 All right, if we can go ahead and start at the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. This is a reading from Romans 12, verses 4 through 8. For as in one body, we have many parts, and all of the parts do not have the same function. So we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us exercise them. If prophecy and proportion to the faith, if ministry and ministering, if one is a teacher than in teaching, if one exhorts an exhortation, if one contributes in generosity, if one is over others with diligence, and if one does acts of mercy, then do so with cheerfulness. And Lord, we thank you so much that you know our hearts, that you have created so intimately and so perfectly, that you have created to love with a vocation of love, that you know who we are and how you have best made us to love you. We ask that you will reveal and open up different parts of our heart that you want access to this afternoon, and that you will show us the best way that we can relate and communicate with you and that we can receive. Lord, we ask that you will just send your Holy Spirit upon us in this room, and that the Holy Spirit will animate the beating of our hearts to teach us how to love with your love. And we ask that the Blessed Mother, who was the perfect Christian, who knew you better than any person on earth who bore you within her, who experienced and received a love, who gave a love to you that is unique, but the one that she desires for us to share in his well, that she will pray with us, that she will intercede for us this afternoon as we pray together. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Amen to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. So I'm excited about this workshop because I think it's kind of fun. It's a little bit different. And I've done it before and have just been really excited about some of the fruits that come out, especially of conversation afterwards. So hopefully there will be something that the Lord will have to offer to you. First I wanted to give a little bit of an analogy, a little example, kind of what we're going to be talking about. And I have four small children at home. And my oldest is 11, and then I have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old, all girls. And then last summer we had a baby boy, baby Colby. And so he will never make an important decision in his life. I'm sure he'll have all kinds of people telling him exactly what he should be doing at all times. But my second child, Claire, she is very strong-willed. They all are in their own way, but she has a very special gift of strong-wildness. So she is also the pickiest eater that I've ever met in my entire life. So we joke that Claire is a vegetarian that doesn't eat vegetables. So if she could survive on oxygen, cake, and tomato soup, that would probably be her preference. So one evening we were at dinner and every night we sit down and she's like, why do you always make such gross things for dinner? And so we're trying so hard to coax her through eating her food. And so my older daughter, Maria, she came up with this great idea telling Claire that if she ate her beans, then she would be able to fly. And so Claire is a very trusting individual apparently. It's like not even on my radar. I'm like, okay, whatever. So Claire, she's giving her all these bites of beans and we didn't know Claire really thought she was going to fly after dinner was over. And so afterwards she was very angry. She was very, very, very upset afterwards. She was literally like standing on the couch trying to jump off. Like, it's got to work. I'm going to will it to work. So I was thinking about this and then kind of what I was saying in our description of this workshop is that sometimes I think that there can be this temptation for us, I think especially as adults who are immersed in different things like this too that are active in our parishes. And we know a lot of really holy people to think like that there is this formula for holiness. Like if I do this, if I do this one thing, then it's going to work. Then I'm going to experience God in this way. It's going to heal these things in my life, whatever. That there's this formula. If I do everything right, then I am going to be holy and it's going to be fine. And then sometimes when it doesn't really work out the way we expect, we're kind of upset about that. Like I thought that I was going to go to this conference and I was going to leave and all of these things were going to manifest in me and whatever. But what I think that is really beautiful about a topic like this about kind of looking inward and looking at our heart and how the Lord has created us is to really have this understanding that God is going to work in our lives and in our hearts in a very unique and a singular way. In a way that he's not going to do for other people. And sometimes it's going to manifest itself in ways that we expect and sometimes it's going to manifest itself in ways that we absolutely don't expect at all. So when I was in high school and I was super, super involved in my youth group and I was kind of known as like this leader within our church. Well then I came to school here. So my identity really was, you know, my group of friends was that I was kind of leading the charge and like inviting people to stuff and things like that. And all of a sudden I arrive at Franciscan University and there's people who like gave up their shoes for Lent in Ohio in the winter and like gave up their bed and I'm like, I gave up complaining about the cafeteria food and I can't even do that. So I kind of had this identity crisis like what am I doing? Like who am I? I thought that I had this kind of holiness thing worked out and all of a sudden I'm surrounded by all these people who haven't worked out a lot more than I do. So my best friend when I was at school here and we kind of went through something similar and we're both very similar personalities like a little bit extroverted, louder. And she went through this period of time where I would, we would be hanging out and she was like really quiet and reserved and she was spending all of this time like in the library. And I was like, we don't do that. We don't go to the library. What are you doing? And for like a couple of weeks this was going on and we would invite her to go and do stuff and she wouldn't come and she would stay at home. So finally I called her out and I'm like, what is going on? What is your problem? And she said that she, you know, had been really like reflecting on the Blessed Mother and how she was pretty sure like the Blessed Mother never was like loud and like yelling and like laughing really like inappropriately loud at jokes. You know, like she would do some times and stuff. And she was like, I just want to be holy so badly. I want holiness so much, but I don't see, I don't see this like as a part of how holiness seems to look like, you know? And we're talking about this and really becoming convicted like your holiness for you is not going to look like it does for monks, right? Who aren't allowed to speak or whatever that is that we really have to start looking and discerning deep within our own hearts about what holiness looks like for us. And so that's basically what we're going to be talking about this afternoon is about the fact that, you know what, the world has already had St. Maximilian Colby and the world has already had St. Trez and has already had all of these giants of our faith, right? But what the world has never had before is you. And that one of my favorite verses from Esther Mary was talking about this earlier and brought it up kind of as a call and a rally for this weekend is that perhaps we were created for just a time as this. That the Lord has created you specifically, your gifts, your heart, your way of encountering him and the people who are in your life and who need to have the Lord introduced to them in their life and that he has placed you specifically within their lives. That the world has had all of these other great saints before but what we have never had is you. And this is what all of the saints had discovered within their own lives and what they did and what they did well was that they weren't trying to live the exact life pattern of somebody else but what they were doing was constantly listening to the Spirit, constantly looking and searching and being open to exactly what it was that God was calling them to do and the way that he wanted to speak in them and wanted to speak through them. And so as we're here on this eve of Pentecost I think that this is a really great image and a really great place for us to start of really inviting that Holy Spirit to come and to ignite within us because what I think is really unique and I don't think really talked about that much when we think about the story of the Pentecost is that there was 12 different men who were in that upper room plus the Blessed Mother, right? And that the Holy Spirit came and descended on this room and here are these people who were kind of lost, right? Like they lost the Lord in his death and then he was back in his resurrection and then here he is and he's left them again. And so their response is that they go back into hiding and they're trying to figure out what do we do? What do we do? We don't know where to go. We don't know what we're called to do. The Lord said he's going to give us this mission to go out to the whole world and bring the gospel to the Holy Spirit. We're realizing everyone in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We're 12 guys. We don't have our leader. What are we going to do, right? But Jesus had promised that he was going to send this Heraclitus, that he was going to send the Holy Spirit and when he did so and the apostles went bursting forth out of the upper room that they went out into their community and it wasn't one of them. It didn't just happen to Peter and Peter went out and was able to preach. It didn't just happen to John but 12 different voices. 12 people who went out with their own voice and were proclaiming the Word of God, right? And were telling people in their own fashion with what the Holy Spirit was doing in them in their own way and that that was what touched the hearts and the lives of so many people. And their response to the Spirit being welled up within them it changed everything about their lives that they were completely transformed. They went from being these people who were afraid and who were hiding in this upper room to these people who were out and who were fearless who were risking their lives going out and preaching Jesus. It changed everything about their lives but it also changed the lives of 3,000 people who were there that day that the scripture says that 3,000 people who would have never known Jesus Christ 3,000 people who would have never had the Spirit come in their lives who would have never been baptized that they came to join the Christian church that they were baptized that day. And the Spirit came into them. The entire course of their lives because they were willing to accept the Spirit and the way that God wanted for these 12 men to live and really we are only sitting here in this exact seat where you are sitting because 12 men did it, right? Because the Spirit came upon them because they listened and they acted and they heard and they went out into the world and all of these thousands of years later because they heard and they did what God wanted them to do in their own lives and within their own hearts and as we read through the New Testament and we read kind of this tension that there is between Peter and St. Paul and like the followers of Peter and the followers of St. Paul and they had very different methods of going out and preaching Jesus into the corners of the world but that's exactly what some people needed. Some people needed to hear Paul and they needed to hear the way that Paul would describe things and the passion with which he spoke and the way in which he shared things and some people needed Peter and in my time I was a youth minister for many years and I worked always with more than one person on staff in our youth ministry office and always with people who were very different than I was and there was teenagers that I could connect with the young men, young women who I was able to speak to and so I had no chance. There was no way that they were going to relate to me. There was no way that they were going to be able to really understand and have their hearts touched in the same way that somebody else was able to do that and was able to share Jesus and I was so thankful always for that and so what our desire and our purpose really is here for us this afternoon is to discover specifically what our tongue of fire is that it's not going to look exactly like somebody else's, it's not going to be like I do this and then this is going to happen and I'm going to be holy and things are going to look like everybody else but where is it that God is calling me? What is my tongue of fire? Where am I going to be able to reach deep within? So we're going to talk about a couple of different specific spirituality types if you're here, I don't think we have any so for the time I was giving this talk there were some sisters in the room and I was like uh-oh, this is a lot of pressure and now you're wrong spirituality type and now you're stuck for life so I don't think there's any here before right now though we're going to talk about a couple different spirituality types and there's hundreds of these so these are not something that you're necessarily going to be boxed into there's some that are listed on your sheet we're going to talk a little bit more about them in a minute, not quite yet but if you wanted to look later on and if you felt like none of these really, I'm not quite sure where I want to use your phone even and you can take a little quiz and it'll tell you where you fit in but when we talk about spiritualities, when we talk about ways of praying ways of encountering God what we're not going to be talking about right now is the obvious things that all of us need to do mass, the rosary praying the scriptures, things like that what we're talking about specifically is what are the ways that when you pray and the ways that you search to encounter God it really makes your heart come alive the things that really resonate really really deep within you and so something that would be similar I think is like the concept of the love languages so love languages are usually in like a couple in a married couple or a dating couple usually this is where this kind of a topic would come up and it's been very useful for my husband and I to be able to understand but basically what it is is it's saying that there's five different ways that we really express and that we receive love from one another let's say I can always name four of them so let's see if I can get all five physical touch, words from affirmation acts of service quality time and gifts so those are generally speaking the ways that we show people our affection and that we experience affection so for all of us though there's one of those that really really hits home like that's when I really understand love and your affection for me unfortunately for my husband and I my very last one is his first one and vice versa so for him he really loves acts of service he loves doing acts of service doing kind things for me to show me his love he really appreciates when I do kind things for him and that's when he really knows my love for him for me words of affirmation words of affirmation all day long like all the time I'm like tell me why you love me like we've been married for 15 years you don't know yet instead he'll say stuff like I already know those he's like oh my gosh how many times how many new things do I have to come up with so it's a battle but he'll wash my car and that's his way of showing me I'm like thank you so now give me a compliment so it's good for us to know though so then I understand when he's doing this that he's showing me his love and for me to also know how to love him best so that's what I really kind of like about this topic about our spirituality is that God is gonna speak to us he made our hearts right and he knows exactly how we're gonna best understand his love we are best going to receive him and he wants to pour himself out to us in that kind of a way and so sometimes for us like we have to be open and willing to like go down these different paths and discover maybe new things that are not natural that are maybe not something that everybody else is doing in ways for us to be able to open ourselves up to the way that God is trying to pour himself out to us because really obviously that's what it's all about it's really all about love it's all about the Lord wanting to bestow his love upon us and for us to be able to know how we can show our love best to the Lord as well because when we pour ourselves out to the Lord then that's when we're changed as well so on your handout what you have is four different examples again there's hundreds of these these were four that I liked that I thought kind of covered a lot of ground so we're just gonna look at these kind of quickly so the first of these is the path of intellect and the path of intellect is most commonly known as like a Thomistic prayer type of a way it's very neat and orderly and the key word when you talk about Thomistic type of a prayer the path of intellect is truth that encountering truth that this is something that resonates really deeply within you that you love theology that you probably should have been at defending the faith instead of power and purpose maybe you came to the wrong conference I don't know but that you really really love the things of your mind and searching to know God deeply in this kind of a way second is the path of devotion this one is more of a Saint Augustinian prayer and this is really looking for finding deep meaning in things and really being driven by the movement of the heart that the movement of the heart is really what will thrust you into your relationship with other people the movement of the heart will be what will thrust you into your relationship with God so looking for meaning and then next is the path of service which is a very Francis skin obvious obviously type of prayer this is where we really encounter God through the movement of our spirit which will call us into action and so this is when we experience God through our senses but also that that experience will really propel us forward into to service into doing things into action and so then lastly this agnation prayer this is going to be very similar to the path of devotion where we're looking for these things that really move our hearts but what an agnation type of spirituality would really love to do is to take those movements of the heart and to really unpack them in a really systematic way to look for the ways that these things will unfold into our lives and those deep meaning of things how do those apply to the other portions of our lives as well and so what I think is really beautiful about this as well is that of all of these different spiritualities there might be certain times where we look in our life and say you know when I maybe at a certain point in my life I experienced the Lord in a more of a Francis skin type of a way but now I'm really loving like this agnation spirituality or things like that maybe at different states in our lives so that different things will come alive and what I think is really beautiful about this is that there's probably a little bit of overlap into different kind of areas and so just like I was saying earlier that there's these different giants that we've had in our faith that have really enveloped these types of a spirituality but that let's say that you are somebody who really falls into this category of like a Francis skin type of a spirituality what that doesn't mean is that you should go home and sell all of your belongings, strip down naked into the woods, okay, like say in Francis it doesn't mean that we have to do everything exactly like him but what it might mean is that we have this call and this love for service and this desire for action and going out which might lead us into more of a Mother Teresa type of a spirituality the way that we encounter the Lord in other people which she learned from a cloistered nun, St. Tress, that she was the one that who inspired Mother Teresa in her way of doing all of these small things with great love, right? And so what we have to do is we have to look at where God is calling us and find these ways kind of as a starting point of where our heart feels like it's coming alive but then there also takes some discernment in how we are to put these things into action practically speaking in our own prayer life and also in the way that we deal with other people. This is why St. Catherine of Siena, she could say if you are what you should be then you will set the world on fire. What she doesn't say is if you're exactly like me then you will set the world on fire, right? And so what we have to do is we have to take this to prayer. We have to take this to the discernment of the Holy Spirit and ask for really an encounter of how God is calling us to stretch and to experience him in a new way. I read this analogy on this topic that I really loved when it's thinking of if you have a problem with your car and your car is not exactly working in the way that you think that it should be and there's some kind of dysfunction that's going on. The way to fix that is not for you to be a really good driver. You can't be a better driver and to fix the things that are going on within your car. And so that's kind of the same type of thing that we're talking about this afternoon is that if there's these areas that we feel like we're missing something within our own prayer life and within our relationship with God then being a better at going to Mass and better at praying our rosary harder and all of those kind of things like they're not going to fix our problem unless we're allowing the one who knows the car who built the car, who built our hearts who knows exactly how we're supposed to function unless we're allowing him and he's going to be the one that's going to work on our hearts. So we'll be able to see all of those types of our spirituality really come to life. The Catechism talks about this. He says the spiritualities of the saints are in their rich diversity, refractions of the one pure life, light of the Holy Spirit. And so I like this image of a prison of this refraction of that we all do have the same Holy Spirit and that same opportunity but the refraction and the colors and the ways that it's going to be seen, the ways that it's going to come out are going to be very different in our own life. So the trick here is though as we're looking at all of these is that we cannot compare these different spiritualities to one another and to say that one is better than the next. And I think that this sounds like that would be really obvious but in the Catholic Church I don't think it's really obvious because if you ever read comments and blogs on any kind of thing that has to do with spirituality you find some people who are very convicted that there is one way that we are supposed to be praying, one way that we're supposed to be encountering God, things like that. I think one of the many beauties of the Catholic Church but one of the many beauties is that we have so many different ways that we can express our faith and we can encounter the Lord as long as they are all under that same umbrella that they are all needed, that we really need all of these different types of spirituality in order for the Church to be alive and to be moving and to be able to be breathing. And so our, we think of ourselves as this body that's many parts I also really love to use baseball analogies I'm a really big baseball fan, go Astros. So when we think about like on a team mentality that the first baseman cannot spend all of his time really worried about what the left fielder is doing, right? The first baseman has to do his job, he has to be all in in what he is called to do, he has to be paying attention and he can't be focusing on what's happening in left field and the left fielder needs to be doing the exact same thing, he needs to be focused on what he's supposed to be doing and if everybody is not focused on their job then they can't function as a team and there will be this great lacking in what what they're supposed to be doing and what their goal is, right? And then also I think another temptation and something that can really happen, we were talking about this actually some of us on the ministry team last night is that often times people can end up within their own spirituality where they feel called and become so enveloped in that as the end all be all that the other types of things that are really important kind of lose their meaning. So for example if someone is really really into this life of service and I think we've all seen this within the church is that somebody gets really really involved in social justice and they are so obsessed you know with this calling and serving the poor and things like that and then the temptation can be that this call of this path of the truth searching for the truth this intellectual path well that's not really quite as important as long as we're taking care of all of the poor you know or somebody who is so into a path of beauty and really focusing on all of those kind of things as long as everybody's happy and everybody is you know comfortable where they are we're experiencing all this goodness and this beauty well then we don't really have to worry about all of these other things that are out there right so we have to make sure that we stay really balanced within our own spirituality but that there's also things that we all need that we all do have a call to some sort of service that we all do have a call to searching for the truth we all do have a call to seek after beauty we all do have a call to the sacraments that we have to stay close to the sacraments we all have a call to silence this is really hard one for me and sometimes when we have a call to those things when they seem like they're in opposition to what our natural spirituality is so for somebody who prefers to have expressive praise who prefers praise and worship to silence for me a lot of times in my life that means I need more silence and that that's where the Lord is going to be able to have an opportunity to stretch me as well and so again this is a constant discernment and an openness to God calling us at different times in our lives and of being able to say yes like this works for me and I I experience the Lord I express well in this kind of a way but God is also calling me and stretching me over here in order for me to be able to come to know him in a deeper way as well and so of course the importance of all of these kind of things is for us to really have a be able to grow in our relationship with God but also for us to be able to grow in our vocations and that our vocation our primary vocation is a vocation to love right so when we find out who it is that God has called us to be when we find the different path that God has called us to be on then obviously what's going to happen in our life is that we are going to start to rid ourselves of all but love which is going to therefore spill over into our vocation it's going to make us a better husband wife mother father sister priest that of course when we are doing well spiritually then we are going to be doing well in the different roles in our life as well so our spirituality is is going to naturally if we're doing what God is calling us to do it's going to rid us of all but love which is the only goal in our whole life right is for us to rid ourselves of all but love so that we can eternally be able to be with the Lord and be in the presence of love himself for all of eternity so what I would like to do is to just spend a little bit of time kind of praying through these different spirituality types that you have in front of you I don't know if all of you have had a chance to read all the way through them but as I've been trying to emphasize like to let the spirit really try to stir within you to stir within you as you read all four of them to see okay this is something that makes me really excited but how am I fostering the spirituality in my life am I actively doing things that is making the spirituality come alive if it's something that's an intellectual life are you seeking are you seeking truth are you intellectually stimulating yourself are you putting yourself in situations where you can grow your intellectual life in accordance with the Lord if you feel like it's this path of devotion are you putting yourself in situations where your heart can be moved are you in the chapel are you in are you entering into community and into things like that where your heart can come alive so to ask yourself that question but then also kind of be looking for okay here's like an area where I feel like God is calling me out of my comfort zone a little bit so just want to give the spirit some room and some movement in this room and then what we'll do after that is take a little bit of time for discussion to kind of help unpack like what's working for some people and what the challenges are for other people so let's start though with some prayer in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit so Lord again you come and you tell us that we are one body but we have many parts in that these parts are specific calls that you have given us and that there will be people in our lives that will not know who you are unless we bring you to them and there will be people in our lives who have their doors of their heart are closed but that there will be an opportunity where that door is open and that you are calling us specifically to bring you to that person's life that as St. Francis says that there are some people who their only sermon that they will hear in their lifetime is the lives of the people who are in this room and Lord we know that us being who you called us to be is vital it's vital to our own spirituality our relationship with you but it could be vital to other people's salvation as well so we invite your Holy Spirit to come into our hearts to stretch them to stretch them into the way that you want to encounter us not today but in as we leave this conference in this practical things that need to be put in place so that we can come to know you deeper and better as you say in the scripture all of the parts do not have the same function so we though many are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another and since we have the gifts that differ according to the grace given to us let us exercise them so what I'd like to do is just give you some time to pray over this handout that you have to invite the Spirit to speak so what I'd like to do now this is a very like workshop kind of thing to do rather than me just talking is to give you an opportunity to talk with one another about what really works for you what challenges you've experienced within a certain type of prayer certain type of spirituality because I think sometimes that can be the most fruitful rather than like me saying this is the books that you should read and whatever for each different type of spirituality this is what you should do when it doesn't necessarily apply to everybody in the room but also to be able to speak from experience and to hear from experience from one another and so what I'd like to do is we're going to break out into four different sections of the room one for each of the different types of spirituality and if you just want to grab two or three people that share in that same type of spirituality with you and you can have a seat somewhere you can leave this room if you want to go somewhere else but to sort of have a small group experience and to answer three questions so the first is just basically what jumped out to you during this workshop session something that stood out to you the second is what is you see as your biggest challenge being able to grow within this spirituality and then lastly what has really worked for you what has been different practices different types of prayers, different things that you've read, resources what have been things that have been really helpful to you in being able to grow in your spirituality so we will do the path of intellect will be over in this corner the path of devotion in that back corner by the door the path of service will be over kind of by the stairs and the path of asceticism will be over here so if you want to go ahead and if you didn't fit 100% into one of those groups just kind of which one you felt most drawn to and then maybe within discussion you will also be able to kind of discern where you can better try to grow in that area as well