Meditation on Lent as the Training Camp of Love

[Music] This is Father James Serbi at the Basilica of St. Mary in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia, and welcome the holiness for the working day podcast. Through homilies, talks, classes, and conversations, the aim of this podcast is to help listeners understand and live the adventure of their Catholic faith in their everyday lives. Please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and family and anyone you think can benefit from it. Thank you. [Music] Lord of my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you at profound reverence. I ask pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time a prayer fruitful. My maculat mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. [Music] [Music] Lord, it's good to be with you as always, but it's good that you're with us, that you wait with us, that you wait for us, that you are open and completely vulnerable, sometimes waiting long hours for anyone to come see you, maybe not here, but in tabernacles around the world, just waiting. Waiting in cities and in country churches, waiting in suburban parishes, religious houses, just waiting. What kind of God just waits? You, the stories of the pagan gods or gods of other religions or the God of subservient, enslaved faiths, doesn't wait for his people, makes demands on them, makes them slaves, and you don't do that, you wait, and you get your poor graces out to transform us so that we can receive more of you. This time of year, I'm often re-watched Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. Great, yeah, I haven't seen it. Historical. But there's an interesting thing about the film that's, I mean, it's so philosophical, and everybody interprets it the way they want. You know, it's the Buddhist interpret it this way, and well, they interpret it a thousand different ways, because there is no like, you know, two Buddhists, there'll be five opinions, but then the Jews have the same thing, there's no magisterial Judaism, so it's kind of whatever you. People interpret it through the different lenses of religions or philosophies, or Nealists will interpret it a certain way, and then just give up and have a drink, and you know, all these different ways of interpreting it, but there's something beautiful this time of year, Lord. To think of Groundhog Day like Lent, we're coming up on Lent. And it's an amazing moment, because it's, it really, it's a story of a transformation, it's a story of a metanoia, that turning from one way into a completely different self, a different reality. I'm sure you know the story of Groundhog Day, if you don't, watch it tonight, it's great movie. Phil Conner's wakes up, it's February 2nd, and he's in Puxitani, Pennsylvania, which in itself is a cross to carry, and, and he lives the same day over and over again, and they say that people kind of like theorize that it's like 10, 20 years worth of reliving. At least the director said that, I think he said it was like 10, 20 years, and he lives the same day again, and again, and again. The setting doesn't change, the weather doesn't change, the people don't change. The only thing that changes is Phil. And he begins arrogance, superior. He's kind of insulated within his ego, and he's an interesting figure, he's clever and he's sarcastic, but he is the sense of being above everyone. And so he makes fun of the town, he condescends, Rita, the producer that he's with, and he's a weatherman, and he sees people are kind of like props within his own little world, and he's not evil, he's just self, he's turned in on himself. And he lives for comfort and image, some control. And then what happens is he's living the day over and over again, so he realizes there's no consequences to his behavior, and so he just starts indulging. He just goes, eats without restraint, drinks without restraint, steals, lies, manipulates. He gives freedom to his appetites. And this is really what happens to us when we're kind of not in the spiritual journey yet. This is the kind of spiritual adolescence. Pleasure? Sure! It's what happens when nothing restrains our soul, when there's no, when there's, it's a false freedom, it's not really freedom, it's actually a slavery. So the heart starts to expand towards pleasure, but not towards love, and so this loneliness and this blue piece in it keeps revealing him. But then the pleasure doesn't lead to any satisfaction. He tries to engineer happiness and it doesn't work. And so he goes and he tries to double down, he try to seduce his women by memorizing details about them because he's encountering the same ones over and over and over. He manipulates Rita with this kind of rehearsed charm. He's chasing different novelties, but it's all repetition. And every attempt collapses. And it's why because love can't be hacked, intimacy can't be manufactured. And then so pleasure without self-giving is just emptiness, and that's where he finds himself in. He gets everything he thought he wanted and he's trapped in it. This is the life, self-indulgence. I'm going to have all this pleasure, it's really great. And then it sucks. And so that leads him to despair. After indulgence fails, he turns to neilism. If nothing matters, nothing's worth anything. That he kidnaps the groundhog, which is hysterical, and he drives off a cliff, and he tries to electrocute himself and he freezes himself, and he just kills himself over and over and over. And still he wakes up every morning. Same song, the Sonny and Cher song. Because despair is like the collapse of false freedom. Like if we have a sense of freedom and it's not real, if we're not living like a Christian sense of freedom, then it leads to nothing but despair. This is why there's so much despair in the world. World says, have these things, do these things, have these pleasures, ta-ta-ta, we have them, and then what happens? Nothing. And so. And he realizes he can't escape himself. That's it. There it is. Now there's fertile ground. Every false god he worships fails. Pleasure fails, power fails, control fails, escape fails. He hits the wall of his own emptiness. It's like this existential wall. And then he starts to crack just a little bit. And the turn subtle. He starts to pay attention to things. So he goes, what does he do? He starts to use his mind. He learns piano. He studies poetry. He reads. He begins to learn how to listen. He's coming out of himself. And at first it's partially performative. You know, he's just. Just now I'm going to become an interesting person. Because every day he retains what he had the day before. It's not like he's a new. You know, he's not new every day. But something starts to deepen in him. So it's that use of the mind. He starts to use his humanity. He starts to notice others. The boy who falls from the tree. The man choking at dinner. The woman with the flat tire. The old homeless man. Ned! Ned Ryerson! The obnoxious salesman that he runs into. And so the repetition that once felt like a prison now becomes an opportunity. He starts coming out of himself. And he stops asking like, how can I exploit the day? And he starts asking, how can I serve? That's the shift. And then he starts to become virtuous. Why? Because he's repeating good habits. Over and over and over. Virtue is the good that becomes habituated. And this is where the movie becomes so brilliant. Because he's reliving the same day over and over. He has unlimited practice space. And so he practices generosity and attentiveness. And he practices courage and competence and patience. And it's like this slow ability to be, he starts, it's training ground for love. He becomes loving through repetition. This is the Lenton. The same environment that once revealed his selfishness now forms his character. And the day doesn't change, but he does. The town is no longer beneath him. It's like a training ground. But then he starts to actually care for the town. And the people in it. And earlier on Phil tried to, you know, he tried to win Rita, but it was like a transactional. Phil starts to just simply enjoy her. This is important. This is important for dating as well. Stop trying to win the person. Stop. It's transactional. It's stupid. Stupid people do that. Enjoy the person. Delighten the person. He no longer scripts the conversation. That's the interesting thing. He doesn't try to control her response by doing the right things. He plays piano simply because he loves it. He helps. I wish I could live this. It'd be awesome. You could be like Rachmaninov by the end of the couple of years. And then you still the rest of your life. He helps others because they need help. And the most powerful shift in the entire film is he tries to stop trying to possess Rita. He begins to admire her. See her. Be fascinated by her. The heart moves from consumption in effect to the ability to have communion. That's the metanoia. That's the purification. That's the transformation. And that's what breaks the loop. When he no longer is using the day for himself, when love becomes natural and not forced and not strategic and not self-serving, and he goes to bed finally content. Not because he conquered the day, but because he gave himself. There was nothing left of himself. And then he wakes up to a new morning and it's a different day. Sorry, spoiler alert, but it did come out in the 90s with the late 80s. Because he's made for more. And that's our mind. Our soul is made for more. That's the beauty of length. Like, length is a training camp in love. A lot of times we see length. You know, I don't think a lot of us don't have a great impression of length. Often because we just kind of like we grew up torturing ourselves because someone told us we should. And of course, as a child, what do you torture your own form of self-torture as you give up candy? Every kid is a crack addict, I think, with like the candy. They'll do anything for the candy. You want me to dress like that and go to someone's door, a stranger's house and get an astro candy? Sure, I can do that. And the candy, the sneaking the candy. I stole candy from the. Who's got candy jars anymore? People still have candy jars. Cookie jars. Sugar. Sugar can be some sugar. You see them, they're like twitching and they're like rubbing their nose and licking their gums and like, "Are you sure there's not cocaine in that sugar?" But what happens is that we're kind of miserable. Like, if you're a little sugar addict, you know, whatever it is, when we're kids, it's like, "I can't have this thing and you're sitting there." And of course, as a child, you know, like a day, you get older. Like, nowadays my days feel like 15 minutes long. But when I was a kid, 15 minutes long, felt like a week. You know, like, if you got. We didn't have timeouts. You just got punished or you got smacked. But if you. And you get your timeout. If you get your timeout, now go have your timeout for 15 minutes. You're incarcerating me in the lowest level of Dante's and Furnow, mother. Frozen in the ice, chewed in his mouth for my betrayal. It's 15 minutes. Go read a book. No, the new thing is, no screen. No screen for half the day. [Screams] It's time for an A-meeting, man. But what happens is that then we grow up with Lent and we think that it's this awful. This awful thing and I have to somehow weather this storm for six weeks. And that's not it. That's how Phil started. Why? Because look at the kid. Look at us. It's like, when. Oh, when I let go of pleasures and it's not motivated by love, then it's misery. And then I start to despair. That's usually why we give up something. And then two or three weeks into Lent, we're nealists. I heard it in awful words. Terrible. And then what happens is usually that sin we go to, you know. The sin that we go to when we don't have anything else, that starts happening all the time. I think we have the shift. Lent, Lord. Lent should be fun. Lent is adventurous. Lent is uncharted territory. Lent is training a training camp of love. I started reading the Percy Jackson books because the kids. The kids are like, "Oh, Percy Jack, you know, they make come." I often preach and I'll use Greek mythology because it's awesome and everybody has for the last 2000 years. So why not me? And I mean, it was good enough for mechalangelo and his roof. It was good enough for me. You know, and it's like, "Oh, let's go to this store." And then this guy writes the Percy Jackson book and they're great. But you also see the problem with paganism, which is awesome. And Percy realizes, you know, he goes and he starts to discover that he's a demi-god. He's the son of Poseidon, spoiler alert. And he goes to camp, half blood, where half-blooded demi-god are trained to be heroes. And they go there to be claimed by the god that is their parent. These awful gods of the Greeks that were constantly like sleeping with everybody. Even Zeus, he would become like a swan or a bull or I'm like, who sleeps with a swan or a bull, but apparently people did. But they train to be heroes. Well, we're not at camp half blood. We're at camp full blood because we've been bathed in the blood. Like you and I share in the one sonship of Jesus Christ. You and I live within the sanctifying grace of the Trinity. We are in relationship with him. We have been claimed by him. And this is our camp to train to be heroic, to use what God has given us so that we can receive from him. It's not like I got to do these awful things or I've got to be like really hard on myself. It's one of the things I don't like about Exodus 90. It's just, you got to grind, baby, you got to grind. That's stoicism. That's not Catholicism. If it is not, if we do things and they're not motivated towards a transformation of our hearts to be able to receive love and to gratuitously give love, then all it is is a stoic grind. You're like David Goggins, man. And I quote him, but I can't in front of the blessed sacrament because the guide never stops cussing. But in this camp that we're in, we discover who we are made for, who we are, who we're already in a relationship with, who has claimed us. And it's a time of learning what restricts love in ourselves. And then purging ourselves of that. Not perfectly. It takes time. Lent really, at the end of lent, we should realize I fail on my own, but with him I can do all things. So it should be interesting and creative and fun and a time of growth. It's not a diet. It lends us not biohacking or morning routine optimization or stoic productivity or a spiritual diet plan or it's not a YouTube video. It's transformation in love. And it's not about becoming impressive. We don't need to be impressive. Everybody, we're trying always to be impressive. It's about being available. Our hearts being available. It's the goal is the availability to grace, the expansion of the heart. So it's not about being more disciplined. The question is, what restricts my love? What restricts my love? Is it my plans, a thing, a habit, a relationship with someone else? Those are the things that we fast from. Those are the things that we transform. Is it that we're mindlessly staring at the screen? And this is like Phil. Like Phil starts to begin to use his mind. There was a woman in her mid-60s that once, not long ago, tried to push a Mercedes-Benz AMG GT Black series to its limit. This is a sexy car. Car was built to reach factory standard, 202 miles per hour. Where you do that, I don't know. Did it on the auto-mond, that was fun, but she pushed it hard. And she crashed it at 145 miles per hour, it ended up in the hospital. Totally bandaged up, smashed up physically, and a reporter came to, this was in England. A reporter came to her and said, "Well, surely now you're going to give up driving." And her response is, "Heck no." She must have been American. I want to get out there and see if I can hit the 220. And there's something that I'd answer that makes you smile. There's this kind of fierce refusal to live beneath capacity. She wanted to know what the machine could really do. But do we have that intensity about our own minds? Why? Because our mind is the way in which we come to know God. I mean, we admire someone who wants to push the machine to get it to its full strength. But do we know what the human intellect can do when it's fully alive? Or are we kind of on mental cruise control? And this is important because the mind's not a storage unit. It wasn't given to us just to accumulate facts. But God gave us a mind for amazing things. Machines can accumulate facts better than we can. I mean, this is why everybody's afraid. It's like, "Hey, I'm going to take my job." Well, if your job is just an accumulatory activity of facts, then yeah, it's going to take it. Good. I hope you enjoy unemployment. Because you're not being human anyway. A computer can store more data than we ever can. Because the human mind is made for something higher. It's made to discover the significance of facts. It's made to see connections between realities. It's made to discern causes and consequences. It's made to reflect. It's made to penetrate beneath the surface of things. And understands the thing in itself and the meaning itself. Ultimately, it's made to recognize that reality points beyond itself to him. If we reflect honestly and deeply on the world, we begin to notice something. That things are not self-explanatory. They're ordered. They're contingent. They bear marks of meaning. And if exercise, then the mind begins to perceive that the world points towards something absolute, something transcendence. The intellect is ordered towards the absolute. That's why we want to know the truth of things. You know that? Kids, once a teenager, I remember my dad was very good at this. Because he would never say because I said so. Why is it my dad, the opposite? Why do I have to do that? And then he would explain it to me. He was like, "Carnel Ratzinger." On the past, this is the pagan philosophers, bedeved systems, and so all the testaments, and so no testaments. And then he led me all the way up to the mountain. And I'm like, "All right, I'll do it." But there's something to that, because I told you so. A kid is like, "No, that's not good enough. I want to know the absolute truth of things." Why? Because our mind is ordered towards you, Lord. It's ordered towards God. That's why when we didn't have him, and then we'd discover him, that's what there's like finally an intellectual piece. And people who have not discovered him, or more importantly refused to discover him, or people who keep themselves in just fact-gathering, or staring at screens all day and not pondering the truth of things, they have no peace. They're stultified. It's a great word, stultified. And the bottomized. If the mind is made for that height, the heights, then the question is, what happens when we dull it? To stultify means to make it foolish, to deaden it, to reduce our intellectual vitality. And because we live in a world of saturated with these passive entertainments, and screens are glowing everywhere, they demand nothing from us. The screen demands nothing from us. They ask for no reflection. They flood our senses and suspend our thoughts. I ask yourself this, like, after periods of passive consumption, do you feel dull? Have you ever noticed that? Like, when you've been scrolling or watching, do you feel like, do you feel sharper? Or foggy? Do you feel like you need to go kind of revive? Lord, I admit, I was, I told you I was not going to consume anything this year. But the other day I came today. I went on YouTube, and it was, you know, I'm going to learn how to use my camera, I'm going to use this one setting deep within the bowels of Sony's menu system. I'll find it. And YouTube taught me how, and it was lovely, and then, I think I spent three hours watching these ridiculous videos. And that led to the news, and then that was the rabbit hole from hell. And it was a total waste of time. But when I snapped to my senses and I got up from my chair, I had to go revive, like, my brain was to be, like, leaked out of my ear and I was collecting it and putting it back. And that should trouble us. Because if the mind has to revive, it means that the mind was suppressed. And the deeper danger isn't simply that we were entertained, the dangers that we'd become passive. And there's a moral obligation that we have as humans. We've been given these great gifts. We're obliged to use our minds. Not as a burden, as a calling. The mind is one of the great gifts that God's given us. It's the instrument by which we know the truth. Jesus said, "I am the truth." If we dull the instrument, how can we recognize him? How can we live in accordance with the truth if we habitually weaken the very faculty that perceives it? An intellectual virtue, it's not arrogance, it's fidelity to the gift. To exercise the mind is to honor the gift. To discipline attention is to strengthen the soul, to choose reflection over sitting and just in reacting. It's growing in freedom. That's it. That's it. Why do we find difficulty being free? Why do we find difficulty overcoming certain sins? It's because we don't exercise our minds. Our minds are passive and they just take in stuff and then what happens? We react. The mind is like glass. If the glass is clean, it transmits light. But if it's dirty and clouded, it distorts what passes through it. And so our intellect has to be kept clean, clean from constant distraction and endless noise and mental laziness and habitual passivity. Because reality is where God reveals Himself. That's a good question for lend. Lord, where do I avoid reality? Because to avoid reality is to avoid Him, to live in distortion. And then what happens is slowly we begin to believe that there's nothing deeper in reality at all. When in fact we've lost our capacity to perceive depth and God made us and through baptism, He fills us with something amazing. He fills us with sanctifying grace. It's the grace that God gives us in order to bring us into communion with Him, communion with the church. Sanctifying grace is this participation in the life of God. And that raises our natural powers. Now our mind is raised beyond the natural powers. It's not a destruction of the natural powers. It's an enhancing of the natural powers of the soul. And it brings us into an ability and into a power and into a faculty that allows us to accept levels of truth that are beyond the power of the human mind to discover. Sanctifying grace is the introduction to the supernatural life, not just the natural life. And it's bestowed upon our nature and it suited precisely to our nature, to our intellectual nature. Angels have it. They see God face to face. They have sanctifying grace. And to keep our minds in the presence of sanctifying grace means that's why it's way, with mortal sin destroys that. So we have to go back to Him and say, I'm sorry. And then He goes, "Here, use the sanctifying grace again." And then he gives us, in order to really use the minds, he gives us the supernatural virtues, faith, hope, love. That's the greatest gift of sanctifying grace. Grace to the soul of a man or a woman who becomes involved with Christ. And so we go to you, Lord. This is going to be a great land. Help us to be really creative. Help us to be quite interesting in it, to use this mind that you've given us to, to be trained in love, love of you, to heal the wounds that keep us from truly loving our self well, and loving others, really loving others, not as a transactional, what can I get from them? And if we examine our conscience a lot of times, that's why we treat other people. No, this is going to be a land where we become passionate with love. And I want to encourage you to invite, bring people on Wednesdays. Bring people to this. Bring people to the meditations. Maybe they don't even go to the pub. It's okay. Bring people to the med, invite the rando, invite the co-worker, invite the friend who's, lent is a grace time. A lot of people respond to God. A lot of people do lent, they're, I know an atheist that does lent. I'm going to do lent with you. Do lent. What? Do you know what lent is? No. I'm just going to do it with you. All right, all right. You know it's not a diet. No. God's going to get through. And then when they experience community, this is what real apostol it is, when they experience community and love and people having good conversation and smiling and not being miserable and trying to use them, it's just going to transform their hearts. As all of ours have been. Lord, we dedicate this coming when and we dedicate the Valentine's Day to you. Not because it's become a last day. So we give you Valentine's Day and President's Day for the gift of our freedom. And Maudigrawe. Leisele, Bonzone, Roulai, let the good times rubble, the good times are knowing you. And with that, let's roll right in the lent and have an adventure. I thank you, Lord, for the good resolutions, inspirations, and affections you've communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help and put them into effect. My Maculant Mother St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.