 It's been a long long day. I got a lot to say. It feels like I'm carrying a two-ton weight. I go to see my friend. Hello, I'm Monsignor Patrick Winslow. And I am Father Matthew Cout. And we are speaking from the Rooftop. A podcast brought to you by Tan Books, in which we invite you to join our conversation out here in the open air. Where we look out upon the world around us from the rooftop of the church and share with you what we see. Well, hello there. Well, hello. How are you? I'm fine. How are you? Excellent. Doing quite well. Oh, I'm glad to see that. So, you obviously have nothing to talk about. I thought your sentence was incomplete and you're trying to get your mind to work, which is like starting one of those old Ford cars. You know, you have to go outside and crank it up, but that's what he's doing. He's trying a little smoke and sputtering coming out of the ears. I thought it'd be fun to have a little moment of awkward size. What happens when the unique circumstance, when neither you or I have something to say. Oh, we have plenty of seconds. Yeah, it's about two to three seconds. All right, so let's kind of jump into a deeper, at least deeper thought for me. It's reflecting on the glorious mysteries, okay? Okay. So, sometime during Holy Week, I think, or leading up to Holy Week, I was reading, I believe it was Ratzinger, but it may have been another theologian along the same lines, where he was speaking about the impact of the Paschal mystery in our lives and the bringing about of the kingdom of God, and that at the time of our Lord, and all leading, and all history leading up to it with respect to the Jews in the anticipation of a Messiah, that there was a sense of the kingdom being in line with history, that there was the history of the Jewish people, the promises made through Abraham, and then subsequently the other covenants, David, then arriving at the time of Christ, an expectation was that this kingdom would be inaugurated within time, within history, and it was going to be sequential, right, so you move through the past and you arrive to the kingdom in history. And he was making the point how totally unprepared the faithful of that time were to deal with God's plan of revealing a kingdom that was not going to be realized as a period of history, but rather a kingdom that was going to, to, in a certain sense, be realized above history in eternity, and it would be experienced by the faithful in history, but not be a chapter of history. You're following me? I do. It has a historical point, but it transcends that historical point, and then also has an eternal character. Exactly, and that is eternal, and it's toward which, just so you know, the Great Danes are at it again. So Lupo's snoring. Well, he's being put to sleep by you, but he's not up for this. Okay, so I haven't even got to the rosary yet, but just, we're almost at it. We're almost, are we at the end of our time? So, okay, so this whole idea that we're not talking about the Messiah coming and inaugurating a kingdom that would be a chapter, sort of a concluding chapter of history, but rather what is being revealed to us in and through Christ is the ultimate eternal chapter of the kingdom of God that breaks in through his passion, death, and resurrection, and becomes accessible to every moment of history thereafter. Meanwhile, history marches on. And in some sense before. And in some sense before, precisely, because we're dealing with the eternal. Abraham enjoys to see my day. Exactly, exactly. So there is that sense of turning their eyes to the kingdom in a different direction above them, but yet imminently present, right? We talk about the eschatological tension, and we talk about the delay of the Pharisee and all these other terms. Now it's me who needs to translate. Eschatological tension. I'm sure that those are household words you guys banter about at the dinner table. Eschaton just means the end, the end things, the tension between the time that is now and the fulfillment of time. And then the parisia is another fancy term. It is a fancy term, which means the coming of Christ, the second coming is return. So, yes. But the kingdom is now, but not fully present, right? Now, but not yet, right? That sense that even though time marches on and we're in time, the kingdom is present in time, insofar as the kingdom is realized within the lives of the faithful here and now, and is fully realized ultimately in eternity. So praying and reflecting upon, you can correct anything that you might need to be corrected there, but... I'm making a list. I know. It's so hard to speak very plainly without getting into jargon. Yeah, I know. So let me kind of get back to my thought. So reflecting upon the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, in particular, I was reflecting upon the resurrection and the ascension of our Lord, then subsequently the descent of the Holy Spirit. There is that our Lord rises and takes his place at the right hand of the Father and ascends. So the first two glorious mysteries. And then the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And then I'm seeing a current, right? I'm seeing the Messiah leading to the fullness of the kingdom and taking his place at the right hand of the Father and then sending the Spirit down upon the church. And it's creating this exchange, this access to the fullness of the kingdom here and now in and through the ascension of our Lord and the descent of the Holy Spirit. And then, reflecting upon the blessed Virgin Mary and her assumption into heaven, that she's caught up into that current and following her son, body and soul, into the fullness of the kingdom. And there, as she is receiving her crown as the Queen Mother of our Lord, that that crown, by inference anyway, seems to be a return back to the faithful here below, if you will, in much the same way that you might see in the descent of the Holy Spirit. I mean that analogously, where of course there's some similarity, but obviously a lot of dissimilarity. But the similarity being that her crown, her queen ship, is used to do good for the faithful. That there is that sense of she follows our Lord to the fullness of the kingdom. That kingdom is made accessible and found in unique ways by the descent of the Holy Spirit. The whole sacraments are affected in through that fall onto the Holy Spirit. Then you have the blessed Virgin Mary following upward, but then by virtue of her queen ship imparting as an instrument of grace her benevolence and her motherly care and attention to us below. All right, go ahead, pick apart the necessary theological distinctions that we need to. No, no, I think that the first thing I would say is that we have that passage in the third chapter of John where Christ tells Nicodemus that we have to be born from above. And it's one of those fun Greek words with community one to highlight the fact that Nicodemus is thinking earthly thoughts and our Lord is not. And that gets to that notion of when we build a church, for example, or when we think about heaven, we think about it being up. And this is a Retzinger point in one of his books that says, well, how else do you depict it? Because we're spatial creatures. And so you think about up. And so you have to have something higher than you. But the fact that it's higher or that we worship on mountains or we think about clouds and rainbows and things in the sun and the heavens, etc. So much so that the word in most languages for the heavens is the same, right, is just the sky. That what is depicted in us spatially and what we feel bodily is, in some sense, a metaphor for a higher kind of realm, a higher kind of life, a higher kind of kingdom that has its foothold here in this world, not just in souls, but in a collective matter relative to the church, right? The church is that kingdom so much so that when Christ describes the kingdom, oftentimes in Matthew's gospel, he's talking about it clearly as something here. At the end of when the kingdom comes to its fulfillment, then we will separate these fish from those fish, the sheep from the goats. Right, now we're talking about the second coming. And so we've got this place that the kingdom is here. It's got its foothold here, but it doesn't rain the same way as Christ said to Pilate, right? My kingdom is none of this world. And yet in and through the church, as you say, you have this incredible rain. And as I think rightly so, if Christ, if I understand what you're saying, if Christ gains the victory, he says he's going to send us his spirit. He tells Mary Magdalene, you cannot cling to me in this fashion. I'm not yet ascended to my father. It's better for you if I go because if I go, I will send you the spirit. So somehow his removal from our senses allows us to participate. And I think we talked about last time in his divine life, in his life, in his real life that we can have inside of us, which makes us members of his household, members of his kingdom. But we're still here. And we are still participating in that kingdom. In that kingdom. And so when you go to a church, for example, the reason they're supposed to look like that kingdom is because that's what you're doing there. You're participating in something that's celestial. And so with her assumption and crowning, absolutely, I think that makes perfect sense relative to she who is the spouse of the Holy Spirit, because all of her queamy activity regards the church that's here. Who else is she ruling? Right. And it is not ruling for what other end than our own benefit. Yeah. Yeah. And it just did that sense of current upward and then returning. Yeah. And that our Lady would follow in the same pattern. And just to consider so many graces that she and the divine plan is permitted to intercede on behalf of others and distribute. It's just an extraordinary thing. But it gave me a new appreciation for the coronation, the blessed infringement, the clean chip, because so often it's easy to kind of reflect on that mystery and think, oh, well, she's taking her rightful place in the kingdom of heaven. She got her prize. Right. And that's a sign for us that we're going to get ours as well, in the sense that we follow in that pattern. But it's not. I mean, nothing of her seems to be self-referential. Well, I mean, that's that's clearly the case. You know, nothing about her is self-referential. That's one of the things I just marvel at with the enunciation and the visitation mysteries, just to expand this a little bit, is that our Lady can say things that would be absolutely audacious for anyone else to say, but she can only say it because she's she can refer to herself as his work, not as something that she has accomplished. And that's perfectly true. And yet she can rejoice in it and even give praise to him for it. So you can she can say something like, you know, imagine if you walked in the room and you said, Eche. Right. Hold. Exactly. I think I think we'd get a chuckle out of that. Of course. But she can say to the angel, behold, yeah, look at me. I am the handmaid of the Lord. I just am. That's what he has made me to be. And then furthermore, in the Magnificat, it's it's almost as if she's standing next to Elizabeth, shoulder to shoulder, looking at herself over across the way. Like it's amazing. Look at that. My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior, because he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. And from this day, all generations will call me blessed. What a thing to say. Right. But everything because of what he's done. So you say it's not self-referential and nor are her nor is her crowning something. Self-agulation or a prize that she's walking around in this adornment and she's pleased with just the adornment. Right. Right. And yet at the same time, this reciprocal action takes place because I work at a seminary, right? So one of the things that I notice with the men as they discern their vocation, and I think it's kind of a hallmark of any vocation is the moment they develop a real tender and filial devotion for our Lady. You really don't. I've never seen a vocation without it. I've seen guys struggle in the beginning with that kind of thing, but at some point it just sort of clicks in. And it's that sort of chivalrous thing that's so deep in the heart of men that that I want to have a woman that I can offer my life for and to serve. And it takes it out of the realm of just the married state, not that that's not glorious, but it's done in such a particular way and it comes with all the particular difficulties that that has. And so that old idea of a knight who maintains his chastity and gives himself over to the service of a queen, all that stuff is still deeply embedded into the piety of the church. When a young man says, I'm going to take all of my powers, summon them up in a virtue of chastity, and offer them for the service of the church. And that takes deep expression in the desire to crown our Lady. It takes deep expression is added just to do something for. I remember when we were at seminary, we had that beautiful statue that you and I both love. And there was a seminarian who we didn't, how shall I say this? We didn't really get along too well. You and I did not care for this individual too much. There's so many, I can't remember which one. It was a bit of a conflict. Yeah, I can imagine. And it was such an ideological time. It was fractured. There were so many parts. And we're all immature and blah, blah, blah. But the point was is that we didn't ever see any piety in this guy or any breathfulness or anything else. And then we're walking outside one day, and you and I and a couple of our friends, we saw him putting a crown of flowers on our Lady statue. And I remember one of us said, well, that's about all it's going to take probably for him to get into because we could all recognize if he's doing something like there's some kind of seed in him. And so the reason I bring it up is because there is this sort of like she uses her queenship to serve her children as a mother does. That's why Tres says she's more mother than queen. And yet we use her service to bring her back flowers or something, to bring her back something by which we can say, I want to make you beautiful too. I want to clothe you in this beautiful as just as our Lord did. And that's where I kind of my mind went in this decade of the rosary. That's pretty good decade of the rosary. Oh, well, thanks. Which was thinking about the gems of a crown and what they truly are, not necessarily a gemstone, but rather the reflection of the particular graces for which she has been instrumental so that what's truly brilliant and what's truly shining with with with glory and color are the aid and assistance that she's offered to hear we who are here below to think of the times in my life or to think of the times and other people's lives that I'm aware of, where the intercession of the Virgin Mary has been so critical, so profound, and to think that they're a part of her crown, that they're a gem there. And that those are the things that are that are sparkling. Those are the things that make it a crown like no other. You know, you see it in all of its beauty, but to understand truly at its truly at its core at its very center. Yeah, these are these are actually I don't care about diamonds. Yeah, but they sparkle more than that's her gem, you know, a soul that she they're more beautiful than that one of her children. That's a that's a delightful image. Of course, we we do speak about our Lady as the Queen of the Angels and I love that the Easter Vigil. We have that that reading from Baruch. Like I don't read Baruch right all year long. I never think said maybe at a wedding. I rarely yeah, but I just rarely think to open up the scriptures and read. Yeah, no, I don't know how to go to and I love it. I kind of it's just like Lily that I wait until that moment. Easter to hear it again. It's seasonal. I love the way it describes the stars as they're sent out. And and then he calls to them and they come back to him with joy trembling with joy. It says the stars come almost like persons right. He sends them out and they come back and they're trembling with joy and they say odd sumo's right. We are here and shining before his face. I mean, when I first read that, I thought what an interesting way to to depict the stars and I didn't realize at the time this is when I was living in Italy. And so I heard this thing and a time for the first time that I really really struck me. And of course, they say echo chi here we are when they come back before the Lord and didn't just didn't realize at the time how much allegorically metaphorically the stars were considered, of course, the angels God's army. So they're always depicted as the stars in the sky or those those images of the angels in God's God's grand heavenly host. And so when we talk about her as being the queen of the angels oftentimes you think about the stars around her around her head as 12 stars. But it's also it's also the angels right there. They're her children too in some ways. So I wonder how that works because on some level she had she has no labor. You know, angels are in heaven. Right. They behold the face of God. And yet they'd like to serve her. I wonder what that is like. In other words, how does that queenship work go back and forth to the angels? I mean, clearly we do have the image of Gabriel and she is not she's kind of in charge of the scene. Even as a girl, seeing an angel for the first time, she has this incredible command and sort of queenly bearing to her in that scene. And I just sort of wonder my own prayer life and how much the angels must delight. Right. I mean, can you imagine if an angel appears to you even before the angel speaks? I mean, what sort of dumbfounded reaction we would have. Meanwhile, she just stands there and receives the message. Wondering what this greeting might be. Yeah. As if it's the most normal thing in the world. Right. Could you imagine? And yet there is not an ounce of pride in it. Yeah. Just a complete confidence in the Lord or God. So truly, truly, truly extraordinary. And so, and you know, kind of circling back, we could just reflect a little bit on how we do reflect upon the mysteries of the rosary. You know, I think that, you know, here I am, you know, very inartfully throwing in your direction, just these thoughts that I conceal, congeal together in a certain trend line, like a certain symmetry of our Lord resurrecting, ascending and sending the Holy Spirit. The Virgin Mary, obviously assuming, but intertaking her place in heaven that doesn't end that there is a type of sending back by virtue of her acts of grace that constitute the crown. And so, following in that descent of the Holy Spirit, there is her interaction with us here below. But, you know, reflecting on the mysteries of the rosary, sometimes people might just think, well, I have to only imagine the scene as it took place. So, you're thinking about the resurrection, you're thinking about the women went to the tomb, you're thinking about the tomb rolling back, you're thinking about the angel. Yeah, then you find yourself rather having exhausted your cash of images, right? And so, the idea of going further and deeper into those images and starting to bring in some theological reflection, starting to bring in some personal inquiry, personal piety and affection, but also curiosity and taking that time and using that little decade, which goes by so quickly, is a moment to explore in the reflection, but not just something of having to play a movie in your mind where it just gets on a rote loop. I defer to you to comment, because I think I've actually provided unwittingly a demonstration of the convolution that is my mind, but I pray the mystery of the rosary. So, when you pray the mysteries of the rosary, you're doing the same, are you not? I do. I typically take, it depends on where I am and what I'm doing, frankly. If I'm not in a position where I have been praying and I'm, for example, I'm present before the Blessed Sacrament or something that I can actually engage my mind in a better way, then I typically turn the rosary into my moments for intercession. And so, I will take the different mysteries. I'm not always terribly good at intercession. Like, I love meditation. I love Luxury of Divina. I love thinking and talking to God. I just love it. What I don't like doing is thinking about other people during prayer. I'm not very good at petitionary prayer. And yet it's one of the greatest things we can do for someone in acts of charity. And so, I sort of push myself, I have pushed myself as of the last, however much time, to be more responsible in that vein because sometimes you think that you can sort of knock it out by the virtue of the fact that you say the Divine Office because we're priests do for the faithful. We say the office, we pray seven times a day for the faithful. It's fairly short, some of it. But that's kind of our opus day. It's our work of God for the people and we intercede for you. But I like to do it with the rosary too, which for me brings up sort of a quite getaway, even an intercession from my mind spinning off. If I'm in a particular mystery and I'm offering for a particular person or group of persons, it is interesting how the mystery gets looked at differently because of the persons through my prayer. As Scripture does at any time in your life, when things change in your life, then you begin to see new things. The light is different. And I do the same with distraction. I mean, we all know it's like to be distracted. We have things on our mind, things that are weighing on us, or things that are just new and exciting, but they're in our heads and we can't get out of it. Sometimes it's as simple as thinking about what I'm going to cook that evening and for whatever reason it is locked in the floor of my head and setting it aside is a hard thing to do when I have to pray rosary. What not have to, but want to pray rosary. So what I'll do is if I find that these thoughts keep surfacing, then I'll beg the question, in what way can I incorporate that thing into the the inspection of this mystery? So let's say it's something as silly as, you know, how I'm going to alter my Italian meatballs for the evening to my recipe. I might think, well, okay, you know, pick a mystery, the visitation. I might think, okay, well, Elizabeth would have received our lady, they would have had something to eat. Exactly. What would that have been like? What would they have talked about? You know, just kind of, instead of fighting the wave of distraction, ride the wave of distraction and gear it toward the direction of your meditation. And I find that to be helpful and useful. And you see things in different light and it allows you to explore different things. That's true. I was doing that recently with thinking about the resurrection. Obviously, this is the theme in the Easter season and and trying to keep coming back to that. So typically during Advent, I only pray the joyful mysteries of the resurrection. I don't do the different mysteries every day during the seasons. Lent, I only did the sorrowful. Easter, I only did the glorious. And my purpose in doing that is I just trying to drill down into the ones that were in whose season we are. And so I typically will think about the resurrection, I have to say almost like for all five mysteries. I'll mention, you know, the other ones, I'll mention them, but I kind of keep going back. And so sometimes I feel like a short, shrifted one. I know, exactly. I was just thinking about the rosary recently. We pray the rosary at the seminary on some days. And one of the guys in the seminary, he like always adds two or three Hail Marys to the decades. He's not keeping track? Or I think he always thinks he went too fast or he shortchanged something. And so he always adds one. Now we're up to adding two or three. Oh no. So it's funny because you could feel the room. I throw a flag in the chapel. You feel the room. I'm like, wait a minute. We were done with that decade. We're moving on. Right. And it's not because they're against praying. Don't virtue signal here. Do not make this about you. Flag on the field. But I went back to the resurrection. Again, talking about not just replaying the scene, but a lot of things being incorporated into that. And I was thinking about our Lord's eating with the, since you mentioned eating, eating with the apostles. And then my mind went back to Lazarus and thought to myself, what a strange thing. I mean, you just raised him from the dead, but you didn't raise him to a glorified life. You raised him to his natural life again. And so after they take the bandages off and the stench is gone, he takes a bath. I mean, life goes on. At some point, you got to go back and just have a meal because you've got a real body. And that body has to be nourished. So here we are at table. And despite the fact that we have this incredible scene of the anointing of our Lord and Judas with the money bag and the whole thing, what is all this stuff around that? I mean, if you came back from the dead with a natural life, you just have to go back to living the life you live before, which is not what we're looking for. Right. Like if anyone that died that your friends with that you care about, if they came back, on some level, yes, we'd be after the shock and amazement of the whole thing. We would take up our lives again. And you would be just as mean to me then as you are to me now. Once the shock was over. But you just get back into life, right? I'd be more justified. Yeah. Well, I might have, I might have seen some things that might make me better. All right. So before I go, I got a little exercise that maybe we can do this back and forth. All right. I'm going to give you a mystery of the rosary and a distracting thought. And I want you to very quickly tell me how you would, how you would turn it in the direction of the meditation of that mission. All right. Okay. So let's take, well, we've already done a lot of the glorious. So we'll go to the, we'll take the presentation of Jesus in the temple. Laundry. Laundry. You have to do your laundry later. That's easy. Right. So first of all, what in the world did our Lord wear? I mean, he's an infant, right? So, but you don't wear swaddling clothes at that point necessarily. And so the, the, there's our lady for the first time, this is a mother, right? Very first time that she's going to present her child in the temple. And then in her mind, how, how does she perceive that? How do you, how does, how does she subject the norms of perfection, but subject to the norms, consider how shall I dress my child? All right. So, all right, go ahead. How should, how should I dress? How should I dress? And maybe they didn't have any options. Or you get into the least. I'm pretty sure Joseph didn't think about what he was going to wear. The son of God, the virgin mother, Joseph, they're subject to the, the, the, the legal norms of the law. Absolutely. That's a good, that's a fun one. Yeah. All right. All right. So if it were the descent of the Holy Spirit and the distraction is I forgot to respond to those emails, that email that I had to respond to, without getting into the topic of the email, just dealing with emails. Well, I think I would run with the fact that I have to respond. So I'm receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit, you know, in what way would I have to respond to that? Do I have an, I have an obligation to, to receive and to respond accordingly. In what way would I have to forward that message, you know, to kind of go out with the apostate? Not just to get rid of it and get it off your plate. That's right. But half of emails is just, it really is just bad, it's badminton. It is. And, and not, and then the other part of it might be if, if the distracting thought was, don't forget to go do my email, then I might take it in a different direction. And what do we as a Holy Spirit help me remember things? Do the gift of the Holy Spirit, you know, and enable me to, or is, or am I actually putting onto the Holy Spirit that something that is meant to be managed on natural level that isn't really dovetailed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit or that would take? Well, that's a good question. And you guard an angel and all that, because at some point we, when we remember these things, we, we might think about them as points of stress. They don't have to be, right? I mean, if I'm actually in a mode of the spiritual life and, and living life the spirit, it's not something I can't ask him about and say, how should I do this? Should I do this? And what level does this take in my life? And it doesn't be like a long drawn out process, but you're still engaging God in your day-to-day life. And so it doesn't become this laborious thing. So that was our before we go. We modeled. Wow. How to. I always totally forgot what we were even doing before we go at this point. I just want to keep talking about this. I want to go through all the mysteries now. It's fun. It's a fun, you know what? You can do this in the car with your kids. You can do this in the car. You can. I mean, it's just something that's great to do with prayer. So there was an old adage that when you get distracted, you don't pay attention to distractions of whatever kind, even, even some possible, you know, sort of thoughts that are something you definitely don't want in your mind. Don't get wigged out. You don't pay attention to them in the same way you'd pay attention to a rabid barking dog. The more you yell at it, the more you pay attention to it, the more it's going to keep barking. The more you stare at it. Right? But if you take the content of it and draw that thing while leaving. It's like martial arts. Yeah. You take the energy that's coming at you. And you turn it back into the direction that you want. Which one is wish? Which one is the Sumo? That's Sumo. I'm not sure why I thought about that. You're looking at me. I think exactly why you're thinking about it. You're such a jerk. We better get going. Oh, all right. So everybody has their homework. When they're praying the rosary, if distractions come their way, then they can give this exercise a shot and see how it works for them. And like I say, also just kind of playing game with the kids in the car. To say, all right, if you had an attraction coming your way and this was a mystery, it's a great way to have a conversation about the faith and to explore and to be curious. Because honestly, these types of conversations that we have, I mean, it's so much driven by intellectual curiosity, spiritual curiosity, search for the truth, trying to understand more. And this is the benefit of being such dunces as we are. Because we're never going to arrive at a place where we're satisfied. There's so much we don't know that, hey, you know, explore. It is a big sport. So if we're way down here at the dunce level of understanding compared to St. Thomas Aquinas, think of how much more we have turf to cover than he does. I've actually just spun it in a way that we're benefiting from our limits. You got to make your weaknesses work. Exactly. Very good. We'll talk to you all soon. God bless you. Ciao. Thanks for listening to this episode of From the Rooftop. 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