 This has been a really nostalgic week for me. I have to say, being back on this campus, it's been amazing to be back in this environment and just to treasure the treasure that this is and the treasure that my time here was those many years ago. Thank you, Petrug, for that lovely and kind introduction. Petrug was, he said, he had the privilege of reading my dissertation. He was actually my examiner. And so if you don't know what a reader is, he examined me and I passed. So I guess I was all right, but anyway. Yeah, so I'm from South Dakota and I'm back in South Dakota now. I actually grew up in the Little House on the Prairie and I grew up on a cattle ranch. My dad is a cowboy and my brother is a cowboy and my brothers in laws are cowboys. And two of them were professional rodeo, actually three of them were professional rodeo cowboys at one time. I come from a long line of rednecks. And I guess you could say I have a checkered past. He kind of read some of it there. I spent some time in parish youth ministry. I was a high school teacher for a while. I was here for 10 years. I was a missionary in Europe. I think he said I started that radio station. I did not start that radio station. I was part of the team that started that radio station in Ireland, the first Christian radio station in Ireland and the first ecumenical one that we know of from the ground up. And then yes, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. And now I work at the cutest little retreat center which I asked the tech people to put a picture up of and maybe they can do that. So I work at a place called the Sue Spiritual Center and somebody asked me this afternoon, the Sue Spiritual Center, what does that mean? And so just to tell you a little bit about our place in the 1970s, gentlemen out in Mead County donated attractive land to the diocese and the Jesuits had been doing missionary work all around the Indian reservations of South Dakota. And at that time, by the way, are there any indigenous people here? Okay, those of you who have diocese with indigenous people, we need to be bringing them to these catechetical congresses, okay? So in the 1970s, there was a movement called the American Indian Movement that was putting a lot of pressure on Native American Catholics to drop the white man's religion, get back to the old ways. And there was an identity crisis that came out of that. And so the Jesuits on this little tract of land built this house as a place that would try to communicate beautifully and clearly that it is okay to be Lakota and Catholic just like you can be Irish and Catholic, Polish and Catholic, Italian and Catholic, you can be Lakota and Catholic. And I loved, I could tell you, I could stand here and tell you a whole bunch more. But anyway, that was the original inspiration behind the place where I work. It's a 15 bedroom retreat house in the middle of absolutely nowhere. I mean, it's way like right between middle and no and where. It's 100 miles from Walmart and Starbucks and I have to drive 50 miles to go to church. So I'm super blessed to have the Blessed Sacrament in the house with me and have access to our Lord 24-7. But it is a bit of a journey to get anywhere out there, especially if it's raining or snowing. So anyway, all that to say, I've been around the block a few times. I know your world. And by the way, one other little side note, we actually have a cause for canonization happening in our diocese. I don't know if you would have heard of servant of God, Nicholas Black Elk. But he is in the process of canonization right now and he is a catechist. He was a catechist. He baptized over 400 people himself in the South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana area before there was, well, I suppose they were states by that time. But anyway, much to be learned there. Anyway, my hands are about 60 degrees right now. So could we just pray for a quick second? Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Jesus, thank you for bringing me back to Franciscan University of Stupendville. Thank you for each person that you've drawn into this place. And we ask you to pour forth your spirit tonight, Lord, that we might take the next step, whatever that is, in trust with you. And we ask all this through Christ our Lord. Amen. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. So I wanted to tell you that I am actually quite surprised to find myself on this stage. I got an email sometime last fall from someone in the conference office asking me if I would come to speak. And so I said, yes, I imagined I would be doing a little workshop and a couple months later I was like, they never did tell me what they want me to talk about. I probably better find out. So either I called them or they called me and I said, by the way, what do you want me to talk about? And they said, well, we usually let the keynotes decide what they're going to talk about. And I said, keynote. And then I said, who else is speaking at this conference? And they said, well, we're going to find a bishop and Father Mike Schmitz. And I was like, Elizabeth, the people that are laughing at that are a certain age. So anyway, but I immediately, when I understood what the situation was, actually I asked if there was possibly a mistake because I'm not a catechist, right? I'm not working like directly in the ministry of catechesis. And so whoever I was speaking with from the conference office said maybe you better talk to Bill Keimig. So somehow Bill and I got in touch and Bill kind of walked me back from the ledge. And what came to my heart immediately as when I understood what they wanted to do with the conference, what came to my heart was to talk about the matter of self-entrustment to Jesus. And that I can do. So when I told Bill that, he said, ooh, the reversal of Eden. And I said, that's good, can I steal that? So I cannot take credit for the title of this talk. I give all credit to Bill. And it was really, I think, inspired. So I wanna preface this talk by sharing a little term with you that I think our Dominican friends will appreciate because I believe it's a motto of the Dominican order. It's a Latin phrase, contemplata alias tradiere, which translates into English as to hand down to others the fruits of your contemplation or to share the fruits of your contemplation with others. And in this talk tonight, I'm not coming to you as a theologian. I'm not coming to you to teach you how to be a better or more effective catechist. I'm coming to you as a pilgrim, as a sister in Christ, as someone who's been on the roller coaster of life on earth after the fall for a long time to share with you some of the things that the Lord has been teaching me about trust and about his trustworthiness. I'm gonna tell you one other thing too. I had COVID in January. And about a month after I had COVID, I noticed that I was having trouble keeping track of my thoughts or holding two thoughts together at a time. I was having trouble with vocabulary. Any of you having issues, cognitive issues since COVID? So that's why if you notice, I'm kind of sticking close to my notes. It's because I'm scared I'm gonna lose my place. So this is really an active self-entrustment that you're observing up here. So what I'm sharing with you tonight are the fruits of my own contemplation. And I will tell you that they are lessons that have been hard won because it brought me and it brings us and it will bring you face to face with the mystery of suffering and at times bewildering suffering. So the title of my talk is The Reversal of Eden. So let's review what happened in Eden. The bishop went over that the other night a little bit, but let's do it again. God created it all and he said it was good. And then he created man and woman and he said it was very good. And he gave them dominion over everything. It just one thing, one thing in the whole garden you can't have this thing, this tree. And then it says on the seventh day that he rested. And then on page two, the whole thing fell apart. An act of disobedience was inspired by the enemy of our human nature. He enters the story, he plants a seed of distrust. Did God really say that? Well, you know, he probably only said that because he's holding out on you. You know, I mean, there's more, you know? And he entices them into an act of disobedience and that one tree that the Lord had put a fence around and said, don't eat this, they ate it. And that moment is the backdrop of human history and of our personal history. So we live on life on earth after the fall. That's where we still are. Life on earth after the fall, also known as the valley of tears. We were born into a wounded state of affairs. You only have to pick up a newspaper or check your internet feed to know that that's true. Okay, something has gone wrong here. It's a mess. It's not safe. Things are not usually straightforward. It's messy. We are messy. Our relationships are messy. Our church is messy. That difficult beginning, that initial act of distrust has left a mark on all of us and it has kind of warped our vision. And even though the process of our healing has begun in our baptism, we still carry the vestiges of original sin that kind of, that lean, you know, towards distrust. Now my life has been very deeply shaped by the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola and much of what I've learned about self-entrustment came through my experiences on retreats where I've made the spiritual exercises. One of the exercises that St. Ignatius has you do is to imagine that you are in the throne room of heaven and there's the trinity. And the trinity is looking down at everything going on on the earth. And they're like, yikes, what's going on down there? They're killing each other. They're hurting each other. They're cheating on each other. They're stealing from each other. And then they're all going to hell. Like we can't leave things like this. We cannot, you know, we can't, you know, if God thinks about ethics, I don't know. We can't ethically keep creating these cute little creatures that we love and then just end up in hell. We've got to do something. We don't want to stop creating because our nature is to create and to do creative things, right? And so they conferred together in heaven and they strategized and they decided together that the second person of the trinity was going to go down there and sort this out. But now that the second person of the trinity has this mission, he needs to involve others in his mission. And so the first one is Gabriel. Gabriel, come here. Okay, here's the holy land. Here's Nazareth. Here's Mary's house. We want you to go to Mary's house and ask her if she will be part of our mission so that I, the second person of the trinity can come into the world. And so Gabriel goes to Mary's house and he asks her if she would be part of his mission, part of God's mission. And she thinks about it for a minute. She asks a few questions and then she says I'm in, awesome. And then we've got to involve other people. We got to get Joseph in and then they're gonna need some help down in Bethlehem so the innkeepers get involved in the mission. And then they're people in Egypt to meet them when they're in exile to help them there. And then eventually they come back to Nazareth and Jesus grows up and then he chooses his 12 disciples and they get involved in his mission. And then at the cross we meet Veronica and we meet Simon of Cyrene and we meet Mary Magdalene and we meet the beloved disciple. We meet all these people who are pulled into the Lord's mission and on and on it goes all down through history until here we are tonight at the John Bosco Conference. You have been invited to be part of that mission of saving the world. What an awesome thing. What a dignity you have. It's overwhelming. So Jesus went on mission in this fallen world and he has invited you as Catechus to partner with him in his mission to redeem the world. We're just, we're involved in a big chain reaction partnering with Jesus in the redemption of a fallen world. And we ourselves are fallen and we are in the process of being redeemed. And I think we hear that word redemption redeemed so often that maybe we forget what it means. So it's worth pausing here just to remember what it means. It means the act of gaining or regaining something in exchange for payment. So that would suggest that what is being redeemed is something of great value, something that is precious to the one who lost it. You are precious to the Lord. Every child who comes to you for catechesis is precious to the Lord and he is in the process of redeeming each one. So God created us for relationship with himself. Some people have kind of a hard time with that idea of our faith as a relationship with God. I, when I was in Ireland, I gave a talk on evangelization one night and I had this kind of little gimmicky thing I did. I'd say I have 50 euros in my pocket, which I usually didn't. I have 50 euros in my pocket, which I will give to the first person who can tell me what is the first line of the catechism of the Catholic church. I knew I was safe. There were all kinds of guesses nobody ever guessed it. And what it is, it's John 17.3. Eternal life is this, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. God wants us to know him. You know, and in this room where I was teaching, these were devout pious Catholics, practicing Catholics in Ireland, Irish Catholics. And this lady pipes up and she says, but we can't know God. God is the unknowable one. And I was a little bit stunned, you know? And I had to converse with her for a few minutes, but to say that scripture is God's own self-revelation, right? He has revealed himself to us. He wants us to know, right? And the more we know him, the more we're gonna love him. But we have an enemy. We talked about that before. He showed up in Eden. We have an enemy and his agenda is to prevent that. So he tries to twist our image of God because if he is successful in that, he's gonna win everything. Everything else is gonna fall apart sooner or later. So second Corinthians chapter 10 verses three through five is kind of a battle cry for Catechus. I'm just gonna read it to you here. Paul writes, indeed we live as human beings, but we do not wage war according to human standards for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have a divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God. And we take every thought captive to Christ. That's the point of attack, our image of God. That's the essence of our spiritual battle. The enemy of our human nature attacks against the true knowledge of God because the more warped our understanding is and the more warped our understanding of God is or our vision of God, the more problems we have in loving him, worshiping him and trusting ourselves to him with our whole hearts. And our enemy does not want that to happen. He does not want that to happen. Father Jacques Philippe, one of my favorite spiritual authors, wrote a little book called Searching for and Maintaining Peace of Heart. And in there he wrote, the great victory of the father of lies, of the accuser, is succeeding in putting into the heart of a child of God distrust vis-a-vis his father. It is marked with this distrust that we come into the world. This is the original sin and all our spiritual life consists precisely in a long process of reeducation with a view to regaining the lost confidence by the grace of the Holy Spirit who makes us say anew to God, Abba Father. So what I wanna talk to you tonight about is this business of the reeducation and trust and my own, you know, contemplation on that problem because it has been a big problem for me. I actually was born on the Feast of St. Martha, you know? And so that's highly meaningful in my life. You will understand a lot about me if you understand that I was born on the Feast of St. Martha. So this business of reeducation and trust has been a rollercoaster for me. Thank God, you know, the Lord got ahold of me when I was young, I was, you know, I would say this, I was a cradle Catholic. My parents did everything right, or almost everything, okay? They took me to church. They had me baptized. I went to catechism classes. We didn't have a Catholic school in our town and so I went every week. And, but I was not getting the lights on, okay? We might, when I say my parents did everything right, I mean everything, right? They were open to life, their whole married life, but largely out of a fear that my mother had otherwise she would end up in hell, right? And so this image that I had of God in my mind was kind of warped like that. You know, I had an image of God that he was watching me carefully to catch me doing something wrong so that he could banish me, you know? And, but when I was in high school, I had the good fortune of having a best friend who she played an absolutely critical role in my discovery of God's love. She was 14 and she really was my first spiritual director. Under her wing I took little baby steps towards God. I learned to read the scriptures. I learned that God communicates through the scriptures and all these little stages that Sherry Waddell talks about in her book, those were unfolding in my friendship with this girl. I trusted her. I trusted her. She made me curious, you know? There's something in a tone of her voice that made me think maybe I don't have this all right. You know? Well anyway, one night she was excited. By the way I should mention she was not Catholic. So one night she called. She was really excited. There had been a missionary speaking at her church and she was, she had really gotten a lot out of his talk and she said, I have decided to dedicate my life to Christ. Do you want to? And I said no. I had no idea what that meant. I had no category for that. And I think in many ways just the culture of our ecclesial life, you know, the main category for dedicating your life to Christ is religious life, right? And I was 14. I wasn't thinking about being a nun, you know? And I think that is one of the big challenges that we have as a church. How do we make the conscious act of self-entrustment into the Lord a more explicit part of the way that we form people? This is a good time maybe to tell you a little story about Barbara Morgan. She was the founder of the Ketaketics program here. Barbara's mother was a Baptist if I'm not mistaken. I don't know if my colleagues would correct me. Was she Baptist? And she got a word from the Lord at some point that God wanted her to become a Catholic. So she did. And then she had Barbara. And I presume she probably had Barbara baptized as a baby. But one day, I think Barbara said she was four years old when this happened. Her mother sat down with her and invited her or helped her to invite Jesus into her heart. Okay. That was what formed the disposition of Barbara to respond to the grace that was already present to her in her baptism. And here we are. Look at the fruit. Boy, talk about seed that landed on a good soil. You know, what would happen if we did that more often with our little baptized kids that have all that latent grace kind of sitting in there? You know, if we were to invite them to a conscious awareness that they invite Jesus in. You know, he's standing at the door knocking and they can say, come on in Lord. How powerful would that be? St. John Paul II, when he sort of was talking about the karygma in Catechesis Tridenti 25, he said that the karygma is the initial ardent proclamation by which a person is one day overwhelmed and brought to the decision to entrust himself to Jesus Christ by faith. What? What? Entrust himself to Jesus Christ by faith? Okay, you're all catechists. When was the last time that you saw somebody get overwhelmed and brought to the decision to entrust themselves to Jesus Christ by faith? Another place in Catechesis Tridenti, he says that the one who has entrusted himself to Jesus Christ endeavors to know better this Jesus Christ to whom he has entrusted himself. I don't know about you, but I've spent a lot of time trying to catechize people who are not endeavoring to know better this Jesus to whom they have entrusted themselves, right? So what if we looked at this differently? What if we looked at this process of coming alive in the faith with the act of self-entrustment being an explicit part of it? How powerful that could be? So I could tell you many stories about my ups and downs and my journey with the Lord, but I want to kind of fast forward to an event that came about when I was here in Steubenville in 1997. I had made the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius some years prior, when I was in my 20s, in a format that's called the 19th annotation version of the, or it's also called the Retreat in Daily Life. And it was and is kind of a school of prayer and a school of discernment. I graduated from the university in 97, but I was fortunate enough to land a job here. But I had a lot of questions about the direction of my life, about my vocation, there were some big decisions on the horizon, and I was terrified. I was so anxious that I actually had a prominent lump in my throat right here, sometimes made it difficult to swallow. I don't want to go into all the details of what the things were that I was praying about and anxious about, but I was sharing with my mom, my mom's a medical person that I had this kind of lump in my throat. And she said, oh yeah, that has a name, it's called Globulus Hystericus. Oh. So anyway, I had wanted to make the 30 day, that's kind of the catalog version of the exercises, I had wanted to make the 30 day for some time, but I didn't make a lot of money here and I didn't have a lot of vacation time, and I couldn't afford to go to a retreat center for 30 days. But one summer I figured out a way to do it, the summer of 97. Father John Harden had written a book called Retreat with the Lord, I found some of his conference talks, I figured out if I prayed three hours a day I could work it in around my day job, I could keep a low profile in my social life. And so I made a modified version of the 30 day and I still count it as one of the greatest graces of my life. Day after day I went to prayer and the Lord was pushing my buttons on the issue of trust constantly. There is an exercise in the exercises called the call of Christ the King. And it's an invitation that you're supposed to kind of imagine your way into that the Lord wants to go on mission, he wants to go actually on crusade, he wants to conquer the world and he wants you to be part of it. And so you're supposed to pray about, what would I say if he did that? And so you pray about that. And then there's a prayer, Ignatius says, those who wish to distinguish themselves in this make bigger offerings like this. And it goes into this little prayer, eternal Lord of all things, in the presence of your blessed mother and all the heavenly court, I protest that it is my earnest desire and my personal choice provided only it is for your greater glory to imitate you in bearing all wrongs and all abuse and all poverty, both actual and spiritual and da da da da da, I don't remember the rest of what it was. But I stopped short when I came to that prayer. I was like, hold on a second here because I am not open to all abuse, all poverty and all wrongs. I am not open to that. And I got stuck. I couldn't move forward in the exercises because I didn't want to say no to Jesus about anything, but I did not want to say yes. This was the picture that sprang up in my mind that someday if I say yes to this, if I pray this prayer, I am going to end up homeless on the streets of St. Paul in the wintertime with no mittens and a gang is going to jump me in an alley and that's what's coming if I agree to this. And I have to say yes up front. You know, not, you know, for an anxious person, somebody who's already anxious, you know, maybe. But anyway, I sat with it for two, three days. And finally I just got to the point of, okay, I'm stuck. I'm not saying no. So okay, I'm going to take the leap. And I took the leap and I said the prayer. And that was the first exercise where I knew I didn't trust the Lord very much. The exercises take you into a deep meditation on the life of Jesus. And so I was meditating on the Beatitudes one day and okay, blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are those who are persecuted. And I couldn't help but notice that a lot of these things don't sound like blessings, you know? And I was looking at a crucifix on the wall of my apartment on Oregon Avenue up there. And my own future was looming before me. And I said to Jesus, I am just so afraid that I'm gonna make a mistake that I'm going to regret. And Jesus with his arms spread wide said, was this a mistake, Carol? And my stomach dropped into my shoes. I had never thought about that. It sure looked like a mistake, didn't it? 33 years old, crucified, accused of blasphemy of all things. He got mixed up with the wrong people, you know? Maybe this wouldn't have happened if he had done something different, you know? That was where my, I had a master's degree in theology and I'm thinking these thoughts, right? So I said, well, Jesus, that's why it's hard for me to trust God because I don't want to end up where you are. So anyway, we carried on. And one night, I remember in particular, I was praying on the scripture where the storm on the lake comes up. And I had an area rug, one of those oriental rugs on my living room floor. And so you're supposed to imagine yourself very intensely in these scenes, right? So I sat down in the middle of my rug and I imagined I was in the boat. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, I was in that boat in my head. I was truing and froing. And anxious, I was, you know, in the back of the boat with my fingernails dug into the seat. And then I heard somebody say, it's a ghost. And then I heard someone say, it's the Lord. And then I heard Peter say, Lord, if that's you tell me to come out there. And I'm like, oh no, someone's laundry blew off the line and he is gonna step out of this boat. And I started planning the funeral, you know, and imagining how I'm gonna tell Peter's wife, you know. Well, you know the story. Peter, he goes under and the Lord pulls him out, puts him back in the boat. And then the Lord says, oh, you have little faith. Why did you doubt? But as I meditated on it, it wasn't a word he spoke to Peter. It was a word he spoke to me. I'm from a little town called Faith, South Dakota. So I am she of little faith. Yes, Lord. So I had a little conversation. You're supposed to have a little chat with the Lord after you have the meditation. So I followed up with this conversation. Jesus and I are sitting in a boat in this meditation where eye to eye, knee to knee. And I said, Jesus, I wouldn't mind learning to walk on water. That's okay. I'd love to learn to walk on water. I just want to do it on a nice day close to the shore. And he said, Carol, I cannot teach you to trust me if it doesn't count. So I had to go pray about that a lot. Every day it seemed like there were these moments like this where he would push the envelopes more constantly, you know, putting the disciples into situations where they were in over their heads and out of their depth. So fast forward, I get to the third movement of the retreat, deep meditation on the Lord's passion. And by now I was sick of the retreat. I wanted it to be over. Okay, I want this to be done. I'm tired of it. And that particular day I was, I had one more hour of prayer and I very seriously contemplated the possibility of just not doing it. That was the devil, I will tell you, because I got the greatest grace of my life that day. I opened Matthew's Gospel over in the Portiuncula, right over there, this is where this happened. I was in the Portiuncula, opened Matthew's Gospel, chapter 27. And you know the scene, Jesus is on the cross, they're throwing lots for his garments. There are people walking by who are mocking and spitting at him and making fun of him. And even the guys on the other crosses are reviling him. And the religious leaders are going by and they're mocking him too. And they say, he trusted in God, let God save him now if he wants him. And I said to Jesus again, you see why I don't trust God? I don't wanna be where you are. And he said, okay, we'll read on. And so I read on and you know the story, Jesus dies and then there's an earthquake and then there's an eclipse of the sun and then people's graves start coming open and people start getting out of them. And the pagan Roman centurion who's been overseeing this whole scene suddenly has a conversion and says, this was the Son of God. And the people that had been mocking him and making fun of him and spitting on him went home, scripture says, beating their breasts. As in, what have we done? What was this? Yeah? I got to thinking. Three days from now, he rises from the dead and three months from now, these people are being baptized. Which means that Jesus's trust in God was vindicated and this grace came crashing down on my head that God is trustworthy. He really is trustworthy and the lump in my throat dissolved like that. I was healed of anxiety. Not permanently, but, you know. It was a big grace and it's one that I come back to a lot. You are trustworthy, Lord. You know, funny little story here. When I was here, I was part of a women's household called House of the Beloved and we loved our name. We kind of thought of ourselves as God's special little princesses, you know. And one day, Father Dan Pati came over to give us a day of recollection and he said, I think I've hit on your charism. And we were all excited because we were wondering what our charism was. And he said, the beloved is the one who stands at the foot of the cross. We had never thought about that before. We were shocked. Anyway, I count that moment when it became clear to me that God is trustworthy as one of the greatest graces that I ever received in my life. And not too long after that, I discovered the writings of St. John of the Cross and that too was life-changing. I do not recommend that you read John of the Cross raw. There's a book by Ian Matthews that you should use as your guide into that. But in the process of that summer and the months that followed, I realized that I needed to go and re-see my whole life, the whole past. And it was like putting on a new pair of glasses, a new prescription. I had to reevaluate everything in light of this discovery that God is actually trustworthy. Sin had warped my vision of God. And when I was looking at life through these lenses of the fact that God could not be trusted, everything was warped. And when I put on the glasses that God can be trusted, everything came into focus. And then all the possibilities of the future opened up into a horizon of hope in light of the fact that God is trustworthy. So after I looked at the past and reviewed all of those things in the light of the fact that God was trustworthy, I started looking at the future. And I made a list of some of the things that I was most afraid of. Some of the things were on my list were, if you call me to religious life, I'm gonna trust you. If you call me to do a difficult marriage, I'm gonna trust you. If you call me to remain single, I will trust you. If I end up paralyzed in a wheelchair, I will trust you. If my life turns out to be boring, I will trust you. If I end up homeless on the streets of St. Paul with no mittens, I will trust you. If I get arrested and put in a concentration camp, I will trust you. Sometimes when I share this list, and especially that last one with people, they laugh at me, especially about the concentration camp, but nobody laughs anymore. I think it's, you know, maybe things are getting a little close for comfort. But anyway, that was back in 1997. And so I had basically given the Lord a list of everything that I was most afraid of and my confidence that he was gonna be there with me and if any of those things were to happen. And I have to tell you, I mean, I cried a lot that night while I was going through this, but I slept the sweetest sleep of my life that night. I rested in God maybe for the first time. I found a little jam in Sirac chapter four where the sacred author is speaking of wisdom. And it's Sirac four, 17 and 18. And he's talking about this person who is going to entrust himself to wisdom. So it says, if he trusts himself to her, he will inherit her and his descendants will remain in possession of her. This is the key part. For though she takes him at first through winding ways, bringing fear and faintness on him, trying him out with her discipline till she can trust him and testing him with her ordeals, she then comes back to him on the straight road, makes him happy and reveals her secrets to him. Wow. So the ordeals are part of that, right? The ordeals have a role to play in our, in God's plan for our life. So the Lord has continually called me, he'll probably call you into situations where you're in over your head and out of your depth. This whole radio project that I was involved in in Europe, the interesting thing about it was that the guy who wanted to start it had this vision. He wanted to get Catholics and Protestants together to proclaim the gospel together. It didn't seem like a dumb idea, but if you were to put yourself in the Bible belt, say, here and say, we're gonna get the Baptists and the Catholics together to proclaim the gospel together on the radio, everybody would think that that was weird, right? Well, that's what happened in Ireland, you know, but because I was naive, it didn't seem weird to me. And I could see this crossroads between John Paul II's new evangelization and the things that the evangelical Protestants had always said were important. And I thought, you know, we can build this, we can do this, you know? And so by the grace of God, we did. And there are half a million people a day or so who listened to this radio station. But because I was naive, you know? I was in over my head. I had no idea how far in over my head I was. I mean, we went through lawsuits. I had sleepless nights. I had heart palpitations. I mean, it was a freaking ordeal, I will tell you. It was a freaking ordeal. But you remember when the Lord led the people of Israel out of Egypt and he had them spend 40 years in the desert? Okay, they brought a lunch along. That's all they had. I don't think that was an easy season for them, but that was 40 years of purification. It was 40 years of discipline where, you know, a whole generation had to pass so that when they entered the Promised Land, they couldn't remember the pagan worship that they had witnessed when they were in Egypt. So there was this daily exercise in trust, you know, waiting for daily bread, experiencing the bountiful quail and, you know, striking the rock for the water and waiting for the cloud to move. Funny little random detail in that story. Their shoes didn't wear out. Can you imagine? 40 years in the desert and their shoes did not wear out. The Lord knows how to take care of the details, you know? And it's interesting the way that the Lord remembers that time as a kind of honeymoon, you know? As you, if you ever read the book of the prophet Josea, he refers to, you know, I'm gonna lead her into the desert and she's gonna remember, you know, and she's going to fall in love with me again and then she won't go back, running back to her lovers, you know? Talking about Israel. He remembers it as a honeymoon. And as he leads each of us on our adventures through life, life after the fall on planet Earth, in each chapter of the Valley of Tears, he is teaching us to trust him. Sirac tells us that he's gonna lead us onto the straight road and make us happy and reveal his secrets to us. And so I wanna tell you where he's going with this. The spiritual life has three classical stages. The first one is the purgative way. The second one is the illuminative way. And the third one is the unitive way. And please God, if you're maturing in your faith and in your journey with him and in your trust with him, he's gonna take you through those three stages. Sometimes I think there are many versions of that that happen kind of over and over again, kind of appealing the onion sort of thing, you know, where we get closer and closer. In the purgative way, you're conquering sin, especially mortal sin. You're cultivating virtue, you're getting to know the Lord through meditation on the scriptures. And there's an active phase of that where you're really, you know, you're working at it. You know, I remember what I didn't tell you about my own conversion, you know, I told you, my parents did everything right. But in spite of that, I was well on my way to becoming a felon by the time I was a teenager. And I had to overcome the habit of stealing, right? And I remember one time I happened to walk through a bake sale and nobody was around and there was a beautiful piece of cherry pie sitting there. This was after I learned what a mortal sin was. I think I was a junior and my confirmation teacher had explained what mortal sin was. By this time I loved God, but I still had some bad habits to get over and this was one of them. So anyway, beautiful piece of cherry pie, grabbed it, ate it up, last piece of pie goes in and all of a sudden I was just like, did I just trade my salvation for a piece of pie? So I tried it off to confession, confessed that I stole a piece of pie. And then I was back a couple of days later with something else, you know, and that was how the Lord helped me to overcome that mortal sin, you know, and I didn't want to be displeasing to him anymore. I had come to know how good he was, right? So that's the active phase where you're actively working at trying to conquer things. And God gives you a lot of encouragement on the way in that, you know, he drops little sweets and little consolations along the way to help keeping you move forward. But there comes a time where we have to see what your motivations really are, right? And so we're gonna take the constellations away and see how you do. No more sweets. You might go to your prayer and it's dry. You might not be able to find any spiritual joy. You find you can't meditate. There's this feeling you must have screwed it up somehow, right, it's called the passive night of sense. And you feel like you're going backwards. But actually, if you persevere in faith, you're on the threshold of the illuminative way. So then comes this second phase, illumination. Now at this time, all the disciplines that you've been practicing in the purgative way start to bear real fruit. Prayer comes a lot more easily. God's communication with you comes through more clearly. Your confidence in him grows more deep. Your intimacy with him grows very deep. And your awareness of your need for prayer makes you more protective of your prayer, right? And you're probably gonna spend a lot of time in the illuminative way. And you're probably gonna experience, you know, a lot of our deals. The Lord is teaching you wisdom. But at some point, you will come to the next phase, the unit of way. Christopher West has a proverb where he summarizes what the theology of the body is in five words. God wants to marry you. That's the golden thread that runs all through the scriptures. He created man and woman in the beginning, marriage in his own image and likeness, bride and groom. Continually throughout the scriptures, he uses marriage as a metaphor of his relationship with Israel. Jesus refers to himself as a bridegroom and the scripture culminates with the wedding of the lamb. God wants to marry you. The saints have given a vivid witness to this. If you read Teresa of Avila, if you know how to read between the lines of story of a soul, if you read the spiritual canticle by St. John of the Cross. Now you're probably all sitting there saying, St. John of the Cross, I'm not anything like St. John of the Cross. You know, listen, you probably are not gonna get the stigmata, okay? And you're probably not gonna levitate like Don Bosco did. But the Lord is calling you to union. He is calling you to union. Isaiah 62.5 says, as a young man marries a virgin, your builder will marry you. And as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you. Of course that passage of that verse refers to Israel. It refers to the church, but it also refers to you. Okay? And we know that people experience that marriage in a really intense way. And we read about it in the saints. And this is actually meant for all of us in whatever way the Lord wants to unfold it. You're being invited at least into a courtship to a deep interior life. And you know, maybe you're not in spiritual marriage. I know some of you, some of you are. Some of you have already started to experience taste of this union. But in fact, we are already in a sense experiencing or entering into our marriage with God in the gift of Holy Communion, right? In the gift of the Eucharist. And that's why we dress little girls up as brides, right? Because there is a nuptial meaning to the Eucharist. It's not just poetry. This is really his intention toward each and every one of you. And this kind of growth in this stabilization of your prayer life is marvelously stabilizing. It's captured in the Song of Songs, chapter eight, verse five. Who is this coming up out of the desert leaning on her lover? Song of Songs. Quite a picture. Who is this coming up out of the desert? The wasteland, the ordeal, doing what? Leaning on her lover, leading on the Lord. St. John of the Cross uses a similar image, striking image in the Last Stands of the Dark Night of the Soul where he says, he sort of prints this image of the beloved resting on the chest of the lover. And he says, the last line is, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies. If you've ever been in love, you know what that means, stuff happens. People are mean to you. People get cut off in traffic. We get bulldozed by one of the Beatitudes. Poverty, mourning, injustice, persecution. But when you know how deeply you are loved, who cares? Haven't any of you ever been in love? I have. And the most, sort of the memory that I have was during a season when I was going through one of these Beatitude chapters of my life and I met a man, fell madly in love with him and it saved me. I mean, looking forward to seeing him got me through each day, right? The Lord wants to be that for you. Perfect love casts out fear. The unit of way is also called the prayer of perfection, the way of perfection, not because you are perfect, but because the prayer is perfect and because the prayer perfects you. St. Teresa of Avila said that even those who are in unit of prayer still commit many sins. Of course, she's talking about venial sins, but still sins. Fulton Sheen once said that when he was hearing the confession of nuns, it was like being stoned with popcorn, right? So it's called the way of perfection because it perfects you and perfect love casts out fear and fearlessness is another word for trust. So the act of self and trustment is the reversal of Eden. I think I'm starting to experience the stability of that act of self and trustment in my own life. I was recalling a moment some years ago, it was the crisis du jour and it was a pretty serious situation. I'd say it hit the top five in my life and as was my typical reaction, I found myself in some pretty significant turmoil, but this time something different happened. It was all stormy up here, but down here I knew, yeah, this is gonna be fine. And it was, it was. Fast forward a little bit more. In 2019, I made the 30 day exercises again so that I could give them and my director asked me, okay, what's the grace you're seeking? What's your desire? And I said, father, I think I may be in Nirvana. I mean, I have what I want. I'm happy in my work. I'm close to my family. I completed my educational goals. I've done my traveling. I'm out of debt. I don't have any desires. And both of us thought that was a little weird, but one night I was out with, I was at Broom Tree in the diocese of Sioux Falls and they have a little gazebo per shelter out there, St. Anne's. And I was sitting out there in the prayer shelter and I was praying whatever I was supposed to be praying about. And here comes this dragonfly. And he lands on the tip of a branch and it's really unique looking dragonfly. You know, they have these really brilliant blue tails, but this one had polka-dotted wings. I had never seen polka-dots on a dragonfly wings, but anyway, so I'm thinking, holy, that's a cute little dragonfly. And I'm just watching him for a little while. And then this gust of wind came along and it started moving his branch up and down. And then the gust of wind got to be more and more of a gust of wind and it's bouncing the branch up and down like this. And the dragonfly is just, you know, stable. And he's making these tiny little adjustments to his little tail and his little wings and he's just completely stable, even though the wind is bouncing his branch. And that's when I knew what my desire was. Lord, I want to have a stable peace in my life. I want to have a peace in my life that is uninterrupted by circumstances. You know, I know there are gonna be ordeals. This is life on earth after the fall. There are gonna be ordeals. But I want the stability of your peace. So that became my quest for the retreat. And as I got towards the end of the retreat, one night I had a dream and that was a funny dream with lots of different parts. One part of it I went to, it was going to a store to buy something and it turned out the store was boarded up and when I looked around there were all these bad guys and they were gonna get me and they were trying to put their guns together. They were all clumsy. They were trying to get their guns together to get me. And I'm, there's one on this side, there's one on this side, there's one behind me. And I'm like, jeepers, what do I do? So I got out of the car like you do. And I walked over to a downtown area in my dream, you know? And it was kind of this little venue and they had a dance going on there and they had a ice cream bar and they had a Bible study going on in there. And they had an academic class going on in there. So I went into the academic class and sat down and I'm listening to the teacher teach and in comes this tame deer. And it was just this little fawn, still had its fawn spots. And somehow I knew that the deer's name was Placidus. And so this all has a point I'm telling you. So I get to my spiritual direction appointment the next day and I go through all the content of what had come up in my prayer and I was just about to leave and I said, oh, I forgot to tell you about my dream. I said, it's probably just a dust bunny in my head. And my spiritual director who knew what I was praying about listens to me tell him about the bad guys and the dance and the ice cream and the deer named Placidus. And he said, yeah, dust bunny in your brain. Placidus means stable peace. I almost started to cry. I was like, okay, Lord, you have heard the cry of my heart and it is your intention to give me stable peace. And what a sweet little image, right, of what stable peace is like. This little tame deer, you know. So my encouragement to you is if you haven't begun to get going on a disciplined daily prayer life, get going, okay, carve out time. I know that many of you pray all day in the car at your office in the, you know, when you're washing dishes and doing all the things. But what I'm talking about is a carved out, consecrated time. Catechism says that we cannot pray at all times if we don't pray at specific times. In your prayer, learn to meditate on the scriptures. If you can find somebody to lead you through the spiritual exercises, do it. It's a school of prayer and a school of discernment. Learn to consistently turn to the Lord in your prayer time with whatever's in your heart, whatever your trials, tribulations, and ordeals are. My spiritual director on that last 30 day had a little phrase about how to relate your ordeals to the Lord and it was this, little prayer. Jesus, I need you to see this. I need you to see this. I need you to look at this thing that's bugging me and you look at it together. It may help for you at some point to start making an annual retreat. I try to do that every year. Very often we are trying to lead on empty. So I can't recommend enough that you take advantage of whatever opportunities are in your area. You know, even though I'm telling you all this stuff, I still struggle with the cross. I still don't want to be there, you know. But going back every year, going back to the Lord, going deeper, whatever you can give the Lord, whatever time you give him, whatever format, he will make the most of it. And if you do this, he will teach you to trust him and you will be reversing what happened in Eden and he will renew the face of the earth. It's been great to be with you. I thank you for everything you do. Let's say a glory be. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be a world without end. Amen, God bless you all.