EWTN Bookmark - Fr. Jeffrey Kirby: Real Religion: How to Avoid False Faith and Worship God in Spirit

[Music] hello and welcome once again to ewtn's bookmark i'm doug keck your host our guest author is father jeffrey kirby the book real religion how to avoid false religion and worship god in spirit and truth published by our friends at catholic answers available through our ewtn religious catalogue ewtnrc.com for all things catholic welcome father kirby good good to see you uh been on the show a couple of times obviously you've been on ewtn many times uh we're talking about real religion uh are there false religions yes anytime we say that it's a religion but we're just worshiping ourselves so are you allowed to call anything false these days actually the title is kind of provocative it's like how can you say anything's real but religion has a definition religion is the worship of god and so oftentimes what happens is we turn it into if we're not careful a worship of ourselves so false religion broadly we would say is self-worship real religion is when we're actually worshiping god now the beginning you say throughout my priesthood i've always labored to be as available as possible to anyone who wants to meet me and then you talk about talking to people and their concerns about the masses you see in summary many of these people wanted the catholic mass to resemble the worship service of a mega church and you said after the couple had explained this is in the discussion and offered suggestions for almost hour i just looked at them and asked but where's god amen amen so this is your the story recounts well meaning very well-intentioned couple and again our conversation everything we can do you know you know in terms of the the music or the the gimmicks or other things we can do and just listening to them at the end just asking that that very clear sober question like you've just spoken an hour about worship but have not referenced god now my hope with that was that they would then realize my goodness maybe our perspective is a little off like yeah how could we talk about worship for an hour but no no they just kept going uh and and of course at the end well the church is irrelevant no wonder why no one's coming everybody's leaving it's because the church's fault or it's you know because we won't allow for a circus and we really insist on worship being the worship of god right well i thought this was real you said they said but father if you do these type of things people will come i thought it was good luck you said okay but come to what our work is not simply to amass a large group of people that's kind of something i like to point out sometimes with ewtn when people worry about how many people are watching the question is how many people's lives are being impacted amen amen and that's core because i like to oftentimes remind people that worship itself especially the holy sacrifice of the mass is the work of the baptized so worship is not strictly speaking evangelization our goal is to get everybody to come how many people can we come if we bring drums and we do this or we can really that's not the goal of worship like the worship is the action of the baptized in christ to the praise and glory of the father so we have to realign this evangelization absolutely the church should be evangelizing we should be involved in all kinds of other activities and events and outreaches absolutely when we come to worship let's tone that language down and remind ourselves this isn't about how many can we get it's to whom we are focused and who we are worshiping well we have to know who we're worshiping so when we go out and evangelize we know what we're evangelizing people too right yes yes amen amen yes yes because you imagine if you you overwhelm worship with this kind of misplaced evangelization then then you know how do you understand god how you're encountering him how are you being transformed by his grace and exactly what do you have to give afterwards that's a great point you say modern western culture separated from the convictions that created it has convinced people that they are the standard of all things and that's the central theme you have here oh yes yeah and i see that oftentimes in pastoral ministry people really do believe like and they may not see it to whatever degree of goodwill they have but they really believe that everything is supposed to revolve around them so the idea that the very demands of worship especially those of us who know christ and the fullness of worship is actually to die to ourselves right to allow for god and our neighbor to be first these principles can be lost and i would argue in large part because we have forgotten true worship you say in absolutizing our emotions and ways of thinking we perpetuate the sin of our first parents to display the consequences of our fallen state how so yeah so adam and eve we know they were placed in the garden they were beloved of the father the garden resembles later in salvation history there's a parallel between the temple and the garden to know that our first parents were expected to worship god but they believed whispered lies and they wanted themselves their own pleasure what they wanted and they preferred that over worship and obedience to the father so in many respects in our fallenness if we don't cooperate with grace we just perpetuate this same fault throughout the course of salvation history throughout human history in his his usual satirical way the novelist mark twain you say summarize the tension the world we're dealing with today god made man in his own image and man is forever trying to repay the favor then you go on to talk about others and say such narcissism is so embedded in our fallen nature that even the best among us struggle to identify and overcome it is part what author flannery o'connor described as the gas we breathe what did she mean yes yes which means again like even those of us who are trying to to observe true religion to worship god to to die to ourselves even we struggle because in our fallen state you can imagine this uh invisible gas that we breathe without knowing uh this fallenness this inclination to self-absorption this narcissism is there and so even again the best of us have to constantly have a healthy suspicion of ourselves why am i doing this what's my focus uh what do i hope to achieve by this uh in terms of worship am i truly worshiping god right so these are hard questions to ask even harder questions to answer you talk about every year there's a battle over first communion and you talk about a particular couple and their concerns you tell the story you say the sacrament was right up there with meeting santa claus going to disney world and making an overseas trip it was only about the pictures the white dress the fancy rosary beats and the family party do you see a lot of that yes and regrettably as secularism increases in our society religion becomes more of a cherished heirloom or a type of rite of passage we could say so in in this case we see young young parents very well intentioned who want to be good parents who say well no they have to receive their first holy communion and i saw this for so long i thought well maybe there are semblances of faith there's something left there you know because they don't come to mass they don't really observe the you know the religious instruction the kids their attendance is terrible i thought maybe there's something still there but then over the course of time i realized no they want the happy childhood list so as we were describing meet santa check go to disney world check you know get first holy community and check like this is just one more thing that the parents want to provide so the idea that a sacrament a mystery of encountering the presence of god is right up there with mickey mouse and santa claus like they have no idea of the sacrilege it's like that is not the proper place of a sacrament that's not how a believer approaches that we we have to stop letting our sacraments and the war should be used in such ways you say in the beginning the book is written out of a desire to remind us all of god's everlasting love for us and our capacity to love him back to right and real religion and then you kind of lay out the book chapter by chapter and the format you have and chapter one covers the virtue of religion the basic tenets of biblical worship what is it about the virtue of religion that's lost on people today yes so oftentimes when when i even just use the term like if they'll say virtue of religion people are kind of like what like it's a new term even though it's in our tradition uh people have forgotten it and oftentimes the immediate reaction is well wait a minute when you start saying virtue of religion this makes it sound like this is something we're supposed to do right because we have allowed religion to become a hobby organic cherished heirloom or something hey you know that's good for you you need that to not be scared of the dark okay fine whatever is good for you but the idea now that wait a minute this is an obligation that we are hardwired for worship that if we don't worship god we're going to worship ourselves the virtue of religion reminds us of that kind of startles people now in our tradition what's powerful is the virtue of religion is placed within the virtue of justice justices give to another their due whether it's punitive or positive someone works for me i pay them a just compensation justice to god is is religion it's to praise him it's to give him that act of of worship of acknowledgement now what's interesting about that is when we don't get that right so if we're not exercising justice through religion if we don't get that right then justice in every other other relationship becomes skewed so when people today want to talk about justice and focus on justice great but the only way we're going to get all this right in terms of justice to our neighbor is to get justice right with god and that is religion right religion yeah chapter one then chapter two begins a four-part explanation in some of the principal modern threats to a revealed religion chapter three evaluates uh kind of self-help chapter four talks about religion becoming a commodity and five exposes religion becoming social activism now that's that's one and we're going to go back to look at some of these but social activism and that seems to be to the point you would think that religion is social activism right and a lot of um you know believers do think that that's what religion is like and we're obviously not opposed to that like sure we we care about the dignity of all people we care about gender equality we care about the environment we care about immigration of course we care we care about human beings as believers but to strip the heart of worship and religion out and make it just that to almost use our tradition just for that purpose right i have to remind people as pope benedict reminded us all in his first encyclical uh davos cardita's s he said look if you think you're going to change the world it's not going to happen we don't have the power to change the world right all we do is we play our small part and the spirit of god changes the world right exactly so once we humble ourselves and realize i'm not going to change all these social ills and i go back to the real heart of worship which is to praise god to adore him to receive his strength to play my part and then allow his spirit to change the world it puts it back in its context well i always repeat mother's phrase when she said our job is to soak the earth with the truth it's god's and the holy spirit's work to open hearts and minds to that truth that that's his job we're not converting anybody but our job is to put it out there so that people can access it now you you have in the structure of each chapter next you have quotes why did you decide to put a quote in each chapter yes i just thought it was you know important obviously people are reading my thoughts or reflections and and wanted to put as much of our tradition in there so people can see you know these are holy men and women who have also indicated uh these parts or of caution or instruction so just to acknowledge some type of authority beyond myself did you pick out the quotes then i did okay yes and there were so many more i had to cut i mean the saints and the holy men and women obviously worship is very dear to their hearts so the ones i chose uh was through a whole pool that eventually i drew from then you have an examination of conscience what are you going to confession here well it goes back to the point we were talking about with the gas we breathe that even those of us who think we're doing it right we just have that have to have that healthy suspicion and just asking questions because you know we're busy things are going on we might read the chapter of the book maybe and say gosh it was something really good in there but i can't really remember what that was or i wasn't sure what i was supposed to do with that so the examination of conscience is to help us to to really bring it home and make sure that our own hearts take this instruction and make it a part of us so it's not just the passing chapter then you have pointers for apologetics so you see this as an apologetic book as well yes if you're going to be a believer and observe real religion you have to be an apologist we live in a secular age um the institutions of our society have given over to secularism if you're a believer you're not ready to fight then you're ill-equipped so we have to be ready in in the chapter jumping way ahead to when religion becomes sentiment which is a big factor today uh our actions and responses determine the moral status of our sentiment because you were talking about where does it fit in as we understand sentiment in this we begin to realize the importance of discipline and a moral formation of our hearts isn't that why nobody's interested in that yes until they begin to see the misery and the heartache and the meaninglessness of raw emotion emotion is a it's a great gift i love emotions i love euphoria but we know that our emotions they have no moral identity they don't know they do not know right or wrong we have to use our intellectual will to order them and that's again formation discipline and there's a better benefit when i can order my emotions so when i have this euphoria rather than using it to justify some wrong or evil or sin to instead reorder that that helps me to give greater charity or kindness so yeah i love emotions as christians we praise them but we have to say they have to be ordered so even if someone says oh that language this just sounds so unattractive we'll do it i mean you see the tranquility and the joy and the greater desire for virtue like that that kind of drive then you understand why it's worth it you say here i think it's important to stress that as we grow older we are called to be less animated expression of emotion as we age our emotions should mature you go on to say an example i would encourage more emotion during the homily and less emotion in the music amen amen amen so i think any human being with with some level of self-awareness could realize that as we get older our emotions mature hopefully they're replaced with greater wisdom and of course in terms of worship i think that there's a way over exaggeration in terms of music over indulgence in many respects and concurrently as i look at my brother priests and say to myself then in preaching sometimes it's good to have a little oomph to to kind of help the people of god wake up and and to hear these truths i mean the prophetic office is given all to all the baptized the priests and the exercise of his prophetic office has to really provoke and help the faithful come to deeper conviction through preaching so i think in the homily you know within reason it's good to have that that emotion at the end you kind of point different humble recognition you say when sentiment is not ordered by and to truth there is nothing humble about it that's right because you have to you're you have no deference to anyone you owe no one anything there is no cause for gratitude because when you're the center of the world well you're con subsumed with entitlement and and self-pity so uh you receive what you were supposed to get right there's no cause for gratitude humility right it's a very uh dark spirit and i think a lonely spirit and one that definitely leads to misery yeah kind of an entitlement absolutely and that's all over the place it's shocking right exactly when religion becomes self-help in this chapter you say many people in our culture who have cr have created a pseudo-religion of self-help they have orchestrated a life centered on personal growth and self-actualization self-actualization as a goal solely unto itself as an idol yes yes and we see that like the exaggeration with yoga or health or diet or fitness or uh centering prayer and all these are various different things all about themselves all about themselves right and and it looks like religion it can even sound it has religious terminology it can even be within our tradition as catholics and christians but it becomes very clear over the course of time seeing the fruits of the tree that this is really just all about them that again the heart of worship has been stripped and this is just a really raw exercise in narcissism right well you say here self-help religion traps us in a well-disguised prison cell of narcissism it deceives us into creating our own little bubble and dwelling there focusing only on ourselves perceiving the world and those around us in a utilitarian means of our own betterment yes oh my goodness and anytime someone says well well you know father i'm just trying to improve myself and how can you criticize this i'm not criticizing self-help or or improvement it's just if we're doing this in a religious context god must be first right so i say well how am i doing it right or what else am i supposed to do well why don't you do a holy hour at two o'clock in the morning i want you to go serve the poor the dirtiest of the poor that make you really uncomfortable if you're willing to do that as faithfully and energetically as you do all these other things then you're in a better place because religion doesn't make us uncomfortable as fallen human beings if we're not uncomfortable we're not doing something right right and you had a quote here uh talking about uh venerable fulton sheen described the mass it's like a radio waves they're running all around us but it's only when we tune on the radio that we can hear them amen are people even searching to dial anymore exactly right exactly i think later i had to update that and say it's like the internet right the internet is always running you know exactly right you know the younger generation is like what is it what are you talking about but just the idea that this sacrifice continues through time and that any time we go to mass we we click on to that sacrifice and we're there we are truly there at calvary it's powerful this was an interesting one too because you with a lot of the health and wealth gospel stuff you talk about the fallacy the best version of myself you say has received a wide audience acceptance even among some good catholic writers and speakers but the acceptance of such a fallacy comes at a tremendous price why yeah so again when you're kind of going back to the you know that view of of you know this self-improvement or self-actualization when anything simply becomes about us and we make the fruits of good religion our focus then we've lost our focus because i praise god i glorify god i worship god if he blesses me with right order or he blesses me with weight loss or to stop a bad habit or something well then that's a benefit but my purpose was always to praise god so if i praise god and i don't get that then i don't feel as if god cheated me so you imagine the person says well i started going to mass because people told me to make my marriage better or you know i become a better person well i've been going to mass for years and my marriage still stinks right you know like you know what's wrong with god it's like well that was never a promise of right religion like we worship god because he is god we praise him and if he blesses us or our lives changed then so be it and in theory if you're open to listening to the word of god you'll probably find yourself changing yourself and your actions and attitudes which then might promote the fact that you'll have a happier marriage amen that inner transformation that happens with grace right exactly we still live in a fallen world well this great quote here saint john vianney said put all the good works in the world against one holy mass they will be as a grain of sand besides a mountain amen you don't hear that one anymore no and i think when we talk about real religion uh for those of us who know the fullness of revelation that god has given to the human family there is no greater good than the holy sacrifice of the mass like go there it humbles us it teaches us gratitude it places us in our proper context there is no safer better more glorious place to be than kneeling before our lord during that sacrifice i thought this was interesting i want you to explain it the communion of saints exposes the isolation of self-help pseudo-religion yeah oh that's good um i'm not just because i said i'm summarizing the tradition um absolutely because if it's all about self-help it's all about ourselves and we get stuck in this this little prison you were quoting earlier uh once we begin to realize the community of saints it just destroys all that because as believers who have real religion suddenly we're surrounded by older brothers and sisters the the saints we're in a huge family that has a lot more to do with that community that communion rather than myself this in the chapter on uh when religion becomes a commodity you talk again about the mega churches prosperity gospel exaggerates the temporal blessings of health and wealth and gives a bloated version of biblical promises and and you you talk about the couple who's kind of looking for well what resources do you have for our family if we decide to come to this farish right yes oh yeah yeah and the couple showed up and i felt like it was being interviewed do you know like what about this what about this what about this and it was only if we kind of measured up that they would join us and and regrettably none of the questions pertain to worship or our spiritual life as a parish or a call to discipleship it was all about what programs or services do you provide that we want as a family that we think we need and if you measure up then we'll join your community and again that's just a complete stripping of the sense of right religion true religion and a stripping really of the sense of of the community life that communion of saints that we have with the holy ones but also with one another all the baptized so it's against a reordering and we've we've kind of lost that where we kind of exaggerate and we again fall into this thought well the whole world's supposed to revolve around me because i think i need this or i want this like well go back to the cross and and place yourself before the sacrifice remind yourself all this isn't about you and i see it this way and if you don't there must be something missing in the way you're seeing it so right right right right yeah exactly you say of the many parts of our discipleship that the prosperity gospel misses is the role and importance of redemptive suffering and that's at the top of the list and that's a very catholic understanding of suffering and things like that certainly mother angelica was emblematic of that but the suffering's not on the top of anybody's list these days it's not and uh and certainly in a broader context we'd have to make stronger arguments in one sense but if someone says i'm a christian then they have to understand the role of redemptive suffering because our salvation was brought about by suffering so so for someone to say i'm a christian but i don't expect to suffer i think things should be easy there should be comfort it's like what scriptures are you reading right again this uh health and wealth gospel the prosperity gospel is very dangerous it's not biblical you know like in fact as disciples we are told if you want to follow me take up your cross and there are times in which the lord will allow his followers to suffer more right for the sake of our salvation and that of the whole world so the idea well no if i follow him then it's going to get easy it's going to be you know comfort and so on like that is not biblical the lord never promised that he would not lie to us he did not promise that and to those charlatans who preached this message you know these are false prophets we were warned in the scriptures of them because people have been hurt their faith has been hurt they've given up a belief in god or even the possibility of real religion because of this false message that's not biblical right and you get into this kind of uh you know word of faith kind of thing tied into that which is the reason it's not working for you is because you don't have enough faith in which case now it's your fault that naturally bad things in your life might hurt you that's so spiritually irresponsible any pastor who says that or preacher who says that is being very irresponsible right absolutely another flannery o'connor quote the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it yes leave it to flannery huh she gives it you know of course she was a woman who knew she was suffering and eventually died from lupus right that just because even though they didn't tell her about it for years they didn't tell her what she actually had right right i think her dad her father died from it yeah right so but she certainly knew uh redemptive suffering and and she's like just because i can't accept the truth doesn't mean the truth changes i have to change we have to change right in the application to our lives in this section why don't you say i have i approached in this examination of consciousness have i approached the gospel as a garage sale taking or leaving whatever i want we used to call that cafeteria catholicism yes yes and to be honest i only changed at the garage because that was a garage sale because i was afraid that people would kind of oh yeah cafeteria catholicism i've heard of that so i just wanted to change up the the illustration but yeah you go to a garage show you just pick what you want and there's no real obligation or responsibility and that's how most people approach their faith what do i want what fits into my house or what i think god should be or what i want religion to be and that's again it doesn't accept the wholeness the fullness offered to us in jesus christ and make the last point no believer or catholic organization catholic organization can justify a break from right doctrine for the empty promise of earthly success amen amen and many of our catholic organizations need to be reminded of that right this is all about the praise of god and faithful following of him right not the praise of society and popularity in the secular world temporal accomplishment or success it's not worth it so how long did it take you to write the book i've been a priest almost 14 years i'd say 14 years 14 years okay so it's going to be another 14 before we have another book [Laughter] watch out we'll have to see but when it happens you'll stop buying it okay thank you very much father appreciate it thank you it's good to see you father jeffrey kirby the book is real religion how to avoid false faith and worship god in spirit and truth and that's published by our friends at catholic answers available through the ewtn religious catalogue ewtnrc.com for all things catholic i'm doug keck we'll see you next time right here on bookmark thanks [Music] you

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Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021