Latest / Virtuous Leaders with Dr. Johann D'Souza / Ep.112 - Paul Rose on How Catholics Lost the Prayer That Saves the World | Liturgy of the Hours | Sacred Music | Catholic Tradition

Transcript

Ep.112 - Paul Rose on How Catholics Lost the Prayer That Saves the World | Liturgy of the Hours | Sacred Music | Catholic Tradition · Virtuous Leaders with Dr. Johann D'Souza

• 0:00
  Most Catholics in their modern imagination haven't even
• 0:01
  imagined Jesus singing. So how do you get to any of this
• 0:06
  if we haven't even imagined Jesus as he is?
• 0:08
  We think of Jesus as this nice guy that we talked to and he
• 0:11
  gives us favors and he tells us what to do and he directs our
• 0:13
  life. Jesus is his primary mode of
• 0:16
  being is he is the word, and that word is clothed in beauty.
• 0:21
  It's clothed in in music. This is Virtuous Leaders, the
• 0:25
  podcast for based Catholics who will speak truth, do good or die
• 0:29
  trying. Here's the show.
• 0:31
  You're the founder and host of the Sing the Hours podcast,
• 0:34
  which is a Liturgy of the Hours podcast is very beautiful.
• 0:38
  I've shared with people and they've been struck by the
• 0:40
  beauty of it. It's my go to.
• 0:41
  If I ever find myself having to do a time of prayer in the car,
• 0:44
  that that's my go to way of praying.
• 0:47
  It was putting on the Sing the Hours.
• 0:49
  What's your current reach right now?
• 0:51
  I think we're doing about 700,000 a month across our
• 0:54
  different platforms, so. That is a lot more than I
• 0:57
  expected. Yeah.
• 0:59
  Why? Because it's not good.
• 1:00
  I'm just. No, partly because it's so
• 1:02
  countercultural. Although, hey, maybe that's the
• 1:04
  reason for it to be widespread. I prefer to say medi cultural.
• 1:08
  It's medi cultural because it transcends culture and it
• 1:13
  subsumes culture and it's a higher culture and because every
• 1:18
  culture is enriched by it and finds its true meaning in it in
• 1:23
  liturgical worship. So it's actually, I wouldn't say
• 1:26
  countercultural. And that's why I think it has an
• 1:28
  appeal to the human spirit because it truly is the
• 1:31
  universal culture with which we are imbued, those who are
• 1:36
  baptized, but universally, which we're called to participate in.
• 1:40
  And that's why I wanted to get you on this show, because you're
• 1:42
  a deep thinker. Actually, it's not just saying
• 1:44
  the hours, but you have, you're very thoughtful and you have
• 1:47
  vision as well. What is where is your audience
• 1:50
  located? Is it mostly US all around the
• 1:52
  world? So it's all around the world we
• 1:54
  post about. It seems we post 24 hours in
• 1:58
  advance for somebody from a United States perspective, and
• 2:00
  we get almost a daily comment. Someone saying why is the most
• 2:04
  recent video tomorrow's prayer? It's not tomorrow's prayer for
• 2:07
  people in New Zealand, Australia, India who very
• 2:14
  faithfully listen. And if we're late posting, I
• 2:17
  hear about it almost immediately from one of our listeners in New
• 2:20
  Zealand is Oh my goodness, it's damn here I'm trying to do my
• 2:22
  sunrise coffee, enjoying the prayer of the Church.
• 2:25
  But the Liturgy of the Hours is something that's it's
• 2:27
  sanctifying all the time. Which is why the Church deputes
• 2:31
  priests and religious and deacons partially to do the
• 2:36
  lurge of the Hours faithfully in Canon law, because their
• 2:40
  vocation is to sanctify the world, to save the world.
• 2:46
  And it's actually crazy that even lay people are told in
• 2:49
  Church documents that in doing the liturgy hours worth saving
• 2:52
  the world is the verbiage that the Church uses, which is just a
• 2:56
  like a bizarrely incredible claim.
• 3:00
  What document is that? I know it's recommended the
• 3:02
  Catechism, but I don't recall hearing that phrasing.
• 3:05
  Yeah, it's actually, it's peppered all around.
• 3:07
  And what comes to mind first would be in the general
• 3:09
  instruction of the litters of the hours, when it describes
• 3:13
  what, when a church in its own voice describes what the
• 3:16
  literature, the ours is, it's unbelievable how strongly it
• 3:21
  encourages like people to make it a constant prayer of their
• 3:25
  own. Like in in chapter 27 or
• 3:27
  paragraph 27 of the church's general instruction, it says
• 3:30
  wherever groups of laity are gathered and whatever the reason
• 3:35
  which has brought them together, they are encouraged to recite
• 3:38
  the church's office by celebrating part of the legend
• 3:41
  of the hour. So if you're having a BBQ, if
• 3:43
  you're having a recollection, if you're after Mass and there's a
• 3:47
  couple of you hanging around, you're on your way to work.
• 3:50
  You just arrived at work, you're a lying cook about to start your
• 3:53
  kitchen duties. Wherever groups of laity are
• 3:57
  gathered, if two or more baptized or gathered, the church
• 4:00
  says in any circumstance, y'all should break out a breviary and
• 4:03
  join the prayer of the church. And then it says why?
• 4:06
  It says for they should learn to adore God the Father in spirit
• 4:10
  and in truth. And that's a huge misconception.
• 4:13
  People think that in adoration. So here we have.
• 4:15
  I have books lying all around my studio.
• 4:18
  So the church last year gave their revised liturgical text
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  approved in English, the Holy Communion and Worship of the
• 4:27
  Eucharistic Mystery outside of Mass.
• 4:29
  Have you heard of this book? Nope.
• 4:31
  So this is the official liturgical text for the Rite of
• 4:34
  Adoration, Exposition, Eucharistic pilgrimages,
• 4:37
  etcetera. And it's actually, it's
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  incredible. Again, most people are just not
• 4:43
  aware of this. It says under adoration, here's
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  the rubrics. The Church has rubrics for
• 4:48
  adoration and for Catholics who have not been to adoration, you
• 4:52
  should go to adoration. It's where the Church exposes
• 4:55
  our Lord in a monstrance and we get to adore him in the
• 4:59
  Eucharist. So Christ truly present in the
• 5:02
  Eucharist. For those who are not Catholic
• 5:04
  listening, this is like one of the craziest, most beautiful
• 5:06
  things Catholics do. And I encourage you to ask a
• 5:09
  Catholic friend to take you. It's a very profound experience
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  because we get to have this almost pulling back of the veil
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  where we see the Lord in his glory but veiled and get to
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  adore him. But the Church has instructions
• 5:24
  for adoration. Guess who the Church encourages
• 5:26
  the faithful to do an adoration. Same literature to ours.
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  Yes, it says, which is very antithetical to what we in our
• 5:34
  modern imagination think is appropriate.
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  We think you sit in silence, but we are baptized into Christ's
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  song to the Father. Christ is eternally singing a
• 5:43
  song and Christ wants our eternal destiny.
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  He wants us to be swept into that song.
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  So it says during the exposition, prayers, liturgical
• 5:52
  songs. So don't just start doing a
• 5:56
  cacophony of modern music to our Lord.
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  The Lord wants to hear His own words given back to Him.
• 6:02
  A true sacrifice to worship God in spirit and truth.
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  That's what it says in the instruction, right?
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  We should do the litters of the hours because it teaches us how
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  to adore God the Father in spirit and truth.
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  True adoration, true worship is taking God's words that He's
• 6:18
  given us and delivering them back to Him as a sacrifice.
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  And that's apparent in the Church's instructions for these
• 6:26
  things. So it says prayers, liturgical
• 6:27
  songs and reading should be arranged, blah, blah, blah, to
• 6:30
  nourish personal prayer. Then there may be readings from
• 6:33
  Scripture. It is also fitting the people
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  should respond to the word of God by singing.
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  It is also desirable a sacred silence occur at suitable times.
• 6:42
  So silence is mentioned last, which is bizarre, but it makes
• 6:47
  sense when you think about the fact that God has given us the
• 6:49
  tools to offer him a right sacrifice of praise.
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  Because he's given us those tools, we should use them.
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  We are not to sit in our only way of personal interaction with
• 6:59
  Christ is not just dumb silence. That is important and we
• 7:03
  definitely in the modern world need more silence, but it's also
• 7:07
  important to see what the Church, what the Church directs
• 7:09
  us to do. So then it says some part of the
• 7:11
  Liturgy of the Hours, especially the principal hours, may also be
• 7:14
  celebrated in the presence, the Most Blessed Sacrament, when it
• 7:17
  is exposed for a longer period, like a holy hour.
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  For through this liturgy, praise and Thanksgiving, which are
• 7:22
  offered to God in the Eucharistic celebration, are
• 7:24
  extended to the various hours of the day.
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  So the Mass is literally carried out into the world when you do
• 7:32
  the litters, the hours. And what more appropriate way to
• 7:34
  address our Lord than in the worship with which he has given
• 7:37
  us to address him? So these are the sorts of things
• 7:40
  that are just like very hard for the modern imagination because
• 7:42
  especially men are told that we're supposed to bury things.
• 7:46
  We're told that singing is effeminate, right?
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  That's for the old lady to do at church, not for us young men to
• 7:52
  do. But then you remember King
• 7:54
  David, the manliest dude whoever lived was just constantly
• 7:58
  singing, constantly at song. The Templars, when they overcame
• 8:03
  the walls of Jerusalem in the and in two different accounts,
• 8:07
  in two different crusades, it says they threw down their
• 8:08
  helmets, eyewitness accounts and burst into the tedium.
• 8:12
  Imagine these blood splattered helmets, these manly Templars.
• 8:16
  Finally, like most of the Crusades didn't work, but the
• 8:19
  crusade that worked. They cast down their helmets.
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  10s of thousands dropped to their knees to come on.
• 8:26
  Like music is the warrior's responsibility, right?
• 8:30
  Anyway, like I said, I was going to derail this conversation in
• 8:33
  about 15 seconds. It took me.
• 8:35
  You actually got into what I wanted to talk about at the
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  beginning of this section. You just quoted something that I
• 8:40
  never heard of before from a book I've never heard of before.
• 8:44
  You previously cited a book I learned about a week ago through
• 8:47
  one of your associates, which is the general instruction for the
• 8:51
  literature of the hours. So my question here is why is
• 8:55
  it, and I'm striving to be a Facebook athlete and I have been
• 8:59
  striving for that for years, why is it that I've never heard of
• 9:02
  these things? It's a great question.
• 9:05
  So first of all, the two books are just referenced.
• 9:08
  Are official rubrics like I read the rubrics of these.
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  These are like not secrets. These are like the instruction
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  manual for two different types of the church's central prayers.
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  The end of that sentence though, when it says worship God in
• 9:22
  spirit and truth says that especially through the church
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  called worship the lady must remember that by public worship
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  and prayer they can have an impact on all men and contribute
• 9:33
  to the salvation of the whole world.
• 9:36
  So when we just stop what we're doing, and when we pray the
• 9:39
  office and we pray the liturgy, the hours, as lay people, the
• 9:45
  Church tells us we saved the world.
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  Shouldn't people be aware of that?
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  That sounds. Important.
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  It's, I know it's very much. I'm going to change my Wi-Fi.
• 9:53
  Is that going to kill everything?
• 9:55
  No, it should be fine. No, it's Riverside.
• 9:57
  I was on the wrong Wi-Fi. Is that better?
• 10:01
  I thought it was fine before but.
• 10:02
  OK, it's even better now. I love it.
• 10:06
  I think part of the problem is that this is a big can of worms.
• 10:09
  This is the can I want to open man.
• 10:11
  OK, we have to lead with beauty. Satan hates beauty because
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  beauty as a transcendental. So the transcendentals are
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  things that are the highest realities, the eternal
• 10:23
  realities. Therefore the transcendentals
• 10:25
  are basically God. God is truth, God is goodness,
• 10:32
  God is beauty. God is will, right?
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  God is word, right. Christ is the word he speaks and
• 10:42
  things happen because it's the highest right.
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  So beauty though, like Bishop Baron says, lead with beauty
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  Dostoyevsky beauty will save the world.
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  Satan knows that, and so Satan, he there is somebody who a
• 10:57
  personal force in the universe, Satan who wants to make sure
• 11:01
  that we see beauty as a mere accidental, not a
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  transcendental. Beauty is something nice to
• 11:10
  clothe the mass in, but it's not essential to the Mass.
• 11:14
  Beauty is nice ornamentation, but it's not essential to a
• 11:19
  building or to your bedroom or to a church or to a liturgy.
• 11:25
  And so with that being said, what a priest generally do,
• 11:30
  because priests are required to do these prayers, it's like
• 11:33
  underpain of mortal sin. For those of you who are not
• 11:36
  Catholic. In other words, we as Catholics,
• 11:38
  and this is crazy to say to in in a modern context, but it's
• 11:41
  the truth. If a priest knowingly shirks
• 11:43
  their responsibility without like good 'cause or without an
• 11:48
  exception from their ordinary, their Bishop or their boss or
• 11:51
  whatever. If they knowingly shirk their
• 11:54
  responsibility to do a single office of the leaders of the
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  hours, then they are going to hell until they go to
• 12:00
  confession. Like it's literally so important
• 12:03
  for the salvation of the world that Canon law dictates that a
• 12:05
  priest must do it under pain of their own salvation.
• 12:09
  Like it is. It is a requirement, which is,
• 12:11
  again, something that most Catholics don't even realize
• 12:15
  that priests are required to do all of the offices.
• 12:18
  They stop what they're doing and they pray the psalms five times
• 12:22
  a day like we think Muslims do. We Catholics do that too.
• 12:27
  We take it very seriously. We pray every three hours.
• 12:30
  So priests, then why don't they preach about it?
• 12:35
  If priests know that they're required to do it, then they
• 12:37
  know that it saves the world. Why don't they tell us?
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  Like how many times have we heard in homilies when priests
• 12:42
  give a homily about prayer? Priests give a lot of homilies
• 12:44
  about prayer. I probably hear 110 times a year
• 12:47
  and I never hear the priests ever mention the litters of the
• 12:50
  hours. You wouldn't think it exists as
• 12:52
  an option for prayer. I watched a podcast about prayer
• 12:54
  with this priest like yesterday. Never mentions.
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  Literally. He's like, when you pray, you
• 12:58
  should have silence and ask God what he wants your life.
• 13:00
  Like a Catholic priest, like the most important prayer we can do,
• 13:04
  the prayer that saves the world. Why don't we talk about Here's
• 13:07
  the reason #1 when priests do it, they generally do it
• 13:12
  silently, and they just blitz through it as if it's just the
• 13:15
  obligation because priests were not formed in seminary about how
• 13:20
  this prayer #1 should be sung. This prayer is our greatest
• 13:26
  encounter with beauty. This prayer is our
• 13:30
  responsibility for letting Christ fulfill his saving work.
• 13:34
  Because it's not that we save the world, it's that when you do
• 13:38
  the Office, you are conforming your mouth and your temple of
• 13:43
  the Holy Spirit to Christ's prayer to the Father.
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  And since Christ is the mediator and intercessor for the
• 13:49
  salvation of the world, when we do the Liturgy of the Hours, we
• 13:54
  join and associate our singing with his singing.
• 13:58
  And that's the exact phraseology that the Second Vatican Council
• 14:01
  uses, that Christ joins our singing to his singing.
• 14:06
  And most Catholics in their modern imagination haven't even
• 14:08
  imagined Jesus singing. So how do you get to any of this
• 14:13
  if we haven't even imagined Jesus as he is?
• 14:15
  We think of Jesus as this nice guy that we talked to and he
• 14:17
  gives us favors and he tells us what to do and he directs our
• 14:20
  light. Jesus is his primary mode of
• 14:23
  being is he is the word. And that word is clothed in
• 14:27
  beauty. It's clothed in in music.
• 14:30
  And he's delivering the word as a song of praise to the Father.
• 14:33
  That's what the Second Vatican Council explicitly says.
• 14:36
  That's what the fathers of the Church say Saint Ignatius says
• 14:40
  in the 2nd century. He says Christ is the song and
• 14:45
  he says that when the faithful join in that song, he echoes
• 14:48
  this exact type of phrase, phraseology.
• 14:51
  We saved the world. This is from the 2nd century.
• 14:53
  This is not a new modern way of looking at theology.
• 14:55
  This is from the earliest. Like every prophecy, for
• 14:59
  example, in Scripture is in verse.
• 15:01
  You ever read the Bible and it's you read Genesis and it's like
• 15:03
  chunks of text, but then you get to Isaiah and it's verses.
• 15:06
  You know why? Because the prophets saying
• 15:08
  their prophecies like Prudential says in his 4th century hymn
• 15:12
  Christ by the voices of the prophets was chanted of with 1
• 15:16
  accord. The voices of the prophets chant
• 15:18
  of Christ. They sing.
• 15:20
  For the modern imagination cannot conceive of people
• 15:23
  bursting into song when they're like warning or when they're
• 15:26
  like we. We can't conceive of it because
• 15:28
  Satan has taken the music from us.
• 15:30
  He's robbed it of us. It's for the specialist, it's
• 15:32
  for the women, it's for the person with the guitar and the
• 15:36
  scepter of authority, which is the microphone.
• 15:38
  And it's not for the Catholic who simply wants to conform his
• 15:41
  voice with Christ. But it is.
• 15:43
  It's for the peasant, it's for you, it's for me.
• 15:45
  And it's how we save the world, do.
• 15:47
  You think Catholics are waking up to the fact that we've been
• 15:50
  robbed of our birthright of beauty and tradition?
• 15:54
  Some are, but there's a lot of red tape that prevents us from
• 15:58
  actually like knowing what to do about it.
• 15:59
  Most people think that what we do about it is we choose better
• 16:02
  hymns and mass more traditional hymns.
• 16:03
  What we do about it is we invest in a choir and occasionally have
• 16:07
  a once a year concert. You know, we should.
• 16:09
  What we should be doing about it is when you're about to check in
• 16:12
  for work, you grab your fellow Catholic and you're like, let's
• 16:15
  sing an office together. That's how you be the change.
• 16:18
  That's how you be the beauty. You're called to be the priest,
• 16:21
  prophet and king. You're called to put on Christ
• 16:24
  and sanctify the world. That's the duty of a layperson
• 16:26
  like Lumen Gentium, the council documents when they define what
• 16:31
  is the vocation of laity, right? What is it?
• 16:34
  It's to sanctify the temporal order, right?
• 16:37
  Our duty is to go out there and make the world holy, to make
• 16:41
  clinical psychology holy, right? To make it's.
• 16:45
  Going to take a while. Yeah, yeah.
• 16:49
  But that's the responsibility, this and the Church, the source
• 16:52
  and summit of that is the liturgy of the Church, because
• 16:54
  that's where we tap into Christ's mediation.
• 16:56
  That's where we tap into in its, in its most dramatic flourish
• 17:00
  when we receive the Eucharist. The totality of liturgy, though,
• 17:04
  including the liturgy hours, contains this Eucharistic
• 17:07
  mystery. And that's how we we truly
• 17:12
  introduce Christ into the temporal order is that we bring
• 17:14
  liturgy to it. And the only liturgy that can be
• 17:16
  brought outside the church. Baptisms have to be done in the
• 17:19
  church. Marriages have to be done in a
• 17:21
  church, a wedding liturgy, right, a nuptial liturgy.
• 17:24
  Masses generally, unless you're like backpacking or something,
• 17:27
  Masses have to be done at least with a priest.
• 17:28
  But usually in a church liturgy, hours can be done by you and by
• 17:32
  me anywhere. This is the the church at work,
• 17:38
  the church in the vineyard, the church in the fields.
• 17:41
  This is the way we bring Christ into your commute, into your
• 17:45
  car. When you play sing the hours.
• 17:46
  When you join me in prayer, you're actually putting Christ
• 17:49
  in your passenger seat and you're singing with him because
• 17:51
  it's the voice of Christ that we associate ours with when we do
• 17:54
  litters of the hour. So bring Christ into your car,
• 17:56
  bring Christ into your kitchen, bring Christ into your bedroom.
• 17:59
  My wife and I do the allergy hours to our baby girls.
• 18:03
  Nothing gets them. We have a 2 year old base,
• 18:07
  almost 2 and an almost one and we have one on the way and
• 18:10
  nothing gets them quiet and ready for bed and they insist on
• 18:14
  it. My daughter Carmela brings in
• 18:16
  all these breviaries. He's not even 2 and she insists
• 18:20
  on holding one. This is an important thing.
• 18:21
  I love your video about the smartphone.
• 18:24
  Yeah, you can access these prayers on a smartphone, but the
• 18:27
  medium of the smartphone not only has all of its problems as
• 18:31
  you talk about, but, And it's dangerous for a child.
• 18:34
  But the crazy thing is that when you have a physical book, like
• 18:36
  here's Bishop Baron's Letters of the Hours encyclicals, these are
• 18:39
  great when you have a physical book.
• 18:46
  Like, Carmelo loves when whenever Julie and I start
• 18:49
  singing it, she insists on holding one of the breviors and
• 18:53
  she will start humming along. And even if it's dark in the
• 18:55
  room, even if we turn all the lights down, she insists on
• 18:57
  having the book. How beautiful is that, right?
• 19:00
  Kids can see mom and Dad when you're doing your prayers, when
• 19:03
  you kneel, when you stand attentively, when you sign
• 19:05
  yourself with the cross, when you're holding a Sacramento.
• 19:07
  This has been blessed. And so it has a Sacramento in
• 19:10
  for reinforcement in terms of its, the channel of grace it's
• 19:13
  been being given to my daughter. My daughter is already better
• 19:17
  schooled in the art of prayer than I was.
• 19:19
  At 25 years old, she joins the prayer church on the mouth of
• 19:22
  children and the babes. God finds perfect praise.
• 19:25
  And I'm I'm very blessed that the church has given me this
• 19:28
  tool that I can sing psalms, my wife and I echoing back and
• 19:31
  forth. And my daughter is being exposed
• 19:34
  to the highest order of prayer and participating in it.
• 19:38
  She holds the book, she hums along, she babbles, she signs
• 19:43
  herself with the cross when we do.
• 19:44
  She's not even 2 years old. That is how you'd save the
• 19:47
  world. That's how.
• 19:50
  Thank you for hearing that. That's a great image that's
• 19:54
  forming my moral imagination positively right now.
• 19:57
  That's beautiful way to put it. Yeah.
• 19:58
  The moral imagination of the modern person is it's not just
• 20:01
  the moral imagination, it's also the imagination for beauty,
• 20:03
  goodness, the moral imagination, truth, also the moral, but just
• 20:07
  the What sort of imagination would you call that?
• 20:12
  Yeah, it's more of the intellect, right, rather than
• 20:14
  the imagination. Yes, man, we got to recapture
• 20:20
  imaginations. Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:23
  Yeah, no, I see that as my purpose in life, protecting
• 20:25
  truths, goodness and beauty. In the new Dark age.
• 20:28
  Let me actually. Yeah, no, sorry.
• 20:30
  No, you OK? Let me get to your vision now.
• 20:34
  What do you hope to accomplish by the end of your life?
• 20:38
  So the general vision is simply to bring the imaginative vision
• 20:48
  that the church has put forth into practice so that, for
• 20:52
  example, the church says parishes should do the litters
• 20:56
  of the hours in common in the church with the priest at least
• 21:02
  the chief hours at least on on Sundays.
• 21:04
  So it's like if we can get regularly scheduled liturgies of
• 21:07
  the hours in every parish, I'll feel like though I've left the
• 21:11
  world better than I entered it as far as like a citizen of the
• 21:14
  Kingdom of God, as far as the church goes, I want all of my
• 21:19
  children to grow up with a desire for heaven.
• 21:27
  The beatific vision. That's an important thing in
• 21:32
  terms of like my projects I currently would really love.
• 21:35
  I hunger and thirst for building an oratory where the hours are
• 21:40
  sung by lay people every single hour of the day.
• 21:44
  Full chant, fully chanted mass every day and where people can
• 21:50
  come and also detox from the various digital and modern
• 21:57
  pitfalls. For example, imagine there's an
• 22:00
  oratory where you have interns come for three months, six
• 22:03
  months, even a year and they aura at Lamora.
• 22:07
  They like work with vines, they make wine, they make, they work
• 22:12
  with cows, whatever it is, it doesn't matter.
• 22:14
  Some sort of like in industry. So they're busy all day, but
• 22:18
  then they drop what they're doing, they give up smartphones,
• 22:22
  they give up technology basically.
• 22:23
  And they join this rhythm of life where they pray and they
• 22:28
  sing and they work all day long. And at the end of three months,
• 22:32
  I guarantee you, if you have a young person who doesn't know
• 22:34
  what their vocation is in life, that's how they'll get it.
• 22:38
  Like one thing that grinds my gears is that retreats.
• 22:40
  Retreats are so often silent. But people, when you say that
• 22:44
  the imagination, right, the moral imagination, because our
• 22:47
  imaginations are so wounded sitting in silence.
• 22:53
  I have found in what I found when I was, I did in a day,
• 22:57
  silent retreat, trying to figure out my vocation.
• 23:00
  I wasn't equipped for that. I wasn't equipped because in the
• 23:04
  silence I had it yet figured out how to dialogue with God and the
• 23:12
  way we dialogue with God. The prophet sang right.
• 23:17
  Christ sings David saying to God.
• 23:21
  So God sings to us through the prophets and then David delivers
• 23:25
  song back to God. Jesus is the song save the
• 23:28
  church fathers the new song. So if I hadn't yet done a lot of
• 23:34
  schooling of communicating with God in song, then in silence,
• 23:38
  I'm not going to have the right music going on in my head.
• 23:40
  And so in silence it was just like, it was just like round and
• 23:42
  around. Is that Jesus talking away?
• 23:45
  That's probably just my own manic suggestion.
• 23:50
  That's probably just my own desires.
• 23:51
  How do I Ignatian, discern the world versus the evil one versus
• 23:55
  heaven versus me? Those are the fourth options,
• 23:58
  right? And the answer is, when you look
• 24:02
  at the Mystics, that unbridled silent prayer is actually a
• 24:08
  great danger. Silence is important in the
• 24:11
  modern age as an antidote to all the noise.
• 24:14
  But unbridled silent prayer without direction and without
• 24:18
  music. Like, I know that sounds crazy,
• 24:21
  but look at Saint Teresa, Saint Teresa of Avila, who's one of
• 24:24
  the great champions of contemplative prayer, right?
• 24:26
  She's like the man. I know.
• 24:27
  It's crazy to say she is the woman.
• 24:30
  So Saint Teresa of Avila, she and her rule, if memory serves,
• 24:35
  forbade her sisters from doing more than one hour a day in
• 24:40
  silence. If you're doing a holy hour,
• 24:44
  it's got to be only one hour. If she because she says that
• 24:47
  after that hour, that's when Satan starts suggesting stuff.
• 24:52
  And what were her sisters known for?
• 24:54
  One of the things, if you read contemporary sources, is that
• 24:56
  they were known for executing the Divine Office.
• 24:59
  Literally hours, absolutely gorgeously, no recited offices,
• 25:04
  all sung, all magnificent. So if I think a very reasonable
• 25:10
  historical claim would be that Saint Teresa of Avila and her
• 25:12
  sisters spent probably 4 hours a day in song singing the Psalms
• 25:20
  and then one hour a day in silence.
• 25:23
  Do you see how the ratio if we then spend an 8 day retreat and
• 25:26
  there was no singing with the Lord?
• 25:28
  Because what happens, what I realize now is that every waking
• 25:31
  moment of silence now, I don't do any social media.
• 25:34
  I, I don't have TikTok, I don't have Facebook, I don't have
• 25:36
  Instagram, I don't have any social media.
• 25:38
  And I'm telling you the truth when I say that in any silent
• 25:40
  moment, if I'm walking to my car, I hear boom, a song burst
• 25:45
  going to my head. And I don't even do delivery
• 25:47
  hours as much as I should. I don't do all of them every
• 25:49
  day. But when you have the when you
• 25:50
  have the daily rhythm, the daily practice, then your thoughts are
• 25:55
  captive. It's just, you could say it's
• 25:58
  simple science and I'm sure you know it much better than I do.
• 26:01
  What the science is about. I guess music goes to your
• 26:03
  middle brain. It like is very powerful.
• 26:06
  But I'm telling you that the song that goes through my head
• 26:10
  in passing moments. So when I go to Adoration and
• 26:13
  I'm silent, then there's this crazy synthesis that happens.
• 26:17
  It's not like I need 20 minutes to gather my thoughts.
• 26:19
  It's there is an explosion of psalmody and then that gives me,
• 26:24
  I know it's the voice of God. First of all, I don't need to, I
• 26:26
  don't need to discern because guess what, the Psalms are all
• 26:28
  the voice of God. And then I can in humility ask
• 26:31
  the Lord, So what is this? What do you want from my life?
• 26:34
  And I know that the bedrock of the conversation is true
• 26:37
  dialogue with God. That's why he gave a scripture.
• 26:40
  We he didn't give a scripture to study and do some Gnostic thing
• 26:43
  where we get some secret knowledge.
• 26:44
  He gave a scripture to dialogue with him and all the scripture
• 26:48
  where we address God is music, the modern person.
• 26:52
  It's like trying to figure out how to pray in silence when we
• 26:55
  don't have, we're not listening to the basic scriptural mode
• 26:59
  that we communicate with God. We're not listening to it and
• 27:02
  we're not doing it because we've been told that it's
• 27:04
  ornamentation. We've been told that it's not
• 27:07
  utilitarian. Like it doesn't do any good.
• 27:10
  Like why would we just pray psalmed?
• 27:11
  Why would we sing? Because it literally is how God
• 27:16
  talks to us and we talk to God. God is clothed in beauty.
• 27:19
  God wants to reach us that way. Anyway, this is now again, I'm
• 27:23
  not an authority here. I'm just sharing my experiences
• 27:25
  and maybe some like church rubrics.
• 27:28
  But I'm telling you, this is like I I don't know where I
• 27:33
  would be without the Psalter. I love that vision.
• 27:38
  I hope you make it happen. Man that the oratory with people
• 27:42
  singing, chanting all day. I hope you make that happen.
• 27:44
  That was the original question, no?
• 27:45
  Don't worry. No, it was I was with.
• 27:47
  No, I'm with you. I was with all everything you
• 27:49
  said. I agree.
• 27:49
  I think what you said was true. Yeah.
• 27:51
  And it's it's very much in line. So it's my vision of preserving,
• 27:56
  protecting truth, goodness and beauty because people don't know
• 27:59
  what they've lost. And this is what we need.
• 28:01
  So I hope I can be a part of that some way.
• 28:03
  Do you have any less words to share with the audience?
• 28:06
  Well, I saw your post about this gradually simplex LinkedIn, so I
• 28:11
  just so tell me about your experience.
• 28:13
  What have you discovered about the gradually simplex?
• 28:17
  And I feel like constantly going through this process of
• 28:20
  realizing how little I know, and just my mind is expanding more
• 28:24
  and more. Yeah, I feel like someone in a
• 28:26
  cave who realizes that it's actually not a cave.
• 28:30
  It's this giant palace or of accumulated ruins, ancient ruins
• 28:36
  through the ages. And everyone else thinks it's
• 28:40
  just a cave. But then you're picking up these
• 28:42
  amazing fragments and but you have no idea where they came
• 28:45
  from or where they're got or where they belong or how to
• 28:47
  restore them. So that's a really cool image.
• 28:50
  You never thought that image before?
• 28:51
  That's beautiful. Nation is flowing.
• 28:54
  That's good. That's yeah, I had.
• 28:57
  I got into a. Discussion with the priest about
• 28:58
  what does solemn mean? Because I was arguing that doing
• 29:02
  something in doing a liturgy in Latin versus English is more
• 29:05
  solemn. I don't know if that's true or
• 29:06
  not, but that was what I thought.
• 29:08
  And then it occurred to me, yeah, I actually don't really
• 29:10
  know what solemn means, and I don't know what the church
• 29:14
  actually recommends. So then I decided to read the
• 29:17
  germ, the general instruction for the Roman missile.
• 29:20
  And it, this was a perfect example of something being
• 29:23
  hidden in plain sight. Then in the missile that my
• 29:27
  priest uses at Mass, it's the first section of the missile.
• 29:31
  It is the germ. I was literally looking at it
• 29:34
  every day for years without even realizing it existed.
• 29:38
  I didn't even know that it existed.
• 29:40
  And then I read it and I realized, OK, yeah, there's
• 29:43
  something, there's a lot of things here I don't know, like
• 29:46
  you're supposed to chant. It's recommended to chants, the
• 29:49
  intro, it, the entrance antiphon.
• 29:51
  I didn't even know that was a thing to chant it, Man.
• 29:54
  There's this massive book, books that are approved by officially
• 29:58
  approved by the church for chants.
• 29:59
  And we're there's literally hundreds, probably thousands of
• 30:03
  chants that most people are completely unaware of.
• 30:05
  What are we doing with our lives?
• 30:07
  We call this entering the wardrobe, by the way, and once
• 30:11
  you go into Narnia. Blow that.
• 30:13
  Johan, you can't go back. I can't be careful.
• 30:17
  If you continue on this road, you're going to realize just how
• 30:20
  big the cavern is. What's crazy about the gradually
• 30:23
  simplex is that this just shows you how like crazy the world is.
• 30:27
  That is a post Vatican to modern liturgical text never before
• 30:31
  done before. All the chants in there are
• 30:34
  selected from the tradition, but the gradually simplex even
• 30:40
  sometimes grinds. People who are super tratty are
• 30:42
  like gradually simplex. That's so modern.
• 30:44
  But that's The funny thing. It's like the gradually like.
• 30:49
  The dumbed down version. Yeah, but it looks like some
• 30:53
  medieval, like ancient manuscript compared to what we
• 30:56
  experienced. Yeah, absolutely.
• 30:58
  Yeah, it's amazing. The modern thing, the modern
• 31:00
  thing, like these beautiful chants, it's all Gregorian
• 31:03
  chant. The church's vision for the Mass
• 31:05
  is, is 99% of it is chant and all of it is giving God's words
• 31:09
  back to him. The church does not envision
• 31:11
  that the Mass ever would be this thing where we like pick and
• 31:15
  choose our own nice little songs to just like interrupt the
• 31:19
  liturgy and offer to God at 4 points at the entrance, at the
• 31:23
  operatory, at the, and then at the end.
• 31:25
  Like this thing that we do, especially in the United States,
• 31:28
  it's not actually something that's done everywhere, but
• 31:30
  we're exporting it everywhere. That's the ironic thing is that
• 31:32
  we, because we set culture like we, we got Los Angeles, we got
• 31:36
  New York City, we set global culture in the West, we're
• 31:38
  actually exporting this dysfunction.
• 31:40
  But there's no rubric. There's no tradition.
• 31:42
  There's no sane reason why we should inject the mass with all
• 31:46
  these random hymns, whether it's traditional hymns, praise and
• 31:50
  worship, whatever it is, because what the church directs us to
• 31:53
  do, even if it's the gradually simplex, which is wonderful, I
• 31:56
  have it sitting on my desk. It's torn to shreds because I've
• 31:58
  used it so much. So the gradually simplex is an
• 32:01
  example of the church saying, OK, what we will provide to
• 32:05
  encourage more singing of the Mass is simpler melodies for
• 32:11
  these things that we are wanting the Psalm that we want to sing
• 32:14
  at the entrance. So the church directs almost in
• 32:16
  every circumstance A Psalm verse to be sung at the entrance, not
• 32:19
  a random hymn, A Psalm. And then it has a simpler
• 32:23
  musical rendition of psalms to sing in the gradually simplex
• 32:28
  instead of the very. They're not very complicated,
• 32:30
  but the more complex one in the official chance of the Church,
• 32:33
  like in the gradual Romanum as reflected in the missile.
• 32:37
  But yeah, basically this isn't, now I'm speaking like inside
• 32:40
  baseball here, but it shouldn't be inside baseball.
• 32:42
  You're right. We should know about this as
• 32:43
  Catholics. This is one O 1.
• 32:45
  This is the first pages of the instruction manual how to
• 32:47
  worship God. But we're so in the rut of
• 32:51
  following our own made-up way of doing things, our own.
• 32:55
  And it's all based on individualism.
• 32:56
  Like we choose our own music because we want it to be
• 32:59
  authentic to what we want, but we like, and it's also all quasi
• 33:02
  democratic. Oh, the average pastor, if you
• 33:05
  said, father, the missile says to do this antiphon.
• 33:09
  So I'm going to sing this Psalm verse at the entrance.
• 33:12
  The average pastor after one week will be like, some people
• 33:14
  complain that they didn't know that song.
• 33:16
  So choose something everybody knows.
• 33:18
  So there's this weird psychotic instead of hearing the voice of
• 33:22
  Christ, we're like, let's hear the voice of the loudest
• 33:26
  complainers in the church in worship.
• 33:28
  Let's do what they want. Instead of let's hear, let's
• 33:30
  give God's own words back to him.
• 33:32
  Let's allow the words we give to God to be held captive by the
• 33:35
  loudest complainers in the parish.
• 33:36
  Like how dysfunctional is Catholic liturgy if it's about
• 33:40
  doing what, what, what we want to hear, doing what we're
• 33:43
  comfortable with? Like it's supposed to take us
• 33:45
  out of ourselves into the heavenly sphere, in into the
• 33:49
  mystery that saves the world, into the voice of the God man,
• 33:52
  Jesus Christ. And instead of that we have
• 33:54
  these weird squabbles where instead of being meta cultural,
• 33:58
  it's microcultural. It's like it's held captive.
• 34:01
  He's that this year old woman wants or the 20 year old dude
• 34:04
  wants. Oh, I want my praise and
• 34:06
  worship, bro. We should do something that's
• 34:08
  more exciting as the entrance and fun.
• 34:09
  Let's do I need you. Oh, I need you.
• 34:12
  Let's do that music. And the problem with that is
• 34:14
  that's microcultural. That's not medi cultural, that's
• 34:17
  not something that Christ then delivers and shapes us all into
• 34:21
  something new together. That's why you get this
• 34:23
  schizophrenic thing where there's the youth Mass and
• 34:25
  there's the old Mass and there's the more traditional Mass and
• 34:29
  there's the mass with Latin. The Mass is no longer this, this
• 34:31
  act of worship where we are listening to God, his word and
• 34:36
  we're giving God's word back to him.
• 34:37
  Now it's the schizophrenic thing where it's, oh, let's please
• 34:39
  this constituency and that's constituency and there's 12
• 34:42
  masses on a Sunday because the priest wants to please everybody
• 34:44
  with a different style that is so psycho.
• 34:47
  But in the modern, in our modern imagination, we think that's
• 34:49
  normal because we're so used to things being catered to our tiny
• 34:53
  little imaginations and our tiny micro cultures.
• 34:56
  You have a culture, I have a culture.
• 34:57
  This is my style. This is your style.
• 34:59
  And if that infects worship and worship disappears, it just
• 35:02
  vanishes because it's no longer the God man directing the choir,
• 35:06
  Christ directing the worship. Instead, it's this cacophony of
• 35:11
  totally discordant constituencies that are invading
• 35:15
  worship. It's oh, I need my little golden
• 35:17
  calf. And you get your golden donkey
• 35:19
  and you get your golden and then worship disappears.
• 35:22
  So anyway, I didn't mean you, you were like any final thoughts
• 35:25
  and I just took it in a whole new crazy direction.
• 35:27
  But this is the wardrobe, man. It's a scary place because.
• 35:31
  Yeah, I've been in the wardrobe. I didn't realize how big it was.
• 35:34
  I thought listening to Tucker Carlson was enough.
• 35:36
  But man, there's like, that's why I want to be the Catholic
• 35:38
  Tucker Carlson, because there's this whole different sub
• 35:41
  wardrobe within the wardrobe that people don't know about.
• 35:45
  That's right. Thanks, Paul.
• 35:48
  Hey, I appreciate you letting me be a little unhinged.
• 35:51
  And no, that's what this is all about.
• 35:53
  Be more. I encourage you.
• 35:55
  Continue being unhinged. That's great.
• 35:58
  Thanks. For timing on, you're welcome
• 36:00
  man. Thanks for listening.
• 36:02
  Please like, subscribe and share with your friends.
• 36:04
  See you next time.