♪ Living on toes of time ♪ ♪ Living on toes of time ♪ (upbeat music) (crowd cheering) - So can someone truly go to heaven without some sort of sacrifice? - Yeah, that's a good question. One that, you know, understood incorrectly, it can sound like we can buy our way into heaven. If we do enough sacrifices, we can go to heaven. But understood correctly, maybe another way to say it is, can you really love someone without sacrificing something? And that perhaps leads us more to the, ooh, correct understanding of the question. - Now you got me on that for a second. Yeah, you got me thinking about have I ever, have I ever loved somebody with, like truly loved someone without giving something up or without a sacrifice? - Yeah, yeah, and this Sunday is gonna be the 26th Sunday. So the gospel can help us in understanding this question, we're still in the ninth chapter of Mark. And at that time, John said to Jesus, teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name. We tried to prevent him because he does not follow us. And Jesus replied, do not prevent him. There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can, at the same time, speak ill of me. For whoever is not against us is for us. Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ, amen, I say to you, will surely not lose his reward. Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna into the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life crippled than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Powerful metaphors, which is what made Jesus apart from simply the aura of him being God. But as a preacher, he knew how to use useful and powerful metaphors. I think of this gospel as being divided into two parts in a way, almost like two different teachings, two different gospels. And the first has to do with who's with us and who's against us. And Jesus wanting to just throw that category away altogether. And the church does that too, naturally at wood, it's his church. In the Second Vatican Council, the church talks about how every person in the world is related to the church and sees that every person in the world is related to the church. And precisely as Jesus says, every person in the world, even an atheist is related to the church in as much as an atheist loves, if an atheist loves their family. Love is of God, therefore they're related to the church, at least in that. If an atheist has good will to the degree that they have good will toward their brother or sister, they're related to the church in some way. In maybe a preparation, that love and that good will that they have, we would say is a preparation for the fullness of the gospel to come into their life and please God it will. But even if it never did, they're related to the church in some fashion. And then the second part, this part about the cost of heaven, the cost of the kingdom of heaven, the value of the kingdom of heaven. And Jesus pointing out that he uses these metaphors. If your hand, if your feet, if your eyes, if these things cause you to sin, then the kingdom of heaven is so valuable that it's way more valuable than to have those things. Go ahead and get rid of them. And so of course his, his hearers would not have heard him saying go out and get an ax and cut off your hands. They wouldn't have, they would have understood he's using a rhetorical device here to impress upon us that what he's offering us is so powerfully valuable. But that's where it gets to that question that we started with about love and sacrifice. A person can feel love, all of the giddiness and the emotional heat that comes from first setting eyes on your beloved or whatever. A person can feel love without sacrifice. But to love someone means to will the good of the other. And I can't continuously will the good of the other without needing at some point to do something that costs me for them. And so that's why I would say no, I don't think that a person can love without some sacrifice. So can a person go to heaven without sacrifice? Going to heaven is about loving God who saved me. We don't go to heaven because of our good deeds. We go to heaven because we have faith in Jesus who died for our sins. But that faith that we have in Jesus should elicit in us a desire to love him. And once we have that desire and once we make that commitment, then our life is going to be lived in a different fashion. And some of what is going to be different about it is sacrifice, the things that we will do that we otherwise wouldn't do. And the things that we won't do that we want to do that we otherwise would do. - Yeah, yeah, when I read this, I just kind of think about, you know, sometimes in life there are drastic, you can call them drastic measures to avoid sin. There are necessary things that we need to sort of get rid of or, you know, sever from, et cetera along the way. One line that is really sort of sort of raw in a way is the last line here. Where he says, Gehenna, comma, where their worm does not die, their worm does not die and the fire is not clenched. Their worm. It's such a sort of an aggressive image or, I don't know, just such a such a dark line of scripture actually. And so I also think about too, like there are, to your point too, these sort of analogies or metaphors are there for us to sort of understand some of these sacrifices that need to be made. I always think about the millstone, which is actually a very, very heavy, heavy stone. You know, first, if you don't know what a millstone is, you know, Bishop, you and I were talking about it sort of when we were not recording, but it's a stone that's large enough to crush wheat, you know, little tiny wheat, which something that small, you know, maybe wouldn't even be crushed by the tire of a car, for example, in the car that weighs, you know, 2,000 pounds because it would not have the force to do that. So the idea that you could be wearing this stone around your neck is sort of a funny image, but it creates sort of an intense, an intense image in your mind for some of these things. - And also a good reflection on the ripple effect of sin, the ripple effect of my sin. What is the impact of my sin on that level? You know, does my sin cause scandal? Does it, you know, you know, what are these? 'Cause all of these metaphors one can take and then reflect on an individual metaphor and say, okay, what would the hands or feet represent in my life? What would the, where in my life do my causing little ones to sin? - Yeah, to ask that question about, you know, are there things that I do or don't do that cause scandal? - Yeah, and then so, and going back to this, whiver is not against us as force. When I read that initially, like, you know, my sort of ADD mind or maybe it's the three o'clock caffeine I need as we record sort of kicking in and causing my brain to sort of have a sort of skip, but when I hear that forever, for whoever is not against us as force, I feel like I'm like, it's like William Wallace, you know, and he's like, you know, not there with his Scottish accent, you know, you know, afraid of, you know, right, you know, you can, you know, if you run, you'll live for a while, you know, I mean, like, no, that's right. And so I, I, I, I hear that, but, but it sort of begs the question, you know, about people who are maybe non-Catholic, people who are, who may actually do good deeds. And I think Simon of Cyrene is someone who I think of who sort of was called into this. - Yeah. - I don't know where, but responded to the call. Is that, is that, is there some parallel between him and sort of that, that message right there? - Yeah, but I, you know, I think of, for example, parents who are gifted with a child with special needs, for example, suddenly they're going to be serving Christ that way, they're, they're, you know, parents serve Christ in their children generally. But when they are gifted with a child with special needs, now they're going to really be serving Christ in a deeper way. And so things can happen that are ordinary things in our lives, opportunities throughout the day to help someone, opportunities to serve the poor, to volunteer in some fashion, Catholic charities, for example, those are all ways of serving Christ, but in concrete circumstances of our life. And looking for those opportunities, you know, living a life where we're open to and looking for those opportunities. - And then today, sort of a unique thing about today's, sort of release of this podcast is that we're celebrating the Feast of Saint Padre Pio is sort of a fascinating character in sort of a, I don't know, in small Catholic circles, maybe seen as a trendy saint for lack of a better way of saying it, a trendy saint to sort of pray to, to talk about, to sort of think about, because he is a modern saint, but also just a fascinating, fascinating character, right? - Yeah, and somehow his name just has a nice rhyme. - Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of stuff to it, it's catchy, right? - But also, we don't have many, we don't have many saints who have the stigmata, the wounds of Christ in their hands or feet. - Yeah, it's very unique. - And Padre Pio did. He has said to have had the gift of reading souls. So, you know, he's known as a heroic confessor in the sense of how long, how much time he spent in the confessional each day. But part of the reason why he spent so much time there was because he had this reputation, and so people would come to him from a long, long ways away. - Yeah. - And he could, you know, someone could confess their sins to him, and he could say to them, is that all? And they could say yes, and he could say what about X? And they would say, oh yeah, that's, that's true. Yeah, that's all something. - Sounds a bit judgy. (laughs) - Which in the confessional you want, were there for judgment? - Good. - But yeah, he also was a simple capuchin, you know, a friar, you know, he lived in his monastery. - I always think the images of him at Mass are in his reverence. There's something about his gaze upon Christ. I've always been fascinated by that. There are certain saints, 'cause you have actual photos and videos of him. - Yeah, that's the other unique thing. - So like, and I think that's why he is, and obviously I'm being sort of funny when I say trendy or things like that. This man's sort of gaze upon Christ was captivating to watch somebody with reverence adoring the Lord in that way. But he also, I mean, that is a unique thing that among the few astigmatistic saints with the astigmat that we have had, most of them were not when there was TV or photographs. You know, they didn't live during the time of that. So it's so rare. You know, St. Francis, for example, had the astigmatism. Well, there was no photograph back then. So with this saint, we have all of that. - Yeah, having those images. It's kind of similar to the incorruptibles as we've talked about before. Sometimes getting that visual sign, you know, sort of causes, seeing things causes greater belief or causes greater wonder. - But the people who have had the stigmata received it as a gift. So that's the lesson for us to take from it. Because when we talk about suffering for the faith or suffering with faith, that's part of what we mean. You know, it's antithetical to Christianity to believe that the more I love Jesus, the less I will experience bad things in my life. Just doesn't work that way. Sometimes people talk about a prosperity gospel. - That's right. You hear that preach sometimes in mega churches or something. And so the idea is simply that, you know, if you really have faith, if you really believe, if you really invest, et cetera, then you will be blessed and you will have everything you need and so forth. But that's just not the way it works. What we will have is the Lord with us as we face whatever we face. Now, mostly we face blessings in our life, mostly. But when those things happen that are inevitable to human life, loss of people that we love, our own loss of health or job or whatever kinds of tragic circumstances can happen, in those moments we remember, that's right. This is all about carrying the cross. I'm supposed to be able and willing to carry the cross because Jesus is with me to help me. And so then we do that, we do carry that cross. - And oftentimes even from a financial perspective, so there's hard data and research out there that those who tithe, those who give money away for every dollar they give away, they get like $1.60 back during that year. And sometimes some may think, oh, you know, is this just, you know, God blessing that in some sort of, there's actually hard data on it. And what it more often really is a better explanation is, is that those who tithe or those who structure their gifts from the Lord, their own personal stewardship in such a way that they can tithe, they tend to be problem solvers, but in the data bears the sound. So it's real, but they tend to be problem solvers and people who sort of receive these things as a gift from God and try to find ways to help other people. You know, when I donate to Catholic charities or to my parish or to these ministries, et cetera. And so there is some truth to good stewardship but to your point, sacrifice is part of it. Sacrifice needs to be made. - But I want to deepen what you're talking about. The formational value of something like sacrificial giving. So who's going to do that? Who's going to sacrificially give? Not the person who's just sort of not really decided yet about how deep I'm going to go with the Lord. It's more likely the person who has decided, I want to go as deep as he'll have me. I want to go all in for the Lord. Now, that person who has decided that and thus has caused them to give sacrificially is not going to just do that because of their decision. That decision is going to affect every aspect of their life. You know, we also see this with the people who use NFP. So people who say the church has continuously taught because it is true in the Christian faith that the use of contraceptives is contrary to God's plan for marriage and I want God's plan for marriage. Therefore, I want to understand how my fertility works and I want to cooperate with God in the use of my fertility. And so I use natural family planning, sometimes called natural pro-creative technology and so forth. The person who's thinking that way has had an encounter of some kind that now is going to invade every aspect of their life, not just that, but it will also affect that. And so that's part of what I think this is or what we can take from this. When the Lord says that we must carry our cross, He's not doing that to be mean to us. He's doing that because He knows that what we will learn about ourselves and about Him and about our relationship together by carrying our cross will be so valuable to us that it can't be replaced, it can't be given to us in any other fashion. It's only through the carrying of the cross that that will happen. - And in the case of Padre Pio, this suffering, was a gift, as he said, was a gift. It's also just fascinating too. I mean, just the concept of sort of just playing it out, bearing the wounds of Christ, having actual wounds. I mean, the man had to wear bandages, gloves, et cetera, I mean, almost like an autoimmune disease or something is the best way I can sort of describe maybe what was looking like on his skin. - His superiors had to guard him from just golfers, onlookers, people who would otherwise have invaded his life and made it impossible for him to live. So sometimes it seemed like he was being kept from the public while he was, to some degree, because the public would have, I mean, we often see that in the gospel stories with Jesus where he has to move away from the crowd because they're just going to mob him. And so a maniac can take over. - Have you ever experienced suffering in your own personal life, Bishop, where you feel that you've endured for Christ or a Christ has called you to endure? - In my own life, I have not had to endure tremendous suffering and I'm thankful to God for that. The death of my parents, in my mind, I don't put that in this category, you know? The death of my parents was a grieving, but a normal healthy kind of grieving. And their death was a beautiful death. They had lived beautiful lives. And so there wasn't the kind of tragic, you know, I was at Texas A&M, for example, when the bonfire collapsed in 1999, 12 students were killed. And that was for a whole community. That was just a terrible blow. I mean, these children, I'm a bit children. These college, I'm 64, I can call them children. These college students who were so young and so full of promise and life and who died in this tragic accident. And so that to me is the kind of thing that's more like this. I've been in hospital rooms with people who were young like that, suicide victims, for example. And who died or were dying in the moment. And those are tragic kinds of things. Or to baptize a baby who's born with a defect that won't allow them to live. Things like that, those are tragic things. - I remember the first time experiencing death. We had a family friend. I was in, maybe I was 12, 12 years old, but we had a family friend who had a young child at the age of one, drowned. And it was extremely tragic for our whole community or whole parish. Very sad, we're very close with the family. And that was sort of my first encounter with, I'd been to funerals of like old relatives, which I hate saying it like that. It's like, I'd been to funerals of old men. Like, they're passive, they're over there. And I don't mean it like that, because everybody has dignity. But it was very impactful to see a small child that I had interacted with on a personal basis. - Yeah. - And to see the pain that that caused so many in such a short period of time. And then even as a mature adult, realizing, oh my gosh, there was so much other pain related to this death that I didn't even understand was going on for the parents and the family and et cetera. And so, when we go through things like this, what do we learn from these experiences? What sort of words do you offer to those when they are suffering? 'Cause you've said you've experienced this in the hospital. We were just in a hospital recently together, working with the chaplain and who visits people all day. - Right, yeah. - And visits people who are going through suffering and asking questions of faith, of why this, that old question of why do good things, bad things happen to good people. But what do we learn from these things? What have you learned? What do you offer to those who are suffering? - Yeah, I think that what we want to do when we encounter someone who's suffering in something like that, that's a tragic kind of suffering, is to simply be with them. The well-met mistake that a person can make is to come in and to try to tell them how everything's going to be fine. And the reason why we might do that is because we're uncomfortable with the suffering. - Right, we want to amend it ourselves or take control of it. - If you're the one who the suffering is happening to, you can't get out of it. The person who comes to visit you, if they could somehow fix it for you, then they could get out of it. But you're not going to get out of it. So what we need is just to be willing to sit with someone, to be with them, to let them express what they're feeling, to let them feel what they're feeling. That's really, really important to avoid, 'cause the other thing that sometimes happens is well-meaning people who give them to believe in various ways, that if they really had deeper faith, they would be okay with this, it would be okay. Don't you realize that this person is going to be with God or whatever? Look, they may get there months down the road, but let them get there. They don't need to get there today, you know, that kind of thing. And so that would be my advice. That's what I've experienced as being the only thing that can really be useful is to sit with someone and to let them experience the grief that they're experiencing. - Yeah. - But the deeper question, it goes to, again, that so many things go to, we always talk about intentional discipleship. If I decide that I'm going to give my life to the Lord because I believe that by doing that, I'll be protected from tragedy, then I won't give my life to the Lord because that's not what you can't try this on, you know? The decision to be the disciple of the Lord is a decision that is made in view of who He is, not what might or might not happen to me. That's it. And if I decide to give my life to the Lord because He is the one who has saved me, then whatever happens to me, I will have Him with me in it. That will be, quote, the payoff, so to speak. Not that I'll be protected from it, but I'll have Him with me in it. And knowing that I will have the Lord with me no matter what happens, gives me a certain power over whatever might happen 'cause I know that I won't face it alone. So yes, it's real. There is a real, and even in a sense, a practical return, you know, to use that crude term, return on investment. I'm going to invest my life, what's the return? Well, the return is the Lord. That crude term. That's a pretty good return on investment. My lousy life for the divine life of God. That's wonderful. And we have writings of some of the saints to modern saints, maybe Mother Teresa and some of those who have, you see there's humanity, which is sort of lost as we always talk about, sort of like, when we read about the saints, and it's like, you know, you're mentioning St. Francis, and it's like, oh, and St. Francis did this and he did that. Oh yeah, by the way, I had the Stigmata. It's like, we read it like it's a bullet list on Wikipedia or something like that. - Which it is, I'm sure. - Which it is, that's right. Which it is. And so, and, you know, so we lose their humanity, but some of the more modern saints we have, we have some of their writings and your experience that some of these people were very, very, very close with Jesus and they were, they had him by their side through their moments of suffering. But still, you see that they're still human, you know? There's still those moments of, whether you wanna say frustration or, you know, it's still recognizing that it's still okay to sort of be like, to cry, to mourn, to weep, you know? As Christ wept, you know? I mean, just, that is a very human thing to do that. In some ways, it's, I think you could maybe make the argument that it's unhealthy if we don't grieve, if we don't weep, you know? - Stowicism is a philosophy, but it's not the gospel. And so being a stoic is not part of what it means to be a disciple. Jesus loved passionately, and his disciples should love passionately. And you can't just have one kind of passion. If you have passion, you have all of them, which includes grieving, passion, loving, passion, all of them. - So I think that that's a good segue to fatherhood because I think when we think of sort of, what does a man call do? What is real fatherhood, sort of this masculinity? Sometimes we falsely think it is stoicism. We sort of think it is this sort of tough guy. You know, I'm thinking of the guy with the meme of the guy with the beard and the face, who's just like, you know? And, you know, so maybe a good question is how was Padre Pio, a good example of fatherhood, and then maybe how can we as men specifically learn from this example? - Well, he and many saints, Father Brian Brooks just sent us a little text with a picture of him at the tomb of St. John Viani. He's another one. He didn't have the stigmata, but he's tremendous model of priesthood. And so Padre Pio would be the same. He's held out as a model for priests of priestly fatherhood, but I would argue, and I would want to make the argument that he and all such saints are also a great model of the fatherhood of men like yourself, married men who have children and who are raising children, even married men or even single men who don't have children, but who are still living their life in a generational fashion. That is to say they're striving to generate life in others around them in many in very different ways. Someone like Padre Pio, you have to think of the courage that it took to live his life as a monk. He's getting up every day, he's facing challenges with just being faithful as a monk. He's doing that for many years. He's experiencing the days that are sort of exciting and uplifting, but also the days that are just one more day, another day, another day like yesterday. - In myself. - Yeah, and he's serving others his whole life is in service of others. Padre Pio was known to spend from morning till evening in the confessional. And so he's not afraid to work hard, especially for the ones that he loves. And so that to me, those are all qualities of someone who's being a father of children. So for a man who is married, let's say, and he has his first baby coming, to already begin to conceive of himself in this newer and higher fashion, that now I'm living, not just for me, not even just for me and my wife, but I'm actively investing myself so that my little children can have life so that they can have food, so they can have clothing and so forth. Those are all beautiful ways for a person to continue that law of the gift, the gift of self, begins in marriage, but then it expands into the family and the children. That's what I think of when I think of someone like Padre Pio as a model for fathers to look to, for the strength they need to do this. - So we will look this week with our eyes towards heaven and see the sacrifices which may be very well be gifts. - Which all fathers make. - That's awesome. - Well, thank you Bishop. - Well, thank you all for listening. This has been "Tuls of Time" with Bishop David Kondrela. We hope you have a great rest of your week. (audience cheering) - Thank you.
