Becoming Saints in Our Time (#002)

[Music] welcome back to the burro shire podcast this is episode 2 the second one I'm Brandon Bhat one of the co-hosts here with my best friend the other co-host of the podcast father Blake Britton Blake one in the books and here we go with the second one I'm ready to go let's do it now the title of this episode is becoming Saints in our time becoming Saints in our time lots of talk in the Catholic world about becoming Saints you know thank thank God it's become common verbage to hear people say you know I'm striving to be a saint I want to be a saint you know that the only thing matters is to be a saint you got the lay on blow famous line about there's only one tragedy in life and that's not to have been a saint but the title of our podcast is not just becoming a saint and how to do it but becoming a saint in our time and why it matters that we were each born where we were and when we were and what that has to do with sanctity what it has to do with becoming a saint let's back up a little bit though and start with the first part of that title on becoming Saints because as I mentioned even though it's popular to talk that way today it hasn't always been that way in the church especially for laypeople you you know priests have a leg up on us you know priests and bishops always had the potential to be Saints but for many centuries in the church it was not considered normal for laypeople with families with jobs to become a saint or to aspire to sainthood when did that really change well we can trace its origins back to st. Francis DeSales in his wonderful book introduction to the devout life he's one of the first major Saints not say that he's the only one but he's one of the first major thinkers in the church one of the first doctors the church to really start reflecting on how can every single baptized Christian share in the call to holiness however it doesn't become this universally taught reality until really the Second Vatican Council in its document lumen gentium chapter 5 and in that chapter which is entitled the universal call to holiness mother church makes this bold claim that every single baptized Christian is called to sainthood and that every single baptized Christian in their own specific way in form is called to actualize that vocation to sainthood of course this would also be widely popularized by st. Josemaria Escriva in his Opus Dei movement which also sought to encapsulate the spirit that was piercing through the Second Vatican Council of universal call to holiness so it is something that is spoken about nowadays on a wide level thank God st. John Paul the second was another huge supporter of this notion that universal call to holiness he mentioned it many homilies many audiences and it was a theme throughout his papacy and it continues to be a theme even now under our current Holy Father Pope Francis we know that one of his most recent apostolic exhortation focused on holiness how to achieve sainthood and he also mentions it in Evangelion gaudium his first wonderful at the style apostolic expectation of Pope Francis documents by the way just until iam gaudium just beautiful just magnificent it really is a great work it was a bishop who told me that when he met Pope Francis and mentioned evangelii gaudium Pope Francis like immediately jumped on and said that's what my whole pontificate is about like we want to understand the core of my papacy what I'm trying to do my program evangelii gaudium so if you haven't read that document read it it's magnificent why think the first three inside peoples are not to get too far off on a side note but now this really is like one of our congressmen basically having to go but continue but I really think that the first encyclicals of the last three Holy Fathers so st. John Paul the second pope benedict xvi who i sometimes accidentally referred to as st. benedict xvi one day and our Holy Father Pope Francis so that at mTOR home a nice day you Scott eat assess and evangelii gaudium those three in senticles really do capture the heart of what Millennials need to actualize in our time so you have this notion of reclaiming the profundity of divinization meaning the unity of Christ that he became flesh and dwelt among us of what that means for us and for our salvation that Saint John Paul the second secondly Davis Caritas asked this notion of we need to help reintroduce into the world this God who is not purely an abstraction but this God of love this God who exists in history and then thirdly the way in which to do that has always say Pope Francis gives us so wonderfully is this Evangelion gallery of the joy the gospel even that shine forward so what were you talking about hahaha universal call yeah so this especially in in Pope Francis's recent apostolic exhortation he mentions that vocation so every single baptized person is called to sainthood it doesn't matter if you're a middle school teacher it doesn't matter if you're a music director if you're a priest if you're a stay-at-home mom if you're a husband and a father working in the world whatever that is we're called to sanctify the space in which we find ourselves I love being Catholic for many reasons Chesterton said there are thousands of reasons why I'm Catholic but they could all be summed up in one because it's true but this is yet another one because it provides an easy answer to maybe the most important question that is plagued mankind throughout history which is what's the meaning of life what's the purpose of life why am I here and the Catholic Church to the baby to the Millenial to the elderly gives one answer to everybody which is to be a saint that's it that God made you because he wants you to be a saint to be a person fully alive and in love with with God in His Church and you can be you can be this was this was the great beautiful news proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council and thereafter specifically by the hope by the Pope's it's not an impossible task see his sainthood is not reserved as an impossible task for the few sainthood is rather designed is ordained for all those baptized in Christ and this is good news this is something that's achievable and is achieved in that genius way given to us by st. therese of lassoo this little way by doing what st. Teresa said extraordinary things excuse me ordinary things with extraordinary love so by fulfilling reality as it's given to us by by fulfilling our daily tasks which are seemingly mundane and simple but to do those things with a recognition of Christ's doing them with us and through us and in us by narrative our Baptism and Confirmation and Eucharist that in itself is already transforming history its redeeming history its sanctifying history in a profound way one thing that's kind of bugged me in recent years is even after Vatican 2 with its emphasis on the universal call to holiness even with the boatload of books and videos and articles and retreats and conferences that have been preached about this subject even with the the thousands of Catholics that have awakened to this called the universal holiness they're still it seems to me a general climate militating against this idea within the church that whenever you really are striving for sainthood whenever you yeah I want to maximize say your piety your devotion your knowledge your your spiritual disciplines and practices there's still a little sense of oh come on don't don't go yeah I'm afar don't go overboard and I've talked with a lot of young people that feel that same thing and you almost have to sort of go into into your own interior life and you because you don't find so much support for this driven call to holiness I experienced that at all a hundred percent I mean this is the residue of secularism and atheism seeping in to the life of the church right into some people and their attitudes in the life of the church I have a school thank God a parish in school or rather on the parochial vicar at a parish and school is a better way to put it and we have kindergarten through eighth grade every single season of Lent I challenge our kids to holiness my first year that I was here at the parish and I did that I got some negative feedback from the parents they thought I was too extreme for the linton practices especially for the little ones i mentioned things like eating only bread and on Fridays sleeping on the floor giving up television for 40 days giving up videogames 40 days so I got emails from parents phone calls from parents saying father Blake we think that's a little bit too harsh and too much for this age group but I stuck to my guns when they came to that this year I got an email from a parent that just pierced my heart and it was one of our kindergarten parents and she sent me this email and said father Blake my child really took your call to Lent seriously and she sent me a picture of her son as a kindergartner sleeping on the floor four on Ash Wednesday night and that pierced my soul because I thought the only thing that keeps people from becoming Saints is that we tell them they can't be and because we've settled for Less piety less zeal less passion than is rightly ours as Christians and so this has this mentality has been very poisonous for us of well don't be too pious you know those are Saints stories from those times like the 12th century in 15th century but that's it's not practical nowadays no that is not true at all it's even more necessary nowadays in a society that's being overrun by a lack of sense of the transcendent my lack of sense of by lack a sense of the profound and the beautiful they need these amazing icons of holiness that live live it to the extreme and I'm not saying extreme and the unhealthy sense but in the extreme of falling Christ to the very end noon Guam a mob of satis one of the great mystics of the 19th century say I can never love you enough Lord I can never love you enough so even from our children to our grandchildren to adults to the elderly this piety this deep passion and zeal for holiness is achievable and not only achievable it should be lived it really should be lived it's we're in desperate need of a lot more john viennese Catherine of Siena's Charles Borromeo street-savvy laws etc I want to redeem that word extreme like you said it has almost a universally negative kind of grace and extremists are too extreme right but even all the examples you just mentioned chased the extreme you know I'm thinking of that also pier Giorgio for sadi another one of our the matrons to the heights very loud though wasn't like let's go kind of high you know brat too high but just kind of hot no all the way up all the way up I don't want to settle for spiritual mediocrity and I'm finding a lot of other young people coming out of the the proverbial closet saying the same thing that most of my you know parochial life most of my friends most of what I've been fed has been being content with spiritual mediocrity but now there's this growing surge of people that says I want something more than that and this is a dangerous demon this is a Danish dangerous spirituality that I'm sure will have a hold podcast on later on called the demon of a set eeeh there's a wonderful book entitled the noonday devil it's by a Bennigan's to Abbot named Abbot melt in a ult and this book names the demon of a set eeeh which is commonly translated as sloth but really in the deeper senses this is the demon that fights against your personal holiness this is the demon that does not want you to become a saint this is the demon that wants us to settle for mediocrity well Abbot Nolt says that's the most proliferate demon in our time this is the demon that's infiltrated the majority of Christian hearts and and I agree because I even see it seep into my own heart sometimes this notion of know what you're good enough priest you know the people like you you know you don't have to do that no no that's not the kind of priest I want to be i I want to be a priest that strives for the heights that goes to the very depths of holiness I want to be another Saint John Vianney that that's that's what we're created to be you know and so to settle for anything less is is to assault our dignity as Christians to assault our dignity as beloved daughters and sons of God so that's something that that zeal that passion for sainthood is something that really needs to be recaptured in the heart of the people and then of course supported by the ministers and leaders of the church so we hope if nothing else that this podcast makes you feel normal if you share that desire to go to the extremes and depths of sanctity if that's you if you're watching this listening to this we're with you you're not you're not alone and even if you don't find support in your parish your community there's lots of other people out there that have that same burning desire you do now we've talked a lot about becoming Saints here let's switch gears and focus on the second part which i think is is very important on becoming Saints in our time in our yeah I'm this is something I didn't reflect on too much until you and I became friends but why is it that God put us here in this place at this time that yeah it's not accidental it's not arbitrary God had a reason for putting us here in this place in this time and of course all the contingencies around you like your family your friends he wanted you to raise these children or participate in this community or whatever but in the realm of sanctity why did God put you in this place and in this time to become a saint yeah man this has been a struggle for me Brandon it's been a struggle for me for a while because I'll be honest and saying that I'm an old soul like I would happily live in like 10th century England in 14th 15th century Germany or France you know or Italy I would love to live amidst that type of music and culture reciting Shakespeare you know we happily live like in first century Nazareth you know I feel like there was someone really famous in there all that time I would like to meet Mary Mother of God but yeah so this has been difficult for me because I often ask the Lord in prayer Lord why would you give me a soul that aches for another age and so this became a point of prayer for me on a regular basis actually throughout all my seminary years and even into my early priesthood in the Lord's response always so profound always so beautiful and he's always so gentle the Lord is never harsh when the spirit speaks in the depth of your heart it's always with this this profundity with the sharpness so it's like a blade it's like this two-edged sword right it pierces but it it doesn't destroy it pierces with a gentle compassion and the Lord said I did give you the soul I gave you for the Aged I gave you I think of that wonderful moment in the Fellowship of the Ring Brandon you can probably quote it much better would you mind speaking to that when Gandalf is with Frodo yeah and Frodo saying I wish the ring was never with me and you yeah I don't only have it it's big framed right here in my office it says this is Frodo speaking I wish it need not have happened in my time and of course the it is this big calamity of the the threat of Mordor and this dangerous ring I wish it need not have happened in my time said Frodo so do I said Gandalf and so do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide all we have to decide is what to do with the time that has given us yeah yeah those words spoken by Gandalf the gray could Justice easily be applied to each and every one of our hearts it's not our decision what time were given but what to do with the time that were given and that gave peace to my heart and soul to hear that not just from me Gandalf but in prayer to hear that from the Lord the Lord gave me the soul that I needed for my time and so in order for us to really become Saints in our own age we have the first and foremost be comfortable in our age even amidst all of its brokenness and we have to be willing to struggle excuse me and to suffer the shortcomings of this age which is something I think a lot of people have difficulty with specifically within the church I know I have I know I have I know you have as well as something we speak about on a regular basis so I think it might be beneficial for us maybe to go through some of those specific challenges of our age and how we who are old souls we who who ache for this for this age of holiness that we seem to be almost out of place living in how we can address these issues and with our own life live through them yeah let's run through some of them you and I compiled a list of some distinct characteristics of this age now some of these are challenges in other words some of them make it more difficult today to be a saint than it would have in past centuries but some of these are opportunities you know some of these are like well maybe God put us here because he wants to he wants us to heroically respond to some of these challenges an opportunity for greater sanctity that we might not have had if we were born 500 years ago so let's go through them so I think if you if you said for Catholics the most distinct thing about being born in the early 21st century or early late 20th century being alive in the early 21st century I think it would almost be neck and neck especially for us Americans between being born in the generation immediately after the Second Vatican Council so the generation responsible for implementing the teachings of vatican ii that's number one number two yeah is the sexual abuse crisis that most of us I mean I came into the church right in the midst of all this sexual abuse crisis you were named a priest right in me right in the midst of all this right almost at the same time that all the Theodore McCarrick stuff was was breakdown so let's spend a greater deal of time on these two things and then there's a few maybe less significant but still worth discussing the distinction so first of all like what does it mean why why do you think that God put us here in the wake of this Great Council I mean that's a pretty rare thing there's only been what twenty-something councils in the history of the church theory yeah so this is it's rare that people are born after a council and charged with implementing that council so what does that mean yeah this is something that I don't think many Catholics reflect on enough is what a grace it is that we are the generation that has been entrusted with the implementation of an ecumenical council of Mother Church so you're absolutely right Brandon if we were to speak I think with people who grew up in the you know late 60s early 70s they would say the Second Vatican Council especially in the Catholic world but even in the secular world was a huge deal this was what all the headlines were coming out for and then of course you had a lot of turmoil following immediately the post conciliar period so right after the Second Vatican Council there's a lot of experimentation going on sort of a lot of struggle on what exactly is the Holy Spirit trying to implement through this council there's also some who misrepresented the council quite widely which is a topic I know we can speak on in a later podcast so the combination of all these different factors have led 250 years of confusion 50 years of struggle 50 years of a lot of Graces which I don't think of spoken off enough pope john paul ii was adamant on that that sometimes we allow some of the negative effects of the post conciliar period to override the immense positive effects of the post conciliar period which are numerous and which will also speak about at a later date I mean one of them is just this universal call to holiness I mean holy nothing else amend this gift to the church that now you have millions of laypeople aspiring to sainthood yeah just beautiful that that alone is significant enough and there are so many others and not to mention the re emphasis on Sacred Scripture on the patristic Sandri awakening of an appreciate appreciate of the church father so so so many things however it is typical that a council does not come into proper implementation until several decades afterwards and what you're finding in our generation is that we're generation that's been born in a specific time in church history right when that that fruit of vatican ii if you will is right for the picking that that moment that's so crucial in which we've gone through these 50 years of trying to grapple with and understand what the council with the holy spirit through the council was speaking to mother church and now we've had our bumps and bruises we've had our successes and our joys now it's time to start implementing it properly and that's gonna be entrusted to the millennial generation of priests and laity it is our responsibility were that hinge generation that's going to leave specifically to the generations ears but then those after them a proper interpretation and implementation second vatican council i cannot under emphasize how vital and important this is the church history this is not me trying to be over exaggerative this is not me trying to build up vatican 2 more than it needs to be and a few medical councils are already a big till this is just a fact of history and this is where we find ourselves and so it's going to be very important for us and for our generation to start first and foremost truly coming to a dynamic and intellectual understanding of vatican ii and authentic interpretation of vatican ii and then implementing that on a ground grassroots level i remember that was so clarifying for me when I realized that unpacking it through conversations with you when I asked the Lord what kind of scene do you want me to be a Lord you know you look across the the centuries and the lines of saints there's such a varied diverse tapestry of different kinds of saints and so the path to you want me to follow what st. do you want me to aspire to and it was through discussions with you and through prayer that I discerned a saint of vatican ii a CI of vatican ii that's the type of saint that the holy spirit obviously wants i mean there's no debate about it got the Holy Spirit inspired this ecumenical council he wants his people to bear it fruit to put it out into into practice and that doesn't mean that you know we just need holy men and women who teach about the Second Vatican Council who are theologians and scholars and all that it means like implementing vatican ii in my house and jumping vatican ii among my circle of friends the the beauty of that council is it addressed almost every realm of culture from high culture to low culture from your daily life to the academy it has implications for everywhere and so what it means to be a saint in our time has to mean heroically implementing the second vatican council yep in that absolutely brandon would you mind sharing and i don't mean to put you on the spot but if you could please share one of the ways that you've influenced that in your family on a regular basis and the one that I'm thinking of for you because yeah please tell me what y'all to talk about so if you could just give me an example of your own free will let me tell you the example is that's for a future episode on divine providence and the freewill and the interplay between those right but I mean please share I honestly share with you have to share with our listeners what your family does to the lives of the hours because that's a direct fruit of vatican ii i mean that really is the segmenting council was emphatic on laity sharing in the lives of the hours and making it accessible the laity so can you share a little bit of how that is in your family yeah I'll do it briefly because we'll have a whole nother episode coming up right now and why to pray the Liturgy of the hours but real briefly the liturgy the hours is a set of daily prayers there's usually five of them that that all clergy and religious are obliged to pray every day so all priests and religious pray these same prayers every day the same prayers are prayed all around the world so it's this beautiful example of the mystical body of Christ joining in prayer it was very very rare for a layperson to pray the Liturgy of the hours before the Second Vatican Council this goes back to what we talked about earlier where you know is presumed that laypeople don't need to get that crazy or that extreme with prayer you know not you know a lot of people that in my circles say why can't Catholics be as devout as Muslims Muslims pray five times a day and I'm like we do pray five times a day to like that's specifically what the Second Vatican Council called for is a reintroduction of the liturgy the hours it was reformed in many ways we'll talk about that in the episode but specifically that laypeople should join the whole church in these prayers and that's not something that I had experience with before father Blake and I became friends I would maybe pray morning prayer or evening prayer every now and then those of you that subscribe to the Magnificat magazine you know that has the daily readings from the liturgy each day that usually has a modified version of morning and evening prayer so sometimes I pray that but is that they're becoming friends with father Blake and going through spiritual direction a lot and trying to refocus and refine my own prayer life that he was very adamant that according to the church this is something that you should be doing it's the preeminent form of Prayer and all other types of prayers should come secondary this should become your main priority you know you can do all the other types as well but make sure you're doing this so I adopted it I started praying the liturgy the hours but what was delightful for me as a husband and a father was to see how attracted the rest of my family became to this sort of structured liturgical prayer it happened organically I did force it but my young kids wanted to join me they wanted to come and join me in the kneeler come join me for morning prayer and then my wife wanted to pray evening prayer and night prayer with me and pretty soon we developed this routine where every morning now our whole family comes in and we all do morning prayer together even our little kids that can't read you know we'll come in the little burros Shire libraries study and they'll march around with their little prayer books and you know giggle or laugh or whatever they're doing but the whole family is there praying the prayer of the church and then to close the day my wife and I now it's the last thing we do before we go to sleep in bed we pray night prayer together that's the nightcap and then usually most of the other prayers I'll do by myself except after we go to daily Mass here and then after daily Mass lately my boys have joined me in praying day time prayer at that time it's been it's been wonderful for me on a couple different levels one if United our family in prayer better than almost anything except the family rosary I don't think I've ever experienced any form of prayer that the whole family is gravitated toward and can do together because it's kind of a more conversing style of prayer if you pray it that way but then secondly its United my whole family to the greater church to know that you know I could tell them hey father Blake is praying this same prayer probably right around the same time we're praying with him you know or the other priests or bishops that they know in the hope the Pope the Holy Father is praying these same prayers maybe in a different language but the same prayers the same readings the same prayers the same intercessions all that so it's it's linked my family with the entire mystical body which again is a vision of vatican ii so i hope that an example you were going for no that's exactly example i was thinking of an and there's a practical way that you have answered your vocation to a universal call to holiness brandon there's a practical way that your actualizing sainthood as a husband and a father usually drawn through obedient to mother church and her wisdom through the second vatican council you really draw on your family now into a mystical form of prayer that unites them with the body of Christ throughout the world that's just amazing so those are the kind of things that when I mention I know it may sound abstract about universal call to holiness those are the concrete practical ways that we could start doing these things and implementing Vatican 2 okay well we're gonna say a whole lot more about Liturgy of the hours and the fruit of it and more specifically how to do it how do you get started what are some resources we'll do that in a future episode so don't worry if it seems overwhelming to pray five times a day or to get all the books and ribbons how about how about this second one that I mentioned father Blake that you and I were both born and what can probably accurately be described as the darkest period in the American Catholic Church oh yeah these last couple dates with all the abuse crisis revelations which haven't really stopped in a way I mean the the abuse cases have gone down dramatically which we're all thrilled about but these major revelations keep coming Theodore McCarrick of course but then other priests and at seminaries and then most recently Jean Vanier the leader of the large communities seems like this never-ending sequence of events and it causes many people us included to ask the Lord why us why now why did you put us here at this time and through talking together we both discerned well it's because you're supposed to be a priest at this time of the abuse crisis I'm supposed to be a layman at the time yet this abuse crisis I unpack that a little more oh absolutely we're synagro is where sin is great grace abounds all the more three months after my ordination to the priesthood one of the worst scandals in American history broke and I was devastated and I remember going to the adoration Chapel and our rectory and falling down prostrate and weeping just crying from the depths of my soul I cried out of shame I cried out of embarrassment I cried out of heartbreak for the victims and their families who have been wounded by the priesthood of Jesus Christ I wept for our hierarchy for our leaders I wept for the laymen and women who would be who would leave the church because of this just my heart was just overrun by so many hundreds and hundreds of thoughts and then the question is rang out Jesus why why did you ordain me why did you make me a priest during this time lord I can't do this I am ashamed now of this priesthood Lord help me understand why you would ask me be ordained here and now the Lord's response was so beautiful he brought up the Holy Spirit brought up the theology of icons so we know that icons which are a style of Catholic art right these are many of us have probably seen icons before but we know that icons technically are not painted or drawn they're written because the theology of an icon is that an icon of something that you're supposed to look through right a Coast's and Greek this window you're supposed to look through an icon to literally touch and encounter the reality itself so you've seen an icon of Jesus is supposed to lead you to an actual encounter with Christ through contemplating that icon the Lord responded be an icon be a sign of contradiction show them what the priest is supposed to be show them what the priest is supposed to be and so my response to the crisis has simply been this I've not tried to make podcasts condemning anyone or criticizing anyone because that's actually not gonna help at all I've not gone out and tried to make excuses for the tragedy because that's not gonna help at all there's only one true response that myself as a parochial vicar of a parish can give that response is to become a saint to be a holy priest to love and cherish and protect my flock with my mind heart body and soul to pray my daily holy hour to be faithful to my bravery to adore Christ in the Holy Eucharist to celebrate liturgies reverently and with deep piety to hear confessions anoint the sick and the dying and so the Lord specifically has has I felt a commissioning from him to be a scientist contradiction to the narrative that's currently being woven of the church and I would say that although this is particular to what I fell my heart from the Lord that it is applicable to the church at large I'll respond to the crisis first and foremost has to be Lord even though it hurts me I know that I've been born at this time to heal and bring hope to the church and Lord the way that I know I'm gonna do that is by being faithful to the vocation that you have personally given me I need to be holy where I am I need to be holy where I am so you're doing that now where you are branded as a husband and a father you be holy where you are and you were teaching your children holiness and you know what those six soon to be seven children who knows the thousands and thousands of souls that they will touch an influence in the ages to come and how that will proliferate for the ages to come same thing for me I'm being just the faithful priest in a little city in Florida on the coast that most people even know existed but I trust that by being faithful to this flock that my loving them with all that I am that my being a holy examples of them will influence a wider community in the years to come so we cannot allow the abuse crisis to be a place of discouragement this is not how Christians deal with things well Christian zoos they take a horrible thing they take a tragedy they take something that is ugly they bring it to the beating heart of Christ Jesus and he does what he always does he does what he did with the cross he makes it into a thing of beauty the cross was an intrument of torture and now it's a sign of hope the scandals right now are our place of embarrassment and shame but if we truly allow it to be a learning experience we truly allow it to be transformed by the grace of Jesus it can be a reminder to us and a way in which we help the church continue to grow in holiness sometimes I think about that question we kicked around earlier about why was I born at this time and not another time and think man it would have been great to be born in a culture that was so supportive and encouraging yeah Catholicism like a universally Catholic culture where priests were beloved there's hundreds of of priests and religious way too many even know what to do with they're walking through the street you're telling me exactly I mean for priests here I think man how how much easier it be to be Catholic in a situation like that how much easier it would be to be a saint huh but then almost immediately after I have those thoughts it comes to me that from the other perspective how boring such a life would be if it was just like no challenges no obstacles everything was supporting your faith I think of like all these Saints who a lot of missionary Evangelist Saint hsihu looked for the worst situations possible the worst Mission territories you know Damian o Molokai seeing the leper colony sign me up that's where I want to go yeah the chaplains and different war zones you know where people are dying in horrific ways that's where I want to go I want to go to the worst of the worst because that's where my missionary zeal is enflamed where it comes alive and I think about that for me and for you for listeners of this podcast it's probably never been a harder time to be a priest in America than it is today you could maybe say the same thing about being a Catholic layman that it's oh yeah no it's extremely difficult but there's something about that that excites me excites you know that's the ideal but like you know we've been given this tremendous opportunity that you know most people don't like priests or they have prejudices about priests they think you're a child abuser just because you're you have a collar around your neck you know well okay well then that's a tremendous opportunity to show them the face of a real priest of Jesus Christ yep no absolutely and we're in this time right now in history that I I honestly I maybe I don't think I'm being too too over-the-top in this comparison but I would be so bold as to say that we're in a similar time period as Benedict was right after the fall of the Roman Empire 476 ad we're in a time when we need a generation of Catholics who are literally going to rebuild the basis of Western civilization and now with the globalization taking place at such a rapid rate through technology our influence is going to spread even beyond Western civilization so what's happening right now is the infrastructure of just humanity in general is being deconstructed so the infrastructure of the of the family the infrastructure of marriage the infrastructure of spirituality the sense of the transcendent the infrastructure of intellectualism and rationality the infrastructure of religion all these things are going to be entrusted to our generation to begin to begin it will not be complete in our lifetime and that's something else that we have to claim as well is we need to start getting back on our fore sight I mean think of the people who built Notre Dame Cathedral who started it never saw it completed but they knew that their work was worthwhile because in the end their children's children's children would have a church to pray in and so that's how I am right now I'm I'm being a priest with so much passion right now because I know that I'm gonna die before I see the church completely healed from this wound and that's okay because Brandon your children are going to live in a church that is healed from the wounds the children in my school the teenagers in my eighth grade class the kindergartners in my in my preschoolers because of how I'm living because of how you're living because of how our generation lives the sacrifice that we make they're going to grow up in a church that's loved that's that's beautiful that they're gonna grow up in a church that has that culture and that infrastructure re-established because of our sacrifices and you know what they're gonna look back and they're gonna say thank you they're gonna remember us with the tender love and devotion because just like the generation of Charles Borromeo and Philip Neri after Trent so we are right after Vatican 2 we're entrusted with this task of rebuilding and reestablishing the sense of culture and and I'm excited about it you know I love this the that what is it the jaw the the joy of battle philosophy in English yeah and it's just this sense of I love battling things and going to war with these sort of these sort of powers if you will to bring about peace and to bring about love well let's talk about quickly because I know we're kind of running out of time a few of the other this is by the way extremely typical of brochure discussion yes but you know we've talked about the fact that we've been born in this post Vatican 2 generation that we've been born in the middle of this sexual abuse crisis a few other distinguishing traits of our age are first of all the technology age and that includes the rapid rise and proliferation of social media especially secondly this hyper emphasis on lust and pornography as two of the greatest challenges especially for young men today that the digital age has helped make that a more significant challenge spiritually than it has in past generations and then finally we live in this sort of disenchanted age you know Charles Taylor the philosopher talks about the buffered self that we've closed ourselves off to the transcendent unlike past generations maybe we can briefly touch on each of those three things and why they're important considerations when we ask what does it mean to become a saint in our age ya know that's a great point I like like I said like you said we can briefly go through them I think it's worth having just a podcast maybe you know long comics because because it really they're so vital Brandon and they affect our generation so profoundly I think we just need to spend some serious time on the man but um first of all technology never before has a generation had of a fingertip so much never before has generation had to learn how to properly and healthily maturely deal with literally a plethora and really an infinite amount of resources specifically resources in so far it's not just bodily needs or bodily you know reason earthly resources but resources of information resources of communication so that's definitely a topic of conversation that our generation is going to have to spend a lot more reflection upon and really start discerning what is our role in maturely interacting with with technology what is our role and learning how to adequately and appropriately use these different tools as opposed to allowing them inform and use us so right now what's happening unfortunately that technology is literally forming human beings I see this especially with the little kids at my parish that some of them will spend more time looking at a screen than they do into another human beings face more time looking at a screen and spending time in front of a television watching Little Einsteins than they will spending outside and being formed by nature so what's happened is nature as formats has been replaced by Tecna nature technology as formative and this has very serious consequences for the development of children but also for Humanity as a whole so we're gonna have to really start having that conversation and reflecting on how do we really become holy become Saints amidst this technological civilization that we have built when it comes to the topic of lust in general I think that lust has become one of the biggest dangers of current civilization the reason being is that as technology has increased dehumanization has also increased with it so as we become a more technological civilization that interprets things through machines that interprets even quality of life according to what we can produce through utilitarianism what happens now is the dignity of the human person is is now reduced and so we start treating human beings as we do an app so as quickly as we access it tick tock in order to make a video that's how quickly we also access using another human beings body for our own personal pleasure they're both the two apps could be right next to each other and they're both just as easily accessible so that's something else that we have to start praying about is how can we protect ourselves from this this qualifying of how we treat technology versus how we treat human beings and finally when it comes to the was the third point the third point was we live in a disenchanted age as a transcendent Chesterton Chesterton always comes to mind with this yeah he says yes what are you gonna say yes it's Chesterton Chesterton is wonderful book orthodoxy probably his most famous work he mentions in there that God is like a child insofar as he never ceases to wonder at his creation the Sun rises every single day not because God cannot think of anything more creative to do but because he never tires of seeing it rise he has this childlike fascination and Chesterton says so wonderfully God looks the Sun and says again again again do it again just like I'm the oldest of four children so I used to give my little brothers and sisters a plane ride you know I'd lay down on my back and I put them on my belly on my feet I'd make them like fly over me they loved it and anytime I put them down what's the first thing that they asked for do it again Blakey they used to call me Blake you do it again Blake you do it again like oh my gosh okay what do you guys got my leg workout right this sense of fascination with the world this sense of wonder what the ordinary has died and it's a it's a tragic death it's a tragic death and so we have to reclaim our sense of wonder this is absolutely vital why is it that millenials impost millenials are the most globalized most interconnected most resourceful rich generation in planet Earth's history and yet they simultaneously have the highest rates of depression suicide anxiety opioid and drug abuse in world history there's a correlation between those two things because something is missing and that's the sense of a life worth living a sense of wonder with my own existence because it's being numbed by the technolog oh so it's being done by technology and some artificial conduits so yeah definitely so those are some of the biggest challenges of our days how we're gonna become sane submits that is that we're gonna have to fully engage with these cultures with the technological culture with the lust culture with the dehumanization culture with the sense of the lack of wonder the lack of transcendent and we're gonna have to really start imbuing those cultures with Christian genius a Christian life and number one through our own witness of life through word in action I mentioned just a few minutes ago how every challenge can also be seen as an invigorating opportunity and it's kind of I see the flip side of each of these three things for example social media you know working with Bishop Baron at word on fire we're seeing the unbelievable fruit of using social media to evangelize in ways that we've never been able to do in church history like we can put out a video and reach tens of thousands of atheists instantly when would we when would the church ever be able to do that we would an atheist ever come across a Catholic bishop you know in in the year 500 year thousand or 1500 but we're Saints today God has put us in this time in part to use these tools that he's given us like the social media and then I think of lust and pornography I remember this line from Bishop Thomas Olmsted's document into the breach he's the Bishop of Phoenix and he wrote this beautiful beautiful is probably not the right word profound document on Christian masculinity and manhood and what it means to be a Christian man and he has a section in there on pornography you know so many men even within the church struggle with pornography and he said imagine standing before the throne of God on Judgment Day where the great saints of ages passed who themselves dealt with preeminent sins of their own day but imagine those Saints saying to each other we dealt with the trouble of lust in our day but those 21st century men those happy few battled the beast up close to me that just wow that sets fire to my heart that invigorates me to think yeah it's hard to be a man today it's hard to battle lust and fight against pornography but in some ways we're fighting this beast more closely and more aggressively than any saint has had to fight him in the past and be because of that there's a certain there's a certain honor there's a certain excitement about this battle that we've been uniquely given and then finally in regards to the transcendent thing I remember getting so into the TV series Vikings you know I love Vikings in general love Viking culture in general oh I know yeah father Blake for um for what was it was it for Christmas it was for Christmas he gave me a Viking drinking horn and I don't even drink but I have my my Diet Coke in my in my Viking drinking horn there he desecrated Pepsi how many more Mead more ale anyway I remember getting into the show Vikings which for a time was my favorite TV show ever ever I've watched the whole first several seasons multiple and there's I mean spoiler alert there's some you know gratuitous VIPRE to is violence some sexuality and things like that might not be best for everybody but what struck me in that series more than anything was the religious dimension it raises the religious questions better than almost any secular series I've seen what was especially notable was that every single character and I'm making zero exceptions here every single major character was religious in some way so you had the English they're Christians you had the Vikings who believed in the Norse gods you had the French who were also Christian you had various pagan groups and Pagan tribes they all had religious ceremonies they all made sacrifices of some sort they all prayed they all had some sense that there's more to this life than the material world and yeah as you said most of our culture it misses that we're disenchanted we don't think that there's more than what the materialist worldview offers and so here's yet another opportunity for those of us striving to be Saints to reawaken the disenchanted culture with the transcendent yeah no absolutely the ancients we may be smarter than the ancients were but they are more intelligent than we are and there's a difference between being smart and being intelligent intelligence that wonderful word in Ted ledger day when it literally means is in latinus to read in between it means to literally be able to see in between the lines to see through the very depths of reality the very depths of things that's what it means to be intelligent to be smart means to be sought to solve an equation that's what smart people can do but the intelligent means to know I exist that's intelligence and the ancient world had a much deeper sense of intelligence they were much more in tune with human existential 'ti than we are nowadays and this is why you would never find in ancient world anything equivalent to a modern atheist at all because they're not foolish enough to fall into such a folly they realized that there is just too much evidence to suggest that the human soul does not desire transcendent reality there's too much 8 there's there's too much unique in human existence to negate the existence of a spiritual realm yeah so it is it's something very fascinating that we need to reclaim it and what I the hope amidst this is I was recently on a little TV show here locally with a medical doctor we had a relationship which we have a conversation between the relationship of medicine and religion and I mentioned that the silver lining in this cloud is that Millennials and post Millennials are getting really wrapped up in this sort of you know New Age spirituality because we were raised in a heavily atheistic civilization and we're starting to get the sense of that does it Norse our souls a lot we're just don't want to admit that it we can find our happiness back home where we were raised which is our Catholic faith and so we want to go try to find it somewhere else mystically like Buddhism or something like that so um but so the sense is there of the of the transcendent spiritual we just need to properly you know orient it alright well we've tried to keep this 30 to 45 minutes I'm thinking this is going to be a pretty common problem with the two of us of extending these conversations as far too long so I'm going to try and wrap it up here sure we can probably assume that we're going to have dedicated episodes to each of those subtopics that we just talked about from the abuse crisis to social media and technology to lust pornography transcendent all that stuff so we'll unpack those I'm sure much much more down the line but let me let's let's close with this father Blake I'm gonna ask you this question because it may be I sums up the whole thing what would you say to someone who came to you and asked why was I born now why did God put me here how would you answer that yeah to to become a saint I know it sounds repetitive but it's the clearest most perfect answer and when I say that I don't mean just to I don't mean that in the simplistic sense of just trying to be a good person to be a saint what makes a saint a saint is someone who vehemently struggles strives wrestles with their age when you look at the lives of saints such as Catherine of Siena here's a woman that was not disconnected or live abstraction from her history lived an extraction from her age she was immersed she wrestled with the greatest tragedies of her time two of which were huge the Black Plague and the other being the Avignon papacy the fact that the Pope's were no longer living in the city of Rome and does she run away from these things does she just say prayers amidst those things no she allows her encounter with Christ to be formed by a deep mystical piety and from that piety it flows into this evangelical zeal that literally changed the course of history that's why you were born in this time you're going to do the same exact thing you were born to wrestle with the age to get bumps and bruises along the way through either struggling with your own personal sin or maybe with the sins of others and amidst that struggle to grow and virtue to grow in holiness almost like a warrior when he's trained you train first with wooden swords and you get hit a bunch by your master when you're a young squire but eventually that's so you can become a knight and go out to battle an actual field and so to wrestle with our age to understand the aches and the groanings of our time and to really bring those to Christ so that they could help sanctify the culture that's always been the vocation of Christians throughout her past for the past two millennia has been the same over and over and over again to sanctify the age in which we find ourselves and you have been found within this age and it's not to question why all you have to question is how are you going to sanctify what's been given to you well said one of our mutual friends and heroes GK Chesterton said that every generation is converted by the saint who most contradicts it yeah that really summarizes a lot of what we're getting at here that here's all these problems with the culture that we've just happened to be born in the Saints will be those who arise in contradiction to those challenges and problems so let's do it let's do it that's what father Blake wants that's what I want that's what you want watching and listening this so let's that's what God wants that's what God wants obvious yeah good well thanks so much for listening to the second episode of the burro shire podcast we've got several more lined up here if you want more information on the podcast to check out past episodes go to bird Shire podcast.com please we mentioned this in the first episode if you like this please share it around especially as we're kind of a new podcast we're just getting out there the more people we can spread the word to the better so if you like this share it with your friends share with your family tell fellow parishioners maybe tell your priest about it we'd like to spread the word as far as we can so the borough Shire podcast and it can be found at borough shire podcast.com thanks for listening we'll see everybody next week [Music]

Channel: The Burrowshire Podcast

Views: 1,642

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Id: T8RXz2JO1c0

Length: 56min 14sec (3374 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020