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All Around Growth
All Around Growth — reflections on faith, freedom, and finding purpose through Orthodox Christian living, formation, and the long work of becoming.
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All Around Growth
Ep. 395 - Spiritual Posture and Cultural Slouching
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Divine Intimacy - Chad Lemoine
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SPEAKER_01Well, hi there, and welcome back to another episode of the All Around Growth Podcast. My name is Rob Kaiser and I am your host. Today is Monday, August 8th, 2022, and this is episode number 395 of a show that provides insight and tools to build the life and homestead of your dreams. And that is correct. I hesitated a little bit, but indeed, today is episode number 395. And the title of today's show is Spiritual Posture. And this show is part and parcel of a series of shows that the show has effectively become, where we talk about seven aspects of life: physical, financial, personal development, family, spiritual, social, and career. And those topics are intermixed with things that are going on here at the homestead, homestead-oriented topics, and anything or everything else that comes to mind. This is a little bit of insight into the mind of yours truly, Rob Kaiser. And the reason for this show today is my morning routine was out of sorts after the big 70th party, 70th birthday party for mom yesterday, slept in with no alarm until 6:30, and wanted to get a good start to the day. So I looked up a longer stretching routine, one that I hadn't done before, a 60-minute flexibility routine, and I'll link to that in the show notes as well. And approximately 10 minutes in, I realized that I forgot to go about some of my other morning routines, like reading from a book of daily meditations and engaging in just a moment of quiet, quiet prayer. And the book that I decided to read today was a book that I learned about from Chad Lemoyne, who shares his meditation of choice on Twitter, and I've linked to that in the show notes as well. But the book is called Divine Intimacy by Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene. And this book of meditations is a classic and it is steeped in Carmelite spirituality. For every day, it offers two meditations arranged according to the liturgical season that enable the soul to enter the conscious presence of God and to reflect on the theme of the day. These are followed by a colloquy that helps the person at prayer to start a friendly conversation with God where acts of praise and love, petition and thanksgiving are made, together with good resolutions for the future. Here we are at the very heart of prayer, which is a heart-to-heart encounter in faith with the living God. Divine intimacy is the state, the highest state attainable on earth. In this union of love, the soul produces acts of love which have an immense apostolic influence on a multitude of souls. This knowledge of the ways that lead to God, according to the teaching of the renowned Spanish mystics, is distilled into the pages of this book. So, like I said, I was doing a stretching routine, I paused, and I decided to read this, and as I continued stretching, I thought, what better title to have for today's show than Spiritual Posture. And I'll talk freely on that after sharing the first meditation and the daily colloquy with you. And the let me make sure I'm on the right where I'm where I need to be here. Today, the title of today's readings is The Precept of Charity. O Lord, teach me to love you truly with my whole heart, my whole soul, and with all my strength. Like I said, there are two meditations. This is the first meditation, and I will read the colloquy with you as well. Virtue lies in the golden mean. This maxim is so exact, for the moral virtues cannot be applied to the theological virtues, which, having an infinite object, can have no limit. The measure of our faith, hope, and charity is to believe, to hope, and to love without measure. However much we love God, we can never love him too much, nor can we love him as much as he is lovable. By its very nature, then, the precept of charity admits of no limit, and we could never say, I shall love God up to a certain point, and that will be enough, for by doing so we would renounce tending toward the perfection of charity, which consists in loving God in a way that is nearly proportionate as possible to his infinite lovableness. This is why it is necessary never to stop in the practice of charity, employing all our strength that it may continually increase in our soul. Because the precept of charity concerns the love of God, the infinite supreme good. It possesses an absolute character. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. Mark chapter twelve, verse thirty. If we so little and so limited, do not employ in the love of God all the little that we have and are, how can we truly tend toward the perfection of charity? If it is not in our power to love God as much as He deserves to be loved, it is, however, possible for us to strive to love Him with our whole strength, and this is exactly the perfection of love which God asks of us. Furthermore, even human love is by its nature, quote, totalitarian. The more intimate and intense a friendship, the more it demands the exclusive gift of the heart, and when a friend begins to make reservations or to give his affection to others, the friendship loses its vigor, grows cold, and may even vanish. Therefore, we must guard against any coldness in our friendship with God, being careful to keep for him alone the first fruits of our heart and to employ holy in him with all our strength. It is true that only in heaven will we be able to love God with all our strength in such a way that our love tends always and actually toward Him. Although this absolute totality and stability in love is not possible to us here on earth, it is possible for us to make an act of love each time that we will to do so. It is always in our power to unite our whole being, heart, affections, will, and desires to God by an act of love. Following the second meditation, there is a colloquy which reads as follows O Lord God, was it not enough to permit us to love you without its being necessary to invite us to do so by exhortations, even obliging us to do so by commanding it? Yes, O divine goodness, in order that neither your greatness nor our lowliness, nor any other pretext could prevent us from loving you, you have commanded us to do so. O my God, if we could only comprehend the happiness and honor of being able to love you, how indebted we should feel to you, who not only permit us, but command us to love you. O my God, I do not know whether I should love more your infinite beauty which your divine goodness commands me to love, or this goodness of yours which commands me to love such infinite beauty. O beauty of my God, how lovable you are, being revealed to me by your immense goodness. O goodness, how lovable you are communicating to me such eminent beauty. O Lord, how sweet is this commandment! If it were given to the damned, they would be instantly freed from their sufferings and supreme misfortune, for the blessed enjoy beatitude only by complying with it. O celestial love, how amiable you are to our souls. O divine goodness, may you be blessed eternally, you who so urgently command us to love you, although your love is so desirable and necessary for our happiness that without it we could only be unhappy. O Lord, in heaven, we shall need no commandment to love you, for our hearts, attracted and ravished by the vision of your sovereign beauty and goodness, will necessarily love you eternally. There our hearts will be wholly free of passions, our soul will be completely delivered from distractions, our minds will have no anxieties, our powers will have no repugnances, and therefore we shall love you with a perpetual, uninterrupted love. But in this mortal life, we cannot achieve such a perfect degree of love because as yet we do not have the heart, the soul, the mind, or the powers of the blessed. Nevertheless, you desire us to do in this life everything that depends on ourselves to love you with all our heart and all the strength we have. This is not only possible but very easy, for to love you, O God, is a sovereignly lovable thing. And that comes from Saint Francis de Sales. I don't know what else to say on this Monday morning other than to share with you my morning, my spirituality, how I engage in it, and how I go about it, how it's changed over the years, and where I currently am. And quite frankly, I have no desire to talk about the future of my spirituality, for what I know about it is my current experience. And it is that that led me to share it with you this morning. Share this book, Divine Intimacy, reading these meditations, the first of which, well, both the meditations I read silently and I read this colloquy aloud. And I felt so moved by it this morning. That like I said, when I returned to my flexibility routine, I felt compelled to share it with you and talk about spiritual posture. You know, I talk about balance in life, spiritual posture is the title of today's show. I'm not going on any notes, I'm just winging it freely here, and I'll listen to this later and add some notes, but I kind of wanted to get back to the essence of the show and how it used to be, which involved a lot of free talking, a lot of free dialogue in the commute to the day job. But since I don't have a commute, the shows have changed, they've become a little bit more structured. But every once in a while I like to do some kind of free talk, and on days where time is limited, like today, these are the times where a free talk episode is a good talk, a good topic of choice. I think culturally we are extremely out of balance. I think that is why the current events of the day have such an impact that they do on us culturally and societally and everything. That's that's that's a brief and passing observation. I have nothing really further to say than that, because my own life has been out of balance for so long. And it's only been briefly where I feel as though I've become or put myself in a position after so much uh time and effort, concerted effort, into the putting in these uh consistent practices in life to find this balance. And I've reached a certain degree of success in doing so. How do we define success? Success is a progressive realization of a worthy ideal. It changes, our goals change. What is failure? Failure is a man who has no goals. Failure is a man who executes on those goals that do not exist, for he executes on nothing, has very well, a plan, albeit weak, but that is a failure. And for most of my life, I've lived as a failure. I just didn't know it. I was financially failing. I was physically failing. I had no sense of personal development. So let's just say I was failing there. I wasn't necessarily failing in my family. I've always had a fairly decent relationship with my family, but I certainly wasn't doing anything to cultivate those relationships or grow. Spiritually, I was lost. That was not even on my radar many of the times over the past, well, as much as it wasn't, it was. But the issue was I wasn't acting on it with consistency. Socially, I was weak. My career was about the only thing that I had going for me. But because I focused so much time, effort, and energy on there, I was weak everywhere else, and therefore my life was out of balance. The big thing that's allowed me to talk about this and you know examine all of this in the way that I do is the 2022 goal setting workbook, which I will again link to in the show notes. But all of this is new. It's all new. I mean, guys, it's only August 8th of 2022. And uh I haven't even I haven't even used this current iter this uh this current workbook, this 2022 goal setting workbook, which I'm sure there's been iterations of in the past, but this is the first year I've used it. And you can use it too. It doesn't cost anything. So check out the link in the show notes. And even though it's August, you know, use it to plan your life, use it to plan the remainder of the year, next year, 2024, 2025. Start thinking ahead. But I've been working in the mornings to improve upon my flexibility and mobility. I think that's a worthy goal to have. I have I do have certain movement goals. I want to be able to do a flat-footed squat, Asian primal squat, whatever you want to call it. I want to be able to hold that. So I keep, you know, I'm realizing that my hips and my quadriceps are far tighter than I thought. And uh we'll talk about that a little bit in the telegram chat group t.me slash allaround growth, where we talk about this and many other things, right? But um my my my body has been you know sore uh lately. Not sore. I mean, for those of you who have lifted weights in the past, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You you know, your muscles are sore. You know, for those of you who have done distance running, your muscles are sore, anything that you've done that's that's athletic, you know, your muscles get sore. Well, I never expected just simple flexibility and mobility routines to result in some soreness, but indeed it has, and it's not it's not a it's not a specific sore. It's it's it's it's just it's it's hard to explain because it's new to me, but I feel like my body is opening up. My posture's changing. I've been very mindful of a couple things with my posture, specifically my you know, my shoulders, keeping them back because I'm noticing a lot of slouching going on and it hunching, and uh even with children, and to me it appears to be directly related to smartphones and their use, and uh ultimate in the way we sit in chairs too, but you know what I'm talking about that hunch, that curl, it's not healthy, it's not natural. So I try to be very mindful of that. And also this pelvic tilt. I don't know how to describe it, if it's an anterior or posterior pelvic tilt, but think about your butt coming up towards your shoulders. That's not that's also not natural. So I'm trying to be mindful of where my pelvis is and my posture and and all of this while I do these stretching routines, while I do these flexibility and mobility routines. Um and it just so happened that like I said, I paused, I read, I prayed, went back to stretching. Didn't go to didn't do the journaling. You know, I'm I'm really gonna try and get back to my structure, my routine, but everything's been out of whack with this party planning and and uh trying to wrap up summer and and uh we'll see we'll see what happens as we go into fall, but um but I just got thinking about spiritual posture and where we are as a society, and I think that collectively we have and are we've engaged in and are increasingly engaging in this slouch culture from a spiritual standpoint. We are exceptionally lackadaisical when it comes to our own mindfulness of our spiritual growth and development. And that's just led to an overall decline in the well, the the the balanced and healthy society that maybe we once had. And one can make plenty of arguments about that, and I'm happy to entertain that and discuss that in the in the chat, but for now I think I've gotta wrap up this this show and and get on with the day, get on with the cleaning from the party yesterday. And uh so guys, I I hope that you have a good day. I hope that you have a great week. I hope that this show was you know a little thought-provoking for you and maybe shed some light on your own spiritual journey and path as well. So, like I said, check out the show notes for links to much of what was discussed. I may have to update those later so I can check in with mom and dad and see what the plan is for the day and ultimately get to work. So if the show notes aren't immediately updated on this Monday, when you're listening to it here on August 8th, 2022, please forgive me and bear with me, for I will update them when I can. But guys, have a wonderful week, have a great day today, and I look forward to catching up with you tomorrow while we talk about a social topic on another episode of the All Around Growth Podcast. This is Rob Kaiser, and thank you.
SPEAKER_00What can I do? The needs are many and the answers are few. People turn away and I wonder why I can help somebody that I wanna try People may think that it's all that I believe in Prince and love truth is always the best way to the world that makes me hard. I bet I tell her I better not tell her I bet I tell her if we stand together, we'll never fall. We can make a difference and answer the call to waste down every day and body starting out, and we're gonna be able to do it.
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