Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #554 Embracing a Life Aligned With Divine Love and Purpose: Don't Settle For Lies!

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#554 Embracing a Life Aligned With Divine Love and Purpose: Don't Settle For Lies! · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I'm Jack Rigg, your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for joining me today.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: St Catherine of Siena said that if you become who you are, that you would literally set the world on fire.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: And St Athanasius, an early church father and a doctor of the church, said the son of God became man so that we might become God.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: You know I make a wild guess at this, but I bet you, most of us, are a bit disconnected from this divine life that these saints are pointing us to.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Yet Saint John Paul II said there's an echo of the story of this divine life that we're created for, inscribed in each human heart, in your human heart, and if you put on the proper lens, if I put on the proper lens, if I put on the proper lens, we can get in touch with this echo within us in such a way that we have that aha moment.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: See, that's the genus of St John Paul II's theology of the body.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: It connects our lived experience of life to the gospel in such a way that our life takes on a whole new meaning and helps us answer those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today, meaning and helps us answer those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Who am I?
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: What's my purpose?
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Why were we created male and female?
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: How do I find happiness here on earth?
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: How do I find love that satisfies forever?
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: Hey, glad you're with me, I'll be.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: I am with Linda Piper as we celebrate.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: What are we celebrating today, Linda?
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Oh, the Feast of St Pope John Paul II.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Yes, and by the time people listen to this, it'll be a week later.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: The one that we put out today, which would be a Tuesday, as we're recording this is actually today is the feast day of St John Paul II.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: So when you hear this, you'll hear it in a week, but know that we're recording it on this feast day, trying to stay a little bit ahead because if we travel, we can put a recording out.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: We were just talking about stolen innocence.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: I just had before this podcast with Linda.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Today I just had Mark and Amber Archer on, who wrote the documentary or produced the documentary Mind Polluters, and Mind Polluters is really about stolen innocence and really what we're doing to young people today.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Linda, you know a quote that do you have that piece there yet?
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: from St Therese of Lisieux, Can you?
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: You know this is going to be a little off topic, but it all winds together because it all comes together in this awe and wonder of the Redemptor coming in right To redeem us of our sins, to unite us again to our blessed mother's heart, to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, because we all have wounds, we have so many wounds, and if we don't find Christ through our Blessed Mother, this is going to be just always a brokenness that we feel.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: I know, when we're saying, even praying, you hear these prayers about just, you know just this moaning and weeping and this valley of tears and all of these things, and that's where we're at today, and the only way to start to heal those is the great physician.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: So when we're talking about innocence, though, you brought up St Therese of Lisieux and we're talking about something that you and I didn't realize.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: Didn't really know Right.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: Yes, this comes from an article that is about St Therese.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: Father Bob Calarosi is the author.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: I'd like to give him credit for this, but just the opening paragraph here.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: The title is Healing and Forgiveness and he says as children, we live from innocence and hope.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: Innocence means without the wounds.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: Isn't that why we love to go back and be in touch with our inner child, that innocence that touch deep inside us before the wounds and disappointments of life harden our hearts and shrink our soul.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: And I think, jack, my point to you was that as you work with the idea of stolen innocence, that innocence that is taken from our kids, particularly in the area of their sexuality, you can actually see and feel that hardening of the hearts and that shrinking of the soul, almost to the point of you know their souls being dying in a way, so to speak.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: And the importance of, as this article will go on to talk about, the only hope that can be restored is through the healing of Jesus as our Redeemer.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: And, coincidentally enough, as we are recording on October 22nd, the feast day of Pope St John Paul, the opening prayer at Mass for the Church was asking that the Lord, god, would grant us.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: We pray that, instructed by John Paul II's teaching, we may open our hearts to the saving grace of Christ, the sole Redeemer of mankind.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: So, as you said, it does all just flow back together to one person and one answer, and that's our Lord Jesus Christ.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no way.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: As you do get a little older and you move out of that age of innocence, we start to feel that brokenness to your point there.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: And as we get older and we look around, we see the evil around us.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: I think today we get a sense of that evil maybe as no time in history, because even if you're in World War II, as John Paul II was right there on the front lines of Nazism and then Communism when he was 20 years old, the Nazis invaded and then the Communists came in right after that he worked in hard labor.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: He had friends of his sent Jewish and Catholic friends sent to the gas chambers, so he was very aware of all of this evil around him.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: And yet he said what the Nazis and the communists especially the communists could not do, which was totally destroy the church and marriage and the family in Poland, because it was very ingrained in their culture and while it was suppressed from the top, it went basically kind of underground and when the communists left it flourished again.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: He said we're approaching a time where we may not be able to come up again that the sexual revolution and the things, the changes that were taking place now technological revolution, sexual revolution, economic revolutions and the power of the powers and principalities that St Paul talks about evil, because God has been pushed out of the culture, out of the human hearts all around parts of the world certainly in Western civilization, though, that we've let evil come into this vacuum, and we're seeing this all around us.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: And so the first thing that communism does is divide us in different ways, but it's always an attack on God, it's always pushing.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: So we can just say communist, slash atheism, slash secularism, materialism, totalitarianism you know, they're all atheistic.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: And then, once you do that, you leave marriages and the families vulnerable.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: There is no protection anymore, because when you de-link marriage and the family from God, then you fall for evil and a twisting and distortion of relationships between men and women.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: You get into these sexual dysfunctions, and when I'm thinking about all of the gender ideologies out there, and again all of that has a real victim, not only the man and a woman in a marriage, say, but it's the children.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Again, it's the children that really feel these effects, because we're out speaking to children.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: So in one way we're very fortunate with the John Paul II Renewal Center is that we're speaking from young people all the way through the ages and we can see what happens when parents no longer are infused.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: And this will be our conversation today, with this grace, with this grace of redemption, redemption of the body walking back into the power of being filled with divine life and love, and ensuring that.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: That's really the essence of this.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: We really can see today, linda, can't we that when we take God out of our own hearts and this is a major problem today that we sense evil around us but we don't know what to do, how to act and, of course, we don't have the power to act on our own, we're really up against the powers and principalities of the world right now?
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that power comes from the redemption of the body.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: And this is what the Pope is stressing over and over again.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: We're in audience 100 today.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: That was given on November 24th 1982.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: Think how far back that is, jack, on one level, on another level, not that long ago, but yet how much has transpired in the degradation of our culture and all the brokenness.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: You know our culture?
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: It's a culture of divorce, it's a culture of brokenness and division and separation.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: Oddly enough, in this same article, the very next paragraph says that Jesus' prayer was that all may be one, challenging us to heal everything that divides and separates.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: And that's at the heart of the gospel.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: And that's exactly what we learned.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: I remember clearly learning that theology of the body was the gospel, the good news all over again, but actually presented through a lens that would help modern man and all the experiences that we've had, understand God's plan in a different way, not a new plan, but understanding it as it relates to all of these evils that we have seen unfold.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and if we would take the lens and Jesus says this many times take the lens of the child.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: You have to become childlike.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: What does he mean?
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: You have to step back and again, all good philosophy starts with awe and wonder.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: It all starts with awe and wonder because there's so much to discover, and one who searches for what's true, good and beautiful and the meaning of life and love.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Unless you step back and you know that that's how we're created and what we're looking for, everything that John Paul speaks about and everything that the church speaks about builds on philosophy, which builds on creation reality.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Think about how we distort just the reality of creation.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: You know, philosophy is always a search for the truth.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: It starts with awe and wonder.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: What is the truth of things?
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: How were we created?
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: How should we live?
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: And then we think about creation, and just even the creation of our own bodies now is being twisted into story.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: A man can be a woman, A woman can be a man.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: The baby in the womb is meaningless.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Marriage is meaningless.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: It doesn't even have a meaning anymore.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: It's twisted into story to mean anything, and when it means anything, it really doesn't mean.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: It means nothing.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: And so that's why the church always says we start with philosophy and then we build on top of that theology.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: And the theology, of course, is God's revelation to us about all those things.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: And so to your point.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: So Jesus takes on a body, walks through the main door and says this is how a person should live and you know, you just quoted about being one.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: Were you reading that article from St Therese again?
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: Well, yes, it was in the article.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: His next paragraph goes on to bring us back to this idea that Jesus' prayer was that all may be one.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: I believe that's John 17.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but here's the interesting thing, because in this audience, number 100, john Paul references Gaudium et Spes, number 24.3, and this is what it says, and this is John 17.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when he prayed to the Father that all may be one as we are one, opened up vistas closed to human reason.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: For he implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine persons and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: This likeness reveals that man, man and woman, who is the only creature on earth who God willed for itself, cannot find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: So, in essence, if you want to really see what that looks like, just look up at a crucifix.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Right, this is my body, given for you.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: God, who is love, sends Jesus, his son, into the world to reveal what love looks like.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: And love is a call to union and communion and intimacy with God himself.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: And love is not grasping and taking, but it's being filled with this divine life and love and then pouring this out into the world.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: It's self-sacrificial.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: And so this is the awe and wonder that we're talking about here, and the awe and wonder of how we're created, male and female.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: And when we move away from that, the dysfunction starts right away.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: You know, whether you believe that or not in the past, I think you should.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: You know, if you've had a hard time, you got to step into the story today.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Story today because, again, when we see the dysfunction around us, if you're looking for a solution here, it is right To in a sense unite ourselves again with the bridegroom who walks into the story to fill us again with that ruah, that breath that we know from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, that we breathed out when we walked away from God in Genesis 3.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: And this story, this brokenness, has been coming down to us from generation to generation.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: And it's accelerating, linda, because we're just not, we're not in the churches.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: We've thrown out and I'll end with this that today they say the studies show that only 8% of Christians actually believe and know the actual biblical teachings that Jesus spoke of, that he pointed us to, and you go, 8% actually believe and follow that.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: So we're in quite a quagmire today.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: With the elections coming up, linda, I don't know.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: This could be a wild ride here in the next few weeks.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: It is going to be, but you have hit on so many important things, including Gaudium, espes 24.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Right in our first paragraph here in our audience 100, the Pope quotes it as well that we're destined to be united in truth and love as sons of God, those adopted sons from all eternity.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: And this unity, such as a communion of persons, is being dedicated to Christ's words, referring to marriage as that primordial sacrament.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: So what the Pope is doing is bringing us back to that idea of the union and communion of persons as that sign of God's eternal love.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: And we've totally lost that, jack.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: I pray all the time that those who are struggling in marriages and who isn't, I think sometimes if you're married, you're struggling in your marriage.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: I know there's a continuum and some marriages are really headed together.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Look, there's a lot of reasons, right.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: I mean there's dysfunction because somebody's an alcoholic or looking at porn or whatever.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: But the underlying, even deeper than that, is because we're selfish and to be self-giving.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Love means to love someone even if they're not loving you back, even if they're not acting in a loving way, and that's very difficult for us.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: But again, that's why I reference the crucifix always, because God loves us even when we didn't love him back, and he's always ready to invite us back into the story.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: If we would embrace that in our own marriages, we could argue about something and then actually still love that person.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: As I'm speaking to you, you know, in a certain way it's a lot of.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: It has to do with tone, right, my tone and the way I respect you, et cetera, et cetera.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: But where does that power come from?
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: It comes from the power of redemption.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: We realize very quickly, as we try to love self-sacrificially, that we don't have the power to do this.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: And this is Christ walks back into the story to unite what we've again, what we've given up in our brokenness and our sins.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: You know, yeah, and the Pope brings us back to understanding that original unity still shapes our history.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: He says, even though we lost the clarity from the beginning.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: It's almost as if you had a image that was just splattered with mud or something.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: You know that sin really made things difficult to see for us, whereas from the beginning we were supposed to be that radiant, shimmering vision of God's love.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: That has been totally muddied.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: And yet, as you just said, that if we realize from the beginning and get in touch with that echo the Pope is saying it's still impacting us here and we need to get in touch with that that when God is the author of marriage, open marriage to salvation, he calls it salvific action.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: It is through the powers flowing from the redemption of the body that it was renewed after the fall, and we can't tread around that, try to get around it.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: It is the only source of the power that we're going to have in our marriages for all the weaknesses that we experience in every way, shape or form.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: And so, jack, to me, while we look at the all the issues of the brokenness in any way, shape or form, we have to recognize that at root it's a spiritual problem that we have, and so we only have a spiritual answer to it.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this is one on the battlefield of the human heart, right Between love and lust, between good and evil, between truth and lies, between all that's beautiful and all that profanes beauty, and it's one in the human heart.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: You know, all of that evil that we see in the world today, linda, starts in the individual human heart that has rejected all that's true, good and beautiful, rejected God, and then manifests what's left in that human heart, which is a lot of evil, and manifests it in the world, starting with our own relationships, with our families, with our marriages.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: This is a very real experience.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: We're not talking about some theological, pie-in-the-sky type thing.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: You know, it may be hard to grasp at first, but what you should be able to grasp is that we were made to love and be persons of love and we're not doing a great job of it.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Just look around and you talk about what we're doing to young people in these schools and showing pornography to those kids, twisting and distorting them and then expecting them not to have wounds.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: It's just incredible.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: The primordial sacrament of marriage in the very beginning, before sin, was the primordial sign, meaning that was the sign that made visible God's Trinitarian love in the world.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: That's what we have to realize.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: So those listening, first of all, it starts in your own heart that we are all one, as Jesus said.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Right, we're all called into this oneness.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: But then to express it as a sign of Trinitarian love, that's what marriage and the family is about.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: You know, this isn't just about marriage and the family, this is about eternal union with God.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: But the sign, the visible sign in this world, and it's true and it's inefficacious and it's powerful, is marriage and the family.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: The two become one, become three, and reflecting three persons in one, it's beautiful.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: Trinitarian love, but I love the way he talks about it here.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: He assigns to us the let me find it here in paragraph four.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: At the same time it is assigned to him as ethos, the form of morality that corresponds to the action of God in the mystery of redemption.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: So I read it and I'm like what is that saying to me?
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: It's actually the Pope says an exhortation to male and female that we might conscientiously be aware of the grace share in the redemption.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: But, jack, you said it in our more everyday terminology it's in our hearts.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: That ethos is what drives me, what motivates me, what is my worldview, what you know?
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: Why do I take the actions I take?
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: What is, in my heart, driving all of that?
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: And the Pope says I'm assigning it to you to get it down into that heart level and then to follow my plan from there.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's said very well.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: And so this all happens on your knees.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: You know, it really does.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: It happens on your knees, it happens in adoration possibly, it happens certainly at the Mass, the sacrament, the confession.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: But prayer John Paul would bring it up in here again Prayer is that where you go below the surface, you go to this deep place of the human heart that you just mentioned, and in that human heart that's the core of who we are as a person, right Body and soul.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: This is where we find the essence of who we are, and when we go into silence and we sit there in prayer, we're inviting God into that heart to reunite with our heart.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: This is where the untwisting comes from, linda.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: You know, for people that have addictions to pornography, alcohol, gambling, I mean, you know you name it right and at the end we don't have the power even to overcome this.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: This is what the beauty of programs like AA do, where you become humble.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: You know, john Paul mentions the threefold concupiscence in here.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: We have to realize that we come into this world affected by original sin and we never totally get out in this temporal space, this draw of the threefold concupiscence that the first letter of John references, which is concupiscence, that the first letter of John references, which is concupiscence of the flesh.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: We feel this in our bodies, right, these passions and desires that have run amok, that are disembodied from our actual soul, filled in our hearts with God himself.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: And then the concupiscence of the eyes.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: And the concupiscence of the eyes is really.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: I look around and maybe I'm looking at my neighbor's car and I wish I had this.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: I wish I had that.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: It's always materialistic, right?
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: I want more and more and more.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: I see the world and I need the grasp, instead of allowing God to give you what you need.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: God will give you what you need if you only walk again to the awe and wonder of this.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: And finally, linda, we see this so well today the pride of life, pride.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Now we have pride month.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: We have Richard Levine, who's one of the guys in charge, rachel Levine, a man dressing like a woman, in charge of our nation's mental health right.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is where we're at.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: We put someone in charge of our nation's—look, I pray for Richard Levine.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: He was a man, married with three children, who decides to walk away and become a woman.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, you think about—and now we take this and their brokenness that we're talking about earlier.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: We don't condemn the person, but we don't take that brokenness now and put them in charge of our nation's health to drive the brokenness down.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: Not the redemption, but the opposite of the redemption.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: In other words, to say, linda, you sit in your sins, you accept your sins and you just dwell in your sins and you manifest your sins into the world.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: This is satanic.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: When this happens, right, this is the anti-creation right it's not the great physician coming in to heal us.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: This is a very different story.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: all that brokenness the Pope wants us to understand is that we have forgotten our original dignity as being made in the image and likeness of God.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: So you know we repeat a lot, jack, in these audiences.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: But finish that, because when you say that, how are we created for that dignity?
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: We're created in two ways.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: Male and female, yeah, male and female he created us yeah.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: And that wasn't an accident, that was so that we can be a visible sign, right, of this complementary nature, of being drawn in union and communion, because God wanted to show us what the inner life of the Trinity is.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: Just give us a little taste, right, we don't know this in fullness here, but we get a little taste of it in this draw from masculinity to femininity, and that's why, you know, he quotes Matthew 5, 27, 28.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: Do you happen to have that there?
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: He quotes Matthew 5, 27, 28.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Do you happen to have that there, linda?
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: Because yeah, let me read it.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Then I pulled it up and it sounds kind of harsh.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: Until you realize what we're saying here and what you just said, that this ethos of a man seeing a woman and tasked with seeing her in a way that's true, good and beautiful, to respect her dignity, to lift up her dignity, what are we doing today?
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: We have men dressing like women actually competing in sports with them, knocking them out, trying to beat them.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: This is total disrespect for the dignity of a woman and it goes back the other way, from a woman to a man also.
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Right, right, we have been tasked, he assigns to us.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: The Lord has the dignity of every man to every woman and every woman to every man.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: So again, that original dignity of if I start with myself and I recognize myself as as female, you recognize yourself as male and begin there with our own personal dignity.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: We have to discover that, recover that Before then I go on to respect the dignity of every man and of every woman, of every person, and all the examples you give.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: If you think through it, it's like the exact opposite of what we're called to do.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: In respecting the dignity, we're disrespecting the dignity, and you can do that in multiple ways, and we can make a list, a litany of all the ways that we're disrespecting each other.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: I honestly drill back to, in some ways, how woman has lost her sense of dignity that is so obvious in the way we dress in our culture, and so not only has she lost her own sense of dignity, she's lost the sense of the dignity of other women by encouraging, dressing in certain ways that are truly immodest.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: And then she has lost the dignity of man, male, because look at what I'm forcing them to be exposed to.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: So to me that's just another example Drilled down.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: It's that loss of the dignity of self, and then male and female, as God created us.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that has nothing to do with a Puritan attitude.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: You know that has everything to do with what we're talking about here.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: So we see the dignity, the inner dignity of that heart, of that woman and vice versa.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: See what happens.
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: If you drive by a local high school today, you'll see that they, like you said, they lost their respect for themselves and this comes.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: This is not those girls faults.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: Somebody went in and has stolen their innocence again, twisted and distorted their creation story, twisted and distorted their hearts so that they no longer are sitting with their hearts anymore.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: So they're manifesting body parts.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: They're saying I am a body part, I'm here to be used for this.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: Concupiscence of the eyes, concupiscence of the flesh again, and then the pride of life where I will create myself.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: I will tell you what to think about me.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: I am no longer a body and a soul, but I'm just an intellect that can do anything I want with my body, that my body is now used.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: This is what they're taught in school now that your sexuality is not something special to be valued, not something to become two with one.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: That Jesus would say that when the two become one it's indissoluble.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: You cannot break that bond again, because that's a reflection of God's love for you and also the inner love of the Trinity.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: You can't walk away from that right.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: And so, at the end of the day, what do we do?
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: No, it's about pleasure, it's hedonism, and these poor kids are being indoctrinated into just using each other for their bodies.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: And trust me, this is very true and very real, because I get calls and emails on this all the time, especially after our talks and presentations.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: People call up Jack, what should I do about my 16-year-old boy?
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: I just found out that he's having sex with his girlfriend.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: What about my brother that's living with me?
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: That was abused when he was an eight year old boy, sexually abused by a family member, is now an alcoholic.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: He lives with me now.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: He's trying to be good, but he's got this brokenness.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: This was just this weekend after my talks.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: This happens all the time, right, it's?
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: a lot of brokenness.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and what you describe with the young people is the manifestation of our article here saying the hardness of heart and the shrinking of the soul.
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: And I think that hardness of heart manifests in our young people in their angry looks.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: Even when I look at young people, so many of them just seem angry to me.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Their expressions on their face seem angry and sad, kind of a combination of that anger and that sadness.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: Well, if my soul has been shrunk by that innocence being stolen, my joy has been taken away too, and again we see that then there's nothing left but using, because I'm trying to find some happiness, which translates more into just the pleasure versus authentic happiness.
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: And so we see the behaviors that we're getting To me.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: By the time we're at that point, we are so far away from that grace that we are to be receiving from the redemption of the body that it's an emergency, literally.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's a great image, you know, when I'm praying outside an abortion clinic and you see young women yelling at you.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: Or I mean that's a great image when I'm praying outside an abortion clinic and you see young women yelling at you or yelling at me for being there, you have to just pray for them because you have to realize that anger oppressor, that's the people, the Christians and those that want to take away your abortion rights.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: Those are the oppressor.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: So when they're angry, when they're frustrated, this starts in their heart.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: But it's a twisted, distorted, hardened heart, and so they spew it out at you because they're told that I am trying to take away their reproductive rights and they don't see the child within them as the manifestation of love between a man and a woman, because it's been distorted.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: That's why I'm going to go ahead and read this Matthew 5, 27, 28, then, because now it's set up right, and this is what Jesus is trying to do here is get to our hearts.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: You have heard it was said you shall not commit adultery.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: Now, this is one of the commandments, right, don't commit adultery.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: But Jesus is going to take it further, because this is always about the heart.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart, adultery with her in his heart.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: So you see, even if I look at a woman lustfully, it's affecting my heart.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: See, I have a decision right here and this becomes pornography, this becomes lust between you know, even these twisted gender ideologies, right?
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: Homeless same-sex attractions, all these things in my heart.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: So what do I do here, when I feel these temptations coming up, temptation's not a sin.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: I always tell these young people don't get frustrated, don't get angry, temptation's not a sin.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: But at that moment, right, when I look at a woman with lust, I have to right away offer that up to God.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: Right, don't push it down, don't indulge it, but offer it up and use every one of those temptations as an invitation to prayer, to open up your heart and invite God in.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: God wants to come into your heart and this is that redemption of the body that John Paul says.
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: And he says Christ comes with power.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: See, this is the awe.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: I started out with awe and wonder.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: This is the awe and wonder, linda, of the story we're invited into.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: And you will not experience that unless you walk into the story and say yes, because God gave us freedom.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: Freedom is a two-edged sword, because I can use my freedom to reject healing.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: The saddest thing is if you've never heard of the Creator, right.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: If you've never heard of redemption, if you've never heard of Jesus who came into the story to help us, right.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: That's the sadder thing, I think, yeah.
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: And the beauty of Jesus speaking to us this way, way, as he did in Matthew, recognizes that we all have that concupiscence, that weakness, if you will of the eyes and the pride of life.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: He recognizes it totally right off the bat.
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: So the Pope says he's speaking to the man of concupiscence.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: He is not setting that aside and saying here I'm holding up this plan for you that you know to us would look impossible to follow.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: He recognizes that right off the bat.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: But with you know why do we have freedom, love?
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: Because, jack, excuse me, we have freedom so we can love.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: But to have that freedom to love, we have the freedom to not love and we have to recognize that freedom exists.
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: So I have the ability to love, and that's that call to holiness that we all have, in addition to all being weakened through concupiscence.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so the spiritual?
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: You just summed up the spiritual battle.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: The spiritual battle is between love and lust.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: That's the basic spiritual battle.
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: Do I become a person of love?
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: In order to do that, I have to be filled with divine life and love.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: I cannot give what I don't have.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: This is the frustration that we feel when we don't walk into this redemption.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: We know this now.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: This is very clear today, as much evil is around us.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: In a way, I'm glad not for evil, of course, and not for this brokenness, but I'm glad that it's so obvious.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: The frustration on my part would come in that other people don't see it or have rejected it, and that's the sad thing.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: I think that John Paul talked about divine providence and that he said that our prayers can alleviate what's coming, but it will not totally take it away.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: It's already in God's divine providence.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: The second coming is coming.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: We don't know exactly when, but it will get worse before it gets better, according to Scripture and according to the divine providence.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: But what the good news is, jesus sees the individual human dignity of the person and he wants us to see what John Paul would call the personalistic norm.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: The personalistic norm means the only proper way to see somebody is through the eyes of love, right Through the eyes of divine life and love, to be able to see the other person through the eyes of Christ.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: And the only way I can see somebody through that eyes of Christ and act that way is if I'm filled with him.
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: First I have to reject my selfishness, I have to die with him so that I rise with him, and that's what we're actually called to do.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: And if we don't do that, our eternity is not going to look so good.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: We're invited into eternal life.
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: Linda right now, and we do need to remember, I think, that when we talk about love, we're talking about authentic love, which is willing the good of the other, and not just this sappy, warm, fuzzy feeling that we may have reduced the idea of love down to in our culture I'm not even sure we have that much anymore, jack, but it is the willing the good of the other and, of course, the ultimate good for each of us is to share eternal life throughout eternity, once we are gone from this historical state.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, all I could tell you is that it works, you know.
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: Amen, tell you, is that it works.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: I talk to people, so many people and all their brokenness, and we all sense that we need something more.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: And it's when we get down on our knees again open up our hearts.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: I'll kind of leave as far as I'm, I'll give you the last word here, but I bring it up often and it's so powerful.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: It's a very simple three-part solution.
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: Before you look at that phone in the morning, get down on your knees, kneel with our Blessed Mother, join with her Immaculate Heart and just go for the Annunciation.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: Let it be done to me according to your word.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to repeat that to God.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: Let it be done to me according to your word.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: I love it.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: It's first thing in the morning.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: And then the temptations will come.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: And the second thing is again temptation's not a sin.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: Let it be an invitation to prayer.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: You'll be praying a lot because the temptations in today's culture will come and if you use it as an invitation to prayer, it becomes really a beautiful thing.
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: I'm not even worried about temptations anymore and they remind me to pray.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: And then the third thing is love the next person.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: You see, just go love the next person.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: You see.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: Become a person of love.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: It will force you to take an action to do the good.
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: I choose the good because I choose again the self-sacrificial love that you described right.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: And as I do the good, I become the good.
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: This is the beauty and the power of this when I step into the arena and I do good things, I become good, I am good, I am good, I'm filled with grace that empowers me to do that.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: And now it happened in action.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: You know, it's really a beautiful thing and you're challenging yourself to accept Jesus, his power, and to do it.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: And that's what we're called to do.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: Our bodies, again, linda, right, you know, john Paul said our bodies are—and in fact, our bodies alone make visible the invisible, the spiritual and the divine.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: And how do we do this?
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: We become persons of love.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: I can't add much to that other than saying that plan of action is what is going to prepare us for that eternal life, for that wedding feast of the Lamb, you know.
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: So if it seems difficult at best, you know very hard on some days, we have to just always remember why am I doing this in the first place?
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: All of this is that preparation for that eternal life.
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: And, jack, you know, the older we get, the more we need to think about that seriously, not just some time off in the future, because we know that at any point in time we could be called home.
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: So we need to have that meaning of life, that purpose of life, always, I think, uppermost in our head as we get very busy with what you described in that plan.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: And we only have to deal with today.
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: That's what Jesus said right, just carry your cross, pick up your cross and follow me today.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: Give us this day our daily bread.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: We know things are coming with this election and different things.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: God will give us to your point.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: He'll give us what we need, right, he'll give us what we need today and, you know, always keep what you said.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: You know, if you keep your eye on where we're going right, pick up your cross.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: Know that you're going into eternal life and you need communion.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: And eternity doesn't mean tomorrow.
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: Eternity means forever.
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: We the on wonder of this is that we're eternal beings and we're moving into eternity and, like you said, every day we get, we get one step closer, which is is a little bit of a scary thing, but you know this is our destiny.
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: Exactly All right, thank you.
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: God bless you.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Thanks for being with me.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: Goodbye, Linda, Thank you.
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: God bless you.
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: Thanks for being with me.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: Goodbye everyone.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: Talk to you later and again it's a week later, but say a quick prayer to John Paul II that brought us so many of these gifts.
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: So, John Paul II, pray for us.
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: Amen Thank you.