to all of you. Brother Bruno was asking me a few minutes ago, and I think it's worth sharing the question, if it's I guess I give the impression that I'm able to stay calm and poised for a lot of these things, and I really don't and can't. But I think for the times that you lose your ability to stay calm, because when you're calm you can manage it, and when you're all disturbed you can't. And especially since people consider you by your very profession, and me by my ordination and my profession, they look up to us and depend on us. If we start falling apart and flipping out, then they do too. It's reassuring when we can stay on top of it.

[01:02]

So when we can't, it's helpful because you learn how how to do it better. So, you know, I was, you know, I was mentioning to brother, it's sort of like the bees. If you go anywhere near the bees all agitated, you're going to get stung. And if you go near the bees calmly or near your sheep calmly, you, you know, disturbing them anyway, you're going to have less milk or less wool or less honey, you know, and if you can bring calmness, you, they're, they're also calm. But it's easier said than done. And what I find more important is to do the ritual with or without presence of mind, and then later worry about the presence of mind. So for example, in a lot of, like picking up that poor young man, obviously I was not recollected and aware of the presence of God, and I was racing with adrenaline,

[02:05]

My eyes were alert on all sides, waiting for a bullet or a knife to come at us. I was completely unaware of the mother, which is really the beautiful part of the story. But later, later when you think about it, your legs knock together and you see how close it was and everything else. By habit, you learn to manage by ritual to do the right thing and then try to integrate it later. I think it's a good point, though, off of that question to mention this to you. I usually once a year—I'm not a preacher. I'm not a retreat preacher. I'm a missionary. But when I'm invited, I usually accept to go somewhere once a year because it's good for me to be, you know, among colleagues and brothers and out of my circumstance and also absorbing what you have and your rhythm and the beauty of your psalms and the reinforcement.

[03:11]

It's beneficial a lot. So once a year I crawl out of the mission in order to spend a week, and two years ago I gave a retreat to the warrior priests, priests who are chaplains in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and the modern wars. Most Navy, Navy people. So I think not being a scholar, I think a value of a sermon or a value of a talk is shared experience which confirms you and confirms the listener in the truth of what the Scripture is telling us. So, of course, with the warrior priest, the different stories that I would give them, which were a challenge to my faith and what I saw in it and what I learned.

[04:16]

It was really interesting what came of that, because toward the end of the retreat, they invited me to dinner. And at dinner, they put this question to me. We see and live through the same things, mass destruction and terrible individual destruction. Ours are caused by war. Yours are caused by poverty or natural disaster. But we see the same things. Why are we crazy and you're not crazy? And it turned out that a week before, one of the chaplains who was supposed to be on the retreat had jumped off a bridge in Rhode Island. And as you know, a lot of returning soldiers from the war have a big problem with suicide. And if you had seen the horrifying headline of the day when it happened, there came a point some years ago where death by suicide of the soldier surpassed death in combat, which is a pretty sobering statistic.

[05:34]

So I said to them, what makes you think I'm not crazy? Because I think that's a good starting point. And they said, we're tormented at night. We never get a good night's sleep. We have flashbacks. You don't seem to be not able to function. We have lots of problems. So we analyzed it out and I think it's really worth saying, because the real question is, where does anybody get their strength before difficult things? Either you never face difficult things and you're lucky you don't need it, or you face difficult things and you learn the secret to where strength comes from. But as St. Thomas Aquinas said, You can never call yourself courageous unless you were in front of something that scared the bejesus out of you. and you dealt with it the right way. You can't call yourself chaste unless you had every possibility in the book not to be, and you were.

[06:44]

You can't call yourself honest unless you've had the chance to steal and you didn't. But the virtues are not dormant. They're not thou shalt nots. They're how you were when thou couldest. It's how it is. So, of course, the purpose of our life is not to avoid the difficult things. The purpose of our life is to try to be as straight as an arrow, as sharp as an arrow, when we're in them. Now, I had never thought about it. I had never thought about the question that they put to me. So it was together that we kind of unwound it. So here was the very first thing. People who believe in God, who are reinforced by other people who are with them that believe in God, do better in everything around the world, even in school. You're automatically on a more positive path if you believe in God and are reinforced by people who believe in God.

[07:48]

It's automatic. Even in medicine, they know this. People who believe in a God do much better from their ablations and their coronary surgeries and their cancer treatments and everything else. They do better statistically than everybody else. But here's a big difference. I'm surrounded by people who believe in God and what we're doing. You're not at all in the military. My hierarchy, all the way up, believes in God. Maybe they have their bouts now and then of doubts, but all the way up, they believe in God. It's not that way in the military. You're not alone in your faith when you're in the kind of work that I am in, but you're alone in your faith when you're a chaplain in the military. Makes a big difference. Here's something else. The people that I've been working with, that I'm working with now, I've been working with them for 20 and 25 years.

[08:54]

And the ones that I haven't been working 25 years with them, it's because I raised them. And they were only 5 years old then or 10 years old then, but now they're on the workforce, you know, for 5 years or 7 years or 6. The point is, it's for the community. It's us doing it. It's not just me doing it. It's us doing it. Imagine when you're deployed to go to the army. You're pulled out of Boise, Idaho, and you're put with 6,000 other people from all over the country whom you never met, and together you go off to horror, and after eight or nine or ten months, when your duty is finished, you all go back like buckshot to where you came from. What sense is there in that? So you leave Boise, you go to a place that is nothing like Boise, and you live through all kinds of horrific things, and you go back to Boise, and now you're just supposed to fit in again in your job.

[10:07]

It doesn't work that way. It brings isolation. The isolation is what I said. It's a lack of cohesion and a lack of love and a lack of understanding which makes you anxious and makes you depressed. And what happens to people, soldiers especially, it's very clear. When we do what we do together, we're all better off. When we face what we face together, we're all better off than day work. You come from here and do the Kelly Girls. You come from there and you do this for the day and you go back. A third thing, a third thing is affirmation. I never don't get affirmation for what I'm doing. Who wants to hear about the war? Nobody wants to hear about the war. It's almost that people are ashamed of modern wars because we know they're fraudulent.

[11:14]

They say what the reason is, three months later it's revealed it's not the reason at all. The purpose of the war is not clear. We always know what we're doing and why. In the missions, and you yourselves, you always know what you're doing and why. It's clear to you, the goal and the mission and the purpose. Nobody, from the top down, has any idea of the purpose of a modern war. You don't even know why you're there. You don't even know why you're doing it. And there's no affirmation for the soldier. Yes, they call you first when you're boarding an airplane. If you're still in active duty, you're welcome to board now. But people don't want to hear about the war. It's not like at the time of Vietnam where every day on the news you saw bodies coming back. You saw them received at the naval yards or at the airports. You saw them honored with salutes and music and flags. You don't see that.

[12:16]

You don't see one body coming back. This is orchestrated by the media. You don't see one. Nobody wants to hear from them what it was like and what they did. Nobody wants to hear it. makes a big difference whether you're affirmed or not. A huge difference whether you're affirmed or not. Here's another part of it. Hierarchy. It's really unusual to get a bump from the hierarchy, at least when you're in the missions. It's very unusual to have any disagreement. They're usually very supportive. That helps a lot, the hierarchical support. It helps a lot. It's not that way. It's career. It's all career in the military. It's all career. And an officer will throw somebody under them under a bus to advance their career.

[13:17]

I'll tell you an example that I saw clearly in Haiti after the earthquake when the Marines were there doing a wonderful job rebuilding the port and everything else, but there was an ugly thing that happened that made me understand this part of it, the importance of hierarchical support. There was a caravan of five jeeps of Marines going from the port, which they were rebuilding out of barges. They were making a port out of barges, because the port was destroyed. And they were on their way back to their base, and the lead car hit a Haitian man on the road. And the lead car left him there. And so the second car passed, and the third car passed, and the fourth jeep passed, but the fifth jeep was full of young Marines, 22 years old, 19 years old, 23 years old, who thought, my God, the lead car didn't realize they hit a man, and the following three jeeps didn't see him, let's stop and pick him up.

[14:23]

They picked him up. Since their base was at the American Embassy, and since that's only 500 meters from where our hospital is, those young Marines brought that man to me, which is how I know this whole story. He needed surgery. The USS Comfort was in the harbor. The only way to get him to the USS Comfort was by helicopter. The only way to get the helicopter was to go to the Embassy and to order it through the Marines. So I went over with the jeep of young Marines and the sick man, and what happened next was terrible. The lead jeep was furious that this man that they had hit and left was now not only in front of them, but at their base. And they wanted him out of there. And they told me to take him out of there. And the young Marines, who were absolutely astounded by this, having assumed all the best about the lead car, started protesting.

[15:35]

And the officer talking to them is, you be quiet about this or you face court-martial. And then he said to me, get out of here with this man. It was unbelievable. So there was another American with me from Scranton, whose son is in the Marines, not there in Haiti. And we took the man and we had no choice but to go directly to the airport, which was still not open for any public flights. It was all military things. And we went in the middle of the runway and we were just trying to flag down any helicopter that we might be able to get to stop, which happened sooner or later, so we could send this man to the ship. While we were doing it, the fifth jeep of young Marines showed up on the runway. They drove all the way there and drove right onto the runway to help us flag down. And I said, what, what are you doing here? I mean, court martial is like federal crime.

[16:37]

What are you doing here? And they were so shook up. They said, you know, our motto is leave no one behind. The motto of the Marine, it's not leave no Marine behind. Our motto is leave no one behind. And here they were, they had become Marines because they had such an exalted idea of what it was and what was their purpose in the world and everything else. And it was completely decimated so fast for them, the integrity of it, the honesty of it. And to be threatened with court-martial for helping a man that you hurt? What made me think of this is the kind of young person that goes home and then you find them hanging in a closet because this is way too much for young enthusiasm, new blood, new heart, enthused about the world to run into this.

[17:39]

It's terrible. It's a burden. It's a burden, especially when you're facing difficult things. The hierarchical support is no small part of the deal. We have it most of the time. It's not there in the military. It's career that would have been bad for the career of those people that they hid in Sevilla and caused a problem for the US military. Another big part of it is this. This really is more personal. It's how much of your own psychological strength you've developed in front of a crisis. Because it's perfectly normal and it can't be otherwise. Everybody in front of something terrible regresses. It can't be otherwise. Nobody expects it to be otherwise. The question is, how far do you regress backwards?

[18:43]

Now, obviously, I've seen a lot of variations of that in a very difficult moment. And a lot of people just become completely wimpish, sit down, start crying, start yelling, help, get me out of here, I can't take this. All of a sudden, here's somebody missing an arm, and all your attention has to go to this well-fed, well-nourished, well-educated person who is now a psychological mess. It's regressing like all the way back to being a child. That's easier to take, to be honest with you, than the people who regress back to adolescence, because they go backwards and there's nothing but rebellion in them. They hate what happened, they hate what you're doing, they hate every proposed solution, they hate everybody who's trying to help, they hate everything about, and they just whirl out these anathemas, you know, which is the last thing that you need is all this negative energy when you're trying to take care of something which is already extraordinarily negative and try to put it into a positive line.

[19:57]

The best regression, and I'll tell you who this is from. This is from Peace Corps. who had the problem from early 1960s when John Kennedy created it. Of all these young people, like these young Marines, going out to all these difficult conditions in the world, and when they come home, not fitting in the world. Culture shock when you get there, reverse culture shock when you get out. Where you went, there's no room in your head to fit in. And now when you go home, home isn't home anymore, and you don't know how to put all of this together. It's a problem for people. Culture shock and reverse culture shock. So Peace Corps studied it. And the result of this study is something that you'll find in Evagrius Ponticus. In the people that have known the human psyche for a long time. And it's basically this. People who are sure enough about themselves to be in very unsure situations do really well.

[21:09]

And people whose inner sureness is so shaky that they cling on to all kinds of structures outside of them to bolster their inner secureness completely fall apart when those structures are not there. It's only giving the advice to not be afraid of your insecurity when you have it, to sit with it, to learn how to find security inside in the face of your insecurity. It's the only point of the lesson. And people whose inner security depends on the outward things, as the outward things disappear, they are demanding that the external world be the way that holds them up. They're demanding it and getting furious if it's not that way. So people who have enough inner assurance, what does it mean? They know they're weak. They're comfortable with their weakness. But they've learned in life there's lots of other things that help with weakness, like you're right next to me, and you're weak, but two of us make two, and three of us make three, and six of us make six.

[22:21]

And the scriptures which tell us, this is God's best raw material. Your weakness is God's best raw material. This is exactly the best entry point for God. So, the people who are secure enough for themselves, in order not to be completely unraveled by the thing before, they regressed in the best way. I'll tell you what the best regression is, according to Peace Corps, but I find it to be true. The best regression is humor. And humor, in those situations is usually gallows humor. It's usually completely inappropriate humor. But I did say this is regression. This is not your best. You're not at your best. This is regression. It's just the best regression. The original significance of a bullfight is a person facing their destiny.

[23:31]

the massive, powerful unknown, completely uncontrollable by you, which you learn to dance with, and hopefully both of you survive. This is the original meaning of it. And similarly, if humor is like the flag for the bull, whereby your humor, you belittle something, you make it small enough that you can deal with it, then the virtue is, you dealt with it. At the moment, you dealt with it. If you want to be psychoanalyzed, yes, for those 20 minutes, anybody who analyzed you out would find ripe material for all kinds of Freudian and Jungian and everything else analysis. But the fact of the matter is, you dealt with it. Then after you deal with it and in time shake and shudder and talk with other people and write your reflections about it and have a belt of whisking, then after you have dealt with it and get back to the point of the development that you had reached in your character and your person, then you have the credit of having handled it.

[24:46]

in no matter what way. So I think when you see the strengths, the strengths which are there for everyone are spiritual, human, hierarchical, based on meaning, based on cohesion and love. What is that? That's religion. It's what it is. And it's the message of every faith. As a matter of fact, people hypothesize that if it weren't for the terrible problems of getting hurt, getting sick, getting old and dying, there would be no reason for any religion. Religions exist to try to help human beings deal exactly with these problems. It's a real important point. This is ancient teaching summarized Wisdom taken from Peace Corps, wisdom taken from military chaplains, it's ancient wisdom summarized and it's good for us to know it because these are our battles.

[25:57]

Our battles are the anxiety and the difficulties of the world and our battle is to try to keep bearing light. It's our battle. I want to give one more example though of when that gets lost, and especially when there's a countersign to try to put a countersign right away, because this example is about one of us. It's not just young people that take their lives. It's not just returning soldiers that take their lives. I've known six priests in my 35 years of priesthood that have taken their lives. I've known six. It's not unheard of that people take their life in priesthood or in religious communities. We are not exempt from people being so swallowed up in despair and anxiety that we are free from that. Now, I want to give the example, though, fully in this understanding.

[27:02]

All of our struggles, all of our life, are precious to God. It's the way we're made into something else. It's the way. It's not something just to get through and forget it. It's precious to God. The fact that the risen Christ, to everybody's surprise, still has all the wound marks shows Our woundedness is precious to God. The way is precious to God. And the struggles of this priest that I'm going to tell you about are precious to God. I'm not giving the story as an aberrant. You know, this is precious to God. So when I was doing my internship at St. Clair's Hospital in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, And it was my time to do surgery rotation. In other words, I was on the surgery service. There was one day that this late middle-aged white man was raced into our surgery room, and he had slit his wrist terribly, and he had drunk a gallon of what do you call that stuff?

[28:22]

Antifreeze that you put in your radiators. All right. Wasn't the first time we've seen that. But only a few minutes later, the doors of the OR opened up and we had an announcement from 1011. 1011 Fifth Avenue. That's Archbishop O'Connor's office. And the announcement was that none of us were to speak anything about anything that we see, hear, or do. All right, well that was already a sign. This was a pretty important person related to the church. In any case, we pumped his stomach and the vascular surgeons reworked his arteries and veins and gave him tons of blood and we saved him. Now, because I was the one scrubbed in, I was the one now assigned to all of his post-op care.

[29:32]

It became pretty clear to us fast that he was a priest. So, he was a priest, but he didn't know I was a priest. So, when I would come in the morning, And I bought a coffee at the corner, those little booths in the corners of New York City, those things that you roll away and roll in. You know, when I bought a coffee, I would buy him a coffee also, and I would bring it up, and buy a New York Times for him, and I would go up and dress his bandages. And he had the Liturgy of the Hours on his small table. So I said, oh, I see you have the liturgy of the hours. Are you an oblate of some order, or are you a priest? And he said, yes, I'm a priest. So I said to him, if you like, I knew he couldn't hold a book, that I knew, because it is worn. I said, if you like, I'll read the morning prayer to you.

[30:39]

He said, what I would rather like is that you read the poetry in the back of the breviary. I would rather hear the poetry. I said, fine. So I read, any favorites? Yes, this one, this one, and this one. So then I said, well, maybe I'll try to get him a book on poetry. It's a little bit thicker than what's offered in the morning prayer. So I went and I got him a book on poetry, but it built a bridge. So finally, He told me his story, and it's really a very sad story. He was from Indiana, and he grew up in the time of the Depression. His father and mother were only children, so he had no uncles and aunts. They had a farm in Indiana. It was depression time. They were losing the farm. His father worked like hell, overtime, plowing and everything else so as not to lose the farm.

[31:42]

His father had a massive heart attack and he died and they lost the farm. So his mother, they're the only two left in the family now, him and his mother. His mother takes him to Indianapolis and she puts him in a Catholic school and she spends day and night scrubbing floors all over the city in order to try to make some money during the Depression. She gets tuberculosis and she dies. So now he's in a Catholic orphanage in Indianapolis, taken care of by nuns, and when he comes to be of age, 17, 18, and 19, he's so filled with gratitude for how the Church was there for him, and the kindness of all these priests and nuns, and he asked to become a priest, and so he becomes a priest of the Diocese of Indianapolis. He's very good. He's calm. He's collected.

[32:43]

He's pious. He's sent off to Rome. He studies canon law in Rome. He comes back. He's director of the seminary, and then he's moved into the chancery, and he's the chancellor for many years. And when he was about 55 years old, he fell in love with a woman for the first time in his life. And it was a tremendous confusion for him. Tremendous. You know, in those days you went to the seminary at 13, and it was a tremendous confusion to him. And he got involved with her through a tremendous human confusion. And in it, his vocation was clarified to him. It became clear to him. This is wonderful, this is beautiful. It's also wrong. And I really feel deep in my heart, my commitment is to my vocation, it's not to this woman.

[33:45]

It wasn't a transformation from something to something else. And unfortunately, the woman, because of his position in the archdiocese, wanted money from him. And he gave her some money. This was before all the current problems. I'm talking about in the 1980s. But he gave her money. And he felt he owed her the money. And it was his own money. But he felt he owed it to her because in a way, she was just a passing story in his life. But later in time, he couldn't get out of this sending money to her. She wouldn't let him out of it. And finally, she said to him, if you don't give me the next allotment, I'm going public with this. Now, this was a crucifixion to him inside, and these are the words he said, he said, I couldn't, you have no idea what went off in my mind.

[34:47]

that I who have had every advantage and blessing from the Catholic Church and have given myself in service to the Church for all of these years was now going to be a scandal to the Catholic Church?" He said, I couldn't even think of it. So he fell into this cycle of despair and anxiety and all of his cohesions and all of his friendships. He had no anchors. So he decided to take his life where no one would know. So he got in his car, he drove to New York City, he parked at the Greyhound bus terminal, he left his keys in the car for anybody who needs a car. He told me this himself. Then he got a room at the hotel just up the street from St. Clair's. He bought razor blades. He bought this antifreeze and he went up to his room and was on the verge and he decided to go into Central Park to think about it.

[35:52]

And he went and he sat on a bench in Central Park to think about it. And then he went back to his room and he did it. And I know from the psychiatry rotation that when somebody has tried to take their life, you really want to determine right away. Did they regret what they did? In other words, is there an instinct in them, much stronger than the destructive one, that they really, the second they did it, they regretted it, and wish they hadn't? And I asked him, because what happened was, after he did it, a chambermaid came in, by chance. Really? By chance? Or was it by the archangel Raphael? Is it all by chance? I wonder if it's all by chance. But she walked in at just the moment that saving his life was possible. And I said, when you heard that door open and she bent over you, was there any part of you that was glad? And he said to me, no. In any case, Cardinal O'Connor was more than gracious to him and let him know that if he couldn't go back to Indianapolis, that he sure had a place, you know, for pastoral ministers there.

[37:08]

In other words, the cohesion and the meaning and the support and everything else, he started finding it. He went to the place for priests in St. Vincent. There's a place for priests up in the north of New York City in the county, but it's for priests with serious problems. He went there, he went there also. But the point of the story is twofold. We have to be really hyper-vigilant to the inner sufferings of people in our communities and people who come to Israel. We really have no idea. There's things people carry that they're not sharing with everybody, and they also shouldn't. But they shouldn't with somebody. We have no idea. And what haunted me about this story, I wondered in my mind, how many people sat on that bench, even for a few minutes, in the time that he sat putting his whole life in a balance. How many people sat on that bench in that time?

[38:11]

How many people even said hello to him? How many people opened up any chance for a dialogue with him? This would be pretty condemnatory of the human race. and would make a fascinating play, in fact, if all of these chances to link before this act of desperation were completely passed up, for what reason? Because it's not in the heart of people to give automatically a sign of goodness, just like, hello, how are you today? An opener of a conversation. The countersign, the sign of goodness, the very simple thing. Like I said, I only picked up his body. I didn't raise him from the dead. I didn't chain all of his killers and put them in prison. I only picked up his body. But it's something that all of us have to remember, especially with the guests who come to our retreat houses. We have no idea of the burden of people. No idea. And sometimes the simplest thing, just greeting each other.

[39:15]

How are you today? Somebody looks a little down and, you know, can I help you with anything? These are massive, you know, like whoever said, I can move the world if you give me a lever, a fulcrum. These little things are massive for us. We can't in any way underestimate them, even if we do them sheerly by ritual. How are you? How are things going? We can't underestimate them. So in the evening, I'm going to talk about what I was going to talk about. Now I flipped it. But when I said yesterday I was going to talk about invisible things, I think it's really worth looking at angels and demons and what our forebears have had to say about them, and which have been so much thrown out the window that they're entering right in the front door now. I think it's worth talking about them in order to try to understand a little bit about how our ancients told us they were.

[40:17]

Because the better we understand how they were, the better we are prepared to disarm their influence in our lives. Are there any questions? Save them up for Saturday or for the Halloween. Anybody? This will be admittedly a very strange talk if the others haven't also been. But the topic is a very strange one and I kind of hesitate to discuss it because for the same reason that Any discussion of liberation theology in the 1980s and 70s and 80s became mixed up right away with Marxism. Anytime that you even try to talk about angels or devils, the conversation gets sidetracked by people that are fanatical.

[41:26]

and people who are very eager to shirk their responsibility and blame their problems on some demon. So the conversation often degenerates to being not real and not serious. But I think that when we're discussing the inner life and when we're discussing an evaluation of what is happening in the world outside of us, I don't see how it's possible to avoid discussions of evil and demonic influence, and I also don't see how it's possible to avoid the discussion of angelic intercession and benevolence. The scriptures have no hesitation talking about either one. And our catechism has no hesitation in talking about either one.

[42:28]

But I think it's a topic that's been so pushed aside since the Vatican Council that if we don't really understand it, we see angels everywhere, even where they're not. And we see devils everywhere, where they're not. And it all gets blurred. So I think the point is the darkness, and I shall give lots of examples of it, and you see plenty of examples yourself, the darkness is also enshrouded by forces that are worse than human badness. If you take a very simple and classical approach to it. Our Catholic philosophers from the Middle Ages have always used natural law upon which to build theology, especially moral theology.

[43:38]

What we learn from nature, what's in natural law, because grace builds on nature, unfortunately so does evil. build on nature. But the arguments of natural law are always based on what you observe happening in people. I mean, I'll give you an example. From the right of a man to defend him and his three children and his wife from violent intruders comes the doctrine of legitimate self-defense. And up to a certain point, that becomes the just war theory. But when the power of war far surpasses anything natural or human, then you're talking about something else, and you have to back up from that natural law, and you have to really question whether there's such thing as the just law.

[44:46]

a just war, because defense of a person and defense of a nation always has to be in proportion to the aggression only, and it stops there. It's never more so that it's revenge and it never pulls the innocent in on it. It has to be in proportion to the aggressive. We know today that war machines, not only nuclear war, we have way too many genocides that have happened in the last 50 years, way too many to just be talking about a button and a nuclear bomb. The assaults on humans by other humans far surpasses anything that you'll see in the wilderness. which is what our natural law is based on.

[45:50]

You'll never see animals trying to exterminate a whole species of their own or a subspecies of their own or another species. It doesn't happen in nature. There's something more to this that has deep, deep desire for destruction, total destruction. which is just deeper than human sin. So the forces which are against God and against life very easily hitchhike onto aggressive human tendencies in order to head the whole thing to the kinds of things that we have seen in the last hundred and 15 years because as we rounded the bend on the millennium everybody was quite clear and horrified that from 1900 to 1999 was the most violent epic in all of human history and the people who died by wars and exterminations far surpassed

[47:07]

victims of war in all previous wars ever fought. There's something really wrong with that. For sure, people get sick emotionally. For sure, people get sick psychiatrically. And for sure, it happens that an evil force takes advantage of their debilitation and their twistedness just to hold them and keep them there. This friend of mine who I mentioned, who is in Columbia Presbyterian Psych Hospital, I'm sure, as I can possibly be sure, that his state was a lot more than a breakdown of a highly functional neurotic. And Monsignor SF in Scranton, who was an exorcist, gave the name of the demons that were assaulting him.

[48:20]

It doesn't mean he doesn't need a psychiatrist. It doesn't mean he doesn't need therapy. It doesn't mean he doesn't need medicine. This is where we have to stay reasonable and real about it. But it means there's something else there that if he is not free of it, he doesn't stand a chance. I have a double major from college a long time ago, math and philosophy. For my philosophy dissertation, more more out of curiosity than anything else, I defended the existence of Satan. And the arguments in philosophy are either a priori or a posteriori. Either you start with something everybody knows and deduce the conclusion,

[49:24]

Or you start with what everybody sees, and then come up with the simplest, most logical explanation, because truth is finally simple. And the a posterior one, I still remember the argument, it had to do with the great kingdom being postulized by Aristotle first, and then Thomas Aquinas and the other Christian philosophers, that if we see infinite variations of beings from the simplest one-celled creature under a microscope, all kinds of gradients up to us, that it doesn't make sense that from us to God it's just an abyss, but that there would be creatures of intelligence and will who don't have bodies in their various degrees. I'm only telling you the argument And in philosophy, for example, if there are beings of intelligence and will, in philosophy there is no such thing as potential.

[50:37]

For something to be true, it has to have happened once. So you can't have free will and nobody ever violated it. It has to have happened once that somebody exercised free will in a contrary way. And by these rules of traditional Aristotelian and to mystic philosophy, if there is a non-corporeal being who has intellect and will, there has to be at least one of them that chose against God, which of course in our tradition is Lucifer. It's a weak argument. A posteriori means you start with things that you can't explain, and you look for the simplest possible explanation. So, for example, if you come in here in the morning and two of these chairs are turned over, and one of the brothers suggests, maybe an elephant came in here last night and knocked them over, you have way too much explaining to do in order to legitimize that.

[51:48]

The simplest answer is the truest answer because truth is one and it's simple. So off I went to Holy Cross College, the Jesuit college in Worcester, where I was at Assumption College in Worcester, and started going through all the Jesuit recorded history of their exorcists. We also have a few exorcists among the Passionists. Father Enzo, who's with me now, one of them who died recently, was in this province and has lots of stories about this exorcism. I'm not talking about the dime-a-dozen sensation kind of people that are speaking in tongues and driving devils out and then stopping at McDonald's on the way home. I'm talking about people that get involved in these things and come away terrified and wounded. That's what I'm talking about. And it happens. So in the studies of the exorcisms of the Jesuits, and they crossed many generational lines, they crossed many territorial lines, they crossed many cultural lines, they crossed many class lines, but there's something that they all had in common.

[53:14]

One, of course, was absolutely loathing of anything of God, an absolute blasphemy of anything of God. But there were others that had to be present for this to be considered an exorcism. For example, counter natural events the person goes in the air and you have to hold him down they speak languages they couldn't possibly know like ancient Babylonian and when they get somebody from the university who speaks ancient Babylonian and understands it they're speaking fluent ancient Babylonian and what they're saying is absolutely blasphemous against the Most High. They know things they can't know.

[54:22]

They know what the exorcist is thinking. They know what happened between the exorcist and his mother when he was six years old. They scream these things out. It's a combination of things. I don't remember all of them, to be honest with you, but it's a pretty scary combination, and these things happen. I remember when I was studying at our Jamaica monastery, we had a bowling team and I was on it. You know, the brothers, we had a team, and we bowled in a parish league. And there was kind of a lady that hung around the bowling alley, looked kind of like a witch to me. Spooky and disheveled. And she came to see me one day and she said that ever since her grandmother died, her house is haunted. That all these terrible nightmares, these terrible dreams, the doors open and close.

[55:29]

And she asked me if I would come over and bless it. Sure, I was 24 years old, beautiful tan from my tennis games, nice and strong from working out, and didn't believe in that kind of thing. So sure, I was gay. The night I was going to her house, I forget exactly who was at the table, but we had 60 in the community, so whenever you sat down to a meal, you had a wide range of, you had people that had trotted the globe in the Second World War, and others who had been missionaries in China, and Philippines, and everywhere else, and I just mentioned in a real youthful, cocky way, Oh, guess what I'm going to do after supper? What? I'm going to go drive a devil out of somebody's house. Well, the looks that I got from the older guys and the stories that they started to tell me of their own experience scared the life out of me.

[56:30]

And I went over there like a timid little puppy ready to pee in any second if I even heard a strange noise in order to try to help them and I was of no help according to this witch who I kept seeing on Thursday nights but later some years later when I really believed in this stuff going in and out of Haiti there was a customs an agent that I always saw going in and out immigration and I just got to know her casually over the years and there came a time when she said, I really need your help. I don't know how to explain it. I really need your help. So I made an appointment to see her. and it was a long really a long terrible story of a very abusive husband who was visiting all the brothels around all the time and would come back drunk and beat the hell out of her and then have sex with her and he got AIDS he died of AIDS she took care of him while he was dying he was villainous tortured at the very end and as a legacy he left her AIDS and since

[57:48]

since he died she had no rest in that house no peaceful moment in that house and she wanted the house blessed but the thing that absolutely terrified her was she had a nightmare one night I don't remember the details of the nightmare but her daughters, her two daughters in their separate bedrooms came running into her because they all were having the same nightmare simultaneously, the exact same nightmare simultaneously. Anyway, I went over and did what the older people have done in our generations, you talk to God, you talk to the devil, you talk to the people present, you say prayers to God, you say prayers with the people present, you tell the spirit, it has no place here, You use the holy water and incense and blessings, and then you hope for the best, but it worked.

[58:55]

Was it a placebo? I don't know. Was it a real thing? I don't know. But the first one didn't work, and that worked, and our Lord Himself said, when the apostles weren't so great at it, this one takes a lot of preparation, a lot of prayer, and a lot of fasting. So I personally don't discount at all. I'm certainly not one to run and say it's the devil that did it, it's the devil that's in there. It's not at all. But I surely believe it's a ferocious mistake to think that the evil that we see around us in its increasing increments And the debaseness of what is in it is simple human violence gone wrong. I think we're really wrong to think that.

[59:56]

We're hearing these readings about Oscar Romero. Father Don said to me today that before Cardinal George died, he said, my successor will be in prison, and his successor will be martyred. What is he seeing? He's seeing that the same concentration of wealth in El Salvador, and then all the violations of privacy and rights that come from it, and the wrenching path that had to be followed in order to confront it, is happening here. The wealth of the whole United States is in the hands of 5% of the population. 5%! And it's very often pretext to scare us to death, scare us to death of each other, that all the violations are happening of everybody's personal information, private rights, that we're all being followed by our telephone, you know, where we are by our telephones, and emails are being read and calls are being listened to in massive...

[61:09]

It's control. And sooner or later the church here is going to have to stand up to that, the same way that the church has stood up to it in El Salvador and in other places. It's insidious. And we have to be ready for the insidious backlash that comes. Even these peaceful, serene places are not going to be peaceful and serene when it gets to this level. in the United States. We have to see what's happening. We have to have our eyes open. We have to understand the insidiousness of the evil. We have to pray against it. In our hymn tonight, there was a beautiful prayer. Don't let the evil thoughts mix with our thoughts. Don't let an evil spirit mix with our spirits. You say it every night after Kaplan, it's the angels to protect this house and keep us safe from the influence of evil. We can't back off from that.

[62:12]

Nobody even knows it anymore. I mean, before, the understanding of angelology and demonology was something very important for religious people to learn and understand. Yes, you can look at it in different terms that are more modern and different ways of looking at it. You don't need the medieval code in order to understand it. But the important thing is, in the same way that the ancient desert fathers and mothers knew psychiatry better than psychiatrists today do, Just because it's in an old form, you can't ignore it, because it's not in a new form, which prefers a medicine for every solution, because that keeps a whole multi-billion dollar business going, when you solve everything by medicine. It's something we really have to be really, really aware of. So, and for the angel part of things,

[63:15]

I don't know who can deny that very often a turn in the road is not an accident, or a sudden thought that saves the day just happened to come from the digestion of potatoes you just ate. I don't know who can deny this influence of light. And to give the example To give the example that we're being pushed forward by entropy, the use of energy, and pulled ahead by entropy, to give that example is almost a way of being able to justify scientifically that we are being helped from yesterday to today by a lot more hands than we have any idea, and we are being pulled from today to tomorrow by a lot more hands than we have any idea of.

[64:26]

For me to deny that is to deny the resurrection. For me to deny that is to deny the community of saints. To deny that is to say, well, what's my mother and father doing up there? if it's not to be part of the church before God helping the church on earth in all of its struggles. What is your aunt doing up there? What is your little nephew who died at six years old doing up there if it's not to be part of this great body of light and moving things forward into the kingdom of God? If it's not that, what is it? But we are being led and we are being guided and we're also being derailed. And even those powers are at war among themselves, for as it's in itself. I don't know how to deny it. But I also know it's not something that you can talk about too easily, because the conversation will get derailed.

[65:29]

But I think keeping everything in its perspective, that a demonic possession is enormously rare, And when you fill all those criterion that there's no other explanation for, you have it. And it's similar to what the church does related to apparitions of the Blessed Mother. They're not going to run and say the Blessed Mother is appearing in Medjugorje. They're going to listen to the message. They're going to study the message. Is this consistent with everything of every appearance that we confirm? Is it consistent with the message that has come before? And the message has to end before it can be evaluated. It can't just keep going on and [...] on like it is in Medjugorje. The Church can't pronounce on it until it ends. But it's rare. It's probably thousands of supposed apparitions to one that the Church says, this is the real thing.

[66:35]

It's the same. We have to allow for it without being strange about it, but we have to allow for it. And our prayers against evil and our intercessory prayers for the good have to be very real for us and very real for the people that we're serving. I've started a practice myself of For example, we had two people executed only three weeks ago, not even 50 yards from our hospital, and a 14-year-old girl pulled into the bushes, raped, and her throat was cut. These were like two days apart, and it's not three weeks ago. And, you know, to say, let's pray for them, is just to mumble off the Hail Mary.

[67:37]

And I have really, in my own practice, have started, before I'll utter a word, I place myself with them at the time, in my imagination. It's not imagination in the sense that they are dead and that happened to them, but it's imagination in the sense that I put myself there and in my mind when I put themselves there it's to really see their torment and to feel also what it's like this kind of violence and frightful ending because from really understanding I can I'll say a real prayer not just mumbling the Hail Mary saying a prayer of regret My God, you know, like we say, I'm sorry for all my sins with the help of God. Yes. Exactly.

[68:47]

Exactly. And with all the mysteries, exactly, and with all the mysteries, it's exactly it. Yeah. And this was part using active imagination in prayer it's imagination because you're not really there but it's not imagination because it really happened but using active imagination links you and so you regret like in my case I regret and I lament what happened to them and in the Jewish tradition of prayer as supposed to be healing of the soul tikum nafesh and healing of the world. Tikkun olam. It's what our prayer is supposed to be. Healing of the soul and healing of the world. then I try with my focus to pray for that soul and that God-awful ending and how confused their spirit must be until covered by light and led to God.

[69:51]

But I want to be part of the invoking of light for that poor person and part of asking God to forgive us for what we're doing and asking the powers of heaven to help us to get out of this kind of a thing. But this kind of praying, it's a prayer, a way of praying, it's suffering, because you enter into it, and it torments you. But this is the kind of prayer that's necessary, especially in our world today. Here, for me, here are some real important points. There are lots of things that give us joy, there are lots of things that don't. The dark is really dark and influenced by other powers. What are the signs that we're on the right path?

[70:53]

And the signs are often very clear. It says, for example, I forget if it's in the Book of Wisdom now, Or if it's one of the Psalms. It's in one of the Psalms. When they walk through the bitter valley, they make it a place of springs. And they walk with ever-growing strength. Look at Oscar Romero just from the reading today. He doesn't know what to do, but he starts using all church properties so that the people that are doing the migrant work are not on the streets, they're inside at least. And then he starts ordering meals for them so that they can have something to eat. He walks through the bitter valley and it becomes a place of springs. And as you continue to go through his story, he's not ever weakening. He's growing with ever-growing strength.

[71:56]

This is absolutely the sign. Who can miss it? What I really would like to tie this to, because I think it makes a lot of sense, I guess it's because my life is so much with the dead, so much with the dead, piles and piles and piles of them, and sometimes I joke, but of course it's Galileo's humor, that I've been in the presence of more dead bodies than I have in the presence of living people. And there's not a lot of exaggeration in that. But I wonder where their soul is, if they're confused and wandering. Pope John Paul, before he died, kept begging everybody, pray for me. Don't say he's a holy pope. Pray for me. The moment of death is a dangerous time. Please pray for me when I die. Well, John Henry Newman wrote a phenomenal poem or story

[72:58]

in a mystical vision of his called the dream of Gerontius. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. Gerontology is medicine for old people, the science of old people, just like pediatrics is for young people. So Gerontius just means the dream of the old man, the dream of the one who's at the natural stage for dying. It's really phenomenal, it's really really phenomenal and so insightful about the world we don't see and this man is blessed in the church and this man has astounding writings and this man's opinion is highly respected and so I don't think that the dream of Gerontius is suddenly an aberrant an aberrant revelation or teaching, but if you haven't read it, the soul of this man starts sinking and going, and the soul speaks a lot, very, very telling about

[74:14]

dying and detachment but almost right away when he's starting to feel this detachment he says I feel suddenly that I'm not falling but that I'm moving and I'm being carried and there have been a few times in my life that I have felt this of being carried And it seems to me this is the same, whoever was carrying me then, this is the same carrier as of now. In other words, the angel guardian for you since the time of your birth and creation, all the way through to the end. So he has, that angel speaks. Listen to what the angel says. The angel says, This is just a little part of what the angel says, by the way.

[75:17]

The angel says, my work is done as I bring this blessed piece of clay to the hands of Almighty God. My job has been to serve and to save, to rear and to train by sorrow and pain in the narrow way that leads from earth to heaven by setting right the balance in his heart that weighs truth and weighs sin. And then the angel says to God, Praised are you in the wonders of all of your works, but none more wonderful than the human being whose fleshy heart you change by a dreary and lifelong fray, transforming this composite of earth and heaven into something higher than the angels.

[76:32]

This is exactly the description of what our life's journey is. And really, really fascinatingly, As they go towards God, they go through what is called these choirs of angelicals. They're different levels of angels who are higher than guardian angels because they have never dirtied themselves or their time with human beings. And as you get higher and higher, there's like five levels of angelicals. I didn't say evangelicals, angelicals. And as they're going up through every... there's dialogue between the guardian angel and the angelicals, and the soul and the angelicals, and it's all so revealing. But there's two fascinating things. When they get really near the throne of God, probably up to the fifth angelicals, when they're really near, It's a place of demons.

[77:36]

And he says to the soul, this is their last chance. And they are going to be merciless. This is their last chance. They will fill you with doubt. They will fill you with cynicism. They're going to bring every horrible memory up to you and throw it in your face and it's all going to be at you all at once in one big moment. This is their last chance and they're drooling and they're sharpening their teeth and they're not going to let up on you. This is their last chance. Close your ears, don't listen to them. Close your eyes, just cling to me. Don't listen to them. If you even start listening to them, you're lost. And so, through they go. Before they get to the last angel, the angel to which the guardian angel will deliver, Giratius, he gives his own community his own community gossip about all the other angels.

[78:42]

Before he lets this guy go, he says, I want to tell you something about these angelicals. He says, I wouldn't in a million years want to be one of them. Not in a million years. They don't know the glory of the human struggle. They don't know it. They sit in these realms of just endless glory and singing, more glorious, more glorious, more glorious, but they don't know the human realm, and I wouldn't turn it in for anything. And then, the grand finale, so to speak, is He hands the soul, to the guardian angel of Christ, who was the angel that consoled Christ in the Garden of Eden. In other words, the one who the most understood the blending of human and divine, and all of the torments, and all the dangers, and all the pain, and all the glory, higher than all the evangelicals, is the guardian angel of Christ.

[79:55]

And this is the one to whom he He hands over our Lord. So, you know, like I said, you know, this morning when I was going to talk tonight, it's a talk about invisible things. But invisible doesn't mean not real. Hope is invisible. what could be more necessary, what could be more obvious than when somebody is in hope. There are invisible things that I think with the problems that we have in the world, religious people for sure, not just by our baptism but by our consecrations, religious people for sure should really get this and really be conversant in it and and wise in it and use it, use this understanding in our prayer and in the way that we help other people.

[80:56]

So tomorrow in the morning, which is the last session, I'd like to talk just a little bit more about the importance of the countersign. In the morning I was, you know, really the point was, I'm talking about my own community. We really should say hello to each other. We really should hold the door open for each other. We really should help each other carry things. We really should say, geez, you look like you're having trouble today. Do you want to talk about anything? We don't have to cry into anybody's life. But the little things mean a lot, a lot. and are a fulcrum sometimes for the whole life of a person without us knowing it. And tomorrow in the morning I want to give another example of that, a really important example of it. And then I'll give a brief summary of what I tried to do for these days, and then if there's any questions, we'll have them.

[82:00]

Are there any other questions now? Okay. Aum. It's very close. Well, that's it.

[83:20]

I'll just give an example. I think for sure, every time you pray, you can't do that intensely. You wouldn't survive a day. But I think that if something hits you really hard, a news you hear about the world... I'll give you a simple example. We have a school for disabled children. And not long ago, a lot of these kids, their parents are so poor, the only way to get them back and forth is on a motorcycle. Motorcycle and wheelbarrow are the taxis of the poor people. And there were three of them, three parents kicked in for one motorcycle. And here you have these kids who can't see, can't hear, and can't hold on, that are on this motorcycle taxi. And there was an accident. And the tire, because the motorcycle is so old and the driver is so poor and he can't even change his tires, the tire blew out and he and all these children were, you know, thrown off into the middle of the street.

[84:42]

But of course, he's not disabled and he was able. to get up and get out of the way, but they weren't. I'm just giving it as an example. When I found out about it because my office is right next to the emergency room and all of a sudden these kids came in and I asked what happened, where are they from and they were from my school and I learned what happened and I saw them. Now of the thousands of terrible things that happened that day or however many they were, this one really got to me, really got to me. Because they're already at such an unfair end of everything as it is, and to see them like this, and trying to explain it, they don't even know how to talk, and they're trying to point, and they're trying... So this... I practically smothered. you know, thinking about it later, I practically smothered, I couldn't even get my breath, like this massive panic attack, I almost smothered. Now, for me, this is a sign, for me, this deserves a special prayer.

[85:47]

This is hitting you a very strong way, this deserves a special prayer from you. Not every prayer, not everybody that comes in, there's tons of disasters, but that hit me. So, for example, If it hit you, what happened to those university students in Iraq just before Easter, in your prayer you go to that room and you picture and Nowadays you don't even need the help. Go to the internet and call up that scene and you'll see the pictures right on the internet. But put yourself there with all of the insecurity and the terror and the fear and the regret and the sadness and from there say a prayer. But I think it's a matter of being willing to be called to a prayer that is that personal. It turns you upside down. without it being all the time, but just see. If there's any news you hear or see that you really think is hitting you in a way that other news doesn't, use the occasion to try to enter into it and pray from that thing.

[87:00]

But I agree, you can't do it all the time, it's impossible. That's how I do it though. uh uh Thank you. I can understand that. Because even an internet depiction of it doesn't shock you like three dimensions.

[88:03]

I can understand that. I never thought of that in fact, but I can understand it.

[88:09]

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