 It's been a long long day. I got a lot to say. It feels like I'm carrying a two-ton weight. I'm gonna see a friend. Hello, I'm Monsignor Patrick Winslow. And I am Father Matthew Cowth. 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. Hello, Father Winslow. Well, hello there. Welcome back to From the Rooftop. And I hope that you are settling in for this conversation because I have something in mind. Which means it's going to put you to sleep. Well, so grab your cup of coffee or tea, nestle in. And if you're driving, pull over. That's a good point. That's a good point. I say it because this is probably from the rooftop in terms of its height. But I do want it to be somewhat practical insofar as giving persons breadcrumbs to be able to follow. But I want to talk a little bit about the Blessed Trinity. And I say that selfishly because I'm at the time in my classes where I'm teaching on this. And I haven't started yet. We're getting into it on Thursday. But I was wondering, I had this line. I read this line from St. Thomas that he says, our greatest happiness is found in the knowledge of the Blessed Trinity and the humanity of Christ. And that's a pretty startling statement. Yeah. And I say as it's all of it is revealed. Right. All of it's revealed. Nothing you can know by the natural letter of reason. Right. You're on an island. You can be there for a thousand years and you will never come to any of those truths. All of them have to be revealed by God himself. And it got me thinking rather practically too. I mean, I can understand it theoretically and so far as, right, this is the beatific vision. This is what we're made for. It's what we're made to behold, to live, and to swim, and to drink in eternally. Okay. Okay. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. But you're saying beholding and living in the Trinity is an experience of the beatific vision. Right. So for people just a little unfamiliar with language vocabulary. Yeah. So when we say that we want to be happy, when we say that we want beatitude, which is the Latin for happiness, right, as sort of entering into someone else's beatitude, when we read in the scriptures that enter into the joy of your Lord. It's something objective. It's someone else's blessedness, someone else's beatitude, someone else's joy as it were that we get to enter into. And when we speak about that classically in terms of theology, we speak about beholding God, seeing him face to face. I want to see him. I don't want to see him mediated through an image. I don't want to see him mediated through anything. I want direct contact. But this is it's not just viewing. This is participation. Yeah. The difficulty is when you think about the beatific vision, you think about all of us standing around sitting around a campfire and staring. You see it. Yeah, I see it. You see it. Yeah. That's on that's viewing or observing. Right. And there's something more to it, obviously, infinitely more to it. But I guess what really struck me about that phrase by St. Thomas is that I can understand it theologically, but I don't know if hardly any of the faithful experience any of that. And that is to say that the greatest knowledge we can have is the whole eternity and the reincarnation comes from knowing those two realities. The greatest happiness comes from knowing those two realities. Which makes sense if that's our beatitude. But what about now? Here and now, how many of us, we typically tend to avoid the topic, because we think to ourselves, it's a mystery. And for us, mystery often means that I just can't know anything about it. Right. There's two ways we use mystery. We use it in a common parlance, like a mystery novel. It's unknown. Professor plum with lead pipe in the billiard room. That's a mystery that once it's solved, it's not a mystery anymore. But what we mean in theological circles, we typically use in terms of church jargon is that something we cannot know unless it had been revealed. But once it's revealed, we can't comprehend it. Or is a rather pithy way of saying it is that it's an incomprehensible certitude. It's certain because God revealed it, but I can't comprehend it. But there is something comprehensible because there'd be no point in revealing it. No point in revealing it otherwise. So that there is some capacity to comprehend the mystery. Right. So what I'm putting at your feet, Father Winslow. I see these sumas lying everywhere. Studying of St. Thomas. What I want to lay at your feet is if this is fundamentally the place where we get the greatest amount of happiness, joy, beatitude, what do you say to the person who is working a nine to five job? What do you say to the mom, the dad that's got five, six kids running around? Like, if you're not thinking about the Blessed Trinity, you're not thinking about the humanity of Christ, the incarnation of the Son of God. Clearly, you don't have any beatitude. You have no joy. Well, I'm not sure I would say that. You know, my gut reaction is that they are likely participating in some knowledge and reflection at some level in the Holy Trinity and in the humanitarian divinity of Christ. It may be a basic level. It may be almost a subconscious level. But I think that if they have any Christian upbringing or background, it's lurking there. And perhaps any type of satisfaction and enduring satisfaction or fulfillment that they're having is actually predicated or standing on these realities. Because everything then is ephemeral. Everything else is just slowly disappearing. Nothing can be retained. And so you have to contend with the futility of every other promise in life of material wealth or goods or reputation or position in society or power, influence or popularity, all of those things. I mean, they don't go with you when you die. And so there has to be at some unconscious level, a type of reckoning with the futility of it all. And for somebody who has a Christian background, they're probably, even if only in a rudimentary sense, resting on or standing on this notion that there is God, that there's a triune God and God became man. Now, it may be as simple as the fact of it. Right? You're missing a ton more if you're only grasping the fact of it. But I think the fact of it enables those other things to be at least pacifying. Because if you reckon with the futility of everything else around you, you're left despairing, aren't you? I mean, if you look at everything you have and you say, it's all going to go away and I'm going to be left without it all. Aren't you left despairing? Absolutely. And maybe there's one little gang plank we can get across those waters of despair in each of those experiences, which is if every single effect, there's another principle between Thomas for you, if every single effect resembles its cause, then all those little effusions of things that we enjoy, the things you just mentioned, they look like him. That's why we're attracted to them. And so, one of the simple ways, and I hadn't thought about this before we, as usual, before we started talking, I just read that line, it's a good place to start. It's a good place to start. But I think that part of the trick has got to be referring all of those joys back to the one that they resemble. Follow the breadcrumbs. Follow the breadcrumbs. And it requires the use of reason. I mean, there is, you can't just be a passive actor. Well, first of all, none of us are really passive actors in life. But when it comes to the big questions, I think that people tend to be passive actors. I think that they just kind of get on with the things that are important to them in the moment or at least in the near future. And they're looking for joy and happiness, you know, through looking for happiness through it all. But they'll put off those larger overarching questions. They'll defer them and not really address them as they should. So they don't follow the breadcrumbs past whatever temporal goalposts they have in mind. Until they're subject to losing them. Until they're subject to losing them. At that point, you say, what is this all about? Right. And that's where truly the punishment of death in Genesis as a consequence of original sin is medicinal. It doesn't allow us to avoid the need to follow the breadcrumbs to something bigger. It doesn't allow us to fall down this pit into a broken state in the whole of original sin and just think, oh, we were born here and meant to die. And that's all there ever is and all there ever was. No, the fact is the death provokes the question that we're meant to ask, is this all there is? Is there something beyond? And actually, I should have stated that when you fall into that pit of original sin and you end up broken, I should have said we're not meant just to live here in perpetuity that would just go on and on. Because if we went on and on and on and on, we might just think that's all there is. But the fact that there is a death provokes and evokes the questions that we need to ask. I remember John Paul II writing in his Wednesday audiences that became what we know as the Theology of the Body. I remember when he stated in there that the moment you shall eat of it, you shall die. And I never thought of it before, but his commentary on that passage and genesis to that law that was given to Adam, I said, Adam didn't know what death was. It's introduced by God. But what was death? What was death? That oddity introduced as a future possible. Because Adam was not created with death in mind. God is not a joist in disruption of the living. He didn't create death. And yet, there's another passage that I like very much in Tolkien's Sumerillian, which is one of his works that's kind of the backstory of all of the Lord of the Rings that people know. If you're not familiar with it, it's really worth looking into. But there's these elves that don't die. And there's men that do. And his statement in there is that that was God's gift to men, was that they would die. And even with Adam, we profess that there would have been some kind of transition relative to the body that is passable to a body that is not passable, not capable of suffering or dying, being broken up into its parts, etc. So if we were to accept the fact that death is God's medicinal gift that makes us look at these big questions, what are the things that we're attracted to and the things that we have greater attraction to once we taste them, because they look more like, they're more perfect effects of God. They look more like him. I mean, I think about as we get older, take yourself for example, I mean, we've had many conversations about how time spent with your family is sort of the most precious thing you can do with your time. And I think we would all say that. That as we get older and we stand to lose members of our family, especially, or we see the take delight, as it were, in all their quirks and things in a way that we didn't before. Because we were spending so much time when we were younger, trying to branch out and get away and now we find ourselves wanting to return and spend time with them. But because that thing looks more like the Trinity than does the car, the job, the money, the whatever, those things do look like God to some degree. And so far as there's certain kind of power there and power gives us a certain kind of capacity and influence, whatever else. And so there's something to be attracted to there. I can see why we're attracted to those things. Pleasure, obviously, is made by God. It's not the bad thing in itself. It's the thing that attracts us to do the thing and to do so contrary to our own good and good of others is why it's sinful. But not that pleasure is not sinful. Right. And one of the things could be mentioned that the higher up the scale you go, the more that thing looks like a trying God. It certainly family does. Certainly. I'm also reminded as you speak of St. Augustine, you know, he's repenting of how he took more delight in the gift than the giver, which is another way of saying I didn't follow the breadcrumbs, if you will, to the one he gave it. That's it. And I ended up using the gifts that were given in a disordered way in a way that betrayed the one who gave them. But and he regrets and laments it. And that reflection is so poignant. But at that moment, he's actually, he's made the climb, right? He's followed those breadcrumbs to the one who gave it. And now he wants to delight in those things as they were intended. So as to be a real experience of the one who gave them. And so it's resonating, I think, with St. Augustine's experience. Do you think that this is the reason that we are afraid of death, even those of us who profess the faith? I mean, certainly we have to have some kind of natural fear of it because it wasn't supposed to happen. And so it's the dissolution of soul and body. I mean, the breaking up of that union that makes us who we are. So it's an unnatural state. We should have some kind of natural fear of it. And yet even faith sometimes doesn't sort of overcome for some. We've been at the deathbeds of a lot of people. I'm always really impressed when people are not just ignorant or distracting themselves or a lot of morphine, but when they're actually conscious of the fact that they're dying and they're embracing it. That always is wildly surprising to me. I should expect it as a man of faith, right? And I think maybe to some degree the reason that there might be a bit of fear of it is because I'm used to just having the breadcrumbs. I'm used to having the gifts and not the giver. And I cannot not have the giver on the other side. Even though logically I would profess that that's what I want if I want the gifts at all. I want the fullness. But there's nowhere to hide there. There's nowhere to say that this thing is mine. Nowhere to say that I can have a space that doesn't belong to him. It's either him or it's not him. And I think that's the conversion point that we all have to sort of get to, that I don't want the things as much as I want him or the persons even as much as I want him. And I can see why that's a little bit frightening even though logically it's not. I think from an experiential point of view, I'll recount two quick stories. One goes back to my time when I was a priest in Upstate New York and Father Bradley, a wonderful man, a very devoted priest, my first assignment. I was in many ways blessed to have him as a first pastor. And I remember him recalling how he had just been that evening to visit a man that he knew all his life who was dying and it was not unexpected and it wasn't untimely. And he was recounting a little bit of the conversation he was having with him. In particular the man said that he was afraid and he didn't understand why he was afraid since he had faith. And Father Bradley, just being a, what do you call an old shoe? Is that what they call it? What are those expressions where you're just experienced? Being the experienced priest that he was, he simply said, of course you are. You've never done this before. It was just a very simple human way of kind of explaining some of the fear. Of course, you're offering a bit of a metaphysical explanation is that we're not intended to, we're not meant to be enduring separate body and soul or meant to be together. So it speaks more to who we are intended to be and there seems to be reason on that level to have a bit of anxiety. But that's also from an experiential point of view. I've never done it before. Now on the flip side, I remember having a conversation with a woman who was facing a potential diagnosis of an advanced cancer. But the word, the final word wasn't in and she was waiting. Of course that weighs on you every single day, thinking that you potentially could get word that you have four months to live. So she came and she spoke with me and I'm not portraying any confidences. And she said, you know, Father, the past week, I found myself anxious and worried based upon what I might hear next week. She said, but then it struck me just the other day. When you die, you simply lose consciousness. That's the experience of it. She said, I do that every night when I go to bed. Right. This is the dress rehearsal. Exactly. She said, and then suddenly I realized, oh, that's all it is. You know, that image of the eternal sick. And so it just took a wall of fear away for her. So there was something on the other hand, you can say, you've never done it before. On the other hand, you could say, I kind of do it every day. Yeah, we do it every day. And for some of our friends, they do it like five times a day. Like Father Gover. Well, and the thing is, though, you wouldn't do it. Yeah. Or you would try not to do it if you thought you weren't going to wake back up. Right, of course. Or if you thought when you woke up, your life would be different. Right. So there's the metaphysical reality. There's the I haven't done it reality. There's the moral reality. Yeah. And that's kind of where I'm landing in so far as that if we don't trace the breadcrumbs back, if we don't trace the gifts back to the giver and begin to grow in a desire to actually live with him, because that's what Faith, Hope and Charity are doing, right? This this this reality of the theological virtues in us that we're going to come and make our home with you. He comes and makes his home with us before we make our home with him. Right. We're supposed to experience that on some level that that everything ultimately gets referred to him. And the extent to which it doesn't, I think, is the extent to which we have difficulty in the thought about dying. So basically, to kind of sum up in a very high level sketch, we're created to have this communion with God to this beatitude, this experience of fulfillment, this experience of blessedness. And we, we have effects of the Creator that are meant to bridge us to him. And all the many things that we experience day in and day out, the many gifts in life, just simple things like food and sleep and personal relationships and encounters and family and all these wonderful, amazing things. And oftentimes we just get satisfied with the gifts and forget about the giver. But we're meant to make that bridge to the giver. And you're saying that St. Thomas is saying that actually the most delight, do you use the word delight that you could have is reflecting on the Trinity and the extent to which we have knowledge in this life of the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ. The extent to which we know that is the extent to which we can have joy and be attitude in that. So it's where the bridge leads, the highest kinds of happiness in this life. Right. And so St. Thomas is saying climb the bridge and get there. Right. Get to the one who gave them all. Get to the giver. Get to the Holy Trinity. The one who became incarnate. And take the time to start to participate in that, in that life. Yeah. That's why I always say have a sort of unease with bucket lists that I've mentioned before. Because it's this notion that the next life is going to be less interesting. Right. Get it in now. Get as much as you can. We're just going to sit there and stare. We're just going to be bored after this. Fire afterwards. Right. And clearly that if all of these things are his effects and we love all these things to various degrees and love them rightly, if we love them in proportion to how good they actually are. Right. Then and only then could we think to ourselves, he is this thing infinitely, this thing perfectly, this thing that is the fullness thereof of life. I'm not losing life. I'm gaining it. To begin to grow in a real desire. And it's not just the Trinity because the difficulty with the Trinity is that's a concept you can't by definition have. You can't reason to the Trinity as you mentioned earlier. You can't have a concept because if you have a concept of it, then it's less than what he is in himself. Right. And that's why the humanity of Christ is so incredibly important. As St. Catherine said is that the bridge across which you get to the divinity of God and those two things together constantly in our meditation. So practically speaking, I mean, looking at anything in creation, any of the things that you love, anything that bring you any kind of joy, take that into your prayer. Why do I love this? Why do I enjoy this and refer it back to him? Find it in him? What is this? How is this reflective of you? How did you create this? And in you is the fullness of this thing that I love. So I begin to grow in a desire for the sweet and blessed country. Yeah, I think that that's beautifully said. I think, you know, is a practical way in which I approach my prayer life when I'm reflecting upon the Trinity, which I do a fair amount. Of course, you look at God made flesh in the person of Christ. But recognizing that he is looking back upon the Father for which he is a perfect image of. And that the gaze between the two, being the Holy Spirit, and I want to, in my prayer life, insert myself in the gaze, in which case I'm immersed in between, caught in the gaze of the father, the father to the son and the son to the father, and immersed in the experience of the gaze itself, which is the Holy Spirit. It's, of course, obviously, these are mental images that all fall short because, you know, every image is going to be more dissimilar than similar. But it's something, right? And we're meant to grasp something. And that's just it. As you said earlier, one reason to disclose the mystery, to reveal the mystery is to have a possible disclosure of it. In other words, that I have this thing revealed to us, this fact that God is Father, Son, Holy Spirit, this reality of realities, because I can explore it, because every little small, small insight that I gain in that realm is worth any information I have in any other realm, because it's about the ultimate reality. And I'm not meant to just throw out my hands and say, well, it's a mystery, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Oh, no, no. I'm meant to explore this reality and, presumably, hopefully explore it for all eternity. Right, exactly. Now, it really is extremely, it gets to the heart of the matter. It does get to the heart of the matter. I think that most people will be left wondering after listening to the two of us talk, well, what does that have to do with me in my prayer life? I would say that what we would hope that people would gain in this conversation is first, this isn't so far above you because it's what you are made for. It is far above all of us when you consider the disparity of our created nature and the uncreated God. But that's not the way we begin this journey, because you can't simply say, I'm supposed to make this journey, but it's impossible, because if you say that it's impossible, then you're not going to make the journey. So you can't begin there just with this disparity between our nature and God's nature. But you know that Christ, God becomes man and bridges that and that we enter through Christ into this intimate relationship with God. And that it requires a daily engagement. There is a mental gaze. I'm sorry. When I drive and I'm on a highway especially, there's some back part of my brain that's driving. It is not the front part. I don't even know how I got from A to B. It's doing it. And now with the aid of all these enhanced cruise control methods, it's doing it even more lazily than it's ever done before. But the front part of my brain can be engaged in erosary, can be engaged in meditation and reflection. And in that sense, you can drive on a highway and probably be more reflective and meditative than if you were walking down the side of the road, especially with all these enhanced cruise control things. But the point being is that there's so many opportunities at the course of the day to be able to reflect upon, to be able to engage interiorly, plenty of opportunity. Well, let's not discount the fact that, as you said, we're made for this and grace is a kind of con-natural principle, which just means that it's with us like any other habit is. It's given to us by God to begin to share his mind. Faith is the kind of sharing of the mind of God in our frail minds, but nevertheless. And so to ask for that capacity to think on these things, to be enlightened by God, to begin to know the persons of the Blessed Trinity and their oneness, but also in their distinctions. And maybe one simple way to begin to do that is that let's just make deliberate signs of the cross. I mean, it's a very simple thing. But if you attach to that sign of the cross that I want to know you as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, just thinking about that every once in a while when you're making the sign of the cross. Because we, you know, we're always swatting flies, right? When we make the sign of the cross. People see a Catholic, they don't know they're a Catholic. But what is he doing? I love it. Like when a movie I see, you know, there's whatever the movie is, and then it comes like a poignant moment. And people are having like a little religious experience where they're terrified. And you see one of the actors make a sign of the cross. Like, oh, like one of those extras is a Catholic. Exactly. Exactly. I like seeing that. It's a beautiful thing to sign yourself with that and to think about what it is you're doing when you're saying that it's a professional belief. So. So as lofty as everything may have been in our conversation today, it's really not. It's the path you're on. And if you're an effective God. Yeah. Right. And this is where, of course, St. Augustine and St. Thomas find the perfect image of the Trinity. We won't go into it here. Yeah, right. But if you're an effective God and you're the highest creature that you know, in you is this reality stand. Right. So it's pretty darn natural to you to think about Trinity. It really is extraordinary. That having been said, I think it's time for before we go. Before we go, Father, I have to just say before we go that I had a wonderful Machiato here offered by one of your wonderful assistants. We aim to serve. We cannot put sufficient amounts of emphasis on the barista culture that is now coming sufficiently to the United States. And I could not be more happy about it. We had a wonderful donor when we first started the seminary that said, you know, Father, I've been with you through this process and I want to get the sister or something. What can I get them? And I said, I think you should get them. Well, I don't know. I'll ask him first. But I had something in mind, they would say. And of course, they said the same thing because they're they're coffee junkies too. And they said, can we have an espresso machine? Well, I thought it would just be like a little espresso machine. And this man got us a Pavoni, which is a pretty serious espresso machine, but has become aside from the Blessed Sacrament, it has become the epicenter of our house. Is that oh, yeah, because everyone hangs out there and gets a coffee and talks. It's that it's the it's the modern day water cooler, the whatever you want to call it. Absolutely. It creates such life in the house. Everyone's you want a coffee? Yeah, let's go get a coffee. Whether it's an espresso, macchiato, cappuccino, caverate, whatever. And I'm glad to see that this has been brought now to the to the heart of the diocese. Well, you have to thank Gretchen for that because she she's usually behind all of those social improvements here. Yeah, she's gracious and courteous. So if y'all come to the chance to remix, really, you get yourself an espresso. Yes. Well, it's actually it's a new experience for me to be able to for her to say, you know, Father, would you like a espresso? Would you like a cappuccino? And it's funny because I feel like I'm in a piazza somewhere just because I'm being asked, you know, if I and it's like, wait a minute, am I at work? That's great. Touches of life. Oh, it does. It does. All right. So before we go, I feel like I always bring up food. And so I'm going to stick with the trend. Thinking and talking is work. We got to get to food at some point. That's why I drink with coffee. Well, that's it. I can bring up coffee because it's awesome. So I'll bring up a classic autumn food. When I grew up, in the autumn, you went apple picking. It was so much great memories. I remember that. Of course, it was gross a lot because there'd be like these rotten apples on the ground to be stepping on that kind of mushy. But that said, it was a ton of fun to get a bushel of apples. Cider never tasted so good. Oh, an apple cider donut. It's like a cake donut with crispy, fatty and everything. It's delicious. But the other day I bought some apples and I was thinking to myself, you know me, I buy fruit and I buy apples, but I don't buy them enough. I feel like there's more that can be done. So one of my favorite ways to eat apples and apple salad. I like putting apples in my salad, but I also like just chopping up a Fuji apple, which I think has a nice combination of crunch, tart and sweet, chopping that up, putting some balsamic glaze, whether it's a white balsamic glaze or red balsamic glaze, taking some crumbled blue cheese and some roaster toasted walnuts and tossing it all together. And it is an unbelievable mentally of flavor. You get the salt and pungency of the cheese with the sweetness and the brightness and a little bit of sour in the apple and the crunch of the walnut. It's just amazing. And, you know, now I want to make an apple pie. Now I'm thinking, like, do I make a strudel? I've never made a strudel before, but maybe that would be kind of fun. But I'm just thinking of different ways. But the apple is extraordinary. So I'm just saying it's autumn. It's time to get the apples. They're in season. I made homeies and raviolis last week with a pumpkin and hazelnut filling and butter sage. Oh, butter sage. I would even eat pumpkin with that because I'm not a fan of the pumpkin flavor. Sorry, I'm a minority. I get it. But either I'm defective or the rest of the world is defective. But something's wrong. It just does not work for me, the pumpkin flavor. But if I had the pumpkin flavor with butter and sage and salt, even that sounds more than palatable. It sounds desirable. You want to get some food? I'm hungry. Yes, let's do that. God bless you all. Have a great week. Enjoy. Take care. Ciao. Thanks for listening to this episode of From the Rooftop. For updates about new episodes, special guests and exclusive deals for From the Rooftop listeners, sign up at rooftoppodcast.com. And remember, for more great ways to deepen your faith, check out all the spiritual resources available at 10books.com. And we'll see you again next time. From the Rooftop.