 You guys ready? I said, just kidding, let's pray. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Why is our youth minister heart of hearing? He keeps saying, I said, I can't hear you. OK, you've got to love youth ministry. Heavenly Father, we bless and praise your holy and sacred name. We thank you for the gift of all these young men and women who are gathered here. And some shockingly old, young Lord Jesus. Bless them, hallow them. Keep them ever close to your heart, Lord Jesus, that they might know that you are the true God, that you have been sent to their world to bring about reconciliation of their heart to your fathers. And that by the power of the Holy Spirit, they can live a radical newness of life. Jesus, we trust in you. Jesus, we trust in you. Jesus, we trust in you. And in your name, we pray, amen. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. A little bit about me. My name is Michael Gormley. I am, in fact, this handsome. Thank you all for being here. So very happy. I think it goes without saying that the more you drink, the handsomer I get. So please, there's a 12 drink minimum, right, Martin? It's all free. Ooh. You know, it was really funny when I was a freshman here. I had all these friends who were like tall, dark, and handsome. And I was like the cave troll that only came out at night, you know? And I remember one of my buddies, he was so handsome. He was so handsome. Every time we would pick him up at the airport when he would like fly home, we'd be like, did you get to see where this is number? And he would, every time. And then one time, he was so used to getting their numbers, he forgot that she wrote it on a cocktail napkin and snuck it to him. And he goes, oh, yeah, I totally forgot. I'm like, that'd be the greatest day of my life. And you forget. Ha. I hate so many people. So we are here today to talk about our Lord. How many of y'all are, this is gross, 20 and younger, 20 and younger. Let me see the hands. 20 years old and younger. All right, and younger. You see how I said that in younger? I didn't say 20 to 18. Yeah. How many y'all are 21 and up? 21 and up. All right. How many y'all are actually in your 30s but you lied in order to get here? Yeah. You're 30, you're 30. How old are you? Yeah, so you're on the Southwest Companion Pass. That's what we call that. Nice. My wife is substantially older than me and gosh, she's so old. And we met, we met here at Franciscan. I was an undergrad. I was an RA, I was an undergrad. I was in Colby Clare Dorms back when they were, yeah, I was the legend. And she was a grad student. She was returning grad school and she was in charge of Upper Floor, Tommy Moore and stuff. And I met her when all of the RA's came out like a week before the students came out and we were doing all this like leadership and all this stuff. And I just remember being like, hi. And it was funny because she was a grad school student. She was older, mature. And I was so young and naive about the ways of the world and she just, she took advantage of it and she swept me off my feet. She swept me off my feet and I never looked back. I never looked back. Actually, at one point she did sweep me physically off my feet when we were dancing and she tried to carry me. We fell, it's fine. It was, it's what weddings are for. So I do wanna thank you all for being here. It's important that we gather young adults here. It's always great because I don't know how you feel but I do a podcast called Catching Foxes heard by dozens. And in that, we have a big young adult audience and the most common response we get, especially people who go from maybe high school or college out into the world is, I just don't know enough to vouch Catholics where I live, right? Is that your, do you guys experience that? Raise your hand if you experienced that a little bit. A little bit, you know, whatever, okay. Yeah, and so the sad thing is they say we listen to your podcast and it feels like we're friends, we're all hanging out, you know? And it's like, yeah, we sort of are except I recorded that a week ago at 11 o'clock at night and I don't know who you are. So if you're a fan of Catching Foxes or every niche I'll bow, let's, we gotta take photos. We gotta take photos. How many of y'all saw me on the pints with Aquinas four and a half hour long episode? Handful, okay. So those of you who didn't raise your hands, shame on you. I drank an entire bottle of whiskey from four and a half hours for you, okay? Now I know how our Lord feels. Okay, so this is the worst talk. You should not be recording this, but you imagine some poor parent that buys this for their younger, Sally, you need to watch this video and they're just like, I don't know what he was talking about, what it was in Jesus. We will get there. So what we do want to talk about is this understanding of, right, the talk, modern mentalities. I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious, right? Have you heard people ever say that? Yeah, I mean, you're probably on Twitter, right? If you're on Twitter or whatever Twitter variant that exists now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the things, all the Macedon or whatever it's called. So the understanding of this, we're gonna get into, but before I do, I have my public service announcement. So I don't know most of you. I know you, but I don't know most of you and thank God. But the idea is, I don't know where you are in your faith, but I have something that I think will help. And it's actually a thing that I think is the remedy to all of the problems in the Catholic Church today. It can't solve all of the problems, but it probably could come closest than all the other stupid solutions I've ever heard. And that's it. Do you read the four gospels? That's what I want you to do. For the rest of your life, I teach people to do this. You start with Mark. Mark is the shortest of the four gospels. It has the word immediately, every five sentences, which apparently back in ancient Roman times is like the equivalent of a lens flare in a J.J. Abrams movie like, oh, it's shocking, an action fact. So Mark skips over the infancy narratives. He starts with John the Baptist preaching, goes right into the words of Jesus, and then you're off. 16 chapters later, you got the resurrection, you got the sending of the apostles. So here's my recommendation. If you don't have a consistent prayer life, okay, raise your hand if you have a consistent prayer, just kidding. Who wants to share your mortal sin? No, but if you don't have a consistent prayer life, this is what I tell Catholics to do all the time. Some people will give advice, and I actually had someone interrupt me when I was in the middle of doing this, it was somewhat funny, but he gave the exact opposite advice that I give. Sometimes people will say, if you don't pray, maybe start off with like five minutes. Five minutes, if you can give God five minutes a day, then you're gonna, I don't tell people to do that at all. A commercial break is fine, but it's not long enough, right? If you love someone, imagine if they only gave you five minutes a day, you would probably stop loving them. So the goal is you wanna carve out enough time. It has to shape, it has to change your calendar. Father Mike Schmitz, he's a friend of mine, I don't know if you've ever heard of him, he's so dang handsome, but we text each other, it's fine, don't worry about it, but he was saying, he has this great line where he says, don't say you love me, show it in your calendar, right? You have to show it in your calendar. Your life has to be different if you actually are bringing me into your life, right? It has to change the way you see things, right? So for me and my wife, this is how I show my love for her. Okay, first I play some Michael Bolton, just kidding. No, so I wake up at about 5.45, I go downstairs. Have you guys ever had froth the milk in your coffee? Okay, I never have. Until my wife brought home a milk frother, I rolled my eyes and then I tasted the face of heaven, right, it is the most incredible thing. So I wake up early, I make her favorite type of froth cream and then I make two cups of coffee, then I go and I sit down, I open up the Bible and I read the Bible for like about a half an hour to an hour and all I'm doing is just observing what's going on in the Gospels. See, sometimes people wanna rush, they wanna get to the Bible and we're like, I want Jesus to tell me a secret, like there's trying to accomplish so much and all I wanna do is see who Jesus is, right? So I read the Gospels just to see who Jesus is. You know people say this all the time, I hear this all the time, like I just don't think Jesus would do that, like I just don't believe in my heart that Jesus would say or do that. You're like, okay, your heart, great, fine. I think maybe Jesus looks too much like your heart, then your heart looks like Jesus's because Jesus says, if you love me, keep my commandments. Right, he says things, he makes demands on us. He's not just some hippie that's just like, yeah, you're okay, I'm okay, I don't even care, right? That's not Jesus, he cares about you, he knows you, he loves you, he desires you to live and adopt the pattern of his life into the context of your own life, right? That's what it means to be a Christian, another Christian, right, another Christ, an altar Christus, another Christ, that's what we want. But we don't know, Jesus, have you ever met Christians that are obnoxious jerks besides me? Have you ever met, right, like you meet Christians who are like full of themselves or jerks are rude or self-righteous? Why is a Christian self-righteous? They're self-righteous because at some point in their lives, right? At some point in their lives, they've been a Christian for so long that they believe that they save themselves. Now they'll never say that, but that's like implicitly in the back of their head, that's what's really going on. I'm a good person, I pulled myself up on my own bootstraps, I gave up cocaine, like whatever it is, they feel like, don't laugh, that's my story, but no, it's not, but they say things like that implicitly in their minds, like if I did it, you can do it, you haven't done it, therefore, judgment. But in reality, Jesus Christ is the judge and Jesus Christ is the one who liberates because Jesus Christ alone is the savior, he's the one who justifies. But we want to, that pride in the center of our hearts, we keep wanting to stoke by these projects of self-justification. So I believe that Christians, the most important thing that we can do is to constantly return to the stories of the Gospels so that his life can become our life, right? You might hear some amazing talks by Scott Hahn and Jeff Cavens and Deacon Harold, like these amazing talks, oh my gosh, that was amazing. Mediocre ones by me, but amazing by them. But here's the problem, it's almost like you're reading another couple's love letters, right? You need to get your own image of Christ. You need to get your own impression, all right, you have friends, right? You all, like you have a circle of friends and you all have your own impression of that friend, right? Like when you think of a person, you think of like, oh, this person always does this, never does that, usually does this, doesn't do that. But someone else might have a totally different experience or impression of them. You don't just want my impression of Jesus, my understanding of who Jesus is, and I don't mean subjectively, I mean like as I've encountered him in the Gospels in my life, it's very important to me and the way I share it is very important to me. But you need your own, right? You can't just let, that's the thing of like reading other people's love letters, like Christ is writing you one and you need to write him one, but you need to spend time in the Gospels, okay? That's what you need to do. So I tell people, you know, chapter a day, just mark, it'll take you 16 days to get through the Gospel and mark. When you finish, if you've never read a Gospel from beginning to end, when you finish mark, go back and start mark again. Because then as you reread it for the second time, you'll be like, oh, I didn't notice that, I didn't notice that, I didn't notice that. Oh, hey, where did that come from? I don't remember reading that at all, right? All of these things all of a sudden come out to you and you're like, wow, that's amazing. And then when you finish it, go on to Luke, go on to John, start over at Matthew, go to Mark, Luke, John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and keep doing that until you're dead, okay? Because the idea is you don't need a bunch of words about God. How much greater is God's own words, okay? So I want you to have that, okay? So that's the thing. Number two, let's talk about the topic today. So I hear this all the time. I do youth and young adult ministry all the time. I used to be at a church that, it was funny. I was in charge of young adult ministry. I'm not a young adult. I was in charge of youth ministry, definitely not a youth. And I was also in charge of Spanish ministry. I don't speak Spanish except for no, right? So that's it. That's it. But the reason why they put me in charge of all those things, one, incredibly intelligent, two, I'm a fan of those categories and the people they're in. And I advocate for them and I fight for them and I want to do ministry with them and for them. And so one of the things I realized when I started going across the country and talking with young adults is this tendency that there's a hesitation to give oneself completely over to Christ or to completely over to the church because then it means you become one of those weirdos, right? There's a hesitancy. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be that girl, right? So what I want to tell you is number one, you're probably very prideful, but number two, Christ doesn't want you to be that guy or that girl. Maybe there's something about them that he wants you to imitate, but he wants it to be you to be you guy and you girl. The grammar is terrible, but you get the point. He wants you to be, he didn't make you to be like a Xerox machine where he just wants carbon copies. Holy you, uniquely you, unique and unrepeatably you, that's what he wants. But you, on fire with the love of Christ Jesus, that's what he wants. And so you can look through the example of other people and be like, a little bit of that, but not of that. Okay, but I understand that, but there's so much fear that people have. And so the idea is I don't, if your fear is I don't want to get caught up in this or that or whatever, it's, no, no, no. Christ Jesus knows you and he loves you, right? So let me give you an example. I was at a concert with some middle school friends of mine and it was at a Taylor Swift concert and it was so fun. Cost me six grand and I had front row seats, it was beautiful, this was crazy. And at the end of the concert, we get up to leave, right? Three hours, all the greatest hits, I'm walking out, baby just say yes and I'm crying and I'm going to the exit, I'm going to the gates and I hear her say something, change my life. She said, and to all my, she comes back on stage, we think she's gone to bed, right? She's so tired. And she says to all my fans, I love you. Now, I don't know about you, but I mean, clearly, I didn't choose Chastity, Chastity chose me. I'm like a, right, this cave troll homeschooler, right? And to have one of the most beautiful talented women in the world tell me that she's in love with me. Like, I didn't know what to do, I called my wife. I was like, honey, I've never been in a love triangle before. I don't know what to do, do we get a lawyer? Like, what's the thing? And the difficulty with this, right, she loves me, she loves me. No, okay, I know that Taylor Swift doesn't love me, right? I know she doesn't love me, because she doesn't know me. You can only love someone if you know them. What she thinks of me, she thinks of my ticket price, which is like 11 more minutes on a super yacht in the Mediterranean, right? That's all, or cake by the ocean, what have you? And that's all she thinks of when she thinks of me. She doesn't know me, right? So it's absurd for me to be like, girl, honey, I'm in a love triangle, right? And she's like, you're not even in a love plane. Or line, I get, Ray, I don't know, I don't know math. The idea is this, right? You can be known, you can be loved. Many of us, right, the Taylor Swift thing is to be loved but not known, right? To be loved but not known. If you are loved but not known, that is superficial. That's weak, you can't build a life on being loved but not known, right? We all know this. But what about the opposite? All right, you ever think about the opposite? What if someone says to you, I know you? No, no, no, no, I know the real you. No one could ever love you. That is our greatest nightmare. To have a parent say that, to have a love interest say that, a crush say that, a spouse say that, that's terrible. No one could ever love you. So what do we do? We're so terrified of that nightmare becoming a reality. We let the pendulum switch the other way and we become comfortable with being loved but not really known. And so we act fake. We put on airs, we posture, right? We use every filter in the book. There's like three filters on me right now, right? So we do this because we're so, enough with the self-deprecating humor. We do this because we're afraid of the alternative but this is the deal. Jesus Christ knows you. He knows the real you. He knows the real you that even you are trying to hide from. He knows what you did last summer. He knows what you did on spring break. Jesus knows the real you and he loves you all the way to the stars. In fact, this is what the whole point of the, not the whole point, but the main point of the woman from Samaria, right? She sits there and then she basically lies. I don't have a husband. And he says, you're right in saying you don't have a husband. You have five husbands and the one you're with now is not your husband. He revealed to her, she thought, I have to hide the truth because finally a human person is treating me with dignity. And if he finds out the truth about my sexual past or whatever it might be, if he finds out the truth about me, he's then gonna treat me like everyone else. That's why I'm in the middle of the desert getting water from a well at noon, right? That's the whole idea. And then Jesus says, you're right in saying, go and get your husband. It's so disjointed. It comes out of nowhere when he says it. And it's because that's the point of the story. The point of the story is for Jesus to reveal to this woman, I've known you the whole time. Then she's like, oh my gosh, he knows me. He knows this truth. But wait, if he's known this whole time and he's treated me with this respect, maybe there's something different about him. And then the argument, the conversation goes a completely different turn. And then when she goes to the town, so the very people that she was avoiding, you know what she says? Come and meet a man who told me all that I've ever done. Could this be the Messiah? Could this be the prophet? And it's fascinating because this is what Jesus reveals. I know you, I know the real you. I am closer to you than you are to yourself, right? How many of y'all are in sales, right? Do you ever work in sales, handful every three, four, five, six? Every hand should be up if you've ever bought something you shouldn't have purchased, because you sold that crap to your sales, right? You ever do that? It's funny, when I talked to like 40 and 50 year olds are like, I bought a boat. I never should have bought a boat. I convinced myself I needed a boat. And you're like, there you go. The suburban, what do you call it? Buyers or remorse, right there, right? So in this context, right? We tell ourselves stories that even we know aren't true and we believe them. So what Jesus wants to do is he wants to cut through all of that, and he wants to reveal to you, to yourself. This is the heart of the Catholic Christian faith. Jesus has arranged everything that we can shed the lies of a false and half-lived life so that we can encounter him in his saving truth. So when someone says, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious, there are wonderful ways that we can approach this. Number one, and whenever I do my work of evangelization, the last thing I do is say what Daniel Tosh, the comedian, but he's so funny. I mean, no, I don't endorse his humor. What he said in one of his first comedy albums, he said, I had a woman come up to me the other day and she's like, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. And he said, really? Well, I don't tell the truth and you're interesting. So you don't want to lead with offending people because that's the impulse of people who think they have it all made, right? People think, I got the truth and I'm up here in some mountain top and I'm coming down to you peasants and I'm gonna correct your way of thinking with some good theology, right? That's not how we interact with real human beings. When someone says, well, I'm not really religious, but I'm spiritual, I'm spiritual. He's like, okay, great, how are you spiritual? Right, the beautiful thing that human beings want is to be known and yet when people like us filled with self-righteousness because we're the savior, come to encounter people who differ from us. What do we do? We don't lead with questions. We lead with statements that are already based upon conclusions. We slap labels instead of hearing a story. And so brothers and sisters, I don't know your backgrounds in theology and all that stuff, but I'm telling you, if you want to make someone happy, if you wanna grow in your own faith, you gotta learn how to give it away. JP2 said, the faith only grows in the measure that it's given. And so going out to people who say, I'm spiritual, but not religious, engage in empathy. Why would someone say that? Well, I don't know. Have you watched the news about religion lately? Not a good track record. Not a good track record lately, right? Like we'll turn now to half-hearted Roman Catholics who deny every single thing they believe and believe that the church, only 30% believe the church teaches the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. And it's like, okay, well, let's go to a place where 100% of the people do. Oh, you hate everyone else in the church. We're gonna have wars between conservatives and trads and liberals and social justice people and it's war all the time. So it's like, all right, we're gonna leave this religious enclave here. Like when you look at religion today in all of its stripes, we are disintegrating. My confirmation sponsor just pled guilty to horrible crimes, horrible. Like when I tell people what happened and then I say, this is the type of stuff he had on his laptop. It's one of those things that's so revolting. There's no, and he pled guilty. And so when I hear it, there's so much brokenness in the life of the church. Can we not be a little empathetic when people are like, yeah, that's not for me? So that's one thing. That is definitely an approach to build sympathy. The other thing is to realize, they also say, but I am spiritual. Now, when people say, but I am spiritual, that can have a whole, it can have a boatload of connotations. It might mean that they're Christ haunted, right? There's a famous line from a guy who said, I don't believe in God, but I miss him, right? The former Christian artists, you know, these are the lines that they say when they deconstruct their discipleship. I don't believe in God anymore, but I miss him. I miss that part of my life. So we can work with that. When people say I'm spiritual, they're saying, you know what? All of the beautiful things in this material universe, I don't think a scientific materialistic understanding of the world as it is is enough for the human heart or is enough for the human mind. There has to be something other than just whirling bits of atoms colliding into one another, right? There has to be something more. I'm not religious. I don't know if I'm ready to yoke myself to a system or to an institution, but you know what? There's gotta be something more than just this, than just survival of the fittest. And so when you hear this stuff, these are the things that I think as Catholics sometimes would get so dismissive, oh, you're not a card-carrying member of the Roman Catholic Church, then dismiss away with you, right? Silliness, especially at an apologetics conference where the whole thing of apologetics is first beat of chapter three, verse 16, do so with gentleness and reverence. How are we reverencing the other person? How are we respecting the other person when we dismiss the very words that come out of their mouth, right? See, this talk started off all funny, and now I'm guilt-tripping the heck out of you. Okay, let's drink. It takes the pain away. So then how do we approach this thing? Well, we approach it in the independent reality of every human being that we encounter who says the words. There's no one-size-fits-all approach. When people say I'm not spiritual, but I'm spiritual, but I'm religious, sometimes that might mean that they practice goat yoga on the weekends. Have you ever heard of goat yoga? Yes, you've done goat yoga. There's so much judgment going through my head right now. I'm just gonna suppress it. My really close friend, his sister, does goat yoga, and I was like, come here, come here, come here. Just explain goat yoga to me. It's like, well, you do yoga outside. It's very beautiful weather. And these miniature goats climb all over you, and they jump all over you. It's really cute. They're very fluffy. And she's like, and for my sister, they took a big bite out of her hair. So, okay. When we talk about this stuff, some people mean I'm spiritual, just means I'm not willing to define myself by just the things I do during the day, like the nine to five, the jobby job, whatever. But for other people, it might mean something darker. So this is a part of my ministry that I don't like. But I have found that when I work in these areas, the conversion experiences are a lot more powerful. When people are involved in a cult witchcraft and satanic activity, there's a lot more people than you think that are heavily involved in this stuff. So I go to a maximum security men's unit prison in Texas. And when I first, it was actually a really funny story. I tried to back out of it and I didn't wanna go, so I tried to do that millennial thing where I'm like, I mean, I got food poisoning, I can't go, right? Like, no, I don't feel good, right? And he's like, no, don't worry, brother, you'll love it. So I end up going. And I roll up at, we're supposed to get to the gate at 5.30, we go inside at six. And I roll up at 5.35, because fashion will be late. And I walk in and the guys there, and all the men are there, we're all dressed up in our matching t-shirts so we don't get shot. And so we're all there and we're gathering, he holds me a card, he hands me a card. The card is a deliverance prayer. And it was like, you know, to buying the powers of Satan and the forces of darkness. And it's like the most intense deliverance prayer I have ever read. And because I went to France, I was gonna hang out in charismatic circles and plenty of that stuff. And I go, and I look at him and I go, what's this for? And he goes, oh, the Satanists found out that we're coming and they've been cursing us for the last week or so. And all I remember, this is the first thought that ran through my head. I just went, oh my, do not tell my wife. Do not, she will never let me come here again. And so we sit there and I'm praying this thing and you go into the thing, and it's really funny because it was six o'clock in the morning, we're finally walking in. And I look at this red sign, I've been staring at this red sign for 15 minutes. And the sign said, warning, no hostages will be permitted past this point. Thank you, Texas Department of Criminal Justice. And I remember staring at the sign being like, why would someone take a hostage from outside and bring him inside? That doesn't make any sense. And as soon as I pass under it, I realize, oh, wait a minute. They mean that because I'm freely deciding to enter into the general population of the prison, if, oh, I don't know, there's a riot and they look for a human shield, why not the fluffy homeschooler? They're gonna get ya. And he's like, yeah, yeah, you're gonna be a hostage. And they're gonna try to trade you for seven pizzas and a helicopter. And they're just gonna say, no, they've been warned. It was on a sign that they walked under when they walked in. And I'm walking through that, and I just thought, oh, I hope my wife does not find out about that one. So we go in, we go down General Pop, go down the hallway, get into the chapel. And it was the most incredible experience of my life, the most incredible experience. But I meet this guy, he kept coming up to me, he was like, you know, I like you Catholics, I like you Catholics, you know? You got your rituals, we got our rituals. You got your high power, I got my high power. And I'm like, we speak in sort of vague terms. I'm like, what's your high power? Like what are you, what, what rituals? And he's like, well, I'm a Wiccan. And I know you guys think we're so evil, but we're not, we just do our little ceremonies, it's fine. And so we start having a conversation. I started leaning into the guy, right? Like, come on, like, we're talking about blah, blah, blah. And we start going, oh, you Catholics, you're always attacking all of us Wiccans just because we're pagan. I'm a neo-pagan, I love how you would always say that. You had the funniest accent. We're neo-pagan. And God, he's such a good dude. I miss him so much. So we started, and I realized, I'm getting nowhere with this guy. We're just arguing, right? And he had perked up at one point when I had mentioned, I said, Nintendo reset button. He goes, what are you doing? Is Preacher Man here, play video games? I was like, yeah, I owned a Nintendo and a Sega Genesis growing up. And I got an Xbox and stuff. And he's like, you play video games? I haven't played video games since I got in here. What video game system? Last thing I owned was a Sega Saturn. And so we started talking about video games. I'm like, nope, I'm not talking about Wiccanism or Catholicism. We're talking about video games. We talked about video games for 45 minutes. You know what that did? I got to know him as a human person. And he had slapped a label on me. Incredibly handsome, that might mean. Preacher Man, that's all I was. I was a preacher man. See, some people say like, oh, that's easy for you to say, you work for the church, you do this stuff. No, no, no, you don't understand. No one on the street corner wants to hear a talk. No one wants to hear from church guy. They want to hear from you as a co-worker, as a friend, as a whatever. No one wants to hear from preacher man, right? So I got to earn all of this credibility, right? Now I might have opportunities more than anyone else, but no one wants to hear from me. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, let's just talk about video games. We talked about video games forever. We talked about Super Mario Brothers for like an obscenely long time. A raccoon hat, tail, you're flying, it's beautiful. And we go through all this stuff, right? The next day he comes up and he's like, hey, hey, hey, did you get to go home and play video games with your kids? I was like, actually, yeah, I did. I was thinking about our conversation. I went home and I played some video games. I played some Halo with my son. He killed me, just another bad head shot to hate him. And so we were talking about this stuff and he was like, that was it. And he goes, yeah, you know, I miss my kids so much. He's like, I got two kids, am I either with my mother and I never get to do anything, you know, never get to, I rarely get to talk to them because when I call, you know, they're usually at school or busy. And then you get the sad stories and then you get the heart. And then he's listening the whole time to the retreat that we're on and the Catholic things that we're doing. He would pull me inside and he was like, all right, all right, all right. What is wrong with Wiccanism? Right, so at this moment, he lived this life where yes, he had a religion, but Wiccanism is a religion in the most like stretched sense of the term. It's a spirituality, but it's a spirituality that is unfolded in on itself. It's a darkness, right? It's usually, the main reason why you become Wiccan usually revolves around sex and stuff like that. And so, and that was it. That was the gateway drug for him. It was drugs and sex and cobbin and all this stuff. And it owned his life. And so as we begin talking, he begins to realize that he can have a different life. See, that's the problem for a lot of people is they think that they're losing life in following Christ because most of us live a very boring life when we start to follow Christ. We just don't do mortal sin anymore. Jesus Christ in John 10, 10 said, I come that you might have life and have it to the full or have it abundantly. But we still live these tiny little suburban dreams that's carefully measured nothings. Like I was giving this talk to these men. I was like, Holy Spirit, come change my life. You can do anything in my heart. As long as I just in this box, like I want to keep my six-figure salary. I want to live in my fancy big house in the suburbs. It's like to have your way, Lord, have your way. But really just only in this six-by-six inch diameter, like, come on. I was like, you want the Holy Spirit to move. You want God to work miracles, but you give him an inch when he desires miles from you. And not to hurt you, but to give you life and to show you what life is actually meant to be for. But because we give God measured doses of our own heart, we don't give him room enough to move in there, right? So this is what I see when I go to prison. I see men where the world has stripped almost everything away. And they've given themselves over to the dark powers. They really have. Whether it's cynicism, anxiety, depression, you know, I met plenty of guys who were like, I entered here at 17 years old and I will leave at 50. My life is over. And so I have to remind them that Jesus Christ can liberate captives even when they still remain behind bars. That their life is not over. It's not on pause. It hasn't ended. That their life has taken on a new missionary territory. To turn the walls of the Ferguson unit into a monastery. They always laugh at that. They think that's the most preposterous thing ever. I'm like, yeah, but just get 10 of you to pray together and see what happens. So another story, another prison story, because those are fun. I had gone to the bathroom, like a boss, and I'm coming out of the bathroom, which is in the back of the place. And I'm walking in, there's this big dude right next to me, right, sitting at the tables and people are doing group sharing. This guy stands up. Now this guy is one of the most hardcore dudes in prison, okay? Head to toe tattoos, ultra violent, and he's the high priest of his pagan, there's all these different branches of paganism in the prison. And he has a nickname. Now in prison, you get a prison nickname. The guards call you inmate, the judge might call you by your name, last name first, first name last, but the prisoners, the fellow inmates, they call you by your nickname for the most part. And he had a nickname that he did not want to be taken away from him. And I can't say his name because this is being recorded. I can never speak his name out loud because people are trying to kill him because he converted and he left that pagan fate. But he had a nickname and they tried to give him a prison nickname and he would get in fights and he would lose, he's a short little guy. He would lose these fights. He's ultra violent, do whatever, take a gouch people's eyes out, all this stuff. But he's like, you never call me by another name other than this. And he had said, since he was like seven years old, he's gone by this other name, right? So he's there and he would get up and he would give his little, you know, your loudest chair, little table chair in. And he would get up and he'd be like, you know, I got my gods, you got your gods, like we all love, you know, I love this, you love that. And he would always be like careful and he would say nice, affirming things about the speaker, but he constantly was asserting his polytheistic view. And then I'm standing there, I just come out of the bathroom, sit next to this guy. And it was as if this guy was speaking to the Holy Spirit right into this man's heart. And I watched an instantaneous conversion, instantaneous. Like some of us are like, I don't know if Jesus exists, I don't know if this Catholic thing is real, I don't know if the Eucharist is really Jesus. This guy went from the high priest of a pagan religion where he did horrible things. He was an Aryan brother, right? The Aryan brotherhood, violent white supremacist gang, all of that stuff to an instantaneous conversion to Christianity, to Catholicism, because Catholic confirmed all that stuff. He sits there, this is how it happened. He was like, listen, like, you know, you guys got your, you know, or he was saying something about God and he was like, yeah, you know, like God, you know, like you gotta love him. And then he stopped and he goes, oh, that's funny. I said God instead of God's. Oh my gosh, this is real. And he, right then, right in a single moment, his whole life changed. And the guy next to me goes, yeah, you praise his name. And this dude, so in a room bigger than this, you're at two corners of the room. That guy didn't hear that. I mean, there's like 65, there's like 100 guys in the room. It's like, yeah, it was about 70 guys in the room. And you can't, he can't hear. There's all the murmur and all the talking and stuff. And he goes, oh my gosh, this is real. This is real. And he goes, yeah, you praise his name. And he goes, the Lord Jesus Christ is real. He is the Savior. He's the eternal Son of God. Oh my goodness, this is real. This is real. I mean, the guy, he's like, yeah, yeah, keep going, keep going. Right? And this guy keeps going. And he's like that. And then he goes, tell him your name. Tell him your name. And the guy stops and he goes, my name is not, and he says his nickname. And then he says his full name, first, middle, and last. My name is, and he gets a little scared. And then he says it. And he goes, haven't said that name in 20 years. My name is, and he says it again. And the whole place stands up cheering for him. And we all start chanting his name. And he stands up on a chair. And he's like, Jesus Christ is Lord. God is real. God the Father is, and he starts preaching. And we're all crying. This guy's like, yeah, yeah. Right? We're all in it. It was the most incredible moment of my life to see the Holy Spirit work simultaneously. But it was because we were willing to invest in a person and not a project. We were there, we were gonna feed him. We were gonna talk to him. We were gonna treat him like a human being regardless of whether or not he converted. Because the problem that we do is we accept labels in the place of a story. We slap him on person so it's easy to dismiss. And what Jesus Christ wants to do in our hearts and in our lives is he wants to work beyond that. So when someone tells you, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual, they're navigating the complicated world of what they truly believe and who they truly are, what their identity is in the cosmos with labels. Sometimes it's an easy way out. As the guy that plays Dwight Trute from the office, he posted on Twitter one time, people who say I'm spiritual but not religious are just lazy, so that was funny. But some people are. Some people don't wanna go through the habit of investing, but they also don't wanna say that they don't believe in anything. They're not saying I'm a stone cold atheist. Some people like Sam Harris, who's a notorious atheist who wrote a book on how to be spiritual without God or without religion. He wrote a whole book on that. They're trying to discover the depths of the human heart, the depths that literature and philosophy and theology and poetry reach, but that the sciences can't. And in a culture that deifies science, all of a sudden there's a whole group of people who are like, eh, this isn't enough to describe my love for my spouse. This relationship, like biochemical reactions is not enough to describe how I love my child. That's not enough. Yeah, you might talk about oxytocin, I'm gonna say oxytocin, oxytocin all day long. You can talk about it if you want afterwards. But no, you can talk about this all day long, but it doesn't do enough to describe how I would give my life for my child. And so they are searching, but the other problem is, this is where it becomes deeply problematic, is when it's rooted in our pride, we just don't wanna be told what to do. And the conformity to a religion means I'm saying there's something outside of myself that perhaps could be a judge of myself. And I don't want to be judged, I don't want to live in the shadow between the ideal and the real. And so I'm gonna dismiss the ideal from really existing and I'm gonna invent from the ground up my own spirituality, my own view of the cosmos and the world. Rather than received or discovered purpose, we invent. And the crazy thing is we know this to be true, that discovered meaning gives you an identity that is so solid that not even suffering can take it away. But invented meaning is so vapid that once suffering, not if, but when suffering comes and visits you, it robs you of even your sense of purpose and meaning in life. And when you have no purpose or meaning in life, you're prone to despair. Okay, so when I talk with people who say I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious, I ask them 10,000 questions because they might have the most beautiful answers I've ever heard. But the reality is Christianity is a religion. Catholicism is a religion. What is a religion? The word in Latin means literally to bind together. It means you're not in this alone. We are bound together. Religion is supposed to not be a private affair, me and Jesus, I'm doing this spiritual thing on my own. I got my crystals and my horoscopes and that's all I need, right? That's it, I'm just this me and I'm just like, wow, here, cancer, I can't date you. I'm sorry, right? We have this ridiculous mentality, right? But this is the thing is people want something more, but they also don't want, obviously, because of the headlines, but they also don't want some external authority being imposed or constraining them. And so what we need to do is understand that religion before it is ever an institution is primarily a virtue. Did you know that? It's the virtue whereby I give to God what is his do, namely honor, worship, and homage. So if religion is not primarily an institution, then for those people, that becomes the bridge to faith and Christ Jesus because it starts with a relationship. Okay, it's one thing to say, I'm spiritual, it's another thing to say, I have a relationship with the God of the universe who knows me and loves me and desires me to know and love him. And that's what we want for God's people for his children, no matter how far off or near they are to the church. We wanna bring them by baby steps ever closer. You might not be the person who brings them into the church, but you might be the person who got them looking towards it. Let that be enough, amen? Also, you get to love them. Have you met people? People are terribly wonderful, right? Have you, like the people in this room, you get to know a whole other world by meeting people. I just, I just, I constantly sit in front of the majesty of the Amago Dei, the image of God and other people, and I'm like, what? Why aren't more people extroverts, right? There's gold in these faces here, right? It's so wonderful that we get to be able to share this life together. JP2 has this great line in his jeweler shop, which is a play about marriage, where he says, he was talking about his love for the woman who became his wife, and he says, one thinks of those times of the alter ego of another self, but people are whole worlds under themselves, separated by space, like other planets. And he says, but there's something about love that makes one think of throwing a bridge to that other world. And that's why Christ didn't ask you to feel like you love your neighbor. He commanded it. Let's pray. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Jesus, you are the word incarnate. You had people that loved you, that hated you, that frustrated you, that annoyed you, and you loved them all the same. Jesus, you rose and died for us, even when we do this to you. So be with us now, Lord God, as we seek to be your missionary disciples. Jesus, I trust in you, and in your name we pray. Amen.