Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #440 Merry Christmas!! Reflection on Nativity Scenes, Bishop Fulton Sheen and Saint John Paul II

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#440 Merry Christmas!! Reflection on Nativity Scenes, Bishop Fulton Sheen and Saint John Paul II · Claymore: Become Who You Are

0:09
Speaker 1: Merry Christmas.
0:10
Speaker 1: It's almost Christmas, merry Christmas.
0:12
Speaker 1: This is Jack Rigger with the John Paul to Renewal Center.
0:15
Speaker 1: I'm glad you're joining me today.
0:18
Speaker 1: I love the nativity scenes around our neighborhoods.
0:21
Speaker 1: I just walk at night, I just love it.
0:24
Speaker 1: It's just peaceful, I get that silence and I stare at these nativity scenes.
0:29
Speaker 1: It just catches my heart.
0:30
Speaker 1: It's just so beautiful, it's telling a love story and it's God's solution to the fallen world.
0:36
Speaker 1: And so that's what I want to reflect on today, and I want to reflect on some things that Bishop Fulton Sheen said and John Paul II said.
0:44
Speaker 1: They try to make sense of this craziness that that nativity scene is the solution to.
0:49
Speaker 1: You know, strolling through my neighborhood again, while admiring the Christmas decorations, I wander upon those simple nativity scenes, and this one in particular caught my eye and I love walking by it over and over and over again.
1:04
Speaker 1: It's a warmly lit stable with our Blessed Mother, st Joseph, a few farm animals looking down upon the Christ child lying on a bed of straw.
1:13
Speaker 1: Very simple, very peacefully.
1:15
Speaker 1: But that scene reminded me that every child, every child, is loved by God and that, while each human person is created in the image of God, reason, intellect, free will, the fuller image is, and it always will be, the nuclear family, which is a reflection, a sacramental reflection in this world, of the inner life of the Trinity.
1:37
Speaker 1: An inner life of Trinity is what it's divine life and love expressed and created.
1:44
Speaker 1: Our bodies were to express and created for this purpose.
1:48
Speaker 1: Again, each individual created a Mago Day in the image of God.
1:53
Speaker 1: We have a reason, we have intellect, we seek the truth, our will seeks like a little motor to what's good, but at the end of it all, it's about beauty and it's about love.
2:04
Speaker 1: It's always been a love story, and so this is what's under attack today.
2:09
Speaker 1: You know, they want to take out and this is just evil Wants to take out that nativity scene, wants to take out that Christ child and wants to take out the image of that holy family, the Amago Day in the world expressing love again, which is the nuclear family.
2:25
Speaker 1: And so I just want to dive into that a little bit and just kind of open this all up and see the beauty of that Christ child.
2:32
Speaker 1: And the solution is love.
2:34
Speaker 1: It's always been love.
2:36
Speaker 1: So buckle up and get ready for the rest of today's episode.
2:39
Speaker 1: It's an attack on love.
2:50
Speaker 1: If you really want to bring it down to the essence.
2:52
Speaker 1: It's an attack on love.
2:53
Speaker 1: We were created in love, by love, and poor love In this fallen world.
2:58
Speaker 1: We saw Adam and Eve and falling, and the next generation, cain, kills Abel.
3:04
Speaker 1: It's amazing what happens when our hearts get twisted and we get tempted when we see the same thing.
3:11
Speaker 1: Today, as I'm reflecting on Christmas, it's so important to put this all in perspective.
3:17
Speaker 1: The enemy is at our door.
3:18
Speaker 1: What is that enemy?
3:19
Speaker 1: At the essence, it's destroy love, destroy the Amago Day within the human person, and the fuller image of that is marriage, the family.
3:28
Speaker 1: When you think about the attack on the Christ child and the manger today and the attack on the child and the womb today, I mean you're seeing the destruction.
3:40
Speaker 1: Cain kills Abel, but this murder just goes on and on and on.
3:44
Speaker 1: The solution is the two great commandments right To love God, to be filled with divine life and love, and to express that in the world.
3:51
Speaker 1: This is not brain surge, but we're in a war in this country that are surprising a lot of people.
3:56
Speaker 1: In fact, I think it'll be a total surprise to a lot of young people who don't understand what's going on and many who are not so young but should know better.
4:03
Speaker 1: There's a major battle being waged right on our doorsteps, but as a people we've grown soft, lazy, selfish, pleasure seekers with little regard for others, and we put our heads in the sand, hoping against hope that the battle that our doorstep will go away.
4:20
Speaker 1: Just leave us alone.
4:21
Speaker 1: Let us live our lives.
4:23
Speaker 1: Is that too much to ask?
4:24
Speaker 1: We say Sorry, if that's what you're thinking.
4:27
Speaker 1: You missed the lessons that history has been teaching since the very beginning.
4:31
Speaker 1: Today we, as Americans, are following the Europeans down a highway that I've been tracking for a long time I, a highway that I've named the 3S highway.
4:41
Speaker 1: That leads to a place called nowhere to utopia, utopia.
4:47
Speaker 1: Do you know that the etymology of the word utopia is nowhere?
4:50
Speaker 1: So 3S highway huh S, by the way, is short for sin.
4:54
Speaker 1: I would have liked to name it the 3S highway, but since sin has been canceled in our progressive culture, nobody's really heard of it.
5:02
Speaker 1: They don't know what to understand about it and they're not going to talk about sin or death, but yet a body and a soul Not filled with grace that the fall position we come into the world is sin and death.
5:15
Speaker 1: The nativity scene Was God's solution to that lack of love in the world.
5:20
Speaker 1: Right, easier to remember.
5:22
Speaker 1: The 3s highway to nowhere, right, god forbid.
5:26
Speaker 1: I have to think oh, I just said God, who that won't do either in this cancel culture, that's another word that's been canceled, isn't it?
5:34
Speaker 1: We got to move ahead, got to make progress.
5:37
Speaker 1: We got to be progressives, got to move forward.
5:39
Speaker 1: How could we live happily on the 3s highway that leads to nowhere, with words like sin and God in our vocabulary?
5:48
Speaker 1: Let's cancel them there.
5:50
Speaker 1: Everybody feel better now.
5:52
Speaker 1: Okay, good, you know, when we start to talk about the 3s highway, this is the broad highway that that mankind, men and women have just opened the doors to in it all around the world.
6:04
Speaker 1: In Western civilization, the 3s highway is the sin of what Selfishness.
6:08
Speaker 1: Huh, this is this up, the pride of life.
6:11
Speaker 1: And then you know the, the concupacence of the eyes where we look into the world we want to grasp and take and fill ourselves.
6:18
Speaker 1: And Then the second s is about sex.
6:21
Speaker 1: Everything's about sex today.
6:23
Speaker 1: Huh, throw a label on me, slap a label on me.
6:26
Speaker 1: It's the way I'm having sex night.
6:28
Speaker 1: You sneak, if I can have more sex, then I'll just be happier.
6:31
Speaker 1: And, of course, we've given over to the state, and the state is just too.
6:34
Speaker 1: You know, it's just filled with broken people that are all grasping in their little way in.
6:38
Speaker 1: The Bureaucracy has just grown so large today and all these little people and some people with a lot of power are Grasping and taking, using their money and power.
6:49
Speaker 1: But we have all these little Bureaucrats to all trying to do different things.
6:53
Speaker 1: You know, and and that's what happened with the FBI and and the DOJ and everything everybody grasping, grasping, grasping and not understanding what's going on.
7:03
Speaker 1: Well, jesus, of course, understood this.
7:05
Speaker 1: In Matthew 7, versus 13, jesus asks us to go through the neural gate.
7:10
Speaker 1: What's the neural gate?
7:11
Speaker 1: Well, look at that nativity scene again.
7:13
Speaker 1: God sends his only son to break into the world at a particular place in a particular time.
7:20
Speaker 1: To be born, you know, in a family, in the holy family, to come into the world in the family and to be a personal love.
7:28
Speaker 1: The amago day.
7:29
Speaker 1: You know, the theology, the body, john Paul would call it.
7:32
Speaker 1: The theology, the body is when Jesus Christ himself really walks through the main door and he says this in, in, and beginning again in verse 13 enter by the neural gate.
7:43
Speaker 1: The neural gate is him, right, it's the bridge that I've talked about so often, for the gate is wide and the way is easy.
7:51
Speaker 1: That leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many and the gate is narrow in.
7:56
Speaker 1: The way is hard.
7:56
Speaker 1: That leads to life and those to find it are few.
7:59
Speaker 1: Well, what makes it hard?
8:00
Speaker 1: Because, because love is a sacrifice, love is a giving of oneself.
8:04
Speaker 1: But this hard road of self-giving love brings meaning and purpose to our lives and Christ is there with us.
8:11
Speaker 1: You know, young people, john Paul would say so often young people, you know that your life has meaning To the extent that it's given away as a gift to others.
8:22
Speaker 1: It seems like the hard road, but it brings joy and and fills your heart with happiness.
8:27
Speaker 1: It's amazing, right?
8:28
Speaker 1: So the 3s?
8:30
Speaker 1: The 3s is of self, sex and state.
8:34
Speaker 1: Huh, this is the broad road, and, and and I'll unpack these just a little bit for now, imagine that you live in a city.
8:41
Speaker 1: Let's call it Dublin.
8:42
Speaker 1: I've been.
8:43
Speaker 1: I've been listening to a couple of people talking about what's happening to these big cities in Europe, and it's the same thing here in the United States.
8:50
Speaker 1: Now, we're not far behind.
8:51
Speaker 1: But Dublin, you know, dublin, ireland, huh, you're seeing the riots now and the breakdown of moral civilization, and so let's just call it Dublin for now, but it could be any city in Europe and and many of the cities in the United States right now.
9:04
Speaker 1: Right, so Dublin has been built right on the 3s highway leading to nowhere.
9:09
Speaker 1: Now, for some reason, the citizens of Dublin never travel far enough.
9:14
Speaker 1: Now down the 3s highway to see that it leads to Nowhere another word for utopia.
9:21
Speaker 1: No one knows why.
9:22
Speaker 1: So they live in this smaller world that they've built for themselves, a world of self, of Self-seeking, self-actualization and powering, self, grasping and taking what I need, of robbing people.
9:36
Speaker 1: And just watch any Ted episode TED right and, and, and you know where people unpack a story.
9:42
Speaker 1: So often you're gonna hear this.
9:43
Speaker 1: You know the self-seeking huh.
9:45
Speaker 1: Life has become a very simple story.
9:47
Speaker 1: Life is about me, me myself and I.
9:51
Speaker 1: This is the new Trinity, and somehow the purpose of the world is to make me happy.
9:56
Speaker 1: Now let's move on to number two, the sex.
9:58
Speaker 1: This is the one thing that I'm told will always make me happy.
10:01
Speaker 1: If only I could get more of it, I'd be happy.
10:04
Speaker 1: The whole porn industry is made up of that, huh.
10:07
Speaker 1: But the sexual abuse of children is amazing how we're sexualizing children and the biggest abusers of them are their peers, because we're growing up in a state where they're just telling you, slap a label on you, let it be LBGTQIAWS++ and you're a person that's going to worry about how you're going to have sex and that's how we're going to label you, with no meaning or purpose behind it.
10:32
Speaker 1: Right, but I'll be happy then.
10:34
Speaker 1: Then the state huh, oh, that's our security blanket.
10:37
Speaker 1: They are in charge of the state.
10:40
Speaker 1: Whoever they are, protect me, care about me.
10:42
Speaker 1: The perfect parents huh.
10:44
Speaker 1: We see young people today, you know, in this broken world, just grasping for the state.
10:48
Speaker 1: You know the state will take care of us.
10:49
Speaker 1: We're going to vote for socialists and Marxists because they're the ones that have our best interests in mind.
10:56
Speaker 1: They don't know anything about history.
10:59
Speaker 1: If they did, they would run so far and so fast from that.
11:04
Speaker 1: See our real life.
11:05
Speaker 1: Parents at least the good ones tell us at some point we have to grow up and become contributing members of society.
11:11
Speaker 1: This, of course, infringes on self, on me, and of course my real parents tried to tell me that sex had meaning and purpose.
11:19
Speaker 1: Yeah right, you old fashioned people, huh.
11:22
Speaker 1: Oh faith.
11:23
Speaker 1: In my world of self, sex is about me and in my world, others, including the unborn are mere objects to use.
11:32
Speaker 1: Women, men, they're objects to use and discard.
11:35
Speaker 1: For myself, gratification, parents can be sold fashion.
11:40
Speaker 1: Gotta get progressive, gotta move forward.
11:43
Speaker 1: The old Obama thing hope and change, hope and change, no better.
11:46
Speaker 1: I trade them in for new parents, for the state, who will take care of me from cradle to grave.
11:53
Speaker 1: Oh, grave, oh, I don't like that word.
11:56
Speaker 1: Let's cancel that word too.
11:57
Speaker 1: Let's not think about the grave thing.
11:59
Speaker 1: No, that won't do.
12:00
Speaker 1: If I have to think about the grave, perhaps I want to get off this 3S highway to nowhere.
12:06
Speaker 1: But what if nowhere actually leads to a six foot hole in the ground and that cold ground with a stone with my name above it waiting to put in that end date?
12:17
Speaker 1: Huh, no, let's not think about that.
12:19
Speaker 1: Better to think about go on Facebook or social media or texting people all day long, anything to distract us.
12:27
Speaker 1: Huh, find something in the medicine cabinet, perhaps to dull my senses, maybe go for a run binge on Netflix reruns.
12:35
Speaker 1: Let's just stick with.
12:36
Speaker 1: Life is all about self sex and daddy state.
12:40
Speaker 1: I mean science may be the way to keep us alive, right, right, well, let's not forget.
12:46
Speaker 1: Manticoring with science has brought us so much destruction and it brought us COVID-19 pandemic.
12:52
Speaker 1: The same scientist in that brought you this pandemic brought you the non-vaccine vaccine to cure it.
12:59
Speaker 1: That doesn't stop transmission, it doesn't protect you from anything, but we put it into our bodies, right?
13:05
Speaker 1: Does that sound crazy to you, twilight Zone?
13:09
Speaker 1: I wish it was, but it's reality.
13:11
Speaker 1: And that reality seeks now to destroy who you Destroy the human heart.
13:17
Speaker 1: The human heart that's made for love, by love, and to go out in love, to be filled with love and go out and be love.
13:24
Speaker 1: Look at all the vitro, the violence, the killing, and everything we hold dear to us is coming down around us and we don't get it, do we?
13:33
Speaker 1: Well, bishop Sheen and his way to happiness starts to talk about this a little bit, and this is written 70 years ago, in 1953, and he's talking about his modern man, man and woman far from peace.
13:46
Speaker 1: And we think about the young people who are so lost today, so unhappy, so anxious.
13:51
Speaker 1: Why, and he writes this no one is dangerously unhappy, except the individual who does not know what happiness means.
13:58
Speaker 1: Life is unbearable only to those who are ignorant of why they are alive.
14:04
Speaker 1: Again, this is my words, right.
14:07
Speaker 1: We don't know our identity anymore, separated from God, and if we're not children of God, created in love, by love and for love, and made to be persons of love and give ourselves a way, as a gift to others, which brings meaning and purpose.
14:19
Speaker 1: We don't know those things.
14:21
Speaker 1: Life becomes unbearable because we don't know why we're alive.
14:25
Speaker 1: Man, bishop Sheen goes on to write in such a condition of soul, equates happiness with pleasure, which is very different matter, and identity with this feeling of joy and nerve endings, which it's not, but things which are external to us, never bring inner peace.
14:44
Speaker 1: The more persistently anyone looks for satisfaction and a goal to serve in something outside of his control, the less stable he will find it, the more subject he will be to disappointments on that broad road of trying to fill again self, sex and state, of trying to fill myself and grasp right, using sex, not seeing someone as a person to love but as a person to use, and then leaving everything in the background to the state, who will just destroy the country and destroy everything around you and even take your heart away, as we see in these public schools and libraries.
15:23
Speaker 1: Now Bishop Sheen goes on.
15:25
Speaker 1: So there's two movements toward happiness.
15:28
Speaker 1: The first of these is our withdrawal from the outside.
15:31
Speaker 1: You know you have to find peace because if you have too great an absorption of the things of this world, you fill yourself up again.
15:40
Speaker 1: The most important thing to do is disconnect on a regular basis, detach from all of this social media stuff.
15:47
Speaker 1: You know Saint John of the Cross would write if you're looking for wisdom, you have to become a person of love.
15:53
Speaker 1: You have to understand that first, what we're talking about here, and then you have to find silence.
15:58
Speaker 1: You have to walk around at night and look for those nativity scenes and just meditate on that, pray on that right.
16:04
Speaker 1: And the third thing is mortification or fasting.
16:08
Speaker 1: You know, fasting from these things of the world.
16:11
Speaker 1: So that's number one.
16:12
Speaker 1: The second movement, bishop Sheen writes, is far more profound.
16:15
Speaker 1: It's an ascension from what is inferior within us to what is superior, from our own narcissistic, narcissistic ego to God Himself.
16:25
Speaker 1: Modern man has experienced the first movement.
16:29
Speaker 1: Exterior things have become so many sources of misery to him.
16:33
Speaker 1: This was written 70 years ago.
16:36
Speaker 1: We're starting to understand.
16:37
Speaker 1: You know we have no control.
16:39
Speaker 1: Wars, anxiety, depressions, the insecurity, the emptiness of life have so terrified men that they've tried to close off their contacts with the outside world and have begun to seek for satisfaction in their own limited selves.
16:53
Speaker 1: So here's what he's saying we're starting to see that the outside world isn't offering us anything.
16:58
Speaker 1: So what do we do today?
16:59
Speaker 1: Look how many men I know, young men are into video games and then again into porn.
17:04
Speaker 1: How many young girls are spending all their time texting and on social media.
17:09
Speaker 1: You know how many schools now are bringing you into these Gleason clubs, these LBGTQ clubs, with the promise that you're being accepted, but long as you accept their ideologies.
17:20
Speaker 1: He goes on to write again this is 70 years ago.
17:22
Speaker 1: That is why psychiatry is having such a field day.
17:25
Speaker 1: The modern soul, alarmed at what it finds without, has drawn down the shades and begun to look for contentment and analyzing its own unconsciousness, its own anxieties and fears, its doldrums and frustrations.
17:39
Speaker 1: So you see this in schools and things right.
17:41
Speaker 1: They all have more mental health facilities to help kids deal with this stuff, right.
17:46
Speaker 1: And then they go in and instead of giving you a solution which is that nativity scene they look for man-made solutions and they're getting very busy, right.
17:54
Speaker 1: But they'll never give you that meaning and purpose with your life.
17:58
Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen goes on to say but such self-containment can prove a prison if one is locked into it with only his own ego.
18:06
Speaker 1: For there is no more confining straight jacket in the world than that of the self left to itself.
18:13
Speaker 1: See this 3S highway about self.
18:16
Speaker 1: You get locked into your prison of self.
18:18
Speaker 1: What you need, gk Chesterton would say, is ear to open yourself up to what Bishop Sheen said.
18:25
Speaker 1: The second thing, to ascend outside of myself to a higher power.
18:30
Speaker 1: Right, the cure never lies, bishop Sheen says, and use an analytic scalpel to release the inner moral pus and watch it flow out.
18:39
Speaker 1: Isn't this what the therapists do?
18:42
Speaker 1: They want you to speak about all this inner moral pus that's with you.
18:45
Speaker 1: Let it flow out.
18:46
Speaker 1: But then what's the solution to that?
18:48
Speaker 1: This is a morbid act, he says, for both the patient and the doctor.
18:52
Speaker 1: The cure rather consistent discovering why one is lonely and afraid of solitude, afraid of prayer even.
19:00
Speaker 1: For most people have a dread of being alone, without knowing why the prospect frightens them.
19:06
Speaker 1: The problem of our day is this problem of finding interior peace, joy, contentment.
19:12
Speaker 1: 150 years ago, the age of enlightenment, right to the exterior world for the answers to their problems, they worship science and nature.
19:21
Speaker 1: Aren't we trying to do that again today?
19:23
Speaker 1: But we've.
19:23
Speaker 1: We've.
19:24
Speaker 1: This wrecking ball has went through climate cults, science cults.
19:30
Speaker 1: You know, we understand all these things, we're called to investigate and to understand them and bring solutions.
19:36
Speaker 1: But you don't worship the climate, you don't worship science.
19:40
Speaker 1: These are tools that God gave us right to to go out into the world, see what's going on in the world and Work with God to find solutions to all this stuff.
19:50
Speaker 1: The 20th century, then, had man worried about himself.
19:53
Speaker 1: He's even more concerned over the problem of self, sex and creating a state that has the power to control all of these things.
20:02
Speaker 1: Climate science will tell you how to live right, so increased interest in mental attitude he should take toward all these things, rather than its physical satisfaction, even sex itself.
20:14
Speaker 1: What's the purpose is begetting of children and a unifying union, a community within marriage.
20:21
Speaker 1: Love has been reduced to a feeling, to a sense of romance and then to an act, never opening ourselves up to the transcendent that we see in that simple nativity scene.
20:32
Speaker 1: Right John Paul II, when, when looking back on that age of enlightenment and then the early 20th century, when we started to say, you know, you know, these man-made solutions aren't going to work, he was reflecting on the 20th century, which began with the hope of unlimited progress, but in it is the bloodiest century known to history.
20:54
Speaker 1: Modern man had placed his hopes for a Messiah.
20:57
Speaker 1: John Paul wrote in his own genius and science, technology, medicine.
21:02
Speaker 1: Does that sound familiar?
21:03
Speaker 1: John Paul was writing this 30 years ago.
21:07
Speaker 1: Whenever man loses sight of the great mystery in that little nativity scene and sets his sights on this world, he always meets disappointment.
21:14
Speaker 1: Even to spear, he said, the world is not capable of making man happy, it's not capable of, saying, saving him from evil and all its types and forms illness, epidemics, pandemics, cataclysms, catastrophes and the like.
21:30
Speaker 1: I added, of course, pandemics.
21:32
Speaker 1: There right, this world.
21:34
Speaker 1: John Paul goes on to say, this world with its riches and its wants needs to be saved, it needs to be redeemed.
21:41
Speaker 1: You know, it seems like we should all cut on to this cosmic story.
21:44
Speaker 1: By now We've seen that the outside world doesn't have Solutions.
21:48
Speaker 1: So we've withdrawn into ourselves, into our own little world again, into our own little bubble.
21:52
Speaker 1: We no longer see that this is a battle between good versus evil, light versus darkness, love versus lust.
21:58
Speaker 1: We never, we don't go out to seek the better way.
22:01
Speaker 1: That's been revealed to us in that little nativity scene.
22:04
Speaker 1: Yet Somehow we missed that larger story.
22:07
Speaker 1: Yet, over and over again, we get caught up in a much smaller one of our own Making, and the result it's always the same it's a lack of love.
22:16
Speaker 1: It's a lack of love because truth and love go together.
22:21
Speaker 1: We have to seek the truth if we really want to find love, and we have to love others in the truth.
22:27
Speaker 1: The truth is that mankind has never been able to satisfy his own Desires, his infinite desires, and so we end up with a broken heart, and I see this and over and over again, and so many marriages and families today.
22:41
Speaker 1: But in the midst of our brokenness and we're all broken in one way or another along comes some very good news.
22:47
Speaker 1: Right, that nativity scene tells us what the path to healing which leads to love and happiness can be found.
22:54
Speaker 1: But first you need to read the language of your own heart.
22:57
Speaker 1: Go out there, see, let let let that silence.
23:01
Speaker 1: See, we don't want silence.
23:02
Speaker 1: Why are we afraid of silence today?
23:03
Speaker 1: Because there's a deep ache in our heart, a thirst for something more, and we were told that we can find this on the surface, but we can't say in.
23:11
Speaker 1: Augustine said our hearts are a restless Lord until they rest with you.
23:16
Speaker 1: So modern man-bishop sheen writes, has been humiliated, neither is proud.
23:20
Speaker 1: Expectations of progress nor of science have turned out as he hoped.
23:24
Speaker 1: Yet he is not.
23:25
Speaker 1: He has not quite reached the point of humbling himself.
23:28
Speaker 1: He is still imprisoned in the self, still worried about and preoccupied with sex.
23:33
Speaker 1: Is a?
23:34
Speaker 1: Is a is not as the beauty of love being revealed within marriage and the family, but it's something to grasp and use.
23:40
Speaker 1: He's dependent on the state and studies, seeing that the state will never satisfy you.
23:45
Speaker 1: It's always an opening to the transcendent right.
23:48
Speaker 1: So we'd stay in prison within the self, able to see nothing beyond.
23:53
Speaker 1: Bishop sheen writes the psychoanalysis May be allowed to bore into his thoughts for a few years, but the time is not far off when modern man will utter a frantic appeal to God to lift him from the empty Cistern of our own eagles.
24:10
Speaker 1: Again, st Augustine knew it well our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
24:15
Speaker 1: That's why Bishop sheen writes, although a catastrophic war may threaten us and I am adding in here too, you know these pandemics, climate change, all these things but he says there's hope because the the times are not as bad as they seem.
24:31
Speaker 1: Modern man and this is written 70 years ago has not returned to God, but he has at least returned to himself.
24:38
Speaker 1: In other words, he stopped looking outside, you know, for solutions.
24:42
Speaker 1: He only sees the terror of the outside.
24:46
Speaker 1: So he starts to go into himself.
24:47
Speaker 1: When he goes into himself these are my words again, he's.
24:51
Speaker 1: He does not find satisfaction there.
24:53
Speaker 1: So this is why Bishop sheen feels some optimism, because he says this later he will surpass and transcend himself with God's grace, which he is seeking even now.
25:05
Speaker 1: No one ever looked for something unless he knew that it existed.
25:08
Speaker 1: Today, the frustrated soul is looking for God, as for the memory of a name he used to know.
25:14
Speaker 1: But see this story, this story about God and that nativity scene.
25:19
Speaker 1: This is not about more information.
25:20
Speaker 1: This is the DNA in our hearts.
25:22
Speaker 1: That's why we need to stand there in prayer outside a beautiful nativity scene, open our hearts to God, allow him just to bathe us.
25:31
Speaker 1: The difference, bishop sheen writes, between those who have found God in faith and those who are still seeking him.
25:36
Speaker 1: It's like the difference between a wife happy in the enjoyment of her husband's companionship within a good marriage.
25:42
Speaker 1: This is self-giving love that we're created again, this reflection that we see in the nativity scene between Joseph and Mary and then a child.
25:51
Speaker 1: And that young girl, huh, a young girl, and I remember this.
25:55
Speaker 1: We all remember these times, right?
25:57
Speaker 1: Young girl or young guy wondering will I ever find a husband, will I ever find a wife?
26:03
Speaker 1: Something within me, right, I'm seeking something, seeking something.
26:06
Speaker 1: This is what he's saying.
26:07
Speaker 1: Open those seeking times when you're young, those who search for pleasure, fame and wealth to Fill those desires for infinite love.
26:17
Speaker 1: They're searching for the infinite, but the seekers are still on the outskirts of the earth.
26:23
Speaker 1: Eternal city, instead of that neural gate that Jesus talked about, who is him himself?
26:28
Speaker 1: What do we?
26:30
Speaker 1: We're on this broad 3s highway, just getting blown around by the wind, never looking outside of ourselves and never understanding that this is a.
26:37
Speaker 1: There's a larger picture.
26:39
Speaker 1: I, those with faith, he says, have penetrated to the real home within the infinite and have found the peace which the world cannot give.
26:48
Speaker 1: When we open ourselves in prayer, we open ourselves to the infinite.
26:53
Speaker 1: We ask the infinite to come into our hearts, to fill us, so that we can become persons of love.
26:58
Speaker 1: Look at, this is not brain surgery.
27:00
Speaker 1: This is the two great commandments, and you can't reverse that.
27:03
Speaker 1: You have to be filled first with divine life and love and then be a person of life and love.
27:07
Speaker 1: The identity is children of God are meaning.
27:10
Speaker 1: A purpose, then, is to be filled and then give that love away to others, to be more concerned about others than yourself.
27:17
Speaker 1: This is what Jesus does on the cross.
27:19
Speaker 1: Marriage and the family are a reflection of this.
27:21
Speaker 1: You know, in a good marriage, a good family, I mean who takes care of the sick ones and the old ones and the unborn ones.
27:28
Speaker 1: This love story is within us, right?
27:31
Speaker 1: This is the love story within the Trinity itself.
27:34
Speaker 1: We're created in Magal day, bishop Sheen says.
27:37
Speaker 1: As one can see a figure far off and not yet recognize him as a long lost friend, so one can sense the need of the infinite and have a desire for the endless ecstasy of love, but not yet know that that comes from that source of love.
27:54
Speaker 1: Who is God?
27:56
Speaker 1: God is love, he is the infinite source of love and our hearts have an infinite desire, he's saying, for the ecstasy of love.
28:07
Speaker 1: Open yourself up the ache that we sense within us, the fear of being silent.
28:12
Speaker 1: This if opened onto that narrow gate of Jesus Christ himself when we cross the bridge.
28:19
Speaker 1: When we cross the bridge, he's given us this bridge of the cross itself and open ourselves up to redemption.
28:25
Speaker 1: We now open ourselves up to the ecstasy of divine life and love.
28:30
Speaker 1: It makes no difference how wicked his soul may be.
28:33
Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen said there is no one subjecting himself to illicit pleasures who does not have a consciousness of his subjection and his slavery.
28:42
Speaker 1: Perhaps that is why alcoholics are often liars.
28:46
Speaker 1: Their lips deny a slavery which their lives so visibly witness to.
28:51
Speaker 1: Such individuals, unable to admit themselves mistaken, still refuse to be convinced of divine truth, and their sadness and their emptiness will eventually drive them to the God of mercy.
29:04
Speaker 1: Or they will what?
29:05
Speaker 1: Or they will perish.
29:06
Speaker 1: This is why Jesus says you know, I'd rather have you hot or cold than lukewarm.
29:12
Speaker 1: And you think, well, wouldn't you rather have me lukewarm than cold?
29:16
Speaker 1: No, because like an alcoholic that finally hits the bottom, he'll bounce, and there are times when he'll finally open himself up to the transcendent and scream for the God of mercy to enter.
29:29
Speaker 1: Our exterior world today is in desperate straits, but the inner world of man is far from hopeless.
29:34
Speaker 1: The world of politics and economics lag behind the psychological development of men themselves.
29:40
Speaker 1: The world is far from God, but human hearts are not.
29:44
Speaker 1: That is why peace will come less from political changes than from man himself who, driven to take refuge within his own soul from the turmoil from the outside, will be lifted above himself to the happiness for which he was made.
30:00
Speaker 1: Again.
30:02
Speaker 1: Just to summarize, right, there is, is he saying, look, we turn to science, we turn to technology, we turn to all these things, and they're not bringing us what we, what we want.
30:12
Speaker 1: And in this, in this movement, to find something to fill up our hearts, we're finally going to open ourselves.
30:17
Speaker 1: This is the hope.
30:18
Speaker 1: This is the hope.
30:19
Speaker 1: This is why I like to speak to young people, to ask them just look around, look at the breakdown in marriages, families, the culture.
30:27
Speaker 1: Look at the hatred, the vitro, the violence on the streets.
30:30
Speaker 1: You know these are things that come from a lack of love and an understanding.
30:35
Speaker 1: Our Amago Day to love as God loves.
30:38
Speaker 1: There's a voice that the faithful hear, that the world they do not.
30:42
Speaker 1: And this is it.
30:44
Speaker 1: And he who sat upon the throne said behold, I make all things new and write this, for these words of mine are trustworthy and true.
30:52
Speaker 1: And he said to me it is done.
30:55
Speaker 1: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
30:59
Speaker 1: To the thirsty I will give water without price from the fountain of the water of life.
31:04
Speaker 1: He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son and daughter.
31:11
Speaker 1: But for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murders, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
31:27
Speaker 1: That's from Revelation, chapter 21, verses 5 to 8.
31:31
Speaker 1: I am the Alpha and the Omega, right, I am the one that says behold, I make all things new, so beautiful.
31:39
Speaker 1: So the next time you walk by an activity scene, pause to reflect on the fact that that's Jesus there who just said those words.
31:46
Speaker 1: That's Jesus there, the eternal bridegroom, who's calling you into a what A marriage, a relationship with him.
31:52
Speaker 1: And how does he come in the world?
31:53
Speaker 1: Very humbly, not selfishly, but unselfish.
31:58
Speaker 1: Not an understanding of grasping for sex as he grew into a man, but he actually gave up marriage here on earth because he showed us that, ultimately, that sacrament of marriage is always a tiny reflection of where we're going into the love and life of the Trinity itself.
32:17
Speaker 1: And then what he always talked about, the state.
32:20
Speaker 1: Hey, hey, give the Caesar, what a Caesar's.
32:22
Speaker 1: But don't forget, at the same time, to give to God.
32:25
Speaker 1: What is God?
32:27
Speaker 1: So, again, the next time you walk by that nativity scene, hopefully today, pause to reflect on the fact that Satan doesn't have his own clay.
32:34
Speaker 1: He can only deform what God has created good.
32:37
Speaker 1: The child lying in the manger chose to come into the world through a family, a man born of a woman, to give up his life for every one of us, so that we could embrace our true identity as sons and daughters of God.
32:50
Speaker 1: And the angel said to her do not be afraid, mary, for you have found favor with God.
32:55
Speaker 1: And behold, you shall conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.
33:01
Speaker 1: God saves.
33:02
Speaker 1: That means From Luke's Gospel, of course, luke 1.
33:05
Speaker 1: In these turbulent times, as you and I stroll through our neighborhoods, let's reflect on an American dream.
33:12
Speaker 1: Let's reflect on that voice of St Faustina.
33:15
Speaker 1: Jesus, I trust in you.
33:18
Speaker 1: Have a blessed Christmas.
33:20
Speaker 1: Our Savior has been born.