JD Vance, Thomas Aquinas, and the Ordo Amoris | Fr. Gregory Pine & Fr. Patrick Briscoe

April 17, 2025

This transcription was generated using AI technology. Please note that there may be errors or inconsistencies.

00:00:05:16 – 00:00:27:22

This is Father Patrick, and this is Father Gregory Pine. Welcome to Godsplaining thanks to all who support us. If you enjoy our podcast, please consider making a monthly donation to us on Patreon that makes our project possible and otherwise. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts. Father Gregory, I know that you are a man of order.

00:00:28:00 – 00:00:53:21

In your life. Thank you. And I’ve seen that. It’s the years that we’ve. And I’ve been moved by the way you organize your schedule. And I think that, in part that has brought, a certain amount of productivity, lots of freedom. I hope so. Yeah. You know, it’s it’s funny, like you want to.

00:00:54:01 – 00:01:17:00

I mean, maybe you don’t want to, but I want to plan my life well enough, but not too well, because ultimately, order is in the service of spontaneity. Because it’s like, what’s the point? The point is to be with to be with God, to be with each other. There’s like no other point. And if your schedule makes it such that it’s hard for you to be with, to be with God and to be with each other, then it seems a little bit silly.

00:01:17:01 – 00:01:34:19

It’s like, wait a second. You mean to tell me that you’re treating life like a series of tasks to be accomplished? Well, that’s that’s not quite the fact or that’s not quite the case. So I like to plan such that I can get the things done that need to be done so that when I’m with the people or even when the people interrupt, I can be present to them.

00:01:34:21 – 00:01:56:06

Sometimes I succeed. A lot of times I fail. But here we are on the way, like Ed Sheeran and Castle on the Hill. We all order our lives. This is the point that I wanted to make. Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. Because everyone has to prioritize. Yep. Something over another. Right. Because otherwise, life is full of impossibilities.

00:01:56:10 – 00:02:17:15

Right. Things don’t get. I don’t know if you remember a couple years back. And by a couple of years, I mean, way back when we were in the studio. Yeah. A very popular viral video called weeping because she couldn’t get over it. I do, I remember that because if Father Innocent Smith just can’t. You can’t hug every cat.

00:02:17:16 – 00:02:45:15

Yeah. And, he was a great proponent of this. Yeah, exactly. It’s a very funny video. Friends, if you have not seen this video. To spend the time watching. Exactly. Sacred study. Yeah. The reason I like the video is because it makes this point that it is in fact impossible to hug. Yeah. And it drives home in a pretty stark way.

00:02:45:17 – 00:03:07:11

To several just right aspects of our life of human beings were finite. It would have been possible for Noah to hug every cat. Let’s just let’s just say that that’s a peculiarity of the of the present kitty dispensation. Yeah. Just just to say. Okay, keep going. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Now, the cats have repopulated the earth.

00:03:07:13 – 00:03:34:09

Nice. Not to be antediluvian. Thank you. Now that now that there are many cats and our lives are what they are. I like to find it. And we always make decisions about what we’re going to invest in and what is or isn’t worth our attention. Yep. Or frankly, our time. As we were discussing at the top of the episode, this came to a head in recent, discourse in the United States.

00:03:34:11 – 00:04:00:21

The phrase yeah is just Latin for the order of life. You could have said any words that you wanted right there, and many of us would have believed you. You could have been like Auto Maurice, which is Latin for cat hugging schema. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s Latin for or just nice. Yeah. Which is Latin for hugging.

00:04:00:23 – 00:04:33:19

Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Just as long as we get back there. The cats all the way down. Latin for the order of love, is a throwback to a, longstanding. Yeah, understanding of how love works in life. So I wonder if you might impact where the order or Maurice or the order of Love’s comes from. Yeah. So this is the type of thing where you can pick a little outpost in the Christian tradition and then make little sorties or skirmishes from your outpost, both forward and backward.

00:04:33:21 – 00:04:57:00

One might say, except that it’s like a happy fortress. It’s like a fortress populated almost exclusively by cats. Open it with open kitty policy. So you encounter this in pretty decent fashion. I was hoping to use the word pleasant today. I said the word of the day. Yeah, exactly. I open up my browser. I said, use pleasant and we will reward you with Bitcoin.

00:04:57:00 – 00:05:19:08

And I was like, yes. So we we get it in Saint Augustine. But I think it comes in the tradition perhaps most powerfully through Saint, Saint Thomas Aquinas. So I think that the formulation of the terms Ordo Maurice might in fact come first from Saint Augustine, but then you have subsequent, you know, folks within the Christian tradition engaging with this notion.

00:05:19:10 – 00:05:37:01

And then it comes to a kind of prominence or it comes to a classic expression in Saint Thomas Aquinas. That’s not to say, though, that it doesn’t have a history or a kind of genealogy which anticipates Saint Augustine, because obviously, Saint Augustine, you know, he’s he’s original in certain senses or he’s novel in his doctrine in some ways.

00:05:37:03 – 00:05:57:11

But he’s relying upon the truths of our human condition, the truths of God, God’s revelation and grace. And he’s representing those or kind of offering those and new in a novel context. So you can see this idea of the order of Morris, you know, from, from the dawn of time, from the mists of our ancient pre-history.

00:05:57:12 – 00:06:14:00

And I think that one of the places in which we see it is in the Old Testament and specifically in the first chapters of the Old Testament and the book of Genesis, where we hear about creation and fall. But there’s this idea that we’re made for things like us. Right. So you can think about Adam in the garden.

00:06:14:00 – 00:06:33:10

He has this responsibility of naming or this responsibility of differentiating amongst the beasts. And he knows that these things aren’t me or these things aren’t like me. But then when he sees Eve at last, here is one who is flesh, my flesh bone of my bone, and he recognizes her as a kind of helpmate, as a kind of sustainer, as the word is sometimes rendered.

00:06:33:12 – 00:06:48:15

And that has that place as a claim on him, or kind of has demands, written into it, which then play out throughout the course of his life in the life of the human race. So I think, you know, you can focus on Saint Augustine in the doctrinal expression, in its kind of maturity with Saint Thomas Aquinas.

00:06:48:15 – 00:07:10:21

Or you can think about biblical or even more broadly, kind of historical roots. In Saint Augustine, he mentions it, or introduces it, if I’m not mistaken, in the city of God is this understanding of the order of more fundamentally, a politically, political idea is a fundamentally politically grounded. Yeah. Logical idea that gets weaponized. Or is it neither of those things?

00:07:10:23 – 00:07:38:17

Yeah. I tend to think, like, if I were to choose one word ending in iCal, I would choose philosophical, and maybe anthropological. Yeah. No, I wouldn’t. Exactly. Yeah. What? What is the ethical form of cat? For clinical. No, that’s just sounds weird. So, you would think about it in these terms, basically all of being all it is inclines to things like it.

00:07:38:19 – 00:07:58:03

And you might think that’s just so abstract that it’s entirely unhelpful. Well, welcome to my world. But but I think obviously we’re consulting our own experience in these matters and trying to make sense of that experience. And and each thing seeks to beget and seeks to preserve and seeks to build up things like itself.

00:07:58:05 – 00:08:21:08

So, let’s start with plants. Plants reproduce. And when they reproduce, they reproduce plants of the same sort. And you might think like, well, that’s a kind of uninteresting genetic claim. I mean, fine. I’m all for uninteresting genetic claims. But nevertheless, there’s a kind of philosophical logic that’s written in things produce things like like themselves. Even though plants aren’t conscious.

00:08:21:13 – 00:08:38:14

They are, as it were, invested in the propagation of their species. And so too you can think with animals, and so too with men. And when it comes to us, when it comes to human beings, it’s not just a matter of mere crass procreation, like more things like us. But we have a way of cultivating things after our own image.

00:08:38:14 – 00:09:07:12

We have a way of like bringing all of creation within our dominion. Again, not as like imperialists or colonialists, but in the sense of, like, tenders to the garden as, as it were, gardeners of creation who like to build things up in human fashion or build things up to a kind of human likeness or image. And there are, you know, further things to be said, but each thing acts or brings about effects like unto itself as part of the outworking of its perfection, or part of the upbuilding of its culture.

00:09:07:14 – 00:09:29:04

So that’s just something that we see that’s philosophical. And obviously there are theological and social and political directions that we can take that claim, but it has deep roots, metaphysical roots. Does Plato or Aristotle talk about this idea? They do. I’m not really good with things other than Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Philadelphia 76 years in the Philadelphia Eagles.

00:09:29:05 – 00:09:48:15

Except insofar as I’ve happened upon them, you know, like, usually in the midst of some 2 a.m. night madness driven, wild exploration. So my suspicion is that you’ll find something like this in Aristotle. The places where you might look would be the Nicomachean Ethics or the politics. But but like this identification of man as a political animal that comes to us from Aristotle.

00:09:48:16 – 00:10:15:06

Saint Thomas adds social animal. But Aristotle has something to say. Even more simply says, man’s a conjugal animal, like we’re made for pair bonding. Were made for family life. All right. And just as soon as you start thinking about family life, you’re thinking about the families that build up, the polities that build up the cities, which have a kind of character and have a kind of integrity and then can lay claim to our allegiance in a way distinct from the way that other cities can lay claim to our allegiance.

00:10:15:08 – 00:10:37:09

So already, if not the actual enunciation of it, you have the principles for it. Well, that’s true with that. Then to somebody we do know a lot about. Good old time, my man. I was just browsing the other day and I want I want to dive in because I think it’s really worth parsing. What’s the stages of the Ordo a more.

00:10:37:11 – 00:10:57:08

But what the rings of the of are doing if we want to think about that. Yeah. Concentric rings. All of these images I think and descriptions will become clear to listeners as we really begin the exploration. So, Father Gregory, if you could take us through, unpack for us what the basic understanding of the order of love is according to Saint Thomas?

00:10:57:10 – 00:11:19:07

Yes. Saint Thomas talks about love on a kind of analogy. That’s a weird way of describing things. But for him, love means distinct phenomena. The most basic expression is just the recognition of something like me and me. In this case, it might be a man, it might be an animal, might be a plant. But we love those things which correspond to our nature and in our experience the most.

00:11:19:08 – 00:11:39:23

One of the most basic expressions of that is like our passions or our emotions. You know, so when we find some sense good out there in the wild, that corresponds, whether it be, you know, like a Chipotle burrito or whether it be, the sound of pleasant music, you know, we’re going to inclined to it because we love it, because it corresponds, it fulfills, it perfects.

00:11:40:01 – 00:11:58:15

But then he’ll go beyond that and describe what he calls dyslexia, which is love with a choice. So that’s a more like a less bodily, more spiritual expression of love. And effectively, what we’re describing there is benevolence and beneficence. I will the good. All right. I do the good for the object of my love, for the object of my affection.

00:11:58:17 – 00:12:20:18

And then beyond that, we’ve identified charity, which is a virtue which God himself bestows, which he infuses, which we can’t create of our own willpower. Or like, with our own resources, but that we can kind of unpack or cooperate with over the course of our life. And then beyond that, we can talk about friendship, which is a kind of stable state in which I choose your good.

00:12:20:18 – 00:12:40:23

You choose my good. We do so on the basis of some shared life. Okay. So love is a kind of response like, in the most basic sense, dyslexia is a kind of choice. Caritas is or like charity is a kind of gift. And then friendship is a kind of stable state. So when Saint Thomas talks about the order of love, he’s actually talking about the order of Charity.

00:12:41:01 – 00:13:02:05

All right. Now we can describe it for these lower order loves. But he wants to describe it for this highest order love, because it’s most urgent for our salvation. And it also is brings the principles and the arguments out to most, kind of vivid or brilliant expression. So for him, it’s so what he’s thinking about first is, you know, who do I love?

00:13:02:05 – 00:13:23:11

I love God as the source of charity, as the end of my entire life’s trajectory. But I also love others, and I love them on the basis of the fact that they are made by the same creator, redeemed by the same Redeemer, and they are destined for the same life of divine beatitude. And so I can see in them one who pertains, one who belongs to God, one whom God loves.

00:13:23:11 – 00:13:47:21

And insofar as I love God, I love those whom God loves. But I can also like introduce into this equation a certain affinity, a certain basis for stronger or weaker love, which takes into account my actual humanity, like who I am and what I’m about, because it’s not insignificant. We’re not called to an abstract love or a kind of equal opportunity love for all, whatever, 8 billion people on the surface of the earth.

00:13:47:23 – 00:14:18:09

We’re called to love in a way that’s organic, that’s human, and to be human is to be embodied, to be limited, to experience our life in time, to have to go through like discursive, progressive steps of unpacking. And that’s going to relate us, interact us with certain people more and other people’s less. And so for him, he treats it in the treatise on Charity after describing charity itself, and then like the act of charity or excuse me, whatever, but then he’ll talk about the subject of charity, the order of charity, before then going into a bunch of other considerations which need not detain us here.

00:14:18:11 – 00:14:39:13

But for him it’s a matter of like, all right, I want to love God, and I want to love those whom God entrusts me. But how do I identify how God is entrusting them to me? And what are like the notes of that, or what are the features that I can pick out? Yeah, I think this is overwhelming in it because again, you can easily go from, okay, so for Saint Thomas Aquinas, loving God is the heart of what it means to love that.

00:14:39:13 – 00:15:05:23

So that’s you know, that’s what life is for this, this spilling out, of return rather of God’s love to himself. And so the temptation then can be to say, well, every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, I must love every fellow traveler with that same love. Yeah. And I think it’s a it’s very understandable how people begin to spell out that equation.

00:15:06:01 – 00:15:25:10

And it has a kind of truth to it. Yeah. But it needs to be qualified. And I think that’s what the what the order of loves helps us to do, to begin to navigate how how that, how that equation can be fundamentally true. And then how it could be possible to love, as you alluded to, every human being.

00:15:25:12 – 00:15:47:14

Yeah. And so, like, you know, we hear in the gospel that we’re called to love our enemies. Okay, so it seems that there is no sufficient grounds whereby to exclude one from my love, because God loves everyone and we’re called to love with God’s love, and it’s already earmarked for everyone. But if we’re called to love our enemies, that’s the kind of like person most distant from us, or person most opposed or contrary to us.

00:15:47:20 – 00:16:14:01

If we’re loving our enemies this much, then we must be loving our friends and our family. This, this, this, this much. All right, so if we get out there to the ring of our of our enemy, it will have suggested that in a more intimate circle, the love burns more brightly, or it burns more intensely in order for it to have radiated out here to this concentric ring, it will have had to have burned brighter, burned more intensely at, at a closer remove, at a closer distance from.

00:16:14:01 – 00:16:29:04

So I think that like, that’s just one thing to correct when people hear Christians are called to love their enemies, it’s almost like Christians are called to neglect their families and their friends, and only ever see to the welfare of their enemies. It’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We didn’t say that. That would be like kind of weird and self negating.

00:16:29:06 – 00:16:44:03

So we’re just trying to correct some of those notions where, like Christians have it in their mind. I’m supposed to be generous. That means holy altruistic means anytime I love myself or anything close to me, I’m being selfish and we can’t have that. So I got to root it out, pull it up. Otherwise get rid of it. It’s like, no, no, no.

00:16:44:05 – 00:17:13:08

What’s foremost here is the good. The good that we share, which is the good of God, the good of his love, which he pours into our hearts. And then we’re thinking about, like how we unpack that good and principled fashion, or like how we distribute that good in principled fashion, even though it’s not a commodity. A misunderstanding people have is that they say about the order of, the order of Love as presented here, the order of the Ordo a Morris is simply philosophical that it that it loses the taste of the gospel.

00:17:13:10 – 00:17:44:19

It loses inspiration because if you misunderstand the order of Morris, it would seem that you’re implying that you can only, in fact, love those around you, and you can’t actually get to the point where you would love your enemies or those distant from you. So so people, people cite challenging this this, wrong understanding of the order of Morris, the words of the Lord saying, people who love their family and friends, satisfy only the minimum requirements of love, because you do, in fact, have to.

00:17:44:21 – 00:18:01:15

So I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that. Yeah. I’d say like the Hebrew formulation or the first century formulation of you have to hate, you know, father and mother, you have to hate wife and children. You have to, you know, or I came not to bring peace, but the sword to divide this person from that person, the other person from the still further person.

00:18:01:17 – 00:18:18:22

So like a lot of that is kind of classic Hebrew overstatement, which is a matter of preference, that is to say, like you need to prefer God to these people. And that’s not like, okay, so in one case you love somebody else and then you love yourself and then you love other, other people. What we’re saying here is we love God most because God is more us than we are.

00:18:19:00 – 00:18:43:17

So on Saint Thomas’s estimation, we love on the basis of union. All right. So we love that which is closest to home, because what’s closest to home is what God has given us. And this is in fact, a response to the gift of God. It’s a sober appreciation of who God is and what God is doing. And God is more present to me than I am to myself, is giving me my being as giving me my agency, as sustaining me and being a sustaining me and agency and is dwelling within me in the life of grace.

00:18:43:19 – 00:19:07:20

So it’s like a lot of people would seem to point out certain contradictions, but it’s entirely consistent. If you start from that vantage, a lot of, a lot of laying out of groundwork here and giving very important and helpful principles that I think have been missed in the general conversation about this. But if we take okay, simply, we understanding the order of love’s to be the love of self, the love of neighbor, the love of family, the love of country, and then the love of the world.

00:19:07:22 – 00:19:34:20

We get a kind of expansive. Yeah, I think there could be variations of that. Oftentimes it’s just just the four reigns, right? Love of, love of neighbor, love of family, love country of others of the world. And some people say they they hear this kind of plan, this schema of these concentric expanding rings. And they say, well, then is it the case that love has to kind of spill from one level to the next?

00:19:34:22 – 00:19:52:10

Like, you can only love your neighbor when you love your neighbor perfectly, then love expands to your family. When you only love your family perfectly, then love expands to your country. Is that actually how we’re talking about something? Yeah, yeah, I think so. We’re talking about something different. Because when we talk about love, specifically charity, we’re talking about a habit of virtue, okay?

00:19:52:12 – 00:20:17:07

And it’s an acting out of a certain power of the soul that one acts through a habit or a virtue, but that gives rise to acts or activities which themselves have these different objects. So what we need to cultivate is charity, all right? And charity is undivided. Charity is one. All right. And when that charity wells up within, it gives rise to certain acts which are directed at certain objects.

00:20:17:09 – 00:20:37:12

And we have a preference accorded to those nearer or those closer or those entrusted to us more intimately by the Lord. But that doesn’t mean, like I have to posit, five acts for myself, four acts for my family, three acts for my polity, two acts for the world entire, and one act for any potential alien who lives at the limits of the universe.

00:20:37:14 – 00:21:04:19

No no no no no. Exactly. It just means that we should expect love to burn brighter as it gets closer to the hearth. You know, as it gets closer to the fire, as the French say, and that we should expect that love in a certain sense to be diminished by distance, which doesn’t mean that we make the effort for it to like to stoke the flame and to grow that habit of charity such that it flames forth in more intense acts, even for those who are distant, even for enemies which you see in the lives of the saints.

00:21:04:21 – 00:21:25:01

It’s just to say that we’re going to accord a certain, like primacy, as it were, or a certain priority to those nearer at hand, insofar as the logic of their lives is more bound up with the logic of our lives. So like they enjoy a greater union, and in a certain sense they are more us than others are, and more we’re more responsible for us than for them.

00:21:25:01 – 00:21:46:11

Not because of some kind of suspicion or hatred, but because, you know, like you’re more responsible for cutting your own grass than you are for the grass of your neighbor, you know, because it’s yours. So when the auto Emmaus first picked up, I was racking my brain. And I know this has been on the international stage before when it came out to sort out where where it was in the air.

00:21:46:11 – 00:22:06:15

I remember, going in high school, going in and reading Mother Teresa’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The end of the last paragraph in Mother Teresa’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which most people know because it’s pretty famous for her denouncing, abortion. Very, very proud is awesome. It’s a great takedown of the evil of abortion in that speech.

00:22:06:15 – 00:22:33:16

So most people remember that. And, mother Teresa suggested that the way to peace in the world, that the way to serving the cause of peace, the way to changing the world is to go home and love your family. And then in support of that claim, she cites the word of Maurice in four successive stages. Loving your neighbor, loving your family, loving your country and then loving the world.

00:22:33:18 – 00:23:05:05

So how is it that, and I think that’s so phenomenal because it shows us how someone like Mother Teresa, who is, you know, the person I can think of, who, whose heart burned so clearly with the love for the poor, with with a gospel vision for it. For what? What Christian charity looks like. And how is it that Mother Teresa then would use the word of Maurice, as a kind of practical examen, as a command for the fact the way to live this is, in fact, a way to bring of peace.

00:23:05:07 – 00:23:25:10

Yeah. I think it’s like a lot of us want to love better. And we experience our own limitations as a source of sadness or a source of pain and suffering, because we want to love universally. But the way in which to love best as a human being is to love. Particularly because there’s only that way to love.

00:23:25:12 – 00:23:44:20

G.K. Chesterton has this hilarious poem called The World State. It says something like, oh, how I love humanity with love. So pure in English, and how I hate the horrid French who never will be English. So it’s like it ends with the encouragement to the way to love your fellow man and hate your next door neighbor.

00:23:44:22 – 00:24:03:09

Like human love isn’t real until such time as it’s made incarnate. Like you can have all the benevolence you like. Imaginary benevolence, that is. But if it doesn’t flame forth in beneficence, that is to say, if goodwill doesn’t flame forth in good deed, then it’s incomplete. So this is like the logic of the first letter of Saint John.

00:24:03:09 – 00:24:19:22

If I say I love my brother, or excuse me if I say I love God, but do not love my brother, that I’m a liar. And the truth is not in me. So there’s a way in which our human lives are meant to be limited because we are embodied souls, or we are and sold bodies, and we’re only in this place and not in that place.

00:24:19:22 – 00:24:45:04

We’re only in this time and not in another. But we’re supposed to love well in the here and now. And basically, like when we find ourselves surrounded by certain individuals in concentric rings, that’s not by accident, that’s by the divine will. God said, I’m going to entrust you with these people. Start here. And if you find that the scope of your love is so vast as to encompass even beyond your you know, neighbor and your family and maybe your country, then be about that work.

00:24:45:06 – 00:25:06:23

But don’t trick yourself into thinking, I’m going to love everybody at the four corners of the earth, and then end up neglecting those close at home, because that’s a way of convincing yourself that you are in fact, or that you are better than you are in fact, which is a lie that many of us indulge. We find it hardest to love those who are nearest at home, but it’s precisely those people whom our limitations would seem to suggest are the ones we’re supposed to love best.

00:25:07:04 – 00:25:40:05

I love this line you use imaginary benevolence because I think that’s downstream of globalism and how connected we are. Yeah, yeah. So it’s so easy to see horrors, and to see them right in front of our eyes, to see them intimately in our lives through social media. And that’s, that’s come about in society now in a way that it was never present before, you know, like even watching President Clinton order bombings during the Gulf War when I was a kid, that was a different thing to see on CNN than it was to experience the way we experience war and conflict now on social media.

00:25:40:05 – 00:26:09:09

So I think that I think that, I think we’ve got that trend of globalization that, you know, that seeing all causes being present before us on the little internet boxes in our pockets all the time. And I think that feeds imaginary. And it’s one of the ways that it’s one of the ways that we’re drawn, out from one of the ways that we’re drawn away from one of the one of the ways that we’re hoodwinked, from not not succeeding in loving well at home.

00:26:09:11 – 00:26:30:04

I’m hearing echoes to, Dorothy Day at the end of Lines of Loneliness, her fabulous autobiography. She says, we’ve all know. We all know the answer to loneliness is love. And love comes with community. And that it’s not possible to have a kind of idea that is absent the incarnation as you’re saying. That’s your point about.

00:26:30:06 – 00:26:51:17

And that’s ultimately in order to live in, to love, well we have to live well with those around us. Yeah. Yeah. Mother Teresa can say go home and love your family. And that’s in fact the way that she lived her life, which was by picking up, dying person on the streets of Calcutta, the back and back, way back at the beginning of her ministry.

00:26:51:19 – 00:27:12:14

That’s Dorothy Day loving particular people, giving a handful, you know, of the bread as much as she could or rose off or picking up a cancerous person from the streets of New York City at the turn of the 20th century. And so it’s that it’s the the kind of scandal of particularity few of us love that, that, that, that actually allows love to flourish.

00:27:12:19 – 00:27:32:06

Yeah. No. And I think that like, that’s something I think about in terms of our own ministry as well. Father Ephram will often talk about your little flock, like each of us have a little flock and in certain, you know, kind of lonely hours of the evening, we might think to ourselves, I wish I had another little flock, or I wish I had a big flock.

00:27:32:08 – 00:28:02:20

I wish that everyone pertained to my flocks. That way I’d have many adherents, many people singing my praises. But I guess it doesn’t matter. And guess what isn’t real? You know, like there are certain people whom the Lord entrust to you concretely and particularly, and your job is to, like, know those people well and to love those people well, to see to the various tasks that populate your life so you can live responsibly and adequately as a human being, but effectively to dispense of those responsibilities so as to create the space in which to encounter the other in all of his or her concretion, and to love the other and all of his or her

00:28:02:20 – 00:28:18:21

concretion. There’s like there’s no substitute for that. And so this is why, like, you know, we do things on the internet, and like, cool. I hope that people listen to these things and profit from these things. But also the internet. It doesn’t matter insofar as the internet isn’t real. I mean, it isn’t. It isn’t blah blah blah.

00:28:19:02 – 00:28:33:19

But like, this will have been good to the degree or extent that it sends people who listen to this back to a community in which they can have a sacramental encounter by which their ongoing conversion will be furthered, you know, so like if we want them to come to retreats one come two days of recollection, we want to meet up with them.

00:28:33:19 – 00:28:48:17

But we’re also conscious of the fact that we’re not going to be able to meet up with everybody on the internet, but they are capable of meeting up with somebody whom they can love, not just as an act of desperation, but as a genuine expression of the limitation of humanity suited to our social and political nature and realized in community.

00:28:48:18 – 00:29:16:03

It’s like we’re for real life, which is in a, yeah, just inescapably local church is not an idea on the internet. The churches, parishes, politics is not actually national. It’s local. Yeah, that’s where it all begins. And Christian love is loving those immediately around us. And then that love burns and radiates forth. Father Gregory, as we as we conclude this conversation, final thoughts anymore?

00:29:16:05 – 00:29:38:00

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And how can they continue to to muse on the question? Yeah. So, I mean, you can just start by googling ordo oh, audio amoris. Amoris, Saint Augustine or Ordo a more a Saint Thomas Aquinas. It comes up in the second part of the second part of the summa in question. 26 Saint Thomas dedicates the whole of the question to it.

00:29:38:02 – 00:30:01:20

And I’d say that like one thing in that question, which will often challenge our Christian sensibilities, is the preference for self to the other, you know, so it’s like we love God most because God’s more us than we are, but then we love ourselves next most because we are ourselves and we love the other next most because the other is potentially in union with us, or maybe already in union with us by virtue of our common family or common life, or common work, or common whatever.

00:30:01:22 – 00:30:29:20

And I think that, like this idea of loving ourselves more than the other in some way, shape or form is kind of scandalous. It’s like, what? I mean, this doesn’t square with what I learned. God other self, right? No. False. But the idea here isn’t this kind of like, hyper affectionate, you know, thought felt indulgence in loving emotion, you know, towards oneself what it is, is just a recognition that I am myself and I can only ever love with the love that I have.

00:30:29:22 – 00:30:57:10

So I think that’s a helpful way in which to kind of circumscribe our Christian efforts. The point isn’t the destruction of the self and the upbuilding of the other. The point is to congregate around the good with the other. But we ourselves need to be in possession of the good if we intend to share it. So I think that that introduces a healthy note again, of limitation, but also of, yeah, just good based sobriety, into the Christian spirit, which I think is, yeah, well, awesome Saint Mother Teresa, pray for us to have for you, my love.

00:30:57:10 – 00:31:19:00

Well, Saint Thomas Aquinas prayed for us that we might know the order of love. Well, Saint Augustine of Hippo, pray for us that all of our desires, all of our lives, might be, turning to you, the listener. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode today. Godsplaining is a project of conversation for conversion. We hope this episode helps you to grow in holiness.

00:31:19:02 – 00:31:43:13

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00:31:43:15 – 00:31:59:15

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00:31:59:17 – 00:32:30:06
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