 Oh, such a delight to be back here, to be with all of you, and to be here at this amazing university. And I just want to piggyback on the words spoken earlier this evening and just thank the university for all that it's doing. If you travel around the United States, and I'm blessed to go to many parishes, many diocese, everywhere I go, I meet these bright, shining lights in the world and in the church. They're called Franciscan University alumni, and they're working in youth ministry. They're working at Catholic schools. They're working at parish DREs. They're working at diocesan offices. A number of them have become priests. And many of them are lay people and maybe have other jobs, but they're building families, strong Catholic families. And it is a sign of great hope in a time of great darkness in our world. So let's give it up one more time for Franciscan University and gratitude for all that they've done. I know I wouldn't be who I am without this place. I know Jeff would say the same thing and many others. So we're so grateful. While there is this great shining light out in the world, we need more and more light, don't we? It can be kind of discouraging being a Catholic, trying to live our faith in the midst of a very un-Christian world, a world that's becoming ever-increasingly hostile to Christianity and just even basic human values. And it's not just all the battles out there in the culture. We have our own troubles within the church. We have churches closing left and right. We have people leaving the church. We have our own struggles with scandals. And it seems like every two months, there's some new Pew research study showing some other bad news about what's happening in the Catholic faith. Church attendance is down and people are leaving the church and that's rising. And there is the rise of the nuns and not the sisters. But I'm talking about the NONES on a survey. When you check which box under religion, many people check the last box, which is just none. I have no religion at all. And those numbers are rising and rising dramatically. When it comes to beliefs about the Catholic church, many Catholics themselves don't believe the basic doctrines. One of the most tragic, tragic things that have come out, and we've known this for a while, but it's dramatically increased in recent years, is the average Catholic does not believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. What we're going to do tonight, the real climax of tonight, is falling on our knees and worshiping our Lord who loves us so much. He wants to be so close to us in His real presence. And this is the greatest gift. This is the center at the very center of our Catholic faith. And the majority of Catholics don't understand it, don't believe it. We are in a time of great crisis. But at the same time, this shouldn't surprise us. This shouldn't shock us, because I think we need a paradigm shift, a change of mindset to remember that we're no longer living in Christendom. We're no longer living in what was built up for about a thousand years and has been gradually dismantled over the last several centuries. But we're no longer in Christendom. We're living in what Monsignor Shea and his wonderful book calls an apostolic age. We've moved from Christendom to an apostolic age. We're back in the time of the Apostles living in a non-Christian culture, and we have to come to terms with that. And what that means is our strategies for evangelization and ministry and our parishes have to change. Our strategies for raising our children, passing on the faith to the next generation, passing it on to our grandchildren. Those approaches have to change, and our expectations have to be different. Are we willing to see reality where we really are right now? That's what we're going to look at today. I want to take a look at this evening. How do we live as Christians in this post-Christian world? How do we strive for holiness in an unholy world, in a very secular world? One of the key places we can turn to in Scripture is in the wonderful writings of St. Paul, who's evangelizing, going all around Asia Minor and into Greece and into Rome, evangelizing in non-Christian environments. And I love what he says to the Christians in Rome. I mean, just imagine, I was just in Rome recently, and had a chance just to go down to the first century excavations at a magnificent church called San Clemente, where you can go down to the very first century, and you're in this place that is believed traditionally to be where St. Clemente, that early pope, that Bishop of Rome, you've heard in the Mass in the Eucharist prayer, Linus, Cleetus, Clemente. This is the third generation, I'm sorry, the third successor to Peter. So very early on, and this is believed to be where he lived, but right across this little tiny alleyway from where he lived is this pagan metric cult, which was one of the biggest pagan religious systems in the Roman world at the time. And this is where they had their own ritual meal. And you could go and look at that and think right across this little alleyway right over here is where Clemente probably opened up his home for the Eucharist because they didn't have big basilicas back then, and Christianity was outlawed. He risked his life to have the Eucharist there. What was it like to live in Rome in the first century when St. Paul was writing, living in a culture that has different values, different lifestyles, and not just different, but a very different view that undermines almost everything that Jesus teaches? What did St. Paul say to those Christians in Rome? This will be the foundation of what we're going to look at tonight. Romans chapter 12 verse 2, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, by the renewal of your mind. So how we see the world, how we view our lives, the battle for our mind, I want to impress upon you that right now there's a battle going on for your mind, for how you see reality, for how you look at life, for how you look at what will bring you real happiness. There is a constant battle going on right now for your mind. Just by living and breathing in this secular world, we are constantly being bombarded with alternative views of what life is really all about. And it's constantly coming at us, whether it's on Netflix, or whether it's on social media, or whether it's in our workplaces, or the education system, or government policies, it's constantly trying to seduce us to a different way of looking at life. And this secular vision of reality isn't neutral. I think sometimes people think that, well, secularism, I mean, I wish we had religion, I wish we had prayer in school, I can, you know, it would be great if there was more religion in the culture, but at least secularism is just neutral. You know, it's just absence of religion. No, no, no, secularism is not neutral. The decision to put God to the side, that itself is a certain point of view. It's a certain way of looking at the world. And the secular culture has very strong opinions about the things that matter most in life. And they are some of the biggest evangelists in our culture right now. And I know this firsthand, working with young people. I've been blessed to work with college students and young professionals in their 20s and 30s for most of my career. And I see it day in and day out in my work with focus. Even good Christians that want to be good Catholics and want to love Jesus and want to have good dating relationships and build good marriages, they are being swept away by the influence of our culture today. The secular culture has strong opinions about the things that matter most, like what is love? What is beauty? What brings us happiness? What is true success? What does a successful human life look like? They have strong opinions about what is marriage? What is the purpose of human sexuality? What happens after we die? What does it mean to be a man and what does it mean to be a woman? Some of the most basic things are being under attack right now from our secular culture. You know, there's something about, I'll tell you about Dr. Stree here. If I were to like take off my glasses right now, I can't see. I mean, I'm like, I am like probably, I mean, I would be legally blind. I would not be able to drive. Like I can just see like colors out there. And even in the front row, I can tell in the front row, you're human persons. I think I can make that out. But I can't tell if you're a boy or a girl. I mean, I just can't make it out. And that's where our culture is right now. Our culture can't see. We don't have the right lenses. We can't even tell the difference between a boy and a girl anymore. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. You see, what we put in our mind matters, what we read, what we watch, what we listen to, the images we put into our minds, they become a part of us and they start to shape our desires and what we want to run after in life. We as Christians have to be very careful that we don't conform to this world. We're going to live in this world. There's many good things in this world and we're going to celebrate those good things, but we have to be very careful for ourselves and the people we love, the people entrusted to us. We want to make sure we're not conformed to this world. And the number one thing we need to do is be transformed by the renewal of your mind. What I'm going to share with you tonight is going to be about how we can build the right interior life that's forming our minds well. I'm going to share with you a lot from this new book that Scott just mentioned that I wrote called When You Pray. It's about prayer, the interior life, and about the many saints that lived in this world, but we're not of this world. I'll share some insights from that, but let's ask our lady, the queen of all the saints to pray for us. In the name of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. In the name of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit, amen. So I'm going to offer a couple of principles on how we cannot be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of our minds. The first thing is we need to realize in our modern media saturated world, where we're just confronted with media everywhere, we have it in our own devices, we carry these things with us, we need to realize that much of modern media bypasses the mind. So Paul's telling us if I want to be renewed, if I want to be faithful to Jesus and not swept away by the world, I have to renew my mind, and yet most of the modern media that's out there is trying to bypass our mind. Basic philosophy, basic introduction to human anthropology here, what it means to be a human person, what makes us unique, we have an intellect, we have the power to reason, remain the image and likeness of God, sharing in God's knowing power, and we have a will that allows us to love, to share in God's ability to love. So we have an intellect that helps us to see the truth, and then our will chooses what our mind is guiding us toward, this is good, and then all of our emotions and our passions are meant to be ordered toward those good things, so that we're pursuing the good with all the intensity of our passions, our emotions. But the challenge is most of modern media is bypassing the mind. It's not appealing to, let me give you these three reasons, you should do this. Take for example, do you ever, you know, watch, you know, when you're watching a sporting event and then there's usually like a truck ad that comes up. Do you ever see a truck ad? They're trying to sell you some Ford truck or something, and do you ever see an ad saying, here are five rational reasons, this truck is better? No, it's just like they're just selling an image that is just appealing to your emotions. You see some truck off-roading in some place that you will never, ever drive this truck, but man, you would look really cool if you got a truck like that, and you'd get that great girl and it'd be amazing, you know? So they're not appealing to your mind, they're appealing to your emotions and selling you an image. I think about true story here, years ago I was flying to a conference where I was speaking on marriage and theology of marriage, and I sat down and then next to me was this woman, she's probably about 32, 34 years old, and she was dressed really professionally, and she, as I got to know her, she, you know, she's married, she's got a couple kids, and she's a committed Lutheran, she has an MBA, she's really professional, really successful, really intelligent, but also really committed to her Christian faith. She was involved in a small group with other women, she loves, she reads the Bible and prays every day, it was amazing, but then she was asking me what I was doing and I was sharing with her that I was going to speak at this marriage conference and was doing a couple, a number of talks. She said, oh, what, tell me, what are you going to be speaking on? I just shared some really basic things, like love isn't a feeling, love is to will the good of the other person, and it's related to the crowd. I mean, just a couple really basic things, and she was just mesmerized, and I, you know, I just shared for about three, four minutes what I was going to talk about, and she says, thank you, thank you. I said, oh, sure, yeah, I thought that was in G, she goes, oh no, I think you just saved my marriage. And I looked at her like, well, why, what's going on? And crisis goes, no, no, it's not that, you know, I've been married about seven, eight years here, and I, you know, I love my husband, but, you know, we've been having some struggles and I've just been a little disillusioned because for many years now, I've been wondering, why is my marriage not like the love songs I listen to? Now think about this, this isn't just some teenager here, this is a very smart, intelligent, polished professional woman, she has an MBA and not just some secular ladies, she loves Jesus, she loves the Bible, she reads the Bible every day, but here's my question for you, what was forming her view, her understanding, her expectations for marriage? Was it Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Or was it Delilah? So don't think that what we take in, what we bring before into our soul, what we listen to, what we read, what we look at, these things affect us. I'm going to give you an example, I don't know if you've ever had this experience where you're watching some show, watching some movie, and there's things that are happening and you kind of just go along with it. Let me ask you, if somebody came up to you, like let's say they knocked on your door and they had a petition, the petition was they wanted you all to sign it because this was a petition to promote adultery in the world more, they wanted to promote more husbands and wives cheating on each other in premarital sex. Would you sign that thing? No, there's no way, right? Because when someone comes to you and it's a little more rational, they're making an appeal to your mind, you go get behind me Satan, there's no way I'm going to sign that thing. But yet you're watching something on YouTube, you're watching something on Netflix, and all of a sudden you see these two characters and they're starting to fall in love and you're kind of hoping that they get together even though she's married to someone else and you're like, whoa, I'm rooting for adultery, what's going on here? Have you ever had that experience? This is the power of modern media is that it bypasses our mind and it gets us to root for things, desire things that in our mind we know are not good, but they affect us. I'm going to share with you a quote from the great St. John Henry Newman who talked about how evil doesn't just exist out there in the world, it's not like just out there in Hollywood or out there in Washington. Evil sets up in the human heart and the reason evil grows and the increases in this world is because of Christians' unwillingness to relinquish it right here. Listen to what he says, evil has its strength in the human heart for though we cannot keep from approving what is right in our conscience yet we love and encourage what is wrong so that when evil was once set up in the world it was secured in its seat by the unwillingness with which our hearts relinquish it. We know it's right and wrong, somebody comes on our petition, you know, here would you sign this petition to promote adultery? We would know that's wrong, we wouldn't sign it. But we'll listen to a song that's all about adultery. We'll watch some shows, some sitcom or some movie and we find ourselves not willing to relinquish it. Modern media deeply affects our soul. All right, that's the first point. Second thing I want us to consider is how we need to build more silence in our lives. If we want our minds to be renewed, I need to have that quiet space in my soul so that I can fill my mind with Jesus, with the scriptures, with the truth of the faith so I can have the right lenses to see reality, but I'll never have the right lenses if I have constant noise, constant business, running from one activity to the next and I'm just going around and looking at my phone and if I'm always like that, I don't have the space to have my mind renewed. In fact, what's more likely to happen is I'm going to be more a slave to other people's inputs for outside influences, whether it's big tech or the media or other people's demands of my life. I'm not going to be able to have that time to have my mind renewed in Jesus Christ. I think of that wonderful story about Elijah in 1 Kings chapter 19. You remember that story where God is going to come to him? God is going to come very close to him. His glory is going to pass by, but God doesn't come in the big wind and God doesn't come in the big earthquake and he doesn't come in the big fire, not in these big dramatic events. How does God come to Elijah? In a still, small voice. One of my kids, my youngest daughter, she's very sweet. She still has this a little bit, but certainly when she was younger, she was very shy and even within the family. If she ever wanted to ask something and she didn't want attention drawn, so what she would do at the dinner table, sometimes she would get out of her seat and come up to me or come up to Beth and whisper, I have some long folk. She'd just whisper something. She's a very quiet voice, but in our house of eight kids, it's just loud at the table. It's loud all day long. There's a lot of noise and commotion. It was really hard to hear a little daughter make her request in that still small voice. We can't hear the voice of God in our lives. We will never really allow his word to transform us so that we can become holy as he is holy unless we build an interior silence to hear the still small voice of God. And there's one thing that I want to focus on that I think keeps us, even good devout Christians, from hearing the voice of God and cooperating with that voice of God, and that is our phones and our devices. Let me tell you a fun story. I resisted getting a smartphone. There's those early adopter people. I was like the very end, the late adopter person. I didn't want to get one and my friends would tease me, Ted, when are you going to get a smartphone? When are you going to get rid of that dumb phone, that little flip phone? And finally, my flip phone broke. I needed to get a new phone and I finally went in and went to the Apple shop and I got my first iPhone. And I'm really grateful I was able to manage my calendar better. There were things I could do on the phone, the other things I appreciated. But the really cool thing was using Siri. That was like I was all excited. Now, I had the smartphone. My wife didn't have one yet. She still had the flip phone. I remember like this is just not even a weekend to me having the smartphone. We're driving through downtown Denver together and I'm just hands on the steering wheel. My phone's down here and we're talking about scheduling a date night and I say to Beth, hey, what do you think? Should we do it on Thursday? Okay, great. And then all of a sudden I wanted to show off. I wanted to go, I'm really cool. Look at the technology I've got. And I said, hey Siri, schedule date night with Beth on Thursday at 7.30. And I was like, and Beth's looking at me like, whoa, your phone can do that? And I was like all proud. And all of a sudden Siri comes back and says, which Beth? Yeah, I ate some humble pie that night. But I wrote an article a number of years ago called My iPhone, My Precious. Those of you Tolkien fans, you get the illusion like to the ring of power in the Lord of the Rings, right? And I took all these quotes from Tolkien in the books and just talked about that's what we do with our phones. It talked about how Bilbo always had to know where it was. He always wanted to know, where is it? And he's always touching it and he's playing with it. And that's what we do with our phones. Where's our phone? I always have to know where it is. Do you ever have that feeling when you think you lost your phone? It's like, you become like Gollum. You know, just like really freaked out. All right, I don't know if this happens in your family, but you're on your phone, you're looking at something and then a family member takes your phone from you. I mean, it is like all of a sudden you become like, what are you doing? We can use our phone also just like the ring of power. We can use our phone to make ourselves invisible. I'm serious. Like you see someone coming. Oh, I don't really want to talk to that person right now. Just pretend I'm really busy, you know, and I'll just be invisible or I'm at some restaurant and no one's with me right now and everyone's doing something. I'll just do my phones like, don't feel like I'm here. So we do things like this. But here's my question. I want to ask about you. I want to ask you a personal question here. What do you do in those times in the day when you have a little pocket of space in your day? Maybe you're at a red light. What do you do at that moment? Do you feel this urge to pull out your phone? Maybe you're waiting in line at the grocery store? Do you have this sudden need? I'm going to just pull out my phone. Or maybe it's in between appointments, in between meetings. How about before you go to bed at night? Do you have this desire to pick up your phone? If you do, it's a sign you have when the spiritual tradition we would call an attachment. This thing has a hold on me. Why am I always wanting to check it, look at it, go toward it? I'm not free. And I'll tell you again, what I'm sharing with you is the number of things we've been working on with our focus missionaries and they're right there. The younger generation definitely relates this. But as I've shared these ideas with people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, many of them have admitted I can relate to some of that. You see, with this thing, it's an attachment and I'm not able to act deliberately. We're meant to be persons with free will. We use our minds, we think, and then we tell our will to do this and we go after it. We're losing our agency, our ability to act deliberately. I don't know if you've ever had this experience where you've got 30 minutes and there's like a 30 minute break in your day or in between appointments or something. And there's like, okay, there's these three quick things I need to get done. In fact, I'm going to get these done, whether it's at work or at home. And then you start working on it and all of a sudden you hear, Oh, okay. Well, I'll get back to them later. Well, I'll forget. So maybe, okay, I'll just quickly solve some of them here and put it down. Then I start going back to my work. Oh, they replied. Okay. So I gotta wait, this is really distracting me. So I'm going to turn it off. And I do that then to some notification comes up. Oh, well, my favorite sports team got this player. What is that about? You know, and then oh, and I'm supposed to come back over here and 30 minutes go by and you didn't get one of the three things done. How many of you ever had experience like that? That's a sign of something having a hold on me. I don't have interior freedom. I'm too attached. You know, on my phone, I typically like try to just reduce all of the notifications. I don't like getting buzzes and interruptions and things throughout my day because I don't want to be distracted. I want to live my life the way I want to according to what I think God wants for me, not all these demands coming from the outside. But there was a new iPhone update that happened this fall. And something happened with my phone and I started getting buzzes again. And I remember I was in the chapel, I was praying in the morning and all of a sudden I just hear and I'm thinking, okay, well, I'm praying right now, I don't want to look at my phone. And I'll be honest, I did not pick up my phone. But you know what happened? I said, I'm not going to pick up the phone. Then I started thinking, wait, there's someone from the East Coast I've been trying to reach and it's 7 30 here in Denver, but maybe their text, maybe it's not. Nope, I'm not going to pick up my phone. But what if it's Beth? What if Beth needs something from me? No, no, I'm not going to pick up my phone. And so I didn't pick up my phone. But man, for my my prayer life for the next 10 minutes was totally distracted. These devices are designed purposely to be addictive. The leaders in big tech have admitted this they come right out and said we're giving you a dopamine hit so that you just keep coming back and be addictive because they that's how they make their money. The more you collect the more time you spend on these things. We say these are tools and I have one I use this, but I have to be really careful. It is a great tool. I'm grateful for that. But you know what tools I keep in my toolbox in my garage. I don't walk around with them all the times. This is more of a challenge. I have to be more guarded here. But unlike my tools in my toolbox, I don't ever walk around the middle of the day going, man, I just need to hold my hammer. I just got I just got to hold my hammer. You know, no, no, no, this is a sign. Again, these things have a hold on us. All right. Third point. So we've talked about media bypasses the mind. We talked about we need to build silence and we have to have this interior freedom, not be so attached to our devices. Third point. We need to be a sign of contradiction. We need to be a sign of contradiction. St. John Henry Newman, I'll quote him again here. I mentioned him a lot in the book. He talks about how there's two senses of the world in the Bible. Like in the Bible, sometimes like, hey, the world is good. God made it. It is good. Jesus came. The, you know, God sent his only beloved son to save the world. The world is good. But then you read other passages of the Bible where like the world is like the, you know, it's the world, the flesh and the devil, you know, so that doesn't sound like it's in a good category there. Or read a passage like this from John chapter 15, verses 18 through 19, that describes how the world hates us. Jesus says the night before he dies, if the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. So Newman talks about there's two senses. There's the sense of the world that's good. It's, it God made it. It's the system of human relationships were made to live together in community, reflected in community of the Trinity, that it's good in itself, but because we're fallen, because we're weak, the world, even the good sense of the world can seduce us. We want to just be careful. We don't get to attach this world, but then he says that there's another sense of the world in Scripture and that is the world that's under the reign of the enemy. It's the world that hates us. It's the world that Newman describes as positively sinful and applying this in our age today. This is the world that hates us because we teach about how important it is to live, not just for self, but caring for the poor, caring for the immigrant, caring for the unborn, caring for the elderly. Modern world hates us. Doesn't want to listen to that or what we say about the definition of marriage, sexuality, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, that there is a moral truth that's true for everyone. The world hates us for that. Are you willing to follow Jesus and be a sign of contradiction knowing you're going to be misunderstood? There will be people that will say you're too religious, you're fundamentalist, you're intolerant. I'll tell you a true story. A couple of years ago I was in Italy with my family and we were out in one of these big tourist places and I'm there and all of a sudden I see this younger couple maybe in their later 20s looking over at me. They're kind of smiling and they're pointing and then they come up and they say, can I meet you? And I shake my hand and say, can we take a picture? And I say, oh sure. Can we take a picture with your families? Oh sure. And I'm like, oh, this is great. This is a fan. Maybe they listen to my podcast here in Italy or seen some of my videos on YouTube or something. And then so they take some pictures with the family and then afterwards I'm talking, oh so how do you know my work? And they said, your work? We have no idea what you do. We just have never seen a family with eight kids. Are these all yours like together? Like I'm just like, here I was thinking this was a fan and they thought we were the circus freak show. If you're going to follow Jesus in this world, you will be a sign of contradiction. Too often Christians want to fit in so much. And I'm not saying don't go out and be weird, but we have to be willing to stand up for truth, to stand up with Jesus. Because here's the thing. I'll share this again. This is especially since 2020. It was there a decade before for sure. But especially since 2020, so many people are afraid of being canceled. Our young people especially are so scared about what their professor will think, their coach will think, what their boss will think, what their friends will think, their family will think. They're so afraid of being rejected. They're so afraid of being canceled. And what we want to do right now is I think we need to practice exercising that muscle of courage. When you have the opportunity to stand up for truth in the workplace with your colleagues, with that family member that thinks you're weird for being Catholic, and you go back after this week and people ask, oh, so you've been away traveling? Oh, yeah, I went to Ohio for vacation. Or you could say, I went to this great Catholic conference. It was awesome to learn more about my Catholic faith. We prayed together. We worshiped together. We learned about the truth of scripture. You know, like, that's a great opportunity. Will you shy away from truth? Because our world is so scared to stand up for truth today. I think right now we need to practice exercising that muscle of courage. Because, you know, even if it's like a small thing right now, if your boss misunderstands you, you have a family member that gets upset, that's a small thing. We could be facing much greater trials in the future. And if I can't practice being faithful to truth on small things and standing up for truth with others, I'll never be able to do it under greater persecution. I remember years ago, when I traveled to Canada around the mid 2000s, I don't know if you remember in the news, it was like one of the first times something like this happened. There was some Canadian pastor that was put into prison and put under their tribunal for, you know, tolerance or something, because he said marriage is between a man and woman. He said gay marriage is wrong. And I was going to Canada to speak on the rosary. You know, it wasn't even on that topic. And I was joking to my wife, well, I hope I make it home. She's like, you shouldn't joke about those things. But it got me thinking about, you know what, would I stand up for truth if something like that was on the line? And so I remember just telling myself, I wasn't speaking on gay marriage, but I worked it into a talk on the rosary. I don't remember how I did that. But I think it was maybe looking at pilot and what is truth on the sorrowful mysteries or something like that. But I wanted to just say something to just practice standing up for truth and dealing with people. I'll tell you this when I've spoken at Catholic conferences with hundreds of people. And when I've talked about the definition of marriage, I haven't always gotten a round of applause. I mean, there's lots of applause, but I could tell a lot of people were just like this. And that's good for me. It's good for me to experience not being liked, not getting applause. I need to do that. Because here's the thing, we want to stand with truth. Truth is not an abstract concept, not just some philosophical thing. No, truth is a person. Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. And Jesus, I want to stand close to you. I don't ever want to just be afraid of standing up for truth, because I know when I have that fear and that fear shapes me, I will be moving away from you. I don't want that. I don't want this gap between me and you, Jesus. And I pray that you give me the courage, always, to stand close to you, you who are the truth. And in this day and age, we might fear, oh, what if I lose my Twitter account, or what's it called now, X or something? Or what if I lose my Instagram account? You know, my life would probably be better anyway. I don't care if I lose my Twitter account or I lose my Instagram account, but I don't want to lose my soul. Let's stand with Jesus, let's stand with the truth. Amen? All right. Fourth, fourth point. So we've been talking about how to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. We have to realize the modern media is bypassing our minds. We've got to be very careful with that. We've got to build more silence in our lives, especially with our devices. We have to be willing to be a sign of contradiction. But the fourth one I want to share with you is this, lift high the cross. Lift high the cross in your life. I love the Good Friday Liturgy. When they bring out the cross, you know, the middle part of the liturgy where they go to the back of the church and the cross, and there's different variations of this that the church lost. But the one I love the most is where they have the cross and it's veiled with this purple cloth. And then the priest starts in the back and then he processes and he unveils a little bit of it and he holds it up. He says, behold the wood of the cross upon which has hung the salvation of the world. And we say, calm, let us adore. And then he goes a little further down the aisle and unveils a little bit more of the cross, holds it up again. And finally he gets up to the very front and the whole cross is completely unveiled. And he says, behold the wood of the cross upon which has hung the salvation of the world. I love that gradual unveiling of the cross. This is the fullest revelation of God in his love, the fullest revelation of what we're called to. But my friends, I'm concerned that today there's a veiling of the cross that's going on in Christian circles, a hiding of this true standard. Instead of unveiling the cross and holding a pie, it's kind of like, we'll mention it over here, but we veil it more. Many people have been writing about this trend in Christianity. It's certainly affecting Christian circles. You can call it therapeutic Christianity. It's all about the good stuff. God loves you. He's amazing. You're beautiful. You're awesome. And God wants to fulfill your hopes and your desires. And God is there for you for all these things. And it's true. These are true aspects of the gospel, but it's only half of the gospel. Therapeutic Christianity says that God is like a divine therapist. He's there to help you solve all your problems and make you feel good about yourself. And He's there. He's there to help me feel better about myself. And He's there to help me pursue my plans and my dreams. And it's all about what God is doing for me, but it hides the cross. It hides that Jesus says, take up your cross and follow me. It hides Jesus' call to repent. So in therapeutic Christianity, if I keep beating myself on social media, on therapeutic Christianity, which is what many Christian leaders out in social media tend to go toward therapeutic gospel messages. If that's the dose I have, then when I see my problems, I look at my problems. My problems are all outside of me. It's because of my parents. It's because of my family. It's because of my roommates. It's because of my boss. It's because of the government. It's because of society. All my problems out there, it doesn't remind me that I'm fallen. I'm sinful. Yes, I have many hurts and God wants to heal all those deep hurts in my life. But there's things I've done also to hurt myself with sin. And I need to repent. I need to change. I need to give up certain things. I need to deny myself. Jesus didn't say, pick up your dreams and follow me. He said, pick up your cross and follow me. And yet modern therapeutic Christianity says, no, no, Jesus is there to just help you fulfill your plans, your hopes, your desires, your dreams. No, no. What we want to see is that God's dreams for my life are always so much bigger, so much better than anything I could come up with on my own. I may have something on my heart. I may have a certain desire and that's good, but I should always take that to the Lord like the saints did and always pray like the leper in Matthew's gospel. If you will, Lord, do this for me. If you will. I want this, but I want you, Jesus, more than I want this, this plan, this hope, this dream. I want you and your plan for my life, change my heart, Lord, to be open to whatever you want for me. 2,000 years ago when Jesus went around Galilee, there were great crowds following him. We read in Matthew chapter five in the Sermon on the Mount. There were 5,000 people in John's gospel, chapter six, 5,000 people gathered when he was there to multiply the loaves. It's amazing. Large crowds coming out in the Sermon on the Mount. People wanting to hear his amazing inspiring teachings. People wanting to come watch his miracles, wanting him to provide more bread. They came back to him, please do that miracle thing again. It's awesome. They brought all their sick and those that were suffering, they wanted to see the healings. And those were great gifts Jesus offered those people. But where were they on Good Friday? On Good Friday, there were only a few that stood close to Jesus. Are we willing to follow Jesus all the way to the cross? See Mother Teresa said, if we draw nearer to the cross, you know what's going to happen? If you draw nearer to the cross, what happens is, ow, the nail is going to hurt you. You draw nearer to the cross. Oh, the thorn is going to hurt you. That's what Mother Teresa says. When we draw nearer to Jesus on Good Friday, we're going to share in his suffering. Now that suffering is redemptive. It's far good, but there's going to be a challenge. There's going to be pain. There's going to be suffering. Are we willing to pick up our crosses? Are we willing to draw nearer to Jesus? Lift high the cross. Don't ever be satisfied with only half the gospel, the therapeutic gospel. Lift high the cross in your own life, in your own parish, in your own family. Now, I think probably most important here, this is the fifth point I want to highlight. The number one way that we're going to renew our minds is being faithful to daily prayer. Faithful to daily prayer. Now, I want to be clear what I mean by this. Daily prayer. I don't mean simply saying prayers like the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Beings. Say those prayers. Those are wonderful, those vocal prayers. But I mean more than that. I mean more than just those wonderful devotions like the rosary. Who prays rosary? Anyone love the rosary? Rosary is amazing. It's a great gift. Pray it. Pray it every day, if you can. Or the Divine Mercy Chaplet. You can use these beads for that as well. Those are wonderful things. But I'm talking about something more than that. I'm talking about even more than the highest form of prayer, which is the Holy Sacrifice, the Mass. Jesus offering Himself to the Father. And we participate in that. That's the highest form of prayer. But all of those vocal prayers and devotions, and most especially the prayers of the Sacraments Liturgical Prayer in the highest form, the Sacrifice, the Mass, the Mass will bear fruit to the extent that it meets those graces, those real graces, the real body and blood of Christ meets a fertile soil of an interior life in our souls. We need intimate time for conversation with God every day. 15, 20, 30 minutes. Whatever you can work in every day, my spiritual director says you should do at least 30. But if you're starting, my spiritual director says I'll give you a discount. You can start with 20. But we want to have that intimate time for conversation with God. And daily prayer, by the way, I mean not just listening to a podcast. You can listen to a great Catholic podcast. You can listen. There's wonderful things out there. So many great resources. But I'm talking about that time with just you and Jesus in silence, maybe using the scriptures, the word of God. And I mean not just reading. Sometimes you'll see people go into the generation chapel and they're just reading. You know, they turn prayer into study hall. Now don't get me wrong, taking, I used to go with Scott, well, he used to take us as students to the very chapel here and he would go up and part of his holy hour. He would pray, sometimes pray the rosary, but he had quiet time. But then he would sometimes bring a book out and read. And that's a wonderful thing to do. Father John Harden, whom Scott mentioned at the beginning, that he did the same thing, would bring a book before the adoration chapels. A wonderful thing. As long as that's not replacing sitting in silence with God or using scripture where you're reading just a few lines in Lectio Divina and you read it over and over multiple times, asking God, what are you speaking to me through this word or using Ignatian meditation, maybe where you imagine, you know, and put yourself in the biblical scene like you're there at the at the wedding feast at Cana and they run out of wine and Mary comes to you and says, do whatever he tells you. What would you do? Would you do whatever you do? So you just put yourself in the scene like those are wonderful ways meditative prayer that the church holds up. Why is this so important? I think it's key. What we want to see is that prayer is good first and foremost. I know I saw on the schedule I wasn't able to attend the talk, but Dr. Michael Dauphiné gave a talk on the virtue of religion. Why do I pray first and foremost out of justice? This I owe this to God. I owe him my time in prayer, but it's not just a legal obligation. It's actually good for me. This is what I'm made for. I'm made to give my life to God, adoring him, praising him, thanking him, expressing my sorrow over my sins, bringing petitions to him, interceding for others. I am made for this. This is where I will find my fulfillment if I make time every day for prayer. But there's a third piece I'd like to highlight, and that is how prayer is important for the people around me. The other people in my life are dependent on me praying every day. You know, I love my wife, Beth. I really do. We just celebrated our 24th anniversary last, the 24th wedding anniversary last week. And I love her, but I know my love falls short. I know I have various sins and selfishness and pride and insecurities, hurts from my past, things that just muddle my love for her. I can't love her the way she deserves to be loved. I need Christ, his love, to radiate through me. My children, I love my kids. They're amazing. But I know I don't always have the right judgment. Sometimes I can react too strongly over something. Sometimes maybe I'm not as generous and I'm a little lazy and I'm not disciplined. There's many ways my love falls short. I need to love my kids, but I can't love them the way they need to be loved. I need Christ radiating through me. And I'm reminded of something, Mother Teresa and the missionaries of charity all around the world. Every day they say a prayer. It's based on something Cardinal Newman wrote slightly adapted. I'm going to read you a line of this prayer. It's so beautiful. Before they go out and do this hard work of serving the poorest of the poor, they pray, Jesus, shine through us and be so in us that every soul we come in contact with may feel your presence in our soul. Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus. Isn't that a wonderful thing? It's going to be wonderful. Every person in your life looked up and saw not just you, but Christ radiating through you. Your spouse, your children, your grandchildren, your friends, your colleagues, your fellow parishioners. If we long for that, that can only happen with a committed, cultivated, interior life, cultivated through daily prayer. I need prayer. Pope Francis says the soul needs prayer like the body needs oxygen. And I need to take in that deep breath of prayer every day so I can give the best of myself to my God, to my spouse, to my kids, to my friends. And I need that breath of prayer so that my mind may be conformed to Christ and not the ways of this world. But here's the challenge. Many Catholics like just doing devotions. They like just saying things and novenas and all that. I love these things. We should have them as part of our spiritual lives. But that quiet time every day in prayer, we don't know what to do. We're not sure. And so we tend to avoid it. But when we avoid it, it affects other people. I'm going to share with you a quote from St. John of the Cross. St. John of the Cross was writing about priests in his day who were busy running around doing a lot of activity, doing retreats and preaching the gospel and all these spiritual activities, parish missions and things. But they weren't committed to this interior prayer, this quiet prayer, meditation every day. And John of the Cross says, let those who go bustling about, who think they can transform the world with their exterior works and preaching, take note that they would profit the church more and be far more pleasing to God if they spent half as much time abiding with God in prayer. Certainly they'd accomplish more and with less toil with one work than they would now with a thousand works thanks to their prayers and the spiritual strength from which they would benefit. Otherwise their lives would be reduced to making a lot of noise and accomplishing a little more than nothing, if not nothing at all or indeed at times even doing harm. When I don't pray, that's not just an Edward Cree problem for my spiritual life. It's a problem for my wife. It's a problem for my kids. It's a problem for the people around me. I might, it's not just that I can't do as much good for them. I might even be doing harm because I'm doing what, this is what I think and this is my knee jerk reaction. This is what I thought through as opposed to allowing my mind to be shaped by God in prayer. I want to have this time for daily prayer, but I know that prayer can be hard. We can be distracted. We can feel prayer is dry. We feel like we're not good at prayer. I don't know how to do this. I just, I'm sitting here. I feel like I'm just staring at the wall or falling asleep and sometimes we don't feel close to God in prayer. Have you ever had that experience? You go through a time, you just, I just don't feel like I'm getting that much out of this. I don't feel close to God. Where are you God? And what the great tradition tells us from all the saints is that it's in those moments of darkness, those moments of trial, the moments of emptiness in prayer that God's inviting us to something deeper. And these can actually be moments of great growth for us spiritually if we're not focused on the feelings we get out of prayer, but on what God wants to do in our souls. Let me share with you this quote from Saint Faustina. Saint Faustina once said this, one act of trust in such moments gives greater glory to God than whole hours past in prayer filled with consolations. Saint Catherine of Santa describes how we may not feel God's presence, but that doesn't mean he's not there. He just might be inviting us to a deeper trust, a deeper abandonment. He may be closer than ever before. I'm going to read that from Saint Faustina one more time. If you have those moments, you're wondering where is God? Why is this happening? How come I don't feel close to you, God? I don't know how to pray. I don't sense your presence when I'm praying. Listen to Saint Faustina again. One act of trust in such moments gives greater glory to God than whole hours past in prayer filled with consolations. Why? Because love is in the will. Love is to will the good of the other. It's not about the feelings I get from my wife. We get date night. It's awesome, but that's not where love is. Love is in my commitment to her, to show up, to serve her good even when I don't feel it. God may be inviting you right now to take that next step with him in prayer to be faithful even when you don't have those feelings. Are you coming for the feelings or will you still come when you feel absolutely nothing? Saint Faustina had many seasons like that. Saint Mother Teresa had decades like that. Saint John of the Cross, all the saints experienced these moments, these seasons, but they were faithful to prayer. And by being faithful to prayer, they could be not conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewal of their minds. And so I'll close with this, is we're getting ready to go to adoration. And I'll just mention, I just got here today, so I wasn't able to be as available earlier today at the book signing, but I'm going to be down later tonight when there's the social after the holy hour. I'll be down at the JC William Center, down by the bookstore area and mingling around, happy to get to meet you and answer any questions. But what we're going to do next is what's most important here, is we're going to get time to be with Jesus in adoration. And some of us might have this great feeling and this closeness, and that's awesome. Some of us may be, I'm tired, I'm exhausted, and I don't know if I want to be here. Wherever we are, the act of the will, I will be here with you, Jesus. That is an act of great love. And the angels and the saints rejoice in heaven when we're faithful to God in prayer. And there's no better place to have time for prayer than with our Eucharistic Lord, who is present to us, body, blood, soul and divinity. And we're going to give the next hour to Jesus. Amen. Let's close in a glory, be in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.