IIC 30: How Small and Childlike are We Supposed to Be?

Dr. Peter Malinoski discusses spiritual childhood and the psychological factors that get in the way of us being confident in God and open to Him in our lives, with a special focus on the first two years of life.  He brings in Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development and John’s Bowlby’s attachment theory as well, with a special experiential exercise at the end.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, your host and guide with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. Now, let’s just jump in right away with this critical central question. Why is it that we have such a hard time trusting God? Why is it that our confidence in God is so inconsistent? Why is it that we are so fickle? Why is it so hard for us to be like little children in our trust and in our vulnerability with God? Why is it so hard for us to have that absolute confidence in God, the confidence that he merits, that he deserves from us? That’s what we’re going to be addressing in episode 30 of Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, released on August 24th, 2020 from the Souls and Hearts Studio in Indianapolis. The title for today’s episode, episode 30, is How Small and Childlike Are We Supposed to Be? We’re going to get in to the psychological side of that question of childlike trust. We’re getting into the psychological aspect of it. There are other sides to the question the spiritual side, the moral side.

[00:01:49] We’ll address those sides in passing. But what is so often neglected, so often denied, so often ignored, and so often unknown and unavailable to so many Catholics, what we really need so badly is a realistic, accurate understanding of the psychological factors, the factors in the natural realm that get in the way of us trusting God and trusting Our Lady. We’ve certainly touched on some of these factors before, so we’ll review for a moment. Now we’re going to go back and we’re going to take a look at what we have already developed in previous episodes. So here’s the causal chain as we’ve described it so far. We have distorted God images in our bones, that is, we have distorted God images in the emotional, intuitive parts of us. The trouble happens when we give in to these God images, when we let them dominate us, when we let them take us over, when we default to them, and when we act in accord with those false God images. Then our self-image deteriorates. Meanwhile, we drift away from God or even flee from him. All the while, we’re losing our peace, our joy, and our well-being. When that gets bad enough, we become symptomatic. We become anxious, depressed, apathetic, hopeless, panicky, obsessive, whatever our symptoms are, that’s what we start to face. What’s the main psychological reason that we don’t resist our problematic God images? Again, I’m talking about psychological reasons here, not spiritual reasons, like having a particular vice.

[00:03:28] I’m not talking about cases in which there’s some sort of demonic activity or something like that. I’m talking about psychological reasons. Psychologically what happens is that we lose track of who God really is. We don’t see God clearly in those moments. We waver, we’re tempted to doubt, we’re inclined to fall again into our destructive patterns, whatever those are for us. We are lured by our false God images into ways of thinking, feeling, desiring, acting, that are harmful to us and harmful to other people. So why do we mistrust God? And why do we mistrust Mary so much? Well, I’ll give you the answer. It’s because we are acting too grown up. We are trying to be way too big. Now, we may be doing that through actively mistrusting God, actively fearing God, actively fleeing from him, actively trying to take over and run our own show, or we could be doing that by not considering God at all, by basically forgetting about him, neglecting him, moving away from him, but not even deliberately. Now that’s what we’re like when we act big. Now we all know the Bible verses, right? We’ve heard them. The Bible verses about, you know, let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. Right? But do we get what they really are saying? Do we really understand what these Bible verses are saying? I want to review some of the verses in the Gospel, just to really drive home a point about how small we really are supposed to be.

[00:05:09] And we’re going to take a look at this from some different translations. And we’re actually going to dive into the Latin a little bit to get an idea of what Christ means, what our Lord means, what Jesus means when he is talking to us about being small. We’re going to start with some verses from chapter 18 of Matthew’s Gospel, verses 1 to 6. “And at that time, the disciples came to Jesus saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?'” They wanted to know who the greatest was going to be in the kingdom of heaven. This was a huge question. They were struggling with it, right? There was some idea about, maybe I want to be the greatest in heaven. How can I do that? Right? So Jesus does this. He calls to himself a little child. “And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me. But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.'”

[00:06:31] Okay, so we’ve got Jesus, in response to the question from the apostles, who is going to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? He says, a child, according to the Revised Standard Version or the New American Bible. A child. If you go to a more literal translation like the Douay-Rheims, it will read, a little child. Why does it read a little child in the Douay-Rheims or in the English Standard Version, these more word-for-word translations. These aren’t the dynamic translations like the RSV and the NABRE. Well, it’s the underlying word there for child is parvulum, right? Verse two reads, “Et ad vocans parvulum statuit eum in mediorum.” So he calls to himself this child, parvulum. Well, let’s look at that word parvulum. What does that mean? Parvulum means very little, very small, tiny, itty bitty, like a baby, like an infant. Right. It comes from the Latin word parvus, right? Parvus means small, little, ignorable, unimportant, of little importance or little stature. Right. That’s what parvus means. And parvulos, that is a diminutive of it. And a diminutive is something that makes it even smaller or littler. Right. So that’s why you’ll see in the Douay-Rheims the translation being a little child. I think it would be better translated as being like an infant or a toddler, right? This is how young we are supposed to be.

[00:08:08] This is how small we are supposed to be. So that word parvulum or parvuli in the plural is used throughout verses one through five of chapter 18 in Matthew. But when he gets to the, “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin.” All right. That little one, little ones is translated as pusillis. All right. And again, that means really small. Really tiny. This is not the kind of language that you would use for an adolescent or for a child who’d be middle school age. This is for very, very small, very small children. And that doesn’t come across in the translations that we typically will hear in Mass or the ones that we typically will read for study. That’s typically just rendered as children or little children. But if we really get into this, we see how small these children are. This also comes through in chapter 19 of Matthew. If we skip to the next chapter, verses 13 to 15. “Then children were brought to him, that he may lay his hands on them and pray. And the disciples rebuked the people. But Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.’ And he laid his hands on them and went away.”

[00:09:27] All right. So he’s hammering at the point again that the kingdom of heaven is for children. All right. And again, it’s translated as parvulos, parvuli depending on the tenses and the declensions and all that Latin stuff. It’s all about these little tiny children, right? There’s this emphasis on infancy again. That’s incredibly important because this is about who makes it into the kingdom of heaven and who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. I think when we hear these passages, we don’t really grip on to what was happening at the time. I suspect that these children that were approaching Jesus, that were being shooed away by the apostles, were not well-behaved 12-year-olds. They were not ten year olds that were showing a strong sense of propriety. They were little, little children who were drawn to Jesus, who in their innocence, who in their vulnerability, who in their littleness, recognize Jesus more for who he is than the apostles did at the time. Right? The apostles were kind of clueless, right? And these were the ones that should have known him best if you just looked at it from an adult point of view. So this call to spiritual childhood is absolutely essential. And it’s not to getting to some point where you’re like 12 or 10 or 8. We’re really talking about infancy and toddlerhood.

[00:11:00] That’s what I believe about this, right. So let me give you a little story about my cousin Ryan. This happened many years ago. We’re probably talking about 35 years ago. He was three years old. And I was probably, I was in my teenage years. And it was Christmas time, on my mom’s side, which is a big celebration. And he was dressed up in this very dapper seersucker suit. He had a matching cap, blue and white stripes. It was Christmas morning, and he got this most amazing gift for a three-year-old. He got those glasses, you know, those glasses that have the big bushy eyebrows and the big nose and the mustache. Right? And he put that on, and he looked at himself in the mirror and he strutted around. And he really believed that we would see him as a man. He wanted to be a man. He didn’t just want to be a man. He wanted to be a big man. He wanted to be a big man. And it was so cute for one thing, it was really striking. It was really memorable. It penetrated, you know, the fog I was in at 15 years old or whatever, and burned itself into my memory as something being really significant. And I think that most of the time in the spiritual life, we are trying to be like my cousin Ryan, when he was three years old. Not in his littleness, but in desiring to be big.

[00:12:23] Right, now he was playing. He was having a good time. He was hamming it up too, after a while, once he recognized that we kind of saw through it. He was playing with it. And it was really enjoyable. But I think what we do in the spiritual life is we try to be way too big. Why do we do that? We do that because we don’t feel comfortable, we don’t feel safe, we don’t feel secure in being small. And there are psychological reasons for that. There’s reasons for that. And if we can get at those reasons in the natural realm, we’re going to have an easier time of it. So just a little bit more about the importance of spiritual childhood. For Saint Therese of Lisieux, everything is based on and flows from spiritual childhood. That’s the assertion of Father Francois in the Complete Spiritual Doctrine of Saint Therese of Lisieux. You know, that means that for Therese of Lisieux, it’s a childlike mindset, a childlike heartset, a childlike bodyset, and a childlike soulset. It’s all about being little. It’s all about abandoning oneself to God as a little child in all things. And I will tell you, this is the very thing that made Saint Therese of Lisieux so unpalatable to me for the first 47 years of my life, or so. I hated the idea of being that small.

[00:13:59] It sounded so syrupy and so sugary. It was just really unappealing. It sounded way overdone, way over the top, so hyperbolic. But really, what was going on for me was a rejection of that teaching, a rejection of her spirituality because I did not want to be small. There are times right now where I don’t want to be small, right? Saint Therese of Lisieux says “It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to love.” This was in letter 197 to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, her sister, her biological sister, as well as her sister in the convent at Lisieux. But that is much easier said than done. There are parts of us that believe very strongly that we are going to be harmed, that we may even be annihilated if we become small, if we become vulnerable, if we become like little children again. Right. So what we want to do instead is that we want to approach God on my own terms, on my own conditions, within my own field of vision, within my own understanding. You know, we typically don’t assume that we’re going to meet God as equals, exactly. Right. But we’re going to be maybe partners. We’re going to hash this out together. We’re going to be like almost equally yoked or something. Just remember the bumper stickers, they were popular a number of years ago that said, like, God is my copilot, right? We want to have that sort of attitude.

[00:15:34] We want God with us, but we want him to basically sign off on the plans and the ideas and the goals that we have. Because of our God images, because there are issues with really being able to enter into a trusting relationship with God. And that is a function of our very first experiences. And we’re going to get to that in a minute. We all have had experiences before the age of 24 months that complicate the way that we see God. I just want to go back, though, and enter into Scripture just a little bit more about the absolute dependance that we have on God. And some of you may be really uncomfortable at this point in the podcast. They may be like, oh, this is really stirring me up, right? Because I’m not mincing any words when it comes to the absolute, the absolute dependance we have on God, the absolute need we have to have that childlike confidence in God in order to be in relationship with him. And if you’re getting stirred up by that, that’s actually really significant. I’m not actually all that comfortable with the whole idea, and I’ve been working with this stuff for years now. So let’s go ahead and go and take a look at what Christ tells us in in John chapter 15, he says, “I am the true vine, and my father is the vine dresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit he takes away. And every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.”

[00:17:34] And this is the money quote right here. “For apart from me you can do nothing.” For apart from me you can do nothing. Right. Listen to the language here. We are to abide in Jesus. Do we really understand what that means? That means like being with him. Doesn’t mean all of this separate autonomous activity. It doesn’t mean us captaining our own ship and pioneering our own way and making our own way in the world. You know, all on our own, which is, you know, something that’s very much a part of the culture in the US. This pioneering spirit, this rugged individualism, you know, this idea that I make my own way. No, what he’s saying is, apart from me, you can do nothing.

[00:18:32] Tie that in with how Jesus sees us. He sees us as these little children, these parvulos, right? These teeny tiny babies. As sheep without a shepherd. And again, I’ve raised sheep. And sheep are the least qualified farm animals to make it on their own that I’ve ever come across. You know, it’s far better, you have a far greater chance that pigs will make it on their own, or that cattle, cows, will make it on their own. Far greater chance that turkeys will make it on their own. Ducks can make it on their own, better than sheep. Chickens can even make it better on their own than sheep can. Sheep really need a lot of help. They really don’t know what’s best for them, You know, because of all the years of domestication. So, you know, we need to abide in Christ because that’s where we’re actually the safest. So now we’re going to take a little more psychological take on this. I’m going to introduce you to some of the ideas of Erik Erikson. He was a psychoanalyst and he really focused on psychosocial development rather than psychosexual development. Freud was all about psychosexual development and the impact of sexuality on the psychological development of people, children. Erikson, on the other hand, really believed that the social aspects, the relational aspects, were far more important. He placed much more emphasis on those than Freud did, and Erikson believed that personality developed in a series of stages.

[00:20:13] He looked at the entire lifespan of individuals, and he looked at developmental tasks or or internal conflicts that had to be be resolved in order for the person to move to the next step. And we’re only going to look at the very first developmental task that Erikson posited. And that is the whole question of trust versus mistrust. Erik Erikson said that the developmental work from birth to age 18 months, year and a half, was all about trust versus mistrust. And he argued that this was the most important problem to resolve. This was the most important phase of life, 0 to 18 months, because it shapes our view of the world. It very much shapes our personality, the influences that we have around whether we can trust or not trust, that becomes so huge. So can I trust those who care for me? Can I trust those who are near me or maybe I can’t. Right. If this phase is adequately resolved, Erikson said the result is a sense of hope and a sense of confidence that relationships are beneficial, that relationships are good, and also a sense of personal competence. There’s the sense that I am an effective agent in the world. And I can move on to the next step, the next phase of a development. So what does this mean? That means that if the infant or the toddler is hungry, thirsty, cold, hot, sick, tired, in need of a diaper change, in need of reassurance, right? Fell down, got injured, needs help.

[00:22:00] If the parent can interpret and understand what the child is going through and can be with that child in a way that’s helpful, and also that that happens consistently. That’s the other key thing about this is it can’t just happen once in a while. There’s got to be enough consistency so that the child begins to trust in the caregivers and in the world around him is a reasonably safe place. The care from the parents, therefore, is critical. The question is, for the child, do my needs get met? Can I rely on my parents? There are some parallels in attachment theory by John Bowlby. He talked about the question of whether a parent is a safe haven, and what he means by a safe haven is that essentially the parent, he uses attachment figure because it could be a nanny or a grandma or something like that. But can the child, can the toddler, can the infant return to the attachment figure for comfort and safety? When something scary happens, when there’s a threat, is the parent capable and willing to enfold that child in a space that is safe, that is reassuring, that is comforting? And then can the parent act as a secure base from which the child can go out into the world and experience things and then come back? Sometimes parents are really bad at letting their kids go out and explore.

[00:23:33] You know, they hover over them. They try to keep anything bad from happening to them. But does the parent give the child the space to do that exploration? And is the parent available when the child needs the parent, right? When the when the child needs his mom or when the child needs his dad. Both of these theorists really looked for the child to develop a sense of competence, for the child to grow up. And here’s where there’s a conflict, actually, I believe, with Catholicism. Right? This is where I think we get this paradox where, yes, we are supposed to grow up. We are supposed to mature, right? Luke 2:52. “And Jesus grew in wisdom and in strength and in favor with God and man.” There is a human development that happens. At the same time, though we’re supposed to remain little and childlike when it comes to our relationship with God. So these developmental theories, attachment theory, and then Erikson’s psychosocial theory, they address what those theorists, what those clinicians saw as good development. And it brings up that paradox, that we are to grow up, we are to become much more wise. We are to be as shrewd as serpents or as clever as serpents, as well as being as simple as doves or as gentle as doves, depending on the translation. And so there’s this paradox.

[00:25:16] But what I think happens is that the experiences of the failures of our caregivers, and every caregiver except the Blessed Virgin Mary and possibly Saint Joseph fails us in one way or another. And we recover from that in a variety of different ways. But there are still these attachment injuries, and sometimes there’s even pretty significant trauma. And so what we need to be able to do is to be able to go back and have a different experience of parenthood from God our Father and from Mary, our Mother. And that’s what we’re going to be getting into more within this podcast. This is sort of an introductory one. I had wanted to get much more into Mary images in this particular episode. And it just got a little long. I wanted to kind of set the stage with this critical point of how small we need to be. Now, this may be a point where some people say, look, you know what? I’m done, I’m done. I’m out of here. You know, this guy seems to be getting off the rails. It’s just more than I want to listen to. But I think if we really get into looking at this and when I’ve worked with people that were pretty well-adjusted, you know, on the surface, at least when they come in for different kinds of evaluations, fitness for duty evaluations, for example, for sensitive government positions, or when you’ve had men that are relatively well-adjusted that have come in because they’re candidates for the priesthood or religious life, or women candidates for religious life, if you really get to know them, if they’re willing to enter into this process where they’re allowing themselves to be known, there’s always issues around trust.

[00:26:58] There’s always issues around trust. So while the attachment researchers initially back in the 60s or so, Mary Ainsworth and others said that, you know, about 70% of people are securely attached, I think that when it comes to God, it’s much harder to be securely attached, in part because it’s a different kind of relationship. It’s a relationship with a purely spiritual being when we’re relating with God the Father. So it’s harder to get the kind of cues that we, you know, we’re familiar with as far as whether we really are safe or not. There’s a whole different way of having to relate. And so any issues that we have that are unresolved around trusting in the natural realm are likely to be reflected in the same kinds of difficulties in the spiritual realm. One of the things that I think is vitally important is that we focus on how do you resolve those things. So we’ve done a whole lot of work around God images. We just wrapped up five complete episodes where we reviewed 14 problematic God images. We’re now going to be moving into what kinds of things can we be doing to help resolve the psychological impediments to being able to know God as He actually is, to be able to trust him and to be able to abide in him.

[00:28:20] Here’s the kicker, though. It’s not something that we can really do on our own. This is the real problem. This is why this is such a thorny issue for people is that because we’re little, like infants, like toddlers, like sheep, because we are not super competent, because we are not supposed to be in charge, we’re not supposed to be the pilots of our own plane, we’re supposed to be able to have this trust in God, how do we do that? Right? It’s sort of like saying, in order to trust in God, I’ve got to trust in God. Well, here’s the answer. The answer is that we actually simply have to let God in. We have to actually approach God with humility, with courage, and with an openness. And this is something that we will be given the graces to be able to do if we’re open to it, if we desire it. And God is going to have a huge amount of tolerance for all of our missteps, you know, the ways that we come up short, the ways that we fall, our inadequacies, all of that. Again, that’s expected when you’re working with little children. Let the little children come to me, the parvulos, you know, the little ones, the itty bitty ones, the teeny tiny ones, the insignificant ones, the ones that don’t get noticed.

[00:29:44] Those are the ones he’s asking into relationship with him. And so we’re going to look at why it’s so important for us to have a spiritual father in God the Father, why it’s so important for us to have a spiritual mother in Our Lady, and why it’s important to have the saints. Because sometimes, to be really honest with you, the idea of this level of intimacy with God the Father is just way too much for some people. And so we can bring in people like saints like Saint Joseph, for example, because there’s so much that can be learned from Saint Joseph in real relationship. And as a psychologist, I’m interested in doing this not just because of the spiritual aspects of it. Because again, that’s not my area of expertise. Why I’m interested in bringing in God the Father, Saint Joseph, Our Lady, other Saints is to be able to heal the mother wounds and the father wounds that we have, the unresolved traumas, the attachment injuries on the natural level, on the natural level, because any wound that you received, any injury that you received, any inadequacy that your mom had in that moment, that your dad had in that moment, even if it was a little thing, if it was a huge thing.

[00:31:04] Whatever it was, God knew about it before time began. He knew about it before time began. And from our limited points of view, so often we get wrapped up in, parts of us get wrapped up in, how could he have let this happen? There’s so many ways in which we don’t understand, so much that we don’t understand about our own suffering, that we wall off in order to make it through the day, in order to make it through our childhoods, in order to make it through adolescence, in order to make it through adulthood. But I’m here to tell you that it has never failed with my clinical work, with those that I’ve been privileged enough to walk with when they’ve done this kind of work, God has never failed them. He has never failed them once. And there have been some really dark times. I have been really inspired by some of my by some of my clients and the work that they have done. It’s just really amazing. But it comes down to can they enter back into that smallness, that littleness? Can they go back to that childlike trust and dependency on God, which then opens the door to abandonment, which then opens the door to greater humility, which then opens the door to all of the other aspects of the spiritual life. That’s actually core. If you don’t have that, you’re going to be missing something very significant.

[00:32:27] And that was one of the reasons why I think our Lord was so critical of the Pharisees. I think they struggled or didn’t struggle with being small, right? Maybe it’s better said that they didn’t struggle with being small. They just weren’t going to be small. They were going to be big. They were going to be large. They were going to be in charge. Right? And there was no way for them to be able to relate with our Lord. So you see this on both sides. That’s the thing that pride does to us. That lack of vulnerability, that lack of humility, is it leads us to wall ourselves off from relationship. And I know some of you may be feeling, but it hurts so much. Some of you may be saying, but I was so badly wounded, and I want you to know that God gets that, and that those things only happen so that some greater good could come from it. Now, sometimes that may sound to people like it’s whitewash, that it’s just some kind of spiritual bypassing, but it actually is true. And if you really sit down and allow that truth to be there, I think it becomes undeniable for people. You actually have to actively resist it in order to not let it sink in. So with that, I want to talk about a little action item. I’m going to invite you to go back to when you were 0 to 24 months old.

[00:33:50] Now, you’re not going to remember this in typical narrative memory, okay? You’re not going to have, you know, the kinds of memories you would have as an older child or as an adult from 0 to 24 months. But I am going to invite you to write down what you know about your life from 0 to 24 months, from birth or before birth to 24 months, what you know from family stories. You may be able to talk about it with your older siblings. Your parents, if they’re still alive, might be able to tell you what it was like from 0 to 24 months. What was that like for you to write your autobiography from 0 to 24 months or from before birth? We could say from conception to 24 months. For me, it was really significant because I was supposed to be born on something like March 5th or 6th of 1969. That was my due date, but I was like 17 days late. And that was really significant because my father had obtained permission to remain at the base and not start a second tour of Vietnam until after I was born. He was a navigator on the B-52 bombers in Vietnam. And since I happened to be so late, you know, his squadron left, the rest of his flight crew left.

[00:35:14] And he had to leave the day after I was born to spend another six months flying missions in Vietnam. And he didn’t come back until I was six months old. And there were all kinds of implications that happened for that. That has an impact on the child. Even though the child doesn’t remember in terms of those narrative memories, it still has an impact. So I’m going to just invite you to write down things like that and to write down the family stories. And if you have a chance to talk with people who knew what your family situation was like, what your upbringing was like, when you were 0 to 24 months. Get that down. I’m going to invite you, if you haven’t already, to consider becoming part of the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. That you can register for online at soulsandhearts.com. Check out the tab that says All Courses and Shows. Register for that. It brings together people that are really interested in becoming more and more resilient, both in the natural realm and in the psychological realm, people who really want to seize the day. We’ve got a very active we’ve got a very active app where we are doing some messaging back and forth. There’s a lot of really beautiful reaching out to each other as people struggle with God image stuff, as they’re working through difficult things, to have that support.

[00:36:32] It’s free for the first 30 days to be a part of the community, and then after that, it’s only $25 per month. It’s less than a dollar a day. And that’s just helps to offset some of the costs to keep Souls and Hearts going. Almost everything we do is free. This is one of the few paid things that we have, and it’s one of the things that helps us keep the lights on. I’m also going to invite you to reach out to me if you’d like. You can email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. You can call or text me at (317) 567-9594. Really like to hear why some of you may not have joined the community I’m really interested in like what’s been holding people back. Is there something that I’m not aware of? Is it something that’s gone on with the podcast, something that you find problematic or aversive or something like that? Or is it, you know, maybe just feeling uncomfortable? Maybe there’s a little sense that it would be a good thing to do, but you’re not quite ready yet. If you’re willing to let me know why you haven’t joined the community, if you haven’t, I would love to know that just because it’s just really valuable information for me to understand how to make the community more inviting, how to make it a better place for folks where they can feel welcome and they can feel that it’s safe enough to take that step.

[00:37:49] So I also want to let folks know that we have a Zoom meeting coming up, and we are going to be discussing God images and Mary images with a particular emphasis on the first 24 months of life. We’re going to get into this deeper in the Zoom meeting, and that will be on Saturday, August 29th from 4:00 to 5:15 p.m. Eastern Time, 4:00 to 5:15 p.m. Eastern Time. That’s on Saturday, August 29th. And we’ve already got a bunch of people that look like they can already make that. We’ve been discussing the time on our app, and it would be a great time to come and meet some of the community. So if you’ve got a chance this week to get registered, to make that leap and join us, we’d love to have you. It’s a really welcoming community to new people. So with that, I’m going to call it a wrap. Really enjoyed being with you today. This was more of a free wheeling. This was more of a free wheeling. I’m trying some new things, not quite being so structured, trying to be a little bit more natural, less scripted. You can let me know if that’s working or not working. And we will invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.