 My mother was dying and I had to stay home and care for her, right? We need like an extreme extraordinary reason to stay put. I think we need to have the opposite. My name is Jason Craig. Today I'm going to be interviewing a friend of mine, Dr. Ryan Hanning, a church historian, professor, and somewhat agrarian. We'll talk about what the somewhat means later. Today, the topic we're going to talk about is something that is in the air we breathe that we don't even realize it's happening. So on this podcast, we are often talking about the fact that many of us in our homes, in our places, we feel something is disconnected, something's just not working, especially if you want to live a life based in something inherited, a beautiful tradition like our faith, things like kin, family, all those things are in some sort of conflict and we're trying to figure out why. And us as fathers, our roles bring order to these things. We want to know what to do about it. So as we've been saying, people argue on whether culture is upstream of politics, whether politics is upstream of culture and what's going on in our society and what's affecting it. But the fact is our homes are downstream of all of it and we catch a lot of the stuff floating towards us and we don't have control of it. And we don't even understand oftentimes that we have embraced certain things that are actually in conflict with what we love or things that we just don't question and we really should. So one of those is if we look at nature, the way God created the natural family to exist, the natural community to exist, he presumes that you're going to live in the garden where he planted you, right? In fact, the first disaster in scripture, the first disaster in history is to be moved away from the home, to be expelled from the garden due to sin. And for thousands upon thousands of years, the natural state of the family, of the village, of the community, whatever it was, was pretty stable and capable of making things like and enjoying things like custom tradition, belonging, these things that are really disrupted in our time. It's because they didn't go anywhere. So technology clearly has changed that we can go places. We have the technology to be very mobile. I mean, this in this country was built on it. I mean, we would not have expanded across an entire continent the way we had. Had it not been for the railroad and then the automobile, even the hard work of going west with wagons and horses was really for the sake of farming. So sometimes we like to think about that as if, well, that's just everyone sort of going for a gold rush, which actually wasn't true, that people were going west to actually settle. They were going away with the very clear and intention of going away to not go anywhere else, to really settle a place and to live and to sort of, yes, start over, but not an endless mobility. In our day and age, we not only have even greater technology to go wherever we want. I think a lot of us have unknowingly embraced a philosophy of hypermobility that we actually think in terms of our own children, our own households, of them defining their success by leaving behind the things that we're trying to communicate to them that they should treasure. So it's a bit of a conflict. We used to say family is the most important thing or your community is very important and this fits very quite easily with our faith because loving your neighbor, it's not an abstract thing. It's the people that are close to you. But then we have, we'll say something about our children say, you know, that one's really bright. They're going to really go far. To leave your hometown is actually a sign of success, of arriving. But the question is arriving into what? And one of the words that can be really helpful for us is cosmopolitan. We arrive at the cosmopolitan ideal. I'd like to read from a quote, a book called The Limits of Liberalism, Tradition, Individualism and the Crisis of Freedom by Mark T. Mitchell. Because this, when people use the term in casual conversation cosmopolitan, generally refers to a disposition of her vain sophistication. Person was not blinkered by the prejudices and limited experience of the provincial, the uneducated and the narrow minded. The cosmopolitan is one who exhibits tolerance rather than xenophobia. Reason rather than prejudice, universalism rather than localism. The cosmopolitan considers himself a citizen of the world and views other affiliations as secondary to his universal embrace. He is suspicious of patriotism and fearful of nationalism. His community knows no limits, rather the embrace of his imagination, if not his actual affections extends to all humanity. Tradition for the cosmopolitan is an impediment to the universalized future that is the object of his dreams. The liberal cosmopolitan dares to dream of a world that has broken free from the confines and local particularities of tradition. Unfortunately, the headlong attempt to ignore a destroyed tradition in an effort to usher in a unified cosmopolitan age has set the table for both philosophical error and social disaster. Now, in this book, he goes on to all sorts of very broad ideas of what that looks like. The problems that having no limits to place has for society that we, you know, lacking in affection for our people and sort of outsourcing any idea actually of loving your neighbor. You can just sort of give to, you know, causes the world over that you like and that, you know, that's good enough. You're loving somebody, even if you don't know who your neighbor is. I think, Ryan, to call you in now, what I want to bring up is how actually that has affected us and our families in the way, particularly we as Catholic families, we talk about constantly. We talk about building communities. People want to have communities rallied around their parish, around their, you know, their people. They want to have a culture. They want to have traditions. They want to have feasts. They want to have processions. But then at the exact same time, in the same conversation, we have an expectation amongst ourselves. It's unspoken, but then we use it. I mean, we speak it that if you love your children, you better make sure they escape this place that we're trying to teach them to love. You better send them away. Even if we're in a good place, there's just a presumption that it is better for a father to parents generally to make sure, to ensure that even if your kid maybe wanted to stay nearby, that they always were provided with the superior option of getting out of dodge and going far in life. So where is this coming from? Yeah, this deep-seated tendency is something I've only recently reflected on is my kids have gotten old enough to like move out of the house, right? And like, we don't realize how much we've imbibed sort of a culture that tells us that having more options is always better, even if those options are, you know, increasingly bad, right? We must assume more options is better and same thing with like leaving the house. And it's interesting because, yeah, I want my children to be successful. I want my children to become who God has made them to be. But also to recognize that throughout human history, really up until the last 150 years, you know, a child leaving the home was like the worst thing that could happen. And I don't mean like the immediate house. I mean like, in an agrarian society, for instance, you know, your children leaving the trade that you had or leaving your farm, you know, fully is a disaster. Now, going and starting up their own farm down the road from you or on your own property or on some property that they acquired for themselves and that proximity to the community and culture, that's great. But this whole idea of sort of like, you know, you have to be free of the culture and the conditions and the traditions that you have built up in order to fully be alive is, you know, it might sound romantic when you're 16 years old, but for the most part, when you become an adult, you realize being disrooted from your support system is actually not a helpful thing. So this is something I've been thinking about a lot as my own children are now growing up and becoming even more the men and women that God has made them to be. But yeah, we live in a society that thinks more options are better and that tends towards making decisions about mobility based on economic potential with totally not even thinking about all of the other really important support systems and structures that exist in a local place, right? Like I said, a parish neighborhood, a community. And it's weird because we live in a way that we assume this is the case, but you know, a lot of the world, Jason, as you know, still lives with a pretty intact localized culture. You know, it's just great. That's because it's that I actually, it takes the artificiality. I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way. It takes sort of an imposing of an idea. And so this is a philosophical idea. Plus it's a practical, you know, technologically abled idea, which is that you can and you should and leave. You're able to and you should do it. This is a philosophy in a technology, but the philosophy I think is the one that's stranger how much and I have it. I mean, I recall that, you know, the satire newspaper, the onion, you know, and it was making fun of this and it said, you know, something to the effect of this. This is a fake headline in case anyone doesn't know what this publication is. I'm not recommending it or endorsing it, but this is hilarious. And he just says, you know, sad or no, no, no. Happy loser stays in his hometown like a loser. Like they repeat loser. You know, it's this. Even though most of us would actually presume we love to the place. Now, not everyone. I guess it's worth saying. If you're in a bad spot and you just have to leave, you just have to leave. But I'm talking about the overarching presumption that even if you're in a great place, you ought to leave is there. And I never questioned this until a good friend of mine who is from a good, healthy culture in South Louisiana talks about, he had no reason to leave. And he has all kinds of reasons. And now he's not, he has not returned. He's actually settled in somewhere else near me. Not, not because of us, but in North Carolina. And the, he says, you know, it's because I was sent off to college. And part of me that's sad because I left a very intact culture with traditions and family. There was literally nothing unhealthy about what he left, but he was sent away out of obligation. And I think even the family would say, yeah, we'd love to have you nearby. But you know, people fly the nest. What are you going to do? You don't want to cook a month like a prison. So they tell me, I want to ask about your story because we're just going to wax about, yeah, maybe we shouldn't do this. Because I, because when we met, I drummed up an email the other day where you were, where were you? What state? Yeah. No, no, you're over there with a stout teaching. Oh, so yeah. So I was working up in Bismarck, North Dakota, but I was working there, but not, not living there full time either. So, okay. Okay. All right. So yeah, you're the guy we're asking about this. And now, and now where do you live? Yeah. Just north of Nashville, Tennessee, in a little beautiful intact community called Jolton, which we, we adore. Yeah. But our dream here has been part of, part of thinking through our assumptions. Right. So for my wife and I, our, you know, primary assumption, all of our early marriage into rearing children, you know, has been essentially that the economic health, in other words, like our balance sheet is the most important thing necessary to be able to provide for the sustenance and, you know, healthy, successful children moving into the future. And that's not necessarily untrue. That's just not primary. Right. And so like, you know, we, we started to kind of think differently about, hey, what does it actually require to, you know, become the people God has made us to be? Where, where are we actually being called to? And I think that's a bigger point. You know, throughout history, especially for Christians, there's always an understanding that like God has one born you, you know, you've become who you are just physically, right? Your biology, you were born in a place and time. And that place and time was not of your choosing, but was part of God's divine providence. And as a result of that, that requires some deference. You know, not just road acceptance, but at least understanding, hey, I have at least a minimum commitment to my place and time that I've been born into. But then as you mature to really discern within line of your vocation, where are you called? And I always, you know, if you read the great saints, you know, they kind of talk like this fourth vocation, the commitment to a people in place God has called you to. So my wife Rebecca and I, we started to sort of have these just sort of general conversations. And we realized that in the place we were living, while we had a really beautiful community, beautiful culture, you're very active, living within the city just was not something that we were going to be able to really become the people that we want to be or raise the family with a type of sort of trajectory, the horizon that we wanted them to have on mind in that setting. So, you know, we moved to Tennessee, you know, a lot of house sight unseen and really had two big goals. One was to rediscover the joy of family life. And two is to re enter into right relationship with the land, which meant that that, you know, our first instinct would not be to go purchase something as much as it would be, hey, can we make it for ourselves or can we get it from somebody that we're in relationship with. And, you know, for, for the most part, we've been able to find that and it's required moving yes to a more rural location. But I don't even think it's really a matter of rural versus cities. A lot of just the framework and the framework here is that most people were born here and lived here and those who have left left for the purpose either of receiving some technical formation so that they can return. Say in the case of dentists or doctors or others or tradesmen, you like learn, you know, something on left but always with the, the idea of returning. So here people are like really deep roots and that deep rudeness, you know, changes the calculus for how you make decisions of how you live. It changes the calculus for. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to say, so you were in a city and there's been times in my life I've lived in a city and it's sort of defined it's kind of, I mean, they're kind of like an airport like we're all here, but I could be gone at any moment because because it doesn't have a connection to the land. It might be a hub of this or that business, but you know that changes and people do find though. I mean, there's a family that, you know, ironically using them as an example, but they recently moved kind of in mass to North and South Carolina where I live on the border. But you know, they've been in Chicago for generations and they've just kind of had to leave because that environment itself has kind of squeezed them out, but they, I think it's now they're here. And what's fascinating is they're really beautiful, coherent family culture is a tradition that clearly goes back to a place where they because they stayed together and now they're doing it. They're like moving. I mean, it's and this is one of those families that has like 12 kids and that one's got, oh, they only have a, you know, they're just getting started. Like just kind of one of those, but they have this really coherent family culture, which was made possible by staying put. And now that the sort of the patriarchs have started to leave that the children are following around them, which is interesting because it is based around the two things you mentioned, which is my family and the land. And there's obviously a connection between our cosmopolitanism and the fact that seasons and where food comes from just, just doesn't matter anymore. I mean, you're, you're choosing to make it matter in your family, but generally as a society, it's not a consideration. There's no security we feel. I mean, you were living in Arizona. There is no natural security in Arizona comes to food. I mean, you like to sustain that kind of population is that completely, I mean, it might as well be a, you know, it's the opposite of like a green house in an arctic or something. It's a air conditioning island. You feel like the artificiality, and I think a lot of fathers feel this way too, like the artificiality and the fact that I've accepted so much of it, right? At a certain point, you just realize like, that's not what I want my children to inherit. And I think for us is interesting that the first move we've made, you know, so we moved out here, we've been married 20, going on 24 years and we moved going on six years ago. So we're not experts at this. We're still living it, you know, trying to adjust. And I think for us, you know, we're always really careful. It's a matter of individual really discernment. It's not as easy to say running away, right? And we talked about before, you know, when my prized possessions is some letters back and forth, Wendell Berry, where he says, look, if you're sick in the city, don't run to the land to cure yourself. You're just going to bring your sicknesses with you, right? If you don't adjust your mindset, it's my wife and I, you know, the move to Tennessee was the first move we made that wasn't economic, right? It wasn't because I was chasing more money or a new job or a different professorship. It was like a real discernment of, hey, you know, Lord, where are you calling us to go? And how are you calling us to live again in right relationship to the land and in right relationship to the requirements of our family? And it was, it was amazing. We saved for three years and left. And seriously, I mean, I think we've got this discussion before. It was scary because like people didn't understand why like they couldn't, they couldn't fathom, like, why would you leave? And then trying to, we're not running away from anything. Like if we had left three years early, it would have been a knee-jerk reaction to run away. But when we actually left Arizona, I really feel like we were sent. And I went back a few years ago for a book release and it was really beautiful. Like Bob, our old friends came out for a big dinner and my daughter was with me and she looked at me and she's, you know, she was, she was a senior when we moved. So it was really hard on her this transition from the city to more rural life. She was, dad, I don't understand how you could ever leave that community. And I go, we didn't leave, honey. We were sent by that community. The reason they're all there at dinner that night is because they prepared your mom and I to like really re-enter into reality. I guess how I feel like coming out here was not running away from the city. It was entering into reality. It was, you know, responding to the call of God to live a way that is more human. And I'm still figuring out what that means, but I can, I can definitely say that it's the antithesis to hyper-mobility. If hyper-mobility means a lack of commitment to the people and the place that you live in, then, you know, we ought to rethink that construct because it's probably not good for the human heart, right? I mean, scripture is full of displacement of, you know, from your land and your people. These are tragedies. Yet we idealize them in today's society. Yeah. And I think to, your story is good because it's, it's helping like, look, this is, this is not to some extreme to say that there are not reasons to leave somewhere and that you just got to stay put and suck it up, whatever's going on. But I think, I think the clear point, though, is that there should be a presumption, a natural presumption that, of course, you're going to stay without some extraordinary reason. That would be the, we, but we tend to want an extraordinary reason to stay. You know, my mother was dying and I had to stay home and care for her, right? It's, we need like an extreme extraordinary reason to stay put. I think we need to have the opposite, that we should raise our family with the presumption that they'll be close by. Yeah. And that they ought to be. By the way, you didn't quite bring it up. You were getting there, but, you know, Aquinas talks about this, that there's an early American literature and even law. There's an obligation of children who received all of their life and strength, that when they come to the strength of being an adult, being a man or a woman, that they now owe their family and their place a certain amount of time and labor. Yeah. And payment and justice. This isn't like, oh, it'd be sweet to stick around. It's like, wait a second, let me get this straight. We fed you until you were mature enough to help us. And so you have been a consumer this whole time. And now that you're strong enough to be a producer, you're leaving. I mean, that's an, that's a grave injustice. They would have seen it as that. And again, in an agrarian setting, it would have been not just scandalous, but sort of shameful that you didn't pay back your community that gave you so much. But we do that. We're like, we send, we, when we send our kids to college, and I'm not, this isn't a discussion about college or whether, you know, the return on investment of that, although that's worth having. But when we send them away, there is a certain reality that right when they're in their prime, right when they would become useful. And I don't mean in a utilitarian way, but just joining in the work of a place, they're gone. Right? I mean, the moment where they could have joined us. The early model for college too, if they ever left, it was for the purpose of returning. It was for the purpose of receiving some technical skill that you could not buy within your community to be able to come back and serve. I mean, all the early proliferation of the trades sort of follow these lines, right? Where, you know, hey, you would be in a place that might have, you know, population grown that you might have needed a, you know, more than just one midwife. Now you need an OB and they're, you know, one of the smart kids would be sent away and come back. And so, you know, again, within the context of the community, the issue was really what the horizon was. This assumption that whatever is beyond the horizon of your reach is somehow better and that your ability to access it is the infinite good is, you know, we got to question that because very often we're called, you know, just on the biological level to become who we are in a particular place. I've really been fascinated lately in diving into this to look at the saints. And it's interesting because in the life of the saints, it's almost like a 50-50 split. Like half the saints were, like, called to go somewhere. And most of those saints didn't want to go. They're like, just leave me here, Lord. And like the other half was, like, called to stay. And the very opposite, like, St. Trezla's suit, like, she wanted to go to the ends of the earth, right? And the Lord was like, no, just stay in Carmel. You know, and so... That's right, right up the hill. It's just like a really curious thing that for whatever reason, part of God's, you know, province and plan, Newman reflects on this, right? Like, God's great province and plan, you know, is very often, you know, we look elsewhere, whether that's the result of concupiscence or whatever. And I think we need to question whether or not hypermobility is good. And even on a practical level, let's go through it. So you leave the resource to your family. You leave the support network. I mean, I was reading the other day that the vast majority of homelessness, not all, but the vast majority of it, those people are radically disconnected from any of the support system necessary to provide for them, right? But yet we live in a society that says, oh, that's a good thing. In the name of freedom, let's remove as many of those resources as possible that would come from a local in the name of either centralizing or the name of, you know, maintaining a city or whatever. And we got to draw those into question. I mean, and just really think about it. The value provided just naturally, biologically, by a good family. And again, there are reasons to leave sometimes, but that can't be the default assumption that hypermobility is giving, that leaving is the norm. It's not. Yeah. So I think it's worth, we should make sure we address, because you're bringing up the saints and missionary activity that people will say, well, I remember when we made a move to a rural, you know, this guy, he said, you know, well, no missionary or saints ever said, I'm moving to the country. They went, you know, to where people were something. What's interesting about that, though, a lot of the saints, one, people in the country still have souls. So I hope some missionaries make their way through. And it's simply not true that there wasn't traveling missionaries. But on the other hand, one thing we have to remember is that there, you know, the missionary is not a rebuke to the monastery. Right. So in Christian culture, Christian theology and Catholic theology, the monastery and its stability is actually what built what we now call Christendom. It was not the mobility of the Romans and their endless expansion or the barbarians, and they're coming to get the resources from somewhere else, you know, away from their home that built Christendom. Actually Christendom and its monastic and village ideal was only possible because people stayed because people actually literally built walls that were not to keep you out, but to keep me in. And that is what built Christendom. So I think we need to be very careful to think this is some sort of insular or anti-missionary impulse or something. But also it's just really striking to me that there is a particular call to the clergy and religious. And I know that, you know, the church is consistently saying like we all have a missionary element in our lives. I agree. But there are those who are called uniquely to not have families so that they can be completely devoted to the spreading and teaching of the gospel. And our Lord commissions them, right? The apostles. And he says, go out to all nations. And he said go out and baptize. It's really interesting when he says go to the nations. He doesn't actually say anything to say like and disrupt those nations or commission all of them to leave and go to other nations. There's this underlying thing that we forget is that the reason we have a New Testament is because, you know, some apostles and then, you know, the apostle of St. Paul, they go out and they plant the church in nations, you know, particular places with their own particular culture. And then they write letters backwards to Corinth, for example, to the Romans. But there's no, in these letters, there's a presumption. In fact, the primary duty, I mean, you read 1 Corinthians, it's like the scandalizing, you know, whatever's going on in Corinth was just crazy. I mean, there's just nonstop controversy. There's Christians suing Christians. There's like incest. There's like all kinds of stuff going on. And, but the presumption of that letter, of James, of Romans is now that you've received the faith and you've received the truth. Now it's time to start to do the real work, which is to stay put and learn how to live at peace with your neighbor. That actually, so if we look at the New Testament, there's not, there's a universal call to holiness, but there's not a universal call to the displacement of missionary activity, that that's extraordinary. So I guess that would be the big point that's a lesson to us is that there's nothing anti-zeal, anti-evangelical about the fact that we need to say. I just think we need to recognize that it's the monastic ideal, which is very familial. And then particularly for us as having families, I am presuming that it is my job to order my home first within itself and then towards the love of its neighbor so that we can mature naturally in this place. If one of my children is called in an extraordinary, you know, discernment to go somewhere else. Of course I'll be happy. I won't hold on to them. But I think that if, I don't put words in your mouth, but I think that would be the simple thing that we're proposing is that by nature, we should literally presume the opposite of the cosmopolitan ideal, which does not come from the church, does not come from God directly in scripture, and is largely contradicted by the philosophies and ideals of the world and our ideas of success. Yeah. And I think, I mean, what it comes down to is, you know, not so much thinking of them as like mutual opposition, but as much as like what precedes the other. And the reality is like missionaries come from monasteries. They come from intact communities. And in those communities, they discover who they are and the vocation they have. And they're very much sent by those communities. And so I think, you know, for the average Catholic dad or mom, it's really about discernment, right? Like, you know, Lord, how are you calling me? The default assumption to be a good steward is to be at the very least appropriately committed to your place and your time and the people immediately around you, right? And so, you know, that's like, that's the basic assumption upon which everything else is built. So the missionary mandate of the church, which is very clear and present, presumes that preceded by that mandate is an intact community. And I think that's the right way to look at it. Yes. I love like Rad Stinger, right? When he talks about, he's giving fundamentals of theology course and he talks about how very often we like to think of things as the opposition to each other. And he's using the Greek term. So like, opposition means things that are understood only in exchange with the opposite. And he says, a lot of things in the church, it's not really helpful to look at them that way. It's better to look at them like a hierarchy that one precedes the other. They're not in this beautiful dynamic tension, but they're not mutually exclusive, right? And so I would rephrase what you said. That missionary mandate, which is in life of the church, presumes that the default assumption is that we have a commitment to a time and place, right? And that we are building a community within our family with others that doesn't presume that we're building that to send everyone out, but that we're going to build this intact for what it's for. And then some from that then will be prepared and called to go out. And this is where individual discernment and family discernment is so key. There's a lot of talk right now. Like we need to be a missionary church, right? And I actually think it's pretty wrong headed. A lot of times, of course, I mean, we already are a missionary church, right? But the emphasis on that, like Joe said, is the idea is that if we were trying harder to like make more Christians, make more Catholics with greater zeal, more prayer, more devotion, then we wouldn't be having the collapse of the family and faith that we're seeing. I think that is the presumption is that we're not replacing ourselves fast enough that that is our biggest headache or our biggest proud heartache, I should say. I actually think the opposite is true, that the reason we can't be missionary and have a very sort of evangelical outlook and zeal is that it's the instability of our own homes and places that make it impossible. We don't have a place, you know, that the church is ultimately a family. We don't have a family to invite them into that not only just the divisions we see, but really the, even the church right now is just hypermobile. I mean, it's just this constant shuffling of things. There's really not stable communities. And I mean, what I mean by stable is the kind that have real tradition. I mean, of long lasting, we have, you know, these things pop up, they go, and things are just in the constant flux that we actually don't have a Catholic culture. But then in the home, our homes are so, and we know that this is statistically, I mean, we know this to be true, that we're just hemorrhaging our own children from the church. And that makes it, in my mind, if we're thinking about this as a hierarchy, like you just said, it's actually, that is the reason we can't be missionary. So the reason we're losing the world is not because we're not trying hard enough. We're not being an authentic enough witness. We're not joyful enough. It's always like blaming these, like, if you guys were just trying harder, maybe I'm showing my cards here a little bit of those in leadership just saying, if you guys were trying harder, then we would be having more baptism. It's like, well, I don't think that's the problem. I actually think the air we breathe in a modern liberal state itself is toxic to the life of a family. I thank to a friend in my community recently about this topic. And, you know, he was, he recently moved there. And I said, man, you need to root down. You need to root down and, you know, be where you are. I'm thinking about leaving. It's like, well, so we're just like cohabitating, right? This friendship, I mean, there's, none of us, we're not really bound to each other. So we're just hanging out for the, you know, I don't know, the temporary pleasure of it, like chatting with somebody at the airport. I don't need to remember your name, right? He said, okay, I see your point. Maybe it means more than what I'm thinking about. And he said, but I don't want my kids to be stunted economically. So you actually said at the beginning, most of the reasons we move anywhere is for work. And people will say, well, I've got to do what's best for my kids when they move for a job. And what that usually means is better job, which your kids, you know, a lot of us are kids, they don't come to us begging for more money. They usually come to us begging for more of us, you know? So he questioned that. But the reason I bring that up is we need to talk about, very seriously, how, okay, if our children are being set up for the idea that they should stay where they are and that we want to grow organic, natural, long lasting traditional communities, our communities rooted in the traditions of the church, et cetera, they need to have help and assistance in setting up their future economically well. So I don't want to go into that, but I want just for the sake of the listeners, that's something that we need to address in a later episode. Yeah, just to calm, I know we got to wrap up, but I think, you know, we often think of leaving the family or leaving the home as a desire for adventure, right? And I can tell you that it takes just as much courage and it's just as adventurous to learn how to live with the people that are put right in front of you. You know? And so, I mean, it's amazing how much often I think leaving is really an excuse to deal with ourselves. And it's within an intact community that you're actually forced to make those commitments necessary to really, again, you know, make you the person that God has called you to be. Here in Joel and at St. Lawrence in my parish, we are celebrating our 144th annual barbecue. So next week we'll be cooking over 48 hours, 4,000 pounds of pork shoulder. Everyone in the community will be there. All the guys are there. We'll be there all night. We got adoration in the chapel and all the men are taking turns. It's an institution. We've never not done it, even during COVID, even during Spanish flu. But it's not easy. It's hard. It is. I'm sorry, I've never heard anyone. I've never heard the sentence. We never stopped doing it through COVID or the Spanish flu. That's longevity right there. That's generations. All right, Ryan, we'll have you back on. I want to hear more about your crazy adventures and I can't even, what do you say, Joel? Joel in Tennessee. Joel. Joel. All right, Ryan, thanks so much for being on the Till and Keep podcast. All right, God bless you. Thanks. This episode of Till and Keep has been brought to you by Tan, fraternus and sword and spade. Till and Keep is a podcast that shows how the primordial command from God to Adam to Till and Keep the garden applies whether you toil on a farm or in a concrete jungle. Visit tillandkeeppodcast.com to subscribe and follow the show and use coupon code Till25 to get 25% off your next order at tanbooks.com.