LIVESTREAM - Grace and Anxiety: Spiritual Growth in a Time of Turmoil - Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.

the title of this talk tonight is grace and anxiety spiritual growth in a time of turmoil and we might start by asking what kind of anxiety are people feeling right now what kind of emotions are people feeling right now I think anxiety is one of the big ones at least among the people that I have spoken to and in general I think anxiety can seriously interfere with or at least seem to interfere with your spiritual life that's because when you're preoccupied and maybe you've had an experience like this when you're preoccupied you find it hard to pray up in part because your mind is so well preoccupied with the thing you're anxious about it's like having a mind running like a wheel or even wheels within wheels you think something through you start at the beginning you work your way to the end and by the time you get to the end you find you haven't resolved it at all and you're back at the beginning so when this kind of thing happens you actually can't make much progress by thinking things through because actually that's part of the problem the problem is you're thinking things through in a kind of obsessive way in a way that leaves you in the fog and that fog can be brought on by fear so in normal circumstances in my opinion the best natural remedy for this is taking good counsel and having patience so you may not be able to escape the fog but you can at least wait until you calm down and your mind clears or you can go find someone else who can give you some good advice and who might have a better perspective than you have but sometimes of course we find ourselves in very unnormal circumstances and that might be could be because of some special circumstance particular to us it might be something like what we're all experiencing right now which is a very strong and and widespread crisis it seems to me we're in pretty grave circumstances but I would say there's good news learning something about our passions and especially something from the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas I think can really help us they can help us understand what's going on inside of us and as we come to understand our own psychology we can better respond in a constructive way to our emotions but even more than that when we meditate on the power of grace and the way grace interacts with human psychology human emotions the whole human person then we have real reasons for hope for the future even when our emotions remain in quite a bit of turmoil so let me start by talking about st. Thomas Aquinas on the emotions or the passions of the soul this was the very first subject that I ever studied Aquinas on in a systematic way I was a graduate student this was before I became a Dominican and I studied at the Catholic University of America and took a course there as a graduate student on Aquinas his treatise on the passions of the soul which is from a part of the the Summa Theologiae in the Prima second day or the first part of the second part and when I began studying it I thought well this is pretty interesting Aquinas is obviously a very smart guy he's come up with a very sophisticated way to kind of develop a system to analyze possible emotions that we have but I mean can this really correspond to the deep reality that human beings feel the deep variations in their emotions can it be adequate to the the passions of my soul because it just seemed to to cut-and-dried for me but the longer I spent studying this material the more I began to realize you know actually I think Aquinas might be right and you know from where I stand now I would say I've become profoundly convinced that Aquinas is giving us real insight into an objective reality about human persons and then it's basically works the same way in every one okay so that's I'm going to start by giving you just a few minutes of explanation of how Aquinas accounts for the passions of our soul what he thinks they are so for Aquinas every emotion or passion Aquinas uses the word and we would tend to use the word emotion but let's stick with acquaintances word passion every passion involves on the one hand the perception of something that you're going to perceive as either good or bad good or evil and a physical and psychological response so very simple example I see a snarling dog coming at me and I feel fear okay so that fear operates both on the psychological or what we could call the naturally spiritual level human beings have a spiritual dimension to our existence which is not supernatural it's just a part of the natural Constitution of what it means to be a rational animal which is to be a human being we have a kind of spiritual dimension to our existence which is natural so that fear operates on a kind of psychological level which kind of verges into the spiritual but it also operates even more evidently to us on the bodily level so even the way we speak about these kinds of things in English points us to this bodily element I would say like I saw the dog and I felt afraid or I felt fear so the passions involve a feeling that's because they always have a bodily element to them something in our body changes when we feel afraid and that's a different feeling than feeling angry or sad so we learn to distinguish these feelings and actually what we're distinguishing is in part the feeling that our body gives us but of course that feeling doesn't just emerge on its own accord it's prompted by what I perceive so more specifically it's perceiving something as good or bad and so it always has what Aquinas calls an object so our feelings our emotions they have objects so in in the case of my example think of a snarling dog okay so some other quick remarks some people have thought that the passions are always bad so this is the view of the Stoics and stoicism is having kind of a comeback today people talk about the wisdom of stoicism or how still can help your life maybe that's because they're experiencing too many unruly passions and they're trying to get control of them and maybe we can understand their motivation but in fact acquaintances would say stoicism which tries to just negate your passions that's not a good solution and in fact in the end is not going to work because if you try to suppress your passions they're they're not going to go away they're just going to surprise you with their power when one day they come back with a vengeance Aquinas thinks that passions are in themselves neither good nor bad they're just aspects of our animality combined with our psychology and ultimately with our rationality so it would be true for Aquinas to say that animals dogs cats lions bears gazelles they have passions or emotions as well I mean gazelles and rabbits they're probably often afraid lions seem to be often courageous or at least so it would seem but especially in us after sin the passions we experience are often disordered and not subject to reason now this is bad in fact it's even morally bad in a certain sense because reason is supposed to be in the driver's seat for us and if our passions don't listen to reason then something in us is out of whack and unfortunately for all of us something is out of whack namely we were born into this fallen state a state of sin so we all receive the effects of original sin the sin of our first parents which includes having disorderly passions passions that don't listen to what our mind tells us we should do and that effect remains in us to some degree even after we're baptized even after we receive the healing effects of sanctifying grace so more on how grace can affect your passions in just a bit Aquinas adds one more way that passions can be morally good or bad insofar as they're voluntary so we all have had this kind of experience you start to feel angry and you think no I I shouldn't let myself get angry so you resist it so that would be good if the anger there was unreasonable but if the anger is disordered and you give into it you can actually kind of give vent to it you can kind of let yourself go with the anger and then it's a sin it's morally culpable if that anger was unreasonable our passions can also be morally good think of an example like this you're walking along the beach and you realize that someone is drowning in the surf can you save him it will be difficult but it's possible and so you feel the passion of daring or courage stir in your breast and you decide to help so you give yourself to that emotion that passion you assent to that passion of courage or daring and you let it energize you as you run into the waves and drag the drowning person out and this is morally good so a virtuous person is more good insofar as his or her passions have been educated to respond rightly to what is truly good and to follow the lead of reason so Aquinas would say that one of the big challenges of the moral life is learning how to deal with our passions to educate them to domesticate them under the tutelage of Reason okay so a very quick review on what passions do you have what passions do all of us have and father Gregory now if you can bring out the PowerPoint slide so Aquinas says that there are eleven passions of the soul and he divides them into two groups can q possible passions these are passions of simple desiring or aversion they're like simple ordinary passions and then irascible passions these are passions regarding difficult things or emergencies you might think of it that way they come into play when we encounter some difficult good that we're striving for or some dangerous evil that we're trying to avoid so art can keep us humble passions come in three pairs so can we go to the next slide you have love and hatred desire and aversion and joy and sorrow or pain okay so love is just resting in a good harmony with a good inclination towards a good that's either present or absent hatred is the opposite in regards an evil desire an aversion desires movement towards a good aversion is moving away from it joy and sorrow okay joy is repose and a good that is present while pain or sorrow is the the suffering of depression or being weighed down by a present evil we're going to talk more about sorrow in a few minutes too but the irascible passions let's talk about those this is the next slide these regard goods or evils that are difficult to attain or avoid and they come in two pairs of contraries just as the can keep us we'll add three pairs of countries this one has two pairs hoping to spare hope is striving for a future good which is difficult but possible to attain despair you give up on the difficult good because you think it's gonna be too hard to get to daring and fear okay daring goes towards an evil that is immediately present in order to overcome it think of the drowning man you go towards the drowning man to rescue him fear shrinks from an immediate evil that we think will overwhelm us even if we think it's escapable now anxiety which I'd also like to talk about for a moment is a subcategory of fear according to Aquinas it's a kind of fear that deals with some darkness in our minds it's when we have unforeseen evils that we're facing or a lot of uncertainty about the evils and that's why I think talking about anxiety is very helpful in the situation that we're in right now and then there's anger anger is a very interesting subject but I'm not gonna say much about it in this talk that would be maybe another talk so what passions are people feeling right now and how to understand them in this this time of great uncertainty and difficulty the first I think is fear so again that's a future evil which is difficult to avoid so when it seems impossible to overcome the evil you have fear so think of a kind of classic example a soldier is in a foxhole and he knows the enemy is out in front of him and then he sees coming over the rise an enemy tank it's rumbling directly towards him and he says I don't see any way to get out of get out of here without being crushed by this tank ok he experiences fear he's not in doubt about what is threatening him there's no ambiguity or uncertainty in his mind he knows that if nothing changes its gonna get him so that's precisely the point he sees that it's probably impossible to avoid and so he's simply afraid of what's going to happen but more pertinent I think to our present circumstances is the subcategory of anxiety because that's about something that we don't understand that's about something that we don't entirely know we have cognitive unclarity so the soldier in the foxhole who hears the sound of a tank or he hears a distant sound he says hey hey is that a tank it might be a tank coming to get us okay he's experiencing anxiety and his his uh buddy in the foxhole might say hey you know calm down it's it's just a truck you know one of our own supply trucks you're you're too anxious Aquinas says that anxiety has the peculiar feature of weighing on the mind the mind can't consider other things they're trapped by the fear of what we don't understand or the fear of what might happen to us and it's just opaque to us what's going to happen other emotions that people might be feeling in the present circumstance despair despair is what happens when we think of the difficult goods that we'd hoped for in the future and now they seemed lost to us impossible to attain so think of a retired person whose savings are all invested in the stock market and this recent stock market downturn might cause despair about being financially secure or a restaurant owner who'd hoped to become a successful entrepreneur watches his livelihood go down the drain because he's forced to close for a month or maybe more there's lots of other emotions that people could be feeling but let me just mention one final one that's sorrow sorrow is sadness when the evil is present and Aquinas thinks that sorrow is one of the most difficult passions for us to experience because it sort of directly attacks the vitality of the body he says so that's why someone who's depressed doesn't get out of bed doesn't motivate to do much sorrow weighs one down it slows one down so what is a remedy for sorrow and that's what I'd like to start talking about now what are some remedies especially remedies in the order of grace that we could find for these passions that people are experiencing right now maybe you're experiencing some of them Aquinas thinks that a good remedy for sorrow is anything that restores our vitality in fact he lists five remedies and this is one of the delightful passages of the Summa theologia also kind of entertaining five remedies that Aquinas lists and they're probably surprising to you if you haven't heard them before the first one is pleasure Aquinas says if you're sorrowful if you're sad if you're depressed go find some pleasure to experience now pleasure for Aquinas is not a bad thing it's a good thing many people don't understand this today because they think of pleasure connected with a lot of things that are in fact not really good for you Aquinas means that pleasures that are rightly ordered are good for you and we really should take pleasure in them we should enjoy them so our culture is deeply confused about pleasure but that's another lecture so we'll just have to move on but the short advice is eat the chocolate have some ice cream you know this is the time when it's okay to do that kind of thing you might say well father was lint yes Lent is pretty tough this year is pretty tough for all of us so it's okay to have some chocolate because that's going to help you with the sorrow is better to have the chocolate than to like be crushed by the weight of sorrow tell us someone a joke you know try and add some pleasure to life the second remedy that Aquinas mentions he takes from Saint Agustin and Agustin talks about this as a remedy for sorrow in his famous work the confessions you probably wouldn't think of this you know your psychologist probably doesn't give you this as the first remedy for sorrow it's a sleep and take a bath okay so Aquinas thinks these work too why because they restore the natural vitality of the body very practical advice because the passions have a bodily component the third tears so it's okay to cry Aquinas even mentions moaning and and wailing right okay now remember Aquinas grew up in Italy in the 13th century and you know some cultures are more expressive than others so Aquinas would have been used to people you know crying wailing being emotional he thinks you'll be worse off if you bottle your sorrow up if you let it out with tears you'll feel better and I think most people do actually experience that when when they are able to cry okay but the fourth and fifth remedies that Aquinas offers start giving us a bridge to the help of grace and that's where I really want to go with this talk so the fourth remedy he lists is the sympathy and company of friends and he thinks that helps someone who's sorrowful in two ways when we see someone else sharing our sorrow it feels like our friend is helping us to carry its weight and that helps but the second way is even better when you see that your friend comforts you you realize that he loves you and that's very consoling it's kind of spiritual pleasure a pleasure not a bodily pleasure but a pleasure of the soul to know that you are loved now you can probably see where we're gonna go with this in the order of grace but let me mention the fifth remedy the fifth natural remedy that Aquinas mentions for sorrow the contemplation of truth this is the best remedy for sorrow Aquinas says because it can afford the greatest pleasure and you're probably thinking I don't know about you Father I don't get a lot of pleasure out of the contribution of the truth that may seem far-fetched to some but when you really actually develop the the habituation of thinking about the highest things even just in the in the realm of philosophy or perhaps you know you're you love mathematics and you you think about you gaze on you contemplate the beauty of a mathematical proof that affords a kind of pleasure there's an elegance to a certain mathematical proof that delights us and it delights us not with our bodies but with our souls with our minds and this takes us away from what is weighing on us by sorrow okay so how can we think about these natural remedies as they're elevated into the supernatural sphere by God's gift of grace and especially these last two friendship and the contemplation of the truth well friendship we have a great communion in the faith which gives us a deep reason to share friendship with those who share our faith and so this right now is a very important time to be even more connected to people like that in your life so very practical recommendation reach out to some of those people they may not might not be the people you normally call on the phone but if you reach out to them and you can share some of your communion in the faith it will help you it will strengthen you and you can carry each other's burdens in fact the lack of this possibility because of the quarantine conditions we're living in can be a real source of suffering right now and I think there's many people who are suffering not only anxiety but also isolation and that's part of the reason why we've organized discussion groups after this lecture we have these student groups at campuses around the country we really want our students and then many other friends who are joining us tonight to gather in zum discussion groups and talk a little bit about how things are going with them what they thought of the ideas of Aquinas presented in the lecture and just experienced some basic fellowship in the truth but we have a divine friendship a divine friendship with Jesus Christ with God through faith and charity he really gives us his friendship he really comes to dwell with us even if our human friends are not present we can always experience God's presence simply by raising our hearts and our minds to him so that's something you can do in the silence of your own home tonight after this lecture is over if you're baptized Christ has marked your soul with the seal his seal he has configured you to himself and if you're in a state of sanctifying grace then the Father Son and Holy Spirit are dwelling in your heart now that's a truth of faith you might not sense that more on that in a second but it is true now if you're not in a state of grace well now is a great time to go to confession and I know there are many priests out there who have gone to great lengths to make confession available to their flock in this difficult time what about the contemplation of the trees in the midst of tribulations Aquinas says men rejoice in the contemplation of divine things and a future happiness that's a quote from st. Thomas and he says this joy can even be found in the midst of great bodily suffering when you raise your mind to God then you come to experience some real communion with him you begin to be able to see what is happening in your life today in light of the eternal truth and the perfect goodness of God and when you see your life in relation to God then all of the trials of this world become relative and that's actually a very important place to be in times like this but even more than that as you experience communion with God you will also come to know that he loves you and that is a theological truth of the first order it's absolutely true if you haven't thought about it much it's worth thinking about it now God does love you and it's one of the great truths that Aquinas teaches God doesn't love you because you're good he loves you because he is good that means even when you are not good and often enough we are not good God still loves you nothing you do can change the reason for God loving you and so no matter what you do he will continue to love you knowing that you are loved by God is one of the greatest consolations and it's one of the greatest remedies for sorrow and anxiety so let me conclude with just some general reflections about how God's grace works in us in general and then how that can give us the right perspective on our present situation so Aquinas teaches that grace works on us from the top down it comes to us in the highest part of the soul so it's principally in the mind in the intellect and the will now our passions are something lower in us they may not be immediately affected by God's gift of grace which is in the highest part of us and that's true even when God is giving quite extraordinary graces to someone it doesn't necessarily change the way you feel okay this is an extremely important truth because it means you should never try to judge your spiritual state based on your emotional state these things are not necessarily connected and sometimes you may be in a spiritually very good place and emotionally be having a really tough time it's mysterious to us why God lets that happen but he does let it happen and probably it's for our good so because our passions have a bodily element even when your mind is rightly ordered to God you may still experience fear sorrow anxiety anger and so forth and you may still experience those things even even in the order of temptations it's true of people when they try to escape a vise in their life think of someone who's been trapped by the vice of intemperance might be lust it might be some other intemperance even after a person like that has gone to confession and been forgiven of those sins even when that person is in the state of grace they may still feel bodily echoes coming from below you might say for quite a while in their passions and in other words we will then experience internal division the highest part of us is really cooperating with grace the lower part of us is not doing so well on that order and that's okay the thing to do is to be patient and to continue to work to follow what your mind says and not just go where your passions lead you without any reflection by your mind Aquinas also says that we can never judge whether we're in a state of grace by our feelings or even by any consolations we experience those might give us some probable indication but they never give us a reliable indication you can only know that you're in a state of grace in a probable sense unless God gives you some extraordinary revelation so some advice when your emotions are not following the direction of your mind when you know that they're out of whack somehow listen to your mind don't listen to your passions or as that famous science says keep calm and carry on st. Ignatius of Loyola gave I think some very good advice about this he said when you're in a state of fear and agitation if you were previously headed in the right direction don't change course keep doing what you were doing before because that's precisely what our enemy is trying to get us to do to change course when we're headed in the right direction and he does it through fear and uncertainty and anxiety wait until you have sufficient light to judge with your mind what is the right thing to do and of course talking things through with a prudent friend can help as of course can the gift of counsel of the holy spirit Aquinas thinks that that's in a way the best remedy for anxiety because God through the gift of the holy spirit called counsel he moves the mind to help us to see what is the right thing to do and that removes the anxiety or doubt the last thing that I'd like to talk about is hoping in God who is perfectly good so hope is one of the theological virtues the object of hope properly speaking is that we would possess God himself that we would see God face to face in the baiting vision of heaven but we also hope in God's help because God who is perfectly good will not fail to give us his aid so that we can escape the tribulations of this life and God willing come to see him in the next world sometimes though gada has a good reason for leaving us in the midst of fear and anxiety and that may be precisely for our spiritual good sometimes when someone first begins to grow in their spiritual life like you you experienced a great conversion maybe somebody who's discerning a vocation has a very powerful experience at the beginning to kind of get that process going and you might feel like God is really present and after a while that becomes a more infrequent experience in fact you might find yourself in religious life and you say you know where were those dramatic consolations of the the first time that I was converted to Christ well God wants you to live the virtues he gave you those consolations to get you moving the goal is not to rest in them but to rest in God and that's the key all of the things that we experience in this life even the goods of this life and the good of our being calm and serene that's all very relative to the goodness of God but God is very good and he has a real plan for our salvation a providential plan by which he uses even great evil things which he tolerates and permits he uses even great evils too good he brings a greater good out of them and I'm sure that in the midst of this terrible scourge of the corona virus epidemic God is at work and he will bring goods out of it so my final advice rely less on your feelings in a certain way soldier on pay less attention to them and instead rely more on God who is almighty and infinitely good so infinitely good that he sent his son to suffer and die rather than let us be lost so with that I think we can now take some questions from our audience and I know that we have a bunch of students queued up waiting to ask a question so let me ask Caleb Whitmer who works at the to misty Institute here Caleb who's who's ready for a question so an some you're up go ahead please yeah it's a great question and so I mean I think obviously Aquinas would say that the spiritual goods are always higher than bodily goods and that we should prefer them we should be ready to sacrifice bodily goods for the sake of spiritual goods okay with that said bodily goods are not irrelevant obviously they are they are important so if you don't have bodily goods there's lots of other goods that you can't pursue so we do think that it's very important to take care of your bodily health just not to prioritize bodily health over say the spiritual good of your neighbor that's one of the things Aquinas would talk about in the order of charity now when we get to the question of the closure of churches or stopping public masses in some cases that's mandated by the public authorities and in other cases the church officials have done that out of a kind of desire to prevent the spread of infection so I mean I think these are very difficult decisions to make it's we are in a situation of grave uncertainty about the coronavirus and its effects how it will spread how bad it could get if if gatherings were permitted and it spreads that way so I mean I do understand the desire to to sort of you know be responsible and I think that is important to be responsible at a time like this all the same I think it's a very very important good that the people of God have access to the sacraments and so you know I've been working with priests here in Washington DC very hard to try to find responsible ways that are consistent with the protocols of medical hygiene to bring the sacraments to people and actually I've been quite edified by the way many priests have expressed a real zeal for that and a terrible frustration at not being able to do that now there there may be good reasons why we can't do it so I'm not saying that those are not good reasons but it doesn't change the importance of finding a way to bring that to people so for example you know as a priest and I was talking with some other priests about this you know it's it's one of the greatest sadnesses of our lives that in a moment of great crisis we can't do what we're supposed to do what what our vocation is made for really and it may just be that we can't because of the because of the infectious disease protocols but I think we should find every way that we can to wring the sacrum so people let me say just one more thing which is that confession is in probably in probably almost any circumstance going to be possible we've worked out some some protocols for this of course confession requires physical presence you can't do it through a video chat you can't do it over the phone but you can be within some distance of a person and it looks like the medical protocols would allow that even even in some cases now of course a lot of training needs to happen a lot of safety measures need to be put in place but that's in this context probably the most important sacrament for people to receive and so I'd encourage you to seek out that doctrine okay sure yeah sorry people on YouTube you didn't hear the question but I think maybe you can gather what it was for my answer so we'll all repeat the question for the next question so who's up next Silvia how you doing please go ahead I was watching through YouTube I'm not gonna be able to replicate the beauty of Sylvia's question but basically she said Jesus experienced passions in his passion of course that's absolutely true and in a certain way that a primary meaning of the word passion for us and so how can we compare our suffering in this time which might be sinful or anyway our passions could in some point be sinful to Jesus passion which is not sinful okay so I think the first part of the answer that first part of the answer to that question is to say passions are not bad passions can be good so passions when experienced in the right way and at the right time are good and Aquinas has a beautiful teaching about that so Jesus experiencing passions is simply to say he was human so he hungered he thirsted he needed food he needed a drink he needed sleep he also got angry he wept so these are things that the Scriptures clearly testify to and obviously he experienced great sorrow in the Garden of Eden the Garden of Gethsemane he surely experienced anxiety in some measure I mean it seems like that's what the the scriptures are describing there but I don't think we could say that he had any any lack of knowledge in that so you know what Aquinas would want to do with Christ's passion is to say okay we we say that Jesus had all of the passions but now we have to remove from it any element that would be inconsistent with his fullness of grace or his total sinlessness or his perfect knowledge so I think that maybe it would be the first thing to say what about our passions okay our passions can sometimes be sinful but I think it's often the case especially right now like you're experiencing anxiety you're experiencing fear you can unite those passions to Christ who suffered for us so that's I think the the great thing to do in any kind of suffering is to think about Jesus to think about what he went through for us and to you know you can kind of imagine yourself going into the church and laying your sufferings on the altar and making an offering to God of the sufferings you're going through and that's precisely where the sacrifice of Christ itself is confess a crevasse of the mass so Christ's sacrifice becomes present also on that altar you can unite your sacrifices to Christ's in that way and you might not be able to go to Mass right now but you can spiritually make a pilgrimage into the church and do that kind of active oblation of your sacrifices are your sufferings so Kayleigh do we have another question Thomas g-body I think that's a great question Thomas I I think you know if you think about the remedies in a kind of hierarchy I'm not yeah I think you can probably think about them that way so you could talk with talk about a physical pleasure you know having a piece of chocolate pretty brief pretty superficial pleasure but you know it's not worthless so you know don't don't discount it too much can you tell what my constellation is in times of sorrow I've got a drawer with some chocolate in it for you no difficult difficult moments like when we can't get the YouTube feed to work you know I'm gonna have some chocolate after this after this talk probably so you know those things are pretty small pretty punctual the the consolation of conversation with friends is greater and can be more enduring because you know when you you know you think about the deep moments of communion you've had with with friends or maybe with family and you can the the reverberation of that in your soul can last for a while and can carry you through some difficult times like you can think about you know the the love that your family has for you and that can help you even more when we're talking about divine friendship and even more we're talking about the contemplation of the trees so for Aquinas you know when you when you rise to that level okay it's hard to get there admittedly you know so maybe it's not good practical advice for everyone at home like you're not just gonna turn off your computer and contemplate trees what most people do in this time is they contemplate Netflix okay that's not a good form of contemplation that is the kind of typical contemplation that our culture proposes to us we try to escape from our anxieties by fleeing into diversions okay I don't think that's the best remedy and it's pretty superficial the contemplation of the truth actually you know requires more of you but it goes it's much more powerful but then when we start talking about the remedies really in the supernatural order that God you know meditating on the life of Christ reading the Bible I mean if you have time at home take to practice reading the Bible it's wonderfully consoling especially in a read the Gospels that that is very powerful let me just say one final thing we often think of grace kind of like a delicate hothouse flower that has to be kept in the greenhouse because it can be killed by one mortal sin okay that's true can be killed by one mortal sin but grace also is very powerful it can become like a massive oak tree and as grace becomes more rooted in the soul as it grows higher towards heaven it can support us when everything else is crumbling around us and I think that really is true so you know one of the great things about being a priest above all in the confessional is that you get to write checks on behalf of God like you're writing checks on God's account and like I don't even have to pay the check like God is gonna pay the check but obviously as a priest you have to be responsible in the checks that you're writing on behalf of God but you can sometimes write someone a check when it's a matter of a theological certitude and it's a theological certitude that God sees you that God knows where you're at that God loves you and that God will help you if you turn to Him so that is something you can you can go to the bank with that and that knowledge actually is I think really helpful okay maybe we have time for one or maybe two more questions Caleb who does who's next Desiree Desiree Fletcher it's it's to you please go ahead okay so the question is how do prayer and fasting work into these remedies and at what point would we say that they're you know maybe disordered or out of proportion to the present circumstance I think that prayer and fasting in this circumstance is actually a very good thing to do in as much as you can so I'm not saying eat all the chocolate you want your dispensed from all Lynton penances that's not what I'm saying what I'm saying is when you're weighed down by sorrow and anxiety it's okay to flex a little bit in that you know in those austerities because that will help you however if you're strong enough to do more then do more you know and that actually can Impa trait or intercede for merit Grace's for the world from God and I think it actually it's extremely important for Christians to be praying for the world and to be praying for those who are sick to be praying for doctors for praying for an end to the outbreak praying for all those who are at home and anxious or suffering so that's I think the short answer that I would give you and I think we have just two more minutes for one final question yeah so we have a question that caleb is going to read out so confessions over zoom confessions over telephone conventions over video chat can I explain that yes and in fact I can direct you to first things the first things website where our own father Dominic Landsman just published an article on this I think today I don't know if it's out yet anyway it's coming out I I know that it's on its way so keep an eye on the first things website and you will find a nice article on that but the short answer is this confession was instituted as one of the sacraments by Christ okay so we are bound to do what Christ did we cannot change the sacraments beyond what Christ instituted and he instituted it in the form of a conversation an encounter between two people and a conversation requires a real presence a personal presence so there has to be the possibility of not just sending a message to someone and that's what's happening in a video chat I mean right now I am NOT I may be in some analogous sense present to you but I'm not immediately personally present to you and it's quite a different thing to be in the same room with someone than to see them through a video chat and we we all sort of recognize that so the the reality of confession or that the sacrament of confession requires a kind of human dimension a human contact a contact on a human scale and so it's not just the transmission of a message through a wire it's being present and being able to hear the words and being able to speak back and to have a kind of well there's a there can be a real spiritual exchange there in a certain sense between two persons and if you think about the profound grace that is communicated in the saccharine of penance a grace that exceeds what any normal human conversation transmits then you can begin to understand the the high importance of having the right context for that for that exchange and as I was saying earlier I think it is really possible to have this kind of exchange even when we face all these constraints from the corona virus outbreak so I think that brings us to the end of our time so let me just say one quick thing a few announcements for you if you haven't subscribed to the quarantine lecture series on our web page please do that you can also follow us on Facebook and YouTube you can tune in next Tuesday March 31st at 8 p.m. for our next quarantine lecture by father Anthony John brownie who's a biblical expert who it just so happens was back in the United States when the travel freeze haven't he normally resides in Jerusalem in the Holy Land in Israel he's gonna be speaking on plagues what can we learn from the Bible and don't forget immediately after we go offline here our discussions groups will start you should have received links for that and so please go join a disgusting group and continue the conversation so coming to you from the Dominican House of studies in Washington DC it's been a great pleasure to have you with us and thanks for being with us good night

Channel: The Thomistic Institute

Views: 25,977

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Id: ghQF82bQqq0

Length: 50min 48sec (3048 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020