Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #599 Claymore! Living On The Surface, Never Going Deep...We Lose Our Identity In A Culture Without God

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#599 Claymore! Living On The Surface, Never Going Deep...We Lose Our Identity In A Culture Without God · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: I'm Jack Riggert, your host.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: This is the update for Claymore.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Miletus Christi this is really for young men, gen Z men.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Let's start with Miletus Christi.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: This is really for young men Gen Z men we started with.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: We're finding that it's going a little bit around for even the younger millennials.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: So up into the 30s, let's say this is the battle plan and Miletus Christi, developed by the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: What it's for is this crazy world that we're living in and this is our regular weekly update.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: And Claymore is really to help young men.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: We're starting to see a real movement with young men.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: We saw it in the election with Donald Trump, and it's not really just about Donald Trump.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: It's more than that.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: It's the young men that we're talking to are saying, hey, there's got to be something more.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: More than that, it's the young men that we're talking to are saying, hey, there's got to be something more.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: We're living in a very toxic time.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: They're sensing something around them is not right.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: This has been going on for a long time.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: We've been talking to young people for a long time, and women too, but the young guys especially, are starting to ask questions more and more and more, and we want to be there for them.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: You can see this craziness right now with.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: We're trying to take down this deep state and I won't get into all this right now because I've been talking about it for years already.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes of Claymore coming out on every Friday.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: We have been talking about this for a long time.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: The deep state.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: You know this deep state and also the deep church.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: And what is that?
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: It's a way of really taking down the United States.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: It's an attack on marriage and the family.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: It's an attack on Christ and the church himself.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: So this is an old battle.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: This has been going on for a long time, but we saw it accelerating.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Something's up right now.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: We want to make sense of it and also, at the end of the day, to always keep our eye on the prize.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: You know where we're going with this thing this battle of the human heart between love and lust, between all that's true, good and beautiful and everything that wants to twist and destroy that.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Remember, satan doesn't have his own clay.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: He could just take what God has created good, including us, our hearts, our bodies, and twist and distort them, and we're seeing this all around him.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: You're seeing the attack on the administration.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Now, with Trump's administration, you're seeing the attack on Elon Musk for really exposing isn't that something?
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: That he's exposing the waste, and you go, who would be against exposing the waste?
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: And so I want to talk a little bit about that today and I want to get into an example or a story that I had with a young woman.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: And I'm going to tell a young woman's story because, at the end of the day, you know all of us, when we start to stand up for what's true, good and beautiful and we start to understand how we're created, our identity, our meaning and purpose, why we're created, male and female, this love story, and especially in this pornographic culture, we also, as men, we have to turn around and protect the women in our lives, even if they don't understand it.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: We've been talking about my sister, my bride, from the Song of Songs, where a man is wooing in this erotic love poetry in the middle of the Bible, is wooing this woman and he calls her sister, my bride, my sister, my bride.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: He calls her sister first.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: You go.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Why would he call her sister.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: First he does because we come from a common humanity, and he's viewing her as a sister, as someone to respect, somebody to protect, especially from himself, from his own lust.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: And he's viewing her as a sister, as someone to respect, somebody to protect, especially from himself, from his own lust, and then, only then, is he worthy to be the bridegroom and bring his bride into this story.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: It's really a beautiful story.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: So this is the battle of the heart.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: Elon Musk, if you've been listening to this for a while, you know I really love Elon.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: You know, if you've been listening to this for a while, you know I really love Elon.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Elon is very broken, though, in his personal life, but the bravery that he's had in exposing so much corruption and buying Twitter itself, which is now X, just to give a platform because he saw the free speech being taken away.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: So we've seen all this already.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: But Elon, he said this late last year.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: He said the reason I believe in truth and honesty is because I'm trying to understand the universe.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to understand reality.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to understand what's the meaning of life, what are we here for?
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: What's going on?
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: So he's asking, asking, asking these questions.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Well, he's not a believer in Jesus Christ, as far as I know, and you can tell that he's got 14 children now and he's trying to repopulate the world, and he's trying to do it through children, what he doesn't grasp yet.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: And this is the moral of the story today, when you take your eye off the prize, when you take your eye off of Jesus Christ, who came into this world to not only redeem us for our sins, to save us from sin and death, but to be a model to showcase how to live when you don't have this objective truth in your life.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: This is what I was just saying.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: He's looking for reality.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: What is reality, what is the truth?
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: And you can go off the rails.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: So he's a genius in so many ways, building all these different businesses and stuff, and you can see he has courage and strength.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: You know he didn't have to put this all on the line.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Tesla stores are getting bombed, cars are getting damaged and so you go.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: Why would he do all this?
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: He had it made and it's just what he said.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: He's trying to stand up for what's true, good and beautiful for our country, for free speech, but he gets twisted and distorted in his own personal life.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Right, we really need at this point to really discern how should I live, right?
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: So that's what Claymore is all about.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: How should I live, right?
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: So that's what Claymore is all about.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: He's getting close with certain things for sure Elon is.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: I just hope we can get him over to the next stage and really to see Jesus Christ, and really to see, in order to make sense of the story that we came into.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: We really need God in our life.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Today we're faced with a culture and a nation in crisis and decline.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Ultimately, this is a crisis of individual human hearts, men and women who've rejected objective truth and instead have embraced subjective constructs of individual thoughts and feelings.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: This falls closely on the heels of Europe and Western civilization as a whole.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: America was always behind that broken, I mean.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Europe was coming down.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: It's been declining for a long, long time.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: The United States seemed to be holding up, but underneath it, with this deep state, was building up, building up, building up.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: And we saw it with the Biden administration.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: The evil just unleashed in the world, pushing pornography and these LBGTQ, abortion, contraception all over the world.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Our CIA, fbi you just saw, oh my gosh, they're pushing injustice around the world and at some point you say, wow, this has got to be broken up.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: The US Declaration of Independence says that governments aren't easy to take down and you don't want to take them down.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: We spent all this time building up the United States, but he said at some point, if the tyrants come back in and this is in 1776, the US Declaration of Independence said that if the government got out of control, if it really became this totalitarian state, then we have to really look at it.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Well, this is what's going on now.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Trump understands this and is trying to break this apart, and it's just a brutal battle, right?
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Fulton Sheen, with a saintly long-ranging spiritual vision he was speaking about these things when I was a kid saw the roots of this decline and today's crisis firmly planted and growing.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: And in 1974, before I graduated from high school, he said this he was warning of a crisis already in Christendom.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: He saw this ahead of time.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: First of all, he said he was warning of a crisis already in Christendom.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: He saw this ahead of time.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: First of all, he said we are at the end of Christendom.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: He said solemnly during his television show, which he had a number one rated television show for a while on TV.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: It's amazing right Now.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Not Christianity, he said, not the church itself.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: The church is the beauty, right, the church, the underlying is beautiful.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: She's really the you know coming down, this deposit of faith coming down to us, spotless bride of Jesus Christ.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: But it's unfortunately, it's run by people and people are always following.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: We see this deep state and the deep church working together, even these globalist things.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Okay, I've talked about some of that before.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: But he said this is what's ending.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: Not the church, he said per se, but Christendom, he said.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: That's economic, political and social life as inspired by Christian principles.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: This has been taken out of our culture.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: We see this happening.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: This is what the young men are sensing.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Something's wrong and it is.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Morality has broken down, he says.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Look at the symptoms, he said the breakup of the family, divorce, immorality, general dishonesty, the violence that we're seeing in our inner cities and across the world, with wars and stuff.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: That was in 1974.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Today it's much worse.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Almost every institution has been compromised by corruption, including the church.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: The murder of the innocents now is a right Marriage and the family have reduced to mean anything and so nothing.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Gender ideologies are pushed on children.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Parents are forced to comply by a weaponized justice system.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen reminded us that of the 22 major civilizations and this is so important for young people will you have a nation?
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: Will you have a country?
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Well, we have to stand up.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Right now we have a window of opportunity, with Trump back in there, to try to break up this deep state that's just been sucking.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: You can just see all the waste just sucking the money, taking the money from all of us and pushing it up, taking it, extorting it in the form of taxes and other things and then dividing it among themselves.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: It's something huh, but we always see this in socialism, neo-marxism.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: It's the deep state.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: They wanted to suck it like a hydra.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: You know, come in into all of us.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: And that doesn't mean every single person that works for the government is an evil person.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: They're not.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: But unfortunately, what happens is you get into a corrupt system and in order to play the game, you got to become part of it, or at least turn your head and pretend like you're not seeing it right.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: So we live this day-to-day and we don't see the decline.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: But now it just got so bad.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: We say, okay, what am I going to do now?
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: What should I do?
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: And so this is what Claymore is about.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: So I want you again to download this Claymore.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: If you go to John Paul II, john Paul II Renewal the website's in our show notes and when you go there, just go into resources, go to Claymore and click on this and just download it just a few pages and that's the battle plan.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: It's a three-step battle plan based on John Paul II's work, where he saw this very, very clearly, kind of like a triangle in front of you, and that triangle marriage and the family, christ and the church builds up the culture.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: And then we take those principles, like Bishop Sheen said, and bring those out into the culture.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: That's the way you save the country.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: That's what the country, that's what our nation was founded on right Judeo-Christian principles, people that were standing up for liberty, standing up for what's right.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: The good news is for all of us as you do that, you actually become a good person, you actually become a person of love, you actually fulfill the very meaning and purpose of your life.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: When you do that, it's a win-win situation, because someday you're gonna be out of here.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: This is a temporal space.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: We're not here very long and boom, we're out of here.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: And when you are out of here, god will be there to take you in, because we're already walking with God.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Eternity doesn't mean tomorrow.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Eternity means forever.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: We're eternal beings.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: That's what Claymore is.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: Claymore's sword is to first of all do battle on your own heart, your individual human heart, between love and lust, between truth and lies, between truth and lies, between goodness and all the evil that comes in the world, between the beauty that we see in the world and the beauty that we see in a woman, a woman to a man, a man to a woman.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: And we don't profane that, we don't twist it and distort it.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: Again, satan doesn't have his own clay.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: He can only take what God has created beautiful, say a woman and a woman's body and twist and distort it into pornography, into use, into using each other, to the point where, if the woman would get pregnant with your child, we'll kill the child, right, mother Teresa?
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Isn't it a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you can live as you wish?
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Look at, this is a tough battle.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: Look at, I know this as a man.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: I've been leading men for a long time.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: I had to fight that battle and I still have to fight that battle all the time.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's amazing.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: I was spiritually attacked on Monday.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you that story sometime Monday night.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: You know, the devil is real, satan's real, and he's out after, after, your heart.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: All right, I wanna tell you a story of a young woman.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: We were having this conversation and I'll tell you about it.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: So I'm writing an article right now, called Living on the Surface, never Going Deep.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: It's a stark contrast that emerges between a world without God, where life drifts into meaninglessness this is what we're told today.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: Right, life has no meaning, only my truth, your truth, et cetera and in contrast to that, we're a world where we embrace our divine purpose and discover our true identity.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: This is the story I want to tell you today, upon arriving at a friend's house, his lake house.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: It's a beautiful summer day last year we come up to his lake house.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: He's got a beautiful lake house.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: It's a beautiful summer day last year we come up to his lake house.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: He's got a beautiful lake house and it's literally right off of the water.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: Well, when I knocked on the door, I was greeted at the door by a young woman, his daughter's college roommate, who had come for a long weekend on the water with a couple of other friends.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: She introduced herself as Jenny and we spent a few minutes chatting before I walked in to greet everybody else After a day we spent on the lake.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: That day we gathered at night for wood-grilled steaks, a bottle of great Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, and the conversation turned to these young people that were sitting at the table with us and I started to ask them questions about dating today, relationships, casual hookups, the prevailing gender ideologies being pushed on college campuses, and I asked a few other probing questions about love and happiness, encouraging them to reflect and just to talk about these things.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: As we talked, I shared snippets of John Paul II's theology of the body and it became clear how many misconceptions and confusions are out in today's culture.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Later that evening, as a friend of mine that owned the house and I were carrying logs to this outdoor fireplace to do a little burning of some wood out there, it's a beautiful setting and everybody was going to come by later on and grab a glass of wine or some drinks and come down by the fireplace.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: My friend mentioned that Jenny had confided to his daughter, saying she felt as though she had lost her identity.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Jack, he said, it's such a confusing time for young people.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: He said what's that expression you always quote from God Amos Best, one of the Vatican II documents, and I replied it's when God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: We don't realize this sometimes.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: When you take God out of your life, god out of the culture, you lose your identity, you become unintelligible, you don't know who you are.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: We become these animals that you see in the world, and human beings can be the worst.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Most of the evil that you see in the world and human beings can be the worst.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Most of the evil that we see in the world are men and women cooperating with evil and we go out, we do evil.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: When we do evil, we become evil, and this is the battle that we're fighting today.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: So we, as Claymore men, miletus Christi, soldiers for Christ, are coming in and saying no, no, no, no.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: We're willing to fight that battle, we're willing to live our lives for Christ and be able to have this guideline right Go along the narrow gate and live properly.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: So isn't that the truth?
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: What doesn't have to look far to see a world losing its way?
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: God has been systematically pushed out of our country, our culture, our marriages, our families and, most tragically, our own individual human hearts.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: When we forget God, humanity becomes unintelligible.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: The next morning Jenny came out into the deck where I had got up early enjoying a cup of coffee and I loved to watch the spectacular sunrise coming up over the lake.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: And that was a morning where the clouds glowed with brilliant magenta streaks in them, that beautiful rose-colored streaks in there, and it had the wisps of soft gray clouds kind of in between them and the birds were singing in the trees.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: It was truly a magical moment.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Jenny came out there and after a few minutes I acknowledged her a little bit, but I was looking.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: I let her just enjoy the sunrise for a little while.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Something about small bee beauty and nature lifts you to big bee beauty God himself, right.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: And then I turned to her.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: I said Jenny, think about the day you were born.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: You arrived on the stage of life suddenly existing in a world that you didn't create.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: You came into a larger story that you didn't write and as a newborn infant you were completely dependent on others for food, warmth, love.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: But regardless of your circumstances, you weren't in an accident.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: You were brought into this world not as a mere spectator but as a vital part of a larger story.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Jenny, you are a beloved child of God.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: That's your deepest identity, as Scripture says before I formed you in the womb, I knew you Before you were born I set you apart.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: It's from Jeremiah, chapter one.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: This is the lens through which you will understand your identity, meaning and purpose in God's plan.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: God's plan that we learn how to love and be loved.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: God is love.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: The truth is inscribed in our hearts and even stamped in our very bodies as male and female, created for love.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: But here lies the danger.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: Our culture has lost its story.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: We no longer pass this down like we should have from generation to generation to generation.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: It's abandoned.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Truth, goodness, beauty, especially the beauty of authentic love.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Truth, goodness, beauty, especially the beauty of authentic love.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: Love in today's time has been reduced to a feeling and then further reduced down to sex.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Right, modern culture screams at us forget about God, the church and the Bible.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: There's no creator.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: We're all here by accident, just random atoms hitting atoms.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: Life has no meaning, then no purpose, no truth.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Truth, only my truth or your truth.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: But the human heart doesn't function well in a world devoid of meaning and purpose.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: As saint augustine famously wrote so long ago you have made us for yourself, oh lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: So where do you come from?
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: You have to decide on just two possibilities.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: There's only two.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: You're either an accident of history, free then to do whatever you please, indulge it, waste it, even end your own life because ultimately it has no meaning or purpose, it's meaningless.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Or you're a created human being, and if that's true, then you're created for a purpose and our whole life is to discover what is that purpose?
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: If you've never opened your heart and mind to this fundamental question of existence, you'll never really have peace.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: There will always be a void that nothing in this world can fill.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: So many people today on prescriptions I think it's over half the country now Anxiety, medicines, depression.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Jesus understands this.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: He understands the human heart's yearning for identity, meaning and purpose.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: He created us.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: It's fascinating that Christianity begins in the very first chapter of John, right in the beginning, with Jesus asking a question of the first disciples who encountered him.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: As the Gospel of John recounts, the next day John the Baptist was standing with two of his disciples.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: He was in Bethany, near the Jordan, baptizing.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Right he's just Jesus walking down toward him and he looks at Jesus and he goes the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: And he says it again with an exclamation point the two disciples of John's who we find out were Andrew, the brother of Peter, and St John, the Evangelist, who actually wrote this.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: They started to follow Jesus.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: Jesus saw them.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: He turned and he says what do you seek?
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: What do you seek?
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: And they said to him Rabbi, which means teacher.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Where are you staying?
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: You seek.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: And they said to him Rabbi, which means teacher, where are you staying?
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: In other words, we sense something about you.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Where are you staying?
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: We want to continue on with you.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: And what did he say to them?
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Come and see.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: Come and see.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: This invitation, come and see has echoed throughout history as the essence of the Christian journey.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: Jesus never imposed, he never used propaganda, he never forced an ideology.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: He simply invited us, trusting the human heart's ability to recognize the truth.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: We all ask what is my true identity?
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: What is the meaning and purpose of my life?
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: Does true love even exist?
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: Jesus answers our thirst with an invitation you want to find those things out?
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Come and see.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: To find the answers our hearts are yearning for.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: We must have the courage to journey beyond the noise and false promises of this world.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: I'm reminded of Carl Jung.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: If you've ever taken Psychology 101 in college, you studied Carl Jung and the crazy Sigmund Freud fathers of psychoanalysis right?
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Well, he wrote in Memories Dreams and Reflections.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: He wrote this I have frequently seen people come to me because they were neurotic when they contend themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success, money, and remain unhappy even when they attain these things.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: Such people, he said, are confined to too narrow a spiritual horizon.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Their life lacks sufficient content, sufficient meaning.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: If they are enabled to develop into a more spacious personalities, get an idea of what the bigger picture, the neuroses, he said, generally disappears.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: What we need is GK Chesterton would say we're closed up.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: Huh, we need air.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: We need air.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: I think this applies to everyone.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: Speaking of Carl Jung, let me share one more story as I finish up here today.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: In 1961, bill W, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote a letter to Dr Carl Jung.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: This letter described in his own words the chain of events that changed Bill's life and influenced the spiritual emphasis of Alcoholics Anonymous.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: Events in which Jung played a key role, synonymous events in which Young played a key role.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: It all began, bill wrote in 1931 in a conversation between Carl Young and a hopeless alcoholic named Roland H.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: Roland H was young, gifted in business, rich, but he had tried every cure for alcoholism available at the time.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: All his attempts failed.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: In despair he traveled to Zurich, switzerland, and placed himself under the care of Dr Young for nearly a year, finally with no success.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: Young was blunt.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: He told Roland that any further medical treatment was pointless.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: Stunned, roland asked if there was any other hope.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: Young held out only one that Roland experienced a genuine conversion, a spiritual transformation.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: According to Young, such experiences were rare among alcoholics, but alcoholics who had them stopped drinking.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: This shred of hope was enough for Roland.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: He returned home and began his spiritual search.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: Bill, in his letter to Young, told of his firsthand knowledge of conversion for himself.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: For Bill it happened in 1934, during his last detox at Towns Hospital in New York City.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: At that time Bill was also an alcoholic at the end of his rope.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: Dr Silkworth, bill's attending physician, laid out the options to Bill's wife.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: She should let the authorities lock Bill up, watch him go insane or just let him die at home.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: Bill knew the doctor's prognosis.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I was at the bottom of a pit.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: He wrote young.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: All at once I found myself crying out if there is a God, let him show himself.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: I'm ready to do anything.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: At that moment, bill wrote, his hospital room seemed to flood with white light.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: I was caught up in an ecstasy which there are no words to describe.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: It seemed to me in the mind's eye that I was on a mountain and that a wind of not of ear, but of the spirit was blowing.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Dr Silkworth encouraged Bill to hold on to this experience, whatever it was Bill did, and he never took another drink from that day on.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Released from the hospital, bill immediately began to work on two tasks understanding that white light, that ecstasy, that white light that had come into his heart, and then helping other alcoholics to experience something equally powerful.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: And it developed into the 12-step program.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: Here it's not brain surgery.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: You have the two great commandments right To open yourself up and be filled with divine life and love, and then to go out and love your neighbor.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: Right, the two great commandments love God, be filled with divine life and love, and then go out and love your neighbor Jenny, st Paul.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: St John Paul II left us a prayer in a homily he gave for the dedication of the Divine Mercy Shrine in Poland, and I want to end this morning.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: I told her with a prayer Would she pray with me?
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: And she said yes.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: And here's the prayer God, merciful Father.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Let's say the sign of the cross right.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: Father, son, holy Spirit, amen.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: God merciful Father, in your Son, jesus Christ, you have revealed your love and poured it out upon us.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: In the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, we entrust you today the destiny of the world and of every man and woman.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: Bend down to us, these poor sinners that we are.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: Heal our weakness, conquer all evil.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: Grant that all the peoples of the earth may experience your mercy.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: In you, the triune God, may they ever find the source of hope that they're looking for.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: Eternal Father, by the passion and resurrection of your Son, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Amen.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: Amen to the Father, son, holy Spirit, amen.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: This is part of the three-step plan right, the spiritual formation number one, where in the morning you get down on your knees before you look at that phone and what do we say?
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: We say let it be done to me according to your word, kneeling with our blessed mother, opening ourselves up.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Then, number two remember that temptation's not a sin.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: You're going to get battered by temptations.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: This is an invitation to prayer.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: It's what Bill W did.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: You fall on your knees and say God, boom, I'm opening myself up to you.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Every time a temptation comes, I'm just opening it up to you.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: It's an invitation to prayer.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: Help me with this, help me with this, and it becomes a beautiful thing.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: You'd be praying all day long, right, but it's always lifting your heart up.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: And then, third, you know, get up from there and become a person of love.
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: Love the next person.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: You see, that's how we start out every morning.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: It's a beautiful thing.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: So, again, download this.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: Let me just read you again from the first page of the Claymore Battle Plan.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: It's called.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: It comes from 2 Timothy 2, verses 1 through 3.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Jesus Christ, and what you have heard from me before many witnesses.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Entrust to the faithful men who will be able to teach others also.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: Take your share of suffering as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: You know, this movement that we're talking about with Claymore is not for those on college campuses seeking a safe place with cookies and milk.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: This is a movement of young men with the courage, reason and intellect to do what men of like minds and hearts have done throughout the ages to go out and seek the truth, what is the truth, and then stand up for that truth.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: Then, upon finding this treasure this is so important to go out and share it, just like Bill W with a brother, go out and find another person or two that is searching for the truth and share this battle plan with them, building a community of brothers and seeking all that is true, good and beautiful, especially the beauty of love.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: To succeed, you must know the plan and know that you're not living in a neutral zone.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: You came into a world at war with an enemy that seeks your destruction.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Over the past decades, the enemy has gained a lot of territory.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: So Claymore battles for life, liberty and the pursuit of authentic love.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: A three-step plan to take back territory for Christ and build their culture of life and love.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: That's what Claymore is all about.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: So every Friday again, I'm going to update this so you'll see the spiritual formation there.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: Get into that spiritual formation, share that with a brother of yours and then I'll continue to unpack the stories.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: On Fridays.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: Have me out at your church.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Give us a call.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: I don't care where you're at in the country.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: You know we fly out there.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: It doesn't cost much anymore on an airplane.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: Get a little community together.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: Let's talk at your parishes or in your communities and let's build these cells.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: I want to build these cells all over the country and help each other.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Also, in the show notes, you're going to see discussion questions in there.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: So sit down with somebody, listen to this podcast and then answer those or just discuss those study questions.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: I didn't put them in all the earlier ones.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: I meant to do that all along and sometimes I just get busy and forget about it.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: So I'll go back and start putting those study questions in the previous ones and then put them all into the ones going forward.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: You can email me.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: My email is in the show notes info at jp2reneworg.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: You'll see it in there.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: Shoot me an email if you have questions or if you need help on something.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: In the meantime, keep me in your prayers.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: I'll keep you in mind.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: God bless you.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: Thanks everybody.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Talk to you again soon.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Have a great weekend.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Bye-bye, thank you.