Tag Archives: Catholic Church

Ep64 Toxic Religion

June 10, 2021UncategorizedButte Montana, Catholic Church, Christ, Fear of God, God, Marie Kondo, PTSD, PTSG, Richard Rohr, Samoa, St Paul, Toxic Religionwrestlingwithgodshow

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Father Len introduces the process of deconstruction to help a listener detox her religious upbringing and purify her religious values, beliefs, and practices.

Ep63 Bible Symbols Revealed and Explained-Part 3 Oils

May 29, 2021UncategorizedAnointing, Carnal, Catholic Church, Christ, God, Holy Oils, Holy Spirit, Israel, Noah, Religion, Sacraments, Sense of Smell, Sensuous, St Paul, The Bible, worshipwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:39 — 16.2MB)

Father Len reveals how oils and their fragrances help fulfill God’s intention for religion and worship to be carnal and sensuous experiences.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Previous Bible symbols episodes: Ep45 Water, Ep56 Trees

Ep62 The Dangers of Anger

May 21, 2021UncategorizedAnger, Book of Proverbs, Butte Montana, Catholic Church, Christ, COVID-19, Dwight Eisenhower, Ephesians, Gen James “Mad Dog” Mattis, George Floyd, Holocaust, Martin Luther King, poverty, Prayer, sacrifice, Self Compassion, self-control, self-discipline, social justice, St Paul, St. John Chrysostom, The Biblewrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:20 — 24.1MB)

Father Len reveals his 30 year battle with anger and explains why it’s like a cancer that can destroy you unless you learn how to respond to it.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Father Len responds to an email from the mother of a 15-year-old daughter who became depressed and filled with rage over the death of George Floyd.
Father Len reveals that anger has been one of his most common sins throughout his life.
Research has shown that nothing rots your body like anger.
“Anger is rottenness to your bones.” – Proverbs
“Anger disintegrates community.” – Proverbs
“A hot tempered man stirs up dissension.” – Proverbs
Anger destroys wisdom and the ability to make wise choices.
“A patient man has great understanding, but a quick tempered man displays foolishness, even after he cools down.” – Proverbs
Anger is blinding. When you’re angry, you always think you’re completely right.
Anger distorts your view of situations, yourself, your view of the world, and your view of your family. It can make you really stupid.
“A hot tempered man must pay a penalty. If you rescue him, you’ll just have to do it again and again and again.” – Proverbs
Anger is very addictive. It’s like the cocaine of emotions.
Anger feeds on itself. Anger begets anger.
Anger often obscures truth and leads to denial.
COVID 19 has become an excuse for anger about almost everything.
When you’re angry, it’s very difficult to recognize that you may be the problem.
Sometimes anger is love in motion to a threat to someone you love.
“Be angry, but sin not.” – St. Paul
“He that is angry without cause, sins. He who is not angry when there is cause, sins.” – St. John Chrysostom
The best response to anger is prayer, self-examination, self-discipline, and sacrifice.
Unreasonable impatience is the hotbed of vices.
Anger tends to focus you on the problem and obscures the solution.
Studies have shown that compassionate people are better at defining boundaries of unacceptable behavior.
“Compassion is the strong man’s tool. Anger is the weak man’s tool.” – Father Len

Ep61 True Friendship

May 13, 2021UncategorizedBook of Proverbs, Catholic Church, Cultural Friendship, Family Love, Friendship, Friendship Love, God, Romantic Love, Unconditional Lovewrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:46 — 33.7MB)

Father Len takes a deep and challenging dive into the nature of true friendship and its profound effects on us throughout our lives.

Highlights, Ideas and Wisdom

In Greek, the word friend or friendship is another word for love.
The word love in English is just another word for sex, not friendship.
Greeks believe there are four types of love. Love of one’s family, love of one’s friends, romantic love, and unconditional love.
Catholics believe friendship love prepares us for heaven.
Catholics believe all types of love speak about the great mystery of God.
Father Len explains why he believes the United States has a crisis of friendship.
Father Len describes much of the friendship present in the United States as what he calls cultural friendship. Relationships based not on reciprocal love, but on getting some sort of advantage, either economically or socially.
“Amen with many companions comes to ruin, but there’s a friend who sticks closer to you than a brother.” – Book of Proverbs
Today the word friend has been turned into a verb. We “friend” people we don’t really know on social media.
Friendship brings something into your life that family and romance can’t.
True friendship helps form us.
We are formed by God and the community of our family and friends.
“One can perish for lack of true friends or for making the wrong friends.” – Book of Proverbs
True friendship has a foundation that you discover. Some common interest, love, passion, vision, or truth.
Father Len explains the difference between friendship love and romantic love.

Ep60 The History of Marriage and What Makes It Work

May 5, 2021UncategorizedAdam and Eve, Book of Sirach, Catholic Church, Christ, Commitment, Covenant, Dante Alighieri, God, Heaven, Judaism, Marriage, Martin Luther, Protestants, Religion, Self-Sacrificing Love, Song of Songs, The Bible, The Old Testament, Theology of Marriagewrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:36 — 42.7MB)

Father Len explores the history of marriage, our changing attitudes and expectations about it, God’s expectations for marriage, and what makes marriage so difficult yet so worthwhile.

Highlights, Ideas and Wisdom

Ancient marriages were rarely about love and had little to do with religion. Marriages were pragmatic contracts between families about such things as wealth, political alliances, childbearing, and, for poor and working-class families, acquiring a work partner.
Christ revolutionized expectations for marriage. Declaring it to be about unity, love, and becoming a true human being, having nothing to do with legal rights.
Modern expectations for marriage revolve around happiness. Finding the one person that’s going to make me happy until they don’t. Then, it’s time to find a new partner.
Marriage is a pathway to becoming the image of God, the image of love.
Marriage involves a death, dying to ego and selfishness.
“True love doesn’t make up for all your faults. True love exposes all your faults.” – Dante Alighieri
You can’t work on your faults until they’re exposed.
True love demands constant sacrifice.
Marriage is about sacrificing your ego and learning to think as two rather than one.
Unmarried people often have difficulty thinking about other people because they don’t have to.
Marriage is a way to holiness because it is about the way of self-sacrificing love.
God can save you, but your spouse gets you in the best shape to be saved.
Marriage gets you ready for heaven.
Marriage is about sacrificing everything for the sake of love.

Ep58 The Big Mysteries of Christianity

April 18, 2021UncategorizedAnger, Anxiety, Atheists, Bigotry, Catholic Church, Christ, Christians, Christmas, Christmas Christians, Communism, Corruption, Cruelty, Culture, Easter Christians, Good Friday, Good Friday Christians, Heaven, Holy Thursday, Human Beings, Injustice, Jesus, Jim Crow, Love, Morals, Richard Dawkins, Sexual Harassment, Sin, Soviet Unionwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:56 — 26.5MB)

Father Len and Irish grapple with the mystery of the three big events that are the foundation of Christianity: God taking on human flesh and living among us, God being tortured and killed by us, and God’s miraculous resurrection from the dead.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Father Len explains why we should view these events as a whole, as one.
Father Len identifies three groups of Christians and their sensibilities: Christmas Christians, Good Friday Christians, and Easter Christians.
Christmas Christians love the idea of God becoming a human being and the practice of giving and receiving gifts as a way of showing appreciation for the gift of people in their lives.
God recognizes there’s a problem in creation and it’s us. We don’t realize that being a true human being means living a life of love. So God takes on human flesh to teach us the way of love.
Good Friday Christians see the brokenness in the world. They have a deep awareness of sin in the world. They recognize the fight between goodness and corruption and injustice, even in ourselves. They see and understand the need to “die” for what is right.
Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, believe that we can solve the problems of the world, on our own, with education and our intellect. Father Len explains why this is a big lie.
We have to be able to see sin and corruption in the world and realize that it’s not the world that needs to change, it’s us. We’re the ones that have to change.
Father Len uses the movie “The Help” to illustrate how Christ’s model for becoming a true human being and living a life of love actually works.
The struggle against injustice and oppression and dying to our ego purifies the soul. It gets us ready to enter the kingdom of God here and now.
Christ’s resurrection from the dead is not just a singular event. It represents a whole way of life that begins for us right here and now and is fulfilled in heaven when we die.
If Christ didn’t die, he couldn’t have been resurrected.
Resurrection for us is not returning back to our former life. That’s resuscitation. That’s continuing to live like zombies with half a conscience.
The resurrection for us is a whole new life. It’s Christ putting his life in our hearts. It’s freedom from all the shame and darkness in the world. It’s so extreme that in the early church those who were resurrected were called “new persons.”
Easter Christians live in the resurrection. Their hope is in them and beyond them. They live with love and joy inside them that can’t be taken away because they’ve died to anger and fear.
“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All our sins begin on the inside, in our hearts.
Our modern culture tells us that the problems in the world are outside of us. Therapists believe this is the result of a generation raised with the idea that self-esteem is all important. A generation constantly told, “you’re smart, you’re good, you’re beautiful, you’re special, you’re a winner, you can’t be the problem.”
If you’re not participating in the resurrection, right here and now, why do you think that you’ll be participating in it in heaven? If you spend your whole life denying your own brokenness, not becoming something new, better, and connected, what makes you think that you will be ready for heaven?

Ep56 Bible Symbols Revealed and Explained-Part 2 Trees

April 2, 2021UncategorizedAbraham, Adam and Eve, Bible Symbols, Book of Genesis, Bread of Life, Catholic Architecture, Catholic Church, Christ, Christianity, CS Lewis, David, God, Human Beings, Idols, Jesus, JRR Tolkien, Noah, Old Testament, Pharaoh, Tree of Life, Trees, Zachariahwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:42 — 30.8MB)

Father Len reveals that trees are symbols for God and human beings and trees represent the most important choices we make in life.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Trees are the third most common thing mentioned in the Bible.
God loves trees and gives them a ring every year on their birthdays.
Trees are places where human beings choose to worship or reject God.
There is a tree present at every major event in the Bible.
Every major character in the Bible is associated with a type of tree.
The only thing Jesus ever harmed was a tree that produced no fruit.
The Bible begins and ends with the “tree of life” and trees are present throughout the Bible.
The story of human history is choosing between two trees: the tree of life and the tree of good and selfishness.
There are two types of food. One gives us physical life. The other gives us spiritual life.
If we eat the fruit of the tree of good and selfishness we are cut off from the covenant with God and disconnected from the source of life.
The temptation to eat the fruit of the tree of good and selfishness is the promise of the power to define what is good and evil for ourselves rather than God.
We don’t have to earn the fruit from the tree of life. God gives it freely to us.
When anybody makes a commitment to God in the Bible there’s always a tree, an altar, and water present.
The tree of good and selfishness often appears in the form of an Idol in the Bible. The Idol is a false tree we create to define our own version of morality.
The Hebrews called idols “luxuriant trees” representing the pursuit of power, sex, and money for happiness. The Hebrew letters for “luxuriant tree” cleverly spell Garden of Eden backwards.
Addictions always promise happiness, but in the end leave us destroyed.
Trees in the Bible symbolize commitments and altars represent the rituals around the commitments.
The spiritual life in the Bible is pictured as a tree that must push its roots down deep to find the water of life necessary to produce good fruit in all seasons of life.
Jesus’ cross is called a tree in the Bible representing the tree of life. That’s why there is one cross next to or above the altar in every Catholic Church. It’s a reminder of the tree we should be eating from each day for eternal life.

Ep55 What Is Salvation?

March 26, 2021UncategorizedBaptism, Catholic Church, Christ, Egypt, Erich Fromm, Faith, Freedom, God, Hebrews, Idols Heaven, Jesus, Judaism, Moses, Repentance, Richard Dawkins, Salvation, St Ignatius, St Patrick, The Bible, The Eucharist, The Golden Calf, The Red Sea, Totalitarianismwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:06 — 23.9MB)

Father Len reveals the meaning of the salvation God seeks for all of us.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Salvation is about freedom and belonging and being saved from harm.
Freedom doesn’t mean doing whatever selfish thing you want to do. That’s merely a form of slavery to the ego.
Salvation is freedom to be with and for others. It’s a whole lot of dying to your ego.
Salvation is not just about me being free. It’s about me and everybody else becoming free. I’m not free unless you’re free.
There is an unease in human beings, an innate desire to escape from freedom. Sometimes being confined is less fearful than being loosed. Being restricted can feel better than being free because freedom means choices and choices and choices. And, choices can be difficult.
Human beings really want freedom and structure. Structure that makes it possible for us to be free and at the same time feel safe.
“The Fear of Freedom” by Erich Fromm
Freedom without structure is just chaos. It’s emptiness.
The Catholic Mass is a prayer for the order in the kingdom of God, not the order created by human structures or capricious living.
There’s always this tug-of-war in the human heart between freedom and safety, between freedom and structure, between chaos and order.
Salvation is just another word for freedom, but it’s freedom with structure.
Totalitarian lifestyles and their appeal are created by the fear of freedom without structure.
God gives us the law to grant us freedom with structure that liberates our spirit for the service of love and community.
The ultimate place of freedom and order is heaven where everyone is completely free, but not self-absorbed.
Jesus came to show us the way to salvation; freedom from our ultimate enemies of hate, injustice, selfishness, and ego.
There is no such thing as personal salvation. Salvation is always tied to belonging to a family and community and everyone in the family and community being free.
Salvation is a mix of freedom, structure, responsibility, and belonging.
Catholics believe three things are needed for salvation.
- Repentance: leaving our old life and slavery to our sins behind.
- Trust and faith in God.
- Baptism and the new life it brings.
Nowhere in the Bible does God save an individual. God always saves a community.

Ep53 Becoming the Best Possible Version of You

March 13, 2021UncategorizedBook of Lismore, Camino de Santiago, Catholic Church, Exile Theology, Lent, Pilgrimage, St Paul, St. Brendanwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:38 — 19.8MB)

Father Len explains the Catholic tradition of Lent, an annual 40 day journey of recognizing and facing our flaws and weaknesses in order to become who we are meant to be.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

To illustrate the Lenten journey, Father Len shares the inspiring story of two childhood friends from Idaho who decide to go on a 500 mile pilgrimage in Italy with one pushing the other in a wheelchair the entire way.
“I’ll Push You: A Journey of 500 Miles, Two Best Friends, and One Wheelchair” by Patrick Gray & Justin Skeesuck
The Way of St. James, Camino de Santiago
Lent is a journey in the heart to becoming more loving and compassionate.
Lent is a death process where we die to our old flawed selves in order to make room for different, changed, and better selves.
Lent is about recognizing and giving up personal flaws and weaknesses like pride, anger, anxiety, addictions, and selfishness in order to grow in compassion, gratitude, love and holiness.
The modern myth of following your bliss, doing only what makes you happy, and avoiding whatever makes you uncomfortable leads to self-destruction rather than happiness.
Facing and entering our darkest part, our greatest weakness leads to enlightenment and discovering the divine.
Running away from everything that makes you uncomfortable ensures that you will never discover who you are meant to be.
Lent is a time to die to superficial faith and discover what real faith and religion is about.
Lent is about self-examination and transformation.
“You only get one crack at life. Why go for the comfortable? Why not become the best possible version of yourself?” – Father Len

Ep48 God is a Trickster

February 7, 2021UncategorizedCarl Jung, Catherine Doherty, Catholic Church, Catholic Mass, Christ, Dorothy Day, Feast of Fools, Feast of the Ass, God, Habits, Ivan The Terrible, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Campbell, Native Americans, Old Testament, Orthodoxies, Religious Mythologies, St Paul, St. Basil, St. Francis, St. Nicholas, The Bible, The Power of Myth, The Prophet Jeremiah, The Prophet Moses, Virgin Marywrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:28 — 38.0MB)

Father Len reveals how and why God uses loving trickery to expose truth and help us understand and live our purpose.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Father Len explores the common theme in the religious mythologies presented in Joseph Campbell’s “Power of Myth” that first got him thinking about God as a trickster back when he was in junior high school.
The trickster in every religious mythology is a rebel who is creative and helps humanity in unexpected, backwards and upside down ways.
The theme of the trickster God, the God who turns things upside down, is also present in the Bible.
Father Len shares the story of Moses, the coward with a stuttering problem who becomes the greatest prophet in the Old Testament to illustrate God’s unexpected, upside down, and backwards ways.
The Bible tells us God’s ways and wisdom don’t necessarily follow straight lines or human logic with lines like: “Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard what God has in store for us.”
Father Len shares his theory on why God loves to play the trickster.
The mystery of God means we can never truly understand the infinite. The God of infinite love and infinite possibilities.
Truth can be very tricky.
Father Len shares a Native American religious myth to illustrate why God sends us tricksters in life.
When God created the world, he gave every single creature a gift that must be shared for creation to work properly.
We crave clarity. We demand things be either horizontal or vertical, hot or cold, black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. But, God provides ambiguity and less clear lines that must be fully explored with an open mind to be understood.
God is willing to forgive what we consider unforgivable.
Father Len uses stories about the “Feast of Fools” and the “Feast of the Ass” to illustrate the value of tricksters in religion and life.
We need tricksters and fools to keep us from getting trapped in our orthodoxy and thinking we have the answer to everything in life.
There is real danger in orthodoxy that boxes God into simple neat little answers.
The heart of any civilization is its spirituality.
God sends us people like Francis, Dorothy Day, and Catherine Doherty who seem foolish and silly at first, but in actuality they are tricksters sent by God to expose truth.
Tricksters have this sacred role to help us laugh at ourselves, see the world from different perspectives and expose hypocrisy and foolishness and our spiritual rigor mortis.
Christ is the ultimate trickster and holy fool. He does everything in unexpected ways. He destroys our enemies by making them our brothers and sisters. That’s a great trick. He destroys death by welcoming death. That’s unexpected.
God is the trickster who’s always overturning our ways.
Habits have a way of deadening the impressions from our experiences, causing even the holiest of things to become superficial or lost.
When things happen in our lives appear to be silly or foolish, could it be the trickster God trying to help us see what is real and true?

Wrestling with God Show

Two fun-loving and God-fearing Irishmen, a Catholic priest and his good friend, grapple with the big questions about faith, religion, and life.

Tag Archives: Catholic Church

Ep64 Toxic Religion

Ep63 Bible Symbols Revealed and Explained-Part 3 Oils

Ep61 True Friendship

Ep60 The History of Marriage and What Makes It Work

Ep58 The Big Mysteries of Christianity

Ep56 Bible Symbols Revealed and Explained-Part 2 Trees

Ep55 What Is Salvation?

Ep53 Becoming the Best Possible Version of You

Ep48 God is a Trickster