Become Who You Are

(CM #9) The Battlefield of the Heart! Directing Passions and Desires to a Love that is Beautiful!

• Jack • Episode 681

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What if the ache you feel isn’t a flaw to fix but a fire to aim? We open with the shocking power of eros—the sudden arrest of beauty, the pulse of attraction—and follow it to its true end: a life of self-gift that can heal hearts, families, and even a nation fraying at the seams. The story moves from a teenage moment of reverent awe to the Cross itself, where God’s desire for us becomes agape: “This is my body, given for you.”

Along the way, we tackle why so many feel anxious and untethered. Cut off from God, desire gets hijacked by porn, politics, and consumerism. Freedom without virtue collapses into manipulation, and culture drifts between corrupt elites and coercive ideologies. 

Read "Directing Our Passions and Desires to a Love that is Beautiful" Here are the links to Jack's Substack and  X https://x.com/JP2Renewal

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Contact me: info@jp2renew.org

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SPEAKER_00:

The Greek philosopher called this Eros, a force that somehow imposes itself on human beings as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a divine madness, which tears man away from his finite existence. It's a spark from the divine. It's a spark to say, This is my body given for you. It's a spark that when Jesus took on a body, his spark, his passion, his divine power was expressed on that cross, giving himself to us. This is what the world doesn't get. This is what the socialists and Marxists don't get. This is what these the greedy people in our government and business itself don't get. The beauty of this girl, seeing her, but recognize the good in her, seeing her not as an object, right? Sensing and seeing her outer beauty and sensing their inner beauty. This is where we all need to go. This is where we want to go. But at this stage, it's only the raw material for love. That feeling isn't love and a lot of the development. This is a special Friday edition for Claymore Militus Christi Soldiers for Christ. Thank you to everybody for joining us. It's an interesting time. These are not normal times for you young guys. I uh I'll just give you a little heads up. The uh the Claymore Battle Plan handbook, the handbook for young men in the spiritual warfare has been done. It's in with the publisher. I'll let you know when it's coming out. Very excited for that to happen. Hopefully we can uh talk about getting me out to your parish. I can do a little uh uh talk out there, maybe uh do some book signings and stuff. We need to get this especially into uh into the hands of young guys, especially young leaders who are seeing that, hey, this is crazy. But but when I say it's not normal, what happens with so many of you, you know, you grew up in this time and nobody passed the story down to you. When I was a kid, there was a lot of craziness going on. But at least my father and my grandfather's uh and my grandmother's uh uh and my mom, of course, they're they're around. They're passing the my point is they're passing the story down to us about their life, about the world, World War I, World War II. They were in those wars, uh, my grandparents and and my great uncles and stuff like that. My dad was in World War II, he's still alive. Um my grandmother fled Poland uh between those two world wars, and so she had a lot of stories to tell. So we know the story is coming down to us and trying to make sense of it. What is the truth of things? How should I live? But you guys haven't heard the story. You know, we came into a world at war, and it's not only a world at war with one another, because all those wars are just a manifestation of the war going on in the human heart. This is a war between our Lord and Satan, between good and evil, between lust and those that lust for power and money and control and those that are self-giving. And so the um the act, the Claymore Act, so we have acts, not chapters, they're very because they're shorter than chapters, one for each week. This is Act Nine, and it's directing our passions and desires to a love that is beautiful. And when you start to think about wars and violence and all the things that we see around us, how can we be talking about directing our passions and desires to a love that is beautiful? Well, you know, take a look at Jesus hanging on the cross, and you see the pain and the suffering. He comes in, it takes on a body, unites it with divinity itself, and takes this on on his body, pours it out to us, and then gives us this power again, reuniting the uh the branch that we are back on the vine of God Himself to infuse ourselves with divine life and love. And so this is what the battle is. When you take God out of the story, you leave a vacuum. And that vacuum is it's we have an enemy here, guys, since the very beginning of the story. He's called Satan and evil. And so what we've done is we just open up the floodgate. We've walked away from our defenses, from prayer, from the sacraments, etc. Claymore, the handbook is to get you back into it, but it's passions and desires. Why do you think so many young people that we meet today have are anxious, uh, depressed, nervous, even suicidal? They've lost their passion for life. So you say, well, how can we be passionate about life in this crazy time? Look at Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk uh lived a full life, giving it all up, and you know that he was going to be attacked. And why was he gonna be attacked? You know, pay attention. This Sunday, Jesus is actually talking about the end times. He's actually talking about that. In fact, let me let me read a little bit from from uh from Luke. And he goes, Then he said to them his disciples, nations will rise against nations and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes in various places, famines, pest uh pestilences, and there will be tremors and great signs from the heaven, terrors and great signs from the heaven. But before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and the prisons, and you will be taken before kings and and governors for my sake. This will be a time for you to bear testimony, and don't worry what you're gonna say, he said. I will give you the words to say it. But they will persecute you, and from John 15 20, if they persecuted me, they're gonna persecute you. And you say, Well, why would they persecute a beautiful guy like Charlie Kirk? Why would they celebrate his assassination and you see this evil? John Eldridge, great author, wrote in uh in a book, All Things New. He said something happened to the human heart. You need to understand this if you would make sense of anything going on around us. Human beings are by nature ravenous creatures. Famished craving haunts every one of us. We're created for utter happiness, joy, and life, but ever since we lost Eden in the beginning, we have never known a day of total fullness. We're never filled in any lasting way. People are like cut flowers, disconnected, how we we look good for a little while, how we blossom, and then you cut flowers, you put them on the table. What happens after a week or so? They start to wilt on, they start to die, and that's what we're like. And we're feeling this inside of us. That's why I love to work with young people because they've sprouted, they they felt that essence of life, and now the world tries to crush it and take it away. And here's what happens: they this is why our sexuality, our passions and desires are so important, because they want to instill a brokenness. They want to rob you of your innocence, they want to get into your sexuality because John Paul would say, when they can twist and distort your sexuality, this is the fastest way to take you away from your heart, to cut you away from from God Himself. Because God said there's a meaning, a purpose for all that. That's what we're going to be talking today. Directing our passions and desires to a love that is beautiful. This is the essence of it. Because if you don't, it's about abortion. It's about uh redefining marriage in the family, it's about twisting and distorting uh who we are as human beings. And so John Eldred says, what happens is we are desperate, lustful creatures when we're disconnected from the vine. We look to marriage or the hope of a marriage, a child, our work, food, sex, alcohol, adventure, the next dinner out, a new car, anything to touch that a side of us. We're ravenous beings. Why do you think the culture loves to be at this consumerism? And I would say this: stop buying stuff that you don't need. Buy what you need. Hey, a young guy probably needs a car, you need some clothes, whatever. But stop worrying about this consumeristic attitude. In fact, I love backpacking when I was a young guy. And uh I love the simplicity of it. Take just what you you're gonna need. And I tried to live my life like that. Uh, you know, I it changed just a little bit when I had children, you know, you want to provide them with the with the with the bigger house if you can, with different things, and it gets costly, you know. And uh, but as soon as they got old enough again, I simplified as soon as I could. I downsized, got rid of the big house because I don't want to be caught up in that. You know, you do what you have to do at that time. You know, there's seasons of a man's life and he has to do this. Okay. When we saw what just happened in these past elections, we have two communist, progressive communist socialist mayors in big cities. One in New York City, the biggest city in the United States, and another one in Minneapolis. Uh so we got Mom Mom Donnie in New York, we've got uh Fry, Jacob Fry in Minneapolis. You know, these are these are lost causes, these promises of socialism and Marxism. But I'll tell you where it came from. Somebody asked me. This is Jack, how come people in big numbers came out and voted for socialists and communists? We for first of all, we don't know our story. We don't know how uh how destructive those forces are gonna be. And they will. It's amazing. They're they're in your pocket after your money, socialists, Marxists, they always want to divide all of us into color, races, uh, economic uh echelons on the economic scale, you know, worker, um, business owner, et cetera. And so now we have the neo-Marxism today. We're we're we're we're more racist, you know, or gender, you know, whatever we can divide people. Well, if we can divide people, keep them consumers, keep them twisted and distorted in their sexuality, keep them on porn, et cetera, we can take the power and the money. Don't don't think mom Donnie cares about anything but power, money, et cetera. And that's exactly what's going to happen. You know, division, violence comes out of that. But why are they there? Are we gonna just condemn uh socialism and communism for young people that don't really know the story of the United States, have never been taught history, don't have any faith being passed down to him to make sense of all of this stuff? Don't forget the gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, courage, uh uh knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord, you know, understanding the story that you came into in the big story. Well, what happens if you don't have any of that? Well, what you see is a capitalist system in the United States that's uh liberal, let's call it democratic liberalism, where you have this so-called republic or democracy we're supposed to be in, and the same thing with Western civilization, but there's no more morality anymore. We've taken the morality out. So what happens? It's controlled by the elite and the big money guys and the military industrial complex and the farm uh pharmaceutical industrial complex, and they're pushing all this stuff on you. So when young people look up and they see sense something's wrong with that, this is a money grab, power, and they're in your pockets, they're ripping the middle class apart. The politicians are getting rich in the so-called democracy. So you go, well, let's be socialist. But here's what happens you you reject one, then you go to the other one. That one's even worse, and then what happens? It'll come back again. Well, these cycles won't last forever. We're getting to the point where we're we've bankrupted uh the United States here. We underdid this whole foundation. So you say, well, you know, what's what's the uh what's the other option? Well, it's the United States that that was built on and understanding that it was infused with faith, and it was not just any faith, it was Christianity. You know, America, for all of its achievements, cannot long endure without the moral and spiritual framework that Christianity provides. Bishop Fulton Sheen warned us about this a long time ago. When a nation loses its soul, it it's gonna lose the culture, then it's gonna lose the nation. The culture is the soul of the nation, what you see around us. Well, it's abortion and twisting of these ideologies. Uh, it's a consumerist uh materialistic side that's throwing out God. It's not gonna last. So Bishop Sheen warned about this when I was in high school. He said, first of all, we're at the end of Christendom. This is in 1974. He said it during a television show. Now, not Christianity, not the church, he said. So the church is going to exist. It's gonna stay with us. But he said, remember what I'm saying here. Christian, Christianity in economics, politics, social life is inspired by Christian principles. That has ended. That is dying. Look at the symptoms then. The breakup of the family, divorce, abortion, immorality, general dishonesty, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you see this, right? So he said of the of the 22 civilizations that have decayed since the beginning of the world, 19 uh rotted and perished from within. We live it to it in a day-to-day and we don't see it decline. Well, now we see it decline, right? So you know, when you get back to our founding fathers, right, the Declaration of Independence appeals to the laws of nature and nature's God. It was right in there. It's a theological claim. Freedom was understood to be endowed by the Creator, not confirmed by the state. That's what socialism and Marxists say. Hey, it's the state gets power. The the democracy says you get power, but in reality, what's happened is that has been so corrupted that it's just a facade. We saw this with COVID, huh? With with all this grabs, put on the masks, get the vaccines, push this, close this, close your businesses. You lose that, and you see the evil that's right underneath. So it could be this very disheartening, but just listen to the gospel on Sunday. Jesus is saying, Well, you know, all of this is coming, and they're going to persecute you when you stand in and you say, No, we have to live by Christian principles. But but he's reminding us, I am passionate for you. This is the story. This is why it's exciting to be talking about our passions and desires with this, because God's desire, his passion is for you. You know, when you look at Jesus hanging on the cross, his eros, his desire, even his his this desire for, you know, for love, to love and be loved, is for you. This is my body given for you. But his eros, his desire for, and don't forget Plato said it's also a desire for all that's true, good, and beautiful. Pope Benedict XVI in his first encyclical said, his eros, God's Eros, his desire, passionate desire for us is totally agape love, which is divine sacrificial love. This is my body given for you. This is what we should be doing, right? To be people of love. So what happens is if you take that love out, that passionate desire out, it gets twisted and distorted, and people become the ravenous creatures, huh? And so what happens is Christianity offered a vision of liberty grounded in a moral duty rather than just self-expression in the beginning. Our founding fathers knew this in service rather than you know just saying, hey, this is everything is for myself. I know I have to go out and be a person of blood. This is my body given for you. This is why the American experiment at its best depends on morally formed citizenry and why its decline is so often follows the church's retreat from shaping moral imagination. Freedom, our freedom, needs the moral uh framework of faith. So Donald Trump said to uh Mom Donnie and and others communists in these communist uh uh blue cities, he was raised in that city in New York. And he said, Well, we're not gonna pay for all your wasteful largesse, right? If mom Donnie's giving everything away, he says, Well, we can't, we're not gonna pay for that, but what's gonna happen? You know, Donald Trump won't be in forever. And, you know, if young people like you don't wake up and understand the story that we're saying, it has to be infused with Christian faith. Socialism, um, communism, they've thrown out God. That's the main thing. They're atheistic, and this and the state wants power. But we see on the other side the corruption gone. And we have to say, hey, there's a there's there's a third way, and that's Christianity. Our founding fathers knew that. They John Adams again said this is this republic will only last uh under a a moral and religious people. We you you don't have the power to to hold it anymore. What it has has to do with our passions and desires. So we get back to the Claymore battle plan, inspired by the teaching of John Paul II, when he said, pay attention. Jesus says this in the in the gospel on Sunday. Pay attention. Your life is not an endless series of open doors. Listen to your heart. Do not stay on the surface, don't you know get blown around by the spirit of age, but sink down to the heart of things. And when the time is right, have the courage to decide. Think, well, Charlie Kirk got assassinated for this message. You know, we're all gonna die. God is passionate for you, He's bringing you into a story. Don't worry about all this thing. Step into the arena, step into the arena arena, live out what's true, good, and beautiful. Don't just be consumers used and abused. You know, this is a win-win situation. When you step into the story, when you understand the battlefield that we're on, it's a love story. And you go, how could it be a love story? It is. It is, it's a love story. This handbook is your battle plan. Your sword is not one of violence. You see the sword behind me, but of truth and love. The call is ancient. Jesus says, You two go into my vineyard. So we got to rise up, brothers. This is our moment to rediscover what it means to be a man, fully alive, fully human, fully free. And so directing our passions and desires to a love that is beautiful. This is Act 9. And so I start out with this uh statement that you'll find in there. So, what is this mysterious force of attraction that stopped me in my tracks? So powerful that today, so many years later, I still have a sense not only vividly in my in my memory, but also in my heart, huh? So this is a powerful, well, what is that? What am I talking about? In the last act, if you remember, we talked about the human's desire, the human's heart's desire for something more, your heart, and that the answer is not only about learning more information, but getting in touch with our own hearts, our inner core, and opening ourselves, body, soul, mind, and heart, to an encounter with that crazy lover, huh? God Himself, He created us in love, by love, and for love. And you go again, how can it in this crazy world and violence? Well, we've thrown them out. We've thrown them out. And this is an old story. It's not just your story or my story. This has been going on for a long time. There was a time, though, where again, Christianity and Western civilization was being passed down to us. It was passed down uh in our families, it was passed down in the culture, it was a culture that lived this out. And then America took this on, the United States took this Christianity on and based their laws, their whole laws, the whole system on these Judeo-Christian principles, really the decad uh the decalogue, the Ten Commandments, huh? And this is the way we're going to do. We're gonna step into the story and be people of love, of service to one another. And the founding fathers understood this, right? So it's Jesus Christ who's the source of truth, goodness, beauty, and love. And that's why our passions and desires, when they get twisted and distorted, you know, we can redirect those. And we're gonna be talking about it today, redirecting those passion desires to the heart of Jesus Christ, who's passionate for you. And this is has to do with our sexuality, with the way we look at a woman, the way a woman looks at a man, and and you see this, these gender ideologies. Well, again, I don't just attack gender ideologies. They're they're wrong, they're crazy, especially the T and the Q for all the different reasons that we've talked about before. But again, I don't attack the young people that are mixed up with this. It's the people pushing these things down because those young people are looking out in a pornographic uh culture and saying everybody's using and abusing each other, and so they get twisted and distorted, and you're trying to protect your own hearts in this confusion. So our passions and desires, though, are not the problem. In fact, they can lead us to what we're looking for. The problem, again, is with our twisted, distorted passion and desires. And here it is that John Paul the uh second challenges all of you. He said, Dear young people, again, pay attention. Your life is not a uh a series of endless doors. You think you, you know, I'll be young forever. You know, no, no, no. This is the time. You got to listen to your heart, he said. Don't stay on that surface, go to the harder things, don't get caught up in the porn, don't just be a consumer. Get the prayer, get underneath, get your spiritual footing back, connect back. That vine gets connected back to the branch, the cut flower gets roots again and start to take in nourishment and water. This is what happens when you get into prayer. In the story of the young man, remember this? The young man who approached Jesus with a question of eternal life? Jesus looked at him and loved him, it says. So, this rich young man, remember we talked about this. You lack one thing, Jesus said. Sell what you have, don't be a consumer, don't worry about all your money and possessions, all those things are gonna go away. And he says, Give it to the poor, and you're gonna have treasure in heaven and come follow me. When you hear this gospel on Sunday, this is eternal life. We're here for a flash. Understand it, go out on this adventure of life. And Jesus said, Give to the poor, you will have treasure in heaven. And he said, What? Come and follow me. No ideology, no propaganda. You will see, you will see. I am the way, the truth, and the life. But you will see it. Tragically, what happened? Do you remember? The young man's response changed the tone of the encounter. The evangelist writes, at that saying, right, Jesus says, Give away to the poor your stuff and come and follow me. He went away sorrowful, for he had many great possessions. So here we are, trying to latch on. And that young man has died a long time ago, hasn't he? He met his maker. He met Jesus, you know, he met God, he met his judge at the gate. And and, you know, he looks up and he goes, Oh my gosh, it's always meaningless, huh? All meaningless, unless you use those things to help others, to do good things for others, huh? Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me. Enter through the narrow gate. Young people today have grown up in a consumeristic culture that keeps them living on the surface of life, never going deep, staring endlessly at your phones and scrolling through social media and keeps you attracted and enticed by this world and its material goods and promises. Yet, how many have become anxious, depressed, unfulfilled? John Paul urges you, listen to your heart. And Jesus looked at him, loved him. That's what you see, Jesus on the cross. I thirst for you. You know, Jesus opens himself up and stare at a cross when you go to Mass at the crucifix at Jesus on there and say, you know, what does it take for a God to love us that much that He's going to pour Himself out to us just to expose Himself to all of this spitting and mocking and laughter, come down from that cross, but He'll do that, right? Well, he said to enter by the narrow gate, Jesus said. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those that enter it are many. This is socialism, Marxism, and also this consumeristic attitude on the other side. But Jesus says, no, enter, take an exit off that consumerism, off the porn, come to the narrow gate, come and see, come and see who, come and see me. Now he said this, you know, that that that broad gate, most people are on that. But and the gate is narrow, and the way is hard that leads to life, because you have to become a self-giving person, and you have to turn your heart inside out. Those to find it are few, Jesus said. What do you seek? He says, Come and see, follow me. I mean, this is the most exciting thing you can do. So I'll tell you a little story here. I led a small team from the John Paul II Renewal Center to the church next door, to a Catholic high school, just in time for mass. So we were doing a high school retreat, there's a church next door, and we went from, you know, into this church. We're there to present an all-day retreat and filed, we filed just behind the sophomore class we'd spend the next eight hours with. We were there to share John Paul II's biblical view of theology of the body, of this vision of love. And these are the 16-year-olds, right? As I looked over the students, they seemed bigger and older than 16. So I prayed for them. We were behind them, with I had a small team with behind me, and we sensed God's presence there. And I knew he wanted to reach their hearts. And I know what claymore he wants to reach your hearts. After mass, we walked downstairs to the conference room where we're going to start this retreat. And one of the teachers on the way down said to me, Good luck with this class. They're going to be a handful. Many of them are not here for a Catholic education, but because the school, this Catholic school, was known to recruit the best athletes from the whole area. And the college talent scouts know this, and the students are heavily recruited, so they try to go to that school, but they're not there because of their Catholic teaching. I smiled and I replied, Well, that may be true, but God is passionate, and I know that he's out recruiting his team. The morning session had gone well, the first of four, and I led 15 boys down the hallway to our small group breakout room. As an icebreaker, I asked them if they had one memory in high school that stood out thus far, thus far. Remember, they're only sophomores. We continued going around the room and everybody had a chance to answer. Then before I could turn the subject back to the material we presented in the morning, the boys asked if I had a memory that stood out for my high school days. That was a long time ago, I replied. But the memory is forever fresh and still touches my heart. It was my junior year. The first day of the school year, and ten minutes before the opening bell, I was surrounded by my teammates on the football team. All of us were high energy, talking, laughing, excited about the new year and our upcoming game, the season opener that we had practiced all summer for. And then it happened. I glanced up. Ooh, and there she was walking down the corridor in our direction, the way she walked, different somehow. Her long, wavy, dark hair, a glow and an energy about her that made her stand out like a light between the other girls she was with. Time stood still. Who was she? I could no longer hear the guys and the sea of bodies I saw only one body, and my heart pounded. Babum Babum Baboom. She was so beautiful. As she was walking toward me, she got closer, right? My intention was in my head, I'm thinking I'm gonna step out into the hallway and say hello. But nothing. She got close and I couldn't move, and no words came out. She glanced my way for a second. We made eye contact, and then she continued down the hall. Then what? The boys asked. Did you ever speak to her? As a matter of fact, yes. In fact, sometimes later, some weeks later, I even asked her to a party where during the course of that night we found an unoccupied room upstairs. We ended up laying across the bed and I kissed her. Let me just say that as our kisses became more passionate, passionate desires, I could sense us being drawn into something bigger. You know, it almost overtakes you, this power of Eros, huh? Then the most amazing thing happened. I opened my eyes and it glow again, like that light coming down that hallway when I saw her the first time. Well, now it was not only coming from her face, but her whole body as well. At that moment, something clicked within me, and I just stopped. I took a breath. And without knowing how or why, I realized that we had been lied to. Whatever this was, this passion I was feeling, and sex and sexuality, well, we've been lied to. We were told sex is just sex. We were told that love is just a feeling and an emotion. And it was all a lie. Something more powerful is that the powerful feelings and attractions we had for one another lying across that bed included beauty, included goodness, and something more that I couldn't put into words. I sensed this. I just pulled back in this passionate time, just to pull back, I was struck by awe and wonder. And what was this mysterious force, force that just stopped me in my trackster? So powerful that today, so many years later, I still have that scene not only adds vividly in my memory, but also in my heart. Again, the Greek philosopher called this hero. A force that somehow imposes itself on human beings as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a divine madness, which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power to experience supreme happiness. Isn't that something? These are the ancient Greeks. Plato 400 years uh before uh Jesus Christ came, but they talked about the spark, this intoxication, you know, this experience that this boom, this explosion of almost like, ooh, she's so beautiful. What is this? It's it's a divine madness, it's a spark from the divine. It's a spark to say, This is my body given for you. It's a spark that when Jesus took on a body, he his spark, his passion, his divine power was expressed on that cross, giving himself to us. This is what the world doesn't get. This is what the socialists and Marxists don't get. This is what these the greedy people in our government and business itself don't get. This divine spark. We've we've lost it, we've become these cut flowers. And so the spark that should be lifting us up to God to be filling us, making us young. You know, what happens? We become cut flowers and we're dying. And this is what you're feeling. Very, very important to kind of capture what I'm saying here. See, Plato Plato understood that this force was experienced as sensual energy, yes, right? But it was more. It's this divine spark, a force that when properly understood could propel you when it's open to Christ's heart himself, like a rocket to your destiny, to the heart of Jesus and all that's true, good, and beautiful. John Paul II called this powerful initial movement of the heart, love as attraction, recognizing the good of another person, in this case the beauty of this girl, seeing her, but recognize the good in her, seeing her not as an object, right? Sensing and seeing her outer beauty and sensing their inner beauty. This is where we all need to go. This is where we want to go. But at this stage, it's only the raw material for love. That feeling isn't love itself, but John Paul would say it's important. It's the raw material for love. It's attracting you to the good of another person, to that divine spark. And one, though, that has a long way to move from this initial stage to authentic love, which is self-giving love, which is I see the other person, I want their good, right? So my heart goes out to all you guys. You're growing up in a very twisted, distorted, and toxic culture. You've been repeatedly lied to about the very basics concerning the meaning of marriage, the family, what authentic love is, the true meaning of sex and sexuality, and more. Particularly disturbing is the sexual indoctrination, the grooming, the desensitizing of so many of your generation's consciences. You've been robbed of your innocence, not only in the music and the movies and the social media, the robbing of your innocence, twisting and distorting the spark that we're talking about, but even the public school system is so corrupt and involved in this. Here, love is reduced to a feeling, an emotion, and then further reduced to sex. In this way, the raw material for love, love is attraction that we're talking about, followed by love as desire, is the second stage. What does that mean? You know, our bodies look down at your body. Your body's not complete. I desire to be complete. I desire that person that I that I see to complete me, and I want to complete her. It's this beautiful dance of authentic love. This is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are created in God's image. We are not complete until we give ourselves away into a love story, huh? And this is the beauty of our sexuality, but it's been twisted and distorted. So love is attraction. I see the girl, I'm attracted to her, I see the boy, I'm attracted to her to him, you know, and and then followed by love is desire. We're not complete. We want to become persons of love. Well, that's been twisted and distorted, and it's never matures into authentic love because what do we do? We sabotage it, right? We use one another right there. Young people, again, robbed of their uh their innocence, sabotaging their ability to experience true love by pornography and twisting and distorting. You don't understand love and the commitment that takes place between a man and a woman in the sacrament of marriage. We use each other. Pornography and anxiety, depression. I mean, no fooling, right? That bond of marriage that creates and holds families together. Well, that holds societies together and even nations together. So so many of these young people who are voting for socialists and Marxists, they they have uh dysfunctional families, so many of them. They were born out of wedlock, so many of them. They were caught up in these gender ideologies. So when you don't have a strong family and formed by faith and understand as a reflection of Trinitarian love in the world, it's such a disconnection. You can't even understand that you get blown around by the spirit of the age. Well, the family is the basic building block of every culture, every society, and then goes out and builds this whole nation. This is what the founding fathers knew. They said this has to be a moral and religious people that understands this if we're going to go out from generation to generation to generation and push down this idea of freedom. Well, the biggest liberation, the freedom we need, is not to consume things and use each other. It's the freedom and the liberation from sin, from sin. So we eskew the beauty of love and we all settle for lust and utilitarianism, using one another and never find the banquet that God has prepared for us. So you're growing up in a culture that has reduced the beauty of authentic love and eros to the point that your moral moral imaginations are left in a vacuum. And then what do we do? We fill that up with pornography, gender ideologies. As confused as I was when I was a young guy by the sexual revolution and the wars and all those kinds of things. Don't forget Marxism, socialism, those things have been around for a long time. Sexual revolution has it's just that we knew some of the story and we can get our feet back and come back in when we fell. But you guys are just blown around by the uh spirit of the age, and you have so many of you at least don't have a uh uh any kind of foundation. So when you start to sink, you you have nothing to stop, right? You know, a George Barner study found that over 10% of millennials born 1984 to 2002 identify as LGBTQ. That's a lot of people, but it's 20%, it's double from Gen Z, age uh 18 to 24 in this case, with this study. And so one out of every five people are so confused, and then so many of the other ones, they're on pornography and using one another, it's a dark and confusing time, and it's filled in by this vacuum of moral relativism. There's no truth. Well, into this no truth, just your opinion, my opinion, comes a voice with some very good news. There's always going to be those who will not settle and give up on that hope that's within them. For the more John Paul said the world deprives you young people of what is true, good, and beautiful, the more earnestly you will yearn for it if you pay attention to your heart and understand what that is, that divine spark of Jesus calling you back in. This this vacuum of modern secularism that you see around you actually becomes an invitation, a fragrance, like a like, you know, you see like an incense or a perfume rising up within you and and uh it attracts you to the sacred. Young people are yearning for something more, for meaning, for beauty, for freedom. In your bodies you feel love. And you feel it stirring, right? These passions within you, and you seek it. Well, you want to break away and use your freedom as you get older to find love. But how often you're led to a counterfeit a lie. And it's sad how often their freedom, your freedom, leads you away from love because it leads you away from God, who is love. And you get yourself, and I get myself, and we all get ourselves in no small amount of trouble trying to unravel these mysteries of life and love. But as you stumble along to find answers and you grow wary of this culture that views you as a disappointment, you know, young white Christian guys, especially, but any men, especially Christian men, uh, no matter what color you are, ooh, that's the only thing that can't be tolerated today, huh? And you you hear John Paul saying, you know, young people of every continent, every country, do not be afraid. True love does exist. Wait for it, look for it, walk into the story. Don't be dispirited, he said, by those who are disillusioned with their life, who have grown deaf to the deepest and most authentic desires of their hearts. You're right to be disappointed with hollow, meaningless entertainment and passing fads with aiming too little at life. Lower the bar, the culture says, the world says, ah, no, that's the world's job, not ours. That's Claymore, huh? To use our freedom, right? You can seek the easy life, but that's not what we do. Because it's an illusion. And he said, insulated by your own value systems of subjective moral values and opinions, you'll never find the beauty that you seek. I am reminded of John Paul II. He asked why he talked so much about sexuality and replied, because the abuse and misunderstanding of sexuality is the main obstacle to spirituality. He reminded young people that the sexual drive is a gift from God. However, he maintained that the sexual urge must never be separated from authentic love, the desire to do what's best for the other. He noted that all too often the concept of love, again, is reduced to emotions and attractions. And such emotional, sentimental love often results in disillusionment, whereby the woman eventually discovers that the young man's sentiment, his feelings, is merely a screen for his desire to use her. Or conversely, the man discovers that he was simply a means to an end the other way. You know, in these young girls are very confused. Sometimes they're throwing their self at young men, uh, you know, and and and you gotta hold back. You gotta hold back, you gotta say no, because they they think they're going to find love in there. But our sexuality is a big deal, right? When relationships are built on these foundations, these weak foundations, the truth eventually emerges that it was never, ever true love at all. Closely connected with the formation of conscience is this work of education, which helps individuals to become more human, leads them to ever more fully to the truth, instills in them greater respect for life, and trains them in right interpersonal relationships. Well, what is that education? That's what the Claymore Handbook is going to bring out and give you. It's also going to be it's an education in Jesus Christ Himself, an education in the faith, an education of what is true, good, and beautiful, great literature, good science, and understanding all these things. Anyways, it's going to be in the handbook. There's going to be resources and stuff there too. But the church can teach us a lot. The church can teach us a lot. There's a need for education about the value of life from its very origins. You know, when you have abortion written into our law today, that it's a right to kill children, it's a right to redefine marriage into anything. When you understand education, you have to understand who you are first. You have to understand the human life first, human dignity. That's our first thing to understand. Marriage in the family. So it's an illusion, John Paul wrote in Evangelium Vita, the Gospel of Life. It's an illusion to think you can build a true culture of human life if we don't help young men, young women to accept and experience their sexuality and love in the whole of life according to their true meaning and their close inner connection. So this is a foundational thing. Our sexuality enriches the whole person. It manifests its innermost meaning and leading a person to the gift of self in love. I become self-giving. When you trivialize our sexuality, it's among the principal factors that have led to a contempt for new life. You know, the baby's here by accident. I didn't mean to have a baby, and we killed the baby. Only a true love is able to protect life. There can be no avoiding the duty to offer, especially to young men, young women, an authentic education and sexuality and love, an education which involves training and chastity as a virtue, which fosters personal maturity, makes one capable of respecting the spousal meaning of the body. I am to be a gift for you. You are to be a gift for me, and we're going to build a life together. Well, all of this in this temporal horizontal thing is a reflection of Trinitarian love. It's always to be connected. So in the next act, we're going to get educated. Talk about education. Watch for the next act. We're going to get educated on these four aspects of love and chastity as the virtue that guides us to a love that's beautiful. So we'll talk about these first. We talked about love is attraction, love is desire. The next one is love is goodwill, understanding that, and then spousal love. And we'll go through those in the next act. So this is that education, this foundation that we're leading. And then, you know, we can learn our history and our math and whatever, but if we don't understand at the same time who we are as persons, everything else is going to get twisted and distorted. Um I'll link this uh this article to my Substack and an X so that you can actually print it out if you want to. This is actually one of the acts from the book that'll be coming out. And uh share it, pick up the phone, share it with a uh friend, and and talk about it. And I put some references in there to read if you have a little time. Hey, keep me in your prayers, I'll keep you in mind. Name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen. John Paul II, pray for us. Thanks, guys. Good to see you.