IIC 35: Being Both Big and Small

We explore how to be both adult and childlike in the spiritual and natural realms through the metaphor of healthy soil.  Dr. Peter provides examples to illustrate the concepts of being both big and small through the metaphor of preparing our soil and sowing good seed.  There are even original poetry and a prize for finding the “Dad’s word play” hidden in the episode.

[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 spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am here with you to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com. And Souls and Hearts is all about shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life. It’s all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 35, released on September 28th, 2020, and it is titled Being Both Big and Small. Okay, so it’s time for questions from our listeners from the last couple of sessions. But I only got one question from the last episode in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. I didn’t get any from email or from text or anything like that. And the one that I got on the RCCD discussion boards, that woman answered her own question so well that I don’t have a lot to add. So I’m going to make up a question from an imaginary listener who wishes to remain anonymous. He’s kind of shy, so I’m going to call him Johnny Hind. And the good thing about a host making up questions is that you can make them exactly how you want them to be, and that’s actually what’s happening now.

[00:02:05] This is exactly what I want the question to be. All right. So this is from Johnny Hind. Dr. Peter, what about responsibility? What about being grown up? I’m confused about how and the challenges of this world, I’m supposed to be mature, wise, virtuous, and so on. That doesn’t sound like being a baby or a toddler like you’ve been talking about in the previous episodes. I can’t just curl up in a corner and suck my thumb and wait for God and Mary to rock me to sleep all the time. I have responsibilities. So how do I be both small, childlike, trusting, but also grow to the fullness of manhood? Well, that is a great question, Johnny. Those are going to be our questions for today. You’re absolutely right. So for the last five episodes, numbers 30 to 34, we have been discussing being small, being like little children, going beyond just accepting our absolute dependency on God, not just accepting that dependency, but embracing it. We’ve been working on following the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, Matthew 18, which says, “At that time the disciples came to Jesus saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And calling to him a child, he put it in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this little child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.'”

[00:03:41] We’re working on becoming like those little children, the parvulos. That’s true. That’s what we’ve been focusing on for the last five sessions. Matthew 19. “Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. And the disciples rebuked the people. But Jesus said, ‘Let the children, let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them. For to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.'” And we talked about how we need to abide in God, to abide in our Lord Jesus Christ. We can’t bear any fruit if we’re separated from the vine. Jesus is the vine. We’re the branches. And we talked about Saint Peter and how he told us, “Like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation.” Now listen to the end of that, right, so that by it you may grow into salvation. That milk, that pure spiritual milk is to help us grow up, right? So now we’re going to take a look at the other side of the coin. We’re going to talk about spiritual maturity. We’re going to talk about that responsibility, right? Saint Paul is very much into this. He says in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. And when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” In Ephesians 4:15, Saint Paul tells us, “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”

[00:05:27] Grow up in every way into Christ, right? Not just in a few ways. We’re to grow up. That is also part of what we’re having to do. So Johnny Hind, absolutely right. We’re not just supposed to curl up on the floor, suck our thumbs, and be like toddlers in all aspects of our lives. We are supposed to grow up. In fact, that becomes very clear in Sirach 15, when our Lord tells us through Scripture, “Do not say it was God’s doing that I fell away, for what he hates he does not do. Do not say he himself has led me astray. God in the beginning created human beings and made them subject to their own free choice. If you choose, you can keep the commandments. Loyalty is doing the will of God. Set before you are fire and water. To whatever you choose, stretch out your hand. Before everyone our life and death, whichever they choose, will be given them.” Sirach 15. Telling us, no uncertain terms, if you choose, you can keep the commandments. And in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraphs 1730 to 1738, those are all about freedom and responsibility, the responsibilities of the Catholic life. So here we have two demands. We have on one side the need to be childlike, to be trusting, to have that absolute confidence in God. And on the other hand, we have this need to be mature.

[00:07:14] We have this need to grow up spiritually, to develop spiritually. So there’s a need to be small and a need to be big. Now, these needs, these demands to be small and big can become extremes. And in the spiritual life, there are two heresies that reflect these distortions that reflect these extremes. And they’re called quietism and pietism. So we’re going to have a little review of different heretical notions where these good desires can lead us off track. So the Spanish theologian Miguel de Molinos, he really was the main proponent and developer of quietism. And from his writings, especially from his Guida Spirituale, which was published in Rome in 1675. Pope Innocent XI extracted 68 propositions that he condemned. Right. So we’re going to talk a little bit about what quietism is. Quietism is the doctrine which declares that man’s highest perfection, what we are seeking, is a sort of psychological and spiritual self-annihilation. And with that psychological and spiritual self-annihilation, the soul is absorbed into the divine even during this present life. So we’re looking for this state of quietude in which the mind is wholly inactive. The mind no longer thinks. There is no will of the soul. There’s nothing that it’s doing. It’s remaining entirely passive so that God can act. Quietism is thus generally a sort of false or exaggerated mysticism. The person is not supposed to take any voluntary actions at all. Period. Full stop. So there is kind of a parallel to this in therapy, right? And when clients are being sort of quietistic in therapy, and I’m speaking by analogy, they’re really looking for a psychopathology-ectomy, right.

[00:09:27] They want a kind of general anesthetic, and they want me to remove all the dysfunction and problems for them while they rest, while they don’t have to do anything. I’m supposed to somehow do this with my psychotherapy scalpel or something, you know? And they say to me something like, you’re the doctor. You’re supposed to know how to do this. And they don’t really want to engage in a cooperative venture to help them recover from the things that they’re struggling with in the psychological realm, right? So that’s quietism, right? Quietism says, I need to do nothing. God needs to do everything. I am simply supposed to be entirely passive and submit myself, disengage my faculties, disengage my intellect, disengage my will. What’s on the opposite extreme? Well, it’s Pietism, right? So Pietism was a movement that really came out in the 17th century within the ranks of Protestantism. It was really a Lutheran movement, a movement sponsored primarily by Philipp Jakob Spener. He was a German Lutheran theologian, and it really aimed at the revival of devotion and what was sort of thought of as practical Christianity, Christianity for the man in the street, for the woman in the street. Right. Philipp Jakob Spener’s sermons, they called for this lively faith, the sanctification of daily life. And it veered off into basically teaching that your individual achievements, the way a man as an individual person lives up to his religious duties, the way he lives up to his moral commandments, the way a woman imitates the virtues of Christ.

[00:11:15] It’s that. It’s their acts that ensure them justification before God. So essentially, spiritual growth in Pietism is an individual self-improvement project that minimizes the role of the Church, minimizes the effects of grace, minimizes the mystical body of Christ, minimizes dependency, interdependency, and help from anybody else. And just like with Quietism, Pietism also has a parallel in therapy, right? Pietistic clients have to do everything by themselves. They’re unwilling to receive help. They’re suspicious of it. And part of that is because it might reduce the magnitude of their own achievements. They have to be the captains of their own ship. They have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. They tend not to accept any kind of suggestions or recommendations very well at all. So the Pietist is basically saying, do everything for yourself. God is passive and inert. I take all the action, right? Well, the Quietest is just the opposite. The Quietest says, do nothing for yourself. God does everything. Be totally passive. God is going to initiate and complete all the actions. So we have Quietism and Pietism. Huh, those rhyme. Quietism and Pietism. You know, all of a sudden, I’m starting to feel kind of poetical. You know, this podcast. It’s a creation of culture. It’s not some low-brow, dumbed down, mass market tabloid of a show. No, no, no.

[00:12:55] We’re really cultured here. We bring in the arts, we bring in literature, we bring in sometimes even music. I’m thinking that maybe I should compose a poem. Yeah, a poem to help you remember the difference between Quietism and Pietism. Now, true story. Here in college, I briefly considered a career as a bard. I thought I could be like an itinerant poet for hire who would compose verses for special occasions. Yeah, that’s this, this is amazing. I could do this right now. I’ve got that same feeling coming on me that I get just before my kids are grimacing and accusing me of uttering a dad poem. A dad poem. A dad poem is like a dad joke, but it rhymes. It’s gotta rhyme. That’s really critical. When there’s a dad poem, it’s got to rhyme. In fact, that’s the most important thing about a dad poem. It’s gotta rhyme. All right, so let’s see. No, no, no, there’s no need to call on the Muses, right? Because that’s probably pagan anyway. I don’t need that. I think I got this, I think I got this. It’s coming to me. Okay, I got it. Ready, here we go. The poem is called The Unhappy Couple. But don’t worry, it’ll end well, I think. I think it’ll end well. All right, here we go. All right. Exhausted from toil was the Pietist. While depleted and numb was the Quietest. That rhymes. These souls, pseudo devout, need counseling, no doubt. Quick! Call a Catholic psychiatrist. Oh that’s brilliant, I love it. It’s such a great dad poem.

[00:14:58] That is really, really good. Did you see how it all rhymed? That’s amazing. That is, like, really, really great. So. Okay, I can just see little Lucy rolling her eyes right now as she listens to this. Oh, okay. All right. Well, let’s pull it together. Pull it together. All right, let’s try to get a little more serious here. Let’s plunge into, let’s grab onto the questions that our imaginary anonymous listener, Johnny Hind, has offered us. Right. Let’s dive into the question of what responsibility we have while being receptive. Like if we’re supposed to have this great childlike confidence in God, if we’re supposed to be like parvulos, like little children, itty bitty ones in the relationship with our father God and our mother Mary, working through the trust issues from our first two years of life, what does that mean for our accountability, our responsibility, our obligations as adults in the Christian life? How are we supposed to be childlike and trusting, but also mature, grown up and taking responsibility for our lives? How do we reconcile all these seemingly contradictory positions? All right, well, stay with me for the answers. We’re digging into those questions. And do you know where we’re going to find the answers? We’re going to find the answers buried like treasures in the soil. Our answers to this apparent paradox between being big and small, simultaneously, they’re to be found in the soil.

[00:16:38] All right, so let’s start at the beginning. The beginning is a very good place to start, so I’m told. And when I think of beginnings, I always think of Genesis, right? The creation story. And the Garden of Eden was, there’s debate about where it actually was. But a lot of people believe that, based on Genesis, it was near the Tigris and Euphrates River. And one of the things about that area was that the soil was extremely rich. It was very alive. It was very fertile. And we know this, right? Because in the creation story of how rapidly the vegetation came up, right? The trees, the grasses, the bushes, all of that. And so soil, we’re going to be focusing in on soil a little bit. And there’s an excellent, excellent book that gets much less recognition than it should called Teeming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web, revised edition by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis. This is an excellent book. It had a huge impact on the way that I raised the crops that we raise here at Nourishing Acres, which is our farm. And it got into all of the complexities of the web of life in the soil. Like one teaspoon of soil has millions of microorganisms in it, if it’s a healthy soil. Far fewer, if it’s not a healthy soil. Most soils are not healthy because they’ve been compromised by conventional farming techniques, fertilizer applications, pesticides, herbicides, all kinds of things that disrupt the natural processes of the soil.

[00:18:20] And so when I’m talking about receptivity, I’m talking about being good soil, right? That’s going to be the theme for the rest of the episode here. So if we go back to the Garden of Eden, God creates Adam and Eve, right? And so Adam comes from the Hebrew word for man. It could be derived from adom, which means to be red, or from the Akkadian word adamu, which means to make, right. All that makes sense, right? And according to you know what we know from Genesis, Adam was created from the earth by God, right? And there’s also a wordplay on the Hebrew adamah, meaning earth, and maybe specifically the red earth, right? Which would be clay soil that’s sort of impregnated with iron oxide, right? That’s the iron oxide that gives the clay the reddish color, and that exists within the fertile crescent in modern day Iraq, where we think the Garden of Eden actually was. And so when God made Adam and Eve, he chose to need the soil, the clay, right. A heavy clay soil, what’s called a heavy clay soil is about 50% clay or more. That’s the kind of soil we have here in Indiana, the kind of soil I work with.

[00:19:50] It’s a heavy soil. Got a lot of clay in it, which has certain advantages and some disadvantages as well. But he made Adam out of a living soil. Those microbes were in that soil in the Garden of Eden. There were millions of them in just a teaspoonful of soil. So the soil that we’re talking about is some not some inert medium, just a bunch of particles of silica and clay and loam and stuff like that, all jumbled together. It’s a living system. And that’s really important because we’re the clay, we’re the soil. God has chosen to need us in working with us. Right. Saint Augustine in Sermo 169 said, “God created us without us, but he did not will to save us without us.” So now that we’re made, we’re now engaged with God in our process of salvation, which also includes all of this spiritual development and includes being both small and big. Right. So in Isaiah 64:8, “But now, O Lord, you are our father. We are the clay, and you our potter, and all of us are the work of your hands.” Okay, so Genesis 2:7, “The Lord God formed man from dust.” Or soil. It depends on how you translate it. “Dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.” So the life of this of the soil was transformed. It was good before, a rich, fertile soil, capable of all kinds of potential growth.

[00:21:40] But God took that life to an entirely new level in making us. He breathed into our nostrils the breath of life. So now we get to choose how we care for the soil. In Genesis, Adam received the command from God to till the Garden and to care for the Garden of Eden. He was given the responsibility of caring for the soil, in particular for tilling it. There’s all kinds of things that we can do that I can do as an organic farmer to make the soil better. There is aerating with broadforks. I use actually use broadforks. I fork the soil. Composting, mulching, watering. I do a lot to encourage the activity of earthworms, which are like a very obvious sign of soil health. I’m doing everything I can to improve microbial life. Because those natural processes, if I’ve got a lot of earthworms going through my soil, I don’t have to rototill it. Very rarely do I rototill anything, because it actually very much disrupts the soil life web. It kills a lot of earthworms. It actually, de-layers the soil and denatures it in a variety of ways. And it actually leads in the long run to soil compaction. So what I want to do is I want to create conditions under which natural processes do all the work.

[00:23:09] And that’s a little bit like what we were talking about before, so that the soil can receive what it needs. So I’m active, I’m caring for my soil. I’m not just, you know, sitting around doing nothing like a Quietist, but I’m preparing that soil to receive the seed. So this is the first major point about how you reconcile being both big and small. There’s an active receptivity. There’s a preparation and preparing the soil of your natural life and your spiritual life. This means that you have a plan of life, that you have dedicated time to pray. That’s like forking your soil, that dedicated time to pray. Getting into that conversational prayer with Mary, with our Lord, with God the Father, with Saint Joseph. You know, setting aside that time for reflection on a natural plane too. To think, to not be so run ragged like a Pietist, you know, running around trying to do everything so that you can believe that your achievements will actually make your life better or make you worthy in the eyes of God. We’ve got to care for that natural foundation for the spiritual life. And that may mean setting aside time for journaling, for getting in touch with your mindset, your bodyset, your heartset, your soulset. Really what I’m talking about with this receptivity and this preparing the soil is being recollected. It’s about being ready for action.

[00:24:38] When I was a little kid, I was like, really impressed with the Minutemen, you know, the Minutemen, that could be ready in a minute to go into action, to go into armed conflict. It’s like, whoa, that’s cool. Right? We’ve got to make sure that we’re going to Sunday Mass, daily Mass, if we can make it, if it fits with our duties of state, to go to regular confession, to be doing examinations of conscience that are relational, right? Where we’re actually thinking about not the rules that I broke, but about what’s going on in the relationship between me and God my father, between me and my mother. Right. So that’s the first major point, that this childlike receptivity, this trust is all about preparing the soil. It’s not about making the corn grow. Right? As a farmer, I cannot make the corn grow, but I can prepare the soil. I can ensure that it’s getting, that I’ve put my garden in a place where it gets adequate sunlight. I can supplement with water if the rainfall is too low. I can add various amendments that are needed. And that’s what we need to be thinking about in our spiritual life. Not that we’re doing it all by ourselves, not that we’re making the corn grow, but that we’re creating the environment for this growth to happen, to maximize the potential for that growth.

[00:26:06] That’s the first point. Active receptivity. The second major point that comes from this verse in Scripture, this is what Saint Paul tells us in Galatians 6:7. “Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” You reap what you sow, all right? And you get to choose what you’re sowing, right? That’s what Galatians 6:7 says, whatever a man sows, that he will reap, right? It’s important, first of all, to sow good things, right? We need to take a look at what are we sowing in our natural lives? What are we sowing in our spiritual lives? Right? I have actually spent some significant time finding tomato varieties that grow well in the difficult climate we have here in Indiana. And Indiana is actually not bad for growing tomatoes, which is one of the reasons why I grow tomatoes here. Besides, we eat a lot of tomatoes. We harvested probably close to, I want to say 300 pounds of tomatoes this year, about seven bushels of tomatoes. And so I took a while to figure out what’s the best seed to sow. I actually don’t grow them from transplants. I actually plant seeds because I can’t get transplants in the varieties that I want. I’m paying attention to what I’m sowing. So what do we take in in our lives through our senses. Are we binging on Netflix? Are we watching? Like a lot of internet news, reading a lot of internet news? Are we caught up in social media? Are we drawn to YouTube? Are we reading shallow romance novels? Maybe it’s something worse.

[00:27:50] Like pornography, right? What are we taking in? What seeds are we planting in our soil? Reminds me of Saint Paul to the Philippians, right? “Whatsoever things are good, true and beautiful, think on these things.” We need to be cultivating, right, what we plant in our soil. Right. Now, a lot of times people are like, whoa, I don’t want this in my life. I don’t want these terrible weeds growing in my garden. But they planted them there. Those were the seeds that they put in the soil. Or maybe they planted good seed, right? But they’re not caring for the soil, right? So there’s big nutritional deficiencies. There’s things that are out of whack in the soil food web that are promoting disease in the plants, the good plants that they planted. Right. So when you’re doing conventional farming, you really look at the soil as though it just holds the plants. Right. There’s not a lot of thought in conventional farming about what the soil food web really is. There’s a sort of sense of, we take a look at, where’s the nitrogen? Where’s the phosphorus? Where’s the potassium? That’s the NPK ratio. We just use the soil as a holding ground.

[00:29:15] We don’t trust that the soil is actually going to produce anything good on its own. We’re going to make all those additives. And when you take that to the extreme, you actually get rid of the soil altogether. And you get into something like hydroponics, where you grow plants in gravel within a nutrient rich solution where you take complete control over providing the nutrition for the plants. You know what that reminds me of, to be honest with you? It reminds me of baby formula instead of breast milk, right? Back in the 50s, there was this huge push, 50s and 60s, where the scientists were saying, we know better what to feed your baby than what you can produce as your baby’s mother. Right? So we want to have that humility, that awe and that wonder. And so we’ve got to think about these two things, these two things that bring the big and the small together. The first is, how am I cultivating my soil? Right? And that’s our plan of life, our time for prayer, especially conversational prayer, relational prayer, where we really get into connection with our Lord, with Our Lady. The time for reflection. We’re caring for that natural foundation, might be journaling, might be drawing, things that really help us to be recollected, both on a natural level and a spiritual level. Regular confession, going to Mass, you know, adoration, those kinds of things.

[00:30:33] And again, you don’t have to do all of them. Take what suits you. Well, do go to Sunday Mass. Well, even some of you probably have a dispensation, right, with the coronavirus crisis. You don’t even have to do that. But be thoughtful about that. And then think about what you’re taking in through your senses. Right. My particular struggle is YouTube. When I’m burned out, it’s so easy for me to go and veg out on YouTube, click on this, click on that, action movies, especially, vigilante justice, is my particular thing. And I’ve been working on that with my spiritual director. You know, just because I’ve given up the sense that God is actually going to take care of me, and I have this desire to want to take care and right wrongs on my own, you know? And so I get wrapped up into that does not plant good seeds in my soil. I wind up thinking about that stuff in prayer. It distracts me in Mass, those kinds of things. So, all right, let’s talk about two people and their soil. Right. We’re going to get into examples. We’re going to go to Luke. We’re going to go to Luke 1. It’s back to origins, right? The beginning of Luke’s Gospel. And it’s the story of Zechariah, right? And the angel, the angel Gabriel appears to Zechariah and says, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.”

[00:32:05] And he goes on about, like all the things that are going to happen with John, the baby that he is going to have. “And Zechariah said to the angel, ‘How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.'” This was not a question that was really asked in good faith. It was basically, yeah, that’s not going to happen, right? There’s too many obstacles here. Zechariah was not being receptive. He wasn’t taking this in. He wasn’t being small enough. He didn’t have a sense of wonder or a sense that all things are possible with God. He was looking at things through this very sort of jaded, sad lens. Right. The disappointment of having been childless, you know, which was really a sign of God’s disfavor. You know, both for Elizabeth and for him, like looking down, not wanting to be hopeful. And so what happened? Well, he was struck mute. Right? Gabriel said, “I am Gabriel, who stand in the presence of God. And I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And behold, you shall be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.”

[00:33:38] Yeah. So we see here is that even when the angel of God, Gabriel, appears to Zechariah, he doesn’t believe. He’s not taking it in. Right. So there is this consequence for him. Now later, just a few verses later, we have the Annunciation. And here we have the example of perfect receptivity, the perfect combination of being big and small in Our Lady. Right? So she is probably 14 years old, 14, 15 years old, something like that. And, you know, “In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you.'” Right? Now watch what happens. “But she was greatly troubled at the saying and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be.” She’s being thoughtful. She’s troubled. You know, there may be some anxiety, internal agitation. Right. And then confusion. Right. So mindset is confusion. Heartset is fear and anxiety. But she’s struggling with it. She’s staying engaged. She didn’t shut down. Right. So she’s being small in the sense of receptivity, trust. Right. But also being big, right? She’s using her intellect and she’s using her will, right? She’s sorting through what sort of greeting this might be.

[00:35:18] “And the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.'” Right. Because she remains engaged, the angel treats her very differently. Right. Reassures her, calms her down, and explains in greater detail what’s going to happen. “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus. The Holy Spirit’s going to come upon you.” Right. And kind of gives more detail about that, but Mary is still not sure of how this could be. She believes it, but she doesn’t understand. And there’s some, like really important details that in order to live it out, to accept this, that she’s got to understand. Now remember, Gabriel is an archangel, right? And when John the apostle who loved Jesus, had his vision in revelation of Heaven, he would like fall down to angels, right? He would like fall at their feet and worship them. He wasn’t really understanding everything that was going on. Mary is understanding what’s going on. She’s recollected. She is focused and she asks her question. How will this be since I do not know man? Right. She most likely had taken a vow of perpetual virginity. So this would have to be some sort of miraculous event. She wanted to make sure that she was understanding what was going to need to happen, so that she could conform herself to it.

[00:36:52] Her questions were not effective denials like those of Zechariah. Her questions were open, receptive, and gathering information she needed so that she could carry out the will of God in this situation. And so Gabriel explains, right? “The Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of the Most High will overshadow you.” And then some more explanations about Elizabeth and John being conceived. And then Mary has everything she needs. And in that space, what does she say? This is the famous fiat, right? “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your Word.” Boom! Period. Full stop. There it is. Right. And that was the greatest thing that had happened in the world since its creation. Right there. Right. She took all that on. Didn’t understand it all fully, knew that there were going to be implications that were going to have to play out over time. She, you know, she didn’t have a complete roadmap. She was, you know, she was going to have to navigate this day to day, but had the trust, had the confidence, right. So there you see the tremendous spiritual maturity along with that childlike trust and that absolute confidence in God together, right there. That’s what we need to emulate. That’s what we need to imitate.

[00:38:26] That’s how we need to be as well, right? She’s got that childlike trust. She’s got that spiritual maturity. All right. So to wrap it, right, we want to be both big and small in the right measure, right? That means that we want to be actively receptive. We want to prepare. We want to cultivate our soil. That’s the first thing. Have our soil ready, just like our Lady’s soil was ready when the angel Gabriel came. And just like Zachariah’s wasn’t. Right, there were issues in his life, in his faith, in his confidence in God, things that he needed to resolve that weren’t done when Gabriel came and he wasn’t ready. So we want that active receptivity. And then we need to choose what we’re going to plant in our soil, what we’re going to take in through our senses, right? Okay. So that’s useful things to review in your examination of conscience. Now I have something special for you. We had a dad poem in this episode. I treated you to that. But there was also another thing. There was a dad play on words. Subtle, right? If you can identify what that dad play on words was, email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Call me or text me at (317) 567-9594 and solve that dad play on words, right? If you do that, there’s a prize. There’s actually a really good price.

[00:40:04] I’m going to give you a copy of the Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew by Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri. This is the first volume of the big series, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scriptures by Baker Publishing. I happen to have two copies of this because I bought just the Gospel of Matthew first and then I loved it so much, I got the whole set. So I have two copies. I’m going to give this to whoever solves that dad play words that’s hidden in this episode. This is my number one go-to Scripture commentary, by the way. And Ted Sri, Dr. Edward Sri, he and I go back a long way back to the early 90s. We’ve been friends for decades. So I really like that work. And like I said, I’ve got a lot of Scripture commentaries on the New Testament. This is my favorite one, my number one is this series. So email me crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Call or text me on my cell (317) 567-9594. First one to get the right answer to what that dad play on words was gets the prize. I’m going to look at the timestamps, you know, and and we’ll get that out to you. Also give me feedback. Right, I want to hear what you all say. So I don’t always have to come up with imaginary characters to ask questions. And join the community.

[00:41:22] Right, the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community is the community that’s grown up around this podcast. It’s people that are really interested in becoming more and more resilient, who are interested in shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life, in resolving the psychological obstacles that get in the way of a deep and abiding relationship with God. Right? $25 a month. That’s all it costs. And there’s a whole host of resources. We have an upcoming Zoom meeting. That’s going to be tomorrow, September 29th at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time. That whole Zoom meeting is going to be about openness and receptivity, and we’re going to be doing experiential prayer exercises. I’m going to show you what I call the garden wall exercise, which I’ve used a lot. It’s one of my favorite ones. It’s really great for people who are afraid of God. It’s specially designed for people who are afraid of God, you can actually see and feel how God respects your boundaries and limits how he doesn’t want to invade you, how he doesn’t violate you, how he works with you, how he wants to be separate from you, but near. But he’s not going to push you, right? So we’re actually going to record parts of this one so that members of the RCCD community that can’t be there on that Tuesday night can see it.

[00:42:40] So if you join the RCCD community, you’ll have access to that and to so many other things that we’ve got that are available to our RCCD members. Now we’re going to shut down the RCCD community. RCCD community, we’re going to shut that down on November 3rd. That’s election day. I’m closing the community down for a few months. We just need some time to reorganize some things and to do some, you know, planning for 2021. If you get in now, though, you’ll hold that $25 a month through all of next year. That’ll be in force until 2022. I really want to increase the programming that we’re doing. Make things even more meaningful, more applicable, and have a greater variety of things. And that all costs money. So we are going to increase the monthly stipend for that or the monthly subscription for that, but not until 2022 for those that register before November 3rd. Also, you don’t want to miss out. I mean, we’re not going to open it up for a few months at least. So if you’re on the fence about that, it’s better to join now. So with that, I’m going to just invite you to 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.