Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #507 On Morality and Conscience; The Fall of Man and the Power of Jesus Christ

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#507 On Morality and Conscience; The Fall of Man and the Power of Jesus Christ · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: I'm Jack Riggert, your host.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: I'm so glad you're joining me.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: This is our Friday Saturday session for young people.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: When I say young people, young at heart also, it could be a lesson for any of us, but it got started like this I love mentoring young people, working with more and more young people, and they're really appreciative because you just see the light go off in their eyes and in their hearts when they flip the switch.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: The switch goes from oh my, you know living like the frog in the proverbial pot, not filled up with boiling water, but with moral relativism.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: And then boom, something happens and they seek the truth.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: I became a Catholic speaker and presenter of John Paul II's Theology of the Body and other things when I discovered her biblical teachings on the true meaning of marriage and the family and the meaning of what it means to be human, human sexuality, why are we created male and female?
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: And I found them to be true and I knew it right away in my heart.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: This is what I'm talking about, like you know, when your heart is ready and you know there's got to be something more.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: And then you hear it and your experience of life says, yes, I know this, it's true, it's this word truth, what is the truth?
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: So today I'm spending more and more time discussing these things, even with my evangelical brothers and sisters who, like me, turn to Christ and the Bible almost as a last resort when confronted by so much evil pain suffering in the world, but also in our personal lives.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: It's usually the pain and suffering in our personal lives and our marriages, our families.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: You look around the world and you say, gosh, what is going on here?
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Well, it seems to me that more and more people that I meet are seeking the truth.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: What's going on?
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: And they're turning to Christianity.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: And there's all kinds of reasons for that.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: And you hear people like it's really exciting.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: You hear people like Tucker Carlson, russell Brand and Jordan Peterson and his wife who just became Catholic, candace Owens, others.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: But yet there's so much darkness out there and so many people that attack them when they become like that.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: And then you realize I got to mentor young people.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: We have to continue to nourish them because, to be more specific, it seems that we're back to that battle of the individual human heart.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: As Alexander Shostakhin would say, it all comes down.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: All the evil that you see around the world comes down to that battle that starts in the individual human heart.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: That's the big story.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: And then we go out into the world and we either bring evil or good in the world.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: And this is what you see in this battle all around us those who either chose, or naive enough to allow evil to walk into their hearts and then they go out and become evil, or they've never had the gospel proclaimed to them, and I'm finding that more and more.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: So many young people have never heard the gospel, at least in all its power and authenticity to change your heart.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: See, if it's just words, it's not going to do anything.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: It might spark good conversations and maybe it sparks a search for the truth, which is a good, positive step, but it's Christianity, it's Jesus Christ himself, the person, the encounter, that changes your heart.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: And that's when it's Christianity, it's Jesus Christ himself, the person, the encounter, that changes your heart.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: And that's when it gets exciting.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: That's when you hear people start to they're converted, and then they start to talk about it and they can't hold it in because something happened to their heart and then they want to go out right.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: And then, when you look around the world, you realize there's no politician or economic system or church leader that's going to save us.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: It's going to be Jesus Christ.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Before I get into the topic today, which is really good, you know maybe the title Morality and Conscience, the Fall of man, you go, oh man, I don't know if I want to hear that it's really good stuff.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Oh man, I don't know if I want to hear that it's really good stuff.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Ephesians, chapter 2, right off the bat, verse 1.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: You know, from death to life with Christ, this is and this is what I'm talking about.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: And think about the people in the proverbial pot, you know, sitting there, versus those that have jumped out and found Christ and here's, you know, st Paul talking about this, and you he made alive, speaking of Christians when you were dead, through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the ear, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience Among these.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were, by nature, children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: Just sit on that, our default position is sin and death.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Our default position in this broken world, without baptism, without coming in, without making a decision to follow Jesus Christ, is sin and death.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: I'm going to read that again Among these.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: We were all once living the passions of our flesh following the desires of body and mind, and so we were, by nature, children of wrath like the rest of mankind, but, but, but, but.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: God, who is rich, in mercy out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: In Christ Jesus, for by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not your own doing, it's a gift of God.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: St Paul says not because of works, lest any man should boast, but we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Isn't that beautiful?
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: Beforehand, that we should walk in them.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Isn't that beautiful If you take that passage for a couple of days and just meditate on that.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Just read that.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: It's really powerful.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Okay, on conscience and morality and conscience, the fall of man.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: I think you're going to really enjoy this.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Buckle up and get ready for today's episode.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: But the serpent said to the woman you certainly will not die.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: No, god knows well that the moment you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like gods who know who can decide what is good and what is evil.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: That's Genesis 3, verses 4 and 5.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: I find more people who once called themselves atheists or at least agnostics, sensing the weight of evil, sin and death in the world, but also within them, the mysterium and equitatus, the mystery of evil.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Russell Brand is one of them.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Brand begins his book Recovery and Freedom from Addictions, based on AA's 12-step program, this way here, in our glistening citadel of limitless reflecting screens, we live on the outside.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: He's talking about our phones and things, and computers and things.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: We live on the outside of the larger story and so outside of the story of our hearts, I add.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Today, he said, we may awaken and instantly, unthinkingly, reach for the phone.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Its glow reaching our eyes before the light of dawn.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Its bulletins dart into our minds before even a moment of acknowledgement of this unbending and unending fact you are going to die, you and your children and everyone you love is hurtling toward the boneyard.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: I know, you know, we all know.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: But because it yields so few lines, so few likes on social media oh my gosh, he's funny.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: We purr on and blinkering compliance, filling our days with temporary fixes A Starbucks here, an Amazon purchase here, a half-hearted flirt, a few minutes watching a reel of porn, any glinting twitch of pleasure releasing a rush of dopamine like a silvery stitch on a cadaver just to tide you over and you're probably too clever to repose in god.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Or pick up some dusty book like the bible that has been outlawed in schools, where the, where the poetry, poetry creaks, you are told with a loathing for women.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Inside that book is is a hatred of trans people, or someone perhaps and I add a couple of things in here perhaps against CRT and DEI and SEL told that the melatonin in people's skin is the cause of hatred in the world, or that you may just be a systemic racist on the day that you were born for some obscure reason.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: I'm taking a little liberty there, but he goes on.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Maybe if science and quantum physics could come up with some force or web or string or something that tethers the mystery to something solid, something measurable, you'd think again.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: But until there's nothing but an empty grave and a blank tombstone, chisel poised in front of you, jizzle poised in front of you.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: So no one's going to blame you if you perch on a carousel of destructive relationships and unfulfilling work, whirling around never, still, never truly looking within, never really going home.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: But because I had the gift of desperation, because I effed up my life so royally, I had no option but to seek and accept help.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: John Paul II starts his work now.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: What I've been working on this last seven weeks or so and I'll continue to do for the next weeks, is from an apostolic letter he wrote to the youth of the world right before the occasion of International Youth Day, when he started International Youth Days in 1985.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: He called it Delecti Amici, which means dear friends.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: He wrote 16 kind of sections there of things that he wanted to tell young people over the years coming.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: So I pulled those 16 apart and I've kind of yeah, not kind of I expanded on them, added some things, almost wrote a chapter for each one.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Not sure what I'm going to do with that.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Yet Some people are asking me to maybe put it into a book form, which I might do.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: Anyways, in there, this is section six.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Not that you need to know that, but I've been unpacking this over the last five weeks, including an introduction.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: So six.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: So this would actually be the seventh one, but this is chapter six.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: There, section six on morality and conscience, the fall of man.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: And so the rich young man comes up to Jesus what must I do to inherit eternal life?
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: And Jesus replies you know the commandments.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: It will be infallibly repeated because the commandments form part of the covenant between God and humanity.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: The commandments determine the essential basis of behavior, decide the moral value of human acts and remain an organic relationship with man's vocation to eternal life, with the establishment of God's kingdom in people and among people.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: At the same time, this code of morality is written in another form.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: These commandments right the natural law.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: This morality is inscribed in the moral conscience of humanity and written on our individual human hearts.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: See, this gets back to how I started this thing.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: This is the battle of the human heart.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Now these laws are written and if we don't reject them, we get in touch with those in such a way that those who do not know the commandments, in other words the revealed law of God, are a law unto themselves.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: I can decide what is good and what is evil.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: Thus St Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, and he immediately adds they show what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: So we have no excuses for this.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: You know, unfortunately, man would fall from grace and enter the tempter, the mysterium and equitatus, a Latin phrase which means the mystery of evil.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: And this is from Genesis right off the bat, the mystery of evil.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: And this is from Genesis right off the bat, genesis 3, verse 1.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: Now, the serpent was the most cunning of all animals that the Lord God had made.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: And the serpent asked the woman did God really tell you not to eat from the trees in the garden?
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: And the woman answered the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: It's only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said you shall not eat of it or even touch it, lest you die.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: But the serpent said to the woman you certainly will not die.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: No, god knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: It's important to pause here and consider that Satan doesn't have his own clay.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: He can only twist, distort and seek to destroy what God created good.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Nothing is more important than Satan than to destroy humanity, because we are the imago Dei, the image and likeness of God in the world.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: He does this directly in many ways, through violence and war.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Greed is recently seen in the push of COVID vaccines, right just to make money.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: They don't care what they do to people, but nothing more effectively destroys human life than the attack on the most innocent and defenseless among us, children and the act that brought them to life and sustains them marriage and the family.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: This is the core attack today.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Right In Matthew 19, verses three through eight, the Pharisees came up to Jesus, and he won't.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: When you listen to this, jesus won't limit himself to the Pharisees' line of questioning on divorcing their wives and points out their hardness of heart.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: See, we're getting back to the heart.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Back to the heart.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: He orders them and us in some sense to pass beyond the boundary that runs between man's first situation.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Remember that original innocence that we know about in Genesis, before sin and the fall.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: So we'll go back to that boundary right.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: And now what does that mean?
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: Jesus is saying go back to the beginning, see what that model was like.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: This means that although man has lost his primeval innocence, today we have right.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: We came into a broken world.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: The force to overcome evil has been restored.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: This is so important.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Jesus didn't come for sin management, he came with power.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: The young man in the gospel seeks out Christ.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: What must I do to inherit life?
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Once again, jesus won't limit himself and doesn't stop at the commandments in this conversation with the young man.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Right, he doesn't.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Just he asks him did you follow the commandments?
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: The young man says yes, now he's gonna take them deeper into the heart.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: And Jesus always proposes that we go deeper, to the level of your heart, where you go deep and you only meet two people there you and God.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: You see, at the end of the day, this is not a commandment story.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: This is not a rule story.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: The rules are only guideposts on the narrow gate and through the narrow gate on that narrow road to Christ, until we discovered that the larger story is a love story.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: The larger story has always been a love story.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: The larger story has always been a love story.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Once we become persons of love, we no longer need the rules.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: In the Sermon on the Mount, jesus presses the whole crowd to go deeper.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: This is from Matthew 5, 27, 28.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: You have heard it said that you shall not commit adultery.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: But I say to you, whoever looks at a woman to desire her in a lustful or reductive way, looks at her with lust in his eyes, has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, if I look at a woman, he's saying no, not.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: If you look at a woman, if you look at a woman to use her instead of love her.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: See, the opposite of love is not hate.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: The opposite of love is to use someone to lust after them.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Excuse me, so these are the romantic challenges really to true love that we see around the world today.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: In the beginning, bereshit, in the beginning, what Jesus points to he says in the beginning it was not so in Matthew's gospel, god created man in his image, in the divine image.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: He created them, male and female.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: He created them.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: This truth presents the creation of man as a special gift from the creator, containing not only the foundation and the source of the essential dignity of the human being, man and woman, in the created world this is where we get our dignity from.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: You take this out.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: You wonder why people, and young people especially, are so confused about their identity but also it's the beginning of the call to both of them to do what, to share in the intimate life of God himself, to fall in love right, to bring love and God is the source of love.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: We're bringing that love right into our own hearts and then sharing it with one another.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: It's a link.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: It's so beautiful.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: While meditating on these words, I had already been at my desk here for a long time when I was writing this and I got up to stretch my legs.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: I went downstairs.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: I have an office upstairs in the studio.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: I went downstairs and I joined my wife in the living room.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: I said hello and she pointed to the television screen where now this is going back a couple years.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you remember this is a super bowl halftime show, maybe two or three years ago, where jennifer lopez was describing.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: So I, when I go downstairs, she's watching jennifer lopez on tv describing her documentary on the super bowl halftime show that she performed last season.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: At that time, and she spoke A clip of her opening act came on, which was, in essence, a theatrical pole dance for the single largest audience on earth.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Do you remember that?
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Here's Jennifer Lopez the biggest audience ever on earth, doing a pole dance.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: And I walked back upstairs and I wondered what would impel a famously rich and famous middle-aged woman to expose her body in such a way.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: I mean, right, I was flabbergasted.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Why would a fabulously rich you don't need any more money, I'm already famous and I'm in middle age, right, I'm not some naive kid anymore why would I pole dance for an audience so big?
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Perhaps the answer will be in her documentary, which I don't remember even watching.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: And what are the millions of viewers all over the world?
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Does a show like that change the way men look at women in their lives?
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: What if Jennifer Lopez's appearance?
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: And husband and children?
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: The world has normalized the fall, hasn't it?
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Is this the paradox that we miss?
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: While women rightly demand equality in the workplace and join the Me Too movement you remember the Me Too movement?
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: One of the most famous women in the world does a pole dance, jesus says in the beginning it was not so.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen stated it this way Only those who live by faith really know what's happening in the world.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: The great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on because they've lost the vision of the heights from which they've fallen.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: We don't understand what true love is, that God is love and we're expressing this in the world or we don't, and it gets twisted.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Remember, satan doesn't have his own clay.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: Well, jesus enters the concrete and historical situation of women, a situation which is weighed down by the inheritance of sin.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: One of the ways in which this inheritance is expressed is habitual discrimination against women in favor of men.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Right, that's what's this old biblical thing that we get.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: But we don't see that it's actually in the Bible that Jesus is raising up women over and over and over again.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: This inheritance is rooted within women too.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: From this point of view, the episode of the woman caught in adultery in John's gospel, chapter eight, is particularly eloquent.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: In the end, jesus says to her who condemns you?
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: I don't condemn you.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: And everybody walks away.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: But then he says go and sin no more.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Be better than that, lift up your heart.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: But first he evokes an awareness of sin in the men who accused her in order to stone her, thereby revealing his profound capacity to see human consciences and actions in their true light.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Jesus is looking at both the men and the woman.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: He says look it.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: We have to understand what love is, jesus, seems to say to the accusers.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Is not this woman, for all her sin, above all confirmation?
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: Above all a confirmation of your own transgressions, of your male injustice, of your misdeeds?
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: You're ready to stone this woman for adultery, but isn't it what you lust for?
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: You know it was a man that did this with her.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: So this is Jesus.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: See.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: This truth is valid for the whole human race.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: The attitude of Jesus in John right here at chapter 8, is significant.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: This is one of the few instances in which his power, the power of truth, is so clearly manifested with regard to human consciences.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: The power of truth is so clearly manifested with regard to human consciences.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Jesus is calm, collected, thoughtful, as in the conversation with the Pharisees that I read earlier in Matthew 19.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Is Jesus not aware of being in contact with the mystery of the beginning, when man was created, male and female, and the woman was entrusted to the man with her feminine distinctiveness and with her potential for motherhood.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Adam, in the beginning, was to protect her, to love her, to keep the forces of evil away from her.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: But he failed in that, didn't he?
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: The man was also entrusted by the creator to the woman.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: They were entrusted to each other as persons made in the image and likeness of God.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: Eve was pulled from the side of Adam.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: This entrusting is a test of love, spousal love.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: This is our test today.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: We are tested to be.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: Are we persons of love In order to become a sincere gift to one another?
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: Each of them, man and woman, must feel responsibility for this gift.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: This test is meant for both of them again, man and woman, from the very beginning.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: After original sin, contrary forces are at work in man and women as a result of the threefold concupiscence right, the threefold concupiscence that St John talks about, you know, concupiscence of the eyes and the flesh and the pride of life.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: These are a stimulus for sin that, if we're not careful, will drag us down.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: This is not a neutral world we came in.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: If our hearts allow this, we'll sit in that proverbial pot.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Well, they act from deep within the human being, these forces of sin.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: This is why we have to invite God into that space.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: Thus Jesus will say on the Sermon on the Mount everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: See, jesus wants our hearts, doesn't he?
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: The human body, and its masculinity and femininity, has almost lost the power of expressing this love in which the human person becomes a gift in conformity with the deepest structure and finality of his or her personal existence.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: This is who we are created to be, yet, yet.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: Yet, if you're willing to open your heart to the power of the gospel, the spousal meaning of the body has not become totally foreign to the heart.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: It has not been totally suffocated in it by concupiscence, but only habitually threatened.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: The heart has become a battlefield between love and concupiscence.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: The more concupiscence, this drag on the human heart what's been released by original sin, the more that dominates the heart, the less the heart experiences the spousal meaning in the body and the less sensitive it becomes to the gift of the person.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: That expresses precisely this meaning in the reciprocal relations of man and woman.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: That's why someone like Jennifer Lopez can go there and do that in front of the whole world.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: Somehow she's lost that.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: She's become less to that sensitive gift right that expresses this meaning of love, and it's a twisting and a distortion and she just falls in that threefold concupiscence.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: See, this is what happens if we don't proclaim the gospel, especially to young people, today.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: They're just caught up in this threefold concupiscence.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: See, this is what happens if we don't proclaim the gospel, especially to young people, today.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: They're just caught up in this threefold concupiscence.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: Certainly, even that desire about what Christ speaks about in Matthew 27, 28 appears in many forms in the human heart.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: It's not always plain and obvious, sometimes it's concealed so that it passes itself off as love.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: It feels like love.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: So I did it, you know, I thought love was a feeling, I thought love was this act of sex.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: That's what young people tell me, although it changes love's authentic profile, then, and obscures the transparent clarity of the gift and the reciprocal love of persons.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: When we get into that, huh, we are looking for something in that act, but we don't understand.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: It's not in our heart.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: Does this mean that we should distrust the human heart?
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: No, no, no.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: It's only to say that we must remain in control of it.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: In a sense, we all stand before that tree, that proverbial tree, the knowledge of good and evil, each one of us.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: And John Paul writes Dear young friends, the response which Jesus gives to each one of us, and John Paul writes Dear young friends, the response which Jesus gives to his questioner in the gospel is addressed to each of you.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: Christ asks you about the state of your moral awareness and, at the same time, he questions you about the state of your conscience.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: This is a key question for man, meaning men and women, of course.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: It is a fundamental question of your youth, one that concerns the whole plan of life, which must be formed precisely in youth.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: Its value is the one most closely connected with the relationship of each of you with moral good and evil.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: The value of this plan depends in an essential way on the authenticity of your conscience.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: It also depends on its sensitivity.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: See, this is what the culture wants to deaden in us, our hearts, so that we begin to just use one another.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: So we find ourselves here at a crucial moment, everyone, when, at every step, when, at every step, time and eternity meet.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: Every step we take, when we wake up in the morning, when we were exploded into this world in the very beginning, we are already eternal beings.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: When we walk out into the sunlight today, you know you are an eternal being.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: You're just on the edge of eternity.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: There's just a thin veil.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: And they meet at this level of the heart which is proper to man.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: It's in the level of conscience, the level of moral values.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: The conscience is the most important dimension of time and history.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: When you go out for a walk today, you guys just invite God into that heart and you'll know that right there, as you're walking, you're entering into the most important dimension of time and history, putting you right on the edge of eternal life.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: Your test is going on there how should we live?
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: Where are we going to spend eternal life?
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: For history is written not only by the events which in a certain sense happen from the outside, right when you look around, and the evils or the good you know there's a lot of good people doing good things out there too but it's not only the things that affect you from the outside.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: History is written first of all from within.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: It is the story of human consciences, of moral victories and defeats.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Here too, the essential greatness of man finds its foundation.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: And what is that foundation?
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Where we find our essential greatness in each one of us?
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: It's our essential human dignity.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: That human dignity comes as a son or daughter of God.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: In order to get there, we have to invite God deep into the heart.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: We have to accept Jesus Christ who came in right.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: Well, I won't go off on a tangent here, I've spoke about this before but we invite God into our heart.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: This is where our consciousness are formed.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: This is that interior treasure whereby man continually goes beyond himself in the direction of eternity.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: Think about eternity.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: You're walking into eternity as you're making your choices.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: If it is true that it is established that people would die only once, as St Paul said, it's also true that man carries within him the treasure of conscience, that deposit of good and evil across the frontier of death.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: So, good and evil, and we have our conscience that discerns that.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: And we decide do I go out and choose the good or choose the evil?
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: And in order that, in sight of him, who is holiness himself, jesus Christ himself, looking at us, right, who's offering himself to us, so that we can overcome evil with goodness, right, you overcome evil with good that we each may find the ultimate and definitive truth about our whole lives.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: And then St Paul says and after that comes judgment, we have to do good in the world, don't we?
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: This is just what happens in the conscience, in the interior truth of our acts.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: In a certain sense, there is constantly present the dimension of eternal life and simultaneously, the same conscience through moral values.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: Simultaneously, the same conscience through moral values imprints the most expressive seal upon the life of the generations, through time, upon history and our culture of human environments, societies, nations and all of humanity.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: What must I do to inherit eternal life?
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: It's powerful, isn't it?
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: When we accept the truth, we go out into the world, we bring that truth into the world, we do good, we become good, I am good.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: The evil that you see out there, the wars and the lusts and the rapes and the selfishness, that's just the opposite of that.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: And there are so many children of the wrath.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you a story about Bill W Carl Young, the spiritual roots of Alcoholics Anonymous.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: Remember Bill W?
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: He was the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: I want to read you a letter, an actual letter that's adapted from a letter that was written on November 23, 1993, in response to an op-ed article in the New York Times by Bob P.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: So, bob P so in the tradition of AA, you don't publish their last names.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: They don't want any kind of fame or anybody to look at them as something special.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: Even Bill Wilson, bill W called himself Bill W.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: If you're on a cruise boat it took me a while to figure out on a cruise boat it said the meetings of Bill W.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: And and you go, why do I keep seeing that you know?
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: And then you realize, oh, that's bill wilson who started aa, that's alcoholics, anonymous meetings there.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: It's such a, it's such a powerful thing when it's done correctly.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: And so anyways, bob p, who writes in 1993 to the editor of the New York Times.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: He says I was surprised and delighted to see your op-ed article on November 19th by the great psychiatrist Dr Carl Jung.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: His thoughts are so pertinent despite the passage of 34 years.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: I wonder how many people know that the insights he expressed in this unpublished letter were the spiritual basis for Alcoholics Anonymous.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: And here's the details Bob wants to give.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: It came about in 1932 when an American alcoholic named Roland Howard was sent to Zurich, switzerland, to Dr Young's clinic.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: After about a year, carl Young, dr Carl Jung, told Roland that since they had been unable to bring about a psychic change in him, he would be discharged.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: No doubt startled Roland asked is there no hope?
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: Then Dr Jung's answer was an astounding one for a man of science, and he said this no, there is none, except that some people with your problem have recovered if they have had a transforming experience of the spirit.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Ooh, this is a spiritual battle, he's saying.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: Through a religious movement at the time called the Oxford Groups, roland experienced the inner change Carl Jung was talking about and carried this message to an alcoholic friend, eb Thatcher, who in turn carried it to a seemingly hopeless drunk, bill W, who became the founder of AA.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Up to that time, the cures for alcoholism focused on winning the drunk away from the bottle, but thanks to Carl Jung and the AA program, it deals almost entirely with gaining meaning in life and with feeling a part of the wholeness of the world.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: As Young says in his letter, the alcoholic, then, doesn't need to go back to drinking, with this essential difference, and literally millions have found a new life in Alcoholics Anonymous.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: In other words, he says you know, at the end of the day, your life has to find meaning.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: You have to connect to the spirit, right?
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: Well, we know the spirit, the Holy Spirit, and you have to be careful, right, because there's a lot of evil spirits flying around too.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: I have been a member of Bob.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: This is Bob, the writer of this letter to the New York Times.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: I've been a member of AA for 32 years and have heard Bill W himself tell this story many times.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: My own favorite young quote is in his book Memories, dreams and Reflections, and he said here if you substitute the word alcoholic for neurotic and I would substitute it for porn also it expresses how AA works, but it applies to everyone with every addiction.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: And so here's what Young says.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: I have frequently seen people become neurotic or any addiction when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they are seeking.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: Such people are usually confined to too narrow a spiritual horizon.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: If they are unable to develop into more spacious personalities, the neuroses generally disappears.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: It's powerful huh.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: That's from Carl Jung, one of the founders of psychoanalysis.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: In 1961, bill W, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote a letter to Dr Carl Jung himself.
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: This letter described in its own words the chain of events that changed Bill's life and influenced the spiritual emphasis of Alcoholics Anonymous, events in which Jung played a key role.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: It all began Bill W now this is the founder of AA.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: It all began Bill W's writing to Carl Jung in a 1931 conversation.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: He says between you, carl Jung, and a hopeless alcoholic named Roland H.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: Roland, a young, gifted person in business and he became rich and he had tried every cure for alcoholism available at the time but all his attempts failed.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: In despair he went to Zurich, switzerland, placed himself under the care of you, dr Young, for nearlya year and you were blunt.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: You told Roland that any further medical treatment was pointless.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: Stunned, roland asked if there was any other hope.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: You, dr Young, held out only one that Roland experience a genuine conversion, a spiritual transformation.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: And according to Dr Carl Young, such experiences were rare among alcoholics, but alcoholics who had them stopped drinking.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: This shred of hope was enough for Roland.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: He returned home, began his spiritual search and Bill W, in his letter to Carl Jung, told of his firsthand knowledge of conversion.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: For Bill W it happened in 1934.
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: So this is Bill writing to Young, telling him about his own conversion story in 1934, during his last detox at Towns Hospital in New York.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: At that time Bill was also an alcoholic at the end of his rope, and his doctor, dr Silkworth, laid out the options to Bill's wife and Bill heard him talking.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: She should let the authorities lock Bill up, watch him go insane, or she could just let him die.
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: Well, bill knew this doctor's prognosis.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: He said so.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as I was at the bottom of a pit.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: Think of yourself at the bottom of a pit, think of yourself at the bottom of that proverbial pot.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: I'm being crushed by by all of this weight of sins upcoming death.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: Moral relativism, I mean right.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: I mean your depression would deepen, wouldn't it?
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: And that's what happened to bill w, and he wrote to carl young.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: All of a sudden, I found myself crying out if there's a god, let him show himself.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: I'm ready to do anything.
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: At that moment, bill wrote, his hospital room seemed to flood with white light.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: I was caught up into an ecstasy of which there is no words to describe it.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: It seemed to me in the mind's eye that I was on a mountain and that a wind, not of air but of the spirit, was blowing.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: And then it burst upon me and I was a free man.
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: Dr Silkworth encouraged Bill to hold on to that experience.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: Whatever it was Bill did, and he never took another drink.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: Released from the hospital, bill immediately began to work on two tasks understanding that white light, the spirit, and understanding and helping other alcoholics to experience something is equally powerful, and he established AA that way.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: You see, jesus didn't come for sin management, did he?
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: But with the power of God, hey, glory to God.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: All right, everyone.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: Don't forget.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: Every morning, before you look at that phone, go down to your knees, jesus, right, just pray with our blessed mother, open your heart up, know that jesus has come with power and say let it be done to me according to your word.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: Now, let it be done to me according to your will.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: Show me the way.
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: Jesus and this is from you know, sister faustina, you know that picture of the divine image.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: Jesus, I trust in you.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: That's it, jesus, I trust in you.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: And then sometimes I'll add have mercy on me, a sinner.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: Jesus, I trust in you, have mercy on me, a sinner.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: And then you can just open your heart, just stay there in silence for a couple minutes, whatever Such a beautiful way to start the morning, know that you're going to be tempted every day, but remember, temptation's not a sin.
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: In fact, temptation becomes an invitation to prayer.
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: And then finally, go out and be kind to the next person.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: You see, take that power and love your neighbor, love your wife.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: Glory to God.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: Talk to you later, everybody.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: Bye-bye.