Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #548 Michael Warren Davis: "After Christendom", How Christians can survive, even flourish, in the coming Dark Age

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#548 Michael Warren Davis: "After Christendom", How Christians can survive, even flourish, in the coming Dark Age · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:10
  Speaker 2: I'm excited to be with Michael Warren Davis.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: He previously worked as editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine, the US editor of the Catholic Herald.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: His first book, the Reactionary Mind, was published in 2021.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: He's written for First Things, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: He's appeared on Tucker Pints with Aquinas others.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: He's got a sub stack.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: If he's still got that going and he's going to put anything else in there, I'll put it in the show notes.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: If not, we won't.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Michael, how are you Good to see you, brother?
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: Thank you, jack.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: No, it's a pleasure.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: You know I'm excited to have you, michael, because your most recent book After Christendom did really help me.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: You know there's a certain lens.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: You have to see this crazy hydra of evil around us.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: Everybody's trying to get their head around what's going on and I think you just did a really good job.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: And can you tell us a little bit what you were sensing when you wrote this book after Christendom?
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: And you're right on, michael, with this.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Oh, thank you.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: So the basic idea of the book is that we're living through.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: The way it came about is I was reading St Augustine's City of God and coming more and more to the conclusion that we're living in exactly the same kind of time that he was writing about the total collapse of civilization as we know it, the triumph of the barbarians, the looming dark age.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Looming dark age and the.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: What he's everything that he's talking about, from the, the propitiously declining economy, the collapse of the social order, the attacking the enemies that are attacking from without, the in, the enemies that are coming from within and the, the hatred of christians and the blaming of christians for the, for all the troubles in this decadent society.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: It rang so true, and what's amazing is that all of that is captured in the first.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Maybe you know one twentieth of the book, right, and the rest of it is all about how St Augustine is counseling Christians to respond to this crisis.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: So the diagnosis is just a small part in the beginning, and then there's just like hundreds and hundreds of pages of beautiful wisdom, and so I tried to draw parallels between St Augustine's time and our time, looking at all of the, and as I was reading, I was finding all of these figures like Pope Benedict XVI, cs Lewis, who are saying basically the same things that St Augustine was saying about our own time, and the parallels were just incredible.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: So that's kind of what the book is.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: I did my best to keep my own opinions out of it and just to take the wisdom of St Augustine and of the great modern Christian thinkers and to show how Christians can respond faithfully to the crisis that we face today.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you did a wonderful job.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: And I think what you just said is so powerful because you unpack your thesis on this, your theory on this.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: You do it in a really beautiful way.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: Then you give us a historical context that we can kind of say, okay, I can see how this fits into everything.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: And then you bring in the solutions, which there's only one.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: I won't give it away yet, there's only one real solution to this, but you do it a beautiful way.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: You bring us deep, you bring us into a pathway, a timeless pathway, to an intimacy with Jesus Christ, and that's really what we're looking for.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: And I gave away the solution at the end.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: But, yeah, as you were saying that, michael, you know, bishop, I was in high school.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: I shouldn't give away my age, but I was in high school in the 70s and Bishop Sheen had the number one rated television show at that time and he said the same thing.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: He said that you, you know the same thing that you're outlining here.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: He said we've seen the end of Christendom and he said wait, wait, wait.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: You know, this is what.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: How he talked, right, he said listen to what I'm saying.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: He said I didn't say the whole church.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: He said I didn't say the gospels, I said Christendom as a as these, as Christianity that influences the culture, the institutions, everything we eat and breathe.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: That's gone, and you make that real clear in here, don't you, michael?
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: That that's really gone and we're fighting, and I'll leave you with this thought here.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: You know, we have these upcoming elections and so many of us of us, right, we think this is conservative versus, you know, liberals, or conservative versus the, the, the, the left.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: But, as you said, there's not much to conserve there and no matter who wins this election, we're not out of the woods here, are we, michael?
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: yeah, I mean, I have my preference and I'm oh yeah, oh yeah, right, yes, and I think, and I think it's pretty clear we'll get back to that and I think it's pretty clear We'll get back to that again, but I think it's pretty clear.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: you know, even though there's so much ambiguity with so many pastors and stuff, I need to give them your book, thanks.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate that, that.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: I heard from a few reviewers about saying that.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: You know well, this book is retreatist and Davis doesn't understand the importance of remaining engaged in politics.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: I say in the book and I would clarify for anyone that has doubts you know you should vote.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Voting is important.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: You should engage in our civic institutions, however, as best you can.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: The point that I made in the book is that so often we think of these.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: First of all, voting it takes a very small amount of time, right, the crisis never ends.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: As far as work is all, right, doesn't take a day off, but voting takes, you know, 20 minutes a year.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: What are you doing with the rest of your time to make the world a better place, right?
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Yes, a lot.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: For a lot of people, including myself, it's sitting on, you know, arguing with people on facebook, it's watching the news, it's these things don't help, these don't actually help.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: They make, they don't make you informed, you, you know the, the, the.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: The stakes are pretty clear at this point.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Right, you know, there's not, there's not a lot of informing our set that we need to do.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: That's not how we solve the problem of the existential eradication of Christian civilization Anyone that thinks that it is unfortunately is deluding themselves.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: I didn't get that sense of that in the book at all.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: In fact, I think you're a little bit of a critic of, maybe, quietism right, as we call it, and said no, you know there's aspects to that right, but there's also aspects.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: We know this, you know.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: You said in the book, as you know, following Jesus, of course, you know, be filled with divine life and love and then go out.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: You too go out into the vineyard.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: And what does that mean?
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: That means we have to bring Jesus Christ into the arena.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: That's what we're doing and that's what you make clear in the book, and we do that by voting the best way we can and being the best fathers or lovers, and taking care of the poor and all those things.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: Like you said, get off of Facebook and do good, go out and do good things.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: Like you said, get off of facebook and and and and do good, go out and do good things.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: How can anybody argue with that right?
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: well, that's.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: That's.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: The funny thing is that the lord says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: And how many of us really think of meekness as a, as a political strategy, right?
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Right, I mean, how many of us think that by becoming less, by serving, by loving our enemy, by serving the poor, that through those what the world would call weak gestures that we actually become powerful?
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: And this is something that we see when we study the early churches that you have, you know, you have people who are going out and evangelizing in the literal sense of preaching the good word in the streets.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: But a lot of what the early Christians did was there would a plague, would break out in Rome, right?
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: And the Christians and the pagans who have this very selfish, self-interested, hedonistic worldview, they run to the country or they hold themselves up in their houses.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: The Christians are the ones that go out to the streets in comfort and care for the dying, and there's no miracle right where they're all through their love.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: They're preserved from the plague.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: No, they die.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: They catch the plague and they die their love.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: They're preserved from the plague?
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: No, they die.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: They catch the plague and they die.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: And we see things like Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor, writing to his priests saying what are you guys doing?
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: The Christians are gaining all of this power because they're serving our poor, right, they're caring for our sick.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: You guys got to start doing this or we're going to get totally wiped out.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: The Christians are going to take over.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: And of course, that's exactly what happens, right, and and that's how, and cs lewis talks about this.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: He says that it's, it's through the through, the through loving service to our, to our fellow man, that the church has gained power in the west.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: And if you and that's the irony, he says oh, I don't remember the exact quote, but basically, it's only when Christians let go of this need for worldly power and influence and give themselves over completely to the loving service of their neighbor that they actually do become powerful, right?
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Oh it's aim for heaven, and you'll get earth thrown in.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Aim for earth, and you'll get neither.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's beautiful, it's beautiful.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: You know, when you talk about Julian, the Apostate right, a pagan emperor that was, as you stated in the book, came from a Christian background and he saw this right that there's, you know, because we think, as you stated so well, we think that going out and doing these good things just comes naturally to people.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: But it doesn't.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: And you know, I'm a big fan of St Thomas Aquinas and of course he resurrected Aristotle.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: But, as you point out so well, even the early Greek philosophers, as wise as they were, as timeless as some of the things they're searching for, what's true, good and beautiful, right, I mean Plato with his eros and his power of love, you know, but at the end of the day, they needed to be Christianized by St Thomas in order to really see all those things that you're describing, michael.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: The irony.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: It's interesting.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: You said Julian the Apostate was a.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: He was born Christian, hence apostate right, and he rejected the faith because he's a figure that's very much also similar to the types of people we see now.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: He thought Christianity was stupid, he thought it was for the intellectually feeble.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: He loved Plato, he loved classical philosophy and he loved magic.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: That's the feeble.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: He loved Plato, he loved classical philosophy and he loved magic.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: That's the other thing.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: He was really taken by magic, which is something that is also, you know, these two currents On the one hand, this idea that Christianity is just for simpletons, it's backwards, it's rustic or whatever.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: It's rustic or whatever.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: And on the other hand, we see the rise of the occult, particularly among educated middle upper, middle class Americans.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: There's this idea that magic is more natural, it's more intellectually acceptable, and Julian is very much sort of a classic representation of the kinds of people that we're seeing today.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: And yes, you know, he but also like these contemporary neo-pagans these are, you know, the people who are living in our cities and in our time, who are reverting to paganism.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: He comes from a Christian background and so he has all these Christian assumptions that he brings with him.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: He assumes that.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: So he goes to the pagan priests and says why aren't you serving the poor and the needy?
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: He has all these Christian assumptions that he brings with him.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: He assumes that.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: So he goes to the pagan priests and says why aren't you?
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: serving the poor and the needy.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: And they say why would we do that?
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: The gods hate me, right, let them die in the streets.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Who cares and this is something that we're seeing is that there's so many people today who think that we can have quote unquote Christian values without Christianity.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: And I don't just mean, you know, traditional marriage.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: I mean don't kill babies, don't kill the elderly, take care of the sick, take care of the poor.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: These are not fundamental human values that everyone can perceive using their powers of reason, because these are not values that were embraced anywhere in the pre-Christian world outside of ancient Israel, right where they had the knowledge of the true God.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and this permeates the human heart again, right?
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know that was Sholzhenitsyn, and you quoted him in the book too was in the gulags for eight years.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: It comes to realize that all the evil that we see manifested in the world, michael, it always starts in the individual human heart.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: It's this battle between good and evil.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: This is the essence of your book.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: That's so beautiful because it brings this thread through and it says look it, we have a solution to this.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: First of all, things are going to get worse, which is a scary thought, but you're right, I think it's inevitable that things are spiraling down and you could see people just, they're losing their reason, they're losing their intellect, they're losing their wisdom, and when they do that, their freedom is no longer free, as we would say, christ sets our freedom free.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: Without that, and you go well, what does that mean?
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Christ sets our freedom free, or God?
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: When God has forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible and those things don't start to make sense until you see the evil around us and the suffering around us and you go Ooh, wait a second.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: You know you're right.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: Natural man, you know, taken out, taking God out of man.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Natural man is like a biological man is not human.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: You know, we're the worst of all the animals actually and I think that's what Schultz and Eatson saw of all the animals actually, and I think that's what Schultz and Eatson saw.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: You know that a guard could be kind and a guard could be evil, but he said even the inmates that were made, as you know, to rule our barrack or whatever, they could be just as mean as the guards were, and they were one of us.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: You know, it's something how that happens.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's apocryphal.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: I don't think it actually happened.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: But GK Chesterton was asked what is you know what?
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: What is the?
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: What is wrong with the world?
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: And he wrote back to the editor.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: It was a newspaper that was doing a survey.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: I've already stepped on this joke.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Let me start over.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: There was a newspaper and they were asking a prominent British intellectuals the same question, asking a prominent british intellectuals the same question what is wrong with the world?
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: And so they wrote.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: One of the people they chose was gk chesterton, and chesterton wrote back simply two words I am, and that's the.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: I think that that's.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: That's something that sultan it's in yes says is that you know, all the evil in the world comes from me, from my heart.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Right, I'm responsible for.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: And it's in dostoevsky too.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: It's, yes, it is.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Elizabeth says you have to feel'm responsible for it, and it's in Dostoevsky too.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: It's, yes, it is Elizabeth.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Osama says you have to feel personally responsible for the evil that your brother commits, and that's the only way to be a Christian, to feel, to take personal responsibility for the evil in the world, and that's such a devastating thought.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: Right's the?
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: That's the work of the rest of your life.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Right, there it is.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: And but that's the.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: That's the only way to be a christian and it's the only way even to have a an accurate perception of reality.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Right, because you know all of these worldviews that we have, left wing, right, whatever.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: If they don't take these things into account, then it's perverting, it's corrupting our worldview.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: We can't even see the problem clearly Because, again, saying what's wrong with the world, what's the cause of this crisis, you can say it's the LGBT, the Skittles people, it's the pro-choicers.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: No, it's me.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: It's me.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: That is the answer, that's the.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: In finding the answer to that question, what is wrong is the first step to creating a real solution.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: If you don't have that first step, if you don't identify the real problem, and if the answer to the question is not me, everything that follows is wrong.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: It's like a math problem, right?
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: It's like a complicated math problem.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: Get the first step wrong.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: The rest of it doesn't matter.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: You're wasting your time.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: No, you're exactly right and we're in a good position here at the John Paul II Renewal Center, michael, because we work with young people and we work with old people, you know, and you know marriage and beyond and do parish missions around the country and stuff.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: But what I really focus on, and what we've been focusing on the last decade, are young people, because of of you know, 90% of them would subscribe to subscribe to moral relativism 90% of teenagers in the early twenties.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: But we're seeing sparks.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: We're seeing sparks especially with a generation Z men that are starting to sense what you're saying, michael, that something's wrong, but I don't have a handle on it.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: And see books like the one you wrote.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: Our mentors, like Pope Benedict XVI, are more current ones.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: Right, and John Paul II, they sense this with young people.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: Right, and John Paul II, they sensed this with young people.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: John Paul II loved young people and you've heard this quote, but it's exactly what you just said, in just John Paul's words.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: He said young people.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: You know that your life has meaning to the extent that it's given away as a gift to others, and they knew it.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: They knew in their hearts, michael, that that was true to others and they knew it.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: They knew in their hearts, michael, that that was true.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: Because it comes down again to love, right, that we become persons of love.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: And that was the early Christians.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: You have a whole thing on the Didache in here and that early teaching right of love.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: How did they know them, michael?
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: They knew them by their love.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: You know and love people in the truth, speak the truth to them and love.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Anything else is a destructive lie, right, and it's beautiful.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: And again, you state these things in the book.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: And not only do you state those, but you show us how to get this intimacy with God in there.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: And it doesn't take you long to get into prayer and fasting and almsgiving and righteousness.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Right, can you talk a little bit about those things?
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: Because this is the intimacy that people are looking for and you have it outlined very beautifully in here, michael, the way you did that.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: I appreciate that.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Thank you, yeah, the St Maria of Paris she refused to talk about, she refused to praise Christians who were loving.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: She refused even to talk about the Christian duty of love.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: She said there was no Christian duty of love.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Christianity is love.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: It's not a part of Christianity, it's not an extra add-on for Christianity.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: That's beautiful.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Once you go to Mass and say your rosary and yada yada, then maybe you get around to loving.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: Christianity is love.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: They're synonyms, they're one and the same.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: And yeah, I read that a couple of days ago and it's been living in my head.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: I just can't get over it.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: And it's so perfect, right, I mean, it comes right out of.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: You know, if we quoted John, right, the first letter of John, you know, here's John and he discovers who Christ is.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: And he goes.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: I realize, right, god is love, not that we love God, but that God loved us First.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: God is love, so Christianity has to be love.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: You can't look at a crucifix and not see love being poured out on there, michael.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: But I think we need to keep talking about what you're saying, because we forget, we disconnect so easily and that's why, again, this section on prayer, fasting, almsgiving, righteousness, we got to step into this.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: Give us this day our daily bread.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: Right, help us Lord.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: Right, have mercy on me, a sinner.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: You got the Jesus prayer.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: So I'm throwing it back in your court because you got the Jesus prayer in there.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: You know you talk about Lectio Divina and all these beautiful ways, right and different ways to pray, but they all have meaning and purpose and there's reasons to have them all, but that Jesus prayer is powerful, brother.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I just met a monk that I asked to be my spiritual father and.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: I prayed blessedly.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: He said yes.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: And I said to him well, can you give me a prayer rule?
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: And he thought about it.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: He said I'm going away for a week.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: I said when I come back, visit me and ask me again.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: I said, okay, he said in the meantime, just take a prayer book and say morning and evening prayer.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: And I was bummed because this was like this was a big step down for me because I had like, given myself this long prayer rule that I did not always faithfully practice, but I had like a bunch of Psalms and stuff like that.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: I was like, okay, I got downgraded a little bit and then I came back.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: When he returned, I reached out and I went to see him this was very recently and he said I said so a prayer rule.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: And he smiled he's very kind, but he's very.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: He says you're not ready for a prayer rule.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: He says you don't know what prayer is.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: Yet he said he said every morning and every evening he said pray the jesus prayer for five minutes and then read a chapter of the gospels or of the apostolic epistles, he said.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: But then he explained he says prayer is.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: Prayer is not saying words to god, prayer is not reading words off of a page.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Prayer is communication with god.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: It's, it's communion with god.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: There's a another saint prayer is a sacrament prayer.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: Is is intimacy with the divine and it's, it's life-giving and it's initiated by god.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: Right, it's not, we don't pray to god.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: There's a hannah says in the book of is is it Samuel?
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: 1 Samuel?
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: She says the God who prays in us when we pray.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: Right, and that's how intimate it is.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: When we pray, we're not reaching out to God.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: God is reaching out to God in us and I just love that.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: And that's what the Jesus prayer is all about.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: The Jesus prayer is about it's sort of the distillation, the essence of all prayer, which is simply putting ourselves in the presence of Christ, invoking his name, lord Jesus Christ.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: The long version is Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: The short version is Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: And we say this slowly in our hearts and or out loud, and we do this in order to again to have this purest form of prayer, this purest form of intimacy and communion with God, and it's life-changing, it's life.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: And anyone that practices it will say it's life.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: I was just reading Rod Dreher's new book and he talks about how the Jesus prayer brought him so much peace that he was able to overcome his chronic Epstein's bar and that's why his priest assigned it to him, Because the doctor said you need to.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: You know, the flare-ups are caused by anxiety, fear, whatever, and his priest told him pray the Jesus prayer 500 times a day and he was able to achieve inner peace and it prevented these flare-ups.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: And I know so many people who struggled with anxiety who were cured through the Jesus prayer.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: The stories go on, and on, and on and on and it is a miraculous, life-changing, indispensable prayer.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes, that's so beautiful, right?
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: You know, I was talking to a priest who's actually an exorcist, but he's a friend of mine, and we were talking about this deep prayer and he said, yeah, he said, jack, just let it sink to the heart, right, and there you'll only find two people.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: He said just you and God.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: At that depth he goes.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: Nobody knows you this way, like even your best friends, your spouse, whatever you know.
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: There's always something that you know is deeper within you.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: And he said that's where you allow this to sink right.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: You allow this Jesus prayer, you allow this prayer to sink to that deep spot where only you and God reside.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: Of course, god, you know, if you look behind him, he's bringing the angels and the saints, so he'll introduce you to different people as you need them.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: And of course, I'm bringing my you know to your point, michael, your anxieties.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: Your different, but I try to not to bring them down to the middle here.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: God knows I have all those things with me.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: I know God's got other things going on, but we just sink down there together.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: And yeah, and when I practice that, it's amazing, and I'll tell you what.
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: I'll just give you one more little thing just to show how beautiful this works.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: I was in a high school.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: I bring a younger team with me.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: You know we're talking about theology, body, some other things.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: And as I was getting ready to leave after the first session, we were doing a little retreat and I said, okay, when we come back, anything anybody want to talk about.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: And you know what they wanted to talk about, michael.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: Now we're talking about love, right, and sexuality, and they're leaning in right, they're interested.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: But yet they said when you come back, can you address mental illness?
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: And I said so what do you mean by mental illness?
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: And that's exactly what it was, michael anxiety, depression.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: Why is it that so many of our peers are talking about suicide?
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: And I just stopped, mike, and I just said hey, you know, we're all living on the surface of this world.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: You know, like this waves just bouncing around and, you know, just blowing us around.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: I said let's just take a second right now.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: Who wants to sink below the surface?
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: I told I'm a diver.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: I told him some diving stories of the awe and wonder.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: You know, when you go into the depths, right, and now I only hear my bubbles, right, and I could look up at the surface.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: I see the boat bobbing around, but not where I'm at.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: And you know what, michael?
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: They came right away with me and they said you can't get this class to be quiet for a minute.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: You know, everybody's distracted on the phones and stuff.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: But you know what really made the difference, michael was when I said does anybody else have any?
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: Now?
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: We're down here, right, we're deep.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: Does anybody have anybody that they want to pray for while we're here?
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: And man, those kids started to unpack stuff, michael, it was like whoa, it was powerful, brother, and so everything that you're saying is so real, so beautiful, so powerful.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: And we need to help young people with this, michael, we really do, because they're so anxious, they're so nervous about everything and they should be, because they're being told a lie, brother.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: They're being told a lie.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: The whole, we were talking about having the correct worldview, in the sense of being able to accurately perceive reality, and that's really what this is about.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Right, there's a really wonderful book written by a monk called Bread and Water, wine and Oil, and he's a monk, but he's also a clinical psychologist he was trained as a clinical psychologist and it's largely about the Jesus prayer and he's talking about how there's a concept it's talked about in the book, the loyismoi, what they call the assault of thoughts, and that's just the chatter that goes on in our heads all the time.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: What was the term Michael?
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: It's L-O-G-I-S-M-O-I.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: In Greek, I think it's pronounced lois, moi, okay.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: And it's just, it's the.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: If you're washing the dishes someday or driving to work and you just you happen to remember this conversation, look back a couple, rewind the tape a couple of seconds.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: What were you thinking about?
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: And it's you probably don't even remember anymore, right?
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: We go through all of our days with this mindless chatter in our background, right, thinking about ourselves, about what we're going to do in the future, about regrets we have from the past.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: I'm hungry, I want to have sex, whatever.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: All these passions and desires and anxieties that bubble up in our heads and we live in that.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: It's going on all the time and that's actually taking us out of reality.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: The point the monk makes is that the way that the brain works, it hates the present moment we spend all the way that the brain works it.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: It hates the present moment.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: The brain hates the present because the the our mind, our brain, is our fallen brain mind, is it geared towards judgment and categorization, and there's so much going on around us at any given moment that the brain gets overwhelmed, so it prefers to think about what it wants from the future, or what it fears in the future, or what it misses about the past, or what it's ashamed of in the past, right.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: So there's fear and nostalgia and we're caught up in all of this.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: But, god, we only exist truly in the present and that's the only place where we can encounter God.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: There's another monk wrote a book the Sacrament of the Present Moment.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: That's where we find God.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: And when we're living in the loyismo, we're living in the past or in the future, or in our appetites and our passions and our desires.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: We're not living in the present, we're not attenuated to reality.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: And so much of the spiritual life is becoming attenuated to reality.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: It's shutting off, know getting shutting off your phone, right, turning off the TV, getting off social media, finding time to spend in quiet, in nature, where we encounter God, spending time in prayer, calming our passions through fasting, through almsgiving, and then and also.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: But the jesus prayer is kind of the for for many spiritual writers, it's kind of the height of this, because what's more real than christ?
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Christ is more real than everything we see around us.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: And so, by by praying the jesus prayer, by making, by bringing the reality of christ to our forefront, he's above, below, to our side, within, without right.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: He's everything and everywhere and everywhere present and filling all things, as the prayer says, and focusing our consciousness on that and making that our immediate reality.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: That's the height of the spiritual life.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: That's what everything else is about.
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's.
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: You just described the good news.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: You know, as you're describing it, I'm thinking that is really good news.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: And and and so let let let's just go to the front of of of your thoughts now, michael, because I think I think it was good what we just did, because instead of you know, this is all doom and gloom, but here's how you get out we just showed, I mean, you just did a beautiful job showing here's the solution, right?
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, the reality is we're all going someplace.
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: This is a temporal space.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: Jesus talks about this over and over again.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: You land here, you're exploded into this.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: You know time of history, and it's a beautiful explosion really, if you think about it right.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: We exploded onto this stage and so many people, michael, don't know where they came from or where they're going, and they're trying to figure out this little thing.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: And what you did is with the book too.
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: You opened this up to a historical context, but still said that pinpoint that you are, that's where you are, and stay there and pray and connect to the eternal one, and then all the other things will be given to you also.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: You'll start to see, and I think that's the only way you actually start to understand the beginning, even from biblical beginning, from Genesis, and you go oh yeah, that's true, where am I going.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: You know, we have that sense, as you put in the book too, at cs lewis.
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: You know, if you don't aim at heaven right, you know.
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: And you, you won't get earth either.
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: And it said in a slightly different way I mean, it's all true, it's all true if I, you know, I, I tell people, michael, I said there's three simple things, and you mentioned them all already.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: Three simple things in the morning Don't look at that phone, get down on your knees and kneel with our blessed mother and just at the annunciation, be it done to me according to your word, right, I mean, boom, you could say the Jesus prayer now to add that in there.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: And then I said the second thing is, you know, temptation's not a sin.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: So every time you're tempted, don't try to push it down, right, again, you got all these crazy things going on here, but just use it as an invitation to prayer.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: Every temptation that comes my way, I just use it as an invitation to prayer.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: And then the third thing go out and love the next person.
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: You see, just love the next person.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: You see, it forces me to get up in the morning, michael, and look for the next person that I can be a person of love, and those little things that we're describing here are the big things, aren't they?
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's everything.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: So tell me this now.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: I can't keep you here all day, so I want to get your what were your thoughts when you were writing this, because there really is a decline and you're not the only one, so you're not.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: You know, this is not it's doomsday, I think it's just reality.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: We see this with you know, abortion and divorce and the violence around us, the lying that's going on right.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: We're actually throwing, or or attempting and also throwing, political prisoners in jail here in the United States.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: I mean all these things.
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: You know we saw the COVID lockdowns and vaccines that don't work, that we have to take, and all these things.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: I mean this is some weird times, michael.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: What was going through your mind?
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: As you said, man, I got to.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: I want to get this down on paper, maybe for yourself at first, and you go whoa, this is good stuff.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: That's funny.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: I haven't been asked anything like that.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: But you're absolutely right, it was kind of more for me.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: I started my career as a political journalist.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: I worked for a British magazine called the Spectator.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: Until recently I was a contributing editor at the American Conservative, and before that I was a contributing editor at the American Conservative, and before that I worked for the Republican Party.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: I worked for the Liberal Party in Australia, which is confusingly the right-wing party in Australia.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: I worked for an Australian senator, who, so I there was.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: I spent my formative years in conservative politics, you know, both as an activist a professional sort of staffer hack and as a journalist, and I found, as time went on, I felt increasingly convinced that I wasn't doing anything good or worthwhile.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: And again that's not to say that nothing good happens in politics.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: Just, I wasn't doing anything worthwhile.
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: I wasn't doing anything worthwhile, I wasn't doing anything good.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: And I think that, uh, it became increasingly clear to to me that the, the because, the fundamental, the problems that we face are not political problems, they're not economic problems, they're not cultural problems, they're spiritual problems.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: Right, there is, there is an actual chesterton quote.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: That's from an essay called he wrote, called what's right with the world, where he's, he's, he's asked these, asked the same question, and he says the answer to this question has always been the same what's right with the world is god, what's wrong with the world is the devil.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: And that was that kind of attitude that was dawning on me, and I realized that I was just kind of flapping my arms right, I wasn't getting it, I wasn't making any progress, I wasn't helping the world become a better place.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: Not that I am now, but I think my vision's at least a little bit clearer, by you know, by God's grace.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: And so that's when I started doing research into these questions and I came across.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: I started I kind of just started, as I was reading, piecing things together and noticing that Chesterton talks about these problems in a way that's very similar to the way that GK Chesterton talks about them, very similar to CS Lewis, very similar to George McDonald, very similar to Bennett XVI, very similar to Sarah from Rose.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: Protestant Catholic, orthodox.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: All these great thinkers have kind of the same worldview, which is there's this temptation to try to control the world through politics, culture, and a failure to recognize that all of these things are passing away.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: The world is dying, right, we're dying.
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: You are, I am, we're all dying.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: The world itself is dying.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: This age is passing away.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: None of this is going to.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: But what lasts forever is love, right?
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: What lasts forever is the four last things, right?
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: Well, it's the two last things heaven and hell, and that's what we have to keep ourselves laser focused on.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: Everything else is a temptation or a distraction.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: And so that I don't know if that's a clear answer to your question.
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it is clear.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: And we're eternal beings.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: We have to look at each person around us.
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: Cs Lewis talked about this too.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: I mean these are wise guys, right.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: I mean in such a beautiful way.
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: I mean the things that GK Chesterton says, I mean they're just so like whoa, that's a little you know how he hit everything from a little different angle, but it was just so gorgeous, right, that you just you stop with him, right.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: But we're eternal beings and you know, cs Lewis would say you know, every single person you see is an eternal being.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: That's why you have to love them is an eternal being.
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: That's why you have to love them.
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: That's why our responsibility is to go out to the vineyard and take Jesus with us into the vineyard, because God wants to save them.
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: And that's the perspective, michael, when you and I walk into the arena and whether it's economics or politics or whatever we decide to do, I mean we have to work right.
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: We have to take Christ with us.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: I mean that's our job is to infuse Jesus into whatever we do.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: But I think it's so powerful when I look at you or I look at the next person I see today and think that's an eternal being.
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: That person is going to be with us forever.
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: And then you look at a child in the womb right and you say that person is going to be with you forever, whether we extinguish that child or not.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: That's an eternal being, and I think what God wants us to do is at least proclaim the gospel to people.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: Do it in love, you know, because they're all broken, michael, aren't they?
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: I mean, when I go out in the world and I'm speaking to young people, man, they'll line up and they're seeking answers from me, right?
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: So I'll be talking about theology of the body and love and all these beautiful things, and something's going on in their heart.
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: Right, you have to give them the model, you have to speak the truth.
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: But on the other hand, when they line up, sometimes they're looking for an answer for me.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: Like Jack, I have this, or I have a child out of wedlock, or I'm divorced.
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: And now what do I do At the end?
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: We can show them the model, we can lead them to water, but everything comes back down to what you described earlier, michael.
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: We have to lead them to the eternal well themselves.
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: They have to go to the great physician for that healing.
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean, we're the messenger for them, but they have to go to the great physician for that healing.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: Like you know what I mean, we were the messenger for them, but they have to enter into this intimacy with them and I think that's what you did again in the book so well.
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: You know, like you said, you spent the first, just the small part, on packing things, unraveling, and the rest of the time saying here's what we need to do.
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: I think that's what you did so well in this book oh, thank you, I appreciate that I, I mean, I could give this to young people and and this will, this will make more of a difference to them than some book that goes on for 300 pages and just explains all the problems we have.
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: We, we, you know, this tells you why, puts it in historical context and then brings you to the well.
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: I mean, this tells you why, puts it in historical context and then brings you to the well.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's what you did.
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: It's funny because I don't know, I don't want to brag or whatever, but I have noticed that most of the people that I've gotten, I mean almost all the people that have reached out to me to say how much they liked the book have been Gen Z.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: Oh, interesting, interesting.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: It's a book that seems to have struck more of a chord with younger readers, I think.
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: I think particularly people who don't feel invested in the current order of things and don't expect to ever feel invested in it.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's a great.
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great point.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, unpack that a little bit.
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great point.
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: What?
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: You just said because they are feeling a disconnection that's a great point because they feel out of sorts and we're trying to give them some kind of secular answer.
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: It's because maybe you're in the wrong body, maybe you're this, maybe you're that, and you're right.
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: They're out of sorts and just say did you ever think about?
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: this prayer coming into your heart, right.
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: I mean, what a great time for us to to help those young people.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: And I think, michael and I want to get back to let you finish that thought, because I think it's an important one, because I said that myself, that we're finding generations Gen Z men myself, that we're finding generations gen z men, maybe even more or a little quicker than the, the women who I think you know are not as analytical, right looking around and hoping to find that lover, that person that will love them or whatever, and then being used by all these, you know, poor guys that are addicted to porn and all kinds of things, and they're really feeling this pain, right, but the gen z guys are some of them.
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: I don't know how many.
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: You have any idea how many are waking up out there.
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: It seems like a few.
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: It seems like there's a lot of guys listening to joe rogan now and and uh, which, which may not be all good, but but it seems like they're looking for something different our parishes, I would say maybe 40 over 60, and then the rest are almost all under 30 um there's just this it is a huge age.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: A couple years ago it was a very typical parish and that it was.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: It was aging out and then we got a young priest and and he started bringing in lots of young people and I would say I mean easily over half the parishes, easily half the parishes under 30, possibly more.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: And I do think that it's largely.
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that there's.
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: I personally am very optimistic about Gen Z.
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: They seem like they're coming to the.
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: I'm a late millennial and my wife is Gen Z and they seem to.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: And I noticed just between the two of us we're only a couple of years apart, but I noticed a difference between her and me and between her and her younger siblings.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: And me and my peers, even those of us who are traditional conservative Christians, even those of us who are traditional conservative Christians.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: Their approach to it is very different than our approach.
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: I notice them being not less faithful by any means, but less judgmental, less quick to demonize those who don't.
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: They seem more eager to empathize with the people who don't share their Christian faith.
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: And then people like me who tend to say we're what's right with the world, they're what's wrong with the world.
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: That's a very judgy, millennial attitude.
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: Gen Z is much more, I think, willing to empathize, but also I think that empathy is what kind of drives them in that direction.
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: They're not again like me, like us millennials, who get so caught up in our own drama, our own narrative, that we want to victimize ourselves.
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: Gen Z seems to be more interested in the fact that other people in their generation are sharing this phenomenon, like the the experience that you had.
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: Why are all of our classmates talking about suicide that wouldn't have occurred to millennials, even if they which we were right, we had a.
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was all about white.
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: Who's looking out for me?
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: there's not that same curiosity about other people, even much less empathy, and so I mean yeah, that mean yeah, that's my two cents.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: But what do I know?
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know what?
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: Maybe they picked up, maybe they took something good out of this kind of moral, relativistic culture which was all about kindness and compassion and empathy right, but it was disconnected from truth and maybe they feel that right.
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: So those words stayed with them, except maybe they're putting some power behind them now and learning how to not, you know.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: You can't just say you know, kindness and love are not the same thing.
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: You know, and so you know and this is the problem with so many millennial and boomer age priests they catch these words now like kindness and compassion.
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: They're starting to, you know, but now they want to bring people into their church, but they want to leave them in their sins, michael, and what we hope, as you're saying this about Generation Z, is they have the empathy, compassion, nonjudgmental right and we're not asked to judge those people.
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: This is just Jesus right but we're not called to leave them in their sins either.
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: You know we want to introduce them to God and to Jesus Christ, but then again it gets back to my thing.
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: You know I'm not the solution Jesus is.
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: So I can lead you there, but I do it as your friend Michael.
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: I do it in empathy.
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: I know that we came into a broken world and we're all broken.
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: We came with original sin.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: We have concupiscence dragging us down.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: We should feel a little empathy for one another, don't you think?
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was something else that stood out from the reading that I did and I tried to make a big part of the book that when you look at the people that you would say are responsible for the harm in our society, whether it's liberals or whatever, whatever term you want to use you have to realize that they.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: So let me rewind a little bit.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: Say you know the story of St Ignatius of Antioch, when he's being dragged to Rome from Antioch to be executed and he writes his final, his seven letters, eight letters and he— and just back up just a little bit more.
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: Michael, I mean this is a very early church father.
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: Basically I mean he's in the first hundred years or somewhere around the first century or the end of the first century, something.
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: I mean he's an early he's.
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: He's early right, one of our early bishops.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: He's the.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: He's a disciple of St Polycarp, who's a disciple of St John.
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: St John, yeah, so he's third generation Christian.
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: We still call of the first yeah, and so he, and he's, he's, he's the, he's the patriarch of the bishop of antioch and and he is, you know, he's arrested by the roman authorities and he's being brought to to rome to be executed.
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: And he writes a series, I think it's seven, letters to the different parts of the church, the church at ephesus, or, and the final one is to the church in Rome.
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: And he, in his letter, is basically he says, he says don't get in my way.
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: I know that there are young men, you know, in Rome who are going to want to try to free me by any means necessary.
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're going to try to rescue him yeah.
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they're going to try to break him out of prison.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, as good young men do.
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: Right they, you're going to try to break them out of prison.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, as good young men do, right, they've got to fight for their heroes, their leader, yes.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: And he says don't do it.
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: And he says he's yearning for the crown of martyrdom.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: And he says so.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: I think he's in his 80s and he says it's.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: It's time for me to start being a follower of Jesus Christ.
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: And 80 years old, this holy old bishop, and he says it's time for me to start following Christ.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: And so this is the attitude that he takes towards martyrdom.
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: Is that?
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: Don't get in my way?
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: This is all I've ever wanted.
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: You know, I lived, I lived a long, full life, and and now I have the chance to, to, to go be with the lord, don't, don't stop me.
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: And that's such a different attitude towards persecution than what we so often.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: And it's origin of alexandria talks about the same thing he's.
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: He talks about going.
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: So I love this stuff yeah he talks about you know what the beauty of what you're doing, michael, is, is, is that that this shows you how real when we step in just to talk about this stuff, right, when your heart is there and God just tweaks you, can you imagine, michael, what it's going to be like to get to heaven?
• 49:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, this is what you're describing, because these saints and mystics which you write in the book what's going to change the world, the saints, the mystics, right?
• 49:45
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 49:45
  Speaker 2: Because they feel what you're feeling right now and they know that twinge is just a little touch.
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: So when he's going right to his death, he has to be feeling what you're feeling to some degree, michael, and you know what you just were allowed the gift, I think, of feeling just a little tiny taste of that kind of joy of being near God, you know, and being able to give up your life for the one who loves you so much.
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: And he gives us these little gifts, michael, it's so beautiful the way you did that.
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: I mean it's.
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: And God and I think this again gets back to what you're talking about Like, just pay attention to the signs, don't, you know, allow your heart to ache a little bit, right?
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: Don't be afraid of allowing God to let your heart ache a little bit because, like we're talking about, we're not there yet and we ache for that closeness, don't we?
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: It's really beautiful, brother.
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: So thank you for that, thank you for that show and not being afraid, even though I don't think you could have held it back anyways, you know, just that show, it's very beautiful, thank you.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: Thank you, I appreciate that and you never finished with origin.
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: I don't think I probably interrupted you.
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: No, no, it's alright.
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: Well, it gave me a minute together myself.
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: He says he talks about going to the Coliseum or to a public execution with the catechumens and bringing them back, and he says that there's a spirit, there's a great lightness in the room because our friends have gone to be with the Lord.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: And so we, especially in journalism and kind of you know, and then the people who are sort of very active on social media and who are really invested in these kind of you know, church politics, secular politics, we talk a lot about persecution and it's something that we're afraid of and we're always talking about.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: Oh well, will Trump save us from persecution or who will do it?
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: Who trump save us from persecution or will?
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: Will you know who?
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: Who will?
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: Who will do it?
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: Who will save us from the persecution?
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: But the, the early church, embraced persecution and and so it's an, it's in talks about embracing persecution and the russian gulags, right, and and I I think that when you take that attitude, you see that when you see persecution as a gift, the way that St Ignatius of Antioch did, the way that Origen of Alexandria did, and the other church fathers, the apostles and Christ himself, when you see persecution as something that is ultimately for the good.
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: Then you look at those who persecute you.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: Whether you're talking about your captors, like St Ignatius of Antioch, the Jaguars, as he calls them, or whether you're talking about the globalist elite right or the liberal elite, or whatever you want to say, they're giving us this gift and they're giving us this, you know the gift of the presence of the Lord, of this chance to sort of to overcome our own worldly ambitions and passions and desires to sacrifice for Christ.
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: But what about them?
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: They're incurring this guilt, this terrible guilt.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: They're becoming slaves.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: They're slaves to sin, they're unwitting servants of the devil.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: And then you have St Paul, who is a classic example of one of these people who's converted right, and he's a great gift to the church.
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: So think about Kamala Harris, or whoever you want to think.
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: She could be the next St Paul.
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: If we love her, if we try to win her over, instead of seeing her as the enemy, the demon, try to win her over, love her, serve her, and do that with whoever's in your path.
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a different way to describe her.
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: In other words, instead of arguing about her stance, say on abortion, I can say you know what?
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: And I really my heart goes out to her.
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: She really needs to be, she needs Jesus Christ, or however you want to word that.
• 54:06
  Speaker 2: But it's just a different way to approach it.
• 54:08
  Speaker 2: And you know what I?
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: I'm not quite so anxious and and nervous when I'm saying that, you know, I mean it's, it's, it's kind of a calmness.
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: I could step out into the arena with that kind of attitude, michael, I could make my point clear.
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: But to your Gen Z point, I it, it doesn't have to be vitriol and it shouldn't be right, and and and.
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: On the other hand, I can also see Trump, and, and he's actually getting persecuted, you know, and it's right.
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know, we wouldn't even see all this evil if he wasn't getting shot at.
• 54:37
  Speaker 2: And now we find out since the very beginning, right.
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: So all these forces, you know, as St Paul calls them in Ephesians six, all the powers and principalities.
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: We're not dealing with flesh and blood, paul.
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: St Paul would say and dealing with flesh and blood, st Paul would say, and I think that's what you're saying.
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: I mean we're in a spiritual warfare and the enemy is the enemy right, just the GK Chesterton, it's Satan is the enemy.
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: My wife's not the enemy, my neighbor's not the enemy.
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: The enemy is the enemy.
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: Hey, god bless you, michael.
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: I only got a couple of minutes left, but I really enjoy this book.
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: Michael, I only got a couple of minutes left, but I really enjoy this book and I really enjoy having you on the show.
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: You concluded with, I think, the gospel, how did you say it?
• 55:17
  Speaker 2: The gospel, the great crusade, or something.
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: At the end, what do you think about these young people?
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: What can we do?
• 55:24
  Speaker 2: We walk into the arena.
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: We want to bring the gospel to them, and I think they're willing to speak.
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: As a millennial, someone closer in age to them, michael, what's the forum or the chance?
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: Is it just as we meet people in the streets and get a chance, like for me?
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: Look, I have grandkids.
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: I've got seven grandkids.
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: Six of them are girls, michael.
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: So that's why I'm still in the battle right, because I see what's happening to them and and, and they're willing to talk too.
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: They're not.
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: They're not, you know, they're just kind of high schoolish and and even down, you know, but they're willing to talk.
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: You know they're really, if you approach it correctly, any, any suggestions for us as parents and grandparents, and I, I, I don't know anything and I this, I, so I certainly don't know anything.
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: I certainly don't know the answer to this, but one thing that I have noticed is that one thing that I think young people always feel across generations is they have a great awareness of others' dignity, others dignity, and I think that when we try to lower ourselves, especially older people, when we try to lower ourselves to be cool, to be like them, to be with the times, there's always that you think about.
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: You think about the old, like the, the 60 year old woman who can't give up her youth and she's wearing a halter top and a short skirt.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: It's very undignified, right.
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: Whereas if you go to young people with to use a male example, like a shirt and tie, right, or if you dress your age, if you act your age, if you have gravitas and dignity, young people respond to that.
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: They don't want you to condescend to them.
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: What they need is leadership, right.
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: What they need is someone older and wiser who can not lay down the law don't be a jerk but who, by the example of their virtue and wisdom, you know a peaceful, well-ordered, dignified, grace-filled life.
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: Come, you know, come, talk to me.
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: Let's have a conversation about that and well I'll tell you, you know, don't have sex before you get married.
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: Don't watch porn.
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: Go to mass.
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: What say your prayer?
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: Then that conversation can happen afterwards.
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: But you think about what a striking physical presence.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: You ask any priest who wears a cassock how many young people come up to them in public and want to talk to them, because they recognize a priest, ideally with a beard or something like that.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: This school of masculine spiritual leadership, or a young nun, the gravitas that they project, that is something that people are drawn towards.
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: You don't have to go to them at all.
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: Authenticity, huh yes, of who you are and if you're authentically an old man?
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: neither of us are old men but if you're authentically an old man, be an old man right.
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: I think that that's something that be an old man right.
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: I think that that's something that you know the influencers, church leaders.
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: I think that that's something that just goes right over their heads, that young people do not want to be condescended to.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: They don't want you to try to act their age.
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: What they actually need is a good example of maturity, um, and so lead them that way, yeah oh, that's beautiful brother.
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: Hey, thank you so much.
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: Hey, listen, where should we go to to to buy the book?
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: And if, if they wanted to reach out to you, you're doing anything like that, or you you know.
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: So give us any contact information you want in the show notes.
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: Uh, michael, for people buying the book from where what's the best place to buy the book?
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: I, I would prefer it.
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: I would get more money if you went to uh, sophia and sophia, okay good yeah, but I mean it does, the money doesn't matter, so yeah, but if we can get him, to go to sophia.
• 59:21
  Speaker 2: They're nice people that listen to us uh, michael, they'll be happy to go to sophia.
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: It's a little extra button for them to push because they don't really have it always right on their computer.
• 59:31
  Speaker 2: But yeah, sophia is a great company and they're doing such good work and so, yeah, thank you.
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: So, sophia Press, I'll make sure I get the link to the book in the show notes.
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: Anything else you want in there.
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: No, that's good, I appreciate it, thank you.
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, thank you.
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: Thanks for your time and, if you think about it, connect me with that young priest I'd love to I don't know what age he is actually at your parish.
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: I'd like to see, just see, what he's doing to bring those young people in, because he's got a good barbell approach going over there.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: It seems like right, keeping the old people there but bringing in the new ones.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 2: That's a great.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: I love to talk to him just to see what he's doing, because priests are looking for answers and that's what I do.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: I meet with priests half the time, so good stuff.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: Thank you, jack.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: Michael.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: God bless you.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: Thanks for being with me.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 2: Thanks everyone.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us today.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: Talk to you again soon.
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 2: Bye-bye.