 So my friend, Sean, grew up in Connecticut and Sean's father, Henry, was a World War II fighter pilot. He was a World War II hero. He was shot down, spent a considerable amount of time in a POW camp. And when he came back to the states, the first thing that Henry did after the war was he bought a piece of land outside of their little hometown in Connecticut in the woods because he had enough of being around people and he wanted to kind of be out in the woods. And the second thing he did was he married his high school girlfriend, Mary. He and Mary had four kids. My friend Sean was the youngest of those four. And on that piece of property, Henry built his house. Now I'm not talking about what we would describe in the suburbs of we're building a house. I'm saying Henry built his house. Henry poured the foundation. Henry did the framing. Henry did the electrical. Henry did the plumbing. Henry did it all. It was his house. And in that house, for, I don't know, 50-ish years or so, Henry and Mary raised their kids and enjoyed their life together. Several years ago, Henry passed away. My friend Sean, the youngest of the four, went back up to help his mom because his mom, being in Thomaston, Connecticut, and on her own, decided to do what most people in Connecticut do when they retire and that is move to Florida. And she said, you know, Sean, I want to sell the home. And I want to move to Fort Myers. So Sean went up and he helped her get the house sold and it comes moving day. And they have the van there and they load up the van with all the stuff. And Sean is ready to help his mom drive down to Fort Myers, Florida. And he says, Mom, before we leave, do you mind if I walk through the house one last time? Because it's not a house. It was a home. And so Sean walks through the home and he's just kind of reminiscent. And all these memories come washing over him and of his childhood of him and his brother and his two sisters and his dad teaching him to throw a football and his dad teaching him to shoot a rifle and his dad showing him how to drive and he and his sisters fighting in the basement. And he's just kind of remembering all that. And he goes upstairs to the main master bedroom and he's looking around and he looks at the ceiling above where his parents' bed had been for all those years and he noticed this little tiny screw in the ceiling. And he looked at his mom and he said, do you know what that is? And she said, no. And he said, you know, dad was a really careful craftsman and if that was a mistake he would have fixed that. I want to see what that's about. So he goes down to the truck to the van. He gets a stool and he gets a screwdriver and he brings it back up and he unscrews that little tiny screw that had been in the ceiling all those years and out of the ceiling comes a panel. And on that panel is a Folger's coffee can. And Sean looks at his mom and she says, I have no idea. And Sean peels off the plastic lid or the cap on the Folger's coffee can and he looks inside and there's $500 in cash. And he says, you had no idea this was above your bed. She goes, no clue. Sean goes, you know, dad was a very careful guy and he was a very meticulous guy. And so if he hid one Folger's coffee can in the house, who knows? So he and his mom, Mary, spent the rest of the day and they scavenged and they scoured and they searched and they looked everywhere in the walls and the ceilings in the basement and by the end of the day they found 12 Folger's coffee cans hidden throughout that house filled with $5,000 in cash. Because Henry, being a child of the Depression and being a World War II vet, knew what we've all re-earned in the last 8 to 10 years and that is you can't trust banks, right? And so Henry had his own private retirement plan going on in his own IRA, if you will. But the cool thing about those Folger's coffee cans wasn't just that there was cash in there but there were also stashed in there report cards from Sean's childhood and pictures of his sisters and birthday cards that they'd made for their dad and father's day cards and Valentine's Day cards all these memories that his dad had sucked away and stashed away and hidden in the walls of that old house. Sean says, it was about that moment that I flashed back to my childhood and I remembered as a kid, 6 times, maybe 8 times, it wasn't all the time, but every once in a while my dad would take me by the hand and he'd walk me around and he'd look around and he'd say, Sean, this house will take care of you. Everything you need is in this house. And he said, I used to think that was the stupidest thing that any dad ever said to his son. And now all of a sudden I realize he actually meant it. That he had provided for us, he hadn't told us but he had provided for us that in the event of an emergency we had resources. I start with that story because in many ways that's my own spiritual journey. As I mentioned yesterday in my little workshop, my uncle was a Methodist pastor. My parents worked at Methodist colleges. My grandfather was a Methodist pastor and his father, my great-grandfather, was a Methodist pastor and his father was actually a Methodist pastor. And his father, surprisingly, my great-great-great-grandfather, you'd never guess what he was. He was a Methodist pastor. I mean, who'd have thunk it? And so I grew up in this very rich Methodist environment for which I'm very deeply grateful. Also, I grew up in the mountains in North Carolina in my little hometown for many years. We didn't even have a Catholic church. I didn't know what Catholics were. And so when I was in high school we moved to Florida, Lakeland, Florida, home of the Detroit Tigers Spring Training Center in case you care. That's right, that's what I'm talking about. It's good to see some smart people in this crowd. And so, and good-looking. I just want to point that out. And so we moved to Florida and I had all these friends who were Catholic. A lot of them were of Cuban descent and I began to discover this thing of Catholicism, but I really didn't know that much. And so I want to share a little this morning about that because of a couple of things that happened in my life, I began to discover that I was wrong about Catholicism because I used to think that Catholicism was just like an old house. And all churches were like an old house. I mean, my town, the Presbyterian church, was an old house. Methodist church was an old house. The Baptist church was a lot of old houses. And the Catholic church was just an old... I mean, churches were old houses. But there came a couple of moments in my life where I discovered that the Catholic church in the church, God has socked away treasures that as I've discovered in my eight and a half years since becoming Catholic, many converts discover and that many cradle Catholics oftentimes have either overlooked or forgotten or grown immune to or taken for granted. But that God has socked away in this old house that we call the church, life-changing treasures, church. And when I say life-changing, I mean life-changing, as a friend of mine says, when you have a life-changing moment, it tends to be life-changing. And so I had a few of those because of the treasures that God has socked away. And so I want to share with you one of those special treasures this morning as we gather together as God's people in this place. And I'm not talking about the obvious treasures of being Catholic. I mean, let's just be honest. It's good to be Catholic. It is. And... I don't care what Anderson Cooper or Dr. Phil or Oprah or Joy Behar say. It's good to be Catholic. It is. And I'm not talking about the obvious treasures because there's a lot of obvious treasures for being Catholic, and I know that I'm preaching to most of you are Catholic and devoted Catholics. But let me just remind you, I mean, there's a lot of obvious treasures to be in Catholic when you got up this morning and maybe you were in a dorm room here at Franciscan and you got up and you went in and you brushed your teeth because you were going to come in and be a good Catholic and you want to have fresh breath and you're looking at yourself in the little mirror there in the bathroom and I hope you looked at yourself and you went, I am one good-looking Catholic. Man! I'm a part of the group of people in another group. I'm a Catholic. And then as you headed toward breakfast which I really wish you'd brushed your teeth after breakfast but you want to head into breakfast and you ate bacon and sausage not that we can smell it and as you were there and you kind of looked down at your reflection in the plate before you filled it up and I hope that as you saw your reflection you probably paused for a minute because I watched you and you went, I'm a good-looking Catholic. I may be some of God's best work because I'm a part of the group of people on planet Earth today that will house more people today than any other group on planet Earth. I'm a Catholic. And then as you made your way here today into the finnigan field house finnigan field house and as you came in and you opened the door you saw your reflection in the door and you paused for just a minute and you straightened your hair which I was a little late because that took me a little longer. Western do not work. That is a problem. It took me forever to get here this morning and so you came in and you looked at yourself in the reflection on the door and you stopped and you just went, man, seriously, I'm a good-looking Catholic. I may be the best-looking Catholic in North America because I'm so excited, I'm proud that I'm a part of the group of people that will not only feed more folks and house more folks and so you came in and much to your surprise you discovered that there were 1,550 other people that were as good-looking as you and went, man, I'm a part of this really good-looking people. These really handsome folks and some of them are really intelligent Tiger fans. I mean, I'm part of this really good-looking group of people that will feed more folks and educate more youngins and house more people and clothe more people than anybody else on planet Earth or Catholic. And those are the obvious treasures. Now, it's important to remind ourselves of those obvious treasures because we're not very good at telling our story, are we? Amen? In fact, we're usually bashful. We like to call it modest, but we're bashful about sharing our story and oftentimes we abdicate that and we give that to the media to tell our story and the media doesn't do a very good job of telling our story. They do a good job of telling their story about our story and they have truths and they like myths and they like outright fabricated lies and so we don't tell our story, we let other people tell our story and sometimes it's important to remember our story. It's good to be Catholic, but I'm not talking about that today. I just wanted you to remember that in case you zone out for the rest of the time and you're waiting for Kimberly's excellent talk on marriage in a few minutes. Just wanted to remind you who you are for a second. I want to talk about a life-changing treasure, treasures that will change you from the inside out to the outside. And I want to share about one of those. We gave you a free copy of my book in your bag. I hope you got that. And it shares six of those. It's one of the best books that my wife has ever written. And so it describes the six treasures that changed my life and I just want to share with you about one of those treasures this morning and to me it's the supreme life-changing treasure, but before I do I want you to turn to your neighbor and say, who are we? And now this time I'm from Georgia so I'm going to teach you some Georgian. I want you to turn back to them and say, I don't know, but we're fixing to find out. Here we go. That's who we are. Here we go. So to remember who we are some of y'all been eating grits. I can tell it because it just kind of came right off of you. This is kind of fun being Georgian, isn't it? That's right. We could use you. We're getting invaded by a lot of other folks right now. And so I want to talk about one life-changing treasure and to do that I need to take us back in time back to the early 90s, way back in the early 90s. And to New Haven, Connecticut I had just graduated from seminary at Emory University in Atlanta which is typically if you're going to be a Methodist pastor in the southeast you usually go to Emory. And I thought I was going to go pastor at church but I had a couple of professors that really wanted me to go do a PhD and so they kind of used their influence and got me into the PhD program in New Testament and ancient Christian history up at Yale. And so Anita and I we packed up our van and we moved to Beverly and so and we took our six month old and our two year old and there was no oil in New Haven, Connecticut. I can assure you nor were there wealth and riches but we moved to New Haven and so we're going up there and there were only four people who were admitted into the program. Usually in any given year they would admit between two and four out of about 100 applicants. And so there was me who was a Methodist there was a Presbyterian there was a Jesuit and there was a Dominican friar and since I didn't know much about Catholicism I didn't know what a Dominican was and a Jesuit I knew because I'd seen that movie The Mission you know and that was about it. So I figured that my closest ally Scott would be the Presbyterian right and so I go to the orientation session the first day at the Religious Studies Department and I'm seated next to this guy in this really interesting outfit and I said hey how are you and he goes and I said tell me a little bit about your garb and he said well I'm a Dominican friar and I went oh that's cool what does that mean and he said I'm a priest and I call him Steve because I knew him as Steve before and he's an intimate part of our family now still my best friend married our daughters and so Anita and I had our 25th anniversary a couple years ago when somebody gave us a trip to Italy and Steve pointed out to us that in canon law you're not allowed to go to Italy for your anniversary unless you take a priest with you so our so we couldn't afford for three of us to go so he and Anita had a great time on our so actually we took him there were three was this is being recorded I know so Steve and I became very very close friends immediately and that was good for me because Steve was the smartest person in our program and I'm from the mountains in North Carolina and Steve was the best prepared person in the program and I was not and so Steve became sort of my coach encourager tutor particularly when it came to classical Greek and the things that we had to learn how to read that I had no clue what I was doing and so we just became very close friends so about two years into that friendship Steve comes to me and he says Alan got an idea for Lent I said great he said I want you and me to go out to a group of cloistered Dominican nuns in North Guilford which is about 30ish minutes from New Haven and we're going to give them their Lent and Retreat I said okay I got a bunch of questions about that I said first of all what's a Lent and Retreat and he said well we're going to go out and we're going to give them for four or five maybe six weeks we'll go out and we'll talk for an hour and I said okay I can handle that and I said what are we going to talk about and he said well I'm going to talk about Thomas Aquinas and you're going to talk about John Wesley now if you're if you got friends who are Methodist you know that John Wesley started the Methodist movement and Wesley actually was very Catholic in many ways when it comes to the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of becoming Holy and sanctification so you're going to talk about Wesley I'm going to talk about Aquinas we're going to compare them and what they had to say about becoming Holy and about the work of the Holy Spirit in your life and we're going to use first Corinthians to do that I said great I said I've got one more question and he said seriously I mean how small was your town and I said really really small and he said well there's this group of ladies back then there were about 50 of them and they range from about 25 up to about 85 and they live on this piece of property out in the woods and they take a vow of stability or constancy or community and they become a part of that community and most of them even in the event of medical emergency will never leave I said really I said now what do they do he said well they pray and I said well I assume that they're nuns but I mean what do they do he said they pray that's what they do I went so you're telling me there's 50 ladies they live on this piece of property they don't ever leave and all they do is pray he said yeah I said I'm in man I am so I am so in so we go out there the first Wednesday I guess it was the first Wednesday or so I'm after Ash Wednesday and we go out there we pull into the parking lot and monastery of our lady of grace North Guilford Connecticut and I will always remember this vision we pull in and we walk across the little parking lot we go up to the door we knock at the door the little peep hole opens lady opens the door I mean looks through and then she opens the door and she welcomes us sister Diane and I looked at sister Diane and I thought to myself you may be the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and she welcomed us in and she got us through we went by the little sort of half wall I didn't know what that was where the family would come to visit on this side and sisters would say on that side I mean really I had no I mean I am a rube I had no idea what we were doing and Steve didn't tell me until later he had to get special permission for me to go behind the cloister wall male ever to do that who wasn't an ordained Catholic priest and he had to get permission from the provincial the Dominicans and from the Bishop the Archbishop of Hartford so we go back there and we go into their community room and it was about twice the size of this just kidding and so it was about the size of this and so there's the 50 ladies and Steve's going to have me go first because he said that I was going to talk about Wesley he's going to talk about Aquinas we're going to talk about holiness that's what I heard but what he meant was I'm going to take in front of a group of 50 nuns and make you look really really stupid so you're going to go first and then I'm going to come up the white knight in my Dominican garb and eviscerate you in front of these 50 nuns didn't tell me that I'm good to know so get up and there's 50 sisters there and he introduces me and I go up and we had a little small lectern and I put my notes there and I looked up and first of all this was the most non-Catholic audience of all time I mean it was unbelievable I looked at these first of all they were all on time that's what I thought that's what I thought I mean I had like a 15 minute warm up act because I was figuring people to kind of be straggling in and I was pointing on land in 15 minutes early because I figured people would be straggling out and so it's just only at 30 minutes all I had was warm up and exit time I didn't have anything so they're all there on time and second of all they were all smiling 50 punctual smiling Catholics I have actually personally witnessed this miracle I have I have but here's what just makes you realize this was a once in a lifetime this was a unicorn experience was it they were not only punctual and smiling get a load of this every single one of them had a Bible you can't make this stuff up man and so I look over at Steve and I said man you've been sandbagging me these are Baptist nuns aren't they they really are and so we do our talks and we come to the last week the fifth or sixth week I can't remember how many of those we did and we save time for question and answer which was other than yesterday the last time that I ever did question and answer because I will never do that again so we do the Q&A and the 15th there was a sister seated over here and I call her sister Rose she's no longer with us God rest her soul and she was a very short stout strong fire hydrant kind of a lady and she says Alan you know thank you so much for coming now I have to tell you after I realized with that first moment in all seriousness when I looked up at these ladies I had to take a step back because it was disorienting to me because I had never heard of anything remotely like this before I genuinely had no idea that this kind of person even existed there was no category for it in my background or my training and for those 50 ladies when I looked at them the first time it was disorienting to me because there was this joy that kind of left off their face and there was this radiance that seemed to emanate from their eyes and there was this ruddiness and this glow I mean I don't mean to over sentimentalize it but it was true and I took a step back because I realized that I was actually in the physical presence of holiness when I read about holiness I'd studied about holiness I'd written about holiness I'd preached about holiness but I was actually in the physical presence for the very first time in my life I was in the physical presence of holiness so we had these marvelous weeks Sister Rose raises her hand and she says Alan thanks for coming I said it's been my pleasure she said you know for most of us you're the first Methodist pastor we've ever met I said hey right back at you quid pro quo Sister Rose and she says and after listening to you I gotta tell you you sound really Catholic and I said thank you I'm assuming that coming from a nun that's a good thing and she says so I gotta ask you why aren't you a part of the church and I thought that's a weird question I said I'm sorry I don't understand the question she said could you rephrase it and she said yeah okay why aren't you a part of the church now I'm from Appalachia alright and so I'm used to that you know that people think I'm stupid and they're probably right and so they think if you talk slower and louder he'll figure it out alright so I said why am I not a part of the church well you know that doesn't really make sense to me because you know I got my little card here that says I'm an ordained pastor in the United Methodist church and maybe there's like a special word for church that's different than our word for church but mine says church and I'm a part of the church so I don't understand the question she said well let me put it to you this way why aren't you a part of the church she knew I was from Transylvania County and I said okay I think what you're asking me is why am I not Catholic and I said I don't really know why I'm not Catholic I don't know that much about Catholic I didn't really know much until I got to be friends with Steve I've enjoyed being with y'all and I respect you but I have to tell you one of the reasons that I'm not Catholic is I don't really get what y'all believe about communion so I don't understand that I said as a Methodist it just seems patently obvious to me that the bread is bread and it symbolizes the body of Christ it's special, it's holy, it's sacred but it symbolizes it and the juice as Methodists we typically use grape juice not wine the juice it symbolizes the blood of Christ it's special, it's significant, it's holy, it's sacred but to somehow think that this becomes the body and blood of Christ in a real substantial way I don't understand that I said I love you, I had a great time I've learned a lot and I respect you immensely I don't get that she said okay she said now you're a New Testament scholar right and I said well I'm working on it and she said so do you mind taking out your Bible never good never good and there were 50 of them and I said yes ma'am and she said do you mind opening to 1 Corinthians 11 because we have been talking about 1 Corinthians Alan with you and Father Stephen I said yes ma'am she said would you open it to 1 Corinthians 11 because would you like to read this or would you prefer that I read it I said you're doing great sister Rose why don't you keep going and she said let me read this for you because you know so she opened up to the words of Saint Paul where he writes for I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread and when he had given thanks he broke it and said this is my body and then she closed the Bible and she said Alan what don't you understand and we all laughed kind of like y'all just did they weren't laughing with me they were laughing at me and then we kind of moved on and I wish I could say that at that moment the heavens parted and the hand of God came down and the voice of God struck me and said Alan I'm inviting you home into the one holy Catholic and apostolic church I'm inviting you into the fullness of the truth I'm inviting you to enjoy the most deeply intimate relationship with me as I give myself to you personally and substantially in the real presence of Jesus' body and blood every time you receive communion but that didn't happen but as I look back now I do realize that the heavens did open and at the hand of God came down with a seed about the size of a mustard seed and planted that seed in the back of my soul and for the next 15 17 years or so God watered that seed and he prospered that seed and he fertilized that seed and he put sun on that seed until it ultimately grew and grew and grew until I realized wow I have no choice but to come home into the church and didn't happen easily it didn't happen quickly it was a little inconvenient I gotta tell you so we finished up in New Haven we moved to Rome Georgia Rome, Georgia and we and it's always important to point that out in a Catholic audience I have discovered and and so we moved we moved to Rome I became pastor of this church and I realized pretty quickly if you gotta preach every week and the main highlight of worship is the sermon there's a lot riding on the sermon and there's a responsibility that comes with that and you better come to bring what you believe God has brought you to bring because that's why they're coming they're hoping to hear a word from the Lord through you and I realized pretty quickly I better find ways to nourish my soul if I'm gonna try to do what God's calling me to do the Cistercian monastery not far from Atlanta started by the guys that it was a mission monastery I guess they called it from the guys at Gethsemane where Merton was in Kentucky and so they started one in Conyers, Georgia and so I started to go to the Cistercian monastery as a Methodist pastor once a month for a day of retreat and so I would go and God bless him I think he's deceased now the Abbot was Father Bernard Johnson and Abbot Bernard would give me spiritual direction out of his generosity and graciousness now again you figured it out but I was it took me a while so I would go and I'd spend some time there and I'd pray and I would attend Mass I didn't receive communion obviously but I would attend Mass and I'd walk and pray and I went to the monastery library I went to the library and man there was a lot of books in there in their library bunches of books a lot of Catholic books Catholics like to write books Scott they like to write books they really do Protestants I'm kind of like Lou Holtz Lou Holtz says I'm the only person who's written more books than I've read and so I go in and there's all these Catholic books and I said man I never read any of this stuff I wonder why I was never exposed to this stuff so I started to read some of these Catholic books and I began to discover some things and most of you already know this I mean a lot of you have been to this conference many of you have been studying the faith far longer than I have but let me just remind you some things that I learned one of the things that I learned is that in the early church there were a number of people who died for the Eucharist who died for the Eucharist who died for their conviction and their belief in the body and blood of Jesus they were martyred and I was like wow how come I never knew this that must be a really big deal they were willing to die I mean I have to think to myself is there anything that if I was standing before an executioner who had a sword or a lion and was getting ready to destroy me and said unless you renounce this we're gonna kill you is there anything so deep and would I do that for the body and blood of Jesus heavens no are you kidding me I would say oh my gosh no it's a big misunderstanding don't let me live it's a symbol it's a symbol but these people died for the Eucharist and I began to think to myself this must be a really big deal then I came across that little book Jesus Shock by Peter Crafe many of you know Peter Peter teaches at Peter teaches at Boston College which we affectionately call the Franciscan of New England and they don't have quite the spirit of hospitality that Franciscan does it's Boston they do the best they can but I mean this weekend has been tremendous the hospitality here the excellence here thank you thank you I mean I don't have to tell you you're here this is an extraordinary place and so I read this little book by Peter called Jesus Shock it's a short little book you ought to read it's pretty good stuff it's all like I don't know 120 pages and a good chunk of that is devoted to the Eucharist and one of the things I noticed that Peter taught me in that little book is that for the first 1100 years for the first 11 centuries 1100 years a millennium and a century for the first 1100 years of church history we don't have any evidence whatsoever that anybody ever disputed debated questioned or doubted the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist 1100 years ok then we got one guy, Beringar of Tours and then we go 400 more years so 1500 years a millennium and a half 15 centuries 1500 years in a row and we only have evidence of one person ever questioning doubting or disputing that this was truly the body and blood of Christ and then we hit 16th century boom and now we've got more than 33,000 kinds of Protestant Christianity just in America alone each with their own understanding of what may be happening and I thought to myself wow what happened for 1500 years a millennium and a half there was almost complete unity and conviction of the body and blood of Jesus people were willing to die for that how come I never knew either one of those two things with all of my education wow there's a lot going on here so I'm preaching every week and as a Methodist pastor I had four Sundays off every year every Protestant pastor at least when I was a Protestant pastor those four Sundays were really important to me because those were times when I could go to church and sit and receive rather than stand and deliver and so I would always try to find a church that I could go to where I would hope that I was going to hear a good sermon and the problem was we would vacation in different places where I didn't know any pastors I didn't know any churches and so I'd get out the yellow pages and if you're under 40 the yellow pages are kind of like Craig's list but print it out I try to find I try to find a church that seemed like a reasonable chance I'd get a good sermon and I'd come back and Anita would go well what do you think that was just horrible and I'm like now I've burned one I'm down to three you know and so there's a lot of pressure and so after a couple of years you know what I started to do I started to go to Mass when we were on vacation and you know why I went because I knew what I was going to get not that we could but let's say we could vacation in Johannesburg, Sydney, Tokyo Dublin, San Francisco or Honolulu no matter where I went I knew exactly what I was going to get I was going to be there in the stream of 2,000 years of liturgy, of history and of the saints and celebrating that as we came before the altar of God and in Persona Christi as the Holy Spirit came upon the priest and he offered to us the body and blood of Christ and I wasn't able to receive that I was there and I was a part of that no matter where I went and I began to discover that as wonderful as this right here is it's not about this and as wonderful as this can be and has been for three days in the end it's not about that that I could go wherever I was and I knew what I was going to get I went on a mission trip a couple of years ago anybody of Polish descent man y'all are some of the best people on earth those folks are great so I was on this I was on this mission trip and we were training young Polish Catholic leaders and we had two Polish priests with us and so they celebrated Mass for us every day and I mean Polish it's its own language I don't know if you know that it's its own language I'm here to impart wisdom to you and I'm pretty good at languages and I went back after two weeks in Poland and Anita says alright teach me some Polish and I went man I got nothing I said those people don't even know what they're saying I mean that is the that is the most complicated language I've ever seen in my life and I said but I did learn a good joke and the joke is when we get to heaven do you know what language we're going to speak Polish you know why because it takes forever to learn so that's what I got I can't speak I mean I can't speak a lick of Polish and so every day one of the priests who's Polish celebrates Mass in Polish and I didn't understand a single word they said but I understood every single word they said so I come back one year from vacation actually I came back several years from vacation but I'm a fairly stubborn, sinful, stiff-necked hard-headed guy and so I just resisted and so after several years I came back from vacation I had a sense of man God is calling me to become Catholic and so for two or three years I just ignored that and resisted that and did nothing with it but finally after the third or fourth year I came home from vacation I said this is just this is too consistent for me to ignore this so I called up my friend my Dominican friend Steve and I called him I said hey man you got a second he goes yeah for you sure and I said I think God's calling me and I heard him set the phone down for a second and I heard him mixing a martini and sitting in his recliner and putting me on speakerphone and he said well tell me about that and I said blah blah blah blah blah and he said tell me why you think you're being called to be Catholic and I said well there's this and there's this and there's this and he said okay those are all great things Alan and those are wonderful things about being Catholic but I haven't heard you mention the Eucharist do you believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and I said well almost I said you know that's one of the things that I'm kind of making my way there everything else I've kind of gotten there so I'm assuming it's going to come together and he goes um and then he says perhaps some of the wisest words that any priest ever said to anybody he said Alan if you don't believe in the Eucharist don't become Catholic because for us it all rides on the Eucharist I said okay that alleviates a little bit of a problem I've got I'll go back he said yeah and you got a congregation with 8,000 people and you're serving 15,000 people in your ministries every week why don't you just keep doing what you're doing I said great I said now what am I supposed to do with this turbulence I've got he goes well I want you to do two things he says the first thing I want you to do is I want you to read the Catechism you know I gave you that and I said you know I've been reading it he goes I want you to go back and read the section on the Eucharist I said I can do that and I said I've got 200 yards from the church that you're the pastor of there's a Catholic church and they've got a 24-hour perpetual adoration that's what perpetual means it's 24-hour again I'm here to shed light and to make you smart right and so he said they got this perpetual adoration chapel why don't you just go by and sit in there some I said okay I said what am I going to what's happening in there I mean do you mind if I ask you a question about the adoration chapel he goes seriously you don't know what an adoration chapel is I went no and he goes where are you from I said what do people do there and he said well they pray I said what do they do he said they pray I'm like here we go again man I mean what is it with you Catholics I mean just pray pray pray pray and he says you're going to go in and there's going to be somebody there sometimes there may be a group praying the rosary and sometimes there may be somebody who's laying prostrate before the altar or before the blessed virgin and the sacrament the blessed sacrament is going to be exposed on the altar there and so I want you to go and just sit and just whenever you have a few minutes go do that and let's see what happens so I went to Walmart and I got a trench coat in one of those things with the moustaches and the mustache and the big nose and I started to kind of go sit in the back like a creeper in the I was an adoration creeper in the back pew and so I'm there and one day I'm there after going I don't know 6, 8, 10 times and it's 9 o'clock on a week day it's daily mass and Monsignor Paul Reynolds God rest his soul Irish priest about 7-ish pastor of that parish missionary priest had answered the call as a 25, 30 year old man in Dublin and they said Georgia and Alabama need priests and he said I'll go and so he came and he gave himself away generously as a priest bringing the sacraments and the gospel of Jesus and the faith and the genius of the Catholic church to the south as a missionary priest his whole life he died a couple of years ago and I miss him every day possibly the holiest man I've ever known he celebrated mass that day and he gets up and it's the homilien he said today's the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas I went uh oh gotta go and he said I've only got a couple of minutes I just want to tell you one thing about Aquinas Aquinas was this big burly guy 300, 400 pounds bald as a cue ball I mean he was handsome and so he was perhaps the brightest, brightest mind the church has ever produced and so nearly 700, 800 years later he was just processing and digesting his brilliance and what he had to say and his philosopher and theologian and preacher and writer and he said one day late in his life I think the year my memory may be off on this but I think it was 1273 it was the feast of St. Nicholas and St. Thomas is celebrating the mass and he comes to the moment where he's elevating the host and he places the host back on the altar and he's dumbstruck he's unable to speak at that day it's a little cryptic but we do know that later that day he talked to one of his close confidants and he said something like this he said at that moment I was dumbstruck and overcome because I realized that when I compare all of my writing and thinking and teaching and preaching and theologizing and philosophizing when I compare it to what happens at that moment in the Eucharist I realized that all of my work is but straw compared to that as I listened to M. Reynolds I was overcome by the Holy Spirit and I said Lord have mercy I do believe forgive my unbelief and I knew I had an ethical problem and I knew and I knew I had an ethical problem and I could no longer with any integrity serve as a pastor in the Methodist Church because I didn't believe what I needed to believe and I needed to find my way home because church that's who we are that's who we are we are we are the people of the Eucharist that's who we are who are we stay with me stay with me who are we we are the people of the Eucharist once more we are the people of the Eucharist so the only thing I want you to understand today is when I was a kid second grade Brevard North Carolina Strauss Elementary School, Ms. Blythe's class I was in there working on handwriting somebody comes from the principal's office and they say Alan Hunt's needed in the principal's office now this was not an uncommon occurrence so I got up and I go down with the messenger to the principal's office and there's my mom and I knew something was up because my mom never came to school she signed me out we got into the car and my dad was driving my mom was in the passenger side my brother James who's six years older than I am was seated in the other side of the passenger of the rear seat and he had on like a coat and tie and on my side there was a little coat and tie and mom said put on the coat and tie and be quiet and so I put on my coat and tie and I looked at my brother and he goes so we drove over the mountain for an hour from Transylvania County to Haywood County and we pulled into the driveway we got out of the car and dad opened the back seat he got my brother and me out he took us by the hand and he and mom and the two of us we walked up to the front door and dad knocked on the door and an elderly woman opened the door and she just looked really gaunt and tired my dad said is he ready and she said yeah he's ready and so my mom went with the elderly woman and they headed to the kitchen and my dad took my brother and me and we were on the right we opened the door we went in and it was a little small bedroom and there was a single twin bed in there and on that bed was an old man who two years before had been 6 feet 2 200 pounds square job bushy hair, thick, strong, robust voice but after two years of cancer he'd been emaciated down to maybe 140 pounds his hair was out, his eyes were that yellow and gray and his skin had the look of death my dad dropped our hands out the door so there's my brother and me and we're looking at this man on the bed and the man looks at us and he says boys I want to tell you something and we said yes sir and he said I want you to write it down and we said yes sir he said do you have something to write with and we said no sir and he said we'll find something and so my brother looks around the little room and he gets a couple of little pieces of scrap paper and he hands me one and he keeps one and so we look at this man and he kind of pushes himself up on his elbows and he musters all the strength that he has in his body and he looks at us and he says I want to tell you something and I want you to write it down and we said yes sir he said so write this down boys always remember who you are that's what he said always remember who you are I wrote it down and I've had it with me ever since and I take it with me in my Bible everywhere I go I wrote it down because these were the last words my grandfather ever said to me always remember who you are so allow me if you would to ask you just one more time who are we we are the people of the Eucharist always remember who you are