Tag Archives: Bible

Ep98 Listening Is Loving

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:13 — 21.3MB)

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Father Len helps us grapple with what it means to truly listen and why God calls us to be professional listeners.

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Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Shema Prayer: “Listen O Israel, the LORD your God is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your mind and all your strength and your neighbor as yourself.”
  • Shema means listen, but it really means pay attention.
  • The Shema is the central prayer of Judaism and Catholicism.
  • The Bible says, ears that Shema will discover God and what God has made known.
  • Our society is not trained to listen, but to overpower each other with counter accusations.
  • God meant us to become professional listeners, listening to the word of God and the voice of God in other people.
  • Listening forms community.
  • Not listening or paying full attention destroys community.
  • Marriage is a type of community.
  • The gift of hospitality is your full attention.
  • We can become what we listen to so we must be careful what not to listen to.
  • “First seek to understand, then to be understood.” – Stephen Covey
  • “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R Covey
  • “The only commandment I ever obeyed – ‘Consider the lilies.’” – Emily Dickinson
  • “The number one sin that people are confessing these days is anger.” – Father Len
  • “All morality comes down to attentiveness, attentiveness to God, attentiveness to other people. The essence of immorality is not to be attentive to others or God, not to see or hear other people.” – Iris Murdoch, Irish philosopher
  • “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again” by Johann Hari

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Ep71 Pride Poisons Everything

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:46 — 28.2MB)

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Father Len explains how pride can poison everything in life from relationships, to religion, to marriages, to organizations and companies.

Highlights, Ideas, & Wisdom

  • Pride and its effects are often so subtle as to be unrecognizable.
  • The easiest way to manipulate people is to use their pride against them.
  • Father Len shares the story of how an FBI agent uses the pride of criminals to induce them to confess their crimes.
  • “The Truth Detector: an Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide for Getting People to Reveal the Truth” by Jack Schafer
  • Prideful people are always defensive because their professed self-worth and inner strength is a façade.
  • Father Len reveals how pride causes him to “freak out and become defensive and disrespectful” when people don’t respect his time.
  • Pride is seductive and addicting.
  • Pride is like an animal that must be fed over and over.
  • Pride is like a freeway off ramp that takes you off the path to God.
  • Father Len tells the sad story of how pride caused Alexander the Great to kill his best friend.
  • Father Len explains how Satan uses our pride to tempt us to sin.
  • “Little Shop of Horrors” Movie
  • Prideful people have a constant need for outward signs to demonstrate that they’re okay which ironically leads them to feeling less and less okay inside.
  • The prideful are always armored up and defensive.
  • “The ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self is the mark of Hell.” – CS Lewis
  • Prideful people have difficulty laughing at themselves because of their constant need for input on how great they are.
  • Great leaders share two qualities: selflessness and humility.
  • Leaders with excessive pride bring nothing but destruction to their companies and organizations.
  • “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t” by Jim Collins
  • Father Len’s litmus test for a spiritual person: one who believes that pride poisons everything.
  • Irish shares the story of how he’s been unwittingly sucked into a corrosive game of pride by a prideful friend.
  • Humility and vulnerability are the antidotes to pride.

Ep9 What is the Bible and why does it matter?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:06 — 17.5MB)

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Father Len explains what the Bible is, where it came from, why it matters and how to use it.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • The Bible is a collection of books of sacred stories that span thousands of years.
  • The Bible is not a rule book. There are rules in the Bible, but they only make sense in the context of the stories in which they are contained.
  • The stories in the Bible give meaning to why we’re here and help us understand the purpose of our lives.
  • Bible stories are stories of a community written by a community explaining sacred reality from many viewpoints, different viewpoints, and even opposing viewpoints.
    • The wisdom contained in the “Book of Proverbs” is innocent and sweet like a young teenage girl.
    • The “Book of Ecclesiastes” critiques everything in the “Book of Proverbs.” Imagine a 40-year-old guy with a cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of whiskey in the other sitting down to share his perspective on life with the innocent and sweet teenage girl.
  • The Bible tests our ideas about life and reveals truth from many different angles. It offers the wisdom of generations and generations.
  • Wisdom grows over time. Wisdom at one part of your life may not work at another. Your truth at age 18 might be true, but it’s a limited truth. Your truth at 50 is another type of truth and it might be true. When you get to 90, you’ll see the world much differently than you did at 18 or 50.
  • The Bible uses many genres to reveal truth. It contains large amounts of poetry, historical facts, myths, and fiction. All are sacred stories.
  • The Bible is inspired by God and directed by God, but written by human beings for human beings.
  • The Bible should be used as stories. Complete stories. Isolating and quoting individual chapters and verses from Bible stories can be problematic. Even though the words are correct, their meaning can easily be misunderstood or misinterpreted when removed from the context of the overall story and its meaning.
  • The Bible disagrees with itself at certain points, and it’s meant to, because then you have to change your thinking.
  • If you’re going to study the Bible, read it regularly in a community with a community’s perspective. Read it slow. Let it challenge you.