 That was a hot day up at the tent How many of you guys were in the tent with me? Holy moly, okay, so I'm gonna tell so you're gonna hear some content twice So I apologize for that, but Let's pray in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit Amen Heavenly Father we invite you into this space and Ask you to send your Holy Spirit upon us to bind us To our Lord Jesus Christ that every thought word and work of ours May begin with you and through you be happily completed through Christ our Lord Amen, and the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen. All right So again, it is a great joy to be with you all this week and This week whatever day it is and I'm also grateful that I had the opportunity to preach at Mass today, so I was able to Thanks, thanks So I was able to cut a little bit off my talk because I usually always introduce myself like I did at Mass But I want to talk a little bit more about like how I ended up where I am Integrity Restored is the website slash nonprofit that I've been working with for the last few years The mission at Integrity Restored is to provide Education training and resources for the church to better help her proclaim the gospel in the midst of the hyper-sexualized culture so So really like the desire of my heart is to speak love into a heart that believes it's unlovable and And so Sort of kind of how I got there so this morning at Mass I talked about my family, right? My dad's from Ireland had three children got divorced mom had two children got divorced mom dad got married I was born Mom died when I was two dad married stepmom. They had three children and then got divorced And I talked about how like that's the family our Lord called me out of it's a family I learned to pray in and I would pray Psalm 139 before I knew about what Psalm 139 Which says Lord I praise you for the wonder of my being I Praise you for I'm wonderfully made because I would marvel at the fact that God had to take my dad across an ocean Through all these circumstances to get him to my mom and put their DNA together and make me just in time before my mom died All right so if our Lord went through all that trouble to make me must have had a reason and I started asking him that reason so I started thinking about being a priest when I was about seven and And my reason for that was that I really wanted to meet my mother Now I knew I had a mother who died and I knew I had a mother in heaven every night I would pray now. I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take God bless my mom in heaven and And so I just but I had this desire to know what it would be like to know her And now I would think to myself I wonder if Sarah feels different sitting next to mom then I feel sitting next to mom Like she must feel different because she grew inside of her body for nine months And I just really wanted to know what that was like So I made up this syllogism and went kind of like this and I really want to meet my mom and my mom's in heaven Therefore I have to get to heaven So I guess I'll become a priest because all priests go to heaven Hey, and and so that's where like the seedlings of my vocation were born in high school I was really involved in youth ministry and Felt our Lord calling me to become a priest and after high school. I went to the military Academy at West Point Studied Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies Graduated 1996 became an infantry officer in the army went to Fort Benning, Georgia learned how to jump out of planes became an army ranger Went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky had the top three lieutenant jobs that you can have as an infantry lieutenant So my career is soaring and my heart was broken Because at that time in my life You know, I felt like God wants me to be a priest. I'm stuck in the army There's nothing I can do about it and So in the midst of my immaturity, I kind of resolved that tension by just getting rid of the voice of God for a while Like I don't want to hear God calling me like I'm gonna put him on a shelf So I can put him on a shelf by staying stuck in sin because if I'm stuck in sin I won't be able to hear him and The most expedient way to do that is to stay stuck in sexual sin because Jesus says bless her to the pure of heart For they shall see God and he means it All right, and he means it. That's why I do what I do because our Lord means that and If we want to show people the face of Jesus We have to address this kind of pandemic of impurity of heart Because otherwise it becomes this in sex holics anonymous They say lust is a screen of self-indulgent fantasy that separates me from my reality I This screen of self-indulgent fantasy that separates me from my reality And so the impure of heart can not see God And and so pornography became a kind of normal coping mechanism for me through college Escalated when I was in the army To a lot of like kind of bars and anonymous women At a certain point. I was Dating a girl. She had a one-year-old child. She was separated not yet divorced and she asked me to move in with her And when she asked me to move in with her, I was like I felt my heart sink You know, I felt my heart sink You know, I felt bad for like her because like I had no desire to get married But also I felt like I lost a sense of who I was And I remember looking at myself in the mirror and saying who are you like what happened to you And so I went on this long drive to go see my brother in florida and I was driving back and I'm crying out to our lord Jesus, what do you want me to do? And I heard him say pretty distinctly. I want you to be a priest stupid I've always wanted you to be a priest And so I went to the church. I attended prayed the rosary at the marion's shrine I said lord i'm gonna ask one more time and if the door opens it opens if it doesn't open i'm done asking Two days later my chaplain walks by my office and I stopped him chaplain Do you know any way I could get out of the army early go to the seminary maybe in 10 years? I'll come back in as a chaplain And he says, oh, yeah the priest recruiter is going to be here friday Just happened to be that week so I meet with him and he says here's all the paperwork you need to fill out I've helped two other west pointers in the last two years Crap Like now I have to actually do this Then a friend of mine introduces me to his spiritual director And this spiritual director is a pretty assertive person who kind of made it his personal mission to make sure I went into the seminary And uh, and it was kind of this authoritarian guy and I remember talking to him and he's like sean What does god want you to do? I think he wants me to be a priest. Good. So do I that means he does Is that how this works? And then he asks me where where do you want to be a priest and I know there were options So I said I'll probably go home to michigan where I grew up and he just looks at me michigan I don't know michigan. Lincoln you should go to Lincoln I'm thinking in my head. You should go to hell Like why would I want to go to Lincoln, Nebraska? So I go to Lincoln to appease him and just kind of check the block and it really just felt like home And so I stayed there and I went to the seminary and graduated or finished seminary in 2005 Uh was ordained in 2005. I taught high school theology of the body for four years Um 2008 2009 I went to my bishop to ask to go back in the army Because I always thought I was going to be the airborne ranger arabic speaking army priest Because we need one of those um And my bishop was very kind. He was very good. He's very affirming. Oh, you'll be great. You'll be great You'll probably be a general someday, but Because bishops always have a but right, but I think you should go to graduate school and study marriage and family You can do whatever you want I think you should go to graduate school. You made a promise of obedience so So I went to the john paul the second institute for marriage and family in rome in 2009 and um and studying there definitively changed my life and saved my priesthood I'll kind of tell that story as we go through today I came back in 2013 and so my first task was uh director of religious education and I had to Rewrite our ninth grade chastity unit And so I rewrote our ninth grade chastity unit unit using the anthropology from the institute and And I remember finishing it and I'm thinking to myself this is going to be amazing It's going to change the world And then after about two months, I realized my chastity curriculum is not going to work Because between 2009 and 2013 the whole world shifted 2009 the biggest distraction in my high school classroom was kids texting during class Can't have your phone out so they could put their hand in their pocket feel the buttons on their phones send a message without looking phone's not out 2013 they can't do that anymore, but other phones have screens and all those screens are delivery systems for everything Including high speed high definition pornography So how do I teach the truth beauty and goodness of god's plan? To a generation that has grown up with the anti-plan Or the anti-gospel And so I shifted my focus and I started educating parents about protecting kids from pornography and filtering and covenant eyes and other kind of accountability software And then those talks led to a lot of adults coming in looking for help And so I ended up starting a men's group. I ended up starting a group for betrayed wives um covenant I down to do a consult and then they started recommending me as a speaker And four years later I am on the road about half of my time doing clergy conferences, which is my favorite thing to do and uh And I've also spoken like at evangelical protesting conferences And I've just been invited to speak at the society of pious the tenth conference I'm pretty sure I'm the only speaker that has done those two things in a year Right um because this is just the problem and we're all looking for like how do we address it Right, how do we address it? How do I speak into that? and and hopefully today Kind of helps to speak into that and And in the current climate within the church like it becomes a little more fearful to speak into that because you know there's a lot of institutional shame And there's a lot of times we feel like the Catholic Church is all these problems and all these problems are in the news And there's grand jury reports and attorney general investigations and and so we can't talk about chastity Because we feel like we have no authority to And and so it comes to mind there is this scene in the gospels with This man who is deaf from birth and he has a speech impediment And so he cannot hear and he also has an inability to speak and so there's two things right There's a spirit of deafness and a spirit of muteness And I think in the church today we have this spirit of abuse This kind of spirit of lust whatever we want to call it And this spirit of muteness that keeps us from speaking about it And the spirit of muteness is doing more damage Because as we don't speak about it The problem keeps snowballing and growing and becoming bigger And so our lord encounters this person he puts his fingers in his ears and spitting touches his tongue and he says be opened And so it's a prayer that I kind of like to bring into the beginnings of every talk that I give When we were baptized the priest said The lord jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak may he soon touch your ears to receive his word in your mouth To proclaim his faith to the praise and glory of god the father Right like now more than ever The church needs to proclaim the beautiful Gospel of love that we've received Because our world is starving for it And so this talk is really about how do we do that? You know john paul the second in april second 1980 said this I think among the answers that christ would give to the people of our times and to their questions often so impatient Fundamental would still be the one he gave to the Pharisees In answering these questions christ would appeal first of all to the beginning He would perhaps do so all the more decidedly and essentially In as much as man's inner and simultaneously cultural situation Seems to move away from that beginning and assume forms and dimensions That diverge from the biblical image of the beginning to points that are evidently ever more distant. He said that in 1980 Bruce Jenner was on my weedy's box When he said that Now how much have we moved to points evidently ever more distant in our own time? Where the average age of exposure to pornography is now between eight and 11 years old? Right, that's like hardcore pornography that I never would have seen in a hotel room at age 24 When sexting is sort of the new dating Right exchanging naked pictures and that starts around 14 years old According to nancy joe sales who wrote a secular book called American girls the secret lives of teenagers and social media And she just went around the country interviewing young people and she said at 14 is when sexting started Right, which is unfathomable like when I was 14 there is no way I would have taken a polaroid camera I'd taken a picture of myself naked and put it in sally's locker But that's seeing that's kind of a common practice now You know, so obviously we have this kind of degradation of sexual ethics and we've moved away from the beginning And benedict the 16th when he talks about evangelization. He says the new evangelization Is dependent on the domestic church and our time is in times past The eclipse of god the spread of ideologies contrary to the family and the degradation of sexual ethics are connected So if we want to be evangelizers, we have to pay attention to the fact that The eclipse of god the spread of ideologies contrary to the family and the degradation of sexual ethics are connected Because because we know we have the degradation of sexual ethics just based on what I just said We know that we have the spread of ideologies contrary to the family based on Ryan Anderson's talk last night And so we should expect that there's an eclipse of god We should just expect that we can't see god anymore because jesus says blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see god any means it All right, but the good news is that the opposite is true that the if we move from impurity to purity. We start to see god You know and the most exciting thing about the ministry that I do is when I get to see the lights go on There was a man who came in and saw me because he had some trouble at work And he ended up losing his job Somebody said you should go see father co-colly. He's really great. You need some pastoral care He comes in and I usually ask people in the beginning like what's your family like that you grew up in You know, do you have any addiction in your family or abuse in your family or like anything like that? No, no, none of that. You know, my dad was an alcoholic. My sister was a drug addict But I haven't I don't have that stuff, you know, like I've been the president of three companies. I'm really I'm really successful I just don't get people I'm kind of like bad with emotions I don't really get emotions and I kind of hurt people's feelings without realizing it And I have a hard time seeing things from other people's point of view And like I'm really successful and I get the job done But I end up hurting people along the way and then people get mad at me and then Huh Well, I don't know a lot But I work with a lot of people who have like pornography or sexual addiction And one of the side effects of that one is that you have a lack of empathy and your emotional range Kind of goes from numb to frustrated all the time And you have trouble seeing things from other people's point of view and you might even hurt people's feelings without realizing it Really? Well, maybe I do that sometimes Uh, how often? Every day So I grabbed a book off my shelf called treating pornography addiction by Dr. Kevin Skinner And I gave him the book and I gave him the name of a therapist and I said let's do an experiment And let's like get this out of your life and see what happens So he comes back two months later bother Thanks for the name of that therapist and things are really going well And my wife has started coming with me and things are really getting better in our marriage But the other day the weirdest thing I was with my son in the truck the other day and he's about eight years old And as we were driving down the road, he just randomly looked over at me and said I like the new dad He's like what? Well, I like the old dad I just really like the new dad So what happened like his emotions came back online he started being more effectively present to his son He was more free to take an interest in his son's life More free to love And his son was able to experience the love of our heavenly father through love of his earthly father Blessed are the pure of heart For they shall see god Because we're created for love and connection In redemptor hominids 10 john paul the second wrote Man cannot live without love He remains a being that is 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 and make it his own If he does not participate intimately in it we're created for love and connection And if that's true then the devil has a plan for love and he has a plan for our family as a plan for our church And his plan is the same plan that's jesus talks about in luke's gospel When he says to peter simon simon behold Satan has demanded to sift you all like wheat Or to sift all of you like wheat to take what is in communion and scatter it To take what's united and divide it to create a culture of rugged individuals With no common connection And I always imagine a family and they're sitting around the table and they're laughing and they're telling stories And they might be playing cards and they're sharing their lives And then this big sifter comes under the table And the devil starts cranking on the sifter and everybody comes out the bottom staring at their iPhones So that's what our families look like sometimes Let's put like lunch with my brother priest looks like sometimes You know, I was the first one to get a smartphone in 2007. It was a windows smartphone. It did email And I thought it was amazing Because now I can do email at home. I'm gonna be so productive So one day we're out at dinner and I'm like checking my email because I can My friend looks at me. He's like who call you put your phone away. What's your problem? We're right here There's a really good sale on amazon Right just looking at nothing Five years later. I'm out with the same group of guys halfway through lunch. We're all scrolling through nothing And we're missing out on each other And I'm not anti technology, but But when we look at the evolution of technology, it's kind of interesting how the devil wants to sip this all like wheat Um when I was uh when I was a kid, you know, this is really fun to do with young people too, by the way So when I was a kid, I knew people who had this kind of technology called a party line Right one phone line four households, right? No privacy. No anonymity. Mrs. McGillicuddy listens in on all your calls Then we got more technologically advanced we got our own phone line We had our own phone numbers, but it was on a shortboard in the kitchen So if a girl called my house for me at seven in the morning on a saturday, my mom started fixing supper What are you doing fix it? It's in nine hours. Just getting ahead of my day. Who are you talking to? right So we got really long cords and we went and talked in the closet or something um Then we got our first cordless phone when I was about 14 And I remember thinking to myself like now I can sneak the phone in in my room really late at night And stay up all night talking to my girlfriend I don't want to hang up you hang up All right, we would just listen to each other breathe All right precious dating moments Most young people don't know what I'm talking about right Uh, then we got email and we just used the email to send really long beautiful letters really fast All right, we used punctuation and paragraphs and we wrote properly and it was really romantic Then we got instant messaging and we created a new language Um cell phones so now we've gone from one phone line four households to five phone lines per household And nobody knows what anybody's doing All right sociologists say young people today spend more time at home than any generation before them And less time talking to the people at home than any generation before them That means when I was in high school I spent less time in my house than people do today, but more time talking to my parents And it's causing a spike in anxiety depression cutting we're seeing all of the kind of psychological effects of a lack of communion and love Social media social media is supposed to connect us, but I think it really divides us Right social media becomes an excuse to not call people I remember when I was in Rome, I got facebook and I was saw the pope So I posted on facebook 300 people liked it within 10 minutes I was like whoa I never have to make a phone call again I'm gonna be so productive And I actually stopped calling my family as much because I would just post on social media All right, and social media also causes social media comparison All right, where I think my life's horrible because everybody else's life is so amazing And so I go on social media and I noticed all my friends went out last weekend and they didn't invite me All right, and that also is causing some psychologists in Europe are diagnosing people with social media induced depression You know and I and it's not just kids, right? I think it's one of the biggest victim groups of social media depression are catholic moms Because they come in and they're just like father I don't understand like how all these women do it like they're so amazing and they they like baked a cake And they were like saints in the cake And then like and then like for for all saints they they made outfits I can't even get through my day. I don't understand how they love their children so much Like they're lying Nobody loves their kids that much they're lying Right and so it causes us to like uh compare ourselves and and And we lose sight of who we are right we lose sight of who we are So it's not just social media. It's not just bad for kids Um and then snapchat is the most popular way that young people tend to communicate today Um, which is sending a picture message that disappears in 10 seconds So when I give parent talks my advice is always don't let your kid have snapchat And all the kids in the room are going what? All right snapchat was invented for sexting. That's why it was invented There's no other reason as in a picture that disappears in 10 seconds And it was it really was invented as a response to revenge porn in like around 2007 That's when revenge porn started being a problem where people would sext And then when they broke up Then the boy would send the girls naked picture to all his friends All right, so we need an app that will make the picture disappear Um, but actually I think snapchat has like all of those pictures in a database somewhere Um, and again, so you can do whatever you want. I don't care But I guarantee if like your daughter has snapchat by the time she's a sophomore in high school Some boy is going to ask her for naked pictures And our kids deserve to grow up in a world where they're not being sexually harassed Like that's just basic So how do we preach the gospel into that mess? So I would propose that we preach the gospel the same way we've always done it But that we have to enculturate it for the sexualized culture So the story of salvation is a story of healing All right, the story of salvation is a story of recovery The story of salvation is our story and we can tell that story really quickly like God created the world And everything was good Then something happened called original sin And things became distorted. Sorry my slides are all like goofy Right, so Distorted means you can still tell what it is. It's just not clear Right, so the family when things were good was like a mom a dad and their natural children The family in distortion is the family of israel or the family of jacob Right jacob fell in love with rachel wanted to marry her got tricked into marrying her uglier older sister leah Had to wait seven more years to marry the woman he loves finally marries her but she's infertile So she says take my concubine and have babies with her and he does and then leah says take my concubine And have babies with her and he does and then finally racialized babies All right, so the family in distortion is like one dad four moms 12 brothers while hate each other and sell joseph to the egyptians That's just like the kilk cally family Right It's like a lot of our families And then what happens jesus enters into that family All right, our lord enters into that family. He doesn't just enter into the holy family of nazareth where everything was perfect Sometimes when we preach on the family we always say be like the holy family and all these ladies are like my husband is not saint joseph My husband was saint joseph would be good, right and we know that none of you are conceived without sin But our lord also entered into this whole family of israel matthew chapter one every year christmas abraham was the father of isek was the father of jacob and we kind of zone out or like why is that a genealogy And then we hear these names like tamar tamar had two husbands die She was waiting for the third brother to come marry her he never shows up She hears her father-in-law is coming to town though So she dresses as a prostitute seduces her father-in-law gets Then shows up with a baby and says okay now you have to take care of me Not the holy family of nazareth Rahab who's a prostitute ruth who's not a member of the people of god The wife of uriah. We don't even mention her name because we're ashamed of the sin of david And when we have all of those stories in our head like all of that mass all of that distortion in our head And we're thinking about all these people We hear the words them was born jesus Right them was born jesus What does that mean? It means if jesus can be born into that mass he can be born into my mess If jesus can be born into that family he can be born into my family So that i can grow in clarity and virtue and hopefully someday Then comes the end of time or the end of our lives And we enter into the kingdom of heaven All right, that's the story of all of our lives And so the the question is how do you tell that story about your life? All right, how do you tell that story about your life? I was born into a world where everything was good then I went to the seminary I'm gonna skip that distortion part Came out of the womb swinging a throw ball right Sometimes we want to do that Right, but again, this is the story of all of our lives So when I look at that I'm like, okay I was born into a world where everything was good then something happened My mom died when I was two My dad was an alcoholic and he was kind of distant in the household when I was growing up I saw pornography magazines for the first time when I was like 11 years old at my friend's house I saw my first pornography video when I was about 14 at my brother's house on a rite of passage kind of weekend When I was in high school I had weak masculine identity and the upperclassmen spread rumors about me that I was gay All those things are things that happened and they caused the distortion about how I understood myself How I understood God how I understood relationships between men and women But then something else happened Jesus entered into my life to reveal to me who I am All right to heal what was wounded to supply what I didn't receive To make me a new creation in him So that I can grow in clarity and virtue and hopefully something to get to heaven. That's our story It's the story that binds us all together And how do we tell that story? How does st paul tell his story when st paul's challenged about his legitimacy? He doesn't say I've got this many degrees and speak this many languages. He just says I was the worst prosecutor of christians And then he who knit me together in my mother's womb So I fit to enter into my life and it changed everything and I was blinded And then the very person that I was going to haul off to jail and in prison opened my eyes for me And I was baptized and now I can't help but to preach the gospel. He just tells that story All right, he just tells that story And the distortion part of our story like that part of our story is really important this morning I talked about my dad's story which was I tried to live without the church for a really long time And it just didn't work which implied jesus changed something I was lost and I was found And I also say like that part of our story is an on ramp for people So in our engaged encounter community, we used to have this questionnaire to be a presenter It was like did you have premarital sex? No to use content to use nfp. Yes Do you go to catholic schools? Yes, okay, you can present because we want to set a good example So my new questionnaire is did you have premarital sex? Yes. Did you have a conversion? Yes? Will you tell your story? Yes, okay, you're hired Because when we can say I was once where you are but now I'm here that means I know the way And we become an on ramp for somebody into the life of the lord I other wise it's like Sort of driving down a congested highway and there's this hov lane, you know Like where everybody's zipping by and I'm it's like sitting in traffic. I'm like, how do I get in that fast lane? There's no on ramp All right, there's no on ramp And people need an on ramp It's what paul the sixth man for me said the church listens more to witnesses than to teachers The people listen more to witnesses than to teachers And so when we look at that story, but in the beginning we were created in the image of god who is love And and so jenesis 127 let us create man in our image after our likeness in the image of god He created him male and female. He created them And so when we think about being created in the image of the trinity There's three movements of love in the trinity and these three movements are really important when we're talking about how do we address sexual sin? So the first kind of love is fatherhood Right fatherhood is this active love. It's this self-giving love. It's the love that says your needs are more important than my needs All right, it's the love that gets moms out of bed in the middle of the night to take care of their crying babies All right, or dad's out of bed in the middle of the night to pick up their kid from jail or something All right, it's sacrificial love the traditional language we use is I want the good for you All right, I want the good for you But that's one kind of love Okay, the second movement of love is sonship right sonship is the response to the father's love All right, so what do I do if somebody wants the good for me if they're willing to sacrifice their life for me If they're willing to die for me, what do I do with that? How do I respond to that? And the words that i'm going to use are from lumen fide The document on faith where the act of faith is described as entrusting myself completely to This person who loves me So I entrust myself to you and trust myself to you means I give myself to you But I give my heart into your hands or I give myself into your care I'm going to allow you to take care of me I could turn off my brain and let you make all my decisions for the rest of the day And I'm confident that at the end of the day my life's going to be better than it was at the beginning How many people can we say that about? Can we really say that about our lord? Because if I'm honest Um That is the hardest thing I've ever had to learn how to do To entrust myself to somebody else When I was ordained to put my hands in the bishops hands and he said do you promise respect and obedience to me and my successors? I do I entrust myself to you I think This is the hardest thing that we do When I was in Rome, it was the second time in my life that I was sitting in class And all my buddies are fighting a war in afghanistan and iraq And i'm learning about fatherhood and motherhood and sonship and daughterhood and family and the ideal of the church teaching and joy Now this professor who's always talking about joy and italian, so it's la joya And i'm sitting there going I don't have la joya I don't even know if I've had a feeling in the last five years As the idealism as the ideal of the church's teaching is crashing into my own experience And it was causing a lot of anxiety for me So I would go home And like when I went to bed at night I would go into this fantasy world of like what would my life be like if only So what would my life be like if only I Had become an army chaplain instead of coming to graduate school and I'd be in afghanistan And I'd be giving people last rites on the battlefield and I'd be running into my old classmates And I'd be saying mass on a hood of a humvee and I'd be single-handedly stopping faction wars What if I never became a priest? I'd be a battalion commander by now. I'd have 670 men under my command What if I married my high school girlfriend? Kids were 15 I started naming them And the more I stayed in that kind of fantasy the more it revealed the fact that I had not entrusted myself Completely to jesus or my bishop And I was out jogging by st. Peter's one day and I'm looking up at st. Peter's and I said out loud for the first time in my entire life I want to be a priest I'd never said I want to be a priest and I was already or I was already ordained seven years When I was a kid I used to say I think god wants me to be a priest It's kind of more passive So like isn't it tragic? And then in seminary My spiritual director would say something like shown. What do you want to do? I want to do whatever god wants me to do Oh, good. You're so holy It wasn't really holy. I think I was looking for a holy loophole Because if I'm only willing to say I want to do whatever god wants me to do then it leaves some space for me to be wrong So then five years in the future I look back and I'm like, oh my gosh I was so immature and this isn't really what he wanted. He didn't really want me here. He wants me there He didn't really want me to be a priest. He wanted me to marry my high school girlfriend Then I start facebook stalking her Happens to a lot of guys It happens to a lot of priests that happens to a lot of married people And trust myself to you means I desire the thing that you desire for me All right, I desire the thing that you desire for me. Jesus. What do you want me to do? I want you to be a priest stupid. Okay. I want to be a priest Every single day I want to be a priest Every single day I want to be a husband Every single day I want to be a wife Every single day I want to be a father Or every single day I want to be a mother Every single day I want to be a catholic christian What would our world look like if we lived every single day as if we want to be a catholic christian All right, we'll change the world right to entrust ourselves And the holy spirit is the fruitfulness of the love between them or sort of the bond of love between them So po benedict the 16th in When he's writing on the image of god, he says Little god is by his very nature entirely being for Being from the sun and being with Man for his part is god's image precisely in so far as the from with and for Constitute the fundamental anthropological pattern Which is a lot of big words that means there's a pattern of love in our lives That starts with being from another being a son or a daughter who entrusts ourselves completely to our parent Then we learn to be with another we learn this interdependent love In our sibling relationships and our friendships one of those friendships eventually becomes a marriage so that when they have children They learn to be for their children And the pattern matters he goes on to say whenever we attempt to free ourselves from the pattern We're not on our way to divinity but to dehumanization To the destruction of being itself through the destruction of the truth. How do I free myself from the pattern? So if my ministry my being for is more important to me than my prayer life I'm freeing myself from the pattern If I'm more concerned with my administrative skills and what I can produce and what I get done Then in resting in jesus, I'm freeing myself from the pattern If I find my identity in what I do or what I produce instead of where I'm from Or if I find my identity in who I'm attracted to or who I'm aroused by who I'm with instead of where I'm from I'm freeing myself from the pattern because identity is always our being from relation Right identity is always our being from relation and we know that because jesus's identity is son of god It's not bridegroom of the church. It's not savior of the world. It's son of god mark 1 1 the gospel of jesus christ the son of god Baptism, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased Transfiguration, this is my chosen son Listen to him end of mark's gospel Truly, this was the son of god The whole point of the gospels is to convince us that jesus is the son of god That's his identity And so in our own lives our identity is on our daughter and that's our core identity It's our first experience of love And it's activated when we entrust ourself to another Right, but it's also like the hardest thing to live into sometimes and we used to know that inherently that our identity was where we're from One of the best identity bestowing moments for me was when I was a kid we would go visit my great aunts So a little detail about my family is that my mother and my stepmother are first cousins Which means my great uncle became my grandpa my grandpa kind of stepped out of the picture My great aunt is my mom's aunt and she's my stepmom's aunt So we went see my great aunt And we're sitting there and when we were kids we had to go sit and be quiet while the old people talk Right and we'd eat those like mints. They'd leave out and stuff, you know And at a certain point Aunt Betty Ann looks over at me and she says Sean when you smile you look just like your mother Oh I know where I'm from I have a connection to this person inside of whose body I grew for nine months It's an identity bestowing moment Okay, it's an identity bestowing comment And it's a comment that's not happening so much anymore. I think because we're so distracted And kids are playing on their iPhones while the old people are talking So in one of our schools the teacher made an assignment to go home to an interview Like whose eyes do you have whose ears do you have whose laugh do you have things like that? In order to show like reinforce that identity Okay So when we look at the genesis chapter two story what we see is that We're created according to that order god creates adam and he puts him in the garden and he gives him this rule Don't eat that fruity. You're gonna die adam believes god. He trusts god He entrusts himself to god and everything is good. So god wants the good for him He doesn't want him to die adam trusts god. He trusts himself to god And everything's good, but he can only love as a son He can't yet love as a husband or a father So the lord says it's not good for the man to be alone And when john paul II describes this he says adam's differentiating himself from the creation So he's sort of learning who he is in the world and he sees something and he picks it up And he's like this is made out of material and so am I but it can't move around or talk So I know i'm not like the rock. I must be like god And he sees the next thing and it's alive and it grows like he's alive and he grows and he's like Oh, but it can't move around or talk. So I know i'm not like the tree I must be like god And he's learning is more like god than the world But if there's a longing in his heart to find somebody else in the world that will reflect back to him who he is And so the lord says it's not good for you to be alone. I'll make you a suitable help mate And then he sees this creature and this creature can move around like he can move around and this creature has beautiful eyes Then this creature starts running towards him and jumps up on him and starts licking his face And he's like, uh, nah, it's just a dog So that's how the narrative goes. I'll make you a suitable help mate. Here's a dog a giraffe a platypus Don't know what that is, right? He brought him all the animals and none served proved to be the suitable help mate And then people cast a deep sleep on adam and when he wakes from that sleep He sees this creature and her body is like his body but not like his body And when he looks into her eyes he can see that she knows the same god that he knows That she's a daughter of the same father So john paul II uses those words from song of songs my sister my bride My sister my bride he first sees her as sister as daughter of the same father then he can unite with her as bride And so she's a daughter. He's a son and then they can be a spouse And he cries out at last this is bone on my bones and flesh of my flesh and I call that the at last moment And I always tell parents you should tell your kids your at last moment story Like when is the moment that you knew this is the person? Because you might have a crazy story Like I was on a double date with your uncle herald, but he fell asleep on me. So I started talking to your dad Then your kid will say lord. I praise you for the wonder of my being and for uncle herald's narcolepsy Right because if he hadn't fallen asleep it wouldn't exist right that's kind of a made-up one, but we all have stories Of the happenstance way in which god brought somebody into our life And those stories provoke wonder and we need a sense of wonder about our existence Because like that's the whole point So now adam can love his wife the way that god loves him god wants the good for him He wants the good for her he also entrusts himself to her She entrusts herself to the lord. She entrusts herself to him She also wants the good for him when that happens in the most complete profound and bodily way a third person comes forward So now he can be a son a husband and a father She can be a daughter wife and a mother and everything's good and then something happens What happens in original sin is the same thing that happens in all sin And so the first temptation that takes place is this doubt that god wants the good for me If you eat that fruit you will not die. You'll be like god. God doesn't really love you He's trying to keep you down every sin we commit in our life starts with I don't really believe god loves me I don't really believe god's enough for me I don't believe that god can take care of me right now I said earlier if my choice is when I go home and I'm really stressed out and I'm carrying a lot of burden And I can go pray or I can watch netflix If I watch netflix instead of pray to deal with my stress that means More than jesus In that moment Anything we trust more than jesus Becomes a false god in some way It just shows there's something else that needs to be converted All right, so all sin starts with a doubt that god loves me if I doubt that god loves me I can't entrust myself to him so I declare my autonomy from him And that relationship becomes ruptured All right, so that relationship becomes ruptured and there's a loss of identity as son or daughter So then the holy spirits evicted from their hearts And now when adam encounters his wife well if god's not trustworthy She's not trustworthy either but maybe she can fill up the void in my life When she sees him if god's not trustworthy, he's not trustworthy either But maybe he can fill up the void in my life And that relationship becomes ruptured When we talk about sexual sin in the church we oftentimes like focus on what's read on this slide like Contraception is I give you all of myself except for my fertility All right and trust my life to you except for the chance of a future Or I think you're beautiful, but I don't want to make anybody else who looks like you masturbation I don't need another person for my fulfillment Pornography I only need a picture of a person for my fulfillment But all of those sins started with a loss in relationship with god Right there are all the results of What was lost? Back here In that loss of sonship and so This distortion is going to pass on to the next order of love And typically when there's a rupture in a marriage What happens is each parent sort of isolates the child and starts to depend on the child to meet their needs And we see that in like isaac rebecca jacob. He saw So rebecca goes to jacob and she says I want you to go to your father dress up like your brother lie to your father betray your father And um, so he'll give you the blessing because I love you the best So jacob can either be faithful to his father and please his mother Or he can or displease his mother or he can please his mother by betraying his father And now he's got to say how do I be the parent of my parent? like how do I Manage my parents needs and now he just lost his identity as a son And in psychology they call out being a parentized child And the whole process starts over again And these things these ruptures they're just they're theological constructs. They're also psychological constructs, but they're They're also just things that happen to us in our life So like I could tell you a day that this loss of sonship happened in my own life Um, I was about four years old and I went to my dad and I said dad can we go fishing and he said uh when you're older Okay, dad promised we're gonna go fishing when I'm older I got to be about seven and I went to my dad and I said am I older? And he looked at me like what well you said we go fishing when I'm older. Oh, yeah, yeah, we'll go great So I started imagining fishing. What does it look like you get up early you go out on a boat You're out on a lake all day just me and my dad Maybe we'll catch a fish So dad came home from work like on a weekday at four in the afternoon And he said uh, we're gonna go fishing get your stuff. So kind of confused I get my stuff I get in the car we start driving toward the lake And as we get toward the lake we turned down this long dirt road and we went to this fishing farm Where they have wells and they starved the fish at the bottom of the wells Up in a fishing line pull out a fish. We were home in 45 minutes Fishing with my dad What I learned Dad doesn't think I'm good enough I remember the guy there the easy spots here the medium spots out there and the hard spots over there Dad going well, Sean we better do the easy one Dad doesn't think I'm good enough I also learned that when dad makes a promise I have to lower my expectations about three levels So fishing will go well fishing Vacation maybe we'll go the lake for the day When you're my sister thought she was getting a computer for Christmas. I pulled her aside. You're probably getting a typewriter So I was trying to protect her from disappointments And I think my father was also trying to protect me from disappointment because he had had a lot of disappointment in his life But then that manifested as discouragement Jesus loves you Maybe kind of tolerates me and I started to develop what I call now the gospel of the suck So the gospel of the suck goes like this god created the world and life's supposed to suck If you persevere in the suck he'll throw you a party when you die Yes, I want to be a christian It's not the gospel It's a gospel that a lot of people carry It's a gospel that a lot of people carry Father, I think god wanted me to marry an addict So that I could offer up my pain and Have unhappiness to in reparation for the fact that I was promiscuous in eighth grade Yuck That's not what our lord wants for our lives Our lord entered into the world so that he could make all things new So that we could have joy so that we could have life and live life more abundantly All right, and where did he do that like he did that on the cross Because everything gets healed according to the same pattern All right, everything gets healed according to the same pattern So we get healed first in our identity as son and daughter and that happened on the cross The cross is proof that god wants the good for you So we have to ask ourselves. What does the crucifix mean to me? When I look at a crucifix, what do I see do I see the fact that god so loved the world that he gave his only son That while I was a sinner he died for me at my worst moment His choice was to give his life so that I could live is that what we see Or do we look at a crucifix and think to myself like I'm a horrible person Because I keep sinning and every time I sin it hurts jesus and I keep telling him I'm gonna stop sinning so I can stop hurting him and I hope someday I stop hitting sinning so I stop hurting him, but he must be frustrated with me because I'm frustrated with me And I hope someday I can stop and then I can make up for hurting him and then maybe he'll love me I used to think like that So I was I was cataclyzed by a sister margaret mary of the disgruntled heart of jesus It was kind of like that idea that like, um Every time you commit a sin you drive another nail into jesus's hands Right Some of you know what i'm talking about And is that true? Yes, it's true. It's true that our lord took on himself the consequence of the sin of the world Which means he felt in his body the consequence of every sin committed by every person from the beginning of time until the end of time Which means he felt in his body all the consequences of sins i've committed But it also means that he felt in his body the consequence of every sin that was ever committed against me So when I felt like I don't belong in my own family Or I'm not worthy of happiness I'm not worthy of love jesus felt all those things because that's the consequence of sin If somebody was abused and they feel like I have no value except for my bodily value I'm not worthy of real love. I'm not worthy of real marriage jesus felt all those things Because of the consequence of sin Because our lord is sinless. He has perfect empathy And if that's true, that means he knows me more than anyone knows me and he loves me more than anyone loves me And if that's true Then I can entrust myself to him You know the place of rupture the place where that loss of sonship Happens most in our world today. I really believe is when a 10 year old gets exposed to hardcore pornography on the iphone that his mom gave him for his birthday There was um, there was a couple who had a 12 year old and So the 12 year old son went to them because he had had a problem with pornography and He was asking him to go to confession all the time. So first thing is like incredibly brave kid who went to his parents and told them He had a problem Awesome parents who somehow made themselves safe enough for their child to come and talk to them But they didn't really know what to do So they brought him in to see me and I started asking some curious questions and these are curious questions I ask everybody When was the first time that you ever saw pornography? Because a lot of times people make the mistake of yelling at a 17 year old for something that started when he was 10 When was the first time you ever saw pornography? fourth grade the fourth grade Where were you? Were you at home? Were you at a friend's house? Were you on the bus? No, I was at home. I was on the computer that's in the public area of the house Did somebody tell you about it? Somebody show you it? How'd you find it? Uh, there was a pop-up and I clicked on it and then I got pictures and I clicked on those and then I got videos And one time I was looking for something innocent videos and I ended up with pornography videos How'd I make you feel? Kind of like my heart was beating really fast and I felt really excited But I also felt disgusting at the same time and I wanted to look away, but I couldn't look away That's normal. That's like totally normal How do you think jesus felt? Oh, father, I can't even think about that Now if jesus was in the room with you, what do you think he would do? He'd probably be standing in the corner shaking his head at me What would he say? Father jesus would say that's bad for you. It's a sin. I'm hurting people I should know better Father, it's just like I'm taking the nails and driving them in to jesus's hands And then I said You're a kid Like you're just a kid And jesus says whoever causes one of these little ones to sin It would be better for them if a millstone were put on their neck and they'd be thrown into the sea And so if our lord was there with you, he would be angry at pornography, but not at you And he just kneeled down in front of you and he'd pull your head into his shoulder And he'd say i'm sorry this happened to you This shouldn't have happened to you I will always love you I will never leave you I'm sorry this happened to you. I will always love you. I will never leave you. This shouldn't have happened to you I will always love you. I'm sorry this happened to you Shouldn't have happened to you. I will always love it just over and over and over and over Until the tears started welling up in his eyes Because he was encountering this father who's rich in mercy. For him, he had somebody to preach the love of God into that space. But there are many, many, many, many, many more people in the Church who have never led our Lord into that space, which is the first pass of healing. So whether somebody's 16 or 66, they need to hear that. It's when the moment of the cross comes into the moment of rupture. It's inviting our Lord into that place of rupture to supply what he didn't have. To supply what he didn't have. And so I'll share with you a little bit about how like that happened in my own life. So when I was in Rome, I had that I want to be a priest moment. But that wasn't the end, right? Like that was like the beginning of the beginning of the healing process. And so I got into my third year and I was like three years into a two-year degree. And I was coming up on the end of that and I still wasn't writing my paper. And I'd fallen into my own like TV addictions, other process addictions, like, and I needed help. And so I realized I had a choice to make. The choice was this, I can either shove all these emotions down and throw myself into my work and become like a really good academic, curmudgeonly priest who doesn't really like people. Or I could take a risk to have joy. But the risk to have joy means I have to make a phone call to my bishop, own everything and go to therapy. And there's like a little fear there, right? Because there's this like image of like father's on sabbatical, father's now a chaplain and a hole in the ground in western Nebraska. And that's a legitimate fear that a lot of priests carry. But I knew that I did not want to be the curmudgeonly priest who doesn't really like people. So I went to Bishop Ruskowitz and he was very kind and he was very good. And we decided I would go to therapy in Michigan to the religious sisters of mercy there. And it was about a month before I went, I was praying in chapel over like the scene of Mary and John at the foot of the cross. And Jesus looks down at John, the beloved disciple, and says, behold your mother. And when he said, behold your mother, I froze like nothing happened. And so I just stayed there for like two weeks. Behold your mother froze. Behold your mother froze. Then one day he said, behold your mother. And I had this feeling, this kind of connected feeling, this warm feeling, sort of like butterflies feeling. And the feeling was tied to a memory. And then the memory, I'm about 12 and I'm downstairs in my basement watching television. And this lady comes to the house who sells Mary Kay cosmetics. And I could hear her talking to my stepmom upstairs. And when I hear her voice, my heart started moving. And so it was really confusing to me. So when she left, I went to my stepmom and I asked her the question, like, am I supposed to know that lady? She kind of looked at me, she was kind of surprised and caught off guard and like, no. I feel like I'm supposed to know her. I don't know, ask your father. It was something, I just got the sense, like, don't ask that question anymore. This is how I remember it. And so I never asked that question again. And I also never let myself feel whatever it was I was feeling again because I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was sexual attraction. I didn't know what it was. But when it came up in prayer, about 30 years of other conversations came to light. And it turns out, as I was thinking about this, praying about this. So my mother had cancer when I was in utero. She carried me to term. I was born, she started treatment. She's 24, has two small boys and a baby, and she has cancer. So she needs help. So the pastor of our parish asked the family to help our family, and they would bring food and clean the kitchen and drive my mom to her appointments and babysit. And when my mother went into the hospital to die, I went and lived with that family. And the Mary Kay later was the mother of that family. And so when I realized that, I was like, okay, I definitely need a therapist. And I need to find this person. So I went on Facebook because old people use Facebook still. So I go on Facebook and I found the daughter of this lady. And I sent this message like, I don't know if you remember me, but our parents used to be friends. And immediately I get this message back. How could we ever forget the little boy that God sent into our lives? And in five emails, I learned more about my relationship with my mother than I had in 37 years of my life. I learned that every day at like one o'clock was my time to go and like lay in bed with my mother. I learned that every day when she was in the hospital she would call and they put the phone in my ear so I could hear her voice. And I never knew that happened. And so when I went to therapy, I got, it was like two hours away from where this couple lives now and I got to go visit them and I was super nervous and, you know, how's this going to work? And I'd seen them, but not with the context. And I remember knocking on the door and Fred answers the door just really nonchalant like, oh hey Shawn, like no big deal, I go in, we're drinking Miller light or something. And then Mary comes in and she starts telling all these stories about potty training me and who remembers what and things like that. And then she says, hang on, I have something for you. And she leaves and she comes back with this bag and inside of this bag she had all the birthday cards from my second birthday party. Like, here's proof that you were loved on your birthday two weeks after your mom died. She had a poem the hospital chaplain had written about my parents as my mother was dying in the hospital. She had all the newspaper clippings from my high school career. And she had a red piece of construction paper that says in crayon, to Mary mom from Shawn. And when you open it up it just says, I love you in big letters. And she carried all that stuff around for 35 years. Like seven times they had moved their home. Just to give it all to a 37-year-old priest who had no idea what it means for somebody to love me unconditionally. Who had no concept that somebody can hold me in their heart without wanting anything from me or seeing me regularly. And it changed everything. It shifted everything. And I found myself in trusting myself to her. Because it's always been a difficult thing. You know, when you're a priest lots of people want to be, you know, your surrogate parent. Like ladies come up to me all the time, father I'll be your new mom. Like get away from me lady. Right? But Mary mom can like hold my face in her hands and say we're going to be here for you and we love you and you're part of our family and there's nothing you can do about it and you can do anything and we're always going to be here. And I'm like, oh that's so nice. And then I started realizing I was entrusting myself to Jesus in a different way because I never knew what it meant to be a son. I was good at being with. I was really good at being for. I didn't know what it meant to be from. And our Lord used that to teach me what that means. And that's what He wants to do with all of our lives. Fundamentally, people who are stuck in addiction of any kind the only path out is to completely surrender themselves to the love of God. That's it. There's lots of paths for doing that. When somebody's struggling, they always ask me what are people supposed to do? Like get a spiritual director, go to a 12-step fellowship and get a therapist. Those are the three things. If you don't do those three things, you're probably not going to be successful. That's just where I've landed. And I really do believe in 12-step fellowships because 12-step fellowships are like a structured way to learn what it means to entrust yourself to God. That's all they are. They're a structured way to learn to entrust yourself to God. And I know lots of guys who struggled, struggled, struggled and then they went to 12-step groups like Sexoholics Anonymous and they got better. And they found themselves in this fellowship and they found themselves in a place where they were loved and they learned how to have community. And they also had somebody to really challenge them to help them to surrender. And eventually, like our Lord's relentless love, he had to just give up and let him in. And people will ask, like, okay, so what do we do? And I want to give you a couple tools and there's one more kind of exhortation story. So like, if the average age of exposure is so young, like 8 and 11, what do we do? There's a really good book called Good Pictures, Bad Pictures. It's a book that parents can read to their child. And in our diocese, we give it out in second grade now. So if you have a second grader, you get this book. And it just teaches them what pornography is and what to do if they see it. Pornography is pictures of people with little or no clothes on. If you see it, close your eyes. Tell an adult, name it when you see it. Distract your thoughts with other things in order your thinking brain to be charged. It's pretty simple. Parents who read this book to their kids, they just say their kids started reporting more. Mom, is that pornography? Yeah. Then mom takes the Cosmo, goes to the store manager and says, my kid just asked me if this is pornography. And it is. And then the store manager, oh, I'm really sorry, I have kids too, and they cover up their magazines. If we teach kids what to do, won't they want to look at it? We've done a really good job with smoking. I get called out about smoking by 3-year-olds all the time. I was at this party. It was 4th of July, I went and bought a bunch of fireworks. I was the hero of the party. It's 3-year-olds following me around. Father, can I help with your fireworks? Father, where did you get all those fireworks? Father, do you like fireworks? Father, why do you smoke? And I'm like, uh, you know that's bad for you. Shut up, kid. You know you could die. I'm like frozen. And he's like, oh well, I guess you're just going to die then. He runs off. So if we can teach little kids that cigarettes will kill them, we can also just teach them. There's this thing called pornography. People without any clothes on. If you see that, you need to turn it off, turn away and tell your adults. And it gives them a language. It gives them a language. There's another book on our integrity restored website called Wonderfully Made Babies. It's just a really good read to your child's sex education book. It's all written according to Theology of the Body and the Creation story. It has an imprimatur from Archbishop Shippu. It's for age nine and up. And I think nine's right. Because they're not like opening up in adolescence yet. And so it's just information. No most common question of a nine-year-old after that book is, can I go play with my toys now? My friend read it to his daughter. She knows exactly how a baby's made. And she's just like, I have millions of eggs. Did you know I have millions of eggs inside of me? She's just like fascinated about millions of eggs. She doesn't care that Adam had a penis. She just cares about her millions of eggs. Right? And they might ask it a little more advanced question, like how does sperm get to the egg? And so this girl asks with Adam an air shot, Mom, how does the sperm get to the egg? There's a special embrace. Oh, okay. How long does that take? Like a minute, right? Dad's like, come on. Right? And they're just really healthy things to do. They're really healthy things to do. And there's lots of good parenting websites. This talk that I've just given, it's on a DVD series that you can find on Integrity Restored called Informed, like if you wanted a copy of a talk like this to give to in your whatever, RCIA, CCD, whatever format. And it's a talk that I give when I get talked to parents, when I talk to junior high, when I talk to high school, when I talk to divorce people, when I talk to addicts, when I talk to white, it's just like my everything I do starts here. Because the gospel is really simple. The gospel is like your beloved son or daughter of God. And we have to learn to live into that. And sometimes we have to be stubborn about having joy because I believe our Lord wants to heal everybody. And the biggest obstacle to proclaiming the gospel right now is our own wounds. The biggest reason parents don't talk to their children is their own history or their own shame. The biggest reason priests don't talk to their people is their own history or their own shame or their institutional shame. In Pope Francis on Divine Mercy Sunday a few years ago, his homily said, don't be ashamed of the wounds in the body of Christ. And when he said that, he's talking about the wounded members of the body. But I think it also applies to our own wounds. He uses this example of Thomas who puts his finger in Jesus' wound. And I was reflecting on that and I asked myself like, what did Thomas doubt? Did Thomas doubt the resurrection? Or did Thomas doubt that Jesus had resurrected wounds? Because he doesn't say, unless I slap him on the back, I won't believe you. He says, unless I put my finger in the wound, I won't believe you. I don't believe that he would be resurrected with his wound. Why would the most shameful thing that happened in his life that reminds us of all of his pain and all of his rejection still be around after the resurrection? And sometimes we want to have like resurrection with no wounds. But it's through those wounds that we come to faith. And the place this became most apparent to me was in 2016. So revisiting my story. In 1998, I'm a Army officer at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. My roommate has a pornography movie in the house. I watched it a ton of times. All those peoples are like burned in my head forever. That was 1998. 18 years later, now I'm this national speaker. I'm speaking at a Protestant conference for a thousand Protestant pastors and me. And there's like two other priests there. And I'm feeling really nervous. And I'm kind of getting, I'm looking for somebody familiar as I'm walking around the hotel lobby and I'm scanning the crowd and pop. This guy's face jumps out of the crowd who was in the video that my roommate had back in 1998. And I was like, what's he doing here? Is he like a terrorist? Maybe just looks like him. Next day I'm talking to a friend and I said, hey, who is that guy you were just talking to? Oh, he used to be in the pornography industry and now he's here with his pastor and he's trying to figure out how to be a blessing. Ugh, thought so. Then Jesus starts saying, Sean, I want you to talk to that guy. Like, yeah, right, Jesus. I gave my talk, went really well. I had Southern Baptist asking my forgiveness for like the next two days. Because the Protestants are great about asking forgiveness because they don't have confession. We just go to confession. We don't really say, hey, I messed up and I hurt you. So I had this line of guys. I told everybody that I would come talk to you because I just did not want to hear from you and I thought you'd be horrible because you're a priest but you're the best talker at this whole thing. It was an amazing place where I learned something about humility. But after my talk, I'm out walking around the building and this guy's standing outside by himself. And I went, wham. And our Lord said, missed opportunity. I want you to talk to that guy. So last day of the conference, I go outside to smoke a cigarette because Pope Francis says, the small like your sheep. And the guy came out to smoke. So it was just me and him. How's it going? And he's like, oh, it's been great. It's been great. How about you? And I'm like, oh, it's good. You know, I'm a Catholic priest and we really only talk about this confession. I'm trying to figure out a better way to like help the church to engage this topic. Oh, yeah, I know. I used to be Catholic. Huh. So we talk a little bit more. And then he looks at me out of the corner of his eye and he's like, my story is different than everybody else's story here. Like, crap, he's going to tell me. I was an actor in the pornography industry for 25 years. I'm 25 years. I had no idea. So I didn't know where to go. So I asked him more questions like, how'd you get out? Was it like a counselor or a group or some kind of organization? No, no, it wasn't any of that. I was just driving off set one day and I collapsed in my car on the side of the road crying out, Jesus, I just can't do this anymore. I know a lot of people shut down their computers saying the same thing. Then he said, I was a Christian before I made pornography and I used to drive in to make pornography saying, Jesus, forgive me for what I'm about to do. I've worked with a lot of people who start their computers up saying, Jesus, forgive me for what I'm about to do. And then he said, you know, I kind of want to get up in front of everybody and just say I'm sorry. And when he said that, 22-year-old me received it. As if he was saying, I'm sorry that you got exposed to me. And it mattered to me. And it mattered to me in a way that was surprising that I never thought. So I've given this talk to now thousands of people. I've said I'm sorry that happened to you to probably thousands of people. The first person to ever tell me I'm sorry that happened to you was this ex porn star at this conference in Greensboro in 2016. And it mattered. And so I said, you know, if you give talks or anything someday, you should just say that. Because I knew exactly who you were as soon as I saw you. In fact, I've been feeling kind of ashamed to talk to you. But when you said I'm sorry, it really mattered to me. And I forgive you. And then he started like to cry a little bit, to tear up. Oh, Father. Father, thank you so much for saying that. Father, thank you. Father, give me a hug. And he gives me a hug. And that was the most profound year of mercy moment. Right in the middle of the year of mercy. And all the things our Lord had to do to orchestrate that moment. And I would have missed it if I was ashamed of my own wounds. If I was afraid of my own wounds. And so it really taught me to be ashamed of the wounds in the body of Christ applies to mine. And it's the fruitfulness of a healing process. The fruitfulness of if I hadn't done the healing that I've done, there's no way I would have talked to that guy. But it also taught me the difference between love to sin and hate to sin. Because I used to think that means I love you, but I hate that you got married outside the church. But my family member just receives that as I don't love my family member. It's different than saying I hate the sin of apostasy, but I love the person. Because in that moment I hated the sin of pornography. I hate what it does to young people. I hate what it does to priests. I hate what it does to camp families. I hate what it did to that ex-porn star. But in a very concrete way I could love the person who made it. In a very concrete way I could love the person that made it. And so like our Lord wants to heal everything. And if we allow ourselves to step into that space and allow him to do that. And we allow ourselves to have transformed wounds. It's then that we can break the silence that's keeping us stuck in our modern times. Let's pray. Name the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord Jesus, we ask your blessings upon all of these, your sons and daughters. And we just ask you to reveal yourself to us in a way that we can understand, to comfort us, to supply for us what we didn't receive. To heal what's been wounded and just any memories that have come up during this talk. We ask for the strength and the courage to courageously and relentlessly love our family members. To courageously and relentlessly preach your gospel of love in a world that's in such need of your mercy. May Almighty God bless you, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you all very much.