Tag Archives: Unconditional Love

Ep61 True Friendship

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:46 — 33.7MB)

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Father Len takes a deep and challenging dive into the nature of true friendship and its profound effects on us throughout our lives. 

Highlights, Ideas and Wisdom

  • In Greek, the word friend or friendship is another word for love.
  • The word love in English is just another word for sex, not friendship.
  • Greeks believe there are four types of love. Love of one’s family, love of one’s friends, romantic love, and unconditional love.
  • Catholics believe friendship love prepares us for heaven.
  • Catholics believe all types of love speak about the great mystery of God.
  • Father Len explains why he believes the United States has a crisis of friendship.
  • Father Len describes much of the friendship present in the United States as what he calls cultural friendship. Relationships based not on reciprocal love, but on getting some sort of advantage, either economically or socially.
  • “Amen with many companions comes to ruin, but there’s a friend who sticks closer to you than a brother.” – Book of Proverbs
  • Today the word friend has been turned into a verb. We “friend” people we don’t really know on social media.
  • Friendship brings something into your life that family and romance can’t.
  • True friendship helps form us.
  • We are formed by God and the community of our family and friends.
  • “One can perish for lack of true friends or for making the wrong friends.” – Book of Proverbs
  • True friendship has a foundation that you discover. Some common interest, love, passion, vision, or truth.
  • Father Len explains the difference between friendship love and romantic love.

Ep51 Why Did God Create Us?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:11 — 23.1MB)

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Father Len reveals three reasons God created us with some illustrative and inspiring stories and a funny Twinkies analogy.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len reviews the two creation stories in the Bible.
  • Everyone is born an Earthling and we only become true human beings when we can love to the point of death.
  • We are meant to evolve into a relationship of unconditional love with God, other people, and creation itself.
  • Pagan myths trace their creation to something grand and declare their superiority to other people and their origin.
  • In Christianity, we have this idea of a Trinity. God is a Trinity: lover, beloved, and love itself. We are created by perfect loving relationship, a Trinity for relationship.
  • God is pure unconditional, self-sacrificing, and self-giving love.
  • Baltimore Catechism question: “Why did God make you?” Answer: “God made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world and be happy with him forever in heaven.”
  • Heaven is a place of ultimate community and unconditional love. Where we’re all completely different, but united together. Hell is the opposite, to live by and for only one’s self.
  • In Heaven, we’ll be together as one as grapes in wine. Shedding our selfishness like grapes shedding their skins. We’ll become one without losing our uniqueness, totally united, just as grapes in wine.
  • Christ sums up all of his teachings this way: “love God with all your heart, mind, and soul and your neighbor as yourself.”
  • God is not a rule keeper handing out punishment for misbehaving. We inflict our own punishment when we choose only to think of ourselves.
  • We’re created for relationship and love, work and responsibility, worship and freedom.
  • Our sin or our holiness affects creation and how we relate to each other.
  • People who live in long and loving relationships live longer, are happier and healthier.
  • It is better for your health to eat a Twinkie with friends than a salad by yourself.
  • People who live life having a purpose beyond themselves live longer, happier and more satisfying lives.