Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#586 Claymore #3: The Sword, Spiritual Battles and Seeking the Truth: How Shall I live?
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Disillusioned by societal institutions that have failed to provide genuine meaning? Generation Z, especially young men, are awakening to a world that is off-kilter. We dive into the societal pressures and spiritual battles they face, offering practical resources through Claymore and essential practices to find truth and peace amidst the storm of moral relativism. You’ll discover how Jesus's steadfast mercy and the transformative power of a personal relationship with Christ can guide you towards your true purpose and value.
Step into a new morning routine designed to arm you for the spiritual battlefield of daily life. We'll walk you through a three-part ritual that begins with prayer and the support of the Blessed Mother, turning temptations into opportunities for growth and peace. Discover how to lean on the saints and Divine Mercy readings to combat the lure of modern distractions, and understand how these moments of struggle can actually bring glory to Jesus.
Stay tuned as we offer insights into the rich young man's encounter with Christ, urging you to look beyond the superficial and embrace a life aligned with eternal truth. On the way we learn not to bury our passions and desires but instead understand the significance of aligning our passions and desires with the intrinsic human desire for God, as articulated in the opening paragraphs of Catechism of the Catholic Church.
As we navigate personal journeys and the search for eternal truth, we invite you to engage with us on this spiritual formation journey, asking questions about prayer, the Mass, and Catholicism. Join us again next Friday as we continue to challenge inefficiencies and seek divine truth, offering gratitude and blessings to all listeners along the way.
1. Spiritual Formation:
a. 3 Simple Morning Solution to combat evil! Knees before looking at the phone!
1. Kneel with Our Blessed Mother, your mother! "Let it be done to me according to your word" (See Luke 1:34-38)
2. Temptation is not a sin: Use every temptation as an invitation to pray! Divine Mercy reading (Download app)
3. Charity, Love the next person you see...action!
b. Daily 15-30 minutes Prayer with Scripture (Lectio Divina: read, meditate, pray, contemplation-silence) Daily Readings can be found: Magnificat Subscription (on-line only $19.99 Year!) or a complete prayer app Hallow or for free at USCCB Bishops.
c. Mass-Eucharist
d. Confession
e. Daily Rosary or Chaplet of Divine Mercy (Hallow app includes the Rosary, Divine Mercy app the Chaplet)
(The Video-Podcast of this Episode will be made available on Rumble. For past episodes on Video visit our Rumble Channel and don't forget to subscribe!)
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Contact Jack: info@jp2renew.org
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Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, the production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggert, your host. Glad you're with me. This is Claymore. This is episode three. I hope you got a chance to watch the intro Episode two. Then. Where is the hope? Huh, where is the hope? Where's the hope? You are the hope.
Speaker 1:And this is episode three, where christ is going to speak directly to generation z men over here and and look at if some women join us. We're okay with that, aren't we guys? But here's how this started. Just when you think our nation, marriage and the family, these, these poor kids confused about the gender, just when you think the whole country is going to self-destruct, generation Z, especially Generation Z men, young men that we're meeting and this has been going on for a while they're starting to see it. Something's wrong. I'm not quite sure what it is, but I've had it with this. Something's wrong. There's got to be something more to life, and you're right, there is something more to life. And you're right, there is something more to life. And we decided look, we're going to be there. We've been talking to young men all this time and the more and more we meet, the more excited I get and I said I want to put something together for young men. So this is Claymore. I'm going to lift this up.
Speaker 1:In fact, I want you to download this. If you have to pause this for a second, go to JP the number two. Jp the number for John Paul II. So John Paul the number two, though reneworg JP the number two, reneworg. Go to that website. Go under resources. Under resources, you're going to see the Claymore Sword and it's going to be in a red box going horizontally, just like this one is right here going that way. Click on that and then download this document. So this document is our battle plan. It's awesome. So this has everything in it you need, and it's seven pages, but you only need really the first four pages. The next three pages are just a summary of the first four, just to be able to get like bullet points and stuff like that so you could see it better. So it's not really long, but it defines what we're going to be doing here.
Speaker 1:And the other thing I want you to do is there's a couple other attachments there. So if you scroll down when you're in Claymore, when you scroll down, you'll see, under spiritual formation now, those boxes that you're seeing. We're going to fill those in, but they're not there yet. But just scroll down underneath them. You'll see that, and there's a couple attachments there. One of them click on Lectio Divina. You're going to need that for later on. You don't have to do it today if you don't want to, but the one that's going to be important for you right away is Praying with Temptations. So download that one or bring it up on your phone or whatever Praying with Temptations. So I'll be getting into that today.
Speaker 1:The other thing I want you to consider is go to the show notes and start following us on X. I didn't pay a lot of attention to X until Elon Musk came in, but we're building out our channel there and I'd love to have you join us because I post videos there and I post a lot of things there now, just really the last months, right, and it's been really good and I want you to follow Elon Musk. Elon Musk has got DOGE Department of the Government Efficiency and it's a battle right now. This is a great thing for young people to do. Many of you are already doing it. You're starting to see what I posted a video today or when you get this. It'll be a couple of days later, but I posted a video with a young girl. She drops a lot of F-bombs in there, but this young lady tells it like it is.
Speaker 1:And, yes, generation Z is waking up to the fact that they've been lied to by the generations that went before them. They got lazy and apathetic and didn't really care. It's amazing how many people were sleeping Now not everybody, I'm generalizing here, but too many and they let these government people just take over like a cancer. It's called socialism and yet 70% of the young people last year we were meeting would say they were socialists. And now you can see what a socialist government does. We'll be unpacking that more as we go forward, but socialism works okay until they run out of everybody else's money. They steal and steal and steal and they get corrupt and more corrupt and more corrupt, and then they take all your money. Well, young people are waking up to the fact that, hey, you guys are taking the money and we're going to be saddled with the debt. You are saddled with the debt already and Elon's coming in there with Trump and trying to clean that up and get rid of the waste. So go there, follow them and support this effort because it's just cleaning up, it's stopping the waste, pure waste. You'll get mad, and this is a good thing to get mad over. If you're a socialist, you'll stop being a socialist.
Speaker 1:The other thing is, 90% of young people and this isn't Generation Z so much, but the ones that came before them, especially going into the millennials were our moral relativists. That means there is no truth, just my truth, your truth. You know, you see this with these gender ideologies and all this kind of stuff. Well, now you're seeing the chaos, the violence, the chaos, the wars. When there is no truth, right, we just get blown around by the wind. We're in a spiritual warfare. That's why the sword huh, we're in a spiritual warfare. That's the Claymore sword.
Speaker 1:I talked about it in the first two episodes so I won't go into it more right now. But this is a battle between good and evil and you guys are figuring it out. You know it's amazing how they, you know, between the phones and the mass media, how they tried to keep you guys in the dark, even when you're young, with these gender ideologies coming into the school. They get you addicted to pornography on these phones, right? All kinds of different things we're going to be battling. We know what's going on. We talk to you guys all the time. We're going to be helping you with that kind of stuff because we want you to be free. We want you to be free, and the first liberation is liberation from sin. But at the same time, we're going to be fighting against this big government too, and the government waste that's going on. So this is a very exciting time. Yeah, it's. It's a battle.
Speaker 1:It can only be won, ultimately it's if, if, the generation z, to my, to, as far as I'm concerned, step up to the plate now. Generation z goes from about 14, 15 years old up until about 28, maybe even, and and I even go and say, going into the early 30s. I'm meeting a lot of young guys in the early 30s, so we don't want to throw them out of the, the, the out of this, out of claymore, so we want them to be invited in. Anybody that wants to, any young men that want to be invited in. That would be the, the, the, the younger of the, of the millennials, right coming in.
Speaker 1:So do you have this printed out? I want to just take you through a little bit. You can read the first few pages here, so I'm not going to take time. But it goes through the battle plan, starts to outline it a little bit. I want you to go and I'm going to put my glasses on here to page three, battlefield defined. So this is kind of the big picture of what we're going to be accomplishing with Claymore.
Speaker 1:There's an enemy that seeks to destroy humanity. Satan doesn't have his own clay. He can only attack and distort what God has created good. First he's going to attack the individual human person. This is Satan again, for he or she was created in the image of God, in love, by love and for love. This is where the battle between good and evil always begins in the individual human heart. Most of the evil that you see in the government and the wars and the pornography and the child sex trafficking and all that kind of stuff, started in the individual human heart. Someone that cooperates with evil, and then they bring it into the culture. That's why it starts with the heart. But then we got to get that solved and we're going to be talking about that right now and then from there we're going to have doctrinal formation.
Speaker 1:So don't don't let the words get to you, but we want you to see the big picture, because if you don't, it's like a movie. You got to 40 minutes late. You ever get to a movie really late. You didn't see the beginning, you don't know how it's going to end. Yet you came into the mood and you're trying to figure out what is going on here. You know something's up and you're trying to figure it out. Well, that's what our life is like. We're trying to figure this out. Well, what we want to do is we want to give you the beginning, we want to show you where you're going to go and we want to help you place this within the context of history. And so you start to feel much more comfortable. You say, oh yeah, I get this now, and so that's what we're going to be doing here.
Speaker 1:The evil one always targets the child first, the most innocent. We see this in the schools right now. But it's the child in the womb first of all. It's abortion right Now. If Satan again, he doesn't have his own clay. He can only take what God has created good and twist and distort it. He wants to kill that child in the womb. Don't forget, it's a battle between good and evil. Satan really wants to destroy the image of God, who is mankind in the world? It's you and me, all right.
Speaker 1:Next, he's going to try to render you sterile. Well, you see this, with the puberty blockers and the cross-sex hormones, et cetera. And then he wants to rip out your heart and get you hooked on to things like pornography, anything to twist and distort who you are. So we're going to start there. If you think about it, you're a body and a soul Without grace, without God. You're like a cut flower detached from the vine, and Satan can have his way. That's why you see this darkness around you and these people with dark minds around you. We want to connect it back up. That's called spiritual formation and that's what we're going to be talking about a little bit today before I get into our actual material for the day.
Speaker 1:Next, he attacks marriage and the family, and we see this Marriage is meaningless today. It could be two guys, two girls, whatever right and so he wants to do that Again, you render that sterile. Third, he's going to go out now and create laws, and you see this, these laws from the Biden administration that were pushing this, trans-affirming care, locking up people praying outside of abortion clinics, stealing the money, stealing the money and making themselves rich, all of these things. So we have to go out and be cognizant of that too. All right, so if you read down on page three, claymore is founded on St John Paul II's three-part blueprint for taking back that territory for Christ, that three parts again, we're gonna get the human heart back in shape, we're gonna understand what marriage and the family is, and then we're going to go out into the culture and rebuild up the culture. So it's not brain surgery. It takes a little bit of effort, right.
Speaker 1:So if you go to page four now, there's five aspects to doing this, and the only thing I want to concentrate on initially are the first two spiritual formation, which is to get your heart back. This is what you really want to do. You want to get your heart back, and of those things, what I want to talk to you about today is A, so it's under one. You see, spiritual formation. You can read all of that. We're putting the grace back. We're connecting you back right Body and a soul. Without grace, your default position is sin and death. You see this darkness around us. Now you want to connect back with grace, right Back with God, like it was in the beginning like it should have been all the time. And so how do you do that? Right? You do that through prayer and the sacraments. So the only thing I want to talk to you about today as far as this goes, this part of it is number A.
Speaker 1:Three simple morning solution. It's a three-part simple morning solution to combat evil. So before you look at this phone very important before you look at this phone except to turn off the alarm, if you have that on is to just drop to your knees, boom, drop to your knees and kneel with our Blessed Mother. I always picture our Blessed Mother kneeling with me and if you read I put it in the notes here See Luke 1, 34, 38. You see that. Read that and you'll see. So this is the Annunciation where the angel Gabriel comes to our Blessed Mother and she says let it be done to me according to your word, yes, and so that's what we're saying. We're kneeling with our Blessed Mother saying nope, I want you to take my heart. Let it be done to me according to your word, and we're asking our Blessed Mother to help us. Blessed Mother, help open up a crack in our heart for your son to start to turn my heart and heal my heart right.
Speaker 1:The second thing is there. You see, temptation's not a sin. You're going to be bombarded, especially in this pornographic culture, but regardless, you're going to be bombarded as a young man with temptation. It's an old man with temptation. Use every temptation as an invitation to prayer. You do not want to stuff it down and pretend like it doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:I imagine a girl or or I've been looking at porn, right, and I see these images that come in my mind. If I try to stuff it down, as you know, it doesn't work very well. And finally you push it down. Push it down and then you indulge. And you try to push it down and be good and then you indulge, right, you get in these cycles. This is using temptation as an invitation to prayer. So when that image comes in my mind, or I see a beautiful girl, you know, walking toward me on the sidewalk, I open up the temptation and I say thank you, jesus, for the beauty of that woman, or I see this image. I don't want it, jesus. I'm going to use this image. You know, please start to purify my mind. It's going to take a little while because your neural pathways actually in your brain, if you've been looking at pornography has actually changed and it's going to take a while to change it back. But don't give up temptation Every time a temptation comes. This is the battle. That's the battle. The first battle is going to be your own heart, right?
Speaker 1:I put a link there to Divine Mercy reading. It's very important. Go there, download that app to Divine Mercy and then every morning it'll be a daily reading, just for that morning. What I like to do is I like to put it on audio. You can read it, but I put it on audio. I close my eyes and this is Sister Faustina speaking to Jesus directly. She's the one that had that Divine Mercy picture and you can go on that app and you can read about that Very, very important. That picture is divine mercy for our time, our day that's. The two rays are coming out of Jesus' heart. He gets hit with the sword, with the lance, actually right on the cross, and blood and water pour out. Blood is baptism and confession, the nuptial bath getting all cleaned up so that you can receive the red, which is the Eucharist, right when you go to Mass. So very, very important. So I listen to that every day because, sister Faustina, I just read this. Last night she said this.
Speaker 1:So this is Jesus talking to Sister Faustina, and then he wanted her to relay this message to us. He says first, don't fight temptation by yourself, but disclose it to your confess. Message to us. He says first, say, don't fight temptation by yourself, but disclose it to your confessor at once. She said so. She was going to a confessor, to confession to a priest, and she said he said, don't try to keep this down, just share it with the confessor, go to confession, share it and then the temptation will lose its force. This is a spiritual battle. We don't realize how it gets its tentacles in us by opening it up, not hiding from God anymore, opening up, giving it to the priest, tell him everything, and it'll start to disappear.
Speaker 1:Second, he said during these ordeals, do not lose your peace. Don't get all upset and lose your peace, say, oh my gosh, I'll never be done with this stuff. Don't lose your peace. He said live in my presence. This is Jesus speaking. Ask my mother Now, don't forget. We're kneeling here in the morning with our blessed mother and the saints for help. I always pray to St John Paul II, sister Faustina, many of my other friends in heaven, these saints, and ask for the support. So don't do it by yourself. When you go to confession, don't be afraid of that and then, on your knees, ask our Blessed Mother and the saints for help.
Speaker 1:Third, have the certitude that I am looking at you and supporting you. Jesus wants to pour out his mercy. He knows what we're going through. He knows he didn't convict you. He didn't come to condemn you. He came to pour his grace into you. He wants this. He said the worse the sinner, the more right they have to my mercy, he says in here. He says I know you're going to be.
Speaker 1:Fourth, he says don't fear either struggles of the soul or any temptations. I'm supporting you, if only you are willing to fight. He said know that victory is always on your side. Fifth, know that by fighting bravely you give me this is Jesus great glory and you get merits for yourself. Temptation gives you a chance to show me your fidelity. He says allow those temptations, open them up to me and you give me glory. I'm there for you. That's why I went on the cross.
Speaker 1:Okay, number three, you get up from that bed, right From kneeling down, and just go love people. Just love people. Don't carry hatred in your heart. Love the next person you see. It might be the cashier. Just be kind, be nice, start to walk into this love story and you'll see how beautiful it is. Right, read Temptation is Not a Sin. That document I told you about it by Father Ryan Browning. He's a friend of ours and so read that and you'll start to see that, how these things can work for you. Okay, you can read the rest of this. We'll be going over this over time.
Speaker 1:Lectio Divina is reading Scripture for that day. So every day there's readings to come for that Mass. For that day it's Tuesday. Okay, here's the Tuesday Mass readings for this day Wednesday, thursday, every single day, 365 days of the year, and it's so beautiful. It's a beautiful way to read scripture because it's not just trying to plow through one book at a time. It matches up Old Testament with the New Testament that it's related to. Don't forget. The Old Testament and the New Testament are going together. They're telling one long story and then you've got Psalms in there and other readings in there.
Speaker 1:So I gave you a couple of different apps. The Magnificat I use that a lot Hallow Hallow is fairly new. I think probably young people would really like Hallow. It's a little more expensive Magnificat's 20 bucks for a whole year if you go digitally. And then the USCCB that's the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops it's free. You can just go on their site for free and you can see the daily readings there All right.
Speaker 1:So if you're Catholic, make sure you go on the Mass on Sunday. Don't skip any Masses. Try to go even during the week. If you're not Catholic, we'll be talking about that more. Go to confession. Go to confession. It's an amazing sacrament. It's so beautiful.
Speaker 1:A daily rosary I do not go anywhere without this. This is the weapon. This is the spiritual weapon. I keep this in my pocket all the time and I pray it. The saints did that. John Paul, as busy as he was as Pope 27 years he would say four of these a day. It's amazing. So you can drive it in the car, whatever. The Halo app will help you go through that, but don't do this all at once If you're new to this. Go through that, but don't do this all at once If you're new to this. Just A, A. Those three simple things in the morning. Take you 10 minutes and you're going to have such a great start to your day. All right, follow Doge D-O-G-E Elon Musk. Follow us on X. You'll see things that we're posting in there all the time.
Speaker 1:Audio you can get this audio podcast on any music or podcast app. And then on Rumble is the video, if you want the video. That's what's called doctrinal formation. Don't get scared about the word doctrinal. It's just unpacking again that bigger story. That's what these videos are going to do. It's walking you into the bigger story.
Speaker 1:If you can find somebody to share this with, you can start to disciple somebody right away. Start bringing somebody else in with you. Very, very important to do that over time. But if you don't have anybody in mind right away, just do it by yourself right now. Text me, you'll see my text in the audio. You can either text, or there's my emails in there on Rumble, my email's in there. It says info at jp2reneworg.
Speaker 1:Send me some questions. If you want, we can bring them up on the show. If you want some. You know, if I get two or three or four of the same one, I'll bring it up on the show. All right, if you have any questions, let me know. Let me get into this so we don't go on too long here and as we go forward, I can dig into the material more right, so we won't have to go through all of these things.
Speaker 1:So read through that game plan. Get a little bit of the big picture in your mind. Start with the spiritual formation. This is the doctrinal, the video. I'm going to try to get this out every Friday. So every Friday, watch for it. Make sure you follow us on Rumble, follow us. Get the bells and whistles on the audio so you remind it when it comes through, and on X right?
Speaker 1:So this is Christ Speaks to you, gen Z. This is Christ Speaks to you In Scripture. Good teacher, what must I do to have eternal life? So this young man is seeking Isn't that what you're doing? You're seeking. All young men should be seeking. What is the truth? How should I live?
Speaker 1:So this young man approaches Jesus. Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus replies with a question why do you call me good? No one is good, but God alone. He's making a point here. He says why do you call me good? You're attracted to me. You know he hasn't said I'm God yet. Jesus didn't. But only God is good. Right, if you're looking for the good and we all are. We have to be attached again to God, right? Then he goes on. Jesus says to this young man you know the commandments Do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not defraud, honor your father and mother. With these words, jesus reminds his questioner of some of the main components of the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue we call it.
Speaker 1:But the conversation does not end here. Remember, the story is about the human heart. For the young man declares teacher, I've done all these things since I've been a young man, since my youth. He says. Then writes John, the evangelist. Who's writing this? He says Jesus looked upon him and loved him. So John sees that in Jesus' eyes. Right, this is what he's doing to you. He loves you, he's looking on you, he wants you to come into the story, not convicting, not condemning, but calling you into a relationship. And he said again I've done all these. Jesus looked on him lovingly and said you lack one thing. Go and sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come and follow me. In essence, this was a rich young man. But really, what we find out through the story and I'll get to that is that the richness is really your youth. Your youth is the richness. It's a small window and this is your real treasure. He says lay all the rest of the stuff down, don't worry about the phones and the cars and all this stuff. Come and follow me, get close to me and you'll have everything. Once again, jesus doesn't impose, he doesn't judge the young man. He does not share an opinion, a worldview, any propaganda, any ideology. Jesus knows something at the level of the young man's heart. What do you seek? And then what does he say Come and see, follow me, see. Jesus is calling us into a personal relationship. That's why the spiritual formation first, right At this point, the atmosphere of the meeting between the young man and Jesus changes.
Speaker 1:The evangelist writes at that, saying the young man's countenance fell and he went away sorrowful. He had, he had many great possessions, so he owned a lot of stuff, right, but again, what what? John paul points out that this isn't a story just for the rich young man. It's a story for all of us, because youth is the real treasure. You know all those treasures you know you had. Your phone's gonna get replaced, your car going to get replaced, your car's going to get replaced. I mean, at the end of the day, what's important? Right your heart? You are important. Do we recognize the battle going on in the young man's heart? He has many great possessions, yet he hears an echo in the depths of his heart for something more. What am I looking for? I want the truth.
Speaker 1:This meeting between Jesus and the young man has a universal and a timeless character. John Paul II wrote and each of you is potentially the one he's speaking to what is the meaning and purpose of my life? Is what he's asking. I will not possess the treasure of youth much longer. Is it to have the latest cell phone, a car, our newest car? To find a career, to get to college, make a lot of money? Well, those things, you know, have a place. A news car to find a career, to get to college, make a lot of money? Well, those things have a place, don't they? In a role? But is that enough? Is that enough? If that's all I do, all you are, is you become one of these corrupt politicians or corrupt bankers, right? These guys that are producing pornography or caught up in pornography as middle-aged men, guys that are producing pornography or caught up in pornography as middle-aged men, ruining their marriages and their families. It's not enough.
Speaker 1:Today's professional marketers know you guys better than you know yourself. They're experts at manipulating your emotions and fueling your desires. They hook you on a phone, social media apps, mass communications that desensitize you to accept pornography, gender ideologies, climate fear, video games right, that'll obliterate your moral imagination, spread propaganda. Look at all. Video games aren't bad. I'm not saying that you should never play a video game, but you know, four hours a day, I mean it gets to be. Your mind will get. Look, and I'm just telling you what the reality is. I meet young guys all the time. Even the government schools are in on it. You probably went through this the critical race theory, the DEI SEL. Then you hear what A woman's right to murder her own child, these gender ideologies.
Speaker 1:How many people live to satisfy harmful or meaningless behavior? That's what they live for. Even going to worship at the gym on Sunday, I pass the gym on Sundays. They're packed Instead of church, right? Especially these millennials. You know you're trying to get a workout in and what Workout becomes? This addictive thing. They're trying to get these little pleasures. And where are they going?
Speaker 1:Today, most people live on the surface, never going deep, and something seems to be happening to the human heart. Human beings are by nature, ravenous creatures. We're filled with desire. We're supposed to be but a famished, craving haunts. Every one of us. We're created for utter happiness and joy and life. But ever since we lost Eden, in the very beginning, the Garden of Eden, we've never enjoyed a day of total fullness. We're never filled in any lasting way. We've become like cut flowers right, you know, a cut flower severed from the vine. Jesus talks about this a lot. You've got these beautiful flowers, you cut them, you put them in a vase. At first they look beautiful and then, after a while, they start to wilt. That's what happens to our lives if we're not connected back to the vine again. So we start to grasp for life, a way to fill that vacuum within our hearts, and we become desperate, lustful creatures.
Speaker 1:Trying to fill this up, we look for marriage, or the hope of a marriage, a child. We get into child porn. We eat too much, we drink too much. We look for a new label to make us happy at L, a, g, a, b, a, t, a, q, an, I, double A, double S, plus, plus. You know what I mean. It's preposterous. The next dinner out, the latest phone to take more selfies of myself, a new car, anything to touch that ache inside of us, and many young people have been untethered from more than just their hearts. Every institution that once provided psychological and moral stability is crumbling. Marriage is twisted and distorted. Families are dysfunctional today and broken up.
Speaker 1:Church allegiances We've got shepherds that are you know these church shepherds that are not shepherding us the way they should. So you guys have come up in a very toxic culture. Don't get down on yourself. You've got quite a battle and just the fact that you're here, that's a big deal. That's really a big deal. Our universities have rotted from within If you've gone. Our political leaders, our government bureaucrats, unbelievable corruption, and we can do something about it right now. Don't forget DOGE D-O-G-E. Follow Elon Musk and support him. Our financial institution, our religious hierarchies who trusts any of them anymore? The breakdown adds a kind of unchecked desperation to our ravenous hungers. This is why the addictions it's so easy to get people addicted today. They want to keep you busy and it's amazing how you can get used. We'll continue to unpack this stuff, but we're waking up now, right? We're saying Jesus, what do I need to do to get eternal life, to get closer to you. This is our current condition, isn't it?
Speaker 1:When I came back into the church after 20 years, I decided to make a study of the catechism of the Catholic Church. I'm coming in, I want to learn more about it. I was a cradle Catholic, got away from it for 20 years and you know what it was surprising. I opened it up, section one, chapter one, paragraph one it's actually number 27 if you got the catechism there, because the rest is just talking about how the catechism's organized.
Speaker 1:But when it actually starts, it starts with the heart, desire of the heart. It doesn't start with sermons about ethics and morals and how you got to follow all these rules. That's what everybody says. Oh, it's about following all the no, it started with the heart. It started with the heart, and all the rest of these things would be addressed too. You know what is sin? What is this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, All those questions.
Speaker 1:But it starts with the human heart. What gets you to start is the human heart. The desire for God is written in the human heart. It's in our DNA. What we're talking about today is not more information. You can Google more information. This is in your heart. It doesn't begin with stuff that's out there. It begins in your own heart.
Speaker 1:What do you seek? Jesus asked. That's why Jesus asked you what do you seek? He knows you're seeking something, because the desire for God is written in the human heart, because God has created you in love, by love and for love. First, love with himself in a relationship, so he can fill you with divine life and love, so you can become life and love in the world.
Speaker 1:We were never supposed to be untethered from that and we're always searching for the truth and for happiness. It's in our hearts, but our minds get darkened. We get into drugs and alcohol and all these different addictions. Look it, I know I'm a guy. These are battles, but when you can escape them and open them up, never push your passions and desires down. Open your passions and desires and say, ooh, I don't want that rocket fuel to be pushed down. I'm a man. I want to be full of passion and desires. I just want it aimed in the right direction. It's powerful enough that you can do really good things in the world. So I remember Carl Jung in psychology. So if you've taken psychology 101, you probably studied Carl Jung, sigmund Freud, or you would if you studied those courses.
Speaker 1:He's the father of psychoanalysis. It's really interesting. He said he's looking back on his life. It's very successful. People from all over the world were coming to him. And he's looking back as an older man, like why did people come to me? Was anybody ever healed?
Speaker 1:Like most psychiatrists and psychologists, they're very frustrated because they can't do much for people. They can get them to talk about their problems, but they can't get them to heal, because to heal you need grace. And he says I'm looking back at all my patients in the second half of their life. And he said that means over the age of 35 years old, and there has not been one. Not one of my patients, he said, in the last resort was not that of going back and finding their religious outlook on life.
Speaker 1:This was Carl Young. He was not, I think. He was an atheist for a while, became an agnostic for a while. As he got older he said there's got to be a God, there's got to be a religious outlook, because I can't heal, but when these people do get healed it's because they regained their outlook on life. So he says this it's safe to say that every one of my clients fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age had given to their followers. And not one of my patients has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook? There's nothing, he said, that can free us from this bond of twisting and distortions, from sin, he said, except the opposite urge of life of the Spirit, capital S the Holy Spirit. It's not the children of the flesh but the children of God who know freedom. Carl Jung.
Speaker 1:Back to the catechism I read. In many ways, throughout history down to the present day, men have given expression to their quest for God in their religious beliefs and behavior, in their prayers, sacrifices, rituals, meditations and so on. These forms of religious expression are so universal that one may call man a religious being. You know, this is the first time in our history that we've thrown God out and we said there's no God, no higher power. We're supposed to be so enlightened, so smart, progressive, and you say, well, we don't need God anymore, we're too smart. It's the same sins, the same failures. You know, it's amazing when you read scripture. That's why it's going to be important when you get into Lectio Divina, you start to read a little bit of scripture every day, you're going to see that the scripture and the things that John Paul writes and these saints write, they could have wrote. And scripture was written 2,000 years ago and even older the Old Testament and they could have been written this morning. It's amazing how they speak to our hearts, right?
Speaker 1:St Augustine, a very worldly man who became a doctor and so prominent in the church. He was a womanizer when he was young and agnostic again. He never did marry. He had one child out of wedlock, never did marry the woman he lived with for 15 years. You see, this goes back a long time. He was born in the third century and lived up into the fourth century. So he went out to make a name for himself, to make some money, et cetera, and he just kept searching something within him, just like your hearts what is it that I'm looking for? One day he heard St Ambrose preaching in the city that he was going through and he was drawn by those words of Jesus. He heard those words and he goes what is that? What is that? Or more accurately, the word capital W, the person of Jesus Christ. He would write later on. You have made us for yourself, o Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
Speaker 1:We see the gender ideologies. You see these breakdowns. We know detransitioners, these young girls who had their breasts cut off, body parts severed, had been on puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones that actually changed their bodies. Because they were young, they were still growing when this happened. Their voice is deeper. Follow Chloe Cole's one. Prisha Mosley is another one, many of them now and you can follow them on X too. Just go to my X page. I'll post things from Chloe once in a while and Prisha Again. Go to the show notes, go to X, and then you'll find other people that you're going to want to follow there too. You know it's amazing damage that these gender ideologies have done, and yet Joe Biden and that corrupt administration were pushing this down on all of you guys. Really, really sad. So, the teacher, what must I do to have eternal life right? When you're not anchored in the truth, when you don't live out of the truth, people get hurt, like these detransitioners that I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:Pope Benedict XVI called the moral confusion that we're in today right 90% Remember I said earlier, 90% of young adults now would call themselves moral relativists. There's no truth. This goes totally against the human heart that's seeking the truth, but they just get away from prayer. They numb themselves with all this. Pope Benedict XVI called that the dictatorship of moral relativism. It becomes a dictator. It actually consumes you. You'll start to fall. You'll be like the frog in the proverbial pot, right, you don't even know that. You just become dark. Your life has become dark, right?
Speaker 1:Then someone came up to him, to Jesus, this young man. Right, this is what John writes. Then someone came up to him. He's talking about the young man whom Matthew's gospel does not name. We can recognize him Every person who, consciously or not, approaches Christ, the Redeemer of man, and questions him about morality. Some young man came up John doesn't put his name in there. This could be any of us. He knew this story was going to be read. You and I were going to read it.
Speaker 1:2,000 years later, it's all young men are asking For the young man. The question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life. Remember, he said I already followed all the rules, the commandments and stuff. He knows there's something more. He wants the full meaning of life. This, in fact, is the aspiration of the heart, of every human decision and action the quiet searching and the interior prompting which sets freedom in motion. I want to be connected to the vine. I want to be free of all these addictions. I want to be free so I can go out and find love and be a person of love and, if you're married already, to give to your spouse and your children what you should be. This is what it means to be a man. This is going to be a battle. That's why it's a sword, right. It's not a lollipop or cookies and milk. This is a battle. We're in a spiritual battle here. We've got to wake up to that and that's what you guys are waking up to.
Speaker 1:This question is ultimately appealed to the absolute good which attracts us and beckons us. It's the echo of a call from God, who is the origin and goal of man's life, created in love, by love and for love by God. Jesus says why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good, he said. This is in Matthew 19, verse 17. What good must I do to have? Eternal life can only be found by turning one's mind and heart to the one who is good. No one is good, but God alone. Only God can answer the question about what is good, because he is the good itself. To ask about the good, in fact, ultimately means to turn toward God, the fullness of goodness. Jesus shows that the young man's question is really a religious question and that the goodness that attracts him at the same time obliges him and all of us as its source in God, and is indeed God himself who calls us. What do you see? Come and meet me.
Speaker 1:The difference between Jesus Christ and all of these different ideologies and stuff is you can encounter Jesus and you can tell it's the truth. You go, ooh, just like St Augustine. Ooh, I heard St Ambrose speaking the word huh. Something's attracting me to the word. That's what that spiritual formation starts with. Hey, god bless you. I'm so glad that you're with me. Watch for it again. Next Friday I'll put up another video, but in between I might put up some other things. So if you give me some questions, tell me more about prayer, give me more about the Mass, or I'm not Catholic. So just shoot me those questions and we'll do some supplemental podcasts and different things for you. We want to be here with you. We want to travel on this journey with you and we're privileged to do so. God bless you. Talk to you later, everybody.