Tag Archives: Love

Ep104 Hope

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Father Len helps us grapple with tough times in our lives and understand the virtue of hope. What is it? Where does it come from? Why it’s essential for peace and joy in our lives.

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Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Paula D’Arcy Theologian of Hope
  • “Gift of the Red Bird: The Story of a Divine Encounter” by Paula D’Arcy
  • Faith, hope and love are different aspects of one spiritual reality.
  • Hope is illogical. It’s not a matter of sitting down and rationalizing with people why they should have hope. If you have some rational reason for hope, that’s not hope. That’s logic.
  • Fear is logical. Depressed people are not irrational. They’re just excessively logical and obsessed with their current state of life.
  • “Notes from the Underground: The Original Unabridged and Complete Edition” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • Wealth, comfort and safety don’t bring hope.
  • Poverty and abuse don’t take away hope.
  • Hope is a theological virtue. It comes from God alone, not the circumstances of your life.
  • Hope obliterates the idea that life should be easy.
  • Hope is uncertain, it believes in possibilities.
  • Hope takes work to participate in. It comes from this relationship with divine love and life.
  • The Book of Revelation reveals the struggles we have on earth and tells us how the story ends with a huge victory party in heaven.
  • “Optimism and pessimism are twins. Both are blind to possibilities and lock you in to your current state of life. Optimism believes you will always be happy and beautiful, with a full head of hair. Pessimism believes life will always be crap.” – Father Len
  • Hope is not optimism.
  • We live better in the United States than any human beings in history. We live in such incredible comfort. Yet, our young people have the highest rate of suicide and the highest use of prescription pharmaceutical drugs to deal with depression. If circumstances give hope, our children should be thriving.
  • “We live in a culture of hopelessness because we keep telling people, you need the right circumstances to be happy. Unless you’re a Kardashian, with tons of money and social media likes, unless the world treats you a certain way, you’re a victim.” – Father Len
  • Hopelessness suffocates hope.
  • “Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity” – Jamil Jivani
  • It’s a myth to tell people if they have the right circumstances, they’ll be happy, they’ll be hopeful.
  • A sense of meaning to your life is oxygen for hope.
  • You have to suffocate the things that kill hope. Suffocate anger. Suffocate victim mentality. Suffocate the propaganda that circumstances give you happiness.
  • Characteristics of people who have hope.
    • They can endure higher levels of pain.
    • They enjoy competition, win or lose.
    • They believe life is good, no matter their circumstances.
    • They can survive in humble circumstances.
    • They turn out happier.

We welcome your questions and comments:

Links to More Podcasts from Wrestling with God Productions

  • Life Lessons from Jesus and the Church He Founded: http://LifeLessonsfromJesus.org
  • A Priest’s Life: https://idahovocations.com/resources/video-podcasts/

Ep99 Dividers and Uniters

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Father Len grapples with the causes, effects and solutions to the anger and division present in our country, our churches, and our families.

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Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Dividers are often inspired and motivated by their own psychological needs.
  • Dividers are judgmental.
  • People with a deep desire for division make up their own rules and condemn others for not following their made-up rules.
  • In the Bible, the Pharisees made up hundreds and hundreds of rules. They condemn Jesus and others for not following the rules they made up. They love to proclaim how much more religious and holy they are than everyone else.
  • People who seek division are the enemies of Christ and true religion.
  • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks
  • Father Len shares the story of a guy who lived much of his life as a divider though he was very religious. His sense of religion was very legalistic and judgmental, critical of everybody. Remarkably and unconsciously, at the age of 50, he experiences a remarkable deep conversion to his faith and becomes a disciple of love with a desire to unite everyone.
  • Some people accidentally and unconsciously end up working for division in a community out of their own sense of anger, insecurity, or pain.
  • Division or unity is a fundamental choice. At some point in life, we must decide between division and unity, hatred and love.
  • Father Len tells the story of a woman who experienced an awful childhood of rape and incest, yet she devotes her life to helping the wounded and broken of the world to reject shame, heal their souls and feel loved.
  • It’s not what happens to you in life that matters. It’s how you react to what happens that matters.
  • Saint Paul warned people to keep away from those who cause division and put obstacles in their way because they don’t serve the Lord.
  • Satan loves division. Satan loves to dress up as something good, but the only fruits he offers are not good, just more division.
  • Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam
  • Social capital is a sense of unity and solidarity, the need to take care of others and build up an entire community or nation.
  • The United States was built on and succeeded because of social capital.
  • Division is where injustice and hatred grow.
  • Higher social capital tracks with more justice, more societal success, and more happiness.
  • Societies that are more narcissistic, about me, me, me, are less happy and have more crime, corruption, and injustice.
  • Social capital is connected with holiness.
  • “Let’s move away from the current plague in our country and our church that we need to attack each other. We can build a great country and church with social solidarity. We can’t build anything putting each other down constantly.” – Father Len

We welcome your questions and comments:

Links to More Podcasts from Wrestling with God Productions

Ep94 Encore: Is there an afterlife?

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Father Len presents stunning evidence from hundreds of personal experiences that supports the reality of an afterlife.

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Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Consciously or unconsciously, how we operate in this life has a lot to do with whether we believe there is an afterlife.
  • Father Len reflects on hundreds of personal experiences with death and dying, during 30 years of priesthood, that offer compelling, inspiring and uplifting evidence that there is an afterlife.
  • Catholics believe that nobody dies alone. The moment you die, the dead are there to welcome you to the afterlife. Father Len shares some amazing stories that totally support this belief.
  • There is a thin veil between heaven and earth.
  • Catholics believe the Holy Spirit creates this mysterious and unbreakable bond between the living, the dead, and God that is stronger than death.
  • The dying process produces healing that can’t be accomplished during our ordinary lives.
  • All the evidence that there’s far more to life than just the here and now begs us to be more attentive to the sacred and the mysteries of life.
  • Heaven is a great feast of love.
  • If there is a hint that all those who loved in this life go to heaven, why wouldn’t you want to be in that community? Why wouldn’t you change your behavior now?
  • In one sense, death is always kind of ugly, but at the same time it produces great beauty.
  • There’s very little evidence that death leads to oblivion.
  • Being fully present while witnessing death and dying will almost always give you a sense of the afterlife.

We welcome your questions and comments:

Links to Podcasts from Wrestling with God Productions

Ep93 Encore: Sex before Marriage

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A high school listener asks, “Will I go to hell if I have sex before marriage?” Father Len offers some sober, surprising, and humorous answers and insight about passion, sex, and promiscuity.

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Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • There’s nothing wrong with sex. It’s so natural. Nothing could be more natural. It’s part of the drive of life that God gives us.
  • Sexual passion is good. It drives us to seek each other out. It brings us together, but there’s something better.
  • Augustine’s highly promiscuous life taught him what was missing in his life.
  • Sometimes things are wrong, not because they’re evil, but because they’re not good enough.
  • Promiscuity is wrong because it can train you to use and hurt other people and not be committed.
  • Being sexual is part of what it means to be a human being, but the best part of being human is something greater. Commitment and love.
  • Passion and pleasure can be blinding, but also be very enlightening. True passion opens you up for God.

We welcome your questions and comments:

Links to Podcasts from Wrestling with God Productions

Ep88 Sadness is a Blessing and Superpower

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Father Len explains that sadness is our lot in life and how embracing it will bring us wisdom, love, a sense of purpose, and help guide our path to heaven.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • The pain of sadness wakes you up to be more tender and compassionate.
  • Sadness is a superpower that can transform you into being more creative.
  • Depression sucks all the life out of you.
  • Denying sadness can lead to self-absorption and a toxic life.
  • Father Len shares the story of how the sadness of prison life became a university for growth for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
  • Depression makes you listless and less concerned for action and the suffering of other people.
  • Depression is when you’re alone. Sadness is when you’re with other people.
  • Those who embrace sadness have a greater sense of purpose in their lives.
  • American society is obsessed with positivity and always being happy, happy, happy.
  • Studies have found Americans smile more than any other country, but test out to be more depressed.
  • Obsession with positive thinking is just a form of denial of sadness.
  • The more you repress something, the more likely you are to act on it.
  • America’s obsession with positivity and always having a positive attitude is a form of repression.
  • Sadness is hard, but it also gives birth to love.
  • Links to Podcasts from Wrestling with God Productions
  • Make a financial donation here: https://www.GiveSendGo.com/WWGProductions
  • We welcome your questions and comments:

Ep78 Future of WWG Show & How to Love like Christ

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Irish explains why there hasn’t been a new WWG Show episode lately and Father Len unpacks three Bible stories about love and illustrates the traits God will help us develop, and we’ll surely need, if we are to love like Christ. This a preview of episode 1 of a new podcast from Wrestling with God Productions, featuring Father Len, titled “Life Lessons from Jesus and the Church He Founded”.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • When Jesus began preaching love and pushing the boundaries of love to include loving all people unconditionally, the people didn’t like it. All they wanted to hear was God loves me and people like me.
  • God tells the prophet Jeremiah, people “will fight against you” when you preach unconditional love, but I will “form you into a wall of brass, a pillar of iron, a fortified wall” so “they shall not prevail against you.”
  • “If you call yourself a follower of God, you need to push yourself to try to love everyone.” – Father Len
  • “Some religious people say they want to hear the word of God, but only if it agrees with everything they think and believe already.” – Father Len
  • “When I die and stand before Christ, the question won’t be, does God love me? The question will be, did I love like Christ?” – Father Len
  • Bible stories examined in this episode:
    • Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19
    • 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13
    • Luke 4:21-30
  • “Life Lessons from Jesus and the Church He Founded” is crafted from hundreds of hours of Father Len’s homilies and talks on faith, religion, and life recorded over the past eight years.
  • “Life Lessons from Jesus and the Church He Founded” is the first new podcast produced by Wrestling with God Productions, the organization founded by Irish with the mission of identifying extraordinary teachers of the Catholic Faith, people like Father Len, and publishing their teachings far and wide.
  • The new podcast delves into stories from the Bible. Stories that reveal God’s purpose for creating us and his intentions for our lives. Stories about God’s expectations for our relationship with him. Stories about what to worship and how to worship.
  • The intention for the new podcast is to help listeners grapple with the true purpose of life and deal with the messiness and mysteries, challenges and difficulties that this crazy life seems to throw at us all.
  • Please prayerfully consider supporting the mission of Wrestling with God Productions by making a financial donation here: GiveSendGo.com/WWGProductions
  • We welcome your questions and comments

Ep76 What Near-Death Experiences Tell Us about Life

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Father Len wrestles with his lifelong fascination with near-death experiences and how what they reveal should challenge all of us to examine how we’re living our lives.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len shares Plato’s analogy of life as a cave where we experience only a dim reflection of true reality and the scientific and philosophical revolution it sparked.
  • “The Republic” by Plato
  • “Life after Life” by Raymond Moody Jr, MD
  • “Near-death experiences are a type of evidence of heaven and gifts from God to color in the picture revealed by prophets and mystics.” – Father Len
  • There have been thousands and thousands of near-death testimonies from adults and children in every country and culture in the world since the beginning of time.
  • Father Len shares the stories of religious and nonreligious doctors who believed near-death experiences to be nonsense until they began to study the experiences of their own patients.
  • “Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife” by Eben Alexander, MD
  • “Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation” by Michael Sabom, MD
  • Modern medicine has increased the number of near-death experiences revealed because of its ability to bring back more people from apparent death.
  • Strikingly similar near-death experiences have been reported by people of all ages who speak different languages, in all countries and cultures.
  • Here are the similar patterns of near-death experiences reported everywhere:
    • Phase 1: All pain, anxiety, and fear are gone. There is just peace.
    • Phase 2: People report popping out of their bodies and floating above themselves able to describe what was happening, where they went, what they did while apparently dead.
    • Phase 3: People, both religious and nonreligious, describe complete darkness going through a tunnel.
    • Phase 4: A light begins to shine accompanied by beautiful music or a feeling of unconditional love with beautiful colors all around. Suddenly a person’s entire life, from beginning to end, unfolds before them. They can not only see, but feel everything they caused other people. Joy, pain, anger, they feel it all. Half of the people in this last phase report being sent back to life because their mission in life was incomplete.
  • The most common denominator of near-death experiences is that life and life after death are all about love.
  • Surprisingly, near-death experiences for the blind and sighted people are very similar. For the blind, the light speaks to them in just the right language and just the right tone. The light speaks at the speed of light. The blind feel the same love as the sighted and also see beautiful colors all around, many for the first time.
  • The light experienced in near-death experiences frequently causes profound changes in people’s lives and religious beliefs. Religion becomes extremely important. The love, community, and joy they encounter in life after death inspires them to practice this life when they return to life.
  • Knowledge of near-death experiences should challenge us all to wrestle with the truth about God and life.
  • Emanuel Swedenborg visions of heaven.

Ep59 Understanding the Language of God

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Responding to a listener’s question about whether God’s teachings are black and white, Father Len explains why it’s difficult for us to fully understand the language of God’s love.

Highlights, Ideas and Wisdom

  • God’s morality and teachings are black and white and pure because God is love, without ego and without corruption.
  • Our interpretation of God’s morality and teachings is often wrong because it is viewed through the prisms of our egos and agendas.
  • Father Len illustrates the dangers of interpreting God’s word through ego by pointing out how wrong the Jews were in their interpretations of the Bible’s prophecies about Christ’s purpose on earth.
  • Jesus interprets morality and laws from the perspective of love.
  • Father Len points out that Jesus welcomed prostitutes and adulterers in his life knowing that prostitution and adultery are wrong because that’s what love does.
  • Love perfects us.
  • The Bible tells us that anyone who does not love and proclaims that they know God is a liar.
  • Our black and white view of morality often errs on the side of being harsh and judgmental, void of love.
  • Black and white morality can be very seductive because we can proclaim it to be justice, but without compassion it can be very wrong.
  • There are two kinds of moral extremes: black and white and relativism. Both are based a lot on ego.
  • Moral relativism is morality based solely on personal feelings and choice usually driven by ego or agenda.
  • Reacting to immoral behavior with love forces us to have empathy and compassion.
  • Father Len uses the Bible’s various perspectives on slavery to illustrate how God is constantly trying to help us evolve in our morality understanding we can’t always accept the whole truth all at once.
  • Fully understanding God’s language of love and morality is a lifelong process.

Ep58 The Big Mysteries of Christianity

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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?

Ep57 The Real Story of St. Patrick’s Day

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Father Len explains how a Roman citizen named Patrick became a great saint and hero to Ireland and the real reason we celebrate him and his life.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Patrick was the child of a very religious Roman family, but he had no use for religion until he was captured by pirates on a beach in England and sent to Ireland as a slave to care for sheep and dogs.
  • Patrick discovered and fell in love with God while caring for sheep.
  • A voice in St. Patrick’s head guided him to escape slavery and return to his homeland where he decided to become a priest. The same voice convinced him to accept an assignment as a missionary and return to Ireland though he knew most missionaries in Ireland were being killed at the time.
  • Father Len explains how the Roman named Patrick, who had no interest in religion as a young man, goes on to use a special talent to help evangelize Ireland and become a great saint.
  • Father Len muses about how our culture ends up taming religious celebrations into secular celebrations like Easter becoming about the Easter Bunny, Christmas becoming about Santa Claus, and Valentine’s Day becoming about chocolates and roses.