Latest / The Manly Catholic: Training Soldiers for Christ / Ep 208 - The Hidden Code Inside Scripture That Most Catholics Never Notice with Fr. Robert Nixon

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Ep 208 - The Hidden Code Inside Scripture That Most Catholics Never Notice with Fr. Robert Nixon · The Manly Catholic: Training Soldiers for Christ

• James Caldwell: you come across one particular number, it might be the number three or might be the number 144,000 or something, and you sit down and think about it, try to find connections with other numbers, both in scripture and elsewhere, and come up with this meaning. And the question is, is that just your own mind kind of imposing this meaning onto? And the answer is both yes and no. But that doesn't mean that what it's uncovering or discovering ⁓ is not valid or not meaningful, you know? And ⁓ I think we need to recognize that part of the meaning of sacred scripture lies in the reader interpreting it with the guide of the Holy Spirit and the teachings of the Church. podcast that calls you out of the shadows and into the fight. Here we forge men into warriors for Christ, husbands, fathers and leaders who refuse to kneel to the modern world's lies. No more passivity, no more excuses, no more lukewarm faith. This is your battle cry, your call to arms. The time for weakness is over. It's time to fight. Welcome to the Manly Catholic. Let's get to work. Hello all. Welcome back to another episode of the Manly Catholic. This is James, your host and with me once again, we welcome back Father Robert Nixon. Father, welcome back to the Manly Catholic podcast. Thanks very much, James. It's great to be with you today and to have the chance to share with you and with all your listeners. Yes. And tonight we're going to be talking about ⁓ Father's latest translation. I'll just flash this up here for everyone. It is called The Mystical Meaning of Numbers in Sacred Scripture by St. Isidore of, is it Seville or Seville, Father? I always don't know which way to go with that. Seville. Seville. Seville, all right. For this one. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Now, for those of you who remember, Father was actually on, back on episode 167 where we talked about the Eucharistic visions of St. Francis of Rome. So here we are once again diving into the translation. was telling Father, he is the master of medieval translation. So we're excited to dive into another book that he has written and translated, I should say. But Father, before we dive in, would you mind leading us in a quick word of prayer before we begin? Yes. We pray through the intercession of our Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, our Holy Father, St. Benedict, and the Wise and Holy Saint Isidore of Seville, that we may be guided in our discussion towards the path of truth and wisdom which bring us closer to you, O Lord, through Christ our Lord. Amen. Amen. Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, thank you, Father. And now, Father, ⁓ so our listeners maybe who weren't able to listen in the last episode, Father Robert Nixon is a monk of the Abbey of the Most Holy Trinity in New Norcia, Western Australia, and serves as director of the Institute for Benedictine Studies. is a prolific translator of medieval works from the saints for 10 books, including The Cross and Medal of St. Benedict, Humility and the Elevation of the Mind to God by Thomas Akempas. ⁓ ⁓ And of course the mystical meaning of numbers and sacred scripture which is his latest release and what we'll be diving into today. Now, Father, let's just start with kind of a basic question. So St. Isidore of Seville maybe might not be a household Catholic name for some of our listeners out there. Would you mind just diving into a brief background of who was he and why does his voice still carry weight, you know, some 1400 years later from he was around? Yeah. So he was born in Spain in the year 560. So that is ⁓ just, well, only 80 years after the birth of our own Holy Father, St. Benedict. This is the very early middle ages, a kind of transition period between the Roman empire, the classical empire and the emerging middle ages. And ⁓ it's interesting that the The Roman Empire, the Imperial organization and classical Latin actually survived longer in Spain than they did ⁓ in Italy, in anywhere else. So was still fairly much the Roman Imperial world at this stage, but it was ⁓ giving way to this emerging middle ages, of course. And St. Isidore was born to a wealthy and noble family. His uncle was the archbishop. of Seville. And when St. Isidore was young, he was sent to him as a student. During that time, he would have been learning, reading, writing, studying philosophy, rhetoric, the sciences, and so forth. Basically, in those days, people studied or learned people studied the whole range of subjects, which is very different from what we do today, of course. Anyway, he became ⁓ an outstanding figure. then worked as ⁓ a preacher because at that stage there were still ⁓ lots of groups of people where Christianity hadn't properly reached and there were also slightly heretical, well I shouldn't say heretical, but slightly ⁓ non-orthodox groups of Christians. So he was bringing them into understanding of the Catholic Church, bringing them into full union with the Catholic Church. ⁓ And when his uncle passed away, ⁓ he was chosen ⁓ basically by popular acclaim and demand of the clergy to become Archbishop himself, which he did. And he accepted this role somewhat reluctantly because he loved the life of study, of meditation, and of solitude. But anyway, in this role, he continued to be an outstanding preacher and teacher and writer and became known as the most learned man. of his age. He was responsible for founding a lot of Benedictine monasteries. although technically speaking, he wasn't actually a Benedictine, we honor him within the Benedictine order as a proponent of our charism, of our approach. And he wrote many books, the most famous of which is a book called Etymologies. And this book talks about the meaning and relationships and derivation of words. And ⁓ it does this in great depth to the effect that it is really an encyclopedia bringing together all forms and branches of knowledge at the time. And interestingly, something ⁓ that a lot of people don't know is that this book, apart from the Bible, of course, was the most ⁓ widely copied or widely held book in medieval libraries. So was kind of like the equivalent of, if I can use as somewhat outdated. Similarly of the Encyclopedia Britannica, probably more relevant to say Wikipedia now, you know, it contained everything. And ⁓ for this reason, because of his great abilities as an encyclopedist, St. John Paul II ⁓ named him as patron saint of the internet. And that was of course in the early stages of the internet when the internet was primarily a kind of encyclopedic tool for putting information, sharing information and so forth. But he, I think he was a wonderful scholar. He brought together not only knowledge of Latin and Greek, but also seems to have knowledge of Hebrew. And because Spain, where it's located, had dealings with Northern Africans, people from further afield, he seems to have been familiar with the knowledge ⁓ and beliefs and sciences of virtually every corner of the globe. And that's one of the things which is reflected both in his etymologies, which is a very, very long work, as well as this shorter work, the mystical meaning of numbers. And reading this book, one of the things I loved about it was the diversity of different strands he brings in, in interpreting these numbers. So you've got stuff from the church tradition, stuff from Hebrew tradition, and then also stuff from the natural sciences, ⁓ biology, astronomy, geography. and then from linguistics, from the classical world and so forth. So ⁓ he was quite a marvelous figure in this way. Yes, he was. I came across that he was the patron saint of the internet. So I'm glad you brought that up. Father, I mentioned this to you as well, kind of before we started. I think a lot of us, we're taught numbers obviously in the Bible, the 12 apostles, the 40 days in the desert, the seven days of creation, the seven sacraments, things like that. And we kind of understand that, you know, the numbers have meaning, but, you know, I guess maybe we don't understand like why it's significant. Would you mind? mean, I don't know if St. Isidore dives into this specifically, but just kind of globally, maybe you can just describe why are numbers significant? I mean, because we see the same things in the Bible over and over and over again too. I'll let you kind of run with We do, in fact, you know, and ⁓ And the significance of numbers was something which was common to beliefs in the ancient and medieval world. And, you know, for us today with numbers, you know, we're dealing with quantities of one thing and another all the time, I guess we think, well, numbers, they're more or less just chance. They're just, you know, whatever number it is doesn't really make any difference. But to the perspective of the world, which was infused with the idea of a kind of divine design to the universe, that the universe didn't just hang together by chance, that it was basically, to put it this way, a phenomenal act of engineering or even an artwork. And so that all of the proportions and harmonies which caused Nate, the natural world, to hang together, ⁓ they had a kind of mystical significance, a type of divine significance. And they believe that the numbers in themselves weren't just descriptions of material things, were, were, if I put it, of philosophical realities or even mystical realities in themselves. And so in the ancient world, mathematics ⁓ was understood as an almost kind of like mystical philosophy. And, you know, this was particularly the case with the Pythagoreans, but But it continued and it was present in the Hebrew world as well. So all the numbers which are in the Bible, they meant something and they continue to mean something because, we think two, three, four, so what. But to them, you know, each of these represented things which went beyond the physical and therefore ⁓ were significant that they pointed us towards this spiritual reality. And if you like the ⁓ quantitative nature of the universe, its kind of measurements and proportions and quantities was like ⁓ a divine, invisible network, a very wise and beautiful network, holding everything together in harmony. And, you know, I think that is something which we probably could recapture in our way of looking at things, you know. that numbers are not just chance or arbitrary or so forth. And we probably think that because we get so many decimal points and so many, you know, extremely long and odd numbers and so forth. But ⁓ to St. Isidore and throughout most of history and most cultures, by the way, ⁓ these numbers have gone beyond that in significance. And, you know, I believe that by looking at them ⁓ in sacred scripture in that way and looking at them not only in sacred scripture, but in our prayers, liturgical acts, ⁓ even in, in the human phenomena and artistic phenomena, even in the world of science, I think we can, we can start to penetrate that things are actually, ⁓ this creation we live in is more mysterious and more intelligent than we might often assume. Yeah, it's gosh, it's just so crazy to think about too, like all the. the sciences and everything. And just the simplest explanation obviously is, if God created numbers, obviously there's a significance behind it because God doesn't make any mistakes. And you just see these same numbers pop up throughout scripture, time. Absolutely. And these numbers are not only a thing which is created, but in a sense, the kind of blueprint for the material world or the framework of the created world. And you know, their importance is so great. you know, for example, with the 12 apostles within our Benedictine tradition, we have this belief, St. Benedict had a belief that the optimum number for a community was 12. And I think, and when the community gets bigger, maybe think about starting a new one and so forth. you know, practice experience shows that that is really the case. 12 is actually a very good number. And you know, when Jesus picked the 12 apostles. He wasn't just, well, you know, there just happens to be 12. It could have been 11. It could have been 13. No, he was specific. It was 12. And when one of them, you know, went astray, he was replaced to complete the 12. And this of course matched with the 12 tribes of, of Israel and, you know, 12, 12 months of the year and so forth. So I think that this, you know, it's, it's all important. This sense that, that everything is connected. Now, Father, was St Isidore in this book, was he the first one to of, I guess, flush out the significance of numbers and the significance, especially in scripture, or was there other ones before him? I know he obviously... Yeah. Well, to a certain extent, there had been other ones before him. So a very famous book on numbers was called The Theology of Numbers by a philosopher called Iamblichus. Now he was actually, ⁓ he was not a Christian. He was a neo-Platonist, a follower of the Greek ideas, but he sensed that. Now the Hebrew, the rabbis also had this strong sense of the importance of numbers and they would, you know, in fact, ⁓ form, look at the numerical meaning of words. Now, one of the things about Hebrew and Greek is that the letters used ⁓ both represent numbers. as well as ⁓ sounds in words. So that extended to that. there was within the ⁓ Hebrew tradition of which Isidore was certainly aware, there was this great ⁓ fascination, this mysticism of numbers. Now, within our Christian tradition, we have writers like Saint Augustine of Hippo, ⁓ Boethius, ⁓ who wrote detailed books on number, on harmony, and Their approach to writing books on, on harmony number, or basically on music as they called it, wasn't that they actually were, ⁓ you know, great players of musical instruments or anything, but rather they understood the study of music as being the study of proportion. You know, and this proportion both extends to, ⁓ to pitch, ⁓ for those who play guitar and instruments will know if you stop a guitar string, ⁓ at the 12th fret. precisely 50 % along its length, get an octave, the note which is in perfect harmony. And that's not just chance, it's because its frequencies are then half of the frequencies of the lower note, or twice of the frequencies. But so it meshes together. And also, of course, in rhythm, you know, the the organization of rhythm, which extended to poetry, as well as music, in in regular groups, groups of three or four, as the case may be. So there was so Augustine, Boethius, and of course the Greek fathers of the church would have all studied this kind of approach to numbers and have been aware of it. However, I think Saint Isidore of Seville is the first one to catalog specifically the meaning of the numbers in sacred scripture, to take that as his primary basis. And he did it in a kind of ⁓ instructive or useful way. And this is one of the things about St. Isidore of Seville. He didn't just write books ⁓ because he felt like it normally. Normally he wrote books in response to a specific request ⁓ to compile some scholarship to which he had access. And this is very much what he did here. Yeah, it's so funny, Father, you brought up music, the importance of music and you talk about numbers and you don't think it would be really connected, but just the importance of order in that. that symphony, you know, that is almost, you know, like, I think it was, it, I don't know if you read J.R. Tolkien in this, ⁓ not the Lord of the Rings book, but the other book, but he basically made a story of creation and it was, it basically started off with a song, you know, and actually C.S. Lewis too in the creation of Narnia, it started off with a song as well. And so you see these themes too of a beautiful order and creation and then it naturally translates to numbers as well. don't know if you want to comment on as well. One of the things which was a belief in the ancient world, both in the pre-Christian world and in the Christian world was the presence of this music of the spheres or celestial harmony and the idea that the universe consisted of these rotating spheres, which I mean, in a sense, guess it really does. And that they were producing these harmonic relationships all the time, which were infusing everything. We couldn't normally hear them, of course, but when you got into heaven, you would be hearing this celestial harmony. And the idea also that through contemplation, certain people could experience it or get in touch with it in the here and now. So the relationship. between creation and a musical composition, I think is a very wonderful one. It often helps us make sense of, you know, why things are sometimes apparently unpredictable or capricious or so forth, or dissonant, and we can have confidence that they're heading towards a wonderful harmony or wonderful resolution. And even the fact that sometimes in the dissonance, in the clashing chords, ⁓ is the greatest beauty. It really is. It's so funny too, because I, you when I was in school and I was studying, I actually would listen to music and a lot of people do as well. The music actually helps them with comprehension and things like that. So it's almost like a calming, you know, certain music, obviously, as well. And I was reading too, you know, even just we could talk about even church music, right? You Gregorian chant and certain hymns as well, the way that they create them and ⁓ It's designed to lift up your soul to God during certain parts of the music and then bring you down for more solemn parts of the mass and things like that as well. all this, mean, it's just because you think art and science and math is like, ⁓ no, those are those are separate things, right? You think about like the right brain and the left brain almost. But no, like these are designed to actually come together and help us make, like you said, followers to make sense of this world, because, on the outside might seem like chaotic and things are kind of over the place. But no, there actually is order. There is natural order. is certain things the way they need to be. And so we need to recognize that. And music and numbers is just a way to bring that all together and help us make sense of our world. know if you have a comment on that as well. coffee and prayer. It's the perfect blend. Mystic Monk Coffee isn't just another cup of coffee. It's handcrafted by the Carmelite monks of Wyoming, roasted with care and infused with prayer. Whether you're starting your morning or fueling your day, Mystic Monk Coffee has you covered. It offers rich, bold flavors that are as divine as their mission. By choosing Mystic Monk, you're not just enjoying exceptional coffee, but you're supporting a community of monks dedicated to their work, to prayer, and to the church. is coffee with a cause. So what are you waiting for? Visit mysticmonkcoffee.com and experience the brew that's feeling faith and flavor. Yeah. And so, you know, I want to kind of ask you, guess, so one thing that, you know, maybe kind of modern readers, you know, might be skeptical. That's like, okay, well, you have all these numbers and, you know, as humans, we try to rationalize things and try to, like I said, make sense of things. So Are you just like reading into the text and these numbers actually don't mean anything? This is actually a very good question, you know, because, you know, you could say, well, you come across one particular number, it might be the number three or might be the number 144,000 or something. And, you you sit down and think about it, try to find connections with other numbers, both in scripture and elsewhere. And come up with this meaning. the question is, is that just your own mind, ⁓ kind of imposing this meaning onto it or proposing this me? And the answer is both yes and no. So it is true. It is an activity of the mind and the mind is uncovering, ⁓ meanings here, uncovering connections and so forth. But that doesn't mean that what it's uncovering would discovery. is not valid or not meaningful, you know, and, ⁓ I think we, need to recognize that part of the meaning of sacred scripture lies in the reader, ⁓ interpreting it with the guide of the Holy spirit and the teachings of the church and also their own faculties of imagination and reasoning. You know, so this is the encounter with the truth. The encounter is not just, you know, it just says this, just says this, just says this. So these are just simple facts. Basically in the Bible, nothing is an irrelevant inclusion and irrelevant detail. And sometimes I think to think about the most odd things or the most apparently irrelevant things in scripture and to think, well, why is it in there? And this can particularly. ⁓ apply with the gospel, but also ⁓ all passages. We might notice, gee, the author of this particular scripture is describing this in great detail. Why is he doing that? And ⁓ you look, for example, at the book of Revelation, and he says, and going on with all these numbers and everything, think, well, why is he specified? Or even more so, I should say, in the case of the book of numbers, of course. don't know if anyone has ever... look, ⁓ and we in fact read through the whole Bible, including the whole New Testament, Old Testament in our meals at our monastery. We have our meals in silence with scripture being read. And you know, sometimes when you get pages and pages of numbers and names of descendants, it can be tempting to skip over it. ⁓ and I have to admit, I sometimes do that, but you know, th th it's not there for no reason. And you know, if you were to ponder these numbers and something, who knows what you might come up with and to be sure what you're coming up with might be your own mind working primarily. But this is not to say that the Holy spirit is not involved in the process because whenever you're sincerely meditating upon scripture, the Holy spirit is there. You know, so I think we, don't need to be too, you know, if we find something we think, ⁓ well, that seems a bit far-fetched or like he just made it up. Well, you know, it is a connection. It exists as a connection. And the more of those we can make the better, you know, it enriches us, I think. the idea of scripture as being something which is not to enclose our minds, but rather to expand our minds to these. ⁓ progressively more mystical horizons. Yeah. I think too, Father, we naturally like our drawn, I mean, like we all have a favorite number, a number that just like sticks out to us or a number that even in our lives just seems to kind of repeat itself over and over again, so to speak. Was there one in particular that, you know, maybe as you're reading his translations, as you're translating this book, a number that really stuck out to you that maybe you weren't expecting or just kind of surprised you or maybe just kind of drawn one that you weren't expecting at all? Absolutely. So one, a number which we probably don't think about all that much, you know, we probably all think about, you know, seven and three and so forth, but the number five. Now I was fascinated by some of the things he had to say about this. Now, one of the, starts with this observation, which I had to think about a few times. This number five. has a unique property that whenever it is multiplied either by itself or by another odd number, it always produces a numeral, including with the digit five, which is interesting. ⁓ and thus five times five produces 25, three times five produces 15. So when it's more, when the five is a factor multiplied with any other, which is congruent with its genus, i.e. an odd number, it all base manifests its presence and nature clearly. And this, says, makes the number five ⁓ a symbol of the law of God, which of course was associated with five through the Pentateuch, the five books of the law of the Old Testament. And the idea is that what he says is that when the law of God is placed in any congruent situation or applied in any congruent manner, it always results in something like it, finishing with the five. So in other words, ⁓ This is what he says, that its proper and congruent expressions of the law of God will always be in accordance clearly and visibly, though they may vary in their exact prescriptions and measures. And this is very important in making sense of why the Hebrew law, the Old Testament law is not exactly the same as the Christian law, however it is congruent. And he makes the point, the connection of the five books of the Old Testament with the five words of the New Commandment. ⁓ Delegatus in vicium sicut delexa you, vos, love one another just as I have loved you, which is referred to as the nove mandantum, the new commandment. And so he shows mystically and mathematically the harmony between the old law and the new law of the gospel, love one another as I have loved you, which of course is five words in the Latin. ⁓ And then we go on many examples, the five. Foolish virgins, feeding of the multitude from the five lobes. And then he also talks about the ancient philosophers dividing the world into five different zones, which we actually do today. You know, the torrid zone, the temperate zones, the Arctic zone. So this is five them. And then the five senses, five valves in the Latin alphabet. ⁓ five varieties of animals on the earth, ⁓ bipeds, quadrupeds, crawling animals, animals that swim and animals that fly. So, you know, I think that this is, a interesting connection to make, you know, and if he had been musically inclined, I'm sure he would have mentioned the pentatonic scale, which is the five note scale, which is common to virtually all the ancient musics of the world. Well, I was thinking too, like the five rosary, five decades. then the five stones. know, this is five, the five decades of the rosary, five by 10, which gives us, you know, 50, which of course is Pentecost. And the word Pentecost itself actually means 50, which is why it's 50 days after. ⁓ So yeah, so I think that there is this, so you kind of reading that particular chapter made me particularly. alert to five, which is not a number I'd paid much attention to before. I was very interested in the threes and the sevens and so forth. You can really nerd out with these, can't you father? mean, you just kind of go into the nitty gritty details and just really dive into all this stuff that it's so easy to overlook though. You know, and this is someone who was, you know, lived, you know, 1400 years ago and he was already picking up on these things. Yeah, you can just like picking up the significance of the number five and I know he goes into the other ones as well. It's just, it's something I think as, meant to it just, I don't know, it allows us to kind of introduce order into our lives as well as like, okay, I do this at, you know, certain times of day. You know, we kind of plan our day around that, right? And we introduce order and it's all based on numbers basically, you know, like, I'm going to pray the angelus, you know, three times a day, I'm going to do the five decades of the rosary. You know, that, that is quite right. And we do, you know, the reason we do that is, ⁓ at a human level, makes it easier to be regular about things. You know, if you know, you're going to do something three times a day, then, know, of course, or if you know, there's 10 commandments and so forth. So this, ⁓ harmoniousness of number assists us on a purely human level on, on, you know, organizing our lives and ourselves. ⁓ but it also, I think links it in. with the greater mystery of reality. Particularly in the medieval world, this symbolism, they would often have multivalent symbolism. You could have the number four, it symbolizes the four gospels, the four seasons of the year, the four quadrants of a solid structure and so forth. ⁓ So this linking of things together, I think is quite a fascinating approach. Yeah, I agree. You know, last time you were with us too, Father, you mentioned, you know, I remember we talked about the Eucharist, obviously, and you mentioned, you know, something that I think a lot of Catholics lose, or maybe have lost just in translation over years is, you know, if you feel unprepared for the Eucharist, it's better to refrain than to just approach it carelessly. Was there something that, you know, in this book, maybe that we've kind of lost culturally that you know, maybe it's just to slow down to recognize the significance of creation and the order that God has actually created or maybe something else that you could kind of help our listeners and readers as they dive into this. Yeah, I think very much so. So one of the things I think which we tend to lose in our faith in ⁓ in relatively recent times, and this is not, I mean, it's not this is like basically since the modern era. ⁓ that we tend to keep this firm separation between faith ⁓ and mystical experience and the brain, ⁓ know, numbers, mathematics, the natural world and so forth. We almost want to say, well, here I've got my logical brain, you know, my scientific brain and so forth, or artistic brain, and here is my mind of faith and they're completely separate. And this wasn't something in the ancient world. So monks, priests, bishops, would study all fields of knowledge. you know, one of the things which I found rewarding in translating this was I had to carefully consider some of his mathematical observations. I had to do a lot of research on his various scientific references and, you know, and find out where he got it from and what was the belief at the time and so forth. And to me, that was fascinating. So I think we need to bring our whole self to our encounter with God. And this includes our imagination, our analytical faculties, and so Yeah. mean, father, what's it like to translate something that, you know, seventh century Latin in it. Cause like you said, I mean, that has to be a lot of research. mean, cause like you said, you had to dive into his other works and like, okay, what did he mean when he wrote this? mean, that has just has to be, as I know more of a personal kind of like behind the scenes type of thing. But what's it like for you to go actually a a wonderful activity to do, you know, and Sometimes it's hard because I've got a lot of duties around the monastery, of course. But, you know, it is always a great delight. And I'm very fortunate to have here a collection called the Ming ⁓ Patrology, which is a collection of about 300 volumes or so, compiling all the writers of the church from late antiquity to towards the end of the Middle Ages. And one of the great things about it is it's got, when the editors put it together, it's got extensive footnotes and that will often refer you to things which you might not have realized otherwise. And of course the footnotes are all written in Latin, so it's also a translation thing as well. But you know, might refer you to something in classical mythology, which you might not have thought of or might not recognize, or points to different readings or other possible readings of the text. Because often these ancient texts are preserved in only one or two manuscripts. And sometimes these manuscripts are, you know, they're centuries old, so they can have physical damage or illegible parts and so forth. So to go through that process is something which I, which I really, really love. ⁓ so, yeah, and it can be an act of a lot of thought and prayer. So sometimes I translate something and then I think about it for a few weeks and come back to it again and see what I can do. And one of the things I do when I'm translating is if I'm ever genuinely not sure of what point someone is making, which does happen from time to time. And I think does happen in a couple of places here where if I could only offer a speculative suggestion, then I acknowledge that as such. So there are, they do remain these sometimes ambiguities and puzzles within. Do you also ask for their intercession as you're going through it? It's like saying this door, like help me to kind of see where your process is and you ask for the intercession while you're translating the as well. I do very much so. you know, I pray through the intercession of the saint and I also read the life of the saint beforehand and try to find out as much as I can about them to kind of, and where possible I find out when. and where and why they wrote the particular work. So I can kind of put myself into their situation as best as I can when they were producing this work. And I said the prayer is very important, the prayer and reflection. Now Father, if there was one takeaway maybe you could have for our listeners just regarding this book, what would be that one takeaway for them to take home with today? So my takeaway from this book is that ⁓ what we encounter in sacred scripture, ⁓ including and especially the numbers, all have meaning. They all represent different connections, different structures, and so forth. So when you encounter one of those, ⁓ particularly when it is ⁓ perplexing or interesting, or the author makes a point of it, then apply your mind and your spirit to ask yourself, what does it mean? And even if you can't find an answer to that question, ⁓ what does it mean? Then the process of thinking about it in itself has been an encounter with the Holy Spirit. Thank you for that, Father. Now, Father, are you working on more translations? Are there more coming out in the coming months or are you taking a little break? Yeah, absolutely. So we have very soon, in fact, it might be out already now, is the life and martyrdom of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, which is ⁓ the earliest surviving account of the life and martyrdom of them. we, most people know, you know, we know about them from the Bible, of course, we know that they were martyred. But most people don't really know that much about their life and mission. And this basically ⁓ covers that leading up to their martyrdom. very soon I have also the life of St. John of the Cross coming out. this I think is a very interesting one because this is one of the lives which was written ⁓ based on the recollections of St. Teresa, who of course was his close friend. ⁓ and worked with him towards the reform of the Carmelite. So it offers a unique perspective. So I think both of these works will be of great interest. Awesome. And are these all through Tan as well? two coming out? absolutely. They're all through Tan. Excellent. They be out in the next few months. Next few months. All right. Well, we should take a, keep a lookout for them, I should say. And just a reminder, the mystical meaning of The Mystical Medium Numbers in Sacred Scripture by St. Isidore of Seville. And this is available at TAN. I will leave a link in the show notes for you guys. Make sure you buy it today. And Father, before we let you go, would you mind giving us a final blessing? Absolutely. Through the intercession of the blessed Virgin Mary, our Holy Father, St. Benedict and St. Isidore of Seville, may the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit come down upon you and remain with you always. Amen. Thank you so much, Father. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time and all the wonderful work. You're bringing back these amazing works that would have been lost. So thank you for the diligent work that you are doing. And is there anything going on at the monastery? Right now. Any projects or anything you guys are working on? We, we have, we, we recently had our monastery buildings repainted, which was much needed. think the first time in, in about 50 years or so. we've, we've done that and we've recently completed our olive harvest for the year. The monks have been ⁓ involved in that picking from our approximately, I think it's about a thousand olive trees we have, which is then largely. turned into oil which we sell through our gift shop. Well, wonderful. I'll be sure to link ⁓ to your monastery as well over there in Australia. Thanks very much. Absolutely. Well, Father, thank you so much again for your time and the work you're doing. Thank you all so much for listening. Until next time, go out there and be a saint. Brothers, thank you so much for listening to this episode. If this shows add value to your life, I'm going to ask you to do three things. Share with the brother who needs it. leave us a review, and finally support the show so we can keep fighting. Links are in the show notes. We'll see you next week.