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Father Len reveals the path to a happy, healthy, and holy life involves multiple deaths and funerals.
Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom
- Father Len shares the story of an alcoholic to illustrate the consequences of denying death in life.
- The “gospel of prosperity,” which professes that if you’re good God will give you health and stuff throughout your life without sacrifice, is a hoax.
- To get to happy and holy requires doing a lot of funerals.
- Change is easy, transitions are hard.
- Every change in life involves a death. Every step forward involves a loss.
- Money can be like steroids for your worst vices.
- It is dangerous not to accept the many deaths and funerals required to get to a better life.
- People want change in their lives, but what they can’t stand is the transition to the change.
- The way of the cross means dying to your ego, selfishness, greed, and fears; dying to all those things that prevent the fullness of life.
- The opposite of the way of the cross is a constant need and desire for more – more wealth, more security, more stuff – and a constant fear of losing anything we have which actually makes us prisoners of fear and greed.
- The spiritual life is not about addition, but subtraction. The way of the cross is the way of subtraction.
- Christ shows us that the way of life is through the cross.
- “Litany of Humility” Prayer
- The spiritual life is this choice between death and life. It’s kind of a trick question. Those who choose a type of death, dying to things like hate, selfishness, fear, addictions, and their own agenda are choosing life. Those who choose life as it is right now will experience no change, no growth, no increase in love or compassion. What they’re really choosing is death.
- “If you die before you die, when you die, you will not die.” – Sign at the Monastery of St. Paul in Greece.
- TED Talk from Jia Jiang about conquering fear by dying to it: “What I learned from 100 days of rejection”
- Dying to fear sets us free.
- There are lots of funerals on the bridge to happiness.