Become Who You Are

#667 Claymore Act Four: "Awe, Wonder, and the Battle for the Human Heart...and Body!"

• Jack • Episode 667

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The ground is shifting—and not just in the news cycle. We’re watching weak foundations give way in the Church, the culture, and our own heart. 

Today Jack shares the vision of Claymore, inspired by John Paul II's map of the route back to bedrock: restore the heart, reclaim marriage and family, and renew society from the inside out. That’s the Claymore battle plan, and today we anchor it in Act Four: In the Beginning: awe, wonder, and a Cosmic explosion of Love.

We start with the stark choice between two cities—the city of man, full of PRIDE and cooperating with evil , and the city of God that humbly receives truth from the Creator. From there, we confront how fear, power, and confusion have warped our response to crisis, from shutdowns to social unrest. Then we pivot to the beginning. Jesus points us to Genesis in Matthew 19 for a reason: before sin, male and female were created to image Trinitarian love. John Paul II’s theology of the body gives us language for what our lives already feel in our bones: your body makes the visible the invisible; its spousal meaning is the call to become a gift—Free, total, faithful, and fruitful. 

That vision has teeth. We name the lie that the opposite of love is not hate, its lust or grasping; it’s use. Porn shrinks the person. Hookup culture counterfeits freedom. Gender ideology splits identity from the body. The answer isn’t outrage; it’s awe—cultivated through prayer, the sacraments, brotherhood in Christ, and daily choices that train our desires in virtue... toward truth, goodness, and beauty. 

We share concrete practices to live the truth right now, whether you’re single, dating, married, or discerning a consecrated vocation. Expect the church to look smaller, but purer. Expect mission to look local, but lasting. And expect joy when your life begins to sound like this: “This is my body, given for you.”

If this resonates, share it with someone who’s hungry for more than slogans. Subscribe, leave a review so others can find us, and email info@jp2renew.org to join the Claymore community. Let’s build on rock—together.

Here are the links to Jack's Substack and  X https://x.com/JP2Renewal

Download the Claymore Battle Plan https://jp2renew.org/claymore/

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Become Who You Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. This is a very exciting uh day today. This is our Friday update, and I know I'm late. I apologize for that for Claymore. Uh Claymore was set up as an apostolate. It's the big sword behind me for young men, a Gen Z, but it's actually expanding a little bit. We're meeting a lot of uh men a little older than that. You know, Gen Z basically goes up to about 27 years old, but we're meeting people, meeting guys that are young at heart, we're calling them. And uh we're inviting them also. They they have a desire in their heart to come back into the church. They're seeking more, and they uh they love the idea of working with young men too, sharing their own experiences and things. So this is very, very exciting. Now we are at act four as I'm unpacking this. Act four of the Claymore Handbook. So, what I'm doing, in essence, for those of you who are new, is finishing a handbook. 52 small chapters, we call them acts. It's kind of a devotional, but it's much, much more than that. It's unpacking the whole story to cut through the confusion that we're seeing today. I want to set this up, though. I can't just dive in. Uh Act 4 is very exciting, and it's called In the Beginning, All Wonder, and the Cosmic Explosion of Love. But too many things on my mind. That's why I'm late today. So I want to set this up. So I'm gonna I'm gonna unpack what's on my mind. I started to think about the world as passing away and the lust of it. This is from Matthew 7. You know, we we thought that the things around us were built on solid ground, that they were built on something that we could we could learn about, take in. We just needed more information as young guys, and we'll we're gonna build a life. But then we found out that this world, just like Jesus said in the Sermon of the Mount, that this world is built on sand. This is in temporal space. Somehow I knew this as a young man, and I unpacked this in earlier Acts. There's always been two fundamental worldviews, two spiritual cities between humanity since the fall. And you and humanity has to choose. The city of man, where man sets himself up as God, declaring, we are going to be like God, so we're gonna decide what is good and what is evil. Or as in the beginning, before sin, chapters one and two, right from Genesis, before sin came into the world, where the city of God is created, and then of course we know the flaw. Jesus comes back into the story to help us build the city of God where man humbly, not prideful anymore, but humbly acknowledges his creator and seeks his will, asking, Lord, how shall I live? This is what the young guys that we're meeting today are asking. Same thing I ask. Every single man and woman has what's called reason, intellect, free will. Reason is always searching for the truth. What is the truth of things? How should I live? Well, John Paul II's vision provides us with a practical roadmap map for rebuilding the city of God, where we're at now. He was very prophetic. At the heart of this vision is Claymore's three-step battle plan, which unfolds in three stages. So I just want to quickly go over that with you. First, you have to restore your own heart, the dignity of the person. Dividing line, Alexander Sholzenitsyn, huh, the great Russian writer who was in the gulag for eight years, he came to understand with this Marxist ideology that the dividing line between good and evil isn't out there somewhere. It is out there, but it starts here in the human heart. Then it manifests that evil from the human heart out into the world. So the first thing we have to do when we're rebuilding the city of God is not go out. We have to go in. Then we have to understand and restore marriage in the family. John Paul II said the future of humanity passes by way of the family. This is just common sense, and it's unpacked right away in Genesis chapter one or two. But every person that's got that human heart that we're rebuilding came into this world to a mother and a father. And we have to understand that and reclaim. And there's there's more to that than just the biological reality. We'll get to that in a few moments. And then we have to go out. Then we have to take that human heart. We have to understand where we came from, that our bodies are actually created to be a visible reality of God in this uh created world. And we have to go out and build a society again, not on shifting sand, but on the foundation, on the rock that Jesus talked about, on himself, on himself. Otherwise, everything's gonna collapse. And that's kind of where we're at today. Bishop Sheen would say this is an exciting time to be alive because we're we're starting to see the weeds and the weeds just separate. We could see the good and evil. We always saw evil in the world, and there was always evil in the world since the fall of man. Sometimes it wasn't so visible. And we always had this hope that everything was gonna turn out okay. Well, it'll turn out okay at the end, but we at the end is eternal life. If we don't keep our eye on that prize and God loves us and he's trying to wake us up, when I see the new Pope, Leo, I was so hopeful about him. You know, he took the name Leo from Pope Leo XIII, who came up with this structure that we're talking about, and John Paul picked up in this whole Claymore battle plan is built on, is on Catholic social teaching. It's like a triangle in front of you, like a picture of a pyramid in front of you, like a two-dimensional pyramid. And what's holding it up in that long base is marriage and the family that starts with the human heart and Christ and the church. Those are linked together. And then we go out into the world. But what you're seeing is the individual human heart is collapsing. We've taken our eye off of God. The marriage and the family are unraveling. We've thrown out God. So that whole structure, boom, the foundation's gone. And of course, everything above it is falling in and caving in. So that's where we're at right now. Why is it exciting? Because we know the story. We know the story. Can you imagine living in this world without it? So when I see the new Pope now, who I had so much hope for, following uh Pope Francis and adding to the moral confusion just recently on abortion, which I've already covered, so I'm not going to do that again. But basically, Cardinal Supic from Chicago was presenting a lifetime achievement award to Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois, who's a rabid pro-abortion politician who has been denied the Holy Eucharist in his own diocese for decades. Supic, of course, in Chicago, who's who's a woke cardinal, wants to do what, huh? He's going to give him a lifetime achievement award. You know, I shake my head at that. Well, then the Pope comes up with this mumble jumble about trying to cover for Supic. Again, I covered that, so I don't want to spend the time here. So the second thing, though, I just saw from Padillo, and I thought, man, this has got to be AI, right? It's got to be AI. But then I just dug in a little bit more. No, it's not AI. It's some climate conference in the Vatican again, you know, pulling up Pope Francis. Remember, uh, Pope Francis was, you know, they're all worshiping the Pachamama, the, you know, the earth goddess, this pagan ritual. Well, now we see Pope uh Leo, he's shown seemingly blessing a block of ice at a climate conference with thousands upon thousands of Christians are being slaughtered, martyred all over the world right now. I mean, we're hearing atrocities all over, burning of churches, shootings in churches, and millions and millions of abortions all over. And I just shake my head again. When 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, evangelical, who proclaims the gospel of life, marriage in the family, uh, he stands up for the life of the innocent so clearly, so courageously, more courageous and more clearly proclaiming the gospel of life than our shepherds in the Catholic Church to the point of being martyred for that. And again, I shake my head and I think about Charlie every single day. Even more, these so-called shepherds, think about this. They have more education than anybody. They go to school forever. So you see, it's not just information. This is a grace. Either you receive the grace or not. You can get all the information you want. You can Google that, and Charlie proved that because the the incredible person that he is, he was, he still is. You know, Charlie's just gone from this life, but he's an eternal life. He's looking down on us. And as a martyr, he is going to bring more into the church as a martyr than even he did the incredible accomplishments he did while he was on earth. But he didn't even go to college, is my point. He didn't go to college. He has this wisdom from God, you know, that one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, how wisdom and understanding, another one. Well, the world is anxious, but they have no clues, no answers. Stock market today. I just checked, boom, up again, up almost every day. It's overvalued, you know, my opinion. It's overvalued. And I was in financial services stuff, so I've studied the uh all this before I went on to get my my theology degree. But as it continues to climb, most people are just living like zombies, like bodies without a soul. That's what a zombie is, huh? You know, I remember it was just like yesterday flying home from Anchorage, Alaska, right before we heard about COVID. Well, I was a little sick in uh Anchorage. I was presenting a parish mission and some other things there. I was up there, uh brought up by uh church up there, and uh I had I picked up COVID. I didn't know it was COVID then. Um I picked it up in Seattle. I had a stopover in Seattle. Seattle is one of the places where it broke out, uh COVID uh broke out, right, in the country. I didn't know it at the time, but um, when I was flying back from uh Anchorage, Alaska 10, 11 days later, I looked at my calendar and it was imploding all of those dates that you set up, all those future presentations I was going to give all over the country, all coming off the calendar. COVID had arrived, and along with it the fear, people so afraid of being sick and dying. We didn't know, you know, we were confronted with what? With death. I mean, I was surprised that people were surprised that they were going to die. You know, I guess everybody expects just to live till they're 90 or 100 or forever. I saw these young people just cowering and and fearful and running around. Hey, this is a wake-up call. We're all gonna die. Charlie Kirk said that before he was martyred. He goes, I'm not afraid of dying. We're all going to die. But instead of this waking them up, COVID waking us up, what happens? They retreated into fear, huh? The masks, the shutdowns. They did everything the globalists wanted them to do. Satan wanted them to do as he was creating his anti-creation. But COVID to me was the alarm, was the wake-up call. You know, I knew all this. I understood, I've been talking about this, but nobody, I shouldn't say nobody, right? There was plenty of people that got it, but in general, most people didn't get it, right? They had walked away from God, from the church, and they didn't understand the globalists around the world had them hiding in fear. Just read Klaus Schae Schwab, COVID-19, the Great Reset. They had this all planned. That book came out almost before COVID did. It was amazing. What many of us came to see fairly quickly was that this was by design. This was intentional. And these same people not only manufactured this COVID virus, right? We know the gain of function, they had the fake solution ready, how the jabs that didn't stop anyone from getting the infection or prevent transmission of the virus. In fact, it was the opposite, as we're learning, how people got sick from that. But everybody had to take the jab. And if you didn't take the jab, you know, you were the one endangering the world. And they just didn't see it. But when you had the eyes to see, you had the ears to hear, you could see the bigger picture that was going on. And I just remember Pope Francis and so many of our bishops in the world, you know, showing that jab, get the jab, get the jab, you got to get the jab. Well, the reason I didn't get it is because I I heard that it might have been tested or even manufactured with cells, uh, uh human cells from aborted fetuses. And I thought, you know, until I figure that out, I'm not taking it. But anyways, to go on, when the coronavirus really first hit, you know, the stock market fell. Tens of thousands of people from all over the world lost their job or had their salary reduced, et cetera. You know, it was gut check time. And what did we what did we see happen? Small business, medium-sized business had to shut down. The big stores that were in bed with the government, nope, they could stay open. Abortion clinics, they could stay open. Liquor stores, they could stay open. But, anyways, all the small businesses and the restaurants around the world were all shutting down. But here's what happened. Here's what really made it worse. Pope Francis does what? He shuts down masses for the first time all around the world. All the mass has to shut down. Then you go, ooh, this is bad, huh? Here's the Pope himself. Here's the priests and the shepherds of the church afraid of dying. Of all the people that shouldn't be afraid of dying, they shouldn't be afraid of dying. And you saw their lack of faith, huh? And the anxiety we have about our economic well-being, the anxiety, we see this about our health. Jesus says what? Where is your treasure? Where your treasure lies, that is where your heart will be. Matthew 6, 21. Where is your treasure, Jack? Where is your treasure, men of Claymore? This is where your heart will be. We found that the Marxists, the secularists, the the materialists on this is it. This is all we have. These are enemies of God and governments around the world who pushes this indoctrination, stolen innocence of our children that you hear me talk about so much, uh pushing these gender ideologies on all of us, the 1619 project that we're teaching of history. Why? All to create and divide us so that we can fight among ourselves as always. This is the Marxist ideology. Pit one human being against the other, and then the globalists come in, the socialists, the Marxists come in, and what do they do? They suck everything from the middle class and they want control and power. And we got to remember that we're not fighting flesh and blood, as St. Paul would say. It's the rulers, the powers, the principalities of this world who are ranks of angels. You know, this is a spiritual war, right? Fear, anxiety, control, power, and destruction, attacking what? The human heart, distorting marriage and the family, and then taking over basically the world for control. We see this. This is all around us. Governments, socialists, neo-Marxists are atheists, building the city of man. Problem we have, we all forgot, huh? That we're all going to die. This is a temporal space, that we're all supposed to be connected to God, but we lost that awe and wonder. As John Paul said, there are no coincidences. So as I was getting ready to just come on and just talk about Act Four for Claymore, getting you further into the story. We're laying a foundation to who we are right here. I read a Peter Herbert, who is part of the Renewal Ministries, he was reflecting on a prophecy of Ralph Martin that Ralph gave in 1975. That's the year I graduated from high school. It was at the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Conference. Peter Herbert said it just as we're coming out of quarantine, he reminded me, the experience of what happened with George Floyd. Think about that. Just coming out of quarantine, things are going to get better now, maybe, right? We're all nervous. And then George Floyd. Well, what happened with George Floyd? They turned that into a nuclear bomb that went off in the terms of the response to it around the world and the fact that it touched deep, unhealed wounds in the life of the United States and our history, culture. But it was amazing that that it was divided by race again. When we had come to the point where we're starting to accept one another, starting to get rid of all of this stuff. But you know, that's not good for the globalists. That's not good for the Marxists. They got to create those race divisions, economic divisions, any kind of way that they can take and destroy the human heart. Don't forget that this is Satan wanting to destroy the Omague, the image of God and the world, which is which is people. Some people responded appropriately to that George Floyd incident, but then you see what? The anarchy, the spirit of revolution, disordered spirits, and there's a whole lot of shaking going on. We just saw that this was unleashed around the world in the cities in the United States. It was amazing. That the same people that were locking us down, telling us we had to wear masks, we couldn't go outside, now let what uh BL uh BLM, right? Antifa, and they let them loose. Nope. They can congregate, they can go down cities with, I remember with the bullhorns waking people up at two o'clock in the morning saying that they're coming for them. And this was allowed to happen. But the other people, the taxpaying citizens, the middle class that the government always wants to take down because they're independent, uh, the small businesses because they're independent thinkers. Oh, you got to stay in your home, you gotta be fearful. And they just wanted to show us, right? But you know, I think about TDS, huh? Trump derangement syndrome. Why? Why? Because he saw through this, you know, and he wants to give our country back to the people. He wants to do the opposite of the globalists. He comes out against us all the time, right? This is a big problem. Because every institution in the United States and the church uh in in many parts of it have been what? We have the deep state, the deep church. It's been captured. And we see this, and we see this power against it, and we see all these either naive or people on the side of of of uh of really Satan at this point, you know. And uh Charlie said this, you know, when he talked about uh the gender ideologies and all this, he would cut through this. No, you gotta stand for life, you gotta stand for marriage and a family. He said this, he said, if you're 18 and you think you're the opposite sex, you have a mental illness. If you're eight years old and you think you you're the opposite sex, your mother has a has a mental illness. You know, this is a wake-up call. And he was martyred for that. See, they they couldn't have that voice. Why? Because he was starting to speak to you guys, to young people, and he was starting to wake you up and having a dialogue with you, and we had to we could we couldn't have that. We would wake up a whole generation. And and if we lose this last generation here, then we lose the country. At the end of the day, you know, just last night or any night, you could watch the riots, you could watch them pushing back on the police right here in Chicago. You know, you can't have law and order. Don't Trump don't send anybody here. We're gonna let the violence go. You know, you think about Chicago, the most violent city in the world when it comes to murders, and also the most rabid uh pro-abortion uh state now, Illinois. We we might be competing with one or two others, with Governor Pritzker, and you see this. Ah, this is what's going on, right? In New York City, they're gonna vote for a Marxist, it looks like, to take over the city. When you read the goals of Marxism, one of the one of them, there's 45 goals of Marxism. 17, get control of the schools, use them as transmission belts for socialism and propaganda, soften the curriculum, get control of the teachers' unions, put the party line in textbooks. This is exactly what's happening here, right? Number 24, eliminate all laws governing obscenity, calling them censorship. You see this. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography, obscenity in books, magazines, present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as normal and healthy, eliminate prayer in the schools, infiltrate the churches, discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate and old-fashioned, discredit the founding fathers, belittle all forms of American culture, and you see them going after marriage in the family. That's just a few of those 45, right? This is the weeds and the wheat that Jesus talked about in Matthew 13, that we're separating ourselves into the weeds and wheat depending on where we fall on all this. And why these trials? Because the Lord doesn't have attention of his people and the attention of the world that's building a whole worldview and a way of life that acts as if God doesn't exist. We've thrown God out. When the reality is we're made for God, in love, by love, and for love. And a lot of us are really concerned, obviously, with what's happening in our country, Canada, many other countries, the Western world, Western civilization, uh Christian civilization has fallen already. We've already seen this. This is an aggressive secularism that wants to stamp out Judy, uh Judeo-Christian values. It's hostile to Christ and the church, that wants to punish us, arrest us, those of us who believe in God want us to be even removed from social media. We saw even President Trump before he became president was thrown off of social media. We can't forget this kind of stuff. If we forget history, then you know we just fall into the same patterns. We got to wake up right now. The world uh elite want to impose a control on the world and the censorship where they don't want the word of God to be spoken anymore. We need to speak it, whether it's convenient or not. We need the courage of the Lord. We need to take on the courage of Charlie Kirk. We need the fortitude of God. We need the Holy Spirit to give us that courage and fortitude and to be a right relationship with Him. You know, Jesus said, My kingdom is not of this world. He created this world to bring the image of God in it through our bodies, through who we are as human beings. But it's a fallen world, and it was never supposed to be our home. This was a place to make a decision for God. We have to be free. So God created us free to make a decision in this little lifetime that we have to choose where we're gonna spend the eternal life. We need to know that our primary loyalty, our primary family is with our brothers and sisters in Christ. This is Claymore. Let me say that again, right? Our city, right, is the body of Christ. Jesus said, I'm gonna come down in the last day and it'll be the city of God. And again, that is built up of all our brothers and sisters. That's not a building, that's not a structure. You know, Pope Francis or anybody else, they can close the masses down. And this is gonna happen again. We can see all kinds of different things coming. We don't know exactly how it's gonna come, but at the end of the day, we have to have God within us. We are temples, St. Paul said, of the Holy Spirit, and our brothers and sisters in Christ, we have to stay together. We have to build this community of love. That's why the third thing in the battle plan, first get your heart back, understand what marriage and family is, and then go out and proclaim the gospel. We have to do that, and we're building up the city of God. It's going to be small, it's gonna be smaller. That's just the way it goes. But Charlie shows us an example of what the theme of Vatican II proclaimed. John Paul was always talking about that and reminding us it was a universal call to holiness for the laity, for each one of us to stand up. John Paul saw very clearly it was a time for the laity to rise. This is the time that we're in right now. We need to be ready for that time, which is what? It's here. Sister Lucia Fatima. The time will come where the great battle between our Lord and Satan is going to be over marriage, the family, the human heart. And this is where we're in right now. So whether it comes to another disaster or not, we all sense this. It's not just coming, it's here. And we need to recenter our lives on the Lord Himself, who is with us every day, and not be so dependent on buildings and structures and all these things that we're doing. Feed from the Eucharist, and we might not always have the Eucharist. So don't put that off. Go into Mass, go into confession, receive that as often as you can. Try to have daily Eucharist if you can. There'll be a time where we may not be able to get that. There was a time where we couldn't, don't forget COVID. We have to remember when other things happen in our lives, that the body of Christ is also our brothers and sisters in the Lord. Again, this is Claymore to go out and disciple one another, build out communities. This is the whole reason. So are you ready to depend only on me, Jesus said, huh? Not on all the uh institutions, in other words, all the parishes, the schools. We're all working for all that. But at the end of the day, we see this coming. It's really a tough battle for those of us who are fighting this battle. And you can see the decline. So if we're really in it, you could see the battle, huh? Well, God's given us an opportunity to be ready for all of that. COVID was just a warning signal, you know. It's like a it's like a big Navy battleship, you know, firing over the bow of a ship, that warning signal, you know. And that's what COVID was. It was a it was a pretty big wake-up call, and people still don't get it. And we can see the weeds in the wheat, huh? Maybe uh this recent warning of the closing of the churches, the economic times that we're in right now. Young men understand this. Uh young people do. They're very discouraged by our taxes going up. And you know, think about the just that socialism, Marxism, what do they do? They always want to take down the middle class. They want to make you unhopeful in the future and and be what? Be instead of being dependent on God, they want you to be dependent on, you know, daddy or father state. It's a man-made thing, it's going to crumble. It's a wake-up call to make sure that we're not dependent on external things, but on Jesus Christ Himself and to spread that within each other to build up this body of Christ. Why is God allowing this? Love. Eternal life with him. The handbook that uh I'm almost finished at 52 Acts, the 52 acts for one act for uh every week that we share with one another, but it's it's not just a series of stories, it's building up a foundation. Again, the human heart, understanding marriage and a family, understanding God's plan and how we go out into the world and spread the gospel. And basically, this is act four that I'm gonna unpack right now. We're laying that foundation. Again, you're created in love, by love, and for love. Don't forget that. God's plan is not in some distant place way out there. Where is God's plan? I'm gonna Google it. I'm gonna get more information. No, no, no, no, no. It's not about more information. It's the DNA that runs within you. It's not out there. It's inside, huh? It's in your heart and your soul, stamped right into your very bodies, and your creation is male and female. This is why the world pushes abortion, gender ideologies, same-sex marriage, all those things to distort the very image of God in the created world. So grab a coffee, buckle up. This won't take long to finish up. It's called Act Four. In the beginning, awe, wonder, and the cosmic explosion of love. Take a deep breath, huh? Name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen. This again is setting the foundation up. This is Act Four. If you haven't had a chance yet, go back and read the the previous uh acts. They're they're short, but like I said, these are I call them acts instead of ch uh chapters. They've got Q and uh QA at the end so that we can share this with one another. So to start out, the human body with its sex, its masculinity and femininity seen in the very real mystery of creation, is not only the source of fruitfulness bringing children into the world, as in the whole natural order of animals, etc. But our bodies contain from the very beginning what John Paul called the espousal attribute. That's the the power to express authentic love, to be a sign and a signal, a sacramental sign of Trinitarian love in the world. This is what we're created to be. This is why it's so sacred. So, brothers, let's rewind once again to the very start, to the beginning, where it all kicked off before sin with a bang of awe, wonder, and love. Your heart's wired for something real, something true, good, and beautiful. That's not just a feeling. Again, it's woven into your very DNA. What the philosopher Plato called Eros, burning desire to love and be love, but it's also more, huh? He said it's it's all seeking the truth of love, the goodness of love, the beauty of authentic love. And so this is really what it's for. You got to be looking for truth, goodness, and beauty in the world. In a world drowning in moral confusion, cutting through the noise isn't about learning new information. It's about reconnecting with that deep yearning in your own soul. Jesus pointed us back to the start to find it. Matthew 19, when the Pharisees testing Jesus by asking, Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? They're trying to trap Jesus, but Jesus doesn't play their game. He directs that redirects them to God's original plan. Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one, so there are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. Well, they push back on him. He says, Well, why in the Old Testament? Why did Moses allow one to give a certificate of divorce to his wife and put her away? But Jesus shuts it down. He's not going to limit himself to that. He says, For the it's because of the hardness of your heart that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning it was not so. And he points us right back to the very beginning. That's your roadmap, brothers. God's design for love written into your body before sin messed things up. Go back to Genesis 1. Betasheet. This is how the whole Bible starts. Betashit in the beginning. The earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, swept over the waters. Then boom, a flash of light pierces the dark, and God calls it good because he is good. He is love. He's going to always take chaos, right? This dark abyss, this chaos, and bring order, goodness, love, truth into it. This is what God does. This is why when we throw out God, while we see all this disorder, we hear God building the story, how he calls it a masterpiece, a lush garden of Eden. He's got wildflowers blooming, uh, animals roaming, birds singing. It's a sage set for a divine love story. This is right from Genesis chapter one, very early on, verses 11 to 25. On the sixth day now, God pauses, like he's about to drop the mic, huh? Boom, here's a mic drop. He says, now he pulls back into himself on the sixth day. He's got everything ready for a wedding feast. And this is what he says. Let us make man now in our image after our likeness. This is God talking, right? He's not by himself. He's a community already, a family. Let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures to crawl on the ground. And what did he do? God created man in his image, in the divine image he created him. How? Male and female, he created them. God blesses them and says what? Be fertile and multiply. Be fertile and multiply. Bring children into the world, fill the earth and subdue it. This is yours. Go out and work it. Discover it. You know, you use the raw material that I've given you and turn it into things. You be creative, you co-create with me. Work our work along with what? Marriage and the family. This is right from the beginning. This is before sin entered the world. This is it, brothers. The truth, the first truth about you, you're not just a random guy. You're made in God's image, male and female, to reflect his what? Trinitarian love in the world. The Father pours himself, think about this. What does that look like? The Father pours himself into the Son. The Son returns that love, and the Holy Spirit flows from this exchange of love. That's the Trinity. Well, your body, your masculinity is a sign of that love, and so is a woman's body, made to give yourself fully to each other, especially in marriage, where a child flows from this exchange of love. John Paul II nails it. He said the human body with its sex, again, its masculinity and femininity, seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only the source of fruitfulness and procreation, as is the other animals can do, but contains from the beginning what he calls the spousal attribute, that's the power to express love, precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift, and to this gift fulfills the very meaning of their being and existence. You know, I got this on a whole new level when my wife and I welcomed our first daughter into the world, our first child into the world was a daughter. Holding her for the first time, looking at my wife, I was blown away. From our love, a new life came into being, a third person created through us and God. It was like seeing the Trinity in action, our self-giving love, blessed by God, where the image mirrors the one who was the model, the love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each child after that just drove it home deeper for us. In marriage, you become co-creators with God, reflecting his love in a one flesh union that's not just physical, it's sacred. See what the world wants to do, twist and distort that sacredness. John Paul drops a bombshell. The body, this is his whole summa of theology of the body, the body, your body, my body, the body alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible. Well, what's invisible? Love, the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of this world, that invisible mystery hidden in God from all time immemorial, and thus to be a sign of it. Your body, brothers, isn't just flesh. It's a sacrament, a sign of God's love, or should be, created, male and female. You're built to give yourself now as a man, built to give ourselves to a woman in marriage, to become one flesh and to bring that life into the world. That's the spousal meaning of your body, a call to love like God loves, selflessly, faithfully, fruitfully. And then the spousal meaning of love is not just marriage, though. It's the two great commandments, and we see this in our religious people that are faithful to God's plan, who actually skip this marriage and to become that life and love in the world, spiritual fathers, spiritual mothers. And so spousal meaning of the body to John Paul is our bodies are built to be like Jesus on the cross. This is my body given for you. Now, the fullest sign of that, of course, is marriage in the family. But the world's trying to bury this truth. It's normalized the fall, since distortion of love. It wants to twist and distort that. John Paul said, say with pornography, the problem with pornography is not that it reveals too much, it reveals too little. What doesn't it reveal? It doesn't reveal the person made in the image and likeness of God. The opposite of love then is not hate. The opposite of love is using another person. This whole culture, the hookup culture, comprehensive sex ed in public schools, gender ideologies all tell you that sex is just for pleasure devoid of any meaning or purpose. Another illusion, falling for that old lie, this narrative of moral relativism. We see this every generation that's that forgets about God. And we see this through history. We see this in the Old Testament. Over the whole Old Testament is that story of God calling them the P his people back and then falling away, God calling. This is the same thing that's happening today, right? Divorce in atheistic uh secular world should be easy. Traditional marriage is optional. Love's whatever you feel like. But that's not freedom, guys. That's a lie. Genesis shows us where it started. Satan tempted Adam and Eve, and they bought into his lies, trading the awe and wonder for what? For shame. So how do you fight back? First, you got to reconnect with awe. The awe and wonder, like uh Plato said with Eros, right? It's sensual. We feel this in our body, this desire to love and be loved. When we see a woman, a woman sees a man. But it's even more than that, huh? This this connection that we're supposed to be filled with divine life and love and then be that person of love in the world. So you got to connect with all that awe and wonder. Everything Plato said that's true, good, and beautiful in the world. Look at a woman, look at nature, receive the Eucharist with the wonder of Adam seeing Eve for the first time before sin. You know, the power of this with a pure heart, no shame. That's number one. Rediscover and reconnect with your awe and wonder with your heart and what it's really seeking, even if it gets to be an ache, right? Stay in that ache, turn to prayer, invite God into that ache, right? Second, guard your masculinity. You gotta ditch the porn, reject the hookup culture, treat women with respect, not as objects. And in order to do that, you're gonna need grace. So, third, above all, pray for strength. Open up your temptations. That's what Claymore says. First thing in the morning, temptation's not a sin. Open up those temptations, invite Jesus in. John Paul said prayer aligns your heart with God's love, giving you the guts to live for truth. And fourth, fourth, live the spousal meaning. Whether you're single, whether you're dating, whether you're called to the priesthood, make every choice a gift of self. Untwist that selfishness, become a gift, pointing to and uniting with Christ's love for the church. You're made to love, brothers, and that love builds a culture of life. It's all connected. The next acts that we're gonna do as we come up here are gonna show you how to defend it in the family and beyond. Get ready. This is your mission. And it all starts with your heart. Everything will be in the show notes. Check the show notes. I put these out on Substack, but the best way I think is to reach out to us on X and become a community. Uh we're building out, we're in this all the plans in the work. We're going to build out our own website for this, our own podcast for this. Uh the handbook will be out. All of these things will be out, but you don't have to wait for any of that. These podcasts on Friday support Claymore, these are these acts that I'm writing, and I'll be finishing this book probably in the next three or four weeks, but then it has to be published and et cetera, et cetera. So it's it's a way, it's a ways off yet. But you don't have to wait. We don't have time. There's an urgency here. So you can read each one of those acts. Again, this was act four. Put those together, discuss them. Each, there's uh discussion questions at the end. For example, uh discussion, question number one: how can you rediscover the awe and wonder of God's design for your body as male and female, especially in a world pushing distorted views of sexuality? You know, you have to read scripture itself, just the scripture we're unpacking today. I would suggest that you pick up uh Theology of the Body for Beginners by Christopher West. It's a great book. There's a lot of meat there, but it's in a way you can understand it. Again, John Paul reveals that the body is created in God's love through the spousal meaning and how you can build that relationship. But the spousal meaning of the body goes, remember, beyond married couples. So if you're not married, it goes out to love of neighbor. We're called to receive divine life and love and in turn be that love in the visible world. John Paul would bring this home for young people all the time. He said, Young people, you know that your life has meaning to the extent that it's given away as a gift for others. Start that right away. And then uh another the last uh question there to discuss is in what ways can prayer help you receive this divine love, resist the culture's life lies, and embrace the truth of your creation? It gives you some catechism uh references there, and these will all be connected again when you pull up these articles. Go on X. There's a community there that we're building out. It's kind of a holder for us right now where everything is placed, but you have to be referred in. So shoot me an email if you want to get in there. Info at jpthenumber2renew.org. Shoot us an email, tell us you want to get in there because this isn't just about news and posting anything. We're supposed to, you know, really with this claymore, we're staying on track and we want to just put uh relevant questions, answers, dialogue inside there. Uh so just shoot us an email about that. Hey, God bless you. In the meantime, again, don't forget the the Claymore battle plan. Download that. You can go to our website, JP, the number two. Again, it's it'd be in the show notes. There's a link in resources there. Go to the resources, pull down the Claymore battle plan. It's only five, six pages. Download that, have that in front of you, share, start to share it with different guys, connect with them, reach out to us, we'll help you support it uh in other ways. We're we're working with young guys all over the place, and they're building up these communities. Uh, again, as the structure starts to continue to unravel, we want us to connect and be lifted up, be lifted up. It's a great time to be alive, guys. Step into the plan. Don't forget, when you step into God's plan, it's a win-win situation. Not only will you win the culture back, you know, and and and be a catalyst to proclaim the gospel in a very, very uh violent world that wants to take Christianity out, but it's a win-win in that you'll be regaining your own eternal salvation and you'll know it. You'll feel it in your heart. Uh, number three in that battle plan is your own formation. Very, very important. Go through that and uh especially that early morning ritual, those three simple things, you'll read it there. Hey, God bless you. Good to be with you. Talk to you again soon, everybody. Bye bye.