 When I look back at how I got to the place I am now as a pastor in the Archdiocese of New York, and I'm going to tell you a little bit how that came to be, over and over again I see that I have tried to run away from God. You know the great poem, The Hound of Heaven, right? I won't repeat it to you because I know most of you know of it, but that experience of running from God and seeking God and trying to find him and then realizing that he's right behind you and he's the hound that's been finding you. I'm going to tell you a few of those different times in my life where I was trying to get away from God and how he really has been the hound of heaven. First of all, there are so many of these trigger points or realities even here in this room. I grew up, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and so I prayed fervently for the ingratitude to God for the Cleveland Cavaliers. I was actually at Game 6 with my brother in Cleveland. It was one of the highlights of my life, which is pretty low, right? Very unspiritual, but I was born in Cleveland, moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan with my family because my mom and dad were pursuing involvement in the charismatic renewal. For some of you know Ralph Martin. He is my mom's brother, and so as we moved to Ann Arbor, we moved right behind, eventually right behind Ralph and his family. We grew up together, and as I grew up during that time, I had this natural rejection against anything charismatic. I think kids respond in different ways, but the closer I got to teenage years, the more I did not want anything to do with the charismatic movement. Then my parents moved to a worse place for charismatic things, Akron, Ohio to be a part of a covenant community. I think they called it in Akron, Ohio called the bread of life, and it was like Ann Arbor, but strict, strict, strict. Father Ed Fried is here from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and so another one of these trigger moments, they're all over the place. Father Ed is pastor, are you still a pastor? Christ the King in Ann Arbor. In Akron, Ohio, my parents involved in this charismatic community again, and they had all these rules, no genes. It was bordering on cultish, I would say, and I wanted to get away from it, absolutely wanted to get away from it, and so I made an exit plan, and what I did was in high school, first of all, I always went to private school, Catholic school, or the Word of God community had another community school, and my parents moved to Akron, Ohio, and my dad decided he would send my older brother and I to an all black public high school, okay, and it was a shock, you know, it was a shock for this very short white kid from another city to all of a sudden move, and two weeks later, you're in a school of 1200 kids, it's called Booktel High School for those of you from Akron Cleveland, and here my dad says, I want you to have that experience, so it was another exit I needed to make, you know, as quickly as I could, turned out to be a good experience, but I graduated in three years instead of four just by taking a few extra classes, and I didn't tell my parents that because I told them right towards the end, so about three weeks before graduation, I told them, mom and dad, guess what, I'm graduating, and so probably not the smartest thing to do, but it was that way they couldn't have any plans for me upon graduation, so I ended up going to study Spanish and Guatemala and Costa Rica, and I went, and it was my way of transitioning away from everything that my parents had prepared for us, always loved my parents very deeply, but there was that, I need an exit plan, I need to get out of here, and so my plan was during that year applied to University of Michigan because I wanted to get back to Ann Arbor because I'm a Michigan Wolverine fan, and I know for Clevelanders it's kind of a strange thing, but you know, University of Michigan, and so as I'm doing that, I start having an experience with God through working with the poor in a dump in Guatemala, and my older brother was in Ireland, he had made his escape as well, and was studying in Ireland, and so we started communicating and we decided, and this was absolutely the work of the hound of heaven, I know it, that somehow he and I decided that we were going to, instead of go to the University of Michigan, we were going to come to the Franciscan University, and we did, and we both came here at the same time, I studied business here, and then I met a priest from the Legionaries of Christ, and I don't know why I was attracted to cults, but there it was, and I met a great priest, Father Owen Kearns, and but they used very strong tactics that's put this way, very good men, I eventually probably used them myself, and I ask God for forgiveness for that, but I remember him saying to me, and I don't, he told me it was the only time he ever used it, and I believe him on that, but he told me, he said, Jonathan, we were here at the JC Williams Center, I had been dating a girl for my whole time here at Steubenville, and he said to me, Jonathan you were created by God to be a Legionary of Christ, you were created by God to be a Legionary of Christ, and I felt it, and this is the strange thing, guys you know this, right, in the midst of all of that craziness, and of the negativity, and the imperfection, and the dysfunction, God is still at work, and he was at work in my soul, and I felt in the midst of that, this is what God wants me to do, and I ended up leaving Franciscan early and going off to the Legionaries, and I was in the Legion, went off to Rome eventually to study, I was ordained in 2002, I went directly, the Legionaries were very good at giving guys with no experience jobs that they shouldn't have had, so they made me vice rector of the seminary, where I was vice rector for five years, and then things started to reveal themselves, and as another trigger point here, Father Shane, who was also a member of the Legionaries of Christ knows, things started to fall apart, and I thank God that he helped me realize when he did, I needed to step away, I think there are guys, let me just be clear, I think there are guys who are still in the Legionaries who are doing good work, and are great great men, no doubt, and God, the hound of heaven, continues to work in their souls, in a way perhaps, and in a place where he wants them to be, I don't know, but I knew at that point, the God was calling me to take a step away, and let me step back to when I was here at Franciscan University, there was a good friend, I don't know if you know, some of you might know the name Manhart, Dr. Manhart, I think he's a doctor, has done a lot of work with men's retreats, etc., but his son Mike used to take us to New York City very often, and it was our escape, I was in a household here in Franciscan, this shows you a little bit the attempt to get away from God a little bit as well, we were in a household called Lion of Judah, which now is a very good household, but during my times it was like the anti-household household, okay, it was, we had, just to give you a picture, we had our t-shirts, first of all for those who don't know what a household is here at Franciscan, they're like very Christian Catholic fraternities, small groups, and so we organized ourselves, and we were all of those who were at Franciscan, but really didn't want to be part of the whole charismatic and Catholic even thing, we wanted to have a good time, so if anybody needs to know where the bars are in West Virginia, or down the street I can tell you as well, but we had on our t-shirts, Lion of Judah t-shirts, we had a picture of Bob Marley's, you know, Lion, you know, this, so just to give you a understanding of where I was coming from, we used to always go to New York City, maybe two or three times a semester, and Mike Manhart used to always bring us to a street called Mulberry Street, which was little Italy, and I remember at that time I was probably 1920 years old, sitting in this restaurant called La Luna on Mulberry Street, and thinking to myself, someday I'm going to live here, it wasn't someday I want to live here, it's someday I'm going to live here, I've never had that experience ever before, but I had that experience when I eventually left the Legion and was coming to New York City to the Archdiocese of New York, I remember, here's another trigger point, my former priest personal director Tom Deverey is here, I remember telling this to Tom that the Archbishop at the time, Cardinal Dolan, sent me to fill in for the priest that he was making his secretary, so I was in a little parish in the Bronx by myself, and I figured I would stay there for a while, and I got this letter from, and I told this to Tom after I got it, I don't know, he might have been the one who made the letter, but it was saying, Father Jonathan, we have named you associate or vicar at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, and your new residence will be 263 Mulberry Street. When I read that I said the Hound of Heaven is not only active, but here when I was 19 years old, escaping Franciscan University, smoking cigars, and using an underage license or my older brother's license to get into bars in New York City, and I'm sitting there thinking, I just know that someday I'm going to live here. All these years later, after having left the Legion, I get a note and I'm told I'm going to be living on Mulberry Street. Now this talk is going to be about godly priorities as a parish priest, but I want you to know where I'm coming from so that you know that I'm not an expert, so that you can take it with a grain of salt and that the Hound of Heaven can use this, I hope, in some way to help you to become the man that God wants you to be, and I hope that this whole experience for me will do the same. After moving to St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, I remember being in a meeting with Cardinal Dolan, and he asked me to start working more closely with the Archdiocese itself in communications, and he said to me, one thing you have to understand, Jonathan, is that you can imagine Cardinal Dolan, right? He's like, Jonathan, come on in, I need to tell you something, and he goes, and he says, he goes, Jonathan, you used to be part of a pretty dysfunctional family, right? I said, absolutely, your Eminence, thank God, and he goes, well, guess what? You're about to find out in a closer way that you have joined another dysfunctional family, it's called the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocesan Priesthood, and then, of course, he goes, that's great, and he said, so what you're going to be doing is, et cetera, right? And I found out pretty quickly that the Diocesan Priesthood and Diocese and Archdiocese are also dysfunctional families. I won't go into all of those details here so that I don't create any trigger moments for the members of the Archdiocese of New York, but you know what they are. After three years of doing the communications and running the Catholic Channel on Sirius XM, for those of you who know it, I felt very strongly that, really through Pope Francis, that he was calling me to go and be in a, all that was in my mind was to be in a poor parish, okay? I wouldn't say that very publicly, but I wanted to be in a poor parish, because Pope Francis, who is the one who does not judge, is extremely judgmental of us, right? Maybe in a good way, but boy, he hits hard, right? He hits hard, and sometimes you go, okay, enough already, enough already. I think he called, he said, those animal priests he sent the other day talking about those who are tough on people with the sacraments or getting their nose and other people's moral business, I don't know. You can interpret in lots of different ways, but Pope Francis had a deep impact on me little by little, and maybe this was a little bit too, that the Holy Spirit was inviting me to do something that I was uncomfortable with, you know? You know, the legionaries have probably the fame of not only being, you know, vocation recruiters, but also of money, right? And some of it's true, maybe some of it's not true, but I knew that there was part of my formation that needed to be healed, and Pope Francis' words, more than John Paul II, more than Pope Benedict, both of whom I love deeply, Pope Francis, the one who began speaking to my heart, Jonathan, Jonathan, God is calling you to something else. I was in Rome with Cardinal Dolan at this time when I was really feeling it, and I was getting close to the end of my three-year assignment in communications, and up on the roof of the North American College, Cardinal Dolan called me aside again, and he goes, let's go have a cigar. I'm like, your eminence, it's 8.15 in the morning. Like, that's going to ruin my day. Oh, have a cigar. So there were at 8.15 in the morning having a cigar, and I don't think he minds me talking about this, you know? Of course, he's complaining about it was during the Synod on the Family, and that was a zoo. The Synod on the Family was a zoo. This was the first of the two sessions, and Cardinal Dolan is not known for liking to sit in one place for hours upon hours, and so for him it was probably even harder because of that, and so we're sitting up there trying to figure out how he can arrive late to the session, and he says, so what are you going to do in the next few months? And I said, well, actually I wanted to talk to you about that, and he said, oh, I wanted to talk to you about something too, and I said, okay, so he ended up saying, asking me if I would be interested in taking a position that was basically going to be a desk job, and doing more stuff with the Vatican, and so I said, in and me I felt at that moment I was like, you know, the answer that I want to give in some ways is yes. Then you also have, I think, the whole formation too of the legion was basically obedience meant submission of your will to your, you know, superior, and here I'm going, maybe this is what I'm supposed to do, maybe this is what I'm supposed to do, but the hound of heaven was right there, and he was saying, you know this is not what you're supposed to be doing. Deep down I felt in a very similar way as I felt on Mulberry Street when I was leaving, also when I was leaving the legion, deep down this is not what you're supposed to do. So I said, your eminence, actually I'm going to ask you for something, and he said, okay, I said, I want to go to a poor parish in the Bronx, and he said, oh, okay, and he said, which one? I said, I don't know the Bronx, you know, I don't know anything about the Bronx. I know it's not Brooklyn, but it's, I don't know anything else about the Bronx, and so he said, I said, so why don't you just, he said, let me think about it the next morning, he said, that's going to be great, that's the right thing, and he seemed to get excited about it, and he said, so where do you want to go? I said, why don't we just do this, the first one that opens I'll apply for, and he said, okay, great, I ended up getting back to New York and applying, and I was told, maybe it was by Tom Devere, I don't remember, no, okay, for this, eventually the Cardinals sent me to the parish where I'm at now, it's called our Lady of Mount Carmel, and sitting down with the new personal director, he started telling me about it, and I was going into a situation in which the priest was being removed, he had only been there for five months, and he told me that situation, and then he, and I said, well tell me more about the parish, he said, I don't think you want to know, and I said, no, tell me a little bit, he goes, read the stats on here, but they're very impartial, but if I tell you anything more, you're not going to take it, and I said, I'm going to take it, so it just turns out the parish was two million dollars in debt, they didn't know this, but I don't think they even knew that there was two million dollars in debt, but water was coming in from every single brick in the place, my first week there, it was a year and a half ago, it was February 14th, the coldest day of the year, and the old boiler completely blew up, then there's, it's an Italian national parish with relatively few Italians there who are sure that they're the only ones who should be there, it's a very large Hispanic population, then there's African immigrants, African American, it's the Bronx, it's the Bronx, when I got there I found out that the founding pastor of our Lady Mount Carmel in the Bronx was Monsignor Burke, who was the pastor of my grandmother's parish in the Bronx, you know, almost a hundred years ago, he was the first Irish, then there were all Italians for a hundred years, and then me, which the Italians love, right, like two book ends, they're like, no, no, this is, I tell you this, brothers, just so that you know where I'm coming from, and I spent a lot of time on this, on telling you this, because the other things I want to talk to you about, I want you to take it into that context, that I'm not an expert, that I would never have said yes to leaving Franciscan University 20 years ago, in order to follow this path if I could know what would have happened, really, maybe that sounds very unspiritual, but I would never have said yes in the moment, if I had known what was to come, I wouldn't have had the grace in the moment to have said yes to it, there's no way, and yet I look at this moment, like I know I am where I'm supposed to be, because the hound of heaven brought me here, and I don't know where I'm going to be in the next five years, ten years, and I thank God I can't see it, because I would probably take off running, which means I'll probably going to be at our Lady Mount Carmel for the next 20 years, and I would probably still take off running. My brothers, we were born into dysfunctional families, and we are part of the dysfunction. I remember one of the most profound talks that received in a seminary was from a priest named Fallo Lorenzo Gomez, who was a Mexican priest who lived like 30 years in the United States and spoke hardly any English, and he was giving us a talk in the very little English that he had, and he would say things sometimes that were awfully strange in part because of his English, but also just because of the way it was, and he says, he said, he said, oh brothers, he said, if you're not, if you're not humble, you will become weird, if you are not humble, you will become weird, and then he said, he told, he went on it, and he said, priests don't have wives, and wives are the ones who make men not get weird, and he went on to give a couple examples, he said if a man walks out of his house when his tie doesn't match his shirt, she says, honey, go back and get changed, and he says, it's not worth fighting, and he goes and gets changed, and then he goes out and he's not weird, right? Father Gomez was saying, brothers, seminarians at this time, unless you become humble, you will be weird, and I think that transitions me into the second part of this talk, which is when I talk about godly priorities for a parish priest, in the end, it's not about making a wise choice to do this rather than that, but rather it is a choice, a decision to be rather than to react, to be rather than to react, to be who god wants us to be day in and day out, hour by hour, hour by hour, yes, making decisions, but not making decisions based on efficacy or anything else, but rather based on who god wants me to be, and in order to do that, I think we need one virtue above all of all other virtues, and that is humility, humility, to be who god wants me to be, not who I want to be, not who other people want me to be, not to be the person who I wish I were, or the person I'm afraid of becoming, but to be who god wants me to be. What I'd like to talk to you about today is the things that I do every day, and I'm going to talk about those things not in any specific order, but to tell you what I'm working on, the things that I'm trying to get out of my life, and the things that I'm trying to make a part of my life. I walked in just the other day to the pasta store right in front of my parish, for those of you know little, literally, the Bronx is called Borgatti's, it's the best pasta, homemade pasta ever, and the owner of Borgatti's a very, very spiritual man, but he also is the one, from his workplace, he watches the church all day long, and so he's got comments about everything, about everything I do, he sees me walk out of my rectory, he sees me walk into the rectory, he's a very, very spiritual guy, but he watches everything, and so I walked in and I said, Chris, his name is Chris Borgatti, I said, Chris, I'm giving this talk to a bunch of priests about godly priorities for a parish priest, I said, you've outlived many pastors here, any suggestions? And he said to me, he said, give me a few hours and come back, and so I came back and he said, he goes, you know, Father Jonathan, I think it's just one, he says it's the salvation of souls, it's the salvation of souls, and I said, okay, and we talked about that a little bit, and I took that to prayer over the last few days, and what I came away from was, no, that's not it. My priority as a pastor is not the salvation of souls, it's first and foremost the salvation of my soul. I'm a Christian, I was created out of pure love, and my Creator wants me to know love and worship Him, and to be with Him for all eternity. The priority, in my opinion, the priority of a parish priest is to come to know and to love and to be in communion with God, not theoretically, not ontologically, sometimes we use that as an excuse, right? I'm ontologically different, but day in and day out, hour after hour, to have my priority to be in communion with God. I also recognize that I'm a son, I'm a brother, I'm a friend, I'm a citizen, I'm a guy with high cholesterol, that's true, and a penchant for pasta, for golf, for scotch, and all of these things have come with rights and responsibilities. Later on, I became a priest, that means that I'm set apart, sort of, it can also be a good excuse, don't talk back to me, I'm set apart. What a dumb idea this parish council had, I know because I'm set apart, I'm the pastor, but it's true that God sees me differently and so should I, see myself differently. The fact that I've been set apart, the fact that I've been ontologically changed, the fact that I'm a priest does not take away from any of those other things that I was before I was a priest. I still have my responsibilities to my mom, to my dad, to my brothers and sisters, to my friends. I still have a responsibility before God to be healthy. After all of those things, I'm also a pastor. To be honest guys, and I think many of you who are pastors would be able to say this, that this reality of being a pastor, not so much the title, but the reality of what I'm able to do each day is now what makes me tick. I do lots of other things, Father Dave mentioned that I do things in the media and the writing and all of that, but as I told my cardinal, the day you want me to stop doing any of that, you just tell me and it's over. So what do I do? What do we do as pastors or as associates? Well, we have to wake up and we have to start making choices. There's the early morning and at first, when I first went as pastor, I decided I was going to do my morning prayer in the church and I decided I'm going to, it's going to be a good example for my parishioners. Okay? The wise ones here know that was not a wise decision, right? It's not wise because you get interrupted and all the rest, but it's also not wise to go do something in order to give a good example. If I spend my relationship with God or what I do on television or what I say from the pulpit as a way to give a good example, I'm really confused. God is inviting us to be not to react, to be not to react. So now I do my morning prayer in the little chapel we set up in the rectory that wasn't there before and I pray with coffee and I'm a lot happier and I pray a lot better and nobody sees me and sometimes that has problems. I remember there's a guy in my parish who is leaning on the traditional aside of things. We all have them. Wonderful thing. He teaches me a lot about reverence and he also drives me nuts. Like a good priest friend of mine said, I love the Latin mass, but I do not like people who like the Latin mass. That's probably risky to say, but that's okay. But this guy loves the Latin mass and I come in, I often go to my school in the morning to do morning prayer with the kids. My morning mass is at 8.30. At our Lady of Mount Carmel, we have so many masses you can't believe it. It's a terrible thing, including three daily with 20 people at each one. It's not a good thing, but that's another story. And so after doing my 45 minutes of morning prayer and my brievery and having been up at 5.30 in the morning or so, then I go off to the school and I come back and this guy is there waiting like this. Like he is often to serve the mass. And he says to me, after mass mass, I speak to you, Father. And I said, yes. And he says, after mass, he goes, the number one responsibility of just like this, you know, and I go, I hate that finger. I hate it. And I'm taking deep breaths, deep breaths. And he says, he goes, the number one responsibility of priests, and most priests don't remember this, is to pray. You arrive to mass two minutes beforehand. And I think you need to reflect on that. I should probably be doing my morning prayer in the church, but I know I shouldn't. That's the early morning. We have 23 minutes, just so you know. Then I have meetings. Don't you love meetings? I've decided that, and this could be right or wrong, I don't know, but we don't have staff meetings anymore. No more staff meetings. We don't have any staff meetings. I'll probably change it in a few years when I get more experience. But what I decided to do is start having individual meetings with my staff. And there's so much peace. It's peaceful for me too, because when sister comes up to me, and I have three in my parish, I'm blessed to have three in the parish, says, Father, can I talk to you? I need to talk to you. I said, yes, you can talk to me. I said, we can talk shortly now, and then we can talk when we get together on Tuesday. It is such a relief now. And then I put one meeting, and I put another meeting, depending on how long that person talks, right after that. And they know there's a beginning and they know there's an end. We do meetings. These are things that we have to do. We're reacting to. If we don't do it, we're going to have meetings anyway, but they're just going to be on the street, and they're going to be here and there, and they're going to be contentious. Then I've got, I have to react to my physical plant. I have a 100 year old church. I have a 100 year old convent. I have a 100 year old rectory. I have a parish center, and I have a school that used to hold 800 kids and now has about 250. And I have two tenants that are also there, right? This is, I say this because this is our lives. I have to react to that, and I could react to it all day long. Every minute of the day I could react to it. Another option is not to react to it and leave it for the next guy. That's a choice too. We'll talk about that later. Then I have my masses. We have a lot of them. And then there's lots of other stuff. There's the school, et cetera, et cetera. I could react all day to this. Brothers, we know we could react to all day to this. And then there's the bills, and there's the checks, and then there's the archdiocese. And now they put me on a committee for religious education, and then there's meetings, and then you can't do anything in those meetings anyway. You don't get anything done, and you're still sitting in them. Those are things we have to react to. Those are things that we should be reacting to at some level. But then there's other things that we should be doing that are not demanding our attention. Like the 99% of the population in my neighborhood who will never give me any problems, who will never ask anything of me because they're not in church. I believe, brothers, brother priests, that if we decide that our number one priority is my communion with God, to be a priest in everything I do, in everything I do, lots of these things that I'm going to mention now will come. If not naturally, at least the hound of heaven will be picking at us. Oh, yeah. Yep. What about that? What about the cholesterol? What about the people who aren't in this church who should be? Let me just give you a few things that I am trying to include in my daily activities. Walk the streets. Walk the streets. It's not the same. Well, I wouldn't recommend in Brooklyn because it's probably very dangerous there. But in the Bronx, just kidding. Just kidding. The Bronx, I live in within the poorest congressional district of the United States of America. Congressional District 13 in the Bronx. So there's some dangerous streets as well. But walk the streets. I have some streets that I like to go to. It's called Arthur Avenue. For other New Yorkers known, it has wonderful restaurants. It's the Little Italy. I walk by and father, how are you? Bon giorno, comi stai bene, padre. That street I have to walk. Then I have other streets. They don't even know what this is. They don't know what it is. Walk the streets. I try to go when I can twice a day, at least once a day, and to different parts of the neighborhood. Hidden works of charity for the poor. Whether you love Pope Francis, whether you love him, love him, love him and find no wrong in him. Or whether sometimes he drives you crazy. We can learn so much from him. Am I doing hidden works of charity? Hidden works of charity. Not am I organizing Catholic Charities. That's very important, too. Super important. But am I, as a priest, in my communion with God, in my being a priest, do I have people who are on my list of people who need me and people whom I need? Sometimes there are pains, too. It was that we have the feast. For those of you who live in Italian areas, the feast, the street festivals, we have a big one called St. Anthony Feast. It's five days long now, and it's preparing for it is tough, because it's all the vendors. You're doing all this stuff that we probably shouldn't be doing, and yet it's there. You have to get all the money, and then you have people who have games that are totally rigged, and they're stealing money from you. It's a very interesting experience. The whole thing is wild. But there's an African American woman who lives in one of the poorest buildings in the neighborhood. She's got six kids, and there's no father, and all the kids look different. And she says, every time she says, Father, how are you? Praise the Lord, bless be his name. Do you have any money? She is a good soul, but she drives me crazy, because I said, I say, let's sit down and make a budget. Let's talk about this. How does this work? Where do you? Because I know she has some income. Let's talk about it. In the feast, which just ended in June, I said to her, I said, her name is, let's say it's Susie. I said, Susie, I said, you know, we church, we try to help you as much as we can, and with all the clothes, and I said, would you, would you, and I had in my mind from the morning, I should not have had it in my mind, but from the morning, a distraction in prayer, I'm going to make Susie work today. This was my idea. I said, Susie, we need help collecting the garbage on the street. Okay, can you give us half hour, an hour? In my mind, I was thinking, I want to see if she will do it. We give, we give, we give. I want to see if she'll do it. I asked her, bless it be God, absolutely count on me. She didn't show up. You know, I'm going, oh, I can't wait to see her again. I'm going to ask her where she was. That's not, that's not godly priority. That wasn't, that wasn't what the Holy Spirit was asking of me. The Holy Spirit has given me Susie to love without any, any, any payback. What else am I trying to do? I don't do these things very well. I've given out my email address to everyone in the parish, and I repeat it over and over again, and I tell over and over again to the parishioners that anyone can meet, meet with me in a personal meeting and to either send me by email or to make an appointment with, with the, the secretary. And they do, and that's hard. I wish they didn't, because usually, you know, they're complaints. Sometimes they're very deep, personal, wonderful, pastoral things. Sometimes they're not, but I think I should do it. I think people should be able to have access to me. It's also hard because then other people who are not in the parish, especially because I do some things, public things outside of the parish, and the people find my email address on our website, and then they contact me and the, but I have to decide either I'm going to be or else I'm just going to react. And I think this, in my case, personally, this is part of being, spiritual direction, having a spiritual director. I don't think I'm ever going to have one. I'm burnt out from the Legion, but I do have one. I don't call him a spiritual director, and he doesn't call himself my spiritual director, but we both know that's what it is. He's a great priest, an older priest, retired priest, who knows me very well, who I lived with at one of my assignments down at Old St. Pats Cathedral. I'm on Senior John, a her, and a very holy man, and I need to see him often and regularly. But it's not, if I were probably in a better, you know, if I hadn't lived so long in a dysfunctional family, being in this new dysfunctional family, I probably could have had a spiritual director in which we would go over point by point and how is your prayer life and how's, you know, what are the virtues that are you working on? And when's the last time you've been, I can't do it. Maybe some of you can't do it either, I don't know. But I need a spiritual director, and I have one. And I have to, in my schedule, part of being is going there, and being with him, and spending time with him, and having lunch with him, and let him listen to the things that I'm doing and that I'm not doing, and then in his own really special way, just saying, ah, you know what I used to do, really, you haven't, why are you behind on that book you said you were going to be working on? What's going on? What are you, let me, we just have about 10 minutes. Let me underline a few of these, these things that make me react. Let me give you a few examples of things that make me react instead of be in my daily life. I have a great secretary. You have to do that because this is being taped too, right? I have a wonderful secretary, she really is, she's excellent, she's been there for many, many years. And she went on vacation last week, and when, and she does a lot of things for me, she makes my life a lot easier, and she's so nice to the people. In fact, when I knew I was going to our Lady of Mount Carmel, I called up the parish, and she answered, and she said, good morning, our Lady of Mount Carmel, how may I help you? And I thought, what's wrong with her? It's a pair of secretaries, they're supposed to be mean, or they're supposed to be control freaks, or they're supposed to tell you that the pastor's not available, or lots of other things, right? Sometimes that we train them to do, other times they pick up on their own. She is a very spiritual, wonderful, wonderful person. So a week ago, she left on vacation to Italy, and it was Monday, and I remember having this feeling of, ah, my secretary is in here. And I thought, why is that? Why do I feel, why is it that I feel somehow this pressure when she's there? And I said, it's strange, because I like her, and she's good, and she helps me, and she helps, you know, make sure I do what I should do, and I, and then I went, oh, that's what it is. She helps. I am reacting to her. I am reacting to what the email she sends to me, the phone calls she makes, the fact that I want to make sure she sees me at least three or four times during the day, so that she knows that I'm working. I don't, why? Hey, why am I doing that? Let me, let me give you another reaction that I found. We had somebody who was organized at a parish activity, and he's been, he had been doing it for years, and he doesn't go to church, but he organizes this big activity of the parish, and he, I am a member of our Lady Mount Carmel, because I organize this activity, right? You've, you've experienced it. And at the end of this activity, he, so, do you know, have you heard of the Gileo? Okay, in Brooklyn, you've heard of the Gileo and, and parts of Jersey as well, and the Gileo is this, it's this monument of wood that's, in our case, it's three stories high that's built every year, and it's carried by about a hundred men through the streets, and there's a band that they're also carrying, and the priest is supposed to go up, go up there, so it was my first year I'm supposed to go up on the Gileo. It's complicated if you haven't heard, heard of it, but so I go and I bless the Gileo, and they tell me to go up. I didn't know what, I'm like, I'm an Irish guy from the Midwest, here in the Bronx, and they've got this Italian thing, even though I lived in Italy for nine years, I never saw a Gileo in my life, and they're telling me this is Italy, and this is how you have to do it, I said okay, so they, so I come out in my clerical suit, I bless the Gileo, and they say get up and give some words, I do it, at the end of, when it's all over, this guy comes up to me and says, and I could tell he was in a bad mood, and he goes, follow Jonathan, people are so mad at you, people are so mad at you, and I said, why, what happened? He goes, you didn't put on your paraphernalia, paraphernalia, what am I supposed to wear? You're supposed to get all, you know, and then he said, if my priest can't be traditional, I can't be Catholic, I'm gonna start going to a Protestant church called and he gave me the name, I'm like, but you know what, I didn't sleep that night, I didn't sleep, why? Because I'm reacting, I'm reacting, I wasn't being in the moment, let me tell you why I react, because I think we all react in different ways. My guess is that we react in a bad way, we live in reaction, maybe another way to put it, either because we care too much about what other people think of us, number one, okay, that's my case, it's vanity, it's vanity, not everybody has it, some people, you know, like I wish he cared what people thought about him, right? But this is part of our weirdness when we're not humble, right? We either care, I care so much that this guy told me that everybody's mad at you, I didn't, maybe I should have, I didn't care who's going to go to a Protestant church, he wasn't even going to mine in the first place, right? But I cared that he said everybody's mad at you, they don't like you, your parishioners don't like you, the people on Arthur Avenue don't like you, they're gonna talk about you, either we care too much about what people think of us, or number two, we react because we fall into activism, I gotta get it done, I gotta get it done, I gotta make sure that this church is in perfect, perfect condition, I'm not gonna be like that guy who left it to his predecessor, I'm gonna have my church in great shape, I'm not, what, I'm not going to, what, I'm reacting, I'm not being, being, I'm not, my priority in that emotion, in that action is not communion with God, love of God, trying to become the man he wants me to be, what's the third possible source of our reaction? What do you think? What the flesh tells me to do? I'm gonna sleep in, I'm not gonna see my secretary, she's not gonna see me, in fact I'm gonna be in my room most of my day, I'm gonna organize things really well so that I only have about two or three masses a week, or make sure I get my two and a half months of vacation, spread out nicely so that nobody knows, or whatever it happens to be, but it's reaction to the flesh, and some of us have that more naturally than others, right, I don't, I don't have the temptation to sleep until noon because I can't, my body won't let me, but others have that temptation, others don't have the temptations I have, of worrying too much by what people think of me, or maybe some of you do or some of you don't have the temptation to activism, of getting stuff done, brothers I probably left a lot of things out that I should be doing, or that should be my priorities, and it's not because I didn't think of them, I mean it's not that I didn't try to think of them, if I left them out it's because I'm not doing them and I should be, and you probably saw that and recognized it, and I hope that as I mature in my priesthood, as I continue along in this wonderful dysfunctional family of the diocesan priesthood, that I will learn to grow in wisdom, but I hope that above all I learn to live the number one priority, which is my friendship and my following of Jesus Christ, God bless you.