Latest / The Catholic Current / Making Better Theologians (David Torkington) 6/4/26

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Making Better Theologians (David Torkington) 6/4/26 · The Catholic Current

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This is The Catholic Current, with Fr. Robert Mittaig.
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The wisdom of St. Augustine, if one can dare attempt to summarize Augustine, is to say
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we're not making any progress on any front until there's conversion to Christ first.
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Is that a fair summary?
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It's funny, now that you say that, I feel like half the great heresies in the Western
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tradition have been from people trying to summarize St. Augustine.
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Isn't that true?
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I did hear thin ice crackling underneath my feet, so I'm stepping back.
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Praised be Jesus Christ, this is Fr. Robert Mittaig of The Society of Jesus, your daily
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host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world, and the world to Christ.
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You're listening to us from the station of The Cross Studios, your local radio station,
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and the iCatholic Radio mobile app, where we proclaim the fullness of truth with clarity
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and charity, as always.
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Let's start with prayer.
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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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Almighty God, through the intercession of St. Ignatius our Lord, we ask that you pour
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forth your Holy Spirit upon us, a spirit of discernment that may hear your voice and obey
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your command.
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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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Amen.
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You know, friends, I like to quote Mark Twain from time to time, and he's reputed to have
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said, everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it.
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There are very many faithful Catholics who say what we need right now are better theologians.
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How do we get them?
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There's a short answer, there's an easy answer, and that answer also suffers from a significant
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flaw that we need to talk about.
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And I am very pleased to say that I have found an author who is prepared to talk about how
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to make better theologians and how to avoid easy and erroneous answers.
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He's a spiritual theologian, and he's an author and speaker who works in prayer, Christian
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spirituality, and mystical theology.
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So, David Torrington, welcome to The Catholic Current.
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Thank you very much.
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David, as I said, I'm a recovering academic.
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I taught philosophy and theology graduate and undergraduate levels for many years.
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I'm very deeply concerned about the Catholic intellectual life, which hasn't had a good
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season in a really long time.
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There's slovenliness, there's carelessness.
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It seems like sociologists have gotten a hold of a chat bot and put in some religious terms.
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It's painful, it's embarrassing.
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And some people, with the best of intentions, say, well, it's obvious.
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You just need to return to Thomas Aquinas.
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That's part of the solution, but I think there's a significant gap, a lacuna, that most people
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don't recognize.
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And in a recent article in Crisis Magazine, you identified what the lack is, and it's
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not with Thomas Aquinas.
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Can you fill us in on that, please?
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Well, first of all, I'd like to say that there were 1,200 years before the scholastics
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started to write, and the Church managed quite well without them.
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Well, yes.
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I'm not here to denigrate them, but merely to point this out.
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If we want to get back to basics, we go back to the early Church.
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We go back to early Christianity.
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We go back to the mystical theology that was absolutely central to early Christianity.
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Right.
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In fact, the greatest mystic in the Church in those early days was called Mary, the Mother
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of God.
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Yes.
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Because on the first Pentecost day, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the apostles
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and Our Lady, because she was immaculately conceived, she was immediately caught up with
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her Son again within contemplation of the Father.
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And she received, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, the fruits of contemplation that made her
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such an important person, a contemplative, and a mystic.
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The first Pope, St. Peter, was indeed the Pope, and he was free from error in faith
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and morals, as with later Popes.
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But Our Lady presided in a very powerful way as the Mother of God, both from her home in
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Jerusalem and later in Ephesus.
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In fact, I've just been writing a book on the influence of Our Lady on the fourth Gospel,
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on St. John's Gospel, and it is immense.
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Yes.
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You know, people don't seem to realize that St. John had been living with Our Lady for
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20 to 25 years, and afterwards he writes the Gospel.
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Do we not realize that the difference in character, the mystical nature of that Gospel is due
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to his adopted mother, Mary, Mother of the Church?
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And to go back to mystical theology, we begin with her at the very beginning and of the
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very profound effect she has on Christianity.
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So, the point I'm really trying to make to you, without going into any more detail
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here, is we're talking about we want to get back to the scholastics or Thomas Aquinas.
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No, no, no, no.
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Firstly, firstly, we must go back to the early Church and to early Christian spirituality.
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And I know very, very few people who are specializing in that subject and emphasizing
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it, because it is of absolute importance.
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I mean, take St. Paul, for instance.
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You know, go to Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, when he speaks about the visions that he had
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being lifted up into the third heaven, the second paradise of his revelations.
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Now, and he's talking about this that happened to him 14 years before.
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Now, if you want to understand what he underwent, you would have to read not only St. Teresa
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of Avila's interior castle, you'd have to read St. John of the Cross's Dark Night
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of the Soul, because until he'd undergone a mystical purification, he couldn't have
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come to such heights.
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And then back to St. Thomas Aquinas, who said through his contemplation, as through
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all contemplation, you receive the fruits of contemplation.
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And here we're talking about the infused theological virtues, the infused cardinal
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virtues, the infused moral virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that you see simply
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redolent not only in the life of St. Paul, but also in his writings.
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How could those writings have ever been produced unless under the influence of the Holy Spirit,
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unless he had received the fruits of contemplation?
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So, if we want to go back to the importance of contemplative prayer, mystical prayer,
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we go back to the early church and study it there.
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What happened to St. Paul?
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And remember, you know, if you go to an author, for instance, like Philip Hughes, the great
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historian, he said that before St. Paul set out on his apostolic journeys, he spent, wait
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for it, he said, 10 years in what he called, quote unquote, his novitiate, before he began.
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And that was preceded by three years in the Arabian desert.
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You know, have we forgot this?
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And the apostles themselves, this is why the apostles spent so much time in Jerusalem.
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I mean, immediately on the, I was speaking about Our Lady on the first Pentecost Day,
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but the apostles weren't immediately transformed, only a few short time before.
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They were sinners, and they still were sinners.
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St. Peter himself had denied our Lord three times.
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St. John had vied with one of the other disciples as to who was going to get the key position
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in the kingdom.
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They called upon Christ to destroy a village because it, you know, because it would not
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receive him, etc.
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So, what I'm trying to say is this, there is no such thing as instant sanctity.
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I believe in everything from instant coffee to instant resurrection, instant tongues,
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instant slaying in the spirit, instant miracles, instant sanctity.
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There is no such thing.
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Now, we've got to get this into our heads before we go any further because, you know,
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you don't just read the gospel and rush out to convert the world.
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When, look at St. Paul.
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Yes, he had a conversion experience.
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Yes, he was blighted.
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Yes, he was baptized.
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But he went out into the Arabian Desert for three years, and he insists that he did this
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before meeting any of the apostles.
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Yes, yes.
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And only after that time, he went to Jerusalem and he said, I only spoke to St. James.
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Then I went to Silitia when he spent, what, seven or eight more years preparing.
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And when St. Barnabas came, he said, come on, it's time, you know, we must get going.
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You're indeed.
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And he did persuade him.
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Paul's argument was that he wasn't ready.
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So, now, if we're going to have a genuinely new beginning, a new theology, then we've
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got to learn to go into the desert again.
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This was the theme of the prophets in the Old Testament, was it not?
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Absolutely.
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And speaking as a Jesuit whose formation took forever and who gladly goes off on 30-day
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retreats at the drop of a hat, there has to be a reclaiming of contemplative prayer.
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There has to be a reappreciation of mysticism.
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And I'm about to publish a paper on John Paul's fetus at Ratio where he talks about reclaiming,
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rediscovering the sapiential dimension to metaphysics and philosophy as well.
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It seems to me that there's an inclination to build theology on a very, very thin foundation.
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And no one is really willing to consider the contemplative and mystical roots that we need
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if we're going to build on a firm foundation.
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Friends, we come back.
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We're going to continue our conversation with David Tarkington.
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Our guest today is author David Tarkington.
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We're talking about making better theologians.
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David, I refer to myself as a recovering academic.
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I worked in universities and seminaries for many years.
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And what I've seen, especially with advanced theological studies for both laymen and clergy,
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is that it is merely academic.
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That you're a curator of texts, or you borrow religious vocabulary to kind of baptize your pet peeve or cause.
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But there seems to be very little in terms of transformation.
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In other words, theology becomes a genre of puzzles and texts to play with and bat around,
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but is not connected to the Fascinans at Tremendum at all.
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And the Church suffers as a result.
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Your thoughts on that observation, please?
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Yes, this is absolutely true.
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You know, we were talking before about preparing for preaching and so forth.
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Wasn't it Archbishop Fulton Sheen who said for every minute you spend in the pulpit,
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you need to spend an hour in preparation?
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And he wasn't just talking about with your books.
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Yes, yes.
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He was talking about on your knees too.
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Yes.
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Yes, absolutely.
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And apropos of this also, remember when the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites,
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and the Augustinians were first let loose after the Third Lateran Council,
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the older orders began to criticize them and tell them and say,
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get back to your monasteries.
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What on earth are you about?
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What are you doing?
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And St. Thomas answered them with that famous quote.
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He said, our work is firstly to contemplate and then to share the fruits of contemplation with others.
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Now, this applies to all preaching.
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Of course.
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But first, our relationship, our contemplative relationship with God
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in order to receive the fruits of contemplation.
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Otherwise, our preaching will suffer.
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Yes.
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I draw an analogy when I was teaching seminarians about preaching.
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I said there's an old joke among academics that says a university education is the process whereby the notes of the professor
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become the notes of the students having passed through the mind of neither.
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And I said, my analogy is this.
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If your preaching doesn't stick in the mind and hearts of the congregation,
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it's almost certainly because they haven't first passed through the mind and heart of the preacher as well.
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Now, where I studied theology, what the professors had in common was a matchless ability to suck the joy and life out of Scripture.
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And one professor told me that she preferred to call herself a professor of biblical studies
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rather than to call herself a professor of sacred Scripture because to call it sacred Scripture,
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and here I quote, was already to prejudice the text.
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I despaired at that point.
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Your thoughts on that, please.
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No, this is absolutely true.
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Certainly, and I'm always going back to the early church.
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Yes.
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I think this is where we should be looking now, not going back to the scholastics.
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As I made clear in the article, there is a place in them in Catholic education and there always will be.
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Yes.
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But the place we must go now if we want to start again is back to early Christianity.
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And the first form of prayer that came in in the early days of the church was when they had to help people
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who had not seen our Lord Jesus Christ as the first apostles had, as Our Lady had, and many of the first disciples had.
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And it was there for the first time that a totally new form of preparation for prayer began, and it was called meditation.
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Because round the fire in the evening and at Sunday Mass, when sometimes there'd be one or two apostles, according to Joseph Youngman,
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in a place like Jerusalem, for instance, sharing their recollections of our Lord.
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And then in the evenings Our Lady would be talking about our Lord.
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They set them afire with the love of Jesus Christ, our Lord, so that they too, in coming to know and coming to love him,
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would therefore be led on, as Our Lady had already been led on, into profound contemplative prayer,
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from where they would receive the strength, if they were not preachers, to live their faith,
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to live what they called not blood-martyrdom, though some of them were called to blood-martyrdom,
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but every day they were called to what they called white-martyrdom, as they sacrificed their life for our Lord Jesus Christ.
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But in order to do this, they were set afire in prayer, and the deep contemplative prayer from which they received the infused virtues.
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My fear is that we are losing the vocabulary, the grammar, the moral imagination to consider any of these things at all.
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For my sins and for the relief of the holy souls in purgatory, I've been reading a lot of synodal documents lately,
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especially regarding priestly formation.
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And it seems to me that a group of sociologists got together with a chatbot and just churned out paragraphs with religious themes.
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But there's really very little about going into any kind of a desert with silence and stillness and solitude.
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Nothing whatsoever.
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But rather just going to lots and lots of meetings and conversing.
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I don't think this is going to work.
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What do you think?
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I'll answer you by saying this.
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I was rereading something I wrote only this morning.
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And I thought, yes, I hope I'm St. John's Gospel.
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And I said, I must put this quote in.
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And the quote from St. John's Gospel was this,
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These people do not understand my language because their father is the devil.
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Wow.
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What do you make of that?
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Well, yeah, nature abhors a vacuum.
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And if we're not rooted in Christ, we're rooted in something else.
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That's certainly true.
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So we need to recover the contemplative dimension.
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We need to go to the sources.
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We need to learn to drink from the great well that Aquinas certainly did, St. Ignatius as well.
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I know among my contemporary Jesuit brothers right now, there's an excitement about teaching communal discernment to just about everyone.
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Because Ignatius and his first companions did some communal discernment together.
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And here's what I noted.
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St. Ignatius was a saint, as was St. Peter Faber.
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All of the first Jesuits had two things in common.
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They made the spiritual exercises under the direction of St. Ignatius.
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And they all got doctorates in theology from the University of Paris.
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And they all lived the cetical lives of contemplation.
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So when those men get together for communal discernment, I want to pay attention.
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But absent those conditions, can we really begin to talk about discernment and listening to the Holy Spirit?
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No, no. You've got to go back.
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We were talking, I think, off-air before we even began about—you were talking quite a lot about St. Bonaventure, for instance.
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And both St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Dunscotus, and St. Albert the Great,
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before they started to study their scholastic theology, most of them, I think, at Paris University,
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they had been brought up in the new spirituality that St. Bernard had spread in the wake of the reopening of the Holy Land, thanks to the Crusaders.
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And this new Christ-centered spirituality, which thundered across Europe with their meat and drink,
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long before they even entered into religious life, as witnessed by their books, books that they wrote that you quoted to me.
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Yes, yes. And one of the things that I experience—I have an imaginary place that I speak of called St. Typicals,
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which is populated by the Typicalians and pastored by Fr. Cheerful.
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And I found that they treat worship like live radio.
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Now, on live radio, the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit is dead air.
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There must not be silence ever.
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And so during the Mass, if Fr. isn't talking, somebody else is talking, or somebody's singing, or someone's strumming a guitar,
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and people seem to panic if there's even a hint or a whisper of silence.
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Now, we can lay the blame at a lot of different places, but what does that do to the ordinary Catholic in the pew,
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where he's being told repeatedly in word and deed,
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there must not be silence in your life, and there is no need for silence.
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And I realize I just asked you a vast question, and we've only got a minute and a half in this segment.
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Well, I'm afraid unless we—the first sacrifice we need to make if we're going to learn how to love God in Jesus Christ,
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because that's where we discover him, is to make the sacrifice of time,
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to create the silence in which to slowly read mull over the sacred scriptures.
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I always encourage people, if you want to start, begin with the great discourse of the Last Supper,
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slowly going over it, read, reflect on it, ruminate on it, as St. Augustine would say.
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And then from there, into the Passion account, to see how this man, this man so full of love,
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was treated for preaching the gospel of love, of care, of compassion.
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This will lead people through meditation onwards and into contemplation.
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I'm glad that you mentioned that, because my current manuscript project is about how to get Catholics to read Scripture as Catholics.
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And one of the indispensable elements of getting Catholics to read Scripture as Catholics
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is to remind them that they have to learn how to read Scripture liturgically, and not in isolation.
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And that would be a vast topic, which is why my book keeps on growing and won't come to an end.
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Friends, we come back to continue our conversation with David Tarkington.
25:27
We're talking about how to make better theologians.
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We proclaim the fullness of truth with clarity and charity.
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I'm speaking with David Tarkington today.
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We're talking about making better theologians.
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And someone might protest, well, you know, Father, good for you.
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You know, you're concerned with the formation.
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You're concerned with academia.
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I got a family to raise, as my late Italian mother would say.
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I've got meatballs to make. I don't have time for this.
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David, for the ordinary person in the pew, for the person who's got a family to raise,
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the concerns that we've been talking about, about becoming contemplatives,
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about spending years in the desert, all of that seems inaccessible.
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But I know looking at your website, you make books and courses available to ordinary people.
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How do you make all that work?
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Right. Well, let's go back to the early church again, shall we?
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And where I want to go is to the hidden years.
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Yes.
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Supposedly we know nothing about what went on in the hidden years.
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But, you know, we know quite a lot.
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For instance, if you read the Talmud, which was written, what, three or four centuries after the Resurrection,
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when the Mishnah, the oral tradition of the Jews, they were afraid that it would disappear.
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It was put down in a book called the Talmud,
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which gives you a very good idea of the sort of spirituality and spiritual life
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lived by the ordinary Jews in the time of our Lord when he was growing up.
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Now, it is here that we learn something that is absolutely essential to early Jewish Christianity,
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which is absolutely essential for us too.
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And that is, we know for certain that Our Lady would herself have been taught
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the most important daily prayer by her parents, St. Joachim and St. Anna,
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and it's called the Shema.
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And the Shema is virtually, well, and in order to describe what it is,
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later on, we call it the morning offering.
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But what happens in the Shema is they offer up the forthcoming day.
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And in that offering is actually, within it, is the first of the new commandments,
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to love God with your whole heart and mind, with your whole body and your whole soul,
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in and through everything that you are going to do in the forthcoming day.
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Now, that was said and taught by parents to their children.
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Our Lady would have taught it to our Lord when he was a young child.
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As he grew up, he would have said it, not just early in the morning,
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but he would have said it three times a day,
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because every good Jew went to the synagogue three times a day.
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And if they couldn't get to the synagogue because they were on a journey
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or they were suffering on their bed, a deathbed or whatever,
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they would nevertheless, at 9 o'clock, when sacrifices were being made in the temple,
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at 9 in the morning, 12 o'clock, 3 in the afternoon, they would go to the synagogue.
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And if not, they'd pray where they were, the Shema, yet again.
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And this, of course, was picked up by early Christianity,
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for whom it developed into the morning offering.
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Now, to the lay people who say, well, what about us?
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When Pope Benedict went onto the Internet for the first time,
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a young married couple asked him, look, we're married, we've got three children,
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where do we get time to pray?
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He said, say your morning offering.
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You know, this is something that, you know, I was brought up with, I'm sure you were.
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And mothers teach it to their children.
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It is essential that we've been born to enter into a sacrificial life
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in imitation of Jesus Christ our Lord.
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And we begin early in the morning by consecrating everything that we say and do
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in the forthcoming day to Him.
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And then, of course, in the evening, and you know this well enough from St. Ignatius,
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when you examine your conscience in the evening,
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top of your list will be, what have I done in my day?
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How have I been putting it into practice?
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And make reparation or seek forgiveness of God for how you've failed
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and make reparation and again renew your resolution to start and consecrate the next day to Christ
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so that by the time you come to Mass on Sunday, you're taking six days
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in which you've tried to offer every sacrificial action you've made
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or to make your whole day into a whole list of sacrificial actions
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so they can be united with the great sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord.
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You know, this is where I think lay people, but not just lay people,
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every one of us should see that this is the first thing that we do in the morning
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is to consecrate the day through a morning offering.
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And if that's gone out, we must do all we can to bring it back in.
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It was central to the Holy Family before the church was first inaugurated on the first Pentecost day.
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Thereafter, it was central because they kept making their Shema
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and they kept going three times a day to the synagogue until they were thrown out.
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And when they were thrown out, they didn't stop saying their Christian Shema,
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which becomes the morning offering.
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It continued. It sacralized the day, making it into the sacrifices that we take with us
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when we go to Mass and unite with the sacrifice of Christ.
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I would like to make a distinction that I have found helpful,
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and I'd like to get your opinion on it,
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about the distinction between a prayer time and a prayer life.
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There certainly has to be designated times of prayer that are just exclusively for God alone, and rightly so.
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And an obvious illustration of that would be the Liturgy of the Hours.
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But at the same time, there has to be a prayer life,
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what Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection called,
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learning to practice the presence of God.
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Because there are people who think that if they show up on Sunday
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and allow God to inconvenience them for as long as an hour,
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then they can put God back in the box, and then they can go back to real life.
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And this is where Jesuits are called to be contemplatives in action.
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They certainly have their days and weeks and months in isolation and seclusion,
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but then they are alert to the presence of God.
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So they have their epiphanies, their theophanies, their revelations in the thick of things.
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Can we talk about cultivating the habit of being alert to the presence of God throughout the day?
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Sure.
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Well, this is one of the things that I've been talking about, really, with the morning offering.
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So that throughout the day, by trying to put everything, to make everything an act of sacrifice to God,
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in whatever you say or whatever you do, but in order to do this,
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a practice began very early in the church, particularly among the Desert Fathers,
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of trying to, of taking a prayer, a short prayer, a prayer like, well,
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Abbot Macarius used to say simply the word Jesus.
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Yes.
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Or Lord to the rescue.
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Or you remember Abbot Jacob talking about the prayer,
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Oh God, come to my aid.
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Oh Lord, make haste to help me.
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That St. Benedict finally put at the beginning of every hour.
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Take a prayer like the Jesus prayer.
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Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
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You choose the prayer that will help you, that you can, that can recur throughout the day.
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Set moments, you can pause and be still at moments throughout the day to continually remind yourself
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that in imitation of Jesus Christ our Lord, you are trying to make the whole of your daily life
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into a sort of mini mass where you are continually offering yourself up through Jesus Christ our Lord
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to God the Father.
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And when at mass you unite this with Christ, what happens is that you receive in return
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the help and the strength to inspire, suffuse, and surcharge you for the week ahead
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to continue your life of sacrifice, because that is what our life is in imitation of Jesus Christ.
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When it's explained that way, I ask myself, how could a sane man not want this?
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Once you know, how can you think that anything else will satisfy or suffice?
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And I've told people from the pulpit that, you know, we have our Heavenly Father carrying
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the broken, bloodied body of his son, and the sorrowful mother standing behind him,
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and he cries out, you are worth my son.
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And we reply with, is this going to take long?
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And I have begged people from the pulpit not to stampede out of the church,
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but to take some time in silent gratitude after mass.
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And I get nearly zero response.
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People are determined to stampede out of the church after mass.
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I know we've only got about three minutes left in this, but will we get to talk about
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what to do about the obvious resistance to the call to contemplative prayer?
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You know, you said there's two minutes left.
37:59
Quite frankly, this is the one burning question that is on my mind in general
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for the whole of the church at the moment.
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It's as if there's something—you cannot move people.
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You cannot move people to give time for prayer, to make sacrifice.
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It's something that, I don't know, I think it really—if it didn't come in in the 19 swinging 60s
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that I can still remember, you know, whenever anything goes, it certainly came in with a bang then
38:38
that people haven't the time, they don't want to sacrifice.
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I mean, I was told—I was going on a program similar to this one, and they said,
38:47
oh, well, if you're going to speak about that, you've only got 17 seconds because people's lives—
38:53
Yeah.
38:55
People's attention span is only 17 seconds.
38:59
Now, how on earth can we convince people to try to teach people how to pray
39:05
and the importance of prayer in 17 seconds?
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That's all they can—you know, that's the only time you've got.
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So I sort of despair.
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But this is the $64,000 question, Father, that you've brought up.
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Yes, it is.
39:19
Tell me your answer.
39:20
I'd love to know it.
39:23
Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to wind down the clock and take us into the break
39:29
and then maybe off the air between segments, I can give you my best guess at it
39:35
based on what I've learned in 35 years of religious life.
39:39
The irony of time is that we spend it like drunkards and we hoard it like misers.
39:47
And for the things that we think are important, we are absolutely lavish.
39:53
And if God Almighty dares to make any claim on our time, we start looking for excuses.
40:01
I mean, I've heard people give exacting exegesis of explaining how quickly we can leave.
40:08
When's the earliest possible moment that we can leave Holy Mass?
40:14
And I just can't believe that we're having these kinds of conversations at all.
40:19
That is absolutely unintelligible to me.
40:22
It's tragic and it's damaging.
40:24
And that's what we'll talk about more in the next segment.
40:27
Friends, when we come back, we're going to continue our conversation with David Torkington.
40:30
We're talking about how to make better theologians.
40:34
And that's a question that applies to all of us.
40:37
If you're baptized, you need to be a theologian.
40:40
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40:46
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40:48
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40:51
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40:54
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40:56
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40:58
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41:03
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41:06
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41:08
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41:10
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41:11
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41:29
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41:33
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41:36
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41:49
Praised be Jesus Christ.
41:50
This is Fr. Robert McTague of The Society of Jesus, your daily host for The Catholic Current,
41:54
where we bring Christ to the world and the world to Christ.
41:57
You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross studios or local radio station,
42:01
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42:06
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42:12
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42:16
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42:19
Support us, please, at thestationofthecross.com.
42:22
My guest today is author David Tarkington.
42:25
We're talking about making better theologians, and we all need to be better theologians.
42:29
David, we have just merely begun to scratch the surface of a vast topic.
42:34
You've been at this for a long time.
42:37
There is a wealth of your work available to people.
42:40
Talk about what you have to offer and where people can find it.
42:43
Yeah, I think before I start that, I would just like to say something.
42:49
The most accurate translation of the First of the Beatitudes is,
42:55
Blessed are they who know their need of God.
43:00
If you know your need of God, then you'll get on your knees and pray.
43:05
The fact is, we don't.
43:07
Now, what I want to say, why I've spent the whole of my life writing about prayer and mystical theology and so on and so forth,
43:15
is because I am a serious dyslexic.
43:21
So dyslexic that I failed every single examination at school.
43:26
I was a total failure.
43:28
Otherwise, I'd have been a Jesuit, because I idolized the Jesuits.
43:32
People like Father Clifford Howell, Father Bernard Bassett, who gave us retreats.
43:37
But that long training, I thought I couldn't possibly cope with it as a dyslexic.
43:42
Now, the point is, I went to see my spiritual director, and he said,
43:48
Well, there's only one thing you can do, turn to God.
43:52
And I realized that there was only one person could help me, because nobody understood dyslexia in my day.
43:58
So I started to take prayer seriously.
44:01
Not because I was holy, because I wasn't.
44:04
I was not a pious youth, but I was extremely needy.
44:08
So I desperately turned to God.
44:11
And when it came to the point where most people get fed up or just give up,
44:16
because it becomes too difficult, I stuck on.
44:20
And I kept praying and praying and praying and praying.
44:23
Eventually, there was a breakthrough came, because perseverance is absolutely essential.
44:29
But it was not because I was holy, because I was needy.
44:34
So turn to God in your need.
44:37
The prayer you must make is, Lord, that I may see.
44:42
That I may see my need of you.
44:46
If you do and you realize that need, you'll turn to God.
44:50
That was the one thing that completely changed my life from everyone around me.
44:57
All the others were going with massive academic futures and so on and so forth.
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I hadn't got a future.
45:04
If God wasn't my future, I had nothing.
45:07
That's why I became completely dedicated to prayer, and my whole life has been given to prayer.
45:14
Now, if you want to follow some of my—I run retreats, online retreats.
45:22
I don't give them myself, or I do give them, but they take the form of videos and podcasts and so forth.
45:29
You will find them on metanoia.org.uk, and they're called Metanoia Retreats.
45:39
I've done one retreat that begins—each one is about 45 minutes, and there are 15 talks.
45:48
The beginning with the morning offering that I mentioned before,
45:53
and all the other features of morning and evening prayer, the examination of conscience, etc., etc., etc.
46:00
Then to meditation.
46:02
Then to when contemplation takes over.
46:04
Not when you choose, but when God chooses.
46:07
All that is explained in 15 lectures.
46:11
Then there are further retreats, both in the podcast and video form,
46:16
and you will find them by going to metanoia.org.uk.
46:22
At the very beginning, when you get the site up, you'll see that I've done introductions.
46:28
Number one, the imitation of Christ, learning to repent with Christ.
46:34
Now, notice, these are the words that have recurred in all the appearances of Our Lady in recent years.
46:44
Repent, pray, sacrifice.
46:48
So, the first part is the imitation of Christ.
46:52
The second is learning to repent with Christ, learning to pray with Christ, learning to sacrifice with Christ.
47:04
Because repentance, as you know, means turning back to God, but repentance has to be learned, and it's learned in prayer.
47:14
Because when you go to prayer, you'll find, oh, I can't pray.
47:18
There are 101 distractions.
47:20
St. Teresa of Avila says you can't pray without them.
47:25
Because every time you turn away from a distraction or a temptation to turn back to God, what have you done?
47:32
You have repented.
47:34
So, in prayer, you learn to repent at speed.
47:38
You learn to make a series of acts of love.
47:42
And the love given when you feel nothing or you're in darkness and don't think you're going anywhere is ten times worth the act of love you make when you're swept up in an ecstasy.
47:56
Let us suppose you kneel down one day to pray, and you fall asleep.
48:02
Is that prayer?
48:03
No, you're asleep.
48:05
The next day you fall asleep, you're taken up into an ecstasy.
48:10
Is that prayer?
48:11
Well, St. Teresa of Avila talks about the prayer of ecstasy, but it isn't actually a prayer.
48:17
Why?
48:18
Because when you're asleep in an ecstasy, you are doing nothing.
48:23
Prayer is in between the ecstasy and falling asleep and what's happening there.
48:29
You're continually trying to turn back to God.
48:32
You're trying to make acts of love.
48:34
You're trying to make sacrifices as you give them to him.
48:38
And then finally, part four, then as Our Lady said, and then sacrifices, then sacrifice.
48:45
Now, on one of the appearances of Our Lady, one of the children said to her, can we come back to heaven with you, Our Lady?
48:52
Will you take us?
48:53
She said, come back to heaven, whatever for?
48:56
What sacrifices have you to bring?
49:00
So when you go to Mass, imagine, and you don't need to imagine it, she's there, saying when you get to Mass,
49:09
and what sacrifices are you bringing to be added to the sacrifice of my son?
49:14
If not, what are you coming for?
49:16
So there we have it.
49:18
Let's end with everything being made so simple in the words of Our Lady.
49:24
All we've got to do is to learn to repent, to pray, to sacrifice.
49:29
Sacrifice what is most precious in your life.
49:32
And what's that?
49:33
Your time.
49:35
To do what?
49:36
To learn how to love God.
49:38
Where?
49:39
In prayer.
49:40
That's where repentance is learned.
49:44
A great medieval mystic who was a mother, incidentally, talking about families, and name was Angel of Foligno,
49:53
said that prayer is the scola divina amoris, the school where loving is learned.
50:01
And there is no other place.
50:02
David, I'm going to have to interrupt you there, because in God's providence or by the devil's scheme, we've only got about 15 seconds left.
50:09
So we're going to have to have another and more conversations.
50:13
And next time, we'll continue on the podcast platform without commercial interruption.
50:18
David Tarkington, thank you for a fascinating conversation.
50:21
God bless you.
50:22
Very good work, and I look forward to next time.
50:24
Not at all.
50:25
Thank you.
50:26
Bye-bye.
50:27
This is Jesuit Father Robert McTaggert, host here every day of The Catholic Current.
50:29
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50:35
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50:37
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50:40
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50:45
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50:48
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50:49
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50:51
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50:54
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50:58
Through the intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, may Almighty God bless you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
51:03
Go in peace and please do pray for me, for I am a sinner.