#718 ACT Two: Awakened by Beauty: The Opening Scene

Most men don’t fall apart all at once, they slowly wilt. When we live disconnected from God’s life, we chase quick fixes, stay anxious, and wonder why nothing feels solid. We use a blunt image to name it: we live like cut flowers, still “looking fine,” but cut off from the source that keeps the heart alive.

We also lay out a simple way forward through the Claymore Battle Plan, a Catholic men’s formation path built on daily spiritual discipline and real brotherhood. The starting point is the Claymore 10-minute morning ritual we call “knees before the phone,” plus a weekly short reading from the handbook and a conversation with a friend. The goal isn’t more religious information. It’s learning “how to fish” so you can find truth, build a foundation, and pass it on.

Then we step into Act Two, “Awaken By Beauty,” from the Claymore Battle Plan, A Handbook For Young Men In Spiritual Warfare, beginning where Scripture begins: Genesis, creation, light, and God’s declaration that everything He made is “very good,” including you. Drawing on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, we talk about how the body makes the invisible visible, how beauty is meant to awaken wonder, and how “original innocence” shows us a way of seeing people as gifts rather than objects. We name the counterfeit beauty that deforms desire, pornography, hookup culture, and digital distraction, and we connect it to the wider crisis of moral relativism, anxiety, addiction, and the breakdown of marriage and family.

We close with three practical moves: reclaim awe through prayer, guard your heart by rejecting pornography and objectification, and reorder your life around the sincere gift of self. If this helped you, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more men can find it.

Support the Mission: The World Changes when we pass on what is true, good, and beautiful--to the next generation and those who God places on our path. 

Transcript

Cut Flowers And Quiet Desperation

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Saint Catherine of Sienna said, Become who you are, and you would light the world on fire. Saint Athanasius, an early church father and the doctor of the church, said the Son of God became man, so we might become like God. I take a wild guess at this, but most of us, I bet, are just a bit disconnected from that divine life that these saints are pointing us to. In fact, most people are living like cut flowers, huh? Just watch them. You know, you go out the garden and you pick these fresh flowers, and they look awesome, how beautiful, they smell beautiful, they look beautiful. You put them in a vase, you put them on the table, they look great for a couple of days. But then what happens? They begin to fade and wilt. Most people are living lives just like that. A lives of disconnection, lives of quiet desperation. You start to wilt, huh? Your life starts to fall apart. Dysfunction starts to enter. You start to experience life and you go, ooh, something's wrong. And you sense that you need something more, and you go out for some quick fix, huh? To help you get through the day. But it never satisfies in any lasting way. Put simply, it's like a man who's really hungry and he's given a fish to fill that ache, something to fill you up. The problem is that men have forgotten how to fish for themselves. So they live on the surface of things, waiting for a fish to pop out of the water, but they never actually learn how to fish, how to fill themselves in a sustaining way. So you live in disconnection. And what happens? We're a bunch of anxious, nervous people trying to get blown around by the spirit of the age. Nothing deep about us, no foundation to our lives. See, that's what Claymore Battle Plan is all about. It teaches us how to fish. So that when we're seeking for answers, we know how to find them. We have a foundation. And in turn, ooh, we teach others how to fish, huh? This isn't brain surgery. In fact, it's what we're created for, to receive divine life and love, and then in turn to be that in our action to love others, to love others in the truth, in fact. In fact, it's living out the two great commandments, right? Love of God, be filled with the divine source of life and love, and then love of neighbor. You become a new creation then, living with purpose and passion. And your life takes on a whole new meaning, and you have 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 of purpose of my life? Why are we created even male and female? What about our sexuality? How do I find happiness here on earth and the love that satisfies forever? Welcome to the Become Who You Are podcast. I'm Jack Riggers, your host. 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 that you get access for free on our website, Claymore Militas Christie.com. The link will be in the show notes. The outline is only six pages long, and it gives you the structure, gives you above the trees the structure and some points on how you enter into the story. And it includes the very important Claymore 10 minute morning ritual, ten minutes a day. That's a must if you're going to get connected back on the vine again. The handbook then complements the outline and is it is the content that fills it all out. It's written in 52 short acts or chapters, a five-minute read, one for each week of the year, and it has Q ⁇ A after each act. If you're new to Claymore, here's your first fishing session. Two easy steps. Step one, knees before that phone. Ooh, always do this. Practice that 10-minute morning ritual that you'll found in the outline. And step two, read one act again from the handbook each week and discuss it with somebody, a friend of yours. That's when it all comes alive. If you follow these two steps for 40 days, the cut flower of your heart will begin to take on new life. This is what it's all about. Stepping into the story that you're created for. It's three connected points. It begins with the heart. Everything begins with your own heart, your inner life. When you search for truth and authentic love, we're made for this. Number two, you experience life, good and bad already, right? So you it so what happens? This is your exterior life, where your inner life goes out into the exterior and they work together. You call this your external life, but it's really taking again your heart, and you say, okay, what's in my heart? What's the battle plan? What's the truth of things? And you see what's going on in your life. And you say, ooh, there's got to be something more. How do these connect? How does this all make sense? And then number three, when your inner and outer life experience the gospel in such a way that the light goes off and you have that aha moment. And this happens when you understand that this is not mere information that we're talking about here. It's touching the very DNA that runs through every cell in your body. You know you're touching the truth of things, and it brings a sense of awe and wonder. And then you get excited and you want to discover evermore. So two brief notes before I get into act two today. The Claymore 10-minute morning ritual includes praying with temptations. And Act 11 of the handbook tells you exactly how to do that. So you can skip ahead to Act 11 if you want and take that in the morning with you, especially in the beginning. I also address praying with temptations in a video that's posted on the front page of the Claymore Militus Christi website. Take a look at that. And each week, the audio version of the next act will be recorded. That's what I'm doing today on Act Two, that you can listen to while you're working out, driving. And also, it makes it easy to share with friends or people that God is sure to put on your path. It's you're entering into the awe and wonder of your creation. You're going to see God start to show you things and do things in your life, and you'll know, ooh, something is very real about that. The audio, right from the handbook, will be followed the next day by a discussion of the same act, and also address questions, comments, and stories that you might send us. So each act, again, I'm going to record it as an audio. That's what I'm doing today with act two. It will be followed the next day by someone from the Claymore leadership team, some of these guys that we're meeting that are going to come on the show, ask questions, go through those QA that follow each each uh handbook act. All right. Got it? Okay, buckle up as we enter the early acts. And these are laying the foundation from the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. Last week was Act One. I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into. Today we're stepping a bit further. Act two, awaken by beauty, the opening scene. Betishit, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while the Spirit of God swept over the waters. Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light. That comes right away from Genesis. This is the opening act of Scripture. Brothers, we begin where all things begin in awe and wonder. Creation itself opens up as an act of divine delight. After forming the heavens and the earth, after calling forth light, life, and order, scripture tells us, and God saw everything that he made, and indeed it was very good. That declaration includes you. This is so important. You were created very good, made in the image of God and invited into an intimacy with him that is meant to shape not only your interior life, but your actions in the world. Now this may sound too good to be true, but it's the inner logic of our Christian faith. John Paul II insisted on this truth repeatedly, and because it stands at the heart of his theology, the body, it bears repeating from Act One. The body, your body, my body, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible in this world, the spiritual and the divine. Our bodies were created to transfer into the visible reality of this world, the invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial, and be a sign of it. What is that sign? Life is a love story, and you're created to respond to beauty, both human and divine. See, beauty draws you out of yourself and awakens you to something greater than comfort or self-protection. Think back to the story from my childhood from the first act, the alleyway adventures, the wooden swords, the sudden encounter with beauty that stopped me in my tracks. That moment was not about lust or possession. It was about wonder. It was the awakening of the heart to the mystery of the other person. John Paul II calls this original innocence. Before sin came into the world, Adam and Eve from the very beginning saw one another without shame, without fear, without the urge to use or dominate the other. They saw the other as a gift. When Adam first beheld Eve, what did he say? He cried out in awe, this at last is the bone of my bones and the flesh of my flesh. From Genesis chapter 2, verse 23. That is the power of beauty. It awakens desire, not for consumption, but it calls the heart toward love and ultimately toward God who is love. The tragedy is that the world has often robbed you of your innocence at an early age. Ever since then, it has worked to dull your sense of awe and wonder. Pornography, hookup culture, the endless digital distraction offer counterfeit beauty. They promise excitement, you know, like we said in the beginning, you know, to feed you like you're hungry and here's your fish, right? But it's an illusion. They promise excitement, but leave the heart numb and restless. Saint John Paul II warned that when the true meaning of our sexuality and love is lost, the foundation of culture itself all around us begins to crumble. Our creation is male and female is not a biological accident. It is the ground of marriage, family, the very transmission of life, my life and your life. When this truth is distorted, everything built upon it begins to fracture. Genesis shows us God's original blessing. Be fruitful and multiply. What does that mean? That's sexual intimacy, isn't it? This is a call to build a culture of life and love. But the serpent entered with lies, twisting truth and introducing shame into the human heart. Innocence, your innocence, my innocence, gave way to fear. Communion gave way to hiding. From that rupture flows what the church later calls the culture of death. This is where the culture of death began, and it has not disappeared. In fact, it's accelerating through history. We see it in the normalization of abortion, the redefinition of marriage, the steady breaking apart of families, and you feel the weight of it, even if you struggle to name it. Anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts sometimes, addictions. They're not isolated problems. Pornography has nearly universal reach among young men, distorting desire, weakening the capacity for authentic love. We're living in an age of what Pope Benedict XVI called the dictatorship of moral relativism, a culture that denies objective truth and replaces it with preferences and impulses. In practice, it tells you to do whatever feels good and they call it freedom. But as you know and I know, this is not freedom. We were made for more. Your heart was created for adventure, for sacrifice, and for the battle to defend all that's true, good, and beautiful. You were created as an embodied soul. Your body's not separate from your spiritual life, it expresses it when united with God's grace. Your body reveals the love story that began in Eden and finds its fulfillment in Christ's union with the church. So what is your response? First, reclaim awe and wonder through prayer. Ask God for the grace to see again, to look at creation, at a woman's smile, at the liturgy of the Mass, with the eyes of Adam seeing Eve for the very first time. Second, guard your heart. Reject pornography. Step away from this hookup culture. Refuse anything that trains you to see others as objects ready that rather than as persons to love. Third, reorder your life around the sincere gift of self. Love is not a feeling. It is a decision of the will to will the good of another. Whether you're single, dating, or married, let your choices form you into a man capable of giving himself freely and faithfully. You're a son of God. You're called to build a culture of life and love. That's the end of Act Two. Read the discussion questions. Remember to tune in tomorrow because we're going to be going through those. And review the Claymore battle plan outline, focusing on spiritual formation in the Claymore 10-minute morning ritual, knees before the phone. Questions like how can you cultivate awe and wonder in your daily life so you recognize God's beauty and creation and relationships? Find out and think about what ways the world's distortion of our sexuality, including pornography, hookup cultures, has affected you. And how can you reclaim God's design for love? St. John Paul II teaches that the body made God's love visible in the world. How can you honor your body as a sign of this love story? Check out the Q ⁇ A and there's references in there that you can go deeper. Remember to check in tomorrow as we discuss the QA and more. A few asks of you, subscribe and share this. For it's in your actions that this all becomes real. Take that small step right now. If you ordered the handbook from Amazon, take a minute to write a review that will help us move up in the algos, huh? And help spread the word. Number three, email me with your comments, questions, and share your stories as we get into this that we can address in the following podcast. Remember, we never share last names or personal info, but I like to use your first name so that you know that we're responding to you and your questions and comments. If you don't want us to do that, just let me know in the email. Finally, sign up for our on our website, go to Claymore Milituschristi.com, sign up there so you can get our newsletter. We've got regular Zoom calls that you can attend. You'll meet other men and we have some training going on. How do you not only get this into your heart, but how do you help others around you, brothers, friends, etc.? We'll have live events coming up all over the country. Remembering this, that the world changes when we pass on what's true, good, and beautiful with the next generation and the people God is sure to put on your path and is entrusting you to bring them eternal life. Remember, this is a salvation of souls. This is an eternal story. Life happens in the blink of an eye, my friends. Hey, God bless you. Great to be with you. Talk to you again soon, everybody. Bye bye.