What to Make of Death + Q&A w/ Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

hello and welcome to pints of the quietness i'm father gregory pine uh coming at you in the usual way at the usual time and saying the usual things but i hope not uninterestingly um so as you have no doubt gathered by this juncture having clicked on the link as you have we're going to talk about death and this is in response to a request from one of matt's patrons who asked that we would cover something of the last things the four last things i thought rather than address it all in one kind of big topic which won't do anything approaching justice to each of those four themes then we could break it up into four distinct themes uh whether i get to all of them remains to be seen it will uh it will it will to be it's kind of to be determined i suppose um but i thought that we'd start with death um since it's the first first thing guaranteed to us all at the end and then pass to judgment and potentially heaven and hell we actually already did hell and how to avoid it but maybe talk about judgment in heaven in due course so when talking about death we have some principles from st thomas aquinas which help us to illumine the concept and i thought that we could talk about um how it is first natural how it is next unnatural and third how it can be supernatural so one way by which to organize it obviously not the only way but away so in what sense then is death to be considered as natural um here i think that we can begin with a consideration of our peculiar peculiar condition as human beings and that we occupy what st thomas aquinas calls the horizon of creation so we alone among created things are both material and immaterial now mind you you know certain material things have as it were immaterial elements but only we um you know kind of occupy this rung of creation which weds uh like the immateriality of an immortal soul with the materiality of a corporeal body so they're bound to be things about our condition which are at the very least paradoxical and maybe better expressed are are kind of like vexed or tortured even because each of those kind of composite factors of our nature have their own tendency so and and beyond that i suppose i should add that our immateriality in this life will be expressed through material means so there's a kind of tension present there obviously it's not an irresolvable tension and so far as we are and continue to be but attention nonetheless and so because we are uh composed of a corporeal body uh or because we have this material dimension uh there's a sense in which we are kind of bound for dissolution uh so anything that has matter uh is going to experience the toll taken by that matter in the course of an earthly life um so st thomas has his own way by which to explain this which draws on aristotelian natural philosophy so he has this idea of the four elements which are paired in these contraries right so of hot and cold and moist and dry you know so he talks about fire earth water you know like we don't have to go into it too terribly much i don't mean to make short shrift of it i don't really understand it too terribly well but i think that uh the kind of current understanding of chemistry has surpassed the yields of fourth century natural philosophers in some ways though their insights remain helpful at least in this regard namely that matter has a kind of dissociative tendency that's not to say that it's always straining to be other than it is or elsewhere but that matter just kind of tends to break down and we have our own ways of describing this uh again if i knew more about biology and chemistry and physics i could say more intelligently what that is but you know in lieu of that i'll throw around buzzwords like entropy i think one way to describe this philosophically is that this is just part of the quote unquote evil that's baked into the universe so sometimes we'll make a distinction between physical evil which is like evil done unto and then moral evil which is evil done and physical evil is the type of evil which is just baked into reality whereas moral evil is the type of evil that we introduce by our fellow choice so in in the case of physical evil it just seems to be such that if you have a material universe it's just always going to be the case that certain things are built up by diminishing other things and that's just how they flourish so like for instance lions eat antelope uh and what it means to be a lion uh entails the eating of antelope so that's a kind of evil that's baked into reality insofar as one organism builds itself builds itself up by the destruction or the diminution or whatever of another organism so it's it's an evil in a certain sense but it's not a moral evil and i think when we talk about death just on its own terms you know abstracting from considerations of sin uh we're talking about a kind of physical evil which is to say that you know we're tending towards death i'd address his own way of expressing this right we are beings towards death he says uh in his extended meditations there upon so um this is just a feature reality which is baked in something that's immediately present to us as embodied or um as kind of in fleshed uh instances of material creation so death is natural in that way so what to what to make of death and answer to the original query is that it's natural but you know to kind of pose an antithesis there is also a sense in which death is unnatural and you can think about this philosophically and theologically i mean at the philosophical level we have certain aspirations which seem to go beyond death okay so you think about the fact of our having an intellect and a will the spiritual powers of the soul and our our intellects are ordered to the truth universally conceived our wills are ordered to the good again universally conceived so so mind and heart will never be sated by particular or limited instances of the true and the good so we have this kind of orientation or tendency to totality a totality which we never experience holy in this life so it seems like we're driven by a kind of aspiration towards deathlessness and so far as that deathlessness encompasses an experience of reality which can finally speak to our need for what is universally true or infinitely true or what is universally good or again infinitely good but i think we get more purchase on this by describing it theologically and you think about it in terms of god's original plan which we talk about in terms of rectitude or original justice so it was the case in the beginning for our first parents that their minds or their higher powers right their their intellect and will would have been subordinated to god um by the stable presence of grace that their lower powers would have been subordinated to those higher powers uh by what saint thomas calls integral nature which is to say like the kind of fullness of virtuous life so that we didn't experience conflict at the level of desire in the same way that we do now so that way you wouldn't be tempted as we are presently to prefer lower goods to higher goods with such a kind of clamorous demand and then third and finally and this is the real pertinent part our bodies would have been subordinated to our souls by these associated privileges of our original state which would have included immortality um and impassability so we would not have died we would not have suffered corruption uh and this is a gift this this third gift as it were of original justice or rectitude which flows from grace which flows from the life of grace as originally endowed so yeah when we forfeit that by original sin it's lost and as a result of which we experience the the advent of death or the onset of death as something that could have been otherwise at something that needn't have been so and so death is not part of god's perfect original plan for our flourishing rather he intended it that that original state be communicated to subsequent generations so that were men and women to have come together in sexual intercourse and begotten you know children that those children when god infused their souls would also have infused grace virtues gifts of the holy spirit you know these these gifts of grace integral nature and the associated privileges of immortality and impassibility that come with them so we were always intended to have a kind of abiding communion with god and that is evident in the way in which we were created so death dawns upon us as it were as a kind of punishment for this original sin and you can describe that punishment in a variety of senses and certainly when you think about it as like something for which we are culpable or something for which one is culpable it seems unfair that we would be responsible for a sin which anti-dates us by you know thousands of years um but it's i think more i don't know intelligible if you conceive of it as being left to ourselves so by original sin we are left to ourselves so we forfeit those privileges of grace integral nature and immortality and impassability and we're just left to our nature but left to our nature in such a way that we have the memory the kind of theological memory of the way in which we were originally intended to be like the riches that we have forfeited by our choice and so we always have this kind of nostalgia for it we have a kind of nagging desire to have it reconstituted in our lives um so in that way death feels profoundly unnatural because our supernatural destiny which we'll talk about briefly dictates such that that we want to live a life abundant a life eternal with god in heaven so then we'll we'll turn to that point now so we've said the sense in which it's natural uh the sense in which it is unnatural what then about the sense in which it is supernatural and here we can just cover one aspect of this and we have to appreciate the fact that christ has taken our death uh has taken human death to himself so when the lord jesus christ took human flesh he did so for the purpose of salvation but there are certain principles that we observe in the manner of his incarnation which help us to appreciate the saving work that he is about and one of those we could call the principle of credibility so the lord takes to himself certain defects of our human condition insofar as they serve the purpose of convincing us as to the truth of his humanity so it's not as if the lord kind of wears a human-shaped cloak about so as simply to masquerade in our flesh but truth be told to bring about salvation by other means rather he genuinely you know assumes our human condition and in assuming our human condition he assumes all the defects associated with sin which don't impede his communication of salvation so he hungers and thirsts and experiences fatigue and suffering and ultimately death and all of these things commend to us the truth of his humanity but all of these things also become places of encounter privileged places of encounter wherein we meet the lord jesus christ you know the incarnate word of god who came for love of us to save us from the sin wherebe whereby we abandoned our original inheritance and left ourselves without recourse to the mercy of god so christ himself you know makes uh or takes the initiative in such a way is to draw us back to god so um when when the lord does this or when the lord chooses this he makes it such that these privileged places of encounter with him his hunger his thirst his fatigue is suffering his death actually become efficacious for the communication of salvation because all of the deeds and sufferings of christ save they're not just play acting right they're not just a kind of show and dance they're actually the chosen means whereby the lord has appointed that salvation be communicated to men and women of all times and places so christ has truly undergone death we can even say in a kind of shocking way that god died insofar as by saying god we point to the one concrete subject all right so the second person of the most blessed trinity but we refer to him as subsisting in a human nature which human nature can undergo death so in this way we have a kind of hold on or we have a kind of purchase on the fact of god's being in union with us even in our you know experiences that are most devastating most destructive um most most desolate indeed and so what worse experience is there than human death insofar as it represents the termination of all of our aspirations at least as we know them in this life but the lord jesus christ inhabits that experience the lord jesus christ takes human flesh in and through that experience such that it becomes a place wherein we can experience intimacy we can experience friendship and what is that but salvation with him in him through him so the lord addresses the mystery of his death to us so that we can be conformed to it so that we can be assimilated to it so now it's possible for us to die in the lord to die with the lord because not that it ever was but that experience is not foreign to the godhead right that experience is known uh is loved in the godhead and it is known and loved in us so that we might be drawn into the godhead by it and ultimately the reason for which we believe the reason for which we hope the reason for which we love in the midst of such devastating circumstances is because that we know that it is only by passing by way of death that one can come to experience the fullness of beatific life in god which is ultimately the horizon of all of our aspirations the horizon of all of our our striving so um yeah while it is true to say that death is natural and while it is true to say in a different sense that death is unnatural it is most true to say in a different sense that death can be supernaturalized provided that it becomes a privileged place of encounter with god becomes a place in which the grace of god is unleashed in those final moments those moments please god of perseverance where we come into the fullness of intimacy friendship communion with a god who seeks to save us so those are some words about what to make of death uh that having been said let's turn now to answer some questions and i'll do my best to actually center myself in my frame because i was reading off some prepared notes and i lost track of where i am okay there we go left right straight all right um all right so dmt core take yourself seriously father gregor okay dmt core says let's say drinking alcohol is a mortal sin i don't say that uh if you go to confession wanting to give up alcohol but you still keep bottles of alcohol at home because you might fall again in sin and drink it that means a bad confession because you are not fully determined to quit the sin but because you still keep the objects that make you sin so that's pose in question form so you should uh change the intonation of the way in which i read it to reflect that fact so contrition entails uh hatred or sorrow regarding past sins with an efficacious desire to change right just to put it in its most simple terms and that means avoiding the near occasion of sin so if you vow to give up alcohol or let's just take some other kind of token sin let's let's do one that's a little more pressing like important use of pornography from you know purpose of masturbation um now this is a little bit different in this day and age and so far as pornography is like infinitely available on the internet um but think back to a time maybe 35 years ago where you would like buy whatever like hard copy things for that purpose so if you were to swear it off right and to confess it with a with a desire to formulate a firm purpose of amendment uh but you didn't get rid of those things that you use you know to commit the sexual sin then i think that might undermine your resolution now mind you you could go to confession and have the desire to go right back home and to get rid of all those things okay but then falter then that may have been a valid confession because at the time of having professed you may have you know kind of basically been on the way which is what you need in the sacrament of confession you at least have to have the baseline desire uh to turn from the things which lead you into a life of sin uh it doesn't mean that you have to have repented perfectly by the time of your confessing so the church will say for instance that it's sufficient to have attrition or imperfect contrition and that you can rely upon the sacrament to fill up anything that may be lacking to that so i think it's important that we take seriously the call to conversion and the call to remove from one's life those near occasions of sin the things that pose significant temptations to a a kind of relapse right or recidivism to use a kind of technical oldie timey word um but that doesn't mean that you have to be perfect before you go to confession because you also rely on the sacrament of confession to make you perfect in an ultimate sense with the understanding that you will be you will be given any number of days weeks months years on this earth and that you have the whole of that time to grow in your conversion without deferring it right because the lord could come in the fourth watch of a night of the night right um but with the kind of urgency inspired by the grace which god gives here we go so giants d b 1092 says um hey father any advice for a new seminarian also in regard to the topic who are some saints other than mary that we should ask to intercede for us near death thanks for what you're doing with pints cheers to you my friend um any advice for a new seminarian yes pray a holy hour every day go to confession every two weeks introduce some modicum of penance into your life and i would recommend fasting in some way on wednesdays and fridays study the faith regardless of whether or not it is assigned and make sure that you have study projects during your breaks at christmas and over the summer that you study the faith for at least an hour each day and that means like theology not just like light reading not like reader's digest and then build cultivate real good friendships among your brothers in seminary like learn or look for ways by which to share substantively without it becoming precious or kind of tortured or hand-holdy you know so smoke cigars drink beer and whiskey find ways by which to connect on a more profound level so as to form the relationships will sustain you throughout the course of your priesthood because it's difficult and it's lonely and it can be very sad um so yeah start there and the lord will bless you i have no doubt oh yeah alexander winkler let's go it's violin time baby um question is high father pine how can we live the spiritual life in the way that the flame does not extinguish and we do not become distracted in prayer or forget to remember constantly god short answer is i don't know uh long answer is just com continue to make use of the means that god points to the task so same things i just mentioned to giants db1092 right but with a kind of understanding that it is god who gives the grace grace god who gives the grace and gives the growth and sees it through to perfection so it's not a personal project that we kind of take upon by ourselves and you know prove ourselves awesome at by a spirit of kind of like machoism or metaphysical bootstrapping as we attempt to do things on our own steam but rather the sense of abandonment to the god from whom comes every good gift on heaven and earth yeah and with a kind of profound humility or modesty which informs our reception of those gifts so i hope that's helpful adam goldberg says hello father um i just made you from somewhere else uh is the little office of the blessed virgin mary are right god bless i think right can be used in a variety of senses i mean it's um it's a kind of extension of the liturgy of the hours so i would say it would qualify as a kind of devotion but it's a devotion that has been used traditionally in religious life and without uh for many years and has proven efficacious so i would say that it's uh you know it's something like the rosary or the stations of the cross so it's not a right in the way that baptism is a right but it's a very efficacious devotion okay here's my question father is it sinful for men to wear the clothing of women my sister says that it is not wrong since clothes do not have gender i am not sure how to respond yeah that's a good question um saint thomas actually asked that question i've forgotten what he says i'm just having trouble just focusing right now um i forget exactly what he says but i think uh a general approach is that your outward manifestation should correspond to your inward disposition uh so you think about it in terms of like the virtue of faith for instance if you believe then your profession of the faith should uh image what it is that you believe so if you were to say i believe in god but in these present circumstances in 17th century japan where the faith is persecuted i'm just going to step on this image of christ because it's not really important you know that i say externally what i think internally because those are just different right uh you know that's seems to me the theory which is proposed or entertained maybe not espoused at the end of the book silence but i think that there has to be a kind of correspondence between interior and exterior so of course one should be on the lookout for hypocrisy which is a disjunct between the two in which you make yourself out to be better than you in fact are but in these present circumstances or in the question that you pose i think it's more so a matter of yeah just like observing custom mores or like tradition of society and i think now it's difficult to answer that question insofar as custom morris and tradition in society have broken down but maybe here's a little parallel that helps with respect to your question that i take from religious life so in religious life there's this tradition whereby you would avoid so-called singularity because singularity gives rise to admiration or bewilderment so like among dominicans it's considered virtuous to just kind of blend in and that's not to say that you set a kind of middling expectation for how you know grace-filled or virtuous or gifted people should be and everyone shoots for the middle but it is to say that like you wouldn't wear you know those like sock religious socks which have saints on them and they're really fun and stylish and whatever i know like a variety of people who wear them and do so to great effect but you just you wouldn't wear that in religious life uh because yeah it'd just be like kind of singular it would just stand out and then it would become so it would become more so a matter of standing out for standing out um so the idea is a religious habit there are a variety of ways in which it's useful or helpful i mean it's a kind of penance it's for the purpose of testimony it certainly reaffirms you or in your own identity but part of it too is to communicate this sense of like we are one uh of mind and one of heart in in the lord um and we seek to build up a kind of communion uh which in a certain regard is you know is bigger than any one individual so it's not a matter of kind of carving out a place for yourself or looking to stand out in x y or z way it's a matter of just kind of just doing the thing right um like for instance when i was vested in the habit you know so first couple weeks in the novitiate i would wear those uh that louis de montfort chain which signifies your consecration to mary and uh my novice master said yeah just consider taking that off and i was like a little shocked at first because it seemed impious like why would you do fewer devotional things when you could do more devotional things but the reason that he gave was you know like you got a a habit and that's that's enough and i i was uh i was impressed by that you know you got a habit and that's enough i think about this too when it comes to like naming children i think a lot of times people are in search of a perfect name but not only a perfect name a unique name i think there's a sense in which you know like conforming to tradition is also way by which of including a child in something bigger and more beautiful than he or she because while you will communicate to your child that your child is uniquely excellent in a way that you are well prepared to recognize and to affirm as a parent you also want that child to have a patron saint right to have beloved whatever like great-great-grandparents after whom he or she were named and things like that it includes them in something and i think that when we bow to the venerable elements of tradition custom moires and things like that we include ourselves in a living tradition we include ourselves in an intelligibility that's bigger than any one person and yeah i suppose my general thoughts about dressing are just that you know it's it's uh not supposed to be singular it's supposed to involve you in a culture tradition in a way by which of conducting human life which is more broadly reasonable than just the reasons supplied by the individual thinking self and the interior and the exterior correspond in a way that's you know very very much incarnate sensible sacramental things like that so that is a long answer to a relatively straightforward question but there you go matthew martinez says father gregory pine how can we know the definition of a god um so there's certain things that we would reason upon and then certain things that god supplies by revelation so by faith and reason also i don't know that we could say that we know a definition of a god because certainly like a robust definition entails some matter of um yeah like comprehensive knowledge which we can't have with god but we can know things that are true about god uh insofar as we reason to them or they are revealed left right left left right left hallelujah says happy nativity of mary to everyone let's go dmt core says we can't hurt god but jesus suffered for our sins so how our sins affect god and us we should feel guilty when we sin even though the sin only affects us yeah i mean you can wound a relationship insofar as you kind of by mortal sin banish god from your heart in a certain way and while that does not hurt god that represents a kind of injustice um and a kind of act of against charity or a kind of act against faith which again while not changing god or affecting god it's it somehow detracts from god's glory which god which glory ought to kind of reverberate through creation it's the very purpose for which we're made okay and murphy says hi father where should i start when beginning to read st thomas aquinas's work any recommendations thank you yes i do have recommendations i would say you can start with some of these shorter academic sermons like the discourses on the creed our father hail mary and ten commandments very approachable give you a kind of thumbnail sketch of what st thomas thinks about things and then one of his most approachable um more systematic works is called the compendium of theology the compendium theologia and i think that's a good place also to kind of deepen your understanding of what st thomas has to say on a variety of topics in a way that's well well arranged so he was writing it at the end of his life he didn't finish it but he finished the entire treatise on faith and started the treatise on hope so the treatise on faith is organized according to the creed um so yeah it gives you a nice little insight into what saint thomas thinks uh and then from there i think you can probably move on to the sumi contra chantillys and the summa theologia in so far as those will be most fruitful and you can of course consult philosophical and theological works which give you introduction to saint thomas and his thought in a way that um yeah will help you to dive right in okay we've got some super chat action going on so i'm going to skip down find it hope for the best that it doesn't take too long continue narrating my thoughts on the matter lest their befall any silence all right here we go um had the dominicans ever discussed using their intellectual superpowers on the growing non-religious like uh bishop baron is trying to do i hear he's considering starting a new order with this focus yes so um dominicans do preaching and teaching that's the wheelhouse and a lot of the environments in which we find ourselves preaching and teaching are churchy type environments so we're preaching to or teaching uh believers but i think that we find ourselves more and more in settings where we are encountering non-believers whether that be in person or by virtual means and i think that we found that to be a fruitful engaging uh or a fruitful ground for engagement so i think we're tending in that direction um as to what will come of it i don't know you know so things you can look at are the mystic institute which is based out of washington dc to mystic evolution which is a project of certain friars of my province godsplaining a podcast which i contribute with a few dominican friars those would be all apostolates that have arisen in the past 10 years which have you know address themselves both to believers and non-believers alike and i think all to great effect in different registers so cheers um all right i'm gonna keep scrolling down because i know there's super chat uh jesus lord of all creation just gave five dollars so boom love it all right here we go i'm gonna scroll back up to the top pick up with joseph paladin cheers to croatia uh hi father since death is the topic why isn't our intellect or intuition more in tune with the concept of eternity since that is what awaits us yet we won't be bored but the feeling of forever is eerie yeah in an answer to that i would refer you to a conversation that i had with matt which is like holy smokes like three and a half years ago now um yeah but just look uh gregory pine pints with aquinas will heaven be boring and that's something um as to why we're not better adjusted to eternity i think that it's mysterious right insofar as it lies on the other side of our present experience our present body embodied experience insofar as our minds have been darkened by sin um or kind of by the effect of original sin which we call ignorance insofar as we kind of buffer ourselves from that reality since it's especially difficult to ponder since death is so terrible a thing um and yeah for probably other reasons beside but those are three intros all right mimi h says why does god condemn homosexuality uh you can go at this from a variety of texts but maybe just kind of a natural law argument a kind of argument that you hear referred to as a perverted faculty argument namely that sexual intercourse is for procreation and education of children and that homosexual um intercourse is not ordered to procreation and as a result of which it um is out of step with the natural law or contradicts or it you know kind of offends against the natural law i think if you were to take a more biblical approach you know you could do the type of excess jesus which saint john paul the second does in the theology of the body there he's addressing more contraception but you can also kind of get at some of these themes concerning homosexuality uh from from a similar vantage point but that um men and women were created uh to be called together in the context of marriage that that bond is blessed and that from that bond arises new life and specifically graced new life so i think that those are the types of considerations which would orient a discussion about homosexuality boom maximilian mk gill says if you confess that you committed a mortal sin without knowing 100 that you committed that sin is the confession invalid no i think it's fine to be safe to kind of er on the side of caution and to confess even if you're not 100 certain that the thing in fact was mortal um it's so it's not it wouldn't be so much a matter of exaggerating as it would be of just kind of covering your bases so i think you can say it and just say just as much to the priest if it makes you nervous otherwise [Music] all right here we go uh james joseph says father pine can you explain what is the meaning of elizabeth filled with the holy spirit praising mary blessed is the fruit of thy womb how can she say blessed is jesus uh so blessed like i mean there i'm not exactly what the word is in greek um i know that yeah like a lot of words regarding blessing stem from the word for grace charis you know and so like having been graced is the way in which the blessed virgin mary is addressed by the angel gabriel at the annunciation so i think the sense in which the lord is blessed is that the lord i mean the lord has grace in spades and so far he has the grace of union that grace which unites his human nature to his divine person um habitual grace right the grace that the quasi-infinite grace which floods his soul and all of his faculties and then capital grace that grace which flows into the life of the church so insofar as the lord is graced we would describe his state as blessed and the virgin mary is the one who uh yeah conceived him there's some hull of blue going out outside my door if you can hear that my sincere apologies or okay um here we go jonathan says when asking saints slash those on earth to pray for you it often feels like i'm going behind god's back like he would ordinarily say no so ask mary because it would be harder to say no to her or ask friends family cause maybe their prayers slash here we go more prayers will be more effective not the same but similar to asking a certain parent because they're more likely to say yes what are your thoughts i think oftentimes we have this experience where we're like nervous to ask somebody or go behind their back but then we discover that the person whom we were nervous to ask or behind who's back where we're going would actually have been delighted to grant the request but we just got so bound up with anxiety that we failed you know to address or acknowledge that fact i think your example uh may be an instance of that so the reason that we can ask mary or the other saints or people on earth or whomever is because god has appointed it to be such god wants us to do that because he delights to give grace by those means because while he could do it directly he likes to do it through intermediaries because it makes those intermediaries more like him god the giver of grace so that we're not just all passive recipients of grace but that we become agents in the giving of grace and in the communication of salvation so it turns out the reason that you want to ask mary is because god desires that it be so boom okay um all right screen it scanning through for the next question uh so mark dilworth asks why are anglican and protestant orders not valid so i've read the document with respect to anglican orders and the basic idea is this even if you still have validly ordained bishops performing the ordination with apostolic succession in the case of the anglican communion the understanding of the eucharist has been perverted or changed right and as a result of which the priesthood which is oriented to the sacrifice of the mass and the confession of the eucharist changes in turn so even if it were a validly ordained prelate you know who was the one ordaining he does so without proper intention so he does so not intending what the church intends by the sacrament of ordination insofar as it is not intended for the sacrifice of the mass uh the ministry of the eucharist that's a basic argument there are other arguments along the same lines uh becky derricks father any last minute advice slash encouragement for someone entering the monastery in a few days thanks for all you do uh yes my encouragement will be this that you may in fact find your first months or years to be very difficult that doesn't mean that it's not for you so people will try to take your spiritual temperature and determine whether or not you are in the life for you don't i wouldn't base it off happiness i would base it off a medical sense metaphysical sense of fit so you will be beaten up but if god gives the grace you will have a kind of confidence that god has given you the grace and you will be able to follow that grace unto the destiny towards which it tends so don't base it so much on you know like present joy or even fleeting happiness base it off a sense of whether or not this is the thing for which you have been made and i think that you can kind of just like after a bit stop discerning and just live and god will make it abundantly evident to you if this is not the thing for you but it it's not really for you to quote unquote discern that or suss it out god will make it known boom dude greetings from manila love it all right shelley salasalam says hello father pine should we always pray on our knees when possible um i remember reading something about our blessed mother saying this to saint margaret mary um thank you and god bless my answer to this is no pray however you darn well please provided you can pay attention or intend the prayer and pay attention and you find it to be sustainable supportable you know good in fact so yeah i think i think praying on your knees is good insofar as it makes manifest an interior devotion and it helps you to stay focused and awake but on its own terms it's not necessarily better all right saw some super chats go in so i'm gonna scroll wildly with reckless abandon and just hope for the best all right here we go uh christopher joseph says is a fleeting thought of envy immortal sin no it needs to be consented to in some way all right i saw another one and let's see if i can find it love it dude jesus lord of all creation is just bopping in all right now i'm going to try to scroll to the back of the top and hope that i can find something approaching like the spot where i left off such hullabaloo such brouhaha okay here we go um oh gosh all right here we go uh hi father gregory what do we make of seemingly harsh language in corinthians about women staying silent at church meetings short answer is i don't know um the question is uh like what if that pertains to uh the cultural time and what are that it pertains to like the universal body of divine revelation and in partial answer to that question i would refer you to a live stream that i did two weeks ago on this channel called headship of christ headship of adam which kind of gets at an understanding of marriage based on an understanding of how christ relates to his church so yeah i mean we can all think of ways in which women contribute to the liturgical assembly non-ordained ways right whether that be in uh the singing of sacred music or you know like chant or polyphony or hymnady or the proclamation of the word in the capacity of elector um so yeah i i don't have a good answer to that but i would refer you to that live stream from two weeks ago zip all right one what three who's groovy sweet answers mary's birthday let's go all right father pine i was curious on what you think are some of the books all catholics need to read whether it be biographies of saints apologetics anything else thank you yeah i mean i can think of a lot of things by which to answer this question um maybe just to take a couple of like gems of christian spirituality i think that uh there's a penguin classics early christian writings uh which gives you like the didache shepherd of hermes first clements letter of diagnosis letter of diagnosis letter barnabas et cetera i think those are good things to read oh some of the letters of ignatius of antioch read that uh the confessions of saint augustine i would read that uh maybe skipping ahead a little bit uh among who else are like kind of go-to wheelhouse um you know like some of these early patristic commentaries on the gospel i think you find very fruitful chrysostom on matthew i found very beautiful um augustine on john and first john i also find very beautiful those would be good little samplings um gregory ambrose anthony athanasius on the incarnation of the word i think is a kind of classic um that that ought to be read and so far is just kind of just like wheelhouse catholicism um among medieval authors yeah these things aren't necessarily like things that one has to read pseudodynamics to bind names as a kind of classic treatise that deeply influences the subsequent tradition saint thomas quinn is this thing with theologiae i think i think that most christians would benefit from some reading of that text when you get to other classics of spirituality um i'm deeply indebted to the introduction to the devout life by saint francis de sales um to certain classics of carmelite spirituality the one that i love the most is story of a soul at this point i'm kind of getting into wild list fashion so that's like 10 but uh yeah if you send an email to matt you can afford it to me and i can send you a list of like 25 books boom all right happy nativity uh father gregory have you ever read the ever gattino's no i have not i don't even know what that is my apologies um so best catholic sources last writings to understand the relationship between human free will and divine providence prayers for you thank you um i would recommend gary lagrange's providence and then gary lagrange's predestination those are the ones that have most kind of shaped me by which i have been most helped [Music] elijah halberd says what is wrong with occam's philosophy and theology for this i would recommend that you read sources oh gosh what is the name of that book sources of christian ethics by surveys pink hairs that is the one in which he describes a kind of evolution a foot in moral theology throughout the like late middle ages and into the modern period so that's that's a good introduction to what he thinks is um especially destructive in the in the thought of william of arkham i've really only read that on it and then the idea of natural rights by brian tierney and some articles apropos thereof um so a lot of people will take issue on the kind of logical metaphysical side with his understanding of universals nominalism being this kind of sense that there's no inherent connection among types of things so like this is a dog and that is a dog but what do they have in common there's no real dogness to speak of even as an instantiated form the problem with that is that it ends up kind of drifting towards a quasi-unintelligibility and it makes it really difficult to explain how we know um on the side of divine attributes you hear it said that you know like occam is a voluntarist so the things the state of affairs that we observe are because god has chosen it so but that chosen it so isn't informed by the divine wisdom in the way in which you would find with other authors like saint thomas aquinas so like occam will say things like god could command us to hate him and in those instances or in that case it would be morally praiseworthy to hate god so those are just a couple of small things [Music] all right here we go pro justice what get it on the screen father gregory uh what do you do if you don't have access to confession i would say you find ways to get access to confession if there are insuperable obstacles to you getting to confession um then you would make you know your best efforts at perhaps a daily examine uh followed by a what do you call that um uh uh stammering an act of contrition um and that you would yeah make serious attempts to avail yourself of the grace of the sacrament so like justin so far as you can make a kind of spiritual communion so you might practice a kind of spiritual confession as it were but with this kind of movement towards your tendency towards the real deal with the understanding that just as soon as it becomes possible for you to go to confession you will all right luis de rendon says hey father how do we be charitable to certain protestants who attack our faith and not let the bitter root of resentment grow within us that's a great question my go-to is pray at the beginning of your conversations insofar as you can without making the encounter too terribly fraught and then try to always seek common ground before arguing so i don't think it does anyone any good to just get into a substantive point without establishing authorities or without establishing the things on which you agree because i think that you're you're just going to find yourself in an intractable dispute whilst getting angry and not accomplishing much if you launch right in more hullabaloo outside and brew haha okay [Music] okay do do all right some wild stuff going on here um uh cruisin all right here we go uh father you mentioned in conversation with matt that when you are out in public in your habit many people look on you in a very negative way can you tell us about some positive encounters uh yeah sure um what are some recent positive encounters whilst wearing a habit i think that like you know just kind of simple things is you get um you get a smile which people are smiling at you not because you know they know you or not because they want to impress upon you how smiley they can be but they're smiling at you because you represent god to them in a certain way um and i think that's yeah that's a great gift and a great privilege when those occasions do arise i was just walking uh through where was i i was walking through the parking lot today of a grocery store and i saw my high school english teacher my 11th grade english teacher who would not have recognized me unless i were wearing a habit because it was at a distance so um it makes you more recognizable in a way that typically leads to conversations uh yeah of a delightful sort i was walking through the cincinnati airport the other day and somebody was like wait a second are you a dominican you know do you know the friars at st gertrude's in cincinnati and i was like yes i do yes i do indeed i live there for a year so i think that those are simple and good um i've had an experience i mean like one of the more fruitful encounters that i had was i was seated in seat d and uh the couple sitting in seats a and b kind of like this is a frontier airlines flight by the way um they kind of called over the lady in seat c and uh said you know like what are you or what's the deal and i started explaining to them we got a little bit of conversation then eventually the woman in seat c said my father just came out as homosexual and moved in with his gay lover and abandoned my mother like what do you make of that and then we subsequently had like a long conversation maybe like an hour and a half talking about that started with the trinity you know worked our way through creation the life of grace the incarnation christ's suffering like sacrifice love you know married love the context for which and it was just really wonderful really beautiful i just had a conversation with a guy on my way back to the united states this past friday oh who's that next to me and at first we were just kind of like joking about the intonation of the stewardess who was speaking schweitzer deutsch um which is always hilarious um yeah but uh but soon we got into questions of metaphysics and the common currents and religious traditions and the guy gave me his card which i still have to email him but uh yeah he he said in the course of the conversation like i really like talking about these things but it's really lonely for me because i don't know of anyone with whom i can talk about it and he's not christian you know i think he was probably raised in a christian setting but he's kind of like more broadly spiritualist but we had i mean we might have talked for like an hour and a half two hours um and you could tell that he was really energized by the conversation and you know like for my part it was great it was great to talk to him so those would be some small things thank you for that question it is humanizing lest i devolve into becoming a question answering robot um all right here we go matthew devis says hi father i've been thinking a lot about entering the seminary i've been thinking a lot about brushing my hair holy smokes um but i also don't want to have to give up the possibility of starting a family are there cases where god allows one to choose their own vocation uh it would be okay if i chose to become a priest or to have a family yep do whatever do either both are good and i think that's the main point that you're genuinely free the lord gives you what you need to make solid free choices and to abide by the consequences thereof because ultimately the point is to become you know to grow in the life of grace virtue gifts of the holy spirit and to give unique and manifest expression of god's glory you could do that in either state so i would say that the default position is to get married and if you find you know in your relationships that god keeps ruining them and bringing thoughts of the priesthood back then it's worth looking at but you don't have to just do the priesthood because it's harder or better um you would do it because god made it manifestly evident to you that that such was his will but otherwise yeah go for it all right so raise you goal says similar to the way that demons can possess people has it ever been documented or is it possible that an angel could possess someone what would the reason be i have no idea i haven't heard of that um so yeah i've got nothing for you sorry guy um oh nice dude hallelujah just killing it answering questions better than me are trousers milk at least wild billy who cuts your hair check this out i cut it myself so that accounts for some of its erratic nature [Laughter] oh my gosh uh justice i'm putting this on the screen because god bless you for asking question what's romance life like for a ridges religious non-existent um here we go it's still too hard to die early even knowing jesus went through death early that is true yep which is why i think it's true to say that death is on the one hand natural on the one hand on the other hand unnatural and true or still it can be supernaturalized but that doesn't make it necessarily desirable for all of the conflictual reasons which we entertained um all right dude killing it um oh man nice all right i'm up to like 3 30 and answering these questions um all right here we go justin dominic says if god is life eternal what is our greatest encounter with god have to be through death thanks yes so so death is just a bodily death right and then our souls begin to participate in a kind of limited fashion in the eternity of god and that we are to be reunited with our bodies so obviously death is not the last word and i think that our being assimilated to god who is life eternal um helps us to account for why that is so so that's a good question um [Music] he's got some sweet back and forth on pants wearing this is incredible um oh my gosh um all right google account dude what a modest name uh father is it okay to strive to a deep spiritual life of prayer even though i don't really understand most church theology as i'm honestly quite stupid i doubt that you're quite stupid um and yes god can teach you very profound things even without a formal education and maybe that be a reason for pursuing it but it's not the only reason obviously the reason for pursuing a life of prayer is for pursuing the lord and love of the lord is mediated through knowledge of the lord but the lord will give you what you need in order to love him as he has per destined you to do so keep killing it um all right [Music] all right forest eagle says man look at that eagle impressive icon um if blood is what constitutes as life of the flesh does this mean that the word that became flesh was the blood of the flesh the divine has no blood how can blood be savior yeah so i i would say that those those two things are uh are working in different registers so when he says the life the flesh is in the blood that's a kind of hebrew way by which of explaining that living things are given to live by god and to god alone pertains like rule over life and death um and then when it says that the lord became flesh i mean he had flesh and blood which pertained to his human nature and the human nature does not change the divine nature but rather is related to that divine nature okey dokey i have answered that question um uh all right here we go all right i've never come to grips with the concept that we have to go through the test called life to qualify for heaven i would not so much think about it as a test as um think about it as a kind of preparation or think about it as a progressive assimilation or progressive acclimatization uh the idea is that we make it to our end by many movements that we are just the type of creature that does such and as a result of which god will afford us the scope for doing so well gloriously um and unto beatific life so yes i saw super chat come in and i'm going to scroll wildly like i've never scrolled before um is it worth getting a degree there we go is it worth getting a degree in theology if it's purely to gain knowledge am i better off studying on my own no i think it's good to get a degree i think academia still has uh a role a place in contemporary society for ensuring the quality of an education unfortunately it's not just like a degree in theology that any old place will do i think you have to shop for a good place but provided that you find a good place and take classes with good professors then you'd be really well served by just such a kind of study and i can recommend the pontifical faculty of the immaculate conception the dominican house of studies in washington dc where i studied is available as a place to pursue a masters in theology over the course of two years and you can get a great domestic formation there that my friends is my little uh what do you call those things advertisement um public service announcement thing word yadda yadda um all right scroll scroll the button the button i like it when you scroll like the butter on the muffin all right here we go um oh my gosh i'll never find the place where i was ever again it's over it's over oh my gosh we're gonna do it i got this no i don't got this evidently i failed to get this all right i'm just gonna start randomly picking questions um he says and then continue scrolling because he's just so ocd that he can't do otherwise um okay um jesus lord of all creation what is the line between making the world a better place eliminating suffering prolonging life versus accepting mortality what will be will be and only god can achieve what we all desire i think that that's honestly that's like super circumstance specific and it's a decision that a lot of families have to make you know when it comes to moving from you know like aggressively pursuing health to like hospice care for instance um but i think that god gives us to know and i think that it's good to avail ourselves of modern means of medicine we don't want to be like cranky uh or like luddite in our sensibilities just because it's new doesn't mean it's bad and in fact it can be very good um but then there becomes a kind of tendency towards death denial or clinging to life in a spirit of i don't know uh even despair about what's what like what awaits us on the other side so i mean it's like a kind of virtuous mean you don't want to be cavalier throwing away your life by not availing yourself of medical means nor do you want to be um yeah mistrustful i suppose are the promises of god in such a way that you forestall the advent of death by means more extraordinary than may in fact be called for in the circumstances so that's a good question um [Music] nice dude i have a meeting with one today dominicans let's go um all right people are encouraging each other to like this video respect um hallelujah is just killing it in chat moderation hallelujah is top-notch top-notch live stream moderation um all right this will be the last question given that god is not constrained by time and the eucharist is the same sacrifice that christ made 2000 years ago does this mean that the sins we commit today increase christ's suffering yes they do which is a terrible thing or a terrible thought but not without its solace insofar as even in those sins you are seen you are known you are loved by god who took them to the cross for love of you and saw fit to quench those flames by the infinite tide of his mercy so increase with respect to how they could have been but not increase in the sense of they're constantly mounting because christ no longer suffers christ is glorious in heaven all right folks that is it for now please if you have not yet like this here video um or if you didn't like it then dislike it um and then if you haven't yet subscribed to the channel please do subscribe to the channel and press the bell so you can be alerted as to future live streams also if you haven't yet checked out god splitting do it to it because it's sweet action and it's getting better and better and i'm actually really proud of the product so we have twice monthly guests and twice monthly live streams the next live stream is this friday at 3 p.m you'll see two of my brothers there so there are five of us who contribute to the podcast and um yeah also sweet weekly episodes that drop on thursdays you'll see them on youtube or on any podcast app about all things catholic it's kind of like a sweet catholic miscellany always casting a contemplative gaze on those things which fill or inform our lives so uh love for you uh and prayers please pray for me and i will catch you next time i'm ponce with aquinas let's go

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

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Length: 60min 30sec (3630 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021