An Incarnational Pilgrimage

Welcome to Catholic Stuff. You should know. The J10 initiative. Hello.

Welcome to Catholic Stuff. You should know. This is Father Sean, Father Michael o', Laughlin, a throwback. Should we also say welcome to what God is not?

Yeah, exactly. What God is not. Listeners, welcome. I'm sorry you're missing mother tell you.

I know you're mad about that. You'll hear back. Yeah, I'm an inferior guest. But you, you are a longtime favorite on Catholic Stuff.

You should know. So there's gonna be a lot of fans out there who are just like, bring it back full time. You know, one time I was recording with Father Mike Rapp, and he is. He was telling the story that he was in Rome and he met.

He met some American pilgrims who were there in Rome. He was studying and they said to him, oh, you're from Denver. We know the Catholic 72 podcast. He goes, I was on that.

They go, no, you weren't. He says, I'm one of the founders. No, you were like, I did not believe him. He put up pictures.

I feel like now I've been away for five years. Most of this is probably remembered me, but some may have been old school listeners. Yeah, they're probably still asking about you. No, it's great.

Yeah, Father Michael and I, he's in town visiting. What'd you say you had a baptism? I had a Parish anniversary, yeah. 50th anniversary of holy Protection, visiting church here in Denver, actually.

It was, it was beautiful. So Father Jal Barstadt, who's the pastor, he is just such a deeply, deeply spiritual man. And. But he had knee surgery.

So he asked me who had been gone for five years, but I was here for 14 years. He asked me to celebrate the liturgies and even preach on Sunday. He gave a talk at. The talk he gave was amazing because he leaned right into the tension.

Like, fifth year anniversary, you're celebrating something. But he basically started his talk, like V talk for the fifth anniversary by saying, so the more I studied the history of this parish, the more I realized that we should not exist at this point. And then he said, you know, there's been 13 pastors. And he just leaned right into.

He said, you know, one of them was a pedophile, one of them was an abuser. And like, that's how he kicked it off. And it was just. He finished with such hope.

Like, even in the midst of satanic, demonic, abusive activity, we still came out okay. And all these years later, here we are, people around some John Chavin, God bless him, 90 years old he came a big year after the founding. He was as close as they get. But John's have, of course, seen it all, but it was really beautiful for him to kind of do as Christ does.

He. He touched on the. The struggle and even the negative things. But it ended with the.

The evangelion, the good news, you know, that we're still here. Thank God. Let's be gracious for that. Thank God and all that we do.

It was great. Beautiful talk. Yeah. That's awesome.

And what a gift. The. The parishes is doing well and alive. And I remember going there a few times.

One in spirituality was my first time when you were still pastor the Divine Liturgy. And then you. We walked down there for, I think it was five Matt Books class in Lurian and sacramental theology. And you did a talk on.

Yeah, the sacraments of initiation in the Eastern Church, as well as what I would call the epiclesis. But you put the accent on a different syllable of epicles. Yeah, epiclesis. Yeah.

I'm probably saying it wrong. Well, what we learned in the seminary was say if it's a Greek word, especially a longer Greek word with three more syllables, say it like you would in English, and then move the accent back one. Syl. I don't think it's always accurate, but that was just kind of the way that they said rule thumb, if you will.

Gotcha. Yeah. But it's a beautiful church. I still remember actually, speaking of which, because I wrote my thesis in seminary, my kind of master's thesis, which it's like 20 pages.

It's really not that impressive. But on the church as a mother, what does it mean to the church to be mother? But the image I used in opening introduction was when you walk into an Eastern church, you'll have Jesus Christ, who's the untouchable, up in the dome. And then the apse where heaven meets earth, you'll have Mary, mother of God, the Theotokos, pregnant with Jesus.

Pregnant with Jesus. And just that image is love. Like Mary is the bridge between earth and heaven to the untouchable. Mary makes us be able to touch God.

It's amazing how we have so many Marian feast days in the Byzantine Church. We will have three Old Testament readings at vespers before any feast. And so there's so many opportunities to take Old Testament passages and apply them in the love of God. So likely use Jacob's Ladder.

Right. Because between heaven and earth and Mary. And much of our hypnobiography says Mary is the ladder. She is the tabernacle.

She is the uncut mountain. All these references from Habakkuk and throughout the Old Testament, they all apply to her. And I love it because we have access to these. We have access to her, therefore we have access to this.

She's the unburned bush. The touch of fire didn't burn. Oh, that's super beautiful. Yeah.

It's so powerful when you dive into the kind of theology, understanding, and it's all right there in the Old Testament and tying in and today's actually, Marian cites the right. Arle of Loretto, optional memorial. I hate to say, but I did not celebrate the optional memorial at Mass today. But Arleigh of Loretto, the story is that Loretto is where in Italy.

So during like the. I don't know what century, but imagine during some persecution in the Holy Land in Israel. The story goes that angels lifted the home of the Holy Family where Jesus grew up lifted all the way to Loretto, Italy, and that's where it sits down. So I wasn't there to see the angels fly the house, but that's the way the story goes.

I was reading a thing, a Twitter poster, expost, whatever you call it nowadays, the other day, and it was interesting that they found evidence of the placement of the house kind of along the journey, like at rest a few places. And then of course, there's all these people that will deny that angels carry it, but they'll say, well, it was carried along that route. But it is very interesting, actually. This fits with the topic.

I want to do very, very well, honestly, with the house, because there is. This is how I've always thought we in the Byzantine Church, for those of you that don't know who I am, I'm a biscuit Catholic priest. Though in the Benzine Church, we have so many of these stories that can seem fantastical. And part of my brain wants to say, did it really happen that way?

We don't need to believe it did. We don't. These are stories that teach something deeper. But we as a church have always spoken about it as if it did happen.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But people that are more, you know, OCD minded, I want to get positive, are more literal minded, may question this and say you're actually causing people to lose their faith because you're insisting upon things that probably didn't happen and they can get very distracted by that. So some people who definitely need kind of proofs for God, who will be turned off if the church seems to promote or teach something that is Irrational, they'll be more so. It is about souls for them.

So it is important to say, you don't need to believe this. These are stories that definitely can be used to expand and build up our faith and lead us towards truth and beauty and goodness. But you don't need to. But I, I oftentimes think, you know, when I'm at the throne of God, it's, It's.

I'd much rather him say, yeah, you, you. You took us as literal stories that were supposed to help you with faith. Rather than saying, no, you explicitly denied it and something that actually happened and was for my greater glory. So it's like, okay, yeah, it's interesting because I'd be curious.

I know your thoughts on, like, the modern project has been to get rid of miracles, if you will. Right. This isn't even scriptural. Right.

Rudolph Boltman, for instance. It's like, let's take any miracle out of Scripture and then you're left with, right, the historical Jesus versus the Christ of faith. And so, like, there's a certain sense of. We do want to go down and be like, what is actually real here?

We need that in a certain sense. But it can turn into, like, this scientific approach to faith in Scripture, which of course, we don't want to do. Yeah, that's. It's so limiting.

So if you're using that as a stepping stone or to help, like we are priests, help someone in our flock understand better than that's great. It's good to know those things and other things, but they have to be stepping stones because nothing. We don't get to heaven by knowing the right things. We don't get to heaven by.

We get to heaven by counting and becoming one with Jesus Christ. And so the. Those things are. If they're true, then they're true.

And then God is a God of science. He's got a order. You know, I just, If I. John Nepel to sham.

Yeah. He did a whole bunch of theology books, and one of them was about the, the divine Logos. It was also Logos of history, Logos of creation. And I just, I just read the summary of it.

I was like, yeah, this is the author. But it was just a beautiful. When God. When the divine Logos, the word of God, created the world he created with a certain order.

And that's what we study when we study science. We're studying the order of God and the revelation of God. And that's a really, really good thing. But you just cannot stop there.

You need to keep on going to faith and encounter A relationship. So I think it can be really good. But I think many people, I mean, it's like with thumbs, quantum. Right.

The Sumo was written for high schoolers. Basically. Most Catholics nowadays don't get anywhere near the adult theology or spirituality that we really should have. And honestly, I blame myself and other priests.

Like, we're the shepherds. We're supposed to be shepherding them in these realities. So many people just stop there. Most Catholics, I think, stop there and don't say, yes, there are things that are scientifically true and that are historically from the Scriptures and those are important things to define, but only if they are a step towards holiness.

Yeah, yeah. We had a professor in seminary. He used to always say it was moral theology. So everything based on Thomas, in many ways, Aquinas.

And he would always say, Thomas Aquinas did not get to heaven because he wrote the suma, because we're all these things. He got to heaven because he loved God and he became united with him. So at the end of the day, yeah, it's about that mystical union that we long for. And Christ will transform us from inside out.

Yeah. But to your point, I was. Yeah, we as priests have to be good shepherds and lead our flock there. And I think one of the things that is beautiful and this ties into the topic too, by the way.

I want to do this topic. Thank you, Father Sean for inviting me to have a topic today. But I also want to do it because Father Sean and I are leading a pilgrimage together along with Christopher. It's going to be awesome.

It's going to be amazing. I've led pilgrimage with Father Brian Larkin, with Father Jason Bunch. I've been on pilgrimages with then seminaries Mike Rap and Seminary Matt Book. That's my first.

2008 to the Holy Land. When were you Dane? 2005. Okay, so I was already pretty.

But that, that was, that was when. I gotta be careful saying this too much. I don't think they're wrong with saying it, but that was when I first heard about the Companions. It was on that trip and there were still seminarians, but they weren't really allowed to talk about it, like publicly shopping.

Said not to, but they said basically we'd be doing this soon once we ordained and. And then I came back like maybe two years later. I was like, how's this project? It's great.

We started. You want in? Yes, I do. So this is gonna be.

If you go to a real life Catholic, this is Christopher Fanatics mystery real life Catholic. You should go to the events and pilgrimages site. And you'll see this is gonna be. We're gonna going for the canonization of Pierre Giorgio Frassatti, which is incredible, especially for you.

Such outdoorsman I love. He's one of my all time favorites. Blessed and soon to be saints. Yo yo yo's mamalonous smokes.

So between the two of us will cover him very well. That's right. But it'll be July 25th through August 5th for the entire thing. There's two different versions.

There's the Romol need for the canonization and then there's the entire pilgrimage where we'll be up in northern Italy based in the footsteps of Carlocuis and Georgia Frassati. So. But I can tell you, some people, their brains work like the locations. My brain works with the people like I love encountering.

I feel like until the start of forward. I remember being a kid, probably 3 years old, 4 years old, and playing the ball pit at Burger King near our house growing up. And I was like, mom, like, come in. Like, why aren't you in the ball pit?

Why are you going to slide? My mom said to me, well, Michael, when you could be a certain age and you have a kid, like, you have more enjoyment watching your kids have fun than doing it. I was like, you're full of it. There's no way you can watch and have much enjoyment watching me edgwing yourself.

And now I'm like, okay. When I go on a pilgrimage, I actually love watching the pilgrims encounter these things. I feel very much like a parent. So.

So new pilgrims every time, former pilgrims are going to come. You and I do this together. It's going to be great because we actually don't always. Because you came on podcast after I left you as well.

We're close to it, so. So it'll be great to know you better to lead these souls together. If you guys want to go to real life Catholic, check it out. Yeah, we can put the link at least for Catholic stuff in the show description.

Everything. Yeah. We'll do the same for what is not. Absolutely.

But to echo that, like, I think pilgrimages is a great way to just encounter the Lord. And like we often encounter when we think of our own conversions. It's not because, at least typically, it's not because I encountered some great mystery of the faith. It's usually because a person introduced me to the Lord.

Right. And for me, one of the biggest people in that was Steve Knappel when he was the euphemist Cabrini where I Grew up, he just led me to Christ and just kept pointing there. And when, when we follow the footsteps of saints. Not saying that Steve is a saint, he's probably not, but maybe he is.

He knows he's a total loser. That's John's brother. But when we follow the footsteps of the saints, Carlocutis, Pier, Jojo, we're going to be automatically led to Christ because that's what they're going to want for us. And to encounter their humanity allows us to then encounter the Lord's humanity in a deeper way.

That is an interesting paradox because we're talking about the more practical, scientific, historical reality. That could be a stepping stone. But I think that can. And then obviously there's different stepping stones towards holiness and faith.

But then you go to. The more you go from proof to belief, that's one of the steps you take. But when you're in belief. So many Christians have gotten this wrong where they kind of abandon the physical, the tangible, they abandon the incarnational.

And that's what we're trying to do on any pilgrimage or even any going to church on Sunday or any holding a rosary or chalk, clean your hands using holy water. When we get to the point of faith, then we can go back to the tangible. So as somebody had said when I first did my first Holy Land pilgrimage, the Holy Land is the fifth Gospel. Basically walk across the gospel.

And the same thing is true for basically any pilgrimage. So we're going to be the canonization of Frasadi. We're also going to where. We're going to where Frasadi and Carlo grew up and where they went to church.

We're going to do all these things and these places become relics. They become the tangible that God is not abandoned. When we have faith, he actually leads us back to these things and he draws us close to himself through being in these places. As long as we acknowledge what they are, they're.

They're holy places that were encountered by these same. And God has graced those places with just free, free grace. And our faithful response to being in these places, our faithful response to pilgrimage is a encounter with the. The incarnationally embodied God who is in this world, created this world with his order.

And then we encounter that by putting the effort and the faith and the prayer and pilgrimages are. Are in one sense not that easy. You know, you're around people you don't know you are dependent upon. Is there someone who is really slow at walking that slows down the whole group?

You know, we do it willingly so that There's a struggle. But you're also on this, this pilgrimage to the tangible, hidden, incarnational aspects of our faith, which, of course, pilgrimages, an ancient, ancient concept for that reason. Right? Yeah, I think.

Wasn't it who said that the Holy Land's the fifth Gospel? I don't know who said it originally, but we'll hear that a million times. But I love that, like, when you go to the Holy Land, like, it becomes that fifth gospel becomes a new way to see. And it's, you know, it's not so much that you're stepping the same, like stones or whatever that Jesus stepped on, but you're going to see roughly the same terrain, roughly the same areas.

And it's changed, certainly, but it just starts to come alive. And one of the cool things for me is just like, as you learn the geography, like you start up in Galilee, you move down towards Jericho, which is the lowest place on earth, at the Dead Sea below, like, what is it, 900ft below sea level or something like that. And then you go up towards Jerusalem and you get to see, like, that's the path Jesus would have taken. Like, he goes to Jericho, greets blind Bartimaeus, and then he goes up to where he's going to be crucified.

Not just that temple, but then up on Mount Calvary, you can experience all that. The Fifth Gospel, it changes you. Thinking of Rome. The pope traditionally has worn red shoes because he walks on the blood of the martyrs.

And then you get to encounter that. We're going to go, you know, the catacombs in these different places, but you get to see where these saints lived and where they walked and where they died at the Coliseum, where hundreds of early Christians were martyred by the lions and whatnot in the Coliseum. And you get to encounter, through, as you mentioned, like, it's so incarnational, it's tangible, it touches us. It makes us encounter real events, real life, things that happened 2,000 years ago.

Way less than. I mean, for saadi died in 1925. It's less than a century ago. Well, I guess it is a century ago.

And Carlos, more recent than that, I think it's. It is pretty incredible because this book in Rome, I'm setting myself up for it, but there's a. It also. We talk about the incarnational body of Christ in the church, but it also the.

The incarnational aspect of Rome, which is one of the first five patriarchates, etc, you have in. In the one city that we're gonna see in the same day, the tomb of Peter When I was there with Chris last time, we, we had this great setup at EWTN where we had chairs on either side of the dome with Peter Dome. And I think it was Chris who said that that is St. Peter's gravestone.

I mean, you can see him from anywhere in the city, but he's buried underneath that dome. And so you have in the same day we're going to see. Well, when we're the cc, we'll see Carlos, Carlos body. But when we're in Rome, we're going to be the head of the station for Sadii and we're going to be where Peter died 2,000 years before in the same city and in that same incarnational reality of being present.

It really is a thing that those Christians who deny the incarnational aspects of acknowledging the five senses, and we use them in prayer, acknowledging our bodies in prayer, acknowledging time spaces, blessed things. And, you know, some, many Christians deny the fact that, you know, there shouldn't be any sort of Sunday obligation. It's like there's something incarnational about on the day that Christ rose, we all get up, we wake up with our physical bodies. We go to church and use our physical bodies and worship.

We encounter the body of Christ and Eucharist, we receive it with our physical bodies. This is where Christ encounters us in these physical things. So many Christians denied that. Thank God the absolute Christians haven't.

But. And what makes next year so special as well as that? It's a jubilee year. And so jubilee, maybe Old Testament, first It was every seven years was like a Sabbath year.

And then every 50th year was a Jubilee year. Leviticus 17:24, something like that. Somewhere in Leviticus talking about the Jubilee year, 7 times 7, 49 plus 1. It was the year that all debts are forgiven.

Which is why in our Father we say not forgive us our trespasses. The actual creek there is forgive us of our debts. Every 50th year, everything is reset so that you can start over. It's hard, fresh.

God's mercy flows. And so the church has now established a jubilee year every quarter century. So every 25 years and, you know, certain indulgences are offered, certain pilgrimage sites, the holy doors in these different churches will be open. And so it'll be a great jubilee year Ordinary.

And then Pope Francis, was it 2016 or something? The jubilee of mercy. So that was extraordinary. So Pope Francis specifically chose that to allow God's mercy to enter into the world in a new way.

But the idea of every 25 years is that at some point in your life you have the opportunity to go on pilgrimage to these holy places. And we're going to do that. We'll see the holy doors as well. They're already open now.

We'll be able to walk through them next year with the Jubilee. And then the canonization of Piero Georgia will be on August 3rd, I believe it's going to be. I didn't even think about that. There's just so much.

But the Jubilee is an incredible time to have a pilgrimage because that's what, as you mentioned, people will do. And to. I mean, pilgrimages. One of the main reasons for pilgrimage in the ancient church were to do as a penance.

You know, you would. The priest would actually give you a pilgrimage as your penance. And I don't want to see them as negative penances are negative penances as opportunities and helpful in an incarnational way to encounter them for of God. But.

But pilgrimages were an opportunity. And so even the pilgrimage itself is an account with mercy. We do it on a Jubilee year. It's just manifold.

And so you can say, you know, I'm going to a place. The struggle of pilgrimage. We're not going to struggle much, but. But it is going to be.

It is going to be. There'll be a lot of people there, and there'll be some frustrating aspects of it that will be aesthetic, that will be like a penance. But most of it's just going to be joyful and fun. But there is that aspect too, of saying, I'm doing this as an encounter, for an encounter with God's mercy.

Yeah, it's. Man, this is getting me pumped up. Just talk about it now. It will be.

Yeah, to your point, will be a little subtle, hopefully not too much. But just thinking Rome is so hot in that time of year and half the places don't even have air conditioning. So we'll see. But I think they're expecting like a million people just to flood the city, maybe more.

I'm pretty sure all of our rooms will have air conditioning because they usually. 206 words, which is running at 56 pretty darn early. So. But yeah, it'll still be encountered with God's mercy in all of its forms.

And it's actually kind of intimate. I think about. You and I are really the shepherds of this. We're going to be the ones that are supposed to be guiding people towards all of these spiritual realities.

But it's going to be awesome. Yeah, I'm excited. I forgot to go Confession gold. And I will be on this region about confession before recording, it was kind of a cool thing.

But speaking of mercy, maybe afterwards. Yeah, it's going to be. And I think also that I was thinking earlier today, I was meditating upon the seven ecumenical councils for some reason, Kevin saying, I was reading and the first, the seven ecumenical councils of the church, Nicaea, Ephesus, Constantinople, these were councils of Jerusalem here. And ask the apostles.

These are the times post Scriptures when all the bishops of the world gathered together to debate, pray about, and then vote on an issue that was not explicitly in scriptures to make, to clarify something for the church and end scandal. And so the first Ecumenical Council talked about the date of Easter. It talked about Christ himself. Was he eternally, eternally begotten?

Was he created in time? Was there a time that he was not these things like this in the Scriptures. But it is really interesting because the seventh Ecumenical Council is the one when there was a question about basically through the influence of the Muslims, many bishops had turned away from the encountering or allowing for iconography and statues in the churches, because these were images. That's why I communism these images.

And of course, the Muslims do not have any images of prophets or Allah or anything like that. So they convinced many of the bishops that the condemnations in the ten Commandments of having an idol. And so there was these big debates. And then, you know, thank God for Saint John of Damascus and others who were able to be so eloquent about that, about the fact that especially iconography, these are windows in heaven.

We don't worship the paint, we don't worship the wood. It's a window. We worship with Christ, who is represented here in a mystical way. But it really is true that we have all these debates, the first Ecumenical Council about Jesus, second about the Holy Spirit, the third about the Mother of God as it relates to Christ.

Is she Mother God or Mother of Christ? All these debates that were so academic and heady became so tangible in the seventh. And the seventh kind of sums up all of them because it becomes something tangible. You can have an icon, and in the icon you could portray Jesus is both God and man, because he wears red symbolizing divinity, blue symbolizing humanity.

You can show the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit, you don't show the Father because he was never made manifest in the world. And all these things Christ said, we call them. We call those in the Jesus, we call those truly ecumenical councils because they're both schism. So in this series of seven, they end with the tangible they end with something you can actually touch, you can actually look at it.

It's not just in your head, you're actually looking at it. So there's something about pilgrimages and relics and the bodies of saints, that it's a return after all of the over the top things. You've been preached a lot shorter than I have. They always say when you get nearly ordained, you're preaching 10ft over everybody's head because you've just gone to seven years of seminary.

You need to bring it back down to earth after a while. So this is the seventh council and pilgrimages and relics and blessings. Time, space and jubilees is the blessing of time every 25 years. These are a.

We are enjoying and being enlightened by the incarnational. When these things become tangible, my faith becomes tangible. When I'm walking somewhere where I've gone to pilgrimage to, when I'm venerating a relic, when I am blessing and encountering a 25 year period since times of creation of God. And all of these things make the faith very real.

It's similar also to the reason why we remember things of be singing like ABC as we teach our King ABCs. Because I promise you, you've been the holy right. So I see the scriptures differently because I've been there. When I hear about Caesarea Philippi and on this rock I'll build my church.

And when I see the hills and Mount Zion and Mount Calvary, things like this, you see, they become tangible. And I remember them much better than I did. And I think that any. The experience of mercy on this pilgrimage, among other things is going to be.

I went for the 25th year, I walked through these doors, I went to this place, I encountered, you know, Frasadi, Carlocutus, I encountered them, Peter, all everything else, all the apostles in general, I encountered all of them. And the mercy became more obvious to me because it encountered the tangible. Yeah, yeah, I think that's so well said in the Byzantine tradition. What is.

Do you get the processions? Yes, very much so. Eucharistic or not eucharistic, we use icons. Anything that is, anything that you can look at Gospel books, icons, crosses.

Gotcha. Yeah. That's what kingdom reminds you. Explaining some of that too.

And you didn't say processions, but I'm sure that's what you also meant as well. Right. We just did a procession here at Lord's for Christ the King processing, the King of the Universe. Right.

So the monstrons around our property, good weather, I mean it's A little chilly, it's in November, but no snow. And it's just so tangible and so incredible. Like you get to do something to your point incarnational. Like you're following, you're looking, you're seeing, you're smelling the incense, you're feeling a cold, et cetera.

The five senses are engaged in a way that actually help you to encounter the Lord. And the Byzantine liturgy as well, like the bells and smells is. I don't want to simplify it that simple. But the way that all of that comes together allows you to your body to worship in a way where you get everything into it, where you can turn your heart and mind towards the Lord in a very profound way.

We're incarnational, right? We're body and soul. Our body matters. And that's one of the reasons pilgrimage should be so powerful.

I think that that's kind of the point of pilgrimage. And thank you for bringing up processions because I think processions are little pilgrimages. You're moving from one place to another. You're actually walking, you're processing.

And so you're actually, I mean this is, this is true. There's a beautiful movie I mentioned on the Catholic side before, certainly not a beautiful movie called Ostrov O S T R O V the island in English. And it's, it's basically a man who is a repentant sinner and he just physically walks around an island and he prays the penitential Psalm 51, he prays the Jesus pray, praise these penitential things. And he basically is, is emptying himself in a cathartic but also self emptying way on this island.

And that sanctifies the island and it makes it a holy place. And when we pray and walk, we're in a sense sanctifying the ground upon which we walk because we are emptying ourselves on that space. And I, like you guys walk around Lords. I'll talk with you, Chris, that your Christ is walking around Lourdes, around the parish property.

But yeah, pilgrimages and processions are incredible. Father Joel just lent us some of his old banners, these beautiful big banners for our reaches California. And oh my gosh, we're gonna use these things to their full glory. We're gonna walk around the park of the prostitution from our church and just sanctify the whole area with crosses, candles, banners, the gospel book and all this stuff to make it beautiful.

But there is what we do on pilgrimage. We're going where somebody else walked or where somebody else's body, wherever else already are. And Adding our self emptying our cry for mercy, our reception of mercy, to what they write down in those spaces. I remember when I was in seminary, I was.

This is pretty recent, I think you had left, because maybe not. But sometime in seminary, I'll say that. And I was driving right next to Holy Protection, the Byzantine Church, past St. Vincent de Paul.

I don't know where I was going. And I see this group of people and this guy wearing these funny investments. It's Father Joel. And I'm like, what is going on right now?

Well, it turns out you tell me this later. It was the Epiphany. So you were all processing down to Watch Park. Do you want to explain that?

Sure. So in the Byzantine tradition, both Catholic and Orthodox, on January 6, the Feast of Epiphany, theophany, we bless water, what we call theophany water, what we call Jordan water. It has a special exorcism, a special blessing. And we only do that one day, only the Eve.

And then on the day of Theophany, where we attend to the nearest Sunday, we all press us down the nearest body of water. So near. And so at Holy Protection, that's Watch park and the lake at Wash park in la, our parish is right next to the LA river, which, by the way, LA obviously is short. I shouldn't use that term because it's short for Los Angeles.

The angels, when you extend that word even further, it's actually Mary of the Angels. So the original name of the full name of Los Angeles. And it's not referring to angels for the Mother of God, Queen of Angels. So we just call Los Angeles for la.

But the LA river used to be called the Poriuncula river after the Puriuncula. Saint Francis told Assisi. So I was like, when I heard that we should just bless, like a pond nearby, I'm like, that's it. We're blessed.

The river. That's what we're doing over here. So we walk down the river and we bless that. But you basically bless the nearest body of water.

And in a beautifully pious way, we say that if every church blessed the nearest body of water, then all the waters of the world would be blessed, in a sense. And so that's what we do. We precess down there. It's easier in LA because it's January.

Not that bad. Correct. You guys look cold outside. You look really cold.

I would wear my beanie processing down, like my bright red Columbia beanie with my. With my beautiful gold vestments. That's actually the things we probably haven't heard this, but podcast listeners have one day when the athlete were walking down on the Sunday after January 6th, and as they're walking down, it's freezing cold, and people are bundled up. We're mittens, we're processing down.

They're singing our hearts out as we walk. And we get to the park, and there's these two guys that are jogging in the freezing cold. And of course, they're breathing heavily. And one of the guys just.

They're jogging and they're panting. So he's talking, right? And he goes to the buddies running with me, goes, something really good or really bad just happened. This is what they're doing is you acknowledge really good or really bad things.

Biden recessions. It was like, such a human moment. Beautiful. Yeah, I love that.

And just to know, like, because I go for bike rides or walks or whatever around Wash Park, I'm like, all right, that body of water's been blast, you know, multiple times every year, annually. So that's exactly what we're going for. Yeah, I love it. But speaking of incarnation, of course, Christmas is coming up, and this is.

This is everything for us as Catholics, you know, the Trinity, then the Incarnation, the kind of two deepest and greatest mysteries in the church. God becomes man, which means he who is infinite becomes finite. He who does not have matter now has matter now has a body, and he sanctifies that. And even just thinking about the relics of the crib, you know, I actually don't know where those are, but then also thinking about the relics of the true cross, I think they're in the.

In the cathedral. Cologne, Germany. They haven't been splitted off like the true cross. They probably have, so.

But there'll be smaller pieces of it somewhere else a week. I'm sorry, I'm probably embarrassing myself right now. I think it's the colognes of some of the three wise men. What's it.

Mary Major, Mary Major. Isn't that part of the Last Supper table? Maybe multiple things. John Lauderdale is the Last Supper table.

Actually. People are yelling into this. I love it. Hey, that means, like, I come on the pilgrimage, right?

But the incarnational fact of, like, Christ touched these things, he walked in these places, and now we build beautiful and big churches and shrines to commemorate and to relive this and to memorialize it, and we get to then experience that. But, yeah, the image of the true cross, for instance, of they found the true cross by laying people who have been paralyzed in some way. Right? Because.

Yeah, to make a long story, short St. Helena goes to St. Helen goes to Jerusalem, and they find this kind of valley, if you will, with all these crosses, and then they start to lay paralyzed people on it. And then the one where, like, paralyzed people are cured and they're able to walk in, there's like, this must be the cross that Jesus Christ died on.

And then they, you know, splintered off, made some relics and, you know, maybe trivial there, but I have a relic of the cross and it's powerful to pray with. Yeah, I just looked it up. It is Mary major. Okay.

I think they said five pieces of. It's probably the majority of the majors there. I had a really beautiful moment. Speaking of incarnational and baptism and death resurrection, I had.

We baptized a young woman who was 18 years old, age 19 years old, last Christmas. We did on Christmas Eve. And we. It was the first time we were using a horse trough because we wanted to do full immersion.

And it was nice of outside LA that we could, you know, kind of put hot water in there and then basically have her kneel down and then put her entire body in water three times. But she had a beautiful reflection on Christmas that she was baptized in a manger because the horse trough is what horses eat and drink out of. I was like, that's amazing. Like, we were trying to hide the fact there's a horse trough.

Like, no, no. Like, all the facts of horse harvest are being baptized on Christmas in a manger. Yeah. Praise God.

That's so. Yeah. So powerful, so profound. When the faith becomes incarnational in that way.

Yeah, yeah, It's. We do call this the feast. We call this the Feast of Incarnation, which annoyed me because the person Annunciation is really the Feast of Incarnation, when actually God became man at the Annunciation. But the revelation of the Incarnation when Jesus was born, revealed to the angels.

Well, angels witnessed it, revealed to the shepherds, the wise men. But the revelation of the Incarnation, I oftentimes will reflect, like, I look at my hands. Like God had hands. Like, it just elevates the digit of our hands.

People that. People don't like the way they look, you know, like Jesus had a nose, no matter how big it was, you know, he had all these things. Like, there's something he elevated when Christ became one of us. It's such a pious.

But I think those of us are theologians, we get too caught up in the big things and sometimes remember that they said the free civil flower. They never, like, only read the four gospels. This is all I need. That's all I need.

These four gospels and that there's to get simple and just be grateful with the laws going about assistive suicidal stuff in our world, that there's just a to be grateful that God gave us life and then took on our life as a human being. And just if we almost ritualize it and remind ourselves to be grateful that, I mean, we have what the angels don't. God didn't become an angel. He became human.

And then I don't think we thank him enough for that. We absolutely take it for granted. Yeah, it's incredible. It's just so simple.

Children can teach us so much when it comes to the things that they try to wrap their minds around, that we just take it for granted. I love the scene in the Passion of the Christ where they kind of do some flashbacks and Jesus is building that table. Like Mary calls like, yeshua, time for dinner, whatever, come on in. And he doesn't hear her and then she comes out and then he like reaches into the water base and washes hands on.

He splashes Mary. I'm just like, Jesus would have had a sense of humor, you know, And I also wonder like being a brick masonry or a carpenter, like, imagine hitting, you know, taking the hammer, missing the nail and hitting your thumb, right? Like, like we've done a thousand times. And who knows what that would have been like for Jesus.

He probably wouldn't have said a four letter word after it happened. But just like the tenderness of like, Jesus is human. He would have experienced all these things that we experienced as well, being human. And I.

Jesus sense of humor. There was one time when I was at my average for Collins years and years ago. And, and I was. We had a family that had been there for, you know, probably five, six years.

And they were moving and so I wanted to give kind of. We were having a goodbye banquet for them. I want to give a kind of a, a heartfelt, you know, tear jerker speech at the end of my liturgy. And so I turned around and I start to say, okay, there's a family here who, who is moving.

They've done so much for this, that region. And anyway, I cannot remember their last name that they've been for five years. Like, I know them 99% of the time. The last time I stood there and I probably gave a five minute talk and I'm praying the whole time going, lord, what is it?

When's the last time? I'm just talking. Then they're really super finals. Just like, I was fine.

I was like, I'm sorry. Like, you guys know me I just spelled spaceship last time. The entire congregation burst out laughing. And then somebody yells, oh, okay.

So I turned back around to finish the prayers of the liturgy and I was like, lord, what was that? And I just, I had this, this very incarnational, very real vision of Jesus just like with this smirk on his face. Like, that was hilarious. Like I kept that name out of your head.

That was hilarious. And you needed the humility too. But that was funny. And some of the times where I felt the closest to Christ, I think just because he knows my sense of humor has been moments where he embarrasses me or kind of laughs at me in a sense.

And I like self deprecating humor and I think Christ likes deprecating when I'm self deprecating, when I'm humbled. And it amuses him, if you will. He's human. He was amused by things.

So yeah, thank God for the Incarnation. Became one of us. He had a sense of humor, he had a personality, all these things and he became one of us. It's really an amazing mystery to comprehend.

It is. Meditate on going to the Christmas season. So great. Thank you.

Of course. Thank you. It'll be great serving with you. We've never really gone on a conversation together, but we will this summer.

It'll be great. It will be. Yeah. So check out the notes.

But yeah. Relaycatholic.com probably.com and you can get the links there. Yeah, there's. There's 75 spots total.

I believe so. And it hasn't filled up too quickly yet, so you got a little time. There's a 300 discount that ends January 1st for both the full length, the 12 days up to Milan or just the Rome portion. But yeah, we'd love for you to come with us.

It'll be, it's gonna be really awesome. I always look forward to these things and actually I can, I can keep my head down, my nose to the grindstone fast and look forward to. So this is one of my, one of my rewards to self that I keep working hard. Me too.

I've never been to a cannonization, so I've heard they're, they're big events, so we'll see how it goes. But I think there'll be like grace present. I got to go to Mother Teresa because we already had a Rome pilgrim scheduled me in the barrel and so. And they end up sketching her candidation while we were already there.

So we already had the hotel's book, everything, literally. Our hotel's right across from the Benedict Museums. So we just. We slept in the morning, we walked out, we got our spot.

It was incredible. Yeah. And I remember it was beautiful because everybody was in Italian. But the moment that it was Benedict, the moment that Benedict XVI said St.

Teresa Calcutta, the entire crowd just erupted. I had tears in my eyes because I knew what had happened. Like, I couldn't understand he was saying. Then all of a sudden, he says, and I hear Teresa Calcutta.

And the crowd is just, like, crying out, like, you just declared her a saint with that phrase. Look at the goosebumps. That's so cool. I love it.

Awesome. Do you have any shout outs, Father Michael? Ooh, I want to shout out the Williamson family, Matt and I Williamson, and their little son Giorgio, who's named after Frasadi. And they're.

They're not going on pilgrimage, but they are going to meet us there, and they're gonna be for the conversation. So little Georgio and such a sweet boy. I was able to hang out with him the night and. And he was just.

He's a talker. He told stories and told jokes the entire time. I heard the story about when he was in the hospital and he was wearing, I think, a Bears. Chicago Bears shirts, which is Williamson team out of Chicago.

And the woman came out, oh, you a Bears fan? He said, yes. And he says, are you a Vikings fan? She says, are you a Green Bay fan?

She says. And he goes, you have too many teeth to be a backers fan. He's like six. It was great.

I love that. And you're the godfather for the oldest. Are you okay? Yeah, she's at the high school.

That's so great. That's awesome. Thanks. Shout out.

Sam Bixman, thanks for listening to the podcast. I want you to come on this pilgrimage so we'll see if we can get him. But, yeah, he keeps listening. And he's a freshman out at UNL and crushing it.

So beautiful. Beautiful. Awesome. Well, podcast.

Gmail.com. what about forgives not podcast? We're thinking the same thing. Yeah.

And I also. We always give. We always ask people to pray. So I am going to ask you actually to pray for Georgia as you hear this podcast.

And if you will also please pray for. I am. I just got hired on as an adjunct at St. John Seminary to teach special counsel in Camarillo, California.

And I am very intimidated, but also very much looking forward to this. If you'll please just pray for me and pray for the seminarians there that they get out of my class. What couples? Maybe more of a general one would just be pray for priests.

Priests tend to get tired this time of year. And we just have the back to back Sunday, Monday, holy day, Christmas is coming up, and then Mother of Gods, a holy day. And that sounds complaining, but sometimes just like Sunday, Wednesday, Sunday, Wednesday. And there's a lot of allergies and guys can get a little discouraged, a little burned out.