Journey Home - 2018-10-15 - Tyler Blanski

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program our guest tonight is Tyler Blonsky he's a former Anglican I'll just mention a couple things as I begin his conversion story is on the coming home Network website CH network.org but also he's the author of a book that when you read the back cover it's highly acclaimed by some very familiar folk and a moveable feast how I gave up spirituality for a life of religious abundance it's available on ewtn religious catalogue and i wanted to mention I I'm about this far into the book so I don't know the story yet which is just as well because I look forward to hearing it now with you Tyler welcome to the journey all Marcus it's good to be here I'm I'm anxious to read the book because I've so many my friends are just raved about it and so thank you for joining us on the program but we'll put the book aside for now and I'm gonna get out of the way and they asked you to start us off way back way let's do your journey you know it probably began even before I was born my parents tell me that they would pray for me all the time before I was even born and I was born in the middle of a freezing winter and you might bill right it's just that you know farming is there is there is not a lot to do in the winter right you're not you're not tilling you're not breaking the earth you're not harvesting you're waiting you might be tending equipment so from a young age my earliest memories are I've just been haunted with this kind of longing that I experienced every winter of just hunkering for more for more God for more life and your parents would have been spiritual folk then yes yeah they were both very passionate Baptists and of course I wasn't baptized as an infant but I was dedicated to the Lord in the presence of many witnesses which is no small thing as I reflect on it in hindsight uh to be consecrated in that kind of way and from a very young age my parents spoke of angels and I was aware of the holy being almost everywhere especially in experiences of beauty or even pain of this longing and hunger for God that would just come out sometimes in the sanctuary when we would go to church on Sunday mornings but most often just going for a walk with my mother or my father my father was an architect and was always sketching he would draw his prayers and my mother is a very contemplative spiritual director and you can imagine this kind of combination of being raised by a contemplative and an architect I was always looking up and how it all shot on the farm you said that were they farmers too or was it all an element oh yeah okay yeah grew up in Minneapolis okay yeah all right all right but you had this Baptist background and and I could see now how the influence of your very artistic parents shaped how you understand the journey of faith that comes out of your book oh absolutely yeah it was something I've always felt as much as I've known yeah so a Baptist upbringing yes I grew up going to John Piper's church and John Piper is just in love with the scriptures I have my earliest memories of a sermon are of John Piper shouting and lifting up his Bible and inviting us to just pure into those pages and that stuck with me and still that love of Scripture is still with me to this day of this is Scripture is a gateway that just brings you into a story that's so much bigger than yourself and of course you know the love of the Scriptures and then being Baptist everything that about my relationship with Jesus was very personal very permeated in the scriptures and very not Catholic in fact I from you know from before adolescence I was I might not have said I was spiritual but not religious but I definitely was leaning that way where in my mind religion was a dirty word and when Jesus went when the eternal son of God became man he came to do away with all the religious hypocrisy of the Pharisees and the Old Covenant and to bring something better which was in my mind something that was very spiritual I just recently I remember the gospel for mass was the gospel where our Lord confronted the Pharisees for being clean on the outside pots but dirty on the inside you know so there was an idea of you need the the substance on the inside just not the externals and for many Protestants it kind of meant throwing out the pot and focusing only on the substance that was me that was me I was so afraid of being religious that I would actually go out of my way of doing anything for our Lord just an effort to I was so terrified of behaving one way with my right hand doing something else with my left in my mind of course Catholicism embodied the worst of Christianity how everything could go south and fast yeah and my parent my grandparents are actually Catholic and so I have memories of going to Mass as a young boy we'd visit them for for a Christmas Mass or some something like that and just sort of being appalled by the vestments in the hymnody and the the formality of the whole the whole thing it just seemed the opposite of the Jesus I knew in the Gospels yeah you could if you watched at that age a Catholic woman with a man Tia I'm praying her rosary in front of a statue you would have probably rejected that just because you have just seen the externals yes because you can't see what's going on inside but you could see the externals even to try to be holy in my mind was to go too far that if I behaved this way on the outside I might obtain eternal rewards on the inside that kind of thing of course it's a false false comparison it's not there not necessarily in opposition to each other at all but it would be many years before I'd come to see that yeah well that was the point of that parable Jesus he didn't wasn't saying throw off the pots but clean up the inside yes that's reality I'm sure of what you get out here in your book here so it's a young man you have faith in Christ a very Baptist understanding of what that means so where'd you go from there well you lead into a spiritual trying yeah well my my teenage years I you know Abraham I think it was Abraham Lincoln once said that if folks won't obey the Ten Commandments he'll end up obeying the Ten Thousand Commandments and I think the same is goes for sacraments where if you throw out the seven sacraments you'll end up turning almost everything into a sacrament and when I look back on my years as a teenager every it was every day was just full of fake prop up sacraments I grew dreadlocks and I practiced yoga and drank inordinate amounts of carrot juice and wheatgrass juice and it was very passionate about the environment and saving the earth and always I felt like God's graces were coming to me through these outward signs of whether it was rockin out or yoga as long as it wasn't explicitly Christian religiosity I was actually quite religious about many things were you baptizing these things as a part of a Christian faith yeah it was kind of a mash-up of you know for me just being spiritual but not religious I would kind of pick and choose what I liked from from different traditions or fads that were going on and was very I'm very grateful that I had a deepening conversion experience at a church camp that really helped set my life on a trajectory of pursuing Christ and seeking Him not wholeheartedly but seeking Him nonetheless our guest is Tyler Blonsky talk about that I mean you're at a bap you're at a camp Baptist camp were you going for the fun of it or were you going anticipating you know yeah I I was going mostly because we went every year and all my other friends were were going and I'll never forget it was a Bible study after you know the worship service were all back in the cabin myself and the other boys and the counselor and we're I don't remember what passage of Scripture we were studying but a student next to me we were probably 12 years old admitted that he had never loved anyone and he really seemed to mean it and I could almost see a gargoyle writhed behind his face and I remember asking him sort of in shock like you don't even love your mom and he was like no and I I never met anyone who it's one thing to have never been loved but to never even be able to love someone else that's an entirely different thing and I remember just just starting to sob and I ran out of the cabin and ran down to the lake and that night I gave my that's the moment where for many years that was when I became a Christian it was when I gave Jesus my whole heart beneath the starry skies as the lonely Pines were knocking against each other knowing that no matter what I knew that God loved me and I wanted to love him back I wanted to be I wanted to love so it was a bit of an awakening too but for the grace of God go I I mean you saw that person and you were so grateful for what God had done in your life yes it's led you to surrender yes so you had mentioned to me earlier that you had a little bit of seminary experience was it it did you have at this time of a year in chling that yeah actually it was it was around middle school that I picked up a novel that I think is really written for old women and I it's about an Anglican priest in a small town and I read I read this novel over and over again about father Tim and it just blew me away how the small town life of a parish priest how he could do the work of the kingdom it was his day labor and it just enchanted me and I remember coming downstairs and saying you know hey mom I think I want to be a priest and she was like well what's that you know I was like I don't know but I want to I want to be one and of course that would just get put to the backburner for a long long time we eventually joined a large evangelical mega church and was very involved there and then eventually scorned what I called suburban Christianity and joined an emergent church movement where as kind of like yoga meets Christianity meets the recitation of the Creed and that was my first taste of something that was like historic Christianity where I had never heard of a Creed before I had never heard of you know the old hymns and to discover that was it send me on a journey so your early upbringing again wasn't creedal but it was doctrinal you at least had standards yes you know I mean yeah I would have thought of it at the time is just biblical yeah and how you understood with the know you have Creed's yeah Creed's and candles we sat in couches and everyone could drink wine it was a very open Eucharist you didn't even have to believe in Jesus to participate it was sort of this theology that the kingdom of God is like a wedding feast and all are welcomed to taste and see that the Lord is good and but I liked the candles I liked the couches and this of course started to my guard went down a little bit for Catholicism where suddenly maybe candles aren't such a bad thing you know maybe the old hymns aren't so bad and then everything changed I went to a school for four artists in high school I went for guitar and being Minneapolis it was a very liberal City and it was a very liberal school and most of my classmates identified as gay and many of the professor's too and by the time that experience was over I was I was ready for something more when I graduated high school I was I don't know how this happened but I was very aware that I I had a lot to learn hmm oh wow the God dropped you into a real challenge then in that art school it was it was I think providentially I think in hindsight I can see how this helped shape me there was a boy at school Mason who had a crush on me and would flirt with me in being 1617 and insecure as you can imagine one day I lashed out to him and just insulted him very loudly in the hallway and a few days later Mason hung himself and of course Mason's story is so much bigger than a high-school crush didn't reciprocate his affection and I knew that but it didn't change the fact that my last exchange with him was was a violent one an insulting one and I wish I could go back in time I remember when we found out I excused myself and ran into the restroom and cried my eyes out and I wanted to go back and say something kind to him but then I was forced if Christianity is I had to make a decision is it possible that Christianity isn't good news for everyone and you know just thinking about Mason could he be a Christian and still identify as gay and live out that lifestyle and in my mind at the time if Christianity were a spirituality it could accommodate Mason's desires and passions where he could still follow Jesus but kind of pick and choose his own morality but if Christianity were a religion with its dogmas and moral imperatives then it probably wouldn't and of course I thought sexual romantic fulfillment was the greatest happiness anyone could have so that was those were some hard questions I had to ask at a young age yeah and with I mean what was the authority in your life at that time to decide which of those options was true the Bible read with the help of scholars but mostly interpreted from personal experience to be honest I yeah I very much I was very proud of my interpretation of Scripture and all that we could go down so many rabbit trails there yeah okay so you came out of that experience then out of that school you said you you're ready for something new yes I will so having dreadlocks doing a little bit of yoga whenever I could wanting above all to have an authentic relationship with Jesus that had nothing to do with religion I came downstairs one day and announced to my parents that I was gonna live in the Redwoods of California for the rest of my life just to save them from being cut down and of course they wouldn't hear anything of it you know I know you need to at least look at some schools and I'm so glad that they nudged me that direction we visited many many colleges and it wasn't until Hillsdale College in southern Michigan stumbled into their and just right away I had never been to any anywhere where people were talking about a heritage and that you could receive this tradition and that you could even live it so it just blew me away and I had never felt that kind of summons before to participate in a story that was truly bigger than myself and I applied the next day and I don't know how I got accepted but it was it was providential because that was my first real experience of Catholicism was rubbing elbows with some Catholics there in the Catholic professional still is a unique school yes I mean I I don't know the history of how it got started what its roots are but I've met many people that have gone there great people were greatly influenced by that school was I forget what its roots were originally I think Anabaptist okay yeah back in the 1840s and now it's census it's a Christian school but not explicitly it's more just it would be Christian and that's judeo-christian greco-roman western heritage great boss but considered a conservative school especially politically I think and that's what so there you are you're landing there as yoga dreadlocks yes well I shaved off my dreadlocks and I remember that first week just being overwhelmed this the stack of what I had a Latin and reading The Iliad and writing an essay on manhood and all I was just way out of my league and I'm a slow learner so it took it was a lot of a lot of time in the library and a lot of almost just grit just to get through and learn how to learn you know but that was so important later learning that openness of conversation and dialogue and receiving the possibility that you might be wrong I learned how to admit being wrong and he'll still college will be up you know and a winsome environment of that encouraged that and not just debate but I mean yes battle debate so did your faith grow while you read it did that was the first time I stumbled into a small angle Catholic parish and I loved it cause it was so nondescript and out of the way there was not nothing contemporary or compelling about it but they opened up the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and it was like she experienced real I was just instantly drawn to the reverence in the posture of these of these folks or earnestly seeking the Lord through liturgy and his religious folk yeah it was a little bit religious but I was so frustrated with what I called suburban Christianity that I wasn't I wasn't thinking that way anymore I was like this is so old-school it's cool and of course being in college we wanted to party like medieval peasants but we didn't have the cult you know I remember reading this essay by Russell Kirk talking about how without the religious cult there can be no true culture and it was a Hillsdale that I first began to wonder with all of our festivity why is it so unfair there was a sort of sadness behind it and we would drink beer and we would sing songs to the stars but the stars had no meaning and there were no religious ties that held us together the the occasion for the Friday night frat party there was an occasion it was it was random and I began to long for a Christianity almost a Christendom where things could go here and where there be a reason to raise a glass in a toast or to dance I remember the movie that of all I want to recommend this movie to folk but the movie that the Lord used awaken my faith to was the movie Jesus Christ Superstar the reason not recommended is because that's really the gospel from according to Judas in a way from his perspective but wrong reason I bring it up now as I remember the end of that movie when that's all done and they've gone through that and acted it we're just kind of walking back to the bus and that so that the counter makes me think about what you said that all the festivity if there's no culture to give it meaning we take away the meaning as they did in Jesus Christ Superstar if you take away the ultimate meaning what are you left with we go back to the bus yeah there's just no meaning to it but you were discovering that meeting there at Hillsdale yeah it was a very you know it's unfortunate to admit I mean I was living one way during the week and then worshiping God on Sundays but I wanted there to be an integration and I didn't know how apart from doing a Bible study in the morning by myself or perhaps in the cafeteria with other you know brothers in Christ I didn't know how to bring about the kingdom of God on earth where it could be a whole life lived in community so I would make little churches I started we call ourselves the guild when I was a freshman it was meant to be an alternative to the Greek system and we would read the scriptures together and and read poetry together and it was rich and sweet and it all came tumbling down when I said you know let's have let's have the Lord's Supper together and one of the guys in the group said you know we need a priest to do that and then another gentleman said you know let's let's have some beers afterwards we were all underage and we ended up having a big quarrel about underage drinking and the Eucharist and it ended up disbanding the guild and in hindsight I can see this is not a coincidence that drink arguing about wine and the morality of drinking and where does it fit into your life and arguing about the Eucharist these are actually very linked and the only place they truly come together and from which it all Springs is of course the Eucharist but I didn't know that at the time it was but I was the first time I could experience schism where it was looking at me like an animal in the face I could smell its breath here we were we were all the same age we were all reading the King James Version which we believed to be the best and yet we couldn't agree on hardly hardly anything and we ended up having to go our separate ways and it seemed to kind of embody my frustration with Christianity and trying to live it you mentioned did you start another church or was this something oh yes well later started the couch Society this was a second effort at trying to be spiritual but not religious wanting community wanting to practice my faith in in Brotherhood with other friends as best we could in college but you know of course a shewing Church and organized religion and at the time there was a professor there who was also a priest an Anglican priest and he would come and we would read poetry and then we would celebrate the Eucharist and it made a big hullabaloo on campus and but this was my first experience of Catholicism was when a guy we called him Old Hickory he he joined the guild and I had never met a man like him he was a devout Catholic and none of my bib local nuances inspired him and he didn't seem to you know I always came to the opposite conclusion that I did about every single matter and yet he was even though he was so religious he seemed more spiritual and more poetic than I had ever could ever you know dreamt to be and so one day I remember going with him to Mass just to see what the fuss was about and it just terrified me I was expecting it to be a bunch of show-offs and Pharisees and you know religious folk and instead it was mothers hapless mothers with their children and folks kneeling in the pew quiet yet there was this like almost primal hunger that I could feel in the building and I remember Old Hickory pulled out he was holding as he was clutching his brown scapular and sort of rocking and praying and I never I just felt like I had entered some sort of medieval Oh a story that I did not understand it terrified even the priest and his clerical --zz frightened me and I excused myself and never went back to Mass from here's what was it about what we'll take a break in a moment but you've mentioned another number of times being spiritual but not being religious spirits but not being wrong what was it at that point your life that you were so resistant maybe even fearful of being religious for me above all I wanted an authentic relationship with Jesus and as soon as you start going through the motions I thought as soon as you have to do something you're obligated to do something then the threat that your heart might not really be in it was was there and if you were to do something in your heart was in there then you were not being authentic and to me that was the great the great sin and so I thought it was actually better to not go to church on Sundays if my heart wasn't in it than to just go just to go through the motions and of course now I can see no husband in his right mind would you know not come home one day after work just because his heart wasn't in it like his wife would not appreciate his suppose at authenticity but yeah that's exactly how I was approaching my faith was if your heart isn't in it don't do it and of course only time can teach you this and experience that love love is what you do when your heart isn't in it right that's when you when you really you bear down and you are present even though what you want to do is check out at the time you would not have appreciated the importance of obedience yes even if inside I don't want to do this yeah my heart ain't in this but I'm called you obey yes it would take years before I began to see that the the religious act of showing up even when your heart isn't in it actually puts you in a place for your heart to grow and actually exploit you show your hand by showing up by doing the work of the kingdom of God you're you're showing that you're trying to grow that you are following Christ even if there are days that your heart isn't it you're not necessarily faking it you're doing it yeah yeah and that old phrase fake it until you until you make it or but yeah that but that puts us a negative spin on the the fake it in other words that's not we're talking about obedience in itself is a trust Lord you called me to do this I don't understand I don't even want to but you called me to do this I'll do that and that's it you know that's a bit like saying Lord take this cup away but thy will be done I mean all I'm with it yes yeah or Mary's Fiat there's I've come to my experience has been that identifying as being spiritual but not religious is a lot like saying you love soccer but never play or you love music you've got a great record collection but you don't actually sing and one thing I've learned being Catholic is it's great to love the game it's great to love music you could have a great record collection but if you want to be a saint if you want to actually have a truly authentic relationship with Christ in His Church you've got to sing you've got to get on the field and do the work and that is what being religious is all about it's why it's such a Incarnation all faith yes we're jumping ahead of ourselves let's take a break down Tyler and I'll take you all the way back before you realize the beauty of this aspect of our faith I pause it a bit and we'll see in a bit and we'll come back in a moment with Tyler glance [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi our guest is Tyler Blonsky and as I mentioned earlier he's the author of an movable immovable feast how I gave up spirituality for a life of religious abundance which is kind of what you're summarizing now is we're talking about it so I left you at Hillsdale College yes well so I graduated with a Christian Studies major and it was interdisciplinary it was you know great books and of course this did not prepare me for any career and I had in college started a house-painting business it helped pay for school it was just a wonderful mix of the body and the mind and I love the work of it and so I decided to paint houses in the summer and write books in the winter and it was just a fantastic life and I moved to Uptown Minneapolis with some friends and pretty quickly ended up living even before I could identify it which was just basically the hipster lifestyle of kind of being in a generational ghetto where there were no young people there were no older people in our lives it was me and my urban tribe living life in the city and I remember these years is being sort of the most painful of my life is sort of feeling an acute loneliness and a sense of searching of where what am I supposed to be doing with my life and I think a lot of Millennials might be able to identify with that kind of experience in their early 20s of Who am I where am I going I was hoping to have maybe some of these ant questions answered in college the answers didn't come and I remember right pretty quickly after graduating thinking that I needed to take a vow of celibacy just to figure out you know should I be should I become a priest someday what's what's going on so I called up my girlfriend at the time and said it's got it you know it's not you it's me I'm becoming a monk and she's like ah you're a real jerk and she she hung up the phone and I breathed the rarified air of celibacy as I called it it was really just you know being chased and that sent me on a journey of I remember that first winter of wanting to write this book about romantic theology it was Charles Williams a member of the Inklings it was that was kind of his shtick and really want to unpack this whole idea of how romantic love especially in marriage could be a vehicle of grace even a sacrament and this was for me this was a huge turning point in my life of discovering Pope John Paul the great and this whole idea of the theology of the body and that romantic love and sexual love that this could actually be telling us more than meets the eye and actually could be preparing us for heaven so wrote a book called mud and poetry and fresh air books was kind enough to publish it and basically arguing as a Protestant that marriage is a sacrament and that you have a choice you have two options you can either choose a sort of consecrated singleness or marriage in your pursuit of Christ and this of course whet my appetite for marriage but living in generational ghetto in the city in my urban tribe I wasn't meeting many eligible young women who were passionate about Christ and you know looking to start a family and frankly even though that's what I wanted I wasn't doing the work to prepare myself for marriage or fatherhood but it sounds like as you were writing that book maybe research mean you were tapping into some Catholic sources absolutely absolutely in fact when I was studying in Oxford my junior year of college we were visiting Paris and I was in Paris when I found out that Pope John Paul the great had passed away and I don't I just discovered theology of the body at the time and first for whatever reason I remember just sobbing and in really mourning his loss well while in Minneapolis started attending a Anglican Church in the suburbs of Minneapolis and it was kind of always on my mind you know maybe I maybe I am called to be a priest to do some kind of ministry and it wasn't until I eventually dated this beautiful woman named Brittany oh my goodness and in a moveable feast I tell the story if you the book gets darker and darker in these chapters until she shows up and God really used Britney to sort of call me back to himself with with a force pretty quickly Britney looked me in the eye and said look if this is gonna go anywhere what are you gonna do to provide for a family you know what I was like hey you know I'm an artist babe like she's like yeah I like your art but what are you gonna do and I confessed you know I hadn't told very many people this I was like I've always felt like I should be a priest and she was like I think you you should pursue that so ended up going on a road trip visiting a small angle Catholic seminary in Wisconsin called miss showed a house fell in love with it instantly and before I knew it I was wearing a black cassock and learning learning these old liturgical rites that the shoulder just drops you right into and getting pretty religious here oh yeah I get pretty religious by the time I wasn't thinking of it as religion I was thinking as this is about as spiritual as it gets I just loved it from you know they said the Angelus three times a day there was the morning office there was even song I just I loved the icons the statuary the whole the whole world just seemed to use Christ and I was so hungry for for what I would probably call just incarnation all or historic Christianity I wrote another book called when donkeys talk rediscovering the mystery and wonder of Christianity while I was there at seminary and Zondervan foolishly published it it turned out to be way more Catholic than even I was anticipating just arguing for a recovery of this medieval synthesis of where everything is United and nothing is let out and where the whole universe is just singing the praises of our God and I wanted to participate I wanted to sing I just didn't know how yet but was that seminary that Britney and I were Wed and of course being at an angle Catholic seminary you're right there in the heart of all those tough topics come to the floor and you have to answer those difficult questions what about homosexuality what about Mary in all the Marian dogmas what about you know why can't women be priests in the Catholic Church I had to kind of tackle those one by one and in doing so without knowing it I was able to consume an Anglican Seminary we really to have different views of so yeah I was actually taking step by step going getting closer and closer to being able to accept the beauty and truth of Catholicism all right it was your Brittany step by step with you on this yes for her it was different you know she was working at a military academy as a teacher down the road and I was the one in the the library reading all of the all of the books and and studying the scriptures but it's it's just it played out just hilariously like for example on our honeymoon you know I'm packing for our honeymoon I'm so excited to be to be married to Brittany at last and I packed this when I entered seminary I was so violently for women being priests to me it was a matter of social justice and their rights and just to entertain the other side I thought you know I want to hear what folks have to say about this so I packed a little pamphlet by an Engel Catholic priest al Maskull and just tucked it into my suitcase and we went to a cabin in the North Woods and whenever I could you know I was pulling out my little pamphlet about what's going on with the priesthood and Brittany was just rolling her eyes but for me it was very providential that when I get married and I discover as it were a woman marriage and I'm reading about the priesthood and how it is linked to Christ being the new Adam and how Adam was the first high priest of creation my mind is just exploding and then I'm discovering Mary's role in the economy of salvation all while I'm on my honeymoon discovering Eve it had an impact on me so suffice it to say when I came back Seminary a lot of my friends didn't even recognize me I was I was married I had developed overnight a Marian devotion I no longer believed women could be priests I was just it was a radical change we were basing these views really on your own discovery not so much in authority of the church at this point well I was I was reading you know Balthasar Ratzinger just devouring strong Catholic oh yeah and I just do everything they said I just I was like Oh at last someone is test the guts to say it like it is you know like I was intuitive and feeling this for a while and frustrated with sort of religious pluralism that's present in in so much of Protestantism I don't I don't say it to be offensive but that's just kind of the state of it for example Aetna showed a house we would stay we would say the Angelus three times a day but we would say it silently so the st. Michael bell would ring and it would just you could hear a pin drop and it was because half the campus believe it was idolatrous and the other half believed it or thoroughly and it was believed that the the happy ground would be silence this way no one would be offended everyone could believe what they wanted to and it was called the pox and a show done where hello Anglicans across around the world were arguing about almost everything when we came in to show the house we could agree to disagree and my time there I began to see just personally I felt it at a in my relationships and just in conversation with my sending parish back home this this was just colossal II bad advice to agree to disagree it almost always played out in more schism more pain hmm so are you at that point leaning toward Catholic to become it or just open to the reality of it i yeah i was so i identify as an angle catholic and i had a vision of sort of bringing the best of Catholicism to Anglicanism without having to actually believe and in howpet shrine the church really is so it was actually when Brittany and I came face to face with the Church's teachings on birth control that we were able to tackle once you tackle and you give God your sexuality in your marriage bed what else is there to give I mean the last thing standing was was Peters office and when that when I discovered just how pet shrine the church is I mean we were it was a horrible moment of of reckoning of having to admit it had been a long journey and God was faithful and had been drawing us in but it was we were about to graduate we had a baby on the way we were going to go back to Minneapolis to start a church I was soon to be ordained to the diaconate and I had to call up my bishop my priest for my sending parish and and kind of bring them in rather late into what had been for me a long journey but for them a relatively relatively new news that I was thinking about becoming Catholic and and your wife was with you she Brittany was Brittany was ahead of me she she was actually baptized Catholic as an infant and just to just escape the chaos of Anglicanism one day we snuck over secretly to a Catholic parish and I had never seen her this way during the elevation she just leaned forward in the pew and she just was like ravenous for God and she was like I'm going up there and I was like you you can't were not Catholic and she's like but I was baptized Catholic I was like yeah a lots happened in between you know I think we just need to stay right here for now and afterwards we walked for to go get lunch and as we were walking I remember was just a windy day and she was like I heard Jesus say come to me eat me and I remember looking at pretty going this is nuts this has never happened at one of our Anglican parishes and she didn't have a lot of the Protestant hang-ups that I had she was raised in a secular home and so for her heard discovery of Christ in her 20s she didn't have kind of the the baggage of Sola scriptura or my being spiritual but not religious her just made sense so there you are what was there what was the final boot that got you it was a couple of them well it was the papacy for sure and I remember discovering there were a couple other closeted Catholics on campus who were all on the same secret journey but none of us knew it yeah and I I kind of confess one day to a friend I was like you know I'm thinking about you know in confidence I'm thinking about becoming Catholic he was like oh I am too and in fact so so does he you know we should meet and soon there was seven of us meeting to pray regularly and search the scriptures and it was just these beautiful terrible moments and I didn't know where to go with a child on the way and no you know career ahead of me I remember deciding that I was going to work at a bread factory down the street and it just on in my mind it just seemed perfect there was no safer place than the Catholic Church for my family and I just wanted to be above all a Catholic dad the just seen it just seemed like almost too good to be true that someone could just be a Catholic dad and raise his children going to Mass and I ended up meeting with a priest at the parish down the road and when he heard of my plan to work at the bread factory he wouldn't hear of it it was like no no we will you consider ministry at my parish I was like absolutely and so started out as a youth minister eventually became the pastoral associate of Faith Formation and was just so blessed to be surrounded I had never Wow there is no place on earth like a Catholic parish so many saints in the making and we were able to just grow up in Christ in such a beautiful way there I was thinking as you said that that there might be people out there wondering uh which parish is he going to in other words they may not feel quite the same confidence about their parish but I'm wondering if a bit of that connects with the very title of your book you're a whole search for what it really does mean to be religious you know I mean it's I mean you your spirituality your religiosity can grow and shape your parish yes absolutely the the closest synonym for religion that I can think of is love and love is something you have to live you have to live it if you're not living it you don't truly love and as anyone experiences in love there are moments where you're at a crossroads in in your marriage or in a friendship or where relationships just with your family with your in-laws things are stressful intense and you can't leave you can't just say well I'm out of here you've got to stay you've got to fight that to the end and see it through and that's what love does love sticks around love is resolve to bring out the best in your spouse no matter what to bring out the best in your children you come home from work and you're exhausted you're exhausted you just want to take a moment right and you don't get one you don't get one you're a father and that's what love is is being present practicing a tune Minh listening loving giving yourself even though you feel like you're not like you might not get much out of it in a given moment at your parish it's a probably the the worst question to ask in love is what am I getting out of it you know you are always asking what can I give how can I listen how can I love this person or this parish better let's think about two scenarios that connect with one is a a faithful religiosity without substance mm-hmm substance without faithful religiosity and words like you were trying to do before I want the substance but I'm gonna avoid all kinds of externals yes or we have good externals but avoid their kind of it kind of end up in the same place yes would you say or would compare them I agree they both end with disappointment it is so hard to pursue Christ authentically when your heart is totally there without any of the sacraments without any certainty when it comes to any church teaching where everyone's appealing to scripture but any appeal to Scripture is an actually an appeal to their interpretation of Scripture and you can feel like you're just flying left then right then left again up down you're all over the place you look back over your life and you can just see how many churches you visited and then left and same with what we could call religiosity of our early going through the motions and then ending in disappointment where you're not quite getting what you longed for and what we longed for just being made in the image of God is transformation wholeness a true authentic encounter in relationship with Christ and with his church I almost thinking that in both cases here we have the externals without a conversion of heart of mind okay it'd look great on the outside as Jesus talked about but you know they're whitewashed tombs you called them on this side we might have the faithfulness but an avoidance for the externals in some ways in both cases they've forgotten the power of the sacraments it isn't just externals it's there's something there - there's something conveyed yeah called grace yes it was grace in your whole journey oh my goodness grace is the dream my life story is just Tyler making horrible decisions and God being faithful despite it his faithfulness and it's it's a journey home for sure but it's probably it's probably like when you're when you're married it was long journey to become Catholic in hindsight you can see how God was laying all the pieces bringing you home but one it's just like when you get married you're a husband but the next day you have a whole life to live and you have to learn how to live into that new rule and it takes a lifetime and that's a little bit what it feels like being Catholic is the journey to the church is one thing and then now only four years into it I still I'm just a beginner there is so much not just to learn but to there's formation that needs to happen in your heart and that's where religion comes in is how do you form a character how do you become the man God made you to be the woman God created you to be it takes habits it takes a life a lifetime of habits compounding those daily rhythms of giving Christ not just your your life in theory but giving them a minute and never don't ever stop giving a minute and maybe those minutes will turn into an hour a day a life yeah the the graces we received through the sacraments are not magic they need to be acted on even when you don't feel that baptism changed me or that marriage ceremony didn't feel the same way but it did change you so now in obedience you act on those graces and then there's that wonderful change that does take place over time it's interesting because what I thought was the work of religion before being Catholic that I dismayed over was for example the idea of penance was just horrible to me and now being Catholic penance is no big deal right penance is I'm grateful for it for me the hard part the work of confession is actually the examination of conscience it takes you have to put your smartphone down you have to be present and think you have to actually reflect over your sins not something you're excited about reflecting on that's where the day labor of faith in moments like those the examination of conscience living out like when you're going when you're at mass and your children are distracting you and you you just you cannot focus it's not like before you had children you could actually listen to the homily and you still have to be present and adore Christ in the Blessed Sacrament that's where the rubber hits the road okay email from Sarah from New Jersey she writes what does Tyler think are some of the best ways to reach Millennials and interest them in the beauty of the Catholic Church when they so often seem to have apathy towards religion mmm that's a great question with Millennials I would say start with story that's why when I wrote an immovable feast it's not a treatise of theology it's a story when the human mind hears a story it relaxes and it can engage and it's a common mistake in stories is we tend to think that the hero is some like the Superman who comes flying in and his red underwear or Robin Hood and his green tights when the hero is actually the protagonist the main character who experiences transformation and the hero of the story of the Catholic Church the story of heaven and earth the hero if the hero is whoever experiences transformation the hero is actually you it's you and me God doesn't need transformation he is all holy he is perfect Christ are the eternal son of God did not become incarnate so that he could experience transformation but so that we could and so when we learn to speak in such a way to a millennial or to anyone where we admit that their transformation is what's at stake here and that they can be the hero of this story where God truly does love them and that transformation and wholeness is possible even in the face of horrible suffering when we start to speak telling those kinds of stories I think people start to listen the just amazing you said that because you you've touched into the work that my staff and I do in the coming on network you would summarize everything we do is about story yes that's what it's about the website what we do here on this program everything even the pastoral work we do in helping people discover the church it's all about story and how God has changed our lives I mean that's what it's about yes and some people say well how can I evangelize well just tell your story talk about the person that changed your life Jesus Christ I mean absolutely when I started writing in a moveable feast I actually kept it a secret I didn't want to be another millennial writing about himself and the only way I got through it was remembering this is in my story this is God's story he gets all the glory he gets all the oh if anything is beautiful true or lovely here it's him yeah there's a oh I remember Saint Benedict saying we are not channels were to be reservoirs and what was he talking about because in one hand people would say we're just to be channels of God's love it's also just kind of go through us well the other extreme is no it's about me no it ain't about me nor is it just not about me at all but what comes out of us comes out of the reservoir of how we've been changed by grace and love that's what comes out and that's what that's what this is about here that's what True Religion that's what you're talking about here yeah through spiritual it changes us that comes out of us is what God's done to it that's our story yes that's beautiful all right you have a website tell us about your website Tyler Blonsky com you can go there to see other books I've written and just kind of any articles I write I post them up there and a moveable feast is available at Ignatius press presses website and also EWTN that's right Tyler thank you very much for your writings and also sharing your journey from on the journey home for us thank you and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home again I encourage you to look at Tyler's book in a moveable feast and I do pray that his journey is it encouragement you god bless you [Music]

Channel: EWTN

Views: 13,840

Rating: 4.7938147 out of 5

Keywords: ytsync-en, jht, jht01630

Id: hHumc13RLkQ

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018