GOOD SHEPHERD STAFFING

“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.” ― St. Augustine This past weekend I was on mission down in the Kensington section of Philadelphia with some young missionaries. We were walking the streets and giving food and clothes to the people addicted to drugs living on the street. We were also carrying a large wooden cross and taking prayer intentions, writing them down on a piece of paper and nailing them to the cross. At the end of day the group went back to the local parish to pray for all the intentions. We had a priest with us and two women who we encountered decided to confess their sins to the priest. So the priest took them aside and heard their confession. As the women were doing so I was speaking to two other young women who were in the process of having some drug injected into their necks by some men they were with. After they were done I asked if they would like to pray a rosary with us. We gave one of the women, Sarah, a plastic blue rosary. She and her friend declined to pray with us but I could tell they were interested. The Holy Spirit moved me to say the following to them. I told them that no matter what they have done until this moment in their lives... No matter the level of darkness they have tasted. They can, today, right now, turn toward the light. They can be forgiven of their sins, they can ask God to come into their lives and help them. You see I saw in their eyes this strange combination of hope and a kind of disbelief. I am sure they were thinking something to the effect of "As far down as I have gone, no one, no God could love me. No God could care about me. I have abandoned Him." We all have this same trouble. That because we know the true depth of our sin, we doubt whether we are loved by God. More pointedly, we doubt we are worthy of His love. The good news, the "gospel" is the fact that God entered into the very depths of death and depravity so that all of us can be reunited to Him and His immense love for us. Despite our unworthiness. ----------------- Sarah and her friend maybe turned away this weekend. They did not choose to lay their inner burden of sin down with the priest. They chose not to pray the rosary with the young missionaries and I. But I could see in their eyes that a seed was planted. I reminded them that there is no darkness that is dark enough that light cannot overcome it. Because it is that light, that love that is fundamental. Yes we can turn away and if the devil gets his hands on us we can fall very far. But as Augustine says the future depends on your choice. The devil may have your past and even your present. But the light of God's love beckons for you like it does Sarah and her friend. You get to choose today which you want. Which path you choose. Do you want the darkness of self will and sin? Or the light of the Truth of God's plan for you?

"Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the powerful of foundations...the more I depended on faith the stronger I became" Unknown Ours is a world of death. What I mean is that it is a world where things are born, they exist and then they die. Obvious point of course yet the implications cut to the very core of our being. Namely that we will, at some point in the not so distant future, not be "being" anymore. As will everyone we know, the universe itself, all known universes and every living thing. When I was the CEO of Growth Era I used to do a daily call with the staff(after much pleading it was reduced to once a week) in which I started the call off reminding everyone in the company that they would die. Mind you the company was mostly staffed at the times of people in their early 20s and so they were very much not in the business of thinking of their own death. I reminded them anyway, number one because it is true and we must build our lives on that which is true, and number two because I thought reminding ourselves of our deaths brought about both a seriousness in our undertakings as well as a gratitude for the many blessings we have in our lives. "Nothing focuses the mind so much as the gallows" (paraphrase of unknown author) But I think the author of the quote I began with has something else in mind. Something beyond a Stoic "memento mori". He is suggesting that there is something in us, some part of our nature which is not, and cannot be satisfied in this world. ------- According to Aristotle we are "rational" beings. Our minds are on a constant mission...you may have noticed. A mission to know. To understand. But to know what? The truth. Well actually both the true and the good. But you see the mind is immaterial. As is what it seeks. This is where religion comes in. Religion comes from the root "religio" which means "to bind" But what are we to bind to in a world of death? A world where everything is going away. Pleasure? Try it and you will be caught in a ratchet effect that will leave you addicted and sad. Worldly success? No matter what level you get to there is always more, there is no theoretical limit actually... Relationships-This is better but still you only get another mixed up, confused soul like yourself. No, what you really want can only be found in the realm beyond death. In the eternal. You can only find rest in truth itself, in goodness itself. As Augustine's most famous quote puts it "our hearts are restless until they rest in thee" This is what the quotes author is suggesting when he says that his "ephemeral" faith was the most "powerful of foundations". It is only ironic if you don't consider deeply the nature of man, the nature of life, and the nature of their source. Once you do your life will make sense as will the path to peace.

"Modern persons will never find rest for their restless hearts without Christ, for modern culture is nothing but the wasteland from which the gods have departed, and so this restlessness has become its own deity; and, deprived of the shelter of the sacred and the consoling myths of sacrifice, the modern person must wander or drift, vainly attempting one or another accommodation with death, never escaping anxiety or ennui, and driven as a result to a ceaseless labor of distraction, or acquisition, or willful idiocy. And, where it works its sublimest magic, our culture of empty spectacle can so stupefy the intellect as to blind it to its own disquiet, and induce a spiritual torpor more deplorable than mere despair." D B Hart We have been de christianizing as a people for a long time. How are we doing as a result? We have alot of money. We have built alot of technology. And, if you look around with honesty you will conclude that we are totally lost. Families broken Drug addiction, porn addiction, food addiction... out of control. Suicides amongst the young Psychiatric pill use We are an affluent but lost people. Why? Because we have lost a sense of the meaning of our lives. We have lost the supernatural hope that can only come from God. We have replaced this with a deification of the self. We invent ourselves, we invent the meaning of our lives we decide on right and wrong. Sounds great. How is it working? Terribly. Why? Because it is not true. it is an elevation of our own will over reason. And we are suffering because of it. Christ, the logos made flesh, came down on a rescue mission. To save us from this darkness and misery. But we are free beings. We can choose a life dedicated to the love of God and His will for us. Or our own will. Where we begin with what we want. And reason from there. Again, look around you. Perhaps look inside you. Examine the inner depths that you keep hidden for yourself. Is there a longing there? A lack? A hole looking to be filled? If so ask yourself if there is anything you have found in the world that has made it go away. Some pleasure? Some amount of money? Some power or prestige? Your hunger is for Him who created you. And the good news of the Gospel is that He is looking for you. So today you can lay this burden down if you want. You can repent, which means simply to turn away. Turn away from the darkness to the light. The time is short. We have no idea how much longer we have. Have you had enough of searching through the darkness of this world? The offer of Christ's light is always there for you. Right now. You can live a different life. As a new being. Will you?

"Then the LORD* answered Job out of the storm and said: Who is this who darkens counsel with words of ignorance? Gird up your loins* now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size? Surely you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it? Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid its cornerstone, While the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God* shouted for joy? This was the daily Old Testament reading at mass and I was struck by two things- 1) The beauty of the poetry 2) How this passage better elucidates our predicament as humans better than almost any other. Albert Einstein said "life isn't stranger than you think, it is stranger than you can think" He was talking about the realities underlying the natural structure of the universe. Yet it applies really to everything about life. It is so strange. Here we are these conscious primates roaming around on a rock floating in the midsts of basically infinite space. And while we are here wandering we all feel exactly like Job... The suffering that has been and is being visited upon us is not only great, perhaps even too great to bear sometimes, but also without obvious explanation/justification. and so we cry out to God and we demand answers. We want to know the why of it all. We did not ask for this life and we want it justified. God's answer to Job's cry above is so telling. The answer is that we don't get an answer, at least not one we can grasp in this life. We cannot, in principle, know this kind of thing. Why? Because we are not the author of life, nor are we the author of our own lives. We are participants in it's great mystery. Job was a good man and was tested by horrible circumstances. Perhaps we are not as good, but still we are tested. We who live by faith must accept not only the mystery at the heart of the enterprise but we must also know that, though we are not the author of life The author is with us. Holding us in His loving embrace at all moments of our lives. And that the difficulties and sufferings we encounter are all some mysterious classroom for us. To learn what? To learn to love. Not as God loves as that is His nature. But to love as fallen, temporal, compromised beings. Beings who can choose loves opposite. If we live well we must realize that all that is unworthy in us is being, or must be sacrificed for this purpose. That we can and must become better servants to that love that created(and is creating) us. Yet in so doing we will not be given to understand. We will live through fog. We must nevertheless serve the love that is our true home. Such is a worthy human life.

Was blessed to be interviewed on the Catholic Herald's podcast. The magazine was a favorite of Tolkein and Chesterton. It was a great experience and I pray it helps someone come home to The Church https://lnkd.in/esR-Rk9e

"If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth" "God hidden within me. I find Him by hiding in the silence in which He is concealed." Thomas Merton I am in Switzerland doing some hiking before going to Skjope to meet up with the team at Growth Era. Walking in the woods today the idea came to me that as I have grown older I have sought out more and more silence. It is a bit strange perhaps because I am a musician and love beautiful sound. But there is something about silence that feeds my soul. I think that without prolonged periods of silence I would go crazy. Maybe this is why our world is so insane today. At least part of the reason. We have made it a kind of mission to fill every moment of our lives with... Noise. Aural noise. Busyness. Visual noise. This exhausts us. It drains us. It makes us deeply un happy and makes us sick. Thus sitting in silence, or walking in silence seems so strange to us. And yet this is where and how we can come to settle into our depths. This is where we can find the stillness that the Bible tells us will be our path to know God. "Be still and know that I am God" God cannot be some thing in the world. Some form. God must be that which silently holds all of this in existence. In Aquinas' latin "ipsum ese subsistens" the contingent act of "to be" itself. That sounds mysterious and of course it is. But in silence we can come to know. Not intellectually. But we can come to the sense of that which is, as Augustine put it- "intimo meo et superior summo meo" "more interior to me than my most intimate intimacy and superior to my highest summit." Time in silence, especially before the Blessed Sacrament, is when I am most filled with God's love and peace. ----- To go back to music- All notes begin as silence. They then have an existence in the form of a vibration. The vibration has a beginning, a peak and resolution.. Back to where it came. Back to silence. The more time I spend in silence the more I realize that the entire world is engulfed in this great silence. Things, people, buildings, planets, stars come and go. And yet the silence remains. Both giving birth and receiving the remains of...everything. And yet there it is. Indivisible. Whole. Merton (as always) puts it best. I'll end with this. "It seems to me that what I am made for is not speculation but silence and emptiness, to wait in darkness and receive the Word of God entirely in His Oneness and not broken up into all His shadows" Perhaps the salvation, the healing you are looking for is to be found not in some "thing" But in that great silent beyond where God waits to reveal Himself to you. Amen