Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #574 Exploring Identity and Love: Lessons from St. John Paul II and the Sermon on the Mount

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#574 Exploring Identity and Love: Lessons from St. John Paul II and the Sermon on the Mount · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I'm Jack Rigg, your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for joining me today.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: St Catherine of Siena said that if you become who you are, that you would literally set the world on fire.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: And St Athanasius, an early church father and a doctor of the church, said the son of God became man so that we might become God.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: You know I make a wild guess at this, but I bet you, most of us, are a bit disconnected from this divine life that these saints are pointing us to.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Yet Saint John Paul II said there's an echo of the story of this divine life that we're created for, inscribed in each human heart, in your human heart.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: And if you put on the proper lens if I put on the proper lens we can get in touch with this echo within us in such a way that we have that aha moment.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: See, that's the genus of St John Paul II's theology of the body.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: It connects our lived experience of life to the gospel in such a way that our life takes on a whole new meaning and helps us answer those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today meaning and helps us answer those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Who am I?
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: What's my purpose?
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Why were we created, male and female?
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: How do I find happiness here on earth?
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Be alive?
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: How are you, linda?
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Good to see you.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, I'm good.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: I'm good.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: It's amazing that it's 2025.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: So we have certified.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: We have certified the new president, you know.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: It had to be hard for Kamala Harris, you know, but she's finally brought that joy.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: You know how they were always talking about the joy that she brings in.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Well, she finally brought some joy in when she certified Donald Trump, I know, in my heart, the thought went through my mind I don't know about you of what it would be like if, on January 20th, she was going to be the president of the United States.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: You know, I mean, it could be a lot worse.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: You know, somehow, somehow, through the grace of God, we have eked it out, haven't we?
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: Yes, and I think you know Donald Trump is not our savior for sure, but we have much more potential now to bring some sanity back into every aspect of our lives that you know we were talking earlier.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: So much of it has gotten so insane that all of us are feeling that now, and I think that the new administration is going to help with that a lot in the governmental areas, but we still have a lot of work to do in other areas.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, we owe it to young people, we really owe it to young people to start to speak the truth, you know more clearly than we have in the past.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: You know the church pastors and shepherds have really got away from.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: You know there's too much of this watered down kumbaya and that's not going to attract young people.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: You know, it's the awe and wonder of life and love, the awe and wonder of their hearts.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: They're going out looking for something.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: I think this will bring some hope to some of those young people that are looking around thinking this is insane.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Of course, some young people never look up from their phones, you know.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: But the good news is, and here I'll give you a couple examples.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: So I was just reading about some young people.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: There was actually a father and a mother, no two dads.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: So what's becoming a typical trans sports conflict?
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: So here's two dads, ryan Starling, dan Slavin, whose daughters go to Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, california.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: They're suing the district, alleging Title IX, which is to protect women right.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Especially protect women in sports and they're saying that allegedly they're using it now for sex discrimination.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: And here's the story One of their daughters lost her spot on the varsity cross country team to a cross dressing boy and then, when she was confronted with that, she said well, this is a trans, you're a cisgender girl.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: You know, a normal girl is cisgender and you don't have the same rights as a transgender boy.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: And she goes what are you talking about?
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Title nine is about girls.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: And she goes well, you know, a trans girl is is very important to us, right?
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: And?
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: And so a trans girl, of course, is a boy you're right, that feels like he's a girl.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: So, anyways, what happened is these girls her and her friends start to wear.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: They call them spicy t-shirts.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: They simply say this these spicy t-shirts, save Girls Sports is what it said, and the lawsuit says school officials.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: So these fathers filed a lawsuit and in there they said the school official told the girls their spicy slogan was like a Nazi swastika.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Their spicy slogan was like a Nazi swastika.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Now you talk about insanity, correlating Save Girls sports with Nazis.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: This is like Kamala Harris, right, and like the View, the woman from the View, saying that all of these things, with Trump coming in and all this, this is the worst thing that happened since World War II and the Holocaust, and you can't make this stuff up, right?
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: So, anyways, the good news is young people across the school district, over 400 students started to wear these t-shirts and the school had to back down.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: So it's amazing, right?
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: So here's young people that say no, no, no, we're done with this crazy stuff.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: We're going to at least make a statement here, right?
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Even if the adults in the room are kids, let's have the kids become the adults.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: And that's exactly when you start to think about it, sandy, linda, and I'll just bring one more example of that didn't just happen.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: Probably a month or so ago, this young boy was flying an American flag on his pickup truck in Texas of all places, you'd think you'd be free down there to fly an American flag, an American flag in America.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: And the school said they had to take it down because it was discriminating against their feeling, making somebody feel uncomfortable.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Well, he wouldn't do it and they were going to actually tell.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: They actually told him not to come back to school until he got his stuff together.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: Well then other boys started to do it.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Finally, you'd see a picture of this parking lot at the high school, linda, every single car and truck has an American flag somewhere on it, and the school had to back down and so this is what happens to bullies right Insanity bullies.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: They back down and it was the numbers of young people Imagine that.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the crux of it to me is if we think of insanity is really a break from reality, right, and reality is the truth.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: And so we have.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: You know every episode of that.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: If you just, you know dig a little bit deeper, you find that it's just a break from the truth and reality.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: And you know we'll be talking about this today in number 107, that we are conscious subjects capable of self-determination.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: You've talked about that a lot.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: What does that mean?
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: These children couldn't put it in those words, right, but they're actually demonstrating we are conscious subjects capable of our self-determination and we recognize the insanity, the untruth of this and we're going to do something to bring the truth into it.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: It's such a great example.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: When you dig down to what is the, you know what's the meaning of it all.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and what we're going to be talking about now, and let's stay right with that, because we're talking about the truth of our bodies, the language of our bodies.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: When we start to talk about the truth, what is real, to your point, right, what is real?
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: And we say, okay, well, what is real with love?
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: What is real with what is love, first of all?
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: And is it just a feeling?
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: That's what the culture is telling these young people?
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: It's just a feeling, it's an emotion.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Does love have feelings and emotions?
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: I hope so, but not necessarily, you know.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's even devolved a little bit from the feeling aspect of like just don't even feel, it's just this activity, right Well?
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: I was going to say it's further reduced down to sex.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: yeah, so you have those stages it's a feeling, an emotion, and then it's further reduced down to, yes, to an activity, to sex, sex with no meaning or purpose.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And so the question becomes what is the truth?
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: What is the truth of our bodies?
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: And this is what John Paul is getting here.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: We have the awe and wonder of how we're created.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Linda and a man, before you jump in the shower today, if you're going to work out, you know, look down on your body and your private parts and say you say that doesn't make sense without a woman, and a woman could do the same thing.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: We are created in such a way that we complement each other, even our bodies, not only psychologically, emotionally, these souls that come together, but our very bodies complement each other.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: What is the truth of that?
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: Well, the truth is my wife and I have all the same body parts in essence hands, fingers, eyes, two lungs, a stomach, whatever.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: The only organ that's different is the sexual organ.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: There's some reason that it's different.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: What is the truth of that?
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: And John Paul would say if you read our body language in the truth, you'll find that marriage itself is a sacrament, it's a sacramental sign.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: And what does it express when it's read in the truth.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: It expresses love.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: And you say well, what is love?
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: How do I see love?
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: How do I make it?
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Well, it's actually in our language, of our bodies.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: We express authentic love, which is a free, total, faithful, fruitful giving to one another that we can say with words in our wedding vows, but also is made clear in our body language.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: When the two become one, open to life, can become three.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: And that's so clear, jack.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: The way the Pope introduces it to us is recalling all the discussions we had about Christ's appeal in the beginning.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: So in the beginning we recognize male and female.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: He created them.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: So that is that perfect idea of the complementarity.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: But when we move beyond that Christ, then in the Sermon on the Mount the Pope tells us is he went deeper, deeper than just that.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: He appealed to the human heart.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: And that's where we say okay, now we recognize that this male-female complementarity goes all the way to the essence of who we are, to our heart and soul, and he is appealing to that element of us to understand the meaning and purpose of our sexuality.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: It's just, it's like all right there, it's beautiful.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: So what Linda was saying and Jesus says in the beginning, we're talking about the unity and the indissolubility of marriage.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: In other words, you know what God has put together.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: Let man not put us under, let man not break apart, and you could see this love story, this sacrament that when the two become one, something happened.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: There's a bond there.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Well, what is that bond?
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: That bond is love.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: It's a way to express authentic love, which is what it's God.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: God is love.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: The first letter of John would say, not that we love God, but that God loved us first, even into existence.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: What's so difficult in this pornographic age that we live in and this toxic culture that we're talking about, linda, is that we've fallen for concupiscence, and this is the second thing that you just said.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: So Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount you know, you've heard it said right, you should not commit adultery.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: And I'm just going off the top of my head here.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: But I say to you, anybody that even desires or looks at a woman with lust, in essence has committed adultery in his heart.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: So he's saying I want to take you into the story.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: I understand you guys have come into a fallen world.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: I understand that.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: I understand that original sin was there.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: I understand that you are dragged down, even after baptism, by concupiscence.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: So you have this.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: You know that this world has been taken over by the power of Satan.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: We forget about that, that this power wants to take us away, wants to destroy us, and Jesus says no, don't let it destroy love.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: I came in not to accuse you, right, and not to convict you, but the reality is that's where a fallen world is.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: I come to call you to something greater, to authentic love, and I do it through my mercy, through my own sacrifice, right.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: How beautiful is that Right?
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: And as we hear that call, you know, we still in our fallenness, in our weakness, want to say but that's too hard, that's impossible.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: And the Pope says no, that it is possible, even understanding, as he says, the man of concupiscence, that weakness, that fallenness that is inherent with all of us, going back to that self-determination, he says you have the power, but it's only through the grace and hearing that call and then accepting that call that we overcome the concupiscence, the lust in the heart.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: And that's he was.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: He was explaining that in the Sermon on the Mount.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: But you can see that the listeners, just like us today, still want to say but you know, oh, that's impossible, you know, this is too hard.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: When you look around, linda, what's going on in the world.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: You know, right now Elon Musk has a big thing on X, going back and forth and he's got all the European leaders in an uproar and basically he's pointing out what Britain has done to their people and, in essence, all the rapes, the sex trafficking, the sexual torturing of young British girls, and it's been going on for two decades now and you go, how could that be?
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: That's impossible, that the British government is allowing it, in essence turning their back to it and letting those people suffer, and so this is already possibly the most heinous crime ever committed by a government against its own people.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: This is happening right now.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: So when you start to think about concupiscence, when you start to think about what happens, when you don't talk about what we're talking about, the beauty of this.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: So the short version is this over a 20-year period, the british government helped relocate tens of thousands of brutish pakistani men into unprepared small british towns.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: They did this for 20 years now.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: The government financed these.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Basically these, these, these incredible and you almost call them animals, these gangs of rove, and these are our brothers and sisters, but they're not.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: They're fallen men that have not accepted Jesus Christ right Coming out of Muslim communities, and I'm not calling on every Muslim as a bad person.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: I have friends of mine who are Muslims.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: They're wonderful, could be wonderful people.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: So again, it's not an individual thing, but this is actually what happened.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: They put these Pakistani men into unprepared British towns and the government financed these and they gave them public benefits and then they started a two-tier legal system to protect them, where Pakistanis were not punished for those crimes, including very serious ones, and British citizens were jailed for daring to criticize the system.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: There's actually men, fathers, in jail for protecting their daughters against some of these gangs and coming out, and they were actually put in jail for some of this stuff.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: And so this is going on right now.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Now you have this going back and forth and Elon Musk exposing what has been exposed for 20 years now, but nobody did anything.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: And finally it's going on right now.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: Why do I bring that up?
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: I read the report from the judge against some of these rapes and stuff.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Linda, I couldn't even read it on the air.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: They're so disgusting what they did to these 11, 12, and 13-year-old girls and the grooming and all the different things going on.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Well, our education system here in the United States does a more subtle but no less damaging thing with the national sex ed standards.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: They're pushing in schools pornography and all these gender ideologies on little kids, grooming them, desensitizing them the same way that these Pakistani gangs did.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: They didn't just go out and rape them, they brought them in, they gave them drugs.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: They found the girls that didn't have, that came from dysfunctional families, that maybe the father wasn't even living with them, right, and so they've looked at them as being unprotected, and then they went after them.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Well, the same thing happens here in this country.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: You have these young people being desensitized, being shown porn in school and then, at the end of the day, we're abusing one another.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: They don't know the difference.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: That's why, again, why does this all matter?
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Because what we're talking about here, we need to bring this to young people the awe and wonder of the sacrament of marriage, the awe and wonder of transcending this.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Don't get down on this, don't think that this has to be like this.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be like this, but we have to stand up and we have to take in the light of Christ into our hearts, understand who God is, how we're called in the beginning as a model, knowing that we're fallen and Christ comes in and he calls us out of this fallenness and gives us the grace to overcome, which is a battle, to your point.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: And John Paul doesn't.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: He doesn't pull any punches here.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: He says, hey, this is a battle of the heart, you know.
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, and he, over and over and over again, says it's possible.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: It is possible with that grace.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: The last sentence in paragraph number three of 107, he says that in this realm of the ethos of redemption, there is always the possibility of passing from error to the truth, as well as the possibility of return or conversion from sin to chastity as an expression of life, according to the spirit.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: And that's from Galatians.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: So you know, when you're speaking of these things that have been going on and allowed to go on, going on and allowed to go on it just I can feel my heart getting heavier and heavier, thinking the depravity and the lack of understanding of our human dignity seems to know no bounds.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: It's you know it just you know, praise God.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: My life hasn't been experiential in so many of those areas, but just to think of it happening to other people just is almost unbearable, Linda we were going there with this country.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: You saw this from the moment the Biden administration came in, the very first day, kamala Harris and Joe Biden were there at the executive table, I remember this 37 executive orders, many of them were pro-abortion, to kill children in the womb, to make contraception easier.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: What difference does that make?
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Because, again, it's that separation.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: If you want to pull apart the sacrament, the awe and wonder of a union of a man and a woman, what would you want to do if you wanted to destroy that life?
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Right, you'd put a barrier where, first of all, we're talking about sin.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Right, this hardness of heart that Jesus is talking about.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: What is sin?
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: It's a separation from God, right, so it's like a contraception on your heart, it's like a condom that's separating you from the spiritual right.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: And then what do we do?
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: We use that to go use each other.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: See, this is very linked.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: So what did happen in Britain?
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: Same thing that happened here in the United States.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: At first, you know, christians gave up their Christianity.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: We allowed the government to take the Bible and this language out of the public square, out of our education system, out of our schools.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: What happens when you do that?
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: Well, it's a vacuum and it's filled with evil.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: And we see this, linda, and until this last five, 10 years, people just didn't want to look at it.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: Right, I think we became selfish.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: We thought, no, I want to be able to determine how many kids I want, and this and that, and making love to my wife, what happens if she gets pregnant?
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: And we never saw the awe and wonder and we wondered why we got divorced and children being born out of wedlock and then abortion would happen, because we'd say, well, I didn't mean to have a baby with you with this, so let's just, let's just destroy the child.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: Well, be with you with this.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: So let's just destroy the child.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Well, this is all really satanic.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: At the end, even if we didn't know it look it, I get it A lot of us didn't know the story.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: But when we do know the story, it's so beautiful.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: And at the end I'll just say this, linda, what Christ is calling us into is an intimacy with him, the last thing.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: So, first, it was the beginning.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: The second word of Christ was that Sermon on the Mount we alluded to.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: But the third one is Jesus calling us into a union, a communion with God for eternity.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: And this is the beauty of the story, linda.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: We walked into a love story and we don't know it.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: We don't know it.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: And the way a marriage really taps into that intimacy with Christ is if husband and wife together are working to achieve that intimacy and that spills into their marriage in a most grand way.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: You know, when the Pope says that we're called and not just accused, he says that that calling is going to make us capable of that faithfulness, that integrity, that strengthening of the bond versus the opposite.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: And we have seen nothing but the opposite as a whole in our culture.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: And yet, jack, my world still has me aware that there are couples that I know of personally who have been married 50 years, close to 60 years.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: So there are some of us who still have understood it and have worked very hard at it, which to me reinforces that the Pope is not dreaming when he says it is possible Now.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: Are any of us doing it in a perfect way?
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: Certainly not.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: We still have our struggles and yet that sense of awe and wonder, here we are 50, 55 years later and we're still together and still trying to achieve that together.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: Our faith has deepened and I think most couples their faith does deepen because that's the only way we get that far is we've been tapping into that grace that the sacrament of marriage actually makes available to us every single day.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: So when you understand that, yes, you know it's possible, and I think young people today, like you say, have reached the point where the insanity is so great.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: You know it's like, in some ways, it's when an alcoholic needs to reach that bottom, like you know, I just can't do this anymore.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: You know it's like the young people are saying this is crazy, this is too crazy.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: Something has to change.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: You know, and, like we said earlier, I think with the government we have a chance of many of those things that we can't control directly from the government are changing and then we have to do our part.
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: Like the flags on all the trucks and all the cars, we have to bring this faith, this grace, back into our lives.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: If we leave the young people the way they are right now, they're grasping for something and they don't know what it is and we need to be able to tell them, and that's why we're writing this series called the Contraceptive Mentality Spiritual Warfare.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: I would suggest to people go online, go to our website, jp2reneworg.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: It's always in the show notes.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: Look in the show notes and then go on there and look at these articles, because it'll bring you into the story.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: There's a formula for it.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: I put it in Article 3.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: A body and a soul.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: When we come into this world without grace, the default state of us is sin and death.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: That's just the reality.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: You know, I had somebody arguing with me about that.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: I put it in one of the articles and they said oh Jack, you know, don't be a downer.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: I said don't want to be a downer.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: I said just have a little patience, my friend, there's a six-foot hole waiting for you, chisel-poised, you know, to put your name and your date on there and that's where we're going.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: I said you know, but Christ is calling us into an intimacy.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: He's overcome sin and death and he wants to give this to you.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: So now you have a body and soul.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: I say yes to Jesus.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: I'm filled with grace that gives me the potential for human flourishing, the potential for human freedom.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Now I have to make it efficacious.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: How do I make it efficacious?
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: I have to live this out.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: I receive this love.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: Now I have to become love in the world.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Right, this is the two great commandments.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: It's not brain surgery, but now in a marriage.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: What does that mean?
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: That means the both of us, to your point, get closer and closer and closer to Christ.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: That's the only way.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: See, I can be married for 50 years, but I can't be totally in love with being married for 50 years unless I'm receiving this grace.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: I start to understand that the sacrament and the sacrifice is the same thing.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Right, the sacrament of love is a reflection of Trinitarian love.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: It comes with a sacrifice.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: We see Jesus on the cross.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: This is my body given for you.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: He climbs the marriage bed of the cross to give his life to his bride.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Well, we're his bride.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: We take from there and now we give this to one another.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: This is the most beautiful thing, and you don't have to be married to do this.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: The saints and the mystics the St Teresa of Avila, st Therese of Lisieux, st Catherine of Siena, st Faustina, st Lucia, they live this out.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: My beautiful sisters, right?
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: I have holy crushes on all of them and they're just because they're on fire with love and they're not married, right?
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: They're living in convents a lot of times and stuff.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: So how do they do that?
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: This is what we have to understand.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: So, whether you're married or not married, whether you're 15 or you're 103, we're all called by Christ to become intimate with him like a marriage, right?
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I like that formula, the body and soul formula together, plus the potential.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: You know, let's focus on that for a minute.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: What does that mean?
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: To have the potential?
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: It means we have to make choices and we have self-determination was your word right that you brought determination.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: So here we are.
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: I have the freedom to choose for the good or to choose evil.
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: It always comes down to that and I was thinking too.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: Another way of thinking about it is that, as you speak in one of your articles about, when I do the good, I become good right.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: That's self-determination, right, that's self-determination.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: Yes, it's exactly so.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: If we think about every little activity I might engage in, does this activity, is it good, does it bring me closer to being a good person, or does it move me away?
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: And I think, okay, I'm drawing a blank here in the spirituality where every action either moves me closer to God or moves me away from God.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: Right, so that's it.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: You know, kind of in a nutshell, which way is it moving me towards truth and love or away from truth and love?
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: And if I move away from truth, I'm getting further and further away to insanity.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: If I move away from love, I'm getting more of a user, right?
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: What's in it for me?
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: Didn't our culture just tumble into this?
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: What's in it for me?
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: Mentality like a couple of decades ago at least, maybe more than that.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: What started?
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: yeah, no, it started in this, in the sexual revolution, the so-called sexual.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: There is no sexual revolution, mean, it's always.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: The truth is the truth.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: We just got away from it to your point and we are actually creating ourselves.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: You know, in essence.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: And now, how do we create ourselves?
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: We can only create ourselves with the grace of God.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: When I say I create myself, it's really saying yes to God, to the one who actually created me, and yes, doing good, I create myself by doing good.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: I can't change the story, linda.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is there.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: Objective truth exists, objective moral goodness exists.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Whether I believe it or not, it doesn't matter, it is there.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: And how I respond to it, that's how I make myself.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: Do I respond to the good?
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: I become good.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: Well, what happens, linda, after two or three generations of going off the rails, that poor young generation we're talking about has no idea of what we at least knew and gave up.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: They never even knew it.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: See, this is the sad thing For all the priests out there and all the people working with young people, all the parents out there.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: You have to share the good news this is really good news that their hearts are looking for something and their hearts are made for something more.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Linda.
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: And in not knowing that there was a void or a vacuum that got filled very quickly by all the online social media and so on.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: I just read an article the other day where a young girl is saying now that there is no young woman under the age of 18 who hasn't been exposed online to unwanted advances and all sorts of things that they weren't even seeking out.
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: Now we know statistics for pornography are horrendous with the young ages and yet a lot of that is being sought out here.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: These girls weren't even seeking anything.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: We're exposed to things again, I won't say on the air, so I'm thinking that was not my life experience.
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: Now the sexual revolution was, you know, starting to happen when I had come of age, but my earlier years certainly, I was not exposed to these things, and so already that void just got filled with things that are so untrue and so far from the truth, goodness and beauty that our young girls need to know about and need to see.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: And yet you know that glimmer is still there.
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: They still, I think, believe there's really true love out there and they're searching for it.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: In one of the articles I can't remember which one it is.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: We have three of them out now in this series and there'll be more to come.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: I put a link into x.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: It reminded me what you just said.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: It's a young girl who went viral and what she's doing is just talking about exactly what you said.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: She said I can't find, and she's a pretty, really a beautiful young woman, and you could just see her heart aching for love.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: And she says these men don't want love, they want to look at pornography.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: They want to look at pornography, they want to look at the screen, they want to blank off, she said.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: And they don't want a real woman, they don't want what comes with a real relationship, because it's work, it's sacrifice.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: Authentic love is self-giving.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: See, I just want to take and grasp.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: John Paul said the opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is lust.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: Love is this being filled and then pouring myself out right.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: Well, I can't give what I don't have and these poor young people don't have the good news that we're talking about.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: So what happens?
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: I want to fill my heart and I don't have grace.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: So I grasp.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: I still have to fill my heart somehow.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: I'm just going to fill it with garbage, I go out and I start eating out of the garbage bin and I get toxic, my whole life gets toxic and pretty soon you give away your freedom.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: Remember we said potential for human freedom.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: If I don't walk into the good, I gave away my freedom.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: You become enslaved to sin.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: Sin again is the separation from you and God, from you and grace.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: So now my body and my soul, body, soul, person is in a default state of what?
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: Sin and death.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: It's just reality.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: But I don't have to stay there.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: This is where we're at.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: This is the good news.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: We got to tell the good news, linda.
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: We have to tell people the good news and you know, really that's the point of this audience is we do not have to stay there.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: You know libido the Pope talks about.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: You know whatever that may mean to individuals.
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: My feelings, you know my pleasure.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: We do not have to stay there.
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: Feelings, you know my pleasure.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: We do not have to stay there.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: Jack, a lot of the theologians and mystics and others who just write everyday articles have emphasized that you can think of love also in a couple of other words sacrifice and mercy.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: And if we think about our culture, you know hearing that, oh my goodness, you goodness, sacrifice.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: We are not all that selfish and many folks are very good still, but the level of sacrifice that it takes really has been modeled by Christ.
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, we have to be there to the bitter end of being able to totally give ourselves for the other, and I think our young people at some level know it.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: It's almost like you know it.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: But to get there, you know, to cross that barrier of how do I get there.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: We're the ones that have to help them with that and I think understanding you know truly love being sacrificed.
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: There's no other way.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: You know it isn't just about myself and my pleasure, although what I've always thought too, is that when one begins to look at it that way and to try to live their life that way, the unexpected joy and pleasure comes with it.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: You know, when making love is done according to God's plan for what that activity really should be, it does send you to the moon, to the stars.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: It's just that beauty that we talk about, that we talk about, and all my hope is that young people will understand that and be able to experience that, because they've been drug through the gutter with our culture.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so just in recap then, linda.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you for that.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: In recap, right, god isn't accusing you.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: He has the power.
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: The mystics would call it this passionate energy of love.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: It vibrates through us, right?
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: You don't see love?
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: How do you see love?
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: It's expressed through your actions, through your words, through your body.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: Your body expresses love or it doesn't.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: It expresses lust.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: Right, young people you said they feel this in their heart.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: They feel there's something more.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: It has to be modeled.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: That's why Jesus always points to the beginning.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: He says you have to know the model, even if you're not perfect, right?
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: So the model in the beginning Genesis 1 and 2, is before sin.
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: But we have to look at the model because we have to know what we're created for, what that desire in the heart is for.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: Then he talks about the Sermon on the Mount and he says look it, it's a fallen world.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: That about the Sermon on the Mount, and he says look it, it's a fallen world.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: That was the model.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: This is where we're at now.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: I'm not pulling any punches.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: I came right.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: I came so you can have life in abundance John 10.10.
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: The interesting thing is, if you read the whole verse, john 10.10,.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: A thief comes only to destroy, to take away and destroy.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: Talking about Satan and sin.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: I have come to bring you life and to bring you life in abundance.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: That's all one verse.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: And so this is what we're asking all of us to do is to relay this to young people that look at the model, look where we're at and look what we're called into authentic love.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: And John Paul would say young people, young people, you know that your life has meaning to the extent that it's given away as a gift to others.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: You will not know love or who you are until you start to give yourself away.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: And again, I said it earlier, but it's worth repeating you cannot give what you don't have.
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: I have to go to the foot of the cross, I have to open myself up to be filled with divine life and love and redemption.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: The grace that you bring it up right, I have to be filled with that grace.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: Who he offers Grace is the participation in the life of God.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: I offer this to you, human beings, my creatures, my beloved children.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: Come receive this and then go on to eternal life.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: And, in the meantime, love everyone you see around you, right, yeah?
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: And parents and grandparents, be that model.
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: You know, we get the model from Christ and his love for the church and we have to model that.
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: And you know, when we are individually working towards that with our own soul and our own redemption, I think there's a synergistic effect.
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: That happens when a couple then, each individually are working on their own soul, but together their marriage is combining that you know.
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, we have to be the model, and you summed it up beautifully.
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: I just want to emphasize again that the Pope just says over and over again that I get it, we're fallen, but we don't have to stay there.
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: You know, accept that grace through the power of redemption.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: And start today.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: You know, very simple, it's not complicated.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: Right Before you look at that phone in the morning, number one, fall on your knees and, with our Blessed Mother, say your fiat.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Right Before you look at that phone in the morning, number one fall on your knees and with our blessed mother say your fiat huh, May it be done to me according to your word.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: I'm opening myself up to that model in the beginning to be filled full of love.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: The second thing is temptation's not a sin.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: Temptations are going to bombard us all day long, especially in this pornographic culture.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: Now we use temptations as an invitation to prayer.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: You want to pray all day?
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Just open up every temptation that comes your way as an invitation to prayer and let Christ do the work for you.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: And then, third, get up off your knees and go out and love the next person.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: You see, it's not brain surgery, it's not easy, but it's the most gratifying, powerful thing you'll do today.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: Just do those three things.
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: Linda, thank you so much.
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: Thanks for being with us.
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: Thanks everyone, Thanks for being with us.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: Talk to you again soon.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: Bye-bye.