Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:02 After we'd be done working sheep. I used to completely hate it when I'd find a sheep ticker to crawling around on my pants or on my sleeve. There aren't many of the good Lord's creatures that I find disgusting, but sheep ticks definitely fit in that category. Now, some of you might not know what a sheep tick is. A sheep tick as a kind of really ugly, totally disgusting, big old blood suck and bug. It looks like a big old flat brownish gray tick and I mean big. A really big one will be the size, your fingernail or a thumbnail and it makes its home crawl around sucking blood relieving itself. And Jen generally make an a dirty mess in the wool of sheep. They're really disgusting parasite. And Anyway, actually, if there's any entomologists here that might be having a conniption fit, just paranthetically if we're going to be perfectly accurate, we do have to admit that a sheep tick isn't really a ticket.
Speaker 0 00:59 All Ticks Arachnids. They have eight legs. Sheep ticks only have six legs. They're actually a wingless insect for all the etymologists out there. The proper term is actually sheep kid, but a sheep kid is what I suppose they must call them on sheep ranches in places like England and Scotland and Harvard and places like that back home, we call them sheep ticks. Any rate when one of your sheep, especially one of your lambs gets real decent size bumper crop, a whole herd of these miserable little critters, Roman around, it's wool and suck and it's blood. The poor animal won't thrive. So that's going to cost you and besides at least scratch and end rubbing and ends up looking ratty and dirty, which means your fleeces will be staying in dirty. So when you go to sell your wool, the wool buyer will dock you for dirty wolf.
Speaker 0 01:48 So that'll cost you too. They're miserable. How does a sheep get infested with these miserable things? By contact with another infested cheep. Suppose you have a clean band, a sheep, but you go out and buy some sheep but it's sale and one of them turns out to be infested. And when you get home instead of thinking about it or if you have kids, sometimes they don't listen to their dad very well. You just turn those sheep out with the band. When one of those infested sheep runs up against a clean sheep, the sheep ticks crawl through the wool into the new hollist and set up a camp and her fleece. That means sheep ticks can spread pretty easily through a flock, especially when they get bunched up like in the winter when you're feeding them. So how does a guy's supposed to get rid all these blood sucking sheep ticks off his sheet?
Speaker 0 02:35 Well, the way we used to do it was, uh, after we'd finished shearing and we'd fill a tank full of water and take this brown bottle is full of some kind of special high powered insecticide and pour it in. I suppose. Again, nowadays it's all environmental regulations a farmer couldn't get that would be just about as easy to buy a small grade nuclear weapon as this kind of stuff anymore. But anyway, uh, if you've ever heard the expression sheep dip, that's what this is a mixture of water. And insecticide is sheep debt. And that's called that cause that's exactly what we did with it. We'd run a sheep down into the tank and through that tank and to go down in the sheep dip and then dare to take a pole and shove its head under the water to make sure that she was dipped.
Speaker 0 03:19 And then he'd come up and go out and then he'd dunk the next one. We'd be running them through and on and on and on till we dipped all those sheep. So Dunkin Sheep and sheep dip is how we kill all those filthy, no good blood sucking sheep ticks. Okay, now why are we talking about dipping sheep? What a sheep tips have to do with anything or the sides of fact. It's a good shepherd Sunday. Let's start asking ourselves, what is it that we're doing here? Obviously right here and right now we're fulfilling our Sunday obligation by hearing mass or in my case, uh, offering the holy sacrifice and that, but there's more to than that. This isn't our neighborhood parish. We've all made a sacrifice of some type to travel to here from all over the place because we're looking for more than just to satisfy our Sunday obligation.
Speaker 0 04:11 At some level, the good Lord has given us this gift, a desire to really become holy. Of course, that includes as priests, we're trying to become holy to not simply by offering holy sacrifice of the mass as reverently as possible. That's a given, but also by instructing the faithful as priests we're trying to do right here in this community. We're striving to do whatever it takes to get everyone here to develop three things. There's three things we really want everybody to develop. The first is a delicate conscience. Second is a loving fear of the Lord, and the third is a profound trust in the Lord, a delicate conscience, a loving fear of the Lord and profound trust in our Lord. A delicate conscience. What's that? That's a very great gift from God. It enables a man who has it to live in such a way that he seldom or never commits a deliberate sin, whether mortal venial, not even the smallest deliberate venial sin because he loves the Lord so much.
Speaker 0 05:18 He'd rather do anything than deliberately offend the Lord with the smallest deliberate sin, and he trusts Lord so completely in spite of the fact that he can see how we can sinfully is this is really doable. Everyone here, everyone here that really sets his mind to it and cooperates and begs God for the graces. This is doable for some might happen as quickly as months for others, it might take decades, but it's actually doable for everyone here present today. See, no fonts is exploited as this very point quote. Even the saints have fallen in the sins of frailty such as video faults of imperfect attention from such imperfections. No one is exempt, but all deliberate and fully voluntary venial sins may be avoided in our seldom or never committed by holy souls who live with the firm and constant resolution to rather suffer death than with flood versions.
Speaker 0 06:19 To be guilty of a venial violation of God's holy law. Close quote, Saint Alphonsus Bishop and doctor, the church that's worth hearing. Again, all fully deliberate and fully voluntary video sins may be avoided and are seldom or never committed by holy souls who will live with a constant in firm resolution rather than suffer death than with full attention to be guilty of a venial violation of God's holy law. So every week we're trying to encourage and correct you without discouraging you. We know it's a battle who weren't in ourselves. It's a battle, but it's doable. It's doable. God will give you a delicate conscience if you keep at it. If you keep working at avoidance in the near occasion, sin, keep praying in at Bagan for that grace. He'll give you a delicate conscience. There are many layman who have Delcon conscience. It's doable. So every week we're here trying to wash everyone clean spiritually.
Speaker 0 07:18 Speaking not only means by the preaching, but of course the confessional. We're not up here to preach a bunch of our personal opinions. Sometimes it may seem like we're shoving your head hunter. Well I don't make this stuff up so I can't apologize for that part of it. You know the content. But I can in a will apologize if my delivery leaves something to be desired. When over holy week we had a seminary and from down here in this country and he's a super nice guy. I have to say that about the Midwest. He's Super Nice and he tells me that he felt that people from the upper Midwest who I think are super nice people too. He thought people sometimes he finds when he's talking to people from other upper Midwest, he thought they were so direct in their speech that he feels like he's being bludgeoned by them.
Speaker 0 07:58 And I was just sitting there thinking to myself, oh boy, what have I done over the past seven years? So, uh, so I'm a wester apologize if I, if we have it because of my turns, his speech, uh, uh, have hurt anybody cause I don't want to be an obstacle. Your growth and holiness. I don't apologize for the content. I don't make that up, but I can apologize from my end of it. All right. That being said, uh, since it's good shepherd Sunday, let's focus on a really serious problem that's like spiritual sheep ticks. It really sucks the supernatural life out of a lot of people who begin to get serious about holiness. We encounter it as soon as we decide to set out on a path to holiness. As soon as we actually get serious about this, we start rubbing up against people who don't have our same beliefs or maybe they do, but they're not serious enough about them.
Speaker 0 08:47 Okay. We discover that we're targets. We're zeroed in on that work at public gatherings, private dinners, grocery stores, the restaurant and visiting ARF relatives at gatherings of other practicing Catholics. We're zeroed in on with smart remarks about the numbers of our children were zeroed in on with smart remarks about our refusal to checkout certain websites or watch certain TV shows or go to certain movies where zeroed in on with smart remarks about our clothing normally regard to not only with regardless ninth commandment shoes but also for wearing visible signs of the faith crosses. Crucifixes metals. Cassocks were zeroed in on all these things and so many more and if we're not strong supernaturally strong, this can take a heavy toll, especially when it comes from people close to us, friends, coworkers, family members, and even other good Catholics, especially when they zero in us and tell us, don't be so extreme.
Speaker 0 09:53 Don't get so carried away and try to convince us to settle for mediocrity. They try to convince us that if the minimum wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum. It's like having a whole herd of sheep ticks, spiritual one swarming all over us, sucking the supernatural strength right out of us, wearing us down, making us tired of carrying the cross. Troubling us with doubts, maybe giving rise to fantasies about find some sort of middle ground, some fantasies about being able to keep our feet in both camps. Suckiness down in the lukewarmness. It's a problem and it's a real problem. It's called human respect. Human respect, worrying about the opinion of men more than what God thinks. That's human respect. It's nothing new. Here's an explanation of it written in the early 1850s by the author of that great hymn, faith of our fathers written by the great English oratory and father favor.
Speaker 0 10:52 Here's father Faber writing in the 1850s father favor to give ourselves up to the spiritual life is to put ourselves out of harmony with the world around us. Grace holds us in one world. Nature draws us down again into the other. This is the secret of the immense power which human respect has over us. Nothing can be more stupid than our submission to it. Look at a person who's completely under its domination watching mid society in public life or in the Buzzsumo's family. Intimate sees a friendship, red confession, or even with God in prayer or an utter solitude. It is as if the omnipresence of God was sponged out all around him and that some other powerful I was fixed upon him and causing him at all times and almost preternatural uneasiness. What a misery it is to be ashamed of our duties and our principles.
Speaker 0 11:55 Human respect is always drawing us off from God to creatures. A Brood of sins of omission fall at wherever it goes, sprung from shame and the fear of ridicule in another brute of sins of commission from the desire to please. When we give ourselves up to God, we deliberately commit ourselves to lead a supernatural life. We put other interests, other loves other enjoyments in the place of those of the world to a certain extent, weaving become unsocial by silence or solitude or penance or seeming its intricity in a word. We deliberately become members of a minority knowing that we shall suffer for it. Now realizing the significance tse of the spiritual life, what is the view that the world will naturally take of us in? How will it feel toward us is first of all surprised and then irritated with our venturing to act on different principles from itself.
Speaker 0 13:10 Such a line of action. Denies the world supremacy and contradicts it's narrow code of prudence and discretion. Our conduct is therefore a reflection on the world as if God had outlawed it, which he has. It's fashions, it's sex, it's pursuits, it's struggles. It's tyranny and its conceits are to us no better than a self-important foolishness. Meanwhile, though we ignore the world, the world cannot ignore us for we are a fact intruding on its domain and interfering with its own opinions. What sort of treatment then must we must must we expect at the world's hands? If we succeed in what we undertake for God or have influence or convert persons or take any high line or approach others by our examples, we must expect to be hated. We shall be feared and with an angry fear. When men see that we have a view and go on a principle, which they do not, they will blame us for blame is easy and we swerved from men's usual standard of praise.
Speaker 0 14:31 Moreover, condemnation of us is safe for even so-called moderate men on our own side. Throw US overboard. We must expect also hard as we must strive to hinder it to be more or less at variance with our own flesh and blood. We cannot see things in their light and they cannot see things in hours, not as something of this kind. More or less we committed ourselves. We took up the spiritual life in earnest from that hour we parted company with the world. Never more to do od, but fly from it as a plague or to face it as a full. What have we to do with giving or taking the world's respect, which we have bound ourselves eternally to disrespect enough for us that we have taken ourselves out of the world's hands and out of our own and put ourselves in the hands of God and we have felt those hands. Oh, happy we gently but firmly close over us and hold us fast.
Speaker 0 15:34 Close quote, father favor, 1854 nothing's changed. All has it. There's still no metal crown. Never has been. Never will be. Let's close just that. My Dad's sheep sometimes pick up sheep tears if by close contacts with infested sheep saucer Lord Sheep lets us can pick up some beds, spiritual health problems by close contact with a society full of people who haven't yet got the grace to see the irreconcilable differences between the spirit of the world and the Holy Spirit, we can fall into the sin of human respect when we worry more about the opinions of men than what God thinks and this miserable condition can easily suck us down in a lukewarmness. You've got a long ways to go before we all become saints, but it's doable. Generally speaking, our little band is on the right trail. Don't let those spiritual, cheap ticks of human respect wear you down sick. Can you? We can. You asked the good shepherd wash with any wounds or tendencies towards human respect by silky you with his precious blood. Ask the Good Shepherd for supernaturally strong personality to resist these temptations. They ask the good shepherd to give you a complete and childlike trust in him. Ask the Good Shepherd. Beg the Good Shepherd to grant you the gift of loving fear of him, of fear of ever disappointing him by even the smallest deliberate venial sin.
