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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.