Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #502 God Is Love! You Are A Beloved Child Of God! That Makes You The Solution To Hatred and Violence!

Transcript

#502 God Is Love! You Are A Beloved Child Of God! That Makes You The Solution To Hatred and Violence! · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: I'm Jack Riggert, your host.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: I'm glad you're with me today.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: God is love.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: You are a beloved child of God.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: That's the reality.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Then, you are the solution to the hatred and the violence that we see around the world.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: In John, chapter 8, jesus says to them these are the Jews of his day.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: He's walking with his disciples and the Jews come up to him and they ask him questions.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Of course Jesus is Jewish right.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: These are his people.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: And Jesus says to them, truly, truly, I say to you everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: The slave does not continue in the house forever.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: The son continues forever.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: So if the son makes you free, you will be free.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Indeed, I know that you're descendants of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my words find no place in you.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: I speak of what I have seen with my father and you do what you have heard from your father.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: The first father Jesus is talking about, of course, is God the father.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: The second father is Satan.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: He's talking about Satan.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: This is the battle that we're in right now.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: God is love.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: When you reject God, you fall into hatred, violence.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: We see it all around us.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Jesus goes on in chapter 8 of John's gospel If God were your father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: I came not of my own accord, but he sent me.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Why do you not understand what I say?
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: It is because you cannot bear to hear my word.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Think about this now, end quote here.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Think about this now when you talk about God today in the public square, when you talk about God as having the answer, when you're talking about Jesus Christ, when you talk about being patriotic and want to bring our moral values back again.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Ooh, the vitriol, huh, oh my gosh.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: It's amazing, the attacks today.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Well, here's Jesus again.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Why can't you bear to hear that?
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: It's because you cannot bear to hear my word.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: He said you are of your father the devil and your will is to do your father's desires.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: He was a murderer from the beginning has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: This is again end quote.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Isn't this what we see around us today?
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: It's amazing what we see the takedown of Donald Trump.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: And whatever you think about Donald Trump, you know he's going.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: They want to put him in prison for what is it now?
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: 34 counts and 91 counts, think, all together.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: It's just baloney.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: You know, it's crazy, right?
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: One attack after another after another, while they're letting criminals and rapists and murderers go free, while they want to abort our children and render our, our children, sterile if they make it out of the womb.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: It's amazing what's going.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: They're starting wars, you know, and and pushing, pushing Russia to go to war.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: This is our government right now.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: It's amazing what happens, right, and why.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: It's the destruction of human beings.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Now, who wants to kill human beings?
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: It's not God, the Father.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: God is love.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: We are beloved children of God, but we've rejected that love and we've fallen to the father of lies.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: See, we think we came into a neutral area, didn't we?
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: You know, we can reject God, we can reject evil.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: Uh-uh, uh-uh.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: You know Ephesians 6 is the most powerful thing.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Maybe I'll get to that in a second, but let me read the rest of this John 8, because he says when he he lies, he's just as Jesus, again talking about Satan, he speaks according to his own nature.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: He is a liar and the father of lies.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: But because I tell you the truth, you do not believe me.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Which of you convicts me of sin?
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: I end here again for a second.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: If you, if, tell the truth, why do you not believe me?
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Why the vitriol?
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Why the hatred?
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: He cannot stand to hear the truth, right?
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Jesus finishes this segment.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: He goes.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: He who is of God, he who is of God, hears the words of God.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: The reason why you do not hear him is that you are not of God.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Amazing, amazing vitriol, amazing violence all over the world.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: College kids, huh, standing up in college.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: You know it's amazing.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: When they're told to do something, they're like lemmings today.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: They have no, they're just living on the surface of things.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: The authorities, the people in power, who are so corrupt, can tell them anything and they'll do it.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Because they listen to the father of lies and it has nothing to do with the truth.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Now, if they really understood it.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: But they don't.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Because you can go to a college campus and we see interview after interview and just say well, tell us about the history of this conflict going on.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Tell us about the history of this conflict going on.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: How about the October 7th where Hamas invaded Israel, and the rapes and the tortures and it was despicable what they did to those people hunting them down, but not only hunting them down to kill them, but to maim them, to hurt them.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Now, if those kids on the college campuses say, hey, I saw that that's wrong too, but let's put an end to this war period, right, and look for real solutions and understood the problem, that's a different thing, because, of course, israel now is invading and going after Hamas, but there's so many innocent victims, right, you could see those pictures too, the hurt and the main bodies of children, families torn apart, other innocents there, you know, on the other side, right In Palestine.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Those are people, those are beloved children of God too.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Who wins?
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Huh, who wins in this battle?
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Satan does, hatred does, violence does.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Yet you think our government's better?
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Ah, we all learned very, very differently in the last four or five years, right?
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: And what's the problem with these social justice warriors on college campuses and even being taught to be social justice warriors from the government, the colleges and universities, even within the churches?
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Huh, what's wrong with that?
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Because they're using the oppressor-oppressed victim model, old Marxist model.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: If you're feeling oppressed, if you feel like a victim, ah, there must be an oppressor out there, huh, it must be this person or that person, and we hang these labels on each other and what is it doing?
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: It's just perpetuating evil.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: D-e-i right, diversity, equity and inclusion.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: It's the most divisive thing you've ever seen.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: You've heard me talk about that so much more.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: So, these social justice activists, these social justice warriors.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: We have to do good in the world, but we have to understand what good is.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Not to go after people just because they're Jewish or white, or they believe in God or whatever the reason is, or they don't believe in God.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: But the worst thing, the worst thing, you know, is what we're combating here at the John Paul II Renewal Center every day.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: We want to bring the gospel of love to our families and to the young people of today who are growing up without hope in a very twisted, distorted and toxic culture.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: They have been repeatedly lied to, not only about all those things that I just mentioned and I can mention a hundred other things but the very basics concerning the meaning of marriage, the family, what authentic love is, the true meaning of our sex and sexuality, and so much more.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: This has left many of them anxious, depressed and even hopeless, to the point of considering suicide.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: We see this all the time.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: You've heard me talk about this.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: How many lives, how many souls could be saved if we're not afraid to talk to them, to our young people today, about the truth.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: But people aren't doing that.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: But the more the world deprives young people of what is true, good and beautiful, the more earnestly they will yearn for it.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: The vacuum left behind by modern secularism is actually a fragrant invitation.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: That vacuum, that void, becomes an invitation for young people to rediscover the sacred.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: And when they see the sacred, when they see what is true, good and beautiful, it touches their heart and it's this fragrant invitation and they say, yes, tell me more about this, but somebody must be willing to proclaim the gospel to them.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: You know, we've accepted that task here, the truth of the gospel, through our work at the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: And with that let me just add here that we got some big changes coming up.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: We added a new executive director, we're adding staff, we've begun to expand in a lot of different directions to expand our capabilities to meet the growing demands placed on us.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: There's so much hurt out there, so much work to do, and none of our work can be done without your help and your continued support.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Please, if you haven't done it in the past, or if you haven't you haven't done it for a while, click on the donation button.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: If you haven't done it in the past, or if you haven't you haven't done it for a while, click on the donation button.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Send us a check.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: The address is right there.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: We really need it right now.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: You know I'm a conservative guy when it comes to money.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: When I was a young guy I rolled the dice so often and put our mortgage and our car everything I owned up over and over again.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Because when you have nothing, you're trying to build businesses up.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: You know you have to take on a lot of debt and risk, and I put my family and my wife in that spot so many times that with the John Paul II Renewal Center I was always cautious.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Right, god, send us the money, send us the money and then we'll expand.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: But God doesn't work that way, does he?
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: He wants you to walk into the wild, to walk in with faith, with hope, with love, with trust, see the evils of the world and walk into the story and bring the gospel, bring God, who is love, into that story.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: So now we've taken on pretty big expenses, brought new people on, and now we have to make sure we can pay them, and we can only do with your help.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: So, hey, consider a donation today.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: Will you please?
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: God bless you, buckle up and get ready for the rest of today's episode.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: One of his last messages that he gave, pope John Paul II gave just months before he died.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: It was for the celebration of World Day of Peace, and he quoted St Paul in there.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: But do not overcome evil with evil, but overcome evil with good, he said at the beginning of the new year.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: This is the beginning of 2005,.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: I once again address the leaders of nations and all men and women of goodwill who recognize the need to build peace in the world.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: So I've taken the theme from St Paul's words to the letter to the Romans.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: This is Romans 12, 21.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Do not overcome, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Evil is never defeated by evil.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Once that road is taken, rather than defeating evil, one will instead be defeated by evil.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: We've seen this over and over and over again In Romans 12, 17,.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: Just before this, he said the profound truth of another saying by St Paul repay no one, evil for evil.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: The one way out of this vicious cycle of requiting evil for evil is to accept the apostle's words do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Well, what's the problem?
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: We've rejected God, we've rejected the one who is good.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: And then what?
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: What we do we?
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: We wage these crazy wars over and over and over again, and our government tells us we're doing the right thing, we're doing the good, when really, just after power and money you know, you've heard me talk about this and I don't want to go in a rabbit hole here.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: But jesus said if your enemy is hungry, feed him.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: If he's thirsty, give him something to drink.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: You know, only God is good, only God is able to change evil into good.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Now, now, because we're beloved children of God, we are the ones that are supposed to do this in the world.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: We are the ones that are supposed to be filled with the love of God and, as children of God, make that manifest and make it visible in the world.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: You see, that's why we are the solution to the hatred and the violence that we see all around us.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: God is love.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: You are the image and likeness of God, through the very act of creation, the moment you were exploded on the stage.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: You were a beloved child of God.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Now you come into a fallen world, into an evil world.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Let me read what I was going to read you from Ephesians, chapter 6.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: This is verse 10.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Put on the whole armor of God.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Finally, be so.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Listen to what he's saying.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: This is the battle that we came into.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: The day you were born, you thought it was neutral, huh, nope.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: St Paul says Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, for while we're not contending against flesh and blood, we're not contending against other human beings, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Therefore, take the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day for having done all to stand.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: And he goes on to tell you how to do that.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Read that, ephesians 6, start about verse 10, or read the whole thing.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: It's good.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Tells you how to do that.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Right, because it's all starts in the individual human heart.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Unless your heart has become one of love, don't look around and think you're going to bring solutions to the world, and you will also lose your eternal life.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: So this is a win-win situation for us.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: When we become people of love, when we accept our adoption and say yes, abba, yes, papa, abba, like Jesus told us to do, we're filled with the Holy Spirit, you go to confession and your forgiveness of sins, you walk in and receive the Eucharist.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: You spend time at silence of prayer and then you start to gain wisdom, you start to understand what is the truth.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Like St John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, these great mystics say you have to become a person of love, and that's what I'm going to be talking about right now how to receive that love, how to understand that love.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: And then you have to sit in silence, you have to accept that, you have to pray, you have to go deep into your heart.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: You have to go to the heart that separates this crazy world and heaven, right there in the human heart that is filled with God, and let God sit there so that you can look back out into this world and see all that's true, good and beautiful in the world.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: Don't forget the world was created good.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: It's us that twist and distort it, use one another, turn to violence and then finally you have to practice mortifications.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: And what does that mean?
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: You have to fast.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: You have to stop doing things that are taking you down Too much social media, watching pornography, not praying, eating too much, drinking too much all those things you have to detach.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: That doesn't mean you have to give up every glass of wine, but you have to understand temperance.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, god is love.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: Christ replies to the young man in the gospel who comes up to him, the rich young man.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: And then finally, the rich man says good teacher.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: And Jesus says no one is good but God alone.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: We have already heard that the young man had previously asked if you've been listening to this.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: This is my fifth session for young people on Fridays and Saturdays.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Good teacher, he said what must I do to inherit eternal life?
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: That's what he asked Jesus.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: How must I act so that my life will have meaning and value?
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: We could translate this question into a language of our own times, can't we?
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: In this context, christ's answer means this only God is the ultimate basis of all values.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Only he gives the definitive meaning to our human existence.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Only God is good, which means this in him and him alone, all values have their first source and their final completion.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: He is the alpha and the omega.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: The beginning and the end is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Only in God do values and their authenticity and definitive confirmation take place.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: Without God, without reference to God, the whole world of created values remains, as it were, suspended in an absolute vacuum.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: It loses its transparency, its expressiveness.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: Evil is put forward as a good and good itself is rejected.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Do we not see this with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: The first thing they did is what they came in and signed?
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: What Bills to abort babies, to affirm gender, so-called gender-affirming care, where you put kids on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and it's okay to mutilate their bodies?
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: No, this is from the father of lies, but we go along with it.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: How many people go along with these lies?
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Total lies that a man could become a woman?
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: Impossible.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: It's not just evil, it's impossible from a practical standpoint.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: But yet evil is put forward as good.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Huh, good itself is being rejected.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: Are we not shown this by the very experience of our own time, over and over and over again.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Take the covid vaccine.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: It's good for you, yeah.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: What do we see?
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: So much pain and destruction come out of that and yet they're pushing the new, the new summer vaccine.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: It's like, it's like crazy.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: Whenever god has been removed beyond the limits of evaluations and our actions, what happens?
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Evil comes out of it over and over again.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: Young people are growing up in a historical moment in human history where the whole world, it seems, is facing quite a conundrum.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: Many of the generations that came before you, young people before you.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: What did they do?
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: They drank the Kool-Aid.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: They rejected the good.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: They got lazy huh.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's about me.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: It's about me.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: They become the most selfish.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: The baby boomers on down have become the most selfish people, maybe in the history of the world.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Only care about their next golf game or their next cruise or the you know.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: Oh, my gosh.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: You know I almost get sick to my stomach sometimes.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: I stopped going to Christmas parties and stuff with a lot of these people.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: It's just one thing after another and I say what are you talking about?
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: What good are you doing in the world?
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: Do you not see young people suffering all around you?
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's nothing I can do about it, my gosh.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: So what do we do with these young people?
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: We leave them suspended in an absolute vacuum, having drank the Kool-Aid ourselves.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: We have no answers for them and we send them out like innocent lambs to the slaughter.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: Young people today are being sent out without the armor that I just talked about from Ephesians 6, to confront the train wreck of evil plaguing humanity.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: The number of victims is staggering, including the poor, the disabled, the sick, but the most ferocious is the evil unleashed on marriage and the family.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Today, so-called modern man has gone so far as to pass laws giving one the right to annihilate a child in the womb.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: This is our right now.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Are we not barbarians?
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: This is our right to kill a child in its mother's womb?
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: We've rendered marriage meaningless.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter anymore.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: It marriage meaningless?
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter anymore.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: It's meaningless.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: It doesn't even matter.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: People aren't even getting married.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: You see what happens when you make marriage meaningless.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Nobody gets married anymore.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: Nobody understands why they should.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: Increasingly, parents are being forced to accept these gender ideologies that would seek to render their children sterile, groom them for sexual exploitation, expose them to pornography as normal, and if they stand up against it, they are told that they'll take their children away from them.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: We've gone so far as to institutionalize this practice, pushing radical gender ideologies, often directly linked to pornography, within the public school systems.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: The teachers' unions are for this, big tech is for this.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: Government bodies, private institutions, in a nefarious plan to rob you, young people and children, especially the innocent, the most innocent among us, to rob them of their innocence and their identity as beloved children of God.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: They know if they get to them early, they can twist and distort their little hearts because they believe right.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: They look up at their teachers and authority and they believe them.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Soon after I arrived to present an all-day theology of the body retreat to a sophomore class, I asked an icebreaker.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: A hand went up.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Yes, young lady, I said.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: And she said to me call me they, which is my preferred pronoun.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: I responded why would you want me to call you they?
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: She shared that she was gender neutral, non-binary, was in this gender fluid space.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Some days, she said, I wake up feeling like a boy, other days as a girl, other times I don't know where I'm going to land.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: I looked at her and her eyes met.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: This young girl was sincere and I don't know their background.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Many of them, many, many, many have been hurt so terribly.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: And I said look, I'm a simple guy.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: I just walked in here and I don't even know your names yet and I looked around to all the kids in the room and now I need to learn your pronouns.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: It's just too much for me.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: I'm a simple guy.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: I wonder if you would do me a favor.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: And I look back at that young girl being a simple guy.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: Let me propose a simple solution just for the moment.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: If you're not satisfied, we can go to plan B for the next session, but just for now, can I call you a someone, a beloved child of God?
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: Would that work for you?
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: After a moment she nodded yes.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: I asked the boy sitting next to her if I could also call him a beloved child of God, a someone, and he said yes.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: Then I looked in the corner of the room, in the back, with the guy with his hands folded, looking bored, and I said how about you, young man?
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Can I call you a beloved child of God?
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: And the Holy Spirit must have been there because he said yes.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: And I added added me too, I'm also a beloved child of God.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: The truth is that we're all brothers and sisters and that we all came from a common heritage.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: We all have the same father.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: I proposed a new pronoun for this journey of the heart someone.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: You are a someone.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: You can go back to the she, he, they, them, this, that, blah, blah, blah, something else, whenever you want to, but for now, just for now, we are each a someone and as the antonym of the pronoun something, the opposite of something, it very succinctly captures the uniquely personal character of a human being.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: You are a someone.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: I understand that by assuming other pronouns call me they that you're seeking a new identity.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: You seem to possess a desire to recreate yourself.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: What if I told you that you were onto something and that Carol Wojtyla, who became John Paul II, called it self-determination?
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: I assume that you are seeking the truth about your identity.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Then you should move beyond mere feelings and emotions that are causing anxiety, which is the normal state when you live in this situation on the surface of life, continually battered by the winds.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: In order to grasp the personal structure of self-determination, to determine who you really are and become that person, we must start from the experience of the human being.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: So for now, let's go beneath all these labels that the world wants to slap on you or that you even are putting on yourself, including I'm not good enough, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not smart enough.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Let's go beneath all the noise and, just for a little while, enjoy the freedom of being the children of God.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: What do you say?
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: And I said let me tell you a little story.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: I'm a scuba diver and one of my favorite things about diving is that, no matter how turbulent the sea is on the surface, as soon as I'm beneath the waves and the surface noise, two things happen.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: First, it becomes calm and quiet and a new world of awe and wonder opens up before me.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: Prayer is a lot like that.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: I proposed to the class that we all pause and I asked if they would take a deep dive with me to the level of their hearts, if only for a few minutes, beneath the turbulent winds of the spirit of the age, to discover a new world where we would find some peace and get to a beautiful place where we can discover our identity.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: The Holy Spirit was invoked and I invited them to follow Jesus into the beginning.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: Act one in the beginning awe, wonder and a cosmic explosion of love.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: I said sit back, begin by getting in touch with the deepest yearning, burning desires of your own heart.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: It's not going to be easy, because you're so used to be looking at these phones and everything filled with noise, but now we went deep into prayer, huh, and I'm praying with them Once again.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: We're getting into this place where Plato called what Plato called Eros.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Eros is the Greek God of love.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: It was identified by the Romans as Cupid, you know that cute little one with the arrow that could pierce your heart with his arrows.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: Cupid is from the Latin cupier.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: Cupier to desire, to desire.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: What does your heart desire?
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: See, the human yearning we're exploring today can be certainly experienced as a kind of arrow that wounds the heart.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: We're all wounded and our hearts are bleeding, but we're bleeding in a desperate search for satisfaction, for fulfillment.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: We'll put on any label, we'll listen to anybody, but they just push us around.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: But arrows, arrows.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: This great desire of the, the human heart, shouldn't be limited merely to romantic love or sexual desire, though it certainly has connotations to that effect.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: Right, we're seeking love.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: There's a reason for that.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: I'll get to it in a minute.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: But Plato described Eros as a longing for all.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: That is true.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: Good and beautiful.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: That's what our hearts are created for for all that's true, good and beautiful, especially the beauty of love.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: All that's true, good and beautiful, especially the beauty of love.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: The sad thing is most of us don't know where to direct that fire inside, so we end up getting burned and burning others victims, victimizers.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: You did this, you did that.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: When that happens, the temptation is to blame the ache itself, right?
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Oh, something's wrong with my heart so we want to quench it out, snuff it out.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: Give me a label, I'll live out of that label.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Give me something to drink.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: Give me some drugs, anything to stamp it out.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: Give me a romance novel full of pornography, it doesn't matter, it's going to take me out of this ache for just a minute.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: Huh, I can be the victim.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: I can be the victim.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: I can call you the victimizer.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: It makes me feel good for a little while, but it'll never get to it, because the burning, yearning desire for everything in our heart is for what is true, good and beautiful, for what is real, for the truth.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: It's incorporated into your design, into your heart.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: What we're talking about is not more information, it's the very DNA that runs through us.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Cutting through the moral confusion of this present age is not about more information.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: It's the very DNA that runs through us.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: Cutting through the moral confusion of this present age is not about more information.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: Get in touch with your hearts, go deep.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: That's why I said earlier, become a person of love and then go deep, sit in silence every day.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: It's about understanding that the story that runs through your very blood and to your heart, that should be manifested out into the world, is already part of who we are.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: It runs in our DNA.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: The Pharisees tested Jesus by coming up to him In Matthew 19,.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: They said is it lawful for us to divorce our wives for any cause?
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: Jesus, instead of limiting himself to their line of questioning, points them back to the original model of marriage.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: He answered have you not read that he who made them from the beginning, before sin, made them male and female?
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: Listen to this, male and female.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: And he said for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother, be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: So they are no longer two but one.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: He's talking about marital sexual union, the beauty, the power of this.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: What, therefore, god has joined together, let no man put asunder, let no man separate.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: And they said to him why did Moses in the Old Testament say it's okay to give your wife a certificate of divorce and put her away?
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: And listen to what Jesus says to them.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: He's always speaking about the heart.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: He said to them ah, it's because of the hardness of your hearts that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: But from the beginning, before sin came into the world, it was not so.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: Bereshit the Hebrew word, for in the beginning the earth was a formless wasteland.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: Darkness covered the abyss, While a mighty wind, the spirit hua, hovered above this.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: You can just read this right away from the beginning of the Bible.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: And then boom, light exploded and it dispelled the darkness and the chaos started to be moved away.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: It was good because God is good, because God is good and because God is love.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: After five days of this creating more and more and more right.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: And he's getting everything ready.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: And now he's got it all ready.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: It's like the opening scene from the Lion King.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: The Garden of Eden is ready.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: It's surrounded by a lush forest, wildflowers abound, animals too, some with long necks, some like unicorns.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: Huh, we call them rhinoceros.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: The whole place is filled with songbirds.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: We hear them.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: It's beautiful.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: It's been prepared for a wedding feast.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: Now, on the sixth day, it's as if God draws back into himself and takes a selfie.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: What is revealed?
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: It's an eternal exchange of love the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: God who pours himself out into the Son, the Son receiving that love of the Father and returns it.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: That love is so beautiful and profound.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: It comes out in the form of a person.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: We call that person the Holy Spirit.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: Now, what about that image, that eternal exchange of love?
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: How will God bring that into the world?
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: Ah, here we go Now, right above the Garden of Eden.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: God in the heavens flips the selfie into the garden of Eden.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: What comes out, what comes forth into the created world, is his image, his likeness, which is what Trinitarian love.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: It's about to enter the created world, and we hear this from Genesis 1, verses 26 through 28.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: Let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and the cattle, over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: God created man in his image, in the divine image.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: He created them how Male and female.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: He created them.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: God blessed them, saying to them be fertile, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: This is the very first thing that God chooses to say to us in the whole Bible that he created us in his image.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: In the divine image he created us.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Human beings, from the beginning, were created to be sacramental, the visible sign of God, trinitarian love in the created universe.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: God is love and because we're children of God, we are to be filled with that divine love.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Bring it into the world, and this is why we're the solution to the hatred and the violence.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: John Paul II wrote this.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: His whole thesis is this the human body, with its sex, its masculinity and femininity, seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and of procreation, bringing new life into the world, as in the whole natural order, but contains from the very beginning the spousal attribute that is, the power to express love.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: Precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift and through this gift we give to one another fulfills the very meaning of our being and existence.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Until you understand that you were created to be a gift to others in love, it was not until I was married and my wife delivered our first child that I got a glimpse into the love of the Trinity in this concrete way.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: Right after the birth of our daughter, still in the delivery room, they handed me our daughter and holding this little five-minute, 10-minute, 15-minute daughter, jessica, in my arms for the first time, and looking at my wife, I was overwhelmed by this new person that she had just delivered.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: Now there were three of us.
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: Later, as I reflected on this day and in the subsequent births of our other children, I began to realize that my wife and I were called to be a reflection of God's image in the world.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: I gave myself, nine months earlier, before Jessica was born, to my wife as a sincere gift of self.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: She received this gift and, in receiving, gave it herself back to me.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: And from that eternal exchange of love don't forget, we're eternal beings.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: Our creation here on earth isn't eternal.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: This act of creation in the world won't be eternal.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: This is going to go away someday.
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: But we are creating human beings.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: We are creating eternal human beings.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: I should say they're going to be with God forever.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: We are eternal human beings.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: We are already eternal human beings.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: From that exchange of love, another person comes into our lives, our baby.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: The two my wife and I listen to this called to become one in the sacrament of marriage, which is consummated how, in the marital sexual embrace, became three.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: God not only created us in his image, but allowed us to be co-creators with him in a new creation.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: You know, I remember as a young boy being taught that God is a trinity, that the Father gives himself to the Son, the Son receives this gift, gives himself back to the Father, proceeding with the Father, and the Son is the Holy Spirit.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: But I had struggled with this image of God until I held this little baby in my arms and realized that her existence was entirely due to the gift of love between my wife and myself.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: It was at this moment that I realized for the first time our creation as male and female makes God's visible image, his eternal exchange of love, visible here on earth.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: This is what we were called to do.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: John Paul II went on to state this.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: This whole thesis, and when allowed to sink in it, revolutionizes the way we start to understand the human body and our sexuality.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: Listen to this against this crazy pornographic culture that wants to use us and abuse us.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: The body, and it alone, john Paul says, is capable of making visible what is invisible the spiritual and the divine.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: Our bodies were created to transfer into the visible reality of this world the invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial, and thus to be a sign of it.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: What does that mean?
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: As physical, bodily creatures, we simply cannot see God.
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: He's pure spirit.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: But God wanted to make his mystery visible to us, so he stamped it into our bodies by creating us as male and female in his own image.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: The function of this image is to reflect the Trinity, an inscrutable divine communion of three persons.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Thus, in a dramatic development of Catholic thought, john Paul II concludes that man became the image and likeness of God, not only through his own humanity each one of us has created an image of God but also through the communion of persons, which man and woman form right from the beginning.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: And John Paul adds on all of this, right from the beginning, their descendant, the blessing of fertility linked with human procreation.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: So when a man and a woman come together, they're giving themselves freely, totally faithfully and fruitfully, forever.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: This is the opposite of pornography using one another and abusing one another that so many young people are addicted to and been told that is what love is, and it's so far from the truth.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: So your body has a nuptial or a spousal meaning because it reveals man and woman's call to become a gift to one another, a gift fully realized in their one flesh, marital union.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: The body also has a generative meaning that, god willing, brings a third into the world through their communion.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: In this way, marriage constitutes a primordial sacrament, understood as a sign right from the very constitutes.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: A primordial sacrament, understood as a sign right from the very beginning.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: Primordial sacrament in the beginning.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: In the beginning when God finally flipped that, when he first flipped that selfie and brought man and woman into the created world, that was the primordial sacrament.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: There was no need for the other sacraments.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: That was the only sacrament that made.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: What does that mean?
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: It made visible God's love into the world.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: We were the visible sign.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: It's a sign that truly communicates the mystery of God's Trinitarian love and life to husband and wife and, through them, to their children and, through the family, to the whole world.
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: Thus, in this dimension, a primordial sacrament is constituted, understood as a sign that efficaciously, really efficaciously, powerfully, transmits into the visible world the invisible mystery of God, hidden from all eternity, and this is the mystery of truth and love, the mystery of divine life in which man, meaning man and woman, really participate in, in man.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: Created imago Dei in the image and likeness of God.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: The very sacramentality of creation, the sacramentality of this whole world, was thus in some way revealed.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: What does that mean?
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: You know, this whole sacrament, the whole meaning reflecting God's Trinitarian love in the world.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: We were a sacrament of that, a sign of that, but not just a sign, an efficacious sign.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: In other words, we partook in that, we made that visible, we made that real in our lives and into the world.
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: Can you see when we reject God, how we reject love, and love doesn't come into the world.
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: What's left in that vacuum is Satan, the liar and the father of lies, who is a murderer and a liar right from the beginning.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: This is why the world is filled with lies and murders.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: You aren't going to solve that with more lies and more murders and more evil, more vitriol, in fact, through our bodiliness, our masculinity and femininity.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: Can you see why these gender ideologies want to take this down, while we want to render marriage meaningless?
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: Because mankind becomes a visible sign of truth and love in the world, which has its source in God himself and was revealed already in the mystery of creation, together with man.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: Holiness has entered the visible world.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: That's why in Genesis we hear they were naked, without shame.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: There was no sin, no shame, just giving one another understanding that we were filled with divine life and love of God and we were passing this to one another and then bringing this out into the world, the world created for him.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: The sacrament of the world and the sacrament of man in the world comes forth from the divine source of holiness and is instituted at the same time for holiness.
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: See, this is what happens when Christ came back in the world to restore our holiness.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: A universal call to truth, to speak the truth, to speak the truth in love, to become love and then love people in the truth and to make that sign visible in the world.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: Right, this is holiness.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: Holiness we were called for.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: Universal call to holiness to be free from the slavery of all of these sins, together with man, right?
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: So who does this for us?
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: Who does this for us?
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: I should say, let me end it like this Such is Christ in this conversation with the young man, right, such is Christ in the conversation with each one of you, when you say to him, let's ask him good teacher, why do you call me good.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: Jesus says why do you call me good?
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: No one is good, but God alone.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: He says Well, he is God, of course, but he's making this point right and therefore the fact that I am good bears witness to God.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: When I do good things in the world, I bear witness, I reflect something of God in the world.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: He who has seen me has seen the Father.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: Jesus says.
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: Thus speaks Christ, the teacher and friend, christ, crucified and risen, always the same yesterday, today and forever.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: Your youth, everyone, your youth.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: When you're young, you open different perspectives before you.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: It offers you, as a task, the plan for the whole of your lives.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: What is that about?
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: Don't waste this time.
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: Hence the question about values.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: Hence the question about the meaning of life, about truth, about good, about evil.
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: When Christ, in his reply to you, tells you to refer all this to God, at the same time he shows you what the source and foundation of this is for yourselves.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: Go to him.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: Each one of you Go to him, for each one of you is the image and likeness of God through the very act of creation.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: But we came into a fallen world.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: It will take us kneeling before Jesus, christ the crucified and risen, one who wants to pour himself back into us to restore what sin and death has overcome by our human actions in the world, allowing evil and hatred and violence to come in.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: Only then, when you receive this again, when your sins are forgiven, you walk into union and communion.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: Your heart becomes one with God himself, can you turn around and love your brothers and sisters and even your enemy.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: This is almost well.
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: It would be impossible to do, of course, without God.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: Hey, god bless you.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Thanks for being with me.
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: Everybody, write me if you know.
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: I've got a couple more of these that I want to continue to do for young people.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: I'll continue to do them till I run out of ideas.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: And I may not run out of ideas because John Paul and God himself wants the young people to come back to his heart.
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: You are the hope.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: Huh, you are the hope, and he loves you.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: God bless you.
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: Talk to you soon, bye-bye.