Pints With Aquinas - Are You Getting HOLIER?! | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: June 15, 2024

Father Pine talks about what spiritual progress in the Christian life really looks like.  He talks about the many ideas of progress and how we can know we are progressing. 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar in the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Ceres and I work for the Thomistic Institute. And this is Pons of the Coiness. In this episode, I'd like to talk about what it means to make progress in the spiritual life. Because, if we're honest, it's not so easy to pin down or not so easy to identify in the midst of it. Because there are all kinds of physical, emotional, psychological factors that can make it difficult for us to sort out what it

means to make true progress and what it means to, uh, like think and feel progress. So let's identify some principles. Let's work through some arguments and let's get down to business and making sense of progress in the spiritual life. Here we go. Okay. So there are kind of two main ways in which we describe Christian maturation. On the one hand, there's like the advancing from strength to strength kind of way.

So you'll hear people talk about the three ages of the spiritual life. You know, as you go from being a beginner to proficient to perfect or another language from the purgative way to the illuminative way to the unitive way. And the sense there is that you're moving beyond habitual sin and in into a kind of life of heroic virtue and ultimately onto a life of infused contemplation and like the kind of predominance of the gifts of the Holy Spirit which one might come to expect in the heights of Christian prayer. So within this setting you get the idea that we're gonna kind of keep ratcheting up and that there's going to be a kind of constant progress that we should be able to track. Well there's another factor at play or there's another theme

that we often hear mentioned in the literature and that's that of like remaining childlike or remaining dependent. So there's an ongoing feature or an ever-present feature of our Christian life where we want to admit our own incompetence, we want to rely upon the Lord, we want to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit. So even while we ourselves are agents, we are nevertheless recipients. So there's a kind of passivity present within our activity that makes it so that we can't just tell a story of advancing from strength to strength as if it were our own work. Alright? So I think many people

experience the tension of these two thematics or these two elements of our Christian maturation. But then you add in the fact that we are in and amidst a kind of contingent world or a complicated world, maybe that's a better way of describing it, and we're not always going to have assurance that the material conditions or the circumstantial factors will help us in this process. Okay, so maybe you're going through a kind of plateau in your spiritual life, or maybe you know you've suffered some kind of trauma, maybe you've lost somebody very dear to you, or maybe you've suffered some kind of violence or whatever it is.

Or maybe like it's just some thing that you have to discern, some ongoing discernment, which has proved especially difficult because of things that you couldn't anticipate and things that you find it really difficult to sort through at present. Alright, so in these circumstances we might ask ourselves, like, what's going on? You know, is Christ drawing off? Is he resisting, like, my progress in some way? Or is there something a little more nuanced or subtle going on in my Christian maturation in the work of perfection which the Lord God is bringing about? And so I recently gave a little talk in which I proposed the fruits of the Spirit is a good way to judge of Christian maturation even in amidst the complications that we have described to this point. So what are the fruits of the Holy Spirit? Well, they are listed in St. Paul's letters as charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness,

benignity, longevity, mildness, faith, modesty, continence, and chastity. Now a lot of those share names with virtues, but as you see we're going to distinguish them from virtues and identify the way in which they're kind of like perfect activities. How we ourselves are made for perfect activities, even in and amidst the complications of life and especially the suffering of life. So let's just talk a little bit briefly about our human nature and how it's open or vulnerable to a kind of upsy-downsy type unfolding. And how we need to be able to take that in stride. So we as human beings are made on the way. We're not made at the end, right? kind of upsy-downsy type unfolding, and how we need to be able to take that in stride. So we as human beings are made on the way.

We're not made at the end, right? We're a pilgrim people, we'll sometimes say, because we come to our end, we come to our perfection in its fullness as the fruit of many movements or as the arrival point after many movements. And on this way, like we said, we're both agents and recipients. All right? So a lot of what we need, a lot of what we require in order to arrive at the end is given us by God and we need to look to God, we need to beg God to give us those things because we can't invent them for ourselves, right?

Uh, we can't, uh, you know, cook them up or fabricate them for ourselves. We need to receive them. All right. So we're on the way, both as agents and as recipients, so we're on the way both as agents and as recipients and we're on the way together. Alright, so you'll hear it said that we are social and political animals, that there are certain human goods which are only available to us in the setting of society or in the setting of polity. And so we're going to suffer in a certain

way, we're going to suffer in a certain sense, the ups and downs of other people. So while we ourselves experience ups and downs, so too other people experience ups and downs. And it's not always going to be straightforward like the reason for which this present moment is real difficult. It might be because it's difficult for me as an individual. It might be because it's difficult for me as a member of a community. It might be for any number of reasons. All right? But what the Lord doesn't expect of us is kind of unstinting growth of a straightforward arithmetic sort, right? There's going to be some upsy-downsy-ness because as it turns out, Christian maturation isn't just showing strength to strength.

It's really found in this second thematic of remaining dependent, admitting incompetence, following the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and coming into the perfection which He Himself gives, okay? So then, when God reveals and when God bestows the divine life, he promises to heal certain immaturities. So he's going to deal with our wounds, he's going to deal with our weakness, but he's in addition going to leave us with certain limitations. He doesn't say, alright, you were human beings with limitations, now you're going to be super human beings with limitations, now you're going to be superhuman beings without limitations.

Well, there are ways in which some limitations are transcended, but other limitations abide. Like, we are going to die unless Christ comes before our mortal coil runs out. But we're going to die. We can only be in this place and not in that place. We can only ever eat to the capacity of our stomach. There are various ways in which we are limited. Okay, so while God is going to heal certain immaturity, certain wounds and weaknesses, we're going to remain limited in this and in that way. All right, within this setting then,

God's gonna grow certain perfections, all right? He's gonna make us stable, He's gonna make us constant in the good, even as we acknowledge and even accentuate certain dependencies. OK, so it's not a matter of like wandering off and leaving God behind. Like, thanks for all those gifts. You've been great.

Swell. But it's it's time for me to set off on my own now that I've accumulated all of these riches or now that I have amassed all of these perfections. No, our perfection is in Him, you know, insofar as we cling to Him, insofar as we find our place as we abide in Him. Okay, so it's not a matter of autonomy, it's a matter of theonomy. Alright, relying upon God, looking to God, and finding that we're not our own rule, God's our rule. But that's not like some kind of violence, or that's not some kind of rule from without that's coercive. Rather, God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves.

God is more natural to us in a certain way than we are to ourselves. And so we can rely upon Him. We can depend upon Him. We can look to Him without fear of that violence or coercion. All right. And in doing this, we come to discover that it's ultimately all for relationship. It's ultimately all for communion. Right. We're meant to be bound up with other people.

We're meant to suffer the vagaries of their kind of growth and even their diminution, we're meant to suffer the upsy-downsiness of their lives against the backdrop of the upsy-downsiness of our life because it's for communion, it's communion all the way down. All right, so then within this setting, what does it look like for us to progress, or what does it look like for us to attain to Christian perfection, Christian maturation? Well, we are looking to live, to abide, to remain firm in the life of grace. Alright, so grace is a habit of being. Grace is that whereby we welcome the indwelling of the Holy Trinity. Alright, so that's the basis. But then, on the basis of said grace,

we wanna act out in virtue. So virtue is a power of acting. It's that whereby we kind of play out the divine life or exercise our humanity in the divine life. So we're not just beings, we're also doings, and God wants us to both be as partakers of his nature and do as partakers of His nature. All right, but now it's starting to sound like we're becoming supermen and women,

like we're starting to sound like we're wandering off. But at the height of the virtues, we find the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And the gifts of the Holy Spirit are like heightened sensitivities to the divine prompting. They're like satellite dishes which receive more frequency so that we can operate in a higher register or in a higher plane. Alright, so they're those strengths, those perfections, where we welcome or are welcomed into a world beyond. Alright, and then against this backdrop, remember, you know, we're relational, we're communal, we are dependent, and you can see that coming through at each stage

and in being so, in grace, in virtue, by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we see the fruits emerge as kind of perfect realizations of the supernatural organism, alright? It's like those things signaling how we, as human beings, are meant to fire on all cylinders Okay, so you have grace, virtue, gifts of the Holy Spirit, and then fruits of the Spirit, as our firing on all cylinders, as our living out the divine life in a perfect way, as evidence of a perfect realization,

a perfect actualization. So then, Father Gregory, this has all been nice, this has all been helpful in a kind of conceptual way, but get practical, get practical with me. Where am I gonna see these fruits of the Holy Spirit? Well, remember, we're made to be on the way, we're made to be together, we're made to be, in a certain sense, upsy-downsy,

insofar as we suffer trauma or might plateau or have an ongoing discernment to undertake, and we're in it together with others who are upsy-downsy. And there's going to be some volatility to our human experience. But what we are called upon to do is to navigate those new situations with grace, virtue, gifts of the Holy Spirit, from which emerge the fruits.

So we are going to have some experience of arriving and some experiences of not arriving even as we continue along our pilgrimage. We hope to get better at living, we hope to get better at interpreting. All the while, we can expect some struggling. Okay, so St. Thomas will talk about, and commentators upon St. Thomas will talk about, how often enough it's in suffering that this capacity in us is deepened. Okay, so when we go through life, we develop a deeper capacity for human agency and human receptivity, but that also opens us up to, or makes us vulnerable to, a greater depth of suffering, because we have a greater depth of feeling, experiencing, entering into the lives of others,

and even the life of God. Alright? So, you might think that going from strength to strength would like buffer you from suffering, or would isolate you, or insulate you from suffering, but it doesn't. It actually opens you up to more suffering. And certainly we see that in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, because what's it all about? Salvation. Our Lord comes to bear salvation, which is to say the divine life to those who have fallen. How does He choose to bear salvation? Well, He takes our human nature from top to bottom and from start to finish. And He lives our whole human life and his living of our whole human life it climaxes or it culminates in the paschal

mystery which is his suffering, death, burial, descent, resurrection, ascension and seating at the right of God. So when Christ wants to communicate to us the depth of his love, commend it to us so that we recognize it and receive it when he wants to show us how much he loves us, he suffers right? Because suffering makes our human nature transparent to the working of God. Right? It shows our fragility and it shows our fragility precisely in its proper light, which is as an opening to, as a making vulnerable to, the working of divine grace, the working of God Himself. So Christ opens that to us in his own humanity so that then we have a place in his humanity,

so that our suffering now can map to his suffering or our suffering can be filled with his presence which is revealed in his suffering. So the embrace of suffering is where we are tried and where we are matured most perfectly as Christians, because it's in that suffering that we can grow in certainty and in confidence that God is present and that is consolation. Okay.

So we refer to the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete, which can be translated as like advocate or defender or counsel or consoler. Right? So that the consolation that we seek in this life is the presence of God. It's not like warm and fuzzy feelings, or like especially encouraging or inspiriting thoughts. It's God himself, because God gives us His gifts, grace, virtue, gifts of the Holy Spirit, fruits of the Spirit, but those gifts themselves signal His presence, because what do we want in a gift? We want the

giver. We want to know that the giver has thought about us, that the giver has loved us, that the giver has curated the experience so as best to communicate the relationship and deepen the relationship. And so when God gives gifts, He gives Himself. So in suffering, a space has created us or a capacity has opened in us to experience life more richly and deeply, but also to fill our cup more profoundly with its, yeah, with its difficulty so that we can drain it to the dregs and find God at the bottom or all throughout. All right, so you can think about like a marathoner for instance. When he first starts running, he doesn't have a great capacity for his craft, right, for his sport. And so he's like jogging and then walking and jogging and walking walking and he doesn't actually end up hurting that much because right when he gets to the limit of his hurt

He stops right he gives in Whereas like when he advances when he progresses He's able to continually jog and jog at ever higher rates and then train in such a way as to deepen his capacity both aerobically and anaerobically but in in the process, he dips into deeper pain, right? He dips into deeper pain, which formerly wasn't available to him. And it actually enriches his experience and propels him towards his goal. The man who broke the four minute miles named Roger Bannister, a British man who was at the time, I think at Oxford studying for medical exams to be a medical doctor.

Um, and part of his research there at Oxford was on what we would call VO2 max. So the kind of crossover point from aerobic to anaerobic exercise. And so he was his own test subject. He'd put himself on a treadmill and he'd run himself to the point of exhaustion, to the point of muscle fatigue, such that he'd collapse on the treadmill,

be tossed back into a pile of pillows, and then one of his friends would turn off the machine so he could get good data. All right, because he was so good, because he was so talented and because he perfected his talents, he had a deeper capacity to suffer. He could max himself out, which is insane. But we as human beings are along the way together, in a certain sense, deepening our capacity to experience life and all of its riches, which exposes us to suffering. Right? But in being exposed to suffering, we are able to experience the divine life more beautifully. And it's in those moments where peace, charity, fidelity, goodness, benignity,

where continence, chastity, these kind of full realizations of the life of grace, virtue, and the gifts of the Spirit come to full flower, come to full bloom, or emerging as fruits of the tree from which we ourselves are nourished, then come to prominence. So when we talk about like guarding your peace, we mean having a sense for the closeness, the nearness of the Holy Spirit, even in the midst of suffering, which itself is consoling because you have God, which is ultimately the only thing that you're promised. So, as we seek Christian maturation,

we hold in mind that God is good, right? God is good, that's the first principle. Second principle is that God creates us to a purpose. All right, God creates us to a purpose. Third, that his grace is sufficient, all right? And fourth, that real life is here and now. All right, so God is good, he creates us to a purpose, his grace is sufficient, real life is here and now, and we're going to get to it by going forward, by going through. Alright, so what is your Christian maturity going to look like?

What will it mean for you to progress? Well, yeah, certainly from strength to strength in the sense that we should be leaving behind habitual sin, advancing in heroic virtue, and attaining to a kind of height of infused contemplation. But also, we're going to have a deepened appreciation for our own incompetence, for our own dependence upon the Most High God, and we're going to be looking to God for His prompting so that we can be led in the way that He indicates. Because we're not meant to drift from Him, we're meant to cling to Him.

All right? But in clinging to Him, we have that consolation of his presence, which will see us through every difficulty. And we begin, like we can even rejoice in the difficulties insofar as they open us up to a richer experience, a richer experience which bears more perfectly his divine life, which we want, which we enjoy, not as some kind of personal project or autonomous congratulations, but as him, right? We want to get him, we want to rely upon him as our law, as more interior to us than we are to ourselves. So that is maturity. I hope you find it helpful. All right, this is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel and push the bell to

get sweet email updates when other cool things come out. Also, I contribute to a podcast called God's Plaining. We actually just had a retreat on the basis of the sanctifier by Archbishop Luis Martinez. And I talked about just these types of things at that retreat. The content there is available on our Patreon page. But we have other kind of conferences and podcast episodes there on God's Plaining, so you should check it out. And I wrote a book, it's called prudence and many of these things are treated

in the context of that book. So if you haven't yet purchased it or profited from it, you might consider doing so all right, no of my prayers for you, please pray for me and I look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with a Coinus.