TRANSCRIPT

(NOTE: This transcription has been automatically generated through an AI program. Consequently, this transcript may not match everything you hear in the podcast episode, and it may contain errors such as spelling, grammar, word choice, etc., due to the limitations of current AI technology.)

Hi everyone and welcome to season two of Midnight Carmelite. This is Andrew Gniadek your host. I’m really happy to be back. I hope you found the break we had was fruitful for you as it was for me, this season is going to focus on our relationship with God as human persons. And what I mean by that is it’s going to go through methodically, things at the beginning of the spiritual life, both spiritually and then the metaphysical aspect of the spiritual life in that understanding that be conducive to growing in the spiritual. That’s all going to be discussed here.

So, this first episode I want to discuss inconstancy and love. So, you’re gonna ask, Okay, well, what do you mean by a constancy in love? Well, let’s start with the obvious as as Catholics. We believe that God’s love is constant. Okay, God maintains us in existence. God never lets us down. God will never do anything to hurt us. Now, if we don’t believe God is love, that starting point is problematic. However, we can even show how God’s love isn’t our problem. We are our own problem due to what I’m calling our inconstancy in love.

So, let’s engage this a little bit. So, what do I mean by inconstancy in love? I would say I would appeal to common experience. Look around your life when you get up in the morning with resolutions for the spiritual life in your career, just with your family, your loved ones. Whatever. What you’re going to see, if you’re honest with yourself is you’re going to see there’s ups and there’s downs, right, you have good days, you have bad days, it’s not constant, it’s you know, well you move two steps forward, one step backward, or heaven forbid two steps back, we’re going step forward, which is obviously not going in the right direction.

So what, how does this relate to God? Well, God’s constant, God’s 100% all the time and then, some And when I say 100%, I’m even limiting him by saying that, which I should, but it’s obviously analogous. God’s infinite God’s omnipotence and his power and acting on us in the material reality shows the infinity of that power that reveals something of it. And an obvious example is the Incarnation and why is the Incarnation an obvious example of God’s constancy in love, because even despite Israel’s constant falling away their inconstancy in love, you see that many times and our inconstancy and love that you just see in common experience, present day history up between Christ to present day, you put all this together and God through the Incarnation.

That was the massive point of the principle, I would say, of restarting how we can be constant and love by participation. Like God is constant love a couple things about love. Just a reminder. So, remember that love causes equality, and what I mean by that is, let’s say you love, you know, again, we’ll say you love, you have a spouse, okay, you love your spouse, right, And you’re at a party with your spouse. And you see your spouse walking around, you know, people are talking there’s food, there’s drinks, there’s you know, the usual usual thing.

Typical party, Right? Nothing out of the usual maybe music, maybe whatever. That’s not important to the example. What it is is maybe you’re talking to someone else in your spouse just talking to someone else and everyone’s kind of mingling and you look over at your spouse and you there’s nothing external that anyone would notice that, you know, your spouse looks normal, having a good time, whatever. But you first get this intuition like a heart intuition. I’ll call it where it’s like beyond spiritual, like a core of your being.

There’s something that you see that no one else can see and it’s not manifesting externally. So it can’t be known through abstraction. Okay, so that’s back to for those who are new. Check out two types of knowledge in season one. Anyway, back to this. So you wouldn’t know that by abstraction. It’s an intellectual operation is my point. So you see your spouse sound intellectual operation objectively personally for the spouse observing the other spouse who the you know, you observing your trust, you think something’s wrong, You know that your way of knowing that is not an election intellectual process as well.

So then how does that work? Well, it’s what’s called union of love. And what that means is that by knowing loving and serving your spouse and marriage, right? What’s happening is you’re lowering yourself under that person. You are constantly I think about it as examples, you’re constantly on the lookout for how better you can love them. So, you know, a simple example would be like, you go into a store to grab some dinner, you know, at the supermarket, let’s say or wherever, and you’re going through the aisles and then you see like, oh, I know my spouse like chocolate muffins, like in these look like pretty good chocolate muffins.

I’m going to surprise with chocolate muffins. Now, it’s not the gift that’s the point. It’s the gift as the expression of your love. So you’re doing something to express your love for your spouse that builds this union. That’s the service I’m talking about here now, back to the party and everything. You know, something’s wrong. You can see that it’s something else. Some other relation is allowing you to know what no one else can see. You get home, you turn to your spouse and you said, are you doing okay because I felt like something is was on your mind throughout the party, even though everything seemed okay on the surface and your spouse will basically say, you know, something to the effect of like, you know, I know that’s how I know you love me because you only you could see something like that, and I think that’s the most powerful thing in the world is love.

You know, we often talk about truth and all these other things, and that will be a separate podcast that I’ll address that, you know, truth and love in their relationship. But the major thing is that love conquers all. God is love. God’s love is constant. Then our inconstancy in love is a lack of participation in God, lack of being Christ like, and again, the Incarnation God so loved us, he served us, he became man, he took his infinity, bound it limited through the blessed Virgin Mary and came into the world as a baby.

He literally loved us so much. He became one of us, lowered himself. Now again, you know, if you read the early Church fathers, which I’ve been doing recently, what stood out to me is how much they see God’s constancy and love through the Incarnation and the Cross, obviously, for victory and redemption. And what stands out to me is that God’s constancy is the source of the restoration of us from inconstancy and love in a fallen nature too. You know, more or less constancy in love in this life in a participated way to ultimately the beatific vision where we are given the light of glory and see God face to face.

So again, this equality is caused by a love between creatures or between God and us that sets up this what’s called in philosophy a contrary opposition between the spiritual person and God, or between the person and some creature meaning another person or you know, worse if it’s something lower than a creature than its debasing the person, but that separate discussion and so we’ll take the person and God in our example. So since a person loves God, then it shows that the person’s priority of love is God in any circumstance, in any case, but because we’re falling and in constant if you again reflect on yourself, the priority of our love is sometimes things over God in certain circumstances, in certain cases, it doesn’t mean all the time.

And that’s the key with the inconstancy to we got to be balanced here, is that we’re trying right? We’re trying to work with God not offer him resistance to his grace and his gifts and his work on us, right? But on the other hand, because of sin, and because of the fact that, because the fact that sometimes we even like habitually mess up without even knowing it, right? That creates a resistance because God is not the problem; we are the problem. And so keeping all this in mind with constancy and love and inconstancy in Love is really important, I think.

So what does this all mean going forward? Well, what the next episode is going to discuss in the season is we’re going to go back into appetites and transformation, and God, I kind of dig into how not understanding your appetites, not understanding this inconstancy. What it’s going to do is it’s going to make you spiritually ignorant because what you’re doing is you’re basically going around without any sort of goal or purpose, and we all know, you know, St. Thomas famously said without order, there’s chaos.

So in order is any sort of thing that is bound to some sort of principle or end something that unifies it. So, for example, for you as a person, what binds you is your personality, That’s what that’s that’s the governing principle, right?

And so these are things we’re all going to be thinking about the next episode. So anyway, thank you for listening, and I look forward to talking to you next week.

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