00:02:04.000I don't believe it's just a prayer that applies it for study as such.
00:02:09.000Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, lofty origin of all being.
00:02:19.000Graciously let a ray of your brilliance penetrate into the darkness of my understanding and take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of both sin and ignorance.
00:02:34.000Give me a sharp sense of understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.
00:02:45.000Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness.
00:03:24.000Not the time of day, the early medieval period.
00:03:28.000Arguably the great system builder of Catholic Christianity, he tries to show how reason, nature, philosophy, scripture, and revelation all belong to one coherent reality.
00:03:37.000His central idea grace does not destroy nature, it perfects it.
00:03:40.000For Aquinas, creation is genuinely good.
00:03:43.000Matter isn't something the soul needs to escape.
00:03:46.000Human reason isn't the enemy of faith.
00:03:49.000God creates nature, and grace brings nature to the fulfillment for which it was ultimately intended.
00:03:55.000That connects directly to what you were asking, Russell, on the chat GPT's back referencing our previous chats.
00:04:01.000Don't spill the beans about incarnation, matter, life, and telos.
00:04:07.000Everything has a telos, everything tends towards end or fulfillment.
00:04:39.000He was a real person, as of course all the saints were, but he's like a sort of more historical figure who leaves behind a lot of writing and a lot of theology and a lot of philosophy and is just a significant father of the church.
00:04:51.000And these ideas about telos and purpose and cause and causality is like that.
00:04:56.000He said, kind of, if you found an object.
00:04:58.000Falling, you would assume that that object has been dropped and that some force is pulling it towards something.
00:05:04.000This is the principle of telos and purpose, causality.
00:05:08.000Here, I guess, he's tackling some kind of ideas of atheism and nihilism, even before I thought such things were populated, given that he's a, you know, 13th century monk and academic from the sounds of things.
00:05:26.000And so, why do you want to talk about Aquinas just because of that in the context of that prayer?
00:05:34.000Yeah, in the context of that prayer, because I read something in this book.
00:05:39.000That my friend Nikki gave me, Teaching from Rest, which is by Sarah McKenzie, A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace.
00:05:48.000And I'm already, it's quite a small book, and I'm already just absolutely loving it so much.
00:05:55.000It's funny because my friend has, I've borrowed the book and she's actually highlighted stuff.
00:06:01.000And when someone else has, when you've borrowed a book, it's very personal, I think, when you see someone's highlighted bits.
00:06:08.000No, I think it's hard when a book's already highlighted because I give.
00:06:11.000Undue attention to other persons' highlights.
00:06:14.000But what if that person was a psychopath?
00:06:55.000I'm really trying not to be a control freak.
00:06:58.000And how I've done that is instead of putting the blocks of time into time slots, I've done it as a checklist.
00:07:04.000And really what it is is if you don't achieve, say, geography on one day, you simply know that you have to do it the next day.
00:07:11.000Now, if in my control freak ways, and I can see that it creates a great deal of anxiety for me, Is trying to keep into time blocks and time frames.
00:07:24.000I do not know how teachers do it in school environments, but what you've got to probably appreciate is when you've got 20 children, I imagine the toll it takes on these teachers.
00:07:37.000But anyway, the battle I face daily is the sort of anxiety driven nature of a school day or any day where I think I've got the idea of how I want it to go.
00:07:49.000And so I guess, you know, it says here just a little.
00:07:53.000A little thing from the screw from the letters of C.S. Lewis, not screwtake letters, from the letters of C.S. Lewis.
00:08:00.000The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's own or real life.
00:08:07.000The truth is, of course, that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life, the life God is sending one day by day.
00:08:16.000What one calls one's real life is a phantom of one's own imagination.
00:08:22.000And then it just says here, I've starred this, and Nikki has highlighted.
00:08:25.000We can't really rest in God's care until we trust that He will indeed care for us.
00:08:32.000And this seems like, well, we're just talking about rest and when's the bit about schooling?
00:08:37.000Well, it goes on to say that every day you should be starting your homeschooling with a specific prayer.
00:08:44.000And it suggests the Thomas Aquinas prayer before study, because what you're praying for is all the things that are in this, you know, you're praying for the understanding and memory and grasping things and.
00:09:02.000Thoroughness and what at the end it says point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in completion through Christ our Lord.
00:09:09.000And I suppose that you do need to pray before it.
00:09:13.000Otherwise, you can just be pulled off centre very easily by the children, by anything really, by just a change in the wind.
00:09:25.000The paradox there of the prayer is establishing.
00:09:48.000And the tension between those two things is where we must live and where we're being taken.
00:09:57.000And there's what we discussed at some length last night.
00:10:01.000In prayer and intense marital discussion, was where are we being taken now?
00:10:08.000And in a way, this is a charge I want to bring to anyone that's watching this because this, I think, is where the rubber meets the road we're not doing life or doing Christ that we may better absolve ourselves of the problems of this world and better enjoy the.
00:10:32.000Futile and ashen fruits of this synthetic secular culture.
00:10:38.000No, we recognize that we are cast out of it, that we don't want to participate in it.
00:10:55.000This is what I find, whether it's in 12 step programs or religious organizations or spiritual groups, there's an unspoken, implicit Toxic interloper in the midst, and it is this.
00:11:10.000C.S. Lewis used the phrase phantom earlier.
00:11:13.000Really, we're all just trying to get back in there and make some more money.
00:11:18.000Really, we're just trying to get back in there and work it out so that we can succeed in the phony ass world, have some sort of pleasant baby shower, have some sort of bridal party, have some sort of fruitful meeting, look good, a successful podcast.
00:11:36.000Dead when God came to earth vulnerable as a baby and lived a sinless life, how does he die in shame and humiliation, naked, beaten to the point where his genitals are unrecognizable, where he the contents of his bowels are oozing down his thighs?
00:11:55.000And that's the highest thing you might achieve.
00:11:59.000That's the high in order that you may experience the transcendent, you must be.
00:12:09.000Now, I like that we start with that Aquinas thing.
00:12:11.000That Aquinas doesn't make that peculiar binary mistake of religion of flagellation, false, what John of the Cross calls animal penance.
00:12:21.000The world is bad, material is bad, nature is bad, sexuality is bad.
00:12:25.000Trying to make the spiritual entirely abstract.
00:12:27.000The spiritual is not abstract, but it is ineffable.
00:12:31.000It permeates all things, but it's not something that's plain and can be easily understood.
00:12:36.000And I would like to read some of this, but I can see you already with Alma reading some of this.
00:12:39.000I think it's because of what you said about.
00:12:42.000Material, when you're talking about material things and whatever else, it says on the next or a couple of pages later, it says, I haven't even read this bit, but I could just see that this has been highlighted.
00:12:54.000But this could apply to all of the things that you just listed, whether it's making more money or doing a podcast.
00:12:59.000It says, What ends up on my list of essentials may not look remarkable to the state or to anyone else, but I just have to keep reminding myself that that doesn't matter.
00:13:07.000I cannot serve two masters and neither can you.
00:13:23.000Today in jujitsu, I did jujitsu with my beloved coach Carlos today and this guy Will, who I know from the coffee shop, who's like a serious.
00:13:32.000Dude, like Iron Man running, but has never done jujitsu.
00:13:36.000And I sort of, because we're doing jujitsu with someone that's very strong, but not done jujitsu before, it's interesting because he's like, you know, someone that could, he can bench press a great deal of weight.
00:13:44.000He's super muscular and fit, but he doesn't know jujitsu.
00:13:46.000So you see the power of jujitsu, but also you feel the power of someone who's just very strong.
00:13:52.000And I was reminded of when I started training with Carlos, or probably resumed training after a period of stopping training with my teacher, Chris Clear, like that I was just holding on very tight.
00:14:35.000If you cut them open, if you can zoom them forth into the moment of their death, like show them it, like in a Dickensian way, like Scrooge over the precipice.
00:15:21.000Anyway, so this is very beautiful from the, I'm guessing Frederick Buchner is a, must be a much admired writer because in the brilliant message, the, where is that?
00:15:59.000It's Frederick Buchner's quote that's on the front of that.
00:16:02.000I just needed that really because I couldn't remember Eugene Peterson in that moment.
00:16:06.000Here, he's in this book, The Gospel is Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale.
00:16:11.000He starts off by saying that the gospel is a tragedy, you know, and that in the sense, gosh, it's not at all obvious in the way that Buchner writes.
00:16:19.000And I know that Annie Dillard is the quote on the front of this book.
00:16:26.000He renders the tragedy of the gospel with the sort of goriness and horror of the brutality of Christ's passion and just the sort of dreadfulness that we all know.
00:16:38.000He sets up this device of a preacher preparing to give some conference.
00:16:42.000Or participate in some conference, a preacher about whom gossip has metastasized into damnation.
00:16:48.000Obviously, something that, gosh, I have some personal experience of.
00:16:52.000But he says here, he says here, like that, as he sort of has set up this preacher as preparing for this speech and shaving in the mirror, and he cuts himself, and then he goes into this very beautiful piece of writing.
00:17:06.000The distances between the inner world that each of us is are greater in their way than the distances between us.
00:17:18.000The distances between the inner world that each of us is are greater in their way than the distances between the Outer worlds of inner space.
00:17:30.000The distances between the inner world that each of us is are greater in their way than the distances between the interstellar, the outer worlds of interstellar space.
00:17:42.000But in another way, the worlds of all of us are also the same world.
00:17:49.000An occasional bad night, not feeling well, a 10 o'clock arrival.
00:17:55.000A two o'clock nap, the same old face in the mirror day after day, an empty feeling in the pit of the stomach, a little blood.
00:18:05.000We are all of us in it together, and it is in us all.
00:18:13.000I like the fact that you don't know no one in some ways.
00:18:18.000In some ways, you can never know another person, even maybe the person you know most deeply.
00:18:24.000There's a stranger in there, there's a stranger in there that you don't know.
00:18:29.000But also, in the stranger that you don't know at all, there is an intimate connection to them because when it comes to what one might call the parameters of human life, birth and death, two areas that the state seems peculiarly interested in investigating and intervening in abortion, euthanasia.
00:19:08.000And what our life is doing, I think, is bringing us into sharp alignment, sharp collision with it.
00:19:16.000Like, you know, like, because I've reached a point where, oh, well, man, my situation is so extraordinary and so challenging and so peculiar.
00:19:29.000And the only way really to survive it, I was thinking about this in our country, the UK, there's this academic that's, it looks like, although it's not certain, that he's ended his own life after a hounding media campaign, after it appears that he exaggerated his biography and credentials and was maybe a beneficiary in some way of DEI.
00:19:46.000Say one side, no, this is just yet another example of diversity hires.
00:19:52.000Giving black people or gay people or whatever, or white people, if it were the right scenario, jobs.
00:19:57.000The other side, of course, say, no, this is yet another example of the very Institutional racism of condemnation and a refusal to believe in a brilliant black academy.
00:20:05.000Anyway, that's not the truth I'm interested in.
00:20:06.000Obviously, I'm interested in the fact that he was hounded likely to death by suicide.
00:20:12.000Now, when you're hounded, it to you know, when you're sort of when that kind of thing happens to you, you're sort of challenged to look at what do you believe in?
00:20:57.000That was something that was when I was talking about some challenge or another, maybe.
00:21:04.000And actually, I absolutely love learning with the kids.
00:21:10.000I love learning new things and really enjoy what they call in one of the curriculums, I use rabbit holes where you just, they'll say, now you can, you know, use these resources and.
00:21:21.000Explore this subject more and it's really exciting and it's fun.
00:21:24.000But I was expressing the difficulties in the things I've discussed, and it probably does come down to a sort of sense of control over the environment and wanting them to listen when I'm trying to talk and stuff.
00:21:36.000And my friend did say to me, She goes, Yeah, she goes, You are homeschooling from quite a place of under quite a lot of pressure in your life.
00:21:45.000You're not like, it's not just, you know, we're not coming from the point of view of it.
00:21:50.000Because I was saying, You know, like, why is it making me so stressed?
00:21:53.000Why have I got so much, you know, Anxiety and stress over not quite getting this right or whatever.
00:21:58.000And she reminded me, she was like, Well, you are going through quite a lot.
00:22:02.000And, you know, so you are coming, you're starting at that point of going through something, you know?
00:22:09.000So anything you do when one is having some big thing they're dealing with, it's got to, you know, you say about this scholar in England and you say like he ended his own life.
00:22:24.000And I presume what happened was he did not, probably did not have.
00:22:29.000An intimate relationship with God, if he had one at all, maybe.
00:22:32.000I don't know because he obviously felt that it was just a totally bleak and a situation that had no hope.
00:22:42.000What it is, you know, like when it's Diana, let's think of the examples we've had in our culture.
00:22:46.000In the United States of America, Britney Spears, or any female star, they do a lot with the female stars.
00:23:04.000When it says it, you know, if you can say a corporation, there's that famous documentary, The Corporation, where it says, wow, if a corporation was a human being, it would be a psychopath.
00:23:13.000Like that's the analysis because, look, it only cares about profit and it doesn't have a.
00:23:49.000That's why really what they want is they like it, they like it.
00:23:53.000And then when Jason Arde kills himself, oh, whoa, whoa, okay, or maybe not, because what are the consequences when Caroline Flack kills herself, or when Princess Diana, whether by design or accident, crashes into that side of that tunnel?
00:24:28.000Because we were talking about this too spiritual warfare.
00:24:30.000You talk about spiritual warfare and you think, have you actually gone mad thinking that there are demons and dark entities that are participating in the affairs of humankind?
00:24:53.000It was a lightning strike down the road from us hitting a tree.
00:24:56.000And by the way, it actually wrapped itself around the tree like a vine, which was really crazy.
00:25:04.000Anyway, you could almost not, like you had to stop the car, the rain was coming down, it was hard.
00:25:09.000And it felt like I'd had, I hadn't slept the night before actually at all.
00:25:14.000And I think you didn't sleep the night after.
00:25:16.000And there was this kind of bit where it was just very difficult, very challenging.
00:25:21.000We were talking about the fact that we were saying, gosh, I think someone must have said this is very much like a feeling of a darkness and like a spiritual attack type thing on whatever.
00:25:30.000But I said to Russell, but it's not like on us because it's everyone's experiencing that storm.
00:25:36.000And then you said the rain and the sun shine on good and evil alike.
00:25:42.000But also, what is this energy, this power, this meteorology?
00:25:47.000What was the storm that started what we would Call Noah's flood.
00:26:23.000And what we are suffering from, as much as anything else, is the demystification and the desacralization of everything, even the demystification of Christ Jesus.
00:26:32.000It's certainly the desacralization of everything.
00:26:35.000The reason it's good to pray before homeschooling is to remember you are always embarking on a holy endeavor.
00:26:42.000You are participating in holiness when you participate in time itself.
00:26:45.000There's actually another wording of that prayer for study.
00:26:50.000So in the book, it's got it differently, but I found this from a Catholic website because.
00:26:55.000I suppose prayers are translated differently or they're shortened.
00:26:57.000I mean, I don't know how one prayer can have the same meaning when it's translated so differently or it's reworded in the different ways, because this one's quite different.
00:27:06.000But this one, when it talks about light and things, it says, you know, pour forth, same Thomas Aquinas, an ante studium before study is prayer.
00:27:17.000Pour forth a ray of your brightness into the darkened places of my mind, disperse from my soul the twofold darkness into which I was born, sin and ignorance.
00:27:28.000The bit that you know is all talking about, even in the prayer before study, it's talking about shining light on the dark places of the mind, shining light in the darkness.
00:27:39.000So, when it feels like there's a darkness and it is a physical darkness of a storm and it feels heavy and you've got a headache and you can't sleep and there's insomnia and there's anxiety and there's troubles and there's strife within your marriage, within your relationships, whatever the feeling is like the feeling of that darkness, it is very, um.
00:28:00.000It really led me to think about like when you pray, the best prayer for that.
00:28:04.000And it's the prayer for it is that prayer of like, please bring light, bring light to this situation.
00:28:11.000And when I was right, because I took a bit of time before today's show to think about today's podcast service, to think about what we might talk about today.
00:28:21.000So I was looking at the darkness and light.
00:28:23.000And I wrote this because I said I was thinking about the sort of anxieties of that darkness coming in.
00:28:30.000And it does say here, Psalm 119105, which I believe, actually, would you help me find that, Russell?
00:28:42.000If that's the one that's about, I am going to put you under considerable pressure to find something now, which I know that you're well caught.
00:30:08.000And like, you know, this is one of the things I say, like, you know, because I've had such vivid problems as a drug addict and as a famous person, all those things, it boils down to something quite.
00:30:17.000Are somewhat comparable, I think, in anyone's life.
00:30:21.000Control and want to be in control of stuff.
00:30:23.000And it's that for all of us, it's the same thing stop, you're not in control, you're going to die.
00:30:26.000Let go, let God, let God in, let the light in.
00:30:49.000He stretches out the heavens like a tent.
00:30:50.000The universe is expanding and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
00:30:56.000He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.
00:31:00.000He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants.
00:31:04.000Oh man, those tongues of fire in the reversal of the fall of the Tower of Babel that is the Pentecost, the coming of the new language, the coming of the new sign.
00:31:13.000Now we have something abstract like a consciousness in AI.
00:31:17.000But what are these abstractions that we can reach to through image?
00:31:21.000The reason this book is so powerful, the idea that the gospel begins as a tragedy oh my God, the son of God came and we killed him, that's awful.
00:31:30.000What a crazy thing for God to do to just be a sort of a peasant guy that tells stories and stuff like that and do miracles.
00:31:37.000And then everyone around him just abandons him at the crucial moment.
00:31:40.000Then a fairy tale, when it becomes a fairy tale, it's there is a mystery here.
00:31:45.000And like, you know, people, there's so many ways that one could attack this.
00:31:49.000There's all these people that refuse to believe that God's real, atheists, materialists, all you're through, you belong, you die.
00:31:54.000Then there's the people that do believe in God, but are functional atheists that act as if some profound mystery is not taking place right now.
00:32:02.000Something unusual, something extraordinary, something magical and glorious is taking place that is simultaneously tragic and comic and also somehow unknowable.
00:32:13.000And it's a very, very hard thing to, impossible in fact, to engage with.
00:32:17.000And it brings you to a place of total submission and humility.
00:32:20.000So, when, if you're a person like me that has thought, I can't live anymore, I can't be alive anymore, like Jason R. Day, I want to kill myself.
00:33:52.000Here you go, you've got everything you need.
00:33:54.000There's some spiritual rebellion in the heavenly realm, something unknowable to us, something beyond abstraction, spiritual, sacred.
00:34:01.000You know, the Scientologists believe in thetans and wars that sound a lot like the Nephilim when you read the book of Enoch, as if they're, and indeed, what are, you know, what was Legion?
00:34:11.000That our Lord cast out from that man into the pigs, that desperate man that had to be chained.
00:34:21.000You said, like, so firstly, we were created without laws at all.
00:36:02.000Because, you know, I think about this a lot because I'm obviously engaged in a very sort of holy transformative experience, but I still have trouble being.
00:37:12.000The antiques world in my country of the United Kingdom is crime adjacent because they're wheeling and dealing and they're hustling, and there's no real way of knowing what a particular vase or chest of drawers is truly worth.
00:37:24.000There's an ambiguity in the antique world.
00:37:27.000They sell their wares at markets and stuff.
00:37:30.000So Lovejoy was a sort of a kind of what do you want to call him?
00:38:12.000And really, Really, what we discussed this morning, and really what we discussed is that to be channeling God and to be truly in spirit, you must be in the fruits of the spirit.
00:38:25.000They should be, these are the things you should be.
00:38:30.000So, really, does that mean in almost everything you're doing, interactions, and you're thinking, okay, here we go?
00:38:36.000Well, another way is if you put this with Matthew 6 33, seek thee first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all this will be granted to you.
00:38:45.000It's like that in moment to moment, like this moment now.
00:38:47.000Are you looking for the kingdom of God?
00:38:54.000A realm or domain that has a king in it.
00:38:57.000So, somewhere in this psychic and spiritual space that I inhabit and I experience, you know, via the senses in the belly and in the heart and in what I might consider the mind, is there a king in there?
00:39:25.000There's a scene between Rowan Atkinson's Edmund Blackadder and Miranda Richardson's, yeah, nurse.
00:39:33.000He's having a sort of a romance with her.
00:39:35.000But really, when the king is Christ, God, come to earth, die for your sins, Christ, raised on the third day, Christ, then when he's the king in there, it sort of calms you down a bit.
00:39:47.000You know, he really, really loves you.
00:39:48.000And you're going to be okay, and you might start experiencing those fruits.
00:39:51.000But all of us are getting hit by a different bit of the waterfall, a little bit, a different bit of the stream of living water, that powerful, silvery, living, mercurial water, not toxic like mercury, but living like mercury.
00:41:39.000Impurity and debauchery, idolatry, that means worshipping anything except for God, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like.
00:41:56.000I warn you as I did before that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
00:42:00.000It's not like you won't go to heaven and have a nice time in the afterlife, it's that you won't inhabit this psychic space that has a king in it because you've got worship in other crazy stuff.
00:42:09.000So, it's not like you want to pretend that you're loving and joyful and peaceful and full of forbearance and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self control.
00:42:17.000But if we pray for these things, Lord, if we pray the word of your Saint Paul, pray to be the recipients, Lord, of these gifts, these fruits, what would that mean?
00:42:29.000That living water that runs through the middle of the city, as it says in the end of the book of Revelation 22, where it says here.
00:42:41.000Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal.
00:42:46.000Flowing from the throne of God, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
00:42:53.000Down the middle of the great street of the city, on each side of the river, stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.
00:43:03.000And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
00:43:17.000They will not need the light of the lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light and they will reign forever and ever.
00:43:25.000The angel said to me, These words are trustworthy and true.
00:43:28.000The Lord, the God who inspires the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants the things that must soon take place.
00:44:22.000My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done.
00:44:26.000I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
00:44:30.000Blessed are those who wash their robes that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.
00:44:38.000Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
00:44:47.000I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches.
00:44:51.000I am the root and the offspring of David and the bright morning star.
00:45:07.000I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll.
00:45:10.000If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll.
00:45:13.000If anyone takes any words away from this scroll of the prophecy of God, God will take away from that person and share in the tree of life and in his share in the tree of life and in the holy city which are described in this scroll.
00:48:03.000Thank you, Lord, for being with us today.
00:48:07.000And God bless everybody here with us in this space for this Sunday, for this week ahead.
00:48:18.000Please may we, please may we cultivate, cultivate the fruits of the spirit.
00:48:26.000And please may we use our headlight, our headlamp or a lamp, just a lamp, just to see the ground in front of us, to steady our feet, to ground us, so that we may not be overwhelmed by the great enormous vastness of life and eternity as such, but under the great light that you provide, but that we may just take it step by step each day.
00:48:57.000Each new day that you created, God, for us and for this, in this beautiful, beautiful world that we live in, where there's nature and there's opportunity and there's opportunity of learning and of loving and all of the things that we should look to in times of darkness, that we may stay in