Are There Too Many Catholic Devotions? W/ Fr. Gregory Pine

I'd like to talk a little bit about the kind of a multiplicity of devotions within the church's Treasury kind of getting a little bit more practical here okay as people seek to live out their Christian life I forget if it was Josemaria Escriva or somebody else but it does the quote really struck me he said there are many devotions within the church's treasury choose only a few and be faithful to them mm-hmm and I really like that yeah because I think it's just a kind of human tendency to get bored with something and to try something else on you know so you try this chaplet in that chapel and you wear a scapular too long doesn't feel holy anymore so you get a different scapular and you know you different metals and different prayers yeah just yeah I'm seeing I think John of the Cross talks about that too about not jumping from devotion to devotion because yeah because of the novelty of it yeah so my thoughts on well specifically when it concerns devotions to Saints and I think that this this rule is is good that's not to say that you should limit your saint intake but I think it's good to have a few Saints with whom you share a common life because I think that those devotions are effectively forms of friendship and you can only be good friends to a few people and specifically can only be best friends to a few people and I think that's you know as we experience like the limitations of our own life you only have the capacity to keep up in a really good way with only so many friends yeah especially if that means you know having you know chats on the phone or like writing letters which especially if their handwriting can take a long time you experience your limitations in that but also you experience your limitations and how much you share your affections yeah how much you share the secrets of your life because if you if you begin to share the states of your life with too many people you can almost feel like exhibitionist right or immodest mm-hm and you share your secrets with your friends because they're another self right so you don't fear that those secrets could be betrayed or leave you because they are they remain in you they abide in you and as much as that friendship is yeah it sits with you and another self and you don't have an infinite amount of affection to spread around yeah if you try to be best friends with everybody you might not be the best with anybody and maybe it's something similar with the vote that if I've got you know 30 devotions on the go it's difficult to give my affection and yeah did one or few and I think like devotion devotion is the st. certainly are a way of cultivating friendship and benefiting from the wisdom and the power the might of your good friend who is you know in the presence of God and the devotions to the Lord our particular way of loving the Lord and I think that if you try to love the Lord in every imaginable way that you'll die of exhaustion so you can't be both a contemplative monk and a mother of six you can't be both a lay evangelist and you know like a service to your community in its tax returns you know like they're just there when you choose one thing you choose against others and so in choosing to love the Lord and a peculiar way or in a particular way you're closing the door to other things but in so doing you're you're doing it as an act of trust that the way in which you have chosen as indicated by him as illuminated by His grace is sufficient right because sometimes the desire to do everything is to try to be as holy in a comprehensive fashion but it can actually betray a tacit form of despair that like what he has revealed or what he has indicated is not sufficient do I need to constantly be doing different things so that I have the security or certainty that all of these things will amount to a good relationship with the Lord mm-hmm but the relationship is about looking to Lord in the face and about responding to him as he indicates right rather than not according to our own lights of how many different things we can do or how many variations on a theme we can deploy because devotions are means to the end which is union with God not the other way around and maybe sometimes we accidentally treated like the other way around almost like my relationship with God as a means to all these devotions and people treat them like ends and they and they speak negatively about people who don't share their particular devotion I like this idea that we should yeah being a faithful Catholic means submitting to the church when she teaches authoritative lis but also not it also means not demanding uniformity where the church allows diversity of opinion or custom yeah and I I I just find this interesting at this might this is gonna sound a little aggressive and so it could be taken the wrong way and I hope over won't be but I think sometimes I'm people may not have intimacy and so they make up with technique what they lack an intimacy it's got cosmos all about 201 the 31 ways to you know you what you lack in intimacy you have you feel the need to make up within technique and I wonder if sometimes is obviously beautiful great lovely as devotions helpful are I wonder if we become so fixated on certain devotions I wonder if sometimes that's not a sign of a lack of intimacy with our Lord and we feel the need to do this and then that and then this two feet does it make sense yeah I mean I'm gonna stay close to my experience and just subscribe so in the morning you know he's typically well in the morning spend time in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament and dominican life so everyone makes a half an hour an hour sometimes more of meditation and there can be a temptation to fill that time and what do I mean by that well there are certain devotions that the church recommends as good holy sanctifying as privileged right so you can read scripture you can recite the rosary you can read from a particularly good devotional book I like divine intimacy a lot I read that you're speaking of kama what's so so you can use that time and you can kind of just parcel it out according to those devotions but then I think there is a temptation to treat those devotions as if they were the point yeah right that you've made a successful holy hour insofar as you've spent eighteen minutes praying the rosary and you've spent twenty minutes reading Scripture and you've spent 22 minutes reading divine intimacy and thinking about a little bit the point of the text the point of the reading is to get to the meditation the point of the meditation is to get to the prayer and the point of the prayers to get to the contemplation which isn't to say that like we're just using these things as a means to an end of contemplation because the point of contemplation is to see the Lord in a way in which the Lord gives himself so there's this understanding in the mystical life the contemplation is a kind of active receptivity but that God is the protagonist that God is doing the work of salvation and that we're trying to dispose ourself to best receive him as he reveals right and as he saves and so the things themselves aren't possessed of a kind of sacramental efficacy they don't they don't obtain X Oberoi Oberoi oh right right rather their XO pareo perrantes they're supposed to dispose you as the worker in your reception of grace in such a way as to be docile as to be receptive as to be open and I think that like that's we should focus on the openness right you can't just be like wild and wooly about it and say I'm most open when I'm wearing underpants and laying prone on a couch you know it's like okay you probably should be seated or else you're gonna fall asleep you probably should be in a place where the Blessed Sacrament is and you should probably dress yourself accordingly on account of the fact that it's undignified to be you know like whatever okay so I think that you know we have to understand it in light of you know the goal and so yeah I think it's good to do all those things in the context of a holy hour but that they shouldn't crowd out the space yeah I'm impatient yeah and it can be exhausting to wait on the Lord but I think it's more efficacious to wait on the Lord than to dictate the terms of the arrangement yeah it can also be a way of it was sort of like if you were with your spouse and you just talked non-stop and there was never time for maybe you know like talking should lead to Union maybe yeah sure I think of an analogy but I mean like here's an example like let me pick on you like do you wear the brown scapular I do not okay so there would be people in the church who would be like really upset about that what do we do with such people who demand that we adhere to their particular devotion as if it were mandated by the church when it isn't sure so I think that you can make an analogy with the analogy of faith so in our explanation of the church's doctrines we say that some things are more important than others and that's not to say that the others are unimportant right it's to say that they assume their place in light of what is most important so the most important things are the Trinity and the Incarnation nestled on the Incarnation you have the divine maternity but it's more important to say that Jesus Christ took to himself a human nature than it is to say he took to himself a human nature in the womb of the Virgin Mary because this is a primary consideration and this is a related doctrine okay but so too in the life of devotion you you you assign primary importance to the things that God has revealed to be of primary efficacy so that would be like the sacraments right so regardless of what you think about the matter it's better to receive Grace's through sacramental means than to carve out your own way of receiving graces right and you don't want to extend that logic in a kind of slavish fashion because sometimes it's better to make 30 minutes of meditation perhaps than to go to Mass that day you know it'll depend on time place and circumstance but so so we don't want to treat the sacraments like they're magic but we'd should decor than primacy you know so baptism you know confession Holy Communion you know etc down the line those things should be ordered a kind of primacy and then within that you know we talked about these indulgences tax yeah it's good to pray the rosary it's good to make the Stations of the Cross it's good to read scripture it's good to spend time in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament the church has assigned the merits to them that it has or it has recognized the merits attached to them that it has because it knows them to be especially efficacious and then you kind of go down the line and just examine where this thing comes from in the tradition the place that it assumes holy people that have recommended and holy people that have done it mm-hmm and how it's borne fruit and then you can kind of assign it a place and a relative hierarchy but if there is a relative hierarchy that doesn't just run roughshod over the persons themselves so I enter into that hierarchy no way that's that's peculiar to me so you could for instance say that religious life is objectively higher than the married state therefore I'll become a religious but that's not a way of discerning your vocation right because that's a good analogy because you're supposed to marry Cameron Fred and have four kids and so so too with devotions there might be some things to which you are attracted because of your particular life in history and inclined but that doesn't mean that there for everyone else so just like I might be I might be of this particular mind when it comes to my worship to the Lord Jesus and when it comes to my pursuit of sanctity but I shouldn't force that method upon like my brother Maddie for instance I shouldn't tell him like you should do XYZ things because I do XYZ things because that's to not take adequate account of why do people do that though because I'm seeing that more and more lately I don't know if it's because we live in a tumultuous time in the church people looking for stability and so that demanding these things of other people yeah I don't know I mean that whatever I do from this point on is going to be tendentious psychologizing but yes right let's go yeah so why do people do that I think sometimes people have found a good why do I do it - you know I've seen em maybe you have two instances in my life where I've got really hung up on a particular thing and yeah I would say they've experienced the goodness of a thing and imagined their life without it and they like lose the capacity to imagine other people's lives without it or it seems to them so much madness that other people would exclude it from their life so like the 54 day rosary novena is something that a lot of people like you know you pray fifteen or twenty seven days in anticipation than 27 and Thanksgiving and some people have had these huge blessings come their way by way of this devotion and so they tell people like you should always be in the middle of a 54 day novena and it's like okay it's worked for you it might work for me but maybe not in this season in my life right because maybe I for instance them you know like the one time that I have to pray is in the car and I find that the rosary puts me to sleep and I got into an accident a year and a half ago while praying the rosary I'm still kind of like nervous and triggered by that actually what happened now no oh yeah just example yeah I'm still kind of nervous and triggered about that and it would be like kind of traumatizing for me to think about praying the rosary right now so I'm just gonna back off on the rosary for a bit maybe I'll come back to it but given who I am and what I've done and where I you know like presently find myself in life that might not be for me and that's just kind of a farcical example but you can extend the logic in other facets and then people will often point to the origins of these particular devotions and they all but they all say how necessary they are to one degree or another like if you read the the how the green scapular came about or the miraculous medal or whatever how the rosary developed none of them are like you don't have to they are like here's why it's so important and here are the graces that you'll receive yeah but you can't do it all you can't do all of them no you can't and I can't wear everything you could people a student probably do wear every colored scapular I even sell them write what they do so I think a good principle of discernment is that a friend just told me this recently that Jesus doesn't discourage and I think that you're going to want to find those devotions that encourage and that's not to say that you just pick devotions based on your own weak psychological state like I just want you know happy fluffy devotions like devotions are always going to place a claim on their life on your life and they're always going to demand something of you yeah but for instance I don't read the imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis because I find it very discouraging yeah and it causes in me like I just get crazed when I read it I've also heard this some people say this of Faustina's diary you know like say you struggle with depression or anxiety she was a woman who in her day was very sad very lonely very anxious in many ways and if you read that it can actually exacerbate your own experience of those things and so maybe that's maybe that's not the best thing to read or if like you know you had some trauma in your early childhood maybe one of your parents died or like all of you have like attachment problems and you're still kind of sorting through that it might not be the best thing to read story of a soul to hear st. Therese talk about the loss of her mother and then her father going crazy and then all of her older sisters entering Carmel and leaving her behind and yes she kind of works it out in the end and attaches to God the Father but if like going through 150 pages of that is rough then you don't need to read that so that again that's not to say that we pick our devotions based on our own weaknesses and know the chords best with our fluffy sensibilities but it is to say that there may be some seasons for this and some seasons for that and some seasons where you yeah you just stick with the scriptures you know you can you can always know that the Scriptures will speak to you because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and forever and this is the inspired Word of God right it's the one book the church demands we read yeah yeah but beyond that we can we're just less certain as to whether or not this is suitable for this this time in place and we just have to be kind of happy with that yep hey if you enjoyed that clip you will absolutely love the full interview so click right there to enjoy the whole thing also a big thanks to these groups who made that interview possible learn more in the show notes below about these guys they're absolutely incredible and honored to have them as sponsors oh and also if you haven't subscribed yet click Subscribe and in that Bell button that way YouTube will be forced to let you know when we put out more content

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 11,176

Rating: 4.9605632 out of 5

Keywords: Christian, Catholic, Podcast, Discussion, Clip, Fradd, God, Faith, Thomism, Pints With Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas, Church, Rosary, Scapular, Jesus Prayer, Fatima, Mary, Novina, Devotional, Lordes, 9 Day Novina, Little Way, Saints, Prayer, Prayer Life

Id: RNLM7o7In3E

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020