 It's been a long, long day. I got a lot to say. It feels like I'm carrying a two-ton weight. I go to see a friend. Hello, I'm Monsignor Patrick Winslow. And I am Father Matthew Cout. And we are speaking from the Rooftop. A podcast brought to you by 10 Books, in which we invite you to join our conversation out here in the open air. Where we look out upon the world around us, from the rooftop of the church, and share with you what we see. Hello there. Hello. How are you? I'm well. How are you doing? I'm doing fantastic. Well, I'm so glad you're here. How can you not be fantastic when you have not just, of course, the faith or Lord, the saints, all good things in grace, but you also have October. I know. It's just gorgeous. Right now at this area of this session, it is mid-October and the Christ is in the air. Which means for us, the Christmas is almost in the air. Oh, you have no eyes. Father Winslow and I are already shipping each other back and forth across the interwebs, illusion CDs and illusions. Do you call them CDs still? I don't know. We call them when it's all streamed. Music. You know. Covers. We're stocking the arsenal. We are. For the Christmas music. We are. We love the atmosphere. And we love curating the environment. Yeah. We can't wait to just set up on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. That's not going to work. You need the whole season to curate. The whole season to curate. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going against the law. It's Advent. I get it. It's Advent. I am preparing. This is how I prepare. I am preparing the way. I put up lights. I put up trees. That's the way of preparing. Amen. Amen. And then when Christmas comes, I stop preparing. And that's the difference. And then I do it. That's right. And I enjoy it. So. I immerse myself. All those scrooges out there that says we can't have any Christmas food beforehand. Out with you. But I'll humbug to you. Exactly. Exactly. You get these zealots of Catholic circles about Father. How dare you listen to them. It's Advent. It's like, okay. It is indeed. That's interesting. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I mean, there's always in the church today. Wonderful time of preparation to be able to enjoy something. Sure. Fasting for the purpose of feasting. It's all great. Well, I actually like put the baby Jesus away because it comes out of Christmas. Ys. Yes. You can't put the baby Jesus alone. No. But I can certainly put up a few figurines of an Franc sob celebrating, all of whom are waiting. They're waiting. All of them. They're preparing every one of them. So then we leave with a teaser the last time we talk. We did. We were speaking about proper vacationing, and if memory serves, you even made allusion to one of our first trips. And that became paradigmatic for me that first trip, because I had never quite done something like that. And just to set it up for you all, I was ordained in the year 2000, January 30, 2000, as was another priest friend of ours, as June. I thought you even said January. For the rest of the church, it felt like winter, June 3, 2000. It was a Jubilee year, and we had set up a pilgrimage. So we decided that I'd made a promise to St. Catherine if she came through on a certain couple of things for me that I needed for my own personal growth and sanctification, one of many things that I would go make a pilgrimage this year in Siena. And so you and some of our other friends jumped on this trip, and we went away right after ordination. And it became paradigmatic for me because the method was the same every day. And the way I ended up calling it and translating this for other future seminarians and priests is when you go on a pilgrimage, you have to grease the skids. And after you grease the skids, watch where those skis take you. So in other words, you have to... You're mixing the two metaphors, but you know what, I'm okay with that. Reaching the skids. The skids, not skis. Well, it's kind of the same thing. What's the difference? It's like a skid where you slide boxes on it. Yeah, but that's the same thing. It's a thing that... I don't ski on a skid. Well, okay. Grease your skis. Wax your skis. Wax your skis. Whatever. Listen, I think the mixed metaphors work. I just, you know, there may be some tender ears or not. So you want to make things such crass... How do you put things to make things smooth on a trip? Right. Which doesn't mean you're not going to suffer. Right. And it doesn't mean your plans are going to get ruined. Here and there. Things you expected, things you hoped for, whatever. But if you... The greasing or the waxing or whatever that I found, we found on that trip was we would spend a significant amount of time in the morning in prayer. That's it. I'm going to go see this, that or the other. We're going to pray. Which was consistent with our lives. With our lives. Yeah. This wasn't like... It wasn't like we didn't pray. We went on a vacation to pray. Right. No, this was carrying our prayer life with us on vacation, not skimping on it, and maybe even being more gratuitous because we're in some holy place. Right. And so, as in our lives, we spend a lot of time in prayer in the morning and then we watch how the graces of the day unfold relative to taking care of people. And the issues that come before us, the various unexpected situations. Whereas on a pilgrimage or a vacation, you're really looking to see, you're sort of playing really. You're just sort of playing with God because you don't know what he's going to unfold for you. You're usually in a different context. Yep. It's not about necessarily the people that are coming to your office, to the church, whatever else. It's you. Sometimes in a different culture, different situation, different context, all sorts of different people. Yeah. And the thing is, you have expectations. Everybody brings certain expectations. I don't care if it's as simple as I'm going to read a book or I'm not going to read anything because I read too much all the time and I need to get out of my head. Whatever the case may be, we sometimes have expectations that are grandiose. And we do this around holidays as well, so we have very high expectations. And they're extremely difficult to achieve, people spend tons of money trying to achieve them. If your hearts are wrapped around those things, in the end they usually fail. Which is a different approach. It's very different. Because you do kind of aim high, but not wrapping your heart around or your expectations around events that are going to give back certain dividends that you're looking to receive. Yeah. So the better you're leading a wide verb to see what God has in store for you, but I want to do this sort of thing and I want this sort of activity and I'm going to set the stage for it. But I'm letting go of the expectations. I may have some hopes, but it's different because the hope typically is about something more noble, about something less specific. There's expectations that are very specific and sometimes it doesn't do anything noble. And as you say, when you bring your prayer life with you, when you bring your faith with you, when you bring all those things you are with you, that make you, you don't vacation from those things. They are a part of you and they're meant to go with you. Then horizons open up, opportunities open up, the most extraordinary thing in paradise. Yes. And that's really fun because you're playing this quote-unquote game with God, like what do you want to manifest to me? How do you, I mean, because he loves you. How does he want to love you? And what do you want for you? And so we would typically in the course of a day, begin to find a theme. Like you would see things unfold in a certain way and you didn't get perturbed anymore if you encountered an obstacle because you realized it was like a treasure hunt and that's just the next clue to the treasure hunt. One simple example, if you recall, we were trying to spend some time in Florence. And all the expectations that one of our brethren on the trip had about Florence, his idyllic city and the art in Florence, et cetera, et cetera, we get to Florence not knowing it was the feast of St. John the Baptist. Where there was all about the football games, soccer, everywhere. And everyone was off, everyone was in the street. It's their patronal feast. Yeah. So you couldn't get a hotel. You couldn't do anything. And so it was so crazy. We ended up leaving. We didn't stay in the city. And it was irritating. Yeah. But it was genuinely uncomfortable. We came all this way to see Florence, we came to see Florence. Right. And we were being turned away to return. It became a practical nightmare. Of course, we did some things that were irritating to the local people in Florence. Some streets and some bridges were not supposed to drive on, but we took grand liberties being Americans. It looked like a road. You know, we were in a sea of people. Yeah, driving over the most famous bridge in Italy. Oh, Lord have mercy. Now you get one of them. We nearly turned on. Yeah, it was unbelievable. But even, for example, we used to say you can't get a bad meal in Italy. Well, that's not true anymore. Yeah. Back then, it was one of the first times we've experienced a bad meal in Italy. We went to some restaurant, I have no words, and it was not good. And it's not like we were going in there with bad attitudes about it, which we did have expectations, but there were reasonable expectations. So we kept meeting these obstacles, can't really get a decent place to stay. It was weird. It was kind of like Nuvo and Icky and whatever. The food wasn't good. The noise was high. You couldn't get in there. We left hungry. We left hungry. But it was these little indications of, I don't want you here right now. We switched the paradigm. We said, okay, all right, that's it. He got us chosen. Where are we going? We got in the car and we drove. We made it up to a town. We didn't know what the town was. When we say up, we mean up, because it's sort of the mountainside around Florence. So we went up to Fiesoli, which is the mother town of Florence. We didn't know that. And it looks over. And it looks over Florence. So we kept going up and up and up, if you recall. We saw some sign for church. For church. And kept driving and driving and driving and driving. Some sign for monastery. A monastery. And we get in the middle of what we considered nowhere on top of this mountain. And we're praying in this chapel there and we see seven skulls. And trying to make the connection to what in the world seven skulls, who do we know, seven skulls, seven skulls. But now, before we realize what that is. We were kind of silly going into the chapel because we at that point had embraced the ridiculousness of having been driven out of Florence. Having a bad meal. Like we went from where we could have gone the route of being irritable, annoyed. Let's call this day. Let's get out of the car. I need my own room. Right. It would have been so easy to go the frustrated route, which happens a lot in vacation starts with people, but we didn't. And it really was a punchy route. We went, you know what? We're on this ride with God and with each other and he prayed, what is in store now? And it got ridiculous. And we started to embrace the humor. And do you remember what got ridiculous? When we were hungry, it was the vigil of Corpus Christi. Yes. And we were hungry. All the antiphons were starving or about food. It was all about food and about feeding our hunger. So we had a guy who let's just say he has a wonderful affection for food, although we all do. And his stomach was growling and we're praying the prayers and we're talking, it was all about food and feeding and hunger. And we had to conserve a lot. We couldn't stop laughing. Yes. We had to leave. And after we noticed these sevens falls. And then all of a sudden we realized where we are. We went to the bookstore and the bookstore apparently was the original chapel space for this monastery. And we see these holy cards and these holy images and you start to realize this has to do with seven men. And you can take it from there. I just remember when the revelation hit that these are the seven Servites, the Servite Order, the Servite Fathers. Now most people probably don't know. So what that is, way back when in the Middle Ages, seven men who were part of a confraternity of Our Lady were having difficulty living in Florence. Because Florence was becoming overrun with chaos. With the merchants and the chaos. Yeah, just the licentiousness, etc. You can read about it when you read, if you ever read Dante's Divine Comedy, he's pretty vocal about the lasciviousness of the times in Florence. And so they decide to leave. And they're walking up the mountain and they see Our Lady. And she just keeps climbing and they keep climbing after her. And they get to the very top and she says, here you will build. And they built this monastery. Now for us, when we were in seminary, the seven Servites were kind of a lodestar for us. Because we thought about our love for Our Lady, our devotion to her, our connectedness to her, wanting to leave lives of chaos and do what the seven Servites did. It was so incredible. Go to a holy place. Yeah, it was so incredibly inspiring. And it was, we were reminded every year because there's a feast day, and that feast day is represented in the city of the hour, or the office of readings we would read about these things. Yeah. So that's how we learned about it. It was the first time I ever learned about it. It kind of became for us, commonly in seminary, a bit of our own personal feast day. So the fact that we had undergone on a mini scale exactly what those men experienced. We were driven out by the chaos of Florence up the mountain. Of course, we weren't following Our Lady. Maybe she was leading, but we then found our way to this monastery. We were in the chapel, looking at the skulls. We didn't know who they were, and we likely would have just left the chapel, gotten our car and gone. But because we were driven out by this holy humor, we couldn't finish our prayers. Which wouldn't have happened if we had a good lunch. If we had a good lunch, if we hadn't embraced the ridiculousness of the moment, we were just, the whole thing turned to humor. It was embarrassing because here we were, laughing in this chapel. We had to leave because we didn't want people to think we're being disrespectful because we weren't trying. And so we went to the first place we could go into, and it happened to be the bookstore, which was the original chapel. So we went from the, quote, unquote, new chapel to the original chapel area, and they marked it where we learned that these were the seven serfits. I mean, what a gift all that was. What a gift all that was. We would have never known any of it. Nope. Didn't have a clue where those guys were. Had we not been driven out of that chapel, had we not been driven out of the city, had we not embraced this more humorous and fun and lighthearted spirit rather than a bitter or anger or let's just give it all up and be frustrated. So it made all the difference. It's a great way to spend a vacation. It is. And that is the right way. I mean, you know, you talk to family and they, you know, they're leading their, their, their little ones and themselves off on a vacation, you know, for some of them, maybe think it's just exhausting, right? Because I'm concierge to how many kids, you know, it's expensive. It's exhausting. It may be difficult, but some parents, although maybe they, they can embrace all of that fairly well, but still it's difficult because new situations, new environments, everyone has high expectations or hearts around certain hearts are wrapped around certain outcomes that may not be easily delivered. And it can be really tense, vacations can be tense and it's not what you want. Yeah. You know, it's, so the rule about reaching the skids then what that ultimately means is that you go where you can slide. And it's okay if there's a path that's blocked off for you. I just had an experience this summer. I was, I had the fortune of, of hiking in the Dalamites, which is my favorite place in the world, the Northern, Northern Alps of Italy. After the hike, a priest friend of mine, we went to this pair of homages to Saint, Saint Augustine, who's in Northern Italy. And so we spent the day in his city where he's buried and none of us, none of us wanted to stay in that city. Like everything was blocked. Everything was just wrong. And you felt it. We prayed there, but something's wrong. And we couldn't quite settle in. So we could just get back in the car and go, oh, we're close to Milan. We'll just go to Milan, go see St. Ambrose tomorrow, go to the cathedral. It's beautiful, et cetera, et cetera. We get to Milan. Everything is closed. The place is chaotic. But we've done this so many times now. Right. Like, well, let's just stop into a chapel. We'll put some more grease on the skids and see where we end up. We ended up in Bergamo, which I had never been to, an incredible town. And beautiful, beautiful churches in the top city. And so then we had the whole next day just to pray in Bergamo, and it was unbelievable. And I could go on about all the races that happened that day. People we encountered, people we met, people we helped, which wouldn't have been there. Just following whatever God wants us to do. That's right. And it wasn't as though you just, my vacation is I'm just going to land somewhere. Right. I mean, you had some idea. You had some plan. And you had some reasonable expectations. It was probably the best way to put it. But it was wide open with respect to, all right, there are going to be some twists and turns and frictions and all of that can lead to some unexpected beautiful gifts through the hand of divine providence. And I think that really is the best way to approach a vacation. And I think it's the right way. In a certain sense, as I think I was saying in the last episode when we were talking, over the course of my many years, you learn, or I have learned, how to vacation better. And I think it is something that you should, people should be thinking about. What are you looking for? Yeah. And you got to change that. If you're looking for, I need peace. I need the X, Y, or Z, this experience, this whatever, this food. How about I need to spend time with you, Lord? And that doesn't mean I'm in church all the time, but I want to spend time with you. You've got up your sleeve, so to speak. And I'm going to be looking for you. Right. And you show me what you want to show me. Yeah. Or it can be also, I want to spend time with my family. Sure. I want to spend time with my friends. It's all included. It's all included. You know, it's not neither or it can be all layered in there. But certainly your spiritual life and your prayer life, they travel with you. Yep. You don't vacation from them. And the same thing, you know. You're better or worse. You're better or worse. And the same thing with your family. I always find it interesting that people when they go to places in Europe in particular, anywhere really, they visit churches. Yeah. Isn't that extraordinary? It is. I mean, it shouldn't surprise me. I mean, in Europe, of course, it's the most beautiful thing to see. They are beautiful, but there's something about the soul of a place, of a region that's reflected also in a church. I had someone recently complain about that, someone from northeast as you're from the northeast. And because Catholicism is relatively new to this area, we don't have all beautiful churches. We have lots of new churches that are functional. And so someone I know, I just experienced some particular suffering. This was related to me, a comment the person made, because the person went after experiencing this or hearing about this tragedy, went to go find a church. And at the end of the day, the comment was, why don't you people have any churches that we can go to? Like big churches with corners, with shadows, with places you can sit on a column and tuck yourself in and kind of hide from things that inspires a certain majesty and beauty. I don't want to go on a rant on architecture right now. But I thought that was so interesting, a person that doesn't really go to church. Right. And when they're there, they experience something, they go right to that church, which have the thousands that are up there, that are not closed by now. It's true. And they are beautiful. And for those who've lived in those types of places, you took it for granted when you were young, that you had these places that you could go. And now we're in a part of the world that was very much part and parcel to the Bible Belt, didn't have a lot of Catholic presence, a large Catholic presence. The footprint of the Catholic presence is now growing. It's making a big difference. But we have to meet that growth. Now, what are... Are we ramping this up for an advertisement for the Seminary Chapel? Well, there... Frederick would be happy about that. You're so good at your job. Frederick would be happy about that. It's true. You need those kinds of churches. If you want to be a part... Everything you can contribute to. Of the late apostolic movement of the Southeast, we're laying... St. Joseph College Seminary Chapel. We're laying the foundations. And we're doing it with churches, with the seminary. And you're raising funds for the seminary chapel, which is aspiring to meet not only the needs of the men at the seminary, but to be able to house guests and visitors who can come, who can find a place to pray. And a place to have a talk, a lunch. Yeah. It takes resources. It takes people to give to be able to have these places. But they're so important. I think of our lady, who indicated at Lourdes, or indicated to Fatima, to the children to have a church built in these locations. Yeah. Right? You know, have processions to take collections. She didn't say just functionality. I want a church built. I want a church. Yeah. You need to have this. And then have processions. And so you need to have that place, that holy space. Do you remember when we were at St. Thomas, you thought about it? Part of the motivation, for a number of things we did, as we articulated it, was get boots on the ground. Right. And you were thinking about having a coffee shop, because we lived right across from UNC Charlotte. Right. Just to draw kids, give them a place to be. I wanted some traffic. Traffic. That would move either through our site or by our site. Yeah. You can't exactly take the church and move it around. But you can bring people toward you and hope that that interaction would lead people to actually opening the door, walking inside, saying a prayer, asking some questions. And so yeah, it's one of those things I wanted to do. I still want to do it. I'm in a position to be supportive of that project. Yeah, I'm in a position to say, how about we put a coffee bar at St. Joseph's? That's right. There we go. That was about to traffic. We got plenty of coffee there. Well, before we go, Father, speaking of architecture and churches and things of that nature, I had a little breakthrough their day with my architects. Oh good. That usually means more money. It's so true. So I'm on air now, pushing for permission to get something done. For people to help you to pay for your breakthrough? Yeah. No, it's a pretty little simple one, but clever. It's quite a little hard time trying to figure out how to do a certain kind of roofing that attaches to the side of the chapel, comes down and creates one of the cloister walls. So you walk underneath it, it's covered. And as we're looking at different materials, different way to keep the thing simple and thin so as not to block light from getting into the chapel, I just looked at the guys and I'm like, why don't we just pay it? Why wouldn't that become a terrace? How much more steel do I need for it to be a terrace? A little bit more cost. But as opposed to, you can imagine a TPO or a rock roof up there or something stupid. There's a door right off the kitchen you could go out there and go outside. Yeah. So this is my new little breakthrough on that one. Oh, another rooftop? Everything else exactly. Another rooftop. It's another rooftop. All right. Mark your calendars, folks. Well, don't. We'll have to give you a deal. If you love the rooftop, pay it for Father Calvary. Father will just do rooftop. That's true. We could have the rooftop listeners dedicate or make restricted donations to the rooftop and we can have you out for a mass for prayer and you can come see the rooftop. That's right. And we can make sure that we have a special inaugural rooftop. That would be awesome. That would be a lot of fun. Fantastic. We'll even maybe get some pictures. Yeah. All right. So my final before we go. So I had to stop at the pharmacy before I came to the office today and I see a whole center section dedicated to Halloween candy. Now that's now the predictable thing is how I would be drawn toward it, right? But what really caught my attention is opposite the Halloween candy or Christmas items. Wow. Christmas candy. It bled in on the other side of Halloween now. Unbelievable. They had. I mean, even I was aghast. I felt like something was amiss. We've come to appreciate the fact that candy canes, you know, Eminem filled candy cane tubes. How many did you buy? That's not the point. You know, I nearly grabbed the Reese's peanut butter cup Christmas bells because I'm like, oh, those are the perfect size, you know, because, you know, the cops, you have to deal with that little cop paper. No, no, no. But if I have a bell, I can just take the foil off. Yeah. You're done. I'm done. I don't have to lick the paper. The commitment isn't as long. You have to lick the paper. You know, I'm not sure you're ever obliged to lick the paper. I'm not going to waste. So, you know, I was taking it back, but I thought to myself, I almost took a picture. I said, I have to show Kalthus. Because he's not going to believe it. Was there a music playing? There was not music playing. But it was like a nightmare before Christmas, you know, that cartoon thingy or claymation movie. I had Christmas and Halloween on either side of me. It felt weird. I have to say that. That said, as you know, I'm in support of getting ready for Christmas early. It's how I celebrate. I think that maybe in the next session we should, if we remember again, probably talk about how do we prepare properly for Christmas? Oh, that's good. Spiritually and around the home. Excellent. All right. God bless you all. Have a great week. Ciao, ciao. Thanks for listening to this episode of From the Rooftop. For updates about new episodes, special guests, and exclusive deals for From the Rooftop listeners, sign up at rooftoppodcast.com. And remember, for more great ways to deepen your faith, check out all the spiritual resources available at tanbooks.com. And we'll see you again next time. From the Rooftop.