Pints With Aquinas - Mind blowing Eucharistic Miracles (Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.) Ep. 566

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P. joins Matt Fradd for an in-depth conversation about Eucharistic miracles, the real presence of Christ, and the spiritual life. Fr. Pine shares his research on miraculous hosts that have turned to human heart tissue, how to detect pride and narcissism in ourselves, and offers practical wisdom on prayer, the dangers of social media, and why showing up in God's presence, even with our mess, is what Jesus desires most. Ep. 566 📲 Connect with Fr. Gregory: The Thomistic Institute: https://youtube.com/@thomisticinstitute?si=-y9ceFdY8f1OT2zw Godsplaining Podcast: https://godsplaining.org/ Your Eucharistic Identity: https://a.co/d/6i9wkEe Training the Tongue and Growing Beyond Sins of Speech: https://a.co/d/caY4pJE - - - Today's Sponsors: Seven Weeks Coffee: Save up to 25% with promo code 'PINTS' at https://sevenweekscoffee.com/PINTS Hallow: Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free. Relay: Ready to overcome porn? Visit https://joinrelay.app/pints and use code PINTS for 7 days free. Good Ranchers: Get $25 off your first order and save up to $500 a year when you use code PINTS at https://GoodRanchers.com   PreBorn: Make a difference for generations to come. Donate securely online at https://preborn.com/PINTS or dial #250 keyword 'BABY' - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠ 🍿 The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is now streaming exclusively on DailyWire+ Watch now: https://dwplus.watch/ThePendragon - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Sign up at Disneyplus.com. Catholicism is kind of crazy, but it's consistently crazy. So you've done something of a deep dive into Eucharistic miracles. There are three instances, 92, 94, 96. In each case, it started to bleed. The doctors who tested this, in certain cases some of the doctors, they had no insight as to where this came from. So it's just like, hey, we've got some flesh, can you examine it?

Whoa. And it's like, this is living flesh. So like, how long has this been separated from human body? Because it's the type of thing which seems like, you know, this, this is fresh. The eighth century flesh that was, when it was examined in the 70s, it was living? 70s they said it was living flesh yeah wow okay yep uh hi hello how are you doing i'm doing well good yeah congratulations on your new book by the way oh thanks training the tongue exactly yeah we

went for um a title that was i suppose positive versus negative okay it seems like the uh james three would suggest taming the tongue but that sounded like domesticating the tongue which sounded like repressing rather than expressing so i went with training also they came up with this cool cover with a little tongue doing exercises. Oh, dumb. Yeah, thanks. Were you happy with that? Actually, I am.

Yeah. So, which I realize. It's a great front cover. It really is. Thanks. I figured, my hope with the front cover was you get a lot of like cool Catholic books with kind of sacred art, which could appear on any book about anything. Yeah. It's like, Jesus being awesome.

But I was like, let's do something a little weird. So that way people say, hey, this is a little weird. And then they read. Yeah. And it's your name that'll sell the book. People want to hear what you have to say. Sum it up in like a couple of sentences. What's the book about?

Basically idea is the purpose of the faculty of speech is to cultivate communion. Yeah, and communion between people is a matter of kind of coming together in thought and affection. And so the whole point of cultivating verbal virtue and rooting out sins of speech is to come together. That's the whole point. That's beautiful. I texted you the other day in the airport, and you helped me phrase what I wanted a phrase about social media. Oh, yeah. What I came up with is this idea that social media perverts and inflames our social nature in a way that pornography.

perverts and inflames our sexual desires. And my thought was that I'm not equating the two in the sense that social media is intrinsically evil. But just like it might be unreasonable to expect somebody to sit before pornography without sinning, maybe it's not reasonable to expect anybody to engage on X, say, for a significant period of time before committing the sins of rash judgment, slander detraction. And it's sad, I think, and something we need to work on as a church that we are Christians seem very interested in some sins and avoiding them and thank God for that, such as sins of the flesh. Yeah, yeah. But there is so many sins of, well, what would you call it?

Speech or rash judgment and these sorts of things, which Aquinas in different aspects calls seriously like mortal. Yeah, yeah. No, it comes in like the part of the Summa theology right after murder, so you must mean business. Is that your experience? Do you agree with my assessment or are you not on social media enough to know? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not on social media either, or I should say certain things that I contribute to apostolically are on social media and I send things in their direction. I think it might depend on the particular outlet or the particular app. Like Facebook, I think, some's better than others for sure. Well, it's like, like Facebook, I think maybe the characteristic sins of the Facebook user are like sadness and maybe self-pity on

account of the fact that you experience other people's lives as whatever, and you can feel isolated or alienated by comparison, just because I think about it as like typically used by older people, maybe at a distance from those whom they love as the way by which to kind of cultivate closeness, but it just doesn't achieve that. I think X is a playground for the argumentative. Yeah. So I think that like discourse on X tends to be more elevated in the sense that a lot of people on X have the hope of exchanging like more substantively.

But as a result of which I think a lot of these things come up where it's like, You've got insult or reviling. You've got like detraction or backbiting. Those would be the main ones, I think. And then it strikes me that like Instagram, the characteristic vices on Instagram would be more like envy or even like a shadia. So like people, they like they communicate their lives in certain golden terms. And they're like, hey, I am just so pretty and holy.

And then you consume somewhat passively and think to yourself, I will never be able to motivate something comparable, whether for love of God or just I wonder if that's a younger person's temptation because increasingly I'm off these things but when I'm on Instagram I never feel like ah why isn't my life like this but maybe if I were younger or a woman

I don't know yeah I think part of it is do you think you would feel like that if you were scrolling through Instagram? I don't know I can't scroll through Instagram you know how like if you don't have the app you can look it up but you can't necessarily navigate it so you rely on other people to send you videos that way you can push, seek further in internet, you know, and then watch it.

So I don't have like the serial experience of Instagram consumption. I found it fast, you know, Jonathan Hady, I had that book, The Anxious Generation. And so if you ask people, so like you ask young people in the United States, what do you want to be? When you grow up, a plurality answer, an influencer. So I think that specifically people who have certain ambitions or like vanglorious hopes to be important, look at other people on Instagram and see their lives as important. and that registers as a kind of like a front or it registers as, yeah, they've got it so I can

or they got it and I don't. So yeah, maybe I think at a certain point you just kind of, maybe you don't give up, but you settle in. Something I'm wondering about too, and forgive me if we've spoken about this, is this idea of a sort of parallel church in which I'm not actually engaging with people

and they're annoying habits at an actual parish up the road, building that's less than inspiring. But instead, I scroll through my photos of beard monks or gothic cathedrals or this sort of thing. And I get the feeling of something like piety or religiosity, but I'm not actually engaging. Do you, does that make sense? Yeah, yeah.

In a similar way to how the converts of the 80s entered the church and went, whoa, things are different than what I was reading. Sure. I think a lot of people are getting hooked maybe by the aesthetic and for good reason. There's a lot of beautiful things in the Catholic Church. And then they go up to like St. Marks or whatever and they're like, are you kidding. Do you think? Yeah, I have two introductory thoughts. One, I was making fun of this water. It's actually quite delicious.

You take it back? I don't know. Yeah, exactly. That is water, just in case people are like, what's you talking about? Yeah, exactly. That's water. That's water. That's like an herbal home remedy, you know. Second introductory thought is, I don't think we've talked about this before. Substantive comment now. Yeah, so I think that there is a kind of temptation to live your life in curated fashion on the internet because you only encounter the things that you choose to encounter. that the algorithm suspects that you would like to encounter, and especially as we engage more with AI, which is really submissive and affirmative of whatsoever desires we have, we tend not to encounter a lot of friction on the internet, or we tend not to encounter a lot of conflict except for the conflict that we like, or the conflict that, like, gets us jazzed about whatever.

Sometimes I used to do this as a study tactic. When I was reading for my dissertation and I was falling asleep mid-afternoon, I just read a quick little news bit about whoever was doing whatever in high power office thing, vague terms. And then I'd be like, ooh, and then that'd get me through another hour and a half of reading about the incarnation. So I think you're right in the sense that I think it is the responsibility of people on the internet to direct folks back just to the simplicity of a sacramental encounter and not like manage their expectations.

Like, hey, the people with whom you recite the rosary after mass are going to be really loud and they're all going to say it at a different cadence. So just gear up, boy. And one old fellow is going to have a whistle. Every time he uses a, says a word with an S in it. Yeah. So not that like we have to manage people's expectations, but I do think that we're responsible for a certain realism and saying, hey, obviously beautiful things here, good

things here, true things here. I mean, beyond. Nevertheless, whenever you're dealing with people, whenever you're dealing with yourself, it's always going to be a bit of a mixed reality. I once went to Daily Mass and left before it started because I was so irritated. I'm not proud of that. This is what I said earlier about, there's two old women talking,

and I wasn't manly enough to be like, it'd be great if you could shut up. I didn't do that. And there's some other sheila in the corner. She's saying the rosary, not in her mind and not out loud, but kind of whispering it, and that bugged me.

Sometimes I do, so as a priest, you have a kind of authority, which you can wield in genteel fashion without hurting people. Okay. So with people who pray out loud, Sometimes I just, I'll just ask an individual without being a brat. Just like, do you know that you're audible?

And they'll be, oh, sorry. So, yeah, no worse. Yeah, if you could, thanks. I just want to point out a social sin that we all should agree is unacceptable. And if you don't, you should be pushed to the fringes of society and poked repeatedly with a large stick named Nigel or something. When people in public play their phone out loud. Hmm. I you're the worst person.

The worst person. Now, if you accidentally click play and you have, you should make a giant show, I'm sorry I didn't know my, that's okay. But you've got two, three seconds, tops. Yeah. Agreed. Have you encountered people in church doing that or they? At church not too, no, so typically at church when you hear a cell phone for an extended

period of time, it's because some grandchild gave some grandparent a cell phone because he or she wanted to be in contact less this individual get lost. And so typically the grandparent wielding said phone has no idea as to how to navigate the menu of options. And so like just hasn't figured out how to silence a thing. Also doesn't recognize the ringer as his or hers. So usually there's like a 15 second period of non-recognition and then a horrified period of recognition. Then the person just goes running to the back of the church with all of his or her possessions, is my experience. So I think that it's the responsibility of grandchildren. to train their grandparents as to how to use their technology in discreet fashion.

My mom used speakerphone on basically every phone call that she took until the day that she died. She'd be dead to me. And she died, and so that's really inappropriate for me to say that. She is dead to you. If she is. If you were in public without looking deeply apologetic. I once went into a sauna. Yeah.

And a man was doing a business meeting. And I hate me more than him for not being like, what the hell are you doing? Why do you think we need to listen? Who do you think you are? But instead I just sat there like a friggin idiot. Yeah. And then poured myriatic acid on the coals and said, take that when you left.

Yeah. Yeah, good. I'm trying to figure out how to left turn into miracles. So miracles. I, I, okay. You crushed it. We've tried a lot of coffee over the years, but our sponsor, Seven Weeks Coffee is the one my wife,

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And so does my wife, right? She deals with a lot of health issues and so it's really important to her. This coffee is mold-free, pesticide-free, shade-grown and low acid, and it's organically farmed. It truly checks all the boxes. I remember when I first heard about seven weeks coffee, I thought to myself, I'm really glad it's got a great mission, but if it's just got a great mission and the coffee stinks, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to drink it. But I promise you, it is stocked in our cupboards. We absolutely love it. I really do highly recommend it. So go to seven weekscoffee.com and save 15% forever when you subscribe. Plus get a free gift with your order. And exclusively, for my listeners, use code pints for an extra 10% of your first order. That's a 25% total

savings on your first order plus a free gift. Just use code pints at checkout. It seems, people keep telling me this. People seem to be experiencing this more than I'm personally experiencing this. I'd love your take. There seems to be a sort of cultural turning towards Christianity in general and apostolic Christianity's like orthodoxy, it's etc, Catholicism, which I think is why I might be here, right? In particular, it's definitely why I'm here. There's no other, not for my political commentary. That's what we need him for.

Exactly. What are your thoughts on Venezuela? Yeah, we're not doing that. I told him I wouldn't. And it's like, okay, well, why? And there's all sorts of reasons. But I think one thing people are open to more and more seems to be the miraculous demonic possession, demonic influence, the fact that the world might be more mysterious

than we had originally thought. So I want to ask a very basic question, and then I want to get into the minutia of legitimate Eucharistic miracles. What is a miracle? Yeah. So a miracle is when something happens, and you have no natural explanation for that happening. So typically it's a visible appearance for which you can account, or a visible change, a kind of physical change for which you can account.

and it's the type of thing which doesn't necessarily suggest like a contradiction in terms but you have to have an alternate explanation as to why this and not something else that's somewhat vague but the basic idea is that god has competence over all of nature all right and there's laws at work in nature or we can speak of laws at work in nature nevertheless it's god's prerogative to suspend those laws or to operate by other means as a way by which of telling forth his glory and then specifically inviting people into relationship with him. So it's not the ordinary mode because when the extraordinary becomes the ordinary, then it's just the ordinary. So it's typically by way of departure or by way of exception, but it directs our gaze back to the ordinary mode. So like St. Augustine has this really cool read on the miracle of the wedding feast at Cana. He says, what happened? Well, our Lord took water and he made wine. He says, that's extraordinary. How do we get wine ordinarily? He says, well, rain falls, waters the vineyard grapes grow they're gathered they're crushed the fermented and you get wine but effectively

water becomes wine so i think the point of miracles isn't so that we just like spend all of our time researching miracles or thinking about miracles but it's to direct our gaze back to how awesome in fact is the lord's ordinary mode of operating like he bestows his life he gives us grace virtue gives to the holy spirit he draws us into relationship with himself he wants us to become saints you know so I think it's like any, any healthy approach to religious faith to Christianity will take miracles on board. It probably won't spend all of its time with those miracles, but I think they're awesome. So they're worth looking at. Do you think it's an argument against the legitimacy of Christianity that most Christians you encounter haven't experienced a miracle?

In my experience, people know someone who knows someone who did. Yeah, yeah. But I haven't. Have you? If I were, yes, I do. Could you talk about it or no? Is it too? So, we talked about Medjugoria a couple of times ago.

And so, like, the church's official stance is that people are free to go. We refer to them as alleged apparitions starting in 1981, continuing up through the current day. And my parents led pilgrimages to Medjugoria for a long, my dad still does. I guess maybe like 25 years, something like that. And the people who would accompany them to Medjugoria would recount seeing things and then also have changes in their life of a semi-miraculous nature. I hesitate to say fully miraculous because I can't think of exact details right now. But like people would recount seeing like the sun dance, so like a disc around the sun moving,

or people would recount seeing a kind of blue light in the shape of a woman on top of one or other hill at the edge of the town, Mount Krishavats or Mount Pudbado. People saw like a kind of oil or liquid, kind of weeping as it were from the statue of the crucified Lord in the back of the property. I mean, I saw that too. Okay. But I always thought that there must have been something inside of it that was producing it. Sure. Do you think that's legitimate?

I mean, I haven't done the deep dive. I just kind of take it at its word. I don't think that the people there would be really weird though if somebody had even installed that. That's pretty malicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's just like to what end. I don't know why they would do that. But then also the people that went, you know, just experiencing conversion, but then also like people with fertility issues that had lasted for tens of, maybe like tens of is too long. But like 10 years, 15 years conceiving immediately upon arrival back home. and things like that. And for a lot of these things, it's not like I've seen the documented proof that there was a problem with endometriosis and then that problem was miraculously resolved. But it's like things changed on account of the fact that people presented themselves in faith for God to work one. That's still not a miracle you've personally experienced. Is it? Oh, sorry. I mean like I went with these people on. So like in my own flesh, have I experienced a miracle? No, that's fair. No, that's good. That answers my question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Okay. Do you think we're too quick to attribute miracle to some strange

a fortunate event? I think we use the word miracle strictly and loosely. I think it's totally fun. Like people refer to the birth of a child as a miracle, irrespective of whether or not the mother was in difficult circumstances prior to her conception or prior to her delivery. And it's like, are we going to spend all of our time correcting those people? No.

Right. It's like when someone goes, it's magical. They're not actually saying magical. Yeah, yeah. They might be using it unless. Just loose use of the term. I think that we're inclined to welcome news of miracles. Like we get pumped at the prospect of things.

is miraculous happening. Yeah. And I think that's a good disposition because I think being Christian means, to a certain extent, being credulous. Like, you're not going to believe in God if you don't want to believe in God because you have to consent, like you have to choose to believe. And so I think that part of our ongoing healing and growth is an opening of the mind and heart to the prospect of God's intervention, to the miraculous things like that.

So I think if like if we just kind of fold our arms over our chest and say like probably not, I bet you something else. I just think that's kind of corrupting of the soul. So, like, sometimes when you talk to atheists, for instance, they're like, oh, I'd love to believe, but God has to make himself manifest. It's like, would you love to believe? I don't mean to, like, call into question your motivations or say that you're uttering these things in bad faith.

Yeah. But I do think, like, to be Christian is to be a little bit dopey, you know, in the sense of like, you got to be the type of person who goes in for something if you're going to go in for God. Yeah. You know, because he's not going to communicate himself in the most manifest of ways, like at the Super Bowl halftime show because it's kind of indecent. And that's also not...

And if he did, the atheist could come up with a different explanation. Like aliens who spoke to us, who were invisible, who spoke to us through loudspeakers. Or he drives out demons by the Prince of demons. You know, it's like there are lots of explanations and people are going to set upon the one that they want. So, yeah. One of the things I know people find impressive about Catholicism is the amount of miracles that have been claimed. I remember a Protestant who converted to Catholicism saying to me, as after he looked at at a bunch of them and tried to scrutinize them,

thought to himself if one of the, maybe he wasn't a Protestant, maybe he was an atheist, if one of these is true and there is no natural explanation, then that's good evidence for something supernatural, whatever that means. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, typically we talk about, we use our minds in kind of like discussing the faith

in a handful of different ways. Like we can, for instance, use philosophical terms to help unpack theological doctrines, Or we can explain how certain theological teachings illumine our human condition. There's even certain things that we can prove. There's one category, though, called signs of credibility or motives of credibility,

where it's like you register various things. You're like, holy smokes, there's a lot of prophecy that culminates in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, not just in Jewish sources, but also in pagan sources. Like, that's wild. Or you look at the teaching of the church, and like, holy smokes,

what other institution has taught the same thing, in effect, for 2,000 years? Like, that's wild. Or you look at the lives of the saints. But I think miracles, they testify to the truth of the faith or they testify to the reality of the faith by a similar kind of efficacy. It's like, hey, I'm not going to like say you have to do whatever, but you got to look at this. All right, I am going to say it. You have to look at this.

And when you look at this, it would seem to suggest that there's something going on here in the life of the church or there's something going on here in the revelation and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. So I do think, yeah, that people of kind of goodwill or genuine openness, when they register these things, they're like, huh, yeah, maybe we've been indebted to it a little bit in the 20th and 21st century because we're exposed to so many fantastical claims and we're kind of post-truth in the sense that we don't really care about a lot of claims. Nevertheless, yeah, there's a power to them. All right. So you've done something of a deep dive into Eucharistic miracles. What started that? I think it was, so I went to Rome for the canonization of St. Pure Georgia, Frizzati, but then it was deferred, or it was like delayed later to the month of September. So I wasn't there for it. But I was there for the Jubilee of Young People. And there was just like a lot of hubbub, in the good sense of hubbub about St. Peter Georgia for Sadi and then St. Carlo Acutus. Pray for us. Indeed. And St. Carlo Acutus was just jazzed about Eucharistic miracles. He very famously made a website about them, which is still available on Archive.org. Is it the one he started? or has it been updated since? I think it's basically as he left.

Good, I hope so. Yeah. So it looks and feels like you would expect. Good. That's not to cast dispersions. It's just to say that. No, it'll be cooler now. It'll be what people are trying to emulate but can't.

Yeah. Anyway. So then I was recently at a Eucharistic Congress in Orange County, California. And they had all of these kind of placards or signs just detailing the various Eucharistic miracles throughout the ages. And up until now, had you had much experience? or interaction with these specific miracles? No, I like, I mean, maybe we've talked about this on the pod before,

but I don't like memorize a lot of things in the sense of, I don't, if there are discrete facts, the only way that you can kind of engage with them is through a kind of memorization, like historical details, for instance, or autobiography. I tend not to retain those things that well. The things that I retain well is where stuff is in the suma and like how the 76ers are doing, which I realize isn't the most edifying thing in the whole wide world. nevertheless, it's where I am. So I just don't know a ton about saints and I don't know a ton about

miracles, but it seemed like over the course of the past year, there was just a lot about it in Catholic press. And it seemed like, yeah, the holiness of St. Carlo Wakudis was in a certain sense ordered to directing our attention to Eucharistic miracles. So I thought, what's not to love? Right. Really quick. What is the Eucharist? Yes. And then I want to get into chronologically, maybe some of these miracles. to see if they're legit. Okay, perfect. Here we go. The Eucharist is the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. So sacraments are signs of sacred things which make us holy. So specifically they cause their effects through their sign power. So the Eucharist is a sign of our Lord's passion. It's a sign of our spiritual nourishment. It's a sign of our union in the mystical body.

but it's peculiar amongst the sacraments because most of the sacraments just signify God's power or they signify God's working, whereas the Eucharist, it also signifies God's body. So like in baptism, for instance, you pour water over the head of a child and you say, I baptize you in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Baptism means washing, so that child is washed spiritually, original, and actual sin are forgiven. You know, grace, virtue, gifts of the Holy Spirit, flood the soul, adopted child of God at the stage of the game, wild. But with the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharist, you don't say like, hey, get charity. You say, this is my body, and then you feed the people of God with that body, and then they get charity and become more perfectly part of the mystical body. So it's peculiar among sacraments in that what you signify is the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. So we say, our Lord is present in all of the sacraments, sacramentally, that is, by the power of the sign. He's also present in the Eucharist substantially, because what you signify,

is the substance of his body and the substance of his blood. The basic observation is wherever his body is, there too is his blood, his soul, and divinity. Because you think about our Lord in heaven, body, blood, soul, and divinity. So when he's made sacramentally and substantially present on the altar, where his body is, there's his blood, soul, and divinity. Where his blood is, there's his body, soul, and divinity.

That's a cool doctrine called Eucharistic concomitants. So, yeah, that's probably enough, unless it's not. Right. So when a Catholic, I mean, the church teaches us, the Orthodox probably has a different way of explaining it, but essentially believes the same thing. You're saying then, for those in the back, when we receive the Eucharist, we're not merely receiving something which signifies Christ. We're receiving something that signifies Christ and somehow substantially is Christ. Exactly, yeah. So we talk about the real presence or the true presence. So our Lord is present on the altar. Now, that's different than how he's present in heaven, you know, because like Jesus isn't like a kind of Santa Claus figure flying around and like dropping presents down people's church chimneys. Bad image. Keep going. So, but we refer to it as true presence, real presence, because it's truly, really, his body, blood, soul, and divinity. And the thing that's wild about it is it's like the only example in the whole wide world of a change that takes place in the substance of a thing without any accompanying change. the appearance of the thing. So you still have the appearance of bread and the appearance of wine, but beneath the appearance of bread is his body, and beneath the appearance of wine is his blood. What a strange thing. Yeah, super strange. It's very strange that Catholics think

they need to eat God. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's a weird kind of eating on account of the fact, ordinarily when we eat something, it becomes us in the sense that we metabolize it. I don't remember exactly how this works from ninth grade biology, but I remember the words adenosine triphosphate. Fantastic. And I remember the number is 36 and 38. I don't remember what that corresponds to. Just keep going, Gregory. Someone will tell us in the comments.

Yeah, sure hope so. And then that becomes like energy or work or fat cells. Who knows? But in this case, rather than you consume and it becomes you, it's you consume and then you become it. Because the Lord makes you yet more perfectly a member of his mystical body. He incorporates you more perfectly into his very self. And so it's like it's not you metabolizing him. It's him metabolizing you without sounding creepy or reverse cannibalistic.

The basic idea is like the Lord has chosen the most intimate and intense mode of communion. Because when you think about it, like that's what a friend does. A friend abides with the beloved. He says like, hey, I want to spend time. It doesn't necessarily need to be structured, but it needs to be present or otherwise like our relationship is just kind of on life support. And then we'll just let each other's text message. stand in our unread until such time as whatever request you have lodged expires, and then I'll say, hey, sorry, just missed it, you know. It's like, that's how friendships die that way at a distance.

So our Lord says, I want to be as close to you as possible. And that's in effect what we have in the Eucharist. Our Lord's intention or express intention to be as close to us as possible. I was talking with Dr. Scott Hahn recently for the Christmas episode we did, and I was mentioning how in 1st Corinthians chapter 1, St. Paul talks about the scandal of the cross. which is a stumbling block to the Jews, foolishness to the Greeks. And I talked to him about the scandal of the manger, right? That God would become a zygote is scandalous, you know, in a way.

Or can be. The scandal of the Eucharist is something similar. I understand the Protestant who denies transubstantiation, who looks at us and goes, this is wild. I mean, at least the Israelites were worshiping about golden car. That at least was worth something materially, but you're worshipping a wafer. Yeah. No, I think that like, and I think that can enter into our ongoing conversations or kind of ecumenical dialogue with folks because Catholicism is kind of crazy, but it's consistently crazy.

So like, St. Ambrose, for instance, when he's arguing for the Eucharistic change, he's like, hey, hold up, wait a minute, hear me out. You guys believe that the only begotten son of God took flesh in the womb of a virgin, right? And then his inaudible interlocutor says, yeah, I guess so. And he's like, okay. Got a big stretch. Like that? So like, yeah. Like the Eucharist, right? Why not? I think this was Pascal's point that people who lived during the time of Christ looked at him and saw only man. Yeah. And people in now day and age might look at a Eucharist consecrated by a Catholic priest and see only bread or not even bread. Yeah. Just what is that? Waifer, I guess. And I do think, you know, it's kind of consistent with our Lord's way of revealing himself or making himself available to us. Often enough,

it's like very subtle or it's very genteel. I had a conversation with Alex O'Connor about divine hiddenness. He did a great job. Thanks. Were you nervous about that? Because he's a sharp fella. Although Trent, I would say, got the better of him in a debate that they had on my channel, which is worth watching. Continue. Nice. Was I a little nervous? I was, I don't remember. It was like two years ago, probably. I get nervous about some things, but it's not. It seemed like a good faith, so did he. You both seemed like you weren't there to score points on each other. Yeah.

And those are the best conversations to listen to. That was how it was explained to me. It was like, just have a conversation. I was like, oh, yeah, I can do that for sure. And then we smoked a scar afterwards. So, but in the course of that conversation, the basic idea is like, why doesn't God make himself more known? Or why doesn't he make himself? Right.

Yeah. And my argument is basically that the Lord reveals himself or makes himself available in a way that brings us along or best helps us. us as human beings to mature into that relationship. Because it would almost be like too showy, too flashy, too kind of crazy. Yep. If we were to show up at the Super Bowl halftime show. And so he does it in a way that kind of corresponds with our human nature. Yep.

And one of the images from the fathers of the church is like he wants to heal us to our depths or to our core. And you can't content yourself with a superficial healing because when you do that, then the wound is still foul and festering and it gets, ooh, creepy. So the idea is like you got to dive deep. And often enough with us, it's through this ongoing question and answerers, through this ongoing dialogue. Like, what are you doing, Lord? And then you hear nothing and you're like, okay, I guess I have to ask again or in a different way or maybe just more consistently. So I think that, yeah, Catholic teaching is kind of crazy, but it's consistently crazy. But it's the type of crazy which helps us as human beings to mature, not just into being good human beings, because God's not content with that. Like he wants us to actually share in his divine life. He wants us to be partakers of the divine nature. And so the sacraments are tailor made to affect that transformation, which, yeah, like the wisdom of God at work in the sacraments is told forth with a kind of subtlety or even with a kind of secrecy. Yeah, I'm thinking of the Israelites again in the Old Testament who saw God's miracles. I mean, they saw the red sea split in half and then asked for the golden calf to be manufactured so they could apostatize in a way.

Yeah. Oh, they were grumbling within like a chapter. Yeah, the pillar of fire, right? The pillar. And so we see that more obvious proofs of God's existence and guidance isn't necessarily, and that's obviously true. I mean, you know human nature. Like what do you want God to follow you around?

Like a cloud or something or like something? And then would you really change your life because of that? Would you have intimacy? I mean, that's what I suppose what our blessed Lord wants from us is intimacy. We don't not just, he doesn't just desire to be another piece of furniture in our ontology, but desire is communion. Yeah. I was thinking about this recently

because last year I was having like some health problems, stuff with my stomach. So I was like always sick and stressed. But it was great in a certain way because I always had occasion to think about God

because I always, you know, there's this ongoing conversation like, hey, what's going on with my bod? Why is it in full scale rebellion? And if,

you know, not to impose, but if you were to like change that, I'd be totally cool. With it, as it were. But like now, you better? Yeah. Like my stomach is fine. I don't do dairy anymore, which is tragic. I mean, my life, man. I'm just transitioning seamlessly into like old age. I, um, tore my MCL in a trip in Africa. And I just know I'm at the age where it's never going to get better. This is just a pain that you're going to have to now live with for the rest of your life. And that might sound too pessimistic. But as you get all of these things happen and then it's like, well, this is life now. Yeah. But okay. To know dairy. Fair enough. So yeah, whatever. So stomach's better, stress less. But I was thinking about it just in the past couple weeks, I was writing some letters to some

friends. And I, it's like I don't have occasion to think about God with the same kind of urgency or the same kind of desperation. I use the word loosely. And in a certain sense, like, it's, it's just easy to forget about God because he's invisible. You know, it's not like, he's not just another character in the story. He is the very sense of the story. I mean, he's himself at work in all of the characters, but it's easy to forget when you're inclined just to recognize like coffee cup, Beersstein. Yeah. Weird. Fleeves. flavored water vase slash whatever, you know, like, but like God doesn't fit in amongst those items. And so you're not necessarily reminded in the same way unless you're like problem fix or like

hurt attend to or whatever it is. So I think that God reveals himself in such a way as to educate us in his presence and in his relationship. And often enough, that's, yeah, it's again, subtle and sometimes secret. This episode is sponsored by Hello. You know, Lent is one of the most important times of the year. And Hello has a Pray 40 challenge this Lent that all are invited and encouraged to join. Hallow's Pray 40 Challenge is guided by lots of amazing people. People you know like Jonathan Rumi, Sister Miriam James Heidland, Father Mike Schmitz, Mother Olga, Mark Wahlberg, Chris Pratt, Jeff Kavens. Hallow has literally thousands of prayers, meditations and music to help you create daily habits of prayer, especially during

I first downloaded HALO probably seven or eight years ago, and we continue to use it to this day. So deep in your personal relationship with God today, visit hallow.com slash Matt Frad to get, wait for it, three months, not just one month, three months free. That's hallow.com slash Matt Frad. Now, I don't know if this is the first documented Eucharistic miracle, but Lanciano in the year AD 750. Is that the first? So I've read about other ones. Like there's one testified to in the early monastic life of the monks of Skate where there was one priest who didn't hold for the real presence. And he was like, yeah, this can't possibly be the case.

And then he was corrected, I think, by like, Aba Arsenius. And he's like, yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. And so then he was celebrating the Holy Eucharist and there were two other monks present. And then all of a sudden, in place of the host, they saw like a child. Like, oh, okay. All right, that changes things. There's also another one recounted of Pope St. Gregory the Great, who there's also. There's like a woman approaching the altar and she was like laughing in kind of derision or mockery and he denied her holy communion.

You imagine doing that to Padre Pio? He would slap you so hard, you know? Anyway. Yeah, so there are testimony of some old ones. But amongst the famous ones, yeah, I think this might be the oldest. But 8750, all times. Tell me about it. And tell me why it's not more or why it isn't simply Catholic wishful thinking.

You know, some kind of thing that happened so long ago. I mean, what's the evidence really? And is it possible? It's just, I don't know, totally natural. But tell us about it. Yeah, sure. So I think, like, this Eucharistic miracle, as is the case with many Eucharistic miracles, has to do with a priest doubting the real presence or doubting the true presence.

I should probably, like, look notes up, so that way I say things that are in de facto, holy and entirely true. Yeah, doubting priest. And often enough in those circumstances, you'll have it that the, precious body turns into flesh and the precious blood turns into blood and um it's like there are lots of stories of this especially in the middle ages so like 13th century 14th century 15th century you can almost tell the story yourself as if like clockwork it's like priest doubts god shows up people lose their minds thing is still visible testable available at present oh golly i hope you're

going to explain what that means yeah sure okay so um the church in her wisdom allows these miracles to be a little bit probed and prodded, not in a spirit of indecency or in delicacy, but as a way by which to testify that this is the real deal, it's not just made up. Okay. And so they've done significant tests on the flesh and on the blood from Lanciano. Okay. And what they've found is... Now, was it just the Eucharist that turned to flesh with blood in it or what?

Yeah, not sure. Yeah. But what they found is that the flesh is basically heart tissue. So tissue of the myocardium and specifically from the left ventricle. wild. And then they can further make determinations, and this is scientific stuff way beyond my ken. I have no idea what a lot of these words even mean. But they'll make determinations that one, like this had a fresh blood supply at the time. Two, this person was in great distress, you know, so like it shows signs of asphyxiation or it shows signs of trauma or it shows signs that this person was like basically beaten at the level of the heart. And then you have like

leukocyte, like a full lucid, whatever, something with white blood cells, which again, the types of things which don't last beyond, in some cases, 15 minutes and other, you know, like 48 hours for some of these indications, which would show that that's like there's, there's something going on here and it's living flesh. When was it tested? Obviously, it wasn't tested back in the 8th century. Yeah, in the 20th century. I think it was like in the 1970s. Is it, is it, should it still exist today? I mean, no. By all accounts, no. So like a host, for instance, should rot. Yeah. Within, I don't know, if not days, then weeks or months. You have a, you have. a lot of Eucharistic miracles where it's like, let's say, in addition to doubting priests, another huge kind of category of Eucharistic miracles is people who treat the Blessed Sacrament Sacrilegiously. So whether it's like somebody goes to the church to abscond with a host because she wants to make a love potion as counseled by a sorceress comes up way more than you think it would. Or like soldiers are raiding this town and they're seeking to deal the death

blow to these local folks and so they tinker with the Blessed Sacrament. Or like somebody just wants some monstrance, abscondes with the monstrance, but doesn't remove the host from it, things like that. You'll have testimony that some of these hosts with which people have absconded last for like hundreds of years, which is wild. Okay, so no, it shouldn't still be around. But the fact of the matter is that the tissue is, it still gives signs of being living tissue. So there was an A.B. blood type, the same as the shroud. Yeah, exactly. So same as the shroud and same as a lot of other Eucharistic miracles, which I guess, I don't know, again, it's like A, B positive or A B negative. I think it's A B positive. And apparently that's a kind of common blood type that you would find

in the Middle East. Again, I don't know anything about these things. And people are going to have all kinds of things to say in the comments. But the fact that it still exists and that people, I think I was there actually. That's awesome. During the, during the Jubilee year of 2000. Oh, cool. It was either this one or something else. Some other one. There are a couple. And this is like the most famous one, I think. Or at least it's the one of about which people speak the most frequently. Wow. So, again, when was it tested?

I think in the 1970s for the first time. But the other cool thing about the blood is that, so there are five different kind of globules of blood, and each of them weighs 15.85 grams. So that's a unit of measure that other people use for those of you listening from the United States of America. It's like an ounce, except different. But then when you gather them all together,

they weigh 15.85 grams. when you're like, wow, that's such like a weird thing. Why don't they weigh, you know, whatever it would be when you add it all together, like 77 point less than such grams. Okay. So I guess people take it to be a testimony of the fact that when you receive any part of the Blessed Sacrament, you receive the whole Christ.

So whether you receive just like a quarter of a host or four hosts, you receive the whole Christ's. You receive him body, blood, soul, and divinity. So there's a sense in which, like, you don't need to compare amongst a little bit of, the precious blood or a lot bit of the precious blood. It's just our Lord's blood. And so the fact that each of those five globules, each weigh is 15.85 grams and then all them together weigh 15.85 grams testifies to that. Is this something that they discovered in the 1970s or have they,

do those globules still exist? Are they still? Yeah, it's still there. Yeah. I honestly don't really know what you mean by globule, just like a little heartened piece of blood. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, that's bananas. What else? That's really wonderful. The non-as is the word. Yeah. So another thing that I think, so I read this in a couple of different places, apropos of like the Lord's genetic life, because when you have flesh and blood,

you should be able to get DNA. And with DNA, you should be able to get some indication as to like, what type of person we're dealing with here? Again, I don't know anything about science. But apparently, everyone who is able to obtain what ought to furnish genetic information gets no sequencing. So like you're not able to know exactly what our Lord's DNA looks like. For what reason I have no idea.

Some people are like, well, he was conceived of the Holy Spirit. So his DNA isn't going to look like an ordinarily conceived person who has the genetic data both from mother and father. But there's a kind of cool veil of secrecy over that, which I read that and I'm just like wild. Yeah. You know what it would be amazing is to know the story of the existence of this flesh and blood that has existed from the eighth century. The story that that has played in the lives of countless people who lived in that area and who came to see that and whatever they experienced. What a wild thing if you... Yeah.

No, I think it's funny. One thing that just in reading the story, there's like 120 or 130 of these different that have been documented. 130 what? No, it's wild. Eucharistic miracles? Yeah. No, there's this really wild one. Would you mind if I smoke to sick?

Go for it, yeah. So I think it took place on the island of Martinique. It's called, the name of the town was Morn Rouge. And there's a, it's on a volcano. It's like Mount Pelae. Okay. And there's one point that's just like, I want to say it's like early 20th century when the volcano was erupting and the people of God obviously were distressed.

And so they gathered in Eucharistic adoration and they saw kind of portents or signs. Basically, like they saw our lord in the host with his sacred heart. And some people testified to see his sacred heart bleed. This is in like May, I want to say. Sorry, what? This is not this May. Sorry, this is like, I want to say it. early 19th century, but nevertheless, it's a thing that happened.

Okay. And so then the people are all totally blown away by this, and they're spared that day in May. And they all go back to the sacrament of confession. They all receive holy communion and a worthy state. They're all just living their best lives. There was another eruption of the volcano in August, and then they were all killed. Oh. So it's like, one thing I think that, I mean, just stories like this, or there are various

Eucharistic miracles that have been lost to us because, for instance, like the French revolutionaries just threw them out. or Spanish Civil War, they just got torn to pieces or whatever. So it's just like the fact that there is a Eucharistic miracle doesn't mean that you're always going to have that Eucharistic miracle, even if the durability of the sacrament was part of the sign itself. And I think this helps a distinguish between miracles and magic. Like the point of it is to cultivate faith.

It's not just to testify to power. I've thought that often, sometimes, you know, I'll think about the revolution that took place with the mendicants, say, and you think about St. Francis in the, Assisi and how many men flock to him, right? And so you could be tempted to say, well, look, where is it today? And obviously there are Franciscans doing great work, okay, but like where's the same level of, you know, devotion? Yeah. And then you realize, well, then I realize, well, there was a bunch of people living at that time who may be saved for all eternity because of the good work Christ did

during that time. Yeah, yeah. And that Christ has only promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church, not the movement Francis of Assisi started or what have you. Sure. Yeah, I think, no, it's fascinating. There are wild stories throughout the whole course of the church. And I think, for instance, of, yeah, there are a lot of Eucharistic miracles where the Lord shows his sovereignty over the powers of nature. So I cited the example of Mourn Rouge. But then there's also, like just in the beginning of the 20th century, I think it was like 1905 on this little island off the coast of Colombia. It's like Tumaco.

There was a huge earthquake that lasted for like 10 minutes. And so the people of God know, like, we're about to get wrecked. So what hasn't already been leveled by the earthquake is there's going to be a tsunami and we're going to get destroyed. So I guess they ring the church bells. They call everyone together in church. And then the priest there puts the blessed sacrament like the Luna in the monstrance and leads them in Eucharistic procession out to the ocean side. And it's like, I guess waters recede and you get this kind of surge. So whatever, you get indication of the tsunami that's about to come.

And then he just blesses the ocean. and then the waters subside. When was this he said to have happened? 1905. Okay. And it's like totally wild. But it's in keeping with or it's totally consistent with comparable miracles that you will have seen at other points kind of in the church's life.

I forget the exact name. I think it's Canosio, but there's this town in Italy. And you have a similar thing where there was a river that flooded the Myra River. And again, it was like priest, blessed sacrament, and then kept at bay. or there was this one in Avignon France. So this is maybe like 15th century after the Great Western Schism, the Avignon papacy, blah, blah, blah, and thus and such. There was this kind of, I don't know, society of holy people called the Grey Penitents, something like a third order group. I don't quite understand.

But they had this church and they had the Blessed Sacrament, which was there for adoration. But at one point the river there, like the Rodana River flooded and the water had risen like way, way, way, way high. and it had gotten to the point where it was like it was into the church. And so they're like trying to get back even in the midst of the chaos of the town. And when they get there, there's six feet of water in the church. But like the Red Sea, there's just a clear path up to the altar. And it's like, yeah, it's totally wild. So it seems like the Lord is doing similar things, but by different means.

Always in testimony to the truth of the faith, always through the sacraments, right? Always through people of goodwill who seek to respond to him with the grace that they've been given. But again, like you said, he's blessing different movements or he's going about it in slightly different ways. When you're reading these different testimonies, how does one weigh the credibility of them? Yeah. What is it about as you read one? Do you sometimes read something and go, well, that's obviously not true? Or what is it that makes you think this is likely to be credible?

I understand your point earlier about being just hard and skeptics, what we've already chosen to believe isn't a good thing. But you also don't want to be idiots. We don't want to fool for anything because that actually makes the faith look. really bad. Like if somebody is saying that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in her toast, you know, and that didn't happen, then it seems like we would be within our interest to actually say that didn't happen. Yes. And the church has done this. And yeah, and the church, the church has been of that mind since, well, it's been a while. Um, I can, you can think about this as parallel to canonization processes. So like up until a certain point, canonizations were typically

just by public acclamation. So if there was a, so somebody would live a holy life and then die. and then people would typically flock to the shrine of that individual pray for his or her intercession touch objects to the grave do whatever and then there would be signs and portents like there would be miracles which would confirm the public cult and then you would just begin referring to that person as saint x or saint y round about like the 10th 11th 12 13th century you have in different places and increasingly centralized ways like canonization processes so st dominic is one of the one to kind of undergo like a full scale canonical process for his canonization, you know, as conducted by the Universal Church. And so, like, you know, you take everything that that person is written and you subject it to scrutiny and you get all of the different pertinent witnesses as to the individual's life and you interview these people and you get written testimony, yada, yada. So it's like, it's involved. But I think the idea is that the church knows that there is scandal or that there is harm done

to the faithful when a thing that seems to be good turns out to be bad, you know, because it really does, it messes with the people of God. And so she's super solicitous to say, all right, let's be prudent and let's be somewhat cautious and circumspect in advancing these claims, not to like, as it were, dim the flame of kind of devout ardor, but really to ensure that this is a clear path to sanctity or that the prayers of this person will avail. And so I think you see a similar thing with the Eucharist. So there's, like we said, there's only a handful that date from before the year 1000. And maybe that's just kind of by virtue of the fact that we have less access to the historical details of past times. I realize we have to have access to like our Lord Jesus

Christ or otherwise were host. But maybe people just had kind of different historiographical notions as to what it meant to recount the facts in those days. Maybe they just didn't care as much. But then like around about the 12th century, it's clear in each of these cases, well, it's clear in many of these cases that like local processes and then kind of diocesan processes were undertaken to test. So it's like everybody was interviewed. They didn't necessarily have the scientific means in the 13th, 14th, 15th century that we have at present. But the ones that have happened in like the last 50 years, they've all been subject to scientific scrutiny. I want to get to them. Any more to say on Lanciano or should be moved to the next one? Is it Centereem?

Santerim, yeah. Yeah, let's go. I feel like I said, is it Santorum and then you said it word that sounded different. So what is it? No, I don't know how to speak Portuguese. I'm making up pronunciations. All right. So tell us about this one, which occurred. in 1266. So in part, so this one is often included with Lanchiano in the conversation

because, yeah, it's just, it's attracted a big public cult. Like St. Francis Xavier visited this one before he went off to the Far East. Wow.

Which is pretty sweet. I also visited this one when I went to Fatima. A lot of people go here when they go to Fatima because it's in between Lisbon and Fatima. I see.

So it's just a little stop along the way. But I think, so like, doubting priests and kind of superstitious faithful, are often ways in which the Lord makes himself known,

or at least in the ancient medieval church, it seems like those were some of the ways in which the Lord made himself known by way of correction. So there's a lady, she was really jealous for the love of her husband. Maybe she just didn't feel that she was entirely satisfied in the relationship, and she wanted to ensure that he loved her.

And so she was counseled by a sorceress to take the blessed sacrament. So like she went, I think on Holy Thursday, received, and then took it out and put it in a linen. And immediately, as she's returning home, it starts to bleed. She's terrified.

So she just puts it away in a drawer in the house. But then in the middle of the night, she and her husband are woken up because there's rays of light emanating from the drawer. And so they're like, so she admits to him what she did. And he's like, we have to call the priest. And so they call the priest. And then they come in and then they bring it back to the church. Okay. And this is it today.

It's still there. And that's it. Yeah. So since 1266, it's just intact. And I suppose one of the reasons we know it's been there since 1266, is there's been like a trail of literature throughout the years that has signified that this has...

Exactly. And like the Iberian Peninsula has never been, it hadn't been as upset by war really until the 20th century. So like for instance, in the 16th century when Protestant Reformation is raging in France and in Germany and other places besides, it's really not raging on the Iberian Peninsula. So there's like, there's a kind of consistency

to public cult and practice in like what is currently Spain and Portugal. And so there's people have been going there. There's another one too in Spain. I visited this one and then I also visited this one in Spain called Osabrero because it's on the Camino Franchise. So a lot of people just walk right past this one on their way into Santiago Compostela. Europeans, man. They have no idea what's in their back yard. People were pumped, like Osabrero, similar like Middle Ages. And it was just kind of hanging out there. It was the thing

where I think, you know, there's just a piece of flesh and that had been in this kind of simple encasement and then like surrounded in wax. And then I think it was Prince or Saint, or excuse me, Princess Saint, get to the one that it actually is. Queen Isabella went on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela. One passes, she's like, we have to get this thing a better reliquary. So she didn't do course and now it's in this beautiful crystal thing. But the basic idea is, yes, there is a continuous tradition of people visiting these places and then testifying to the truth of these things. So Lent is just a couple of days away. So let me ask you a question. Do you know what you're giving up or doing to strengthen your relationship with the Lord?

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The testimonials and the stories speak for themselves. My listeners get a seven-day free trial when you use my code pints. So click the link in the description below and make the most meaningful Lent of your life. Join Relay today and use code pints. And so this has been examined? Yes. And what was any discovery that was notable? I don't know about specifically like basically every every so all the ones that I've read with any detail it all comes back that it's tissue of the myocardium so which is like the big muscle at the bottom of the heart left ventricle. It's like purified blood. So did it turn to flesh or is it just blood? Flesh and blood. That's flesh and blood. Yeah. Is there any, I'm sure people have asked this. But is there any sense in which this is just some big hoax perpetuated by a group of people who keep replacing it?

Yeah, people have suggested all kinds of things. Some people suggest, yeah, there have been some like contemporary ones. Like there's one in Buenos Aires, 92, 94, 96. And people were like, oh, no, there was one recently in Poland. I think it was in like 2009. And people suggested that the flesh was the flesh of a murdered man. So people will say all manner of things. Yeah, and fair enough.

And so like part, yeah, no, go for it. It's bizarre. Yeah, it's totally bizarre. And so, like, part of the authentication process or authentication process, whatever the right word is, at least with recent miracles has been, listen, like, these are the movements that people took. So people have been, like, investigated as to their movements and where the Blessed Sacrament was taken during, like, the intervening periods. Because often it's like, like, in a lot of contemporary ones, it's like the Blessed Sacrament falls to the ground and then it's picked up and then put in water to dissolve. So it's like distribution of Holy Communion, somebody makes a mistake. And then, you know, does with the Blessed Sacrament as one ought, either you should. you consume it or you put it in water to dissolve. And so you would like put it in the tabernacle or put it in the safe of the church. But then, you know, you come back a week later and it's bleeding. That was the case in Buenos Aires. Yep. That was the case in, I don't know how to pronounce any words in Polish because they've got like

extra slashes and things and stuff like that, Salutkov. But basically, anytime these things are tested, the flesh always comes back as myocardium tissue. Yeah, all right. So it's like what pumps blood through the body from the left ventricle, which is like purified blood specifically. And then it's always like, it has been distressed. there are white blood cells full like kind of

you're saying that like any eucharistic miracle that we have examined scientifically this is what it shows yes yeah yeah yeah so it all comes back like a same again I don't know scientific words but yeah so I suppose what is this like under the care and direction of the bishop to to guard to give permission certainly tests yeah yeah exactly

wow yeah all right what's key gone go no yeah well let's move on to more common or not common but modern yeah miracles of the UK Because of course people will look at this and say whatever this is something perhaps that was concocted and talked about before people could really examine it and Yeah, all right. So let's so you said bonnus aries Yes more to say about that or sure Did you exhaust your knowledge of it? No, there's like so there's three separate instances. Yeah Did I scratch myself now? No, I'm scratching and I'm saying what happened about this not about you? You look great. Thanks

What happened in these three instances? So the basic idea with the first and the third so the so the so the there are three instances, 92, 94, 96. The first and the third, I think it was that a blessed, like, the Blessed Sacrament fell to the ground. Is this in the same church? I think it's in the same church, or it's the same priest who's the kind of protagonist of each of these.

The second time was just a Picks that was in the tabernacle, but in each case, it started to bleed. So it was like they put it in the little receptacle where a priest washes his fingers, I think. No, in this case, it was just, it was put in water, and then that water was either reserved in the tabernacle or eventually reserved in the safe. And then they went back to check on it. it to see that it was dissolved so that at that point you would put it down the sacrarium, which is like a special sink that ensures that our Lord's body is taken care of.

So it's like you've corrupted the species. It's no longer the Eucharist, but you would still just put it directly into the ground rather than putting it through the plumbing system. But when he went back, here it is. It's the blessed. So the Blessed Sacrament is bleeding. And again, kind of same as before, fresh leukocyte formula, again, active white blood cells, which suggests like the presence of, like the body's fighting,

whether infection or some type of trauma. And then again, tissue from the myocardium, specifically from the left ventricle, again, which kind of pumps purified blood through the body. And again, so like the doctors who tested this, in certain cases some of the doctors, you know, like they had no insight

as to where this came from. So it's like, hey, we've got some flesh. Can you examine it? Whoa. And it's like, so one, this is living, like this is living flesh. So like how long has this been separated from a human body because it's the type of thing which seems like,

you know, this, this is fresh. And you're saying this was in Boniseries. Buenos Aires. And the other two places also. So yeah, so 92, 94, 96, all in Buenos Aires. But my point is in those two, like the eighth century flesh that was, when it was examined in the 70s. It was living flesh. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. Yep. Totally cool. Yeah. And so then, again, testimony to the fact that this person endured great suffering or that this person was in like traumatic circumstances. Now, you've said this several times. Yeah.

But for those who are like, what does that have to do with anything? Well, because it's. consistent with what we know of our Lord's passion and death. Right. So the death that one would endure by crucifixion is a death of asphyxiation. So tremendous physical pain. Obviously, our Lord had more pain than any of us have ever endured because he had the most sensitive human nature since Adam and Eve. But also, our Lord underwent his passion voluntarily in the sense that he's God, so he dies on his own terms. And so something like fathers of the church, medieval theologians, they'll say, note the fact that he utters a great cry immediately prior to giving up the spirit.

A person who dies of asphyxiation doesn't utter a great cry. So this is testimony to the fact that he is competent up until the moment of his death, but that he commends his spirit to the father. Nevertheless, he endures in our flesh what it looks like he indoors in our flesh. Like he's got a real human nature. These are real human activities. And so our Lord is really, really, really suffering. He is really, really asphyxating. He is really, really dying in his human nature. And so, like, all of the tests that comes back about these various Eucharistic things, these various Eucharistic miracles, they communicate. They're consistent with the gospel account. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Did you talk only about one or two of those instances, or all three?

So I think the first and the third were, I think Blessed Sacrament dropped to the ground, and then the middle one, 1994, was a pix that when somebody went to retrieve it, they just noticed drops of blood. And you said earlier that a lot of the time when these Eucharistic miracles take place, it's because of an unbelieving priest. Was there any story around this? No. Yeah, it's actually, it's cool. In recent ones, there's less testimony. So there's maybe like six, seven recent ones.

I think the most recent ones, 2003 in Thomastown, Connecticut, where an extraordinary minister basically ran out of hosts and then looked down and there were more hosts. And like the priests saw enough. Basically, people saw enough. And this is currently in the process of a diocese and investigation. But then there's one, 2022 in Honduras. But these ones, these most recent ones, like the last six, seven, eight haven't been on the occasion of a doubting priest. Yeah. Which just, it might, again, seem to suggest that the Lord is just doing something new.

Yeah. And you can think about, like, the middle ages everyone believed with certain exceptions. You know, obviously they have the same struggles that we have today, less technology. But so it's like the people who don't believe are the exceptions and they receive these kind of signs and portents. Whereas now the people that believe are kind of the exceptions. And it's fascinating that a lot of these Eucharistic miracles seem to be by way of encouragement, you know, for believers, less so by way of correction for unbelievers, which I think is cool. Also, Buenos Aires, 92, 94, 96. The bishop of Buenos Aires at the time was Jorge Maria Bergoglio, which is wild. So he was part of the investigation process as well. So do these hosts still exist? These hosts still exist. Yeah. And that you're saying is a miracle in and of itself.

Yeah. Well, I mean, like, they should have corrupted. Yeah. But in the fact that they're saturated in blood, if you were to throw human, you know, blood on them and just keep them there, presumably it would dissolve faster. Yeah. But that still exists today. That still exists today, yeah. Yeah. I might have to become Catholic. All right. Now, I don't know how to pronounce this one that took place in 2006 in Mexico. Where is that Tistler? Yeah, let's go with that. All right. We don't know. All right. What happened here? So the thing that I love about this is, so again, like you said, people say all manner of things. And they're going to have their doubts and they're going to have their accusations, as it were, or their counterclaims. So you see blood appear on a host, which is what happened in Tixla. So there's a bloody host in a suborium. It was actually an extraordinary minister who was distributing.

It was like, holy smokes. It was a religious sister. And she was like, so they subjected, again, the host to a series of tests. And what was discovered was, you know, because people say, like, you know, you bled on it. And then you said it bled. So solved. Yeah. But then they can actually do tests, which demonstrate that it bled from the inside out.

What? Yeah, which is wild. I don't know how this stuff works. Again, I wish I knew more about it. But flesh blood. It's flesh blood. Fresh blood. So not blood, you know, after the fact, which just dried up and tells the tale of somebody else's life.

Same thing, blood type, AB, AB positive, myocardium tissue, lacerated and traumatized. So it's like the host at its edge where, I mean, like, basically where it's bleeding. has flesh and that flesh tells a similar story yeah but I just love the fact that they can prove that while the blood on the outside had coagulated and dried

nevertheless there was still a fresh kind of wellspring of blood from within which is cool wow and that still exists I think so I shouldn't I shouldn't say everything with like total confidence

but I think so okay and are there any is this the most modern 2006 or are there others that have been there have been a couple in Poland like 2008 and then there's like another one

and like I want to say like 2016. I mentioned the one in Honduras in 2022. The one in Connecticut, we'll see, 2002, which are still subject to further investigation. But the one in Poland, I mentioned. Yeah, so drop the host, place it in the safe. It was like, again, a religious sister who went to retrieve it, maybe like a week after, and came back. It was bloodstained. One of the things that I really love about this one is they were trying to determine, you know, like, so this one in Poland, it's in Seculka, Poland. I don't know again how to pronounce things. but they're trying to determine like what's you know like what's going on here and as they did their

investigation on you know like the edge of the host which had turned to bloody flesh they found that the flesh was interwoven with the bread so it's not just like here's flesh and here's bread it's like here is flesh interwoven with bread which would seem to suggest that the eucharist is our lord's body and blood told forth in the appearance of bread what we see kind of in sign in mysterious sign This just looks like bread. Truth be told, it's our Lord's body. Is here, yeah, told forth in manifest fashion. Like the bread becomes his body.

The appearances are just kind of a help for you, so that way you can locate it, you know, and it would be kind of crazy if we received under the appearance of flesh every time. So the Lord and His loving kindness takes our humanity into account and gives us a sacramental sign. But wild times.

Is that the best book on Eucharistic miracles that you have there? I mean, I saw why. one from Tan, which I know has been highly recommended. Is that the same one? This was like the one which is largely, okay, so Carlo Acutis did his research and made his website. This is kind of the fruit of that website slash the fruit of that research. And then this is what's like the Vatican has had a series of displays going around the world. And this is kind of in the background of that. So a lot of it looks like it was from a GeoCity's website curated in 1999. So it's not necessarily like

the most beautifully done, but it's got a lot of cool details. And I took the, these 3M tags which say sign here for documents and I have used them in the way that they are meant to be used without signing them. But yeah. So this book is great. I profited a lot from this book and it's just kind of like two little two page cameos of each story because if you were to have extended documentation for each of them, you might never finish the book. So it's for the person who's interested in the whole wealth of the church's testimony. I would say that. I want to ask you about what it's like being a priest and consecrating the elements and whether that experience made it more or less difficult to continue believing in the real

presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Does that make sense? It does make sense. Yeah, like I would think if I was that close to something, I would maybe find it more difficult to believe, maybe in the same way that the apostles. Yeah. I found it difficult to believe when our Lord excused himself to go to the restroom or something. Sure. That's supposed to be.

That's difficult. Yeah. Did you struggle as a priest at all? Or have you always had a strong devotion to the Eucharist? And how has that changed at all? As you drink your fake water. Take my last sip of my really delicious raspberry water. That's got to be crystal light.

That's got to be crystal light. What's crystal light? It's like that sugar-free. Yeah, it tastes fake, doesn't it? Yeah. No, it's got that going on. That's sucralose or splen. Now, why are you drinking, before we get to the more important topic,

non-alcoholic beer. Tell me about it. Oh yeah. This is a recent discovery. The aforementioned stomach problems have ruined my life in various ways. I mean, our lives are all being ruined progressively. Yeah. But it's like, okay, because they relate to Jesus and somehow it's fine. All right. Yeah, but like alcohol is doing a number on me. So I switched, I still like the taste of beer. I also like mild carbonation. I find that a lot of bubbly water is too aggressive in its carbonation. You know, it's like the bubbles come after you. Whereas beer carbonation is just the right amount. And so, sorry we couldn't get you the, what was the Samuel Adams. Wait for it.

Steady. Have you had that one yet? You can hate it. That's good. I'm going to go, I'm going to go get some whiskey. Nice. I'll just, I'll just talk randomly. Yeah, I'll talk about the pre-suit.

Oh, I'll give people extraneous details while scratching my right ear. Oh, nice. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I. So you've stopped drinking alcohol altogether? Yeah, basically. I mean, like, like in certain situations, You know, if you go to a parishioner's house and they're like, hey, we have prepared this delicious meal for you.

And we've been saving this bottle of wine for 10 years. It's like, you're a terrible stomach egg? Yeah, exactly. No, it's fine. Cigars? Sometimes you got to got, I haven't been smoking as many cigars, but sometimes you have to have a ghouly, you know, where you send all the slaves back to their native lands. Okay. That's an Old Testament reference. I don't actually hold for slavery. Okay, cool. Cigars as well. Well, I don't know how, yeah. It was the first thing that came to mind, which is often enough, the reasons for which I say everything. But, yeah, so I was ordained on May 20, first 2016 at the time. I think I was 27 years old, which is young. I still am young. Are you? How old are you? A 37? Yeah, okay, I'll let you say you're old. It reminds. I said young. I said, I said, I'll allow you to be young, but not after 40. Okay. I think it was Dostoevsky's man from notes from underground who said that it's an indecent thing to live beyond 40. And I think he might be right. And that's why I think all of the health issues that we have is God's way of being like, just so, you know, you should definitely be dead. So. But whatever, keep going. I just finished that book two days ago. It's beautiful.

Isn't it? I love how you loved Dostoevsky. I love Dostoevsky. I just read the double recently. Have you read that? I haven't. It was good. Do you read Father Sergius?

No. That's Tolstoy one that Eric Varden comments on, Bishop Eric Varden comments on and the shattering of illness. I've been reading a book of his essays. Let's go. He's incredible. He's incredible. He's smart dude.

Yeah, he's really good. Yeah, people, this is good. Sorry, we're going all over the place. It's good. It's better this way. People should check this. out. It's a book that Word on Fire just released. It's a book of Eric

Varden, Bishop Eric Varden's essays. I forget the name of it, but I have it in my bag and it's excellent. Especially for people who feel like it's difficult to devote a lot of time to serious reading. Reading essays is a nice

compromise or a nice stopover, you know? Okay, back to Tolstoy. I don't know that I'd much to say about Tolstoy or Dassevsky, really. I'm appreciating notes from Underground the second. I'm reading, I just finished it for the second time. And I appreciated it more the second time.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting, like, what he wants in life. Like, he's figuring out what he wants in life and he's, like, settling for secondary and tertiary things. I think what he wants is love, but he, like, domination, mild embarrassment, power,

I really encourage you. Equity. And everybody to read a gentle creature. That book, no other book has killed me like that book. That's, is that by Dostaski? Yeah. I've never heard of that book. Well, it's glorious.

This is, so this here is, let's go. I won't give it to you. No, I don't want you to. But I will buy one for you. Compass Circle. That book, every husband should read this book. Okay. It's a novella.

So it'll take you like three hours or four hours. But it's similar to notes from underground and it's a man who wanted control over his wife. Ah. But it opens with her killing herself. So I'm not giving anything away. So what happens is she's thrown. herself out of the window. She's dead and she's laid out on a card table and the husband is sitting there bewildered and he talks about how it came to this. Oh my gosh. Dang. Do you think

there's a big connection between like temperament and what we enjoy? Probably. Yeah, because I can't see my wife ever enjoying that under any circumstances. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I want to hear stories. I actually read the death of Ivan Iliitch to my children on a beach trip. Nice. It's the best meditation on death you'll ever read. Okay. Did they cut into it? Well, it was sort of like at night when they had no other choice and they were sort of lounging around. Uh-huh. And I just read it to them.

And Peter's like, what now? Peter, well, this was a while ago. So Peter was probably like four. It's a beautiful book. Dostevsky. Notes from underground. Yeah. Yeah.

Good. Yeah, so I was ordained on May 21st, 2016 at the age of 27. When you were young? And when we were young. I feel like there are a lot of songs that have that as a title. But I, like the first couple times that I celebrated the Holy Mass, I remember looking at my hands and thinking those are my hands. And I also just kind of consciously, at that time, I was way underslept and way over-tasked because I was like responsible for queuing up a bunch of these masses of Thanksgiving for my classmates and then like at the local parish and then at the monastery of nuns and yada yada and us and such. And I also had guests in town from Columbia because I'd studied Spanish in Bogota the summer before.

and I had like a couple of people whom I was hosting for whom I was principally responsible. And then like I was involved in extending conversations with my mom about blah, blah, and thus and such and like parties. And I was trying to like hold off wedding reception type festivities, which I thought would be inappropriate in the circumstances. The line that I kept using was mom, this is more like a funeral than it is like a wedding. That wasn't, it wasn't working. So I was just kind of like totally bewildered.

But at a couple of points, second use of bewildered in the podcast, at a couple of points, I was like, I'd like there to be like a counter throughout this. Yeah, exactly. A new feature. So at a couple of points, I looked at my hands and I was like, those are my hands. And I was like, ooh. And honestly, the thought, so I don't want to say that these things are alike. But it was the first time that I really seriously thought about hell as a possibility, it kind of like scared me.

And by kind of like scared me, I mean, it really like scared me. And it gave me the willies where I was like, oh, let's bracket that. Don't look at that. I was like, let's think about that later. And by later, I mean never. So I kind of made a similar judgment within the first week of my priesthood about my hands. And I think that actually the most like moving experiences celebrating the Holy Mass have been recently. So I wrote a book about the Eucharist, here it is, plug, called Your Eucharistic Identity.

Okay. And I was doing a lot. Yeah. That's yours if you want it. I do want it. Thank you. Bingo. Your Eucharistic identity.

Yeah. A sacramental guide to the fullness of life, Ignatius Press. Blameau. Beautiful. So I was doing a lot of research for that. I was reading a lot of books about the Eucharist, and I was, like, thinking about them, you know, during meditation, and then we have morning prayer and then Holy Mass.

And in the context of Matt, I just kept finding that I would just start crying. It was, and it's like someone embarrassing on account of the fact that I pertain to a religious community, which, you know, there's like 70 men in the house where I live. And so it's like, you're like 14 priests around the altar and then like 35 brothers just sitting there. And I just like can't help myself. So you're crying while celebrating the Holy Mass? Yeah, typically just con celebrating too, which you have just like very little involvement

in a concelebrated mass, you kind of like extend your hand, then extend your hand, and then extend your hands, and then you say the words. But I was just, I was just kind of getting blown away by things. And that's beautiful and consoling. It's also ever so slightly distracting for the people of God, for as many as are encouraged by it, I'm sure, just as many are like, this guy up there with his tears. Come on, you know, just give me the blessed sacrament. So, again, it was like a similar kind of, not like bracket this in the sense of it's

not worth considering, but maybe this just isn't the time and the place or it's not appropriate. So yes, I find that provided that you have space, time in which to explore the Eucharistic mysteries, the Lord will bowl you over and the way that he sees fit to bowl you over. It may not be with tears, you know, it may not be with sensible emotion, but it will be with an ongoing kind of conviction that this is real and it's worth it. And I find, like, my dad, for instance, you know, he's a man who's very faithful to time in the presence of the blessed sacrament. He'd always wake up super early. He'd go to the local monastery for like a 530 holy. hour and then they had mass and then he would come and have breakfast with my mom like he had

already been up praying for like an hour and 45 minutes and then he and my mom were having breakfast at like 715 which is pretty impressive um but like I think about my dad and my dad you know like we all go through stuff in life and some things are easier and some things are harder my dad certainly with my mother's sickness and then her death is like the hardest thing he's been through but it's also made him like a beautiful man a wonderful man beyond the beautiful man wonderful man that he was five years ago And I think there's like a certain Eucharistic. Oh, so? How has he become more?

I mean, he's just like tender. He's kind. He's solicitous. He can't hear too terribly well. So sometimes you have to repeat things, but everyone's just basically on board with that because you're kicking it with a living saint. He recently went with my sister and her family to Rome for the Jubilee. So he was there for like canonization of St. Pierre, Georgia and St.

Carlo Ocudis with my, my sister's got five kids. They're like nine, seven, five, three tiny. Chaotic, I'm sure, to fly to Rome. I'm sure it's quite chaotic. Oh, yeah. And it's like you get in line to get into the Vatican and the line. in and the line's like a billion people long and then like an hour in everyone has to go to the bathroom nope not everyone half of the people have to go to the bathroom and then a quarter of the

people have to go to the bathroom 30 minutes later and then you know it's just nuts it's totally insane because you can't time child's bladders children's bladders whatever small bladders um but i was talking to my sister when they came back i was like hey how was it and she was like your dad is a saint our dad is a saint he is a saint he's just he's just yeah you can see how his experience with the lord his experience with the lord kind of like in light of my mom's sickness and death has you shaped him, formed him, made him the man that he is. I wrote him a little letter for his 70th birthday. And it's basically like, the last line is like, you're my hero, dad, you're my hero. Because he's just, he's the man. How does he respond to that sort of affirmation?

I think well, I mean, like, with mild embarrassment, ever so slightly abashed, but just like, you know, just grateful that the Lord has given him gifts. So have you seen him mellow out over the years and become, yeah, this seems to be, this is something that I find quite interesting. I don't know what you think of. of it. In the old fairy tales, if a man has done his job right, he becomes the sort of gentle, quiet old man. Yeah. And if a woman's done her job right, she ends up like the, there's, there's some strength to the old woman. Yeah, yeah. Does that make sense? Oh, it does. So it's like if the man is too gentle in the beginning, this isn't a good sign. If the woman is too

aggressive, not good. Yeah. But there's something about that journey where the saintly old woman who's very forthright and tells you exactly what she thinks. And you see what I mean? Yep. And then the man, I mean, I think I'm not your dad and I'm not saying I'm a saint, but the Lord has made me more gentle. I find myself more kind and meek and even though I get irritated about things. Again, but like with my family, I just love being around them.

I look at the way I was as an early dad and I wish I could go back and this is a very weird thought experiment and bite me and give me whatever it is I have now that could just cause me to calm down. You know what I mean? I do. How have you grown as a priest? Ooh, in that regard. I was actually thinking about this recently. Sometimes I get upset with emails. Oh, yeah. Because we talked about this the last time. Yeah, maybe we just, let's just avoid emails. Yeah, but I can be like, I like saying anything, you go. Yeah, no, perfect. So what about him? It's just like, I think that sometimes I just like I come up for air and it's I don't know what I've been doing for the last seven hours but it's usually thinking about something as ever pertaining to

faith discourse and then trying to write something whether I'm doing that for love of the people the God or for my own kind of presumptuous feign glorious ambition who knows you know I pray that the Lord purifies me in due course yeah but then you get an email and it's like here's a thing I've got this problem and you're the one to answer it slash do it for me now and I'm like or else I'm something. become an atheist. Take everyone with me. So it's like, I, I mean like, I welcome the questions of the people of God because I do think, and I said it last time, that a priest is ordained for the people of God. I think you're responsible for the people in your local setting, primarily and principally,

but nevertheless, your heart's broken open to the whole world because the Lord's heart was broken open to the whole world. But sometimes I can just be like impatient and lacking in perseverance with the silliness. Actually, I received a grace the other day. Did I make mention of the fact? Yeah, I was in Southern California in Orange County. Oh, this wasn't for the Eucharistic. Congress. This is for like, if you ever heard of this guy, Ryan Bathay, he was a podcast, The Exorcist Files with other Carlos Martins. I was recording stuff with him. He lives in San Diego or Escondido. And so like I wasn't staying in a rectory. But so I got up and I like walked to a church, which is like maybe like four miles away. So I had like a nice hour walk. And then I was doing

my holy hour at church and then I walked home. And when I got into church, it was like people were trying to figure out how to pray the liturgy of the hours. Uh-huh. There's like a lot of chatter about like pages and flipping and blah, blah, blah, and thus and such. And then they eventually had the Holy Mass. And so I was like there making my holy hour and there's just like a lot of hullabaloo and brew ha ha. Just a lot of people moving around and talking and yada y'all and you're in the pews? I was in the pews in the back just kicking it. And I don't know why. I was like profoundly grateful that the people of God is such just kind of like that the church is such a mess. Because like a parish church is a place in which everything happens, you know, like Southern

California, you got your baptisms, you got your Kinsenayas, you got your wedding, you got your everything. And you can just feel the here comes everybody, nature of the church quite palpably or kind of tangibly in the moment. And like the priest seemed like a good priest. He was preaching for his people. It seemed like he loved his people. And I don't know. It just kind of like soften my heart. Because sometimes, yeah, again, I can just be impatient or lacking in perseverance when it comes to the concrete demands and requests. And I think that's just everybody. Like whether you're married or a priest or anybody other than a hermit, you're going to experience some of that. So I think that the change that has happened in my life over the course. the past 10 years has been a kind of change of intentionality. And I think that what I relish most about being a priest is being able to just give people God, not in that I am the sole possessor of God, but I think that when people approach a priest, they're like, you're the guy that gives me God. So like, don't mess this up. Yeah, exactly. And you can register that as pressure, or you could register that as opportunity. And I find that you do have a precious opportunity as a priest to just

kind of pour into people, as they say. Yeah. And I think you can do that in very simple ways. Just asking people questions. I think that listening is way more generative than I suspected it was 10 years ago. I thought I always had to be talking. I still talk all the freaking time. Nevertheless, I think that listening is really, really precious and it can help people to heal and to grow. Oh, man. Yeah.

Pour into them. That's the thing. Yeah, yeah. So true, isn't it? You know, if you've ever gone through something terrible and you've gone to somebody to share that thing, you've gone to them to share that thing so that you can experience their affection and warmth toward you. as you share them that thing, you know, very rarely do you go to share that thing so that you can get like three pieces of quick advice or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that like, there's something about a good listener that actually there's a part in here in this book,

about conversation specifically. I think a lot of people think of listening as dead time. And they think about like a conversation as percentages. It's like you talk 46% of the time. I talk 54% of the time. And so like we're doing our little calculations as to who's being more egotistical or who's being more altruistic in whatsoever moment. But truth be told, like if the point of conversation is coming together. Yeah. Like if it's a kind of convergence of thought and affection, then listening is really, really precious in the sense that you afford somebody, the opportunity to be vulnerable, to be open, to actually share what he or she is thinking about and like experiencing with a kind of confidence like this person cares and it's not an affectation.

You know, it's not artificial. It's real. You know, it's organic. And I can entrust myself to you on account of the fact that you've given me permission by your eye contact, by setting your phone apart, by actually asking questions of a sensitive sort, you know, like, those types of things. So I think, yeah, lessons learned. As America celebrates 250 years this year, Good Ranchers is honoring the legacy of American ranchers, the hardworking people who help build and feed this country day in and day out. And they take that very seriously. Every single cut you find on Good Ranchers.com is sourcing.

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Have I told you about my experience with this? So I tend to be more introverted. And so if I'm in a crowd of people, I don't like that. I like this a lot. You know, if there's someone else here, I might like that. If somebody else comes, at some point I no longer understand the rules and it tires me out and I just leave. Yep. But I had sort of a thought to myself, well, you know, like I don't want to be fake, you know.

when people stop me, I'm not gonna. But I think what I was really doing was justifying whatever the opposite vices to the virtue of affability. And in fact, that's one of the objections Aquinas responds to is this idea that it's fake. I'm sure you remember this. Do you want to talk?

You don't. Go. Okay. Well, I mean, I think his point of the virtue of affability is that that's how societies have to function. Sure, yeah. So kind of like, just get over it. I have like a little section on affability in here.

And the basic idea is like, I think it's hard to open up as a human being. Or it's just hard to be yourself. Yeah. Because you suspect criticism or suspicion or judgment or whatever. And so with affability, the idea is that you're offering a person a kind of invitation to be himself. And you're saying like, hey, you know, like I'm interested in you and let's see how this goes.

and I also like St. Thomas has a lot of things throughout where he says you got to give people the benefit of the doubt and you got to treat people better perhaps than they deserve because like you can judge things and be somewhat savage in your judgment of things like you know you can judge a microphone in its quality or book in its binding or whatever but like those things don't suffer by virtue of your judgments and you're not looking to cultivate a relationship with those things so like who cares but with people they do stay to suffer by your judgments, especially if you vocalize them. And also, your judgments can militate against the cultivation of a relationship, which is the point, really. That's why God has entrusted us to each other. And so, like, affability, it affords the other space. It affords the other, a kind of leisure in which to, yeah, just be, be himself. What I'm noticing in me and in other people of late is the difference between a sort of fakeness, which, which is maybe fine, right? I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong.

And then at a kind of a genuineness. I mean, what I'm saying is not terribly insightful. But I mean, you go to a cafe sat and something like, hey there, how are you? And you're like, I don't even know if you mean that or if you're seeing me. Sure, yeah. And then there's someone else who's like, hey, how's it going? And there's like, oh, you saw me.

Like you're in touch with me. You're not just rehearsing a line. We're in communication. And I know I full prey to that. Someone, I was in Holy Mass the other day. and someone in the back pew and God bless you if you're the person it just took me off guard

like I was praying and Mass was about to start and this person was so friendly hey Matt great to see you how you doing and I was very fake I was something like oh hello good thank you hi and I think part of that was I didn't I don't know you and like

you could be the most awesome person in the world or maybe you just want to have a really intense inappropriate conversation before mass starts and I'm trying to gauge that sure but I think I came off as and I shouldn't have and I'm sorry for that. Does that make sense? It does.

Yeah. I think too, maybe I mentioned this before in conversation with you, but it is, it can be, I think the fact that many people are superficial and they're superficial because they perhaps just need to get through their day. So if like you're a nurse, for instance, you can't condole with everybody whom you serve because it'd probably kill you. So you have to have a certain, I don't know, professional distance. And I suspect that like the cashier at the 7-Eleven, you know, like doesn't really,

Really care how much that is. Yeah. Well, you have better and worse parts of your eight-hour shift, and I think that you can kind of ebb and flow, and that's totally appropriate. But I like going to like hipster coffee shops, or at least I did when I lived in Louisville, Kentucky. And there were a handful and they were fun. But, you know, like, often enough, the places that say, like, everyone is welcome. That what they effectively mean is everyone is welcome except for you guys. So I'd go in there, I'd be like, doop to do. I'd have my little little theology books that I was planning to read and I was going to get my cool little.

Dressed like a KKK member. Yeah, exactly. And I'd like go to check it. I was like, oh, I would love for myself a little less and such and yada yada. And the person was like, okay. Like, ooh, yikes. But one time I went into this coffee shop, I think it was called Safai. And there's this gal there. And, you know, like, I'm walking in and I'm just kind of gearing up for another somewhat terrible encounter. And maybe she has, like, blue hair and she's got like facial piercings and tattoos and stuff like that. So I'm thinking she's not going to like me. And so I'm just

like, oh, please. Oh, gosh. But then like, for whatever reason, just total warm demeanor or like bearing. and like genuinely nice greeting. And then it was just kind of like, it was like she almost had a sense that I was gearing up for a little bit of a lat town. She's like, why would you think that? You know, like, you're here. We're here.

I'm pumped. You know, like, that was the whole vibe of the exchange. She was like, hey, what can I get for you? And I was like, it melted me. Like, I almost started like crying in a hipster coffee shop. I'm like, but I'm losing it. You know, it's like, so I do think, yeah, that human beings have a unique capacity

to minister to human beings without it being ministry. You know, just being human. I think, often enough in a kind of desertified situation in which you experience nothing after the manner of positive emotional reinforcement, just to have like normal emotional contact can be so refreshing. Oh, I love that. Yeah. I was once stopped me immediately when you realize you've heard me tell you this, okay? Okay, great. I was at a coffee shop in Minnesota, and I'm looking across and there's the Sheila sitting down with blue hair and piercings.

And I was just like judging her and the world. And God have mercy on me a sinner for this. I'm not proud of this. I'm looking at her. I don't mean to overstate it. I wasn't necessarily directing my animus at her, but I was just like, ah, the state of the world, how people dress.

And then I look at what she's reading, and it's my book on pornography. Isn't that nuts? Have I told you that? No, that's awesome. That's a very weird experience to be in a random coffee shop and a blue-haired woman

is reading your book on pornography, which is against pornography for those who are new to the show. You probably could have gathered that. And it was a, I didn't know what to do, but I, without thinking much, I had to go over and tell her. Yeah. I don't know what I expected out of that encounter, but I was like, hey, hey, I wrote their book. And then I even took it from her and opened up the back cover to show her my face to show her.

Like, I'm not just a crazy person who wants to tell you by way of a, I don't know. Anyway, that was weird. Nice. Was she receptive to your revelation? I mean... It's sort of like what we're talking about. Bewildered? What's the three? What does that mean? Oh, that's the third time we mentioned bewildered.

Oh, good job. Well done. Man, I got the counter up. So was she bewildered for? I think it was more... Do you know when people stop you in public and they go, hey, how you doing? And you go, oh, hi, I'm good. And then you kind of, like I said, in the back pew, you wish you could kind of go back.

So maybe it was like that. Maybe I was like slightly too enthusiastic. For got it. But she was lovely. Nice. I keep bringing this up and maybe you can talk into it. All right. I love Ephraim the Syrian.

Nice. And I pray one of his prayers at morning and at night. And in both there's this emphasis on, help me to see my own sin and not to judge my brethren. And for whatever reason, since we're being honest here and opening up about when we want to cry, there's this line in his prayer to the Holy Spirit that says, if I have made, I'm not crying now, just about to burp. I just did. I'm hoping they silence that on the audio trail. No, leave it in. Bewildered.

It says, if I have made fun of my brother's sin when my own faults are countless. I don't know why. Whenever I read that, it just, ah, it hits me. I'm sure this pertains to training the tongue. But this weird need we feel has been given to us to go around the world deciding who's in and who's out and where people are on that spectrum. Not anything God's ever asked you to do. Actually, the opposite.

I understand we're supposed to make judgments and things like this. But just this, yeah, just where does that come from? And how do we overcome that? I think it's more pronounced in a deteriorating society. Like we find ourselves legitimately saddened by the state of things, the state of speech. I was in the elevator day and these fellows were there

just cursing and things like this. I just thought, like, if my children were here, would they do that? And I thought, probably, I'm not sure. That would be sad if they did. You know, so, you know, so I don't know if when you're in a sort of a place in culture that feels morally degenerate, if that is a way of sort of putting up walls to protect yourself from it or something. How do you find that balance, I guess, that I'm asking? Because, you know, you don't want to be an idiot. Like it seems entirely appropriate that if you got a blue-haired woman with piercings and this, that your assumption is she holds a particular worldview and may hold a particular view towards me a priest. That seems like an appropriate thing. Yeah, how do you navigate that?

So a couple quick thoughts. Yeah, I do. There's a little section in the book about sins like insult, you know, like detraction, whispering gossip, those types of things. And I think part of the thing is we just make judgments. So that's just what human minds do on account. of the fact that we encounter different things here, you know, like in our relationships and interactions, and then we need to formulate a kind of position. Or we need to adopt a stance. Yes. That's just how the mind works. Now, I think there are reasons for which we tend to be negative in our judgments. I'm sure there are like evolutionary biologists who have cool theories as to why it's good to be negative because then you notice threats or menaces to your bodily

integrity and then you survive and then you pass on your genetic code. So my suspicion is that we're probably inclined, if not by nature, at least by fallen nature, to notice the negative more readily than the positive. So it's just a matter of we need to adopt an intellectual stance. We're probably inclined to a certain degree of negativity. And then the next thing is, I think a lot of people are hurt, and they find that the way in which to kind of create space in which to manage their hurt is to hurt back. So it's like, I register a hurt done by whomever. You know, like maybe I have it in my mind that people with blue hair hurt me because they treat me poorly. coffee shops and so my judgments of them while perhaps based in fact or perhaps based in accurate sociological

observations might be motivated by a kind of counter hurt you know it might just kind of be an effort in which i'm buoying myself up by yeah creating some space so that these people don't hurt me again there is another sense in which too like we might just be living in the world of comparisons you think about the sin of envy for instance st thomas says it's supposed to opposed to the virtue of charity. Hatred is chemically opposed to the virtue of charity. And then he identifies two sins which are opposed to joy, which is like his kind of principal fruit of charity.

And those he says are a chatee or sloth and then envy. Both of them are a matter of sadness. So like sloth is a kind of sadness that the divine good is so lofty because I basically think I'm unable to attain it. And then envy is a kind of sadness that the other has been thus blessed or that the other is excellent in this way,

kind of gaining honor and glory, however, you know, because it seems like that diminishes my own excellence. You know, it's like there's only so much good to go around. And if this person's got whatever percentage of good on offer, then I've got that much less available to me. And so it's like you could have all the good things in the world, but if somebody has more or if somebody has things which you judge better by comparison, it causes you a certain sadness.

And then so sometimes we use our faculty of speech. We use our judgments and our faculty of speech to undermine that person's reputation or that person's relationships, so as to kind of claim for ourselves, something of the good that we feel that we've lost. So I think it's just intellectual posture, kind of tendency to negativity. Sometimes it's pushing back against hurt,

but other times it's just trying to get others to suffer so that we can, I don't know, make out better by comparison. These intellectual sins like pride and envy, et cetera, are sins that we notice palpably in other people. Yeah. And we hate them when we encounter. us talked about this. Like pride is that sin that we detest when we encounter in somebody else,

but rarely notice in ourselves. So the question is how do we notice if we're being envious or prideful? What prevents us from seeing that? Yeah, yeah. How on God should we be against it without falling into a sort of neuroticism? Sure. How do we repent of it? Yeah, I think so pride classically understood as opposed to humility. In humility, you recognize that every good and perfect gift comes down to us from the Father of Lights? Or what do you have that you have not received? If therefore you have received it, why do you boast as if it were your own?

So humility clues into the kind of gift-like character of our human lives, whereas the prideful person thinks it's his by right, and he often thinks himself better than he is in fact. So there's a kind of blindness and an inordinate or like a kind of disorderly self-estimation. You just think you're awesome, and you might be good, but you're not as awesome as you think.

I think part of why, so you can identify pride in another person because that person thinks he's the center of the universe. And it's clear to you that he's not the center of the universe. The reason for which it's clear to you is because you're the center of the universe. Because all of us experience our lives as if we were at the center of the universe because we're at the center of our lives. And so I think that, you know, you can do any number of things to confront pride head on, like praying the litany of humility, for instance. But I basically think every effort at displacing yourself from the so-called center will convict you as to your pride and help you grow beyond it. I don't know if you ever heard that lecture that David

Foster Wallace gave. It's like a commencement address at Kenyon College from late 90s early aughts. I don't think so. Basically he says like this is the point of a liberal education, you know, to displace yourself from the center. And he, who tried our CIA twice and, you know, didn't persevere in either instance. He said that the point of this displacement is worship. because if it is the case that we're creatures, then our lives ought be referred to our creator. And so we need to be able to create this space at the center so God can take up residence there.

You know, not just like emotionally and psychologically, but spiritually. So I think when it comes to confronting pride, the effort has to be at like getting over ourselves or kind of taking our own selves a little lighter than we do at present. Yeah. With a recognition that there are more important things,

that there are better things that, you know, like there's God to be worshipped rather than self to be kind of pet, petted. Who knows what the past tense of that is. That litany of humility is something everybody should look up and pray at least once, because if you're praying it sincerely, you'll realize how wretched you are. Yeah. But then I like your point about, you're, displacing yourself in little acts. Like what really bothers me, many things we've discovered during this interview is when you,

the plane comes to a halt, the light goes off and people who stand up and walk past people, they also should be pushed to the fringe of society with the rest who are listening to their phones like your mother on speakerphone. That is, that drives me crazy. But a good question for me to ask myself is, does that, why does that bother you because they're going to get ahead of you? Because maybe that's something I could permit. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, yeah.

Like the times that people, in my estimation, cut me off or prevent me from attaining the thing that I want to, the fact that that bothers me so much may be an indication of my pride. Yeah. Or just attachment to your own way. Yes. I think that like, you know, sometimes they make the announcement. You know, there are folks who have tight connections. Can you stay in your seats for a second? They're going to come to the front of the plane and then you can put up.

100% okay with that. Totally makes sense. And it might be the case that the people that are pushing to the front have tight connections. connections they're just not announced or that they just haven't been signaled by the stewardess, who knows. But I also think that whenever we find ourselves in a position where we think that our time is more precious than that of another or our priorities are more important than that of another, often enough, like we're often operating under these premises unconsciously. So like for instance, like why would I drive like a crazy man on the highway trying to get ahead of this, that and the other car?

It's like, where am I trying to get and what do I, what goal do I have in mind? I was coming home from an event at Christendom College. This had been, it doesn't matter when it was a been. But I was coming home from an event and, you know, I think I left the college at like 930 and front royals maybe an hour and a half from where I live in Washington, D.C. And so I'm thinking like, all right, if I get in bed by 1115, then I can get X number of hours asleep and I have this mass tomorrow morning at this church, which requires this amount of preparation, this drive and then my holy hour and then morning prayer and then blah blah, blah, that and such. I'm doing all the calculation in my head.

And I'm driving because it's like I just want to get to bed. But it also started snowing. and snow is a healthy reminder sometimes that you ought to slow down. Like I wasn't just speeding with impunity, but I was going faster than I needed to, and I was also stressing myself out. You know, and so like you show up at home

and you're all wound in a knot because you've been driving for an hour and a half. So you could get to bed earlier, and then you can't sleep because you're stressed out. Because you're crazy. So I think that we just find ourselves in those situations where it's like, I'm more important or I'm to be preferred,

and it's just like, is that true? And I think when we can catch ourselves and dial things back, And it's not just take it slow, but also seed ground. Like there are six seats on this, whatever, CRJ 700. I don't actually know the names of planes. And let's say that you're in seat A. So presumably, like, let's say C gets up and then B gets up, like, do you need to hustle?

Or can you let D-E-F go? Like, it doesn't matter at the end of the day. You can offer. And then the guy's going to be like, my wife has a carry-on on the overhead and it's back one row, so go ahead. You know, but it's like you just had a humane experience in which you recognized another individual as with equal rights as it were to the right of way. I'm ashamed. You're like you're accidentally calling out many of my current sins,

you know, of people and just not, yeah, wow. That's really scary, isn't it? When you realize how inattentive you've been to this fact, you're just going to go around life as if you're the center of the universe,

getting frustrated when people decide they are, not being willing to offer that up with any kind of peace, but not knowing the whole time that you were doing that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it seems to me that in order to be attentive to that, uh, we need space.

We need to develop a sort of interiority. Yep. Which can't be done, I don't think, uh, without silence. And so if I'm continually just, uh,

consuming podcasts and scrolling through TikTok or whatever it is people do or I do, then maybe I could never really be fully present to myself. to see these disorders. Yeah. And I also think, too, like, we can be conscious about just checking our immediacy expectations. You know, like, if you're looking at your email and growing frustrated that somebody hasn't gotten back to you as quickly as you think they ought, maybe in, like, one out of every seven instances, that's true because corporate policy is acknowledged within an hour and respond

within 24 hours or whatever it is. But six out of seven times, it's like, who cares? You know, people interact with email in different ways. Some people don't respond, you know, some people respond eventually. Some people respond immediately. You know, it's just people have different expectations. So when we feel the immediacy expectations kind of welling up within us, that can be a good little occasion to say, ooh, I was about to send a nasty email. I don't need to send a nasty email.

Beyond not needing to send a nasty email, I need to just take a quick second to recollect myself in, what am I worried about? or what am I stressed about or why am I feeling this urgency with such a, ugh, vehemence? Because I think that often enough, what lies in the background is a kind of pride, where it's just like these people aren't doing what I want. Once we get into the habit of like controlling people, manipulating people, using people, and we do that in somewhat third-going fashion, then we're well down the garden path of Pride Town. 80,000 babies. That's how many lives were saved last year through our sponsor, Pre-Born,

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What I want to talk about, though, is how we did, I know we've been talking about this, but I want to focus more on how we detect that in ourselves because narcissism is this word that gets used a lot today. And maybe for good reason, what do I know? But I'm pretty sure that if you and I would have gone on YouTube right now and look it up, it wouldn't be about detecting your own narcissism. It would all be about, almost exclusively be about,

dealing with your mother's narcissism. Like everybody else is a narcissist, you know, and that seems narcissistic to me. You know what I mean? Maybe we could talk about how time spent before our Lord and the Blessed Sacrament in silence can be an antidote to that because I'm giving space to sort of be self-reflective in the presence of the Lord. Yeah, no, for sure. No, I think there are various ways in which we can begin to heal and grow beyond our

pride. And I think that time and space are kind of necessary preconditions in the sense that if I'm always hustling from A to B, then I'm probably going to hustle past a lot of people. And, you know, life is complicated. And sometimes you have to fulfill certain obligations or perform certain duties. And there's going to be some measure of hustling. Nevertheless, if our whole life is constituted by hustle, we don't have that time. We don't have that space. Then we're probably going to miss out. And I think some people are completely content to do this because they think they're hustling towards a bigger venue or a better show or whatever else. You know, like they have it in mind that this is by way of advancement. And I think that what lies in the background there is like a lot of people are worried that this isn't their real life.

Like what they're doing right now doesn't really matter too terribly much, but they're about to arrive or they're about to get there. This reminds me of Larry David's joke, wherever I am, I want to get the hell out of this. So I think a lot of people think that. And it can be difficult to reconcile ourselves to our actual circumstances. Like, this is, this is God loving me. This is God saving me. It may not be the circumstances that I would have ordinarily chosen or given my kind of dream vocation.

I wouldn't have envisioned myself here. Nevertheless, I can see how this is precious. You know, like if I do the work of trying to reconcile myself to the will of God, I can see how this is for the good. You know, I can see how this is him loving me. This is him saving me. But I think a lot of us are inclined to look past our lives because we have it and I don't know, somewhere tucked away

that there's a bigger and a better. And I think that one place in which we can be, yeah, like you said, reconciled to our lives as they are, our real lives, which are not elsewhere, which are here and now, is in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. Because it's a kind of performance of what we anticipate to do for all eternity.

And so you can't skip heaven. You can't hustle past heaven. You can't improve upon heaven. You just abide in heaven. heaven, you know, unto ages of ages. And so as the end is, so should the means be. Now, we can't live at present as if we were in heaven wholly and entirely. Again, you got certain responsibilities, you got certain duties, you got to hustle a little bit. But nevertheless, we should, basically, our time here on earth should reflect what we anticipate our time in heaven will be.

Because if it's like there's a complete disjunct, that's like weird. You know, if it were just a mere matter of delayed gratification. Like a lot of the Lord's promises just don't make that much sense. You know, it's like 160, 30-fold in this life and in the next. You know, like, he is the pearl of great price. You have him at present. And so you should be able to appreciate the riches that you have. I'm blathering a little bit.

But the basic idea is that in Eucharistic worship, we have a forced haste of heaven. You know, so like in the setting of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the prolongation or the extension of that in Eucharistic adoration, the life of prayer more broad It's just like that one peasant said in the curie of ours is parish, he looks at me and I look at him. And that's enough. You know, like to be in the presence of one, whom you love and who loves you beyond all measure, that's enough. Because that's the whole point. That's the reason for which we are made persons so that we can live in interpersonal communion.

Yeah, that's beautiful. I love what you said earlier that my life is not somewhere else. It's here right now. John Lennon said something not as profound perhaps, but somewhat the idea. I think it's actually quite profound. I remember hearing a philosophy professor once in a class making fun of this. And I actually thought it was pretty profound. Life is what happens to you while you're busy planning something else.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. That's right. That's true. And so this is why I love this idea that's kind of maybe more prominent in Eastern Christian spirituality of like abiding in the heart. And just this John 15 idea, right, of abiding in the vine, just to remain present before him. So I don't know how snow works. but I can play in it all the same. But so too can children.

And I don't really, I have no idea what it means that God is as attentive to me as he is to my mother in South Australia right now, maybe sleeping. I don't know. You see? I don't know what that means because I don't know how to be present to my children all at the same time. I'd prefer it if God were present to me in the way a beekeeper were present to his bees. I could at least somehow understand that better, yeah? but I can give myself over to that truth without having what wait I don't understand that well you think of a beekeeper he he's present to his bees as a sort of blob of beiness

I like the idea I don't like the idea but it's more understandable to me that God would be present to us as a blob of humanity oh okay he doesn't know me individually he's an attentive to me fine I can accept that he's attentive to oh y'all see what I mean that I can I guess intellectually grasp that more I was just picturing like that suit with those gloves Yeah. And like... That's right. God is outside of the earth. Yeah, that, again, I think people would have an easier time with that. If there was like an invisible beekeeper, we're like, all right, sure, I can get down with that.

But the idea that God knows me now and is holding me in existence now and knows what's going on within my heart now, that's what the Christian church teaches, yes? Yes. That's bananas, right? I don't understand that, but I can submit myself to it in the way I can sort of submit myself to sunshine. I don't know how it produces vitamin D. I don't even know what vitamin D means. Yeah, yeah. And I don't need to.

I just know that, well, all right, I guess I'll give that a shot. And I think something similar, right, that I can give myself over to the good God and say, I am here and you are here. And submit myself to this truth that Holy Mother Church has taught me. And there's something about living in union with the good Jesus, who, again, I don't know what it means to say he exists within me. You could tell me, I'm sure, but even if you did, I wouldn't know what it meant. So I just submit myself to that and just to be in continual communication with him.

And that is the only way I know how to live a good life. And that when I'm doing that, I end up less stressed, less threatened, more able to be present to the person in front of me, you know? Because I think that's probably why a lot of the time we're not present to the barista or to whoever is because we're not even present to ourselves, much less the good Jesus. Yeah, yeah. Now, you say that again, but with all your theological knowledge. No, I think, yes. Or don't. I can say any number of things, but some of them will be coherent and some of them will be incoherent, as is my custom. I'm thinking about the, again, apropos of the theme. Last year, I was having an easy time thinking about God because I was sick and stressed,

and so there was a constant reminder to refer to my life to God because it felt like I was just, you know, dying on the inside. Yeah. That's somewhat dramatic, but that's how it felt. now less so because I'm not sick and I'm less stressed and I'm actually feeling pretty good but what I find is that like in the context of prayer for instance I just start making lists or my practical intellect just runs wild as to the various things that I could be getting done not like I'm of divided heart and I feel like I oughtn't to be praying but in the sense that after I'm praying I'm going to be hustling and it's like that's what's really important

to me or at least my mind's kind of fretting would say. seem to suggest that that's what's really important to me. That's like, does my stomach need to be twisted in a knot or does my brain need to be aflame with worry in order for me to care about this? And I think that that's like, that's the work of the Christian life, irrespective of how you're feeling or how you're doing, just to refer your life to God in the sense that, you know, this work of displacement, like I get out of the way so that he takes center stage because that's just the objective state of affairs. I want to reconcile myself to the objective state of his affairs. But also, like whatever I'm experiencing is something that I can direct to him, like in conversation

with affection as a kind of token of love. I think like, okay, here we go. This is the most concrete thing that I'll say. I think a lot of people think that they can't give God anything. Not on the one hand, that's true because he's already given us everything. Everything that we would give him is already his gift, so it's just kind of giving back. Okay. But more so, I think that people have it in their mind that they're required to offer a perfect sacrifice. And in order to offer a perfect sacrifice, they need to be in a spot to offer it, like emotionally or psychologically or spiritually. You know, so they need to have like moved beyond habitual sin, cultivated heroic virtue and kind of find themselves in the first stages of infused contemplation,

and then now they're going to be ready to rock. And so, yeah, they just, they spend a lot of their lives working up towards a thing that God is asking from them now. So what are we misunderstanding? Well, so like take the example of forgiveness. Like, picture a person who can't forgive. And maybe I've talked about this with you before. I forget. I repeat myself a lot. Like say this person is just really, really angry at another person, feeling very fendictive, very vengeful, hurt, you know, just beyond compare, and just can't find it in his heart to forgive this individual. And knows, you know, God asks us to forgive and just can't even get the prayer out, you know, like grant me the grace to forgive this individual. I want to love this individual. I know that I have to love this individual, but I can't,

at this stage of the game, muster the courage to do so. Just like that's just not available to him. I think that that person still has something to give. You know, like, Lord, I'm vindictive. Lord, I'm vengeful. I give you my vindication. Amen. I give you my vengeance. You know, and you might say like, well, I don't know, like, that's kind of evil.

Do we give God evil thing? Well, like, here's the thing. Maybe it's just the case that I'm tempted by evil thoughts. Or maybe it's the case that I'm tempted by evil activities. But if I give God those thoughts, if I give God those activities, I'm effectively giving him myself, which is what God. wants. Yes, I see. That's what he wants now. That's what he wants forever and ever and always. So why just, why wait to the forever and ever and always? Why not just do it now, even though

what you have to offer a present stinks? And that's another thing that's beautiful about Eucharistic worship is that the Lord has given us the perfect sacrifice to offer. We talk about uniting our sacrifices with his. That's a totally appropriate theological expression. But we have it in our minds that like we have to be there making perfect sacrifices. That's exactly not the point or that's not, You get it. I don't know how word order works. But he that's, his is already the perfect sacrifice. I'm shouting. His is already the perfect sacrifice. So like it doesn't matter what our sacrifices look like at all. It just doesn't matter at all. It's like he's offering a chalice of wine and we just put in a little drop of water. And that's sufficient. That's like he just wants us. And the way in which we give him us is by just referring our lives to him by making a sacrifice of whatever we have available to us, whether it's resentment or lack of forgiveness or self-accusation. or yada yada, yada, thus and such, like, we can go into all the details. And so I think that, yeah, maybe back to your point, that's it. That's the idea.

Yeah, that's beautiful. My friend John Eldridge refers to maybe what you're talking about as practicing First Peter 5.7. Okay. Like, how do I surrender? What's First Peter 5, 7? Cast all your anxieties upon him because he cares for you. And so one of the ways that John does this and has taught others to do this is to say something like, Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit, I give everything and everyone to you.

And to repeat that and to be specific about what it is you're giving to him. Is it something like that? Yeah, that's something like that. But beyond just giving everyone and everything, like even give the parts of your life, which at present you judged to be ugly, unsavory. That's what he means. Okay, perfect. Yeah. It's even giving to you that I can't give to you.

It's surrendering what I can't surrender. Something that I read recently and I've been trying to do is like when you first, fall into serious sin and feel great shame and anxiety to give that to him. Yeah, yeah. Like, I give you that pain. I offer this pain to you. Yeah. What do you think about that? Yeah. And I think you can offer him the sin itself. Yeah. Okay. In the sense that like, what does that mean? Obviously, you want the sin to be pardoned. Yeah. Right. And you want to be healed and groaned beyond the sin. But the purpose of being healed and grown beyond the sin isn't so that you end up like an nubrimench so that way you can wander off and not need god like you can in a certain sense

rejoice on account of the fact that god has permitted this sin which convicts you as to your dependence and sends you back to him with contrite heart just just convicted to the marrow of your bones that apart from him you have nothing and so you can give him that you know like in the sense that i mean the sins of sin is a sin and he'll take big ones or small ones as occasions whereby to bring you back like in the sense of like convert you more deeply but at the end of the day if like our sinlessness becomes a kind of occasion of idolatry, right? That can be a stumbling block, you know, insofar as we can begin to esteem ourselves strong apart from God,

whereas we're only ever strong in God. You know, he chooses the weak to shame the strong. And it's in my weakness that I am strong. And so I think the point of this isn't to say, like, we'll never grow as human beings. No, we will grow. We will heal. That's the promise.

And it'll be accomplished in most excellent fashion in heaven. But our growth goes by way of recognizing one that we're creatures. who look to our creator for everything, and two, that we're adopted sons and daughters, and that we have a father who loves us. And it's like, until we get those two truths into our minds and hearts, like we'll always be tempted to wander off.

And so I think that what we have here on earth is just opportunity after opportunity to be convicted, right, and to kind of be drawn in the wake of our Lord as he makes his moves, you know, like as he conducts us further up and further in. I want to talk about how the body matters in reference to Eucharistic devotion.

I suppose what I'm saying is how can we grow in our love and devotion of the Holy Eucharist? This is just a simple question. And I would think part of it, I'll just say what I want you to say, and then you'll say it better. Lema. Is something like, I know it can be perceived as holier than thou, and perhaps it's the reason we're doing it. And certainly that wouldn't be a good thing. But there's something about walking into a chapel, and I'm not saying this is necessary. Or not weird, but just to get on both knees and to just drop your head to the floor and to say,

I love you, Jesus. I thank you for yourself. Thank you that you love me. There's something about using your body that teaches your soul, obviously. This is the whole point of liturgy, I suppose, part of the point of liturgy. But yeah. Yes. So, again, I have some thoughts in the aforementioned book, your Eucharistic identity.

But like the main point of that is like what God wants. us to do is show up. So I think that without being overly simplistic, I think a lot of it has to do with proximity, not just with proximity of mind and heart, but also with proximity of body. So on my way here today, I woke up at whatever, X o'clock, and then I celebrated the Holy Mass, and then I ate breakfast, and then I went to the airport, and on my little trip, I prayed some of the liturgy of the hours, and then I got on the plane. And in the past, sometimes I've, like, made my holy hour on the plane, because if I'm going to be bopping to someplace that's far away and yada yada. How do you do that? What does that mean?

Basically, I just put my hood up and then I put on a sleep mask, which suggests don't disturb me. And then I just think about God for an hour. But I just found, like more and more over the course of the past five years, I've been convinced that if I can get to a church, I should get to a church. So I just looked up directions to the studio and then I stopped at a Spanish-speaking parish on. roots. And so I like knocked on the doors the type of thing where it wasn't just like doors open. I was like, Podreiraesar in the presence of De Santissimo. And then I was like, yeah, yeah, for sure, it's in the capia. And I was actually like, it was really beautiful because I got the impression from the ambient noise that this is an active parish and that there are a lot of folks working at the

parish. But all of them were bopping in for little visits. So was the Ucatshapp, no, it's just the Lord's in the tabernacle. Yeah, exactly. But people were just coming in to pray. And a lot of folks were getting on their knees and a lot of people were putting their foreheads on the floor. And there's this one woman who was praying and she was working whatever out. She was working out with the Lord and crying. And it was just like super tender. I'm just like this strange person that they don't know. They've never seen me before. I don't live here. But there's something just beautiful about our Lord's proximity. And again, we put it in terms of friendship. You quoted John 15. He's the vine. We're the branches. He's called us friends, no longer

slaves. It pertains to friends to do what, to share their secrets to spend time. And so the Lord shares with us everything he has from the Father. And he spends time with us. and Eucharistic liturgy. So even though he has ascended to the right of the Father, yet he remains, you know, truly, really in the Blessed Sacrament. And so I think that, like, sometimes we have it in our minds that there's like a secret key to Christian life or that there's a code we need to crack.

And then until such time as we obtain the key or crack the code, then we're on the outside looking in. And we're just this mundane thing. It's not dramatic. It's not what it could be. But I think this is our Christian life, again, life is not elsewhere, it's here. And I think a lot of it is just to be conducted in the intimacy and intensity of proximity. And so I think that, like, what should people do? I think about my

sister. So, like, my one sister, she prays each morning. She has five kids, all of whom are nine and younger, at this stage of the game. And she doesn't necessarily have a ton of time, but she makes time. And what she'll do is sort of drive the car to the church parking lot, and she'll pray in her car. I don't think the church is open at that time, but she just wants to be close to the Blessed sacrament, which I just think is really cool. Because it's not magical. It's not talismanic. It's not an amulet. But it's, but it's his true presence. It's his real presence. And he has made himself really, truly present so that we can gather around, so that we can congregate, so that we can worship. And so I think that the whole point in that book is basically God has instituted the sacraments

as signs, which give us goods, you know, which give us graces. And so read the signs. So St. Thomas directs our attention to the fact that, like, there's a twofold consecration. What is that signify? Calvary. It makes Calvary present. There's, you know, bread and wine. What does that signify? Sussinance, festivity. It's meant to sustain us. It's meant to delight us with charity. And then, out of many grains, one loaf, out of many grapes, one chalice. Out of many Christians, one mystical body. It is making us one in the mystical body. So if we just show up and bring ourselves with whatever, like, attention span we have, with whatever concerns we have, and present ourselves, you know, like approximately to the Lord, the logic of his Eucharist,

sacrifice will work its way into our bones. It'll work his way into our minds and hearts and gradually draw us in his wake. So I think it's like the proposal is it's simple. It's not to be complicated. It's got to be constant. It's got to be consistent. You know, you got to keep showing up. But the Lord who has begun a good work in you will see it to completion. I like Jordan Peterson's rule, what's something you could do that you would do that would make your life better. And what I love about that rule is the would you do part. And so maybe after this podcast, people are going to get like jazzed out of their minds and going to commit to an hour of adoration every morning and they'll do it for, I'm talking about myself, they'll do it for like two days and then they

won't do it anymore. So what do you think about that advice? About being, I like what you said though, about being constant. I think that is really important. This is why I'm always encouraging people to be modest in the devotions that they choose. How does that apply to Eucharistic adoration? Sure. Yeah. So a couple of small thoughts, actually, apropos. Eucharistic miracles. There were a couple of Eucharistic miracles because when the Blessed Sacrament wasn't as widely available for adoration, like prior to the 13th century, sometimes not even reserved in a tabernacle in the church in a way that you could worship publicly, people would just take the Blessed Sacrament home and they would make little shrine. And then it

would start bleeding. Don't do that. So don't do that. So one thing is, I would say a lot of people have it in their mind that either you're a daily communicant or you're a Sunday Holy Day communicant and never the twain shall meet in the sense that like maybe I shouldn't go to daily mass because I don't want to go to daily mass every day. Whereas I just don't think that's true. I think you can go to daily mass here or there on occasion. So too, I think a lot of people have it in their minds like I need to do something that I can do every day. I can't get to church every day and pray in the presence of the blessed sacrament. So I'll just, I'll do my prayer at home. Yeah. Where it's like, bro, you can pray in the presence of the blessed sacrament once a week or twice a

week. So I think it's like set a standard and that standard will probably have to account for the complexity of your life. You take vacations. Sometimes you work in person. Sometimes you work remotely. But I think it's like to kind of be on the lookout for opportunities for intensity, intimacy in your Eucharistic worship. And so I'd say the kind of sine qua non, the baseline is that you pray every day. You know, in the sense, like if it's a friendship, then friends commune. And I'd say, the number that I often say is 20 minutes. But if you're not there, you're not there. Fine, five minutes. And I think that you can pray by one, maybe reading a word of sacred scripture, thinking about God, asking for what you need and thanking him for what he's given you. That's five minutes well spent. Now, if you have the opportunity to bop into a church, I think you should prefer mass to mental prayer, but you might mix it up. So see if you can make it to a daily mass here and there. Again, I'm not saying once a week.

I'm not saying once a month. I'm not giving you a cadence. I'm just saying open to the possibility that this is for you, you know? Or you pass by a church and you're not in a rush. Bop in. It sounds like the type of thing that most people won't do because people with cars tend to think in terms of destinations and they don't really think of anything along the way. It's part of the reason for which we don't know how to get from A to B without GPS at this stage. But I think that to kind of have this sensibility, and one thing that you can do is just make the sign of the cross when you pass by a church to reaffirm that there's something going on there and that something going on is good. And then I'd say, you know, like to pray in the presence of the exposed blessed sacrament, when you can. And again,

not saying once a week. I'm not saying once a month, but I'm saying at intervals. And if you want to make it liturgical, well, you've got certain feasts, which are especially precious opportunities, like Corpus Christi, for instance, which is associated with a Eucharistic miracle of Bolsena or Oviedo, where priest, doubted, bled, corporal, you can see that. Some people think that that's part of the inspiration for Urban the Fourth telling St. Thomas Aquinas to write the office of Corpus Christi. So I think it's like, I think the first encouragement is to break out of this idea that either I'm a bare bones Catholic or I'm a turbo Catholic. You're just Catholic, all right? Or you're just Christian in the case of folks who are working the way there or whatever.

And then I'd say, seek to live an organic life, which is friendly. And you want to have your baseline because you don't want to say, I'll pray whenever I feel like it. You probably won't pray. Or you won't pray with the frequency that Christians ought to pray. So daily commitments, but then seeking a kind of Eucharistic. you know, intensity and intimacy whenever you have the opportunity. And to do so not by way of imposition or let's start with rules, but let love lead and then see where it takes you.

And yeah, be delighted when it takes you in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. An unfair question, because I haven't prepped you for this, haven't prepped you for any of this, but do you know if there's been any Eucharistic miracles in the Orthodox churches? I don't know. Yeah. It's interesting how Eucharistic adoration, I think there are some instances, maybe very few in Orthodox churches.

Okay. But it's not common. Yeah, yeah. And that's okay. I don't know. Yeah, there's something about the simplicity and the, yeah, of Eucharistic adoration. Like it's almost like you could try a little harder if you want me here. Like just a few rays of light or something.

Maybe the carpet doesn't have to smell like cat urine. Right. You know, in a dank basement. Yeah. But there is something. I mean, I go back to Pascal's line, all of the world's problems come from the fact that man does not know how to sit alone in a dark room silently. Yeah. No, I think the last chapter in the book is about Eucharistic adoration. And I just talk a little bit about my experience of insomnia. I'm not nearly as insomnia, whatever the adjective is, as a lot of people. But I'll get wound up and then I can't sleep.

And I think one of the things is beautiful about Eucharistic adoration is that it gives you a kind of trajectory for giving up. So like often enough when we give up, we're just giving up and it's an act of desperation. Whereas I think that we all need to give up, like in the sense like we all need to stop trying at certain points in our life because you just can't sustain the effort throughout its whole course. But then the question is with whom or towards whom will you give up. And I think like for a lot of us it's like with our mom or maybe with our dad or with a close friend. it's like these are the people that you can be dissolved in tears and totally, you know, at odds ends and not fear judgment and just feel a kind of comfort and consolation that there's somebody there to love you. But, you know, you know, you might be in situations where you don't have access to those people, you know, like people die or people move or people live at great distances. And at the end of the day, like the human comforts and human consolations will only ever be so rich or they'll only ever be so good.

Whereas I do think what the Lord wants of us is to kind of give up in his direction in the sense that like salvation. is his to work out. I mean, it pertains to him by right. Because what is it? It's just the giving of divine life, in our case, to sinful people. So he's going to do what he's going to do. You talked about the litany of humility, the last line there, that others become holier than I, provided that I become as holy as I should. That's savage. But I think the basic idea of that is God's going to make you as holy as he makes you. So our responsibility is just to show up for that. And so I think there's this real spiritual good that can be gained from kind of like giving up in God's direction. And I think that adoration gives you that opportunity.

So I'll be like in my room. I'll try to get to bed because I want to get a good night's sleep because blah, blah, blah. It's the next day and it's, bleh. And then it's like 1015, 10.30, 1045, 11, 11, 15, 11, 30, 11, 45. It's like, I'm not going to sleep tonight. Bummer. And, you know, you can spend the rest of the night raving or doing your laundry or learning the Dominican right, which I did one time between like 2 and 7 a.m.

You celebrated that at my house. Let's go. Beautiful. Let's go. Or you can just bop down to the chapel if you live in the kit, you know, in a religious house and something that I find super precious about that is like I'm not using the Lord as my sleeping draught you know like I'm not using him as my tonic I'm just this is terrible you know like to be awake in the middle of the night just stinks it's just awful but I can kind of give up in your

direction in the sense like I can have it be awful but with you and that takes some of the sting out of it and it sweetens my experience sometimes you fall asleep you know because like the Lord unwinds you or the Lord undoes you whatever he does but I just think that Eucharistic adoration It's not a project. You know, you shouldn't come in there with your checklist with your 57 prayers to recite. I think it's just a place in which you can kind of give up in God's direction and let him do with you what he wants to do with you. Beautiful. I know this is clearly not the point, but I'd like to talk a little bit about insomnia. Yes. Because I had a terrible sleep last night. Bummer. And I, yeah. Is that often or is that rare? It's increasingly common. I tend to, I tend to go to bit early. Okay.

Maybe I'm going to bed two. Nine, ten? Yep. Yeah, nine. If I had my choice, it would be nine. But then I'll wake up at like two or three. And I feel like I'm up for about, and I know it's nothing compared to what you've gone through. So I don't mean to equate it.

But it's like an hour, you know, hour and a half. And I'll go to bed, but then I'll wake up again. Yeah. And then I'll wake up at like five. And then I can't go back to sleep. So, you know, this is the nice thing about long form podcasts. We can meander to different tributaries. What have you found?

has helped you other than adoration. Yeah, right. Adoration for one. So, like, I'd say one set of answers on this side, another set of answers on that side. I found that, like, you know, every time you talk to somebody

about insomnia, they have their recommendations. Yeah, and like, sometimes you're open to them, and sometimes you're like, you have to be taking this herbal supplement. Do I? Yeah, so I'd like to think that I've tried most of them at this stage of the game. And the reason for which I loved the kind of Eucharistic adoration solution, though it's not a solution so much, is just a further question, is that it kind of broke me out of that paradigm. It just made it possible for me to stop trying to fix the situation. It was like, who cares? You know, just this time is worthy. Because it's not that your time outside of the presence of the blessed sacrament is unworthy, but it's especially worthy in the presence of the blessed sacrament. Because you can, you know, you get the sense or you believe in faith that God is doing with you, what he is doing with you.

So I'd say that, like, kind of giving up is, for me, that was the most important step. But then it turns out my stomach issues have proven instrumental in the resolution of some of my insomnia issues. Because now, like, I just, I got to the point with stomach issues where, like, I could only really have one cup of coffee a day and it just had to be like a little shot of espresso. And I wasn't smoking cigars, really. And I wasn't, I didn't have dairy or I didn't have raw onions or I didn't have tabanabe sauce. So, like, all of, like, the inflammation and the problems that I was having, I think were causing. or making it harder for me to settle down because of the stress and just because of the upset. So less caffeine, less tobacco, not things that you would necessarily want to hear.

But I tried like Valerian root and Coms Forte and melatonin and magnesium three and eight. And I tried all these different kinds of things. And I just didn't find that any of them really helped that much. They kind of helped a little bit, but there's something nice as you get older in that your body will punish you for acting poorly. Yeah. If you and I were to continue to try to live the way we may have lived in our late teens, early 20s, yeah, your body will punch you in the face. We're not, anyway. And then you, and then what?

You know, you wake up exhausted. Yep. And then when you're exhausted, you reach for the quickest antidote. Sure. And that's often not a good thing, right? It's like the chocolate or the bread or the sin. And then it's just this spiral. Yeah, yeah. I think for me, I wonder what you think about this is just to not eat as late.

I think it was Nate Bargatsy who has the joke, you know, once after 40, you can tell where everything is in your body that you've just eaten. Oh, yeah, it's right there. It's right behind the heart. Yeah. I think we'll talk about that in terms of weight gain or weight loss, like cutting out late eating is a great way in which to lose weight. I don't know how concerned you are about that. Not so much about that, but sleeping, I would like to sleep. I think it's, I mean, some people recommend. Less liquids, too. liquids yeah those get you up apparently there's like some eastern society that has liquid consumption down to a science such that like the tension of the bladder wakes them up at a certain time they don't need alarm clocks because if you eat this or if you drink this amount at this time then you will be woken up at this hour that's incredible um i just heard this a couple of days probably not true nevertheless i'm repeating it um can't help myself uh so what did you look at i was looking at superman i hadn't noticed him until this point isn't that fantastic that is awesome that's seinfeld Superman you ever watch sign for it? You shouldn't because that's disgusting and you'd be a dirty sinner. But if you did, you would have seen that exact. I love it. That's awesome. Superman. Sleep. Sleep. Insomnia,

eating stuff. Oh yeah. Some people say that you should eat a little bit before you go to bed because sometimes we awake out of hunger, you know, or like... Not a problem of life. Never concerned. Yeah, that's not. Also, too, like when you carry a lot of stress in your body, your cortisol just surges. So that's a good question. I presume it's that. What do you do to do? to de-stress? So, a lot of it, so I don't know anything about this stuff. Let's just pretend you do. Okay.

What's that good to do? I have worked with basically folks who do, I don't know, reform wellness. You had Jackie in the pot. Oh, Jackie's terrific. Yeah. So the basic idea, like they ran me through a bunch of tests to determine how I was doing and they're like, okay, so this is an indication of stress very high. You know, admitting to stress is quite humbling.

Yeah. Well, like, their thing is you can actually get addicted to stress. Yeah. I mean, we've all been there when you're like, I'm going to read some Dostoevsky tonight. And you're like, but I could also, and then you get a bunch of stuff done, because we just live in fight or flight. They have this whole thing with like sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and then like your body just kind of get overloaded. Can we give them a shout out? What is there? Yeah, reform wellness. Go check out reformed wellness. Whatever you think it is, it's better than what you're thinking.

Yeah. Yeah. So just they're like, okay, what are the symptoms? What are the symptoms give indication of? And often enough, it's just that you're doing too much. or you're not building stuff into your life that helps you to relax. So they're big into like, you know, you work for 90 minutes, you pause for 30 minutes. You can't do that in the ordinary workday in a lot of situations. But like you can do like a 5010 in the sense that in a lot of workplaces, people don't expect 100% utilization. And you're going to get up and maybe you're going to like walk to the restroom and maybe you're going to like get a little cup of water. And then maybe you're going to like chat with a person. But this idea of like kind of like leisure recreation is something that.

we've kind of pushed to the margins of our lives. But we could stand to be more leisurely. We could stand to be more kind of recollected in God's presence on the Lord's Day, things like that. Yeah, that's good. I tend to have my cigar in the morning. Nice. To that point about as you get older, your body punishes you,

I can't, it's really great that I can't do much alcohol or cigar. Like if I had two glasses of whiskey, I'd be punished for it. And I'm glad. I'm really glad because now I might have a shot or none. Yeah, but okay, stress. So, all right, so stress, I get that bit.

I think also, this is advice I wish I would take, which is to just. What would Peterson say? Well, just to, yeah, right, is to prepare for sleep. Like, I'm at a hotel right now. I've been working out every morning and it's terrific. But I think one thing I'm going to do tonight is I'm going to go on the treadmill and just just walk really fast for a solid 10 minutes and then maybe run for five or 10 and then walk. really fast again. It's to kind of, yeah, yeah, body soul composites, huh? Yeah.

I think, you know, people talk about, I love that we're talking about this, by the way. It's just incredible. People talk about sleep hygiene, you know, that you should kind of ritualize the end of your day. You should turn down lights and distance yourself from technology and blah, blah, and all good stuff. Stuff to be learned from that for sure. My kind of sensibility, though, is that if our attachment to these types of rituals becomes a kind of idle, then our departure from the rituals can actually cause us more stress and then be an occasion of further insomnia. So I think it's like, you know, like for a father of four children, it's like stuff's going to happen at the end of the day. I don't know, one day out of three. And then I'm going to get

angry at my kids. Yeah, exactly. It's like, do you want to be angry at your kids? Yeah, exactly. So it's like the routine is in service of the life, you know, and you want the life to be well rested. But if it's not well rested, it's still the life and it's a life with good people and you can love them. So I think it's like with all these things, we try to find what works for us often enough it's going to involve some sacrifice it's always going to involve discipline but i think that we we do the best what we have cognizant of the fact that it's going to be only like imperfectly realized because if we try to realize it perfectly then we're going to be really annoying to everyone yeah yeah that's good all right this has been delightful i'm so glad you were one of

my first um podcasts because i just feel so comfortable with you and i really appreciate the conversation um i want people to know everything that you all doing. Tomistic Institute, God's Splaining, whatever all she got going on. Tell people about that. Let's go. All right. So I teach you the Dominican Analysis Studies and I work for the Timistic Institute. Domestic Institute has things online like Aquinas 101 and the Timistic Institute podcast and they've got things in person like campus chapters that you can join if you're a college student retreats. You can travel to Washington, D.C. for those or conferences for which you can sign up and do course. Godspending is a podcast that I do with three other Dominican friars. And that's just,

that's available where podcasts are available, YouTube and audio apps. But also your, um, the Thomistic Institute podcast, just so everyone knows, are really philosophically, theological, rigorous lectures that people can listen to. They can't. So if you're sort of tired of just gobbling up conspiracy theory crap or political crap that you're just, maybe it's not crap, but you know, you're like, okay, I've probably consumed enough. Yeah.

I did this the other day. I was driving home and I got to listen to a lecture by my friend, Dr. Rob McNamara. Let's go. It was fantastic. So it's really a great service you'll provide there. People should definitely subscribe to that for intellectually stimulating, but not just for the sake of being intellectually stimulating, but to kind of redirect you toward the good life.

It's next. It's really good. I went back and forth with Michael Knowles and he said that it's like the only podcast that, I don't know if I should say this. He says like the only podcast that he listens to anyone. Yeah, he said he does. Yeah, we went to Holy Mass yesterday and he said he listens to that all the time. It's really excellent.

And your audio quality has gotten significantly better, so well done. We sent a bunch of road mics to our campus chapters, and they're implementing the change. Good on you. And so, yeah. And then I wrote these two books recently. So your Eucharistic identity, which is available through Ignatius, and then training the tongue, which is available through Amas Road, for which you also published a book. Amas Road. Yeah.

St. Paul. Yeah. Yep, I did. That was called How to Be Happy, Tom's Aquinas, The Secret to a Good Life. Exactly. Do you know the story about my dedication? No. The dedication is the best part of the book.

Okay. Let's see if I can remember it. To my very good wife Cameron, who during one of my rather melancholic moody spells, learnt that I had written a book entitled How to Be Happy, said, wow, you should read that. That's the dedication. We're in the hospital. I remember, yeah, because she was gone through a lot in Stubenville, and I was like, hey, do you like this, cover. She's like, what's that? It's a book I'm doing with, oh, what's it called? How to

be happy. You should read that. Boom. This is what's nice about being married. I'm sure having brothers helps too. Yeah. No, I want to preach to homily at St. Dominic. We got back into the sacristy, Father Patrick, who contributes to God's splitting. Yeah. He just looked at me in the eyes, he goes, that was nice. What did he say about a homily? Because it wasn't? Or why? No, it's because I can kind of get carried away with weird vocabulary and tortured grammar and subordinated clauses and stuff like that. And I'd gotten really carried away. And I was like feeling proud, but also slightly suspicious that I may have gotten carried away.

And he goes, well, that was nice. I was like, dang. That must be beautiful to have brothers who can, who you trust enough to be able to speak into your life. Yeah. It's a gift. It's a grace. And that project has been super beautiful because, yeah, for a variety of reasons. But I find that men stick together when they have common projects and that friendships

among men are enriched by those common projects. And so it's beautiful to have something, you know, like for the people of God, for the Lord. You're going after together. Exactly, which draws you together. I have to share this story. You shared earlier about your experience of being given the gift of tears at the consecration. I was like this with my wife recently. And I know whenever you share a story like this, you're on verge of making people throw up or think that you're just performing or something.

And maybe I am, but I think it's still true even if I am. I was looking at her recently. and I had this profound sense that I didn't know who she was. Like, what are you? You know what I mean? Like, it's kind of like the familiarity with the Eucharist where you get reamazed sometimes. It was like that I'm like, who is this person?

She's fantastic. And she's a complete, like, complete, and maybe that's not true, but it felt like she was a complete and utter mystery to me. Yeah, I was very grateful for her. Marriage is a beautiful thing, man. It's tough as hell. I don't understand people who say it's not.

I was on a, I did a thing with the fellows from Daily Wire recently and they were going on about how easy marriage is and they're still waiting for it to be difficult. And I'm like, I don't, I guess I'll shut up because good for you. Dang. It's a hard thing. You bring your poverty to each other and you just like live together. But it's so beautiful. At both, Kristen and Visit, I was just talking to Dr. Cutterback, who was a gym. And he has a little work about friendship, which is beautifully.

beautifully done. But he was just saying, he's like, I'm not sure if this generation is ready for the difficulty of marriage. Just talking about, like his students

are talking about recent graduates. I think, like you mentioned the fact that the numbers of folks converting to the Catholic faith have really been picking up in the last like five to seven years. So it's like the rate of disaffiliation

is slowing. The rate of affiliation is picking up. 17,000 adult converts in France last year. Yeah, exactly. It's cool. I think like 5,500 adult converts just in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles last year.

Glory to Jesus Christ. Yeah, and it's everywhere. It's like, I mean, like the United States, yeah, I don't hear so much about like Latin America or Africa, but Western Europe, Central Europe, eight, like Mongolia, places you wouldn't anticipate, places you wouldn't ever, yeah. Australia, I was just with Archbishop Anthony Fisher. What a man. And he was testifying to all these cool things.

But I think it's our responsibility to help these folks, kind of equip these folks with the difficulty of life that lies in store because to become Catholic is the first, you step in a long journey which long journey will entail trial you know yeah and sacrifice god bless you thank you for being on the show thanks thanks for having me great darkness is falling upon this land these brothers are our only hope to stand against it not our only hope we need you merlin merlin merlin was a myth before a father was even born merlin slew seven men with his own hands You might escape you of such a thing. The Mortal Man.

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