Episode 4: Acedia & the Signs of the Times - continued

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode Four: Acedia and the Signs of the Times Continued - Why acedia makes perfect sense right now. So welcome back to our podcast. So far, we have discussed a lot about acedia, including where it shows up for us personally, its symptoms and its manifestations.And last time in episode three, we something called the Signs of the Times in Catholicism. And if you remember from episode three, the Signs of the Times are essentially our way of looking at what’s happening out in the world and interpreting it in the light of the Gospel.I wanted to do a two-parter, and this is [00:01:00] part two on the Signs of the Times because I think it takes a little bit to sink in, and I hope that you will get more of that in this episode.So why are we talking about acedia, and the Signs of the Times? Or in other words, why should we care about this intersection specifically? We talked about, early on in this series, acedia manifesting on a personal level and how that shows up acedia manifesting on a societal level is how the Signs of the Times come to be.I want to offer a reason to go to the societal level, even though acedia is a deeply personal spiritual topic. And that is because the Signs of the Times have really been with us throughout all of human history. The Signs [00:02:00] of the Times, even though it’s a Vatican II-type phrase, is really about how do we look out into the world and see a lot of suffering and injustice and make sense of that in light of our faith.When I go about the world today, which is rampant with injustice, I personally can feel really overwhelmed and really powerless. And this intersection of acedia and the Signs of the Times actually helps me to make a little bit of sense of it, although certainly not all of it does make sense. But also, to temper my reaction in the wider arc of human history. Something I like to tell myself is that we really aren’t that special right now. A lot of times you hear people say, [00:03:00] oh my gosh, this is the worst it’s ever been, or never in my lifetime can I remember a time when we’re so divided and it’s been this terrible. And certainly, that could be true, especially in the course of a lifetime. But I think what’s on the flip side of that type of thinking is this idea that we are perhaps in the worst part of human history, or we’re dealing with the worst humans that have ever existed.And that can lead to a lot of hopelessness and also a lot of despair. And as Christians, we have to push through that and get to what we are meant to do and called to do in light of the teachings of Jesus Christ. So, it helps us to make sense of what we’re seeing, to know that the Signs of the Times have always been with us and so has our faith [00:04:00] and we’re alive here and now in this particular moment using those tools to try to navigate all of this and live as Christ would intend us to live.It also helps, I think, to know how the false spirit, or in other words, the devil, or in other words, evil, operates in the world. I hear a lot of people saying right now, I just can’t believe the amount of good people that are doing awful things or supporting awful things, and again, it’s hard to make sense of that as Christians, especially people who say they’re Christians.But when you look at it through the lens of acedia and the false spirit, the goal of the false spirit is to get as many people off track as possible, and that is how acedia operates on a [00:05:00] larger scale. So, when I see all these things happening and I see otherwise good people supporting really bad things, I tend to not let myself drown in despair.Although I would be lying if I said I had succeeded in that at times, but I instead try to think about how is this false spirit moving in this and what does the false spirit want us to do? It helps me to see humanity really struggling with evil, and that makes it more manageable in my brain more towards action as opposed to despair.So just as a recap, we know the false spirit has two goals: one, to keep us from living out our God-given vocation, and two, from allowing us to do the most right that we [00:06:00] can do in the world.And when you think of it that way, in the framework of those two goals, what we’re seeing right now is a lot of people who are straying from their God-given vocation and a lot of people who are not living into the most right or justice that they can do in the world.Think about the world that we would live in: Everybody living into their God-given vocation, trying to do good. We would live in a very different world than what we find ourselves right now. That’s where we’re heading, right? That’s the Kingdom. That’s heaven. That’s the world where everybody finally gets it right and we live in this peace and harmony and love of God. We as Christians, and I think specifically as Catholics, are called to work to bring about the [00:07:00] Kingdom here on Earth. It doesn’t say to accomplish it necessarily with some finality, but our goal is to not dwell on the when and the how and the where, because Jesus says nobody knows the day or the hour anyway, but to try to bring about the work of the Kingdom in the here and now.So today we will be again, primarily drawing from the two books the Edia and Me by Kathleen Norris and the Noonday Devil by Jean Child Malt. And we will review right now the four signs that we brought up in this last episode, and we’re gonna continue on. With more signs today. So just as a review, the four signs from last time that we’re [00:08:00] seeing, is number one, many people not having a closeness with God or drifting away from God.Number two, the sensationalization of everything from media to sex to violence, like the most evocative thing, the most graphic thing, the most wow factor. Number three, thinking that it might be better to not exist.And if that’s a little too much, too heavy, too extreme, think about questioning our own worth and our existence here and now. And finally, number four the one that I resonate with personally is this idea of instability and restlessness and how we kind of flee from the depths of what we’re called to and we busy ourselves with a lot of other [00:09:00] things the false spirit needs this in order to thrive because the false spirit doesn’t want us to live into our calling or do the most good in the world because that’s quite frankly how evil in the false spirit are overcome.I think of it a lot of time, too, of just like the false spirit is always trying to make us spin our wheels like you go over there in the corner and run on the hamster wheel, and that will gimme a lot of time to focus on carrying out my false spirit plan because you’re gonna be distracted on your little hamster wheel Peloton that you’re doing, nothing against Peloton. I just am picturing a little hamster on a wheel with a Peloton.The other thing the false spirit is doing, while we’re so distracted, is making division among us. The false spirit knows that the soil of all of this is a divisive world, and that’s something [00:10:00] we’re feeling so much right now. It’s like putting all of us on our own little respective hamster wheels in different corners of the house, and what happens? One, we get really absorbed in our little hamster wheel, Peloton. Two, we aren’t communicating with each other, we’re making assumptions about each other. We’re exaggerating what we think the other person may or may not be doing because we’re not in connection and we’re not having a healthy encounter with each other. What better way to keep us divided than to keep us all restless away from God questioning life and getting whiplash from every sensational thing coming our way on our screens, right? The false spirit in that sense keeps us in a holding pattern, and that is exactly by design.And our job is to say, as [00:11:00] Becky, my wonderful spiritual director told me, our job is to say, I see you little punk. And yes, she did use the word punk, and I love her for that. You are not going to do that to me. I believe in what is good and right and compassionate and true, and you won’t fool me.You won’t keep me town. And it’s important to remember that it’s a hamster wheel, but it’s not a cage with a lock on it. We have free will. We can exit the wheel at any time and we can step off of it and say, hey, false spirit, I get what you’re doing now. I’m getting off the hamster wheel. I’m gonna go find my friends and we’re gonna work together to put you in your own corner.So that my friends is a prayer right now, if there ever was one. And with that, I will talk to you [00:12:00] about the remaining Signs now we’re going to move on to number five. All right, so signs of the time, number five: struggling with being alone, and in the Noonday Devil on page 116, Evagrius, remember our like main dude here, calls acedia, a flight from oneself, it’s not just the temptation to flee what you’re called to do, but it’s actually to escape your true self.And that might show up as no longer knowing how to be alone or perhaps being afraid to be alone. And this is not the kind of afraid to be alone, like in COVID when you know we craved social interaction because we’re social beings and all that stuff. It’s more [00:13:00] so that in solitude, he writes, what’s scary about it is that we discover what we are really. Like who we really are and we start to face our own demons. And Jean Charles Nault writes: “I do not play a role for long when I am alone, since there is no one to observe me except myself.”I love that quote. He’s essentially saying, we all kind of role play when we’re out being our social creatures. Maybe some of that is our true, authentic selves that we show others. But there’s a lot bearing down on us in a social environment, whether it’s how we look as a parent, how we look as a coworker, how we look as a neighbor, whatever it is.But when you’re alone, there are no roles to play. So, we’re left with our [00:14:00] authenticity, which might be a little scary. As Christians, we also believe that if we tend to flee ourselves like our inner being, that in its essence is also fleeing God because God dwells within us. So, there’s also a quote on page 131-132, and it says, quote, “No one thinks of anything but getting away. But wherever he goes, he takes himself along. Now, if emptiness, anxiety, boredom, dwell within a being, this emptiness, anxiety, and boredom will follow him to the ends of the earth. The tenacious illusion of always being better off somewhere else does not abandon the individual. [00:15:00] Anything seems preferable to self-awareness and diffuse pain.” Woo. Okay.What I appreciate about this quote is when we flee ourselves. We always have these kind of false attachments to this idea that we will get somewhere and that’s when we will finally resolve the things that we’re unhappy about.And part of that might be true, right? Like I said in previous episodes, you know, the goal is not to sit in misery, right? But sometimes we have an attachment to a false promise that if we flee ourselves or circumstances, we can somehow make it better. And some of it might be better, but we also might acquire new problems.But what I like about this quote is it says it [00:16:00] will follow us. And that’s what I’m trying to get at in those earlier episodes when we talk about this: it’s not about punishing yourself and sticking around. It’s essentially to say, be careful when you’re thinking that way, because what you’re actually unhappy about might be something internal. That circumstances and whatnot is not going to change because it will follow you and it’ll follow you into the new bright, shiny, right? So I really love this. So again, sign number five.Struggling with being alone because it really turns the mirror on ourselves and we have to look honestly at what we see now. Sign number six, not having the courage to live into our own [00:17:00] greatness. You guys, I love this one so much. I’m gonna have to say it again. Not having the courage to live into our own greatness, to reject one’s own greatness.Jean Charles Nault, page 117 says, “It is the inability to believe in the greatness of the vocation to which God is calling us.” When you first read this, you might think, I don’t know if that’s actually true, because who would not wanna be great? Of course, yes. We all wanna get there, but if we are talking about a true vocation, a calling from God, it could be like the coolest, best, happiest thing we’ve ever done with our lives. But chances are what I’ve discovered is [00:18:00] it might be some of that and also a lot of other really hard, difficult things, and that can engender a lot of fear. And that’s why when we talk about vocation, we talk about the need for courage. Because when we say yes to God. It is not yes to simply the good parts of what we wanna do, but also the extremely hard parts of what He’s calling us to do. Future Pope Benedict is also quoted in the book and he talks about, “A false humility that has become so common today. Man does not want to believe that God is concerned about him, knows him, loves him, watches over him is close to him.”So, if we don’t think very highly ourselves, which can look like [00:19:00] humility, but it’s again a false humility. We can on the outside look very humble, but maybe on the inside what we’re actually doing is running away from what we’re being called to do by almost like downplaying ourselves. If we really lean into, like he says, a God who’s concerned about us, knows us, loves us, watches over us is close to us, like that actually takes courage because what you find when you finally get to that space might be the most fulfilling, yet challenging thing that you can do in your life.We also might be struggling with guilt or shame, or we feel that God has wronged us in some way or told us that God doesn’t love us or pretend that we don’t need God, or we’ll just be fine without God. Those are all [00:20:00] ways, again, that we run from this. So, we tell ourselves, oh, I can’t go there because God wronged me in some way and I’m gonna hide behind that instead of living into my purpose. Or maybe, sadly, tragically, somebody belittled us, maybe even a religious person told us that we were small instead of the big fullness that God has created us to be.Or maybe we tell ourselves stories about how we don’t need God’s calling. We don’t need that vocation, and we will just be fine without God. When I think about this, I think back to a time on Facebook, and usually these stories go the way of all stories when I think about a time on Facebook. But I was in this group, and I don’t remember the exact [00:21:00] situation that it was brought up, but the question was, what is the hardest thing to accept about God do and what do people struggle with more?Do they struggle more with the idea that God is angry with them for not following all the God rules. Or something else. And a lot of people were saying, oh, people are so egotistical, they’re so self-absorbed. Like they can’t accept a God that’s like about the Truth, they run away from it and all their vanity and all this stuff.I was looking at it and I was like, eh, I don’t actually think that’s what’s plaguing our modern world. I think a lot of conservatives like to hold that up is like all these godless, vain, ego-driven people, narcissistic, running around. We’ve all strayed from the path. That’s how we got to this place, and I’m like, no, I think it’s actually [00:22:00] the opposite. And I argued on Facebook with strangers that what is actually hard to accept for people nowadays is that God is so in love with them unconditionally. Not that He is angry at them for not following all his God rules and this, that, and the other, but actually the harder thing is to accept this unconditional abundance of love that God has for us.Of course, the commenters, were like, what? That’s nonsense. But to me it makes total sense because I actually think we live in a world where we get a lot of negative messages already. Either about ourselves, our worth, our inabilities, how we measure up or don’t, we’re almost constantly [00:23:00] surrounded by that criticism, and we can get really down on ourselves and say, oh man, I’m just like screwing up, or I failed, or I didn’t rise to the challenge, whatever it is. But actually, I think what is counter-cultural right now is to accept that at least one Being out there will love us no matter how tremendously flawed we are. No matter how tremendously, we miss the mark, like what is actually quite radical is God’s unconditional love for us.And we might even run from it because we don’t think we’re worthy of it. But God is constantly there. I always say trying to woo us. God is always trying to tell us how absolutely in love with us He really is. And I think to [00:24:00] sit with that, talk about being alone and sitting with things is actually what we’re struggling with the most.So, another way to think about this, sign number six, not having the courage to live into our own greatness, is to say things like, who am I to be? ... That’s the way that I most understand the sign it’s not that. We don’t want to be whatever this vision is of our vocation, but we have doubt in ourselves that we are actually worthy of such a call. And again, I struggled with this when I first read it because I was like, no, if God’s calling you, you know you’re worthy of it ‘cause God’s saying it, or I don’t know what I was thinking.But then I [00:25:00] started to think back and I was like, no, I actually do this a lot in my life, especially in the years that I did spiritual direction, one thing I wrestled with was I just kept staying the course, even though it wasn’t my calling, or maybe it wasn’t my calling anymore, and when we hear ourselves say things like I’ve always thought about doing… Those are the whispers, but we tend to drown them out with our sense of stability for one, which is of course, legitimate. But two, we drown them out by thinking maybe there is no way we could ever do that. We start to talk ourselves out of it. I talk myself out of a lot of things and one of them is actually what I’m doing right now, which is [00:26:00] reflecting and talking to you all on this very public platform, in spiritual direction. What came up for me is [that] I need to write more. I need to reflect more in a public way. A lot of times I would look at other Catholic, Christian, female writers out there and say they have all these followers, they have all these books, they have all these connections. There’s no way I could get to that level. Or who am I to speak messages into the world that resonate with people, and I talked myself out of it because that was easier than actually living into it.Alongside that as a parallel is internalizing messages from society that tell us that we’re not good enough. Like when I look at my Instagram or my Substack, I look at that number of followers and I say I did put [00:27:00] myself out there and four people liked it, we’re always getting these messages from society as whether or not what we’re doing is being deemed acceptable. It’s essentially being told by the external world, you’re not good enough, or who are you to think you’re going to make this impact, whatever it is.The good thing is that God is there for all of us, and He’s in there with us in all of it. Whatever the self-doubt is, whatever the comparison that we’re making between ourselves and someone or something else is God is always in our corner because He is literally inside of us.Trying to call us into a greater sense of being, in that sense, it is revolutionary, and I think resistance [00:28:00] to accept not only how much God loves us unconditionally. But also, to see how wonderfully God has made all of us with all the talents and skills and beautiful gifts that He put upon our hearts.What are our gifts? What might He be whispering to us and calling us to do? And for the false spirit, what a better way to keep us down than to trick us into denying our own greatness. The false spirits wants us to walk around with our heads hung down low, not held up high.Not proud of who we are as a created child of God with a meaningful purpose in this life. So, for you, dear listener, the next time you are talking yourself out of doing something great or even just daydreaming about it, think about how acedia is showing up and acting on you.[00:29:00] In the books it talks about how this particular problem can be really inherent in the midlife. Or the midlife crisis years. Not believing our own greatness, when we get to a certain age or as we get older, we start to convince ourselves that it’s quote too late to do our lives over or to take our lives in a different direction.So Jean Charles Nault on page 129. “So it is that acedia is above all the devil who causes us to regret the decision that we have made. This is the sense in which it is the devil of maturity. Even though one may still be young, whereas there is one devil who keeps man from making a commitment, from taking a step, acedia makes him regret having taken it. So, we see the paradox of [00:30:00] flight. While it seems to be in advance, it is instead a genuine regression.”Wow, that’s really deep. What I like about it and what resonated for me was [that] one of the ways we can talk ourselves out of our own greatness, is by saying, it’s too late for me. Or who am I to switch gears or pivot and all the people that it might affect, which again, legitimate concerns, but what does it mean also to radically trust in God and to say, okay, God, if you really want me to do this, help me help me find the way. St. Thomas Aquinas says, “The reason that acedia is so pernicious is that it is a response to good and not a response to evil. We tend to deny or hate [00:31:00] our own goodness.” So that’s really powerful too, because, it is a response to our own goodness that is false. Think about the false spirit. The false spirit does not want us to see that truth and instead clutters our lies with all the acedia.What if we take it to the level then of never living our purpose in the world because we take up too much space. Who are we to speak our truths or our voice in the world? This is how the false spirit, again, purposely keeps us down, but also from realizing how truly wonderful we are in the eyes of God.So, I want you to reach for the stars, and when I say reach for the stars, what I really mean is reach for the Heavens, which is God. Our stars are to truly be in the service of our calling and [00:32:00] to do the most good in the world and to not sink into mediocrity, which is one of the synonyms for acedia.Remember, mediocrity autopilot hamster wheel when it seems too late to do one’s life over. The decision on the other side of that is to go on living in mediocrity. To sit on the conveyor belt of life to turn on the autopilot.I think that’s why Thoreau pointed out that a lot of people live these quiet lives of desperation, right? When they maybe have rumblings of their greatness and what they’re meant to do in the world, and they’re desperate to get there, but they just hold it all in, put the light under the bushel basket and live this quiet life of desperation. [00:33:00] Jean Charles Nault writes on page 130, “When someone no longer dares to do what is essential and great one must be content with what is secondary and mediocre.”Again, on page 131, “The devil’s tactic is to propose what is reasonable. Yes, he is the prince of lukewarmness, the king of compromise. His goal is not to make us fall into specific errors, but on the contrary to leave us in uncertainty. To submerge truth and uncertainty because it is impossible to stake one’s life on vague ideas and consequently to become a saint under those conditions.”Wow. So the prince of lukewarmness, the king of [00:34:00] compromise to submerge truth in uncertainty because it’s impossible to stake one’s life on vague ideas. That says it the best.And that brings us to sign number seven if you’re falling along with the numbering. And there are actually eight, so we are almost there. Sign number seven is what’s called ideological optimism. This is a sign of the time that John Charles Nault talks about it on page 124 and describes it as, quote, “A boundless confidence in the progress of humanity and science. Therefore, it is necessary to accept nothing that cannot be verified, demonstrated, or experienced by reason.”Okay, so you might be thinking. [00:35:00] No, actually we’re not trying to go into this territory where we reject science, and that sort of thing. That’s led us to some really bad situations, but it’s not necessarily that they’re talking about a rejection of science outright. It’s an idolization of science and this idea that logic and reason is the end all be all, and that’s what will save us. It’s basically humanity saying to God, we don’t need you because we have science. We don’t see science as an enemy, God gave us reason and we have science because God so beautifully and intricately created the world.I think if done in the right framework, the study of science is actually a way to come closer to the awe [00:36:00] of God and not the rejection of God. So that’s sign number seven. This idea that we have it all figured out by ourselves with science, our own ego, we start to drift away from God, which we talked about earlier.Again, the false spirit, and we start to lose the mystery of life itself. And mystery is something that Catholicism specifically calls us to embrace and meditate upon that. There’s just some things that we might not fully be able to prove or understand about our faith, but we take it upon ourselves to sit in the mystery and want more and more every day to deepen our belief.And finally, the last sign, sign number eight, is something that I think is really applicable to what we’re seeing right now [00:37:00] on a societal level, and that is excessive nostalgia for the past. So this is really happening right now. Okay. And I think you know where I’m gonna go with this, but before I go there, Jean Charles Nault on page 125 says, “As a reaction to the gloominess of the present, there may indeed be a tendency to cultivate an excessive nostalgia for the successful, well-spent moments of the past to embellish it, to delight in it, to tell stories about it. When nothing goes well anymore in the present, it is so reassuring to become attached to the past. When one quote ‘did so many good things,’ end quote, then one tells the stories to oneself or to [00:38:00] others.” So again, I think you know where I’m gonna go with this.This is exactly the strategy that Trump and the Make America Great Again, folks use to woo people. And I use the word woo because there’s a lot of romanticism involved. So going back to the false spirit who wants to keep us spinning our wheels and distracted. This fits in with that because this attachment to the past is a really great way to keep us down because it takes our focus off the present and our God-given calling and how to react to it.When we get wooed by this mentality, we think that the solution is to recreate the past. Make America Great Again is this [00:39:00] illusion that back in the day was better today is, gone to blazes. And so, what we need to do is go back to where we were and it preys on people’s one selective memory of the past.And when I think about this. I think about my friend Chris, and he is someone I met in college and became friends with, and he is a Black man. And one day we were talking and I told him how much I loved the movie Pleasantville, which for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is this magical surrealism film about going back in time to like the 1950s. And at that point in my life, I was really enamored with the 1950s, I think, because like my dad loved a lot of the music [00:40:00] from the 1950s. And I just had this idea in my head that it was just like this awesome idyllic time with like poodle skirts and stuff like that.And I was talking to Chris about this, and he stopped me and he said, it wouldn’t have been for me. And what he was saying was, as a Black man in the mid-20th century, his life would’ve been vastly different than the Pleasantville movie, right? It was the time of Jim Crow and a lot of rampant, overt racism, which still exists today, but I think this idea of Pleasantville, the attachment to the past, the idolization of the past, is a strategy to keep us down because we tend to live in the romance of it and distract ourselves from the work that is in the here and now and what we’re called [00:41:00] to do.Another example I wanna give, in addition to the conversation I had with my friend Chris, is this movement, or this fervor around Traditionalism within Catholicism right now. Or maybe within an orthodoxy. It’s been talked about in the New York Times and so on and so forth. I’ll just stick to Traditionalism and Catholicism because that’s something that I am more aware of and grew up in, for at least some of my life in that part of my extended family, really embraced this. And while our immediate family was not part of that, I was around it a lot growing up because family functions like funerals and weddings and so on and so forth would occur within this kind of radical traditional [00:42:00] Catholic setting.Traditionalism similar to MAGA, they use the same tactic of idealizing things so as to distract from the present moment. And one thing that really troubles me about Traditionalism, especially in raising families, is the call is to actually, one, regress to the past and build that again if that can ever truly be, or two, to live in a bubble, this kind of protective bubble, which sounds like a good intention, but remember the false spirit twist those good intentions, right? It manipulates it, so it might sound like you’re doing a good thing to protect your children, to raise them in this kind of insular environment where you can control like what they [00:43:00] consume and who they interact with whatever it is, it might seem like a true good intention parenting act. But instead, the false spirit twists that and keeps the holding pattern for this viewpoint as one of constantly looking in the past, idealizing the past, being nostalgic for the past, and not being in and of the world and doing God’s work in the here and now.And the Catholic church warns us about this. The Catholic Church in so many documents, stresses to us that we are meant to engage with society. We are meant to be in and of this world. We are to wrestle with modern-day ethics and challenges. We are not to retreat and hide or create a false narrative in order to comfort [00:44:00] ourselves or flee, which would allow us to avoid our calling again and the call to engage and to do good. So, you can see how this is really attractive right now because the false spirit is using this nostalgia, this romanticism, this us versus them, so protect yourself to bring us farther and farther out of the world and back into a time that doesn’t even exist anymore.When I think about growing up, I sometimes slip into this mentality because sometimes I say to myself, life used to be a lot easier before there wasn’t smartphones, there wasn’t constantly the screens, but when I think about it, when I was a kid, there were a lot of bad things happening then too. That is [00:45:00] still present here today. But I was either being appropriately guarded from it or. I was not yet having the mental acuity to notice and understand it.What’s worrisome to me about this last sign of the time is I think the false spirit tries to distract us back to the past so that we give up on the present. It makes the present seem so exceptionally bad that it feels like it is forever irredeemable, and all we can do is yearn for this idyllic time in the past. And again, I think the MAGA movement has capitalized on this. They know that people are discontent and overwhelmed with the way things are. I’m definitely not arguing [00:46:00] that, and they use the false spirit tactic to say, we’re gonna make it great again. But it’s really a smoke and mirrors in the name of this false vision. Again, a false vision by the false spirit to keep us distracted from the present moment and from doing the most good. So, in that sense, to overcome it, we need to name it if we are ever to get out of it in our current context.So those are the full eight Signs of the Times. I hope it gave you something to chew on. I am really happy to have prepared these episodes to share them with you, even if you don’t agree with all of the content, I hope that there’s something there that allows you to go a little bit deeper in your own personal life or how you see the world and make sense of it. [00:47:00]In the next episode, we have a really special treat. It will be the inaugural interview of the moderate Catholic, and it is going to be about how Acedia has dialogue with other world religions or as we say interreligious dialogue.So, stay tuned and I can’t wait to meet you there. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christinagebel.substack.com