Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J.: How to Suffer Well

the following is an e wtn special presentation well the next speaker feels qualified to speak on this subject of happiness suffering in the love of God and and has been teaching it for a long time in Georgetown University and many other universities so without further introduction I'm going to put it into a wider context first and then get right down to that issue of why and all-powerful all-loving God might allow suffering in the world in order to give the context I'm going to implore you today to consider intellectual evangelization as an integral part of the New Evangelization intellectual evangelization is like what apologetics used to be it's it's cutting edge of faith and reason that's what it's supposed to be but today it is giving vital answers to questions which students have and not just students but young adults and also adults as well middle-aged adults as well because these questions if gone unanswered are causing unbelief in our culture the Pew survey that was just done last year indicates that we are going up at a rate of 1% a year in unbelief among our young people from about 16 to about 30 years old but of course we've already seen a 25% to a 35% increase in unbelief which could be characterized as agnosticism or just atheism or just you know literally don't care anymore but the key thought is that this unbelief used to take two year or two generations to accomplish first you kind of drop out of the church then you stop believing in God or you just don't care about God or the God question anymore as we've been hearing about throughout the conference now it is one generation 1% to here we've gone up from 25 to 35% unbelief in 15 years we will be at 50% where Europe is today this should be shocking the fact of course is we can stem the tide there is absolute there are resources that I'm going to talk about that can really get students re interested in their faith by answering directly the questions they have I'm just going to point to the four Biggie's that we've identified in our research at the magis Institute by the way I'm just going to give you a website and I'll just keep referring to it because there's plenty of free resources free video casts free encyclopedia of faith and reason everything is on this thing it's classified I think it's easy to use but I'm going to give you the four big questions but the website is magis center.com WWI Center comm the first question that the kids have is simply this is a problem basically they believe right now approximately forty to fifty percent of kids believe now that faith and science are in some kind of conflict if not in full conflict with one another they also believe that science is truth therefore it is right they are relegating faith to Fantasyland and this is causing a lot of our intellectually oriented kids to leave the church for no good reason you know my solution to this already I've given talks on the evidence for God from contemporary physics which is profound and we have all kinds of resources ones you can buy ones that are DVDs ones that are free video casts etc on that website I beg of you if you know kids who fit into this category stop the cultural myth confront it with the data of physics the board of Lincoln and Guth proof the entropy evidence the fine-tuning evidence confront Dawkins with the myth of his of his arguments this can be done the resources are there if you know schools who can use it we beg of you just try and get these resources into the schools we can't nor the problem anymore second problem the one I will be addressing in detail today why would an all-powerful all-loving God allow suffering in the world because if he were all-powerful it seems as if he could prevent it and if he were all loving it seems as if he would prevent it we all know sitting in this room that the second part of that rationale is as false as it can possibly be that suffering and love are incompatible with one another and I'll be talking about this in great detail in a moment they simply aren't but it is another cultural myth and it's being perpetuated and indeed it's being promoted in the new media I mean the nume very sophisticated Dawkins is very very sophisticated website the kids are being confronted by this in school by their teachers not just by fellow students it just it's so easy to kind of put it into it and we can do it the right way but again that that myth needs to be addressed and we can't wait any longer to do so the third myth which is really killing our kids is the false dichotomy between virtue and freedom and basically the myth goes like this Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church are loading a bunch of rules and regs on me that other kinds of churches and other kinds of philosophies moral philosophies don't have you know what the other moral philosophies are coming out of the secular age here the key thing of course is they're thinking well since these other philosophies and these other religions are just as reasonable right moral relativism as Christianity and Catholicism why should I follow the the teachings of Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church why should I do that and of course once you fall away from the moral teaching then of course you get sucked in not just into the culture but sucked into the wrong side of a cosmic struggle between good and evil and that that can really destroy souls I don't have to tell you we have to confront the myth and we have resources to do this interesting resources to do this forth you know the old line that comes from the the capstone course and the high school the Catholic High School has been teaching sacraments and teaching all the various kinds of you know moral theology and and and all the various catechesis life in Christ it's all very good stuff important stuff to be teaching and the finally get to the capstone course and the kid raises his hand and he says but wait a minute what if God doesn't exist and Jesus Christ never walked or talked on this earth anyway and then the rest of the kids go well yeah you are dead if you do not address this myth of the non historicity of Jesus which the kids get on the television they get on the new media it's all over the place it's absolute malarkey I mean you've got NT right today one of the best historical exegetes who ever lived no debate has been lost by NT Wright against any of the Jesus Seminar people he mops the floor with them and they wind up a green one there's a funny rendition Dominic Crossan telling President right remember the head of the seminar you know he's debating NT right at the end of the debate he winds up agreeing with everything NT Wright says and you look at it and so funny except it's a travesty because the only people that get the play on the media is Dominic Crossan because it seems more interesting but our kids are absorbing it and it's killing us we got to address it and again on the on this magis center.com we try in a way we have four landing pages for each of the myths each of the problems and you can get resources for each of the four and you can just look at it from there but I want to address the myth today of happiness suffering in the love of God the false dichotomy between suffering and love now I'm going to do this the right way and the right way is to get our kids up to what I'm going to call level 3 and level 4 happiness first we got to get them up to the eternal perspective we cannot answer the question of suffering without the full truth of Christianity and the full truth of Christianity is that we are called to an eternal life not just this finite life we are called to the unconditional love and unconditional joy of being with the Trinity in full love with every other person in the communion of saints in a symphony of love we are called to this as our ultimate destiny and all we have to do is make the choice to get our narcissistic egos out of the way hard for me to do but this is the challenge this is what we have to do but of course we need to tell our kids hey there's no ultimate tragedy and suffering on this earth even the grief of losing a child profound and horrible as that might be even to contemplate that is already being taken care of by God God is already pulling that child to himself into perfect joy God is already taking care of providentially of the person if they are receptive to his providential care at the very moment the suffering occurs God is already making good come the holy spirit is already opening doors where closed doors exist but what we have to do is we have to make sure that we can get our kids onto this plane that they can see this fuller reality and then learn hutton how to suffer well basically we have kind of a five-part program in order to do this I'm just going to very briefly go through them number one we go through those four levels of happiness that many of you have heard me talk about before secondly we try to get the kids on a transcendent plane we give them ever that they have a soul and I'll talk about that a moment thirdly once we can kind of establish to them that they have a soul that's immortal once they see the fourth level of happiness and the third level of happiness that's where you know true peace and true joy and true love are going to occur where real meaning in life is going to occur instead of the emptiness that we just heard John Garvey talking about and and Catherine Jean Lopez talking about so the key thing then is we need to get them to that point where they can see what life is really about then we need to give them a definition of God that Jesus gave who is God we have to get them up to the level of the father of the prodigal son so that's our third step is to get them their number four let's confront the myth right now so in the fourth step there they're prepared they're ready to go and once the the step the step is to say okay why would God allow suffering why would he allow suffering caused by human beings why would he allow suffering caused by nature the blind forces of nature just doesn't seem a lot that an all-loving God would do that and we're going to talk about the quick response to that but there's also of course a much more a prolonged and profound response as well and finally fifth step we need to teach them how to suffer well in light of their faith in light of all the steps that we've gone through how do they bring prayer into their suffering how do they bring natural virtue like courage and temperance into their suffering and finally how do they best follow the holy spirit in times of their suffering these are the things that I think will help our kids we can profoundly confront the myth it does take about six seven eight class days and the more time people and teachers take on it the more profound the explanation can be but it'll be life-changing for these kids if they could get not just for the kids we can bring it into the parishes it's life-changing for people in the person I give these talks in parishes people just swarm you know over the resources at the end of the talk so I mean the key thought is is very clear okay so let's get to it first thing four levels of happiness I'm not going to go through all four levels with you right now what I want to do though is give you the big existential crisis that occurs right at the nexus between level 1 and level 2 on the one hand and level 3 and level 4 on the other hand so this is the big crisis because of course level 1 and level 2 are the kind of happiness that come first level 1 from material goods right so I accumulate material goods I have all kinds of material satisfaction and from pleasure so of course Bob Spencer sees a bowl of linguine lunges it down and goes YUM he's happy so all these things make a guy happy so let's call that level 1 happiness and level to happiness is ego comparative satisfaction that's the kind of happiness that comes when you're basically better than somebody else have comparative advantage over somebody else or getting a lot of ego highs all today it's a kind of thing where you basically know right you know I am smarter than you thank you very much you know I mean I am a you know I have more status than you thank you thank you very much you know and I just want you to know that I know and and so forth and so on but I mean there's a great deal of happiness that comes from such things and of course let's just call them ego comparative satisfactions but of course we can see almost automatically what begins to happen especially to the 15 and 16 year old who's achieving more who's achieving less who's got more power who's got less power who's more intelligent who's less intelligent who's got more status who's got less status who's more popular who's less popular who's winning and who's a proverbial loser said with complete disdain and voice I don't have to tell you that if this becomes the only way of being happy for a 15 16 for a 3040 year old if this is the only thing that defines happiness material and pleasure satisfactions and ego comparative satisfactions I mean these things are not bad in themselves right achievement of course is good credibility only comes from status so you gotta have some status right you gotta have some material well-being I mean that's obvious you know it's good because you don't have any security otherwise you want it you know not to cower at every competitor that comes along so you've got to have some experience of winning you gotta have some self-esteem so level one and level two aren't bad they're just terrible when they become ends in themselves they're terrible when they become the only objective that will make my life worth living seventy percent of our kids will default to level one level two happiness as the only thing that will make them happy because they are utterly ignorant of level 3 and level 4 nobody ever gave them the menu so for all intents and purposes we got to stop it and we got to get the kids to choose level 3 and level 4 as many of you already suspect level 3 is contributive kind of happiness this is the kind of happiness that comes from making a difference to somebody or something beyond myself I want to make a positive difference to my family I want to make a positive difference to my friends I want the world to be better off for my having live Nate I want the world to be optimally better off for my having lived you get hooked on it you want your family to be optimally better off for your having them your friends to be optimally better off your organization and institutions that you serve to be optimally better you want to leave a legacy I want to leave a legacy I mean here you all are I mean why are you here I mean you're already level three and level four people otherwise you wouldn't be bothering listening to a bloviator like me on a perfectly good Saturday after the key thing of course though is yeah you're there but a lot a lot of people in our culture they're not there they have no idea that they could leave an optimal make an optimal positive difference and leave an optimal legacy in their communities to their church to the kingdom of God they could make an eternal difference they can make a difference to the culture they can make a difference in this side they're oblivious to it and I don't have to tell you what level 4 is because level for clearly we are transcendent beings and that's what we have to establish to the kids that we're transcendent beings we desire not only perfect and unconditional truth and love and goodness and beauty and being as John Garvey was intimating earlier on but in addition to all of that we really we really desire God himself we really desire to be in communion with God our hearts are restless said Agustin until they rest in thee as he addressed God yes that is true and we can never be satisfied never can we get out of a state of restlessness without being in communion with God because God is the only objective that we truly desire perfect and unconditional true love goodness medium being is God himself now what's our problem how do we get the kids to choose to go to the contributive away from the ego comparative especially when they're a winner how do we get them to choose to go to the transcendent especially when they come from material means how do we do it by giving them the one thought they had never figured on and that is that when you make material satisfaction an ego comparative satisfactions level one and level two when you make that the sole objective of your life get ready everyone because this is what you can expect you can expect jealousy because anybody who's got a dealt a better hand than you you're gonna want to find a way of you know dealing with those people you know put them down a little anyway I mean the pointed inferiority you can expect inferiority if you're on the losing you can expect superiority with all of its beneficial gifts like contempt of other beautiful good human beings made in the image and likeness of God yes you can feel contempt I'm so sorry things you haven't accomplished nearly as much as I have with your life but I guess you can live with yourself so it's okay you know and that's nice okay you know I'm so I mean we literally demean and contempt another human and we're surprised to find that these human beings that we have demeaned do not want to give us agile ation and tell us every day how far superior we are to them in fact they're poised for flight as condemned customs as the contemptuous person is the loneliest I can put in the rest of the phrase only their mothers can stand to be around them the point of contest just kidding I know mother's love is unconditional but the key thing to say is this is not a life you know I mean even the winners are going to get taxed right because you're constantly facing fear of loss of esteem you know just a knockdown in public you're just killed by ego sensitivities I mean you know you mispronounced the word spectroscopy in public three times and somebody like them Spencer that word spectroscopy it's better you pronounced inspectors copy and now everybody thinks you're an idiot and then you go home and you play the tape a hundred times over and then have suicidal feelings yes indeed yes indeed of course all these things happen I've been there done that the point I'm trying to get to though is kids know when you tell them what's really going on and why they're miserable why the self-pity and why the loneliness and why the ego rage and why the jealousy and why the inferiority and why the superiority and everything else that makes life so happy when you tell them what the source is click level 3 and level 4 the contributed the legacy the transcendent their true selves the light turns on and they choose it I swear they choose it and when they do choose it for themselves that's part one of the suffering mystery because you need to convert the heart before the mind it's not going to work if you give a rational argument as I will give in our fourth step if you don't have their hearts in the trim it will not work so we need to get them up to level 3 and level 4 by their own choice and the vast majority of them do that a 70 percent default rate to level 1 and level 2 now turns in to an additional 40 percent coming onto our plane level 3 and level 4 and that makes all the difference but let's get to that fourth plane that level 4 that transcendent domain so that the kids know hey nothing's going to end here this is merely a transitory life it's all going to be redeemed in God's eternity and unconditional love and joy according to the promise of Jesus Christ did you know you have an eternal soul and if you do that's what you ought to be living for and not just your baser self and the kids will always say give me some proof well we give 4 kinds of proof we talk about the natural propensity toward transcendence spirituality the sacred and religious I'm not going to do that mercifully for you today but it's in the curriculum number 2 we talk about those five transcendent desires and we use Plato's argument and aquaintances argument to show that the only source of the desire for perfect none conditional truth love goodness beauty and being the only source could be perfect and unconditional truth love goodness and being itself and if that's the case then God is present to each one of us in our consciousness in our creativity in our thinking in our emotion and everything that we are completely transforming us out of the domain of the animals you know Bernhard Lonergan's great phrase when animals run out of biological opportunities and dangers that's instinctual opportunities physical instinctual biological opportunities so you stop petting the dog stop all the biological opportunity of affection stop feeding the dog that's a biological opportunity of of food you know stop is threatening the dog so a biological danger you just stop all the bylaw opportunities in days you know what the dog the most sophisticated dog will do it will fall out of its state of Ko nation into a state of slumber and fall asleep human beings do not do anything of the kind they want more truth and their insatiably curious they want more love and their insatiably looking for love they want more goodness and justice and they'll insatiable II search for it and think about it and create for and of course you start describing it as a the kids go ahead sort of like me do I want more beauty every singles so why do I turn up the music to 1000 decibels because I want it to be more beautiful they know they know all of a sudden when you present them with hey I bet those desires are unconditional that you want perfect truth love and where did you get the awareness sufficient to desire perfect an unconditional truth love goodness beauty and being where did you ever get that by looking out into the world and seeing some beauty how could that give you the awareness of perfect beauty so that every single solitary manifestation of beauty you see in the world is not good enough I can improve on I can tweak this baby where did you get that capacity that awareness God present to you when you make the argument and I make it much more prolonged argument but the key thing is the kids get it and they begin to have this slight glimmer maybe om transcendent and didn't we nail them with the near-death experiences we only do near-death experiences from the vantage point of peer-reviewed medical journals so like in The Lancet which is the the big medical journal in England or the JAMA the Journal of the American Medical Association's diseases for children or whatever it is so it has to be a peer-reviewed medical journal it has to be a longitudinal study that lasts for many years it has to be done over a course of many patients many high ranging from fifty to a thousand patients in the study etc etc it has to have control groups etc clinical death is very well defined flat EEG right no electrical activity in the cerebral cortex manifested also by fixed and dilated pupils and no gag reflex which indicates in the lower brain little sputtering electrical activity for all intents and purposes the brain is shut down dead and taken from me as a guy interested in physics no electricity no voltage no organic and physical activity dead Oh Desiree what's my point my point simply is this during these manifestations and we tell the kids this right we just go through and say hey during these manifestations a soul literally leaves the body in 25% of the cases people undergoing clinical death 25 experience what's called a near-death experience so 25% 75% do not we don't know why you know I can't read God's mind yet I don't know why but but the fact is 25% do and it's worth studying those 25% because they're hovering over their bodies and they're able to see a lot of things going on in the operating room and outside the operating room and the kids are all kind of no you're kidding me no and as I say here let's just take a look at some of the veridical evidence veridical evidence is something very unusual so it can't be just something typical that happens during a resuscitation procedure right so you know a machine or you know that that's very commonly used or the paddles which are commonly used during research can't be anything like that it has to be something truly unusual that the patient saw and can be subsequently verified with great accuracy so essentially for example the guy will say well you know when I go in outside of my body I I went you know I just kind of zoomed out the hospital walls there on the fifth floor and I was kind of hovering outside the fifth floor of the hospital and I saw this sneaker on the ledge out there looked like it been out there for 20 years one of dr. Melvin researchers at the University of Washington crawled out onto the ledge of that hospital and there it was how did he know when I asked him you you know this is tough to answer I mean Oh mr. so-and-so we lost your dentures oh you really didn't actually I saw the nurse when I was getting resuscitated she yanked the dentures out of my mouth and she threw it on this table but it slid under a machine that looks just like this so if you go down to the Omar and you look at all those machines that look just like this you'll find my dentures there they are yeah here you go mr. stones own here's your dentures back you know I you know when I was dead you know I went into the room that waiting room next door and my brother was there in my t-shirt insulting me never speak badly of the dead and keeping the curses any the words he knew the exact words of the insult that's the best part and of course we're able to account it dr. Janice Holden actually did then a comparative study of all of the veridical evidence of our 37 major studies in peer-reviewed journals took all these things she eliminated all the the data that was not vertical not unusual enough so the 55% of the data was too commonplace you know the Machine the paddles whatever so the remaining 45% get this 37 percent of those people 37 percent reported veridical unusual data 100% accurately using the strictest criteria only 8% had slight in accuracies though generally correct in what they were describing how do you explain that kids are kind of looking number two Kenneth ring did a study of near-death experiences of the blind and discovered in his study that 80% of blind people regain their sight and most of these people were blind from birth so most of them for the very first time in their life during their near-death experience so they're floating out of their bodies and for the first time in their lives they're seeing down below and they're going huh I've never seen colors before but the best part is they not only can for the first time with great hardship describe color and shape and try to describe it terms it because they've never had any words for it right they really didn't know what red was but they could tell you it's a brighter color than this one over here I I could tell you it looked beautiful so forth and so on and of course they describe these things including veridical unusual data eighty percent how do you explain that and then when they come back into their bodies that they're blind again I got to tell you it's hard to explain number three dr. Melvin Morse over the University of Washington Medical School did a huge study had a kind of a modified polygraph machine to measure people's you know responses to death anxiety and of course you know that you'd measure these little kids so you know he wanted patients without an agenda and kids are great that way and so course he gets right out there he he's measuring this almost 100% of the kids who experience clinical death that's 25% of them I mean 25 percent of the total sample right had a near-death experience almost 100 percent of them actually had almost no death anxiety as measured by his modified polygraph of all the other 75% almost 100% of them who did not have a near-death experience they their death anxiety was higher than the norm how do you explain this it's just really difficult unless there's some intervening experience that is so profound it affects the entire psyche you can't fool the pilot maybe you can okay but not all the time fourth you go over to the other side and when you get over to the other side you typically see either deceased relatives or you see Jesus you see a loving white light or all three or two or three the key thing of course is when you get over to the other side the little kids see Jesus and even kids who are not Christians will come over and they'll come back and they'll say you know I saw Jesus and the researcher will say well how did you know it was Jesus if if you're not a Christian oh he told me it's just that simple completely without agenda but the more interesting thing is the relatives the deceased relatives you know so the kid goes over to the other side and meets on you know iris who the kid never heard of before comes back and says to his mom you know hey mom I met and I was not you know that iris I mean she died 20 years before you were born and then the kid says oh she told me that was her and she says well how did you really know oh she told me that the secret name of your teddy bear cuddles squared or whatever that would have been my teddy bear but but the key thing of course is you know the mother is in the state of shock because she never revealed this to anybody it was the secret name etc what I'm trying to say is the evidence today for near-death experience is not only convincing to adults who really sit down and study it not just convincing for the doctors you know like dr. eben Alexander or recently wrote that book proof of heaven and so forth um you know Harvard fellow but it's very convincing to the kids but my point is simply this they start believing oh my gosh I probably have a soul that's going to survive death and it's going to meet the loving light light and deceased relative holy smokes maybe there is something to this Christian message and then BOOM which is load right on the new evidence for the resurrection from NT right and jumpy Meier we just put right on there because of course we want to show that the the connection between the near-death experiences and Jesus is revelation through his own resurrection we want to show them what the real Chris connection is and that Jesus is the way now I'm sorry oh my gosh all right let me just I'm not going to be able to get to who is God what I want to get to though is I want to get to why would an all-powerful all-loving God allow suffering you have to split the question into two parts the first part is why would an all-powerful all-loving God allow human beings to cause suffering to other human beings in a nutshell here is the answer because God needs to create us free to choose unloved to choose non loving things in order that our love might be our own our love cannot initiate from us if we do not have the choice not to be loving if we do not have the choice not to be loving then all we are are robots all we are are programmed robots programmed by the great marionette here in the sky who literally has given us all the properties to display loving behaviors toward one another for which we have no choice but that's not love and that's not being made in the image and likeness of God with the dignity of God himself the only way God can give us the ultimate dignity of who he is is to allow us to choose the possibility of unloved he doesn't create the actuality of suffering he creates the possibility of suffering by creating the possibility of unloved because he has no other choice if he wants to create creatures like himself pertains to us pertains to the Angels the kids get it but then there was the question about why would God allow nature to do that the blind forces of nature okay Spitzer so it is correct that God would not allow you know that God would allow suffering for the sake of love but why why would God allow nature to con suffering terrible suffering Grievous suffered volcanoes and earthquakes and floods and famines and disease why why would he do it and the answer in Bree is this because God wanted to create an imperfect world he did he didn't want to create for us a perfect little pleasure bubble that we could be in where he is hovering God parent could be over us at all kinds preventing any kind of pain from happening to us he literally wanted to create us in an imperfect world when my father first told me this I thought are you kidding me this sounds very suspicious to me and my dad said there are far worse things than suffering out there he told a parable which I don't have time for today but what he wanted to tell me his son just think for a moment if there were no fear if there were no fear because there was no possibility of pain no possibility of embarrassment no possibility of mortification no possibility of death if there were no fear do you realize you would never know whether you have any courage or not that you would never know that you had metal that you chose something a great sacrifice to yourself because you wanted to defend an ideal or defend a person you loved that you just you wouldn't ever know this you think that not knowing not being able to choose courage is better than not suffering and then he goes on he says you know everything has a cost I mean if we're ever going to display self sacrificial love then of course we're going to have to pay the cost sacrifice means there's a cost to it I mean my father's just saying to me do you realize that if there was no suffering possibility of suffering in the world if God created you in a perfect world do you realize that you would never be able to sacrifice for anybody who'd never know that about yourself you don't have to do it for an eternity all you have to do is keep choosing it a few times in this world so to know who you are you define yourself but isn't it nice to know that you're capable of making self-sacrifice for somebody beyond yourself for an ideal beyond yourself for a faith beyond yourself that you are capable of high mindedness and to pay the cost for it that you're capable of self sacrificial wouldn't you want to know or would you just want to be in your little pleasure bubble and begin to think well maybe the pleasure bubble in the dead good but the key thing of course so he goes on then he says do you realize that if God created you in a perfect world there'd be nothing for you to do absolutely nothing for you to do you couldn't improve the world you couldn't operate for the common good you'd have no self definition of having done anything for anybody because God the hovering parent went out and did it for you he made sure that there would be no reason to get together as a human community in the common cause as we are all here oriented around common cause there'd be no reason for it whatsoever because God would have done it all and done it better than us and of course he keeps going and God also allowed us to build the kingdom of God he allowed us to have a place to actually do something for the kingdom of God because he didn't do it oh we can build the church why are we here we can build you know the hope and light in the world because there is something for us to do God left some space for us to do these things and finally of course gets down to my father's that wonderful gift of humility remember st. Paul in 2nd Corinthians chapter 12 and he says you know the Lord gave me a thorn in the flesh an angel of Satan to beat me to keep me from getting proud and of course st. Paul recognized something really important that there was something far far far worse than suffering something that's a thorn in the flesh is some physical ailment maybe his eyes possibly you know who knows but the key thing is is he's got this lure in the flesh it's in it's impeding him it's causing him pain something's going on an angel of Satan is beating him why because he says to keep me from getting proud and he recognized there's something far worse than suffering and that's narcissism and that's arrogance and that's pride that's all of the ego sensitivities and all of the ego manifestations that literally blur the vision of love and the vision of joy that is ours in unconditional love and joy in heaven and he knows us and he says oh my gosh I don't want to give up real love to be a narcissist I don't want to be born you know without the possibility of knowing I'll take the suffering because the narcissism is far far worse than that at the end of the day the key thing is my father said there are far worse things than suffering and that far worse thing is not to know courage not to know self sacrificial love not to ever have humility as a possibility over against narcissism and egocentricity not to be able to do anything to build up the world or make it a better place to enter into community for common cause to do something noble and to do something great there's no possibility of nobility for the church no possibility of nobility for the world argh a perfect world is definitely overestimated if you are being given an eternal life the kids get it my last minute I'll just simply say this we can give the kids a formula complete with spontaneous prayers and the natural virtues that they're going to need to supposed to suffer well they have to realize that God does not want to cause suffering and he doesn't want to con suffer he is with us in compassion during our suffering but like any other parent he has to let us go he has to let us make decisions he has to let us define ourselves he has to let us go from level 1 and level 2 to level 3 and level 4 through our own choice and decision he has to let us define our existence because if we do it even perfectly for just a short time on this earth enough to show the manifestation the direction that we want to go God can take care of the rest believe me he's going to have to do it for me because I'm not going to be perfect at the end of this life and if he takes that pur that little decision that little sets of decision my imperfect life and he can transform it into the fullness of his unconditional love that's forever and it's worth the suffering and then we teach them how to use the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit does involve once that door slams I tell you the Holy Spirit is opening up another door and when the Holy Spirit opens up another door it's going to be sometimes very unusual almost unexpected you won't even know where it came from and you'll go as I did at one point a door was slamming and I was kind of looking at something else and finally you know you know as I was examining all kinds of different things that were going on my life in college suddenly occurred to me that the one thing I really did like was some religion one thing I really did like was you know philosophy I'd come to this over a long period of time and of course I finally followed the impetus because of a great spiritual director Gerard Steckler and I just have to tell you this makes all the difference in the world but you have to see the opportunity when the door opens and you have to step into it you need to test the spirits right remember the old trick of discernment if you're increasing and trust in God hope in your salvation and love that new opportunity that door opening has to be the Holy Spirit because the devil would never open that door to you alternatively if you see your trust decreasing trusting God decreasing your hope and salvation decreasing your love decreasing you know that can't be the Holy Spirit that's got to be the enemy of your human nature the evil one himself the key thing is if you look for the open doors the Spirit will present it when the Spirit opens the door you'll feel a sense of fascination you'll feel a sense of energy and a sense of desire go through it after about two months test the Spirit makes sure you're increasing in trust and hope and love and if you do ask the people around you and if so follow the open door till its conclusion look at what happened to me the key thing of course is for all intents and purposes this is our method thank you very very much you

Channel: Napa Institute

Views: 44,718

Rating: 4.7929883 out of 5

Keywords: Fr. Robert Spitzer, Suffering, Catholic, Jesuit, Napa Institute, Reason and Faith, Faith, Reason, Science, Atheism, Jesus Christ

Id: PQ47ZtkS8x8

Length: 47min 36sec (2856 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2013