#715 ACT One: I Wonder What Sort of Tale We’ve Fallen Into?

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived… for the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”[1]
— Henry David Thoreau

Dilecti Amici. Dear friends and brothers in Christ.

Let’s speak plainly.

You are living in a world that is loud, chaotic, and confusing. Social media, influencers, advertisers, schools, and even government all compete for your attention. Each tells you what to think, what to buy, what to fear, and who you are supposed to be. The noise is constant, and it leaves many young men disoriented and exhausted.

Pope Benedict XVI described our age as a “dictatorship of moral relativism,” a culture in which truth is reduced to preference and feelings replace reality. It should come as no surprise that so many are struggling. The statistics do not lie. Fifty-seven percent of teen girls report feeling persistently sad or hopeless. Forty percent of teens struggle to function normally because of depression. Thirty percent of teen girls have seriously considered suicide, a figure that has increased by sixty percent in just the past decade. Among LGBTQIA+ teens, fifty-two percent report ongoing mental health struggles, and twenty-two percent have attempted to take their own lives.[2] 

And let us be honest. Almost every young man today has been exposed to hardcore pornography, often at a young age, robbing innocence and distorting the moral compass. Suicide and overdoses continue to claim far too many lives. As Henry David Thoreau observed long ago, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Yet this is not the whole story.

You are not alone, and you are not doomed. I have seen young men begin to wake up, sensing that something is deeply wrong and refusing to accept shallow answers. You are hungry for meaning, for truth, and for a life that matters. Too often, what you are offered instead are empty slogans or expert opinions detached from the reality of good and evil.

That is why I picked up a pen.

Do you need another book? Perhaps not. But you do need guidance. You need a battle plan that helps you confront the questions burning in your heart: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? Why were we created male and female? What does authentic love look like? Where can lasting happiness be found?

This is where Claymore Milites Christi enters the story. Visit the Website! 

[1] Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays.
[2] Centers for Disease Control, Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2021. 

Transcript

Prayer And A Call To Awaken

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Name of the Father, the Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. Saint Catherine of Siena said that if you become who you are, that you would set the world on fire. Saint Athanasus, an early church father and a doctor of the church, said the Son of God became man so that we can become like God. I take a wild guess at this, but most of us are a bit disconnected from that divine life that these saints are pointing us to. Most people in fact are living like cut flowers. Just watch them. You know, you go out to the garden and you pick some fresh flowers, you put them in a vase, put them on the table, and they look great for a few days. And then what happens? They begun begin to fade and wilt. They are living lives of disconnection, most people, aren't they? Lives of quiet desperation, actually. And when they sense that they're starting to wilt and fade, and they need something more, they go out for some quick fix to get them through the day. But it never satisfies in any lasting way. Put simply, it's like the man who's hungry and is given a fish to feel that ache. The problem, though, is that he has forgotten how to fish for himself, and so he lives on the surface of things, waiting for a fish to jump out of the water. But he never learns to actually fish. So he lives in disconnection, anxious, nervous, depressed, sometimes even suicidal, while he's getting blown around by the spirit of the age, nothing deep about him, no foundation to his life. That's what the Claymore Battle Plan is all about. It teaches him how to fish. And in turn, he teaches others how to fish. It's not brain surgery, is it? In fact, it's what he was created for to receive divine life and love and then turn and to be that divine life and love for others. In fact, it's living out the two great commandments love of God and of neighbor. When he does this, he has become a new creation, living with purpose and passion. His life takes on a whole new meaning, and he has answers for those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today. Who am I? What's my identity? What's the meaning and purpose of my life? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness here on earth? How do I find love that satisfies forever? Welcome to the Become Who You Are podcast. I'm Jack Rigert. Let's learn how to fish together. By now, some of you have gotten the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. All of you should have read the Claymore Battle Plan outline. This can be downloaded and accessed for free, read on our website or downloaded. I'll put the link for our website in the show notes. This outline is only six pages long, and it gives you the structure of the battle plan and provides you with that most important Claymore 10-minute morning ritual that is a must if you're going to get connected back on the vine. The handbook then complements that outline and is the content that fills it out. It's written in 52 short acts or chapters, one for each week of the year, a quick five-minute read, and there's Q ⁇ A after each act. If you're new to Claymore, here's your first fishing lesson. Two easy steps. Step one, knees before the phone, always in the morning. Knees before you look at that phone. You practice the Claymore 10-minute morning ritual. Again, it's found in the outline. Step two, read one act from that handbook each week and discuss the questions and answers that follow. If you simply follow these two steps for 40 days, that cut flower of your heart will begin to take on new life. One note there, real quick. It's part of the Claymore 10-minute morning ritual. It includes praying with temptation, so powerful. Act 11 of the handbook tells you exactly how to do that. So you can skip ahead to go to go to 11, and you know you can read that in the morning until you kind of memorize what's going on there. I also address praying with temptation in a video that's posted on the front page of the Claymore Militus Christi website. Take a look. And for those of you who live outside the United States, and we have people from over a dozen countries that listen to this show on a regular basis, I don't know if you have access to Amazon in your country. So you can order the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. I don't know. You can try to order it, though, if you can't to our website. If you have questions, just email us, emails in the show notes. In the meantime, for you and for those of you who like audio also, I'll be reading one act from the handbook each week on the show, starting with act one today. So you have it. And in addition, I'm going to do a follow-up show each week that adds commentary and where we answer any questions that you send in, so it's important. Use our email in the show notes, send questions, comments, stories as we're going in and teaching others how to fish and while we're learning to fish ourselves. So let's begin. Act one. I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into. I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived, for the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau The Lekti Amichi, John Paul starts, dear friends and brothers in Christ, let's speak plainly. You're living in a world that's loud, chaotic, confusing. Social media, influencers, advertisers, schools, even the government all compete for your attention. Each tells you what to think, what to buy, what to fear, and who you're supposed to be. The noise is constant, and it leaves many young men disoriented and exhausted. Pope Benedict XV described our age as a dictatorship of moral relativism, a culture in which truth is reduced to preference and feelings replace reality. It should come as no surprise that so many are struggling. The statistics do not lie. Fifty seven percent of teen girls report feeling persistently sad and hopeless at times. Forty percent of teens struggle to function normally because of depression at times. Thirty percent of teen girls have seriously considered suicide, a figure that has increased by sixty percent in just the past decade. Among LGBTQIAS plus teens, fifty-two percent report ongoing mental health struggles, and twenty-two percent have attempted to take their own lives. And let's be honest, almost every young man today has been exposed to hardcore pornography, often at a very young age, robbing innocence and distorting the moral compass. Suicide and overdoses continue to claim far too many lives. As Henry David Thrall observed long ago, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Yet this is not the whole story. You are not alone, and you are not doomed. I've seen young men begin to wake up sensing that something is deeply wrong and refusing to accept shallow answers. You're hungry for meaning, for truth, and for a life that matters. Too often what you are offered instead are empty slogans or expert opinions detached from the reality of good and evil. This is why I picked up a pen. Do you need another book? Perhaps not, but you need guidance. You need a battle plan that helps you confront the questions burning in your heart. Once again, who am I? Why am I here? What's the purpose of my life? Why were we created male and female? What does authentic love look like? Where can lasting happiness be found? This is where Claymore battle plan enters the story. What began what began as a framework shared among brothers became something more. As I was out and as our team was out speaking, you know, we're talking John Paul II's message and how it transformed our lives, I watched young men and women lean in, ask honest questions, and share their own struggles. It became clear that John Paul's vision needed to be handed on in a way that could be lived, not merely studied. This handbook was born from that realization. At the heart of John Paul II's theology of the body is a simple but demanding truth. Life is a love story. You are created to receive love and to give love. Your role is to make God's love visible in the world, in this world, through the gift of yourself. That truth has been stirring in the human heart from the very beginning, and it reminds me of my own childhood. I was born on the south side of Chicago, the oldest of five boys. When I was in second grade, my family moved into the upper floor of my grandparents' two flat. Behind the building was a small yard that opened up into the alley, which was our main artery to adventure and freedom. It was in that alley that my brothers and I first were awakened to the three themes written into the very heart of every man. Life is an adventure, life is a battle, and the meaning behind it all is beauty, especially the beauty of love. One day, armed with rubber band, pistols, and wooden swords, we opened the gate and stepped into the alley. Suddenly I stopped. Voices floated through the air. I looked up and I saw them. Twin girls, perhaps in fourth or fifth grade, but to my second grade heart, they carried a beauty I could not name. I felt for the first time the mysterious power that the beauty of a woman has to draw a man out of himself. Even my younger brother sensed something significant was happening. No one pushed past me. One offered a shy wave. The girls turned, they looked, and they smiled politely, and then they disappeared down the alley, unaware of the effect they had on us. We soon learned where they lived, and from that point on every adventure took us in their direction. Their building became a castle, ruled by an evil knight, and rescuing those princess twins became our sworn duty. We stormed stairwells, fought imaginary battles, and we saved them again and again throughout that summer. The tragedy is that they never knew they were being rescued. This was chivalry at its finest. At the same time, I felt a desire to be a missionary priest. I wrote letters to religious orders serving in distant lands, placed places filled with mystery and danger. Even then, especially at the Mass, I sensed this too was part of an adventure, a battle, and a beauty that was sacred. Somehow, without knowing the language for it, I held these two longings together. There was no conflict in my attraction to that feminine beauty and my attraction to the sacred. Both had awakened awe, desire, wonder. Later, I would discover that I had been touching the very structure of the biblical love story, which can be summarized in five words. God wants to marry us. This story, this love story is written into our hearts. It's inscribed in our bodies, so that our bodies can make visible in this world that love story. Saint John Paul II taught the body and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of this world the invisible mystery hidden in God from time memorial, and to be a sign of it. Think about it. The Bible opens in the first book of the Bible with the marriage of Adam and Eve in an earthly paradise, and it closes in the last book of the Bible with the wedding feast of Christ and the church, in the heavenly one. Christ reveals himself as the bridegroom. The church is his bride, and that bride is not an abstraction. She is you and me called into communion with him. For this reason, Saint Paul writes, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. Ooh, he says this is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church. The deepest desire of the human heart is to love and be loved. The deepest desire of the divine heart is the same. In Jesus, these desires meet. This is my body given for you. Our longing for love and communion between a man and a woman points beyond itself. It points to the Eucharist and God's desire for union with you. The love story written into your heart and body finds its echo in Christ's final words on the cross. I thirst, he says. If you listen in the silence of your heart, you will hear him say it to you. I thirst for you. Abide in my love, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full, he says. Whoa, that is the promise. Joy, fullness, meaning. The world's trying to pull you apart, brothers, pornography, hookup culture, moral relativism. They all promise freedom, but deliver emptiness. You're part of a larger story that you did not write. Like Sam Gamgee. You may find yourself asking, What sort of tale have we fallen into? The answer is this it's a love story, and it's a battle between good and evil, and you have a role to play. These following acts are going to show you how to fight through awe, adventure, prayer, and truth. This is the end of Act One. I will post the discussion questions in the show notes. Don't forget to check out the commentary to Act One and send us an email with any questions and comments. And then finally find another brother to share this journey with. Help him learn to fish. Until next time, glory be to God.