Transcription
And he says, "Uh, Father, I knew this may be a trivial question to the normal questions you receive, but if you have a certain attachment to a sin, could you explain how to get rid of this attachment?"
"Not a trivial question at all. No, not at all. Well, meditation, well, prayer to begin with. I'll be using meditation support, prayer, but, uh, prayer to start. Meditation, asking God, 'Deliver me, please, O Lord, from this weakness which is offensive to Thee, dangerous to my soul, and scandalous to those around me.' Pray that. Pray, 'God, please God, give me the grace to overcome this.' Whether it be a quick temper, whether it be laziness, right? Whether it be taking liberties in matters of impure thoughts or images, or, um, just loose speech and criticizing other people. It can be any number of things, right? But if people recognize they have this fault, and especially as a great fault and gives great scandal, well, the more reason why they, they should actually spend time each day praying to God for deliverance from this. And then meditating upon the opposite virtue: patience, right? And, um, uh, custody of the tongue, custody of the eyes, right? All of these things are good. And to, to ponder over what we read in sacred scripture about our Lord and His example. Our Lord says, 'Follow me. Follow me. If you wish to come after me, you'll have to be taking your cross every day and follow me.' As a matter of fact, our Lord actually says, 'Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am meek and humble of heart, and there you will find rest for your souls.' That's what He says. So He says, 'Take my yoke.' Well, His yoke is the cross, right? So He, in other places, He says, 'Take my cross and follow me. If you do not take your cross every day and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.' So our Lord is telling us, 'This is the yoke I want you to carry, and I want you to follow my example.' That He starts out with meekness and humility at heart, which is the fundamental starting point for anybody who wants to overcome any fault, because he has to admit that he's, he is at fault, right? He has to admit he has their weakness. So that's a good place to start. But then our Lord says, 'And he will find rest for your souls.' And, uh, our Lord tells us, 'There's the remedy there.' Yeah, there's the remedy in this. So, but, uh, to take some time each day, some say 15 minutes in mental prayer, meditating on things like that. Okay, what am I lacking? I take it to my Lord. I take it to God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost. And, um, I invoke the Saints in heaven to go with me to God in prayer, to join their prayers to mine, and asking for this grace to overcome this. And then I spend time to meditate, meditating about our Lord's life and where He manifested these virtues of patience, of circumspection in speech, even with, you know, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, how He dealt with sinners, right? Uh, so many things in our Lord's life. Everything in our Lord's life may be speaking of virtue. And so there's no virtue we can't find practiced by our Lord that is not edifying to ourselves. So to meditate on that, think about our Lord's example, how we can follow it, how we can, in the practical order, follow that example. Here, we can even think about the things that come up in daily life, because for the most part, it's, it's not as though every day we live a different life. I mean, the same things came up over and over again, right? And you're going to find the same, the same things, the same need for patience. The same spouse you married isn't going to be undergoing, uh, necessarily great transformation overnight. So you can expect the same issues to come up. Same boss, right? Same highway and the drivers on the same highway, and all the same things. You know, we can even single out, okay, this is what, um, this is what I'm usually tempted the most. This is when I most often fall. Okay, and I'm asking God now to deliver me from this, and I'm looking at my Lord's own example in, in how He deals with this, and I want to learn from His example. So what practical, you know, takeaway can I have from how I should deal with this question, uh, with this particular situation? And, uh, you know, they're going to get answers. They're actually going to get very practical answers as to what they can do to change the things, uh, how they deal with things, and therefore change the outcome. How to respond differently, with a different tone of voice, or how not to respond, yeah, at all. I'm not saying that God will give them a script to follow, but he might. He might give them an actual script to follow. This is what I want you to do. This is how I want you to handle it. And then going forward, well, finishing the meditation, they give thanks to God, right? They make a point of the things that they, they'd learned. Okay, I have practical resolutions now. I'm going to deal with these things. And as Saint Catherine LaVare said, if she had nothing come back, nothing concrete, she thanked God because she said, "Well, that's exactly what she deserved." So she wasn't upset about it. She said, just at that moment, she wasn't getting specific answers to her very specific questions, but she knew that God wasn't ignoring her. He was just answering her in a different way. In any case, what always ends by thanking God for His indulgence, and, uh, and then making some practical resolutions, and, uh, going out to put them into practice.