Bishop Barron Presents | Shia LaBeouf - Padre Pio and the Friars

[Music] well i'm delighted to be here with shia labeouf today and uh you and i met when several months ago when you were up in my pastoral region working with the um capuchins to prepare for this extraordinary role you played of padre pio so i ran into you up there one day and i just saw you a few weeks ago when you were premiering the movie for some of the uh capuchin so delight you're here today to talk to us good and so i mean i could talk to you all day about a lot of things but uh maybe first a bit about about acting i mean you're you're seeing one of the best actors in your generation and when i watch your films i'm reminded of people like you know de niro and pacino and and daniel day lewis and some of these people who are are more identified with you know the method acting style stanislavski and all that i'm just wondering i mean do you agree with that would you say you're kind of a method actor and if so what what's involved in that i think people put that on me but uh yeah and and i'm honored by the the people you just mentioned to be included that way or be perceived that way but uh one i'm not at that level one two i i'm not in that school of thought so stanislavski uh is about sense memory and um it's it's very intellectual it's a whole lot of um conceptual it's a whole lot of cognitive it's heady it's very heady and i'm i'm like a whitman character i'm like a very unintellectual feeler and so i i don't i don't identify with that school of thought really i don't really know what i do or what where where it comes from or how it happens i know that i feel a whole lot i got a big heart i don't know if i'm a method guy um and i think some of that stuff's ridiculous it's like kind of the staying in character that's sort of the classic i like to be immersive i like all immersive experience not just acting it's probably why i like catholicism as well i like all immersion i like being fully i like adventure and that requires like full immersion so i would i would consider myself an immersive actor but method acting has like a bad um smell to it like too technical too intellectual and just kind of kind of douchey kind of like just like mean you know me yeah sometimes i feel like there's people on on film sets like they um it gives some people an excuse to behave uh terribly you know you hear some stories of guys just like sending people like rat carcasses and you know like ridiculous things that have nothing to do with the moment on set uh what's the famous olivier story that he's with dustin hoffman right and hoffman stayed up all night and to you know get totally into this character and didn't olivia say like why don't you just attract something it's a lot easier well yeah and and and this is tricky because both of those actors are incredible you know who would you side with me personally i i appreciate hoffman more and maybe that's just because my generation but uh i i don't think it's required to first off i i now having played pio some of the penitence involved in method is interesting because then you're not acting i hate acting i hate acting because it feels like like um you can get it wrong when you're really in it um then you can't get it wrong i hate losing you know i like to win and so there's ways to like backstop a performance where you leave yourself very little room for error if you're in the middle of it you know um if you show up with all the caps it's it's easier to to believe and uh that you're a part of that because you showed up with it uh equally if you're playing a gangster and you roll in with gangsters it feels the same way whereas um the make-believe stuff feels like frivolous and uh unintrinsic and like wishy-washy so say a bit about your own preparation then so not the intellectual stanislavski thing but uh this immersive entering into the emotion of it tell me more about that you're preparing to play padre pio you know what's involved in that yeah because stanislaus is like therapy it's like therapizing right which is really heady yeah and let's focus on childhood trauma and the problems and things like that um yeah so okay pio right so you you wind up with uh this enormous responsibility and you learn how enormous it is the further in you go and you start to get very scared and that fear motivates like all things fear fear and discomfort motivates like growth and change and so you i uh get this um i'm tasked with this enormous thing which feels like and this is a whole story in itself how the role even came to me but um which also feels miraculous and and unearned and um and and um i anyway i wind up with this this task and the task is to play like one of the most spiritual men that ever lived you're playing uh one of the most respected beloved saints that ever graced the earth some people in in you know italy don't carry a jesus on them they carry a peel on them right you go to certain places in italy and he's everywhere he's elvis and um i mean not in the best way and you you recognize rightly that this is more than a role that this is pio's interesting um because pio also saved my life i mean it's it's not just like a like a movie or something like that but and i don't mean that lightly um let's hang out i want to get back to that of course i want to ask you maybe one more thing about about acting um if you're if you like immersive experiences and you get tasked with paying playing pio your life is going to change well i can get i see that yeah for sure that happened to you yeah here's what i want to ask you about though actors have been fascinating to us from ancient times it's not like a hollywood thing it goes all the way back to ancient times and people loved actors they find them fascinating for some reason people that can play other people we find compelling and then even like the ancient philosophers were very interested in acting in theater you know can i interject for one second yeah go ahead just to say that mass is a bit of a performance yeah mass you are the priest is performing the last moments of christ's life and he is a vessel for this extraordinary experience this extraordinary moment in time and he is re-playing these this when as he's imbuing as the host is imbued with the spirit you're that is a bit of a performance and so different priests have different performances and there's a not to say a priest is an actor because that somehow minimizes the sacred nature of the task but there is a correlation between mass and um and being an actor uh completely immersed in an immersive experience that was my first inroad yeah to pio was okay that mass is an immersive experience he's fully involved his mass was very different than other masses that were performed in that it was it was lively it was uh you never knew which way it was going to go we have some films with those we've seen padre pio yes and it's an emotional experience it's not just the tradition of it it's not just the ritual of it it's it's a it's an entire journey that he goes through he's exhausted at the other end he's sweating he's dripping he's crying there's snot it's like the man went to battle he went to war and it feels like like there's a death that happens in a resurrection and it's it's um extremely emotional which is how he touched people he didn't touch people through like these profundities that he spit he was also an immense feeler uh he you know a lot of his contemporaries didn't liken him to an aquinas or an intellectual he was an extraordinary feeler he was like a pro-feeler and that was my first inroad to him was the fact that i as an actor who feels that way that i'm not like an intel i didn't go to school i didn't go to juilliard i'm just like a street tough who wound up in this wild world and in peo i found the same kind of misanthrope who wound up in this wild situation where a lot of people put a lot of pressure on him and he felt the enormous nature of the task that was my first inroad sorry for speaking too much here's a lot of things were going through my mind as you were talking one is i heard bruce springsteen say one time and his first introduction to performing was being an ultra server so ethan's catholic parish he's an altered point he said there you are up on this stage that's well lit there's people out there and you're dressed up and he said it was like my first introduction to performance i also thought of thomas merton you know that name oh spiritual writer oh yeah so merton had all these friends in new york who were not catholic and he becomes a trappist monk which is a pretty you know intense expression of catholicism so a lot of them came to his first mass and they didn't quite know what was going on so one of his buddies a guy named seymour friedgood who was jewish said what is the mass and merton said well it's like a ballet with certain prescribed movements and gestures and that was the pre-conciliar mass the older mass which probably is a little bit more like that you know it's just but it's to your point about the performance of it or the drama of it because it is a sort of recapitulation of the drama of christ's life even the priest coming into the sanctuary that the the word entering into flesh coming into the world the priest being relatively silent for the first part of mass the quiet the silent years of jesus then the proclamation of the word that's jesus preaching you know then there's the sacrifice of calvary et cetera so the the mass is a if you want a dramatic representation of the life and death and resurrection of jesus also when mass is done really really well you feel like something like a secret is being shared with you and good performances are this way when you see really good performances you feel like oh wow this person is sharing a secret with me it connects in something deeper where you feel like somebody is expressing something from in you and you're seeing it uh up on screen and that's what i get out of really good mass a really good mass feels like it's sharing some secret with me some profound secret with me um not to get too corny or anything like that but let me ask about that because that was my question about the philosophers i won't get too technical don't worry about that uh but like aristotle said theater is cathartic and what he meant was that means it's like cleansing catharsis me like a purification as i watched the actors on stage he thought especially it was pity and fear and sorrow these deep emotions we have that we kind of act them out with the actors and we sort of deal with them and you know we post freudian people get that too of like deep emotions in us that might be suppressed but they're coming out as we're watching a great film or a great play i mean do you do you see that or what what's the what's happening when you're watching a really good movie beyond just entertainment yeah you're activated it's probably why mass has changed you know matt the the mass has changed because there was a yearning to activate the public in an artificial way and i would say i mean i'm not no expert on any of this but it feels like this bureaucratic activation like rules were set or a change happened in the tradition from latin mass to the mass that you now receive at a traditional catholic church it's almost as though the church is trying to to to um uh to from the almost from the office activate the audience without putting the agency on the priest we have full conscious active participation which is where the singing and the back and forth comes from whereas old latin mass put all the agency on the priest to be fully activated and that at that activation of the priest was supposed to activate the audience to activate the uh the laity that all the agency was put on the priest and so and and i don't want to get too far into this because then you get into controversy but latin mass affects me deeply deeply and because it feels like they're not selling me a car and when i go to some mass with the guitars and stuff and i'm from you know santa ines right so that's where i was catechized and there's a lot of guitar playing and there's a lot of like what feels like um like they're trying to sell me on an idea whereas what i feel when i went to oakland and went to like um and by the way there's a very incredible version of that as well that's super activating and very emotional that i've experienced up there with father bobby there's also and father peter but there's also this something that hap you know christ the king in oakland does a latin mass every day of the week and it feels like it's it's not being done to sell me on anything and it feels almost like like i'm being let in on something very special and the quiet uh um the the it it activates something in me where it feels like i found something it's a little bit like a band when a band is pushed on you uh you it doesn't feel the same way as you finding it when you find it then you root for it it feels like this special thing that you found and you protect it and you hold it and it's yours when somebody's selling me on something it somehow takes my it kills the the my my my um aptitude for it and my suspension of disbelief and my yearnings to root for it i i get it there's an immediate rebellion in me yeah yeah no i get that you're hitting different dimensions of it you know because you might say the shadow side of the older form was it became too much of a theater performance and the audience is just kind of sitting there taking it in where what all the liturgical reform people wanted this is way back in the like the 40s and 50s was this full conscious active participation so that the the congregation's not like just watching a show but we're involved you say the give and take and so on uh but then the shadow side of the other approach i think you're right and saying i can feel too put upon like they're as you say trying to sell me something you know so trying to find that organic rhythm because you don't want to be exclusive either no right which is what latin mass feels like sometimes it feels like like i have to know latin to experience it but however i would also say that there's certain language where i don't need to know the words yeah which is what i feel when i watch pio's mass yeah i know what's going on and i feel it deeply i it almost feels more powerful than when i know every single word it takes me out of the realm of the intellectual and it puts me squarely in the realm of the feeling the and the beauty thing that you talk about do you know what joseph campbell you know that name yes comparative mythologist and he was raised as a catholic way back when so in the old church right he said he thought the greatest problem was when we moved the mass from the older form and he said to make it more like a like a cooking demonstration and what he meant was well here we are everything's well lit i'm gonna i'm this and this and that and you know i i get his point it's kind of the point you're making that if it becomes too obvious too rationalized too hey everybody look here's what's going on that it does take something away yeah from the experience of the mystique of it the part of the idea of using incense which we do at the catholic mass and we say well our prayer is going up to god yes indeed but part of the symbolism there is it blocks our vision the smoke gets in the way yes in fact it gets in your eyes even yes where people are coughing and i can't see but that's appropriate around sacred things if everything's wide open to view and under bright light oh there it is yeah well that's by definition not the sacred world yeah so see the challenge to me is trying to find a way to honor all these things we're talking about and the liturgical wars going on are often people on both sides seeing good things in their approach but it's trying to find the place where they can all find expression yeah i think that's the yeah and and i do i mean as a person who's involved in the arts to deny some of the senses and it heightens some of the others so yeah so when you put me in this rationalistic logical word word word word word plot plot plot plot it takes me out of the feeling realm yeah whereas latin mass puts me squarely in the feeling realm because i can't argue the word because i don't know what the word means so i'm just left with this feeling that feels sacred and connected and really what what hindered my i was i was never an atheist i was always an agnostic even when i was a sam harris ted talk you know christopher hitchens guy which is who i was before i fell in um um it um i always had a belief but i never had like a connection latin mass gave me something where i felt connected uh which took me out of belief into connection belief kept me you know i had belief because that's the rational logical it's not logical or rational to be atheist if you really go deep enough you get to the big bang and then then you're screwed again you know you have to account for it somehow which puts you in a belief situation right but too much of that logic and that too much of that rationale takes me out of feeling which takes me out of connection no that's it's a good instinct because the catholicism i think part of our genius is we never threw anything out that we have kind of this all-encompassing thing you want rationality man you got thomas aquinas and he'll he's more rational than anyone in the whole western tradition but then that same time as aquinas who could write in a highly highly technical way they say couldn't get through mass without weeping copiously yeah and so that's catholicism is that we've got the emotion we've got the art we've got the the sensible we've got the intellectual and it's all there we never threw anything away you know and so because people are different places when i was a young kid i responded to aquinas's arguments that they made a huge difference to me like wow that is really rationally compelling other people respond in very different ways i responded differently at different stages of my life when i i got through that and then other things opened up to me you know so i love that that we've got this house with all these doors that are open and you know com whatever door works for you come on in well merton is really interesting because he's a poet and he speaks really rationally but his writings are annie's was an atheist so if you walk in and you're you were me reading you know seven story mountain uh he spoke to every part of me he was a big deal for me him and uh he was for me too yeah i didn't realize that you had read so you read the story it was sort of required if you were gonna play pio i was told he was a big deal yeah the guys who catechized me all the guys at san lorenzo gave me him and jim townsend jim townsend was a capuchin who formerly was a a con man he was a convict yeah he murdered his pregnant wife and then spent 20 years in prison and then spent 35 years in the seminary or uh 35 years in the order and and he was another um he was another um invite for a person who felt totally depraved when i walked in you know i walked into this my life was on fire i was walking out of hell it wasn't like i you know i willingly came in here on a on a white horse singing show tunes i came in here on fire and i didn't want to be an actor anymore and my life was a mess complete mess and i'd hurt a lot of people i felt deep shame deep guilt i didn't like to go outside much i really like i had a i had a yearning not be here anymore you know i was on my way out is that where you were when you accepted the role of repeal this is why when you spoke about the role i wanted to kind of dive in there because it's kind of formative to how this all happened to me i was willing because pain made me willing to go about this in a different way than i had previously you know my my whole my opinion about god before this happened before the pain struck before my world had crumbled was art love and god they all mean the same thing they're synonymous and as an artist who creates art i found myself in a in a in a godly position often right where i was in charge and i had also been told my whole life like your life is your life you have to make with it what you can you know you got to be a good guy and then you got to get married and then you got to get a house and you got to get a job and do good at your job and like your life is your life and things will work out if you put effort in and you know it's up to you and i always really felt that and it made it hard to believe in god because it felt like my managerial skills are what are going to amount to uh a fulfilled existence yeah when all of my designs failed when all of my plans went out the window when my life had led to serious infliction of pain and damage on other people i threw up my hands like my plans are garbage and i don't want to be here anymore and i have no and that was required to enter po you had to actually it's why it feels like celestial mathematics or some kind of divine it feels way you know too uh coincidental to be a coincidence but my life was completely like i told you on fire and i'm in a spiritual program where where i go on zoom and i you know we we have meetings and another person that was in this meeting who's also part of the same fellowship of like the down and outs was a man named abel ferreira and he wound up seeing me in the meeting uh we shared sensibilities we had heard each other share a few times and then he wrote me in the chat box do you know about padre pio and of course i didn't know anything about padre pio this is before the offer of the film yes he had been this had been gestating on his side for years because his his grandfather comes from the same region in pietro china and he has a connection to pio in many different ways he's not a catholic he's a buddhist which i always had trouble with as a person who was always self self self and now i'm not going to get in that conversation but me and him have wrestled over this many times and i thought okay well what is this padre pio thing and this is early days in my um my my what now looks like a salvific journey from my side i was still egotistical on max i was still grasping at straws how do i hold on to what i've lost how do i build a career again how do i and so when he when this director who i respected i had known he made movies that i really loved you know bad lieutenant for me is one of the greatest performances ever made and i know he's an actor's director and the fact that there was this director reaching out to me because at this point i'm nuclear nobody wants to talk to me including my mother the manager's not calling the agent's not calling i'm um i'm not connected to the business anymore and so the fact that this man reached out to me felt like something like in my egoic mind wow this is a miracle my chance this is my chance this is my chance and so my ego shows up and now i'm like yeah well padre pio and my ego is what makes me research po it's not my catholicism or my you're supposed to be a cool role for me to play great now i can get back on the horse yeah okay and so i start researching pio and and as i'm researching pio he tells me about his plans to make a movie and he tells me that willem dafoe is going to be in the movie and now i'm really an ego wait so i can go from bottom barrel to working with willem dafoe ah this is my chance you know back on the hustle back on the ego and i start leaning into this thing and he says well if you want to do this role i need you to start researching go up and find a um i need you to go find a seminary okay that's when you made your way up to center uh san lorenzo so the closest seminary to me yeah yeah living in pasadena was san lorenzo so i drive up there and i park my truck and i start living in the parking lot and i'm immersing myself in this world and i'm sending videos back to him to willem and abel who at the time were you know working on the script and i'm falling into um a group of men that met me in san lorenzo namely a guy named brother jude who starts talking to me about the gospel and he says well if you're going to play p.o you need to read the gospel and so i've never read the gospel and he's reading matthew you've never read like the gospel matthew straight through i've read all sam harris i've watched all the ted talks yeah right and was really good at attacking catholicism because it made me feel superior and they were kind of agnostic slash atheist at the time yes i'd like to i'd like to argue because it made me feel like i was in power right yeah yeah um i'd like to be contrarian i like to sit with a bishop and then put you on your heels because that would make me feel powerful right uh which i find most secular people enjoy the control of it yeah because so much of life is uncontrollable to feel and control feels good so uh i was that guy i come up with these arguments my mother had a spirituality he was sort of undefined he was jewish right yeah but but like hippie jewish like not like traditional jewish according to the testament my mother had never read the old testament she was jewish in culture she liked the art she liked being a part of it she liked the rabbis and the charisma but she she wasn't a practicing jew and that she wore to fill in and read the old testament and i had never been given any of this information never been i've been bar mitzvahed phonetically i read the hebrew phonetically okay so it felt like a show yeah it felt like a hustler you know what you were saying i didn't know what i was saying and in that way it felt and it wasn't emotional it felt like i was doing it for my grandmother who at that time was on her last leg and i was told i needed to get bar mitzvah for my grandmother and you were like 13 at the time and i and i read it phonetically and my grandmother's happy and they put me on a chair and that's my spirituality yeah for a long time and it felt fake because i never invested there was never any i had never felt any real suffering in my life so i didn't have any willingness to have any belief so i had no faith um okay so that's the now you're up at san lorenzo and you're given the gospel of matthew i'm reading it for the first time i read it for the first time and things start to strike me like just like like john the baptist yeah okay like john the story of john the baptist uh being being a reformed hedonist being this man who was wearing like this this who was sort of like you know scraggly and like he kind of felt like a old western character from kind of like like i don't know like he felt like like um uh he felt like a cowboy eating locust and where yeah yeah he felt he felt like kind of rustic and strong and masculine and my opinion of christ at this point felt almost like i was reading about a buddhist like this very soft fragile all loving all listening but no ferocity no romance then you hadn't read the gospel i read the gospel i just had these this art that i had seen right this very soft more feminized yes and so i hadn't had this idea of like uh the old testament christ on a horse cape dipped in blood sword i had no none of that was in my lexicon of knowledge so all i knew about was this very soft meek jesus which didn't fit into my idea of what uh like my what masculinity would be i come from like a my dad was a mongol biker you know it's like we i it wasn't appealing to me and then i read about john the baptist and it became quite appealing his the the grizzle yeah right and then you get further into the gospel and you start getting into like elements of this like redemptive it felt like i started reading about a route i started like reading a map like towards something that felt like um let go that's really what i got out of the gospels if i could wrap it up in two words it was let go and at that time when i was reading it i was holding on so tight to a life that i was slipping away through my hands to a 35 years of management that the gospel gave me this this invite to just let go what never was appealing to me about buddhism was this idea like if i'm in a boat and the boat is sinking and i don't know how to swim buddhism is a book that tells you and read this and learn how to swim better and at the time of my life like i didn't want to swim anymore i had a gun on the table i was out of here i didn't want to be alive anymore when all of this happened okay uh shame like i had never experienced before it kind of shame you forget how to breathe you don't know where to go you can't go outside to get like a taco like you don't want to go in that's where you are when you're up there reading the gospel and and thinking about the playing power yes but i'm also in this like this deep desire to like hold on and so i read the gospel with this man jude and i keep hearing like in many different variations of it i'm not going to explain the whole gospel here nor do i need to it's you but i keep hearing let go and to a person who's been gripping so tight for so long it feels like ah it just feels like it's just um um it just feels like the right move to let go like complete surrender for real and um and it stops being this like prep of a movie and it starts being something that feels beyond all that and i stopped sending videos like at a certain point with jude i just like really fall in and then i meet these when these women the sister lucia of the uh um the uh uh sacred heart sisters who starts really like catechizing me in a very real way in a very like let's go through it let's talk about it paragraph by paragraph and what happened was there also happened to be like a meeting at the church for this other spiritual program that i'm in right next door to sister lucia's so i'd wake up in the morning 9 a.m i'd go to my meeting and then 10 a.m i'd be with sister lucia and then 11 a.m i'd be with brother jude and then 12 i'd be with brother father james who's now in berlin but father james was like this father james felt like an old sheriff i don't know if you met you messed up sure yeah he's like this he's like a grandfather right his hand is enormous yeah he made me feel safe he would just put his hand on my shoulder sometimes and he wouldn't say much to me he wasn't but he was also like this archie bunker character where like his love felt like you had like like you're pulling it out of him yeah he's always around and i started falling into this group and i'm living there so i'm taking showers in in there and i'm eating with them and we're hanging out and they're drawing you into the christian the catholic thing they're drawing him into the gospel into a certain way more than that it's not even like they're trying to they're drawing me into like laughter they're like sharing jokes with me it's like we're just like hanging out and i at this time i had no friends in my life see what did jesus do with people when he first met them typically he'd eat and drink with them you know so you think of jesus while he's giving the sermon on their mouth well yes he does but the typical move of jesus was well let's get around the table and we'll and we'll talk yeah and he's talking to prostitutes and centers and tax collectors and you know so that move of theirs uh you know to kind of draw you in yeah draw you into their life yeah and i'm eating their ice cream and i'm eating them out of house at home and i'm filling the tacos back up but like i'm really like i'm they're not asking nothing of me they're not asking me to sign nothing they're not asking me to do nothing or take pictures i'm just like sitting around and i'm petting their cats and i'm hanging out you know and um [Music] and uh but the the lesson of as you're putting let go was coming through yeah that's all i kept hearing but not just let go but reach out right to someone who's reaching out to you the reach out had happened for me yeah i was already there i had nowhere to go this was the last stop on the train there was nowhere else to go in in every sense it was like i know now like my god was using my ego to draw me to him was drawing me away from worldly desires it was all happening simultaneously but there would have been no impetus for me to get in the car and drive up here if i didn't think oh i'm going to save my career and what happened to me when i got here is a switch happened it was like three card monty it was like like like somebody tricked me into it yeah it felt like uh not in a bad way in a way that like i couldn't see it i was um i was so close to it i couldn't i couldn't see it uh i see it differently now because time has passed and um and anyway so i um i i'm hanging with brother jude and then brother drew gets called away and he has to go like be an archivist somewhere so he's got a time for me another man enters the fray named brother alex and brother alex has um a totally different energy young guy he's about your age he's my age yeah super austere yeah uh very prayerful yeah and i don't know nothing about prayer because i can't cultivate uh an unforgiving myth i don't know anything about silence i don't know anything about quiet i don't know anything about it i got a cell phone in my phone that will give me everything my ego needs it's buzzing all the time i got all this you know there is no silence or i don't know anything about meditation meditation at this point my life feels like a self-imposed time out prayer feels like i'm memorizing somebody else's words like i'm an actor like i'm doing monologues for myself in my head and alex says uh just go into that chapel and just shut up we're the blessed sacrament yes and just sit there just sit there and be quiet and um and and that feels like a very strange thing to tell me and i'm also rebelling and right around this time you and the deacon show up for like this deacon's meeting well that's the first time i met you the first time i meet you okay the deacons are all hanging out at the church and and i feel like oh this is like wow it's amazing i get to sit in here and you know my my like i feel like um like i'm not allowed to be there and but then all the deacons are like being really warm with me and i'm sitting with the bass first right smash yeah we do math and then we go like have a little sandwich right and you do this you do this talk about prayer yeah and how it's really a simple uh four-step process prayer you know and and i needed somebody to simplify it for me because it felt like one i needed i needed to be defined i didn't want it to be this esoteric i needed something very defined and very practical i needed something very like boots on the ground and you said quiet leads to loving thoughts loving thoughts leads to loving action loving action leads to peace and that hit me heavy and that tree side was quoting there whoever it was it changed my life so then then you go into pray rosary yeah and i'm just learning rosary at this time i you know i know the front half i don't know all the prayers i i can do you know i can get us get to the middle of the rosary i don't know the dismount prayers but but but i have enough to like it pauses my head yeah which i guess what rosary does for a lot of people it it makes it tactile it's a great prayer right it takes me out of the cognitive and it puts me into the physical it physicalizes it and for somehow somehow that pauses all of my internal non-stop chitter chatter monologuing of what i want what i need and this animal in here tom's the monkey mine that was uh merton's line that he got from the buddhists actually that the monkey mine's always leaping around yes here here and and it calms that it calms that and centers it yeah and makes me feel present because it's right here right i can hold it hold it in your hand yeah right and so we're praying the rosary and i'm waiting for loving thoughts and it's not my first or second or third or fourth or fifth or sixth or seventh thought but then i hear a thought like call your mother tell her you love her now me and my mother at this time mother don't want nothing to do with me you know though the news that had come out has been like i've been abusive to women and been shooting dogs and i've been willingly giving women stds and like there's it's disgusting it's depraved and my mother is embarrassed beyond all imagination she wants nothing to do with me and we hadn't talked and i'm living in this parking lot and and i get out of rosary with you and i call my mother and um and i say uh i don't have much to say to you but i love you and i'm safe and she said oh i'm so grateful and she hangs up the phone and it's the first time i had really like talked to my mom and i felt this peace cause i had all this resentment animosity like how could you dip on me you're my mother you know no matter what happens like this is conditional love that you offer me so you know uh then i start reading the confessions by augustine and his mother and that relationship and everything starts to feel like click click click click click right and augustin being like a hedonist who had made all these flaws and then then they started explaining francis to me and all this ego that was in france's complete egomaniacs right yeah like and and i start feeling all these connections and i start seeing this route and the the the and it says let go and and and like i find a a way for myself this is all before we're even in the movie i'm not even reading the script yet i'm just like it's just like laying the ground not even in the pio yet i'm passing pio's statue every day and i'm kissing him on the hand just out of like reverence for the statue but i don't know anything about the man yet then i get to reading about peel and about suffering now this is another hack that happens to me at some point where i felt like my suffering was pointless i didn't understand what was going on i felt like you know um like i and father james walks me through like offering your suffering up as purposeful as like intrinsically valuable right that god taps certain people right to go through certain suffering so they can be more effective at bringing the good news forward and we start talking about purpose and i'm questioning like what my purpose is because before this moment my purpose was just to be a good actor my purpose was just to be the best actor that was my whole purpose in life like just such a little dream like the dream of an ant yeah and um and james says you know what are you good at and i'm like i'm good at like i'm good at like bleeding in front of people he's like what are you talking about i was like well that's what i do you know i sort of just throw myself at walls they film me people tell me it's good that's all i know how to do he's like okay so you're good at suffering how are you gonna help other people with that i was like i guess i make movies and stuff and he's like yeah but what else and um we start getting deep off into this conversation and what the arithmetic of purpose is and james says you find out what you're good at first you find out how you can help other people with that and that is your purpose yeah and that's the leap frog right i mean there's so many spiritual principles that you're talking about and it was what's cool to me is you were learning them not abstractly not from a book you were you were living through them and you had some good people guiding you but you know one of them is the whole attachment detachment thing which every spiritual master talks about i mean ancient medieval modern every master is you've got to hunger for god we all do which is infinite hunger it's what everybody wants sam harris wants it trust me uh but we hook it on to something in this world so we say it's going to be its wealth it's power it's pleasure it's my career it's whatever it is is going to make me happy and of course it can't because the desire is infinite so it can't be filled up yeah there's no ceiling right so you keep throwing things in more and more and more and more and of course it doesn't work and that's how we get addicted which i think why attachment in the classical spiritual masters is very much like addiction today that we know a lot about that we get addicted to these things and you know you're addicted to sex or taboos or to drugs or to success or to my ego exactly you know so you would you would wander down that path i was wearing a success mask for 30 years and but see it's like the um do you ever see this thing it was jim carrey it was a really funny little routine he did it was at the golden globes and he got something he said this is not just jim carrey speaking to you this is two-time golden globe winner jim carrey and then he said what i dream about at night is that someday i will be three-time golden globe winner and then the quest will be over and they all laugh but it was perfect it was a perfect little parody of that one yeah so you're in there and i'm thinking of chesterton you know g.k chesterton have you read oh yeah he's a wonderful line from one of his father brown stories you know these detective stories and that god will let us drift to the end of the world but then by a twitch upon the thread will call us back you know and so you're talking about having wandered a long way but then this twitch on the thread came and it was this whole weird padre peel yeah movie and then these people yeah who i know everyone you talk about i know these guys very well and and strangely they weren't trying to get something out of you i mean you had nothing to really offer nothing to offer them but they they were just there to say okay you know we're going to draw you into our world here just by our friendship and laughter then we're going to if they didn't do it for fun and for free i'd have never heard anything they said i wouldn't have heard word one right uh because i would have ripped them apart because oh this is a transaction and you're doing it because of this and that and this and that yeah like father james when we know very well if someone said you know this guy he's a really famous actor and you know if you get to he's like i don't care i mean he didn't i don't yeah he didn't care at all he wouldn't care at all he didn't care at all and that's what made him a powerful yes and what he said to you that see that's the move now from addiction and then we we get we reach out to the lord not to the things of the world but then the next move is always missions he's like okay why did he call you back with a twitch upon the threat yeah why so that now he can send you out on mission you know so that's james saying to you okay what are you good at well how can you use it yes you know but james is also a big pio guy he keeps saying to me like don't make him weak yeah like meek and weak are two different things no right let me explain the difference to you between being meek and being weak meek is to be treasured meek is to be valued meek is a submissive respect weak is having no faith and he starts explaining stuff like that to me where you know meek in my head from a kid who never had a puberty ceremony i mean you know judaism and you're 13 and they put you on a chair and you get a driver's license but it's not like i'd wander off into the woods and come back with a lion's head you know there's no puberty ceremony for a young man today you know that's a problem in our culture yes we've forgotten how to do that and you don't really know what what what it is to be a man you know and and he starts james starts talking about mountains you know this is where seven story mountain comes about but we're in a conversation about a mountain about what in nature is masculine and i'm like uh and he says mountain and he says do you know why he goes because it's immovable you know the wind is not going to move a mountain and then we start talking about my wife and my what my wife wants in a man and and being stable and where that stability comes from for a man and that it's not going to be something you will it's going to be something you lean on and that mountain is in that chapel this is like my journey to this he starts reaching back to the bus to sacramento yeah and but he does it like through this rah-rah cowboy talk you know i feel like i'm listening to like um like i don't know i don't know what to describe it as but it feels like john wayne it's like this this rah-rah kind of thing that touched on it kind of it touched on this thing that i came from and it it it accounted for this whole side of this christ that i didn't know yet and he sort of like masculinized the whole thing for me as this warrior's journey and he starts saying he starts reading like heraclitus to me i don't know anything about heraclitus but he's like there's this quote i want to read to you and he goes you know heraclitus talks about the kind of what a warrior is he says and i'm paraphrasing but he says you know of a hundred out of a hundred men eighty are just targets uh ten are fighters because they uh ten are are fighters because they they make for the battle and we're grateful for them but ah but the one the one is a warrior and he will bring the others back and you know i'm starting to have like emotional experiences with this guy in this you know with these cats running around we're eating ice cream and i'm having like emotional experience with him explaining heraclitus and like this this um this thing that i hadn't had before which felt um like a task more than me more than just like myself and it was also like tapping into this other program that i come from and so now i'm starting to share like in this other program on zoom like these guys are seeing me in a parking lot and they're seeing these friars walk behind me everybody's going out and they're they're desperate for god over here as well you know that that whole thing is about finding a higher power and so they're seeing me like hang out at this seminary and they start driving up and the guys start yeah these guys that are in this other program start driving up to the seminary and start hanging out with these other friars and my world sort of connect sort of collides and then um [Music] oh man where are we in the story but but um we've come a long way spiritually at that point i mean now now i'm really like now i'm experiencing prayer i'm experiencing rosary um starting to learn mass really well i'm starting to be a part of mass i'm starting to feel the effect of mass i'm not receiving the host yet because um we weren't sure if i was baptized or not and so i couldn't receive yet and i felt this deep longing i didn't know i was baptized i had been baptized earlier in my life and didn't even remember it my uncle was a um uh had baptized me in uh trinity uh um trinitine uh i'm saying it wrong trinitarian formula yes that's right yeah and so i so then we found out that i could receive mass and started receiving mass and i start feeling like this um deep reprieve it's not just this like it's not just like a cracker anymore i start feeling like um i start feeling a physical effect from it i start feeling a reprieve and it starts feeling like regenerative and um and i and i start um enjoying it to such a degree i don't want to miss it ever and then i start going to other masses in different parts of the city i went up to san lorenzo and and uh doing liturgy the hours with them which feels like a bigger version of what i'm experiencing in santa hines at mass i'm feeling it even i'm feeling more reprieve feeling safety which is really what i'm chasing like this safety and i'm feeling it with these brothers and i start feeling like this this fraternity start to build around me and then i start telling abel like i got to bring all of these guys with me and he's like well we can't do that pick one and and i don't know who to pick and so i go to um um i go to the head of the novitiate and i ask him to pick and he picks alex oh and that's how alex is how alex falls in and so then then they write a role for alex and then me and alex wind up going to italy he's in the film he's in the movie actually yeah he's he's my right-hand man i mean in life and in the film yeah and he what he brings with him is like it's like a he's like he's like a walking um he's like uh i don't know how to describe him he's he's my inroad into catholicism he was the guy who escamed me in pretty much and continues to be the guy who i can text him about anything you know and he's also a really good mediator between me and my director because i'm not an expert in catholicism but i have one with me who's really good at at being diplomatic with two creatives he doesn't have this like energy he has a very he's like water i don't know how to describe it but but um he's he's he's very diplomatic and so i mean by this time you've moved a long way from being on on fire in that negative sense when he say you were really i'm not feeling that anymore yeah now i'm feeling like quite driven and it was i'm trying to let's name some of the moments it was the way these guys included you in their community is one thing yeah reading the gospel yes you started reading things like the seven story mountain yes you're spending time in front of the blessed sacrament right jim townsend brother jim jones also gave me permission as a sinner to feel like well i hadn't sinned like that and he was a capuchin so it made me feel like okay well me too like uh you know i'm involved in this conversation yeah it was it was seeing other people who would sin beyond anything i could even conceptualize also being found in christ that made me feel like okay well that that gives me hope yeah and james said hope is h-o-p-e hearing other people's experiences and i that it's the truth for me i started hearing experiences of other like depraved people who had found their way in this and it made me feel like i had a classic form in the spiritual tradition going back to people like augustine you know augustine who was i mean he was lost the same thing i mean he reached a point in his life what what he was obsessed with was fame i mean in a way like like you wanted a great career he was this rhetorician he wanted to be the speechwriter for the emperor which indeed he became and then that famous story remember in the confessions when he's going to accompany the emperor as he's going to you know recite one of augustine's own speeches and that's the high point of his life and they run into this poor drunken guy in the street you know let's carry on and augustine looks at him with disgust and then he realizes you know yeah i mean tomorrow he'll be sober but i'm still going to be completely drunk yeah on ambition yeah and yeah it led him down that same sort of hellish path until it was ambrose the ambrose for him was sort of like father james or brother alex for you there was this great bishop in in milan and it was his preaching and i hear gus augustin went to hear him because he heard his rhetoric was impressive i'm going to hear this guy he's a great you know user of the latin language but as he listened to him he's also preaching the spiritual life right and so augustine uh and tears had a lot to do with it augustine was like a hyper intellectual but man there's like tears on every page of the confessions yeah and he starts weeping as he listens to ambrose you know yeah so that's a story from so many centuries ago but it's your story in many ways yeah yeah it is um yeah and i'm i'm experiencing a lot of that also but also the weird thing is is like separating what if this is actually happening to me for me and what if this is like p.o and this film and preparation and the separation you know i i'm i before this movie i'm chasing no separation but here it felt even further and there was a certain point where abel's like asking me to do an accent and you didn't do an accident no you just spoke in your america because at a certain point like i prayed on it you know and i thought this is the separation i'm not after this feels like like okay now i'm just like wearing a mask like a p.o mask whereas it felt like the task wasn't that the task even beyond what the director was asking of me and he found a way to find the same kind of uh he found my reasoning just was that i was having like genuine while we were practicing latin mass i was having genuine emotional experiences and be aside from the fact that you know as a neapolitan speaker his accent wouldn't match italian anyway but it felt like i i that would have taken me out of this thing that felt very personal and um so we didn't do an accent because i felt like what was happening to me was like like some kind of vessel i'm not gonna get too cheesy about it but it felt like um like i wasn't it was i wasn't in control of a lot of the stuff that was happening there wasn't a whole lot of like emotional actor prep it was like very prayerful when i felt like i couldn't hit a moment i would me and alex would like we would pray and then it would come like the emotion would just come pio is a very emotional guy yeah a very a very um and and and math is very technical it's so technical and so it's very difficult you have to be very proficient at latin mass one so i spent most of my time not even studying po i just studied latin mass so i went up to oakland i lived in oakland and just uh with with the at the seminary um in burlingame uh and then in oakland and i'm just going to latin mass all the time and then after latin mass i'm studying with the the priests from the uh christ the king which is traditionalist latin mass and i'm studying with them but there's no emotionality with them they're very like it's like french latin mass which isn't italian latin mass it's very like it's just like stiff peel wasn't stiff pio was like you say he was almost a dancer and so you're trying to like build this mass that pio is known for it'd be like playing dylan and not knowing how to play guitar like if you want to play dylan you don't just read dylan biographies right you have to pick a guitar and you have to learn how to play a guitar and then the guitar needs to be your best friend and then you need to sleep with the guitar and then the guitar needs to be your your only travel companion that's the way into dylan right the way into pio was mass and it wasn't until i felt like i started having emotional reactions in mass did i feel like i was anywhere near playing pio and mass got very emotional like really really really emotional and then i felt like okay now i now i have permission to go study pio so then the po study started and that took us to italy then i started going to where he studied and san giovanni rotundo and you see it and and something was offsetting about it because what i knew of pio to that point was like this is a man of deep humility who's offering up his suffering and you walk into uh uh san giovanni and you see this big mosaic of this man and there's pictures of him watching them build it and my first inroad in to what james was talking about offering your suffering up and offering your ego up and entirely is i always pictured a priest would be so uh against the idea that he's being put on this mount rushmore in this town and what i'm seeing in this man is like deep utility deep focus like a man who's just so laser beam focused he doesn't care if you think he's ridiculous he doesn't care if the church thinks he's ridiculous he doesn't care which it did for a long time part of the drama of padre pio which was another inroad for me basically 10 years said you know don't celebrate mass right sit in this room and by the end of his life he's this living saint and now he's this you know one of the great saints of the 20th century but during his lifetime yeah he went through a real psychological and spiritual suffering with not much to lean on other than like his a few spiritual advisors and people who he would celebrate mass out of his window because he wasn't allowed in the church anymore he wasn't allowed out of his room anymore when you go to san giovanni rotundo um there's his room and then there's a chapel a small little chapel the size of this table that they built for him there's like five chairs in there yeah that's where he would celebrate mass for like 10 years and he would open a window and he would celebrate mass and he would hear the crowd outside and it felt like this you know and not to minimize po but or or aggrandize myself but this is another inroad for me where we're exiled you're nuclear you're uh you're a depraved individual you're disgusting we don't want nothing to do with you anymore and i'm feeling that in pio because this is what the church said to him as well um you know uh you're doing it wrong you're a no-no you're a persona non-grata i mean they weren't sure what to do with them i think they were just thrown off what is this well it took him a long time to figure him when he claimed stigmata the church at the time sent a bunch of rationalist unbelieving people who thought miracles were impossible and we were beyond the age of miracles and he's got his hands wrapped and they're saying let me see and he's saying no and then they write them off you're a liar yeah you're a liar and you're using the church to sensationalize and create a spectacle out here so you can sell key chains or whatever they thought they was doing you know and um so they write them off as a crazy as a lunatic uh a person who is who is pimping the church is what they thought um and he had genuinely experienced something it's true of a lot of the mystics too that they the church has a hard time taking them in at first and it takes a while to figure them out um but i like how you're using that those away into your own life experience because again i'm feeling all this deep identification like here's another example of a man who when he was exiled he didn't hit twitter right he didn't go on twitter and say i didn't do this i didn't do that he just got quiet yeah he got quiet and he said is that so and then he continued doing what what what served him and his and the people that he was serving he didn't get loud he didn't do the martin luther he did the saint francis which was he quietly got more christ-like yeah and cultivated that as opposed to like this rebellion he accepted it yeah he could have started his own church started his own order right he had that much following he could have at that moment walked off into the woods and created his entire a whole new sect of catholicism and there are a lot of people in the tradition who did things just like that you know probably mystics who had some legitimate sense of god but they didn't keep communing with the church yes but let's go back to the stigma for a second because i don't want to give away too much of the movie but it is featured in the movie that padre pio bore in his own body the wounds of jesus yeah right and you could say from a distant perspective like oh wow that's really something it's kind of glamorous you know but he took it for what it was i mean this enormous suffering yeah uh they hurt you know literally these were wounds that hurt and the idea is he was identified with the suffering of jesus which is a suffering that redeemed the world you know and this very deep mystery is precisely through our pain very often yeah that we because that we find salvation but also we become a vehicle of salvation to others right and so i mean you're talking about your own pain in your this is why when i said to james you know he's like what are you good at yeah right i'm like bleeding in front of people yeah right and then i start looking at pio and it's genuinely what was going on he's he's doing mass and he's bleeding in front of people he's wrapping it up yeah he's not it's not a billboard hey look at my stigma but it i feel like this deep like identification with a pio figure and um and then i started looking at how he moved through the exile which was to get quiet and cultivate more of the christ in him and that becomes my mo that's modus operandi i and and it's happening to me while i'm researching and um [Music] uh yeah so i'm i'm i'm i and i'm and i'm also getting friendly with people who knew him you know he because you met some who actually knew him people were about 1968 yeah so these would be pretty old men well when you go to san giovanni rotunda the the fathers that are there now were confessing to pio wow so when they were young yes guys probably yeah and so you walk in and they're like you're po you know and you're feeling all that too you know you've got a little bit of that oh yeah they're sizing you up you're dealing with a person who it's not just like their favorite baseball team you know right you're dealing with it's it's a big chips on the table and then they walk you into his corpse that's right so he's he's there yeah and it's overwhelming yeah it's like the the weight of it all you know you're standing with a dude he used to confess to this guy yeah and this guy created all this and you're in this town with the third biggest hospital in italy that this man built out of nothing this place they used to go radishes and that's got the third biggest hospital a radiation center at the top and you know they're studying cancer treatments and it's like you can't even fathom how much was done how much got done in a very pragmatic sense not in an esoteric hoodie do way in a very like feet on the ground like like it feels like lumber it feels like you can hold it and you're looking at this and you're feeling this and again i'm just feeling like this let go like you got me you know and it feels like this like i'm imbued with this with this this um this thing doesn't require me to do much you know it requires me to get out of the way and so i just show up on set with that and these guys are all on set and now we're doing scenes and the guy who confessed to pio is by the monitor it does something it does something did he tell you anything that was helpful did he say like he did he should do he did he told me that that um he told me there was one time where he was confessing and there was a woman in the hallway who was wearing a dress that had her ankles exposed yeah and he when he opened he had somebody send her away and he said uh he told me about different teachers that he had in his life the the father who i was with was um a little bit blind he had vision problems and he told me about this teacher who in the seminary he told me about two big teachers for him one was a man who bought him really big books so he could see better yeah and the other was was pio who had failed him in his seminary he used to teach the kids i was p.o had to teach the kids yeah uh pio uh would catechize the youth and and walked him into uh uh postulancy he was the one who was like man on the man on the ground dealing with the the new recruits as you would say and uh they had a curriculum and you could fail the curriculum if you didn't study he was flunked by he was flunked by po and this is a blind man right so and he at first he thought this is completely heartless how do you how do you flunk a blind man and and it was this if he heard pio say you can do better yeah and it motivated his life he's now one of the head friars there you know uh one of the most respected most beloved old dudes in there and uh he sort of also welcomes everybody in he's after mass he he the same guy i'm talking about uh he goes and walks into the lane and he raises his hands and they all come around him and they kneel around him in a circle and he prays for everybody they love him the whole neighborhood loves him um but he was the one who said you know the two teachers that mattered to me was this this really giving soft approach that identified like my problem in like um was soft with me bought me the big books and then there was this pio influence which was holding me to account and had a big yeah he had certain ambitions he was tough to flunk a blind guy and tell him you can do better yeah it requires a certain kind of um a person who can see more in you than you can even see in yourself and so he this is kind of the energy that he had and so there's scenes in the movie that you know you know with him cursing and confessional and stuff like that that you know james really loves you know father james loves those scenes because they they introduce a certain he was tough in the confessional for sure yeah there's a that's well attested right they didn't take a lot of guff in the confession no if someone's playing around like yeah father here are my sins and pottery people knew come on if you had come in four times with the same issue he wasn't gonna even listen to you anymore he would just send you away and you'd hear him yelling from confessional as you were waiting to go into confession and so as you're walking into confession he just let loose on another guy you know there's certain this is the pio style of doing things tell me about i mean now we're on this theme of of the tough padre pio uh a really striking element of the movie to me are the scenes where he's literally wrestling with the devil and it's it's well accounted uh for in in the stories of padre pio that his brothers would hear this like ruckus up in his room yeah things being thrown around and his body being hurled against the wall yeah and it was i mean he he was wrestling he was struggling with the devil well broken fingers bloody noses yeah right yeah he was he was he was in f he was in brawling all night which i know would strike a lot of people today i'm sure is beyond bizarre but you find it in the spiritual tradition like crazy that people who are really close to god the devil hates them and will go after them yeah and you know padre pio opened something up that was extraordinarily powerful and i would say included someone like you so we go back to 19 you know 30-something the young padre pio or whatever 1920 but he had god had you in mind i mean that padre pio would reach out to someone like you right right so my point there is of course the devil hates that he hates that and so of course he's going to go after that because that's a very powerful moment when grace is breaking into the world right and so i i find that very plausible the older i get the more plausible i find that the devil of course wants to go after even in a very direct way those uh avenues of grace which feels like a suffering hack because then you feel like oh okay well the suffering is actually a gift yeah like you you blessed me with this when i think about like what's happened in my life this way like the old me when i walked in was so upset about the you know so resentful about the woman who accused me of all this you know i wanted to go on twitter and write all these things and i wanted to justify this and explain all this and now i actually see like the woman saved my life you know she she is a for me a saint in my life she saved my life and that happened you know that the perspective switch feels miraculous what a spiritual experience for me is not like talking to a cloud or like when you talk about like supernatural um in my life it's it's it's a change in perspective yeah that feels miraculous to me there's no other way i could have done it on my own so when i think about pio and this and this fighting in this room um uh yeah so yeah it's it's it feels like um like i can't account for his perspective in that room i can't account for it it's his journey it's his thing and i think about okay well what are my personal like fights was it physicalized what and and also did he there's a question whether like he he is this is this um him writing in parable form you know did he did he genuinely and i would ask the guys at san giovan what did they say it was a full-blown fist fight yeah no see the devil is usually more subtle because people at lower levels you know of a spiritual order he tempts and he does all kinds of insinuating things but i think with the great saints and the mystics he's like i'm coming at you yeah coming at you very directly yeah that doesn't really surprise me there are a lot of stories like that in the great tradition you know um and padre pio was and he he opened up this avenue of grace that was extraordinary so of course the devil hated him you can see it when you go you see there's dents in his room in the wall there's dents in the room in the wall uh there's like there's like blood marks on the wall they're still you know they they have preserved this cell to such a degree that i mean that's another wild thing to walk into they still have his heart in a crystal box you know this is really like that's i guess another thing that i love about catholicism it takes me out of like all this cognitive um like i have to do this fairytale make-believe and it puts it right there like i can touch it you know i don't need to wonder whether a saint exists when i'm looking at his heart when i'm looking at his when you have all these talismans of like what this actual like physical mana of what was there for a person who's as caveman as i am in terms of i need a polaroid picture i need a polaroid picture of god catholicism offers it to me you know it gives me polaroid pictures it's the incarnation right i mean in jesus we find the face of god and uh right so the the appeal to the mind but also i mean to the heart the body the emotions and then that's carried on through the great tradition for sure and that's the saints right that's why we keep relics i mean it's a yeah it's a prolongation in a way of the principle of the incarnation that the word becomes flesh and so in the flesh of the saints you know i mean i've got a padre pio um relic back in my chapel you know someone gave me years ago and uh i mean it's powerful stuff yeah this is the other thing is you you start like i'm blessed to have had the experience i've had because um once i met all the caps in italy then they introduced me all the caps in rome yeah and then when you go to rome and you go to the you know the head of the order has a room that is full of relics that is overwhelming it's just it's just you cannot deny it do you go to the bone church yes yes yeah this type of stuff is like it um yeah it's just so effective it's just so effective it just um it's really hard and it's also like trying to describe it to my buddies over here it's like trying to describe what pizza tastes like i can't right i can't describe to you what pizza tastes like you got to either put pizza in your mouth no but they they'll see something in you though see they'll see the change exactly so jesus says you know metanoia is his first word you know we say repent but it means go beyond the mind you have that's what it means literally so noose is mine meta is beyond so he's saying go beyond the mind and so the mind that we all get stuck in is this one of fill it up fill up the ego with all these things you got to get beyond that mind and as you put it reach out because the central theme of the bible you could say old testament anew is trust trust in the lord because our word would be faith you know and before that means something more cognitive it means something more visceral it means trust let go as you say let go of all that old thing let go of that old self which has made you miserable right and trust the kingdom of god is at hand jesus says and that means he's at hand here i am trust in me reach out to me you know and that's christianity i mean that's that's catholic but it's so irrational to just trust yeah i can't just jump from nothing to faith because i i'm convinced i need all those things to be happy and so i hang on to them desperately if i let go of my career let go of pleasure i let go of power whatever it is i'm not gonna be i'm being lost you know but that sounds like peter walk on the water uh you know as long as he's looking at the lord he's able to walk on the water but you're looking around you know it's in the fear you know perfect love casts out not hate the bible says but all fear right perfect love casts out all fear and that's a very important move i'm afraid i'm afraid to let go let go perfect love right the love that comes from god and is directed back to god casts out all fear and then then see you start glowing with it so you're not on fire the way you were describing like in this hellish fire but now you start glowing with this this light which is i receive a grace and i give it instead of saying hey i got something i'm going to get more of that no no what you get give it and then you'll get more of it it didn't make any sense to me that god comes to those who um who give i i that's not what i was told in in before i came in uh god comes i came from the school of god helps those who helps themselves that's what i was told yeah and that's not what i found god comes to those who give those who ask that's what i've experienced i didn't do any of this this this is so when you talk about like what's your school of acting it's like i don't know i have no idea i showed up for this movie and there'd be scenes that i you know we would be doing math and right before i would do mass uh you know i turned alex and i said brother i love you and um [Music] he said i love you and not be that that'd be all the prep i need you know old me used to like live on a set you know i would like live in a tank yeah and i'd be living in the tank and like doing all this extra like extra blah blah blah because i was so scared that i wasn't going to get it right that i didn't want to leave any room for error i had no faith in anything other than my own will and my own efforts and then you get to this set it's it's um you can only go so far and then you really do have to have faith because you're you're it's not like you're um you're not playing anything you can actually rationalize action you're fighting with the devil what you know how do you how do you you have to have faith because it feels so and that's the other thing is like it could get so corny it could just get so garbage and you're desperate to get it right you're desperate to like protect this man's legacy and i remember when i was you know i had also been going to other latin mass in van nuys like i'm quite close with mel gibson and when i i didn't know how to get to latin mass i didn't know how to find it you can't like go type it up online and find it and he had he'd uh introduced me to certain latin mass which um uh because he's very into that traditionalist thing um and uh he he uh you you walk into like uh um that realm and you have people coming up to you once they know that you're playing pio and you start they start like coming up to you and and tugging at your at your shirt sleeve and saying don't get it wrong he's the only one we have you know you start hearing things like that you go you ship out with so much pressure yeah that then you're in front of the mass and you've just gone through six seven months of the shirt tugging the introduction to the order the introduction of who pio was and you're standing in front of the mask that he used to serve mass at and you're trembling with fear and there's no way you can actually find the agency that he had and like and and you go through all the second guessing that to have alex with me rooted me in something very tangible and real and when i turned to alex and would say you know i love you it felt like god this is really where where which really is god for me you know um art isn't god for me which is where i used to come from art loving god being synonymous but god and love are still synonymous for me and the more loving that i am the more i feel closer to god that's what god is right so so when art reflects him yes you know the true the good the beautiful reflective but what he is is love and love is willing the good of the other so that when you do that you're you are in the presence of god i mean you're the divine life is surging through you when you when you truly will the good of the other which is a very very rare thing you know because we're so tainted by our ego that even as i'm i think i'm willing that person's good but but probably there's a lot of because i'll get something out of it yeah right that's why those moments of when you can return to another human being and say i love you or demonstrate that that's a that's a rare thing that means god is in you right now give that away keep giving that away and you'll get more of it and you'll get more of it and that's that's the saints live in that place um but which is difficult on a film set yeah i mean when the camera is on you right it's so easy to get lost in ego when the camera is on you right it's actually it takes extraordinary effort to get out i mean forget the camera for a second i wake up in it my left is my left my right is my right you are in front of me you know it takes extraordinary effort and um it takes real work to get to another perspective uh if i don't have a higher power if i don't have god you know if i don't have freedom doesn't feel good with no structure you know if somebody stripped me naked and threw them in the ocean it wouldn't feel good i'd be free but i wouldn't enjoy it um this has given me structure to be able to enjoy my freedom to be able to he's given me yeah it's given me purpose the structure of it i need the structure of it bob dylan freedom just around the corner from you but with truth so far off what good would it do well let's go down the bob dylan route for a second because i mean he speaks a lot of these truths you know because dylan comes out of that tradition but but that's exactly it so we can so valorize freedom as like spontaneity i do whatever i want but with truth so far off what good would it do i mean freedom's always correlated can you say the lyric one more time freedom just around the corner from you but with truth so far off what good would it do that's from joker man remember from like the early uh 80s no you're a deep cuts dylan guy i'm like a big hit stealing guy oh yeah yeah i'm both you know i i started loving bob dylan when i was about 13. and it was the concert for bangladesh remember that no no no 1971 george harrison organized one of the very first benefit concerts now that's so commonplace but it was like the first one for bangladesh had gone through a great flood right all these people that were suffering so we organized this concert everybody eric clapton uh ringo i mean everybody at the time was there and then the climactic moment was that he brought up bob dylan who sang like five of his most classic songs and he had been out of uh commission for a while people hadn't seen him and i that was the first record i heard about dylan was that performance and it just i was like 13 or 14. and it just changed my life can i tell you about the other story yeah i made a movie called honey boy about my dad yeah right and um neil young was a big deal for me and my dad yeah um and and we didn't have like the budget we were small little like three million dollar movie really tiny uh film and we didn't have like the money to pay for this neil young song that was was a big deal for me and my dad and i wrote this letter to neil young and asked him for the song and he sent me a price tag that was exorbitant and would have been our whole budget so then i reached out to my dad and my dad plays me this dylan song call all i want to do is yeah you know i don't know if that's called that but it's baby be friends baby friends with you and uh i send the same letter to dylan and he gives me the song for free oh is that right yeah for free pretty good yeah for free nobody would do this nobody would do that i mean he's such a champion of the arts like such a giving guy i don't know if everybody knows that about dylan like the way that he moves in the industry or in business like he's he's uh he gives a lot of his music away to other like um bubbling artistic endeavors he just freely gives it away which i think says a lot about who the guy is well he's he's not far from here he lives in malibu you know so does he yeah that's where his his main house is i think he has a farm in minnesota too yeah i picture him living in a chicken coop or something like that yeah he lives in a well i think he does have kind of a strange pictures i've seen like the environment around his house it's kind of like a farm gotta be but oh no i mean bob dylan because i think with dylan he does i mean so many different things and different styles but he's someone that knows the spiritual tradition pretty well because he's biblical yeah bible from the beginning to end from the earliest stuff hard reign and all that all the way to today is the bible i think is the great golden thread that runs through his writing well and as a blues guy you can't really get into lead belly and guys like that unless you're into the bible well the blues is all the bible it's all bible yeah and and so that whenever you get into kind of americana music like that it's going to be uh the bible is the thing because see people have forgotten the bible though they don't know the bible the way people in the 19th century or even like dylan's generation first part of the 20th century most americans had a pretty good acquaintance with it now they don't um what's the solution for that what do you know that's a good question and i just finished a commentary on the about half the old testament that's part of what i'm really dedicated to is trying to make the bible better known and a lot of my the preaching that i do uh people say well it's remarkable because you're talking about the bible so often well what else would you talk about but for a long time we didn't a lot of our preaching wasn't biblical so um i'm dedicated to you know making that sound meaning you were encouraged not to talk bible kind of we were encouraged to talk about people's experiences so in homilies yeah like to say the bible is kind of too heady or it's too strange or it's this distant thing so talk about you know your experience how it relates to their experience and maybe bring in a little something from the bible and that was a disaster i mean uh to be honest with you like my generation was trained to preach that way and it was disastrous the bible is so much more interesting than my experience yes and when i bring my experience to the bible you know and say well my world belongs in that world right my world should be drawn up into that world that makes it more compelling i think mm-hmm i agree i i find that's i guess why traditionalist mass hits me from a different angle there's not like this relatable like the homily doesn't like okay we'll let our we'll let our we'll let the like all the all the air goes out of mass when when when that part of mass happens when we we've done a very prayerful we've answered it's very prayerful the the the initial prayers and then you we get to the homily and like there's this right well that happens when it's your it's the priest's kind of own words and own experience dominating now you know obviously they are my words and of course my experience will influence it but when that comes to dominate to let your hair down right before you're asking me to fully believe that we're about to walk through the death of christ yeah seems like huh they should be christ words right so the homily is an extension of the gospel and it should be christ's words that you're preaching if it's just if it's you know bob barron sharing his private spiritual intuitions with you well then who cares you know that's i might do that at a cocktail party or something but yeah at mass it's the prolongation of the gospel that's what the homily is but but the irony is the more i do that the more compelling the preaching is and the more it reaches people if it's christ's words it's the bible that dominates you know yes hey listen i could talk to you all day yeah i was just thinking about myself but uh thank you for being here and it was just delightful and uh you know my feeling honestly is is padre pio from his heavenly place just as those capuchins kind of took you in you know up in san lorenzo drew you into their company and more deeply into their life because we believe it's not just that company we could see but the one that we can't see and uh that company too of the saints reaches out to us and i think played a role in drawing you in for sure and so you're playing padre pio i see as a result of of his intervention you know in your life from his heavenly place so praise god for that praise god for that thanks for letting me sit down with you all right god bless you shall we yeah thank you all right peace [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 2,117,430

Keywords: Bishop Barron, Bishop Robert Barron, Shia LaBeouf, Honey Boy, Suffering, Method Acting, Ego, Traditional Latin Mass, Padre Pio, Capuchin Friars, Friars, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholic Teaching, Bishop Barron Presents, Word on Fire, Bob Dylan, Catholic Mass, Acting, Addiction, shia labeouf, shia labeouf interview, shia labeouf conversation, shia labeouf catholic, shia labeouf conversion, shia labeouf bishop barron, shia padre pio, shia labeouf padre pio, shia christian

Id: hjxKG4mR3U4

Length: 81min 19sec (4879 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/throwaway009335]

So nice to see this posted here.

[u/willardTheMighty]

Haven’t watched this yet just wanted to say I saw Bishop Barron on the Lex Fridman podcast and he’s great.

[u/Nick_VltorOfficial]

Seems that people in the Jung sub have common interests. Not surprising, but still nice to encounter.