https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ax_nkkNxGMs
So have you ever come up with a perfect comeback ten minutes after the conversation ended? It is a universal human experience, I think, but we don’t have a way to refer to that. But the French do. The French have a little phrase for this, it’s l’esprit de l’escalier. And if you translate that literally, it means stairway wit. So you’re on your way down the stairs, and it’s like, oh, there it was! So they have this way of actually talking about it, not only the words, but also this tradition of coming down the stairs, and they have this understanding of it. So whereas we have to use lots of words to describe this scenario, they’ve just got one pithy little phrase that goes right there. Apparently James Joyce tried to name this in his Ulysses with the word after wit. But have you ever heard the word after wit before? Nobody uses that. So it doesn’t do us any good. The only thing you can use the word after wit for is to show people that you’ve actually read a James Joyce novel, which I haven’t. I got that from Wikipedia. So here we are. We are here to talk. We are here to have conversation with each other, and we are talking with words, with grammar, and with rhetoric that we have inherited, something that we have had given to us. And the words and the terms that we have are more than just how we communicate about things, but the ability to name something, the ability to talk about it and be understood, is bound up with our ability to actually understand and usefully relate to something. If you don’t have the ability to name it, it is very difficult to actually talk about it and to relate to whatever it happens to be. I think about a time that I was in a parish. It was a slow afternoon in Wapatun, North Dakota, and somebody stopped by my office. I was a priest at this time, and I had a hard time getting a read on this guy, and he had a hard time articulating himself. I don’t know if he was just very uncatechized or perhaps maybe he was a little slow mentally. And we’re just going to call him Christopher. That’s not his real name. And we were just having this conversation. Christopher had some kind of sin that he was convinced that he had committed somehow, having abandoned God, and he didn’t know what to do about that. He didn’t know how to handle it. He didn’t even know how to talk about it. And we had probably like an hour-long conversation, and we just weren’t getting anywhere with it. It was just very frustrating. And so eventually I thought, let’s just try something from the Bible. And so we went to the end of John’s Gospel, where Peter and Jesus are speaking, and Peter has done this massive betrayal of Jesus, and he’s never even heard of the man, and cussing people out, and now he’s got to come back and be reconciled. And Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Feed my sheep. And the second that we got there, his eyes just lit up. All of a sudden there was understanding behind him, and he says, I just have to say I love him. And I was like, yeah, you do. And in that moment, it’s like he knew what he… I never got a clear idea of what exactly had happened, but he knew that he had hated the Lord, and now if he turned around and began to love him, then all would be well. And apparently all was well because he just left my office, you know, floating on a cloud, and he went into the church, and he went and prayed, and I went and came off and did something else, and he left me a $20 Walmart gift card, which I didn’t ask for, right? It just kind of showed up. So apparently, I just was able to give him this idea. You need to love the Lord. It was the scriptures that gave it to him, and that made this whole experience that he’d gone through. It had named it. I had a time where I would abandon the Lord, and now I love him, and all is better. So our ability to name an object, the ability to name something, comes very tightly with our ability to understand it. We see this also in the inverse way in George Orwell’s 1984. The party uses its control of public communication to try and direct the citizens’ thoughts by taking words away that they don’t want them to have, and so they’re trying to eliminate the word freedom. Now, if they don’t have the word freedom, they can’t imagine being free. That’s the theory anyway, and you know, at least in the novel, that appears to be working. Now, this is a very important work that all parents do with their children. You have to teach them how to name things, and it’s not just, you know, putting a name on an object like we’re tagging something, but like empathizing with whatever they’re experiencing and being able to say, oh, that’s what this is called, you know. Are you scared? Yeah. They don’t know what scared is yet, but like, you know, they see the dog, you can see them shrinking away from it, and it’s like, oh, that’s scared. That’s what you’re feeling right now, you know. Are you tired? No! Yeah, yeah, you’re tired. You’re tired. We’re just, you’re going to take a nap. No! You know, the kids don’t, they don’t know that they’re tired. They don’t know why they’re so upset. We have to name their experience for them so that they can begin to articulate it, so they can actually interact in the world, and that is their world, right? You know, it’s like when the, when children are very young, it appears to be just a lot of experiences that they’re unable to name, and as they grow older, as they’re able to come into society, they’re now able to name these experiences, they’re now able to interact with other people. We want to shape the world that they live in in an appropriate way so that they can grow up. So you’ll let certain things in, you’ll tell them stories from the Bible, tell them stories of things that you’ve done, tell them all sorts of stories, and there’ll be certain things that we’re going to put off till later, that they don’t need to know yet right now. We actually want to shut that out, you know. The longer you can keep them from learning four-letter words, the better, because they’re going to go out and use that word in front of somebody you want to impress and embarrass you, and well, there you go, there you go. And as they grow older, as our children grow older, we try and direct their attention to those things that are truly meaningful, right? What we consider most important. Trying to have them grow up in a good way so that they can be wise, so they can be strong, they can flourish, you know. You must go to church with us, homework is important, this or that is dangerous, stay away from that. Try and keep good company, all of these things. So what are we doing here? What are we doing with those people who are under our care when we’re trying to shape their world such that the right things come in and are considered important, those things that we don’t want them to focus on are left to side and not given any place. Well, what we are doing is we are providing healthy relevance realization for our children. That’s right, you really didn’t think you’d escape fancy vervekey words, did you? Healthy relevance realization, we name certain things, we hold that up, we say this is good, and certain things you say we don’t talk about that, or we only talk about that in certain circumstances, and that’s not where we spend our time. Now for those of you who aren’t up on your fancy vervekey words, relevance realization is the coolest pun of all times because it’s got these two meanings to it, relevance realization. Relevance realization is when some fact or object reveals its importance to you, its importance in whatever it is that you’re doing. So this can come in that I realize now why this is so important and this thing has now become real to me, it’s sort of popped into existence and is now worthy of my attention. Relevance realization is when some fact changes things. You can imagine you’re communicating with somebody, I should have written down an example ahead of time, somebody is coming to you looking for something and you think they’re just there to chat, and you’re like, hey, how’s it going? How’s your wife? How are the kids? How’s work? And it’s like, you can’t tell why they’re so antsy, and it’s like, you really offended me yesterday when you said this. Oh, that’s a really relevant thing right there. I need to know about that because sometimes my big mouth gets me in trouble, and if you’re upset at me, then they’re like, oh, that is a very relevant piece of information. I was kind of confused why you didn’t look happy and just said that, but I’m not upset. I’m just saying that I was kind of confused why you didn’t look happy and now I know it was me, and I’m going to have to say I’m sorry. So this relevance realization, oh, that’s, and I did say that, and then you were really quiet last night, oh my gosh, sorry about that. I did it again. So this relevance realization, I realize now that this has happened and this becomes real to me. This is what good parents try to provide for their children. They provide this as best as they can. You want your children to live where those things that are most important and valuable are very visible, and those things that you want your children to stay away from are not visible. They’re kept off to the sides or are treated with a certain amount of caution around them. We just don’t bring this up anywhere. And so now we get to the Psalms. The Psalms, as are the whole Bible, are the inspired word of God, and we can use that phrase kind of cheaply. You just say, oh yes, this is the inspired word of God, therefore I have to read my Bible now because it’s important, and I made this, you know, and I made this, you know, promise that I was going to read a chapter of the Bible every day, and now I have to do it because it’s the inspired word of God. We can take this idea seriously. We could take it like, yeah, this is the inspired word of God. These are God’s words. This is what he wants me to know. This is what he thinks is most relevant for all of his children to have access to Generations of Christians have made these Bibles extremely accessible. You can get one in every hotel room. If you just go walking down a main street, you’ll probably find somebody handing out Bibles. We’ve got this, these books everywhere, and we believe that his Holy Spirit has spoken through the words of human beings to us, that we can encounter what the Lord wants us to know through the words of man, and the Psalms are in a particular way very unique in the Bible. It’s always been the prayer book of the church of the Jewish people before that because it’s God inspiring us to talk to him. All of the Psalms are prayers. All the Psalms are cries from the heart of every conceivable human circumstance to speak to him. Just as we teach our children to speak to us so that we can interact with them, so too God teaches us, his children, to speak to him through the words of the Psalms. That comes to my experience with the Brewery, what we all had a little bit of an experience with. I was about 18 years old. I was in my end of my junior year of high school, and I went on a vocation discernment retreat, the sort of place you go to figure out whether or not God is calling you to be a priest. I’d gotten to the seminary, and I dropped my bags off in my room, and then the priest who was running, I was like, okay, now it’s time for evening prayer, and I’m like, what’s evening prayer? No, no, no, it’s just here’s this book. Okay, I’ve got like five ribbons here. I don’t know what I’m doing. I would just, you know, you go to this place, and you go to this place, and then this side’s going to go, and that side’s going to go, and you’ll figure it out. And eventually I did, but I didn’t that night. They just sort of dropped the Psalms in my lap, and I’d never really encountered them before. And it was kind of confusing, but that’s how important it was. It was important enough where, hey, if you’re going to be a priest, you’re going to be spending time with the Psalms for the rest of your life, and so we’re just going to kind of throw you into it. I get to seminary, and now, you know, I’ve had a little bit of experience with the Brewery. I’ve now had an opportunity to get the rhythm of the how to do, but nobody ever told us the why. Like, why do we do this? Because we’ve always done this. And that’s actually maybe the right way of doing things. It’s like, no, you look, you show up for morning prayer at 710, and that’s just how things are. And, you know, I started to wonder about this, and started to, because when you’re just beginning, it’s just formulaic prayer, right? They’re just words that I’m reciting. Sometimes I’m confused by them. Sometimes I don’t really understand them. And we do them over and over again. We go on this four-week cycle with the Psalms and other prayers, and after you go through them enough, they just sort of start popping out of you. If you’ve done this for two or three years, you’re consistently showing up and reciting these Psalms over and over and over again. They really start to get inside you. They start transforming your memory. They start taking the place of cartoon shows you saw when you were a kid, and now become something where, well, it’s actually started to provide some meaning to you. Maybe when you’re happy about something, you start saying, praise God in his holy place. Praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his powerful deeds. Praise his surpassing greatness. Praise him with sound of trumpet. Praise him with lute and harp. Praise him with strings and pipes. Praise him with timbrel and dance. Let everything that lives and that breathes give praise to the Lord. Maybe you don’t say that out loud, but that sort of thing just starts to be the way you think about praising God. Oh, praise the Lord Jerusalem. Zion, praise your God. And then you start giving thanksgiving. He has strengthened the bars of your gates. He has blessed your children within you. He feeds you with finest wheat. He sends out his word to renew the earth and swiftly runs his command. These words just get inside of you, and now you can start seeing the world through it. Instead of just being happy about something because you accomplished it, you start to see it as, no, it was actually the Lord who gave that to me. He has strengthened the bars of your gates. He has blessed your children within you. Was it me? That was somebody else. Now, not all of the Psalms are happy. In fact, I would say the majority of the Psalms come to us out of some kind of distress. We could think of the experience of exile that the Jewish people went through during the Babylonian captivity. Many of the Psalms come from that time. One day within your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. The threshold of the house of God I prefer to the dwelling places of the wicked. By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion. On the poplars that grew there we hung up our hearts. For it was there that they asked us, our captors for songs, our oppressors for joy. Sing for us, they said, one of Zion’s songs. How could we sing the song of the Lord on alien soil? If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I remember you not, if I prize not Jerusalem above all my joys. And I don’t even have to be in exile. I don’t have to have been violently ripped away from my homeland to understand what that means. That sometimes this world that we live in is a fallen and wretched place and we want to go home. But we’re not home. And that’s okay because the Lord has given us the words to make that prayer to him. Sometimes it’s even worse than that. Sometimes you’re being persecuted or you see evil men triumphing. The Psalms have something for that too, a little reminder. Do not fret because of the wicked. Do not envy those who do evil. And I’m going to have to paraphrase here because the exact words are gone. But how slippery are the slopes on which you set them, Lord. They fade away and perish into nothing. And when you wake you dismiss them as phantoms. They wither up like grass which is born in the morning and withers in the evening. Reminding you that hey, God is in charge. That he is absolutely supreme and absolutely on top. Therefore when you see the wicked have their day know that their judgment is coming soon. And well, vengeance is mine, the Lord says. And sometimes it’s even worse than that. Sometimes you feel abandoned by God. Sometimes you feel like the Lord is not hearing your prayers. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. O come, every Wednesday night. Come on. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt, Lord, who would survive but with you is found forgiveness. For this we revere you. My soul is waiting for the Lord. I count on his word. Let my soul watch for the Lord like the watchman watches for daybreak. Just as the watchman watches for daybreak, so let my soul wait on the Lord. Because with the Lord there is mercy and fullness of redemption. Indeed is where… That’s the rest of it’s gone. But when you’re feeling abandoned, there’s a reminder to wait on the Lord who acts at his own time according to his own purposes. That’s the most relevant thing you need right then. That’s what you need to hear right now. Perhaps you have sinned. It happens to all of us. We have the great model of repentance in King David who after his sin with Bathsheba wrote that great psalm of repentance. Have mercy on me, O God, in your kindness and your compassion. Blot out my offense. Wash me more and more from my guilt and cleanse me from my sins. My offenses, truly I know them. My sin is always before me. Against you, you alone have I sinned. What is evil in your sight I have done. That you may be justified when you give sentence and be without reproach when you judge. O see in guilt I was born, a sinner was I conceived. Indeed you love truth in the heart. Then in the secret of my heart teach me wisdom. O purify me, then I shall be clean. O wash me, I shall be whiter than snow. Make me here rejoicing and gladness that the bones you have crushed may revive. From my sins turn away your face and blot out all my guilt. A pure heart create for me, O God, put a steadfast spirit within me that you may be just. Oh there goes, there goes. But I got a good ways into it. Having that psalm inside of you or at least bits and pieces of it reminds you that no matter how badly you’ve sinned, the Lord can still restore you to the place where you belong. Are we scared? He who dwells in the shelter of the most high and abides in the shade of the almighty says to the Lord my refuge, my stronghold, my God in whom I trust. If you’re scared, you’ve got some of those words of the Psalms or sometimes the Saint Michael prayer if you’re really scared. That is there for you. So whether you’re scared or not, you’re not scared. When the Psalms really hit you, it can be a powerful experience. But a lot of times the Psalms don’t really resonate with exactly what you’re going through right now. This is what every seminarian realizes when they get to Friday night prayer. Because Friday night prayer is Psalm 88, which is probably about as dark as it gets. I really should have brought my bravery here. I think we’ve got a couple of Bibles if you want to reference them. Yeah. Should have just had an index of Psalms that would have done me well. Psalm 88. You’ve been over it, Father. I’m super impressed. Well, Lord my God, I call for help by day, I cry at night before you. Let my prayer come into your presence. Turn your ear to my cry. It goes on for a little ways. Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors. I am helpless. Your wrath has swept over me. Your dreadful assaults destroy me. They surround me all the day like a flood. They close in on me. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. That’s how it ends. And it’s Friday night, and you just, you know, you had a good time with the boys. And now I have to pray back, right? Why? Why can’t we have like, oh, I’m having a good day. I can go with the good day Psalms, or now I’m having a bad day. I’m going to go with the bad day Psalms. Why do we have to just go with this structure that we do over and over again? Because it’s not all about you. These Psalms are connected to real human experiences that are happening all over the world, every day, everywhere. And so you, when you pray the Psalms, you pray for those who are not praying right now, those who cannot pray, those who can’t even think to pray, that your prayer scales with that your prayer scales out to the whole world. And so that’s why this was something that took me a while to understand. When St. Augustine wrote his massive commentary on all the Psalms, he said, all of these are Christ. It’s either the whole Christ, Christ the head, or Christ the body. The whole Christ is here. That everything the church is and the church does through her head is found here in the Psalms. And as we explore them and go through them, we see the whole pattern of everything ever. And so even when I’m having a great day and I’m praying one of these very sad Psalms, one of these Psalms that came out of a painful time in somebody’s life, I can pray it for them. I can be the source of grace for them that they don’t even know is coming to them. And so the idea is that the monks and those who are praying hold up the world. They keep grace of Christ flowing even to those places where people don’t know about it. They don’t know, they don’t know I’m praying for them. I’m praying for you without your consent. All of this, all of this is a great gift given to us from God to remind us, remind us of our calling, to remind us of who we are, of who he is, and what’s most important to him. That in all circumstances we would look to him first. Not to look around, not to look inside, but to look to him who created us and who governs all things well. We are easily distracted. We get caught up in this world. We get caught up in things all around us. Everything around us changes, decays, and through our prayers and especially I think through the Psalms our Father redirects us to that which is eternal, that which is unchanging, that which is ultimately important. As far as we can tell these Psalms here have been prayed for 2800 years or longer. They stick. Every single sort of human experience you can have, every sort of circumstance you can find yourself in, somebody’s prayed to the Lord and the Lord has lifted up their words into a sacred song that we can all benefit from. So I feel greatly blessed that the church forced me into this because I wouldn’t have done it on my own and like a good mother she taught me what was most important for me and now I have the opportunity to share that with everyone I meet and the whole world. So when you find yourself in whatever circumstances you’re in, if you don’t have the words to express yourself, turn to the Psalms. Even Google can help you with that. Psalms of thanksgiving, Psalms of praise, maledictory Psalms, they’re all there for you. You don’t have to make it up on your own because our Father teaches us to pray. He shows us what we should be looking at and hopefully welcomes us into his Kingdom at the very end. Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you Father. We’re doing great actually. Mostly I just put way too much time in for opening remarks. We’re going to take a little break. We should really talk about questions. Oh yeah, so if you haven’t looked at this, if anyone wants to ask questions, we’re also going to have like a sit down time at the end where everyone will have a chance to come up and talk with Father Eric or me or with Jim specifically about the stuff we brought up and have like some back and forth. But yeah, absolutely. If anyone’s got any questions from this talk in particular, go for it. I’m going to go find out about coffee for us. I have a question actually. Can you elaborate on this interesting relationship? You seem to be saying both that Psalms gives a way to respond to how we feel and yet they’re also shaping how we ought to feel. Right? Because you’re talking about here’s a way to express these things that I’m dealing with but then there’s also this thing that you’re talking about with Friday evening prayer. Well, maybe could you just elaborate on how you’ve seen that work in you? Well, sure. You know, we’ve got bad things happen to us and the first thing that we want to do is we want to just pretend it’s not happening. Why not go away from it? It’s like, well, you know, if the Bible wanted us to do that, it wouldn’t ever have anything bad recorded in it. But it wants us to look plainly at the reality. Doesn’t want us to be ashamed of what we’re experiencing and the reactions that are in that. So we’ve got Psalm 88, which ends, my one companion is darkness. And so if you are genuinely experiencing that, let that experience out. It’s okay. You can go all the way down into those depths, you know. Jesus himself from the cross recited the beginning of Psalm 22. Which also reminds us, you know, Psalm 22 begins, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? But it ends, All the earths of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord and all the families of the nation shall worship before you. For kingship belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations. All the prosperous of the earth shall eat and worship before him shall bow down all who go down to the dust. Even the one who could not keep himself alive. Posterity shall serve him and it shall be told to the Lord to the coming generation. They shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn that he has done it. So these Psalms also remind us of the end of the story. And then even when we’re not personally experiencing what the psalmist is experiencing, we have the opportunity to offer up that prayer to somebody, for somebody else. So, I have a question. What would you say, this is a point of discussion that I’ve had with my own family and with lots of people. For somebody who has not experienced very much suffering in their life, they’ve lived like a very happy and fairly untroubled life versus somebody who’s experienced some degree of suffering or trauma. There’s often, I think, an unhealthy desire of somebody who’s experienced trauma to like bring other people into, experience it to a degree so that they can feel understood and accepted. And there’s also this thing that can also turn to a twisted dark thing where you’re trying to destroy innocence. As a result of, you know, something that’s been done to you. This seems to be getting at some, like I’m formulating my question as I’m talking out loud. There’s a way that encountering the scriptures in the way that you’re talking about in the Psalms forces you to confront the dark stuff, even if you’ve not necessarily spent much time with the dark stuff. So it seems to be that there is a thing that is right and good and appropriate about that, but maybe in a certain way. Could you like expand on that a little bit, maybe correct the way that I’m talking about it? Yeah, so getting even something that you need to learn eventually all at once at the wrong time before you’re ready for it is not good. So we wait till our children are a certain age before we begin to explain the mysteries of life to them. Because it’s proper for a four-year-old to be innocent, but when they get to a certain age they need to to encounter that. And when it’s done appropriately, it comes in stages in a safe environment from somebody who genuinely cares about the well-being of their child. So I say it’s actually the duty of the parents to do that. Don’t tell the school to do it. And when all of this stuff comes at you at once, something horrible like abuse, that is deeply traumatic and you’re not ready to deal with it. So what I would say, I guess, is the Psalms give you safe doses of the world from a certain amount of historical distance. We know some of these are Psalms of David, the rest, the author, is generally unknown. And we can look at that, we can see what despair looks like and all of those things and observe it from a safe distance where it’s not going to overwhelm us. And if you’re formed in it properly, then when a feeling of betrayal comes, even the one who was my companion who ate my bread has turned against me, you now have categories to deal with that. It’s like, oh yeah, I was warned about this. Sometimes people are like that. They say one thing, their words are smooth as oil, their tongues are smooth as oil, but underneath them are naked swords. You’ve been warned about that. It gives you kind of a safe approach into the struggles of life rather than being just bulldozed by it because you had no idea it was coming. So maybe there’s a difference between providing scaffolding that can be grown into versus maybe the twisted version of it which is forcing some of the actually experience trauma. Spreading the hurt versus telling the full story. Can you talk about specifically in the imprecatory or maledictory Psalms, I mean I guess there could be a lot of different ways you approach that, maybe depending on what your own circumstances are, but like, I don’t know, just what advice would you give about like when you’re, I mean if you’re just praying through all the Psalms and you come to something like that, like should you try not to apply that to any humans at all or like I’m just, you know, like how do you approach that especially when you have people that you feel like maybe… Well let me ask you a question. Do you ever get really mad at somebody? Yeah, but I’m wondering like should you only try to apply this to like Satan and his angels or… I don’t think so. Okay. So let’s say that you’ve been genuinely wronged by somebody, right, and they really actually have taken a chunk out of you. You’re going to have all of this stuff going on inside of you, that is the natural response to it, and you can have a variety of actual responses outside of yourself to all of the passions that are stored up within you. Where are they going to go? You know, are you just going to go murder that person? It happens. People do that. Or can you pray to God to smash this wicked person? Because way better, way, way better to do that. He doesn’t have to listen to you, right, so you can say, no, I’ve got plans for him, or maybe he will, but like when you’re doing these maledictory psalms you’re placing it into his hands, right, vengeance is his, I’m not going to take vengeance, maybe I will have legal recourse. That’s not the same as, you know, like sitting down with a lawyer and going through a deposition doesn’t get your passions all stirred up, you know. It’s designed to calm you down, to make you rational, to bring you into the space of public relations, you know, not to get you ready to go full berserker and paint yourself blue. Yeah, so, though I don’t think it’s wrong to pray the imprecatory psalms, but you should also be moving towards forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness, I don’t know, it seems the most common way of talking about these things is that forgiveness is always possible and reconciliation isn’t. I kind of want to dive into some of the Greek that Jesus uses, but I didn’t bring it, so. So yeah, yeah, so I don’t think it’s inappropriate to pray it against people as long as you’re trying to practice forgiveness as Christ would have us, so. How would you go about starting to memorize the psalms? Would you start anywhere, or would you start with specific psalms, and then also like, what would you do? Yeah, so, honestly, the easiest way is to just start praying the Roman Breivary, because you can, and you know, you can download the iBreevery app. It’s free, and it just kind of spits stuff out for you every day, and even if you’re only doing night prayer, say night prayer takes about six or seven minutes, you’ll get kind of a decent chunk of psalms memorized. So anyway, I can only tell you how I did it, and that was, you know, show up and you’re going to do this without us explaining why, and you’ll understand when you’re watching this video, but I’m going to understand when you’re older, and now I do. I would take suggestions from the floor if anybody’s done that, but it could it could just be regular old, you know, four, yeah, or you could do the old four lines a day. Four lines a day is always a… It’s poetry, right? So like Spencer Fabian, Taliesin, D.C., like, if you just like do the raw effort to academically, you know, like you did in school, just wrote, memorized something. So they’re, it’s helpful to memorize particular songs, especially ones that you like that are already meaningful to you, because then you can call them forward in the way that you’re talking about, but I don’t have it memorized anymore, but Psalm 139 is one of the first ones that I memorized because I had a guy, a friend, who was a… He’s got probably half the Bible memorized, and he helped me. We were on a backpacking trip, just walking through the forest. He would like say lines to me, and I’d repeat them back, and we kept going for like three days, walking through the forest, and we did this, and that was really my first experience with really memorizing any significant chunk of the Bible. So I mean, you know, the old-fashioned, or I don’t know, that’s why the real old-fashioned thing, but like the academic thing is also totally legitimate for it. This doesn’t work for married men, but you could also become a monk. Yeah, that’d be the most reliable way to do it. I mean, you’re doing it every week. You’re doing the whole Psalter every week. It’s like you’ve been victimized. You see those old, the monks who’ve been there for a long time. Some of them, they don’t even have to open. They’re just there. Well, thank you so much, Father. We’ll have more, you know, full side and whatever. Thank you. Thank you.