worldview environment, dynamic coupling. So it has to do with the way that you understand the world to be. And if it matches up with the way that the world is, then that’s, I think you tend to experience joy from that. But part of that includes, and this is where people make the mistake, I think, joy in that sense, your worldview has to take into account the stuff that you’re not capable of understanding and not capable of knowing. It has to take into account mystery and it has to take into account suffering and even out of unavoidable, unpredictable suffering. And if you’re able to live your life in such a way that you’re open to those things and you’re almost expecting those things and you have a particular stance towards things, then the result would be joy, which includes positive emotional feelings, maybe. And so I want to differentiate, you know, we’re not talking about just happiness. Joy isn’t happiness. Joy is this state of being. That’s why St. Paul had it as a fruit of the spirit, which is what I started off with, right? It’s like, okay, it’s not the root, it’s not the trunk, it’s not the branch, it’s not the leaf, it’s the fruit. It’s the thing that comes at the end. That’s kind of the telos towards which the whole spiritual organism is tending towards. And it comes from appropriate participation with God through Jesus in the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen. Amen. So it seems like joy and domicile are inversely related. Yes, that’s a good point. And I did want to say, Corey, too, it’s a good point. I’ve been tweeting out about the age of gnosis. And the age of gnosis is very much, oh, I know about this thing, and therefore it’s solved. If you know something about yourself, it’s solved. Because knowledge is the thing that solves problems. And of course, it doesn’t. But that’s very age of gnosis-y. I got to sit down and write a substrack on the age of gnosis. Because that framing, like, mature pressure has been like, I found this very helpful. I’m like, oh, okay. Well, I’ll keep tweeting it out then. Because it’s been an experiment. You know, Sandy mentioned earlier, do you analyze this stuff? I did an age of gnosis tweet today. And actually, I just did a normal tweet. And then I said, wait a minute. I can put this in the age of gnosis framing. There’s no analysis necessary. I can just do that for whatever reason. Like, I don’t understand that particular feature in my head. But I don’t have to analyze things. I can just, you know, sometimes I analyze things. But a lot of times, I can just go, oh, yeah, that’s this. I already know. What I’m struggling with is how to describe it or how to explain it or which words to use to make it more clear. And yeah, I think when you place, like, happiness is very much a psychological, scientific sort of a term. And it’s very materialistic, or at least leaning in that direction. Whereas when you place joy in the direction of, it doesn’t matter what’s going on with the material, right? As long as you have right relationship in the spiritual, you can still have joy. And I think that’s a super important way to think about things. I’m glad you made that differentiation, Corey. Thanks. Hi, Jacob. Hi, Emma. That was well timed. All right. So I have a question from like half an hour ago about PVK and Kale Zelda. And specifically, so I can’t remember who it was that mentioned it, but it might have been you, Mark. You said that both of them were experiencing domicide. Now, I can point at what PVK might be experiencing, the collapse of the Christian Reform Church, North America, that sort of thing. I can look at that and say, OK, yeah. And I’m just curious what you guys see with Mr. Zelda in there. What does he talk about all the time? Well, he talks about his kids and raising them. He talks about the pope and all the problems with the church. Yeah. Yeah. If you hang out with certain online Catholic circles, you will be very convinced that you’re experiencing domicide right now. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I thought, but I wanted to bring that to the surface so that we all knew what we were actually talking about. And so actually, you know, there was this great, it was just, you know, Scott Hahn went on Pines with Aquinas like two or three months ago. I was just going to bring that up. Yeah. And it was like a whole two hour conversation, but they made like a nice little five minute clip with Scott Hahn. That just popped into my feed today. OK. OK. And he had this great point where he was like, listen, here’s the trouble with the news is that it broadens your sphere of attention far beyond your sphere of influence. Yep. And you’re just. It’s not like it’s not like those can ever be one to one. I think that’s actually impossible to have the one to one, your sphere of influence and your fear of attention. But if you spend too much time with your attention outside of on things that are outside of your influence, it’s just going to make you anxious. That’s all it could do because there’s bad things out there and you’re helpless against them. Like watching previews for like a Doomsday movie on loop. You’re constantly focused on this movie and then when it actually arrives to your doorstep, you’re kind of like, you’re kind of like over it or something like, yeah. No, I have after my divorce, I went down a super deep like YouTube trip on like all of the religions. I drank from a fire hose, like as far as this whole corner and like as far as getting researching Buddhism and Hinduism and everything, like, because I just didn’t know if this God thing was something I was going to keep in my life. I was like, OK, I’ve never quite understood it. Nobody’s ever been able to explain it to me. Like I sit in my my simple Bible church and we talk about angels and demons all day, but or talk about this spirit or that spirit or this thing or that thing. There’s no definition to any of this. It’s just out it out there in the open. Like, and I’m like, what are you talking about? Like, what are like, how do we rectify this with reality? And everybody just went along with it. But yeah, no, it’s very strange. Yeah, that’s a good that’s a good description. Yeah, you spread your attention out, right? There’s a flood of information on the arc. Your attention is going to get spread out not only past your influence, but past your cognitive capacity. And then people think this is really what’s happening. You’re like, why did everybody fall for, you know, whatever? It doesn’t even matter. Why did we fall for misinformation about the Hamas, Palestine, Israel thing? And any one of the three sides, it doesn’t even matter. Why did it fall for misinformation? Because they’re overloaded with news. And so it’s not like they can research all the things they’re being told about that they think they have to know about. And so you have to defer to experts. If you have no choice, the problem is you never listen to experts. I say this all the time. You listen to leaders. They have skin in the game. People who don’t have skin in the game aren’t leaders. No true Scotsman, maybe. But also, you know what I mean? You can tell when somebody has skin in the game. And so and look, that’s not a like there are there are still going to be people with skin in the game. They get wiped out because they have skin in the game and you will have listened to them. And that will have been a mistake. Too bad. Like that’s the world. There’s limits on everything. There’s limits on that. And that’s where people get into trouble is that, yeah, you’re cognitively overloaded by all the information. And maybe you should narrow that down a bit. And I seem to have talked about this in his books, actually. Right. Maybe you should only read the news once every three months or something. And you should read it. You shouldn’t read anything recent. You should read something that’s three months happened three months ago because the contrast from when it was happening alive and what was written and what’s written in three months later is going to be huge. And maybe you only need that summary of what happened and not to be embroiled in the latest machinations of, say, an upcoming election when it’s a year or two away or whatever. Whatever happens now is really not going to be that relevant. And you wouldn’t notice except in hindsight anyway. It’s not like you’re going to notice in the moment. This is the watershed moment to turn the election campaign. He’s done. No. So it’s like one little scandal and it will just change everything. We can get all you’re like, oh, yeah. Okay. So take the Trump election or something like that. Oh, yeah. Trump’s my guy. I’m on the Trump train or whatever. We’re going up to the elections and I think it was 16. And then say something came out, a video of Trump, snorting cocaine or something like that. Probably would have lost or something like that. It would have changed the whole thing three weeks before when you’ve been following this thing, devoting massive amounts of attention to it. But all of it’s outside of your sphere of influence. You’re literally just an observer. And yeah, no, I agree with you that you have to find leaders that have skin in the game. And honestly, that was one of the kind of going back to why a Protestant might become Christian or become Catholic is like, well, because they actually have leaders. They actually have like, hey, this problem, that’s that guy’s job. You could actually go to a person like in the Protestant Churches really like that. I mean, your local pastor is, so if he’s a trumper or something like that, it can deter you. It can distract you. People get very distracted with these things that they have zero influence. And when I say that, I’m speaking about myself because I tend to get distracted with issues that I have no, they’re much easier to deal with than issues that I have influence over. Exactly. Well, then that’s the problem. Yeah, we all have that problem. We don’t get around it. So what you’re talking about there, Mark, is exactly why the structure of Twitter is necessarily and fundamentally bad for us. Even if you only add your friends and curate your stuff on Twitter, the way that it’s organized is too much for us to handle. It’s actually a thing that dissolves your attention into a bazillion different places. You can also, the way it’s not, so it’s true that I think you should find and follow leaders because it has to be a person ultimately. The thing that shapes your worldview, so your worldview, if you talk about resilience, is the interaction between your worldview and the world, right? Which is spiritual, by the way, so there’s no distinction between material and spiritual. Like it is the dynamics between the two. That worldview and the dynamic comes from organizing principles that you give your attention to. That is the way that your worldview molds itself and breaks itself and rebuilds itself and matches itself to what you’re experiencing in reality. And the best principles that you can learn from aren’t just like ideas. We’re used to a principle being a specific propositional statement of fact or something like that. Rather, it should be a person which can encompass, lived out over time, a mode of being that can encompass many, many, many, many, many more propositions, infinite numbers of propositions worked out over time and in specific times and places. There is a way that you can build that resilience into yourself such that even when the material world around you falls apart and even the way that you live your life and even if you look at news and really, really distressing news, even if it directly affects you, if you’re resilient, then you can still experience joy rather than domicide, I think. And I think it’s another distinction that we should make is if we’re going to use the word domicide, I don’t think we should differentiate between material domicide and spiritual domicide, maybe, unless you want to make material domicide really specifically like your specific context, like your house blew up in a gas leak or something like that. Yeah, that’s sure. We have to work for that. That’s homelessness. And homelessness can happen to all sorts of people. But the perpetually homeless seem to also have domicide. Corey, would you say that you said resilience, but as you were talking, I kind of thought that’s kind of a type of fitness in the evolutionary context, that you’re able to wade through these certain subjects or your worldview is fit enough to survive the catastrophes that the world will offer you and will come into view. And so you have to have a worldview that’s fit enough to like, I mean, we’re all saying like, yeah, Twitter is really bad. It’s a horrible way to communicate. It’s overloading. You can’t do anything, but it’s a part of our world. There was a point in time when the jungle probably wasn’t as loud as it is, like say today, the jungle got loud. You know, I don’t know, like sometimes you’ll go out in the woods and it’ll be, you can hear a pin drop, you know, other times you go out and the cicadas are out or something like that. And you just, you can’t hear anything like it’s so noisy out there. And that, and if your worldview isn’t fit enough, then you’ll, the noise will overtake you. And, but yeah, no, you’re talking, you’re saying resilience, but I think it’s, it’s imperative on a lot of people that are at least aware of, of a worldview and why it’s necessary. And in that, that it, it’s a part of fitness, like just like, you know, exercising is a part of saving off cardiac arrest or is a part of saving off obesity or anything, or increasing endorphin or whatever, you know, or brain chemistry or whatever. We know it’s good for us, you know, and, and choosing or or honing a worldview that is resilient to these, to where you can actually, you know, occasionally get on Twitter and not be overloaded or whatever, or to hear that there’s a war breaking out in Ukraine or that the Israel is, you know, in fact going against, you know, is going into Gaza or that there are war crimes being committed or that there is, you know, whether we want to call genocide, not genocide, you know, I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, genocide has become a political parking point at this point. It’s like whether or not the crimes are actually being committed. I can’t tell because we’re, we’re damn near, we’re dang near in the matrix right now. Right. You’re far away from it. You’re not, you’re not up to ground and that’s, you’re a family or anything. Yeah. Right. And you’re fooling you into thinking that like part of, oh, the internet brings us together. No, it does not. I’m sorry. Right. It allows us to communicate in a very flat way. And that has huge upside usage, but it does not bring us together. And that’s part of the problem. I robustness is probably the wrong word, Josh. I mean, I hate to mention it, but at the end of the day, that seems to live as a whole book on that called anti-fragile things that gain from disorder. And that’s actually what you want. Right. Because there’s the book of Job. Somebody mentioned that in the comments, William, William Branch mentioned the book of Job is he’s anti-fragile to some extent. I mean, not the whole thing, right. It’s not a linear progression, but, but he actually gets better as a result of the shocks that he’s receiving. Right. He does go into a questioning time though. He goes into a time where he directly questions God and it’s like, and he gets, I mean, obviously God talks to him back, but he gets to a point yet he is anti-fragile. Right. Like robustness is linear. I mean, this is what Taleb talks about in the book. Robustness is there’s a certain point past which you’re done. Like you’re fine, fine, fine. And then you’re done. Anti-fragile is you have all these shocks and each shock has a different effect, but on average, those shocks build you up. And so you’re stronger from the shock. Your bones are a good example. If you wrap your bones on a table every day, you’ll have a super hard hand, you know, and people have done it. Right. And so, you know, there’s a lot of martial arts training around that. It takes years, but like you can do that and that actually works because your bones are anti-fragile. It’s, they’re not robust. They’re anti-fragile. It’s just a different, you know, and you need that new language. Taleb’s very careful about adding new words, which I really like about his books. Yeah. No. And I think that the, that the I’m done point that Joe breeches where God has to say, well, where were you when I created the foundations of the world? Where were you when, you know, like, you know, like he, like he gets confronted, you know, and I think that that’s a, that’s a very, that’s an important part in job story. Cause everybody remembers, okay, job is the man who got tortured, you know, God and the devil made a bet. And correct me if I’m not interpreting that, right. But it’s always seemed like that to me, that God, God and the devil make a bet. And what that’s basically, that’s basically correct. I said that one time to a Protestant pastor and he looked at it. He’s like, no, that is not what I was like, yeah, he’s like, they were literally like, he’s going to crack and God’s like, no, he won’t. Yeah. No. And so, you know, it, he comes to this point and he doesn’t, he doesn’t ever, um, yeah, curse, God and die like his wife says to do, but he gets to a point where he’s like, yo, what up? I’ve been faithful. I’ve done the things like I’ve, I’ve been your servant. Why? Like, he gets to a definite point of why, and he has an honest, he has a confrontation, you know, with, with, with God. And, and I think that that’s an important part of that, um, of a worldview that it’s actually hardened off, you know, that it’s actually, it’s actually gone through the fire and it’s actually been tempered, you know, still, it’s that encounter with God at the end that realigns him properly. So yeah, no, well, and even tempering steel, like I happened to, I made a knife one time with a guy who knew way too much about metal and how to, you know, how to actually, you know, you know, you know, turn, you know, temper metal and everything like that. And he talked about the molecules and how they’re, they’re, they’re not in alignment until the steel, I believe the term was annealed and, uh, you have to, you have to fire it and then you, you have to quench it, but it has to be done in a specific process and he used oil, like used motor oil after the, the knife had been hard, you know, heated up to this, to this point where it was like malleable and it was like soft and it could have been, it was, it was actually in that state almost if it wasn’t for the fact that it was so dang hot, it was actually fragile in a way. Um, and then it would be cooled, but in the right solution and the molecules would align and it became like, well, very hard carbon metaphors. That is such a perfect metaphor. No, I love, I love metaphors like that in the Bible, like we, you know, father was talking earlier about the fruit and it’s not the, it’s not the leaves, it’s not the trunk, it’s not that, but, and I, my dad one time said, well, any analogy breaks down if you push it too far, like, you know, yeah, we can take what we can, but no, the biblical analogies get better the harder you push them. Like sometimes like you’re like, he was saying like, it brings you back into alignment. Well, actually that’s what happens with steel as well, you know, and so like there’s these, there’s these, these, these, these analogies that are biblical that seem to just won’t get more clear and now for more clarity. And I, and I kind of cling to some of the analogies in the Bible as far as like fruit and the refiner’s fryer and things like that, because I’m like, no, if this is true, if this is really true, if this is written, you know, something that was inspired by God, it shouldn’t break down. If I push it harder, if I, if I really try to dig deeper. Yeah. The crucible is the other related refiner’s fire metaphor that I’m going to throw something out here. Now that metaphor, the refiner’s fire with steel, I think steel is great because of the realignment. And I’ve been thinking about worldviews in terms of geometric structures. So that works well for me, but it’s so beauty is the refiner’s fire and the work of the refiner’s hammer. Trauma is getting tossed into a lava pit. Discuss. That’s not bad. Well, yeah, I like that. So there was a project early on that, that, that we were working on in the, in the wisdom community there. And one of the things that was noticed was that Mark and Manuel can be rough on people, right? So we want another server. We’ll bring them into the other server. We’ll give them shepherds that they can, you know, you know, be introduced into the concepts that they may need to help them get them unstuck. And then we’ll send them to the forge. And that’s where Mark and Manuel were. So yes, we use that metaphor. Which one of you use the hammer? Which one of you use the anvil? Unstoppable force beats immovable object. Oh, there you go. I think, I think Manuel’s got to be the anvil. That’s not you’re very stubborn. I, I, no comment. This is, this is amazing, right? Because it gets us back to the fundamentally spiritual nature of all reality, right? Because what is the difference between, you know, fancy dance, carbon steel blade and cheapo Amazon knife? Both are made out of ferrite. It’s literally just the form, the pattern of the molecules that they’re arranged in that makes one of them like 400 bucks and the other 20. And that value was 100% correct. Same thing with the difference between coal and diamond. It’s literally just form that brings the value to these things. Material that you’re making it out of. But it’s the quality that arises from the form plus the materiality. And it’s like, wait a minute, what the heck is right? And that part of that arises from the process, right? That transitioned it from one form to another or into the form that it’s in. And that’s where quality happens. Like that’s how quality comes to be in the world. And as we know, being as good. There you go. From self. Well, you were talking about like, what’s the difference between, you know, you know, a super high dollar, high carbon steel knife and, you know, the Amazon thing. And I said, yeah, that’s why I’m Catholic. And like, I remember one time I was talking about value or quality. Like, I feel like I’m in the presence of a tradition that’s been around for a very, very long time when I go to when I go to math. And, and I’m learning more and more about it. Only just since last year, around this time, actually, is when we started attending and then we went through RCIA and got confirmed and everything. But I’ve always had a sense of, of what is valuable. If you put something in my hand, that was, that was a good craftsmanship or something like that. I always felt like I could kind of tell off the bat, like somehow I knew that I really liked a, an automatic watch versus a Timex, you know, a digital Timex, I’m talking about with the automatic winding. And then I remember one time I bought 10 ounces of silver one time. And I remember just holding that, that silver bar and thinking like, I don’t know why, but this feels better than my, you know, like 300 bucks in my hand. I don’t know why, but it just, it like, and I remember one time I handed it to my brother and he was like, where’d you get this? Did you steal this? Like, where did this come from? I was like, no, I bought that off the internet. Like I wanted to collect some silver. And so I bought that. And he’s like, he’s like, this is, this is cool. Like he’s like, it’s really cool. He’s like, I’ve never held like a substance that was like just pure and it’s worth money because it’s pure anyways, getting back to like why I, there’s a sense of authenticity that the Catholic church offers that I, you know, in a sense of tradition, I’m half Native American and my mom, the one thing my mama, we weren’t involved in the tribe at all, but growing up, we were kind of taken away from it actually. But we’re, I, one thing I knew about the Hopi Indians is that they value tradition over like everything. Like that was their traditions and their practices were like everything. And it was all to keep the way, you know, it was like, this is the way we do things. And this is the way you do the corn. And this is the way you do the, the, you know, the wrapping of the beads, or this is the way you weave the basket, you know, and it was all about keeping that way. And I see hints of that in the, in the Catholic tradition, like, no, we’re going to keep it this way because it’s the way it’s done. And that, and I, and I really appreciate that. There’s a sense of value and authenticity, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. And that, and I see that high carbon steel blade in the Catholic church, whereas when I was in my Bible churches and floating around to other Baptist churches and that, I just felt like I had this cheap Amazon knife. I was like, this doesn’t feel authentic. This doesn’t feel real. This doesn’t feel like if I, if I had to, like, if I, if I really had to use this, like if I needed to take this into the woods and like survive with it, I really feel like I’m going to be disappointed with it. And, and the more I questioned and the more I tested it is, yeah, let me down time after time is like, like I was saying earlier, like what’s the spirit, what’s the demon, what, what, how are you defining these things? You know, what, what, when you say I heard God, you know, what, what did you hear a voice? Did you not, you know, like what, what happened? Like, you know, let’s get specific about these things. So I know what you’re talking about and they would always just float over them. They would never really define them or pin them down. And that was some of the specificity that I found inside the Catholic church. I was like, ah, this seems like it has meat. This seems, this seems nutritious. This seems valuable. This seems heavy. It seems weighty. Like I got something in my hand of value, something like that. Very good. Nice. Thanks for sharing that. I hadn’t heard half of that yet. So good. Good. I’m glad you’re here. I feel the same way. Yeah. Yeah. It’s yeah. Things that, things that, that end up lasting. Yeah, no, it does seem to have a sense like when, when you’re, when you, yeah, you have a sense. I even told my dad that one time. I said the reason, well, some of the, some of the reasons I’m converting to Catholicism is as well, like the church that I grew up in is gone. It’s no more. It just banded, you know, this happened, that happened. The members dissolved, you know, the church shut its doors open again, but under a different name and different leadership and everything like that. And I was in, like Mark said, you only get like one generation into these things. And they, they, like, I would say that I haven’t kept up with all of them, but 90% of the kids, and we were well educated in the Bible. Like we, we, we, we were taught theology. We were taught the terms. We, you know, the critical thinking skills, you know, things like that. Like you should question what the world is teaching you, all those types of things. But it was always sick with like the chick tracks and like about Catholicism. Like, you know, they had other ones that were like, damn, you’re traumatizing. Honestly, if I’m completely honest, like some of those were harsh, those track comics, but like that was very heavy in my church and stuff like that. But all that’s gone. Like, and like, I have nothing, nothing of that tradition. I mean, it was the start of a tradition, I suppose. But I have nothing of that to hand off to my daughter. Like, you know, I have nothing to pass on to my, to the next generation. Whereas I told my dad, I said that Catholic church that we got here in town, I’d never been into it before. You know, I started attending, but I’m pretty sure when I pass away, that church is still going to be in existence. And I was like, and my daughter can go to the church that I went to. And I’m pretty sure into the future for a long time, it’s going to be there. And if not, there’ll be another church that has the same tradition, and has, you know, very much that same theme, that same. You could kind of, we always talked, in the Protestant way, we always talked about churches being planted, like church planting and things like that. But in the, and one thing is, is like, it always seemed to me like the Protestant churches, as I, from like my work with trees and that, are kind of like, they’re kind of like shrubs or something like that. They sprout up, but they just don’t have the longevity that trees do. They just don’t. That’s emergence is good. Right? Planting, planting, planting. Emergence is good. I, yeah, emergence isn’t good. And, and look, I mean, you need a deep historical grounding, which means you need something that’s lasted for a long time. Something that’s tied back to 2000 years ago. Right. Because, because those memories, maybe that church is gone, right? Like that could happen, but those memories and that ability to, to engage in that similar enough liturgy that reminds you of that means that even if that church is gone in that specific location, those memories don’t go away because they’re triggered by the liturgy. Can we take a moment and actually express our love for Jack Chick and the amount of entertainment he gave at least some of us during our youth? I looked at, so, I mean, there were, there must have been like 30 different ones that my church had in the back. And like, while I was sitting back there, not paying attention to the sermon, like I should have been. Yeah. I was looking through those and like, I think I have like a lot of them almost memorized. I worked with them so much. Does anybody else know what we’re talking about? The chick trot, the chick trot. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. No, no, no. The, the Vatican has a database on all the Protestants in the world so that when we take over, we can wipe them out. Every parish priest have access to it. Yeah. Well, the, the anti-Catholic one, I remember I would like, I specifically thought about it. So yeah. Okay. There was many, but like I specifically thought like, okay, like my parents handed this to me. They also handed me a Bible. So like, this must be like, you know, basically like doctor, like this stuff is like, you know, they never explained that like, yes, some things are just not like, they’re just people’s opinions or whatever. This isn’t like part of the church, but the anti-Catholic. Your parents gave you, your parents gave you chick trots. Oh, we handed them out at Halloween as a church. We’re like, we, we had, we had, oh yeah. No, like instead of handing out candy, we handed out chick comic one year. I remember that like, yeah, no, I was not raised Catholic. Like I was not, it was a very difference between being raised Catholic and being raised in a church that hands out. I knew people at our church that used to look up as a tip and restaurant. I bet everybody loved that. Yeah, no, that was a great witness, but no, I was terrified of the Catholic church because of what I learned to chick comics. I was terrified. Now equally, I was terrified of going to prison because of what I learned in chick comics and the one that was related to Sodom and Gomorrah. That was horrible. Like there was some traumatizing stuff in those comics. Like there was, there was very like content, but yeah, no, the chick comics were very anti-Catholic and, and a lot of what I see, Jacob, you and I could look at a chick track and we can laugh at it, but some people were raised in a context where that was serious business. But, but they’re so campy. Yeah. You know that in some context, you don’t have that context when you’re a kid. Yeah, well, I mean, I like the line between like campy and really like profound and meaningful participation is a little bit sometimes, you know, it’s like, so like the anointing of my anointing of my ordination. If you didn’t do that right, it’d be like, that’s really stupid. Why did he put oil on that guy’s hands? This is ridiculous. But because we had the appropriate gravity in the, in the ceremony, you know, it’s just, and then I was like, oh, that smells really good. Yeah. Yeah. For the whole rest of the orientation. So, so yeah, yeah. I mean, like one man’s camp is another man’s I remember, I remember walking through the park near my home and seeing things that might have been chip tracks on the ground and running to go see them and to find them because it was like, oh, look, there’s another one. You mean they didn’t make you want to become Christian? That wasn’t the law, huh? I want to meet the person who actually became a Christian because they read the chip tracks. You mean like, like coming from one tradition to another or, because there’s plenty of people who probably would have read maybe one of the less bad ones and then decided, yeah, I need to go back to church. Like I can see that, but. Yeah. Okay. That I could see. Yeah. Yeah. No, I thought they, I still think there’s some amount of deliberate camp in them in trying to be funny and a comic and. I don’t know, Jacob. From what I’ve heard of them, I don’t think so. I think, I think, listen, okay. I have a Facebook page, right? And maybe I should repent of that, but here we are. And I’m friends with people who are like my dad’s age and older on Facebook and they will unironically share AI generated images of our Lord and our lady with a pair of prayer hands. Right. And it’s, and it’s all sorts of AI, right? So you have like the majestic, you know, storm cloud Mary looking over the earth, you know, and, and then like they’ll have like Disney Pixar, you know, manger scene. They had like this Disney Pixar priest holding a child’s fingers were all messed up and tears coming out of his eyes. And I’m like, like, you can’t see this, but they’re just like, Oh, this is just wonderful. So some people have like zero discernment in this stuff. And I don’t know how to explain it because. No, I want to just do Pixar short about like a priest’s first mass or something. That would be great though. I could probably find that photo. Talk about something while I find the photo. So I’m reading about Chick tracts. So there, there are places on the internet where you can find the chick tracts that the Chick tract organization no longer allows you to publish and purchase because people were buying them as gag gifts. Those are the ones you’re like, those are the, those are, those are the ones. Is there a chick tract about Babylon mystery religion or is that a different thing? I feel like chick tracts might be what Regina Doman was drawing on in the midnight dancers. But I’m not sure. And that’s my main exposure to that branch Protestantism admittedly. So. Oh, Oh my gosh, his fingers are like blending into each other. I need to make sure I don’t put people’s real names out there. Hold on. People thought that was a real picture. I don’t, I don’t understand. No, I could see if I wasn’t like thinking about it real hard, I would think it was a real picture. That’s and then I would look again. It’s obvious animated. Yeah, it’s all over. Just look at the eyes. You just gotta look at the eyes. Well, I mean, I think it was a real like cartoon that somebody made out like, like real life. Okay. Yeah, no. Oh, I could believe. No, I thought it was a real. I don’t believe that some like, like EWTN made a cartoon or something. Yeah. Here’s another one. What? It’s just like, come on guys, we can do better than this. Like we, we had fraud Jellicoe, right? We could do better than this. Yeah, but father Eric, this is the same generation that was like obsessed with minion names. They just like this. This is way better than some of the other stuff I’ve seen Boomer’s post on Facebook. They like it. It’s cool. Mark, are you out of yourself? That wasn’t an example of something like, I didn’t find that to be so horrible. What? Like it’s, it’s the idea of the Vic depicting divine persons with AI. Sorry, persons associated with divinity with our lady specifically. Like using AI for that. It’s just like, you know what? You know what? I’m just going to say it. Anathema sit. Yeah. The fact that it’s AI is. Yeah. It’s emergence is good. It was funny because it made sure. But there are more real like human made Disney Pixar style animation. But yeah. Yeah. As a human made, that would, that would be different. But mature Pichot tweeted out about this at some point. He said, you know, where you were trying to snuff out real life while trying to replicate AI. It’s like, well, I didn’t think of it that way. That makes it a billion times scarier. Thanks. Sure. I really appreciate that. It’s worth thinking about like why we would react against pictures like that. Is it because AI made it or is it because like it is super, super, super cheap and actually cheapens the whole prospect because of how easy it is to make. And it’s effective. Really it’s propaganda is kind of what it is. Yeah. There’s lots of reasons. I think it’s wrong. First of all, and it’s bad already. Everything about it is bad. And I think that, you know, like the depiction is just incorrect. Historically, spiritually, the whole thing is just bad. But also, yeah, it’s cheap. It’s a cheapening. Right. And AI does not create or even manifest. What it does is it smashes things together that it has already. And it makes reasonable guesses about it. And then ultimately, with all of those things that I’ve seen, and maybe not all of them anymore or whatever, but ultimately, the humans probably picking from four choices. And so how much is that the AI at the point at which the AI puts out four options or three options or how many options and you pick one or you get one and you decide it’s no good and you try again? Like how much of that actually is the AI? And then that’s a worse corruption because now you’re cooperating with the AI to do something like that. And that just makes it worse. Yeah, man, I can’t explain why I hate it so much, but I just plain do. I feel like. So. I would be scared to sit down and draw a picture of our Lord or our Lady. Obi-Wan Jesus? Where does Obi-Wan Jesus rank relative to this? So, it was a meme where somebody was taking a picture of their great aunt’s mantelpiece and they had a picture like a portrait of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the young version from the prequel trilogy. With the long hair. With the long hair, the beard, you know, and it’s like, when do I tell my aunt that’s not Jesus? I mean, Ewan McGregor’s a pretty good looking guy. You know, in the 1970s, he very easily could have played Jesus. We’re a little too racially sensitive now to allow that anymore, I guess. I don’t know. He had to be a person of color, I guess. Yeah. Can’t argue with that, actually. But you know what? If the Nigerians make a really good Jesus movie with a Nigerian Jesus, I’m going to be cool with it. Yeah. Not going to argue about it. Taking, oh boy, oh boy. He’s taking the flesh of another art and saying it’s my art’s face now. Yeah. That’s what it’s doing. So anyway, anathema sit. We’re not doing that. Glad we’re all in agreement. Yes, Laura, we’re still here. We go for two hours every Sunday. Two hours is the perfect amount of time. Ooh, it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. I’m glad you’re all in agreement. Two hours every Sunday. Two hours is the perfect amount of time. Ooh, Sally’s on fire tonight with this. Yeah. Anti-AI stuff. Like Xeroxing an image of someone else’s kids and slapping it on your snowman and saying it’s my child. Yep, that’s AI for you. I’ll just answer this for bubble this. No, we will not. AI is not an AI. Because, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, listen. The fifth Lateran council said that the human soul is created immediately by God at the moment of conception. Yep. That is not created by the parents. It’s created by God. So, yep, Jacob doesn’t like that. I don’t care. Fifth Lateran council said it. We believe the human soul was created before creation. Okay. I mean, I don’t think that’s correct, but like each of that’s that’s like some origin stuff. Wow. And so God’s got like this big jar of souls and they just got to keep on throwing them out, you know. The Talmud talks about a chamber named Guth, which has all the souls that are waiting since before creation to be incarnated. Well, I don’t like that. It’s much better than thinking the parents did it. So when he runs out, will that be the end of the world? That is actually the condition for the coming of the Messiah is that all the souls waiting in Guth. And that is one of the many reasons Orthodox Jews have lots of kids. To hasten the coming of the Messiah by emptying the soul room faster. Correct. Fair enough. See, Irish families just do it so they can have a son who’s a priest. Oh, Laura, Laura. Yeah. Why don’t you post the post the citation in the chat so I could take a look at this now? Corey, did we address your TVK crypto Catholic talk yet or? Yeah, Laura, come on and talk with us about it. I want to hear your takes. On PVK being secretly Catholic? No, you did a stream about crypto Catholicism. Oh, on the street. Crypto Catholic. Yeah, I watched the street. Yeah, I watched the stream. My jaw dropped and I’m glad he made a Vander clip of it. The Unitarian. Oh, yeah. And it was right after reading about that in here. Thanks for the recommendation, Mark and Paul. I’m still waiting on the library. Oh my gosh, I am learning so much and it maps perfectly. Like all the universities, like all the I’m learning now about the origin of the left coast, which, you know, my family origin is like El Norte and left coast from Southern California. I’m like, this is exactly right. Liberalism is exactly Yankee dumb Unitarianism. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that was pretty. Yeah. Yeah, that book. It does make sense. What is that book? American Nations. American Nations. Yeah, PVK finally read it and then now he’s probably has it. He kind of misunderstood some of it. We can’t. There’s a lot of stuff in there. There’s it’s a lot of just facts. There’s not. He’s definitely got some opinion in there, the author, but it’s a lot of facts. You could interpret that a lot of different ways. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. The Wikipedia page on it must be correct and have a synopsis that makes reading it worthless, right? Ask chat GPT to summarize it for you. Yeah, I’ve had pretty good success with that. Definitely the way to go. I actually had chat GPT. So I read this really, really long book that’s impossible to summarize because he’s constantly rambling and but I decided to do a book review stream on it and somebody said, hey, have chat GPT like summarize it. So I started getting into an argument with chat GPT about the book and I’m like, no, like I was opening the book and showing it to the camera like, no chat GPT, you’re just playing wrong. I was using chat GPT to help practice my Latin grammar because it could chat in Latin and I was trying to also study canon law questions at the same time and I would ask the questions about the code of canon law and it would just make up canons. Yes. Yeah, it does that. Oh yeah, canon 1157 says this. It has no humility. Yeah, then I would be like, no, I’m like, oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It doesn’t understand how citations work. It just fundamentally doesn’t understand what citations are and what they are for. Somebody showed me a screenshot of chat GPT saying, like the Talmud says, godliness is next to cleanliness. Amazing. That’s the main problem with it is that it doesn’t care. When it makes stuff up because it doesn’t want to be wrong because it just reflects the arrogance of its creators. It doesn’t want to, what does that mean? That feels like assigning too much agency. Yeah, the good thing about AI is it doesn’t want. I don’t think it’s aware of it. It doesn’t want to be. I don’t think it’s aware enough to not want it to be wrong. People that created it don’t want it to be wrong. Okay, that’s better. I just, ever since I realized that the reason it makes up citations is because it has no idea why you would cite something. It sort of blew the whole thing open for me. It can’t know that. It can’t know that. I can’t understand that. There’s a bunch of things it can’t know. And everyone’s like, this new breakthrough is AGI. You guys are so far away from AGI that the fact that you talk about it makes me think you need to be on medication or maybe off your medication. I don’t know which. It’s got to be one of those two though. So what I want out of my Catholic artist, right, to be making sacred art is at least the capacity to have this happen. It’s Frangelico painting a crucifixion scene and he just breaks down in tears because it overwhelms him. Ain’t no computer going to be crying because if it does, it’s going to short circuit. Right. Oh, anyway, if anyone says that we shall create images of holy persons with AI, let them be anathema. I’m going to get Sally mad at me. I played around with AI image stuff and some of the stuff was really pretty. So pretty. I’ll give it pretty. I’ll give it pretty all day long. It’s not going to make anybody mad. Don’t go be making icons with it. That’s what you’re saying. It’s very pretty. Evil can be quite beautiful. That’s why beauty won’t say cool. Thanks. I think we need to talk about the definition of beauty. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Mark, go read Fantasties. Yeah. Jo actually did a talk on this. He actually agrees with this particular point. Sorry. The argument from authority is the weakest form of argument according to Boethius. That is also true. No, but my argument was by example. My backup was by Peugeot. So exemplified right in front of you over and over again. Lots of things are beautiful, but most beautiful things are not good. I don’t think we can get to the bottom of this in three minutes. Any last words, Sandy? This has been fun. Now I have homework. I have to write something for tomorrow. Good luck. And thank you for letting me join. Always a pleasure, Sandy. Emma, any last thoughts? Pray for me because I’m almost done with school, but I am not quite done. That’s actually the worst place to be. It is the worst place to be. Yep. Jacob, final thoughts? I’ve been working at Catholic Charities for about four months now, and I still have not met a single priest. Yeah, sounds about right. Sorry about that, man. It’s been hyper bureaucratized and desacralized in basically every state. It’s basically an arm of the US government now. Priests are probably needed elsewhere, right? We have this beautiful chapel, which 200 nuns used for decades, and it’s empty and they had a service on Easter. That was the most recent time it was used, and they’re not going to have any services for Christmas. Yeah. Wow. Pray for more priests. Pray for priests, pray for Catholics in California, because it’s easy to be Catholic in North Dakota, for Pete’s sake. Corey, final thoughts? I want to stay on for another minute to hear Laura’s hot take. I don’t think Laura’s going to have a hot take. I think she’s got her mind made up, and we’re not going to change it. Mark, any last words? Yeah, I hope that everybody can recognize their struggle and turn it into joy. My last words are, rejoice now. Say it again. Rejoice. Rejoice. And God bless you all. Good night. You too.