Pints With Aquinas - God is Beauty w/ Christopher West

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Please support us on Locals or Patreon: https://pintswithaquinas.com/support/ NEWLY TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH St. John Paul II's "God is Beauty" https://shop.corproject.com/products/god-is-beauty-a-retreat-on-the-gospel-art Code "PINTS" for %20 off for this title! REVEALED! TOB Institute's Live Confrence! https://www.revealedexperience.com/optin1644505721637 Hallow! https://hallow.com/mattfradd "OLD" clip: https://youtu.be/Yb7ZfWcL4gk 

Hey, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. Thank you so much for listening. If you like Pints with Aquinas and want to support us, you can do that in one of two ways by supporting us on Locals or Patreon. If you go to pintswithaquinas.com slash give it'll let you know there what you get in return. Thanks. So I want to say I went to a Thai restaurant last night. Do you like Thai food?

Do I like Thai? I can't say I like would be my first choice. What's your favorite? I do have an experience of a Thai restaurant where I bit into one of those things that you're not supposed to eat that is like super spicy hot thing. And my mouth was on fire.

So that's my memory of Thai food. So I had a pleasant one. I had Thai food Christmas. You'll see why I remember this. Christmas Eve back in 2012. And I got violently ill. Oh. I don't know if you ever had that experience where you get sick off of a food and then

you just cannot look at that food for years. Egg drop soup for me. I got sick eating egg drop soup when I was like six years old. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, like you kind of crack the egg. Yeah, right. Can't do it. Oh, even the oh, really still can't do it. That was that was like 45 years ago or no, 46 years ago or something. I still can't do it. And do you think it was because of the egg drop soup that you got sick? Yeah, I think it was like the yeah... I think I got food poisoning. There's a chance that I just got sick and I happened to be eating Thai food that night,

but I got violently ill. It's the worst thing thrown up, isn't it? I wouldn't wish it on even my worst enemy, really. Yeah, I would. But, yeah, I'm thinking, yeah. But no, so it went out last night because I was in Florida a couple of weeks ago, wife and I had Thai food and like this is the greatest of all foods. I thought it was sushi but I was wrong. It's Thai food. And I'm getting to this age where things are going differently. Like I'm getting ear hair. I actually bought one of those buzzer things. Yes, I have them. I have all kinds of hairs growing out of my ears. Hair on the back of my neck is growing? Oh yeah, welcome to the world. I don't want to question my body. I presume it knows what it's doing, but I can't imagine why this is necessary.

Have you yet found a hair growing out of the tip of your nose? Not yet. Tell me what that's like. Well, it's not... Right now they're just the blonde ones, but eventually they turn black. Really? Yeah, that's what I'm told. And that I've seen it too. It's not pleasant. Yeah, so, but one thing that's coming with age is this insatiable desire for spiciness. Like a craving? Yeah, I just love spicy food. So a couple of weeks ago, we were in Florida, and you know,

it's Thai, so I don't want to be over the top. So I'm like, yeah, just, just some spice. It wasn't spicy enough. So last night on the way to the airport was in Florida, Fort Lauderdale, went and got some Thai food. The whole family sitting around and I look at the guy and I went, make it Thai hot. And he's like, his eyes widened. He went, are you sure? I went, yes.

And he went, it'll really hurt you. And I went, at that point, my family's looking at me. I'm not gonna back down. And so I'm like, did I stutter? No, I didn't. So he brings me that. Not good. And I started eating it.

This was last night? Last night, right before I got on the floor. How are you feeling right now? Terrific. In fact, I started eating it and I look at him and I'm like, get me some more spice It didn't sound like that, but he brought me like this pour over like really spicy chili and do it I ate the entire thing no no no no and it was the greatest experience

It was it was a mystical experience It reminds me of the days when I may have made it when I got high like I felt high well Forgot I was like and at one point my I said to my daughter, I'm like, touch, touch the back of my head. And so she did this and she's like, what I was sweating yes out of the back of my head.

Well, you know, they say my body trying to do just there. What's in that area getting sweaty? You're going to feel this the whole way through. Yeah, I know. I just did. Oh, it was terrific. No, not my thing. But I can't do it. What

I love. I know you have a I know you love food because I think one of the first times you and I got together. I don't know if I said this last time we had breakfast. We went we were at some conference. We had breakfast and I said something very responsible, like just sausage and eggs. And you said like a milkshake. Remember that? It was like some chocolate. I do remember.

I remember more a conversation. I don't remember the milkshake, but I remember having good conversation over that breakfast. I do, it can be a kind of, dare I say, a mystical experience. A hundred percent. I mean the taste buds, taste buds are absolutely phenomenal. These little things on our tongue that give such sensory delight. My worst, one of the worst periods of my life was the five or six days that I had COVID

and I couldn't taste. It was, it was, it was horrible. Did you experience that when you had COVID? How did you become aware of that? That I couldn't taste? Did you lose your taste? Did you lose your smell as well? Yes, smell and taste was just gone.

I remember it was, it was the day before I could taste and smell. I woke up the next morning and I'm eating my breakfast and nothing was happening. Yeah. And the next five days without it. And I know many people have gone weeks and months from COVID without taste and smell. That happened to me. Because remember, weeks and months. I'd say weeks. So that I was supposed to come to your house. Remember our family and then we got COVID. Yeah. It was funny as did you initially think this is because of COVID or did you think something is wrong with your food? I knew immediately. Oh, I got COVID because I was having these weird body aches and I couldn't figure out what they were. And then when the taste and smell went, I was like, this is COVID.

And interestingly, the only thing I could slightly taste was graham crackers. How weird because that's not a very potent taste. But I ate a lot of graham crackers during that week because I wanted to taste something. My grandpa lost his taste and smell after falling off a roof. Some sort of accident that led to him losing his taste. And smoke, you imagine he used to joke about his taste in smoking. You can imagine. He used to joke about, you know, my grandma could be poisoning him and he wouldn't know. I had to share an exquisite taste experience that I had just recently. I did a 30-day sugar detox.

Somebody introduced me to it and said, you know, you might sleep better, you'll have various benefits from just getting off all the sugar in all of our foods. So I said, all right, I'll try it. And you're slowly reintroducing certain sugars like fruits after a week or so you could have an apple and then after two weeks you could have blueberries. Matt, these blueberries were exquisite because I had not tasted sweetness for a while. And just because I had not tasted sweetness for a while, and just adjusting my palate to the experience of putting these blueberries on my tongue, it was exquisite. And I think of how there's a, I forget where in the Old Testament it says that the Lord will conform his delight to every palate. Something like this.

And like the things that delight you, like that hot spicy, never for me, can't do it, not gonna go there. For me, it's cinnamon is one of my most delightful fragrances and tastes. Like it makes almost everything better cinnamon the only thing I can think of is steak you wouldn't put it on steak you know what though that you know Cincinnati chili Cincinnati chili is something you put

over spaghetti and the chili is flavored with cinnamon and it's quite good so because I'm trying to think like a list of foods that you wouldn't put cinnamon on, but almost everything, almost everything. I mean, not not well, even like celery. I'm trying to think of random foods like chicken. Chick, chick. Yeah. But chicken. I'd put it on chicken. My wife makes these green beans that she puts this like cinnamon,

brown sugar kind of thing. Oh, it's really good. And I'm, have you ever, have you ever put your tongue into the center of a Cinnabon at, you know, Cinnabon stands at the airport, the gooey center? I haven't fallen that low yet. I always see the people there and judge them mercilessly. I'm like, you know those, you know those cartoons

where like the coyote, you know, Wiley Coyote would smell something and you like float through the air to find it. That's what happens. Everybody at the airport. When I'm walking through the airport, industrial fans blowing the smell of the stand smell is floating through the airport. I'm like, floating off to it. There is a, I don't know, something about cinnamon. Ever since I was a little kid, kid, it was a delight to me. And I love Neil Young's song, Cinnamon Girl.

Like this is my song when I'm in a certain, I make myself very vulnerable here. When I'm in a certain place with the blessed mother in my prayer, I'll sing to her, Neil Young's Cinnamon Girl. Cause I don't know what it is, haven't heard it. She's my cinnamon girl. Ba da it. She's my cinnamon girl. Ba da ba, she's my cinnamon girl. So Mary, Mary is like, to me,

she's baking up the bread that comes down from heaven, right? Her womb is the oven that bakes the bread from heaven. And for me, because the taste is conformed to my palate, it's like a delicious cinnamon roll. I know that sounds really weird out of context, but. We'll make sure that's a clip. We'll make that a 40 second clip. But it does, it says it right in scripture

that she smells of cinnamon. She smells of anker, ochre, I don't even know how to say that spice. Henna, blossoms, and cinnamon't even know how to say that spice, henna, blossoms and cinnamon. Yeah. There's something to that. And what is cinnamon?

This fascinates me too. Where food comes from. I don't really know. Is it some sort of root that's dried? Tree bark. Tree bark. I didn't know that. I guess it makes sense.

It looks like it. I say bark, you say bark. So what is a cinnamon tree? It's a cinnamon tree. They take the bark. Have you seen a cinnamon stick where it's kind of curled up? Yeah. a cinnamon tree. They take the bark. Have you seen a cinnamon stick where it's kind of curled up? That's a little chunk of the bark. That's a small tree.

I don't know what kind of tree it is. I mean, I can't say I've looked at a cinnamon tree, but you take the bark and you scrape it. This is why we need a gigantic TV here so you can look it up and show it to us. You scrape this tree bark, you know, grate it, you put it on your tongue, and it delights you. Yeah. What the heck is going on there? And why did God give us these taste buds anyway? So when I found out I had COVID, I started getting aches and all that. But when I first lost my taste and smell, I thought there was something wrong with the other things, like the external things and not me, which is a nice analogy.

I cracked open a tin of espresso and pulled it back. So it was brand new. And I'm like, this bloody gone off. Hmm. I showed my wife. She's like, no, you have COVID. I couldn't smell or taste anything. Have you guys had COVID? Same thing. Did y'all lose your. I think I never knew that. Yeah, I was trying to really good pizza that I knew was going to be so good. And I just couldn't I never knew that I did. Yeah, I was trying to get a really good pizza that I knew was gonna be so good, and I just couldn't taste it at all,

and it was so disappointing, and I was like, what is going on? I thought something's going wrong with the pizza. I wanna press into this, because the experience of having no taste being so depressing to me, when it returned, I had a deep gratitude, and it did, it took me to a deeper understanding

of sacramental reality, that the pleasures, the delights of this world are meant to be signs of heavenly delight. And I mean, take it the whole way. You can't have a biblical reading of reality and not recognize how significant eating is. The original sin, the symbol of the original sin is eating. And the symbol of the consummate reality of our redemption is eating, Eucharist, right? There's something going on.

And back to cinnamon trees, right? Both of these meals, the original sin and the meal of our redemption, we get from a tree. There's something going on here with trees, eating, fruit, desire, hunger, longing, all consummated in a meal. We consummate our faith, we consummate our union with God our faith, we consummate our union with God through eating. And if it's real, if the Eucharist is real, your tongue and my fleshy bit, yeah, right there, if the Eucharist is real, that is the meeting point of heaven and earth. Think of how babies take in the world, right?

Everything is in the mouth, right? And you have to learn the hard way that there are certain things you shouldn't be putting in your mouth, right? And this, it's a desire for knowledge. It's how we gain knowledge of the world. We want to taste it, we want to feel it world. We wanna taste it, we wanna feel it, we wanna experience it, we wanna experience it in our mouths.

And this desire to know through the mouth, I mean, we learn the hard way not to put in the mouth, but this desire to know through the mouth doesn't go away. What is a passionate kiss? It's the first thing I was thinking about. What are we doing? What the heck is that? Open mouth, tongue, slapping, slishing, sloshing. Oh, it's so good. What is it in the first line of the song of songs? Right? Kiss me with the kisses of

your mouth. It's right in the opening verses, right? Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me with the kisses of your mouth. So the thing by which I take in the world, in a sense, and the thing by which my wife takes in the world. Meat. Yeah. Yeah. You know what bugs me? What's that song? It used to have the line and it's been taken out. Oh yeah, I know what you mean.

He gives us the big sloppy kiss. What is that song? Yeah. Heaven meets Earth with a sloppy wet kiss. Heaven meets Earth with a sloppy wet kiss. Some people couldn't handle that. And so there's versions of the song where they remove that.

And okay, okay, I get why that makes us uncomfortable. It makes us uncomfortable because the enemy is after that sloppy wet kiss to conjure up Okay, okay, I get why that makes us uncomfortable. It makes us uncomfortable because the enemy is after that sloppy wet kiss to conjure up in our minds distortions and perversions. Yeah. And quickly this whole mouth desire to know the world and experience intimacy gets twisted up, that's the enemy's goal, precisely to keep us from entering the glories of kiss me with the kisses of your mouth. Saint after saint after saint says that that line in the Song of Songs

is fulfilled in the Eucharist where we are mouth to mouth with the Lord. I learned this from Bishop Barron that the word adoration, if you pick it apart, ad-ora means at the mouth, mouth to mouth. Adoration, ad-ora, at the mouth, mouth to mouth with God. It's amazing. It is. I didn't realize that. And it's the fulfillment of every sin-a-bun, it's the fulfillment of every taste-treat delight, it's the fulfillment of your love of hot, spicy food,

which I can't relate to, but I love about you, it's awesome. Because that's madness, right? That's something beautiful about you. But all of that yearning to know, to taste, to take in is fulfilled in the Eucharist, if we have eyes and taste buds of faith? When I became a Christian at 17, what's really cool when people become Christian, at least this was in my case, like I hadn't been, I hadn't read a lot of Christian literature

or even the scriptures, so I didn't have their analogies to use for what I was experiencing. So how I was explaining it, I think, was a lot more even if imperfect, original. So for me, it felt like I had gained another sense. And so it would be like if nobody in the world had the sense of taste, and I was trying to explain it to them. That's how it felt like I was trying to talk talk to my friends about this love of Christ and the world was more colorful and everything was more vibrant. Yeah, it's like the physical senses, sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, open you up through that experience of conversion, through that experience of encounter of Christ, the physical senses open us up to what the tradition calls the mystical senses. There is a way of seeing

that's related to physical sight but goes deeper. There's a way of hearing that's related to physical hearing but goes deeper. And this is what I'm getting at, there's a way of tasting that's related to physical taste but goes deeper. And a lot of people think the sensual world, the sensual life is the enemy of the spiritual. This is not the case. If we take the incarnation If we take the incarnation seriously as we should, as Pope Benedict XVI says very well, he says Christianity does not discard the senses, but it invites us to expand our senses to their widest capacity. And then we pass over from the physical reality to a mystical experience of the senses. I mean, you've just done that here. I mean, we didn't plan on talking about my Thai food experience,

but it went seamlessly into our relationship with God. So I love how you see the world so sacramentally. I don't know how to see the world otherwise, although I remember seeing it otherwise. And in seeing it otherwise, if we don't see the world sacramentally, I think we have two options. We're going to see the world as an idol that holds the satisfaction of those sensual yearnings, or we're going to see the sensual world as the enemy of the spiritual desires. Stick to that first one for a moment, the idea of would you say the physical world

holding the promise of? It's so true, I mean, we see, we've had that maybe experience of, you try to create the most pleasant experience possible. So like you, in a worldly way, so you watch TV while you're eating something salty, while you're drinking beer or something sweet, which offsets the salty, which makes you go back to the sweet. And we're trying to sit in something comfortable, like everything about us. But yet it doesn't fully satisfy. I just gave a talk in Ave Maria on Thomas Aquinas. We had to say about happiness.

He has five remedies for sorrow in the prima seconda. The fifth thing he says is sleep and baths. And I love that because I think a more sort of maybe puritanical view of the world is like if I'm experiencing sorrow, someone might say, offer it up. But the other thing he says is like sympathy of friends, like go tell somebody about it, share your load with them. Like it's pleasure is the first thing he. Tears and groaning. So not just crying, but ugly crying. But I love that. Sleep and baths. Let's go back to this guy who's drinking his beer, having a salty thing and watching TV. What's he looking for? What am I looking for? I'm just looking for the satisfaction of my yearnings. What am I looking for? I'm just looking for the satisfaction of my yearnings. I just want to, I want to, I want to feel at rest. So I would say the same experience, sensually, could be had by one who's idolizing these things and by one who sees these things as a sacramental reality. And here I think of the Pharisees accusing Jesus of

being a drunkard and a glutton. Because the only paradigm they had for someone who enjoyed wine and food as much as Jesus did was he's a drunkard and a glutton. Because in that pharisaical view of the world, which is non-sacramental, the sensual pleasures, if you're enjoying them, then you're enjoying them wrongly. Because they don't have eyes to see a right and holy way to enjoy these things. Jesus enjoyed wine more than anybody. He enjoyed good food more than anybody. Why? Because he was living the sensual realities of these things rightly, as a gift received from the Father that's meant to lead him back to the Father through the gifts of creation. And I would say this, we only get in trouble with the beautiful and good things of creation, be it a beer or a salty thing on our tongue or the relaxation of sitting on the couch and watching a good story or something. These things get us in trouble when we expect them not to be sacraments of something greater, but when we posit our ultimate pleasure, ultimate fulfillment

in them, then what is meant to be an icon, a window to heaven, we stop at the window and the icon becomes an idol. This is the recipe for cynicism. Yes. Yes, because we posit a fulfillment in there that it can't give us. And then we get pissed off when it doesn't. That's why all of our, we will eventually despise whatever we idolize. That would be one way to put it.

Whatever we idolize, we will eventually despise because it cannot realize what we want it to. It can't do for us what we want it to. It can't do for us what we want. And you think of the cynicism in so many marriages. Yes. All right. The morning I got married back in 2006, I went and got a bagel with one of my groomsmen. This is the morning of the wedding. Morning of the wedding.

So you're not yet married. Not yet married. And this waitress who just, you know, seemed like a very cynical, hard woman, heard that I was getting married and looked at me and went, run. And you just know that that cynicism comes, I think, from this desire to have that longing fulfilled, and then it doesn't. And you feel like it can't, and you've been lied to. Yeah, yeah. And it comes from positing in something that can't give the fulfillment we yearn for, we posit in that, or we even demand that it does. Yeah. It reminds me of a story. A student of mine, this was, I don't know, 10 years ago maybe,

he pulled me aside after my lecture on Christ's words about the resurrection, where Jesus says, in the resurrection we're no longer given in marriage. And John Paul II has a brilliant way of unfolding what this means, and I would summarize it like this. We no longer need a sign, the icon, marriage is an icon of a heavenly reality, right? The Bible begins with the marriage of man and woman, but it ends with the marriage of Christ and the church. And the beginning is pointing us to the end.

When Jesus says we're no longer given in marriage and the resurrection, he's saying we no longer need a sign to point us to heaven when we're in heaven. And I was unfolding this for the students and this guy pulled me aside and he said, Christopher, you finally helped me understand my dad. And I said, tell me more. And he said, my dad's been married eight times. And he said, on the fifth wedding,

when I got the fifth wedding invitation, I refused to go. And I called up my father and I said, I had it out with him. I said, Dad, what is your problem? From marriage to marriage to marriage. And I think he was the offspring of marriage two or three or something. And his dad said very honestly, he said, son, I just can't find a woman who will satisfy my yearning and I just keep looking. And the light that this student had gotten on his dad is that his dad was looking for God but in the creature. And St. Paul unfolds this in Romans chapter 1 where he says, we no longer turned to the Creator and worshiped the Creator, we turned to the creature and worshiped

the creature. And then Paul says, and God gave us up in the lusts of our heart to our depravities. It's a very insightful line. We don't tend to think of lust as idolatry, but I think it's really helpful. It's helpful for me as I look at my own life, Matt, and I look at what my yearnings are, what my desires are, what my aches are. what my aches are. I'm 52 years old and I am still on occasion haunted by dreams of a girl that I dated when I was a teenager. Like she comes back in these dreams I have. And I've really, with the help of spiritual direction,

I've really tried to look at what is going on. Why does this person keep showing up in my dreams? And I was 16 years old and I had this ache, this ache for love, for fulfillment, for affirmation. Somebody tell me who I am. Somebody tell me the meaning of life. Somebody tell me who I am. Somebody tell me the meaning of life. Somebody tell me how do I find satisfaction? How do I quench this burning, aching thirst? And this young, attractive teenage girl waltzes into my life and I just went, you're gonna do it for me, you're gonna satisfy

me, I'm gonna posit this angst, this hunger, I'm gonna posit my fulfillment in you. What a terrible injustice for me to put that on a teenage girl. And. I latched on like I latched on with please feed me, please. And like the way you're expressing it is a very intense way. I'm sure you expressed it in a socially acceptable way, but this is what was going on your heart. It was just acting out the internal reality in a cool, socially acceptable. Of course, of course, you play it cool because you gotta play the game. You can't scare away the thing that's gonna satisfy you.

Exactly, so you learn, you are shaped and formed to put it, I think honestly, but crassly maybe, you learn to manipulate, to get what you want. You learn to weave your way in to extract what you think is going to satisfy that ache. And I've been on a 35-year journey of realizing that idol in my life. That was an idol. That was a big idol. And the, you know, have no idols is the first commandment for a reason. You know, have no gods other than me. And you know, and when we read that commandment, I am the Lord your God, you shall have no- Most of us like, yeah, that's fine. I'm not bowing down to golden calves or anything. But here's a way into our idols. Look at the word worship. Do you know what happens when you pick that word apart, what it means? Worthship. Like, what are we positing ultimate worth in?

To what do we ascribe ultimate worth? And as I've examined that question in my own life and my own heart, what I've ascribed ultimate worth to is the thing that I think will satisfy that hunger. That's what I worship. You know, it's funny, like, in my relationship with my wife, and this is probably true of you and Wendy, and I think it ought to be true of any two people who fall in love. It really does seem to satisfy that there, like in a deep sense, not in a trivial sense, but I remember when my wife and I fell in love, like, oh, everything was better. Everything

was beautiful. And it was like no no this does satisfy me you don't understand i am completely satisfied in this relationship uh i think that's probably true i mean people might call that infatuation but i think it's that's a bit crass i think it's it's deeper and more sophisticated than that but i remember when wendy and i were falling in love this we were walking along a trail next to a body of water, a pond, and all of creation was alive. Yeah. Like the birds were singing in ways

I had never heard them sing before. 100%. I could hear the insects, the leaves, the greenness of the leaves. Yes, I felt the same way. Everything was brighter. I wanted to, I wanted to get, we didn't, but I wanted to get totally

naked and run through the woods like Adam and Eve, like in harmony with all of creation. I was in Australia, too many deadly things. But it was a taste of that, right? And love is meant to do that. It's meant to give us a taste. It is. And I remember saying to my spiritual director at the time, isn't it inappropriate when people say like, you are my everything? No, she's not your everything. God, you're everything. And he was old and wise enough to say, you absolutely should say and feel she is your everything. It would be inappropriate in that stage to not say what lovers say. You are my everything. I need you. So how do you balance that realization with the fact that she isn't your everything, can't be your everything. Let's press into that. I want to bring this up, which I find compelling. You know, when

Pope Benedict XVI gave that, I forget what it was called, the Anglican, I forget, to welcome the Anglicans into full communion with Rome and to keep their liturgy. The Anglican, I think the word is just escaping my brain, the Ordinariate, the Anglican Ordinariate, where he welcomed the Anglicans who wanted to be in union with Rome and they could retain their liturgy. And I spoke to an Anglican, a priest of the Anglican Ordinariate, I hope I'm getting that word right. Yeah, you are. Who is now in union with Rome, but he's retained the Anglican liturgy.

And Rome has approved these Anglican prayers. I've been to several liturgies and they're beautiful. And in the Anglican nuptial liturgy, in the very exchange of consent, are these words, the bridegroom says to the bride, with my body, and the bride returns with the same, with my body I thee worship. With my body I thee worship. Fascinating that this is accepted as genuine liturgical language. Wait a minute, wait a minute, you're not supposed to worship the creature. True, true, true. But there is a, if we understand marriage sacramentally, which we are meant to, and marriage in, as John Paul II says, is not only one of the

seven sacraments, it's the model and the prototype of all of the sacraments. It's the foundation, he says, of the entire sacramental order. What does that mean? The goal of all the sacraments is to unite the bridegroom with the bride, so that the bride might conceive and bear forth life. Who's the bridegroom? Who's the bride? Christ is the bridegroom, the church is the bride, and the bride is meant to conceive eternal life. This is our faith. When you put these spousal lenses on, all the sacraments come alive. That's the context in which we can properly understand the sense in which the bridegroom can say to the bride, with my body I thee worship.

What we are getting in the sacrament of marriage is a taste of authentic worship. And that worship in the sense that we can say you are a taste, I'm imagining you're my wife right now. That's fine. You are a taste of a heavenly reality. If I just zoom in on my wife and think you are the heavenly reality, now it's false worship and it becomes an idol. But if I allow the joy I experience in my love for my wife and the sorrows and the struggles and the sufferings

which are integral to the whole mystery of it being a sacrament because what we're doing at the altar is pledging to love as Christ loves the church and if we really take that seriously, this is where it's going to lead us, right? So there will be times in married life, you know this, I know this, where we're feeling the crown of thorns, where we're feeling the nails, where we're feeling the lance, and we can be tempted to think something's going wrong, but maybe something's going right. But all of this is to say living the sacrament becomes an act of true worship, right? And it doesn't leave the creature behind.

True worship is offering creation itself to God. That's what the Mass is. We are taking, blessed are you Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have this wine, we've received this wine, which we now offer you, we've received this bread which we now offer you. We can also say I've, through your goodness oh Lord, I've received Wendy. And now in our very marriage bed, which by the way John Paul II says the marital embrace is meant to be liturgical. What the heck does that mean? It means it's meant to be an offering, a receiving of a gift from the Father that

we then return to the Father. And I would say this, the true Christian sexual revolution, if we could use that expression, is when sex is no longer something that is worshipped, that's the lie of the sexual revolution, take your yearning here, this is what will satisfy you, but the true Christian sexual revolution is when sex is no longer worshipped but the sexual embrace is worshiped. Yeah, I see, worship. It becomes a husband and wife giving themselves to one another are at one in the same time, John Paul II says, if they're living their sacrament, they're giving themselves entirely to God in an act of worship. Which is to say, Lord, you are everything I desire. Thank you for this taste. Thank You for

heaven breaking through in our marriage bed right here. This is a little, little glimmer of an ultimate reality. This is a sacramental foretaste of an infinite ecstasy, of a heavenly union. Thank You for this. We receive it, we rejoice in it, and we're not worshiping this, but we are praising you and worshiping you and offering this taste in thanksgiving. I can see somebody who's taken too much theology, getting into a relationship, and then refusing to say the things lovers say, because, no, no, you're not my everything. God is, or something like that. They shouldn't say that. They should be saying you're my everything. Read the Song of Songs. My lover is mine and I am yours. My lover is mine and I am yours. John Paul has a beautiful reflection on this word belonging. I belong to my beloved and my beloved

belongs to me. This is the language of lovers, right? And the intimacy we are called to with Christ. Saint after saint after saint says the language that comes closest to accurately expressing what I'm experiencing in intimacy with God is the language of human love, the language of erotic love. This is the song of songs. Okay, but help me understand this. If I'm right in saying, it's not okay to say, no, God's my everything,

so I'm gonna say you're my everything. Like, if I'm right in thinking that young lovers ought to talk that way, how then do you reconcile that language with the fact that she actually isn't your everything? We ought to recognize, that's why I brought up the whole Anglican liturgy about with my body I thee worship. It's the same thing as saying you're my everything, you know, you're

my everything. If we understand that rightly, we're not saying you are God to me, but we're saying, hopefully, you're a sacrament of God to me. You're a sign of ultimate love. So, what probably happens then in the initial stages of love that then mature is that thing that you've said has to mature as well. And when it doesn't, divorce happens. I want to share something vulnerable with you because I know you'll understand it. And maybe you can help me say it better. But I was sitting with my wife recently and I said, I completely understand why a man would abandon his family and just

live a life of debauchery. Yes. What? Of course. And I don't know if I would trust anyone who's been married for more than five minutes who doesn't understand that. And, you know, but I know it leads to death. I know this for a number of reasons. I remember growing up in Australia, my good friend's dad abandoned their family, moved to Bali, which is just north of Australia, and was with prostitutes and everything. And he came back and he's just this fat, dark, he was an Italian guy, so a darker skin guy with bright, bleached hair and a shell necklace. And he was in his fifties and everybody saw where that leads to. Yes. Like it leads to death. Yes. Yes. Yes. But then you kind of contrast that image with the man who faithfully loves his

wife even when she disappoints him and turns out not to be God, imagine, and vice versa, you're disappointing her, and somehow can transcend that. That's when it looks like the resurrection. Like you think of the elderly couple. I think of Scott and Kimberly Hahn. I mean, they say elderly, I mean, they're in their, what, 60s, but I see them at Holy Mass together every day. And his arm around her, them praying beautifully after Mass together. Like, that's what you get if you remain on the cross. But if you get off the cross, you look like the fat dude with the bleached hair. And if we're honest, everybody yearns for the former, right? What you witnessed in Scott and Kimberly, that tested love.

And Scott and Kimberly are open about trials and struggles they've been through. And Wendy and I have been through our fair share of them. And my experience of married life has been that if you let marriage do what it's meant to do, it's like a funnel that will take you right here. I see. Right here. And we don't like that.

I'll just speak for myself. There's a big part of me that does not like the cross. I don't want to die on the cross. I don't want to bleed. I want to feel good. And I want to sit down on the comfy couch and have my salty snack and my beer and watch something and just numb out. And there's a time and a place for those kind of, you know, I just need to leisurely activities.

But are we running from the cross? And I know in all of the temptations, and you're just being honest, any man who's being honest with himself has had the temptation to, I just gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here. I can't deal with this anymore. Get me out. Is there some other way that I don't have to deal with this that I can live my life and kind of lick the jelly off the toast, you know? I don't have to deal with this, that I can live my life and kind of lick the jelly off the toast. You know, I don't want the... Just to this point, I heard Jordan Peterson giving a talk and he said, what's interesting isn't why people become addicted to drugs and porn and alcohol. What's interesting is why they don't do that all the time. Like why they don't just

shoot stuff into their veins continually. Like that's interesting. Why wouldn't you do that? Yeah. I love that. And I think it's because we see, we, let's go with the prodigal son, right? He leaves his father's house in search of something that he doesn't think his father wants to supply for him, and he takes his hunger out into all the pleasures that the world is saying, this is what you want, this is what you're looking for, this will satisfy. And he finally gets to the bottom of the barrel and he starts thinking of the servants in his father's house who are well fed. And in the lowest place he could possibly be, he says, I'll go back to my father.

What's fascinating to me about that story, many things are, but this in particular is that the hunger that caused him to leave is the same hunger that brings him back. And whenever I've had my hunger pull me away from love for my wife, love for my kids, when I'm entertaining, well, maybe over here I could have my satisfactions. The same hunger that tempts me to direct it over here, the same hunger says, no, if I'm honest with myself, I know the only way to satisfy this is by bringing it right back here and bearing the sufferings that come with loving a person in good times, in bad, in sickness, in health, till death do us part. I want that. And if I'm honest with myself, I want to be loved that way too. And it's scary to be that vulnerable with another human being.

It's scary to place that need of your heart into the hands of another human being. That is scary. I think it was probably 20 years into married life that I finally said to Wendy. And I remember it really clearly one day. I said, I think you really love me. I think you really love me. Like you've seen my worst. That's how I feel about my wife right now. I'm that's where I'm at.

And it's a beautiful place to be. Because it's what the heart really yearns for. We play these games where we wear these masks because we want to be loved and accepted. And one of the great gifts of married life is you can't get away with that. You cannot get away with those masks. You can't get away with that. You cannot get away with those masks. You can't hide. You can't hide your real self with all of its gifts and all of its warts and all of its blemishes.

You can't hide that when you're sleeping in the same bed, sharing a home, living life that closely intertwined with another human being. This is one of the greatest gifts of married life, is it will expose your real humanity. And my fear has been, oh shit, oh shit, is she gonna love me? Am I lovable? Am I lovable? Am I lovable? And it's 20 years into married life, I'm like, she's seen it all. She's still here. Oh my gosh, I think she really loves me. What more can you ask for?

Yeah. Both. Both what? What? The hedonistic pleasure and the deep love. Yeah, and isn't it sad? I mean, I say that flippantly, but I know that every time I've indulged in hedonistic pleasure I'm just sad and I hit the barrel quickly. It reminds me of a line about

Gollum in the first book of The Lord of the Rings where it says he was basically looking for something, but there was nothing there. Just furtive rememberings or something? This came to me when I was wrestling with these very things, this is a couple years ago, and I'm praying through where my idols are trying to seduce me, and I'm praying through, no, I know that takes me away from really loving my wife, as I'm called to love my wife. And I had this song pop into my head, this often happens, this is how the spirit speaks to my heart, often through the music I grew up on. And it was a song by the band The Clash. Do you remember The Clash? No, not really. I've heard of them, but I didn't listen to them. The Clash were a 70s and 80s punk band from London.

Maybe, I don't know if it was London, England somewhere. Anyway, the song was called Death or Glory. And I'm praying into this like, Lord, I see this pull over here, I want to, I know it's taking me away from the kind of fidelity I'm meant to have to my wife, I'm getting pulled over here by this idol and this song, Death or Glory. And I'm like, okay, Lord, I've had this happen to me enough of times when I'm enough times praying when a song pops into my head I'm supposed to pay attention. And I said what what are you saying to me through death or glory? And he said this is what I heard, you know kind of in that place where you're listening in prayer

Do you want the glory that leads to death? Or do you want the death that leads to glory? Yeah, and this crystallized for me what I was wrestling with in my Can I have the glory that leads to glory. And this crystallized for me what I was wrestling with in my heart. Can I have the glory that leads to glory? Well, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and the glory we long for comes through a death, and that's where I know I resist. The temptation that was being held out to me was, resist. The temptation that was being held out to me was you can have the glory now. But if you grasp at the glory now, it's going to lead to an eternal death. If you accept the death now, it's going to lead to an eternal glory. What do we want? When we go for those temporal glories...

These are your options. Yeah, these are your options. The glory that leads to death or the death that leads to glory. And when we choose the glory that is here and now that I can grab with my own hands and take for myself, if I cling to that, if I hold on to that and don't let go, don't allow my heart to be converted, if I cling, it leads to hell. This is real. I recently finished reading an 833-page book by Mikhail Waldstein reflecting on the philosophical and historical context in which John Paul II wrote the Theology of the Body. Who teaches here at Franciscan, by the way? What a guy.

It is quite the book. And it was a hard read. It took me four months to get through it. But the whole thing was worth it for one footnote. If this was all I got from the book, this one footnote was gold. And he gives the proper Greek translation of what we typically render in the gospel, very familiar passage, if you seek to preserve your life, you will lose it. But if you lose your life for my sake in the gospel, you'll find it or you'll save it. When we give that a more literal Greek translation, it's something like this. If you seek to build a defensive wall around your life to keep yourself safe, No way. you will lose it.

But if you let that wall come down, you will beget your life. Beget your life? What does that mean? You cannot enter the kingdom unless you are reborn. Yeah. It's this sense of begetting, right? Christ bases the whole entrance into the kingdom in his conversation with Nicodemus on this idea of being regenerated, the begetting of everlasting life. And because grace perfects nature, that's the perfection of the mystery of normal generation, right? You and I came into the world through our mother and father's sexual union. And they came into the world through their parents' sexual union and their

parents and their parents and their parents. It goes all the way back to the beginning of time. But Christianity introduces through the New Testament, Mary opens the power of human generation to the Holy Spirit, to a new kind of generation. And our baptism is modeled after what happened in Mary's womb. We are regenerated by water and the Spirit. But when we build that defensive wall around our lives, we're refusing that regeneration, we're refusing that supernatural begetting. And just finding that more literal translation of that passage, it was just about a month ago that I found it in my reading.

And I've been coming back to it over and over and over again because I continually find myself building these protective walls. I'm afraid. building these protective walls. I'm afraid. It is not, it is not, in this fallen world, it is not safe to be human. But it's even more dangerous not to be, I would say. And when I say it's not safe to be human, what happens? This is why fame kills people. This is why any is why fame kills people. Yes.

This is why any degree of fame kills people. If you are not careful. Because if you're on a plat- yeah exactly. If you're on a- that's right. If you're on a platform, there's just a whole lot more guarding because there's a whole lot more eyes and fingers pointing at you. Yes. And it just becomes all the easier to build that wall.

Yes. Yes. And it's- we the easier to build that wall. Yes. Yes, and and it's We have to be a little careful here we're we For example clothing Clothing is a necessary. Mm-hmm results of our fallen condition, right? There are threats in the world there are threats in the world that need to be guarded that need to be guard against and every day We put clothing on need to be guarded against. And every day we put clothing on, not consciously, but way down in there, let's just extract from the elements. I know we put clothing on because it's cold and whatever else.

Extracting from the elements, the deep message that we're giving our hearts every day we put clothing on is it's not safe. I live in a world where my own dignity is constantly threatened, where my deepest identity is under threat. And I have to cover what reveals my deepest identity because of this threat. So there's that truth. We live in this fallen world. There are things we have to protect, but there's also the call in the spiritual journey with Jesus to get naked. St. Francis, naked to follow the naked Christ was his motto.

Naked to follow the naked Christ. And that idea of if you build these defensive walls around your life to make yourself safe, you'll lose your life. We could also put it this way, if you remain behind the fig leaves indefinitely, you'll lose your life. But if you get naked in my presence, you'll beget yourself. You will be reborn. You'll be regenerated. There's a stripping that the saints speak of that we all have to be willing to accept, and it scares me, Matt. The stripping scares me. And I'm like, I cling. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh, don't remove that. That's too, you're making me too vulnerable. I don't want to go there. It's too scary. I've had this kind of recurring

image in my prayer life of a turtle with no shell. And it's gangly ugly looking, this turtle with no shell. And he's like totally threatened. He has no protection whatsoever. And he's like desperately wanting to cover up or put that shell back on. And it's an invitation to my heart of be not afraid. Let the walls come down. I love you, the real you, the real you, the real you. And I have to learn this over and over and over again because my formation in this fallen broken world was the real you is not lovable.

You got to hide that. You got to bury that. If you want to be accepted, you got to bury thatvable. You gotta hide that. You gotta bury that. If you wanna be accepted, you gotta bury that. You gotta hide that. You gotta live behind a wall. You gotta live behind a mask. Lock that up, bury it. You're not lovable there. You're not gonna be loved there.

There is a movie I just watched, which I want you to watch. And I want everybody to watch it. It's called Old by M. Night Shyamalan. You heard of it? You seen it? Did you watch it? I'm gonna make a note of it right now. I want to show you a clip before this episode's done. All right. It broke my heart. I was flying back from Poland to... I have a little movie list here on my phone. So I'm writing it down right now so I don't forget. Old by M. Night Shyamalan.alanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanamanaman man an nmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnm appearance. Oh, I'm not going to tell you. I'm going to show it to you because it's the exact opposite of Song of Songs 2.

Let me see your face. And then the dove does the dove turns. But in this and if people have seen it, they know the exact clip I'm talking about. It's horrifying. She will not be seen. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh some point in this interview, I want to take a break and maybe we could find a way to play that clip for folks. Matt, that scene that you just described, that is that war, the warning that you won't, you know, the don't be seen. I don't want to be seen.

I will not be seen. That's that defensive wall. Yeah. If we build a defensive wall around our lives to keep ourselves safe. Here's what we're going to do. So what I think we should do is if you go to YouTube and you type in. Let's see old. What would it be?

Girl in cave, old. It's probably like a one minute clip. Once you find that, if we can put that up on the screen. Unfortunately, I don't have a TV. We can watch it. I want to go around. I want to show it to you. And it's I know I'm not giving you much to go on there. Yeah. Because it it's exactly what the Lord wants people to watch right now. Like in this in the context of this conversation,

I'll tell you the movie scene that gets at the same idea. I don't know if it's as compelling as the one you're going to share, but I rewatched recently What's the what's it called? We say something like I don't I don't want to see the light or sorry. I'm cutting it right for sir, but It's a girl she's looking at a yellow bikini, but she's getting old Yes, oh did you find it? Are you able to put that on the screen and for me and Christopher to come watch it together?

Yes, I'm trying to think of a way to put it on stream. It's only a three minute clip, I think so long as you comment on it. Can I share this? Yes, sorry. That's all right. Yeah. Notting Hill with Hugh Grant. Yeah, I haven't I've sort of long time ago. No, you're on Julia Roberts, all right. Notting Hill with Hugh Grant. Yeah, I haven't, I saw it a long time ago. No, Romcom.

Julia Roberts. Yeah. Hugh Grant, Notting Hill. So she plays this famous movie star in the movie and through odd circumstances she meets this owner of a small bookshop on Notting Hill in London. And they're kind of dancing in, is it possible for us to have a relationship? You're this huge movie star and everybody in the whole world knows who you are. My mom can't even remember my name, he says.

And so they go back and forth and they kind of date a little bit and then they break up and then she comes back and says, I really want to give this a go with you. Can we have a relationship?" And he says, can I just say no? It's not gonna work. You know, everybody knows who you are, nobody knows who I am. You're gonna break my heart and I couldn't handle it. And she says, and Julia Roberts acts it very well. She says, you know, the fame thing isn't really real. The truth is I'm just a girl standing before a boy asking him to love me. And she plays it so nakedly, you can see it all in her eyes, she's just vulnerable and saying don't listen to all that. Those are just

masks, those are just, it's not real, this is the real me, I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy longing to be loved. That scene has haunted me since I first saw it in 1999 because of how the masks are coming down, the walls are coming down, and she's getting naked, right? She's saying, will you love me? And this is the cry of every human heart. And I think we're going to see the reverse in this clip where- Will Barron I want to give people a heads up before we watch this, Neil, too. Neil Milliken Where this woman, based on what you're saying, is afraid to be seen. And I can see it from the look on your face how deep that goes for you.

Yeah. Because it's the fear of every human heart. So just so people know, this is this is a very troubling scene. So big trigger warning here. There's nothing sexual in it, but it is horrible, horrifying. It's terrifying. And I don't just mean in a spiritual sense. I mean, it's a horror clip. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. It's horrible. So I would just kind of warn people. So when you play it and they and we hear the volume, is that going to add a weird loop for the listeners or? I don't think it'll be too bad. Okay. Is that gonna add a weird loop for the listeners or? All right Kara is dead isn't she? Whoever did this killed her didn't they? Kara died.

She was next. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! quickly. Oh Oh, OK, so there it is. So just a bit of background. So this so they show that they show up in this island and they're taken to this beach because people are doing experiments on them

because they found this beach that ages people really quickly, right? And she's this gorgeous blonde in a string bikini who says to her daughter at some point earlier in the film, sit up straight. You don't sit up straight. Boys aren't going to like you, right? So she's so into her appearance and then she gets old and her whole, whole life has been about how she looks, man. And she, um, she just gets old and hates herself. And at one point her husband says, put some makeup on, you know? And so she hides in this cave and she refuses to be seen. So that bit at the end though, as she's flipping around, what's happening is her bones are breaking because time is so quick, it heals immediately. So her body becomes all broken up. But that there is the opposite. It's like,

I will not let you see me. I cannot let you see me. Because if you see me, you'll see this and I'm not acceptable and I'm not wanted. Ooh. Matt, this is striking you. It's tapping something deep in your heart. Can you put into words why it's going so deep in you? I think it's going so deep in me because I think deep down I don't feel wanted. I think, you know, maybe like many of us as a kid, just through whatever, you know, through the subjective interpretation of parents or through whatever, you know, through the subjective interpretation of parents or through their objective wrongs, through the rejection of friends.

I remember I had this, this girl I really liked when I was about 16 or 17 and man, just felt ugly, frackly, skinny, unattractive. And, uh, her friends called me pretending to be her pretending to want to be with me. Oh, man, my heart rejoiced and then got crushed, you know? So I think it's just this fear that I'm really not, you don't want me like, and if you think you do, or if anybody thinks they do in any capacity, it's only because of the mask I've been willing to put on. It's got nothing to do with me. And I know that, right. That's the fear. That's, that's the deep place it's hitting. And so I sat on that plane and I paused that clip and I just, in the name of Jesus Christ, I renounce the lie that I am not desirable.

And in the name of Jesus Christ, I proclaim the truth that you love me, that you died for me, you know, that I have friends who love me, that my wife loves me. Yeah. that I have friends who love me, that my wife loves me, yeah. So just... Are we not getting at the deepest cry of every human heart right here? I mean, if we can allow the layers of things that cake over our hearts to just fade away, be peeled away, and get down to the real stuff in there. Is this not the cry of every human heart? And that raw, vulnerable need comes into a fallen world and gets crushed, mocked, spat upon. And we come, we come, this is what happened in my life. And I, I can almost remember, I taste it more than I actually remember the instance of it,

but a time in my life where I was just done with being the crucified one. And I didn't, I didn't express it that way. I wouldn't, I didn't have the language for it. This is all later in life as I've looked back at my life where I've realized I was being crucified. The part of me that was most vulnerable, the part of me that was most human, the part of me that was most needy was being mocked, spat upon, rejected, and nailed to a tree. And I got to a point where I'm done. I don't want to be the crucified anymore.

And it seems to me, you know, correct me if you think there's some other option, but it seems to me we're either going to be the crucified or the crucifier. And I got to a point where I was done being the crucified. So I'm gonna now dish out to others what's been dished out on on me. This is the standard bully because the father bullies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I ended up doing to others what was done unto me. I get to determine what's acceptable, what's lovable, what's cool, you don't listen to the right music, you don't ride the cool bike, you don't wear the right clothes. All that was my working out on others what had been dumped on me, which was just a wound

of rejection. And I was trying to escape my own pain. And my spiritual director said this to me just recently. He said, Christopher, you trust your own coping mechanisms more than you trust Jesus. The way out of that pain is not by becoming the crucifier to others. The way out of that pain is not by becoming the crucifier to others. The way out of that pain is to identify more deeply with the crucified and let him lead you in into this resurrected life where you know the love of the Father. And I can say I desire

that, I want that, I yearn for that, but man, I still have a lot of stuff I gotta work through for that to be more and more a lived experience. And it's not that it hasn't been a lived experience, there have been times in my life where I've lived in a freedom of knowing I'm lovable in my nakedness and my raw humanity. I've experiencedvable in my nakedness, in my raw humanity. I've experienced this from my wife.

And this is, you know what, we're kind of looping back to that whole what's the right sense in which you can say you're my everything. My wife has shown me this love of God in an unadulterated, beautiful way. She has shown it to me over and over and over again. And inasmuch as that really is the love of God flowing through my wife, I can say you're my everything without it being idolatrous. But do I stay there? Do I remain there?

It's like the weeds come back. I heard somebody say that the problem with a living sacrifice is it keeps trying to crawl off the altar. Yeah. Yeah, that sums it up. How did you, because you've been teaching the theology of the body and stuff, probably, I don't know, I don't want to speak for you, but as you say, this has been an ongoing experience where you've had to learn this at a deeper level. Head knowledge, heart knowledge stuff. And there might be someone in here who's about to get married and they hear what we're saying,

like, oh, of course, I, a hundred percent. But how do, how are you, or have there been kind of moments in your marriage where you've been able to stop worshipping Wendy, stop idolizing Wendy, even when after you had that head knowledge? Yeah, we went into marriage with the the the theologically correct understanding that you're not my ultimate fulfillment, you're meant to be a sign of it. But like any fallen human beings, we were bent towards one another and we wanted the other to take away that ache.

That ache is painful. That movie clip that you just showed. You know, where do horror movies come from? Remind me to get back to my own marital experience here, but I wanted to say this as an aside. Where do horror movies come from? They come from something deep in our psyche that we're trying to work out through these stories. I read a fascinating book years ago called Monsters in the Id by E. Michael Jones and

he traces the whole genre of the horror movie back to Frankenstein and Dracula in and through the slasher movies of the 80s and Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street and stuff that I grew up watching. And he says that there's a place in our id, you know, monsters in the id, and I don't know the technical breakdown, Freud's breakdown of the psyche and all this stuff, but there's this place called the id, like way down in there, where we are dealing with contradictions. And these contradictions have to be expressed, they have to come out. For example, he says one of the main contradictions we're working out in horror movies is the contradiction we know that we want sexual pleasure,

but when we separate sexual pleasure from its life-giving intent, meaning marriage and family life, it leads to death. We know this deep in the psyche. And he says, this is one of the main common threads of the horror movie genre, is we are working out the fact that we know promiscuous sex leads to death. Who, you know, the chainsaw, who's coming after whom with the chainsaw in these movies? How often is a teenage couple in the backseat of a car losing their virginity? This is when the Freddy shows up with the chainsaw,

right? And we're working out in these images, in the horror genre, these deep contradictions we feel. I mean, just look on Netflix at the covers of the thumbnails of movies, right? How often do we see sex and violence combined, you know? Provocative poses of women with puddles of blood on the floor and knives and big explosions. I once heard it said very well that the perversion of the life instinct, this was a book by Father Paul Quay, the perversion of the life instinct begets a death instinct. The life instinct is the sexual instinct, it's meant to lead to new life, but when

we shut that down and we're just after the pleasure, it leads to death, leads to a culture of death. This is the root of the culture of death we're living in. All of that to loop back to that movie and then my marriage, that movie clip that you showed and I was really moved, Matt, by the way that touched you so deeply. It's something you feel at a visceral level. This human longing to be loved, and we think that aging and death is the enemy of this love. We think to be loved we have to be young and beautiful. And

that cry of her heart, I don't want to be seen, I don't want to be seen, is you won't love me if you see me getting old and dying. And so in this Song of Songs it's one of the most important passages in the Song of Songs, the lovers cry out from the depth, De Profundus, from the depths of their spirit. They cry out for a love that is strong as death. In some translations, for a love that is stronger than death. Pope Benedict XVI, before he became pope, long before he became pope, wrote a book called Introduction to Christianity, in which he says, This cry from the Song of Songs, the cry of Eros,

for a love that is stronger than death, takes us to the basic problem of human existence. Like, okay, what's he gonna say? What's the basic problem of human existence? The basic problem of human existence is this cry of Eros. Eros longs for a love that doesn't decay, longs for a beauty that doesn't fade or wrinkle or blemish, longs for a joy and a fulfillment that lasts forever. But we slam up against the absolute contradiction speaking against of that reality with the fact that we age and die. That is a slamming the door on that dream of a love that lasts forever, of

a love that is stronger than death. And then masterfully Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, says the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is the answer to that cry of Eros for a love that is stronger than death. And we learn through the glory of Easter that the cry of the heart for a love stronger than death is not just a dream and the doors not slammed in our face with death. In fact, by bearing our death, Christ transforms the horror of death, which is what that clip, that's what that woman is facing. She is facing the horror of her own death, which understandably leads her to conclude, my dream of a love that sees me as beautiful,

that sees me as worthy, that sees me as lovable, desirable, is not real. It will never be fulfilled. And death is telling me it won't be fulfilled unless Jesus is who he said he is and he bore our death to transform it into glory. Unless the resurrection is real and really shows us that it's not just a dream that love would be stronger than death. And then the cry of our heart, put it this way, if the resurrection is real, that woman could, through faith,

peacefully accept that she's aging and dying because death is now the portal to the love that she longs for. If the resurrection is not real, then our faith is in vain and love is not stronger than death. And in the end, death swallows us all up and that's all there is. And these dreams and hopes we have of a love that lasts forever are false and life is meaningless. But if the resurrection is real, then we need to proclaim it to the ends of the earth. We need to proclaim it to her. We need to

proclaim it to every human heart that feels that fear of death. And I feel it. I have felt it recently very viscerally. I feel aging and dying. I'm getting age spots I didn't used to have. My beard and my hair is going gray. My wife is going gray. We're not the young 20-somethings we were when we got married in the 90s. We're getting old and death is on the horizon. My parents aren't going to be here much longer. And I feel this. I feel that there's only one generation separating me from the abyss. And both of Wendy's parents have died. She's facing that headwind, you know, without anybody in front of her. Oh, that's a very powerful way to put it.

Yeah. It's almost like while your parents are alive, you still think, well, we're good. Right. There's someone in front of me. Right, there's someone in front of me. We're all in a conveyor belt and we're all going to fall off the edge of it. Nobody can escape this. The dilemma, the conundrum of death. Is the resurrection just a pious idea? Is the resurrection just some flowery thing we celebrate once a year at Easter time, but has no real bearing on my day today? visceral response to that very tender place in your heart that felt and teared up the cry, felt

and teared up feeling the cry of that woman's heart that's being projected on a screen in a story. But where does that story come from? It comes from whoever wrote the story, M. Night Shyamalan, or whoever wrote it. I don't know how to say his name. These artists are geniuses. What are they doing? They're just honestly opening it up and they're looking in there and they're saying this is what I really feel, this contradiction in a longing to be beautiful forever and I'm facing the ugliness of death. Death is ugly, it's brutal. My sister died of colon cancer two years ago, she's four years younger than I, she was four years younger than I. I was with her at the moment of death, I've never experienced that in my life, the moment

of death with someone. And maybe I talked about this in last year's interview, I can't remember, but being with her at the moment of death, I saw her seeing everlasting beauty. I saw her seeing it. And I had a moment of deep confirmation that everything I believe and hold to be true about the Christian faith is real and is true. And there are four people in the room, my mother, my father, my younger, my even younger sister, and I when Emily died. And in that final breath we saw her seeing everlasting beauty. I don't have any other way to say it. And so my faith was confirmed in a brilliant flash and then she breathed her last. A moment ago

I was holding the hand of my living sister and now I'm holding the hand of my living sister, and now I'm holding the hand of a corpse. And grief just hit me like a Mack truck, totally unbidden. Like I was like, okay, now's the time to cry. No, no, it's just like grief, just tears, like welling up. It was four o'clock in the morning, and I think I woke up the whole hospice care facility with the groans that came out from the depth in the face of...brutal! Freaking brutal! Death is brutal! I am not a fan. If the resurrection is real, then there's hope.

We've got to be honest, like this movie maker, and say we've got to look at that stuff, we've got to look at those fears, we've got to look at what's really, really going on there. The answer to the fear of death is not to dye my hair and get plastic surgery and go on these crazy diets to keep my aging body looking like it's still in its 30s. That is just all out fear of death being manifested. If the resurrection is real, then the return of my body to dust can be accepted in faith peacefully, that I am not merely returning to dust, but my dust to which I will return. What do we say at the beginning of Lent? You know, the priest puts the ashes on and remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. We do need to remember that, but we also

need to remember that we are dust destined for divinization. If that's real, then I can return to dust in peace, accepting. What does it say about us that we are ashamed of people who cry? You know, you read the stories in scripture where people are rending their garments and weeping for days. Now you go to a funeral and it's, you kind of get the sense, it's kind of, you know, be sad, but don't go overboard. Yeah, I'm thinking of that scripture again. kind of be sad, but don't go overboard.

Yeah, I'm thinking of that scripture again, if we build a defensive wall around our lives, we're going to lose it. If we let it come down, we will beget ourselves. It's almost like I think it's a it's like we all have to partake in the lie. You know, we don't believe in heaven, but, you know, life ends at the grave, but it's okay. It's okay, right? It's not okay. But we have to pretend that it's okay to just keep getting by, maybe. It's also, I think, just a fear of human emotions in general.

So uncalculated and undisordered it like not orderly yeah yeah yeah yeah and it reveals the it what makes us naked which is which is probably the same reason we feel or can feel uncomfortable around people with severe physical handicaps or special needs yes it's that vulnerability is the same thing when you weep and wake up the ward in the hospital. What is that? I mean, I don't want to claim I know what it is, but I can... if I feel that visceral place in me of vulnerability, I don't want to be naked in front of others. And there's a rightness to that, but there's a time and a place to be naked. Oftentimes in the Gospel we read, His hour had not yet come. They wanted to throw Him off the hill, but He walks through the crowd unharmed because

His hour had not yet come. But there is a time and a place where Jesus, metaphorically and quite literally, makes himself naked, allows the stripping to happen. That nakedness of Christ on the cross is theologically very significant. He endured the cross heedless of its shame. And I think there are moments in all of our lives where we have to endure a certain humiliation, what we might consider a humiliation, heedless of its shame. I'll tell you one experience that happened to me very recently. I was teaching my favorite course to teach at the Theology of the Body Institute is Theology of the Body and the Marian Mystery.

It's a 30-hour course where we're just diving into the mystery of Mary and I love teaching this course. And I was teaching, it was Wednesday morning, the courses are just, I know what day is what. We start on a Sunday night, we end on a Friday, Wednesday morning I know what's going on, and Wednesday morning it's when I'm teaching on the assumption of the Blessed Virgin, what this means. A bodily assumption into the infinite glory. What does this mean?

And I'm always, this is just my method of teaching, I'm always trying to connect for my students the doctrine of the church with the deepest yearnings of our hearts. Otherwise it's just a doctrine, it just kind of falls flat. What does that mean for me, right? I'm always trying to connect it with this cry of the heart for a love that lasts forever, for a joy that lasts forever. This is deep in our hearts, it's written into us. And I woke up early, I knew this lecture was coming on the Assumption, and I started feeling something in my heart of

certain blocks in my students where they were putting up certain walls. I was like Lord how do I how do I help them how do I help those walls come down so that they can receive the beauty of this teaching and its full splendor. And I teach often with video clips and little pieces of art here there songs and and I remembered seeing I had seen last summer on Broadway, Springsteen, live on Broadway. I'm a huge Springsteen fan. His music has meant a lot to me. I'm not a fan of his politics, of course, but his music has meant a lot to me. And it's on Netflix, Springsteen on Broadway. If you want to see a master storyteller, at the peak of his craft

with music and storytelling and weaving the two seamlessly and and really taking you on a journey of his own heart and opening it up vulnerably to an audience, watch Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix. It's brilliant. He talks about his Catholic faith, he talks about, I mean, he's, you know, he's not a practicing Catholic per se, but he grew up in the church in the 50s and 60s, and he talks about the impact of that, both for good and for ill in his life. He talks about the sacramental worldview that this gave him and how he brings that into his music and this fighting for redemption and I believe in the Promised Land as one of Springsteen's songs. And he's talking about this vulnerably and he's a master storyteller and I just thought,

oh, I'm going to show that clip to my students where he's making all these connections with growing up Catholic and how this brought came into his life and his storytelling. And it's really beautiful and it'll open hearts. And then I heard this kind of whisper in my heart, really beautiful and it'll open hearts." And then I heard this kind of whisper in my heart, Christopher, tell your story. Do what Springsteen did for your students. Tell your story. I'm like, oh crap, but that's gonna make me really vulnerable. And yeah, that's lead by example, teach by showing. If you want your students to open their hearts, then open yours. And so I started taking down notes. What am I gonna say? What am I gonna say? And then I heard again, no, no, no, don't, just trust me. Surrender to me. I will lead you. Just go

with an attitude of surrender. You're not in control of this. Let me be in control of this. Let me lead you. And I won't get into all the details, but it took me into the most vulnerable place I have ever been with my students in my life. And I was just, I started walking through sacramental experiences from my childhood, things that I loved as a child, all of which became idols. And we're kind of looping back to what we were talking about earlier. And I remember the smell of Stan's Record Bar in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This was a record store that I would walk after Catholic school. I'd walk like five blocks to downtown Lancaster and go into Stan's Record

Bar and see if my favorite band had a new album. This is the only way to find out, you know? There's no internet in the 80s. This is 1983. And I remember the feel. I remember exactly where my favorite band was in the record store. I remember the feel of the weight of the records flipping to see if they had a new record. And I remember the day the psychedelic furs had a new album. They were my favorite band in 1983 and I pulled it out. Yes! And the album was called Forever Now. This title is, it's yearning for heaven. We want the glory forever now, we want it now. And I walked through the experience, this visceral experience of the music and that album and what that song

Forever Now is one of the songs on the album, what that song meant to me. And I walked through the experience of how much I loved my home growing up and the smell of the fresh cut grass and the smell of bacon on Sunday mornings when my mom was cooking brunch and the memories that this stirred for me. And I latched on to music, I latched on to my home. Another big idol was Feminine Beauty. I told the story to my students, man, this made me vulnerable. I was six years old and we were headed off to Nags Head, the beach in North Carolina for a vacation the next day. And we had a babysitter who was coming along as a mother's helper. She was probably 15 or 16 and I would have been six years old maybe. And totally innocently, she undressed in front of me and my brother as we were getting ready for bed.

She was getting ready for bed and was very innocent, but it was the first time other than than my mother, that I had seen the breasts of a woman. And I'm six or seven years old and I was overwhelmed by beauty, by the beauty of the feminine form. I was just absolutely overwhelmed. And that was a beauty that I latched onto and became an idol in my life. And the story is unfolding in real time. In front of my students, I'm realizing that these things became idols in my life.

Music was a beautiful gift that I turned into an idol. The love of my childhood home was a beautiful gift from God that I turned into an idol. The feminine form was a beautiful gift from God that I turned into an idol. And then I started unfolding, looking back at my life, how the Lord over the last 30 whatever years has been redeeming these idols in my life, untwisting my idolatry to show me that my love of music is meant to point me to heaven. My love of my childhood home is meant to point me to the home that is everlasting, and they're all rejoicing in everlasting music. And the feminine form is a sign of heaven itself. Mary's body became heaven on earth, the dwelling place of the Most High God. And these idols have been being redeemed in my

life. And then I felt this nudge of the Holy Spirit. I want you to show your students what it means to yearn for heaven. What it means to let idols become icons that redirects your desire towards the infinite. I'm like, no Lord, don't ask that of me in front of 90 people. I don't want to do it in front of 90 people. This is like when you pray, you know, go in your inner room and close the door. I'll let it out there. Don't ask me, Lord, to do it here. And I shut it down. Uh-uh, not gonna do it. And then it came again. Christopher, I want you to reveal. I want you to show. I want you to teach by showing what it means to yearn for heaven. No, Lord, don't ask this of me. Please don't ask this of me. And I shut

it down again. And then it came a third time, Christopher, I'm asking you, trust me, follow me. And I, okay, okay, Lord, I had been telling the students all week long, when the Holy Spirit comes, don't ask where he's taking you, just go. Just go. And the Holy Spirit was trying to take me somewhere, and I was like, I don't want to go. I'll be too naked. I'll be too vulnerable. I'll be misunderstood. I'll be rejected. But he called and I finally, after I put up wall after wall, I said, okay Lord, I'll go.

And when I said, okay Lord, I'll go, I fell on my knees in front of the tilma. We have the tilma hanging up in front of the room. And this whimper, this yearning, this ache welled up from deep in my gut, and I just sobbed. And it was a cry for heaven. That's what it was. And to this day, I don't know exactly how my students received all that. Some of them shared with me that some kind of grace bomb exploded in the class when that happened. A few shared some memories of their own childhood that was coming back to them and how the Lord was untwisting things for them. Okay, praise God, let it be. I'm sure other people thought it was the most inappropriate thing they might have ever seen a teacher ever do.

But I was doing my best to follow the lead of what I thought the Lord was asking me to do. And I do know this, the people who have had the biggest impact on my life have been the ones who have been willing to be naked to expose what's really going on in their hearts, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. And I don't even know how we got talking about this. I have no idea the thread of this conversation.

How do you, how do you deal with criticism on such a public scale? I mean it's one thing for somebody who doesn't have much of a platform who's being vulnerable in front of friends and often friends are unwilling to be vocal in their criticism but anyone with a platform gets mercilessly criticized. How do you personally deal with that? You just said there were probably people in the classroom who thought it was the most inappropriate thing they've ever seen. I'm sure if we went online, just like if we typed in my name, there would be public criticisms of you. Oh, absolutely. There have been many. I'm so glad that you're vulnerable. I mean, I look at people like, I think one of the reasons

Jordan Peterson is so effective is that man is so vulnerable. He is vulnerable. I don't know how he continues to do it. While the criticisms are just being shot at him, he's still like crying on YouTube videos and just being moved to tears and doesn't seem to be willing to shut that part of himself down. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God.

But how do you personally deal with that? Because I mean, none of us are infallible. No, correct. And those, you said there was three times or two times you wanted to shut that thing down. No doubt there were things that rose up in you to shut that thing down that seemed perfectly reasonable. Yes, perfectly reasonable. This isn't appropriate. This is something that should be shared with those. So then

when the criticisms come, they confirm those things that we're trying to throw the brakes on. And even as you sit here now, you're not 100% certain, I'm sure, infallible, certain, that you did the right thing. How do you deal with that? I have to know that I'm loved, even if I got it totally wrong, even if my critics are

100% right. I have to know, you know, it doesn't matter, it's okay, because my identity doesn't come from what you think of me. But getting, do I live that perfectly? Hell no, I do not. I would also say as I look back at 25 plus years of having a ministry, you know, in the public eye, that I've, by necessity, I've learned more, again not perfectly, but more how to straighten up and find my identity here. And if I'm looking for my identity here and what people are saying about me, it's a death trap. It's a suicide rap. We've got to get out while we're young because tramps like us, baby, we're born to run. Springsteen, sorry. Yeah, it's a death trap. To seek my identity in what other people think of me is a death trap. When I went through some

really painful public criticisms many years ago, it was really wrecking me. And I sought out one of my mentors, I remember last time I was on your show, we had a long conversation about the late great Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, who was a personal friend of John Paula Seconds, and I had the honor to know him over a 20-year period. He died in 2014. And I went to him seeking some consolation because I knew he had been through the wringer of public criticisms and misunderstandings and all kinds of getting raked over the coals. And he knew a lot of these people who were raking me over the coals publicly. And seeking some comfort from him, I shared with him the woes I was experiencing in these really painful public criticisms. And he said four words that have stayed with me. He said, why do you care?

And he meant it. He meant it. He lived it. This man did not care what people thought of him. He was free. He was living in a place of freedom. Not because he had his act together. Not because he had figured out how to, you know, function. He was quite a dysfunctional

human being in many ways. But he knew he was loved there. He knew he was loved. And that captivated me. And I'm only slowly learning it. Why do you care? That's great. I was at a gathering just last Friday of theologians, scholars, like the real scholarly types. I'm not, I mean, I'm a theologian of a sort, but I'm not a, I don't consider myself a scholar, right? I was with some real scholars. This is what they do, scholarship. I consider myself much more an evangelist. I dip into the scholarly world and I draw as much as I can and then Michael is... Regurgitated. Yeah, regurgitated, translated. Like the mama bird who chews up the food and then... That's not maybe the best image for my students, but anyway, that's what I consider myself.

But I was invited to this... every once in a while I get invited to these symposia, if that's the right way to say it, where theologians and scholars are presenting their papers. I cannot read a paper for the life of me, no way, I can't do it. I'm going to, I'll share some key ideas and quotes and I'll read them, but I'm going to try to make a connection with my audience, not just read a paper. I can't do it. Anyway, there are all these scholars reading their papers and at the end of the symposium we had some nice conversation over some wine and dessert and there was something I had said in my lectures that one of the theologians

there corrected me on in the presence of these other scholars. And it was good correction. Something I was saying was kind of confusing the processions of the Trinity. And when she pointed out to me, I was like, oh yeah, that's something I... yeah, I get... yeah, I see that. I need to fine-tune my language there. If that had happened to me 15 years ago, I would have been a mess because I was looking for, I was desperately looking for other people to tell me who I am, and particularly from theologians, because I was striving to be one, right? And I wanted the theologians to affirm me and give

me some Bennies and tell me how good a job I'm doing. Well, what I ended up getting was real public criticism from all the people that I wanted the Benny's from, and it was great medicine. It was great medicine for my bent soul, seeking my identity in wrong places. Not that I didn't have a little bit of that shrinking feeling the other day

when this theologian in the presence of other scholars pointed out I needed to fine-tune my language and what I said was not correct. There was a little bit of a wah-wah-wah, you know, that feeling, but it didn't send me in a tailspin. But I do, I have these little interior exercises like, okay, I know where my identity comes from. It doesn't come from what these people think of me. Thank you. I'm loved here. I'm not perfect. And I'm loved in my imperfection. I have to teach, I have to learn that lesson. I have to be taught that lesson over and over and over again.

Mason- This came to me in prayer in Krakow in adoration and was just repenting for all the things I get wrong. All the things I say that are false. All the, maybe the harshness I've expressed towards certain people. I mean, you do a lot of podcasts, you're going to say wrong things. Yeah, sure. I just felt really kind of overwhelmed by it. And I sensed the Lord say to me, and it was, I know it was the Lord because I felt that liberation that comes after he speaks I don't need you to be perfect I need your humility and obedience. That's Jesus. Yeah it's Jesus and what I sensed in those words was almost like you really think I need you to speak perfectly in

order to convert souls? This is not what I need. Please, girl, please. Matt, that is freedom, brother. I've been in very similar places. I took a sabbatical in 2010. I just needed to pull out. I'd been through a lot of public criticism and I took a six month sabbatical. At the end of it, I wasn't even sure if I was coming back. Like I just, I had, I was just done with being in the public eye

and I just didn't want it. There was a time in my life where I liked the public eye because it gave, it stroked my ego in ways that I was really insecure and wanted ego strokes. And then of course rightly so, all of that backfires and the Lord wants to show you where your real identity comes from, not what people think of you. And I was really wrestling like, Lord I don't, I just, can I just be a UPS driver? You know, just all he does is drop packages off at people's houses and I mean you've even told the story on last year's interview. I didn't I think so. No Anyway, I that's kind of my go-to fantasy when when ministry work gets really hard

I just want to be a UPS driver just deliver packages and come home at the end of the day and turn it all off And My spiritual director said to me Christopher you packages and come home at the end of the day and turn it all off. And my spiritual director said to me, Christopher, it's very similar to what you were just sharing, that you don't need to be perfect to do this work. Like I felt like a fraud because my imperfections had been on display on a grand scale, and I felt like I couldn't do this anymore because I felt like a fraud. And this priest said to me, Christopher, you don't need to be perfect to do this work. What you need is to have all your imperfections open to His merciful love.

That's how He will reach other hearts through you, through your vulnerability, through your admission of your imperfections, through your getting naked. That's how hearts are touched. Where is the most potent? What is the most potent moment of Jesus's ministry? Naked on the cross, poor with his heart split open and the blood and water gushing. What seems like utter defeat becomes the precursor to ultimate victory. If we're following him, well what does he say? I'm going to Jerusalem where I will be rejected, I will suffer greatly, and I will be put to death. And a few lines later he says, follow me. Okay, okay. If I'm following him, everything that happened to Jesus will, in one way or another, happen to me.

If you're following him, Matt, everything that happened to Jesus will, in one way or another happen to me. If you're following him, Matt, everything that happened to Jesus will in one way or another happen to you. The disciples not greater than the master, as Jesus says. If they treated me this way, they're gonna treat you this way. The surprise is, at least I think where it stings the most, is that oftentimes that rejection comes from within, from people that you would think would stand by you. That's, yeah, Jesus came to his own and his own did not receive him.

What kind of world do we live in? Really, really, I pose this to you, I want to hear your response. Like, what kind of world do we live in in which perfect love enters it? This is Bonaventure. Is revealed and is offered. That's what, yeah, that's Bonaventure's point. This is what happens to perfect love in a fallen world. Yeah.

We reject it. We not only reject it, in the most... We mock it. We mock it. We spit upon it. And we kill it. Jesus says, this is my body. I'm giving it to you. And we nail it to a tree. We suck. I've done this. You've done this. This is our broken, fallen condition. I'm haunted by classmates from grade school that I mocked. They were Jesus and I mocked them because they didn't wear the right clothes. What was I doing? I was acting out on them, what was acted out on me. I became the crucifier because I didn't want to be the crucified. They were the crucified in the politics of third grade or fourth grade, you know, or eighth grade or twelfth grade, pick your grade. What were the human dynamics? You know, who were the cool people? Who were the rejected ones?

Who were the ones on the sidelines? Who were the ones you didn't want to hang out with for whatever reason? The rejected ones, the ones on the outskirts, the ones who weren't cool enough, the ones who didn't wear the right clothes or listen to the right music, they were Christ in our midst and my mockery of them, I was mocking Jesus. And at the same time I was really mocking the Christ in me. I was rejecting the crucified Jesus in me. I was crucifying Jesus in me by acting out the pain I felt on them. That's really part of what was going on there. Mason- I was reading my morning prayer in the Magnificat several months ago and I forget what psalm this line comes from, but it says about God, he has never despised the poverty of the poor.

Broke my heart because that's all we do. You know, not all we do, but in our fallen state, we mock the poverty of the poor. Whether it's how they look or how they speak or what they wear. The poor, I mean, it's funny, like we can romanticize the poor. You know, love the poor. Yeah, but the poor, if they don't in some initial sense repulse you, probably aren't the poor. Here in Steubenville and other kind of lower economic areas, there are real poor people who shout at you randomly for no reason. I'm thinking of a few folks here or who smell really badly, who wear pajamas to Kroger.

This is the greatest travesty that anybody would wear pajamas outside of their house. That I cannot accept. The smell, the urine, that's fine. Wearing your pajamas to Holy Mass or to Kroger, there is no place for you in heaven. But yeah, if it wasn't in some way initially repulsive, it wouldn't be the poor we're referring to, you know? You know the story of St. Francis and the Lipper and what he had to overcome? I mean...

Can I tell you? Please. Oh man, so we moved here and I was telling my wife how angry I was. All these people in their friggin' Hello Kitty pajamas and their stamp tramp. You say that? It's probably really offensive. You know the tattoo on the lower back. You don't have one, do you, show?

Okay, good. And I was just like, oh, so disgusted by the whole thing and people with their bright pink hair. And I actually said to my wife, I'm like, and I was being serious. I'm like, yeah, these are like my lepers, you know? And I was referring to St. Francis. And she's like, wait, wait, okay.

In this experiment, thought experiment, you're Saint Francis. And these are the lepers. So I'm like, all right, I see the point. Okay, I need to go to confession. But to Saint Francis. Who has the leprosy? Hmm. Yeah, both of us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a great reflection that Pope Francis delivered to the Roman Curia right before Christmas this last year on Naaman, and this recently came up in the cycle of readings, the story of Naaman, who was the great warrior, right, Syrian warrior, and had won all these battles, and he won this renown and Underneath the armor he has leprosy

That's right, and Pope Francis had a beautiful reflection on What it meant for? Naaman To disrobe to take the armor off And bathe in the Jordan. And he was inviting the Roman Curia, he says, oftentimes great gifts or great accomplishments, you know, here speaking to the Roman Curia, these are the armor that we wear to shield or cover over a real disease in our humanity, a leprous disease that we all have. And if we cling to our armor, and this is, we're back to that

passage, right? Exactly. You build it up. If you build this wall around you to protect yourself and don't let it come down, you'll lose your life. And it was really a powerful reflection about taking off the armor that we put on, getting naked and descending seven times. And of course, that's the biblical number of perfection, right? And I get impatient with this whole bathing again. Oh, Lord, haven't I already dealt with this crap in my life?

I gotta go back to it and deal with it again? And it's that bathing seven times, come back seven times until you are perfectly cleansed, which is not gonna be in this life. That means there is a recurring need to examine where's the armor I'm building up, and can I have the humility to take it off, not hide behind accomplishments, not be hide behind any masks I might be putting on,

get naked and bathe because I'm leprous underneath. Now I'm not that familiar with the story, but I remember there being a line where, is it Naaman? And he initially rejects the Prophet's advice? And somebody says, if he told you to do something extraordinary, you would do it, but you won't do this? That line has always really struck me. And I wonder if you know why. Why does it strike you? It strikes me because there's a simplicity exactly we want the grand we want our healings to be some extraordinary thing But what if it's just simply going to confession there you go Yeah, and receiving the Eucharist and opening your heart when you do it. Mm-hmm. What if it's just simply

Learning to love your spouse in the thing that bugs you most about your spouse What if it's simply walking up to one of these people with pajamas at the grocery store and just giving them clothes? No, what are we going to say? And I don't know, saying hello. Yeah, you're exactly right. Looking in their eyes and treating them like a human being. Yeah. And in the process examining, why is this bugging me so much? Here's a line, we despise the poverty of the poor because we despise our own poverty.

Boom. Absolutely. And see, you and I, we've learned how to mask that stuff. Their poverty is more on display and we're like, cover that SHIT up so I don't have to look at it. Because what I'm really looking at is a mirror of stuff in me that I don't want to look at. My cousin once said something to me, you know, people say things and it could have been 30, 40 years ago and just stays with you. I have a cousin who went to a on spring break somewhere and

there was this nude beach in Miami and he found himself walking across this nude beach and there was a woman who was... Nude? Nude. Good. And very overweight. And my cousin said, he was describing his experience, oh, then you had these women over here who were naked. But then, and then I saw this person, I was like, cover that up! That hurt. That, like, cover that up. That hurt.

That, that, that, that in one sentence summarizes a deep neurosis in my family. Okay. Yeah. Which is cover that up. Cover that up. Don't let your warts. Don't let your wounds. Don't let anything that you let your mess. Don't let your warts, don't let your wounds, don't let anything that... Don't let your mess.

Don't let your mess show. Don't let anything that would make anybody think our family is unlovable be on display. That is seeking your identity here from what others think of you and it leads precisely to building that wall that if we keep it up we will lose our lives. Between here and the beatific vision every wall that we have erected, every fig leaf that we're hiding behind has to come down and I'm here in John Cougar Melon Camp when the walls come tumbling down. They all got to come down. All of them! Between here and the beatific vision. So let's start now. Let's start that. That's the interior journey. It's an integral part of the interior journey. It's not the whole interior journey, but it's a very important part of the interior

journey. Yeah, we talked about this last time, and I don't want to have to rehash the whole thing. But sometimes our prayer regiments, our walls. One saint said the best way to pray is to not have a plan or something to that effect. It was from Jacques Philippe's book on Time for God, I think it was called. But this this this intimacy you're talking about is scandalous to some Christians, which is so odd. It's the scandal of the cross. They've made Christianity into some other thing. And it's

a temptation. It's a temptation around the cross. I think it would be safe to say that in the end, every false version of Christianity and every falsity in every religion is some attempt to get our hands on the spiritual goods but not through the cross. Not be naked. Not be naked. Yep, yep, yep, yep. It's forever now without the suffering. Without the suffering, without the cross. And that becomes an idol. You just showed me a clip of, who's the priest from? Father Jason, right? We were talking before we went on air, and you showed this clip of what he was saying about how we can look for a false religion in political leaders who will give us what we want, who are pro-life, who are pro-marriage, and yet they're also selling us a bill of goods.

And if you're looking for true religion, our leader is going to be naked with holes in his hands nailed to a tree. That's our religious leader. And we want the strongman. We want the strongman, right. Are we willing to... We want Barabbas over the son of God. Ooh. Ooh. Do you know what the name Barabbas means? Yeah. Tell folks.

You tell talks. It's your show. Well Barabbas means son of the father. Bar Abba, son of the father. Yeah, son of the father. So we have to choose between two sons of the father. Yeah. Yeah. We have to choose between the crucified or the crucifier.

And when we chose Barabbas, we chose the one who inflicted the pain rather than absorbed it. And we gotta be careful here. It doesn't make us doormats, right? But there is a time where we must follow Christ the whole way, and we must have prudential judgment in when our hour has come, right? There are times where they were dishing out

punishment on Jesus and it wasn't his time to open up and receive it. And he walked through the crowd, as I was saying earlier. But eventually his hour came where he had to absorb the horror of sin and death in order to bring about the greatest victory over it. And I get suspicious of certain movements in the church, and I don't mean formal movements, but I mean currents in the church of kind of a, get out there as Christ fought? If we think we can fight on the terms of the battle laid out by the enemy, we will be taken out by the enemy. Christ shows us the way to fight is very different than the way the enemy fights. Yeah, martyrdom. That's where we hold them up, right? Speaking of the marriage ceremony in martyrdom. Yeah. That's where we hold them up, right? Speaking of the marriage ceremony in martyrdom, my friend Derek Cummins pointed out that in

the Eastern, we talked about the Anglican Ordinary, in the Eastern wedding ceremony, the husband and the bride wear crowns. Crown one another, yeah. We initially think of that as the king and the queen of their, their dominion, which it is, but it meant more deeply to mean the crowns of martyrdom. What a really fancy, pretty nice way to talk about what's about to happen. Here's a golden crown.

You're going to die. Yeah, might it not be more fitting to place a crown of thorns on them? That's where Christ consummates His marriage, on the marriage bed of the cross. That's the language of Augustine. The marriage bed of the cross. The marriage bed of the cross. Who says that? St. Augustine. The marriage bed. Yeah. The marriage bed. Let's say it again. No, I'm trying to get it to sink in even for me because I teach this all the time. Yeah. And it just, it's striking me in a new way the marriage bed. Okay

When you're cool, would it be if you were super into like Christianity that you made a big cross for you and your wife to sleep on this this reminds us But I can't even sleep on it But in a way in a metaphor problem, what are you again in this metaphor? You're Jesus in this metaphor? Yes, yes, yes. But in a very real way, in a very real way, John Paul II says this, I brought it up earlier, the marital embrace is meant to be liturgical, a participation in the work of God. That's liturgy, right? What is the work

of God? The work of God is to do the will of the Father. Where does Christ consummate that will? On the marriage bed of the cross. It is finished. In Latin, consumatum est. It is consummated. What is consummated? The marriage of Christ in the church. The altar at the Mass, when we understand and we're looking at the Mass as John Paul II invites us to, he says the Mass, the Eucharist, is the sacrament of the bridegroom and the bride. Yeah, keep going, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I was going to talk about the Baldacino border yeah yeah we'll get to that so so the altar at the mass is the marriage bed where the sacrament of the bridegroom and the bride is

consummated and the baldacino over the altar is explain to people what that is so if you can picture the high altar at st. Peter's this is a great example where we have I think it was was it Bernini or Michelangelo who designed that. No idea. Baldacchino. I think it's one of them. Anyway, over the high altar you have this huge canopy that is situated right above the altar and it's called the Baldacchino and it comes from the Jewish tradition of the marriage bed where there would be this tent, if you

will, placed over the marriage bed. It's an imitation of the Holy of Holies. Only the priest enters the Holy of Holies to offer the ultimate sacrifice. The symbolism here is so profound. What is the ultimate temple? Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Lord? When Christ says, tear down this temple, rebuild it in three days, what does John say? He was talking about his body. The high priest in the marital embrace, this is the symbolism of the baldacino, the high priest is entering the holy of holies.

The theology of a woman's body is that of temple, dwelling place. We see this fulfilled in Mary. Her body, not metaphorically, her body literally became the dwelling place of the most high God. Every woman shares in this dignity. Her body proclaims dwelling place of the Lord. How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord, Mighty God. If I can loop back to what happened to me when I was seven years old and I saw that

babysitter, did I know that this was happening? No. But deep in my being, at the purest level, of course it was distorted in my fallen humanity, but at the purest level of my humanity, what was my heart saying? How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord, mighty God. One day within your temple is better than a thousand elsewhere. This is the theology of the marital embrace. The woman is temple, the bridegroom is priest. The priest enters the Holy of Holies to offer the ultimate sacrifice of flesh and blood. And this is how life comes into the world. Is this the way we think about sex? If not, why not? Because there's an enemy who is hell-bent on blinding us

to this mystery. Because if we start to see truly the theology of our bodies, the theology of maleness and femaleness, and the call of the two to become one flesh. It's the mystical key that opens us to the wine cellar of union with Christ and the Church. For this reason a man leaves his father and mother and the two become one flesh. This is a great mystery, Paul tells us, and it refers to Christ in the church. We hear that scripture when it comes in the cycle of readings, it goes in one ear and out the other.

Whereas John Paul II and the whole mystical tradition is telling us this passage, this is John Paul II, this passage is the crowning of all of the themes of sacred scripture that ebb and flow like long waves throughout the Bible. This is the compendium or summa, John Paul II says, of everything God wants to tell us about who He is and who we are and why we're here and how we are to live our lives. And that's why the enemy is hell-bent on pornifying our vision of the body. Because when it's pornified, it's no longer mystified, if you will. It's taken us in the wrong direction. Christ comes to un-porn it, if you will, to de-porn it, to purify us, to purge us of

all those diseased ideas and understandings so that we can recover that mystical key that will take us into the wine cellar. What did you just say there? Pornified so it can't be mystified? How did you put that? Do you remember? How did I say it? That's the first time that ever rolled off my tongue.

I said that the enemy wants to pornify our vision of the body so that it will no longer be mystified. I mean, mystify in the sense of mystical. Not confusing. Not confusing, right. I say that because also, like, when you encounter the mystical, it also untwists the pornified- How do we overcome evil with good? So this is what happened to me. I mean, I remember seeing my wife breastfeed for the first time, and the horror of pornography could not have been more evident to me.

I mean, I already knew that pornography was horrible. But when I saw my wife breastfeeding my son, I saw in the clearest way I think I've ever seen it, the evil of pornography. Yes. Yes. You were tasting it in a way. You were tasting the evil of pornography because you were seeing the holiness. And here we're looping back to what we were saying earlier about taste buds and taking the world in with our mouths. I saw a video on YouTube some years ago. It was some primitive people, maybe Papua New Guinea or something, where the custom is, and forgive me if it's not Papua New Guinea, I don't know exactly where, but it's a primitive tribe and the custom is right after birth, the woman places the baby on her belly. So the baby comes out of the womb, she grabs the baby, places it on her belly, and she just lies there bare-breasted.

And the newborn infant... Crawls to her breast. Newborn infant. Crawls to her breast. Oh, no. No, the newborn infant knows how to find the breast and over a period of maybe 10 minutes or so shimmies its way up to the breast and latches on. Forgive me for making your microphone a breast there, but latches on, latches on.

Where does that come from? And what does it say sacramentally about what a human being is? Right from the moment of birth, we thirst for the breast. And the mother who offers her breast to the baby, just as you saw, this is a theology lesson. And here's the theology lesson. Your hunger is good and it's okay that you can't satisfy it on your own. There is another who is gift. That is your child feeding at Cameron's breast.

Your child is getting that theology lesson. No wonder we're so obsessed about breasts in our world. When you untwist all of that obsession, it brings us to this fundamental truth that we hunger. We hunger for something we can't grant, which brings us right back to what I quoted earlier Ratzinger saying in Introduction to Christianity, that this is the fundamental problem of human existence. Eros cries out for something that it, an infinite satisfaction that it cannot grant. It can only be given by a gift. And we can, I mean we could have

a whole, I could go on and on about this, but what is the biological function of the mammary gland? It's to transform... this is a simplistic way to put it, I'm not a biologist, but in the end this is what's happening. Blood is being transformed into food by the mammary gland. Where did Jesus learn at the natural level that blood could become food if not at his mother's breast? The very word mama, which is in English the most affectionate perhaps term we can offer for a mother, mama. Have you ever done the math on that? No. Mama. It means breast. Does it? Yeah, think mammary gland. Mama in Latin is breast. The offering of the breast is so integral to what motherhood is that it's what we call

her. We call in the most affectionate way, we call her mama. We call her mama. She's our mama. Mary is our mama. Mary is our mama. She's the fulfillment of Isaiah 66 with this vision of heaven where we will all drink from the abundant breast of the New Jerusalem and find comfort in the overflow of her milk.

That's an image of heaven I can connect with because it taps into the most, the deepest yearning of my, the original yearning I felt at the moment I was born was for the breast. And a sacramental vision of the world sees the holiness of the breast as a sign of heavenly mysteries. And that's where the enemy's right here. He goes right here. The enemy attacks right here to blind us, to blind us to the theology of the human body. Seven years old, the sight of that babysitter's breasts, and the way I latched on, not knowing anything about sacramentality or how this is actually holy and meant to point me to heaven, I just latched on to the

thing that was right in front of me, and it's been the lifelong idol from which I have needed purification. But what we need to, I think a very important lesson here, and I can beat myself up, is so important that behind every idol is the desire for the true God gone awry. Can I quote something from Voitiwa in this book? Can I say something about this place? Please, yeah. Okay, this is a great privilege for me to present this to all of you people. Where's the camera I can look at? You guys. It's a great privilege for me to present

this to you guys. This is up till now an unpublished retreat that Carol Voitiwa, who became St. John Paul II, delivered to artists during Holy Week of 1972. It's called God is Beauty, a retreat on the gospel and art. And I was surprised. I didn't even learn of the existence of this until 2015 or 16. I was reading a book by Stanislaw Griegel, who was a lifelong friend of John Paul II. He was also a professor of mine in graduate school. And he mentioned this retreat to artists that Wojtyla gave.

And he said it forms a single whole with John Paul's theology of the body. What? And I've never even heard of it? I contacted a friend of mine who, I knew it was published in Polish, he mentioned that in the book, so I contacted a friend of mine in Poland, I said, can you help get an English translation of this for me just so I can study it for myself? And when I read it, I said, this has to be made available. So coincidentally, the Theology of the Body Institute was just in

the process of starting a press, and this is our first offering. We got permission from the Vatican to do an official English translation, as official as it might be. Who did the imagery? The images are beautiful. Yes, my son Thomas, Dave Lieberg, is the artist, but my son Thomas kind of stylized them. I see. And my son Thomas also did the cover. And the, yeah, we wanted it to be beautiful. We wanted the book itself.

I just lost my bookmark. We wanted the book itself to be beautiful. So it has these beautiful images inside and I invite the readers to pay attention because the visuals in the book, like this of the woman, will take you on a journey. She will reappear later in different form and you'll see how the visuals themselves kind of take you on a journey. But I want to point out what I believe, and it ties into exactly what we are saying about... Can I just let people know that they can get this book by clicking the link in the description below,

and if you use the promo code PINCE, you get 20% off. So go check that out. And that's 20% off as many copies as you want of that book. So if you want 100 copies, you get... Really? 20% off. So go check that out. And that's 20% off as many copies as you want of that book. So if you want 100 copies, you get- Really, 20% off of 100 copies? 20% off of as many as you want. And the first 60 pages or so are the retreat itself. And then the rest of the book is, I have a commentary in there,

and then we have reflections from some other theologians and artists just unpacking some of the themes. It's a five-lesson retreat delivered during Holy Week in 1962, but this point was the one that stayed with me the most when I first read it, and it's directly related to what we are saying. Is our approach to the body that of an idol or an icon? And what do we do when we idol or an icon, and what do we do when we recognize this idolatry? We all have this temptation to idolize the human body. Listen to this. Is this John Paul or you?

This is Voitiwa himself, direct quote from Voitiwa. Follow along, I'm on page 24, the final paragraph. This is Voitiwa himself telling a story from when he was a young priest studying in Rome. Okay. I need my glasses. Me too. Speaking of getting old. Yeah, there it is.

Decay of the body. Guess what, Matt? It all leads to glory. If we accept the humiliation of the body, it leads to the glorification of the body. Those are some pretty smart glasses, I don't know. Well, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Okay, he says, this is direct Voitiwa, I'm reminded of the day when I wandered for many hours around the baths of Diocletian in Rome.

So background here, this is where the masterpieces of Greek sculpture are housed and what are the Greeks sculpting? The human body in this very stylized, idealized, naked form. So like every culture, the Greeks had this idealized way of portraying the naked body. What did this young saintly priest do? He ran the other direction and said it's evil. Do you think that's what he did? I don't think he did that. No, that's not what he did. He said, I encountered in these baths the masterpieces of ancient Greek sculpture. That was a very laborious day, and he underscores this a couple times, that he took great efforts

and it was a labor to get out what were they really looking for in this portrayal of the body in this way. He says, I took great pains to understand their art and I noticed with what immense effort all those people, those great masters of sculpture, had sought to demonstrate perfect, absolute beauty in the human body. And here's the key in the next line. And in doing so, he says he came to realize that they were looking for the incarnation. Whoa, pause. Let this sink in. In our quest, and let's call it spade to spade, the idolatrous quest for perfect physical

beauty which every culture manifests in one way or another. Every culture has its ideal of what the perfect body is, right? This has been blown way out of proportion in the modern world with the way we can alter the human body with computer technology. And you've seen those videos, I'm sure, like the Dove commercials where they demonstrate how images of a woman's face and body get photoshopped. You haven't seen it? No, I haven't.

They're worth looking up just to see how we are being deceived by, you know, the advertisements as to what the human body is supposed to look like. Anyway, so every culture has these idealized images of the human body. What does Voitiwa say? I took great pains to get underneath it. What are they really looking for? And he concludes they were looking for perfect beauty manifested in the

human body and guess what what's the title of this retreat God is beauty God is beauty God is perfect beauty and that perfect beauty was manifested in the human body you got to keep reading okay here go. Let's read the whole book. This looks... So this is what he says, after this walk for many hours, and he says again, it took such great effort to spend time with that ancient pagan art. Listen to this, I understood the gospel anew, and I understood it better. I understood that what had been the subject of their search for absolute impeccably perfect beauty in the human body, that that beauty, and here he uses a capital B, that that perfect beauty, this perfect beauty did indeed become incarnate in the gospel.

What are we really looking for when we turn to these idealized images of, quote, beautiful human bodies, end quote? John Paul II tells us we're looking for Jesus, whether we know it or not. We're looking for perfect beauty manifested in the flesh. He goes on to say, God who became man, God who revealed himself, this is what we're looking for, because he appeared in the flesh. This perfect beauty is not some ethereal,

misty beauty floating out there somewhere that we can't reach. That perfect beauty entered time in a male body born of a female body. This is critical because it's always male and female together that reveal the mystery. Right? This perfect beauty appeared in the flesh. Together with His, Christ brought with him an entire special world of beauty. Beauty which is identical with him as God, just as he is identical with capital B beauty. God is beauty.

What does this mean? I mean, that can sound kind of lofty perhaps, but I want to bring this literally, this is what the gospel is, it is literally bringing ultimate beauty down to earth. That's the incarnation. God is beauty. Matt, tell me, just off the cuff, tell me an experience in your life when you encountered something so, well you already did, yeah, your child breastfeeding. You encountered something so, well you already did. Yeah. Your child breastfeeding. You encountered something so beautiful that it brought a tear to your eye

or you felt like your heart skipped a beat or. Oh golly. Tell me, tell me another experience. We just celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary and I was, we went away and I was laying in bed, my head on a pillow, my wife's head on a pillow, we were looking at each other. I started crying,

realizing how many times I look at her and take her completely for granted. And what a mystery she is to me. I was just so overwhelmed by her beauty. So right there in that place of being overwhelmed by your wife's beauty, Eros is being awakened in your heart. What do we mean by Eros? We have to define that word. I remember when I first read John Paul II's Theology of the Body and he kept using this word Eros and I was like, something was getting tripped up in me because I had equated that

word with the pornographic. Erotic, the erotic realm to me was synonymous with the pornographic realm because that's how I had been shaped and formed. And John Paul II said, no, we mustn't confuse eros with another Greek word, pornea. Eros, he says, is the upward impulse of the human spirit towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. Your desire for truth, my desire for truth, we don't want to be lied to. Nobody wants to be lied to. That's Arros.

Even if somebody shows up at your door at three in the morning, the police say, and you know something terrible has happened, even then you don't want to be lied to. You don't want to be lied to. That's the desire for the true, the good, and the beautiful is Eros. When you encounter just an act of human goodness and it, it brings a tear to your eye or it just moves you. I remember a flight attendant one time

saw that I had asked another flight attendant if I could have some milk with a cookie that I had had from like the leftover lunchbox at the church seminar that I was speaking at. And I always, they have milk on the plane, but I know, I know, cause I know how planes work, you know, that sometimes you can kind of coax a little carton of milk out of the flight attendant

and sometimes she'll say, no, it's just for the coffee. And I got one of those, no, it's just for the coffee ladies. But this other flight attendant saw this interchange and she looked at my cookie and she could tell I was disappointed. And she comes up, she puts her hand on my arm like this. saw this interchange and she looked at my cookie and she could tell I was disappointed and she comes up, she puts her hand on my arm like this, she says, I'll get you a carton of milk.

Instant tears. Wow. Just this act of goodness, human kindness, that's Eros. It doesn't mean I wanted to jump in bed with her. My heart was awakened by the good, the beautiful. When we encounter something so beautiful it brings a tear to our eye or it stirs some inexplicable yearning. That's Eros, right? So when we encounter the true, the good, the beautiful, Eros is awakened in us. And that Eros, awakened in us and that Eros, John Paul unfolds this here but also elsewhere, I unfold it, he unfolds it implicitly in the retreat, I unfold it explicitly, proper

sense of the word, not you know what I mean, in my commentary, that the proper name for that attraction is Eros and that Eros is ultimately a desire for God. God is beauty. Our yearning for God is what the saints call the holy longing, the holy eros. We are to become, each and every one of us, this is the journey of the Christian life, we are to become an all-consuming eros for God. Saint Augustine says, the journey of the Christian life is to be trained by longing.

We will, just as Augustine did, if we're aiming our longing for God at creatures, we will exhaust them like the prodigal son. They won't give us what we're looking for. And please God, that will bring us to a place of conversion as it did for Augustine. Beauty, ever ancient, ever new, long, have I sought thee in creatures but not found thee because he was treating these creatures as idols right that that replaced the Creator but what what Voitiwa is telling us in this section of the of the retreat when he talks about the Diocletian baths and here I'm gonna turn to my commentary on that section. He's telling us that our idols can become again icons. So I'm gonna say to everybody watching this, what are your

idols? We were saying earlier that we all worship something. We worship whatever we think is going to satisfy Eros in the end. What do you think is going to do it? Is it the human body? Is it money? Is it success? Is it reputation? We must allow our idols to be untwisted so that they can become, again, icons. And here's my commentary on that passage that I just read. I say, notice the painstaking efforts that this young saint made to understand what the human heart is really desiring in its pursuit of idealized bodies.

It's looking for ultimate beauty in the flesh. Alright, pause there. If Christianity is real, if the incarnation is real, then ultimate beauty has been manifested in the flesh. This is not a footnote in Christianity. This is the source and summit of everything we believe. This is the body of Christ given up for us, and we're circling back to so many other themes we talked about that desire to eat, that desire to take in, that desire to consume. I had a student come up to me one time and said, Christopher, I

was talking about beauty and our yearning for beauty, and he said to me, Christopher, I don't want to just behold the sunrise. I want to eat it. I want to take it into me. I want the beauty to be part of me. I want to taste it and swallow it so that I become the beauty. Wasn't that, what's that one of my favorite movies, that Christmas movie, It's Wonderful Life? Yes. What's that bit at the beginning where he talks to Mary and he says he wants a lasso to the moon?

What do you want Mary? Do you want the moon? I'll throw a lasso around it. I'll pull it down. You can eat it. Exactly. You can eat it, see? Andso the moon. What do you want, Mary? Do you want the moon? I'll throw a lasso around it. I'll pull it down. You can eat it. Exactly. You can eat it, see? And then the moonbeams will come out of your eyes and the tips of their hair. Yeah. Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter.

Yeah, great movie. There's some bad theology in there though. The angel, Clarence, was supposedly a human person who lived here on planet Earth and now he's trying to earn his wings in heaven Oh sure, of course, it's a bad theology. We don't become angels I don't like the angels not we don't become angels and the point here is back to the body That we we we we demand Not only if we are honest with our hearts and sometimes we're dishonest sometimes we're copping out

But if we're honest with our hearts and sometimes we're dishonest, sometimes we're copping out, but if we're honest with our hearts, Matt, I want to be with you forever. I want to be able to look in your eyes forever because this is how I know you. Your body reveals you to me. You're not an angel trapped in your body. You are a body person. And I want to encounter you, the real you, the whole you forever. I want to know you forever. If I don't know you forever, I'm missing out because you reveal a beam of God's glory that no other human person reveals. And if I don't know you forever and you are not your soul, my soul is not me, says Saint Bonaventure. Or is that Aquinas? It's one of them. It's one of the greats. It's a great saint who said, my soul is not me.

What lives forever is not just the soul. What lives forever is the human person, body and soul. We are destined for everlasting life. Yes, our bodies will return to dust, but as we said earlier, our bodies return to dust, but dust destined for divinization. If God can gather the dust at the beginning of time and breathe his life into it, he can gather that dust again at the end of time and breathe his life into it. Resurrection of the body. This is not a dispensable extra. This is not a footnote. This is what we are placing our faith in. I don't want to know your soul forever. I want to know you and your soul is not you. In the same way you don't want to know my corpse forever.

Exactly. I don't want to know your corpse. I want to know you. I want to know you in the unity of your body and soul. If we forget this point, it's not only that we veer in the direction of something un-Christian, we veer in the direction of something anti-Christian. He who denies Christ come in the flesh. Is that where you were going? Exactly. Yeah, that's great. How do we recognize the evil spirits? They're the ones who are always trying to excarnate the mystery, to rupture the wedding of spirit and flesh.

This is what our faith is. Our faith is the marriage of the divinity with the humanity, the spirit with the physicality, the material world. And it's not just our bodies that are destined for everlasting life. He took on flesh and in doing so he brought to himself, summed up in his very body, the whole material world. There will be a new heaven and a new earth. Which means somehow, it doesn't mean that, you know, trees will participate in the divine life in the same way that human persons have the capacity to do. But all of creation will somehow be renewed. All of creation will be taken up. All of creation will somehow, in some way, we've got to be careful here, but will somehow be divinized. If this is the goal of all creation, how happy were the fish that Jesus ate?

Because what was happening to those fish? They were becoming the body of Christ. They were becoming divinized by Jesus eating them. How happy were the figs that Jesus ate? And here I might add, it shouldn't surprise us that bread and wine can become the body and blood of Jesus. Every time Jesus ate bread and drank wine, it became his body and blood. There's something similar happening mysteriously, of course, in transubstantiation. The mystery of Christ bodily incarnate reality is being sacramentally

re-presented to us. This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it? Um, let's take a break and then come back. And we are back from the bathroom. And then come back. And we are back from the bathroom. Well, I'm back from the bathroom. Hey, everybody watching right now, I want to invite you to go check out Halo, which is a prayer and meditation app that is becoming more beautiful and sophisticated by the day. Halo.com slash Matt Fradd, H-A-L-L-O-W dot com slash Matt Fradd.

Fantastic app. I use it regularly as sleep stories. It helps you pray the rosary, the divine mercy chaplet, leads you through lexio divina. I believe Bishop Robert Barron has recorded all 150 Psalms and so you can listen to a Psalm every morning. It's really, really good. Have you ever heard of Hello? It's not just one of these things I'm talking about because they're paying me. I'm actually really excited about it. In fact, I was in adoration the other day and I saw a woman with gigantic headphones on. I'm like, I bet that's what she was doing. Or Bruce Springsteen or the other.

Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. If you download the app right now, they do have free content so you can try it out. But if you want access to the entire thing, go to hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up there and you'll get, I think, three months free so that you can try it out and then decide to pay the nominal fee monthly. It's really, really, really, really good. Really, really beautiful, too. You should do a sleep story with them. They invited me to and my schedule didn't allow it when they wanted me to do it.

So if I can get that back on my schedule, I would never tell Scott harness. But sometimes I nap to him reading Romans to me. It feels really creepy. Really creepy. But his voice is so beautiful and deep. And so anyway, my wife has a book beside her bed, the bed, our bed. We have the same bed. Good. We're married. That she reads only it's a book on us on some saints life. I don't remember what Saint, but she reads it only when she needs to fall asleep because it's so poorly written. Yeah, all right. Well, this isn't the case with Scott. This is just exciting enough that it keeps your interest as you're falling asleep. And I read the Song of Songs. For Hallow? Yeah. Oh, beautiful. Yeah, yeah. So check it out.

Hallow.com slash Matt Fradd. Hey, um... Hey, can I share one more passage from this book? Yeah. Which is really awesome. Okay. Yeah, I got promise. Promise is awesome because I didn't write it. I mean, I wrote the commentary, but the most awesome part is what Voytewa wrote. This is something people really struggle with.

Again, we have a link to this book in the description. Type in pints in the promo code section, get 20% off. And this is on page 120. 120. This is a direct quote from Voitiwa earlier in the retreat, but I'm reading from the section of my commentary on it. But this is Voitiwa at the bottom. If a person would finally experience religion,

not half-heartedly, not merely from the perspective of a sense of obligation or an additional responsibility that weighs on me. If a person would experience religion in its fullness for once, that is from God's perspective, then a fundamental internal revolution, a transformation would take place. The world changes. It gains a completely different meaning. Yeah, and my position in the world also changes and gains a completely different meaning. And my position in the world also changes and takes on a different meaning. For as long as I remain the subject of a list

of musts," he talks about this when we look at religion from our own perspective only, religion becomes a list of things I have to do. Yeah, it's about I. I have to follow these rules, I have to believe these doctrines. He says when we approach religion that way, we have a very skewed, truncated vision. When we look at religion from God's perspective, we realize that the first thing is that He loves me. This is what we were talking about earlier, that deep doubt that we all have, when I am utterly naked and all my broken humanity is on display,

am I loved there? When we start there, then the things we must do flow out of a love that we've received rather than an obligation that feels imposed upon me. As our hearts are transformed by the experience of being loved, we want to learn what it means to love others, and in this way we come to fulfill the law. But when we put the rules or the musts in the front, we're putting the cart before the horse. And if we do that, he says, I need my glasses again, as long as we're

doing it, putting the must firsts, all these weights that we put on ourselves. When I live religion from that perspective, I do not have a real sense of the meaning of my existence. That's amazing. He goes into such rich themes in here and I just want to underscore it. How has this never been translated? Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know. So it was a retreat he put together, do you say during Lent? During Lent of 1962, Holy Week to be specific. It was specifically delivered to artists, but it's not only for artists in the sense that, you know, I paint or I sculpt. Yeah. He says actually... This is in the back here. Let me read it. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Not all are called, this is in the back here, let me read it. Oh yeah, go ahead.

Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term, yet as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life to make a work of art. To make of it a work of art, yeah. Yeah, that's what this retreat will help us do. It will help us make a work of art of our own lives. I think I've told you this before, here's something I think you should do, because when people hear about the theology of the body, and then they run out like I did, and buy all of the lectures given by Pope John Paul II,

it's very overwhelming. You need to record, even pay somebody else to read his things in a lovely Polish accent, and then do like a five minute commentary on every lecture, that'd be cool. We are toying right now a few ministries devoted to the theology of the body. And hey, if you guys, if you like this idea,

let the show know in the comments so we can engage this. But we're thinking of doing a podcast like that where we're reading the text and offering some commentary. So that sounds like a good idea. Cause I think what happens is a lot of people encounter your interpretation of John Paul the second. And I'm like this whenever I hear anybody's commentary on whoever, Plato or whoever. I'm like, did he really say that? But then you're like, Oh wow, he really did

say that just from what we've experienced here. So that'd be, that'd be cool. What is the theology of the body Institute up to these days, other than coming up with an amazing logo? You like our logo? Could you download the logo and throw it up on the screen for folks? It's so beautiful. The other one was crap. Yeah. The other one was sorry.

It was to show you I'm being honest. I know I'm glad I, I, I, I never did like that other logo and I wasn't really in, well, I'm not going to pass the buck. Yes I will. I wasn't in charge of the logo, but I was hands on in designing this logo. Beautiful. Thank you. I'm glad it is like really one of the most beautiful logos other than points to the coin.

No, do you recognize this? The symbols in there? I mean, no, I don't know. Let me see. Do you have it up on symbols in there? I mean, no, I don't know. Let me see. Do you have it up on the screen for folks? It's right between us. I mean, do you recognize those flowers and the stars?

What are the flowers and the stars? Can you turn the screen so I know what you everybody's looking at? Just make sure we have the right. Yes, not the two folks. Flowers and stars. Genesis. I don't know. Revelation. They're taken from the Tilma.

Oh, I see. Those are the stylized stars and flowers from the Tilma. And the shape, do you know the shape in the middle? You know what that's called? Well, I immediately thought of what I can't say on, you tell me. Well, you already said it. No, I know I said it. But I'm sure it has that. Well, you already said it. No, I know I said it. But it's a shape in sacred art called the mandorla.

And it does, let's be honest, have feminine connotations. What? I was thinking of an almond. Well, that's what the word mandorla means. It's Italian for almond. Exactly. Okay, let's apply everything we were just saying. Can we do this? I mean, you can do it. I'll see how far I want to come along. Let's try to apply everything we're just saying. Yeah. That, oh my gosh, am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?

Scary. Am I even allowed to say it? I can't even say it on air. Am I even allowed to say it? I can't even say it on air. Where does that come from? Where does that idea come from? This is a shape that is, is, it obviously has a feminine kind of connotation to it, and you're not mistaken to recognize that. Right. But we have, our minds have been pornified. Yeah. Right? This is an art, this is a shape in sacred art that reveals the marriage of heaven and earth. Imagine two circles coming together.

Yeah, like a Venn diagram? Yeah, and in the middle you have the shape. Just two circles. Oh, I see. Two circles coming together. Could you Google explanation of the mandorla. Google mandorla explanation and you should get two circles overlapping. Do you, do you see it? Come on Neil, how we doing? Explanation, type google images explanation of mandorla. You know I've noticed on Joee rogan lately that people are getting a little bossy with poor jamie now it's not only i don't know i watched that mr beast

episode recently he had him on and every five seconds he was like hey hey jamie pop pull this up like poor bloody jamie used to be just joe we really do need to get a TV here. We're gonna do that. That's gonna be great. We're gonna do it. Patreon.com slash Matt Frack. Did you find it? Where you have two circles overlapping, heaven and earth overlapping? Yay, nay, maybe? I mean, this is what it, this is, well... So, okay, so let me, whether we have the diagram or not, imagine two circles coming together, they're overlapping and in the middle we have this shape.

You will see this in sacred art. Once it's pointed out to you, you'll see it pop up everywhere. You'll see it pop up on vestments of priests. You'll see it pop up on the Gospels. You'll see it the way the womb of Mary is portrayed in the Theotokos icon is often that shape. And what is being symbolized by the mandorla is the marriage of heaven and earth. Because the two circles, one heaven, one earth, come together. That shape in their joining is the mandorla. Yeah, we got it pulled up now. You have it pulled up?

Can I see it? Well, it's kind of small for... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there we go. That's exactly it. So that's the mandorla. You'll see the shape. Yeah.

Once it's pointed out, you can't not see it. And it is a holy representation of the holy marriage of Christ in the church. The very icon in the church's tradition of the marriage of the Lamb has this shape. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a mandorla. What's happening in this shape? Again, the marriage of heaven and earth, and where is that marriage consummated? In the feminine body. It's consummated, this is St. Augustine. The marriage between heaven and earth is consummated

in the bridal chamber of Mary's womb. Which is what we're about to celebrate in two days? Yeah, there it is. There it is. So this like, even if- Can I press in a little bit more? I just want to say this because there are viewers out here who heard you say,

well, I don't want to even say what I think I'm seeing. The body is holy. Obviously this is a veiled image, right? It's a veiled image. It's not a graphic image. But it's a veiled portrayal of a sacred mystery, ultimately, of what it means to be human, which is to open like a bride to receive the gift of the bridegroom. And this is what we were talking about earlier that that nakedness that is required, this openness of the human heart. John Paul II says that woman is the model of the

whole human race, that woman's body reveals to all of us what it means to be human. Because for life to come woman has to open to receive to conceive to bear forth this mystery of openness is is essential to what it means to be human and Mary is the one who teaches us this way of learning how to open this is the theology of a woman's body. Openness to the gift. The enemy wants to pornify that openness. So we no longer see it as something holy and sacred, but we see it as perverse and distorted.

Well, speaking of E Michael Jones, I mean, what's it called again? The shape? The mandorla mandorla is like the shape of many monsters faces. Like, think of your your your your your making a face. But I'm just trying to think about. Well, here's one. What about. Gosh, what was that fantastic kind of horror show with D&D on Netflix? Stranger Things. Remember that monster? Oh yes, yes, yes. I thought the same.

If you see that monster, throw that monster up on the screen too. Yeah, there it is. Monsters in the Id. Yeah, it's like a giant vagina with teeth. It's terrifying. There is a horror movie called Teeth. Oh dear God. And it is, that's the theme. Yeah, nobody watched that yet. I

haven't seen it. I've read about it. Yeah. And I read about it with interest because that is the enemy's goal to pervert these things so grossly. Oh okay. So this is again why we really need to get a screen. Oh, look at that thing. Yeah, monsters in the id. All of this. All of this must be redeemed. All diseased ideas and images and understandings of both the male and the female body must be, between here and the beatific vision,

must be fully purified, fully purged, fully untwisted. And we have to remember this basic principle of Catholic cosmology. I can't imagine I didn't share this the last time I was on the show because I always share it, because it's so important. It is this, the devil doesn't have his own clay. All he can do is get his hands on God's clay, which God looked at and said, behold, it is very perverse. No. God looked at and said, behold, it is very good. The enemy gets his hands on that and twisted into something like that monster, right? Christ comes to untwist Right? Christ comes to untwist what sin and the devil has twisted up so that the iconography of creation is restored.

What does Jesus say? He says, see to it that no part of your body remains in darkness, but that every part of your body comes into the light. And if every part of your body comes into the light, your whole body will illuminate you like a glowing lamp. Right? The enemy wants our bodies in darkness. The Lord wants our bodies in the light.

And he says specifically, let no part of your body remain in darkness. These parts of our body that the enemy wants to warp and attack and distort and pervert. Saint Paul says it very clearly. Those parts of our body that we think are less honorable. Why do we think they're less honorable? Because these are the parts the enemy attacks most violently. Those parts of our body we think less honorable, St. Paul says. These are the parts of the body that deserve the greater honor because God has bestowed on these parts of the body the greater

glory. And why has God bestowed on these parts of the body the greater glory? Because these parts of the body reveal the call to Holy Communion that reveals the mystery of the ultimate Holy Communion between Christ and the church that takes us up into, which is really the ultimate Holy Communion, the communion of the Trinity. Tell us what you're doing with TOB and what's coming up. Yes, you asked me that earlier. We are doing an event from May 13th to the 15th called Revealed, and we're doing something new. You know, the online Catholic conference has become kind of a dime a dozen, and we're doing something

different. We are having a live conference that we're limiting to about 80 or 90 people. And then we are broadcasting that live, but with new technology that's going to allow some real creative interaction. So it's not just going to be watching talking heads in a pre-recorded video. We have Father Mike Schmitz coming, we have Jeff Cavins coming. We have Jason Everett coming We have Bobby and Jackie Angel coming beautiful. We have we were gonna have some guy named Matt Fred come Well, when is it again? May 13th to the 15th, but you told me your schedule would not allow did I tell you that or did Melanie?

I don't know. I don't know. But we were so many good things to do. I know. I know. It's like you can't say yes to all of them. Believe me. I know. Yeah. But check out, do we have a link for them? It's in the description. Revealed. Are they coming to PA to do this? Yes. Yes. All of these speakers are coming to PA. Maybe I can come. I don't even know. And they are, we're all going to be in the same room together. We're gonna have, you can sign up for free if you wanna do the online version. Of course, there's a premium pass you can get online

that'll give you all the extra goodies. But the keynotes will be available for free. Look at your calendar. My little calendar. The keynotes will be available for free. But then the thing I'm most looking forward to is sitting down... I'm around, man.

You are? I could. I'm not saying I will. I'm just saying I could. All right. Well, let's continue that conversation. All right. May 13th.

What I'm really looking forward to is we're going to have each of the main presenters will have a keynote on some theme of how the theology of the body makes visible, or excuse me, how the theology of the body teaches that the body makes visible what is invisible. This is a whole idea of revelation, the making visible of the invisible. And where the goal here is to unfold theology of the body is not just the title of a bunch of talks John Paul II gave on sex and marriage. It's a pair of glasses that if we put these lenses on, the whole universe takes on its sacramental truth. We start to see the world as it really is. We start to see our faith as it really is. Next to the Mary course

I teach, my favorite course to teach is when I go through the catechism from start to finish, wearing these lenses. The creed comes alive, the sacraments come alive, the moral life comes alive, the life of prayer comes alive. I love what Mikhail Volstein said, that the theology of the body is the John Pauline lens for reading the catechism. This is what we're trying to show in this conference, revealed, how the theology of the body opens the whole of our faith in new ways. So there'll be those keynotes from Mike Schmitz, Jeff Cavins, yours truly, Damon Owens, Jason Everett. I just want to go hang out with Jason. I miss him. I haven't seen him in a long time.

Then come. That's one of the goals, is for the speakers to get some time to hang together. And we're going to be filming some of that hang time where we're having casual conversations. Right. I'll come. Will you? I probably will. There's no, I'm such a Luddite.

I didn't even have my, I don't have a smartphone. So can you pull out my Google calendar? Is that weird? You probably can't do that. Can you? It's great that we're doing this on air though. All right. You guys heard it.

He said he's going to come. So that'd be cool if my wife would come. We could just come up together. Sounds amazing. Good. 13th of May. 13th to the 15th of May. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And you can you can hang also with me and Wendy. You can.

Oh I'd love that. Yeah. All right. It's in your calendar. Do I have nothing in there yet? There's nothing on there. That's the purple map at Matt Fred. We won't say the full email address. I will not put your face on the promotional materials until I get the confirmation.

But if you're coming, we'd love to have you. Maybe I'll bring Neil with me and we could like film some quick chats with people. That would be fun. Making about me, not about DOB. Well, I'm all right with that maybe you'd hire Neil he come and help although your sons really good yeah he's got a he's got a knack for it how how are you all what's happening yeah I'm sorry that's my fault yeah yeah yeah looks like you're good though all

right all right we'll talk right after this'll talk. I'll check with my wife. I'll see we can do it. All right but good for you for making expanding this because I agree that when the When those conferences as virtual conference started it was revolutionary. Yes, we were so grateful Yeah, because you know, there was only 15 days that kovat affected everybody and during this that time it was really tough 15 days that COVID affected everybody. And during that time, it was really tough. But now it's like, okay, like I talk about theology, the body, I need a human being in front of me.

It's just such a different thing. This is why we're gathering us all together. And this is why I am so grateful for your time to come down here to be part of this, because this is so much better than Skype. No doubt. I just reached out to Anthony Esselen, who I love. And he said, I tried to get him up here, and he said,

I'll do a Skype interview, but I'm not going to do that. I'd rather go to his house if he'll let me and interview him there. You just cannot beat this. Yeah. And when you're talking theology of the body. Yeah. Please. Yeah. So we'll only have about 90 people, 80 to 90 people live there in the room with us. That's one of the ways you can attend. Free access, you get all the keynotes, but the premium pass, you also get those kind of casual conversations.

Cameras are gonna be roaming at all times. We're gonna be sitting on couches. We're gonna have just informal things like we're doing right here. Which is a great way, we were talking about this before we got on air today, that just a casual conversation, we came in here not knowing what we were talking about this before we got on air today, that just a casual conversation, we came in here not knowing what we were going to talk about. I mean,

we knew we wanted to eventually get here, which we eventually did, but we were just two guys who love each other and love our wives and love Jesus and we're just talking. And stuff came up that I never would have expected came up. And we know those are precious moments. So that's going to be kind of the feel of the event that we're doing. I love it. So again, for those watching, we have a link to the brand new book below. And there's also a link to this upcoming conference, which I may or may not be a part of. I don't know if that incentivizes or turns anyone away, but there you are. All right. So what we're going to do now, unless you you wanna touch on anything else, is we're gonna wrap up here,

and then we're gonna record a post-show wrap-up video just for those very attractive people who support us on Patreon and Locals. So if you are a Patron or a Locals member, thank you so very much. We're gonna do a post-show wrap-up Q&A where we're gonna get into stuff that might have us banned on YouTube. This is kind of part of the reason we like to do those post shows kind of hidden behind a

wall. You said the beautiful people who are local or what? So I, people can support me on Patreon or Locals. What's Locals? Locals is a free speech sort of alternative platform by which people can also support you and get extra content. It was sort of started in part by Dave Rubin and others and I've had an amazing experience over there. It's really cool. In fact, one of the first videos I did was kind of criticizing this New York magazine article on transgenderism. And I just sort of ripped into it and was pretty sure that YouTube was going to ban me for the video. But then I did a video over on Loc and the heads of locals who I'm sure I don't think a Christian, they get a Jew, a Christian, someone.

But they were like, this is amazing. Good for you. It's just they're open to different opinions. So that's that's what we'll do. So, yeah, we'll put we'll put links below to Patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. And then I think it's Matt Fradd dot locals or something. But the videos will be there as well. Anything else you want to touch on before we jump into that section? This has been quite a long conversation.

I don't know. I mean, I could go on for another three hours, believe it or not. But I think I'll just leave it right where we've left it. You know, you get some Thai food. No. No. All right. Cinnamon roll. How about a Cinnabon?