The Restless Hearts Podcast

Episode 141: Life...God's Desire For Us (Fr. Ray's Homily from 6/30/24)

This episode of the Restless Hearts Podcast includes the Proclamation of the Gospel and Father Ray's homily from the Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time on June 30, 2024. You can view the full liturgy of the Word for this Sunday under Daily Readings at usccb.org.

Episode 140: Life Will Overwhelm Skill—Fr. Ray's Homily from 6/32/24

This episode of the Restless Hearts Podcast includes the Proclamation of the Gospel and Father Ray's homily from the Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time on June 23, 2024. You can view the full liturgy of the Word for this Sunday under Daily Readings at usccb.org.

Episode 139: Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human—Session 10, Happiness, Joy, and Love (7/14/23)

The final conference of this retreat calls our attention to those experiences in life that evoke the emotion of happiness because they are meeting our conscious or unconscious needs.  Easily overlooked in self-awareness and powerfully reinforcing due to the pleasant and positive emotions they evoke, these experiences may well distract us from our call to be fully human in that they may satisfy desires that do not contribute to our health, holiness, or growth as persons.  In contrast to happiness, joy is not an emotion but a choice to be mindful and aware of the goodness of life, the gift of love, and the hope for the fullness of both in eternity.  Finally, listeners are invited to review the various stages of life to note how love has come to them, possibly in fragmented and incomplete ways, but still love that calls us to the fullness of our humanity.

Episode 138: Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human—Session 9, The Paradox of Power (7/14/23)

Power, which is understood as our ability to influence others, is as pervasive as sexuality in human relationships and is constantly being exercised by everyone over everyone in  a myriad of different strategies and styles and often without our conscious awareness that we are both exercising power and having power exercised over us.  As such, power can be both very dangerous and very beneficial.  This conference invites listeners to reflect on their own relational styles and ways of attempting to satisfy their needs by exercising power and invites them to note whether their exercise of power is effective, ineffective, mutual and respectful, or dismissive and destructive.

Episode 137: Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human—Session 8, The Dangerous Blessing of Sexuality (7/13/23)

In this eighth conference, listeners are invited to reflect on the pervasive experience of sexuality in our lives, the most powerful force in the universe, and to note how its power can and has been used as a destructive force through dominance and control, as a weapon and as a toy, and as something that takes life rather than gives life.  At the same time, sexuality is our most direct sharing in the life of the Trinity characterized by free and full giving and receiving for the sake of creativity and love.  Aware that sexuality is an experience that can tempt us in many ways to be both less than human and more than human in our expression of it, it also contains within it the invitation to be fully human as it calls us into relationship, self-gift, and love.

Episode 136: Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human—Session 7, Loneliness as the Locus of Revelation (7/13/23)

With this seventh conference of the retreat the focus shifts from reflections on experiences that evoke emotions to experiences that are universal and pervasive in human life and yet are profoundly prone toward denial, illusion, and a lack of self awareness, while tempting us to compromise the values we profess to live by.  In this session, the very noxious and uncomfortable experience of loneliness that typically isolates us from others and cries out to be relieved in a host of unhealthy and even addictive ways is explored as something that can reveal the full truth about our real selves and join us in solidarity with the human race and be a foundational building block of authentic community.

Episode 135: Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human—Session 6, From Shame to Humility (7/12/23)

The sixth conference of the retreat focuses our attention on those experiences of life in which we know ourselves to be inadequate, imperfect, and incomplete which inevitably evoke the emotion of shame and the myriad of unhealthy instinctive reactions to which it tempts us, including disappearing, blaming, doing violence to oneself, and shamelessness as well as to the capital sin of pride which is simply the other side of the same coin as shame.  It invites consideration that the fully human antidote to shame is the virtue and practice of humility which is defined as allowing others to see us as we truly are and allowing them to make the choice to accept us in love or to reject us, with trying to influence that choice.

Episode 134: Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human—Session 5, From Sadness to Gratitude (7/11/23)

Noting that life is filled with loss and so is also filled with the unpleasant and inconvenient emotion of sadness, this fifth conference invites listeners to take note of losses that have been ungrieved and so unhealed, to see loss as an essential part of life and the emotion of sadness as possibly the most humanizing of our emotions, and the reality that sadness is in direct proportion to how much we have loved who or what we have lost so that to avoid sadness is to deny love.  While the process of grieving is painful and difficult, the courage to enter it is a choice to be more fully human as sadness reveals love which can move us from emptiness of loss to the fullness of gratitude.

Episode 133: Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human—Session 4, From Anger to Passion and Compassion (7/11/23)

The fourth conference of this retreat invites listeners to attend to experiences in life in which our needs and desires are not met and so evoke the emotion of anger and its instinctive drives toward hostility, aggression, and violence as we assert the satisfaction of our needs as paramount to anyone else and so act in a more than human ways as well as the less than human tendency to see ourselves as undeserving and worthless.  The talk suggests that anger properly listened to and understood can be an invitation to the fully human experiences of solidarity with the rest of humanity and its suffering and deprivation as well as a righteous passion to correct harmful and exploitative practices that deprive people of their humanity.

Episode 132: Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human—Session 3, From Fear to Trust (7/10/23)

The third conference of this retreat invites listeners to reflect on experiences in life that evoke the emotion of fear and the instinctive responses to fear; namely flight, fight, or learned helplessness may not serve us well in all circumstances (while they may be quite appropriate in others).  It further invites us to consider that experiences that evoke fear may well be invitations to trust and so lead us to growth, courage, and faith.