Become Who You Are

#670 Claymore: Act V-- "Stepping Up to True Love": Fight for Marriage, Family, and the Human Heart

• Jack • Episode 670

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A sword only matters if someone is willing to lift it. We gathered to name the real war for the modern male heart and to chart a path back to love that doesn’t flinch from truth. Not a lecture, a battle plan: see the enemy, recover your purpose, and protect what makes civilization possible—life and the family.

We start by cutting through the fog. The world isn’t neutral; it’s contested ground. We talk candidly about how hearts go numb, how vice becomes normal, and why broken desires spill into broken marriages, fractured families, and anxious kids. Drawing from John Paul II’s encyclicals and Theology of the Body, we anchor our stance in a robust vision of the human person—reason, intellect, and free will made in the image of God. Then we go to the source: Jesus’ words in Matthew 19, “from the beginning,” where male and female, one flesh, and indissoluble union define marriage’s truth. If the last great battle centers on marriage and family, then guarding them is not politics—it’s fidelity to God's Plan. 

From there, we press into the heart-level fight. Lust doesn’t just distort behavior; it distorts vision. We contrast the culture’s scripts of objectification and spectacle with Christ’s healing gaze in the story of the woman caught in adultery: mercy that restores dignity and commands a new start. John Paul II’s insight guides us—concupiscence threatens but doesn’t erase the spousal meaning of the body. 

Practical steps follow: morning prayer at the moment of temptation, a clear break with porn and the lies it teaches, and accessible study with Theology of the Body to retrain desire toward self-gift. None of this is about sin management. It’s about transformation, learning to love as God loves, and becoming men who can be trusted with vows and with the vulnerable.

We close by inviting you into brotherhood. Claymore isn’t just ideas; it’s formation, accountability, and resources you can use today—downloadable battle plans, discussion prompts, and a growing community that stands shoulder to shoulder. Maybe we can shift the culture over time; certainly we can rescue the people right next to us. 

Subscribe, share this with a brother who needs it, and leave a review so more men find the path back to a clear mind, a clean heart, and a love that endures.

Act Five Here! "Stepping Up To True Love"

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, men of Claymore. I hope you're doing okay. For those of you new, joining us, the big sword behind me is our logo for Claymore. Claymore is the big Claymore sword made famous by William Wallace in the movie Braveheart. If if you are too young to remember Braveheart, go dig that up. Mel Gibson produced that and was also a star actor in a very, very good, but uh you don't have to as part of Claymore, but you'll get an idea of the warriors that we're in and the battles that we're in. Claymore, uh, let me just read you a little bit, and I hope uh you'll download the Claymore battle plan from our website, but go to our websites in the show notes. This is a discipleship program. Let me just read a little bit from this Claymore Militus Christi Soldiers for Christ, this battle plan. Claymore was inspired by John Paul II's apostolic letter to young people, Delectia Michi, means dear friends. We go dear friends, dear brothers. His encyclicals also, he's wonderful encyclical on life and on truth, and also on his Catholic uh social teaching. And then finally, theology of the body. But you don't have to know all those things right now, but it's inspired by John Paul II's works. You'll see this in the battle plan. Claymore is a movement of young men with the courage, the reason, and the intellect to do what men of like-minded minds and hearts throughout the ages have done, which is what? To go out and seek the truth. Then, upon finding this treasure, the truth, what's true, what's good, what's beautiful, especially the beauty of authentic love, to share it with another brother, to disciple one another, building a community of brothers, all seeking what's true, good, and beautiful. So that's what we're doing. Discipling one another. Claymore gives you the framework to do that, to know what to discuss, to bring you into formations. It still gives you plenty of flexibility in there. Very, very important that you get your own heart back together. That's how all this starts, right? So to succeed, you must know the plan and know that you're not living in a neutral zone. You came into a world at war with an enemy that seeks your destruction. Over the past decades, the enemy has gained a lot of territory, and this goes all the way back to history, but the history of the church for sure, when Saint Peter, our first pope, warned us, he wrote this in in one Peter chapter five, verses six through eight. Brothers, he said, Humble yourself, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that in due time he may exalt you. Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you. Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. So that's what he that's what's going on. You know, this is a spiritual war. I wonder how many people really, really understand that. It's being played out across the globe in real time right now, right before our eyes. How many actually see it? As Christianity has been pushed out of our hearts, this is where it all starts, guys. It all starts in our hearts. When you get all this noise coming at you, and you wonder what is going on, always starts with the heart. When we push God out when we haven't been praying, going to the sacraments, it's a spiritual battle. And that void, that vacuum is filled up by Satan. And this is a damaging ripple effect as evil actually comes into our own hearts. Lies, distortions, pornography, abortion, gender ideologies, all these things. We just take all this garbage and we don't realize how much garbage we're taking in until we bring the faith back into our hearts and into our mind, our senses and stuff. And once we bring that in, then we start to look around, we start to see the darkness, and you go, whoa, that was there all the time. We just didn't see it. We're like that proverbial frog sitting in the pot. We just get used to it. Everything becomes normalized. That's what you're seeing today. When your heart becomes darkened, it damages in your marriages, your future marriages, the family becomes dysfunctional. It's a ripple effect. This is a damaging ripple effect. So from to think about this, all these human hearts and they have given themselves over to evil, and then it goes out and affects your relationships, your families, and everything. And you see this in children today. Children's mental illnesses weigh up, anxiety, depression, even suicidal thoughts. We meet with kids, some you know, they're really hurting, they're really asking for answers. This is why you could come in. Because once you step into this claim or battle plan, and again, this is a battle plan of Jesus Christ. We're just putting it in a systematic way that we can come back and understand the big picture that's going on, starting again with our hearts going out into marriages and the families, the culture, and the nation. Well, 70% of Americans are on some type of prescription drug today for anxiety or depression, for pain. And what do you think about all this brokenness and it's going on in cultures across the world, including ours? You start to see how corrupt the shows are on television, for instance, playing on Netflix and Disney, even. You know, you see all the twisting and distortion of who we are as human beings. It's all an attack on the heart and marriage on the family. Chaos then comes into our cities with all the fatherless men and women we see out there. Forty-three percent of every child being born in the United States today is born out of wedlock. So nobody's taken them to mass, nobody's given them a moral uh structure, bringing virtues and values around the dinner table. I mean, these poor young people are just getting blown around by the spirit of the age. So atheism replaces God. And this, again, this has that ripple effect as our reason, intellect, and free will. Those that's what makes us different than all the animals, right? We have reason, intellect, and free will. When that becomes darkened and it we're shut off to everything that's true, good, and beautiful, it's replaced by irrational behavior. This leads to violence. It always does. And then an unending cycle of hatred and dysfunction that people can't escape from. It all begins in the individual human heart again, and that ripple weakens the two pillars of every single civilization in human history life itself, a child, and then marriage and the families. These are obviously linked together, but they're linked to Christ and the church. When you take God out, this is the Imago Day, the image and likeness of God. And when you take this out, those pillars break down. The child and the womb is attacked. We have abortion, and we have these gender ideologies that attack the nuclear family, things like same-sex marriage. And so when you think about that, you're damaging the very basic cell of human society, of human communities from the very, very beginning. Again, what we're doing, huh, is we're taking out the actual building blocks of society, and you see this whole thing crumbling down. So why are why am I, and why are you disciples and friends of Jesus Christ? Well, it began for me, and I know for many of you because I because I'm with you, looking for peace that the world doesn't give. We're looking for answers that the world doesn't have. We're looking for truth that is always true, no matter what. We're looking for a rock, a solid foundation that we could build our lives on. Why am I Christian? Because it's tr it's true. And everything good, beautiful in my life has flowed out of church, church and the Catholic Church's teaching. And it came back into my heart. And when you get redeemed, and when you get saved from the enslavement that you don't even notice sometimes from the evil that was in my own heart, say, you start the light bulb goes off and you start to look around, you start to see everything that's going on. So this brings us to Claymore Act 5. It's in the show notes. You can basically what I'm going to share with you today, you can download. It's a published article that you can actually take and share that with a friend. There'll be discussion questions at the end of that. So everything will be in the show notes. If you go to X, we have a community now built on underneath our uh John Paul to Renewal Center Center page on X. We are going to move that. This is just a placeholder for now as we're building out the the website for Claymore, and then everything will be in one place. It'll make it easy for everybody. But anyways, if you want to get join that community, even though it's just in pilot now, we are letting people in there. You have to be referred or asked to go in there because we don't it's just really posting these articles and things and communicating among ourselves. And so it's not really being marketed or pushed out yet. As soon as the website gets there and we have a permanent home, then we'll be sharing that that more. So let's let's talk about this, right? Let's buckle up, go into Act Five, and it and the reason this uh what I just mentioned to you is you can go back in and read the the earlier four. This is all setting up a foundation on these two pillars, marriage and the family, the ch the child life itself, linking it up to the church so that we can go out and build a life, including work, the culture. We want to build something here in this nation and take our nation back from all those that would would uh would would take her down. And that this revolution is going on. Again, you have to just go out and look. So let's try to make sense of all this. This is Act V, stepping up to true love. And this is the fall and the call to be a man of God. This is from Matthew chapter 19, verses 3 through 8. Jesus said, Because of the hardness of your heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. See, he's taking us back to the beginning, the way marriage and the family was designed. So it starts out this letter that I wrote, which again is linked, the Lectiamici, John Paul's work again, means dear friends. So dear friends and brothers, let's face it, authentic love is under attack. Sister Lucia Fatima nailed it when she wrote the last great battle between our Lord and Satan is going to be over marriage in the family. And this is what we're this is what we're finding right now. The family is the heartbeat of humanity and the basic building block of every society through history. But Satan's coming for it hard, twisting what God made good. He doesn't have his own clay. Remember that Satan doesn't have his own clay. He can only distort, twist, and distort what God created good. And nothing hits harder than attacking the two pillars of society, the lives of the most innocent, our children, and the sacred bond of marriage that brings them into being and protects them. So you're in this fight, brothers. You and I, and time is short. The path forward is going to be led by young men who have the courage and the wisdom to step up with you. This is why we need to go out and build communities, because we need each other to stand up for this, and we need a lot of young men to stand up for this because we want to create a nation here in the United States again. Take this back from the radicals. Really, you know, when you look out and you see all the radicals and people taking this down, don't forget that each one of those persons behind them is the real enemy. In other words, that person I'm looking at is really not the enemy. The enemy, Satan himself, and the evil ones are the actual enemy. If you don't understand that, you really miss what's going on. It gets back again to Sister Lucia. The last great battle between our Lord and Satan is going to be over marriage and the family. Don't we see that again? Abortion, gender ideologies, etc. So this is why Jesus is coming back in and he shows us the way. So when the Pharisees, Pharisees came up to Jesus, they tried to trap him. They ask him, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? This is an attack on marriage again. They wanted to just easily step away from their marriages, she's not doing it for me anymore. I'm going to go on. Well, Jesus doesn't take debate. He points back to God's 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 they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Well, they push back on Jesus. Why did Moses in the Old Testament allow one to have a certificate of divorce and put him put put his wife away? Why did Moses say that? Then they're asking Jesus in the Old Testament. Why did he allow divorce? Well, Jesus shut it down. For the hardness of your hearts, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning, it wasn't the plan. It was not so. So that's your call, brothers. First understand marriage in the beginning before sin harden our hearts. Then say yes to Christ's act of redemption. Accept his grace. This is what the battle plan starts with. And get your house in order, your own heart in order. Remember that Jesus didn't come for sin management. He came with power, such power that Saint Athanasus, an early church father and the doctor of the church, proclaimed that the Son of God became man so that we might become God. Let that sink in. You're called to enter into a union and communion with God that's so intimate and real that God himself uses spousal language throughout the Bible to describe it. In Isaiah 62, verse 5, the prophet Isaiah says this, as a young man, he's describing God here. As a young man marries a virgin, your builder, your creator, shall marry you. As a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall God rejoice in you. God uses spousal language because this is the intimacy God wants with us. We express this in the visible world. These are linked together. Remember just the two great commandments. It's not, it's not brain surgery here. Be filled with divine life and love and then live that out in the world, in your in your relationships, if you're if you get married and you're marriage, but always love your neighbor. That's the first thing we always start with. Marriage is a big deal. It's a sacred bond. First, this bond is restored between you and God. This is always where it starts, because he has to give us a new heart. This radiates out, this ripple effect out to love of neighbor. And Genesis 1 lays it all out. In the beginning, Betesheet, the word for in the beginning. This is how the whole Bible starts out. You know, the chaos over the you, you know, just read those first words and think about the chaos. It's just darkness, it's just, you know, there's no order there. And God comes in to create order. Betesheet, huh? In the beginning. God created man as his image then, in the divine image, he created them. How? He created them male and female. So you're not here by accident. So don't sell yourself short. You are a gift from God, made to share in his love. This is where it all starts, but sin messed it up. The serpent slithered in, right? This evil came in, cunning and deceptive. He said to Adam and Eve, Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden? There's a lie right there. Did God tell you not to eat from any of the trees? Well, Eve caught on to that. She says, Well, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. It's only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. That one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That God said, You shall not eat of it lest you die. And the serpent says to Eve, You certainly will not die. No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it, your eyes will be open, and you'll be like gods who know what is good and what is evil. That lie is the lie that we're feeling today. Be your own God, but without God. What did St. Athanasius say? God came into this world, right? Took on a human body so that we could become like God to redeem us, huh? We enter into union and communion with Christ, into that body and the soul that He pours out to us. So Jesus comes so that we can be elevated, but here you can be your own God, but without God, you can't be God without God. This started to fall. And we're still living in its shadow. Today the fall's been normalized. Flip on the TV and you'll see it everywhere. I recall a couple Super Bowls back where this rich and famous middle-aged uh celebrity, I'm not even going to say her name, performing a pole dance at Super Bowl for millions to watch. And when I I watched that, what I thought, what compels a rich, famous woman getting it now now in middle age, you know, not at 20-something. She still looked good for her age, but it's all relative, my friends. So what compels her, with all the money, all the fame, all the stardom, to seek the admiration of men, not for her gifts, not for her beauty, not for her talent, but it's an object of desire. It's not just one performance now. It's a culture that says exposing your body, chasing fame, or living for pleasure is that's what it's all about. But it changes. What happens? It changes how men see women. This is what's happening when they do that. Your girlfriend, your sisters in Christ, your future wife. How many of you see them differently with this culture? How many of you are hooked on pornography, twisting love into lust, huh? Instead of being self-giving, we grasp and we take. The lies don't stop there. Even in the public school systems, they're in on a pushing these gender ideologies, critical race theory, and fear, driving narratives like climate emergencies and even forcing jabs, these vaccines that have not all been thoroughly proven safe on children. Why are they taking 72 vaccines? That's a whole nother issue there. But it's not that there are 72 vaccines or whatever the number is, it's always going up, but that they haven't been thoroughly proven safe for kids, and we're giving it to them. You know, you can't make this stuff up. These aren't just ideas. They're attacks on man, created male and female, with a reason, intellect, and free will in the image and likeness of God. We're supposed to use our reason and intellect to see these ideologies, to see these lies and distortions, but so many people don't, right? Because their minds and and and intellect have been darkened. Satan's goal, listen to this, because when you hear all this confusion and stuff and all these different things, you can get really tired. Always just come back to those two pillars. Satan's goal, the bottom line, destroy the Imago Day, God's image in you, create it male and female. He attacks the innocent through abortion, families through divorce, and a new definition of marriage, and so is division, fear, and hatred. Always starts there in the family. You know, when you come into a family and you don't have a mom and a dad, well, everybody has a mom and a dad, whether they show up for work or not, or something happened to them. Uh, it's very difficult, John Paul would say. You know, read Letter to the Families that John Paul wrote. You can just go online, uh, the Vatican has it there. Say John Paul II, Letter of the Families, and you'll find it there. And read that. Even the first few pages of that, it's really beautiful. But John Paul II said that the human body, male and female, is meant to express love, to be a sincere gift to one another. But sin, concupiscence, the this this pulling down everything that's true, good, and beautiful is within it. Well, it twists and distorts that gift. Jesus dug deeper in the Sermon on the Mount. He said this, you have heard it said that you should not commit adultery, but I say to you, whoever looks at a woman with lust to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. You see, lust isn't just an action, it's a heart problem. Reducing a person to an object, the exact opposite of love. You know, the opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is per se pornography. Instead of being a gift to one another, we take and grasp and you see each other as objects. Satan's loves this. So this isn't just about rules. Jesus didn't come for sin management. He came with power to transform your heart. Why do I believe in Jesus Christ? Because of the power. The power. I know this in my own heart, and so do many of you. The world's normalized lust, division, and hardness of heart, but John Paul II says the spousal meaning of the body, this call to love one another, hasn't been totally lost. It's been threatened by concupiscence, this almost like a gravity that wants to pull us into sin. But the gospel's stronger. Look at Jesus with the woman caught in adultery. He doesn't condemn her, but calls out her accusers first. So do you remember that? She got caught in adultery, they're going to stone her to death. Jesus comes by. And what happened? They all turned and went away. And Jesus left alone with that woman. She looked up to him and he said to her, Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? She said, No, no one, Lord. And Jesus said, Neither I, neither do I condemn you, but go sin no more. See, Jesus saw her dignity, her worth, and he's calling you to do the same. You're standing at a crossroads, brothers, like Adam and Eve at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The world's pushing you to lust, to use, to follow lies, but your heart's made for more. It's made for love. Real, selfless, life-giving love. John Paul II told young people, Christ asking you about your conscience, your moral awareness, the plan for your life. Your choice is shape not only just you, but the people in the culture around you. Lust obscures love, but it doesn't erase it. You've got to take control of your heart. So what's your first move? First see women in your life and around you as God does. Whether it's your crush, your other sisters in Christ, or a stranger, treat them with respect, not as objects. Ditch the porn, lean into prayer. Especially remember praying with temptations. That's part of the Claymore plan. To pray with temptations, the first thing we do in the morning. So important. And there's also, you can download actually the actual prayer there at the Claymore website too. It'll be in the show notes. Third, begin to read John Paul's Theology of the Body. You can get a I suggest a book like Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners. Just a paperback, should be pretty inexpensive. And it'll get you into this theology of the body. It's so beautiful because you'll embrace God's plan for your life. You're made male to give yourself in love, to protect our brothers and sisters and our children, whether in marriage or another vocation. Remember that marriage and the family's the battleground. And you're the warrior. You got to stand up for these two things, right? So there's some discussion questions that'll be added on here. And if there's any questions that you have, my email will be in the show notes. Just email us. It'll be info at jp2renew.org. Build out these communities. This is the only way that we're going to be able to take back our own hearts for sure. So it's a win-win situation. Whether we can change the whole world or not, this is God's plan of providence, but we can do what we're supposed to do. And as we act, as we do what we're supposed to do, grace will come into our lives. And it's a win-win situation because you we may be able to change the culture and the country over time, but we can certainly change the lives of the people right around us and say yes to Christ and allow him to change our hearts and walk closer with him, which gives us eternal life, which is really what we're all looking for, anyways. So hey, God bless your brothers. Good to be with you. Talk to you again soon. Bye bye.