#748 Christ Is The Light: Why A World Without The Supernatural Becomes Unnatural

Anxiety has a way of haunting the edges of your day, even when you’re praying and trying to do everything right. We start with a simple moment that turns intense fast: a bike ride, traffic that feels too close, and a rising sense that something is off. The turning point comes when we stop treating that fear like random noise and name what it often is: a real battle, both interior and exterior, between truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and what deforms it. 

From there we move straight into the heart of Christian spirituality: Jesus Christ as the light of the world. We lean on John’s Gospel and on the command to “walk while you have the light,” then connect it to the courage of “be not afraid.” We also bring in GK Chesterton’s line, “Take away the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural,” to explain why modern culture can feel so irrational even with all our technology and information. When the supernatural gets rejected, we don’t become more “natural” or more free, we lose the light that makes human identity, marriage, freedom, and truth intelligible. 

John Paul II’s insight lands hard here: we cannot understand ourselves without love, and we cannot fully know ourselves apart from Christ who reveals man to himself. That’s why Jesus can say both “I am the light of the world” and “you are the light of the world” we become luminous only by staying close to the source. We end with a clear, practical path: knees before the phone, daily prayer, Scripture, confession, the Eucharist, the rosary, and silence, so the light of Christ can shine through ordinary lives. 

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Transcript

Anxiety That Prayer Could Not Settle

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Earlier this week, I was feeling anxious. Something within me, something in my heart wasn't sitting right. That anxiety, you know, that comes over you sometimes, you know. And uh usually I can go into prayer, meditation, prayer. I can spend some time with Christ and uh kind of go deep b below the the surface of this crazy world and find some peace there in Christ, with Christ, through Christ. But it it wasn't working well. You know, I was still, I would, I would find that peace, you know, as I was meditating. And then I would get up and it would follow me around, it would start to surface again. So later on that afternoon, I decided to go out for a bike ride, a bicycle ride, and I can blow off the steam, you know, and get this kind of nervous energy out of me. But as I was riding my bike, um I usually ride the roads and the traffic is is going by. I usually wind my way out into some country roads with less traffic, but to get there, I'm in traffic. It usually doesn't bother me much. And uh this time I I've been thinking, you know, these cars are getting a little close. Uh I've been launched once or twice uh over the many, many years that I've been riding, and and all of a sudden I was getting I was nervous about it. I was thinking, man, these cars are getting close. I wonder if the person behind me is texting and doesn't see me. And it was just this premonition, like, what is going on, you know? And then I was thinking, you know, I'm gonna get on that country road soon. I wonder if those dogs that that uh that uh can can give a little chase, they're used to me, and they usually don't bother me. And uh, but what happens if this time the that German shepherd comes out and takes a chunk out of my leg? And so all this is going on. As I was riding, I was getting ready to pray the rosary, which I love to do on my bicycle, just kind of meditate on that, you know, on the rosary. Um, I realized that there's a reason. I it just came to me that God wants me to acknowledge the dangers, that we really are in a battle, that there's a battle between truth and falsehood out there, between good and evil, between beauty and everything that profanes beauty, and acknowledge it. I just had this premonition, yeah, acknowledge it. We have wars going on, we have corruption in the government, we have this, that, and blah, blah, blah. And once I acknowledged it, this battle that we're in, interior and the exterior battle, that we've talked about so many times uh with Claymore. And once I did that, now I see where I'm at. I'm in this battle, and now I went into prayer.

A Bike Ride And A Growing Fear

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And this time it was different. This time the scripture phrase came to me from John chapter 12. Walk, and this in this instance it's writing, right? But walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. Believe in the light, that you may become sons of the light. And I understood that I have to become the light in the world. You have to become the light in the world. We have to be filled with that light. So be not afraid. John Paul II, be not afraid, one of his favorite uh uh slogans, huh? Be not afraid. Know that there's a battle going on. Know this, acknowledge it, this anxiety that you're feeling, you know, between the peace that Christ wants to give you and the real world that's putting pressure on us, uh, the mental illness that's out there. I don't want it to come in here. Anyways, then I got into prayer and I realized that Christ is calling us to be the light of the world and not to be afraid of all of that battle. Only then could I really not be afraid, just to acknowledge that look at God has me. And even if I do get launched, and this is my last day on this earth, as I enter into the light of Christ, this is a win-win situation. You know, you you win your heart back, you win your marriages and your families and your relationships back, and you become the light out into the world that Jesus calls us to. And uh and you're gonna get persecuted in a battle for this. So you have to get ready for these battles. And this, I just felt like this was this day that Christ was just reminding me of all of this.

Christ The Light In The Battle

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So the name of this podcast today is Christ is the light. Why a world without the supernatural becomes unnatural. Welcome to the Claymore Become Who You Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. So good to have you here. G.K. Chesterton wrote, take away the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural. Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural. You know, we might expect him to say, take away the supernatural from our hearts, from our lives. What remains within a man,

Chesterton On The Unnatural World

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man and woman is the natural. That's what we might think. But his point is profound. Human beings were created for communion with God. When a society rejects God, it does not become more rational or more natural. Instead, it becomes insane in a way. It begins to redefine the natural, redefine marriage, redefine the family, redefine our sexuality, take away our freedom, tell us it's freedom, and then enslave us to sin, huh? Take away the truth. Moral relativism. It's my truth, your truth, etc. Even human nature itself is distorted, huh? We see these in these in these trans ideologies, etc., etc. What remains is not natural, it's not nature, but a distortion of nature. Because we weren't made to be just biological animals. We become the unnatural. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy, which I love, only the supernatural has taken a sane view of nature. Only the supernatural has taken a sane view of nature. You know, man is something more, huh? We we are given an intellect, reason, the searches for the truth and free will so we can choose the good. We see what's real, what is true. Now we hear what? A man can become a woman. Yet when we ask what a woman is, they cannot define what a woman is. So it makes sense of this, right? A man can become a woman. To become something else, but what is that? I don't know. We can't define a woman. I'm not a biologist. A woman we hear has rights. Yet in women's sports, when a man identifies as a woman, he can take away her right to compete in women's sports. And yet when that woman, with her so-called rights, stands up to defend herself, ooh, you cannot defend those rights, or you are canceled. You're a bigot, you're a hater. Make it make sense, huh? Well, of course you can't. When the light is taken out of the world, when the light is taken out of the human heart, you are left in darkness, and it will never make sense. GK Chesterton was a prolific writer, writing over a century ago. In the everlasting man, Chesterton argues that man, men and women, again, cannot be understood merely as another animal. C.S. Lewis adds, not only that, but he becomes the worst kind of animal, for at least animals by their nature, follow their natural instincts. A man does not. He becomes unnatural. Chesterton explains, it's natural for man to believe in the supernatural and to be infused with it. And it never feels natural to accept only natural things. This was the battle I was feeling on my bicycle, huh? The world has lost the essence of the supernatural. It doesn't become natural, it becomes irrational because we were never made to be like the rest of nature, huh? We are supernatural beings. This is our natural state. John Paul II taught that when we lose sight of God, we inevitably lose sight of ourselves. That light that is to come into our life is a person. And not only is he a person, his core being is love. God is love. I'm going to read you a part of this. It's really beautiful. Redemptor hominus is first encyclical and means the redeemer of man. Redemptor hominus. And he says in there, man cannot live without love because the essence of our being is love. He remains a being that's incomprehensible for himself. His life is senseless. If love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it, make it his own. If he does not participate intimately in it, this, he says, is why Christ the Redeemer fully reveals man to man himself. God is love, God is light, and so to be a person of love is connected to that light of God. Man cannot live without love. He becomes a being that's incomprehensible for himself if love is not revealed to him, if that light is not revealed to him. John Paul II loved Gaudium Spes number twenty two from Vatican II, and he quoted it often. He said, It's only in the mystery of that light, that word made flesh, Jesus Christ, that the mystery of man truly becomes clear who we become. It's not an add-on to us. We are to be supernatural beings. Together, Chesterton and John Paul II are making the same point. Chesterton, remove the supernatural, and human life becomes unnatural. We see it all around us. John Paul II said, remove Christ, then the supernatural, and man becomes a mystery even to himself. We no longer know who we are. So we read in Scripture, this time from the first chapter of John verse 5, the light shines in the darkness, and darkness is not overcome it. Our culture, the world, the society around us is suffering from the loss of the supernatural. When the light of Christ is extinguished, we do not return to nature, we wander into darkness. Christ is the light. This is one of the great paradoxes of our age, isn't it? Never before has mankind possessed so much technology, so much information, so much wealth, and yet so many people feel lost, anxious, lonely, confused about the most basic questions of life.

Why Modern Life Feels So Lost

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They can't answer the timeless questions that man has always been seeking to answer and wanting to answer since we can remember all the way back way before Jesus and the ancient Greeks. Who am I? Why am I here? What's the meaning and purpose of my life? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? What is marriage? What is freedom? What is truth? These were once questions that nearly every civilization could answer. Today they're debated endlessly, often without any agreement that objective truth even exists. How do we get here? GK Chesterton again, who offered his profound insight more than a century ago, take away the supernatural. What remains is the unnatural. Most people would assume that if we remove the supernatural again, all that remains is nature. This is what we hear in the culture. Reality, science, reason, facts, that's what we're going to be left with. But Chesterton understood something that our modern world has forgotten. Man is never created to exist apart from God. The supernatural is not an addition to human life, like frosting on a cake. It's woven into the very being of who we are. We're not created in it just biology. Remember from Genesis chapter 2, verse 7, God takes the creation, the nature, and he blows wa into us. So that's why St. Thomas Aquinas would say in a Summa that grace builds upon nature. It perfects us. It makes us into the image and likeness of God. How we were created from the beginning, we're made for communion with God. We were made to be filled with this grace. Saint Augustine wrote about it so beautifully, you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. This is what I was feeling on my bicycle, this restless heart. When we remove God from our understanding of ourselves, of man in general, we don't become more human. We become less than natural. We begin to lose sight of what it means to be human at all. That is exactly what we're witnessing today. A culture that once celebrated motherhood now debates whether mothers even exist. A civilization that once recognized the complementarity of man and woman now teaches children that sex is merely a feeling. Marriage becomes whatever we decide. Freedom becomes doing whatever I want. Truth becomes whatever I feel like. The body itself becomes something to redesign. We can redesign ourselves like we see in these trans movements or the redefinition of marriage. Reality doesn't even exist. Chesterton saw this coming many, many years ago. Take away the supernatural, what remains is the unnatural. But scripture goes even deeper. The Gospel of John opens with those breathtaking words. In him was life, and the life was the light of men, the light that shines in the darkness, and darkness has not and will not overcome it. Notice

Jesus As The Light Of Life

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that John doesn't begin thinking about politics. He doesn't begin with the culture. He doesn't begin with economics. He begins with light. In the world today, there's darkness. How? Because the light has been rejected. See, before there is darkness, there's a rejection of the light in our hearts. Jesus later declares, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. Notice what Jesus does not say. He doesn't say, I'll give you better opinions. I'll help you win political arguments. I'll make your life easier. He says, I am the light. Everything flows from that. When we lose Christ, we don't simply lose religion, we lose the light by which reality itself is understood. This is why John Paul II repeatedly taught that Christ reveals man to man himself and makes his vocation clear. We are to become persons of love. We see Jesus hang on the cross. This is my body given for you. The God of love pours himself out to us to bring us back into union and communion. Blood and water flow out from his side, huh? So it's only in the mystery of the word made flesh of Jesus Himself that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. Think about that. It's so obvious today, huh? The greatest mystery isn't merely who God is, though. The greatest mystery is who you are, made in the image and likeness of God. And you cannot fully know yourself apart from Christ, apart from the God who created you. This is exactly why so many people struggle today with identity. Our culture tells young people to go out and find themselves. Scripture tells us an entirely different story. Christ reveals us to ourselves. So we don't go out to invent ourselves. We go out to discover ourselves. We have reason that seeks the truth. We have free will that to choose the good once we find the truth. We don't invent ourselves. We are discovering ourselves. We came into a world that was already going, it had a beginning, it's going somewhere. And we were called to go into that world and discover the story. And in discovering the story, the light himself, the God who created us, we discover ourselves. This is why the title of this podcast has always been Become Who You Are. Men of Claymore, women of Claymore now. Become who you are. Not become whoever you imagine yourself to be. You want anxiousness, you want depression, you find darkness in your life, huh? Go out and just make it all up for yourself. Become who you are, not become whatever the culture applauds. Become who God created you to be. The light does not erase your identity, the light reveals your identity. Then something remarkable happens. Jesus

You Are The Light Of The World

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turns to his disciples in the Sermon of the Mount and says, You are the light of the world. Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Wait a second. Wait a second. Just a few chapters later, Jesus says, I am the light of the world. Now he tells you, you are the light of the world. Which is it? Well, the answer is both. Christ is the source. We are the reflection of that to take it in and to make it visible in the world, huh? The light himself, visible in the world. Think about the moon. The moon has no light of its own. Every beam of moonlight is borrowed from the what? From the sun. Likewise, every saint in history reflected the light of Christ. Saint Francis reflected Christ. Saint Therese reflected Christ. Saint Maximilian Colby, who gave up his life on the concentration camp for another man, reflected Christ. This is my body given for you. Saint John Paul II reflected Christ in his life and his teaching. They didn't manufacture holiness. They remained close enough in intimacy with Jesus Christ that his light was able to shine through them, become yoked, huh? Jesus said, Yoke yourself to me, unite yourself to me, for my yoke is easy and my burden light. John Paul II said it so beautifully to young people. Only if you are one with Jesus can you share his light and then be a light in the world. There it is, there it is. Not just trying harder, not pretending to be perfect, remaining united to Christ. The darker the culture becomes, the brighter authentic holiness shines. See, we can see that today. This is why this moment in history should not discourage us. It should cause to greater courage. Darkness has never defeated light. You know, a single candle, it can illuminate an entire room. In the morning I get up and I pray in my office. I have a little altar set up, and I light one small candle. Sometimes it's before the sunrise, huh? And I don't turn on any other lights. I close the door and it lights up my altar and it lights up the room. One faithful father can change this whole family. One courageous teacher can change the classroom. One holy priest can renew a whole parish. One mentor can redirect the young man's life. One saint can transform a whole age. History proves it again and again. The answer to darkness has never been more darkness and confusion. It's always been more light.

How The Enemy Dims The Light

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Perhaps this is why the enemy works so tirelessly to distract us, and the enemy is real. You didn't come into a neutral territory. This is what I was on my bicycle. God wanted me to acknowledge, hey, the battle is real. The enemy is real, but I am with you. I am the light. Stay with the light. See, the enemy doesn't have to convince us to worship evil. He merely has to keep us from the light. Endless scrolling, constant noise, pornography, entertainment without silence, politics without prayer, opinions without any wisdom, information without any contemplation. Little by little the light grows dim. Not because Christ has moved away from us, but because we have stopped looking for him. My friends, the solution is not complicated. Saint Thomas Aquinas again teaches grace does not destroy nature, it perfects it. It brings the light into our lives. John Paul II in his theology of the body said, our bodies, in fact, our bodies alone make visible the invisible, the spiritual and the divine. Our bodies were created to transfer into a visible reality of this world, that mystery hidden from all eternity in God, and be a sign of it. What is that mystery hidden from all eternity in God that we're a sign of? God is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, huh? We were asked to bring that light into the world, into the created world. This is all the way from the beginning.

A Simple Battle Plan For Holiness

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So, two asks of a Claymore soldier for Christ, two asks of you from the Claymore battle plan outline that you can access immediately, as you know by now on the Claymore Militus Christi website. Go under formation. That's it's only a six or seven pager, that outline. Go to the 10-minute Claymore morning ritual. Always, always, knees before the phone in the morning, always, and go through that Claymore 10-minute morning ritual. This is opening ourselves up to grace. And then what do we do? The second thing? We read an act from the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. See, you're going vertical, opening yourself up to grace and intimacy with God. First thing in the morning before all the noise comes in, and then we're being formed by the handbook. What does that mean? To give you a total formation, you'll see as you're going through it. But you're developing a framework to fill in your life with. And it's all detailed in a battle plan outline, filled in by the battle plan handbook. This is all done yoked to Jesus Christ, the light of the world. From there, just those two asks. That's how we get started. And then you can go on beyond there. I'm not going to go through a day without reading some scripture, huh? To bring that light in. I'm going to make sure I go to confession. I'm I'm taking the nuptial bath, getting rid of all of the sin and the vice and having the grace to come in so that I can be united to him where? At the Mass and the Eucharist. I'm going to try to pray the rosary daily. Spend time in silence. Remain in Christ. Because when we remain in him, something extraordinary happens. His light begins to shine through us. The world doesn't need more angry Christians. It needs luminous Christians, men and women whose joy cannot be explained apart from Christ, fathers who lead their families in courage, young men who defend purity, young women who radiate dignity, families that become small lights in the neighborhoods, which are growing darker by the day. You can really see them standing out. This is the mission of Claymore, not merely to win arguments, not merely to criticize the culture, but to become so united with Christ that his light shines through our lives. Chesterton warned us, take away the supernatural. What remains is the unnatural. Look around you. Jesus gives us the answer. I am the light of the world. And then he turns to us and says, You are the light of the world. You see, this is our mission. Become who you are, and you will light the world on fire, Saint Catherine of Sienna said. Become men and women so united with Christ that others encounter his light simply by encountering you. Because the battle for the next generation will not ultimately be won by politics, technology, or even brilliant ideas. It's going to be won by saints, one soul at a time. Until

Walk In The Light And Close

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next time, remain in Christ, walk in his light. Be not afraid and become who you are. Hey, God bless you. Great to be with you. Talk to you again soon.