Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #735 A Personal Witness, Seeking Answers—And Why Living His Faith Truly Changed Everything

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#735 A Personal Witness, Seeking Answers—And Why Living His Faith Truly Changed Everything · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Claymore Become Who You Are podcast, the production of the John Paul 2 Renewal Center.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Jack Riggers, your host.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Saint Catherine of Siena said that if you become who you are, that you would set the world on fire.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: St.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Athanasius, an early church father and the doctor of the church, said the son of God became man so that we might become like God.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: I take a wild guess at this, and I bet you most people are a bit disconnected from that divine life that these saints are pointing us to.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yet the entire Claymore Apostolate hinges on one decisive reality: men whose lives have been changed by this witness and encounter with Jesus Christ.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: We're celebrating Pope Paul VI's feast day today, and he reminded us that people today put more trust in witnesses than they do in teachers.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: And John Paul II added, the witness of a Christian life, of a changed humanity is where this all begins.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm excited to have Mark Schmidt back as a co-host with me.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: And he brought a special friend in the house.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: So Cooper White, thank you so much for taking the time to be with be with us.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna lay back a little bit, and this will be fun for me.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: So Mark, I'm gonna lay back and let you let you take it from here because you and and explain your relationship with uh with Cooper.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's a friend of yours.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well excited to be back back here with you, Jack.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And Cooper, thanks for taking the uh taking the time to comment and be on the podcast.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Jack and I were talking uh the other day, and I and I just sharing with him, you know, I think, you know, there's just incredible power, as you mentioned within the quote from Pope Paul VI, of the witness of a man.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think people don't just want a theological exercise where it just makes sense in the classroom, right?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: They want to see, okay, you're you're talking about this beautiful theology, this beautiful truth.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what does it do for my life?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: How has it transformed my life?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's really at the heart of why we're having Cooper on and why we want to talk about these conversions, because that's what people are really looking for.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're not just looking for ideas, they're looking for an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, when Jack and I were talking about this, of trying to bring on some guests to really share their story.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Cooper, you came to mind.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: We've known each other.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've uh, you know, I've heard your story and parts over the years, but just looking forward to the opportunity today to kind of dive more into that of, you know, what led you to Catholicism and most importantly, is what has that done for your life?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't we just start with, you know, a little introduction of yourself and we can go from there?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sure.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: So Cooper White, I came into the Catholic Church in uh 2013, grew up in an incredible evangelical family that loved the Lord, very, very involved in ministry.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: My wife's family also very involved in uh evangelical ministry.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we were really raised really well and have no complaints about you know the quality of our families.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh I met my wife uh actually back when we were in high school, got married in 2003.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: We were both raised in families that uh really love the Lord, taught us to love the Lord, and uh we now have five incredible kids in a really unexpected journey.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk about it here.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: The Lord brought us into the Catholic Church in uh in 2013.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's just been really one of the great joys of our lives, but it was certainly unexpected.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was not what was in the cards, it's not what we thought uh we had coming for us, but a lot of the greatest blessings we've gotten have been are the ones we didn't ask for.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because it you know, I can imagine you know, when growing up in a home, if if there's some issues or you feel like you didn't really experience Christianity in a good way, you know, I could see there would start to be a desire to maybe look elsewhere, look for look for other answers.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, you grew up in a home with with a really what it sounds like a great experience of Christianity.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I'm curious of just kind of what what was that journey like as maybe some cracks started to form in the foundation?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: What were the things that started to make you question?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, even though I had this great experience, something is missing.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I could tell like a really, really clean, like linear story.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: If I was going to be really honest, there's about 10,000 different little things that happened over time.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: But but but the real linear way that it went for me was pretty early on when I got involved in youth ministry in college, you know, young men, kids have a way of asking just the hardest questions.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: And one thing that I realized pretty quickly was a lot of the answers that I had were answers that worked inside if you kind of like had an evangelical framework.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: If you basically had an agreement, and then the question was like, okay, well, you know, is our Calvinists right or our Minians right?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what's predestination?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Those types of conversations I was kind of prepared to have, but I wasn't really prepared to have conversations with people that were generally skeptical about some of the fundamental claims of the faith.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so I still remember having a conversation with a kid who started to ask me questions that I just wasn't ready to answer.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: And what it started was the first kind of seed of me saying, I need to take this seriously, not just like in a way where I feel deeply about it, but where I've thought deeply about some of the claims that we're making.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: And that led me to C.S.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis and on a really fun journey of really studying and learning about my faith more.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: But as I began to learn more and kind of dig in a little bit more, there were some fractures that weren't so much getting covered over, but they were starting to deepen a bit.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: And one of those was um around some of the evangelical claims around the nature of truth and how you can know truth and how scripture is really the only thing that reveals kind of God's word to us.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the questions that came up for me was just, okay, so who decides what scripture then?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're not so much concerned with what are Paul's words, we're concerned what are God's words that were spoken through Paul.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: And and so, um, and so I started trying to wrestle with, okay, I was diving in and apologetics into kind of the historicity of scripture.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: Were these words written by Paul or were they influenced by Paul or John or Peter or whoever?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: But that doesn't necessarily answer the question of, let's say, for example, we found third Corinthians, which Paul potentially alludes to in in his letter to Corinthians.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: So let's say we find this third work.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: Does that count as scripture or does it not?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: And if it does or doesn't, who decides that, right?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because again, of course we would love to have more of Paul's words, but whether or not it's scripture is a totally different class of is this God speaking directly to us?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so those type of questions began to start creating some fractures for me when I was involved in youth ministry.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: I ended up leaving youth ministry, going to get a master's, trying to get a PhD because partly because I wanted to answer some of these questions, partly because I was and probably still am very arrogant, and I wanted to go be the person who wrote the book to like solve all of these problems for the evangelicals.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and when I went back to Wheaton to get my master's in theology, I thought, look, everybody has to be asking these questions.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, we're gonna get these answered.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember asking my professor the question, you know, what happens when we find third Corinthians?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, Thank God we haven't.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, oh no, of all the possible answers, that's not the right answer, right?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: Because like, even if it's not scripture, right?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: Even if it's not, certainly we want more.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: We we want more of Paul, not less of Paul.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so I started saying, okay, there's something fundamentally broken with the system.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: And and then there were some other handful of things too that, you know, we can either get into now or or later around, you know, my understanding of what the nature of the church was at the time.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: And and then obviously the the brokenness, the disunity in the church.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: I had some kind of fledgling, failing attempts to try and even get some unity locally that was just a pretty, pretty much an epic fail that that also kind of like were some early seeds for me that something in the way that I was experiencing Christianity was broken, even though my experience of the faith, my encounter with really valuing the faith in my heart was was pretty strong.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Two things that kind of come to mind from that, from what you were sharing about the struggle with you know, authority is really what it what it comes down to is did you find when you were at Wheaton that your other fellow students were asking these questions?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Did you feel like you were the only one asking these?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'm sure too, maybe outside of that professor, I mean, what did you find was maybe potentially the most satisfying answer to that question?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it's interesting.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: I would say that there's variations that questions that that people ask.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: After becoming Catholic and having conversations, a lot of times, I'll talk to different people and and we'll you know have mutual friends.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: They'll say, well, you know, I think they're on the way to the Catholic Church.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll say, I actually I don't know right now because I'm not sure that they're actually asking the question that you think that they're asking.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a way to ask these questions that I think do tend to lead to the Catholic Church, but there's some ways of bracketing them where I don't think you're quite yet asking the fundamental questions that don't lead you there.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I would say is I had a lot of friends that were wrestling with the idea of what is the nature of, you know, to I don't think we talk about it quite in the same way, the nature of authority.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: But uh, you know, there's all these different interpretations of scripture.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: There's all these different claims about what it means that the Bible is inspired by God, how much is it inspired?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Is it inspired in every jot and tittle?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: Was it inspired in the original author or the last and uh translator, or is it the King James is the only English version that legit?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's not not so much at Wheaton, but in some of my upbringing, that was like what some people thought.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think some people were asking a question on the nature of authority and who decides.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the common answers to your uh question was I don't know how popular it is now, but was something called confessionalism.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: And there's this idea that this actually same professor said, Well, you know, I'm kind of brought up in the covenant theology world.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, there's a document written around the time of actually it was a little bit out after Calvin.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: And he basically said, Look, that that document, I know I can't interpret scripture that's different than that document.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: And again, that did more to damage me than anything else because I thought immediately, well, whoever wrote that document, they were at that moment in time, they were stepping out of the tradition they were brought up in, right?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so that that method of interpretation and kind of limiting the way that we interpret scripture in line with a type of orthodoxy doesn't really hold up when you hold it up to scrutiny of history of saying that, well, at one point in time there was another tradition that those people were part of that they were rejecting.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can't like create an artificial tradition that then becomes this authority over you.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think that confessionalism was probably the most valid.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think for a lot of people, they're just not aware of the fact that there's a problem, that me and my my Bible are going to figure it out together.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone else asking these questions?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or did you feel like you were kind of alone asking these?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: No, I think there were.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think there were a lot of people that were asking variations of this question.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think over time, as Catholicism or something like Catholicism started to becoming more apparent to me, I I you'd see people kind of kind of nod along, but there was somewhere along the way that they were making a decision that made it less appealing to them.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I think there's types of these questions that people were asking.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: My sense is is that, you know, maybe they're less than a third that were asking a variation of the question.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: And and other people had other questions that are.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's I think as all of us know, you know, when we arrive at the truth, unfortunately, things get messy, right?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sin gets in the way.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: We have different experiences, biases.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not just a simple math equation for a lot of people of two plus two equals four.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm gonna follow that.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a lot of sometimes baggage that comes into arriving at the truth.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think kind of seeing that and growing up in the in the Wheaton College community, you see that it's not just as simple as arriving at that.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think so it kind of leads to this question of what was your uh kind of experience of Catholicism more on kind of that emotional, experiential, historical perspective, like kind of growing up and also too, more broadly at at Wheaton with all those students.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think what did you see were probably kind of the common roadblocks that people are like, you know what, there might be some issues here, there might be some cracks in the foundation, but Catholicism is not even an option for me.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not even gonna let myself in that thing go there.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean that's that's for sure.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I would say for me personally and and for my wife also, you know, Catholicism wasn't an option.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't there because our experience of the people that we knew were Catholic were there really uh a couple of categories that I placed them in.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: There were there was the the quote unquote good Catholics that were basically just closet evangelicals, right?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: They they went to mass, but like in every part of their life, you know, that seemed faithful, like the Bible studies they were going to with us and whatever, it was just like they were raised Catholic, and that was kind of weird.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: But like, you know, sometimes Pentecostals are weird too, you know, like it was just kind of like you know, everybody has their their things and and that's their their their thing.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: And uh but most of the Catholics that we knew, or the people that we knew growing up were um were making horrible decisions uh growing up, and we just didn't know very many faithful Catholics.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so when I first told my wife that I thought there was a chance that you know we might end up being Catholic, you know, her first response was to grab my daughter, scoop her up in her arms, and say, Neither me nor my children will ever become Catholic.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I got excluded from the family uh almost immediately because and for her, what she was saying was her motherly instinct was I'm not going to raise my kids in a world where it produces those kind of people.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so we had never really had a positive experience of Catholics for either of us growing up.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Very nice people, but not people that seemed like the the faith uh had a had a really strong grip on their lives in the ways that we could identify it as as evangelical.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the last things after we became pretty convinced that we were supposed to be Catholic, we had all the kind of the theological things answered.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: We'd kind of uh, you know, Missy had listened to relevant radio for three years and kind of got catechized through through that.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, one of the very last things that happened for us was we basically said we we don't know any faithful Catholics.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so there we had a a friend who was actually ended up coming over into the church.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: They they they left the Anglican church not long after we did, but they introduced us to who ended up becoming our sponsors into the church.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: And they were really the first people that we identified as as robustly Catholic, but but also incredibly faithful.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: And then they introduced us to a whole bunch of other people.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let me ask you this right now, because it's very, very interesting what you're saying.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so in spite of not meeting any faithful Catholics, you're still progressing, you're still you're you're still looking at at the church.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: So what's that impetus?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're leading this thing, right?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Your your wife is a little bit behind, at least certainly initially.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: So what is pushing you?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even see a faithful Catholic out there.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I see all these lukewarm, you know, apathetic people, and yet it you're you're being drawn.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: So so what's going on in your heart and your head at that point?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: So for me, the the way that it went was uh my wife and I in like 2004, 2005 went to Rome, and I was like, this is not okay.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: What's going on here?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: It seemed superstitious, it seemed like you know they were gonna somebody's gonna be rubbing St.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: Peter's foot off.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like I just had no categories for what was going on in in Rome.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was probably pretty anti-Catholic.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, over the next few years, I I was becoming more concerned with the disunity of the church and and was saying, okay, like there is something that maybe is there, but it was just kind of like way, way off in the distance.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: And and then I was in a class at Wheaton, and they basically had it was the best reading list I'd ever been given.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: We we read kind of uh important text on this topic of nature and grace, the important scripture text, we read the important uh historical authors like uh Augustine, uh, we read um Aquinas, we read Calvin, and then the important kind of like modern authors, both Catholic and Protestant, that were dealing with this issue.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: And what I found was that the Catholic answers were so much more compelling.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so I started saying, okay, there's something here.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: Mostly I was just trying to annoy my teachers by starting to quote a lot of Catholics, but uh I thought there was some way that the Catholics had some insight that I could use to do my theology that would be, you know, make me look, I don't know, edgy or something in the evangelic world.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then so there was something this kind of like compellingness to it.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: But then I started reading The Church Fathers, and I remember reading Justin Martyr's description of what a church service is.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I believe it his writing is the kind of the first that we have that's that's a pretty good description.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I read it and I was like, that does not look at all like what happens when I go to church.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: You you have this first part that kind of like looks somewhat similar to what what's going on, but then you have the second half, which is you know, we call the liturgy of the Eucharist that that didn't even have a category inside.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the height, that was the pinnacle, it wasn't the sermon, it wasn't the praise and worship music.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was that God was being made present.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, whew, that's rough.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then I a few weeks later, I read Saint Cyprian, and he had this statement, and he said, There is no salvation outside of the church, and it cut me to the quick like that.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I knew in that moment that what I had experienced was not whatever he was talking about was the church, and then I needed to figure out where that was.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so we went from kind of like pretty classically evangelical to we ended up becoming Anglican.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: That was my wife and I's halfway house to being like, okay, like you can kind of like squint and see how Anglican kind of like reaches to kind of in into the ancient church.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's certainly what John Henry Newman with the the the Oxford movement was trying to argue for.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: But as we got there, it was just had so many of its own kind of in internal incoherencies that that it was that it was difficult to stay there.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so I and some friends started reading the Catholic Catechism together.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: And again, we were just kind of like looking on the outside, kind of like longingly in.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: But we didn't, again, to this point really know Catholics, but it was the theology of the Catholic Church that was drawing me.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then for my wife, it was um she got really sick with Lyme disease and it wrecked her world, wrecked her world.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: And she was suffering, and the answers that she was being given on the nature of suffering was a few things from the evangelical perspective.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and again, I'm not saying that everybody who's evangelical only has these three.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think I've heard other people have different ones, but it was generally one is that when you're healed, you're gonna have this ministry, and this is gonna be part of what God uses.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: Two was gonna be there's some sort of sin in your life that needs to be confessed or something like that.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: Or, or you just don't have enough faith.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: There's some, which is kind of more the Pentecostal direction that that there's something that you need to claim, you need to confess, or something that the healing will come.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: But all of them lead to the same thing, which is basically saying, you're broken right now, but when you get better, like things will things will be okay.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: And and the Catholic answer to that was wildly different, both in what she heard in Relevant Radio, and then when we met that friend and she introduced us to a bunch of her friends, they would say, geez, Nessie, God must love you so much that he's allowing you to go through the suffering.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, isn't it amazing how much how beloved of God you are right now in this moment, even if you don't ever get healed, because God is allowing you to share in his suffering and unite that suffering to him.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: And we again didn't really have categories for this redemptive suffering, but it became compelling in and of itself that there was something true.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: There was a truth that was being stated that we didn't have, and that that truth was compelling us in.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then as we began to meet some of these families, it was overwhelming.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: It was the easiest decision in the world when it finally came.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: So so you you finally found some you finally found some some people that were alive, right?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: That their hearts were changed.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: And and you're exactly right, you know.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I know people that that uh have been Catholic all their life just because they were raised Catholic, that that are go to mass, but the lens hasn't really fallen, the scales haven't fallen off their eyes yet, you know.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and so that that's really why our apostolate, we really push these young guys, Cooper, to to investigate deep and and then once they figure it out, just to live it out.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: It it says right in here's the front.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: We have an outline, a Claymore battle plan outline.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: You get right on our website.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: But but here's my point.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is what John Paul said to young guys.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: I want to get your uh thoughts on this, uh, Cooper.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: He said, pay attention.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: This is speaking to young people now.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Your life is not an endless series of open doors.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Listen to your heart and don't stay on the surface of things, but go to the heart.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: And when the time is right, have the courage to decide.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: I say that because I it at some point it goes from being this intellectual journey that you're on, right?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: What is the theology of this to ooh, this is sinking into my heart.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: And And and one other thought comes up because you were to you're quoting the catechism also, the same Saint uh Augustine.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when I came back into the church, so I was I I left the church for a long time.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: When I came back in, I I wanted to sit down like you.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's figure out the theology of this thing.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: I I brought the catechism out.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: I laid it down next to me with a notepad, pen and paper.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna write down all the all the uh the rules and regulations and the it you know do's and the don'ts.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I discovered something so powerful.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: It starts section one, paragraph one, you know, line one, it starts with desire.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: It starts with desire.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: What is the desire of the heart?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you have that famous quote come out of there from St.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine, our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I I see you while you're speaking about this, there's a restlessness going on.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not all here, it's in the heart, right?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it drives you almost, boom, you were being driven to find the truth.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: I I think this is this is, you know, you know, for those of you who may be new to the show, I mean this is a Holy Spirit moment.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the God who who's in Cooper's heart wants him to find the truth.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you were open enough, Cooper, to keep on this journey until you say, hey, dude, I I I'm gonna keep I'm gonna keep this up until I figure it out, which is, you know, it's really uh astounding to see a human being, right?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're driven.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: We're driven for this.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: No, for sure, for sure.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: And and and I think it wasn't as much an openness in me.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: I I think I've always been pretty arrogant and conceived of myself as pretty self-sufficient, unfortunately.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: But what happened for me over time was there just started to be less and less of a possibility of a middle way between atheism and Catholicism for me.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: Was that the that I was desperate to hold on to the Lord as He was guiding me, that that I just it was very hard for there to be another way without me just pursuing cynicism or skepticism.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so God pursued me both by pushing me, but also kind of removing some of those supports of kind of, you know, what what I thought I could create is my own kind of little halfway house.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I th and I think Newman did something similar in the Oxford movement.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think they were trying to create the middle way, and I was trying to create my own middle way where I could could could have my cake and eat it too.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: And and the fact of the matter was was that God all the time was prodding me and pushing me along.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Without him, I wouldn't have done it.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there wasn't a compelling pull on the other side that, oh man, I you know, those people really have it all together.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: I I didn't know those people until like a month and a half before we actually came into the church.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: And how about your how about your w wife?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Where was she at at this point?
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Was she all in by the time?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: So so my own.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, when when did the the switch flip for her?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so so she got sick in um 2011 or 2012.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was just yeah, so she got yeah, sick in about 2011, and for the next two years, it was just um, it was just rough.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I won't go through all the details.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: It was just really rough.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it was probably in um the spring of 2013 that um that she started listening to no, it was Christmas because she asked for uh a radio that she could listen to while she was on her back for most of the day, and uh she started to listen to relevant radio.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: And for her, she had read some of the things that I'd given her some some writings from Therese of Lesou and Catherine of Siena, as well as uh Julian of Norwich on kind of suffering and how to meet Christ in suffering.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so she was like, Okay, there's something here for our audience here.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I just want to give you a little heads up that uh that uh you you might be wondering where what happened to Mark?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he was having technical uh troubles and our feed uh got interrupted.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so Cooper and I were on our own, like two orphans.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: But uh so we lost Mark, but we're gonna finish it up without him, and I think you're gonna enjoy the rest of the of the show.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: But okay, let's tune back in.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then she started listening to relevant radio and found that compelling.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then basically, as soon as we were introduced to that friend who was so on fire, loved the Lord so much, um, and was deeply, deeply Catholic.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: She was like, Let's go.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, okay, I'm ready to go.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: I've been kind of waiting, but like we should probably like talk to our family about this.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: We should probably let some smart people try and talk us out of it because like apparently we've been wrong for like the last you know 28 years or whatever.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, maybe we want to just kind of like create a little window here for us to make sure we don't do something crazy.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: And she looked at me.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: I remember sitting in the car, we were driving over to a friend's house, and she looked at me with like death in her eyes and was like, I just don't understand why you're dragging your feet so much.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, whoa, okay, all right.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: So that that's where we're at now.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so, and so it was like this incredibly compelling moment for her, where as soon as for her she knew that this was the truth, she's like, We're going.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so she ended up that week going to mass for the very, very first time on a weekday service, and um and uh and that the weekend before was the last time we ever went to a Protestant church service, it was over.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: As soon as she decided, as soon as she was all in, we we never went back.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: So it was it was no, and then it was a hundred percent yes.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think it if I was gonna be really honest about it, I would say it is in so many different ways that it's hard to describe.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: GK Chestrington basically says one of the hard things when you're trying to prove something that you believe is completely true, it's hard to figure out like where you start from.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: And and because it it really has changed and affected every single area of our life that it's hard to find like the exact well, well, here is where it's really different.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: But maybe just to grab a few points that I think have been really different is one thing is just the importance of the sacraments for our family in and just the rhythms of our family life are so much around the sacraments, so much around, you know, obviously getting to mass, getting the family to mass, but also confession and and whatnot.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so there is a way of dealing with sin inside of the Catholic Church, inside of our own hearts, inside of our own marriage, where like when things are going on for us, it's like, okay, wow, that was really hard.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: That was really hard between us, you know, maybe we had a fight and we found like there was just sin kind of welling up inside of both.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: And we're like, man, not only do we need to reconcile, but like we got to go to confession, we got to get this right.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's just something to do with the brokenness when it pops up, um, that it wasn't there weren't really categories for those type of things.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's just like the natural rhythms of the church that that are just that are gifts every single day, whether it's you know, the the times and the seasons of the church, you know, the Lent and the Easter tide, the feast and the fast, and all of that just creates a like a very natural way to have like meaningful conversation and meaningful, meaningful engagement with the faith, where it's not like, okay, now it's time to put on our faith hat.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna have a Bible study as a family now, or we're gonna have this.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's more like there are these natural ways that the family lives and exists where the faith is just real in a way where it's like totally real rather than this add-on, rather than this extra piece on top of our otherwise normal lives.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: And even when we're not doing a very good job of like living it out faithfully, like the rhythms of the church just kind of carry us along and allow us to engage in it in ways um kind of like it's it's almost more compelling when things aren't working than when they're working perfectly.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: Because like when everything's humming, you know, a lot of different things you can kind of pull off.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: But when the wheels are starting to fall off, the question is is is the thing really there?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Is the foundation really there?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: Is it solid?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if it is, that's okay with it.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: The wheels are getting a little rocky because the foundation is still solid.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's the biggest difference for me is that I used to be really terrified when I would encounter a question from whether it was the kids or something else that I didn't know how to answer.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: Or if you have ever have a kid that's struggling with their own faith, for me, I'd be like, oh my gosh.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: But now I know that there's this God who just won't let them go, who will continue to pursue them if they go to the ends of the earth, that he will always be after them.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's a poem that that says, you know, the hounds of heaven are are, I don't know, more compelling or whatever than the hounds of hell, or more dogged than the hounds of hell, in that God is always kind of going after us.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so, I don't know, there's 500 different ways, but but I really think it's kind of the rhythms and the ways of the church that are probably the things that are most significant for us.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: My first guidance to them would be don't be afraid.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is whatever it is, is either true or it's not.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if it's not true, if the Catholic Church is not true, then I want to be a thousand miles away from it.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's for me, I grew up with these kind of underlying fears that that if this idea or that idea wasn't true, or if this kind of fell through, or if you know, we discovered this or that thing, that oh my gosh, everything would fall apart.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the amount of confidence that I'm that I have now being Catholic, that like I may not know the answer yet, but that the answer is there and you can lean into it.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so I would, I guess I would just encourage people to say, like, really, really lean in.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: You need to start at the truth of what the thing is and and lean into that.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say, from an evangelical perspective, it is built on this idea that me in scripture are enough to be able to come to the truth, or me and this encounter with with Jesus are enough to come to the truth.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I would just say, like, if Jesus prayed for the church to be one, why is it so divided?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: Why are there different denominations that are out there?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we constantly schisming?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we constantly going out?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: And why are we not realizing that unity that Christ wanted, that Christ desired?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: And and I think, you know, there's some things that that are just hard to answer there unless you either come to a Catholic, you know, understanding of kind of how those things work.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: But um, but I would say that the fact is that if God is pursuing you and is pursuing and nagging at your heart, just lean in and trust the God who's encountering you there and allow the uncomfort to be there and for God to meet you there.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's not a question that we're asking that hasn't been asked before.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the beauty of what you're expressing is that it was answered a number of times, all the way from the early church fathers.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we weren't the first ones to ask those, were we?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, those questions have been asked.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: The beauty of it is that you can find people asking those questions, you know, six centuries ago, twelve centuries ago, two thousand years ago, and still getting answers that are coherent and and you know came within what we call the uh magisterium and the traditions of the church.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: So they're really beautiful when you can say, you know what, I have a question.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: I know I'll find it.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if I don't find it, then it's a mystery.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the the fathers all the way through will say, Well, that there's there's a little m mystery with the Trinity.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: We know a certain amount of the Trinity, but when I look at my wife, I say, Well, there's a mystery about her.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: And as long as I've been married, I still don't totally get it, you know?
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's so there's mystery in life.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing is the Eucharist.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you receive the Eucharist worthily, you allow God to actually move in your heart, whether you realize it or not.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: But if you do it worthily and you have faith and you say, Hey, I I want you, I don't get it all, but I want this, I give you access to my heart.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh Jesus Christ is going to actually act in your heart.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is phenomenal.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're a changed humanity, guys, and and sometimes I think it's good just to look back at your life and say, Wow, I may not be perfect now, but but but I I am different.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: I am different on this journey, and my family's different.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh how much dysfunction would it have been behind me, right?
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's right.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: I agree.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: Let me just put a quick plug-in here as as we're as we're going, and that's so well uh said, and Cooper, thank you so much.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: I want to just put a plug-in for those of you who are listening and saying, yes, I I'm I'm getting it, I want to know a little bit more.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: And also, if you want to share your faith with other people in your life and just don't know how, it it can be very uh hard today because we weren't all formed well, it's not all our fault.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: And also, where do I even start?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I've met with a young guy uh yesterday morning, and where would I even start?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we have it with the Claymore uh apostolate.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: We actually have the Claymore handbook that gives you an opportunity to be able to share this with somebody and say, hey, you know, uh my my faith has done so much for me.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: I have something I want to share with you.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we do it in a way that makes it easy.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: So again, the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook, just go to our website, Claymore Militist Tristy.com, you get all the information there.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you're gonna be able to meet more people like Mark, like Cooper, that their lives are actually changed.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and so that's so important for all of us to know.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, once you're into the truth of things, you know, just quickly again, as we're going out, I mean, can you ever walk away now?
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that that's I think a big question.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what what would I go to?
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: For me, it's become there's there's just no there's just no middle ground between Catholicism and atheism, skepticism.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: I I think God is real, Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and he founded his church.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean that and and and that's it.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: And that that is fundamental.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so that doesn't mean that storms won't come, it doesn't mean that things won't get hard, it doesn't mean that there's not days that it's not difficult, or or there's times in prayer that it feels silent or distant or or difficulties come and I and I lack the faith to like feel like I'm hanging hanging on, but but in that time, you know, God, God is hanging on to me and He's hanging on to us.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so no, I think there's there's no there's nowhere to go, right?
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's nowhere to go.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: And and the and the great thing is, is the Catholic Church for a lot of people on the outside looking in, it looks like you know, all these dogmas or all these restrictions or all these rules.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: The fact is, is that um the Catholic Church is the one thing that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, is that you walk through the door and you feel like, oh, are these things going to constrain thee?
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: But in fact, when you walk in the door, you you find that these are the things that compel you, they they they drive you, they drive you forward.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: So uh where where else would we go?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like you have the words of eternal life, right?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's what when Jesus first told the world about the Eucharist, everybody you know starts running away.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: And Jesus says, Are you gonna go too?
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: And and Peter says, No, like you have the words of eternal life.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, God is being made present to us in the Eucharist, and He is giving Himself, and it is there and in that moment that we become partakers in the divine nature.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: And it is only through becoming partakers in divine nature that we can escape that is in the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's it's where life lives.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so, where else can we go?
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: To that, hey God, love you.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: You are a gift, appreciate it.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks everyone, thanks for joining us today.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to you again soon.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Bye bye.