 want to just say thank you for being here. I really want to echo Father Dave's sentiment in just knowing the challenges that many of you faced this past year in your lives personally and within your vocation. Having to do things in a way that unprecedented in all those other words that we've thrown around so much that they just don't seem to have impact anymore. But I know that I have to be completely honest. The pandemic wasn't that bad for me. I had a lot of time to pray, had a lot of time to be alone with the Lord. When they shut down the campus, they told all of us, if you're not essential, it to be in your office on a day-to-day basis, please work from home. We don't want anyone up here. Well, everyone in our office decided to work from home, which meant, wait, my office is empty. So I used to come in every day and be the only one in my building. The greatest challenge for me coming out of a pandemic was remembering to shut the bathroom door. Because it's right across the hallway from two women's offices and I'm like, yeah, I got used to do it. Yeah, I'm a guy. I'm like, am I going to close the door if there's no one else in the building? No. You know, my family, you know, we all, everyone's healthy, no one lost their jobs. We got off so easy compared to some. But I did miss last year not being a part of this week. I love being a part of the pre-stakes and seminaries retreat. Right before the pandemic, I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana doing a parish mission. And then I was swinging up through Cincinnati and doing a parish retreat. And I got back, it was the day after I got back and everything shut down. And then the only thing that I really missed was I had a whole year of missions and things lined up to do and they were all canceled. And it's a passion of mine to do that. But even in the midst of that, back in at Christmas time, you know, I did my first traveling, actually in October of last year, I flew out to South Dakota to let a men's retreat. And then went back to Indiana to do another parish mission at Christmas time and have had a few things pick up here in the spring. So I mean, like even, you know, my, I'm fed by things like this and God has been so good. And to have everyone back here on campus is just a tremendous blessing. This workshop, you know, these next three together are gonna be talking about life and the spirit. And, you know, to be in this chapel and to be able to lead this, this is like for me, such a familiar place. I graduated from the university in 1989. People say, well, what was Francis gonna like for you? Well, Father Michael Scanlon was the president and Father Dave Pavanka was my roommate. So I had it pretty good. I felt like Joseph in the Holy Family, you know, I've got the Immaculate Conception and the Incarnation and then there's me. But they, you know, all the great people that God has put in my life have just helped me on my journey in the Lord. And to be able to welcome people here, I work in the Office of Outreach and Evangelization. I'm the director of formation and evangelization. I also, you know, which is mostly outward facing for the university, but I also every year run the life and the spirit seminars. We do, you know, retreats for our students. And so once in the fall, once in the spring, there's about 150 of our students in here with another 40 that are leading the retreat, praying for baptism in the Holy Spirit. And it's a beautiful, blessed weekend. And this year I'll be launching with a Bob Lesniewski School of Prayer for our students to deepen their walk with the Lord. And when I come to share with you life and the spirit, I mean, it's so deep. I feel like three sessions over the course of three days, not nearly enough to even begin to scratch the surface. And I know that my words alone are not gonna be enough. So I'm gonna stop now and just ask the spirit to lead us. You know, the spirit would anoint my words that he would touch your hearts, because this is not about the messages, so much as it is about the spirit wanting to have his way in our lives. So let's begin in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Heavenly Father, we praise you, we worship you, we exalt you, you magnify your holy name because you are awesome and true in all your ways. Out of your abundance of mercy and grace, you've called us out of darkness to live in your light. You've called us to be your children. Without anything that we could have done to earn it or deserve it, you chose us. And you blessed us with your Holy Spirit. The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is alive in our lives and we thank you for that. It is our hope, it is our strength, it is our light, it is our life. Holy Spirit, we give you permission right now and throughout the rest of this retreat to take us where we need to be spiritually, to open our eyes to see things that we are, maybe not seen right now, to hear things that we need to hear. Most importantly, to give us the energy, the grace, the strength to move and cooperate, to see where you're leading so we can follow. Holy Spirit, come and bless us. And Mary, your life was a continual surrender to the Holy Spirit. As spouse of the spirit, you incarnated Christ to the world. Blessed Mother, pray for us that the same Holy Spirit would allow us to be an incarnation of the love of Christ in a real and living way that we would decrease and he would increase in our lives. Blessed Mother, pray for us as we seek to serve you as we pray. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of our womb in Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death, amen. Amen to Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. All right, so what is this life in the spirit? Why are we here? What is this all about? These are good questions. I think life in the spirit can, some people think that life in the spirit is this book that somebody wrote about how to have a life in the spirit or it's a seminar. We hear life in the spirit seminars. They still happen all over the world. People are going through life in the spirit seminar or they go on a retreat, a life in the spirit retreat. Or they come to a conference like this and there's a track, life in the spirit. That's what life in the spirit is. Life in the spirit, for some people it's become this eccentric spirituality. For some it's what gives them the ability to look at others and say, I'm special because I have this spiritual gift or that spiritual gift. They make it really much us versus them. And even on our campus here, we have a lot of very traditional holy young men and women and a lot of spirit-filled very holy young men and women and it's like Satan is trying to make this an issue like somehow there's a dividing line. You're either a good Catholic or a good charismatic. And life in the spirit is kind of like a rip off of some sort of Protestant experience that we've tried to Catholicize but it really has nothing to do with authentic Catholicism. And those who have been baptized in the spirit, they cry out, you've got to do this. Everything and those who are not say, I have the holy spirit, what are you talking about? Why do we need to talk baptism in the holy spirit? Life in the spirit, why is that even an issue? Because whatever is good in the church, Satan uses it as a tool for division. That's what he does. He's trying to divide the body of Christ. And what I want to do is not necessarily convince you with my words that for those of you who might be I've never gone on a life in the spirit or anything, I'm not sure what baptism in the holy spirit is, is to convince you of anything other than that there's something that God wants to do in our lives. People ask, well, I've been baptized. What is baptism in the holy spirit? We're gonna get to that. Well, is it a one-off thing? No. It's a continual renewal of our lives. And this is why I think before we can talk about what baptism in the holy spirit is, we need to talk about what life in the holy spirit is. It's because it is, it's a way of life. And when we look at what life in the spirit is, it begins in our baptism. All of this that we're talking about, this renewal, this charismatic renewal, has its roots in baptism and confirmation. And that is, I think, one of the issues that I think plagued the renewal in its early years is it became a subculture in the church rather than being brought to the heart of the church, to renew the church in its heart. It was seen as kind of like an offshoot, kind of a weird thing. And the people who were in that weird thing were more than happy to have their little prayer groups and circle up and say, we've got it, it's good, rather than bring it back to the church and see how it can be used to serve the broader church. And I think goodness that Pope John Paul II and even Benedict XVI and now Pope Francis have really called on those people who are in the renewal to serve the broader church, to bring this gift of grace to the broader church. And we're seeing it happen. And it looks very different than it did through the 70s and 80s in many ways, this life in the spirit and how God is manifesting it in the church today. But however he chooses to manifest it in my life, your life, anyone's life, we come back to the simple understanding that baptism is what begins our life in the Holy Spirit. We receive that grace, the power of God's love through the power of the Holy Spirit at baptism. And the catechism says a couple of very clear things, that this grace is favor, and this is article 1996 from the catechism, says grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. So we see that it's God's gift. God wants to give this grace to us. It's his favor. It's unearned, undeserved gift freely given by God to help us to respond. So it means that whatever happens in baptism demands a heartfelt response. And the question is how are people responding to the grace of their baptism? The response to baptism is to live life in the Holy Spirit, to allow that power to change us, to transform us, to make us like Christ, to conform us to his image and likeness, so that we can serve God by doing his holy will. We become partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. So what we also know is life in the Spirit is the foretaste, a precursor as it were of eternal life with God. Like some of the benefits that come to us by being his children, we think, oh, the best stuff is yet to come when we're finally perfected and living in God's presence. And that's probably true. We cannot even begin to imagine what heaven's gonna be like, but that doesn't mean that we live without that right now. It's amazing how many Catholics are totally unaware of who they are. We have a real strong identity crisis. You ask the average person who they are, the last thing that they're gonna talk about is being a child of God. And if the grace of baptism is at work in your life, you're going to know that's the fundamental identity that's been given to you by God. It's going to well up in you. And when people say who you are, you're not gonna say, this is what I do for a living, you're gonna say I'm a child of God because that reality will be real for your cooperation in response to this grace of baptism. It says in the next article, 1997, it says by baptism, the Christian participates in the grace of Christ, he receives the life of the Spirit who breathes charity into him and who forms the church. So in article 1997, we hear the expression, life in the Spirit. We receive this by the Spirit who breathes charity into us and who forms the church. So we know that it's a very personal encounter that the Holy Spirit breathes into us. In the same way that the Holy Spirit breathed, you know, when God breathed into Adam, the Holy Spirit was breathed into this dust and it became a living being. At the moment of our baptism, God came very close to us and it didn't stop there. He breathed his life into us and we became a living thing, a child of God. But it's not just a personal thing, it's a corporal thing. That's what forms the church. It makes us a body that makes us one. It's so sad that right now, we are looking at every issue that we have in the world through the lens of racism. You know, and if you disagree with somebody, they can call you a racist and that ends the conversation because they've just defined you. When baptism is the ism that we need to be focusing on, especially in the church, the ism that matters is baptism. It's what unites us. It's what makes us one. There isn't another ism out there that's going to solve the crisis of disunity in our church. It's baptism. It's that's the only ism that we should be talking about because that's the one that will even has the remedy for the actual racism that's out there because no one's going to deny that it's out there, but it's not like everywhere you look, there's somebody out there full of hatred based on race. It's just not the case. But we've got everyone worked up and there's riots and there's death and there's destruction and there's brokenness. And this thought is just leaving a trail of broken lives and broken dreams and broken communities. And yet the answer I think is still hidden in that sacrament. It goes on to say in article 1998, it says the vocation to eternal life is supernatural. It depends entirely on God's gratuitous initiative for He alone can reveal and give Himself. I love this. And this is a good reminder for all of us who are looking at the church and saying, how can I awaken faith in my people? How can I bring people who have fallen away even before COVID who had stopped participating? How can I awaken in them a hunger for God and bring them back to the church? Well, we do understand that the vocation, the call of God in our life is supernatural. And we most likely associate the word supernatural with ghosts and paranormal activity, right? You know, like there's even a show I think supernatural about all this stuff. And but supernatural for us just means simply above our human nature, our fallen nature. There's something above it. Super and sub, super is above. Something that will get us to rise above our brokenness, our sinful nature, to take off the old man and live as the new man. That's the grace of the Holy Spirit. And when we wanna bring somebody to Christ, remember that only God can reveal and give Himself. We want somebody to have Jesus. We want somebody to understand who Jesus is and His love. We want the other 70% of Catholics who don't believe in the real presence and the Eucharist to come to know and believe in the power and presence of Jesus and the Eucharist. Only the Holy Spirit can reveal and give them that. We cannot. We stand simply before the Lord as instruments of grace, but we are not the grace. And we need to make sure that we are alive in the Holy Spirit. And finally in 1999 it says it's the sanctified or defying grace of baptism. It is the source and work of sanctification. And I mean many probably have read from Christendom to Apostolic Mission if people read this little book. There's a lot of power in that book, but one of the things that just struck me more than anything was we need to start incarnating the Christian ideal. The one person I think that put the whole world on their ear when it came to their witness was someone like St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. People could not figure her out to save their lives. Why would somebody want to live in the slums of India, pulling people out of puddles of their own waste, clean them up and love them and just hold them until they die and do this day after day after day. You know, people say, oh, you're just shooting a BB at an asteroid, you're not solving anything. And we need to be reminded that our job is not to eradicate poverty. Our job as Christians is to love the poor. It is the worldly concept that somehow we can eradicate what's wrong with the world because we don't want a world that's broken. We wanna save the world from its brokenness. That's the worldly thought. Our job is not to be the saviors of the world. Our job is to love. And when people stay in their lane and do that very well, they become a beacon in this world of darkness. And people will not buy into the message of Christianity until they start seeing the Christian ideal left out, incarnate in front of them in a very radical way, both in love and holiness. When people say, John, what are the gifts that the Holy Spirit wants to give to the church more than any love and holiness? What about speaking in tongues? Yeah, yeah, that's all right. Love and holiness. That's what's going to change the church. That's what's gonna renew the faith of those who've fallen away is when they see incarnated in us, the love and holiness of Jesus Christ. Article 1699 says this. It says, life in the spirit fulfills the vocation of man. This life is made up of divine charity, love of God and human solidarity, love of neighbor. It is graciously offered as salvation. I think another shortcoming of the renewal back in the 70s was that there was a lot of in reach with the Holy Spirit. And my wife grew up in a charismatic community down in Dallas, and for four years I served as the charismatic community down in Dallas. And the prayer meetings on Sunday afternoon were very edifying, beautiful praise, people sharing their love for the Lord. But it seemed like people were prophesying to one another. And I noticed after a while it was always the same prophecy. God is getting ready to do something new. And I'm like, yeah, if this is so wonderful and so awesome, why don't we let that new thing we go out, we actually help other people understand what we have? And I think a lot of communities circled the wagons and said, okay, we've got ours, let's stay strong, let's stay united, let's put the world, us against them, it's us against the world. And the Holy Spirit is not us against the world, it's us going to the world. You know, our enemies are not the world. The enemy is the principalities and the powers. We're supposed to be serving the world. And so life in the spirit is made up of, yes, loving God and giving him praise and being in prayer groups and singing and expressing our love for the Lord. But it's also loving our neighbor radically, getting a little bit dirty on the way, loving until it maybe even hurts a little bit. So the fulfillment of this is not just a vertical, the cross teaches us that there's the vertical movement of love and then there's the horizontal. Both of those together make the cross, the symbol of our love. So life in the spirit is not just a spiritual awakening that lifts us up to heaven, but it's also a spiritual awakening that causes us to reach out to our brothers and sisters in a new and radical way. That's the fulfillment of our baptism. Baptism is the sacrament of initiation that begins life in the spirit. But this ongoing of living that out, letting that grace transform our lives is called life in the spirit. And we hear in that paragraph a couple of very important things. It fulfills the vocation of man. So as a priest, life in the spirit will help you fulfill your vocation. Even more so, it'll help you fulfill your fundamental call to be a child of God. Because before you are a father, a priest forever, you were created to be a son of the father, a child of God, dearly loved. You know, one of the hardest things I ever had to do was minister to church where a priest who had just left the priesthood to go and he said this at his closing mass. He says, I'm leaving the priesthood and I'm gonna go live with my gay lover down in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was in with the Salem at the time. Just, this is what I need to do with my life to be true to myself. And the last thing he said was, and by the way, if any of you are hired, I am gonna need a job after this. So bad, so bad in every way. But I knew him. I knew that his prayer life had been in the toilet for a while. I didn't know exactly the depth of what he was struggling with, but I know that he had given up on prayer, that life in the spirit, staying connected to the source of his identity. As a married man, life in the spirit helps me fulfill my vocation to be a husband and a father. For those who are single, it gives the ability for us to fulfill our role as a single person. There's something for all of us, but it fulfills the vocation of man. And what does life in the spirit do for us? Because it is given to us because God wants to do something innocent through his first. He wants to bring us into deeper communion with the Holy Trinity. Article 260 in the Catechism says the ultimate, ultimate end of the whole divine economy. So everything we know that God has done in his creation and interaction with man from the very beginning is geared towards this one thing. The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God's creatures into the perfect union of the blessed Trinity. That's it. Everything that God has done, he wants us to be one with him, to be members of his family. God exists, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the communion of love, a communion that's ever giving, ever growing, ever wanting to give itself away. And so he created us in his image and likeness that we might share in that divine love, that communion of love. And the greatest gift that the Holy Spirit gives to us is himself because it's his presence in our soul that unites us to the Trinity, draws us in. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone to pray. Right, I feel like I'm hitting a wall, hitting a wall with the Lord, banging on a door that wasn't open in front of me. And one time the Lord spoke to me in prayer to give me this vision of me banging on the door once again, God, I'm here, don't you understand, I'm trying to pray. Open up, bam, bam, like through my effort, if I just was obnoxious enough and kicked that door enough, it was finally going to open. And all of a sudden, like there was a tap on my shoulder and it was the Holy Spirit. He led me around past the door, around the corner of this building that I was trying to get into. And he said, here's the door you're supposed to go into. And it was just like the Lord reminding me in my prayer with this vision that even the Holy Spirit wants to be the master of our relationship with Jesus, to guide us to where we can truly find Him. Sometimes we approach God like, we've got to figure this out, we've got to knock these walls down, we've got to make this happen. And the Spirit's like, just be still, let me lead you, let me guide you to that secret place, that path that I've created for you to encounter Jesus in a new way. The life in the Spirit enables us to fully develop our abilities, our character, our spiritual nature. It completes us, it makes us fully human. And this is so important in today's age because we have people who don't even believe they have a spiritual side anymore. We have a lot of people who dabble in spirituality because we all are hungering for something beyond ourselves. I think it's written into our DNA as human beings that there must be more. But as more and more people have gone distrustful of the church and organized religion in general, they're dabbling in different spiritualities and meditations and mindfulness is a big thing. You know, like within the confine of your mind I can find and elevate myself. My mind is like a bad neighborhood. I don't go in there alone, man. Like if I wanna ask God to renew my mind, he's going with me. I'm not gonna try to figure that. That's like a bag of monkeys or something, you know? Like we need the Lord. We're not going to save ourselves by meditating and elevating our mindfulness to whatever, you know, I don't know, idol that we've created, concept we've grasped, you know? It's about God revealing. And only the Holy Spirit is the one who can reveal and give himself to us in that way. But also, like I shared in that passage from 1699, it says it's not forced on anyone. It says that life in the Spirit fulfills the vocation of man. It is graciously offered as salvation. Now, we have to stop and say, well, life in the Spirit is given to the church as salvation, freely given by God as our salvation. Yes, it's also offered. It's not forced on anyone. The life in the Spirit only works if we yield, if we surrender, if we can, an imitation of the blessed mother say, let it be done unto me according to your word. That's the only way it happens. The immediate fruit of life in the Spirit is eternal salvation, a taste of heaven. We're not there yet, but we're on the path. And God gives us these little tastes of heaven along the way to entice us to woo us, to keep moving forward, to keep not to give up on this journey. You know, our eternal destiny is intimately tied to the life of the Holy Spirit within us. And to understand, to better understand his work, we have to only look to the words of Jesus. The words of Jesus confirm what a great gift the Holy Spirit is by the way he calls him. This is John 14, 16. It says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. Oh boy. So there's, I can't just say, I love you God and that's it. You wanna put conditions on it? Can I just say I love you God and it's true? Why do they have to be conditions? I have to keep your commandments. That's like a high bar. Yeah, you gotta love your neighbor as yourself. Well, that doesn't work out very well for me some days. You know, but God, if I love the Lord, I'm gonna be striving for this. So what does he say right after? He goes, look, I will ask the Father and he will give you another advocate to be with you always. Oh really, another advocate. Oh, so Jesus is our first advocate. He's with us always. But now we have the second advocate, the Holy Spirit. And we all know that the word advocate literally translates into Advocatus, the one who's literally called to our side. So you wake up in the morning, you stumble down in the kitchen to make yourself a cup of coffee, you got Jesus to the right, Holy Spirit to your left. Somebody's got your back, somebody's in front of leading you, hopefully the Spirit's leading you because the hardest thing about making coffee in the morning is you have to do it before you have your coffee. Am I right? God, I think goodness they created those coffee makers that you can program the night before, so you can come down to a cup of brewed coffee. Or if that's too much work for you, there's always Starbucks up the street. You can't swing a dead cat in some cities without hitting a Starbucks, right? I mean, it's great. And by the way, coffee is indeed proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. But with the Holy Spirit, he's an advocate, he's with us all around us. We have never been alone. I feel sorry for the people who lived this last year in isolation who truly felt that they were alone, especially people that we used to sit next to in pews, who when they couldn't practice a communal faith, lost the sense of belonging to God. Didn't understand that they were never alone during this time of pandemic. None of us were. We had advocates with us. We had Jesus and the Holy Spirit there to comfort us. And what does an advocate do? Well, we know an advocate can sometimes, the lawyers are called advocates, right? What does a lawyer do? Well, a lawyer defends you. You being assaulted by the enemy, tempted to despair, lust, pride, to have another drink or another drink because the weight of the stress is too much right now. And you just wanna medicate out of this state of feeling awful and then you wake up and you feel even worse. When we're being attacked like that, that's what the Holy Spirit's there to do, to defend us. We need to cry out to the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, defend me in battle. Strengthen me to choose the good. Holy Spirit mediates. Okay, I'm feeling far from you God because I think one of the worst consequences of the fall is our short-term memory. It doesn't work well when it comes to God. Am I right? We can go to prayer. If you say in our prayers in the morning, the Holy Spirit's moving us. You know, we're experiencing great consolation and then we go to the office and the stack of things that are there waiting for you within five minutes, you're like, why did I ever become a priest? This is not what I signed up for and your mood is just like in the tank, right? I mean, we're up and down. You guys are mad. I mean, I get it. Some of my best friends, I'm very blessed on this campus are some of the friars and it is wonderful to walk with priests as brothers. When I do a parish mission, one of my favorite things to do is to hang out with the parish priest. You know, because like then there's somebody who, I won't be there next week to judge them or anything like that. They let their guard down. It's amazing some of the conversations I've had at two in the morning, a week of a parish mission, it's beautiful. But it also shows me that, man, there's such a need for fellowship, for friendship and brotherhood amongst our priests who live in the bubble. You guys do it and feel so sometimes so isolated just by the nature of your ordination and the call on your life. But the Holy Spirit's there to mediate as well. So when we feel like we're far from God, the Holy Spirit can bring us back. When we need counsel, the Holy Spirit can counsel us. And we know this about a lawyer. They take a pledge that no matter what they think of their client, they're always gonna work for their clients good. Even if the lawyer is 100% sure that you're guilty, he will defend you in court. He will treat you like you're not. He will stand up for you. It doesn't matter. And that's the good, beautiful thing about the Holy Spirit. He always acts on our good. No matter what the reality is. So that we might be restored and forgiven. Jesus goes on to say in John 14, 26, the advocate, the Holy Spirit that my father will send in my name, he will teach you everything. And remind you of all that I told you. That's pretty good. That's a good promise there. Once again, it seems that the apostles were slow learners. Has anyone seen the chosen? That's a beautiful adaptation. I mean, it's fictionalized. There's some things in there that aren't in scripture. So anyway, everyone just relax. No one's rewriting the gospels. It's an interpretation. But the key moments that move you the most are taken right from scripture, right? They're beautiful. We know that Jesus drove seven demons out of Mary Magdalene and to see the change of her life. I think one of the interesting takes to me is Matthew appears to be on the spectrum, right? And I've got a cousin who's autistic and so I appreciate that. I have a tendency to think that all these guys were on the spectrum at some point. I mean, it takes a little bit of just being off to wanna follow the Lord with everything you are. In light of what the world teaches. Are there any seminarians with us this afternoon? The fact that you heard a call and still wanna be a representative of the church in the face of how much hate there is for what you're gonna stand for. What you've just committed your life to is to be hated by the most of the world for the rest of your life. Thank you for saying yes. That's a heroic yes. And you are choosing to be hated. It's going to happen. The worst that has happened to the men in this room will be multiplied by a factor of a hundred for you 10 years from now. Why? Because it seems that we're not really gonna be able to turn around until we start seeding seeds of faith with the blood of martyrs. It's what it's taken in every other time when the church has been under attack. And hopefully we can repent and we can do penance and we can become bloodless martyrs and offer up prayers and sacrifices for the people that we love and for the conversion of sinners. But I just get a sense that it's like we've already seen it. People walking into churches and shooting priests blinded by hate in the devil. We see religious liberties under attack. It's gonna take courageous boldness. It's gonna be men who are being led by the spirit being reminded what Jesus said. What did Jesus say? If they hate me, they're gonna hate you. But don't worry, I've overcome the world. Confidence doesn't come from looking at the world and saying, I'm tougher than the world. It doesn't come from staring Satan in the face and saying, I'm tougher. We can be weak and we can be small but we believe in a God by sitting on his shoulders and being filled with his grace and presence. He is the one that helps us to overcome. To experience the victory over sin, the victory over Satan. That's what life in the spirit does for a man. Just like Jesus knew the weaknesses of apostles. He knew that there would be deniers, that there would be those who would forget his teachings. He knew that there would be heretics that would rise up through the ranks, that they would need to sift out. You know, I saw the best meme on Sunday on the Feast of St. Anthony and it was St. Anthony going, I find lost things and I hammer heretics and your car keys are over there. You know, so he's ready to hammer the heretics. And I mean, granted, pastorally speaking, maybe you don't wanna be known as the hammer of the heretics, all right? But how about the hammer of the heresies? You know, to know the truth so well that we can defend the faith, to be convicted with that boldness and that being able to preach the gospel with love. He knew that they would be attacked by their enemies. How did Peter, who went from being, denying Christ by the accusation of a slave girl, stand before the Sanhedrin and say, whether it's right or not for me to obey man or God, I can't answer that for you, but I will not stop preaching the name of Jesus. What happened to Peter between, you know, the 50 days? You know, it was Pentecost, right? We know what happened. When the Holy Spirit came upon Peter, he finally became the rock. Because up until that time, he looked more like pebbles and gravel and dirt. You know, he was not much of a rock. I imagine at times Peter felt like Jesus was mocking him. Every time he tried to do something courageous or bold, like he'd open the door into his face every time. He's like, why didn't he call me the rock? And he, oh my gosh, the other guys were like, where did it go, rock? You know what I mean? But he ended up being the rock through the power of the Holy Spirit. He knew that they would need help to build the church here on earth. And the Holy Spirit knows that we're gonna need his help. If we're gonna rebuild, renew, and restore the church in our time. In the same way the Spirit knows your weaknesses. That's one of the great comforts we can all take. When God chose you, he knew your weaknesses. He knew the forehand and he chose you anyway. Praise God. He knows your weaknesses, your faults, your sins. He knows the secret struggles that no one else knows about you. He knows it all and he's there with the grace for you to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and a holy priest of God. That's what he does. And he longs to teach you and give you the grace. Continue to pour out the grace to accomplish his will in your life. Life in the Spirit is not about grabbing onto charisms and say, well, I'll get this dazzling little shiny toy that Lord gave me and here's another one. Life in the Spirit is a deep, deep interior movement of the Holy Spirit who wants to be, for lack of a better expression, our own personal spiritual trainer to speak into each one of our hearts. You're like, that's the beautiful thing about getting a personal trainer is that they design a system of getting a healthy that's just for you. You know, they don't mass produce athletes. They figure out what kind of body type you have what kind of blood you have, like you do all these tests and then they design a specific thing for you. There is a specific path that you're going to walk on to become holy that's not for anyone else. It's your path and the Holy Spirit's the only one that can illuminate it for you. He wants to teach you. The most important thing that the Holy Spirit wants to teach all of us, and this is the one thing we do have in common is that love is the aim. Once again, from the catechism, the Holy Spirit in love, it says, St. John goes even further when he affirms that God is love. First John chapter four, God is love. I love that. Who is God? I think of the reason why people have such a hard time understanding who God is today is because there's not enough love. They don't see the love. God is love and where there's an absence of love, there's going to be an absence of God. God's very being is love. He says, by sending his only son and the spirit of love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret. God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and he has destined us to share in that exchange. That's amazing. Our destiny is to share in the external exchange of God's infinite love, the same love that unites the Trinity. And he wants to teach us that love. He wants to draw us into that love. He wants to teach us how to forgive, how to pray, how to stay pure in an impure world, to spiritually lead our parishes, our families. He wants, you know, for us as lay people, he wants us to be able to teach us how to celebrate and participate in the mass and be connected to this mystery. This mystery is too profound for the human mind to enter into. Only the spirit can draw us into that. You know, he wants to help us to repent from our sins and heal us of our past hurts and wounds. Literally everything we need, I love that. You know, he says, the advocate will send him my name and he will teach you everything. Well, what about everything? But can he teach me everything? There's nothing that you need to know that the Holy Spirit can't teach you. He's like better than Google, okay? Google, anybody can put stuff out on the internet. The difference between the Holy Spirit and Google is the Holy Spirit's always right. He only gives you one answer, but he makes you, you know, I love it, it says like, you type in something you're searching for, it says, we created 3.7 billion different options in 2.02 seconds, right? And God says, I create the one thing, but I'm gonna take a few months for you to kind of unpack before you. And I wanna journey with you on this journey of discovery. But I want a quick and easy answer, Lord. No, we are going to journey together and you're going to trust me. And when it's dark, you're gonna continue to walk with me and when light comes, you're gonna see and have more confidence. But we're gonna do this together because he'd rather have us walking in humility and trust with him than running confidently in the opposite direction. And that's what happens when things get easy for us, we can become very presumptive, run off on our own and say, I got this now, God. Thank you, God, for the answer. I will see you at the finish line. Good luck with that. Rather than like, okay, God, I only have enough to take the next step. And that God's like, I'm only asking you to take the next step. And when you're done taking that step, let's sit down and we'll talk about the next step. But I'm not the world, I'm not Google, don't treat me like, okay. So I surrender to hardest words to say. You know, I love the ocean. My wife and I have vacation at the ocean. My wife loves the beach. I love the ocean. Problem is, you really can't get to the ocean without going through a beach, right? It's, for some reason, that's the way God has designed it. I don't like the sand. I burn very easily. So if I'm out on the beach, I've slathered up like 300 SPF sunscreen. I have my umbrella, you know, I'm wearing my hat, my sunglasses and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go run in the water and I'll swim for 15 minutes, come out and get back under, you know, like, because I burn very easily and very badly. My wife, she's out for two hours, turns a nice golden brown and it only gets better from there. She's been gardening all spring and she's already got her sandal tan. You know, her gardening sandals with the lines across it. It's pretty funny, but she just liked that. But I love the ocean, but I love the ocean at night. I much rather sit on the beach at night. I don't have to worry about the sun and there's just something mysteriously wonderful and beautiful about the ocean at night. You hear it, you can't see it, you know, sometimes you're just listening as wave after wave comes up on the shore. The oceans cover 140 million square miles of the Earth's surface. It's a lot of ocean out there. And we just got another one, right? Which they just said there's a fifth or a sixth ocean. What is it? Fifth, yeah, we got another ocean. Woo-hoo, didn't know we needed one, but hey, guess what? We got another ocean, everyone. So now you put another thing to put on your bucket list. All right. And when you think about the ocean, if you go to the Mariana Trench and you're on the surface of the ocean right above the Mariana Trench, you can know just to have it go down almost seven miles before you hit the bottom. Like seven miles. Just going down and down and down. But the thing is once you get to about two miles, which is the area of two miles and below is called the Abyss. The water pressure is so extreme. It's like lying on the tarmac of an airport and them stacking 50 jumbo jets on your chest. It's a lot of pressure. You're not gonna survive. I'll just tell you that right now. But the amazing thing about it is in this ocean is there are 1.5 million different species of life that have been identified and classified in the oceans. 1.5 million different species of life. But scientists estimate there's at least 2 million more on the low end. 2 million more species of life. On the high end, there's some scientists that say there might be as many as 50 million more species of life. And the reason why most of it has remained undiscovered is 90% of all life that inhabits the ocean lives below the Abyss. In places that we can't find it on our own. In addition, if you're out in the ocean right now, floating around in a little tiny particulate form are about 20 million tons of gold. All right, so if you're wondering, I'm not sure if I have a good retirement plan through my diocese. You got a lot of time, it's like a sieve and just go down to the ocean, scoop, scoop, scoop. You might get rich. It might take you a few thousand years. But the reason I share that is because I don't think there's a better analogy to life in the Holy Spirit than what I just shared about the ocean. Because out of all this 140 million square miles of ocean, we've only explored about 10% of it. Only 10%. Which means, for the most part, this big ocean, this deep expanse of mysterious body of water that's teeming with life. So much of it has yet to be discovered and so much of it is only able to be found in the deepest parts. And this ocean that's filled with gold, filled with enough life to sustain all life on earth. The ocean produces enough food to sustain all life on earth. This life-giving, mysterious, wonderful, treasure-filled thing, we've only began to scratch the surface of what it is. And I would say even on their deathbed, most saints would say the same thing about the Holy Spirit. We've only begun to scratch the surface of who the Holy Spirit is in our lives. The Holy Spirit is a life-giving lover and a life-loving giver. He wants to love us and give us the life of Christ. He wants to make us one with the Trinity. This life in the Holy Spirit, we could be living it for a thousand lifetimes and not discover everything that there is. The deepest, most beautiful, peaceful parts of the ocean, we can't get there without help. We need the Holy Spirit's help to discover more about the Holy Spirit. We need to yield. It's the same with us in the spiritual life. We can't get there on our own, but God wants to draw us into the deepest deeps. We need to go deeper with the Holy Spirit. We need to let the Spirit teach us to lead us, empower us and send us on the mission that we were created to fulfill. All the while living in perfect unity with the love of the Trinity. People who've tried God and found him boring, unresponsive, have become disinterested and never encountered the Holy Spirit. I like the line which in the wardrobe, I read it to all my little kids, I have five children, my oldest is now 27, my little one is still 12. But I made it a habit of reading them all several times over their childhood, the chronicles of Narnia. And one of my favorites is when Lucy's asking, I think it was Mr. Beaver about Aslan, and he's like, is he safe? And Mr. Beaver goes, no, no, he's not safe at all, but he's good. Our life in the Holy Spirit is not safety because we weren't created for safety. We weren't created for comfort. There's no spiritual safe spaces in the kingdom of God. We want to have like, oh, I want to God, but I want to stay right where it's peaceful and easy. It's like God is like, no, out there, risk. Love is risk, faith is risk, life is risk, but we always know what the risk of God that he's there to see us through. And we need to go forward. The Holy Spirit wants to awaken our faith. It wants to strengthen our communication and communion with Christ. He wants us to grow, he wants to help us grow in spiritual freedom. And the Holy Spirit, as it says in the Catechism, is the master of interior prayer. And if we are struggling in our interior prayer life, if we're hitting walls, once again, the Holy Spirit can teach us the secret path that God has created for you to encounter him. The Catechism in Article 851 says, those who obey the prompting of the spirit of truth are already on their way to salvation. We must be willing to consider and be honest in our evaluation of ourselves, right here, right now. Are we really engaged in living this life and this spirit as our primary vocation? Because no matter what state of life you're in, life and the spirit is what you're created for. Are we willing to stake our lives on the fact that our salvation depends on the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives? And that just like we can have a relationship with Christ, intimacy with Christ, we need to develop a relationship and intimacy with the Holy Spirit. On Thursday, when we're together, we're gonna take some time to pray. John Paul, John Paul's great. He's the guy who plays guitar with Bob. So he normally is here to start the session with a song and end with a song. And today I texted him like, are you gonna be there today? He's like, I can't, I gotta get my taxes done by five. Millennials, what are you gonna do with them, right? Like, you know, I love them like a son. You know, I wanna smack him in the head. But it's all right. He'll be here tomorrow and on Thursday when we pray for the Holy Spirit. But in addition to the ordination graces that you are benefited with, gifted with, the ability to say prayers and move grace, to cause grace to change ordinary bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the ability to bind and loose, the ability of all the things that you're given. There are still other gifts that the Lord wants to give you. It says in the Catechism once again, this is articles 801 and 802. It says, whether extraordinary or simple and humble, charisms are graces of the Holy Spirit which directly or indirectly benefit the church, ordered as they are to her building up, to the good of men and to the needs of the world. Charisms are to be accepted with gratitude by the person who receives them and by all members of the church as well. They are wonderfully rich graces for which the apostolic vitality and for the holiness of the entire body of Christ provided they really are genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit and are used in full conformity with authentic promptings of this same spirit that is in keeping with charity the true measure of all charisms. So the Lord, and I've seen this, I've seen this with our students, praying for certain gifts to be poured into their lives, gifts to teach, gifts to preach, gifts to serve, gifts to be musically inclined. Whatever gifts that God gives us, some are very simple and humble. Like I marvel at people who have the gift of hospitality who can just light up a room with their smile and make everyone feel welcome right away. That's not my gift. I mean, I can try and I think I'd do all right, but I don't have a gift for it. There's just some people that just naturally know how to make people feel loved and welcomed. People who can just serve behind the scenes and not need any recognition or credit. Humble people who just want to use the simple gifts God has given them to spread love and peace and joy and one person's life at a time if that's all it takes, if that's all they're given. They want to do that. But I've also met people, I've met a lot of priests who have gifts of healing and different charisms. I believe that they're an essential part of the priesthood, manifestations of the spirit that we can use to serve the church in particular ways. Because Jesus said in John, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as scripture has said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water. When we are up serving in the name of Jesus and using the gifts that he's given us to build up the church and using them in love, we become a river of grace, a blessing to the world around us. And God has chosen you for this. You're here because God has chosen to make you a blessing to the world around you. Not just through the use of your priestly faculties, but as you're being a reflection and being made in the image and likeness of God and a vessel of the Holy Spirit working through you and in you. It's like explosive grace, beautiful grace that he wants to pour out on each one of us. And gifts, in that same section of the Catechism, it says, the spirit prepares men and goes out to them with his grace. The spirit manifests the risen Lord to them. Like our job is not just to perform the functions. Like my job is not just to put food on my kid's plate to keep shoes on their feet, a roof over their head. My job is to manifest the risen Lord to them. When my children remember me, well, they remember me as a reflection of the risen Lord. That's what matters to me, that they see Jesus in me. It says in article 768, so that she can fulfill her mission, the Holy Spirit bestows upon the church very hierarchic, I don't like that word. Those official church gifts and charismatic gifts, right? You know, the institutional church brings us the grace of the sacraments, the apostolic secession, the impersonal Christy nature of your ordination. But then the charismatic gifts are the gifts that the Spirit just wills to breathe into people's lives and equip them for the ministry that he's called them to. And both are necessary for the health of the church. The personal manifestations of the Spirit that God wants to pour into our lives to make us stronger in Christ and to edify us are things like conversion, the grace of conversion, the grace of repentance, healing, faith, contemplation, the prayer of contemplation to be able to bestow with our heart, mind, and will the beauty of God to acknowledge that, to be drawn into that mystery and transformed by that encounter. That's a gift of the Spirit. Holiness and love, like I shared before. And if people were only open up to those two gifts of the Holy Spirit, it's God's holiness and his love at work in our lives. We could radically change the face of the church. If we were seeking to pour the Holy Spirit out on people, pray with them to be filled and seeking those two things above all others. But he also wants to do these gifts, like for people like in the church, we see people who have gifts from music and writing and prophecy and words of knowledge and teaching and administration and leadership evangelization. People whose gifts are mercy and compassion, service, giving, hospitality, healing, intercessory prayer, encouragement. The list goes on and on. And people say, well, what about speaking in tongues? Isn't that a manifestation of the Spirit? I 100% believe it is. Well, what good is a gift like speaking in tongues? How does that edify up the church? Well, for me, what I find is, you know, like I go to prayer meetings and we're over here at this conference, I feel very comfortable putting my hands in the air and praising God and if the Spirit leads me, I'll speak in tongues. But 99% of the time when I'm speaking in tongues is when I'm moving into contemplation and meditation, when I'm just surrendering. There's a language of prayer that God gives me that just allows me to stop thinking about what I need to say and just put my spirit where it needs to be to receive what God wants to give me in the moment. That's what the gift of tongues does for me. You know, I've never interpreted a tongue. I've never spoken out a tongue to be interpreted. I know that those are real gifts, but that's not the gift that God has given me. But as I wrap up here, I just wanna say like, when we come back tomorrow, I wanna talk about more about if life in the Spirit is so vital and what does the, what do we mean when we talk about baptism in the Holy Spirit? Why is that a thing? Why do we need that? And I think, you know, we have to understand, like we need to be alive in the Spirit. How do we get there? How does that happen in our lives? What is the response that will help? What is the disposition of our souls? What posture can we assume before the Lord to make ourselves more open to the power of the Holy Spirit? And how can we pray in such a way that we can activate that grace more fully in our lives and collaborate and cooperate with that grace more fully in our lives? You know, the prayer that the church has given us is three words, the most dangerous three words that you'll ever pray, come Holy Spirit. If you pray in that with faith and expectation without limits or conditions before the Lord, buckle up, because you never know what the Lord is gonna do, but we're gonna go there this week. And I'm glad you guys are here.