 It's been a long long day. I got a lot to say. It feels like I'm carrying a two ton weight. I go to see my friend. Hello, I'm Monsignor Patrick Winslow. And I am Father Matthew Cout. And we are speaking from the Rooftop. A podcast brought to you by Tan Books, in which we invite you to join our conversation out here in the open air. Where we look out upon the world around us from the rooftop of the church and share with you what we see. Hello, Father Patrick Winslow. Hello. How are you? I'm doing very well. And yourself? I'm fine. Good to get back together again. It's been too long. We've been rebuking ourselves. We have seen each other on many occasions, but never had the chance to actually do any recording. But now that we are recording, we find ourselves in the midst of Advent. We do. A very short one at that. A very short one at that. So you have four Sundays of Advent. And this is the shortest possible Advent season because you go from the fourth Sunday of Advent to Christmas Eve later that day. This is the Advent at Easter. I mean, that candle isn't going to be melted at all. That fourth candle is brand spanking new. Well, most pastors generally will dislike this setup for Christmas, but that candle is going to be recycled. Yeah, it's going to be recycled. I mean, come on. No one will notice the millimeter or centimeter that it burns down for a good morning. And as it is, right, so priests are going to have to have a truncated Sunday morning schedule. Because priests are only permitted to offer three masses maximum. The bishop can't even dispense from this norm. Maximum in a day, that is to say from morning until night into a calendar day. So you have the custom here in the US. Most people go to Mass on Christmas Eve, and we really load up the Christmas Eve masses. So we have a pretty extensive schedule. Well, you can't really, if you have limited priest resources, have that extensive evening schedule and have a normal Sunday morning schedule. You just can't make the math work. So I think what's going to happen, or a lot of priests are going to have fourth Sunday of Advent on Saturday night, vigils, maybe have a couple more. A lot of people want to know if they can get the two first. No, there are no two first. There are the people will want to know, can I go Sunday Sunday evening, not the way to celebrate Christmas Eve and fourth no, no. So a lot of people, you know, I know that, but they're going to ask that question. Are you asking that question? Well, well, you know, I've, I can certainly appreciate it from the busyness of the time of year. Having if you have kids, young kids, it can be always a challenge to keep the kids well behaved. Perhaps everyone in line, everyone in sync. And then you come in the morning, they're already excited and really it was said about Christmas and there's so much work to be done. And then you got to come, if you're going to go on Christmas Eve, you come back. Maybe the answer, I think real, really the practical answer is perhaps go on Christmas morning. It's very calm. You know, people don't know that. It's hustle and bustle and busy and barely any seating room. You have to show up an hour or more in advance to get a place to be seated at a Christmas Eve mass. But you go either midnight mass or the Christmas morning mass. And you got plenty of seating. Plenty of seats. It's very peaceful. I always took the early mass at St. Thomas when we were there. I love that mass. He did. I was very happy for you to have it because we had a true midnight mass. True midnight mass. And so and I don't do well. We would get back 3am, you know, get to bed and we had the 7.30. Yes, you had. And I loved those people that came to that. We were we were together every year. Yes. The early birders. And it was just beautiful. It worked really well. Well, all right. So let's get off of that. Moving away from the practical, you were bringing up, I think, more of advent in spiritual terms or time of preparation. Or maybe you weren't. I don't know what you're going after. I wasn't going after anything. I just noticed that. Just acknowledging the context. I have had some people comment about a previous podcast that we're very grateful that we gave them license to prepare for our Lord's coming by decorating early. Oh, really? Yes. Good. I've heard a number of comments on that. And it's probably more typical that we're getting compliments from giving people license. Well, that's true. They're not doing they need to rain it in. Yeah. Of course, living in the seminary, we don't really have much of an option. So if we're going to be engaging in the season and having various persons over in festivities and everything else, we have to be in early. So of course, we decorate decorated everything on the Saturday. Yeah, it looks beautiful. First Sunday. It's very well done. It's very festive. It's a it's a decorating that matches the style of the seminary. So it's very fitting. It's very beautiful. It's atmospheric. Well, thank you. It's lovely. Speaking of which, we do have an open house on December 16th from let's see it's I think it's from two to five December 16. Yeah. So so I don't know that this would even air. We're hoping that it airs before then. You probably won't. But we'll try it. But because we're getting close to that day, but it's a 13th. But the idea is that people can come and not just see that the seminary one is decked out for the celebrations, but also to come and see our new poly tick. Explain what that is. Beautiful. So for five years, we've had a wonderful artisan and her brother working on a sacred piece of art that is adorning currently our chapel and now will be moved in the future to the major chapel. But it's an artwork of 14th century C&E's painting, a tempera painting on gold. Really quite stunning. Not something that has been done in any recent future, for recent history. And it's taken five years to accomplish. So it's a main panel with Our Lady and the Christ child panels of St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Mary Magdalene, St. John the Baptist and of course St. Joseph. It sits upon a predella with two other paintings, one of the epiphany and the three kings and then one of the assumption of Our Lady. So I would just invite all of you either on that day or another day to come and come pay us a visit and behold what I think is the most stunning piece of art that's great. Certainly our diocese in the last many years, but anywhere that I've been. Truly, truly beautiful. In fact, in the center panel, you have Our Lady holding our Lord as a child. Good time to come. Yep. And I did notice that you're, aren't you in there? Is that your face that I see in the palm of our Lord's hand? I mean, isn't that what that is? That's a bird. Those are your legs. Definitely. I recognize those legs anywhere. Those little bird legs. Yes. So there's an old tradition in medieval art where the baby Jesus, well first of all, in that style of art, baby Jesus does not look like a baby. Like he does and he doesn't. He's got kind of, he's got a baby body, but a bit of an older man face. Not quite old, but he's wise. Sort of cherubical. He's cherubic and he's knowing. And the idea behind that, of course, is that he's representing the three ages of man. He encompasses them all, our infancy, our adulthood, and the capacity to give his life over and death. But then he holds this bird and there's a wonderful statue in the church of San Agostino in Rome. It's a picture. It's a statue of Our Lady, the Christ child and St. Anne. And St. Anne is clearly attempting to get the bird that the baby Jesus is holding. And he's holding it away from her as if to say, you can't have this. The first time I ever noticed it. Because it represents? It represents his passion. And the first time I saw it, I'm like, I think they're just playing. It's kind of cute. She's sure that's what he has and she's tickling him, whatever else. And he's being a child, you know, Divine Brat and not giving him that kind of thing. But the idea in that Christologically is that it represents his passion, the finch. I think because the finch took a thorn out of his crown of thorns out of his head during the passion and was splattered with Christ's blood. And so that same image is on the finch's head. But be that as it may, either way, it's the sign of his passion. So in this particular case, what we design is that our Lord is taking our lady's hand who cannot take the passion from him, can't take over the passion, but she can participate in it. So he's grabbing her hand and kind of leading her hand to the passion to us to hold it with him. So very beautiful. I thought it was you. I know, I know, I know. Your little self in the palm of his hand with your dangly little chicken legs. Oh, jealousy. It even makes its way into Advent. Nope. At least now I can appreciate the finch. Let's talk a little bit about preparation. Yes. We are in the season of Advent. We got to assist people at some point to prepare, etc. for our blessed Lord. And when we say that, I think part of the rub sometimes is that, wait a minute, what actually changes? You're saying prepare, but I'm going to go to mass the first Sunday of Advent. It's the same road that's coming on the first Sunday of Advent as on Christmas day. What am I preparing for? The same thing happens every week. So what's the difference? So I thought we would leave it up to Father Winslow to handle for us. What am I saying? Theologically. What are we preparing for? Yeah, in a sense. Yeah. Well, there's a triple vision, right? You have, you know, Advent is oriented in oneself toward the eternal horizon. So the future event of the second coming of Christ. And so as a season that is yet to be fulfilled, it is a season of preparation toward the ultimate fulfillment of the Kingdom of God being fully manifest and the consummation of all of history. So that's toward which we're moving. But of course, all of this becomes known to us because of the first incarnation. So you have our Lord conceived of the Holy Spirit born of the Virgin Mary and becomes man. And that's the feast day that we're celebrating at Christmas. So we're looking backward at the time in which God became in flesh, became incarnate. And we're looking forward to the time in which he'll return and to be the summation and consummation of all of history. And then of course, you have his presence with us now that perduers until that time. And we see it most profoundly in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist at the celebration of Mass. We see his incarnate presence under the appearances of bread and wine. And so we have this triple vision really. And so we want to always prepare to celebrate the Lord, particularly his past coming as a type of commemoration of that grand event in all of history. But also, as it perduers and indoors to this day through the Holy Eucharist and the extension of the incarnation that remains with us today, and is leading us toward that final consummation of all of history, when we will have bodily resurrections and be with him in that eternal kingdom. So that's what it is that we're prepared for, a past event, a present event, and a future event, all at once. So, you know, oftentimes in the Church's artwork, when you have scenes of the Annunciation, which of course is March 25th, because nine months later is December 25th, right? Those two go together as the nine months of our Lord in the womb of our Blessed Mother. In fact, you genuflect on the feast day though. So that's if you've ever gone to the Daily Mass and it's March 25th, you'll say the Creed and you'll genuflect at the mention of the incarnation. I can't remember the new translation, I always had to read it, was incarnate of the Virgin Mary. And you would genuflect, and you'll do the same thing at Christmas Day. So the two times a year you genuflect. So the 25th, recognizing the nine months prior or antecedent of the conception of our Lord in the Virgin Mary's womb and then on the birth. But when you see her in the Annunciation, in probably one of the most depicted scenes of our Lady's life with our Lord, you know, she's oftentimes reading a book and she's oftentimes, that is to say, the scriptures, and oftentimes looking at Isaiah 714. She's definitely not reading canon law. She's not reading, well, she doesn't. And she's probably not reading the show, but she's a believer. She has faith. In case you didn't know, once you knew Winslow as a canon lawyer, which I joke around. And Father here is a Thomas, I study moralist, he studies canon law. But we need him because he keeps the trains on time. And as I tell everybody, you need a good moral theologian to teach you all the loopholes. I don't seem to give. Oh, they find a way around it. I give you know you don't give me them pay you enough. So if she's reading 714, she too is engaged in some kind of preparation, right? Because of course, unlike us, she's waiting for the first coming. And in that case, the first coming of the Messiah, who is going to be born of a virgin? At the same time, just because that's the case, doesn't necessarily know that the one to come is going to be the Son of God. Because of course, God hadn't revealed yet that he had a son. There might be some antecedent hints and some foreshadowing in the Old Testament. But strictly speaking, that Christmas is also a revelation, hence epiphany being one of the greatest feasts of the season, a manifestation that God has a son. We didn't know that before the incarnation, before actually that was revealed to the to our Lady of the Annunciation. And so she's she's also in that period of waiting for something that she doesn't know is coming necessarily. That's interesting. Yeah, and certainly that knowledgeable be matured and clarified when he speaks and starts teaching us about the nature of God in his discourses that pertain to the Father and the Spirit and himself. And that's where we start to we get the Trinitarian theology in Divine Revelation. So we have a more concretized expression of who it is that he is, and that he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father in union with the Holy Spirit. Oh, I'm not suggesting the Mary did you know song, which is heretical, right? I mean, the idea is that she did know, but she didn't know before necessarily. No, no, no, I know to me. Gabriel came. But yeah, to truly understand say, okay, I've conceived by the Holy Spirit. All right, you have a sense? Yeah, this is God's work. This is God's work. This is a divinity, right? The Holy Spirit does not conceive anything less than the divine. That's right. So you know that that's what's going to happen. But yet to be able to say but that's that's in relation as a son to the Father and the Spirit like to start to formulate those relationships and articulate them. They really he will be the one to to hone to hone for the definition of those relationships. But it is a great question as what can she deduce based upon the words of the angel and what she's experiencing happening to her and when she holds the child. And for that matter, what the angels say in the fields to the shepherds. And then the reference to a manual, God is with us. I mean, what are those things that can be good? I've always marveled how we have these saints in history that demonstrate extraordinary gifts, insights, wisdom, knowledge, prophecy, as well as of course, you know, profound works that are often written that we read over and over and over again because of their clarity and insight. But then when people talk about what Mary knew, somehow she's dumb as a stump. You know, she doesn't have the knowledge, even though she's not conceived, she's full of grace. Yes. It's like, you know, as a perfect example, if I fall in all of the insights, all of the gifts that every saint ever had, I'm Padre Pio for heaven's sake, who had these mystical phenomena. So all of them add them together. And they're still going to be less than what she possessed. Yeah, absolutely. So I find it extremely difficult for people to propose with a straight face that somehow she was just this maiden girl who was clueless. Exactly. No, I think that just the opposite of my contention is that she's she's unfallen. She's filled with grace, which means she has the gifts par excellence of understanding of... Original justice, right? Everything. And all of a sudden these words come to her from the angel Gabriel, words that we're going to repeat forever. Like, it's true when she says, all generations are going to call me blessed. What do we say? Everyone who says the Hail Mary, how many times a day? Blessed are you among women? Perpetually, yeah. We're consistently repeating that. Hail Mary. And I would say that at that moment, everything for her lights up. She realizes exactly what this what she was made for, number one. But also, what it meant when Isaiah was talking about that and what God is actually going to do with not just some messiah, as we've heard a thousand times, that was simply political, but something incredibly more. The one who was going to save us from our sin, but also happens to be the Son of God. The only one who can actually repair that which was made with him through him and for him. And the prior moment, though, is the one I'm interested in only because if she's preparing for something by the reading of scripture, by her own life, by her prayer time, by by inspecting, as it were, all the signs that God had given to her, and she could not have and no one could prepare necessarily to be the mother of God. I mean, God prepared her by her medical conception by his grace. And yet, just knowing what is going to happen doesn't happen. I can't imagine until Gabriel says something. And so the reason I'm bringing that up, maybe just my own musings, is that I think sometimes I'm preparing for something I don't know that's going to be larger than the thing that I'm expecting because this particular season is all about everyone wanting like the perfect Christmas, you know, or the perfect scene or for perfect family visit or whatever the thing is to nail your Christmas dismount. Right. I'm going to land it. I landed that. Right. And the hard part is there are too many players or too many actors. Yeah. It's not like you going off the vault. It's like you and 20 others are going off the vault together. Yeah. Good luck and get everyone to land that dismount together. Yeah. And so maybe we need to consider our preparations as being a bit more grand than all the social lubrication happened and everyone got along. Let's just smile at each other as we launch off this off this pummel horse. We pray we don't kill each other on the way down and it can have a little sense of humor about us. You know, I was thinking about this earlier today, I think it was, that God became man, this incredible act of love while we were fallen. And it seems like a simple statement, but practically speaking, I'm not sure how well we, the faithful absorb that reality because so often we think that we merit his love. So often we think that we have to deserve it. But we deserved nothing. In fact, we got what we deserved, right? The consequence of original sin, which is death and no access to eternal life. So we got what we deserve. That's justice. Yeah. But his becoming man, this is the good shepherd who's going after the lost sheep of the human family. That's the act of love. And that precedes our sets or rather our response, right? That is that to which we are responding. And to understand that that love is not contingent upon our perfection. Yeah. St. Thomas has a great line in this discussion about charity in which he considers charity as a kind of friendship between man and God. And since friendship requires a kind of mutual benevolence, and take us for example, I'm always benevolent to you, but that's not reciprocated. There's so many things wrong with that sentence. What happens ultimately is that I get the merit of being friends to him, but I don't get the reciprocal. For the sake of the point, we are going to concede to whatever stupidity of an analogy or an example you're going to offer. Well, because St. Thomas asking the question, if this is the definition of friendship, which is mutually known, benevolence, we'll end good together. It's going to be mutually known. And it's going to be beneficent. You actually have to do something about which you will. You will good to another, but you got to do something for that. Once again, the lack of disparity between myself and myself. You have to have concord, right? Which is a kind of, you think the same thing about the highest things. Your hearts are kind of concorded, right? They almost like chords on a piano. With. They're with together, with the heart. And then there's a kind of joy in the shared life that you have, depending on what that kind of shared life is. A delight. A delight in it. And so if that's the definition of a friendship, the question arises that, that how can Christ have charity for us? Because we're not friends, right? And Thomas answers very simply from the scriptures. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He says that he will the good to us such that would allow us to will the good to him. His doing that, his becoming man and dying is what makes of us capable of friendship. Without which we couldn't be friends, it's true. But we didn't merit that. But it's very act that allows us to be capable of actually doing that in return. Precisely. But to really wrap your head around that notion that he loves not contingent upon our perfection, but rather in spite of our lack of perfection. And then, as you say, provides a means by which we are able then to love back. Our lack of response is our inability to actually participate in that. But to really change him. But I think that, you know, without putting it all together, but to stop at that one moment and to reflect upon that, that his love is so great toward me, toward you, toward all of us, without being contingent upon me meriting a thing or me being perfect. You made me stop at that point when you said you. That really did boggle my mind. But I mean, how many times like, all right, so in previously live in ministry, we have opportunities to work with people. But how often are people stopped in their tracks? They're looking backward upon their lives and they have regret. And they feel the weight of it. And they feel defined by it. And when they say they don't feel as though God can truly love them or that they can really move forward, there's this fight with despair. Actually, there's a lack of a fight with despair. You're actually conceding to it. Yeah. It becomes so difficult to really own the fact that in spite of your faults, that God loved you first. And it's a very hard truth to wrap your head around because we are so accustomed, especially as adults, thinking that we need to deserve it. And then we put ourselves into an impossible position because we fundamentally think that we need to deserve it. So therefore we say, well, what can I do to deserve it? Well, you can't do anything to deserve it. Well, I'm in a bit of a, I'm in a bit of an infinity loop of despair, right? I'm never going to come out of this because I can't. Whereas you can take a hold of your present and your future. You can respond to this grace to bring yourself, as you say, in concordance with this divine life. You can move in that direction, but you have to fundamentally believe that he wants you to and that he still wants you. Yeah, this is the old adage of, I mean, so many, but Mother Teresa said it very simply, you know, that we love things because they're good, right? Yeah. And God's love makes us good. Yeah, it doesn't, we don't, it's not a precondition. It doesn't love us because we're good. Yeah. It's the same thing with beauty. You know, St. Thomas says beauty is a condition of one of the requisites of love, that it's the kind of thing that gets love going because it's a, I won't go into a beauty thing right now, but it's something that just, the mind takes pleasure in because it's a kind of ontological perfection something that's perfect that someone sees and it begins that process of seeing it as a good, it will love again. And that's, but the adage is different with God because he doesn't begin to love us because we're beautiful, but we're beautiful because he chooses to love us. Yeah. And then there's, but there is a corollary to that deserving that I find very satisfying as well. Because I sit on that first point a lot. I need to because of the biology of my life, my sinfulness, whatever. And I love the fact that I just, I reveled, I'm happy about the fact that that I can't change his mind about me in the sense of how he loves me. But there's the corollary that I find very satisfying and delightful is that I can respond. And that's that whole notion of merit. Maybe we should have a different talk, you know, discussion about just what is merit. Because it's not deserving his love. Not the same thing as deserving his love, but there is real merit, because he wants to be able to say to us at the end of our lives, well done. You can't say that unless there's some genuine merit involved, or because of his grace and because of his power, we can actually do something to which he can say, good job. I agree. And I think that's worth another time slot where we discuss it further. That said, we've seen people stuck where they won't proceed. Because they can't get out of the loop thinking that they have to do something to merit moving forward. And that's been done by our Lord. I mean, that's been done by God. We have to accept that we have to move forward. And it's hard because when we look back in our lives, I mean, we want to take a big old eraser and erase away. But the truth is, we can do something better than erase. We can change. Yeah. Yeah, he can make all things new. You know, that's awesome. We're good. Well, before we go, you were commenting on what I think is a legitimate option for Christmas trees, which is the long needle pine. I am accepting of all different kinds of trees. And so it's the shape of a football. I mean, this thing tapers on the bottom and it tapers on the top. It looks like a pineapple. Yes, you have a green fuzzy pineapple. I love it. So we have lots of different trees this time. It's large for a pineapple, small for a tree. Yeah. And so I have one of the trees we have, I just, I fell in love with it. We have a wonderful tree man who gets us all our trees. You can go pick him out and he's a wonderful person. Can you take this off of someone's front lawn? I mean, it looks like a bush. This thing I just fell in love with. It's not quite the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. No, it is. It's not better than that. It's quite a volume for that. But I love it. So those of you who chose the tree that is not perfect, thank you. So unlike this ugly duck behind me, I actually have a beautiful, full, almost perfectly shaped, truly tree. It's exquisite. I'm going to show you a picture. However, it's a type of tree I've never had before. It's not the normal pine that you get or that you see. It's fuller, but not long needle like this thing. So I get it home. I put it up and I'm realizing this doesn't smell the same way. It doesn't smell better. I can tell you that. I'm sorry. I just remember when we had that tree up for so long and saying Thomas, oh my gosh, it's so rotten. We kept spraying it with an evergreen spray. Well, I'm back to that. So I got those evergreen sticks and put them in there. I've got the vaporizing scents of evergreen. Like the things you used to hang from your beaver mirror? Yes. It's working. It's a full-on approach of pine. But I have to say, for the physical beauty, I had to sacrifice the scent. Now, I'm going to see how it goes with my synthetic scents. So far, it's going fairly well. But when I first got it, I thought to myself, do I make a mistake? Did I sacrifice the scent for the physical beauty? But to be fair, I didn't know that was my proposition before I got into the house. It's only when I got into the house, I realized that I had to sacrifice something. Yeah. You never sniffed your tree. But no, who does that? I do. You're ridiculous. You did not walk around lifting up a tree. No, because the whole tree lot is filled with glorious scents. It's just that I know. It's in the air. Now, for those of you, and we're going to let you go, but for those of you who are handicapped emotionally and whose wills are bent and whose minds are darkened and have a fake tree. Oh, my. There's still time to make confession before Christmas. I'll have to leave it right there. It's a cult of repentance. At least get a real wreath for the door or something. Just some evergreen. Something. Let's get some of the outside inside. But it's hard to vacuum. We're having some vacuuming issues that we know in any event. All right. God bless you all for the blessed preparation of that. God bless now. Thanks for listening to this episode of From the Rooftop. For updates about new episodes, special guests and exclusive deals for From the Rooftop listeners, sign up at rooftoppodcast.com. And remember, for more great ways to deepen your faith, check out all the spiritual resources available at 10books.com. And we'll see you again next time. From the Rooftop.