Tag Archives: God

Ep16 What is forgiveness and why do it?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:33 — 25.2MB)

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Father Len explains what forgiveness is and isn’t and the powerful positive effects it has on us and those around us.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • We live in an age of anger. It defines our politics, the way we drive, our Facebook posts, and even our religion.
  • A lot of religious people baptize anger and make excuses for it by calling it righteous.
  • Nowhere in the Bible does it mention God’s having righteous anger. There is no righteous anger. Anger is anger.
  • There is a joke about Irish Alzheimer’s. It’s when you forget everything, but those you’re mad at.
  • People often confuse forgiveness with reconciliation. Forgiveness doesn’t require reconciliation.
  • Everything is forgivable, but not all things can be reconciled.
  • Forgiveness means you’re not going to be trapped in a prison of anger, bitterness, and resentment. It’s a source of freedom.
  • Attempts to reconcile with the sociopath can be problematic. An invitation to get hurt again and again.
  • Forgiveness that skips over justice and doesn’t hold the offender accountable is fake forgiveness. Its amnesty and submission to the wrong. It turns forgiveness into the way of the weak and not the strong.
  • Why should we forgive? First and foremost because God said so.
  • Father Len describes how forgiveness gave Nelson Mandela freedom.
  • Father Len tells the amazing story of a young actress whose career was ruined by Alfred Hitchcock, but she was able to forgive him and later attend his funeral free of anger, bitterness, and resentment.
  • Bitterness has a long-term effect on the brain. It makes you dumber.
  • Anger contributes to bad decision-making.
  • Wounded people wound others. If you hold on to anger and a really deep hurt, you’re likely to hurt other people.
  • Forgiveness silences the voice of the offender that keeps telling you you’re a victim and you have no dignity.
  • Forgiveness contributes to better health and a longer life.
  • Dr. Robert Enright’s “International Forgiveness Institute”
  • “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” – CS Lewis
  • The book, “A 1000 Acres” by Jane Smiley is a great story about the power of forgiveness.
  • People who’ve been able to forgive a deep hurt have a much greater capacity to love.

Ep15 What Is Prayer?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:23 — 8.6MB)

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Father Len shares his love of prayer. He explains what prayer is and isn’t and the purpose of prayer. He also offers some ideas for developing your own personal prayer life.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • True prayer is listening. It’s about being totally mindful of God and being in the presence of God.
  • Prayer is not about providing God with frequent intelligence briefings about stuff we want because God is the “big candy machine.”
  • Father Len shares a fun story about a very kind and well-meaning minister and his wife that were concerned about the inadequacies of the car he was driving at the time and volunteered to “pray him up a new truck” to illustrate what prayer shouldn’t be.
  • Prayer is about being in the presence of love and wanting it to control you.
  • Father Len shares a favorite type of prayer he uses called “The Daily Examen” created by St. Ignatius 500 years ago.
  • Meditation on virtues like joy and love is an effective type of prayer that can help us find God in the fingerprints of our day while providing a sense of calm and peace.
  • Our whole life should be a love affair with the divine that inspires us to regularly spend time with God.
  • Some of us confuse entertainment that is self-gratifying with prayer. Father Len explains why golf is not prayer.

Ep14 Finding Lost Faith

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:31 — 25.2MB)

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Father Len explains what causes a loss of faith and gives listener Jennifer some ideas for finding her lost faith.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len explains the difference between faith and belief.
  • Faith is like a muscle. If you don’t use it, it will atrophy and you’ll lose it.
  • Faith is like a seed. It’s a gift from God. We must prepare the soil in which it grows. The soil is our hearts. The best means for preparing the soil is prayer and reflection.
  • Faith is like water. It needs a path to flow. Prayer and reflection dig the “trench” that allows faith to flow.
  • Prayer and reflection are habits that give birth to faith.
  • Father Len introduces one of his favorite tools for feeding and deepening his faith, “The Daily Examen” created by St. Ignatius.
  • The daily practice of gratitude will make you a happier person and deepen your faith.
  • “Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy” by David D Burns M.D.
  • Life is a matter of negotiating problems.
  • Troubles in life do not cause faith to evaporate. Quite the opposite. We can find the presence of Christ in all of our problems.
  • “God whispers to us in our good times, but shouts to us in our pain.” – CS Lewis

Ep13 Understanding Human Evil

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:40 — 23.5MB)

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Father Len reveals two primary impulses God gives us and how we can use them for good or evil. This episode was recorded before the murder of George Floyd, but it couldn’t be more relevant.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Human evil is the most difficult kind of evil to grapple with because it’s what we do to ourselves.
  • Human evil is never part of God’s plan.
  • God created human beings with two primary impulses. One is rooted in self-interest or self-protection. The other an inner sense that alerts us when we’re violating God’s law and urges us to live lives of generous care for other people.
  • “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ep11 Why do we need religion?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:20 — 17.7MB)

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Father Len explains how religion helps us recognize who we are meant to be and helps us become our best selves.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Religion is to spirituality what tea is to water. Religion adds flavor and extracts the essence of spirituality.
  • Practicing religion makes people happier, healthier, and live longer. It reduces depression, lowers blood pressure, crime, and the divorce rate.
  • “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by Robert Putnam
  • Religion brings people together and helps them recognize who they’re meant to be.
  • We all need a community that cares about values and way of life to bring out our full and best selves. Working together with a common purpose, we begin to share each other’s story and become more concerned about other people’s stories than our own.
  • Human beings have always searched for the divine.
  • The common translation of the word shalom is peace, but it really means unity. This unity has four parts. Unity between us and God. Unity between each other. Unity within ourselves. Unity with creation. When you have all four, you have shalom and a great analogy for religion.
  • “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions” by Johann Hari
  • We all need connection with a goal and purpose in life that is greater than us.
  • Father Len reveals what he believes is missing in our Facebook “connections” and why he believes the “Facebook life” is likely contributing to rampant depression and the rise in suicide, cynicism, and mocking in our society.
  • Research has shown that worship produces a Spike in the love hormone oxytocin that helps bind us together.
  • Worship helps us discover our personal worth, other people’s worth, and the worth of God.
  • Father Len shares a little fun “family trash” to illustrate the relationships, values, and commitments that flow from religion and help us improve ourselves and our lives.
  • Religion is about a sacrifice and an offering of that part of us that thinks only of ourselves in hopes that part of us will eventually die.

Ep10 What is religion?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:02 — 24.8MB)

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Religion has been with us since the beginning of human history. Father Len explains what it is and what it always has been.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Religion is a binding of a relationship and commitment to God and other people.
  • Religion can be traced all the way back to the Stone Age, Paleolithic and Neolithic times.
  • Early religion was a mix of storytelling, music, art, architecture, astrology, and ritual that brought people together, unified them and tied them to a common purpose.
  • Stone Age caves were like churches often containing the same 32 symbols that are believed to be a hieroglyphic response to God.
  • Religion is not a monologue from God. Religion is a dialogue between us and God with us responding to God.
  • There’s good religion and bad religion. Good religion is one that binds us together and to God. Bad religion is just a structural form for coercion that often divides us.
  • Good religion is both educational and unifying. It helps us discover the presence of God in our daily lives.
  • Human beings have forever been trying to answer this call from a mysterious thing we call God that binds us together and directs our lives.
  • There have been cultural experiments without God in countries like Soviet Russia and Communist China. These experiments in atheism haven’t gone so well and led to lots of bloodshed and millions of deaths.
  • Atheism’s failures can be traced to the lack of a higher moral code beyond human reasoning.
  • We like to proclaim ourselves as rational, but we’re not. We’re really good at coming up with excuses to justify our behavior.
  • Atheism says there is no source of justice beyond “how I view things.” In religion, we say God is the source of justice and our behavior will be judged by God.
  • Atheism is a type of religion. It may take more faith to believe that “I am the measure of morality” than the faith it takes to believe in God.
  • Taking the Lord’s name in vain is to misuse religion for power, wealth, or violence. To commit evil in the name of God.
  • There’s good Scripture and bad Scripture. When you think God is telling you to do something that is not in the Bible, that’s bad Scripture.
  • Father Len explains how to choose a religion and why not to choose a religion.
  • Love is not just an emotion. Love is also a type of reasoning.
  • Father Len shares a fun MacMillan family dinner table conversation to answer the question, “should you choose a religion for your child?”
  • Religion is incredibly human because it’s constantly seeking the deep connections we all crave and need in this life.

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.

Ep8 How do we know God is real?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:28 — 15.1MB)

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Father Len reveals that evidence of God is always present in us and around us, in all aspects of our lives. He explains why some of us recognize and accept this evidence and others don’t.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom 

  • What evidence are you looking for? What evidence are you willing to accept?
  • CS Lewis was head of the atheists in England until a walk through nature made him begin to realize he did believe in God. He then came to recognize lots of other evidence of God in his life that he hadn’t permitted to affect him.
  • People see only what they want to see. They don’t see the world as it is. They see the world as they are.
  • All of life is evidence of God. There’s something quantitatively different about life itself versus inanimate life.
  • Love, joy, pain, suffering, it’s all evidence of God.
  • Father Len uses a monopoly game analogy to explain the difficulty people have recognizing and accepting evidence of the presence of God.
  • “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” by Francis S Collins
  • Dorothy Day was a confirmed atheist until she held her baby daughter for the first time and instantaneously felt an overpowering sense of love and joy.

Ep7 Defining God is Really Hard

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:16 — 14.0MB)

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Father Len explains that we don’t have the words or understanding to accurately define God, but our brains are hardwired to seek the divine.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Some notion of the divine has existed in every culture since the beginning of time.
  • Brain studies have shown that human beings are hardwired to think about God.
  • “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief” by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, Vince Rause
  • Accurately defining God is impossible for human beings. No description of God is ever perfect.
  • We try to describe God in human terms like God is love, God is like a father, and God is like a Shepherd. God is all these things, but way more.
  • Mystics over time have described God this way: “You are different, you are different, you are different. No thing in creation is an accurate image of God.”
  • In the Bible, when angels go to heaven they describe God like this: “You are holy, you are holy, you are holy.” In this case, the word holy means different.
  • God is always speaking to us. Human beings long to reply to this divine thing.
  • God is among us and through us, but not part of creation. Creation is not God.
  • The Bible says God is neither male nor female. The reference to “God the Father” does not mean God is a man. It describes God’s relationship with us likening it to the relationship between a loving parent and their child.
  • Augustine described God as “the lover, the beloved, and love itself” and alternately “the giver of the gift, the receiver of the gift, and the gift itself.”
  • Julian of Norwich described God this way: “God is creator, redeemer, and sanctifier.”
  • All of life has an element of mystery and surprise. Studies have shown that even couples married for 50 years, who know each other so well they can communicate through grunts, whistles, and glares, are surprised and mystified 15% of the time by something they learn about their spouse. We
  • Human beings are meant for relationship. Relationship with each other, creation, and God. No human being can satisfy all our relationship needs. Only God can fulfill these needs.
  • “In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.” – Voltaire

Ep5 The Good of Coronavirus and Other Evils

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:47 — 22.7MB)

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Father Len helps us wrestle with evil. What is it? Why is there evil in the world? How can the consequences of evil help us mature and become better and more complete human beings?

Highlights, Ideas, & Wisdom

  • Father Len explains why the Corona virus crisis demands that we wrestle with God about what is evil and why there is evil in the world in hopes that this pandemic will become a species changing event.
  • Father Len introduces us to theodicy, the theology that grapples with evil and why an all good and loving God permits evil in our world.
  • Father Len shares “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” The story of a man whose pain, suffering and loss from the death of his best friend cause him to look deep into the purpose of life and how to become a complete human being.
  • Father Len explores the theology of St. Irenaeus that looks at evil to find the ultimate goodness of God.
  • Humanity is born innocent, but immature. We have work to do to become mature and complete human beings.
  • We don’t get to define goodness for ourselves. Only God can define what is good.
  • Maturing is a complex process. It requires that we experience the pain we inflict upon ourselves by going after the wrong things to make us happy. We must come to understand what is evil, evil’s consequences and die to our selfishness.
  • God did not cause the Corona virus, but God can use it to make us better people.
  • The coronavirus demonstrates how interconnected we are in this world. What happens in China affects us no matter where we are in the world. A problem in one part of the world becomes a problem for all of us. We’re waking up to the fact that either we survive together or we fall apart.
  • There are two types of evil. Moral evil and natural evil.
  • Moral evil is the things we do to each other. Often, without knowing or thinking about it. A good example is texting while driving. We’ve trained ourselves not to care about the accident it might cause and the pain, suffering, and loss it can inflict on other people.
  • Natural evils are things like the coronavirus, earthquakes, and floods.
  • St. Irenaeus would say the coronavirus itself is not evil. What is evil is the way we respond to it. If we deny its danger and existence, think only of our own well-being, endanger others, or be unwilling to come together as a community to battle the virus, that’s evil.
  • The coronavirus offers us a source of bane and enlightenment. For some of us it will be a source of spiritual enlightenment and help us to become more mature human beings. For others, the experience will be dismissed or quickly forgotten.