Tag Archives: Moses

Ep55 What Is Salvation?

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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.

Ep45 Bible Symbols Revealed and Explained-Part 1 Water

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:43 — 14.4MB)

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Father Len reveals what water symbolizes and why it shows up so often in the Bible.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • The Bible contains many symbols that God repeats over and over again.
  • The symbols help us understand what it means to be a human being.
  • Many symbols in the Bible end up becoming part of the way Christians worship.
  • In the Bible, water always symbolizes change, a change in consciousness as we are becoming who we’re meant to be.
  • There’s always some sort of death associated with each change as we give up something of our old selves in the process.
  • Father Len explains what Catholic Christian worship rituals involving water symbolize.

Ep17 Race, Culture, and Jesus

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:22 — 15.9MB)

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Father Len reveals why Jesus came into the world as a Jew and why God created multiple races and cultures.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • God chose an enslaved, weak, and hated people to show God’s strength and bring love into the world.
  • Father Len reveals his joke about every Jewish feast.
  • The Bible constantly wrestles with racism.
  • There is just one race in the Bible. That’s humanity. There are many different nations, but they’re all part of one family.
  • Humanity is united by the language of love not rules, regulations, politics and technology.
  • Father Len tells his favorite racism story where God’s punishment for a Middle Eastern woman’s racism is to make her skin white as snow.
  • The Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, has made dozens of appearances around the world over time. Always appearing as a person of the nation in which she appears. This to signify that Christ is present in all of us no matter what the color of our skin or our country of origin.
  • If Jesus came into the world today he might well have black skin and be of African descent.