1/6/20 Patrick Flynn

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program as I say probably too often we have this opportunity once again that EWTN gives us to sit back and relax and hear how the Holy Spirit touched someone and brought them to a deeper relationship with deep with Jesus Christ and His Church and our guest tonight Pat Flynn is a former atheist and reverts in other words he was originally brought him Catholic but then left it and then became a non-believer and I find these programs important today because we hear this talk about the increase of nuns nuns meaning no faith not religious sisters but no faith no which I can't even imagine because all my life I've been blessed by grace to believe in the reality of God I can't imagine what it would be like and maybe we'll talk a bit about that tonight with our guest Pat Flynn Pat welcome pleasure to be here so much thank you so much thank you very much yeah yeah you're uh you're an increasing population in this country statistically yes and I am a millennial as well so I fell right into that pool statistics for a while in fact it was a little bit different because I I really did pursue atheism in a very philosophical sense when what I've realized is most people in my generation who are nuns they're not atheists they might check a thei ISM on a box right but they're really spiritual but not religious they might believe in some some force right or some others that atheist and agnostic issue you know where that's awful well we'll get to that in a moment but that's why I think Pat that I really believe that God raises up men and women in a time when they're needed and are given gifts and grace now the question is will they use those gifts and grace we shall see for the mission you know I'm saying and and and so how do we help them help our Millennials recognize that they are here with a unique mission in a time of great need so I'm glad to have you here let me back off and let you start way at the beginning of your speech teacher and way back we shall go so yeah was baptized Catholic grew up in a very nominal Catholic family did not really have a proper or rigorous catechesis at all you could attend church we were mostly Cree stirs you know Christmas and Easter and whenever the grandparents were in town we would we'd go to Mass if you ever thought how your parents got that way you know I haven't really inquired that much because my grandparents were quite Catholic and in fact we'll probably get to this later my grandfather was just one of the most beautifully faith-filled men and it's funny because during my period of sort of non-belief I knew he was a beautiful man and a good man and I just realized well he just believes in all the spooky weird stuff and there can't be any association there and obviously my opinion has changed on that that who he was was inseparable from his faith and he oh and and everyone saw his example and how great of a man he was but I don't think he really taught the faith he never really catechized or properly pass it on now his example has been a great influence but it didn't seem to be quite enough so I'm not entirely sure I'll have a conversation with mom and dad when I get when I get back and I imagine they're my age you know but you know that time period of the 50s 60s and 70s was was a difficult time if he didn't have good grounding it'd be easy to get drawn into the soup everything in their yards yeah so there was not there definitely was a lack of again proper religious education and catechesis there and I think that I was just a product of that and the seeds of doubt started pretty early for me I specifically remember being in the sixth grade and this for me this would have been when 9/11 happened and there were two very significant events in my life you know everybody remembers where you are when 9/11 happens happens you also remember where you are the first time your fundamental worldview is challenged and my teacher was just going over the you know the origins of the universe the Big Bang Theory and I remember this like sinking feeling and like the floor was dropping out from under me and because this is not what I was taught in Sunday school like this the universe is some 13.8 billion years old and all this chaos and swirling particles and there's no mention of an or even wasn't there something about like a snake in there I'm not hearing anything about that it's of course you know I never got the adult version of Catholic theology I was running all for this kind of babyish kindergarten theology so you know you don't become a full-blown atheist at that point but it plants seeds of doubt and those seeds of doubt increased over time as I became increasingly interested in many different things music and writing were always great passions of mine so much of the music I was listening to certainly wasn't religious in nature that had an influence not a direct intellectual influence but a lifestyle influence and then the writers I was interested in I loved especially Mark Twain and I don't know what his final really position on religion was but he always had quips and and witticisms attacking religion I memory had an essay called what is man which is very deterministic very bleak and that really influences you when you're young because you don't know how to respond to something like that you don't have you know the philosophical equipment to address us and it seems very compelling and there was one other writer he's not as popular these days and I forget how I stumbled upon him but his name was HL Mencken no and he was a vicious old atheist and I thought he was hilarious I love this guy he was he was he kind of remind you of a Christopher Hitchens but of way back when you know he's incredible with his rhetoric his wit absolutely hilarious he's politically very aggressive so that that was and he's kind of libertarian leaning which was attractive to me when I was when I was young well the philosophical pragmatists was in that school I'm not sure I think he probably would have classified himself and yeah and maybe that he was it was hard to pin him down exactly what he was but some people would even say he was an anarchist I'm not sure if reading back on him if that's if that's true or not he was obviously very skeptic he was just a skeptic full-blown 'he's got the political skeptic moral skeptic religious skeptic and that really rubbed off on me I wanted to be like him here's this bold guy he seems really smart he can write really well hates religion hates the clowns in Congress right like that sounds all that sounds all goes what time period in your life was this would have been now this would been like early-ish high school were you a loner in this or were you in a group of folk no I had I had friends both music friends and other friends I remember um one of my friends actually first had to be a book on on libertarian philosophy and economics and that really stimulated my interest to it's not to get too off track but it's you know I I'm mostly in the fitness industry but my education is economics and in philosophy so it's a weird mess of stuff and maybe we can try and sort that out as we go but in this journey the interesting thing about Menken is he also had one of the first English works of Frederick Nietzsche so he really passed me off to the old atheist an existentialist at that point and that's what really piqued me in my interest in philosophy specifically from an atheistic standpoint and you know even though at this point I'd pretty much put my religion or whatever was left of it to the side I still was burdened by the big existential questions I wanted to make sense of the world that I was experiencing you know that our guess is patch then my guess is there's a lot of folk out there like me that did not have a lot of philosophical background so we heard a word like Nietzsche yep we've heard we've heard it enough we know he was an atheist but we may not know well in summary what does that mean that somebody likes Nietzsche what's the point of that versus a Catholic belief in God and a creator yeah yeah it's and that is important so atheism is is it kind of become a slippery term and people will use it differently sometimes people will use atheism in a weak sense and they're really sort of agnostic so they don't affirm a worldview but they just don't accept a worldview either they don't accept a theistic worldview whereas and there's many different interpretations of what Nietzsche actually was and looking back I would say he was more of a writer and a poet than he was a strict philosopher so my impression of him has diminished over the years but at the time he really rubbed off on me he would probably be something like him what we call metaphysical naturalist we believe that only physical things exist that rules out God angels spirits everything sort of reducible he would he would have ruled out objective morality for example as one of his famous proclamations there are no objective moral facts so and that was attractive to me because he because I wanted a worldview I wanted to like what is this all about so the kind of flimsy weak a theism was never something that was very interested in if I was going to pursue this and I really wanted it to be robust I wanted to be rigorous and people like me to spark my interest in that so yeah there's you know it's not just that you don't believe in God you would positively say there is no such being as God or anything like God would be this it's just visible the one other question that I think sets them apart is is there a trajectory purpose with this physical world is there that or no purpose is just here that's right he would be a committed nihilist in the sense that there is no objective meaning value or purpose to the world we really have just kind of emerged spontaneously from some chemical soup or whatever there's no teleology no directedness in nature not for humans not for any if he were to write a fictional novel you would see no need to have that novel resolve to anything probably I mean I'm saying yeah it has nope there's no plot with a purpose there's no trajectory yeah it's just one thing after another yeah and the interesting thing was I was also interested in a 9r and a little bit at this time and she she was what she would call is now called an Objectivist so there would be an atheistic worldview where you try to hold on to certain things like morality and and that never seemed to work for me it seemed like if you if you're going to be a physicalist and an atheist where do you where do you ground this stuff so I was I was more attracted to the what might be called an eliminative accession of saying okay since morality isn't something that we can distill in a test tube or look through a microscope it's got to be some type of illusion right ultimately so that's the kind of atheism that that interested me and many contemporary thinkers on that side it wasn't just just the old ones was never overly impressed with the the so-called new atheists I found them to be quite petulant on a and and very inconsistent in the sense that okay they want to affirm a particular worldview but they don't want to ride the conclusions out consistently of what that worldview was about they want to they want to have their atheistic cake and eat it too if you will they so want to have their morality and their reason and consciousness and all these things that I think the more robust atheistic thinkers who are more consistent with their starting premise were willing at least when writing their academic papers to rule these things out you know when they're on on Twitter talking politics they're suddenly right back in you know making moral condemnation and praise and blame so okay so you're saying you want to have integrity with this belief in other words if these are the principles have an effect in my life there should at least be I would say have been consistency from from the start and I was talking with somebody the other day I think the problem and what originally led me out of atheism was not running into her encountering any great theistic philosophers I kind of kind of wrote that off because a lot of the objections that that they gave to theism I just assumed were good without without checking out the other side which seems to often be the case but as I kept driving deeper into this worldview and the more consistent I try to be with it the more incoherent it became and you would I would read certain atheistic philosophers like these eliminative a'somethin Alex Rosenberg who would say look if all we are are just a collection of fundamental particles fermions and bosons then well how do we make sense of not just morality but consciousness human reason meaning truth and then what what somebody like Rosenberg or people of that sort of philosophical consistency will do will just say well we just we don't explain them we explain them away they don't exist right so there is no consciousness there is no since you're not the same collection of particles that you were five minutes ago you're not the same person you were five minutes ago you know it exists and so I got to this point of like okay that kid that cannot possibly be true that is it's too incoherent and anything that I would use to argue for that would assume the things that it immediately discredits so you couldn't so so what I thought was the rational position suddenly became a deeply irrational position it couldn't sustain itself it would it would ultimately self-destruct so just as I experienced a worldview crisis back in the sixth grade eventually this was later off this is after college now I experienced a very similar worldview crisis with my atheism or nationalism yeah I Pat Flynn is I guess fascinating Pat when I was in college I went through a time of scientific materialism so it would have been especially I'm thinking of my sophomore year where I I was never trained in philosophy so but I was asking some of these questions and I what I remember thinking is okay if if there is none of this invisible reality but there is the reality of all those things you just mentioned consciousness awareness and there is that there is another vision visible but there is this rather than explaining this all away I had to have an answer and the answer that many of us came up with is is the god of time in other words given enough time yes I can't explain it but the answer is whatever however it came about given enough time is how we've gotten this and people sometimes say that you know they call this like on the theistic side there sees God of the gaps arguments well the sword cuts both ways does the naturalism of the gaps too and consciousness is a big one right so if we and this was big for me if reality fundamentally is just a collection of very small physical particulars that are undirected unaware unconscious and then we're just supposed to map imagine that given enough time they could just swirl about and then somehow flip over into their complete and perfect qualitative opposite right into things that are unified direct a way our consciousness I mean it's it's a qualitative abyss it doesn't seem like it cannot be coherently traversed the analogy that sometimes given is it doesn't matter how many white Lego blocks you have and how much time you have to tinker around you're never going to get a purple tower out of it there's a qualitative ingredient that's fundamentally missing and I think that the best atheistic this isn't something that theists and atheists necessarily disagree on this is actually a point that they do agree on so except for rather than going back and challenging the initial initial premise certain eliminate Avista a theistic thinkers will just say yeah that's true therefore consciousness can't exist but it sure is anything I I exist I am aware of the fact that I'm aware but in order to even get to a conclusion like this it first has to come through my trans self transparent act of self understanding so it can't be coherently denied so so I got to this point where I realized I cannot reasonably accept this position so what I have to do is I have to go back and and check my starting point and it may be try and work through again on first principles but there are people who will just bite the bullet and you know yeah I think I mentioned on the program I I know of a of ex-catholic who died in his late 80s and in the last book he wrote he says you know I don't know where I came from I don't know where I'm going all I know is when I die I'm just fertilizer for this world yeah we pay back Mother Earth for all the damage I've done to her that that was his last conclusion and and you know God rest him but I mean like why do we why would we owe anything of any type of value to a value of al ulis universe you know that's that's a big question isn't it so those questions haunted me so there you work how long did that period we're to take you a long time I mean after college even to my first kid and you know there's this there's there's two sides of my story there's the intellectual side but there's also the emotional side you know having that first child and having my wife and and and realizing that I have such a profound love for these people in my life but I'm supposed to believe that this is just some some some chemical interaction right away from the same page with you so yes she's a convert as well was never baptized and that was more of her moment when she when she first held our child the love that she thought for that child she knew that there was something transcendent there that was not reducible to you know molecules in motion so we both had that experience and and so you know and that how do you raise these kids like what do you teach them fundamentally am I gonna raise my kid is a material and it's so funny because now that that my kids are older you see they all really do have this innate pole towards transcendent they see purpose they see design like as Aquinas said we all have this general and confused knowledge of God it's it's there you really have to be indoctrinated out of it atheism is not a normal natural position to hold doesn't mean people were born with Christianity crystal clear but we tend to see intentionality you know purpose let's see yeah you're you're young enough to where you've you've never known a world without the Internet that's correct so just as you were describing some of those things I like I'm not a big face person face book person but I have seen Facebook posts recently from young Millennials who are nuns or atheists and we're seeing it in their the way they're bringing up their children mm-hmm and they're almost bragging about it on the Internet and it's scary yeah I mean before I probably would have celebrated that but now I'm honestly haunted by it and terrified I am a little bit more optimistic I think that the Millennials will be will experience a great resurgence in religion that's wild space while you're here of course yeah but I I think I'm not I'm not totally pessimist I mean I can't be right as Catholics were obligated to be ultimately optimistic but so yeah so there I was and you know existential II very confused and I decided I need to I need to go back and I need to hear some other people out so I kind of just restarted my philosophical journey and went back to many of the classic thinkers like Plato and Aristotle and started to work my up through you know Agustin abou atheists and Aquinas and you know once you get to some of that Thomas Aquinas is he's done so many people in before I often joke that I I converted to Thomism before Catholicism her but the you know it was it was a stark difference because I began to see this worldview emerged it was fundamentally pretty much the opposite of everything I just believed and I think when when talking with atheists it's never like the disagreement isn't over one proposition it's not it's not just does God exist or God does not exist it's it's really a shift in paradigm of how you see the world materialistically reductionistic lee if you're a nominalist and and for most people these these things aren't thought-out but they're just kind of implicit they just kind of assume this is part of the culture and now I'm starting to study these thinkers who are presenting a worldview that is more holistic as much top-down as it is bottom-up you can like be a good person develop in virtue there's objective meaning and and and and and this is outside of the Christian worldview at first some of these pagan philosophers were making good arguments for this stuff you know that there is such thing as essences it's human nature right and that we can use our reason to discern what is really good for us and I found this not only very attractive but convincing it seemed to jive with experience and you know I think that if we don't need to deny basic obvious facts common sense and then we probably shouldn't do so doesn't mean we can't ever be misled but it was for me this was the first time that I was really hearing some some very robust arguments for a worldview that seemed to to jive with experience rather than constantly be counter to it does I'm not a philosopher but is there a sense in which at the core of all this thinking amongst these philosophers as well as yourself that is there at a core of it the question of am i accountable to anybody I mean the the moral law haunts you at all times ultimately am i accountable to anything they are one and and the moral question was a big one for me I mean the three big things for me were how come anything why does anything exist at all and that that brings you into some of the classic arguments for God's existence which the longer I studied those the more convincing I found them them to be the other one was consciousness like we talked about how do we make sense of this this it's it's so common that we take it for granted how how fantastic and mysterious it ultimately is and then Evan was morality right we all live in a world where we believe that some things are truly right and truly wrong some things are really good and really bad but if we're a physicalist a reductionist we have we have no way to ground that right we need we need it seems like we need to have that perfect transcendent reference point right as god is that supreme perfect being that who contains within himself the plenitude or the fullness of all existence from which we can have some sense really to make sense of our moral language some objective reference point CS Lewis uses the example of like you need to know what a straight line is before you can start calling things crooked well the universe can't be that reference point particles can't be but a perfect morally Supreme Being could be right so there's at least harmony there like that definitely could work and then that that takes care of the value so you have moral values things being good or bad but then you also have moral obligations we feel like we should pursue the good and avoid bad now why is that the case it's certainly difficult to make sense of them all I will just say well that was yeah you were shaped by your parents shaped by your culture that's where it all came before or evolution is another one but the problem with evolution is it either it either begs the question or it doesn't settle the issue so if certainly an omniscient omnipotent being could bring about life in any way that he wants so did we evolve to discover world facts or did we invent them through evolution and that's a philosophical question that's not and people get confused on it that is not something that evolutionary science can answer if we and the funny thing is we assume that through evolution we have discovered real features of the world right that you're really there I'm not hallucinating you so why then arbitrarily deny that we came to discover certain world facts and features so science doesn't sell that's a philosophical question you would need evolution plus naturalism to reach that conclusion and that's exactly what's in debate so you can't just assume it from the beginning which I found a lot of people do because it could be the case that God know guided us through the evolutionary process and we came to discern certain moral truths through that that's not that's it that's an epistemological question or how we come to know of moral values and duties the question is how and do they exist that's the more fundamental question that was the one that interested me more let's take a break right in their pad I think cuz I want to ask the question as you're all this stuff you're dealing with at that time in your life all these questions good stuff and reading all things Aquinas during that time were you on a trajectory upward or did you hit a no-man's land with all these questions where was the step was it this way or was it this way before that I'd like to ask that when I come back and before we break I do want to remind you of the CH network.org website if you will that's the coming home networks website if you're being drawn by the discussion that Pat has or the way he was dealing with the reality that's all around us in our world now all the different opinions and you're interested in those kinds of stories you can find a slew of them on the coming home Network website and also help if you happen to be asking those questions so again at CH network not war [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi our guest tonight is Pat Flynn former atheist and revert I want to mention a couple things first of all he has a website chronicles of strength comm one word chronicles of strength calm you'll probably talk about that later in the program but also want to tell you that Pat's conversion story is written up on the CH network website it was it's entitled how mine non-belief was obliterated and so if you go to CH network.org and do a search you'll find that story on our website alright that's me back on the way yep okay yeah so on the more personal side I did hit it's really a series of it's one crisis after a next right so before I even sort of gave up the atheistic project it's very frightening it's a very bleak and despondent worldview you know you just kind of some days you just want to go into bathroom and suck your thumb and hope it ends right and then you know as I'm coming out of that and I I I realize that God is really the best explanation for a lot of different stuff right for why any contingent thing exists at all right why is there something rather nothing we really need that eternal uncaused cause of everything else aside from himself or why the universe began to exist so going back to the to the sixth grade right like yeah who you know who bang the Big Bang right it seems like that smacks strongly of a transcendent creation event where all space time matter and energy just winked into existence come on or the the fine-tuning of physics right for intelligent life objective moral values and duties consciousness religious experience mystical experience and your death experiences right all these things do not fit into a naturalistic worldview but they're just the sort of thing you would expect if God did exist so that opened me up to a two religious perspectives and like I said I was I was very attracted to Thomism and existential tome ISM and it just seemed correct to me it seemed like this is the right view of reality like this is a worldview that you can be consistent with and it's still coherent had answers the questions and answers beautifully and with rigor but I don't want anything to do with Christianity so I had your secular for so long you you really do assume the the cultural bias against Christian not just Christian but Catholicism I was wondering if it was just Christianity but even though I mean there's no greater enemy to the secular world in the Catholic Church so I was ABC anything but Catholic for a long time so you mentioned the break that you know asked if I had dabbled in Buddhism I did so I spent a long time being probably something of a religious pluralist and I was reading people like Aldous Huxley and the perennial philosophy and the idea there is all religions are wrong but also right they're all kind of pointing at the same thing but they all do it in a mistaken and confused way so just just pick whatever does it for you and go with that and you know the thesis that it's it's kind of the idea that superficially religions are different but fundamentally they're all the same and eventually I came to reject that just because it's wrong it's actually the opposite the more you study religions you realize superficially they're similar but fundamentally they're extremely different you know questions on identity who we are morality destiny meaning origin metaphysics they're answered wildly different by by world religions so that's a I wasn't able to square that circle but it had me interested in various you know lines of Buddhist and Hindu thought and I found a lot of good beautiful stuff there I definitely did and I look back on that and that was definitely a valuable stepping stone but I never found that consistency and coherence that I would ultimately find in the Catholic Church so you know the funny thing is is I'm studying not just Aquinas but the great to mystic tradition so I often say sync time at st. Thomas but it was really the mystic tradition there's so many great contemporary philosophers that were very influential to me as well and I was able you know in my own weird way to just keep that separate from the question of who was Jesus for only so long for only Son especially would you start diving into question really is really a theologian right philosophy as he said it's just a hand made to theology it's just it just kind of you know builds that bridge if you need it to get there to the queen of the sciences so eventually I guess I just became curious enough and I said okay is there is there really anything to Jesus was he just was he just like was he like a Buddha was he just an enlightened monk was he was he a legend was he a myth and that's where I had to kind of take off the philosopher hat and roll up my sleeves and and really look into the case historically and as people I'm sure familiar with this program have probably heard a lot of times you go in with a sort of one mission to disprove it right and you come out as a convert and this was exactly the case for me I was I was absolutely alarmed to find just how historically credible certain facts of Jesus's life were not only that he existed but that he was crucified we have the empty tomb you have the post-mortem appearances and you have this sudden and rapid rise a Christian belief that came out of nowhere and like these are these are the facts that are well attested that have great consensus among historians that alone alarming but then you have to ask the question of how do you best explain those facts and I went through sort of the the general you know maybe it's conspiracy maybe it's hallucination none of these work none of these can adequately account for these for these historical data points the resurrection does that works really well now what I found is is before if I was an atheist I would never have accepted that but since I already had now I think a pretty robust philosophical conception of God the the issue of miracles was no longer an issue clearly if God exists miracles or at least possible and then you look at the historical context at the time and it kind of clues you off I kind of kind of you know hints that hey this is this is significant here so I didn't have any like a priori reason to to reject the resurrection anymore and then once I I saw that there is great basis to accept this as a belief and it's it would seem so fantastic that we would even have this evidence if it didn't I like like what's the chances that we would have something like this that's mean we have like of all the historical events that ever happened we have like zero evidence for it the fact that we have this much evidence with something that just kept like why would this maybe God wanted me to have this evidence it was the thing I kept thinking like maybe he just wants me to have this evidence because at this point I was I was kind of praying for the first time in my life to buy was praying sort of the agnostics prayer God if there is a God saved my soul if I have a soul and and I just felt this this this pull towards Christianity and the more I probed it historically the more compelling I found it and you know there's a lot of stuff going on you know with my wife at the time and we're having these deep conversations cuz she's having her own kind of crisis of faith or coming into faith and I'm like I think Christianity might be true and she's like okay I'll hear you out but I am never going to become Catholic it was her famous line so but I was I was happy I was excited that she was willing to look into this with me and kind of walk this path with me in her own separate way and so what we did is we started kind of going to two different Protestant denominations we were kind of bouncing back and forth between Lutheran and evangelical churches now for me at this point I wouldn't say I was ever a Protestant I think the the whole notion of Sola scriptura was a complete non-starter and if I was going to commit to a religion it had to go through all the way I couldn't get to some arbitrary stopping point and throw my hands up and say this is just my basic unexamined assumption you know and I can't question it that that wasn't okay with me and the idea of just going by the Bible alone or the Bible was the only Authority you know I kind of found the classic Jesuit critiques of that right that scripture can't tell you what counts the scripture scripture can't interpret itself you know scripture can't teach you how to apply the consequences or lessons from Scripture in a modern-day context and it just seemed to unbefitting to me like if God saw it befitting to reveal himself then why would he suddenly see it befitting to leave everyone so desperately confused over a book that everyone argues about but if he left us not with a book but a church which scripture seems to affirm a church that he guides and protects to promulgate the truths of the religion then you don't have that you don't have that epistemological problem anymore then it goes through so Catholicism and and the question of authority which was which is very interesting because as somebody who is always very libertarian leaning the whole idea of Authority was deeply repulse it for me okay but then I realized it's just a kind of authority that matters right maybe I don't want some like earthly tyrant but if the authority is God well that's it that's a different question so is there legitimate authority here so I kind of made that intellectual assent to Catholicism while we're still well you know attending various Protestant denominations and my wife eventually kind of discovered the same thing you know one church teaches one thing another church teaches a completely different thing nobody can seem to agree on what this what the Bible actually teaches or says that was very frustrating to her and so I had her we actually together rewatched the Catholicism series by the ship Robert Barron and I think when she saw uh that series break down the stereotypes that she helped that she held at the Catholic Church and it did for me as well that it's not just some backwards patriarchal institution but there's there's real beauty and goodness here not just truth that that was that was my issue was true but I think for her seeing that the beauty and goodness was there that really opened her up so I did spend a short time in the Protestant world but uh it never it never really did it for me so I was pretty quick to move to the Catholic Church but I could remember the the instance that really did it kind of you know you got to use the head to liberate the heart and then the heart liberates the head and this was true of my experience it was Christmas Eve and we were going to again to the Protestant denominations I just told my wife I'm like I feel like I need to go to Catholic Mass something something I was praying again still a little bit you know more specificity in my prayers now I God help me really lead me where you want me to go when it's Christmas Eve and it was it was sleeting out of us I see was bitter cold and like I just feel like I needed to go to a Catholic Mass she's like you do whatever you want that's fine I think it's unnecessary we're gonna go to a Lutheran Church tomorrow but if you need to do that do that and I did I went out it was freezing cold and almost spun spun off the road but I got there and at this point I was I was pretty familiar with it with the church fathers that was a big part of my process while studying the the earliest Christians the Apostolic and the Church Fathers and seeing what they taught specifically about the hierarchy and the visibility and and the unified nature of the church and even more so the the the language of sacrifice and a devotion to the real presence really really got me and when the Eucharistic prayer was conferred at Mass and I'm not a big feelings guy I'm not I kind of live up in my head most of time that was the closest thing to a deep spiritual experience I think it was a very deep spiritual experience me and that was when I just I was finally out of my head and I just I just knew interiorly this is where God wants me this is this is where I belong I have come home this is where I should have been all along so as much as I as I like to go on and make it seem like it was very intellectual the Holy Spirit was was guiding me the whole time through so many different paths to bring me back to the church awesome I've got to at least two questions for my friend because your description of your journey is fascinating and there's definitely a path to it I mean Catholic up brings but essentially starting from scratch yeah and going through all the the thinking through all of this and then even to the reality of God then if you will the Creed's in a way in other words there are these things which makes sense and they believe and what I'm wondering about is that it seems that a big hurdle for someone of your particular background it's referred to in second Timothy chapter 3 when the beginning of that st. Paul is talking about the last days and he gives a lot of signs of what's going to happen in the last days and we're living in the last days and the whole time of the churches the last days if you will but he says understand this and one of the signs along with a lot of other things which are very prevalent our culture he says that men will be holding the form of religion but denying the power of it to me that the big step but I want you to talk about is not just this journey to the reality of God the acceptance of the God acceptance authorities substance of everything makes sense but the sacramental economy is a whole different thing this is that baptism does something confirmation does something Eucharist is not just it's Jesus yes marriage does something ordination does something the power of it how did you get that hurdle yeah that's a really good point because the truth is is the god gap will always be filled by people you know and people define and argue about religion in different ways I think the best way to see religion is as a virtue we have we have you know a moral obligation to God God has rights over us right and that's why religion was always traditionally seen as a virtue and it's asking the question we've live in a very relativistic society where you know everyone even in Christianity people want to have a relationship with Jesus their way this is my relationship with Jesus for me with the fundamental question is is there a way that God wants us to have a relationship with him I want I want to know his preferred method of relationship and answering that is what brought me into the church but to your point is people who aren't religious they are religious it's just they're they fill that gap with some other ultimate commitment that's another way people think about religion what is our ultimate commitment maybe it's politics maybe it's the climate maybe it's Mother Earth like the talking friend you talked about maybe it's sports maybe it's video games maybe it's something you unfortunately pornography or or whatever you are no matter what you're always going to have some ultimate commitment or religion in that sense in your life so the only question is do you have the right religion that's the only question doesn't mean you can't care about other things but you have the right stacking or hierarchy or priority so that was something that struck me is that I was still a religious person throughout I just always had the wrong the wrong religion again this that this idea this movement which in my mind is what separates non Catholics from Catholics is the belief that these physical things that the church has put forth really do something yes and and for me the sacramentality was huge because it wanted to be fitting and it's consistent God has always worked through stuff before so yeah it seems like he would continue to work through stuff now he gave us stuff we are stuff right we're physical like we're not we're not Gnostics right we believe that what God Creed's is is good like so we're not trying to escape this is where you know kind of I separated with Plato who thinks that the body is kind of a prison it's it's not right the body is something that deserves to be respected ultimately to be glorified physical stuff is good it might be falling right now but it's good so God gave us the stuff he gave us food he gave us ultimately himself his flesh so the transubstantiation Aquinas was huge and I now had the philosophical and metaphysical worldview to make sense of this you know once you have there was philosophical distinctions you're like okay yeah as long as I believe that miracles are possible then there's no there's no incoherence here and if this is what God taught then I'd be foolish not to accept it and it seems like not only just from Scripture of John 6 but then just looking at what the earliest Christians believed their devotion and commitment that the real presence was undeniable and that was a huge poll for me to the Calgary Church I wanted nothing less then then what Christ gave His Church which was himself that was that was huge for me yeah all right question and I guarantee the artist I don't know the answer to this in your life but one thing that was affirmed for me and my own journey was the writings of st. Francis DeSales who recognizing that we affirmed the reality of temptation in our life you know the devil's there whatever we don't always recognize it but God's also inspiring he's proving the reales reality in our life so what I'm asking you is that did you have ever have a personal miraculous word of the Lord to say yeah I'm here to say that often audience when we have these in our life they don't you know they don't often have the power in the telling because they're for us yeah and I'm wondering did did the Lord ever say yeah I think so I've never fainted and I've never heard never heard it audibly but I think that the experience and I said like I'm not very much a feelings person I'd I just had never been so in fact a lot of the the sentimentality and the feelings of Christianity was somewhat of a turn-off for me because I didn't want anything to do with feelings I want what's right what's correct what's true but that experience with Eucharist I think was was in a non audible way God saying yeah I am here and this is and you are here and this is where I want you to be and it's it was the most spiritually a profound thing that had ever happened in in my life before and I love recounting these stories I don't thank you again I'm you on because I don't actually get to talk about it that much what's valuable well this is you look back and you've realized that certain things in your life that you might not have thought were significant at the time we're hugely significant in one way or the other but certainly when I look back I do see what you pointed out that God's providence was there all along there were certain things that I was learning certain ways I was developing even in times of deep suffering in fact some of the periods of suffering my life were the greatest opportunities for moral growth and that was also attracted to me about Catholicism the way that handled the problem of pain the problem of suffering both philosophically and theologically was it was was satisfying to me in a way that most other religions and other denominations could not could not handle that and seeing that Catholics almost in a weird way at first embrace suffering embrace mortification is ways to join ourselves to Christ's passion because God does not want us to just be fat happy cows here on earth we were meant to learn to love to increase in charity a goodness and that there's there's certain things that might not have been possible without human free will and suffering and obviously the promise of bringing or evil is big for anybody who's an atheist right because that's the the main objection and cause housen was able to deal with that for me and and shed light on my past experience if I go yeah even though I didn't think that anything possibly good could have came out of that instance it did it did shape me in some positive way it ultimately brought me to where I am during your story for me confirms something that I've come to believe over the years whenever we talk about the formation of conscience which is what we want to have HAP our young people that one of the most important foundational rocks of the formation of conscience is a belief in the Creator because from there everything else if you don't believe in a creator then it's it could be stumbling and crumbling but after for belief in the Creator that there's one God who is the creator which is Irenaeus says and against heresies of the foundation the second thing is gratitude is gratitude I'm only here because of that and once you get that then everything else can be built on that and if you lose that everything else as I found comes comes tumbling down and there's good reason to affirm it and that's what that's what I would encourage people search out these philosophic arguments you know search out the rich intellectual Catholic tradition that unfortunately has been suppressed in many ways mm-hmm I do have an email but before I get to that manure into physical fitness we didn't even touch on its crimes that a part of this journey in a very odd haphazard way like I said my education is not in that it's it's quite different but as I was going to college I was personal training people and I grew up very unhealthy very out of out of shape so kind of getting into the into the fitness game was was a big turning point for me you know it was a very big positive in my life and so I would teach people kettlebells in college you know that looks like a cannon ball with a handle on it and as I was going through my education I started a blog I started a YouTube channel got a couple of book deals so you know it's it's just one of those things where and now it's funny because now I can see how it connects in in in such a sense that um a lot of my audience are coming to me for for for fitness for health but I see so often this this deep spiritual yearning and since I've started sharing my conversion process and I've started a segment on my podcast called Sunday School where we dive a little bit deeper in the philosophy at theology that's become my most popular segment people care less about the kettlebells now and more about tell me more about this this spiritual so because I think a lot of people you don't have that foundation they try to find that satisfaction somewhere else but as Agustin rightly taught you know our hearts are restless until they rest in the oh lord you can't solve a spiritual problem with a physical solution now there's many physical problems that people should be swinging kettle bells and trying to eat right that's important but you're not gonna you're not going to be able to solve all your problems here so but as beings that are both physical and spiritual yep that in certainly sense the physicality of our life is a type of the spiritual yes so in other words what we experience and try to do in the physical life is a type of what we do with our spirituality again very attractive to me with Catholicism the body isn't something to be escaped from so the embrace something to be celebrated you know God gave us this physical stuff he gave us our bodies so I've always loved the physicality of Catholicism everything from the you know the Catholic calisthenics right but it for me it increases reverence it increases worship the incense we're using all of our senses because they're good and in the same way we should want it's virtuous to take care of our bodies these are our gifts and it Inc and we can increase in temperance and fortitude all these all these virtues by having a right relationship with fitness the problem is sometimes people will make Fitness their religion and then it becomes disordered so we need we need temperance there too but it is important all right we have an email from Zachary from New York he writes I am a convert to the Catholic Church from a non-religious background I've been intellectually convicted that the Catholic Church is true and that there is a God however I have been really having a hard time knowing how to have a personal relationship with Jesus and believing that he knows me on a personal level how can I break through this barrier and develop a relationship with Jesus this was hard for me too one is because people would always ask me if I had this personal relationship with Jesus before I was Christian Catholic I know what do you mean who is this who's this guy right and then I realized that this is this is this is what it means to be to be Catholic right we want to know and love God is our ultimate end the beatific vision so I can't just work things out intellectually like this needs to be a relationship and I guess my first advice there would be what I do pray for it pray for it I've had to ask realizing that that Catholic theology properly understood is not we can't do it on our own we can't just pull ourselves up by our existential bootstraps God wants to help us so I ask God to help me pray he help me pray I ask God to help me love him I ask God to help me increase in faith and he's answered those prayers because they were asked sincerely so I would say don't try and do it that was my mistake first I kept trying to do things and I realized that that isn't the point God wants to help me get these things done he wants to give me the grace to have him done so when I think he kind of especially for coming from a philosophical background you're used to working things out yourself I think the paradox here is once you really become Catholic you really got a you got to let God take the lead on some of these things and it was when I started a price a god leave me where you want me to go save my soul by all these different things that that that's when that relational element really came into my life and I was always led to Catholic Mass there are a couple times in Scripture when our Lord goes to the man at the Pool of Bethesda where you know well more often than not it's about I know I'm supposed to be over there and that's where I'm supposed to be and I wish I was there how am I gonna get there b-but the first step is taking a step in that direction mm-hmm it's up to us by grace yep to me which is prayer it's examining ourselves it's getting rid of stuff in our life that holds us back asking God for so that gives us a strength to move in the direction he wants us to go and that was there was another thing that I found attractive about Catholic theology was the the co-operative element between Grace and freewill Catholics don't deny free will which is I think it's really important we don't do that for many reasons one is there's good reason to affirm it but God doesn't he doesn't override right it God is so intent he can he can he can move us nudge us freely into a relationship with himself so God has that first act of initiative right we can't do it on our own but we do have this role to play this cooperative role of this this mysterious relation between grace and free which as I was exploring Protestant theology I realized freeroll often God got overruled and it kind of made me question well what's what's the point right do we want do one do we want love a real relationship or do want puppets and I think in the church's wisdom she's been very wise to not allow that full-on double predestination Chronicles of strength comm what's there oh well my podcast the Pat Flynn show so listeners of this segment probably be most interested in either philosophy Friday or Sunday school but if you're if you want to learn about kettlebells and resistance training and intermittent fasting and all the other fitness and nutrition stuff we talked about I always have you know two or three segments a week they're regular articles here and there as well number of books out on all kinds of different subjects all right got about a minute to go Pat let's say somebody's sitting out there looking at you right now I heard all you said why should they who's right where you were yeah why should they make the same journey as me well it depends where they're at if you're if you're at where I was where you think maybe this could be true you know I've looked at the evidence it seems like maybe I could 50/50 right that's when you toss out Pascal's wager right when somebody's like right there it's like just and you don't have to fake it you don't have to say I believe that's insincere but just seek what do you what do you have to lose by living a life of religious seeking pray the agnostic Sprayer god it's my favorite God if I if there is a God save my soul if I have what do you have no nothing to lose from that and this studies we have now the show that religious people report subject you know higher levels of subjective well-being less incidences of disease depression anxiety of so much to gain to love to to live virtuously to have that sense of community and then of course all the all the theological significance to have the possibility of an eternal relationship with God the beatific vision are you be a fool not to take it honestly if you're if you're already there like halfway there just seek you don't have to you know sign on a dotted line anywhere just just seeking it's our thing Pat what a pleasure that's the very moment for joining us on the program and once again chronicles of strength calm is you your website so I invite the audience to go there and then one last reminder if you'd like to hear more of Pat's story which was entitled how my non-belief was obliterated go to ch network.org and you can find the rest of his story thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I do pray that Pat's story has an encouragement you published [Music] [Music]

Channel: EWTN

Views: 17,972

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Id: ShYjmeNEnkY

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020