IIC 34: Radical Receptivity

In this episode we look at ways to increase receptivity to intimacy with God the Father and with Mother Mary, covering the six dimensions of openness.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where by God’s grace, 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 Doctor Peter Malinoski, your host and guide with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 34, released on September 21st, 2020, and it is titled Radical Receptivity, radical spiritual receptivity. We’ve been building up to this topic over the last few weeks, and now we’re here. Radical receptivity. But before we get into that topic, let’s just cast a glance back at where we’ve been in the last few episodes to prepare for this episode. Now, in the last episode, episode 33, we explored openness in the natural realm, because grace perfects nature. We often start with the natural realm in this podcast, right? So we looked at how psychologists define openness. Remember, openness is one of the big five personality traits, one of the five personality traits that have come out over and over again in factor analytic studies that have looked at personality. Openness comes out along with neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Those five, openness, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, are the big five. Those are the big five personality factors that personality assessment has identified as being major.

[00:02:11] Those are the important ones. And again, open individuals, those that are high, that score high in openness, are curious about both their inner and outer worlds. And they have experientially rich lives when you compare them to individuals who are lower on openness, sometimes called closed individuals. Open individuals also tend to lack conventionality. They’re unconventional. They’re willing to question authority. They’re prepared to consider new ethical, social, and political ideas. Okay. In the last episode, episode 33, we looked at the six subdomains within openness, the six areas that psychologists have described where you can be open or less open, right? The first is fantasy. Second is aesthetics. Third is feelings, fourth, actions, fifth, ideas, and sixth, values. All right. So fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, values. Those are the six subdomains underneath openness. Today in this episode, episode 34, we’re going to look at openness in the spiritual life, openness in the spiritual realm. Now I use the word receptivity to capture a sense of openness in relating with God and relating with Our Lady, our spiritual parents. Because what I’m talking about is not just openness. It’s more than openness. Receptivity is the word that I use because it has this quality of taking in, of allowing to come in, admitting something into our lives, into our souls. There’s that quality of receiving, right? And so we want to be able to receive ideas, knowledge, right, information, but also, and much more importantly, relationship, connection.

[00:04:20] So I’m really talking about a relational receptivity when I’m speaking about an openness in the spiritual life. And the type of openness or receptivity that I’m talking about is radical. It is actually really different than what you’re going to hear in most other places. Remember, you know, we’ve talked about how the primary developmental task from that 0 to 24 months old range is to learn to trust. We really went into that in episodes 30 and 31. Our primary task as an infant and a toddler, our developmental work, is to resolve this conflict between trusting or not trusting. And remember that we’ve identified that there’s one essential thing for a Catholic to be resilient. And that one thing is that childlike trust in God, that absolute confidence in God as our father who loves us, who cares for us, who embraces us, who cherishes us as the apple of his eye. Let’s just take a quick look at Psalm 22, and we’re looking at verses 9 to 11 here. And remember, Psalm 22 starts out with, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is the Psalm that Jesus recited, he recited the first line when he was on the cross. It was one of his seven last sayings. And when Jews in that era recited the first line of the psalm, they’re referring to the whole Psalm, right? So Psalm 22.

[00:06:06] “Yet it was you who took me from the womb. You kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth. And since my mother bore me, you have been my God.” Look at this imagery here from David, right? Because David is the author of this psalm, King David. You kept me safe on my mother’s breast. If we have that childlike trust, if we have that absolute confidence in God, nothing stops us from being resilient. We can fall down and we can get up because we have that deep awareness, that deep knowledge, that knowing in our bones that we are deeply loved, cherished, that Mary delights in us, that God rejoices in us. But this childlike trust, this absolute confidence in the goodness and providence of God as our father, this is the primary area in which we as Catholics fail. This is the primary area where we as Catholics fail. We fail in this childlike trust, in this absolute confidence in God. And why? Well, as we’ve been talking about in the last few weeks, it’s because we try to be too big. We try to be bigger than we are in reality. Now I’m going to emphasize the 0 to 24 months. This came out in the episode titled How Small Are We Supposed to Be Really? I think that was episode 30. And so I’m just going to bring in some Scripture quotes that sort of flesh that out a little bit. This is Saint Peter, the pope, first pope, head of the church, 1 Peter 2.

[00:08:03] And he’s commanding us, “Catholics, like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation.” Right. He’s saying like infants long for their mother’s milk, let us long for that pure spiritual milk. In other words, we need to be like infants nursing at that pure spiritual milk. That’s how dependent we are. That’s how small we’re supposed to be. And lest you think that Peter was the only apostle to use this analogy of nursing, I’m going to remind you of Saint Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2:7. And he’s telling the Thessalonians, “But we,” that is Paul and his companions, “proved to be gentle among you as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children.” As a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children. This is how Paul, as tough as Paul is. I mean, this man is made of iron, right, in terms of his resolute will, in terms of his strength, in terms of his virtue. Right. He’s saying we prove to be gentle among you as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children. To the Corinthians, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3, “But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.

[00:09:53] And even yet you are not ready, for you are still of all the flesh.” Okay, so he’s saying that, you know, we need this spiritual milk when we’re early in our spiritual development. Now, what I’m going to say is that if we have unfinished developmental business from 0 to 24 months of age, that trust versus mistrust, then we are still supposed to be really young. We are supposed to be able to receive the milk, the spiritual milk. This is not something that we want to rush. We don’t want to grow up too fast or act bigger than we really are in the spiritual life. We need to be humble enough to be small, to receive the milk that we need to be able to mature in the spiritual life. And if there’s one thing I see often amongst serious Catholics who are my clients in psychotherapy, it’s that they’re rushing the process. They’re trying to be bigger than they are. They’re trying to imitate the saints with ascetical practices. They’re trying to die to self before they really are self-possessed. There’s all these psychological factors that are getting in their way. Isaiah 49. This is our Lord, our God speaking to us. “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” Can a woman forget her nursing child? There’s an emphasis here on the child nursing on the child at the breast.

[00:11:40] This is the tenderness of our God as father, right? Our father. Our spiritual father. And he knows that at some point, many women are going to forget, our culture is going to become insensitive to the children in our wombs. Right? Like with abortion and the disrespect for life, the culture of death that Pope John Paul II spoke of. Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Isaiah 66. Isaiah says, “Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her, all you who love her. Rejoice with her in joy, all you who mourn over her, that you may suck and be satisfied with her consoling breasts, that you may drink deeply with delight from the abundance of her glory.” When commentators discuss this, when reputable commentators, Catholic commentators discuss this passage, they’re talking about Jerusalem. Obviously Isaiah is. But it’s a type. It’s a form for church as mother, the Catholic Church as our mother, and also for our Lady, but also for God’s loving care. Right, that we may suck and be satisfied because we’re little people. We’re little parvulos. Right? We talked about this, right? It means a little child. It’s a diminutive, right? Which means that it’s not only little, but itty bitty. And as a clinician, I see so much psychological baggage around trust, so many psychological impediments around this absolute confidence in God. This baggage stems from negative experiences that we’ve had. It doesn’t have to be that we were abused or that we were neglected, or Dad hit us with a two by four or any of that.

[00:13:47] We all have these common attachment injuries. We all sustain these emotional wounds when parents, in just being human, they’re not attuned in some way. Right? And these common attachment injuries, these wounds, they lead us to be guarded, careful, cautious in relationship. We bring these wounds, we bring these injuries into our relationship with God our Father, and with Mary, our Mother. And it causes issues, right? It’s not just in my clients either. It’s ubiquitous. It’s in all of us. When I interview candidates for the religious life and do assessments or for the priesthood, guys that are well-adjusted, women that are well-adjusted, there’s still these attachment injuries. And I think it is because God is our primary father and Mary is our primary mother, right? Isaiah 40:11. “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd. He shall gather together the lambs with his arm. He shall take them up in his bosom. And he himself shall carry them that are with young.” Right. This is an image of the tenderness of God our Father. But how many of us really have that deeply in our bones? How many of us really look at God our Father that way? Or do we have one of these 14 negative God images that we outlined in episodes 23 to 28, or 29? And when we went through the 14 common negative God images, the distorted God images. Our Lord says, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

[00:15:42] Right. And if we go back to Isaiah, what kind of rest? Right. He gathers together the lambs with his arm. He holds them in his bosom, and he carries them himself. Remember how existentially dependent we are on God. We depend on God for every millisecond of our existence. We are much more dependent on God than a human infant is dependent on his mother. And we forget, or we don’t know God as Father, as this tender, loving father, because we don’t let him in. We don’t let him in. We don’t let our mother in to take care of us. And there’s a lot of resistance to being taken care of as a young toddler, as an infant. I mean, this is something that doesn’t even cross the minds of people, that God would take care of us in this way, that Our Lady would take care of us in this way. I want to emphasize how much Mary is our mother. This is a brief little passage from Father Emil Neubert. His book, My Ideal Jesus: Son of Mary, from part one, chapter four. And here, here in this passage, Father Neubert is quoting Jesus. This book is written in terms of Jesus and Mary speaking directly to the reader. So in his book, Jesus says, “Mary is even more truly your mother than your earthly mother. She loves you, you, all imperfect and ungrateful as you are, she loves you with a love that surpasses in intensity and in purity the motherly love of all the mothers in the world. Above all, she is more truly your mother because of the nature of the life she has given you.”

[00:17:51] And so Father Emil Neubert talks about how Mary gave us our spiritual life. She renewed in us the spiritual life. She brought the Savior into the world for our salvation. Incidentally, there is a book study that’s just happening in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community on this book, which is one that I highly recommend. One of our members, Jonathan, is putting that book club together right now, and that’ll be starting up in the next week or two. So it’s one of the benefits of being in the RCCD community is that we’re in active discussions about how we can be small, and we’re really engaging with this in a way that’s absolutely necessary for us to heal. And just as a side note, and I may be getting a little out of my depth here, so if you’ve got a background in theology on this, and I need to be corrected, by all means email me or call me, let me know. But these distortions that we have, these unmet developmental needs around trust and mistrust, if we don’t correct these on in this life, I think one of the functions of Purgatory is to help us correct these deficits in the natural realm.

[00:19:12] It’s not just about a spiritual purification, it’s also about correcting all the defects. It’s about dealing with all the unfinished developmental tasks that we have in the natural realm as well. So, you know, it’s one of those things where we can do the developmental work now, or we can do it in Purgatory, right? So if you remember, if we go back to those six dimensions, those six dimensions of openness. I’m going to bring those back up now, but this time we’re going to be looking at them through the lens of a receptivity in the spiritual life, right? We’re going to be looking at relational openness, receptivity, the taking in of the graces of the presence of God. Right? Because God is supposed to dwell in us. And Saint Teresa of Avila was very clear about that, that for a Christian in the state of grace, for a Catholic in the state of grace, God dwells in the center of our souls, like in the center of that crystal, right. And so that receptivity becomes so critical to that relationship, right? So the first one, openness to fantasy, right? So this is the first of the six subdomains or the six dimensions of openness that psychologists have described. Now we’re talking about this in the realm of the spiritual life. So a vivid imagination, a fantasy life, right? A way of visualizing or imagining a different world or different ways of being.

[00:20:54] This corresponds to the faculty of imagination. This is so vital when we want to break out of our old patterns, our old paradigms, the wagon wheel ruts that our wheels get stuck in, right, is to use our faculty of imagination to visualize what it’s like to be with Our Lady, with her taking care of us, to be with God our Father in this loving way. So that openness to fantasy, we can bring that in in terms of changing the way that we pray, bringing in imagery, for example, that’s very different than what we may typically do. And we’ll be talking about this in our upcoming Zoom meeting. We have a Zoom meeting coming up. It’s still to be scheduled. I haven’t fixed the date yet. We’re still looking for a date and time that works for many of our community members, but that’s another benefit of being in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community is that we’re actually going to be practicing this. We’re going to be working with our imaginations in image-based prayer to be more open to that relational receptivity. Because when there’s closeness, when there’s guardedness, it’s because of experiences. And the only way to correct an experiential distortion is through a new experience. You can’t think your way out of that. You can’t solve it like some sort of algebraic equation. You’ve got to actually have a new experience, which means you have to be open to that experience.

[00:22:31] If you’re open to that experience of God being loving, of Our Lady being loving, they will take advantage of that. They will come in, but they won’t intrude. They’re not going to invade you, right? They’re not going to come in where they’re not wanted. And so creating that space for this new way of relating is absolutely vital to overcoming the wounds and the injuries that we’ve sustained. So the second of the six domains or dimensions of openness, openness to aesthetics. This is the appreciation for art, for beauty, poetry, music. And that’s where we started to address this a little bit with having an image of Our Lady that you really like, like right now, again, I’m holding this card that has Our Lady, Untier of Knots. I find that one just really beautiful and really hopeful. All right. So the aesthetics. To pray in beautiful places, right, to elevate our vision to the beauty and grandeur of God. Third, openness to feelings, right? So here’s where we talk about receptivity to my own inner feelings, emotions, considering the emotional life, not neglecting that and trying to put some sort of happy face on, how we are trying to sort of fake it till we make it with God, but rather coming to God in an awareness of what we’re feeling, what we’re desiring, what our attitudes are, what our impulses are, all of our internal life, not hiding that from God, not hiding that from our mother, but bringing those things to our Lord.

[00:24:30] Being open to those things. It takes some humility to come in contact with what’s really in us. You know, when the saints talk about their wretchedness, they’re in touch with a lot of their internal experience. It’s not that they’re worse than the rest of us. They’re actually much healthier than the rest of us. They’re actually much more ordered than the rest of us, but they actually see what is, you know, what is disordered within themselves, right? And they recognize it. And they can recognize it because they have a deep sense that it’s okay because of the love of God, that God loves them anyway, that our Lady loves them anyway, as precious sons, as precious daughters. So receptivity, openness to our own inner feelings and emotions, and bringing these things to God. I’m going to talk about this in particular in a little bit when we get to some practical applications and prayer. Fourth domain, fourth dimension of openness, openness to actions. This is the willingness to try different things, to go to different places, to work with different behaviors. And this is so critical when we are learning to relate differently with God and Mary, to try new things in prayer, not to be locked into our old, you know, regimens, maybe stuff that was helpful to us 10 years ago, 15 years ago, or even, you know, three months ago.

[00:26:01] But to be able to respond to what we need now, right? To try different ways of praying, to ask different ways of connecting with our God. The fifth, openness to ideas. And this is one is particularly important to me because many of the ideas that we hold are unduly influenced by factors that we’re unaware of. And sometimes what we hold to be true as part of the deposit of faith is not really the faith, it’s just our understanding of the faith. And sometimes we have to give up our understanding of the faith in order to possess the faith more deeply. That’s part of the learning and growing that we need to do. So these openness to new ways of understanding the depth and the grandeur of God. And that’s where this trust comes back in, because we’ve got to trust that if we do begin to stray, that we if we do begin to follow an idea that’s not correct, that God will come after us. That doesn’t mean that we can wantonly abandon God and expect that he’s going to drag us kicking and screaming back into a relationship with him. I’m not talking about that. But I’m talking about if we’re making an honest effort to seek him and somehow we get off track, we get deceived, we make a mistake, God’s going to come after us. And if he’s not, if that’s not true, then we’re all doomed anyway, right? This only holds together if God is as the Catholic Church teaches him to be, which he is.

[00:27:50] The sixth dimension of openness, openness to values. And this is willingness to reexamine and reevaluate social, political, and religious values. And again, this goes back to what I was saying before about reconceptualizing what we understand about the faith. This is not an openness, this is not an openness to heresy or to any kind of apostasy or abandonment of the faith. But one of the things that Jesus was most adamant about in working with the Pharisees was their incorrect interpretations of the faith. And they were supposedly the experts, the teachers of the law. But they got it wrong. They got it wrong. And there are things that we are going to misunderstand about the faith as well, that we’re going to need to be corrected on. So the receptivity, the radical receptivity, the creating of the space for our God as Father and our Lady, our mother to enter in, is absolutely essential. And a while back in the RCCD community, I asked about like, what do you know about your life from age 0 to 24 months? What do you know about that time in your life? What might have been missing, what might have gone on? You know, we need to have those wounds healed. And we can bring this into our prayer if we’re open, if we’re receptive, if we’re open to new ideas, if we’re open to new ways of praying, maybe we can imagine being held by the Blessed Virgin Mary in her arms.

[00:29:45] One of my favorite images of Our Lady is L’Innocence. It’s a picture of Our Lady. I’m looking at it right now. It’s a picture of Our Lady holding the Christ Child, but also holding a little lamb. Right. So Jesus is probably, I’d say about eight months old in that picture. And the lamb is actually probably younger. I would say that that lamb would be maybe six weeks old. It’s a real young lamb given the size. And sometimes I imagine myself being the lamb held in the arms of our Lady with the Christ Child. I go there in prayer. That’s the kind of thing that I’m talking about. That’s different than just rattling off the vocal prayers, you know, of the third mystery, the third Glorious mystery of the Rosary or something like that, where I’m not engaging. I can do that too. But when it comes to trust versus mistrust, there’s a huge benefit to praying in this image-based way. Being rocked, listened to, being able to cry on the shoulder of our mother, our mother Mary. Sometimes I will walk clients through the things that they remember, the painful moments of their childhood, especially the ones where their parents weren’t as receptive as might have been desired, at least in the memory of my clients.

[00:31:10] And what would our Lady do in that situation? Invite her in. And it can be incredibly powerfully healing to have our Lady there, to have God our Father there, or sometimes Saint Joseph. Sometimes that’s a little more accessible to people. Some of you may be familiar with the lactation of Saint Bernard. This is the story where Saint Bernard was praying before a statue of Our Lady asking her, monstra te esse matrem. Show yourself to be a mother. Right now, we don’t know exactly what he was struggling with. We do know that Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had a deep devotion to Our Lady. Many of his writings were about our Lady and her motherhood. And so in front of the statue, he prayed, monstra te esse matrem. Show yourself a mother. And the statue came to life, and the Blessed Virgin gave Saint Bernard of Clairvaux her milk. Her milk from her breast. Different accounts say it happened in different ways. There’s at least 27 different classic paintings of this scene. Some of them show her squirting milk from a distance of 7 or 8ft. Some of the stories say that he actually nursed at her breast. Right? It illustrates how she responded to that prayer of Saint Bernard, though. You know, his preaching, his connection with Mary was so deep. He was known as the Marian Doctor. He was also known as the Troubadour of Mary. And he was very into the Song of Songs. He really gripped onto and was open to this very intense, real, raw, earthy relationship with our mother.

[00:33:09] Monstra te esse matrem. Show yourself a mother. Prove to me that you’re my mother. I wonder if he wasn’t in some real distress at the time. Some real need at that time for a mother, right? Our reality is that we are like babies, like little infants, like toddlers. That’s our reality. We we need our Lord. We need our Lady in our dependency. Now, sometimes, especially with this imagery that I just gave you of the lactation of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, there can be a real fear of openness. For example, I have worked with clients who, when you start talking about that kind of closeness, that kind of intimacy, where it involves the body, right, the bodyset, there can be like real concerns about sexual attraction, eroticization of the connection and so forth. That is actually really, really common. And most people who suffer from that don’t think it’s all that common. They actually think that that’s just kind of unique to them. Right? That that’s just their twisted, distorted problem. It’s how they’re particularly disgusting or revolting in some way. And I’ll tell you, if we haven’t worked out these relational connections, this intimacy, by the time that we’ve reached puberty, it’s likely to be sexualized. It’s just a fact, right? I’ve known men who were very serious Catholic men that are very frightened about developing a deep relationship with Christ for fear of some kind of homoerotic same-sex attraction, sexual attraction to Christ.

[00:35:04] Right. And what I would say is, again, let’s go back to how God understands all of these things, how our mother understands all of these things, right? I’ve used the example of kidnapping before. Let’s imagine that you’re a parent, right? And you had a little son, a little daughter that was kidnapped, very young and was sex trafficked and got really screwed up and began to expect that any interaction with adults was going to have these sexual or erotic aspects to it. And then was rescued. We just had in, even in Indiana, we just had, I think it was 6 or 8 kids that were in a sex trafficking ring, rescued from it. You know, they’re going to have issues, right? And if they go back to their parents and they have issues, their parents I think are going to understand that. We would understand if there was some kind of erotic attraction there. Our Lord understands that. Our Lady understands that. We can bring that to our Lord and our Lady. In fact, that’s the best way to be healed from it is to be in relationship with them. It is not going to be something that offends them when we’re coming to them for that to be healed, right? That doesn’t mean we can indulge in it or turn it into some sort of perversion, or derive some sort of, you know, sexual weird gratification from it.

[00:36:29] That would be perverted. But struggling with this thing, definitely, we can bring this to Our Lady, to our mother, to our father. When we’re receptive, tremendous things can happen. Right now, I’m deep in a study of Judges, the book of Judges in the Old Testament. And in chapter seven, Gideon had 32,000 men, and he was up against the Midianites, who had 135,000 men. Right. More than a 4 to 1 advantage. Gideon didn’t really want to lead the Israelites. He tried to get out of it. He was one of the least members of one of the least important families in his in his tribe. God said, do it anyway. So he rallies, he gets 3000 men together to go after the Midianites. God says it’s too many. And so Gideon says, anybody that’s afraid can leave. So 22,000 of his men leave. He’s left with 10,000 men. God says, this is still way too many. And there’s this test where they drink from the stream. And those that brought up the water in their hands and lapped it like dogs got to stay. Everybody else got sent away. Gideon only had 300 men left. So we’re dealing with 300 men against 135,000 men. These are, you know, these are tremendous odds, right? But God has a plan, right? He sneaks up on them in the night.

[00:37:55] They have torches and they blow trumpets, create all this chaos. The Midianites wind up slaying each other in the darkness and the confusion. Right. Gideon was receptive to the love of God. He trusted with this absolute confidence, right? This childlike trust. And it was a tremendous rout, a tremendous rout of the Midianites. Our Lady at her Annunciation. What an amazing receptivity that she showed at that time. I mean, I could go on and on about that, but we’re getting farther on in the time here. So I’m going to have to abbreviate what I was going to say about that. But I’m going to invite you to imagine, to bring back to your mind’s eye, her receptivity, her confidence, her childlike trust at age 13 or 14 to become the mother of the Savior of the world. I’m also going to invite you, though, to consider, before we go, what the alternative is. What is the alternative to being receptive? Well, we’ve got an example in Genesis again, in chapter three, right? Adam and Eve hiding from our Lord, hiding in fear. They’re no longer open to experience. They’re no longer receptive. Our Lord comes and looks for them because they were not willing to look for God. You know, we really would like to know what’s happening. We’d like to be able to have God’s omniscience. We’d like to have God’s omnipotence. But really, our life is kind of like driving at night with headlights on.

[00:39:29] God gives us enough grace to see what we need to see, to make the decisions we need to make in the near future. We’re not going to see the whole route. We need to be able to trust in him. Right? So this receptivity, this radical receptivity, this openness to the relational connection with God and with Mary, that’s what’s going to break us out of our old paradigms. That’s what’s going to get our wagons out of those ruts. That’s what’s going to break us out of the comfort of the familiarity of the dysfunction we know. And so later this week, I’m going to be working with the RCCD community members in a Zoom meeting. We’re going to be going over some exercises in a walled garden, an English garden, where we can really begin to relate with God our Father and with Jesus and with Mary our Mother in ways that are new. I’m going to give some image-based prayer techniques to really help you be able to connect with Our Lady as mother and with maybe Saint Joseph as father. I’ll probably use Saint Joseph as father because that’s a little easier image to work with. I’m going to invite you to get in touch with me. You can always contact me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. That’s my email address or on my cell at (317) 567-9594.

[00:41:05] If you’re in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, you can reach me through a private message as well. I’m really curious about your experience of this podcast episode. I want to remind you that the RCCD community, the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, brings together people like you, people that are really interested in growing more and more resilient, growing not only in the spiritual realm, but also in the natural realm, shoring up that natural foundation for the spiritual life. These are people that are coming together to seize the day, and that together are taking advantage of this opportunity in this crisis for great spiritual and psychological growth. It’s $25 a month. That’s all it is. It’s actually really cheap. And we’re going to hold that price until November 3rd. On November 3rd, which is election day, we’re going to close the community, and it’s going to stay closed for a few months just so that we can grow in that cohesion, get to know each other better. We’re not interested in, you know, thousands and thousands of members. We’re interested in really being able to know each other and being able to help each other along the road. Check out soulsandhearts.com. If you click on the tab that says All Courses and Shows, you can find out more about the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community there. I’m going to invite you now to just join me in invoking our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.