Welcome to Catholic Stuff You Should Know, the J-10 Initiative. Hello, good morning. Welcome to Catholic Stuff You Should Know, early morning edition, at least for the two of us. Father Jacob here.
Father John, this is the earliest. I think we've almost done this for 15 years, and I can't remember an earlier start, so. Incredible. It's about 6.30 in the morning in Grand B, Colorado.
Very snowy, Grand B, Colorado. And we have to record before heading out. We've finished up Villa here, new Villa time before Thanksgiving, and it's snowy. So we're going to stay mass, pack up, and hopefully get up over the past as well.
You guys get the easy route. We've got one last. So for a long time listeners, you know that Villa is the companion several days of vacation every winter, usually after Christmas, but now that we're 21 guys, getting harder to find a place. We rented this huge family reunion cabin at the YMCA here at Sonomont Ranch, and we're up here.
Came a little earlier this year after Thanksgiving, but we always record one together, but we opted to- Stay on vacation. Stay on vacation. And opted to play Ucker late into the evening last night instead of record, which is why we are up early this morning, which actually worked out really well. Yeah.
Well, I worked out for you. I lost the most painful Ucker game I think I've lost in a while. That was merciful that you guys let us win. So Sean and I were down 6-0, and it was bad.
I was getting Ucker left and right. I was playing way too aggressive. And Jacob's a good Ucker player. And David Hall is a very good Ucker player as well.
So came back, came down the last guard. You got to love it. Well, I think what made me angry was Sean played a total me move. So he beat me.
How I would like, I'm not going to let him call it. He did the exact same thing. So he called it a suit. He couldn't have a business calling.
And if it had gone to me, I could have called a suit and laid it down. I said, give my hand. You got to play aggressive, though, with good players like you. It was nice because usually Sean and I don't talk to each other for a few days because we're playing each other all the time.
So it was nice, actually. So yes, we were up here with the boys the last few days, but we have been getting hammered with snow. I mean, it is, I think several feet, they said 40 inches up on birthday pass, which somehow we have to drive. But they've been out clearing it because Global got home last night and so.
Yeah, I think you've got Thanksgiving traffic heading up and all the skier resorts already open last week. And they're getting a foot or two. They absolutely want traffic coming in. So I don't know if skier resorts give the plows kickbacks, but it seems like they've been working all night.
Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of a fitting morning to do this podcast. So Father Jacob, as you guys know, is heading west back to Glenwood here when we're finished. And then I'll head back east to Denver.
I get the triple bypass of my own. You get the triple bypass. Yeah. And I go back to lovely 6th Avenue, Denver, Colorado.
So it's been worth it being up here with brothers. And yeah, I think we'll just take it slow, take it safe, we'll get back, but we hope everybody who's listening to this has enjoyed their Thanksgiving and is well into land. That's right. Yeah, so we, you know, we record at different times.
And so this is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving has come out in two weeks because we rotate with the boys. So we'll be, yeah, we'll be longing to end by this point. And last time we had recorded, I think we said, and look forward to all four of us together sometime in December. We're actually going to push that closer to our anniversary in January.
So we have a couple of big things coming up in January. One is the 15th anniversary of the podcast, which is on January 6th. And so we are going to have a special recording with the four and that should be a great time. And also my book is coming up on January 24th.
So you're going to be hearing an obnoxious amount of tell your friends to heights and under abs, letters from the Caro trail. And I think that I think you're going to be spared of this, but Sean's going to have to dedicate a couple of of podcasts. I was thinking we could even get the other guys. I hiked the Caro trail with three, three guys.
And it's the story. Jake was on it. Actually, all the podcast guys were on it. So at least a leg.
Yeah. Yeah. So they'll have different things to chime in. But so we have a very exciting 2025 coming.
But before then we have, we have an advent. You're first as a priest. First as a priest. Yeah, it's exciting.
Really the first advent in seven years where I don't have finals that I'm focusing on leading into Christmas. That's kind of nice. That is nice. Yeah.
So I'm going to talk about these falls during the end of the semester. And so it's always kind of hard for students, I think, to really get into the season because you're kind of wrapping something up and then it's almost Christmas. So I'm excited to be in the parish. It's a very full.
I was actually the theme of this podcast is based on a talk that I've been preparing for or kind of an advent reflection, a retreat night at the parish. And I was trying to find a day for that. And when I looked it up, I realized there was one evening. This is about a week and a half ago when I set the day.
There was one evening that wasn't already booked for anything. Yep. And then we got a couple of events or a prepping for an event. So we've got our Art Lady Guadalupe, obviously, is a big celebration, especially for the Hispanic community.
And so there's a like two days before the hall is booked for the Mattechenas dancers practice. And then the day before it's booked because they're getting everything decorated and ready to go for the next day. And then the Art Lady Guadalupe celebration is like a day long thing. So there's three days for that.
We have pennant services at our parish and then we help them out. So Aspen, Carbondale, Bissalt, and Rifle, so all the priests of the valley kind of come together to help out with those. There's a lot going on. Like too, too much, but there's pretty much every day we got something rolling.
It's going to be beautiful. I love Advent. I think everybody kind of loves this time of year. It's crazy.
I think as priests, it's when you're in the field, it's a lot going on, but it's a beautiful, beautiful time of year. So this is great that you're leading us off today with a topic on it that is providential, actually. Because you're also prepping for a talk series, similar topics. Yeah, I can't really talk about it.
I don't know the contract, but I might have a, there might be something that I'm. Well, you're back burnering some ideas on a relog of John. I'm riffing on Advent ideas. This is so beautiful on light, on the theme of that.
Balthazar has a chapter in Heart of the World called The Coming of the Light. And that's what I'm kind of the situated on and then really just spending this advent praying and reflecting on the prologue of John and doing some writing with it that may, it may become something. We'll also stay tuned on that. But it's perfect because that's your topic.
So I, well, the other thing too was I've been working on this and in yesterday's Office of Readings, we're just totally on point with Augustine reflecting on the coming of the light from the second letter of Peter. And so there's just a lot going to roll towards it. Obviously, that's on theme for the Liturgical Year. So we are in the dark nights of winter, but Christ is coming and that's the advent.
We're approaching, moving towards the coming of Christ. And so this for me kind of germinated a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to give a short reflection on the season of Advent slash Christmas at a rotary club meeting. Oh yeah. And there was a Jewish woman who was kind of giving a reflection on the Jewish vies as well as kind of Hanukkah specifically, which is a festival holiday of lights, the eight days of oil that they should have only had one day, but it burned for eight days with the Maccabees story.
So you've got to have got this theme of sustained light, but then Christ in John calls himself the light of the world in John eight, but we also have from John one in the prologue that the light comes into the darkness and the darkness cannot, has not, cannot overcome it. And I just love the parallels between Genesis one and then John one and we've got in the beginning in Genesis one, God speaks, and there was light and creation begins. And that's the first day of creation, kind of this light, this word and then light. And then but on day four, I thought was really interesting, day four of creation is where God speaks and creates the sun and the moon and the stars and the sun and the moon and the stars in Genesis four, not Genesis four, sorry, the fourth day of creation in Genesis one, the sun and moon and the stars are created and they're created to rule the day and the night and to be signs.
And then a couple of weeks ago, as we're kind of approaching the end of the, the churchful year, we get a reading from Daniel. This is the 33rd Sunday of our nighttime cycle B. We get a reading from Daniel that ends with. What day is this?
For the reading. The reading. The reading. This would have been Sunday, the 33rd Sunday.
So we could go. Well, I guess a little over we could go. I'm taking notes today as you speak. I'm your student because I'm going to steal all this for my writing projects.
So go ahead. So we've got, I mean, the apocalyptic kind of end time prophecy of Daniel that seems to be coming out. And this is obviously the apocalypse just means the unveiling. The apocalypse is gets translated to the Revolazio, the unveiling and the revelation.
And so in those days, I Daniel heard the word, this word of the Lord at that time, there shall rise Michael, the great prince guardian of the people, which shall be time unsurpassed and distressed since nations began until that time, your people shall escape. Everyone who has found written in the book, many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake. Some shall live forever. Others shall be an everlasting whore and disgrace to get kind of this end time, this resurrection, but then the line that's really interesting ends with, but the wise shall shine, shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament and those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever.
And then the gospel that goes with that, so the 33rd week gospel is from Mark. The gospel of Mark, chapter 13, for the 33rd week, ordinary time, this is like the last Sunday before we have Christ the king of the universe, which ends our regular ordinary time. But it is Gospel Mark 13, verse 24, Jesus said to his disciples, in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and the stars will be falling from the sky and the powers and the heavens will be shaken. So this connection of Genesis, where there is this first day of creation and God speaks and there's light.
And then the fourth day of creation, the sun and the moon and the stars are set to govern over the night, the day to be signs for the seasons and the times to be able to navigate by. And then Jesus is saying, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will be falling from the sky and the powers of heaven will be shaken. And Daniel says, it will be the wise that shall shine brightly, like the splendor of the firmament, those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever. And so you get this transformation from the old creation to the new creation.
With the old creation, the order of the old creation was darkened due to sin already, that sin enters the world in Genesis 3 and the sin darkens the world, darkens the intellect, darkness starts to reign over creation. And so Christ comes for a new creation, which is where we enter John 1, the prologue, and in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. And so just like Genesis, where you have a word spoken and light comes in John 1, the word is with God. And then a little bit after, I can't remember exactly the verse, but in chapter 1 of John, the light enters the darkness.
So the overlaying, all of this I would just add, on this theme of John chapter 1, being a very clear kind of movement of a new creation. So it's a new creation story in Christ. The first chapter of John is actually a seven day creation story. And so the first day, John chapter 1 verse 1, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.
So this kind of creation, as you said, of the new world, of the new creation, in the Logos in Christ, in the word. What's interesting though is the fourth day is when you said the sun on the moon. The fourth day is, because it says the next day, the next day, the next day, the fourth day is John chapter 1, 43, where he encounters, I'm sorry, I don't know, but. You're in the Greek.
I'm in the Greek. It's a little slow here. It's a bit early for this. He encounters Philip and he discovers him and he sees him.
So it's kind of like light now, because the whole beginning of the prologue is about Christ, the word as the light, light of the world is just going to be reflected throughout the gospel. John is saying, I am not the light. And then Augustine riffing on that. Is this Philip under the fig tree?
Philip under the fig tree, which is how we, we conclude the last three verses, but it's Christ seeing the Nazariah and he's seeing him without guile, without do-loss. And so, Dolos is the Greek word here. So the guileless one, the one without duplicity, without darkness in him, is this Philip and Christ is inviting him, come and see. And so the whole kind of entry point to the new creation is not so much just the physical and geological landscape, so to speak.
It's in the order of grace and the transformation of the interiority of man, which is happening. So the sun, the sun, literally, is now the one penetrating into the human soul and kind of revealing what is light and what is dark. And so Christ, who is the word, who's this first word that all is created through and for and in, this light is spoken into the world, and this light now enters the world in John one, in Luke, in Matthew, the infancy narratives of Christ, the light enters the world. And so you've got this first day of creation, but it's a new creation and the light has now entered the world again.
Biblical scars will probably point out that this is totally a spurious connection, but as you said that, I'm thinking back to the gospel from the mark, and Jesus is talking about learning lessons from the fig tree. When his branches become tender and sprout leaves, you know that the summer is near, and so there is an order to creation that is telling of what is to come. And so then in the new creation, there's also signs that are telling of what is to come, something that should be seen by us to see, to be able to, he has eyes to see, ears to hear, know that the time has come. And so that brings it back to Daniel, where if the sun, the moon of the old creation are falling away, have been darkened, then the wise shall shine brightly like this one of the ferment of the stars in the sky.
And so the wise, the just, which then Augustine is going to riff on in this reflection, is the Christian, the saint, who has been enlightened, illuminated in Hebrews, or no, I think it's Ephesians, we get Paul saying that I pray that your eyes of your heart might be enlightened by the Holy Spirit. So this is enlightening of the Christian individually to see, but then they themselves become the just and the wise will shine brightly. So we've got the sun and then the Christians become like the stars in the fervent of the sky, who then are the ones who will govern or lead properly ordered in the new creation. One of the things I love about Advent is the, we're meditating on the light and the coming of the light of Christ in the physically darkest time of the year.
And so this idea that the nativity of the Lord, that the great feast of Christmas falls on the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, when the light then comes back and the kind of aligning of that in the early church was not some kind of pagan appropriation. This is kind of what floats in the air of our ideological postmodern time is that Christians kind of stole this from, you know, the worship of Thor, whatever it was that we were doing, no offense to our friend Thor, but this kind of idea that it was all pagan. And it's really not. It's about the fulfillment of, again, creation in the new creation.
So it builds on the natural grace, built on nature, but there's a deepening of it in terms of how grace transforms the human and how Christ is transforming creation in light of becoming human. John, chapter one, verse one here is another place to go. This is kind of like Lexio Divina, this morning, which is, which is kind of nice. Oh, I'm probably like, thank God, the last few, you and I love to go deep intellectually and we love that stuff, but it has to be interiorized and this is the work of first.
Hopefully this Advent reflection will help with that, but John, chapter one, or first John, chapter one, sorry, verse five, God is light and there is no darkness within him. And then this is where it ties into what you were talking about the wise. What does it mean to become wise? Unless you walk in the light and who is in the light, we do not have communion with them.
For it's in the blood of Christ that we were cleansed from all sin. So communion, Camudio, this idea of union in relationship, union in, in, in, again, kind of tying things back together, communion is the central idea of what the church is, of what the new creation is, happens from this walking in the light. So light is not just something that we kind of reflect on, but it's something that we have to actually interiorize. We have to become light because God himself is light and Christ is the light of the world.
Christ is God himself shining in creation, having become creation in his humanity. Yeah, I just roll him back to the solstice so that other Peter Sirsich, if he hears us, will delight, the counter, not counter, but the kind of opposite feast is the nativity of John the Baptist on June 24th at the summer solstice. So when it's the brightest, the longest day of the year, we celebrate John the Baptist who comes into the world to prepare the way. And then what does he say when the Lamb of God comes?
He says, he must increase and I must decrease. And so even in our kind of dates for their nittivities, the one starts when the sun is at its longest and until the coming of Christ, the sun is decreasing. The light is decreasing. John is decreasing until the nativity of Jesus when light starts to increase again.
So John must decrease and Jesus then increases, but you also have the Old Testament, the Old Covenant to kind of decrease, the Old creation decreases for the fulfillment and the recreation in Christ. That's beautiful. I've not put that together. Father Peter Sirsich is a brother companion who is a John Baptist scholar, that's a little shot out there.
There's a holder when I was talking with Father Hulk, who's our eminent biblical scholar at the seminary about the dating and where it kind of came from for Christmas. And there's a lot of ideas, some to say a total pagan appropriation of the Christian church. He does seem like the date was kind of established by Constantine in the 300s. It's kind of the normative celebration of the time.
There's a couple other odds and ends there to be argued. But it's interesting, the one thing we know that we could situate a true date for the nativity is Zechariah in the temple, receives the message from the angel Gabriel. And we know from the Old Testament, the ordering of the priestly classes with their celebrations or their service of the temple in Jerusalem. And so they would have celebrated different cycles.
So we don't know exactly what they are, but I don't want to get super deep in that. It could be a whole other topic later, but it would be Zechariah and figuring out exactly when he would be celebrating at the temple. It could give us a closer, I guess, true historical date, but this brings up a broader question of the symbolic value versus the kind of historical factual value. And even if we don't have the quote unquote exact birth date of Jesus Christ, that doesn't negate the fact that Jesus was born, that he's witnessed too, by the apostles, by the other church, by men who gave his life, witnessing to his resurrection, to the empty tomb.
And then even if the church then chooses to establish a date, just as the Easter date was kind of argued east and west in the early church, the symbolic value, even if it doesn't have like, oh, I'm my birthday, June 9th. Well, if we were celebrating a feast of St. Jacob years down the road, if it wasn't on June 9th, it could have a different symbolic value, which doesn't make it invaluable. Yeah.
Yeah. Right on. I mean, I think that's important that we understand that the logic of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the old creation and the new creation is there's a threefold staging. There's of like levels, so to speak.
We think as moderns in a different way, we think of like, well, how could these early Christians not have the exact date that Christ was born? You know, like what? How did somebody not write that down? But again, part of that is the hiddenness of the incarnation and then the nativity itself is that the first 30 years of Christ's life, like the 90% of Christ's life was just given to the contemplation of simple family, agrarian life, the kind of daily quiet routine of this loving communion of the holy family.
And so it's kind of hidden from us. Some things we just don't get to know. We don't get the exact all the information. That's not how the gospels are depicted.
That's not how, and it's not how revelation unfolds. What it does, the pattern and the logic of it, is this, it begins in creation and then it develops in history. So all of the feasts of the Old Testament, such as Hanukkah being kind of the last of them, are grounded in creation itself, but they're events, they are historical events that happen. But their significance is celebrated not so much as the Fourth of July or Memorial Day or something like that.
They're grounded more deeply in creation. It's the seasonal logic of a world that is pre-industrial. We just don't understand where they lived according to the harvest of the crops, to the decline of the sun. They were aware of the stars in a deep way, they lived in relationship with them.
And then the point after history in Christ is eschatology. So the end times, and this is the threefold kind of reasoning and logic of it. So when you tie in Daniel into this, and we're reading John 1 in light of this prophecy of Daniel, that's going all the way into Revelation. This is the end times.
The sun and the moon as these kind of symbolic acts of God is light and the struggle against sin and darkness. This is something that's going to get sorted in the end, in the kind of great drama of the apocalypse. But that all plays into the logic and the reason and the thinking, which is also totally human, happening under Constantine, happening at a time, happening at a decisional moment in the life of the church of when to situate the great feasts of the liturgical year. But the liturgy really does envelop all three of those.
Yeah, I like that you bring in kind of the technological revolutions of the world now, because I was reflecting on this. When the gospels are written, when the letters are written, when Revelation is written, the theme of light and light coming into the darkness, if you've ever been in a truly dark place, like you can't see your hand in front of you. It's disorienting and you don't know where you're going. But even one small light, even a match lit, lights in a way that can't be overcome.
Any light that enters the darkness, because darkness is a privation. Darkness, just like sin, evil is a privation of the good. Darkness is a privation of light. It doesn't have positive value itself.
It's measured by a decreasing amount of light, not an increasing amount of darkness. And no darkness can actually come overpower a light. You light a light. It's there.
You see it and now it gives hope. Well, one of the things that we have done in the world, which is amazing, we've conquered darkness. We have electronic light everywhere, to the point where we don't think about the stars. We don't look at the stars.
We don't see them as governing or being signs. I went down a little rabbit's hole learning how sextants work. I don't actually know how to measure them, but systematically, you know, the concept of measuring the angle of the horizon to a fixed point in the sky, and then you've got kind of a plotting chart based on the sun or north star or whatever it is. You can take the time of day, the angle between the horizon and the fixed star or sun, and then with your chart, you can figure out where you are latitude and longitude.
So it can give you a very exact location. And since when you're sailing, you've got your maps, you're going to plot, you know, once midday or near midday, you're going to plot at night, and then you've got these kind of breadcrumb trails on your map of where you are. It gives you a location, it gives you direction, which is profound. Well, we're still doing this technologically.
We're just doing it with satellites orbiting the Earth, and these technologies that we take for granted are doing incredible things. Then we just think, oh, I can ask my phone, and therefore I am in a better position than somebody before. But because we've conquered light technologically, we just flip a switch and there's light. I think there's a mode to include conquered natural darkness.
We think we can technologically conquer the existential or the spiritual darkness. 100%. Yeah. I think that's right.
I mean, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, when we read this, you know, when we read like, okay, you're in the first century, you're Christian, and you're reading this idea, God is light, or the word is light, John Chapter 1. The idea of light would have been so much more powerful in light of the Carol Square is a great word.
I don't mean to drop a big one, but the light darkness distinction that comes from, we've done stuff on Caravaggio before on the interplay artistically between trying to draw it out, but the light itself would have been such a powerful kind of vision for people who lived without electric light, who had no screens. There was no electricity. It was just the simplicity of the day-to-day life. And this is the world not that long ago.
My dad tells stories about his father, my grandfather, Papa Laddie, Laddis Love, an apple who went by Laddie, who was a wheat farmer in North Central Montana from Czech immigrant family. And he didn't wear a watch. He just knew what time it was, because he was working out in the fields all day, every day. He had a sense of exactly what time it is, where in relationship to the sun.
So what you're saying about this ability to navigate life and world and the kind of geographic terrain that we find ourselves in. There was a profound kind of expertise that had developed over centuries and talking millennia of human experience grounded in this and then just suddenly radically transformed in the last 200 years. And now with the kind of the dominance of it, I think there's a kind of technological prowess and this kind of Promethean attempt at controlling darkness with light in itself. And that's a bit terrifying.
I just finished a book by Christine Rosen called The Extinction of Experience. And I was thinking about podcasting. It's going to be Christmas. It's kind of like a dark topic.
We'll save it for Lent. Her whole point is trying to get her hands around how technology is attempting to transform things in ways that is dehumanizing us. It's a very simple basic thing that we all kind of think about and we talk about a lot. But to the point of the battle between light and darkness in the soul is not something that a kind of technology can ever accomplish.
It's something that only God can do because God himself is light as we say in the Nicene Creed every Sunday. God from God, light from light, true God from true God. We're talking about Jesus when we say that. And that greatly lead into this reflection from Augustine that was in the office of readings.
And he starts by saying, we Christians are the light, at least by comparison with unbelievers. Thus the apostle says, for once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk then as sons of the light. And elsewhere he says, the night is far spent, the day is drawing near.
Let us therefore lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk uprightly as in the day. But then he has the sober reality. He says, nevertheless, since the days in which we are now living are still dark compared to the light which we shall see, hear what the apostle Peter says.
He speaks of a voice that came from the Supreme Glory and said to the Lord Christ, you are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. This voice he says, we heard coming from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain, because we ourselves were not present there and did not hear that the voice from heaven. Peter says to us, and we possess a more certain prophetic word to which you do well to attend, as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. We're still in this mode of the old creation passing away, but the light has entered into the darkness and it's giving us a fixed point to look towards.
The light like a lamp is in the darkness and we can set our course by it. And then those Christians who have become light who are enlightened by the Holy Spirit by Christ now are also other signs that we can other people might set their course by. And so the saints who have gone before us, Christ himself, the gospels, John the Baptist, the apostles are lights by which we can set our course. Because what we're ultimately going towards is this light that we can't even comprehend.
That eye has not seen and ear has not heard, which is not even being conceived by the hearts of man is what we shall see. See God unmediated, which brings us to Revelation 22, and it brings us to the end where night will be no more. They will need no light or lamp, sorry, night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or the sun for the Lord God will be their light and they will reign forever and ever.
So that light that will reign for us has entered the darkness and is enlightening us and giving us direction, but it's towards this final culmination where the night is no more. The darkness is totally dispersed. In the early church, referred to the newly baptized as vaux-tees-moy as the illuminated ones. So we're not talking about Illuminati here in kind of a Gnostic sense, but the illumination of the soul is one of the kind of principle ways that you become a lampstand.
And as you're kind of praying and you're hearing this and praying through Advent, we're going to reflect a lot on Revelation, such as what Jacob was just talking about here. These lampstands are kind of everywhere. And it's like why this image of lampstands and the light, the interior lighting that happens from some kind of sustained burning light. This is really the image of what a Christian is meant to be.
This goes back to the parables of the virgins that we're going to hear about as we go through the lens and about having the oil for the lampstands. And what does that entail in terms of the life of faith and living in grace? And so, and I just find that to be in the midst of a very, a constant temptation towards moralism in the church of like, we have to kind of get together and get the church all figured out. Everything has to be kind of perfect because it's post-Christian and people are losing their faith and blah, blah, blah.
And it's all this kind of darkness among us. It's just like we just need to be light. That's the task. But we have to understand that the the hiddenness of light in creation and in Christian life is just, there has to be this kind of radiance.
And it's interesting to think about like people you've met, Christians you've met who just are light. They just bring this kind of, not just like levity, but they carry in themselves the kind of lack of duplicity that we were talking about with, with Philip earlier. There's just kind of a purity and a simplicity for it. Not Ulric who we talked about.
I'm not going to be talking about the virginity of the light. I think that's a very interesting kind of image to think of light as virginal, this kind of pure, unstained, and this is what the soul really needs to kind of radiate again, moving towards the end times, Revelation 22, the end of the entire Bible ending with this theme of light that it began with, and then kind of giving us that last hidden pointer into what heaven will be like, which is a place of the totality of light, the light of Christ. Yeah, I think my last thought was then just with Revelation, the seven churches are described as the seven golden lamp sands, which are bringing light, being participating in the light of Christ. But it's always because they're participating in the light of Christ, and when we cease to participate in the light of Christ, we cease to shine as we should.
The lamp can go out. And in God's providence, churches have been really strong and vibrant and illuminating in a place of time. And then some of the places of the early church where the early Christians were are the Christian minority, if just don't even really exist as a Christian church anymore, other places have risen to be lights in the world, and there's just kind of this ebb and flow of history, and I was chatting with Brother Greg Peterson and David Hall, and Greg and I were, what would we do if we were able to make all the decisions? How would we save the church, how would we make it happen?
In the end, the conversation turned to the reality of God's providence is allowing certain things to happen, and why did some churches, quote unquote, fail, and yet they were there to illuminate Christians for the time? And that gives me a great rest in the providence of, like, I have a particular church, I'm serving as a priest. All of you listeners have a particular church you're a part of, there's a place and a time where Christ has worked in a particular way, which illuminates this community at this time for a certain mission, for a certain purpose, and God's providence is working through that. So what we have is to just enter into that light, be that light now, rather than thinking, I don't need to think about making the new Jerusalem happen, that's God's project.
I have, how do I enter into that light and build that kingdom in my very small sphere right now? Allowing the Holy Spirit, praying for the Holy Spirit, begging the Holy Spirit to enlighten my heart, to enlighten my mind, that as the light of Christ comes into my life, I become one of those wise ones, one of those Christians, one of those illuminated ones who then becomes a guide for others. And on that topic, I'll maybe offer one last point as well, not to go to kind of deep into culture and philosophy here, but the Enlightenment's project, so modernity largely understood itself as enlightening the world that was in darkness, so everything prior to the 17th century was just darkness, the dark ages, as we learned in our second one, my psycho education, you had a good one. Shout out, Maryam, shout out who I love, doing great work at homeschooling, but that was kind of the narrative I was told was that everything was in darkness, and then we discovered science, we discovered the empirical science, and we saw man's rationality as the source of light, so man became the source of his own light.
That whole project is collapsing, enlightenment, we still have this kind of scientific and technological drive, the project itself is collapsing, there's a lot of despair over, there is no light, as this darkness is the nihilism and the existentialism in the last century. To your point though, the greatest temptation we face is to try and fabricate light in ourselves, to make ourselves the light, to understand ourselves as the light, and to be able to kind of see in ourselves this capacity to illuminate the complexity and the darkness of human experience, which we can't, we just fundamentally can't, and I think as you get older and the more you are self-reflecting in Christ, you realize that I just desperately live from the need for an interior illumination, which comes in grace and the light of faith, this is what I live from, this is the only real light that I have. It works through the light of reason, but the light of faith is ultimately what guides us. Well that's all I got.
Alright. So I hope that was fruitful for you in your advent, reflections, I didn't pull up my shoutouts beforehand, do you have any? I do, I do, I have two shoutouts. So one is, I want to thank Ian at 14er Certificates.com for sending me a 14er he reached out through the podcast.
Kind of cool, if you're looking for a last minute Christmas gift, you've got some people who like 14ers I wanted to shout out, his cooperation, his dad draws, it does hand sketching of all the different 14ers and then they'll kind of make them, kind of if there's a significant one like they tied in, some different things for a sense of mind. And then a shout out to Father Ben Privanau, I hope I pronounced that right, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who is a listener, who is a friend of Frankie Moscato, who I got to be Frankie Moscato, is this wonderful woman. She really is, when we think about people who are just light in the world, this is a great example that Frankie's an amazing musician, I met her through some friends, we were all hanging out at Bill at Marybeth's, and sorry it's early, I'm spacing all the names here. And yeah, she was just hanging out with us and she was like, I gotta fly back because I'm singing at the Packers game tomorrow, singing nationally, I'm like, of course you are, you know, but just kind of cashing and dropping out.
So Frankie and Father Ben, thank you for listening and shout out to you guys. Dona shout out, Mary Yelnicker, she emailed Father Sean and I, just thanking us for our podcast on Anointing of the Sick, and she shared a beautiful story, which I won't share here on the podcast, but a beautiful story related to Anointing in her own life and family. And so just want to shout out Mary, thanks for listening, we're glad that our podcast was a help to you, not a hindrance and that God is working in your life, and that your faith is shining brightly for me in your testimony. Thank you.
Well, beautiful. This is the last podcast that we will have before Christmas. We will have one more that comes out right after Christmas on the 26th and then we're going to hand it off to the other guys and do a little rotation. We'll switch it real soon.
Swap out for the new year. And so, but we'll have one more together. We got to figure out when we're going to do it because we got a busy, busy man in the middle of the Springs here who lives three hours in Denver. But we'll get that to you and about wishing you all very blessed, Advent and Mary Christmas.
God bless you all. Take care.