#733 The Sacred Romance: Redirecting Your Passions and Desires

In a world that often feels disconnected from the divine, many of us grapple with profound questions about identity, purpose, and love. Saint Catherine of Siena once said that if you become who you truly are, you would light the world on fire. This echoes the sentiments of John Paul II and Saint Athanasius, who spoke of the deep yearning inscribed in each human heart—a longing for a divine connection that can transform our lives. In this Episode we delve into these themes, particularly through the lens of Saint Augustine's journey and the insights from the Claymore Battle Plan.

To start, we must recognize that our hearts are filled with desires to love and be loved. Yet, they can also be confused and hurt, struggling to find coherence in our experiences. In *Act 26* from the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook, we explore how the gospel intersects with our lived experiences. This interaction leads us to our "aha moment," where we encounter Jesus Christ and begin to understand our true purpose.

"The World Changes When We Pass On What is True, Good and Beautiful" Visit Claymore and Get a copy of the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook! 

Transcript

The Divine Life You’re Made For

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Saint Catherine of Siena said that if you become who you are, that you would light 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 might become like God. I take a while to guess at this, but I bet most of us are just a bit disconnected from the divine life that these saints are pointing us to. Yet John Paul II said there's an echo of the story of this divine life that we're created for, inscribed in each human heart. And if we put on the proper lens, if we get in touch with this echo within us in such a way we have that aha moment. Today I want to touch on Act 26. This is not more information. We have to get in touch with our hearts. This is the whole Claymore battle plan, isn't it? So another way to say this is that the deepest, yearning, burning desires of our hearts to love and to be loved, to know the truth combined with the live experience of your life, and these are coming together in us, and we're trying to make sense of this. And then the gospel comes in at the right time and the right place and touches that and it brings the whole story through. So we understand where we came from, where we're going, and we encounter Jesus Christ. This is called the aha moment when our life takes on a whole new meaning. It helps us answer 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 are we created male and female? How do I find happiness here on earth and love that satisfies forever?

Big Identity Questions We Avoid

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I want to do a little commentary on Act 26 from the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. First, you got to get the human heart back. That's what I'm talking about here. But as soon as you do, you realize that you're created for love, by love, and in love. And in order to do that, I have to receive this love. I have to go to the source and be connected. This is what we start with today. We want to start, it's a connection of the heart. And once you're filled with divine life

Getting The Human Heart Back

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and love, then you have to turn and become a person of love. This starts right out with those two asks. If you haven't downloaded, just go to our website, Claymore Militaschristi.com, download the outline. It's just a six pager. It's going to give you this whole overview of those three steps and also formation. Read formation because there's two asks of every Claymore person. The first one is before you look at that phone in the morning, you fall to your knees. You're opening your heart up. Read that formation, right? Be it done to me according to your word. The second one's so important. It's about temptation. We're all flooded with temptations all the time. We can get very discouraged about that. And then praying with temptations, of course, is Act 11. Don't forget to read that. It's just a powerful prayer. And we start to get our hearts back. This third thing I like to do on there, I personally, you could read a little scripture there. I personally like the Divine Mercy app. The Divine Mercy app is from the diary of Sister Faustina. And that diary is this dialogue between Jesus and Sister Faustina. It's so powerful, it's so

Divine Mercy Against Anxiety

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beautiful. I just want to read you a little bit that I've I discovered recently. St. Faustina is talking to Jesus and she says, Yes, I know all that, but great temptations assail me and various doubts awaken within me. And moreover, everything irritates and discourages me. Have you ever felt like that? Here's what Jesus replies to her, my child, and as I'm listening to this in the morning, he's speaking to me. You know, this message for Sister Faustina was to go out to you and me too. So you, my child, know that the greatest obstacles to holiness are discouragement and an exaggerated anxiety. These will deprive you of your ability to practice virtue. All temptations united together ought not to disturb your interior peace, not even momentarily. Sensitiveness and discouragement are the fruits of self love. You should not become discouraged, but strive to make my love reign in place of your self love. Have confidence, my child, do not lose heart in coming for pardon, for I am always ready to forgive you. As often as you beg for it, you glorify my mercy. So if you wake up discouraged, or you wake up with an exaggerated, he calls it anxiety. And he says, This is about self-love. I've been meditating on that uh the last few days. And he's right. Of course, Jesus is right. But I mean, it it works, it's so practical, it's so beautiful. So I feel in this anxiety, you know, you see this craziness going around you, you know, what's going to happen? Blah, blah, blah. It's self-love. I'm worried about myself. I'm overly worried about we're all supposed to love ourselves, but not be overly self-loved, where I replace everything else, which is self-love. And I go inside without Christ, and here I am worried about everything. I can get very discouraged in a situation like that. He says, he said it replace that self-love with love for me. Bring me into here and focus on me. And I calm down so almost immediately. I said, Of course it is. You know, this over-exaggerated self-love about me, me, what's going to happen to me? How's the world gonna affect me? Blah, blah. You know, just hey, I just went outside, I took a walk, and I just relaxed and I just opened my heart up. Um, right from that Claymore 10-minute morning ritual, and just opened my heart, boom, Jesus comes flooding in, and I love him. And all of a sudden, my anxiety started to melt away. That discouragement started to go away. And then what is what else does Jesus say here? He says, as often as you beg for it, you glorify my mercy. Jesus says this over and over again. He says, When you come to me, you glorify me. You know what? We're looking at Jesus and we're saying, Jesus, you came here to pour yourself out to me, and I'm acknowledging that love story. And then I go and I'm filled with that divine life and love so that I can be that person. So it's always about receiving divine life and love and then go out. Then what's the fourth thing is we're gonna pray the St. Michael prayer. Saint Michael holding the sword. We need his help. We need his help. You know, uh, this is a battle between good and evil. And then fifth, what's the fifth thing? Get up and love the next person you see. You've received love, now be the be be that love.

Receive Love Then Give Love

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So now I'm just gonna touch on Act 26. You can read the whole act yourself. But it starts out with this of Saint Augustine. Late have I loved you, O beauty, ever ancient, ever new. You were within me, but I was outside. This is Saint Augustine. He was in his thirties already when he he came into the church. These piercing words from Saint Augustine have echoed through the centuries.

Saint Augustine And The Inward Turn

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Today we're diving deep into what they really mean for our lives. This episode is about the sacred romance, the awe and wonder of encountering God in the depths of your own heart and the curious journey of becoming the right person, the person you were created to be. So here's the beauty of this as I step into this commentary on the sacred romance. It's so incredible. And it's it's about taking that divine love into my heart to become a person of love. When you try to do this on your own, you start to grasp, we become ravenous creatures, trying to fill the infinite in a finite space, and it never fills me totally. And this is what the sacred romance is all about. The sacred romance, again, is the awe and wonder, uh wonder of encountering God in the depths of your own heart, the courageous journey of becoming the right person. Now, this gets us to step two, because everybody's looking for the right person, right? I want to fall in love, you know, I the right person is is out there someplace, but we don't want to take the time to become the right person. So when the right person comes along, what happens? They they reject us because they're also looking for the right person. So this is the the reality when you're when you're young, when you're any age, actually, you're to be filled with divine life and love. You have to be filled with the right person in order to become the right person, that new creation. This is what it's all about. So let me take you into the awe and wonder of the inward encounter. Let me take you into Saint Augustine's story. Brilliant, passionate, and restless man. For years he chased pleasure, ambition, new philosophies. He lived with a woman for fifteen years. He never married her, fathered a son out of wedlock with her, and tried to satisfy his heart with everything the world offered, but nothing worked. His heart remained restless. How about today? We see these addictions and everything. This is a restless heart trying to fill, trying to fill, trying to fill. But then came a moment of grace. He heard the gospel. It's when the human heart and the experience of life come together and we're trying to make sense of this, and then you hear the gospel at that right place, at the right time, just when you're asking, what is the truth of things? And boom, he heard the gospel, he surrendered to Christ, and he looked back with both joy and regret. Why regret? Because you look back behind you and you see um how much pain and suffering you caused yourself and other people. This is the human condition. But this is why I started out with uh Christ's mercy, and that you know he wants to pour this mercy out to you. In confessions in in book uh book ten, he cried out with that statement from the beginning, Late have I loved you, O beauty, every ever ancient, ever new. You were within me, but I was on the outside. It's it's amazing, isn't it? That you know, God is in us. We're created in love, by love, and for love, but we're free. And we become disconnected. But God is not way just out there. We were created to make God's love visible in the world. We were created just to be filled with divine life and love. Sin is what separates us. So God is within, He's run into our bloodstream. But if we don't acknowledge that and we just look without, we have to say yes to this love story. Also, think about the church. When Saint Augustine or myself or you, we come back into the church. God was there already. He was inside the church, right? The head and the body of this church, but we were outside of it. How do I become united? I come back into the church to unite myself with that with God in prayer and the sacraments. It's an amazing, beautiful story. So he says, Do not go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man, he said. What is the truth of things? God is not far away. He's closer to you than you are to yourself. Augustine would later say, You were more inward to me than my own innermost being, and higher than my highest. Brothers and sisters, this is the awe and wonder we're invited into a personal encounter with the living God in the depths of our own hearts. When we stop running outward and turning outward, when we stop scrolling, start worrying about achieving all the time, chasing, performing, and we courageously turn inward, we meet the one who has been pursuing us all along. And you know what you discover in prayer that as you as you fall into meditation, that you meet two people in the depths of your heart, you and God. You and God, the only one that really knows your heart. So this encounter is not cold and abstract, it's passionate, it's beautiful, it sets the soul on fire. Saint Augustine discovered that the very desires that once led him astray were not evil in themselves. This is so important for all of us. When directed toward God, those same passions become a pathway to transformation. He went on to say, Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you. Have you ever felt that restlessness that restlessness? I'm sure you have. That longing nothing in this world can fully satisfy? Ah, that's a good sign. C. S. Lewis wrote this is so beautiful. Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. If I discover something within myself, a desire which no experience in this world can fully satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. That's in mere Christianity, and it's bookmarked, of course, uh in the book. So you can find that if you want to read that. C.S. Lucis is a treasure, isn't he? So the ache, that ache

Redirect Desire Toward God

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in your heart, points you toward the sacred romance, an eternal love that never fades. So I receive love so I can become who? The right person. Redirecting my desires toward the right person. This is the virtue we were talking about, becoming a person of virtue. Virtue means manliness. How should I live? Don't be filled with self-love and self-always worried about me, me, me. Put Christ inside. Your anxiety levels will go down, your your your discouragement's gonna go down. And then I'm gonna become a person of love. And then when the right person comes along, and you know what that right person is, anybody I could find that I should love. You know, don't always be looking just just for that one special person, because he or she may take a while to get there, right? Learn and practice becoming a person of love. And here's the hard truth many young people share with me. They dream again of finding the right person. Yet few of them have done the hard work of becoming the right person themselves. Pope John Paul II gave this urgent counsel to young people. It's right on the on the front of the outline, isn't it? Your life is not an endless series of open doors, he said. Do not stay on the surface, but go to the heart of things, sink down into prayer. And when the time is right, have the courage to decide. He said, Youth is not just for pleasure, it's for growth in wisdom, stature, and favor with God and others. Jesus himself grew in these ways during his hidden years. And I remember in my own struggles, like St. Augustine, I had my seasons of self-indulgence and wandering. I feared that saying yes to Christ would mean losing my passions and desires, that I would no longer be fully a man. But in a chapel one day, kneeling before the Holy Family, something shifted within me. I realized when we say yes to Jesus Christ, our body and soul become in a real way impregnated with his life. We become one with him. And as Gaudium et Spes teaches, man, meaning men and women cannot fully find themselves except through a sincere gift of themselves. See, this is the narrow gate that Jesus spoke of in the Gospel of Matthew. He said, Enter through this narrow gate. You find this in prayer, huh? For this gate is wide and a road broad that leads to destruction. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to authentic life. Becoming the right person means choosing that narrow road. It means allowing God to heal, purify, and elevate our desires instead of amputating them. Look at the other saints. Saint Teresa of La, a woman of intense longing, in her famous vision, an angel pierced her heart with a flaming spear, and she wrote, When he pulled that flaming spear out, I felt that he took my entrils with him and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe, the sweetness caused by this intense pain so extreme that one cannot possibly wish for it to cease, nor is one's soul content with anything but God. I put the longer quote in the book, you know, look that up. So this is Erosanta's desire for what's true, good enough and beautiful and the sensual desire for love. But transformed, united into agape, self-sacrificial love, this is authentic love. When human desires are purified and lifted into divine love, God does not want to extinguish your passions and desires. He wants you to redirect them. We bring our passions, we take that horizon and we go vertical with it, huh? We lift it up to Jesus Himself. This is how we know. This is how we know when we feel this in our hearts. Then from that union, you then pour yourself out as a sincere gift to others. This is how you become who you truly are. In Act 32, faith in action, you're going to meet Pierre, Saint Pierre Giorgio Fersati, a young uh saint, he just became a saint this year, who's a great example of this. He lived life to the fullest. He took his passions and desires and aimed them at Jesus Christ. Not through empty pleasure did he live his life, but through adventure, friendship, radical love for God and the poor. His short life was filled with joy because his desires were ordered toward the eternal. Read Act 32, touch on that. It doesn't hurt to move around a little bit with the handbook, just go back to the beginning again because you know this winds out, get your heart back, understand marriage and the family, understand this love story. Otherwise, it's like a movie you came into 45 minutes late. You know you didn't see the beginning of the movie. You haven't seen the end yet. You walk into the story and you're trying to make sense of this. This is what the battle uh Claymore Battle Plan Handbook uh does. It brings you into the beginning of the story, so you understand where you came from when you were exploding onto that stage of what we call life at a certain place and a certain time.

Courage To Decide And Say Yes

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So here's the question I leave with to with you today. Do you have the courage to say yes to Jesus Christ? To enter into this sacred romance, to let him redirect your passion desires and become the right person, the person you were created to be. It begins with this inward turn to find God. God is already within us, as Saint Augustine said. He's not hiding from you. And that's what he said. I was on the outside, but you are on the inside. Prayer again unites right? God and yourself. It begins with that inward turn to say, Jesus, come into my heart. Ask, seek, and knock. So stop, be still, return to your heart. Listen for the beauty, ever ancient, ever new, who's already within you. It continues with the daily choices we make. Start with that Claymore ten minute morning ritual, praying with your temptations, fasting from vice, so love can flourish. You know, life happens in a blink of an eye. Don't wait until it's too late to love him. Start now. You were born into a story of awe and wonder. God is writing redemption into your story, just as like he did for St. Augustine. Will you then have the courage to step fully into it? This is not a time for lukewarm, is it? This crazy world that we

Share Your Story And Next Steps

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live in. So I'd love to hear your story. Have you had your own late have I loved you moment? What does becoming the right person look like in your life right now? Reach out to us, leave a comment, join the conversation. Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter on the website, come to some of the events that we're we're we're holding. Uh share your story with us. Uh write uh to us. We'll bring it up on the on a uh on a podcast. Or reach out to us, sign up as a leader or a disciple on the Claymore Militic Christie website. Make sure you have the the uh Claymore Battle Plan outline on your desk at all times, on your table, have the uh Claymore Battle Plan handbook, and don't forget the journey with somebody. You know, at the end of the day, God puts people on your path. Once you start to feel this fire, don't don't wait till you get it all figured out. You've got the handbook there. Continue that journey, but also uh start to open yourself up to others and share this journey because we're made again to be filled with divine life and love and to become that life and love with each other. Don't forget to subscribe, like, share this uh with someone God has put on your path. Because if you become who you are, you will literally light the world on fire. Hey, God bless you. Talk to you again soon, everybody. Bye-bye.