 and I'm your sidekick. Hey friends, great to have you with us tonight. We'll be starting in just a minute. Put in the comments where you're from. Yeah, pray the Umburellino prayer for us. You can do that for us. Everything's working just fine at the moment, but we will go ahead and start with a prayer in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, thank you for all of our friends from all over the world that are with us tonight to speak about this door that St. Teresa of Avila revealed, the door wherein when we enter, we can come to know Jesus like never before. Pour out your Holy Spirit on Dr. Lillis and I tonight that we might bless all of those who have come to the webinar to listen and to learn. And to have a much more beautiful and rich lent by drawing near to you and your suffering. We pray these things in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. So welcome to by this door, the wounds of Jesus and the life of the Trinity. I'm Dan Burke. Since I'm introducing myself, I have this rule that if I have to introduce myself, this is how I do it. My name is Dan Burke. I'm a sinner and you shouldn't listen to me. Now, Mike, the guy that's with me is Dr. Anthony Lillis and you should listen to him. And he and his wife Agnes are blessed to be parents of three young adults. He's taught graduate level theology for more than 300 years. Dr. Lillis specializes in spiritual theology, spiritual direction, various classics of Catholic spirituality. His expertise or his doctoral work was in on St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. And of course he's a very deep water in the other doctors of the Carmelite world. Well, Elizabeth isn't a doctor yet, but we're hopeful for that. But St. Teresa of Albala, St. John of the Cross and St. Therese, he's the author of Fire from Above published by Sophia Institute Press, Living the Mystery of Merciful Love, 30 Days with Therese Blasiu and 30 Days with Teresa of Albala, those last two books he and I worked on together. He's the co-founder of the Aval Institute. The Aval Institute wouldn't exist without him. And in 2013 is when that all started. And he's the chief academic officer for the Aval Institute. He also teaches now for St. Patrick's Seminary. Welcome, Dr. Anthony Lewis. Well, Dan, it's wonderful to be with you. Thank you for having me. And I have to disagree with you right off the bat, though. People should listen to you. You've been trying to be faithful to Christ for a long time and through the school of hard knocks and through prayer, God has given you some stuff that we all need to hear. So thanks for making this happen this evening and it's always, always great to be with you. You truly are like a, I don't know, a brother in the spirit for me who's kind of helped lift me up and point me in the right direction. And so I'm always glad to do something with you. Well, that's very kind, very kind. It's always a blessing to work with you. If somebody asks where St. Patrick's Seminary, that's in Menlo Park, California. Yes. Yeah, Menlo Park, California on just south of San Francisco on the peninsula. So say prayers. We have students from all over the Pacific Rim and it's a growing student body, but like every seminary in the country, we need lots of prayers. Yeah, most definitely. Well, I think we've got to begin with St. Teresa of Abula. You have been teaching for the possibly VA community through the book of her life and we've done some work together on this, but would you say that her most significant conversion, I think she was 39 years old, right? Was before the statue of, was it Eche Homo statue of Jesus, right? Or was it at the pillar, scourging at the pillar? I think it was the Eche Homo statue. Right, right. Yeah, and yeah, it was a powerful moment because we know from her life that about a third of the life, it goes over how she was drawn to prayer and she was drawn to do something heroic and beautiful for God, but every time she began to go into it, she ran up against something that discouraged her and she would backslide. And that moment was the moment where she told Jesus, I won't get up from my knees until you give me the grace not to backslide anymore. And the reason why she prayed that prayer was, it was a moment of actual grace through the statue. She says it wasn't as if she was looking at a statue anymore, but Jesus in the immensity of his love revealed to her how much he loved her, how much he has held nothing back so that we might know the love of the father. And when that pierced her heart, it opened up a whole new pathway in her spiritual life. What's interesting too is people might think, might be curious to know, she entered the convent in 1535, a lot in Canaanacion, right outside of Abila and she was 20 years old. Three years after that, she had gone through an illness. She left the convent and then she picked up a book on mental prayer by Francisco de Osuna, who was a Franciscan priest called the Third Spiritual Alphabet. So that was 1538 is when she started reading that, which really had a big effect on her though, didn't it? I mean, she struggled up until her conversion before that statue, but Osuna really taught her to pray, didn't he? He did, that was a very important book for her. Even at the time of her conversion too, she, I can't remember the exact sequence, but just before and just after that event, she was reading also the Confessions of St. Augustine and the Life of Antony. And so she was doing, I mean, for those who, some ask, well, how do I have that kind of conversion in my life? And one of the things you can do is dispose yourself to it by reading the right kinds of things, read people who've lived a converted life and you hear how God works in their lives and it opens you up to the way that God may want to work in yours. If I remember right, she said that during that period at least, she never went to prayer without a book. So she spent a lot of time in spiritual reading that then aided her prayer, right? Yeah, well, and you know, today that different spiritual families like the Carthusians are adamant that you should always have a book with you when you go into mental prayer. Now, later on she didn't, of course, when her prayer simplified. And I think that was post conversion when she began to know infused contemplative kinds of prayer and she no longer needed the aid of that kind of spiritual reading, right? Well, while that's true, it's also true that we can find it even as she describes the highest levels of union, the fact that sometimes a soul struggles with very basic kinds of prayer, no matter how advanced you go. Yeah. And so I think she retained throughout her spiritual pilgrimage a profound humility about her humanity and the aid that spiritual reading or the scriptures or memorizing passages from the scriptures can be for mental prayer. Is there anything substantive to why, you know, she began mental prayer in 1538 and it took her 16 years before this conversion? Is it just go back to what you said before where she was just really not being consistent in her spiritual progress? Some of it had to do with the lack of consistency. Some of it has to do with as you begin mental prayer, you come up against a threshold. Prayer at first, there's a kind of sweetness to it and you feel drawn to it, but you also come against these thresholds where you have to enter into experiences of prayer that are uncomfortable and inconvenient and unfamiliar. And for her, the specific thing we discover after her conversion, if you read the life, you discover that the problem she had before her conversion continued afterwards. God's going to heal it, but the biggest thing that surprised her, and I think she was coming up against this, as she engaged mental prayer, she assumed that she was going to get morally better and better and better as she prayed. But as she engaged mental prayer at first, what first happens is you become a lot more aware of your sins and in your at least experience, and in her case, some people around her said, you seem to be digressing rather than progressing in the spiritual life. There must be something wrong. And up until her conversion, whenever she'd come across something like that, she'd let it discourage her and she'd abandon the prayer. After her conversion, this is where she's made the decision to persevere with prayer and all the saints that she comes across after that, whenever she is wondering, should I continue? Cause I seem to be getting worse. They always encourage her to believe, basically, these along the lines of, to believe in the love and the mercy of God being communicated in her prayer, to believe in that more than she believes in her own weaknesses. And so that was the block was, when you see the reality of sin, as you pray, you see the reality of sin in your life and when you see that, it's discouraging. And it takes a special grace of God to persevere in the face of your own weakness and hostility towards him, to persevere in believing in love and to keep that commitment to prayer strong. It was during that time too, I think, I remember right there, she recounts that the devil related to what you're saying about, she is doing good in terms of pursuing the Lord, even though there's some flex, there's some fluctuation in her commitment and discouragement or whatever, but the devil actually convinced her that she was too sinful to pray. Yep. Yep. And Dan, it's so good that you brought that up because I think that happens to a lot of people they don't believe how much God loves them, they don't believe the dignity of their lives and the great calling that they received. And so they believe they're not worthy to pray, not worthy to allow God to love them. And this was part of the journey of her conversion. Yeah. And so 16 years after she starts prayer, fluctuating on and off, struggling, she also got some bad advice, bad spiritual direction, the devil convinced her not to stop praying, that she learned a lot through that period, of course, and she reflects back a lot on that period in terms of this was the error and this is the truth, because once after her conversion, she said the one thing you should never, ever, ever stop doing is praying, right? That's right. That's right. She was pretty passionate about that. So she has this big conversion, but in terms of this statue, it's a little tiny thing, isn't it? Do I remember right? I think I've seen it in Spain. Okay. I remember it slightly bigger, but it's not a life size. Yeah, it's not a big thing. Yeah, but somehow when she encountered that statue, it's the Eche Womo is the statue where Jesus has been scourged and mocked and the crown of thorns has been placed on his head, read in his hand, and Pilate, he's pulled out in front of the crowds and Pilate says, behold the man. And so it's the humiliated, mocked, beaten, abandoned, denied, betrayed Jesus. Go ahead, sorry. This Jesus who suffered so much is the threshold into mental prayer for Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Therese de Jesus. Now, when you say threshold, I think, so she was wrestling with prayer. She did read the book, it did help her. She read these other texts that you described. She was fluctuating in and out. In my mind, what helped her, and correct me if I'm wrong, what helped her to have this encounter. So there might be some people out there thinking, well, gosh, I sure love that kind of an encounter. In some ways, the progress of mental prayer, let's say, from a discursus, like thinking about the text in Jesus in scripture and that sort of thing, from that kind of prayer to affective prayer, where then the, I wanted to say the emotional component because what is happening in our mind actually reaches our heart and begins to spill over into our humanity, right? And then, but this, would you put this in the category of affective prayer an experience in that kind of deeper meditation, let's say, or do you put this in the realm of a mystical vision kind of an encounter? Well, it can be many things at the same time. Yeah. And so we make these distinctions to try to understand different kinds of graces, but the way the graces are communicated to you, they're kind of multivalent realities. And so I think probably when you're dealing with a statue, you're dealing with a form of prayer that is called composition of place, exterior composition of places. When you have a beautiful work of art that's before you, that moves your heart to devotion. So it's a sacramental, you know, and so she was dealing with a sacramental and that's certainly at play here, but her experience of this sacramental went over and above what a sacramental usually does. The love of Christ who suffered for her, all this humiliation so that she might be able to have a friendship with him, her bridegroom, all of a sudden wasn't an idea or an abstraction, but another, a real person before her vulnerable. And he was inviting her, her vulnerability, invited her to be vulnerable with him. And so there's something of a mystical grace there. There's something, perhaps there's something extraordinary there, there's definitely something affective that you've said, but something that has also entered into her imagination and stamped her intellect, all of this kind of fires together in this moment where another way to look at this grace is, you know, what's her response to this grace? It's compunction, you know, she's pierced to the heart by how much Jesus and his vulnerability has loved her. Well, this is the highway, the pathway into the heart of the father is to be pierced by the revelation of his love and the suffering of his son. Yeah, she said in her autobiography, I've seen clearly that it is by this door that we must enter if we wish his sovereign majesty to show us his great secrets. This door is of course, meditating on the humanity of Jesus. What does it mean? So we've been, obviously we're using Teresa of Abel as the backdrop because this was, you know, such a huge part of her conversion and very much a part of your life and my life in terms of her influence on us and all that we do is quite significant. But what is it mean to meditate on the humanity of Jesus? And I think of course, it begs the question as compared to the divinity of Jesus. Okay, well, okay, if I could back up because this is actually going to answer your question, but this is a very vital question. Can you contemplate the divinity of Jesus without his humanity? And the answer is no. We only know his divinity through his humanity. That's how God has chosen to reveal himself to us. But to back up a little bit, what was the doorway that helped Teresa enter into the humanity of Jesus? And I'm speculating here. And so this is an area people could disagree with me, but I think it was the death of her father. If you read the life, you'll discover the father began to go to his daughter to seek spiritual counsel. And she actually, because of reading the spiritual alphabet was pretty conversant with the spiritual, with mental prayer and the practices that sustained it. So she gave him that information. He took it to heart and began to live it. And one day in one of their conversations, he asked her, when this happens in prayer, what do you do? And she had to be honest and say, well, dad, father, I have to be truthful with you. I'm not spending that much time in mental prayer because religious life is too busy for it. And he stopped seeing his daughter after that because he didn't want to clutter her life and make her life more busy. And he dedicated himself to prayer. And she was with him when he died. And I think that experience of seeing someone who was authentic with the Lord instead of playing a game. Yeah, because that was during that 16 year period where she's fluctuating in and out. She's teaching on prayer. And she even knows, because she reflects on this, that she's a hypocrite at that stage. I mean, she recognizes how evil that was for her to be teaching and not doing what she was teaching. That's right. And in that place to be confronted with someone who embraced it and opened themselves, and she saw before her own eyes the conversion of her father and his transformation into a saint. And I think she saw something that she really wanted. I think she was touched by maybe a sense of betrayal that her father, I don't think intentionally conveyed to her but she must have been aware of it in somewhere. And so do you see the death of a loved one, the death of a saint in our lives, disposes us to take the spiritual life a lot more seriously because the mystery of death plunges us into our humanity. It makes us real and sober about what it means to be human. Now when you see the humanity of Christ and you see what he suffered as he was coming up to his death, do you see how much more vulnerable her heart is going to be because she's been sobered and made humble by the love of her father even as he himself died. And anyway, so I think our humanity, our own humanity, the humanity of people around us as we love them and as we kind of be real with it, all of a sudden the mystery of Jesus's humanity has space in our imagination and in our hearts to communicate itself to us, in our minds to communicate itself to us. As we receive the suffering love of Jesus's humanity, this is what gives us insight into his divinity. His divinity is incomprehensible but that incomprehensible love of God is communicated to us through the suffering love revealed in the humanity of Jesus. There's no other way to access it or receive it except through his body and blood. His body and blood give us his soul, his whole humanity and with that whole humanity, our whole humanity is impacted by it. So back to that very practical question, what does it mean to meditate on the humanity of Jesus? Are we just talking about his passion primarily, his suffering, like what we're doing here in Lent, many of us are spending a lot of time thinking about all of what he went through, what led up to his betrayal in the garden and then his trial and then all of the abuse and then ultimately the crucifixion. Is that what we're talking about? Can we talk about meditating on the humanity of Jesus? This has a special place, especially this time of year there are other dimensions. You can look at the whole humanity of Jesus from the incarnation to his glorification at the right hand of the Father. This is what St. Paul does in the letter of the Philippians though he was in the form of God. Jesus didn't deem equality with God something to be grasped at but rather emptied himself. Well, that self-empty and takes him all the way back to the throne of the Father so that at Jesus' name every knee must bow and every tongue confess that he's the Lord. Well, do you see the pathway that opens up? The passion begins when the word becomes flesh and it's fully manifest in his last wordless cry on the cross and the silence after he's breathed his last the Father has spoken to us everything we need to know for our salvation. We need to listen to the silence of God who suffered death for us. And if we receive that mystery, ponder the mystery of Jesus' humanity we also see the mystery of the Father's love a love not vanquished by death so powerful that they can raise up humanity. And so our contemplation of Jesus' humanity also takes us into the resurrection. But when we contemplate even the resurrection it's the resurrection of the crucified Christ. So it's not resurrection or the cross. The crucified Christ has come to us and appeared to us and we see his wounds and we can ponder those wounds and what they meant for us. Wounds that already are waiting to be unveiled to us in the first moment he's in the womb of his mother. Those wounds reveal what's in the heart of Jesus. And so to go back to your thing the passion and death of Jesus has a singular place. The mystics and the church say that there is a singular kind of grace that comes through meditating on the passion of the Lord not because there's something less than the whole reality of it but because that passion leads to the resurrection because it comes from the enunciation in the passion and the shedding of the blood what is inside Jesus is unveiled to us. What is inside is humanity has made manifest to us. So now we can see what's in his heart. It's a heart that gives itself to the end and will hold nothing back for us. And this is what we receive when we consume the Holy Eucharist. This unveiling of the love of the Father that triumphs over death but is unveiled in Jesus's suffering. And so it's going to be unveiled as we enter into that mystery it's going to be unveiled in our own suffering too. So Anna, always going back to the like, what does this mean for me tomorrow morning that's different than today? And I think it's important to make sure we cover what for us might be very obvious but for many it is not. And that is that Teresa by the time she had this experience I think was convinced of the necessity of living an authentic life of prayer not playing around anymore. She had gone through that whole experience she recounted with the loss of her father and all of that. She then at this stage is convinced that we should never fail to pray which I think disposed her and would you agree for this kind of encounter her? So this is touted as her conversion moment but I actually, my sense is it began before that and I think you even made that argument relative to her father's death really. Yeah, the seeds are there. I mean, you can see little seeds of conversion all the way through. Something definitive happens at that stairwell on the way to choir but there are all kinds of graces being communicated beforehand in a variety of different ways. And the conviction that's beginning to emerge in her that prayer needs to be a regular part of my life. Until the stairwell she's still haunted by the possibility of backsliding and the grace she secures is not to backslide anymore. But the conviction that you ought to pray I think you're right that this is beginning to be. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, I was just going to say the conversion kind of continues afterwards when the gift of mystical prayer kind of unfolds in her life that the Lord is finally able to free her and heal her of some of the attachments that were coming up and confounding her so much. But that grace that she receives later is a grace, it's not beyond the suffering of Jesus. Christ crucified who speaks to her. It's a continual conversation that unfolds and this goes with her definition of what contemplative prayer is. It's nothing other than a conversation with the one who loves us. And I think it's important to note so she has these experiences before this major conversion but what she was doing I think leading up to it after her father's death was in fact, disposing her to the great graces of encounter and really even if you look in the writings of other great spiritual doctors of the church, they'll echo this reality that the encounter with the humanity of Jesus is a transformative experience always comes out of the fruit of mental prayer. Do you agree with that? I do, I just nuance it like this. The encounter we have is actually the encounter with the person of Jesus and that encounter always happens through his humanity. It's an interpersonal relationship but an interpersonal relationship that doesn't happen above and beyond our humanity but within the limits of our humanity. Jesus has chosen to disclose himself within the humble limits of our humanity and so that when we encounter Jesus, we encounter through his humanity, the divine person in a personal relational way that makes a call upon our existence more than for anyone who's met their spouse. When you met your spouse there was a call upon your existence. You knew after you met them at a certain stage that your life could never be the same and there was something in you like shifted. Well, that's on a human, that's a very real experience. It's on a human level. It's an analog for an even greater more intense experience when you encounter Jesus in this way. He really loves us and he has chosen to love us through our humanity. And so there's the crowd listening is saying, so how do I get there from where I am? And I think the one, you've got to have a commitment to daily mental prayer. You've got to set aside what I like to use is the three fold sacred element, sacred time which is committing to God every day and saying, this is your time. I won't take it back. It'll always only be yours whether it be 10 minutes, 30 minutes an hour. It doesn't matter that, you know, as long as there's enough time to begin to immerse ourselves in sacred scriptures in the gospels because that's where we encounter both the humanity and divinity of Jesus in its most pure form in terms of a written record anyway. And we do that so sacred time every day get up at the same time, sacred space. It's really helpful, especially when you're new if you can have elements in your, where you pray that draw your heart and mind to God. So in this case, of course, the Eche Homo statue, you know, stopped her in her tracks and on, you know, I have a crucifix right over my desk here and I pray in my chair here or up in the chapel but the crucifix happens to be one that's realistic that shows the depth of his suffering which has got some parallels to the Eche Homo statue where, you know, it helps me to meditate on his suffering and what he's done for me. So sacred time, sacred space, icons and things that draw your heart and mind to God. And then the last one is the hardest one which the other two help with which is sacred attention which is the practice of some form of entering into the story like Alexio Divina or Ignatian meditation. I like a blend of the two where we're reading the passage, we're placing ourselves in the passage, we're talking to God about the passage. This is the kind of thing Teresa was doing. We don't know exactly what she was doing but that is, this is what mental prayer is. And so that's what disposed her soul to having this greater grace that then resulted by the way. I mean, it's important for people to understand she entered the convent when she's 20 years old. So she enters in in 1535, three years after that she starts practicing mental prayer and then she went through all the imaginations we talked about. Then there's a 16 year difficult period but once she establishes this kind of deeper immersion in meeting Jesus every day and going to him it disposed her to this great conversion. She established 17 foundations, 17 convents in 20 years on horse and buggy, no cell phones, no air conditioning, no electric cars, no rubber tires, no motors, you know. I mean, she rocked the world after this encounter because she had a real encounter with Jesus but if we don't, we must, let's say it a positive way, we must if we are to know what it really means to know him like she did and really live to the fullness of what we're called to be we must every day face him, every day say Lord here I am again in my broken, my broken humanity, my weakness, my tiredness, my lack of interest even sometimes my lack of desire, but I'm here Lord and that is when he begins to till up that soil and he gets rid of the hardened soil where the devil is stealing away the seed and he gets rid of the shallow soil, right? That is easily disrupted by the winds and the waves of life and he gets rid of the thorny soil that's distracted from riches or meaningless pursuits but unless we meet him there, all the bad soil remains which she experienced but when we begin to meet him there he begins to heal all of those things and he begins to open up our hearts and our minds to the reality of who he is. She prepares, he prepares us to see him and then he reveals himself to us sometimes in small ways sometimes in big ways like this etchy homo statue but never more to be the same, never more to be the same. It's that, no, that's extremely powerful and so the council that you've given, the practical council about making time for God every day and then kind of spiritual exercises spiritual exercises are tools you use. We don't use the tools to achieve a spiritual state but we do use the tools to kind of help put us in the presence of God and prepare us for the personal encounter but the encounter itself comes in the nature of a gift you can't force it, you can't produce it but you can welcome it and just like you would prepare for a guest to come to your house, you can't force the guest to come into your house but you can open the door and you can make them feel like it's a good place to come. This is, St. Augustine talks about this in the confessions about his house being too small and too healthy for the Lord to come in but Lord when you enter you purify it and you enlarge it for your presence and also in his tractates on John he does a similar thing that what happens in prayer as we engage this prayer every day, these spiritual exercises what is the Lord doing? The Lord is gradually purifying our hearts that he speaks about purifying is getting the vinegar out of our hearts and then so that as the vinegar comes out of the hearts he can enlarge the heart and pour in the sweet honey of his encounter. Well, this is what Teresa's also opens up for us. Yeah, I think if we have people in our audience who maybe have back slid in the bed or a little bit lukewarm or never even had this kind of conversion but you want it and that's why you're hanging out here. I think that meditating on the suffering of Jesus I don't know about you but it softens my heart in a big way. I mean, this, in particularly this year I got permission from my spiritual director to share what's happened to me this year but this year for whatever reason I've been in the spiritual desert for a long time and a couple of things happened to me. One, we have the chapel here at the retreat center and this hymn has been coming up in the liturgy of the hours that we chant the hours and it's when I survey the Wonders Cross do you remember that hymn? And nope, I'm the only one who knows the tune and so Kyle asked me to our liturgy guy here asked me to sing it and I've yet to be able to make it through I've only been able to sing it enough where everybody else could keep singing but I've just been brought to tears because the lyrics of that passage you know, when I survey the Wonders Cross upon which the Prince of Glory died all that I count as gain all that is gained I count as loss and poor contempt on all my pride. You know, when we begin to consider what he did for us and how badly he suffered and how good he was how beautiful a man he was and I think the chosen and maybe this year the chosen might have been what's prepared the soil for me more to re-enter into this reality but I think in the chosen the humanity of Jesus is so beautifully portrayed that it could bring me to tears in this moment I look at him and I think, wow, I really love you. I really, you are amazing, right? And then, so that's happening as I'm watching the series then I get to length this year and now I'm thinking of that guy who I think is so amazing in love and would really have loved to been back in the first century and hung out with him, you know I think of him being brutalized, you know for me, you know, by his own choice and then the other thing that brought me to just deep tears and struggle is I've had my lung diseases flared up really bad in the last month or so worse than it has since I almost died from COVID and I was sitting in my prayer chair one morning not really struggling to breathe and the Lord reminded me that the death on the cross is through asphyxiation. Wow. And I began to weep because though I, you know, so he's perfect fully God, fully man perfect in all ways so that when, if you can imagine when you and I encounter an injustice against us we do so in our imperfection. So it's almost like whatever injustice happens to us in some way we can say, yeah, okay, that's justice I deserve hell. So yeah, you know, but Jesus never and we feel the betrayal and we feel all of that how Jesus felt at all of that was exponentially worse than any human that has ever lived because of his purity because it was so far from who he was, right? So I can't know what it was like for him to not be able to breathe on the cross. I can know what it's like for me not to be able to breathe but in that moment he drew me to himself forehead to forehead and I wept because I could feel just a little bit the tiniest sliver of what he suffered and I could say with a deeper conviction than ever before in my life, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that my sins caused such agony in you and I can only feel a sliver of a sliver but I think what it revealed to me and it's bringing me to tears now, what it revealed to me is that we can meditate on his humanity, which is bringing before ourselves purposefully. Like I'm reading this book, The Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ by Albin Goodyer published by Sophia in Stupress. You can read Finding God Through Meditation by St. Peter of Alcantara and he gives you a meditation on the passion every day. So you can read those things, but I think it's when we suffer and we can remember and call to mind and connect some aspect of our suffering with what he went through and then we can draw near to him and console his heart in our sorrow knowing that his was exponentially worse than us than anything we could go through. And that, I don't know, has really just wrecked me this year, that whole experience over and over. Well, this mystery that you have, that you've elucidated just to take it the next step, yet you're suffering, you're struggled to breathing, for breathing gave you a sense of solidarity with Jesus. But here's the other, it gave you a doorway into how much he suffered and the immensity of that suffering love of Christ in the face of our hostility. And it does pierce us to the heart and we need to let it pierce us to the heart. We don't do that enough. That being said, there's a whole other dimension because Dan, you are a member of the mystical body of Christ and his passion is being renewed in you and extended in space and time so that in your sufferings like had said St. Paul, you make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ. We actually use that language when they anoint the sick. The purpose of the anointing of the sick is to join the sufferings of the person who's suffering to the passion of Christ Jesus for the salvation of the world, for the good of the church and the salvation of the world. Well, what does this, I mean, this is true of physical things like a physical illness and I'm struck right now, Jesus has struggled to breathe and all our brothers and sisters, including yourself right now who have struggling to breathe, this opens up a very particular concrete contemplation of the crucifixion, but it's also true that there are other wounds in us, spiritual wounds where we were maybe abandoned or betrayed or a denied, where we were humiliated, where all the most noble and wonderful dreams that we hoped for were crushed and we were left in disappointment and tempted and haunted by thoughts of bitterness and resentment. And Jesus bore all of that too for our sake, but he's also because you're in the mystical body of Christ, he's renewing his mystery through those things. If we give him those things, he is going to join them to himself and this is what happens at every mass. He's going to join them to himself for the salvation of the world. And this is what makes meditation on the passion of the cross such a powerful and fruitful thing in the Christian life. We are union with Christ Jesus is about our own salvation. It's completely true and we need that salvation. There's stuff in us that's really broken that needs to be healed. But the way he heals it is he doesn't take our wounds away. He puts his finger in our wounds and transforms them into vessels of his love. He transforms the cavities, the absences of love that ought to be in our lives, those cavities in our hearts. He transforms them into chalices for his precious blood. And this meditation on what Jesus has done for us just like you've done, just like you illustrated, Dan, this opens up that kind of thing. We're not alone in our suffering. We don't suffer as rugged individuals by ourselves. We are loved by God and he's taken our side and he's embraced us and he's shared everything that we're going through with us so that we don't suffer alone. And he's transforming it into an instrument that will transform the whole world if we will, but believe and cleave to him by faith. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautifully stated, beautifully stated. I wanna turn a corner and have some folks get some questions and answers. While folks are typing in their questions, I wanna tell you guys about, if this has been a blessing to you, we've got even something a lot bigger than this. Thursday, March 30th through Saturday, April 1st, Eche Homo Prayer and the Paschal Mystery, we have over 50 Catholic speakers lined up for you. Bishop Andrew Cousins, Johnette Bankovic Williams, Father Mitch Paqua, Father Josh Johnson, Dr. John Bergsma, Claire Dwyer, Dr. Mark Miravalli, not to mention Dr. Anthony Lillis. It's free. Dan Burke. It's free to watch live. It isn't free to us, but we really wanna transform the church. We really wanna give you all that you need to become a saint. So go out to spiritualdirection.com and in the events page, or it says you can do forward slash Eche Homo, Eche E-C-C-E dash Homo in order to sign up to get more of this kind of beautiful reflection for your lent so you can draw near to him. So we have a few questions rolling in here. One is, is St. Padre Pio the only saint to experience the shoulder wound of Christ? Yeah, we don't know for sure. We know that it was reported in his case, but what the saints have experienced, most of what they've experienced, we don't know because it remains such a secret mysterious reality between themselves and the Lord. When I was growing up in the mountains where I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, there was a great mystic. She died before I was born, but they still talked about her. She was a Mormon convert who received the stigmata every Friday and prayed for the church. She lived down in LA for a little while and moved up into the mountains. Those mysterious sufferings of the saints unveiled for us the power of the wounds of Christ. Beautiful. I just got a note from our producer who said to remind you that if you sign up for Eche Homo, you should purchase extended access for $33. She said, it goes up to $79 once the event begins. So if you don't capture, so it is free to watch live, so there's no barrier to anyone who doesn't have the funds. But it goes up to more than double that as the event begins. So that, and that pays for us to help host these things on a server and make sure it's all available to you. So make sure you sign up for that. So by available, you mean the recordings would be available if you paid $33? Yeah, so if you don't have time to watch all 50 or there's one, like if Clare Dwyer is speaking and Dr. Lois is speaking, that's a tough thing to choose between. And so if you want them both, then you need to get extended access. No, it's not, that wouldn't be that tough. I'd listen to Clare. I'd listen to you both. I'd listen to one and two here. So how do you overcome distractions when you pray? The moment I start to pray, I find it hard to concentrate. How can I overcome this? Well, I think one is you will overcome it when you die, but you don't want to hasten that. I wrote a book called End of the Deep, and the whole book is oriented to helping you to deal with this. But one of the most important ways to deal with it is, show up at the exact same time every day because you begin to train your body to be your friend and you're telling your body, it's this, I pray at this time, and your body will become more oriented to prayer. That'll help you overcome distractions. Another one is have material to read. I really think the better part by Father John Bartunek is the best daily material to meditate on ever. And all the books I'm recommending, by the way, including Dr. Lillis's are on spiritualdirection.com in the shop area. You can get them all there, but including the Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ by Alvin Goodyer that I mentioned earlier. But into the deep, if you pick up that book, it'll help you to deal with distractions and give you structure to pray. What are other tips that you have for Dr. Lillis? Well, I think what you've just said is very good. Sometimes also, the reason why so much for our prayer time is spent in distraction is we don't spend enough time with the Lord. Yeah. And so sometimes you need to go in and enter into his presence and it just takes a little bit of time to set aside the earthly care so that you can attend to him. It's almost like any other relationship you have in life. You can't just walk into a room and have the deepest conversation you've ever had. You kind of got to spend a little bit of time with the person and then open up your heart. So make sure you're giving yourself enough time in prayer. Yeah, I would say a minimum of 10 minutes to start is necessary. The more distracted you are, usually the more time you need. So you may need 15 minutes just to deal with getting your head in the game and paying attention. But like Teresa, take a book. The better part's great. The Gospel of John, you don't have to pay for more books is fine, so good stuff. How is it that carrying our crosses with Jesus in the purgative way? How is carrying our crosses with Jesus in the purgative way versus the limited way? What's the difference in the carrying of the crosses? It makes me think of the difference between fighting sin and habitual sin versus acquiring virtue and fighting imperfections, but how would you differentiate? Well, it is the struggle with sin. You struggle with sin a little bit differently in the illuminative phase than you do in the purgative but you still have that basic struggle with sin. Well, also joining your sufferings to the sufferings of Christ, in the purgative way, you have this desire for the Lord, but it's not come into a deeper stability. And so you'll notice that as you try to surrender your sufferings and join them to the sufferings of Christ Jesus, you're on again, off again. You backslide a little bit, you go back and forth. But as the Lord, you allow the Lord to communicate his love into your life and to purify and enlarge you and you enter into this illuminative stage of your spirituality. You'll notice that you'll be able to do, make the same offering of your sicknesses or psychological stress. You'll be able to make the same offerings, but you'll be able to do it with a deeper stability and that stays strong and consistent all the way through because the Lord has given into your heart his peace. Beautifully stated. I think another way of looking at the progression too is how we deal with suffering. In the pre-purgative where we're not really converted, we're inebriating from suffering. You enter into the purgative way, you're going from good to better. You might accept the necessity of suffering in an intellectual way. And then mid-delay purgative, you're more embracing the suffering and saying, okay, I understand that I need this. You enter into the illuminative way and beyond, it's, you can even develop a love of suffering and a desire to suffer. But it's just how Jesus works in us to purify that union, that drawing near to him in the midst of our crosses and how we react to them. The key is, don't set him down because if you do, the narrow way disappears. And if you pick it up again, the narrow way will reappear. And so you have to keep it, it's just, but it is, don't beat yourself up. It is normal earlier stages to really, not like it all that much, but later you realize the power of it. Like for me, when I went through COVID, the fruit of COVID and my own suffering and what happened during that time was a 300% increase in our student population in the Avalon Institute. And I think that was directly related to suffering and the prayer that came out of suffering. And I'm not pointing to me as virtuous in any of that. I'm just saying how God uses suffering. Excellent. Excellent. When using the gospel, when using gospel for daily mental prayer leaves one flat, how would one use a good book for meditation? So there's a little danger here. What was it like for Mary to come when Jesus visited Mary, Martha, and Bethany? What was the disposition of Mary when she sat at Jesus' feet? Was she looking to be entertained? Was she looking to feel a certain way? I don't think any of those things were true. I think she was just looking to be with the master and was ready to receive anything he would give. And we have to be that way when we approach the gospels and I'll be honest with you, my prayer is very simple at this stage in my life, but I still read the gospels every day. It is rare that they move me, but it is always true that they change me. It is rare that they move me, but it is always true that they change me. So how we feel about the encounter is 100% meaningless in terms of how, whether that's as a gauge of what God is doing. Beautiful. So we have to be careful. What else, what else, Dr. Lewis, on that? Well, I'm just thinking right now about a friend of mine who's a hermit. He memorized the 150, he lived in India and the Holy land in Ethiopia and he's out here in the Bay Area or north of the Bay Area now. He memorized the 150 Psalms in Hebrew and he tries to pray them all every day. And his attitude towards the Psalms is not what he's getting, what he gets out of the Psalms. His attitude towards praying the Psalms is basic. These are all the movements of Jesus's heart and I need to learn to treasure each one. And so I suppose you could apply that to the whole scriptures, but when Jesus prayed the Psalms, he prayed them with his heart. He let them into his heart and it's what he felt. And this hermit, he's recognized that this is Jesus's prayer and Jesus's prayer has a man who is praying in fulfillment of centuries and millennia of men who've turned to God and poured out their hearts to God and he feels that he is the custodian of this. Well, we are the custodian of the gospel. And so this maybe undermines a little bit what Dan was saying. Don't worry about feeling flat. Let the words of sacred scripture echo in your heart and become the language of your soul. We need to learn to speak the language of the scriptures because it's in the language of the scriptures that God speaks to us. Back to the recommendation of the Better Part series for a meditation on every single passage of all four gospels. And in it, Father Bartunek gives you, each one opens with a quote from a saint, then the text, then Christ the Lord, Christ the teacher, Christ the friend, Christ in my life, and then questions for reflection. So if you're not very good at, if you will, getting into the scripture just from your own natural weaknesses and you wanna go deeper, this is golden. This priest is very holy. I know him very well and this will really help you a lot to dig in a little deeper, especially if you have no background in biblical studies or you don't necessarily have an imagination for what's going on there. That can really help kind of prime the pump because you give you holy imagination to work with a little more than just the text. But then you get used to expanding on the text and entering into the text yourself and you don't need books like that. But did you mention that Teresa was healed of attachments while experiencing mystical phenomena? So the attachments themselves were not hindrances to such an experience. I only have one thing to say and then I'd like you to comment. Your poverty is no barrier for God's grace and mercy. Amen. All right, now you Dr. Lois. Well, Dan, you summarize that answer in the most beautiful way. Jesus chooses to dwell in our weaknesses and our voids and in the areas of our life that we're most ashamed of. That's where he walks and that's what he suffers with us because he doesn't want us to suffer alone. And there are some things in our lives that are healed without seeming any work at all and in no time at all. And then there are other things that the Lord permits us to suffer with him for a little while. And then at his pleasure, according to his sovereign will, he acts with power so that you know unmistakably that he is the Lord of heaven and earth and that he has authority over everything going on in your heart and you can rejoice and give thanks with him in that. So do not be discouraged when you find evil in your heart. Do not be discouraged when the Lord permits you to, well, when the Lord carries it with you for a long time before he heals it completely. He's at work, he's sovereign and he has a great plan for you. And what he does is going to be the cause of a praise of glory in your life. Beautiful. Can you speak more about the empty spaces of our weaknesses being filled with a chalice with his most precious blood? Well, this is a meditation. Tresa Avila, I wanna go back through her writings in John of the Cross because I think there's connection points in their writings to this insight, but this is an insight that began to emerge in the 20th century with different saints and mystics. And so I'm hearing things like this, but we live at a time right now where the idea of healing being healed from the misery of our lives is being talked about more and more and in all the different ways we need healing in our lives is being talked about. A mistake that gets made is that, and I made the same assumption myself, is that when a healing happens, the problem or the wound like magically disappears and you never deal with it again, healing has more of the thing that when you are wounded and the wound is not healed, that wound will always diminish you and weigh you down and prevent you from the freedom you need as a child of God. When a wound is healed, it becomes the source of new life. And the place, there's a number of ways that this healing takes place, but the place par excellence where this healing takes place where the misery in our lives, the absences of love that ought to be in our hearts and is not there can be transformed by Jesus from something that diminishes our existence to something that helps us live to the full, that the place par excellence is the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, when we place our misery on the altar of Christ, Jesus takes that misery, all the absences of love and betrayals of it that you're suffering, the sorrows, the secret sorrows that only you know, he takes that and he joins that to himself. He joins it to himself on the cross and he loves it because he loves you. And when he loves it and the father sees it and blesses it, touches it, that absence is transformed from something that diminishes you by the love of God. It's the love of God heals. By the love of God, it's transformed into something that was holding you back and limiting your freedom to now something that opens up possibilities that I subject to death can't see. Beautiful. It reminds me of Anjoy and Sorrow by Khalil Gibran. Did you ever read that? I haven't read that. It sounds like a beautiful book. It says, the book is the prophet and they're asking the prophet all these questions and they said, you know, a woman said to the prophet, speak to us of joy and sorrow. And he said, your joy is your sorrow unmasked and the self same well from which your laughter rises was often filled with your tears. And how else can it be the deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain is not the cup that holds your wine, the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven is not the loot that soothes your spirit, the very wood that hollows was hollowed with knives. When you were joyous, look deep in your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. And I think it captures, you know when we overlay of course or I mean he was a Maronite Catholic, I don't know how faithful he was but I think this insight is a deep meditation on this reality of the power of suffering and how for me in living with sickness all my life it softens my heart, when I'm sick it makes me more dependent, it opens me more fully and when you join it with the sufferings of Christ when you meet him in the suffering it magnifies with an eternal glory as you noted to the joining with Christ in the redemption of the world. And part of what we have to do to mature in this reality is begin to say, ask the question I guess it begins with trust, right? The father is a good father, the Jesus that the blessed Trinity is a good God who wants the best for us, first and foremost. Now I'm suffering, it was either caused or allowed how do I join with Christ in his suffering? How do I embrace God's movement knowing, believing this is necessary for my salvation? This is necessary for the salvation of the world. That kind of thinking disposes you to the graces wherein our suffering becomes our joy. That's what a powerful reflection and I was not aware of that, I wanna find that that that's stuff to open up a deep meditation for this beautiful season of Lent we're in. I think this area gets asked about so much because people wanna know at the end of the day that the things they're suffering is their meaning behind it? Yeah. And this meditation that you just gave us Dan, this is the reason for our hope and God is in control and he's good and he has a beautiful plan and we can trust that plan and something powerful is going to happen in our lives is happening because we do, so very powerful. I hadn't thought about doing this but I just, I'm gonna do it and get in trouble. I just finished a book, Reflection, it's called, the title is Finding Peace in the Storm, Uniformity with God's Will. It's reflections on St. Alphonse is great but very short work on Uniformity with God's Will. It'll be out in August, which is just a month, never a month away. If you wanna get on a list for that, for that kind of thinking that I was just giving you and it moved you, send an email to questions at myabela.com and we'll start getting a list together. Those will be on the front end of getting a maybe even early copy of that book. A few other questions, I wonder if you've ever heard Louisa Pecorretta, 24 Hours of the Passion and the answer is yes. And it is a very good thing to meditate on. The only thing I would caution you is that there are people who are, Devo Taze of Pecorretta who have done harm to her cause by getting out in front of the Bishop of Trani and those who are working through her writings in the Vatican. So she's already been determined to be essentially a saint. She's a servant of God. She hasn't been canonized yet, but her writings are being reviewed and it's gonna take some time. There's only a few of her writings that have been approved. 24 Hours of the Passion is one and I think the one on the Queenship of Mary. But you can go to the diocese of Trani in Italy or in Spain, I mean, and find out the sources you should be relying on. But it's very good and beautiful meditation material. I don't know, you have any comment on that doctor? No, I think that was well stated. Yeah, I have a friend who was the postulator for her cause. So learned all the ins and outs of what's going on with all that. So there's a lot of problems because of that harm her cause because of people unauthorized translations and uses and stuff. Okay, how do you draw near to the Lord during times of temptation when all you can think of is the sin and you can't focus on the Lord? I would challenge whether you can or can't. It certainly can be hard sometimes when you're focused on yourself and hard on yourself and you're mired in shame. What do you think, Dr. LaRose? Yeah, I think shame and being self-centered kind of ruins our ability to, when we're a little bit too self-occupied with our own sufferings, shamed of them self-pity and all of this, it's kind of working against the opposite of offering it to Jesus. And so this is an area that we, it's kind of an area where if you notice this going on, you surrender it to the Lord and you say, this is what's going on, Lord. Help me turn my attention to you and your goodness. Help me take my mind off of what's pulling me down. The evil one, evil on the whole but especially the evil one always likes to be the center of attention. And even in your prayer, he likes to make it seem as if evil defines the silence of your heart and evil defines who you are as a person and he wants to be center. So resist that with all of your heart. Don't let him be center. Turn your heart to the goodness and everlasting mercy of God. Again and again and again, exhaust yourself turning to Jesus. Amen. Somebody said, glad to know Gibran was not a wrong source. I'm not endorsing Khalil Gibran. I just find that reflection very moving from the prophet and certainly in company with what we're talking about today. The name of the book, Angela, I don't know which book you're talking about. 24 Hours of the Passion by Louisa Prichoretta. The Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ by Alvin Goodyear. The Better Part by Father John Bartunek. I don't know which one you're talking about. But we've got to wrap it up. I want to tell you again, don't miss Etche Homo Prayer in the Paschal Mystery. Thursday, March 30th through Saturday, April 1st, over 50 rock stars of the Catholic faith. I mentioned a handful, Bishop Andrew Cousins, Johnette Williams, Father Mitch Paco, Josh Johnson, Dr. Lewis's Be Back. And it's free to watch live. Nobody is deprived. We love to serve people who don't have normal access. However, it does cost us money to store these things and make them available long-term and manage all of that. So when you sign up, purchase extended access, and it's less than half what it'll be once the event begins. So make sure you do that. spiritualdirection.com forward slash etche-homo or go to the events page on spiritual.spiritualdirection.com. Anything else, Dr. Lewis? No, I think, Dan, thanks for leading us through this evening. I want to thank all the people who made time out of their busy lives to join us in this reflection. And I hope that something in this has encouraged you on your Linton journey. Amen. All right, Mrs. Producer, what's next? You taking us offline? God bless everybody.