Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #595 "I Am Sick With Love...A Love As Strong As Death" (Song of Songs)

Transcript

#595 "I Am Sick With Love...A Love As Strong As Death" (Song of Songs) · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I'm Jack Rigg, your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for joining me today.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: St Catherine of Siena said that if you become who you are, that you would literally set the world on fire.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: And St Athanasius, an early church father and a doctor of the church, said the son of God became man so that we might become God.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: You know I make a wild guess at this, but I bet you, most of us, are a bit disconnected from this divine life that these saints are pointing us to.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Yet Saint John Paul II said there's an echo of this story, of this divine life that we're created for, inscribed in each human heart, in your human heart.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: And if you put on the proper lens if I put on the proper lens we can get in touch with this echo within us in such a way that we have that aha moment.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: See, that's the genus of St John Paul II's theology of the body.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: It connects our lived experience of life to the gospel in such a way that our life takes on a whole new meaning and helps us answer those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today meaning and helps us answer those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Who am I?
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: What's my purpose?
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: were we created male and female?
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: How do I find happiness here on earth?
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: How do I find love that satisfies forever.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Hey, it's good to be with you.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: It's good to be with you, jack.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: You know overcoming colds and all these things.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Hopefully I come through without coughing and it is so great to be able to do this.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Our audience is merciful, kind, compassionate.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: They have empathy and if you have to blow your nose or something, they will understand.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: They're very kind people in this audience.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: I love them, so don't worry about all that stuff.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: But today it's amazing.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: We're still talking about the Song of Songs, eros and Agape.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: We're talking about this love that's strong as death.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Set a seal upon your heart, for love is strong as death.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Our flashes of fire are most vehement flame.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: So this is love that nothing can put out.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: This is the love of Jesus Christ on the cross.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: This is the image behind me of Sister Faustina had painted and I'll just read you just now that I'm thinking about it this morning.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: So I read this every morning.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Just this little clip.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: This is from Divine Mercy.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: So this is the diary of Sister Faustina.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: This is what she was going through.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: She kept a diary and it was centered around that painting that Jesus wanted painted.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: He said be at peace, my daughter.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: It's precisely through such misery that I want to show the power of my mercy.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: My daughter, all your miseries she was going through various miseries and even suffering bodily herself.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: He said my daughter, all your miseries have been consumed in the flame of my love, like a little twig thrown into a roaring fire.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: By humbling yourself in this way you draw, consumed in the flame of my love.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: This love is eros, this great desire of the human heart for love.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: It's everything that's true, good and beautiful welling up within us.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: It's so powerful, this love, that Jesus is talking about that.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: This is what's getting poured out on the cross.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Huh, pope Benedict XVI would say Jesus' love for us is eros, this actual sensual love that we feel even within our bodies.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: But he said it's totally agape love, divine, sacrificial love, and so this is the love that God pours out.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: So, as we read, love between a man and a woman as strong as death, jesus on the cross has love even stronger than death.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: You know it overcomes that.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: The flip side of this, linda, is all of the trans movements we see, the pedophiles that we see.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: I just read a story of a man who posted a video of himself raping a four-year-old disabled child who he had handcuffed to a bed, and so this is the opposite, and I bring it up as a juxtaposition to show the opposite, these gender ideologies and all these things.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: And the reason I bring it up is not to judge even some poor, confused person that thinks I'm a man and I think I'm a woman.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: You know those.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: You know not to judge them, but they're twisting and distorting of that and it doesn't take long for those people to go off the rails from a sexual standpoint, you know, not only in their own bodies, but to use other people improperly in different things.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Right, and we can all do that.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: A man breaks a woman, right, and we have a woman, you know, that has sex with someone and then has an abortion.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: I mean this evil and people suffer and we're all broken in different ways.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: But it just shows you the power of this when it's distorted.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: There's probably no power within a human person than love, right, I mean you know St Paul talks about, you know, in 1 Corinthians 13,.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: Right, you can have everything else, but if you don't have love, you have nothing.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: This is God right.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: God is love.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: And we understand that we don't make sense to ourselves if we don't experience love.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: We have heard that many times.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: As we've talked about it.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: Jack, it does in many ways become very simplified when we think of the juxtaposition of two very simple ideas self-giving or self-getting.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: All the perversions that we see, particularly in the area of sexual satisfaction, just really boil down to that total inward.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: It's all about myself and the pleasure that I'm seeking, irregardless of what I need to do and who I need to hurt, you know, and the agape love that you speak of, with Christ pouring out on the cross, that's a good image, to think that the love is being poured out in such a way that you know his body was exploding with love.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Exploding out.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and again, we can see it in that image behind me, Linda, right, exactly the water and the blood.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: So what?
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: The Pope in our audience, that number 112 that we're doing today is making it very clear that through this idea in the Song of Songs, love is strong as death there is still this element of restlessness, this element of the bride and the bridegroom even though they have come thus far with knowing that they have set the seal upon their hearts and that I am for my lover and my lover is for me, that they have made the commitment, there's still this element of restlessness and I found that intriguing to delve into it a little bit more.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: Because the reality is and now, speaking to those of us who have been married and married a long time that we've learned over the years that just because we're married and have a spouse doesn't totally satisfy that something more that we're all searching for Right.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: So, it's very intriguing to consider.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: It's erotic love poetry here.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: But you're right, there's a restlessness you can tell, even though you said it may, as a seal upon your heart.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: So when you get married and and married and we consummate this sexually, it's so beautiful that when it happens, we've given each other to one another in this powerful way.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Again, the sacrament of marriage is something that we can't even conceive today, but it was the primordial sacrament, it was the sacrament that made visible in this created world in the very beginning, before sin even came in the world, in Genesis 1 and 2, the sign of infinite, eternal love.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: When sin came into the world, linda, it gets exactly what you said, and St Augustine said the same thing.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: He said, you know, it's the contempt of self to give yourself to God, right To love for God, or I love myself to the contempt for God, and so I either love myself, and always to the point that I will exclude God.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: I want to fill myself, right, this is this lustful self-satisfaction.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: You become like an addict, and that's what you see.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: How do you rape a four-year-old child?
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Right, you have become so addicted to this and twisted and distorted into this evil.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: So, love of self trying to get some satisfaction, that's how bad it can get to this evil.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: So, love of self trying to get to satisfaction, that's how bad it can get.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: But even in marriages, just between a man and a woman, you have this restlessness that you're talking about.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: And people, it's very important for people to realize that you cannot fully satisfy one another, because this was primordial sacrament, was a sign of Trinitarian love.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: It's in a finite sign, right, we're going to die.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: We were never supposed to be here forever.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: We have to open ourselves up to infinite love and that's where that restlessness if we understand the restlessness between the love between a man and a woman, it can be erotic and powerful and at the same time it's never going to be enough.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: But you enjoy this journey together.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: Still, john Paul would say to couples love never is, it's always a becoming, a becoming something more.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: You're on this journey together and until you aim, both of you aim your love, even with each other and for each other, at that heart of Christ, and then, if you aim it like that, this actually comes back into your relationship, into your marriage.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: And that's why John Paul would say talk about contraception, right, and the church talks about not to contracept, because when you contracept that flow of grace no longer comes into that sexual union, and so then lust starts to enter into this lovemaking instead of this openness to grace and authentic love, because you've totally separated from the whole purpose of it.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: Our God, who is the author of marriage, is a life-giving God and we're just taking that out of the equation.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: You said so many important things.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: I want to go back to this idea of husband and wife together on this journey towards the infinite.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: And it becomes very lopsided if only one is on that journey without the other, because it enters into all the aspects of marriage.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: And yet the idea is, if we're both together on this journey, you know I heard it expressed several times that we're supposed to get each other to heaven, right, and our children?
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: So now you know we can't.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: Most of us are blessed with children and that's a big part of the picture.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: You know that enters in for us very quickly, that we've got to have an understanding of what it's about.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: And if we're just kind of stuck in just the initial phases of that attraction, you know we're going to find ourselves very quickly in a whole heap of trouble because real life enters in right away.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: And so that concept of trying to get each other to heaven plays out for me in that we can only both do it if we both are open to that infinite love and that grace that became available to us in the actual sacrament of matrimony when that bond was first.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: We were joined together in that sacramental bond.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the bride in Song of Songs says that her heart aches.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: She's sick with love.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: She's sick with love.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: It is something in your body, right, you're sick with love.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: You almost can't.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: At some point you realize that, no matter what happens here in your body right, you're sick with love.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: You almost can't.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: At some point you realize that, no matter what happens here in this world, there's going to be an ache, there's a sickness.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: I want to express this love and we want to express it together, but there's still.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: We're finite people and again, once you open yourself up to the infinite one, this agape love and bring this down.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: This is the only way St Paul says it in Ephesians 5, husbands, love your wives' lives, love your husbands, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: This is really the two bookends of the whole Bible, right the creation of man and woman in the beginning, and then this marriage in Genesis 1 and 2 of a man and a woman in the beginning, and then this marriage in Genesis 1 and 2 of a man and a woman expressing the infinite love, and then the book of Revelation with Christ in the church, and this is where we're going.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: Well, this is linked today If it's not linked.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Linda, I meet so many young people and they're being used and they're using each other and they have no idea this is so important to talk to them about because they feel this ache.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Now, right, I'm sick with love, right, she sees this boy, this young girl, 16 year old, let's call her and she sees this boy.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: He's on the basketball team and he's maybe a year or two older and he pays a little attention to her.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: They almost get sick with love, right, and they want to express this and they feel that that's in this sexual act, of sexual union that they're going to find that and be filled.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: But they'll never find it.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: They're going to be an empty, they're going to be used.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: And I see a lot of so much brokenness in our apostolate with the John Paul II Renewal Center and I see a lot of so much brokenness in our apostolate with the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: So many broken young women and men too.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: But these girls are anxious, they're depressed, they go into a very dark place looking for love, aching for love and then being used by a man, say, and this is happening all around us, and this is the nefarious aspects of our school system.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Now our public school system is actually pushing this, really bringing this sexualization down on our children.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: The national sex ed standards that are pushing so hard here in Illinois that we're trying to keep out of the public schools, but Chicago has accepted them.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: Other districts have accepted them around where I live and they're sexualizing kids, linda in kindergarten and talking about these gender ideologies, you cannot make this stuff up.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, you see the evil of a state that's been twisted and distorted and the evil of our leaders in this state of Illinois who would be pushing this down, all these trans ideologies on kids.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: It's amazing twisting of what we're just talking about right here, right.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Right and correct me if I'm wrong, but from the little bit I've read about the details within some of the comprehensive sex ed, is that the focus is on what I said earlier, that self-getting this is okay.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: That's okay Because you deserve to feel good, you deserve the pleasure, right.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: It's just this tremendous focus on the lust or the self-getting, and to the point where I really believe our kids have no concept through any of that education that there's the other side of the equation of how we were really meant to be and that's the self-giving part of it.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: No, john Paul would say, is when they're young like that, you just steal their innocence.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: You're stealing, robbing them of their innocence and you're obliterating their moral imaginations when they're supposed to be children.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: You know, here's something I mean, when you see how, you know, love is supposed to be just this power that we're talking about.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: Right, this is the song of songs, you see, this erotic love, poetry, and and and how, you know, he, the, the, the man in the story, the bridegroom, you know peaks, you know, stays behind the lattice in one area, you know, like he's not approaching her and he says and he doesn't want to be aroused before it's time, you know.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: And so they're being very careful.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: They feel this erotic energy, right, this power within them, but they know that they haven't totally committed yet.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: And that's this beautiful dance, right, to get to know one another.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: And when we meet young people, that's what we tell them.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: You know, you feel this in your body, right, this love is attraction, love is desire.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: Our bodies even are designed in a way that says our bodies aren't complete without the other, you know, but at the end of the day, that's not love.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Yet you have to wait until just like the end of the day.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: That's not love.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Yet you have to wait until, just like the song of songs, do not awaken love or stir love before it's time.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: You know it's like we're, we're coming.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: We haven't gotten married yet, we haven't committed yet.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: And it's only that commitment, it's only that type of a love.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: When I flip the selfie, when I'm no longer to what you said, no longer just thinking about myself, but now I open myself to be, to want your good, to want what's good for you, I have to flip the selfie.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: I have to love.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: And the only way to do that is I have to start to love God more than myself.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: Who gives me the power to do this, and to love my neighbor and then, in this case, my sister, and then my bride.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: Right, he calls her sister my bride, acknowledging her first as a person, as a sister with a common father, common heritage in our humanity.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: And then we make a commitment to give to one another.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: If we don't do that, we really set ourselves up for this twisting and distortion in our own way.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: It doesn't mean the man that gets married is going to go out and rape a child, right?
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: But we use one another even in our marriage, and we feel this.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: And what we feel, jack, whether we're consciously aware of it or not, is that all of that really imprisons us.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: You know that we become slaves to that and what we're really seeking is the great freedom that you know.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: Christ has come, you know.
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: He has given us freedom to set us free and it brings it down.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: You know what you said about.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: You know all the feelings that young people experience and that attraction.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: You know some have said, well, why would God let me feel all of this?
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: You know, if I'm not supposed to act on it, and so forth.
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: You know, and the Pope made it so clear to us we must understand that those are the raw materials of love and that he's given us sensuality because he wants us to experience the feelings, but in due time, right?
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: So you know, when you're building a project, you have to start gathering the materials that you're going to need, but they aren't the finished product in that form.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: So enjoy the fact that I'm awakening to this attraction to another, because that's really telling me I have the capacity to love and that God is calling me to love.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: But if I jump right in the way our culture is telling children, you know, we just totally ruin the entire project because I never get that sense of what authentic love really is.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's a great point.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: You sabotage, you know, your chance for love.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: That's what young people do.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: It never is love and they sabotage it.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: Here's, you know, beloved, not superficially attracted, not superficially attracted to her feminine otherliness.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: You know what that means.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Basically, when, when, when, what you're describing there, why would God give me these great desires, right?
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: Well, the great desires, the desire to be united with Trinitarian love and to express that in our bodies, in our marriages, right, trinitarian love, that in our bodies, in our marriages, right, trinitarian love, the power of the love, of everything.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: This is rocket fuel.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: When a young person says that, why would God give this to me?
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: If you understood this, you open this power to God and let him come in and join with you.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: Right, it's the most powerful thing.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: That's an encounter with God himself.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: I was at mass this morning, linda.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: You've got these tastes and sounds.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: You've got the bells going off, you've got incense, you've got the candles burning.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: You know, you know, and you walk in and then what does he say?
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: You know, this is my body given for you.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Taste and see.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: This is my blood given for you.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Taste this, drink this.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: So we're taking this in.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: I mean so we're taking this in.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is a a powerful movement and if you understood it, you'd say, yes, jesus, thank you for that.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Thank you for giving me this, because I have this little tiny taste of what, what this is love, authentic love.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: But if you stop there, I see you not.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: I think love is body parts.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: I was talking to a couple of young guys about this.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: They're struggling with pornography and I said do you think you're just after body parts?
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Is this, this power, right?
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Why would God give me this, right?
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: I said do you really think that's body parts?
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: I said you know, if you just took and look, this is going to sound kind of weird, but if it works for some of these guys, I said if you just took the skin off those body parts, you're talking about it's blood vessels and nerves and muscle striads.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: I said why don't you take those muscle striads and put them up on a wall and frame them, if that's what you think you're after, right Sounds?
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: kind of weird.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: But ooh, no, that's not what I'm after.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Said then, what are you after?
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: You're not after this body part, you're not after just to have an orgasm.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: You are after love, authentic love.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: It's the mystery of that woman that you're after.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: You have stopped and you think it's just as physical, to your point, linda, filling myself.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: I haven't even got close to what authentic love is.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: So this is that love that rivers cannot drown, right?
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: It's the vehement flame of love and this is what we want to find.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: And when we use each other, it becomes an addiction, it becomes a twisting and distortion, and Satan loves to do that.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Because you're taking that fire of love, inverting it like a rocket.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: Instead of the rocket going up on its flight plan, it's coming down and crashing and burning, and that'll take you down.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: That'll take you down.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so we had spoken beforehand about Eros gone awry, and it has gone awry in every imaginable way.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Yes, it has.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure that Well, something else could show up in the news tomorrow or some other way that I haven't thought of, but you know we have people chatting on their work time in the government about their experiences with the transgender, after surgeries and so forth, and, you know, with a focus on how it makes me feel, you know, and those sort of things, and it's just constantly that search of self-gratification.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: You know the young men struggling with pornography.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: I would like to say and you began that conversation what are you after?
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: You know what's your goal here, what is the point?
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: What are you seeking?
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: And then after the fact, so the orgasm, as you said.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: Then what?
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: What happens after that?
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: Where are you?
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: Are you better off?
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Are others better off?
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: Just kind of to analyze a little bit, why am I doing this?
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: And you begin to see how it is the total inversion or perversion of what God's plan for us has been.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: You become an addict, you know, and it's just like anything else.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: You know you become an addict because you're trying to get that fix, that high, and so you start to chase the high and that's what you see these serial people that are, these people that are, you know, infidel, right, I mean, you're not true to your spouse and they're chronic, right, they go out and they're always searching always looking.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say from my experience, as I have working with people with alcoholism, my experience as I had working with people with alcoholism if I just settle on an understanding that I've become an addict, I sometimes give myself that as my excuse to just continue to wallow in this behavior, because it almost implies that because of the addiction, I have no control, and that isn't true.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: That isn't the case.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: We can never heal from that if I feel like you know, that's all it is is the addiction and, as you said, that's the power in what we're talking about, of true, authentic love redirect those rockets right and go out from myself.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: So that's a really important idea I think that we need to understand when it comes to the whole addiction.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: When you start to feel this eros right, this coming welling up within you.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: You know, prayer is the best thing, man.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: I mean you get into prayer and you open yourself not to stop those feelings.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: You know, I learned as a young man.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: Many, many years ago I was actually backpacking and I had broken up with this girl.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: And then I was backpacking in the Rocky Mountains and I got up high above this tree line and I found this tree at the very top of this one peak.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: And then, when I came up to that tree, I looked down and I said, whoa, there's a huge valley was below me and it was beautiful and it was just all this gorgeous flowers and some elk were down there, and across from me was even a higher peak that I didn't see at the angle I was coming up, but when I got to the top I could see.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: It actually went up higher.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: It still had snow on it and coming down from the snow melt at the top was a waterfall, but it looked silvery because the way the sun was hitting and it was gorgeous.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: So I took my backpack off and I'm looking at this beauty, right, and this beauty starts to well up.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Well, I start to think about that girl again and I thought, man, I wish she was here with me, right, so that I can enjoy her beauty and we can be looking at this together.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Right, and I almost got up and I thought I'm going back to the city, right, I'm going to basically try to take the beauty that this is lifting me to, which is really infinite beauty, right, and to go try to satisfy myself with this girl instead.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: Right, and I sat back down, linda in that and I decided I forget exactly how it happened, but I decided to stay in the ache.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: I called it.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: You know, I had this ache, like I wanted to.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: I see this beauty.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: This is what the bride in the Song of Songs is saying I'm sick with love.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: And I was like, sick with love, but in a twisted way, trying to fulfill myself this way.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: And when I sat in that ache, that sick with love, and I opened it up to God and I sat there and I went into prayer, and that's what I mean when you go into prayer.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: I invited the infinite lover into my heart, you know.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: And I sat there in prayer and I, you know, you learn some really powerful, beautiful things and the peace and the joy God will give you, those little things that say, yep, you did what you were supposed to do here.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: Stay in the ache so that when you go back down to the city I'm not lusting.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: But I've been filled now and I become a person of love and I look at that girl differently than I did before.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's what St Paul meant with that peace that surpasses all understanding, right?
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Because I think our Christian faith is full of paradox, and this is an example of another one that it is actually staying in that ache that brings you to that peace and that calm, and I think the Pope talked about it in this one where, even though there's that restlessness of our couple, they still, within their spousal union, find that peace and that calm.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: So it's like, paradoxically already, but not yet right, we have both.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: And that's because just keep that thought, but because we're not there yet.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: The tension is because we're not there yet.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Because we're not there yet, the tension is because we're not there yet.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: This is the hope of the heart, right, that God is really calling us into an eternal love story, you know.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which brings me back to our triptych.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: You know, go all the way back.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: You know we looked at where have we come from and where are we now.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: And you know, really, looking at all the aspects of where we are now, but that final where are we headed, where are we going?
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: And you and I, the older we get, I mean, you just naturally think of that more and more with very elderly parents.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: You know that's, that's constantly on our mind.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: Is this it?
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: You know?
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: No, I think we better be thinking.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: We're very nervous to talk about death today.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: Right, I mean, you know people don't have a faith and of course, you know I mean I'm generalizing here, right, but our culture.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: You know, I always get back to this.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: You know where I really realized the power of prayer and faith is when Trump came in.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: We see all these Christians and people that really understood there is evil coming into our culture, evil coming into our country, evil and corruption coming from the government, but evil in our own hearts.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: And then you see these Christians that really took it seriously and said you know what we have to battle here?
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: It's the battle.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: That's the sword behind me right.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: Battle my own heart.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: I have to become a person of love and now I have to get the.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: We have to go battle the forces of evil in the world and this is what we're doing right now.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: It's it's uh the mega movement, to me, is not a political movement.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: It's really a spiritual movement of saying, hey, you know and you saw this, so what you were describing, doge, you know, is coming up with this, because they're going into these emails and they're trying to find these paper trails of money and stuff and where it went, and they're the ones uncovering these sexual emails and all I mean there's.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: There's all this perversion coming out that they weren't expecting right, they were not, they weren't looking for the, the federal employees that were just sitting around in these sex check boxes.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: But this is the fallen human condition, isn't it?
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: And you mentioned the word enslavement before.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: We don't want to be enslaved in this lust and selfishness.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: We want to be able to find an encounter with God and at the end, linda, there's nothing, there's no way to explain this except to have an encounter with God.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you really want to go, all everything we're talking about here is to get down in prayer on your knees and ask and speak, ask and not Jesus said and have an encounter, Let him come into that ache.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: right, Let him come into that ache.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, ache, right, let them come into that, ache, yeah.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: And to me, if you're married, there's nothing better than to have that encounter with your spouse.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: Mike and I, when we were out in Australia and we kind of traveled up to the Great Barrier Reef, we were on Heron Island, a tiny little island off of Queensland, and there was just the resort and then a university research station and you could walk around the entire island in 15 minutes.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: It was a tiny island, so not, you know, at night, no lights, no city lights, and we were on the helipad which was one way to get to the island, the helipad which was one way to get to the island, walking around the island.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: And we stopped there and looked up and the night sky was beyond description.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: The Milky Way it was there and just the beauty of it was unbelievable.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: But to experience that with my husband, there was a special kind of magic to it, if you will, that we both, in a way you know, like, okay, we've been married for a while and everything, and had experienced marital love, and yet there was something even grander here of together experiencing this infinite love of the universe.
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: And I think if married couples can work towards that too, you know, because you say, often become a person of love and then the nitty gritty, day-to-day stuff takes over and like how can I do this?
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: Well, maybe together we need to experience more of the beauty that God has afforded us in the world.
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: You know, and we would find that as individuals with prayer, we're strengthened together, you know, and pray together.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: Married couples should pray together.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: We've started trying to say the rosary every day together and there's really nothing like it, you know, to have that grace and that love fill your heart.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: So while we're doing it, and you know what you remind me, you know, go out and take a walk in the woods together.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: I mean you know it's really something at night, like you said, you know the awe and wonder of a sky, something at night, like you said.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: You know, you, the awe and wonder of a sky, you know when you really can see, like you said, a, you know a part of a galaxy, you know, and and you just you're in awe and wonder, right, it stops you and it says, yeah, I'm just a little tiny, little dot here and I think I'm so important, right, you know, when you hear these, this pride, pride, this pride, that, and you think I'm a little tiny speck in the universe and I feel called by god to be a person of love, and you just go, wow, I mean, that's a very, I'm very humbled by that.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: Okay, how do you get so twisted and distorted into pride, like I'm so proud of myself?
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: It's just just good, dude, you're a little ant, you know, not even an ant on a universe, but yet God knows you and fills you and you and I can experience, like you were just saying, this power of love with another person, a power of love that we're supposed to be in the world, a power of this ache for love that we have with God, and we're experiencing all this.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: You should be in awe with God and we're experiencing all this.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: You should be in awe and wonder of everything we're talking about here.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: And what do we do?
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: We twist and distort and we go look at some pornography or we try to rape some little child.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: You know, get out of yourself, please.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: Move toward the stars, you know, yes, toward the stars, you know, yeah, yeah, and just you know.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: To young people I would say that if you're wondering, you know what is God's plan for me, understand that everything we've been describing, and the beauty and the awe and wonder, is God's plan for you.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: But it'll only be experienced if you go down the right path with it.
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: And that you know, like you said, that innocence being stolen makes it extremely difficult, not impossible, because there's always hope that when one realizes that if I can fill myself with that infinite love, I can get on that path and start again.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: So there's so much hope in this, and yet each one of us needs to make the commitment that that's what I'm going to do.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: I'm going to search for that narrow way right.
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: The way is narrow to get there and yet it is waiting us.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: It's the arrows that God really has intended for us on that good, true and beautiful path yeah, well, god bless you, linda.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: Thanks everybody.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: We, we will be back maybe in two weeks.
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: Linda, I'm going to be traveling.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure if I'll get back in time next tuesday to record an episode or not.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: So if we miss a week, we have to miss a week.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: Right in the meantime, I'm going to the rocky mountains and I'm going to go look for that sky Tuesday to record an episode or not.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: So if we miss a week, we have to miss a week.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: Right In the meantime, I'm going to the Rocky Mountains and I'm going to go look for that sky.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: Hey, thank you so much.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: Thanks for being with us everyone.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: Bye-bye.