https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kPGueSjxu-s
Good evening and happy Divine Mercy Sunday to all of you. Glad that you’re all here and I’m glad that I am here. So last week we had the Holy Week, the Easter celebrations and you know it’s quite a lot of busyness and activity for a priest and I get to follow that up this weekend with confirmations and that’s one of the seven sacraments for us here in Catholic land and in our diocese we have combined our confirmation and First Holy Communion celebrations and so that’s usually in about third grade when kids receive both their confirmations and First Holy Communion. Now as the bishop secretary it is my job to drive him around to get him to the various churches that we’re doing confirmations at which means that I get to have a bit of a higher level view of our diocese. I get to see more variety than I would just in the one parish that I am in as I was in the first three years of my priesthood and then you start to get to the point where you’re like oh that’s how that works here, oh that’s how they did that and the biggest contrast I can find from all of these various parishes is how well these kids have been prepared. You know for a third grader something like confirmation and First Holy Communion celebration is a rather stressful event. You know they’re usually made to wear you know the young ladies are usually wearing a white dress, the gentlemen are wearing a pair of slacks and a tie and a nice shirt, sometimes even a jacket or a suit coat on top of that. So that’s not the way that they’re accustomed to dressing and then they have to behave in somewhat more formal and ritual manner than they are accustomed to and so it’s just a little bit different for them. And you shouldn’t just throw let’s say a third grader into such a scenario, they should be properly prepared. Now most places will do a rehearsal for this, getting them ready to receive communion, getting them comfortable to it but sometimes you go to places and you find that people are not properly prepared, that they, the kids just look lost, they’re fumbling around and you know it just gets me thinking a little bit. What we’re doing is not that terribly difficult. It’s simple enough where you should be able to train at least most of eight year olds, most of a group of 30 of eight year olds to do this pretty well. They’re not going to be experts at it, we don’t need expertise but to basically be able to follow the right thing. There’s always going to be that one kid who doesn’t pay attention to everything and just kind of crashes and bashes their way through life. But most of them should be properly prepared. And that makes me wonder, what is it that the priests who were responsible for preparing these kids for, what was it that they were really caring about when they were preparing to have the bishop come into their parish? What was it that was their priority? It may be the case that they’re stressed out, that they’re overworked, overwhelmed and aren’t really able to handle things the way that they might like to. But it could also be the case that they are not loving the correct things. They aren’t caring enough about the proper administration of the sacraments to do what’s basically their job. I’m not in a position to judge any particular priest that I’ve seen in my diocese on this account but I do sit there and wonder. Then I look back at myself and I think, well, that question is actually a decent, troubleshooting question. Anytime I find something going wrong, what am I caring about? Is this something where I am not looking at the right things? Is that why things are not working out the way that I do? Sort of like when you’re troubleshooting a computer, the first thing that people tell you is, well, have you tried turning off the device and turning it back on? That’s a really useful thing that you can do in order to kind of clear out the memory and get a fresh boot of Windows going. Oftentimes, whatever funky thing that was happening in the memory is resolved pretty clearly by just turning the computer off and on again. Maybe you can find this to be a useful tool. Maybe when you are finding something not working out the way that you were hoping and intending for it, have you tried loving the correct things? Is your heart really in the right place? That will always be compatible with this. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Speaking of neighbors, I would very much enjoy some of you to be neighborly. If you’re unfamiliar to me, I do ask to have the webcams on. If you’re going to do something nasty, people see your face before you do it. Here we are. I’m in the middle of the day evening, and I don’t really have the capacity to talk to myself for two hours straight. So I hope one of you people, and I can see that there’s a few watching, will join me and tell me if I’m caring about the right things by doing this every Sunday night. We have about 29 different confirmations that we’re going to do this year, and it’s all about trying to care for the right things. Hello. How are you? Hello. I am okay. What? I like your topic. Although I didn’t. Is he going to get to the loving part? He hasn’t even mentioned the word yet. How do you go about doing that would be the question. What do you think is the… How do you determine what that thing is? Well, that is the question right there, isn’t it? That is the next good follow-up question right there. I mean, you can kind of think of your life in terms of what you’ve obligated, what you’re obligated to do, and maybe start there. So, you know, certainly worshipping God, that’s your top priority right there. And then attending to your family, attending to proper care for yourself, attending to important things in your life, and then kind of working your way down the list. There’s ways of prioritizing those things where you can have them working out just fine. I don’t know. And then just comparing it to perhaps somebody that you admire and the way that they do things. That might be a good way to reset those priorities and to love what they love. So the exemplification trick. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don’t know how much of me is me just doing what my dad did, but a lot of people say that when they see us in a room together, they’re like, oh, that’s how that worked. Apples and trees, huh? Something like that. Something like that. I definitely could have fallen off a worse tree, that’s for sure. Well, I think that’s always the big theme in my opinion. But what’s been a big theme lately is the discernment. Like, how do you know? How do you know you’re doing it right? How do you know what to pay attention to, right? All those hierarchies are right there. And some of the discernment is actually really simple. So we’ve got this idea, at least in Catholic moral theology, of a negative moral norm. Thou shalt not. And if you go on the other side of that thou shalt not, and you are not in alignment with the good, you’re not doing with what a good person would do, you’re not giving glory to God by your actions. It’s nice having that framework of like, okay, if I cross on the other line of that, I know I’ve committed a sin. But then there’s also the positive moral norms. You should do this, you should do that. And with a few exceptions, it’s not like one of the positive moral norm is feeding the poor, right? You should try and contribute to the welfare of the poor. The thing is you can’t do that at all times. So it’s like you have to balance that out with many other things. And I actually see this kind of difference between what we could call more progressive folks and more traditional conservative folks, is the traditional conservative types tend to focus more on the negative moral norms. People going on the wrong side of the law, whereas at least rhetorically, I’m not sure inside their hearts, people who tend to be a little more progressive seem to be more about, we need to be doing this for people, we need to be doing that for people. And maybe sometimes they’re right, but it can be difficult to discern that. Yeah, well, I think the fundamental difference is it’s more, we’ll say, moral or ethically tenable to tell people what not to do, because it’s a lot clearer. But it’s less so to tell people what to do, especially with respect to, like, you’re not a good person unless, right? The world isn’t perfect unless. And that actually is a very left-right divide. Where it’s not that nobody tells the other side what to do or something like that, it’s the things they say. It’s like, oh, don’t do that. And it’s cast the other way. It’s cast as a restriction. But actually, the restriction is in the people telling you what to do, right? Because they’re telling you how to allocate your time, energy, and attention, and which order it should go in. Whereas on the other side of the register, people who will say aren’t so progressive are just telling you, no, no, don’t do that. And the reason why that’s more tenable is because you really could kind of screw up the world. And we’re kind of in it with you. So, like, no. That’s why, you know, people talk about, oh, the church is all full of rules. But, like, in terms of your day-to-day living, there’s only five that you have to follow. That’s go to church on Sundays, confess your mortal sins at least once a year, receive communion at least once a year, observe the pathetically easy fast and abstinence days of the church calendar. And as you can, support the mission of the church materially. Right. Yeah, that’s all low bar. Yeah, right. And so those, that’s, you know, that list is commonly called the five precepts of the church. There’s more to it. But, like, in terms of that, like, those five things that you have to do, that’s about it. Okay. So, I mean, all I have to say to that is help, help. I’m being oppressed. Yeah. It’s pretty easy there. Yeah. Help, I’m being oppressed. Yeah. And I think, well, I’m a high bar person, so I’m a little miffed at the low bar there. Like, in terms of what we can actually ask of everybody, that’s what makes, because the Catholic Church is for everybody. Here comes everybody. That’s Catholicism for you. Right. And it’s sort of cast exactly backwards. Yes. You know, I’m going to sit there and encourage you to do more, but I’m not going to say that you’re falling short if you’re not beating that. I don’t know. Maybe you’re just really not very capable of doing things, and it’s all you can to meet those five basic things and keep a job. And if that takes all of your energy, well, the Lord isn’t going to do anything magnificent through you, and maybe that’s okay, because he has his overachievers. They’re called saints, and they tend to get most of the work done for him. That is true. Yeah, that’s, yeah, we’re really, missing saints is not a good thing. But yeah, you know, like a saint that really inspires you can be the one who helps you to readjust your loves and care more about the right things. Yeah, by exemplifying it. And that’s what you need, that exemplification. It can’t be word alone or book alone or something crazy. That’s just nuts. If you don’t, you don’t know how to interface with the words. Right. You gotta have, words are low, low information. Nobody likes that. It was one of the early appeals that you heard a lot was, oh, you know, their vocabulary is limited to the 10,000 words of the Bible. I don’t know if the Bible only has 10,000 unique words or something. Hebrews got like all sorts of words that have three ways we could translate it into English. So, right. But the total number of words might be 10,000. And it was the number of words quantity that was being used as a derisive way of relating. Most people only have like four or five thousand in them, right? Or four or five? Yeah, I have no idea what the average. Right. So that’s something I’ve heard where people are doing like, oh, Shakespeare. Wasn’t really Shakespeare. He was actually 14 different people as they do a word count in Shakespeare. And he’s got like a vocabulary of 30,000 unique words that he’s used in his entire corpus. Right. So like he was just an absolute monster in terms of vocab, including coining new words. Inventing new words. So I don’t know. I’m just I’m happy to say that he was a genius and that was all there is to it. So. But yeah, I don’t know who’s who are these people that are saying there’s only 10,000 words in the Bible and therefore and therefore what? So according to the googly thing quickly, it’s 20 to 35,000 words. An eight year old has a 10,000 word vocabulary. OK. All right. I got the numbers mixed up in my head. I don’t get paid to do numbers. My argument is that an eight year old can understand it. Yeah. My argument would be the exact opposite is that the more words that you have, the more junk you filled your head with that you probably don’t need. And now you can sound wicked smart, but you ain’t. You talked about Hericoresis, right? Yeah. That’s a two dollar word right there that you’ve never heard. Hericoresis before. I have not. Who’s that? That’s impressive. Yeah. Who is that? Who is that? That’s actually probably the correct way to respond to somebody. I mean, if you’re in a theology classroom, you can go ahead and talk about Hericoresis. But most of us don’t need to hear about it. Ah. Oh. These confirmations are a lot of work, though, because I got to I got to fly in there and get the altar servers from like zero to going in like half an hour. Oh, jeez. Half less than half an hour into our live stream. Emma’s here. Hello, Emma. Hello. Oh, it’s it’s confirmation season already. It is confirmation season already. And it will be until middle of May. Yeah. Oh, it’s going to be tired. Yes, yes, it will be. What was that, Andrew? I didn’t hear you. I was going to say, wasn’t that like last week? Confirmations Easter Vigil. Easter Vigil. Yeah, yeah. But there’s there’s more to it than that. Now we got all the normal kids getting confirmed at the usual time. Yep. These are third grade confirmations. Third grade confirmations. Oh, out order, baby. We’re all about that. I had to wait till I was a junior in high school. Yeah, we’re not doing that anymore. Everywhere. I don’t think that was a good plan. So, like, I’m glad. But third grade is really probably the youngest I’ve heard. Yeah. So this is this is what happened, right? In the Middle Ages, they were doing confirmation and First Communion together when people were teenagers. They wanted people to be able to serve the sacrament before they were approached again. And that was working okay. And then in the early 20th century, Pius X is like, we need more people taking communion. And he was right in those days to to say that. So he started he lowered the age of First Communion to about seven. And the confirmation got stranded out of order, right? Because the order for initiations, baptism, confirmation, Holy Communion in the teenage years. But in our diocese, this was gosh, this was 20 years ago. Archbishop Bishop Aquila shows up and he’s like, we’re just we’re going to do it in third grade. Now we’re going to do both of it in third grade now. And he was a firm man and he was able to implement this over a loud chorus of objection that hasn’t entirely faded away at this point. And so now they have the grace of confirmation in middle school, which I think is a good idea. I think that’s a good idea, too. Maybe you can have that that strengthening of the baptismal graces in there. I definitely didn’t love having to wait till almost the end of high school. But don’t they have to like agree to a whole bunch of stuff, kind of like baptism? Yeah, it’s a lot easier when they’re in third grade. What’s going to say? Wouldn’t it make more sense like when they have when they’re older? Yeah, sure. But look, like nobody can force you to be Catholic or go to mass on Sunday once you get to a certain age. So anyway, so so you’re always you’re always free to apostatize. The fact that you had some oil on your forehead from your perspective, if you become an atheist, you had some oil on your forehead. Really won’t change that. So I don’t think it hurts anything. I think it’s a great idea. I’m all in favor of it. Grace comes to you regardless of your maturity level and understanding. That’s good news for me. Yeah, me too. It sounds like universal good news, but yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So anyway, you need to get used to Father Eric being kind of tired on Sunday evenings because some of these are road trips where we’re doing four confirmations in a weekend, one on Friday, two on Saturday, one on Sunday. And staying overnight in towns that are a long ways away. That sounds fun. Yeah. So it was only three this weekend. But yeah, I’ve got it easier than the bishop, though. He he has to go and give his big homily every time he’s going to do all the preaching and he’s got to take photographs afterwards. And I don’t have to do any of that. So it makes it easier for me. Yeah, quietly is the right word for it. I’m just the driver and then I train the little people to be in the right place. And that’s how to mind. You know, it’s like when I’m going like this, like that means come over here. That doesn’t mean just stare at me. I mean, come over here. Oh, my God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Come over here. Oh, my God. I’m sure I was like that in fourth grade, but. It’s just funny. It’s just my mom would tell you that I was like that all the way through high school. So. Emma, a young space shot, inconceivable, I say. I know you’d never believe it of me now, unless you spent 20 minutes with me altogether. Yes. Can confirm is a space shot. The same thing as a space cadet. Yes, roughly speaking. Roughly speaking. Yeah, the idea of being off in space and not paying attention because you got lost in your own thoughts or something that. Yeah, people. That happens to people. I mean, if you have really interesting thoughts, some people are really into it. You know, some people are not. Some people are like really prone to it. Yeah, I’m better than I used to be, but. Must have been the grace of confirmation. It was part of it. It was the grace of confirmation. Fixed all your problems. Finally got there in high school. Oh, my gosh. I’ve been waiting for this. I didn’t even get the Bishop. Oh, gosh, you got confirmed by just a regular old presbyter. Yeah. What a. What outrageous. Because the apparently the Archdiocese of Boston is too big and Cardinal O’Malley was too busy. So I wouldn’t want to be appointed priests. Shocking. Do some of the confirmations for him. Rather than auxiliary bishops, huh? Yeah. Huh. I didn’t realize you were in Boston. But when was that that you were in Boston? I was. I mean, I was confirmed in 2015. Okay. Spring 2015. I wasn’t in Boston, but I was in the Archdiocese of Boston. I’m not sure how big but the city of Boston itself is it like sprawling? It’s pretty tight, right? Tiny city. It’s minute. It’s almost not it. It’s a walkable city, right? You’re gonna bother to walk it all day. Big deal. It’s one of those old enough to be like that cities. Not like St. Louis. Well, it’s also but it’s also constrained and the people there wanted it that way. And you know, everybody everybody talks about Central Park. It’s like, well, where did that come from? Well, the guy who built Central Park, Frederick Law Olmstead first built the ring the the emerald necklace around Boston, which literally constrains the city. You couldn’t build the city bigger anyway, because it’s this big ring of no city in the middle and people just sort of followed that along. You know, a lot of the Puritan money, the Mayflower money and stuff was like, he ain’t building the city any bigger than this. So in fact, for a while, I think they had a moratorium on buildings in the city like for decades. I think that was one of the mayor’s and then they open that up and now you don’t recognize the place. It’s like, where is what is this? And then they open it up and sell these buildings. They weren’t here before and it was weird, too, because it affected Cambridge. So Cambridge wasn’t building either. And then they were a bunch of junk everywhere. So uglier city now, I assure you. Well, I do love the city that I live in. It was a mistake to design it around an automobile. Just not good, not good business. Yeah, yeah. Well, anyway, what can we do? We just wait for everything to fall to pieces, I guess. Or we can rebuild. You can rebuild, Andrew. You’re the architect. Is school going well? Yeah, we actually have a lot of conversations about cars. And cities. So. That is definitely on the radar of architects. For or against? Usually against. That’s what I thought. That’s what I thought. Why would you build a highway when you could build a cathedral or something? Yeah, I guess we could just build like a hundred cathedrals all in a line out to some other place. You think about the footprint of a major interchange of two interstates, let’s say it’s like. That’s a lot of land. It takes up so much space. It takes up so much space. And then I end up realizing that the city that I live in at the center of it is just a way to get someplace else. So there’s no actual head to it, right? And as we all on this live stream know, if it doesn’t have a head, it doesn’t probably exist. If it doesn’t have a head, it’s dead. You nailed it, Andrew. It’s not a thing. No hand, you’re dead. I think that a lot of people do things in the city, right? It is supposed to be the center for commerce. Right. And a lot of the large cities have like a financial district and an ethnic district or two. Like Boston has three. But Fargo was built like probably 90% of the town was built after the introduction of the automobile because we’re just such a new city. And so everything got built according to automobile logic, which is, you know, it’s just, I don’t know, zoning laws. I think that’s what I’m supposed to be upset about, right? Is zoning laws, you know, this is the housing zone. This is where people live and this is the shopping zone. Oh, yeah, the planned. Yeah, that came that all came out of the same period in the US history, by the way. I’m sure it was the success of the so-called robber barons, including Ford and Edison. They were both very and they weren’t the only ones, but they were the big the big names. They were very big on planning. Really big like Edison. So yeah, I think it was Edison and I think he was in bed with JP Morgan and Ford or something. But like he went off and is like his third phase of life. He went off and like they built a mining machine. It was a mobile mining town. So effectively you put it up against the mountain. It carves up the mountain and does like all the processing in one place as a moving factory. Yes, it was a marvel. Oh boy. Right. It’s like a speed punk nightmare right there. Exactly. Well, then there’s all kinds of stuff like that in history that like nobody knows. Literally nobody has been told right like it just it’s weird outlier stuff and not that it didn’t work. But like it had a time and place and and the extent to which a lot of things rely on the people that invent them to actually keep them moving. Which is sort of contrary to we’ll say more recent ways of thinking right because you get you know, Harvard Business School where management is a skill and each management independent the thing you’re managing which is partly true. But also great man theory is there’s a point to it. And it just turns out that you know, and they’ve done studies like on the great philanthropists. So the great philanthropists were also first great businessmen for the most part right. They earned the money then they gave it away. Yeah, right. The money is not that hard in the US doesn’t happen in Europe. Europe’s got a completely different problem and lots of problems. But in the US they all earn their money and gave it away. Well, it turns out they’ve done studies on this when they ran their charities. Their charities were much more efficient. They did much more good in the world. And then when either the second generation came along or other people ran the charities, they didn’t do as well. And boy no one wants to hear that because boy that really yeah. Well, it’s really not good news that competence is a finite resource. Yeah, when it’s not like I would prefer I would prefer to live on a planet of highly competent people. But I don’t yeah, but but we sent everybody to college. So now they’re perfectly competent. Oh now they’re all just incompetent in the same ways. Well, and right and arrogant about it because they’ve been told that this is what competence is and now you should earn, you know, 20,000 Nvidia chip. It’s just ones and zeros. It is literally- It’s just nicks and pearls. It’s the same thing. Well, it all came from the Jacquard loom. So fair enough. Yeah, which came from knitting punch cards, I think. Yeah, the Jacquard was the one who used the cards initially in a machine, in a mechanical machine. That was a long time ago. It was. It was way back then. It’s pretty cool. Yeah, and all the early computers were actually mechanical, like actual gears from IBM and NCR and companies like that back in the 1800s. Nice. I thought they were just underpaid women. Well, they had like NASA computers there. So there were slide rules, just doing math all day. No one was underpaid back then, but yes, certain women are better at certain types of math. So they had a lot of women doing that work. And they called them computers. There were mechanical machines long before that. But they probably weren’t as efficient and broke down too much, whereas you just. They, so a lot of the history of IBM, which I actually didn’t know until like very, very recently. Right after I returned from Arkansas, in fact, and Dr. Jim turned me on to the idea that maybe I should be listening to audiobooks on my long trips. It turns out that a lot of that stuff, well, it’s not that much, but it’s a lot of that stuff. A lot of that stuff, well, in fact, the entire history of, we’ll say computers in the home is all tied up in military, right? Like the big driver for computers is artillery. It’s rocketry basically, but it’s rocketry stems from artillery. So they, yeah, at a certain point, you can’t use the slide rules to calculate because the battle’s moving too fast. It’s not that you can’t do the math, it takes too long. Right? So it’s like, oh, so we need a mechanical way to do this. And then the complexity that that requires is not easily done with a mechanical machine anymore. Right, right. Because a mechanical computer is basically a microcosm of whatever it’s trying to calculate. Right, and the early calculations, just like the early writing, that might be a pattern. I know we’re not on navigating patterns, but I’m gonna speak to you. You can do patterns, that’s fine. But the pattern is everything gets used for commerce first. So early writing is largely accounting. Early computers is all accounting, all of it. It’s all business accounting. And then government goes- They can use it for war. Right, well, no, no, no, it’s not even that. When the government goes, we need calculation machines that do a certain thing that isn’t accounting, because accounting is an addition, subtraction, and whatever. Double entry book is pretty simple. It’s like, oh, oh, we can do some of this stuff. But then it turns out that the ability to calculate trajectories requires a bunch of different math. And then it just, you can do some of that mechanically, but then it takes long. And then you’re back to human speeds, even with the mechanical machine, and it’s like, oh, that’s not good. And then they go electronic on it. That’s roughly how it works. It’s very compressed, but that’s roughly how it works. Xander, you haven’t been on it a while. No, I haven’t. Some of that Exodus 90 action, and just haven’t been on the internet. I haven’t done any Exodus 90. I’ve been putting the toddler to bed. Oh, 180. That’s also a good use of your time. But I’ve been keeping up with my prayers, Father. I just finished the Divine Mercy novena. That’s a good one. It’s really funny. In my head, the Divine Mercy novena is super traditional, because my dad was very intent on us praying the Divine Mercy novena when we were kids. But that wasn’t popularized until the 90s, I think. Yeah, or the 80s or 90s. It’s a relatively new thing. So we moved from South Carolina to Norway. And my dad was all excited about the Divine Mercy novena and the Divine Mercy devotions and all of that. And he goes to the priest and says, hey, are we doing confessions on Divine Mercy Sunday? This really sarcastic Norwegian priest. He was awesome. He looks at my dad and he says, oh, you mean that Polish thing. Wow. Well, yes, it was the Polish saint and the Polish pope who popularized this, so I suppose. I guess that makes the Polish thing. I guess it’s just a Polish thing, yeah. It’s still going pretty strong, so I think it might actually last for a while. It won’t just be a little flash in the pan. Flash in the pan devotions could be good, too, though. Sometimes they’re just what you need for that period of time. Right, right, right. Well, I think that it has the, there’s a lot of significance in the Divine Mercy image, too, and the whole focus on connecting mercy to both the blood and water of Christ. There’s a lot of power in that emphasis. And I think it’s symbolically there, I’ve been meditating a lot. And I think that there’s something to be said for the idea that mercy requires both the blood and the water. That if you think of mercy as the water, but it doesn’t make sense without the blood. It’s the blood being the rigor or the guilt, like having that sort of symbolism of accountability. So when you pierce Christ, the blood is revealed, but with the blood comes the water that immediately is there to provide mercy and the opportunity of salvation. Well, I look at the way it’s played out in the life of the Church. This actually connects back to the very beginning of the livestream. We do baptism first, that that’s your first sacrament in. And let’s say that you’re converting. It’s all going to happen in one night. And the fullest symbolism is you’re putting something under the water and killing it. Now, the person doesn’t die, but all of the sin inside of them dies, which is why the Church, even in its modern liturgical documents, actually has a preference for full immersion baptism versus just pouring the water on the head. Not that I’ve ever been able to do it, because you need baptismal funds that are designed for that, but it is a preference there. And then confirmation, so you’ve washed away everything that would keep somebody from God, and then you seal them with the gift of the Holy Spirit so that the devil can’t just get right back in there. And then you fill the person with the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion. And so the Church Fathers have seen among the, it’s a symbol. So we’ve got Mr. Navigating Patterns here himself. He’ll tell us that a symbol can go from many to many, and that’s the benefit of symbol. But one of the more common ways the Fathers of the Church interpreted the water and blood coming from Christ’s side was he’s giving us baptism and the Holy Eucharist, which are the two greatest sacraments that the Church has. So yeah, I mean, but it’s like, it’s a symbol, so we can do a lot with it. But yeah, but yeah. But when you’re preparing, when you’re consecrating the wine in the Mass, also there’s this mixture of the wine in the water, which you can also, you can see as the wine, the red wine being a stand-in for blood. Well, Christ says it’s his blood, but there’s the mixture of getting in the Mass, like you start, you add a little bit of water to the wine, and then there’s a little bit of wine in the water at the end when you’re cleaning. I think, I don’t know. I suppose, yeah. So the infusion of water, gosh, I don’t even know it in English anymore. Through the, oh my gosh, I don’t know it in English anymore. I only know it in Latin. Per huus aqua et vinem mysterium, eus officiam, or divinitatis consortis, cui humanitatis nos trifieri dignatus as particheps. What’s that, Emma? Through the mixing of wine and water, it may, I couldn’t catch the second half. All right, isn’t it? Because it’s so fast. Isn’t it basically like, well, Father, is that the new right, or is that the old right? That’s the new right there. The old right’s a little longer, and I don’t have that memorized, but it’s always on the card in front of me, so I don’t need to. The English is basically like, it’s about how in creating man, his nature was, he dignified man’s nature in his creation and still dignified it even more greatly through his restoration. And so there’s this like, it’s looking at the incarnation of Christ being both God and man. That’s actually what the, like explicitly, at least in the language, the old mass is looking at. It’s a symbol of the incarnation of the two natures of Christ being found in one person. So, yeah, it’s not really. I was talking, I was just going through the Latin mass missile earlier today. I think I was focusing on something else. I’ve been going through it for two years, and I still haven’t got it figured out, so. I’m trying to find this text here on the internet. Here we go. Don’t waste your time. They destroyed search a long time ago. Here we go. I knew the internet sucks. Here we go. Putting it in the comments. Uh-oh. You might need to pause this course on civic little information, the divinity of Christ here. Wow. Maybe sharing the divinity of Christ to humble themselves to share. To share. So this was actually a point of controversy between at the Council of Chalcedon between those who held a monophysite Christology versus a diphyzite Christology, whether or not the divinity of Christ absorbed the humanity of Christ, and those two didn’t come to stint, and they took this ancient liturgical practice, comes all the way to the fathers, of mixing just a little bit of water in with the wine and saying, look, the water was dissolved in the wine, so the humanity of Christ was dissolved in the divinity. Can you imagine making an argument from literature like that today for theology? Yes, I can. Are you kidding? He’s waiting for his chance. I’m like, I’m just ready. It’s just like, it would catch so many people so off guard, and I am absolutely here for it. They’d freak out. It would be glorious, absolutely glorious. Everyone would just be like, what does that have to do with anything? Do you have any predictions, Father, for Dignatus and was it in Fatai? Oh gosh, yes. I just imagine them releasing that document on the day that there’s a massive eclipse in the United States, and it’s the feast of the Annunciation, not on the correct day. Wait, what? There’s a document about human dignity coming out tomorrow. Called Infinite Dignity. I have my prediction of what it’s gonna be. My prediction is that it’s actually not going to cause near as much of a kerfuffle as the last one, but it’ll say what it needs to say only five times longer than it’s really necessary with lots of that really irritating Italian habit of putting everything into the passive voice. That’s my prediction. That’s your prediction, okay. I don’t think I’m gonna read it. English doesn’t like passive verbs. Unless you are a scientist, and then everything has to be third person, past possessive. Unless you’re a scientist, and then you have never done anything to things things have just happened and been acted upon. You gotta take the person out of the science. No, it drove my mother nuts proofreading my writing for years after high school and college. Cause she was like, active voice, active voice, active voice, active voice. I’m like, this is how they taught me to write in school. Passive aggressive voice. Yes, oh my goodness. It was done. She was like, you did it. Not, it was done by me. It’s like, come on, get in the world. Be part of it. Speaking of eclipses, we’re, totality is like running right through here. So we’re gonna go, we’re gonna go chase clear skies tomorrow morning. I’m super excited. I went to the one in 2017. I was in Nebraska, middle of stinking nowhere. And it’s actually really incredible to see. So just watch out for the vampires. You just watch out for the vampires. Yeah, werewolves get super powered. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It is really, for those of you who haven’t seen a total eclipse, like the difference between a partial eclipse and a total eclipse is just like, they’re not even the same thing. You’re tracking along, you’re chugging along. And it’s like, it’s a little bit darker and the shadows are weird. And then all of a sudden, like reality breaks and you get sucked into the realm of fairy for about four minutes and you don’t know where you are or what’s going on. And then you just get like spit out on the other side in a daze in like rural Missouri. Well, the animals act funny. Like you notice around you outside. Yes, including the rational animals. The rational animals particularly act funny. Well, they lose their ground. They don’t think they have any. I mean, that’s the part of the meaning crisis, right? Is you think you’re a rational creature and you live in objective material reality and of course you don’t. And then when the things around you change in a way that your subconscious notices, but your rational mind does not because it doesn’t pay attention to the noise level of birds during the day, because like, why would you? It’s sort of normal, right? Then you freak out and you don’t know why because you’re a rational creature after all and nothing changed. It’s just nothing to see here. Mark, it’s funny that you said that about noise levels of birds because I’m actually wearing my American youth birding t-shirt when I was on the American Birding Association’s Youth Team to the World Series of Birding in Cape May, New Jersey. This would have been in 2008, I think. So yes, I am that as there’s plenty of things I’m not keyed into as anyone who spent time with me in the real world will know that there’s plenty of things I’m not keyed into, but bird song is one thing that I’m totally keyed into. And that’s one of those, I mean, I think about this on a regular basis, how like most people aren’t like, oh, that’s a brown-headed cowbird. Oh, that’s a pine warbler. Oh, that’s a chipping sparrow. Oh, that’s a Northern Cardinal. And, but then I realized how many layers of reality are there that I’m not doing that with because I’m keyed into birds, but I’m not keyed into a hundred other things. And then all of a sudden you realize that you’re just mostly walking along blindly and yeah. Well, unless you’re even- You can’t pay attention to all of it. Right, you can’t, yeah. And it’s questionable whether you should be paying that much attention to birds, I don’t know. It is, well, the confidence of attention breaks down. I noticed the last eclipse. Like I was like outside going like, whoa, this is wild. Cause I have a huge field of attention. So I was just like, oh, all of this stuff is missing. There go the frogs, there go the birds, there go the crickets, like the dragonflies are doing strange things. What happened, where are the butterfly, you know, all this stuff- It’s just a partial eclipse, right? Or did the totality go over South Carolina? Cause the last one, I think it might’ve, I guess. Just kinda- No, I thought- It was a Southeast arc, yeah. I thought it did. I have video of it somewhere. It’s just sitting on one of my servers somewhere. So I have video of it somewhere. Cause I had cameras, so I pointed them up at the sky. No, but it was, I think it was total, but it was weird for a few minutes, like really weird. And I was like, whoa, the whole world just got weird. What’s going on? And then it subsided. And then it took a while for things to get normalized. It was like cacophonous. And then everything went back in sync. And it was like, well, that’s pretty interesting. It’s interesting what happens. It is. That’s the worst hornet sting I’ve ever had during the last partial eclipse. Oh no. Do you get stung by hornets often? Not super often. Okay. I don’t think- It was one of those with like the really dangling, like stingers. I don’t know if it was actually a hornet, but whatever bug that is. And it really hurt. And I was out with my younger siblings. I mean, I think the hornets- Observing the eclipse. They come in like a dive bomber, right? Sometimes. The other one I’ve had is just like the dumbest hornet sting I’ve ever had. Cause it was crawling on my shirt and I stabbed myself with it and it didn’t seem to bother. And that was just embarrassing. You didn’t tell anybody about that one. You just kinda took care of it. I mean, I think I was like 11. Oh, okay. That was a long time ago. Are we talking about hornet stings? Yeah, I’m sure you’ve got a wild hornet sting story. No, I don’t wanna hear Ted’s horrific I don’t have any wild hornet stories again. After the bear? I don’t have any. From the Caribbean? I don’t wanna hear more Ted in nature. I wanna hear all the Ted in nature stories. No, I actually have no bad insect sting stories. I’m like, social insects and I get along just fine. I don’t know why. Really? No, I’m just curious. Yeah. But I would say that I’ve heard- You’re a man of peace and you’re beating him upon the hive. You know, I had that realization when I was like, I don’t know, like 11 or 12, I woke up one morning and there was a wasp on my bed, just like on my covers. I was like, you know, I’m just gonna not freak out. I just lay there in bed, the wasp crawled around on me for a while and then flew off and I was like, yeah, I mean, the last time I got stung by a wasp, I think I pushed a tree over with a tractor that had a wasp nest in it and one of them stung me and I’m like, okay, fair. Like, I deserved that. Like, you’re doing your thing. Did you attempt to push the tree over? No, I bumped it really hard. No, it was in a really tight spot in some small woods and then I didn’t even see the wasp nest but then I was like, wow, why does the back of my neck hurt really bad? And then I looked up and, you know, it all made sense. No, I just remember reading and I was only getting to bring up, I can’t remember if it was a hornet or it might have been one of these, like the bullet ants, some horrible South American ant but a naturalist like describing what it’s like to be stung by this insect, described the pain level as being quote, completely unacceptable. Is this like a British anthropologist there or a British entomologist? Exactly, how English is that? It’s like, I find this thing completely unacceptable. Do better. This is outrageous. This will be on balance. I’ll be writing to my MP immediately. Yes, exactly. Oh my goodness, no. What was the last thing I did? I got my finger smashed at tailgate last month. That hurt really bad. That was a real pain. Yeah, pain is a weird thing. Pain is just weird. Pain. It contracts your attention. It’s the second most real thing according to Peterson. Yeah, that’s a weird one, dude. He needs to tighten that definition up because what he said is the most real thing is like powerful narcotics. Yeah, no, I’m glad somebody else noticed. I was like, this is a terrible definition, Jordan. Yeah, yeah. He has had issues with that now. Really? Yeah, that’s why he went away for a little while as far as I understand. Oh yeah, back in, back before 2020. He got nerfed with benzodiazepines. Yeah. Ooh, is that on the timeline? Should put it on the timeline. I don’t think I put it on my timeline on Peterson’s video. Put it on the timeline, Jordan. I will, I will. Well, I’ll have my people do it because I have people for that now, thank goodness. What’s interesting is that Peterson’s also the only person I’ve ever heard who made, he’s like, everyone’s like, man, why do people get addicted to drugs? And he’s like, that’s actually a terrible question. A great question is why is everyone not addicted to drugs? Exactly. He’s like, that’s the good question. It’s like, oh man, that’s so true. That’s so true. So maybe we’re all just addicted to digital drugs. I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah. This doesn’t have. Huey Lewis got what he wanted. That’s all there is to it. We got a new drug. Does it make him feel sick? Well, that’s what he was talking about. He was talking about love. Yeah, yeah, but we got a new drug. Yeah, it’s called the internet. Have you guys been following the Jonathan Haidt stuff? Which? Well, he’s been all over the podcasts and the news in the last week because he has a book about social media addiction, especially among adolescents or middle school aged children. And he’s on a big, basically no one should be on social media before 18 kick, which I’m not sure what to make of it exactly. I think he makes a lot of good points about social norms and smartphones, but I honestly, I don’t know. I don’t really trust the government necessarily to put the kind of regulations that he would want to have happen. Be sure to just make that. Yeah, the government’s not gonna solve it. But why 18? 25 is much better. No, no, you were doing good before the qualifier. No one should be on social media. So it applies to other age verification things. Like the example he used was Pornhub, for example, or like, which apparently doesn’t have any real age restriction per se. So the idea is that basically social media sites and other websites should have to have some kind of age verification that the government could enforce and they could be sued if they, I’m probably with you, yeah. Do you just require Pornhub to have age verification and everybody like freaks the heck out? Yeah, it doesn’t even matter. You can’t do it. Yeah, you can’t. The smart guy that developed internet developed into spec and basically the spec is make sure this can’t be interfered with from a central location. I mean, I’m oversimplifying, but like, and they did it. Like the mission accomplished. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Like, so all of this is crazy talk. It’s all crazy talk. There’s no way to enforce anything on the internet. The really weird thing about digital stuff is if you think about like, I mean, I like thinking about this in terms of like hooks, like, you know, there’s these like, they’re hooks and you can say that they like take advantage of our psychology or our dopamine cycles or our sin. You know, there’s a, I think those are all true. Those are all true ways to talk about it. And, you know, we’ve had like, right, we’ve had certain hooks previously, like violence towards other people or sex or things like that. And then we started like, with certain technical capabilities have been able to develop some really powerful hooks, like say, opium. That’s a great one. Figure out if you grow poppy seeds and refine the sap from them in a certain way, like, hey, that’s a pretty crazy hook, right? Or cocaine, also a really crazy hook. Right. Fentanyl, like just a tiny amount will take you from the worst pain in your life to bliss. To bliss. So that, well, the reason I was bringing up like opium and cocaine in particular is that you can find specific places in like, in history where it was like totally wrecking a society, say opium in China, when the British were making sure that a lot of Chinese were addicted to opium. And then we kind of like got past that. Okay. The thing about opium or cocaine or any substance, any physical hook is you have to be there with it. Right? Now imagine what digital technology has done is it’s like, there is now fentanyl in everyone’s fridge. Like fridges come standard with fentanyl. And so it’s like, you want to go get breakfast? You’ve got to get breakfast and also not grab the fentanyl out of your fridge. And it’s like, how do you do that every day of your life? Like, I don’t know. It’s like, I just don’t have fentanyl in my house. And then I’m not, you know, like I, there are these huge barriers in my physicality to get to that likewise with any substance or lots of other, these like really negative hooks. Gambling, right? Gambling is another big one. Like, dude, if you read the psychology of casino design at all, again, it’s like, it’s just tapping into these things, but I can choose to never go into a casino. But when you have digital stuff and Mark, as you said, it’s built to spec that it’s always leaky. Like the internet is intrinsically leaky. So you’re like, we want to plug all the cracks for the addictive stuff. It’s like, what is the addictive stuff exactly? And how do you plug the cracks? And so then when everyone’s life is like, well, you have to do the internet to do life. It’s like, man, we need more monasteries. Yes. Because what else, like what else? I don’t know. It’s tough. It’s really tough. It’s like, yeah, why 18? What’s that? We need to put internet in monasteries? Silence. You need to get people on the internet and monasteries. I’m on board. Let’s do it. Legitimately engage. Yeah. Yes. Strange. Thank you. Thank you, Father. That is correct. Yeah. But the answer was in an 80s movie all along and nobody paid attention. It’s the best line in the movie too. And nobody paid attention. Everything that’s going on now is in War Games. Just watch War Games. You’ll see it all. It’s right. The pattern, all the patterns are right there. We still don’t have an AI system that lives up to the standards set to us by Joshua. That’s correct. That’s correct. Yeah. They were running that on a chip that could be measured in Hertz, I’m sure. Yes. Well, it’s the same path. The story of the professor who built it is the story of he trained it to play checkers and he used his child to train the computer and he trained it to play chess. And it was very familiar with him. And then this new kid comes along and they think it’s him. And they think it, right? They only have one pattern. And that movie is so good. It’s like completely underrated at this point. It’s only gotten better with time. Movie’s called War Games in case nobody knows what we’re talking about. War Games starring Matthew Broderick and nobody else really have known that I can remember. Mark, I thought you would appreciate this. I was reading back through some Calvin and Hobbes and there’s this great one where Calvin and Hobbes are reading a newspaper and he’s like, Calvin says, oh man, scientists are talking about building thinking machines. It’s like, what’s gonna be left for humans to do? And Hobbes goes, irrational behavior. And Calvin says, maybe they’ll invent psychotic computers. That’s great. And then the Bing chat box starts insulting you, right? Boom, mission accomplished. Put it down, Bo Watterson predicted large language models. He was there. Oh man. It’s all the same pattern. That’s what people don’t realize. Everybody’s like, it’s all new. And I just did a video with Adam, Echoes of the Past. And I was like, no, no bro. None of this is, nothing you see is new. None of it, 0%. Just like an history. We’ll find the same thing going on with different implementations. I always find that comforting. Really? Yeah, we’ve survived it so far. Is that a source of comfort? Yeah, we know how to deal with it. Wow. We’ve survived this stuff. I feel like we need some gigantic brackets. Already. And qualifiers. No, we need, well, the qualifiers are you have to be aware, right? The world is a tension. And then you have to actually attend to it and do something about it. And Ted, you had the solution earlier, right? We need more monasteries. We need a bunch of them immediately. Yeah. No, that’s the solution. And Sally Jo goes into this, right? Why doesn’t the Catholic church own a bunch of spas? They should be running the spas instead of the dirty, smelly hippies that run them now. I agree. I would love to run a spa. And we could do it. Build a spa. I would love to go to a Catholic spa where I didn’t have to worry about like crystals. You can come to Fargo and join my religious order. Yes. We can build the post-modern baths. It’ll be like a whole urban monastery dedicated to clean living in the 21st century. Yeah. Food, clean lifestyle, and a spa. Yeah, the problem is you can’t live in North Dakota. It’s not a livable part of the universe. It is if we get them TV’s. I’ve been dead this entire time. Oh. Sally’s making a distinction between crystal hippies and dirty hippies. I make no such distinction. Sorry, Sally. The crystal hippies are used to be corrupted by the church. I don’t like either of them, but the crystal hippies will like, like surprise me, they’re weird crystal crap. As long as the crystals dissolve in the baths to make bubbles, it’s fine with me. Those would be acceptable crystals, yes. But yeah, no, the churches should have, should absolutely have a market there. You go there, there’s no cell phones. You can relax, right? Like, yeah. There’s a gym for the boys and a spa for the ladies. That was my plan for my future house if I didn’t have kids. No phones? In the bath, yeah. No phone to the bath. Okay. I can approve of that. Don’t take your phone into the bath. I think it would come from that. No, that’s a bad plan. Hmm. I didn’t even got my phone. I mean, there’s a business model there for sure, but I’m just, the churches should be doing it though. That’s the problem. Just make retreat centers nicer. No, no, no, we need real retreat centers run by people who care. Yeah, make them like real retreat centers. The problem is you can’t pay people to care, but you can pay caring people. Every retreat center in our diocese will have a sauna. Hooray. Yay. And a flat screen TV. No. No? Ellie’s got a business. What about wifi? That’s what we’re going for. And free wifi. There will be a single ethernet cable running into the Abbott’s office. And by law and by custom, he will not be on the internet unless there’s another brother in the room with him, also working. Ooh. I like that. Just to keep the Father Abbott free of temptation. Oh, and really good ad blockers on it. So he won’t have some kind of ads showing up and presenting images to him. Oh man, I can make it happen. I just need more. That’s half of pirate sites. Let’s give him a YouTube premium subscription. The YouTube premium subscription. Oh goodness. I think Sally goes on to something. That physical wellness is abandoned by the church. It has been. Physical wellness, the church should be paying attention to physical wellness and not levels of affluence. You know what I want? I want the Catholic equivalent of Tai Chi. What’s Tai Chi? Yeah, that’s a good idea. Like moving meditation thing. Cause I was thinking about this and there are all these like moving meditation, martial arts that are like martial arts or movement and religion together at the same time. And I was like, why don’t Christians have this? Yeah, do not. I feel like we had to have them at some point, but where did it go? Well, that was all monasteries. Like all types of monasteries. Warrior monks. Yeah, warrior monks is a thing because all types of monasteries did that because they were education centers. So really all the education came out of there. Yeah, I guess it would come out of the Greek gymnasium tradition. Yeah, and that had its own problems. Well, it did until- I mean, I guess. They fixed it with equality in the Republic. Yeah, that’s only funny if you actually know what, know the joke in the Republic and know that it’s a joke. I don’t remember that part. People take the Republic way too seriously though. I will agree with that one. Well, he mentions like literally at least nine times. He says, and the women and the men must train together in the training center, right? And because they trained naked and like any idiot can figure out- Socrates. That’s our Socrates. Yeah, exactly. It’s just so dumb. And obviously like they keep mentioning it, right? They keep bringing, he brings it up at every possible opportunity. Like this is why I like Plato. He’s my kind of guy. Oh my goodness. Yes, like I said, the gymnasiums had their problems, which is probably why they weren’t adopted wholesale by Christians in the early centuries of the empire because the gyms and the bath houses were places of iniquity very often. Sin, sin, places you could go to get some good sin in. Good sin. Yeah. I thought it was sin. Well, you know, just talk to the people who yell outside my window at two o’clock in the morning. They’ll tell you all about the good sin. I don’t think the father has said it is good. I think he’s saying that the people think it is good. If you’re gonna go for it, you know, you’re gonna go all the way. Yeah, if you’re gonna do a thing, do it right. Don’t be loopy. And do it wrong. Yeah. You’re wrong, right? Yeah. I mean, this is all comes back to loving the appropriate things and what the empire of screens that we have set up are encouraging us to do is to love only that which can be communicated over a screen and through some headphones because that’s what it can do. But we should be loving our bodies more because they are created by God and they are our conjoined instruments, the natural instruments with our souls in the constitution of a human person the means whereby we experience the creation that God has created. So, yeah. Loving our embodied life more than the glowing screens. Sounds hard. Here’s a real question. Yeah. It relates two screens. Would you ban screen stream mass if you had the capacity to do so? Because I was hearing people talk about this in relationship to well, Protestant churches on another podcast today because height had gotten brought up. You mean like projector screens? Well, no, no. Like smartphones or like devices. Well, it’s definitely a transgression to bring out your phone during mass. I’ve never seen a smartphone anywhere near a Catholic service ever. Really? Okay. I mean, so what happens the most common way to come up is some old woman has forgotten to silence it and it rings during mass. That’s the most common way these things get manifested. Occasionally you will see somebody who downloads the readings on their phone and they’ll follow along with it but most people don’t like doing that on their phone. They would prefer to have something on paper. Like the paper, because it’s less ephemeral than the phone. But I don’t see a whole lot of like candy crush. You know, like Catholic churches, most of them you get the sense like, oh, this is different and I’m not gonna just. There’s a reverence field around a Catholic or an Orthodox to be fair to my Orthodox friends church. Like it’s, and it’s palpable. And yeah, like that wouldn’t be tolerated. Like I can see where the heathenists pretend Christian Protestants would not care but like everybody else does. Well, I think it helps that the mass is usually what, somewhere in the range of 45 minutes because there are longer Protestant churches. Depends on where you’re at. 45 minutes is a little on the short end for a Sunday. If you’re at a really small church that doesn’t have a lot of music, 45 minutes is pretty doable. But most larger churches, it would end up taking closer to an hour. And if you’re gonna join me and Ted at the traditional Latin mass, we’re looking at hour and 10, hour and 15 pretty easily. We hit solidly hour and a half today. And on the orthos there are two hours, right? That’s their short one. But that was Latin mass and it was a really full Latin mass with a lot of music. Now, are you talking about like screens up there for music? You seen that too? I don’t like that. I kinda, I’m not even sure about pews and hymnals, right? Like pews and hymnals might’ve been a mistake because there was- I would like to see hymnals please. I know, but there was just this great, like the young monk shows up and he learns the ancient melodies to chant during the mass. And like by the time he had the wizened old monks, they didn’t even need the books anymore. So I don’t mind it so much when you’ve got like, this is, these are 15 year hymnals, right? Like we’re gonna keep these hymnals around until they wear out and we have to replace them because they’re falling to pieces. I don’t like the, oh, here’s our 2024 hymnals. Yeah. Or the miscellaneous. Well, I also agree just on the premise that it’s annoying to try to announce what number page the recessional’s on when the priest is halfway down the aisle after the Marian antiphon already. And yeah, that’s- Well, a hymn board should be able to take care of that. Well, you don’t always get to change them. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, we won’t be able to fix these problems. Oh, I know, digital hymn boards, there we go. Just put a screen up. I’ve seen that, that’s, it’s okay. I don’t like it. I’ve seen ones that are actually just the like, red clock numbers. Yeah, that’s what I’ve seen. No electronic anything. Anywhere near the church. So we’re gonna have to go back to candles? Within 50 miles. Yeah, absolutely candles. Candles, no microphones. Oh gosh, if I could never use a microphone in church again, that would be wonderful. Why would you need- We would have had to not design our churches like gardens for 100 years or 70 years though, for that to be popular. A lot of like carpet and dead materials that absorb sound. Yeah. That’s your job, Andrew. Get on it, dude. Almost my job. It will be, it will be. Why are we seeing that in champagne? Yeah, I actually went to an Anglican mass on Ash Wednesday where they printed the liturgy on like letter size paper and it was about 20 pages. So, I mean, I guess that’s one way- You got a packet. Yeah, exactly. That’s one way to- That’s like homework. Yeah, exactly. To deal with the problem of the, just make sure it’s all on the paper, but yeah. I mean, we will do for like big liturgies, we will do print out pamphlets, right? So my administrative assistant was busy all last week getting our, we’ve got a synod coming up in the Diocese of Fargo. It’s a big meeting. Something good might happen. And so I’m in charge of it. Oh, is it a good kind of synod? Not a we’re closing half the churches in the Diocese kind of synod? Right, yeah. We’ve already closed all the churches. Like when a church closes in North Dakota, it’s because the town’s dead and nobody’s left to keep the lights on. So it’s a little different than, you know, St. Louis selling half of their churches because there’s nobody in them, but they’ve got the priests. And I mean, it’s just, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, we’ll do like the big booklets, but like a letter size, that’s just not a, somebody was just lazy with that. That’s all there is to it. Yeah, because usually we do like two pages to one letter size, and then you fold it in half and then it makes it look like that. That’s what I- Do Anglicans have enough money to pay people to do that for them? I don’t know, I always think of the Anglicans and the Episcopalians is just got big endowments, you know. You always have great music. Anyway, I do hate the mics. I really do hate the mics. Especially when you go someplace and the only one they have is the one that hangs down by your ear like you’re a pop star. Ooh, fun. No, they’re not fun at all, they’re awful. Your vestments. They’re not good. Hey everybody, welcome. They’re not good when you do theater either. I’m about to do the mass, y’all. Weird. They’re always very difficult to deal with and they’re very visible and they make me sad. I used to do mics for our high school theater. I also had a mic in high school theater. Did you ever have to take them to your face? No. See, ours were really old and they didn’t like have the plastic molding to go on your ear. So we had them taped to our face and our neck. Yeah, I was the person. I was the person who distributed them every night and then collected them and made sure they all worked and didn’t get lost. Nice. So you just taped a mic to your face and then you’re like, all right, time to go do the sacrament of the mass. No, I’ve never had to tape them as a priest. Usually most places, they’ve got the little lapel mic and you just clip that to the front of your chasable. Interview. It’s okay. It’s not that visible, but you’ve got to like, there’s like a whole- Industry standard. There’s a whole art to like going down there and turning it on and off at certain points in time. And if you forget, it gets really awkward really quickly. Yeah, like you’re trying to like get something like, get the water, get the water, and then everybody in the church can hear it. Oh yeah, the mic- Or just your priest who likes to sing and we can hear you singing like way louder than anybody else. I have very, very vivid memories of masses at the cathedral in Detroit where I was in seminary. And I know it’s great that Archbishop Bigoran would walk in with a hymnal singing whatever hymn that they were doing for the opening mass. He should not have had his microphone on because the choir was in the front and he was in the back and he was a solid second behind the choir. Yeah, that happens. It was just, and like he couldn’t hear it. That’s just excruciating. And he’s such an excellent bishop. But that’s excruciating. People will hear you and see you singing without the microphone. It’s just, ah. No one needs to hear you singing that well. Even the good ones. Yeah, we have that problem in the cathedral because the cantor’s at the front, but the organ is in the back. So my friend of the choir director’s like, we should really just keep the cantor back here because that would be way easier. And liturgically correct. As somebody who has done a fair amount of singing and church music, I firmly believe that musicians belong in the back. I do too, yeah. And is there not a place that they generally enjoy it back there more because like, if they have to start passing music out or somebody freaks out and loses their mind, nobody sees it, you know? They’re not up there in front. I do not wish to be seen if I am singing in a choir. Like, it’s not nice to look at when you’re singing anyway. Like, you may think- Yeah, there’s not a whole lot to look at. Yeah, it’s the singing, you don’t really look at the music. You kind of listen to it. So, but yeah, you don’t have to see a lot of that, like hand waving and conducting and all that stuff. It’s just coming from heaven as far as you know. Yeah. How would you know? How would you know? What would you be loving? You should love something higher that you can’t see. Oh, yes. Love something higher. And you specifically, the not seeing it is important. Yeah. I mean, I usually see it. You’re mystically representing the cherubim when you’re singing at church, Andrew. Okay. So just pretend you’re invisible. Okay. Yeah, just act invisible, duh. In the choir loft, in the back. I’ll sneak up and like tie the choir director’s shoes together without him noticing. Would a cherub or cherubim do that? Maybe. Those aren’t real cherubim. What cherubim would do that? Evil cherubim. I want you to pretend that you’re covered in eyes. Oh, okay. Right? That you’ve got six wings and four faces. Really important. How am I gonna prop a bucket up on a door if I got six wings? Exactly. I don’t know, man, but the cherubim figure it out. Wow. All right, I’ll give it a go. Yeah, I guess those are Putin and cherubim. I don’t know where the, that would be a fun thing to look up actually where the name cherubim came from for those. It’s just a bunch of Italians painting things. I don’t think it’s that serious. They weren’t theologians. No. But like, did they even use it? Like when did it actually start? The naked baby cherubim? When did they start calling them cherubim? Because most like art critics and stuff call them Putin. Which just, what does that mean? Little boy. Okay. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t acknowledge any art after the Renaissance. So. Excellent. Well, these are in the Renaissance. Right, right. So starting in about- Also including. Starting at about 1350, I’m done. I’m just done with it all. Yes, we might miss Fra Angelico. He was good. No, he can count as medieval. He can count as medieval. He’s much more medieval than he is modern. Sorry. He’s much more medieval than he is Renaissance. I used the word modern, Mark. I’m sorry about that. I heard it. I was gonna forgive you. I don’t know. Can we give up Botticelli? Cause Botticelli is pretty good, man. Right. There might be something good out there. At least we’ve got Jonathan Peugeot, right? I could probably like his stuff. Yeah. I like his images of all creation. Those are cool. Should get that on my wall somewhere. I can put more nails in this wood paneling. Nobody can stop me. Does he know who you are? Peugeot? Yeah. I think so. I’ve met him twice now. I think I stand out, you know, usually wherever I go. Do you stand out that much in a symbolic role, Peugeot? Yeah, I was the only Roman Catholic priest there. Dang. Whole mess of Orthodox priests and a couple of Anglicans, but I was the only Catholic. And he was called out on stage by Father Stephen DeYoung. Yeah. Well, I called him out first. Yeah, but he said your name, so on the stage. Yep. Any day now, I’m gonna become YouTube famous. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll have my own Discord server. It’ll be great. Don’t do it. And Monastery. No, I don’t think you can start your own Discord server. Digital Monastery. Don’t you already have a Discord server? Me? No. No. I think Mark’s could be called Father Erich’s. We hang that on Rye. Since Mark is part of the Catholic circle. Yeah, Mark’s part of the Catholic faction. Apparently. What? I can’t even. I can’t even. Well, guess you’re confirmed now. Is that how that works? Coming into the church is just a formality at this point, Mark. I’ve already told you the five things. It’s pretty easy. You can even pull it off. I ain’t doing any of that. Sounds like a plot. A signed Catholic by VanderKlay. I said, I say no. Yeah, really, by the heathen of heathens. Yeah, I’ll stand by my help. I’m being oppressed. Oh my goodness. Help, help, I’m being oppressed. Yes, being oppressed by the nasty old church, which is 100% a voluntary organization at this point. Super oppressive, man. Just feel the oppression coming out of me. You don’t want that sweet YouTube money either. I’m only up a couple bucks so far with ad revenue. And that took like two and a half years. Takes a while. Better get started. Well, I’ve heard, Mark, that you’re gonna enter the church right after Peterson does. No worry, I’m pretty sure Peterson understands why he shouldn’t do that. I think we’re safe there. He’s not going in. I hope not. We’ll probably get him on his deathbed. We’ll see, probably, but you know. We’ll see. We get a fair number of them right before they go. It happens. We could also, I feel like we’ll find out when he dies that he’s secretly been Catholic for the past 10 years. No. No. Like for now? Did you hear it? Did you hear it? No, like before he died. Like from whatever time it is. No. I don’t think so. Did you hear him talk to McGilchrist? That was an interesting talk. No, I need to check that one out. I’ve been busy, like, I don’t know, with other things. Really? Yeah. It’s not like you just bought a house or anything, Emma. What are you talking about? Yeah, but it wasn’t even that. That’s the funny part. I visited friends. Well, I went to a conference in St. Louis, a classics conference, and I presented a paper. And I have friends in St. Louis, so I stayed with them and I was hanging out with them. And it was a lovely weekend. Have you ever gotten to the Basilica there? I’ve not. I went to the Oratory of St. Gregory and Augustine today. That sounds pretty cool. I’ll let it go. It was pretty cool. Did you see the book I dropped in March this morning? Oh yeah, that was great. The priest who gave the homily there. Oh, really? Oh, okay. Yeah, he gave the homily today. He’s a former Episcopalian. Oh, weird. Yeah. I’ll be interested to hear your take on McGill Christian Peterson, because the whole time, especially at the end, I was like, you guys are so close. I’ve got a video for you to watch that’ll explain all of this in a way better way that’ll just make sense to you. I don’t think Peter’s ever gonna watch my video though. Too bad. So close. One, two, three. Little language. Can you attack your keyboard, Andrew? Little language, but other than that, it was a really good talk. Okay. That’s a good thing. I want to do more with McGill Christian, so I will probably check this. I really enjoyed the master and his emissary. I thought that was a very enlightening book. We were talking about that today. The problem is the elephant is the frame, but you’re outside and on top of it. Yeah, my question. He’s not the elephant and the rider though. He’s the master of the emissary. He doesn’t use the elephant and rider framing, I don’t think. Oh, that’s, yeah, that’s true. That’s somebody else who does it. Yeah, but that it’s the same sort of problem in master and emissary where it’s, they’re not accounting for framing at all, right? I still think it’s a really useful thing to tell somebody, hey, you know, the talking, chattering part of you isn’t actually the smartest part of you. Yeah, yeah. The part of you that’s, the part of you that’s smarter and like actually is connected, actually is connected to reality and not playing in a virtualized sandbox is the right brain. And it doesn’t have a big vocabulary. It doesn’t have a big language. It doesn’t talk very much. It doesn’t articulate very much, but it knows things. And it’s like, it’s perfect with the now legendary navigating patterns model, right? Cause that’s where the continuous processing is. Right. On the right. Right, they describe continuous, that was the Peter Stuck. He describes continuous processing, doesn’t use the language. I’m like, dude, you’re so close. You’re so close to having this all worked out. Just a little bit, a little change in a couple of words and then a little more thought, maybe 10, 20 minutes. You’ll get it. It’s real easy. I feel like if you look in a baby’s face, you realize that the smart part of you isn’t the talking part. Depends on how old, we’re talking like three months. Cause when they’re like newborns, their eyes don’t even work. No, like eight to 12 months, like before they’re able to talk, but when they’re like clearly figuring things out and they’re just watching everything you do so closely. Like my niece turns one today and she got her first cupcake. There you go. And the pictures of her at her birthday party are so cute. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Studying the cupcake and then smashing it to pieces and getting most of it on her face. Perfect. Perfect. Processing everything, but absolutely not able to make words about it at all. Right. Well, and the number of people that confuse thought and words you were going over this today on the Discord server is unbelievable. And I’m like, no, that’s because when you communicate your thoughts, you put them into words, but it should be obvious that you think before you speak. Therefore, it can’t be the words, but no one can work that out. And I’m like, what did we do when we quote educated these poor people? And like, I don’t understand. Oh, Emma, I did that education video, by the way. You haven’t commented on it. I’m very upset. I’m sorry. I’m trying to- Crushed. I know. I’m trying to balance a lot of things. I’ll have to check that one out. Okay. I did it for you. So I’m like, wait, what the hell? Okay. Well, I think you two can work that out someplace else, not on our live stream. Oh my goodness. 9.30 already. It is 9.30 already. And we’re talking about reordering our loves here and have you tried reordering your loves? And I’m going to take care of my body by allowing it to rest. And if you’re at a similar time zone to me, I encourage you to do the same. So good night and God bless you all. Actually, in that earlier time zone.