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
#638 Why do we suffer? Does our suffering have meaning? With Dr. Aaron Kheriaty—Psychiatrist and Author
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The question haunts us all: Why do we suffer? And more importantly, does our suffering have meaning? In this profound conversation with Dr. Aaron Kheriaty—psychiatrist, author, and courageous voice during recent cultural upheavals—we explore the Christian understanding of suffering that offers liberation rather than mere explanation.
Join Jack Rigert and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty as they explore the profound themes of suffering, faith, and the significance of the cross in Christianity. They discuss how suffering is an inherent part of the human experience and how it can lead to deeper spiritual understanding and connection with Christ. Dr. Kheriaty emphasizes the importance of prayer, particularly the simple prayer "Doce me passionem Tuam"—teach me your suffering. This brief aspiration, when repeated throughout our days of struggle, shifts our focus from demanding explanations to entering more deeply into Christ's redemptive love.
The conversation also highlights the role of the Mass as a central aspect of Christian life, where believers can encounter the sacrifice of Christ and find healing and joy in their own suffering.
For anyone struggling with physical pain, psychological anguish, or spiritual questioning, this conversation offers not easy answers but something better—a way forward that acknowledges suffering's reality while discovering its redemptive potential. Visit passionemtuam.org to learn more about this powerful prayer and access Dr. Kheriaty's full series on suffering's meaning.
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty's Series: Catholic Exchange
Dr. Kheriatys's Blog: Human Flourishing
"Doce me passionem Tuam" (pronounced "doe-chay may") Website
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Learn this prayer doce me passionum tuum, teach me your suffering, repeat it, meditate upon it. Open the Gospels and read the accounts of our Lord's sufferings. Place yourself there in the scene, as St Ignatius, loyola and so many other saints have recommended. Become another character in that scene in the Gospels where our Lord takes up his cross, or where he's nailed to the cross. Take in all the sights, the sounds, the smells. We don't need a complicated scholarly exegesis or explanation of the Gospels. If we pray this simple prayer in our hearts Lord, teach me your suffering, don't you make pass the unknown to me. If we go deeper into those moments in Christ's life where he suffered, he will do the exegesis for us. He'll explain to us. What does this mean for me personally?
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you for bringing up the Mass, and I have an article in the series precisely about the Mass Because the Mass is the prayer of all prayers, and it is the place that we go to be most fully united to our Lord's sufferings, because what the mass is, as the Council of Trent taught, is their sacramental representation of the sacrifice of Calvary.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggins, your host. You know being human's not easy, is it? It seems that we all suffer. Most of us want to avoid suffering, go into the doctor for a remedy at the slightest pain. But since we can't avoid it we're Christians. We look up to Jesus Christ on the cross. We wonder why did he accept suffering? And does our suffering have any deeper meaning? Can we make sense of it?
Speaker 2:So today with us is Aaron Curiati, md, a physician specializing in psychiatry. He's the author of three books, including the Catholic Guide to Depression. He is a fellow and director of the program in bioethics and American democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For many years he was professor of psychiatry at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine and also the director of the medical ethics program at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. Dr Curiati has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, newsweek, the Federalist and First Things and on matters of public policy and health care. He has testified at the California Senate and the United States Senate. And finally, dr Curiati is a plaintiff in the landmark free speech case Missouri v Biden, which is currently before the US Supreme Court and I'm wondering if it's still in front of there. We've got to hear just a little bit about that. For his work challenging government censorship, the journalist Matt Taibbi has called him the most ambitious theorist of the censorship industrial age. Aaron welcome.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Jack. It's great to be with you. Thank you for that kind introduction.
Speaker 2:Yes, you know I was saying right before we came out and I want to repeat it to our audience who may not know you that I've been following you for a long time, well before COVID, and we work with a lot of young people and I was using your research, your reference material, where you reference anxiety, depression, even suicide among them, and really brought some answers, you know, trying to connect them to a deeper meaning. But it was during COVID that I really saw your convictions and your courage come out. You got yourself in a little bit of trouble there, pushing back on the censorship of free speech, Obvious what was going on to us, but there weren't many voices at that time, Dr Aaron, speaking about these things. But you did. What gave you the courage to do that?
Speaker 1:Well, I think it was my faith. It was trying to live a life of prayer and the sacraments and my conscience while I was at the University of California, irvine. My conscience just convicted me to try to challenge the university's vaccine mandate because it contradicted, it undermined, a core principle of medical ethics, the principle of informed consent that I had taught to students in the required ethics course medical students every year and I couldn't imagine getting up in front of those students with a clear conscience and trying to teach and explain that principle if I hadn't stood up and tried to defend that principle in the real world when push came to shove. So I ended up challenging the university's vaccine mandate in federal court. I didn't prevail in that case and the university ended up firing me as a consequence of that in retaliation.
Speaker 1:But I have you mentioned another free speech case that I filed, along with four other private plaintiffs in the state of Missouri and the state of Louisiana against the federal government and that's a case called Missouri v Biden. We had alleged that the federal government was pressuring social media companies during COVID, but now we know it began even before COVID and continued afterwards pressuring these companies to censor constitutionally protected speech and the plaintiffs, among many, many other people, were victims of that government censorship, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment. And just a very quick update on that case yes, yes please.
Speaker 1:The government is now sitting down to negotiate with us a settlement in that case. So essentially you know that settlement will be a binding precedent once it's approved by the court, which we are hoping will put a stop to a lot of this government-mandated censorship. So I don't have the details of that yet because they haven't been hammered out with the defendants, with the federal government and the agencies named as defendants, but I should have updates on that soon that I'll post on my sub stack.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for that, and so you might have a legacy there that we're going to be studying case history right in law and who knows what's going to happen. It's a crazy world out there. We know that and I'll just mention this to you, as I did in the introduction. We've been working with a lot of younger people, especially young men. That's what that sword is. We have an apostolate within our apostolate, called Claymore Miletus Christi, and these are young guys that came out and they started to vote for Trump, not because they think he's God or Jesus Christ, but they just sensed something's wrong and they were looking for a model, a role model that would seem to be on their side, and now it's a great time to evangelize.
Speaker 2:Many of them, dr Kiriati, are hurting, the men and the women, obviously right from a very toxic culture. So you mentioned in your article you know this hurting in our hearts, but there's all kinds of hurting going on there, so trying to make sense of that is a very interesting angle, and you wrote what moved you and the meaning of suffering itself, right. So you wrote and I wanted to ask you what moved you to write that. Of course, you know, I just unpacked it. I think that's why I kind of stopped there for a second. But you wrote during this past lent a series that can be found on catholic exchange, the meaning of suffering. Of course we'll link that in the show notes, but give us a little background on that and what prompted you, what moved you to write that?
Speaker 1:Sure. So I was really inspired to write this series on the Christian meaning of suffering and the cross, which you mentioned, which was published in Catholic Exchange during Lent. I think I was inspired by working with my patients, especially, and by things that I had learned from my patients in terms of how they were trying to contend with their suffering and anguish.
Speaker 1:And if there's one thing that I've learned as a psychiatrist is what you mentioned in the intro to this episode, which is that everyone suffers, number one and number two we very often don't really know what another person is suffering, either exteriorly or interiorly. A lot of the suffering that people endure remains hidden. Actually, I have a very common experience as a psychiatrist of having patients disclose to me forms of suffering, whether it's childhood abuse or other things that they've endured in life, that they have not ever disclosed to anyone else, including a spouse, including their close friends. And so you know, I became convinced that not only is everyone suffering, but very often their suffering is hidden. It's very hard for them to share it. So people are bearing these burdens and looking for answers.
Speaker 1:Patients often raise in the clinical context with me, raise the philosophical problem of evil, the problem of why would an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God allow so much pain and suffering in the world, and for my patients and for myself, when I endured almost five years of a severe, debilitating chronic pain condition, personally you know this was not an abstract philosophical question. Personally, you know this was not an abstract philosophical question and it couldn't be answered by a philosophical treatise. This was a very personal, you might say existential question that has to do with my relationship with God and this question is perfectly natural for us to ask. It's natural to ask why did God allow my wife to get cancer? Why did God allow my child to be afflicted by this injury? Why did God allow my family to have our good name unjustly slandered? It's not any sort of mystery why we would go to God in prayer and ask those questions. A sort of mystery why we would go to God in prayer and ask those questions.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that I discovered and I learned both from my patients and my own experience, and what I tried to convey in this series of articles, is that while asking those questions are perfectly natural, and while I sometimes try to help patients in the clinical context to reconcile these questions, it's important to notice that all of these questions tend to focus on my own suffering. We want God to explain our anguish to us, but the fact is, this side of eternity, we're usually not given the answers to those questions by God. Our finite intellects are not really capable of comprehending the reasons behind God's providential designs and if you look in the Bible, for example in the book of Job, job has 37 chapters of basically Job's suffering and Job's and his friends' questions that they put to God. Why is this happening? Did I do something wrong to cause this? And finally, god shows up in chapter 38.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, which is I just say to people that haven't read that for a while. You have to go back and read that, but I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Speaker 1:No, not at all, absolutely. Yeah, it's one of the most beautiful, powerful books in the Bible and of course it speaks to this question of human suffering. But when God shows up, he doesn't actually answer Job's questions. He poses a question to Job. He says where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? In other words, look, whatever I would explain to you regarding your suffering is beyond your or your friend's ability to comprehend. But God does not leave us there. And the Bible, the biblical revelation, does not leave us there. And the Bible, the biblical revelation, does not leave us there, because the fullness of revelation, of course, comes in the Gospels in the New Testament.
Speaker 1:If we look to the New Testament, we see that the real answer to the age-old problem of evil is not found in some philosophical treatise or even in some abstract theological explanation. The answer to the question of suffering is found in the cross of Jesus Christ, and that's at the center of this series that I wrote. Our job as Christians and what we need to do when we suffer is to turn our attention from our own sufferings to the sufferings of Christ. That's where we're going to find liberation. That's where we're going to find a peace that the world cannot give. We have to turn to the cross, and in fact, I think this is an important message for our day, because the world and even many in the church today have forgotten the cross. Right, everyone loves the miracle-working Christ, who heals the blind and the lame and the lepers, who turns water into wine and multiplies the loaves and the fish. Right, everyone loves Christ, the wise teacher and the brilliant preacher. Even Thomas Jefferson and the old deists liked the teachings of Jesus, even if they discarded the miracles.
Speaker 1:The prosperity gospel huh the prosperity gospel, which is a distortion because it says essentially that Christ suffers so that we don't have to. But that's not the message of the New Testament. The message of the New Testament is that Christ suffered so that we could be united with him on the cross when we suffer, so that we can be liberated from the burdens of our suffering because of what he has done for us, because of his love, so that we can discover that which transcends our suffering, which is the love that he expressed for us in his own passion. Right. So we need to turn our attention to the crucified Christ, even though we prefer the resurrected Christ, christ the teacher, christ the preacher. But we cannot, and those are obviously important, we need the whole Christ. But that includes the crucified Christ, that includes Good Friday, without which there is no Easter Sunday. And so you know, I think the tendency today is to sort of try to sanitize our Lord's passion.
Speaker 1:Protestants have removed the corpus, the body, from the cross, and even Catholics have rendered the body very often sort of bloodless. You know, we have this sort of resurrected Christ gazing out at us, you know, with serene eyes on many of our crucifixes. And you know, occasionally we'll encounter an old, bloody Spanish crucifix from days of old, you know, with a more accurate and realistic depiction of what Christ would have looked like when he was nailed to the cross, and it sort of arrests our sensibilities, it's sort of shocking to us, right, and I think that's actually a good thing, because the cross is scandalous. The reality of the bruised and bloodied and beaten and gritty blood, sweat, tears crucifixion is a more accurate depiction of what actually happened on Good Friday and in fact our Lord's suffering was not even just limited to Good Friday.
Speaker 1:This is another theme of the articles that I wrote. One of them I think it's part four in the series of seven articles is entitled Christ's Suffering from the Incarnation to the Ascension. Right so, just becoming a man in Our Lady's womb, just divesting of his glory and becoming a human embryo, the second person of the Blessed Trinity is taking on. I mean that's a form of suffering, right. Being born in a cave with no room, in the end having to flee to Egypt because the king wants to murder you as a little infant, all of these things that our Lord endured throughout his whole life.
Speaker 2:And do we have to remember? Yeah, right there we have the annihilation or destruction of the innocents. Exactly, I mean right at that time, and he didn't try to stop that. Nobody tried to stop it.
Speaker 1:The cross was imprinted upon our Lord's life from the very beginning.
Speaker 1:And you know we tend to romanticize the story of the nativity, you know Christmas cheer and so forth.
Speaker 1:But again, you know, we've grown so used to these things that we often forget.
Speaker 1:When you stop and think about what actually happened on that Christmas night, and then shortly thereafter, as you said, with the slaughter of the innocents and the flight into Egypt and all the rest of it, you see that Our Lady and St Joseph and Our Lord, even as an infant, took on the sufferings of the human race, and that's where the love of Christ is most fully manifest.
Speaker 1:So what I'm attempting to do in this series of articles is move our attention from our sufferings to his, not because our sufferings don't matter, but when we place them in that broader context, we see that suffering is not necessarily a tragedy, because it's there that we find the cross and in the cross we find the fullest manifestation of God's love for us. So to turn our attention back to the Gospels, which we've gotten so used to right that they often maybe lose their shock value, shock value and to wake us up again, put us there in those scenes where our Lord is suffering for us is kind of at the center of what I'm trying to do here. The tendency is to want to flee suffering, to avoid it right.
Speaker 2:When we hear that you know, pick up your cross and follow me, we're hoping that you mean he's carrying most of the cross and I got a little piece of it. Maybe right, but for some reason he doesn't allow us to totally escape this, does he? No, he doesn't.
Speaker 1:He wants to unite somehow.
Speaker 2:And I know that's what you're getting at with your articles, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and by turning our attention to him and being totally fixed on him we can develop the fortitude to do that. And in fact, it's not even primarily fortitude or courage that is at work there, it's love, right. So you think about the martyrs, which is the preeminent example of what we're talking about here, among Christ's disciples taking up your cross and following him. These people did it all the way to the bitter end. I think about St Lawrence, deacon of the early church, who was martyred by literally being barbecued. He was roasted on a gridiron right and somehow, in the middle of that horrifying—.
Speaker 2:Who famously probably didn't say but we know, you know I'm done on this side, turn me over, turn me over, right. It's amazing actually.
Speaker 1:Whether that story is sort of apocryphal and legendary or not, it does get at something that really happened there, which was his enormous kind of courage. And in fact what I argue is that St Lawrence was not necessarily braver than the rest of us. He was just madly in love with Jesus Christ, right, which is what allowed him to live the cross, to be united to our Lord's crucifixion in that way. So that's a little bit of the theory in practice and in fact, what is really at the center of what I was trying to do and I just want to stop people here again just to recognize that I mean you're a psychiatrist with a clinical practice, I mean you're meeting real people.
Speaker 2:No, this isn't like somebody that just says, hey, I'm going, I kind of feel this way, you're experiencing it. Like you said, did you have a back injury? Is that what it was, that you had for five years I did yeah, and then also with your patients.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I ruptured a disc, I had two failed spine surgeries, I had some scar tissue tethering the nerve root, so I was essentially on my back for the better part of almost five years. So I experienced severe, chronic physical pain for a long period of time and I, you know I needed something at that point that would help me again to turn my attention away from my own suffering and to the suffering of Christ. And so the other thing that I offer in this series and in fact, if people remember nothing else from this podcast episode, I want them to learn and remember this little prayer, this little aspiration. It's four words and I like it in Latin Doce me passionum tuum is this prayer that I taught and kept repeating in the course of this series, which translates teach me your suffering or, more literally, teach me your passion.
Speaker 1:I like the Latin docime passionum tuum, because the word passionum has both of those connotations which the English words do not. So, teach me your suffering or teach me your passion, is a simple prayer, a simple aspiration that we can repeat literally a hundred times a day, right when we're bearing up under the burdens of the day. That will help us turn our attention from whatever we're dealing with, to what our Lord has done for us. So you know, if folks take nothing away from this episode, at least take away those four words. It's a beautiful little prayer which, again, doesn't ask God to help us avoid suffering, as much as we might want that. It doesn't even ask God to explain to us why we're suffering, which was probably beyond our comprehension, this side of eternity but instead it takes us more deeply into Christ's suffering. It draws us into the depths of his love, and that's where we encounter the love and we develop the fortitude to bear the cross with Jesus.
Speaker 2:It's interesting to me as I think about a patient coming into you, Dr Curiati. And of course they want relief from suffering, and so how do you? Balance, that between prayer, faith, psychology, uh, and maybe even, you know, not only uh, you know, a mental illness of maybe of some sorts, uh, but physical also. You know, this is a hard balance for someone like you. When somebody's at least coming in, it probably takes a while to massage this absolutely no.
Speaker 1:That's a very good question. Thank you for asking that, because I do want to reiterate I'm not suggesting here that we love suffering. I'm suggesting that we love the lives that God has given to us, which entails suffering, and the person that we have become is only the person that we have become, in part because of what we have suffered. Now, obviously, I'm a physician, I'm a psychiatrist. So whenever possible, using the tools of modern psychiatry, of modern medicine, whether that's medications or psychotherapy, or diet and exercise or other interventions that I do to try to help treat mental illness and psychological pain, I'm going to intervene and I'm going to try to help you mitigate your suffering, right? So this is not a counsel of passivity, this is not a counsel of like in the face of illness. Don't go seek help and don't go seek treatment. No, obviously do those things. Christianity is a religion of healing.
Speaker 2:We're going to ask you to join us by helping us get the word out. So if you could make sure you subscribe and then hit like. No matter which platform you're on, Remember that the Become who you Are podcast is on audio on any music or podcast app. We're up on Rumble YouTube. You can find us on X. When you do subscribe, hit the like button.
Speaker 2:A couple things to share with people Love Ed. Love Ed is just such an important apostolate, so it's within our apostolate, the John Paul II Renewal Center. This helps parents give the talk to their children. We're trying to push back on all these gender ideologies and the porn culture and give children the truth and do it through their parents, and we help them do that. The other one is really taken off too. It's Claymore Miletus Christi, Soldiers for Christ. That's where you see the sword behind me. That's the big sword. That's our logo for Claymore. That's a Claymore sword. And this is for young people, especially young men, Gen Z, high school, all the way through, let's call it till they're 30 years old or so. They're starting to really understand that something nefarious, very toxic, is going on in the culture, and so they're stepping into the church and we're discipling them. So we want to help get the word out about those things and, lastly, try to consider at least consider financially supporting us. Everything's in the show notes. Hey, God bless you. Thanks again. We'll be right back to today's show.
Speaker 1:Christians invented the modern hospital back in the Middle Ages. Christians have been in the business of health care from the very beginning because our Lord was a healer, among other things. Many of his works, his miraculous works, were miracles of healing, so that's deeply embedded within the Christian tradition. So we should do what we can, obviously, to mitigate the misery in the world. Right To deal with poverty.
Speaker 2:I could see right here, yeah, and right here, though, this would be the time to interject with somebody, because, even in the healing process, even if I think I'm on a road or you think your patient's on the road to healing, you still have this interim, this period where they're still going to suffer, and so, regardless of what journey you're on, there's a time right to get deeper with our Lord.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right, and sometimes the healing interventions themselves are difficult and arduous, right? The surgeon takes out the scalpel to lance the abscess and he says this is going to hurt a little bit, right?
Speaker 2:And medication has many side effects, right, I mean, these things aren't. They don't come without any side effects.
Speaker 1:So all that to say, yes, we try to mitigate suffering. At the same time we recognize that in a fallen world, not all illness is treatable. Sometimes the treatment itself can be difficult or painful or arduous and at the end of the day, try as we might, we will never fully eliminate all the suffering in the world. It's very important for us to accept that right. Attempts in medicine to ignore that reality end up with proposals like well, if we can't treat someone's suffering, then if we can't eliminate the suffering, we'll eliminate the sufferer through doctor-assisted suicide or euthanasia or aborting the baby who has fetal anomalies or a diagnosis of a serious health condition or dreams of transhuman right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the transhumanist dream of trying to use science and technology to live forever and so forth. This is a substitute religion, I would argue, an attempt to redeem ourselves through science and technology and medicine that is doomed to failure. In fact, in the end it's going to cause more suffering than it mitigates. It's going to end up being dehumanizing.
Speaker 1:So recognizing the limits of science and medicine, recognizing the limits of political efforts to eliminate forms of suffering like poverty and so forth. Obviously, we do everything reasonable that we can in that regard, but at the same time we live in a fallen world and we're never going to completely escape suffering and just age. I have a father, dr.
Speaker 2:Curiati, that's almost 100 years old, old World War II vet, and he's blind now. He's almost deaf, and you know my wife always kids with him and says you know, getting old is not for sissies, you know, but he does, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but he does what you're suggesting in these articles. That's why they resonated with me, Because I see him at 3 o'clock praying the chaplet and offer up his suffering for his kids and grandkids and all this stuff. And so it's inevitable, the best-case scenario we get old and die right, that's the best-case scenario. So this becomes very interesting. So how do we in the now get used to this right? And that's where the beauty of your articles, I think, come in, Like, let's just do this because there is suffering, and if I'm not suffering, my neighbor is or my child is or my grandchild is, and we bring that suffering as part of us also, isn't it?
Speaker 1:And what the incarnation should teach us, and especially us, and especially our Lord's entire life, but especially his passion and death on Good Friday, is that God is not far from our suffering.
Speaker 1:So whatever we're experiencing, whether physical or psychological or spiritual forms of suffering and anguish, every pain, every agony, every horror, even the kind of unspeakable forms of suffering and anguish, every pain, every agony, every horror, even the kind of unspeakable forms of suffering that people are reluctant to disclose to anyone. Our Lord experienced that as well. He took that upon himself in his passion and experienced it in the very marrow of his bones, and he redeemed it. He went to the very depths of human misery in order to find us there and to draw us up with him. In fact, he went to deeper depths than any of us could possibly imagine and any of us have been to, no matter how difficult our lives have been, and he invites us into his love precisely there, at the center of the Christian revelation is a man hanging on a cross, and we're being invited to participate at some level, aren't we in this?
Speaker 2:So how do you explain? This to someone that's coming into the faith now. And now we're following what you said, right, and we're saying, yeah, and I do have these hurts, these pains. Look, we have 60 million adults running around today in the United States alone that have been sexually abused as children. I mean, talk about that right. But now and I'm speaking to these people all the time, so I'm very interested in your answer here. How might I start to learn myself and also to maybe share the essence of what this looks like you?
Speaker 1:know. Yeah, thank you for asking about that. Of course these you know, these horrors of childhood sexual abuse, any form of sexual abuse. But especially when we think about innocent and defenseless children, these horrifying sins which infect the world and even the church, I have to say that wound our lady's immaculate heart, the harm of her children in that way. How do we even help someone who's endured something like that? I think we begin by acknowledging their pain and also by acknowledging that if we haven't personally experienced that, we can't possibly understand what they have been through, but that our Lord has understood it. And in fact it may sound strange to say this, but the effects of what they endured.
Speaker 1:Christ also endured that on the cross. It may sound strange to say that, but our faith teaches that he took on all the effects of sins, including those sins. He felt it in the very marrow of his bones, in his soul. He has been there with them in that. And to go deeper into that is not primarily an intellectual exercise, and that's why I would say again, I return to the four simple words of this prayer Learn this prayer. Doce me passionum tuum, teach me your suffering. Repeat it, meditate upon it, open the Gospels and read the accounts of our Lord's sufferings. Place yourself there in the scene, as St Ignatius, loyola and so many other saints have recommended. Become another character in that scene in the Gospels where our Lord takes up his cross or where he's nailed to the cross. Take in all the sights, the sounds the smells.
Speaker 1:Be one among the crowd, right, place yourself there in your imagination in order to go more deeply into that moment in Christ's life. And Christ, you know, we don't need a complicated scholarly exegesis or explanation of the Gospels. If we pray this simple prayer in our hearts Lord, teach me your suffering, don't you make pass the enemy to him. If we go deeper into those moments in Christ's life where he suffered, he will do the exegesis for us, he'll explain to us what does this mean for me personally? So I would also counsel that people get away from an overly intellectualized approach to this.
Speaker 1:And look, I mean I love theology, I studied philosophy, I love diving deep into, you know, the intellectual aspects of the faith, but when you're talking about something like suffering, the answer is not going to be found in a philosophical or theological treatise. The answer is going to be found in with our heart treatise. The answer is going to be found in with our heart, with our imagination, with our will, with our affections and emotions, entering more deeply into the suffering of Jesus. And again, that's why, instead of recommending or writing, you know, a theological treatise on the Christian meaning of suffering, really I'm recommending a simple prayer, four words.
Speaker 2:But again, you're inviting, but you could see in your words, and you're inviting them into an encounter with Christ, and that's a personal thing, that's right, that's right, that encounter, that can only happen in prayer.
Speaker 1:So one of the other things that I did in the series in part three of the series, I describe how to make a preparation for a consecration of the Holy Cross of Jesus, which is a longer prayer that I included at the end of this series as a way to go more deeply into our Lord's suffering, and you know people like being given things to do. How can I actually enrich my spiritual life? And so this practice of making a consecration, I think, can be very helpful, and so I have some ideas there in part three, meditating on the passion.
Speaker 2:What would? Somebody listening for the first time, maybe you know we have some new young people coming in. When I say young people, they're in their 20s and 30s, right, so they're not kids, young people coming in. When I say young people, they're in their 20s and 30s, right, so they're not kids. But trying to understand Catholicism, trying to look at the cross, maybe they weren't given anything, you know, and we have an encounter with Christ is what we're really, really. I mean, that's the important thing. You know. I remember Pope Benedict XVI saying something like your faith will never be an ethical decision to your point or some lofty philosophical idea.
Speaker 2:It's going to be an encounter with an event, an encounter with a person, and then he said that encounter will give you a new horizon, a way to look at the world and a decisive direction for your life. That's what you're calling them into. So if I'm going to try this right and we'll put those words across the screen a number of times when we edit this, for people to see it, it'll be in the show notes, your articles will be in the show notes. But what do I expect? What do I expect?
Speaker 2:Maybe I'm a young person, I know something's wrong, but I don't really feel a personal pain, pain. I feel like something's wrong, pain, right, which is bad enough sometimes. But what can I expect? And how would I massage? So I'm going to say these prayers. Should I do it at home? Should I go to mass to do it, you know, and what can? What is there a way to say? Because we just said this is a personal encounter, so he's not going to woo me like he wooed you, dr Kiriati, but so he's going to woo them differently. But what could they look for? What could they sense?
Speaker 1:So a little aspiration like this can be said anytime, anywhere, while you're working, while you're driving in a car, every time you walk up and down a flight of stairs, when you flip a light switch on. That's the value of these simple aspirations From the Jesus prayer, which is very popular among Eastern right Christians. Lord Jesus, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The idea of just repeating the same simple prayer over and over until it's written on your heart is deeply embedded within the Christian tradition, both in the East and in the West, and this prayer that I'm recommending should be prayed in the same way. Right, it can become like the beating of our heart.
Speaker 1:Now, with that said, also, besides, when we're just walking down the street and we say a brief prayer or a brief aspiration, we should set aside some time every day devoted only to prayer 20 minutes, 30 minutes in the morning, ideally in front of the Blessed Sacrament in a church.
Speaker 1:And this is where you know when I recommended some ideas for preparing for the consecration of the Holy Cross of Jesus, you know I described some ways that you could do this in your prayer and some methods that you can take to your prayer. But in those moments you can look at an image of the crucified Lord and just look at it and take it in right. One of the strange things about the crucifix is the central symbol of Christianity. Is that Christianity, the paradox of Christ's love expressed on the cross, is that it took a symbol that in the ancient world was so horrifying that the early Christians didn't use it. They were very close to it and it was like this is like the electric chair of the day, except it was an electric chair that was designed to inflict the maximum amount of pain before it actually killed you.
Speaker 1:So the idea of wearing something like that, you know gazing upon that. But over time Christians came to realize that, no, the crucifixion is not just an image of horror which scandalizes us, it's an image of love and somehow, they had to feel that right Because they had in many cases they could volunteer to walk away.
Speaker 2:You know right. You know I don't give, you know, I give a little incense to Caesar and I can walk away. And they didn't do it. I always wonder, dr Curiati, what I have to right. I think we all wonder, do we have the courage to do that? But they must have sensed what you're talking about here.
Speaker 1:Well, I think they did, because they were closer to the event too, and somehow you know the early Christians. If you look at the accounts of the martyrs, you know their sufferings are almost mentioned as a footnote, almost as an afterthought, and the focus very much is on the crucified Christ and on the Eucharistic Christ. You look at the accounts of the martyrs of the first century or two of Christianity. It's extraordinary, whether it's the death of St Ignatius or the death of St Polycarp.
Speaker 1:Many of these you know well-known early Christian martyrs. What you see is that Christ is at the center and not their own suffering. And I think they almost sort of took it for granted that they would follow our Lord to Calvary right as part of being a Christian right. They weren't shocked or surprised that the disciple is not greater than his master, as our Lord told us, and that, you know, this is for them. Literally taking up their cross and following him may have meant that they had to give their blood, they had to shed their blood rather than betray their faith in Christ. And I think there's something in that attitude of the early church that's totally focused on our Lord and you know, it's not that their own sufferings don't matter, but it's that they were secondary and that they were able again to do what they did to be thrown to wild beasts in the arena.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember St Ignatius of Antioch just saying don't even come rescue me. And he wrote these beautiful letters yeah that's right. And he was looking forward. Are we being called all of us, do you think, Dr Cariotti? Are we all being called to participate in some way in the suffering of Jesus Christ, as Christians?
Speaker 1:I think so. I think all of us need to try to learn from the martyrs, not that we're going to suffer what's sometimes called a red martyrdom, the literal shedding of our blood.
Speaker 2:But I mean even in the suffering that you and I were talking about earlier, just in our physical pain and mental illnesses and all those things and you know, mental illnesses and all those things Are we always called, you know, in this life, to carry our cross and actually participate. Is that what Christ, you know? Does he want us to become into this and actually experience some of what he's going through? You know, as I'm trying to work through my pain and suffering and I'm trying to say, okay, what does Jesus, what does he want me, what does God want me to do in this action of saying this prayer and moving and opening my heart to him?
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's exactly what he wants, and I wouldn't dare say that unless he had said it first. I don't know how else to interpret. Take up your cross daily, you know. Deny yourself three things. How else to interpret? Take up your cross daily, you know. Deny yourself three things. Deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow me, okay, so. So this is not me. I would not have invented this religion, right? I?
Speaker 2:you know, if, if I, if I were to dream up still around how this was gonna go, yeah this is.
Speaker 1:You know, no human being would have been born in a you know who. Who, who was pretending to be God, would have been born in a manger, would have been scourged at the pillar and crowned with thorns and crucified. So again, I'm saying this thing only because our Lord said it and St Paul understood this. Again, you dive deeply into the letters of the New Testament, not just the Gospels. Paul understood this Again. You dive deeply into the letters of the New Testament, not just the Gospels. St Paul has this very peculiar passage where he says I make up in my sufferings. What is lacking in the sufferings of Christ? That can be difficult to interpret, because on the one hand he says elsewhere that nothing was lacking in the sufferings of Christ, were sufficient to redeem everyone right who accepted the grace of Christ's redemption. So what does he mean there? What he means there is that all of us have to come more fully into participation and union with Christ, so that every member of his mystical body shares in his suffering, shares in his passion. That's what needs to be done.
Speaker 2:So it's our own participation in the cross that is still waiting to happen and to make it present in today's world in our families.
Speaker 1:So, Christ, yes, 100% St saint paul.
Speaker 2:Everything is there on the cross, everything we need, but but we need it for ourselves and we need to. We need to bring this down, just like in and before I. I let you go. We have to talk about the mass just a little bit, because this is the idea that we're we're entering into and making present that one-time historical sacrifice, and then taking our suffering and saying this is the way I'm dealing with you. I mean, it's a profound thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you for bringing up the Mass, and I have an article in the series precisely about the Mass because the Mass is the prayer of all prayers and it is the place that we go to be most fully united to our Lord's sufferings. Because what the Mass is, as the Council of Trent taught, is the sacramental representation of the sacrifice of Calvary. Protestants sometimes objected to Catholics claiming that the Mass was a sacrifice because they said, well, jesus' sacrifice on the cross happened once and for all and we don't need additional sacrifices, like all the other sacrifices of the Old Testament, animal sacrifices and so forth, repeated over and over and over again. Well, they were right on one point, but they were wrong on another point. They were right that no other sacrifices are necessary after Christ's sacrifice on the cross in order to redeem us, but they were wrong in denying that the Mass was a sacrifice, because the Mass is not another sacrifice.
Speaker 1:The Mass is the same sacrifice of Calvary, made present to us today. So, literally, at the Mass, we are with St John and Mary Magdalene and Our Lady standing at the foot of the cross, able to receive the graces that flowed from Christ's pierced side, the blood and water which the Church Fathers always interpreted as representing the sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist. We are there at every Mass, literally as though we were contemporaries 2,000 years ago, standing at the foot of the cross, able to partake of and participate in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross through the cross the body and blood that is offered there and that is given to us as our food and drink in the Eucharist.
Speaker 1:So you said, what can people do besides praying this simple prayer? Well, the way to go more deeply into this simple prayer is to participate more frequently, daily if possible, more attentively and more fully in the sacrifice of the Mass. Attentively and more fully in the sacrifice of the Mass, and I would recommend, just as a good practice that many Catholics are not in the habit of, after you receive communion, our Lord's Eucharistic presence remains there inside, until the species of bread and wine are broken down by our body, which is about 15 minutes. Our Lord's Eucharistic presence is literally right there inside us, right underneath our heart, in our stomach, as it were.
Speaker 2:It's amazing, yeah.
Speaker 1:Stay for 10 minutes after Mass and give thanks for what you have just received. Stay for 10 minutes after Mass and converse intimately with our Lord in that moment. Tell him your troubles right, bring your difficulties to him, bring your conditions to him.
Speaker 2:But when I do that now, I have a different perspective after reading your material. So while I'm bringing him my troubles, I am going to make a conscious effort to say, but I'm going to concentrate on your suffering right now your suffering.
Speaker 2:You know, I have the divine mercy picture behind me. You mentioned baptism and the Eucharist right Flowing out of the heart of Christ. Sister Faustina, one of the things that these young guys do, dr Curiati, in the morning is they fall to their knees before they look at their phone. They open up their hearts. Be it done to me, according to your word. The second thing they say and this is where I'm going to use your prayer and I'm going to start to get this out to these guys is that temptation is not a sin. They're flooded with temptations, these guys. Their innocence was stolen from them, their moral imaginations have been obliterated in many cases, and so we're teaching them and just walking with them to open up those temptations. This is the time to say that prayer. I feel this pain, but I also want to unite this pain with your suffering. I acknowledge your suffering. Teach me now. And, man, I just got goosebumps. Something positive, I think can come out of that.
Speaker 1:No, that's very good.
Speaker 1:We need, you know, so many people need a healing of the imagination and the healing of their memory from what they've taken in from their senses, from what they've experienced, and meditating on our Lord, on his sufferings, and in a very tangible way, st Teresa of Avila says we should never try to get beyond the humanity of Christ in our prayer into some abstract realm where we're only communing with the divinity of Christ. The humanity of Christ and the divinity of Christ are united inextricably, and so to encounter him visually, you know, using our senses, is such a beautiful and powerful way of healing the imagination and healing the memory. If people want to go deeper into this prayer, there's a website passionumtuumorg P-A-S-S-I-O-N-E-M-T-U-A-M, and maybe you could link to that in the show notes that has this prayer. It has this series of articles that I mentioned. It has the consecration of the Holy Cross of Jesus.
Speaker 2:Is that your website?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I set this up recently just to help spread devotion to this prayer and help people kind of have a place they can go to dig into it a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and where else? I mean, is that the main connection to you? If they wanted to see your work, are all the articles linked there? You said, yeah, the articles. I'm thinking what's the best way for us?
Speaker 1:to link to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the articles I'm thinking what's the best way for us to link to you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the article series on this prayer that we've talked about is on that website, passionumtumorg, if people want to see my other work that I've done on depression and on bioethics.
Speaker 2:I have your book, by the way, very good Other topics.
Speaker 1:I have a personal website, aaroncariotticom, and I also have a Substack newsletter that people can sign up for. The Substack is called Human Flourishing, so that's another way to get connected up with my work.
Speaker 2:All right, and we'd love to send you a copy of this outline for Claymore Miletus Christi, just to take a quick look at that. It's a wonderful way to disciple and again I want to use that prayer in that instance. The last point I'll make, just because my mind is moving now with everything you've unpacked, is Sister Faustina and many of the other mystics. You know there was a certain joy you brought to the heart of Christ. It reminds me John Paul said that in a sense Christ unites all our humanity with him on the cross and unites it to divinity. So everything at the Mass, we have it there. But there's a joy. There's a joy that we can bring to God. He expresses it in the diary. You know that you've brought me this joy, that other people just bring me this cold, like I'm just paraphrasing, but this coldness to them even when they pray or whatever. But you bring a depth, a warmth.
Speaker 2:I think that's what you're getting at with all these articles. I mean, you know, we're going deep. We're going deep with everything.
Speaker 1:Well, this is the strange paradox of Christianity. You'd think an article series on suffering and the cross might be sort of, you know, dour, pessimistic or kind of a downer. But the beautiful thing about this prayer is precisely that it leads to joy, that it leads to liberation and to interior peace. And you know, to go to the cross to find that might strike people initially as kind of odd, but this is the great mystery of our faith that in the depths of Christ's suffering is precisely where we find joy. So Christians are not called to go around with a long-drawn face or a pessimistic attitude. Actually, the cross always leads to the resurrection and the deeper we go into the mystery of Christ crucified, the more we can participate in and live, even in this life, the joy and the peace of the resurrection.
Speaker 2:Well, that's how we're going to end this. That was beautiful and what a pleasure again, what an honor. Like I said, I know you as a man of conviction and courage and faith, and so this was very meaningful for us and, I hope, for our whole audience. So thank you very much, thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 1:Thanks, bye-bye.
Speaker 2:Thank you.