 Welcome back to Vine Intimacy Radio. My apologies. We had a little different kind of approach to the show today, and I, as the host, I didn't properly signal to my co-host and our producer what was going on. And they apparently no longer read minds, and so that didn't work either. So we're back. We're gifted. We're not that gifted. We're heading to segment number two. I don't know. Jordan maybe can read minds. On Divine Intimacy Radio, on internet or social media, internet persecution, so to speak. So on your markets, go. Welcome back to Divine Intimacy Radio's Dan Stephanie Burke. Segment two, we talked, of course, in the first segment, Sister Kristen Gardner, who's the postulator of the cause of Sister Claire Crockett and how the, her, what is it, documentary about her life and her conversion, and then her beatification process was taken down by YouTube for spurious reasons and said it was fraud and they were selling stuff, whatever, and they were doing none of the things that were accused of. Yeah. And, you know, we just need to push back on this stuff. Yeah. We need to be clear. We need to be bold. We need to be loving. We need to be all that we're called to be. But we need to push back on these things and find ways around them. Yeah. You know, get the word out. That's why we had that show, the first segment of this. And now we're going to our issue. Yeah. Yeah. And I would encourage, because I do know Sister Claire's story. I have watched it. It's beautiful. You don't want to miss it. Check out sisterclare.com, watch her story and pray to her. Yeah. Pray to her that her cause can be moved forward because it's not a minor thing that her English views were 5 million, Spanish views were 4 million. Yeah. That's amazing. She's obviously got, you know, the, the holiness of the persona, you know, her, her cult is, is rising. So let's pray to her maybe to help deal with these issues. You know, not on the internet that keeps shutting down good content, Christian content, important content of how we need to communicate out to God's people. What's going on? Yeah. And ours isn't quite as dramatic in terms of 5 million views. But just asking our producer, you gave me a number a minute ago, Jordan, about the high, high number of views on one video. We had 62,000 views at one point on several of the videos and now it's, we'll be lucky if we break 300. 300. And what's fascinating is we don't, just like the sisters, we don't deal with a lot of controversial political issues. What we deal with the Catholic mystical tradition. So, you know, my instinct is just, you know, the work of the enemy, but we do need your help. So our main YouTube page is spiritualdirection.com YouTube page and that's got all of these shows on it. And we've been posting there for years, thousands of hours of great content. What we've decided to do to try to reboot the effort and figure out ways around this challenge and wanted to invite you to help us out is start a new page. We're not, we're not getting rid of the old one. We're going to keep posting there. But a new one called, what is the title of the page? If you search Dan Burke, The Way of Contemplation. Dan Burke, The Way of Contemplation. And it's going to be content that I'm producing, asking and answering questions on the interior life. And some of that will also include my beloved spouse and co-host as well and other folks like Father John Bertunek, Dr. Anthony Lillis. A lot of good, a lot of good new content. But what I'd be grateful for you to do is help us get the word out to try to break this barrier and get to where our views and distribution are back up. And we're also looking at other, you know, channels and means to get, get the word out as well. But head out and do that search at Dan Burke, The Way of Contemplation. And when you go out there, the way you can help is subscribe, which tells YouTube you're interested in it. And then comment, which affects the algorithms. Jordan, do you want to explain, you know, I, and by the way, this is for all Catholics who care about good content on, on social media. How is it that these companies determine that your content is interesting and rise it, like automatically rise it up to the top in searches and that sort of thing so that good Catholics know here's what I can do to help, you know, like the sister Claire situation or our situation. Basically, you know, it's not enough just to watch a video. If you subscribe, that helps the algorithm liking the video, sharing the video. That's huge commenting on the video basically interacting and telling every interaction tells these different platforms that this is content that I want to see. And it allows the algorithm, which is generally unmanned. It's automatic. It's pretty automatic. You have to help the algorithm recognize that this is content that I want to see and that others want to see. Otherwise, you can subscribe and if you don't interact, you may not see anything. So how little or a lot do people need to interact? Can they just like put? Yeah, I agree. Or great or anything helps any comment like that thumbs up or sharing that sort of thing. No, sounds good. Yeah. So head out to Dan Burke, the way of contemplation, spiritualdirection.com as well. That YouTube page and you're going to find all kinds of great stuff. You know, I had to just to switch over to a like a Q&A thing that we can post for people. I had a question that was asked to me here at the retreat house recently that we can address and that will post this up and in one or both of the places. But somebody asked me how important is it that we know where we're at in the spiritual life, you know, like in the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways. Is it important at all? And what does what? What does let's say say Teresa of Avila of John and the Cross teach about those phases and why? Why did they spend time delineated, including Thomas Aquinas and St. Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of sales? Why did they spend time delineating phases of spiritual growth? Seems like it'd be pretty important. Well, I think the first thing that comes to mind is an understanding that the spiritual life is not a is not a straight line trajectory. I was just discussing this with the director the other day because they were concerned where they would, you know, kind of make a surge forward to be doing really well. And then they'd fall back and it was kind of this tug of they felt like a tug of war of like, why did this happen to me? You know, I thought I was doing better. I thought I was past these kind of things. And we were working through that. And so what I did is I described it as rather than a linear line from the purgative to the unitive. It's a little bit like if you throw spaghetti on the wall and it's a little bit of up and down and up and down and back and forth. But what you want to know is the overall trajectory. Are you continuing to move forward? You know, if you took a ratio or a percentage of the the movement, is it an upward movement towards greater union with the Lord, less sin growth in virtue, more prayer, more self giving, more self denial. Yeah, so I would agree. I mean, the first and most important concern is, are you generally making progress, even if there's a wavy up and down? The only thing to clarify on the spaghetti thing is, so the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways can be relatively compared to like childhood, adolescence and adulthood, you know, in our psychological, physiological development cycle. So you can't be a child and an adult at the same time. But in the in the little twists and turns in those phases, which can be decades long, you'll go up and down and back and forward in your progress, just because that's our brokenness. And that's the way even God teaches us. Right. So one, trajectory is the most important thing. Are you increasing in love? Are you decreasing in sin? Are you increasing in virtue? Are you increasing in patience or whatever your root sin is, pride, vanity, wrath, lust, you know, avarice, whatever those are, are they minimizing and are their opposite virtues emerging just in a way that is, you know, let's say on an annual basis, which is a good way of judging, asking someone who knows you really well, am I better in this way than the last year? That tells you you're heading the right direction or not. But they also delineated between the phases, all of these spiritual doctors of the church, so that we could in those phases understand what's normal and abnormal. Right. And then yield to what the Holy Spirit wants to do or heal us of or where we need particular work in terms of sin against sin and that sort of thing, yield to those movements in that phase. Yeah. Does that make sense? What what we're basically showing is that the Holy Spirit has provided common language between the different doctors of the church saints that have described this. I mean, there's a place I think it's in spiritual direction or in your navigating the interior life, where you show the different languages between the different saints, denoting the purgative, illuminative and unitive and how they describe how they describe it. So it's it's providing some commonality and language, some commonality and understanding. Should you be staring at that dashboard? Absolutely not. Yeah, you don't want to stare at your gauges when you're driving your car. No, because that becomes that becomes an exercise in narcissism. Yeah. You just want to know and to be able to have this conversation with your spiritual director. Like you said, you know, what maybe once a year, once every six months to just make sure that you're still on the trajectory towards oneness with the Lord. And what is it? I mean, your examine helps you decide, OK, where am I? How do I move forward? How do I diagnose this with my spiritual director? How do I discern this? And how do I use the examine in my in my plan of love? Yeah. As it were, as we describe it to continue this upward trajectory. Yeah. And just to give you a really specific example, like if you're in the early purgative stage, which is the first stages where you're beginning to say, yeah, yes to the Lord and I want to move forward. The thing you're going to realize is that habitual sin is the first target to go after. Now, you do you do how you do that is multifaceted. It has to do with, as you say, the examine going to confession regularly, immersing yourself in the sacraments, which is the greatest sources of the life of God, you know, in you, given to you, poured out for you in and through those sacraments. So you have the clarity to see what is my sin. Self-awareness always growing in self-awareness. Right. So you have the clarity to see through self-awareness. And then you have the strength to pursue that sin and to go after that sin and overcome it by God's grace, but you also have to cooperate and fight like crazy. And so in the early purgative stage, that's how you yield to the Holy Spirit is if it's mortal sin, you got to be super aggressive because that's so dangerous. The ultimate, you know, end of dying in a state of mortal sin is not ending up in the in the good place and going to the bad place, going to hell. And none of us wants that. And that's not God's desire, which is why he gave us, gave himself up for us and gave us, gave himself through the sacraments to us. So if you want to, if you want to get a good treatment of that, like the lay the first treatment I did was in navigating the interior life, as you mentioned, which also has a quiz, if you will, or a self-assessment, to better ways on a quiz of finding your roots in and making you more aware of which to tackle first. But then also in Devil in the Castle, which is my most recent book where I updated the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways. And of course, you can find courses like about this. And at the Avila Institute, I teach foundations of prayer and union with God where I go into it in depth at avila-institute.org. Really all the work that we do teaches about this in some form or fashion, including our marriage retreats. Yes, exactly. Everything we've incorporated this. Because it's such a powerful perspective. Well, it's life changing. Yeah. Well, with that, we're all out of time. Until next time, may the God of peace make you perfect in holiness. May he preserve you whole and entire spirit, soul and body irreproachable at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Alrighty. Alrighty.