Ep. 115 The Priest’s Triple A League: Getting ready for the Majors Pt. 2

A lot more God talk in this one people, which you may or may not be into.  A lot of Philosophical and theological perspectives on God, with a capital G.  We continue our conversation with a very interesting Seminarian who has been studying not only theology but philosophy as well so he use big words, make brain thing hurtey. 

This recording dates back to August of 2022 and I’m just now getting to it… my friend the Seminarian was in a summer program of Chaplaincy at the hospital where I do some volunteer work, we’ve had some interesting conversations and I finally connected with him to be on this show.  

We start out with a simple question, that being:

If God is all loving, how can there be so much hatred among us? 

If you are looking for an answer to that question, you’ll need to visit another podcast, but inevitably, the answer to all questions can be found in a podcast.

A few glossary items referred to in this episode:

• The Eternal Now - It feels to me like I’m hearing more and more about this referred to as Mindfulness and mindfulness meditations, but to a Catholic Seminarian it is much more.  It is his desire to be as present to God as he is present to us.  This also sent me down a crazy rabbit hole that led me to a site called “faithhub.net”.  Faithhub!  Doesn’t that sound tasty?  Like GrubHub only they deliver faith!  Right to your door!

There is a post titled, “God’s Eternal Now” it reads, “God, is present, here, and NOW. In each moment.  It is our greatest desire to be present to God as he is present to us.  It is we who are often missing from the moment and, therefore, are often out of touch with God.”  Even if you take God out of the equation, and please do if you have a negative association with that word for now.  Take God out of the equation, and most reasonable and thoughtful people would see the value of being in the moment and that, regardless of faith, we spend way too much time regretting or reliving the past and fretting about the future.  I know I do and there really isn’t much value to it.  Other than the satisfaction I get out of having a winning drop the mic argument with a fictitious person I’ve never met in a situation that will never occur.

Back to the article on Faithhub… and get ready for a rabbit hole because it led me to a previous rabbit hole, that being author C.S Lewis.  Remember I told you I thought he wrote Alice in Wonderland but it was actually Lewis Carroll?  Well, this time it IS C.S. Lewis I am interested in.  Lewis was an author of novels filled with Christian metaphor and before he wrote the Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, he wrote a novel called “The Screwtape Letters” which was dedicated to his friend J.R.R. Tolkien.  “The Screwtape Letters” was published as a list of letters from a senior demon or devil, named Screwtape, to a lower level Devil, named Wormwood… sounds like JK Rowling snatched and changed a couple of names there doesn’t it?  Wormwood is actually the nephew of Screwtape, and Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to treat his patient, which is an earthly being, so as to get him over to the dark side.  Wormwood tells Screwtape, “Our business is to get them (meaning mortals) away from the eternal and from the present.” He also tells Wormwood that if the human “concerns himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.”  - Your affectionate uncle, SCREWTAPE.“

This all gets back to the Eternal Now our Seminarian tells us about in this episode.  Next glossary term...

•  Boethius - He was a Roman Senator and Christian Scholar in the Early Middle Ages, when Rome was embracing Christianity and wrote and translated a bunch of texts.  There’s your moron definition.  next….
• We talk about How to pray for someone and give them their money’s worth.
• We learn the origin of the term scapegoat!  You guys probably know already but I haven’t a clue.  He also tells us who THE all time scapegoat is.  Here’s a hint… the GOAT is not Tom Brady.

Also, a note: There is a graphic description of death and dying in this episode that you may not feel comfortable hearing, specifically involving a patient dying from cancer.

With that same patient there is a discussion about the power of forgiveness, which leads me to bring up a professor I have mentioned before on the is podcast, Dr. Fred Luskin from Stanford University.  He has done extensive research on the training and measurement of forgiveness therapy. His research demonstrates that learning forgiveness leads to increased physical vitality, hope, enhanced optimism and conflict resolution skills. It also shows that forgiveness lessens the physical and emotional toll of stress, and decreases hurt, anger, depression and blood pressure. There is a link at the bottom of the description to a short talk by Dr. Luskin.

We pick up our conversation right where we left off last time, in fact there’s a slight overlap as our guest is talking about the literal versus figurative when trying to interpret the Bible.  It’s my conversation with a seminarian and his chaplaincy work in a hospital and thank you for listening to The Modern Moron…

CLOSE - I hope you enjoyed that conversation with my friend from the seminary and I will try to keep in touch with him and hopefully have him back.

Since I have a couple of minutes I’d like to tell you about a recent visit I made to a patient.  I was on the floor walk along and came to the door that was closed and had a sign posted that before anyone entered they should check with the attending nurse.  I did and found out that it would be okay and that he seemed to be in a good mood that day, as he had been doing Elmo impressions earlier.  Not knowing exactly what that meant, I walk in and find a young man, probably in his 20’s to early 30’s, long hair with a gauze mesh over his entire left leg due to a burn, and not much clothing other than that.  His blanket was covering his kibbles and bits, and he had an incarceration geo-tracker on his left ankle.

 

Not much of a traditional conversation.  Even though I’m a moron, I’m feeling like not only am I observing someone who could possibly be a meth addict to the point of permanent damage, I also have the very unprofessional feeling that I’m observing someone who could be schizophrenic.  Also, he looked to be fairly healthy physically and lacked the gaunt look with accompanying sores and missing teeth.  He seemed to have all his teeth.  Yay!  They certainly were not dentures… and if they were, he got ripped off.  

So which is it? Meth of schizophrenia?  I looked it up and gosh darn if there isn’t some overlap between methamphetamine-Induced Psychosis and Schizophrenia.  How about that.  There is a link to a study of just that at the bottom of the description if you’re interested.

It can be difficult, with out the proper educational background, to make the distinction between someone who is suffering from addiction to Chrystal Meth and someone who is schizophrenic.  I was speaking with a new friend who is in one of my exclusive social clubs that has recovered from addiction to meth and heroin, and he told me based on his experience and not medical data or trials or anything professional, that someone on meth will hallucinate, see and interact with hallucinations, partially because the stimulant effect has kept them up for 4, 5 or even 6 days and they are literally trying to sleep while awake and it results in these hallucinations.  Again, that is the experience of one person, not a science based or clinically based conclusion.  He also said that in his experience, the withdrawal from heroine was more physical with an actual craving for the drug, while the withdrawal from meth was additionally psychological.  Again, his experience.  

Also, I noticed he had rather long fingernails, which I was slightly concerned that if he got squirrely on me, I would not care to get scratched by this… um… person.  He did seem to respect that I was a Chaplain, he did have a bible with him and at one point asked me what was my favorite quote from the Bible.  I am not that familiar with the bible and you wanna know what this moron’s answer was?  I said, “you know, the gospel of Matthew is the first thing that comes to mind.”  I mean, why limit myself to a favorite verse?  I’ll take the whole book, thank you.  

This patient was pretty cagey.  In fact that’s a pretty good word to describe him.  Every couple seconds his eyes would shift as could his mood.  So I tried to wrap up my talk with him in some prayer.  He asked me to pray for him and just like our seminarian recommended, I asked him, “what would you like me to pray for?”

His response was, “I would like you to pray that I will be back with my wives and that I never test positive for Chrystal Meth again.”  Not my wife, my wives and not to be released from the grips of Meth and it’s addiction, just don’t let me get caught.  And you know what?  That’s exactly what I prayed for… “Heavenly Father, please let Bob heal from his injuries so he  can be reunited with his wives, and may he never test positive for Chrystal meth again.  And also God, please release him from the grips of it’s addiction.”  I threw that last part in there so I would have a clean conscious.  He told me that prayer was very powerful, I bid him goodbye and as I left the room he continued a conversation with his imaginary friends.  Out of curiosity, if you have ever prayed for either of those things, to be reunited with your wives or to never test positive for meth again, would you please… PLEASE contact the Modern Moron because we would LOVE to hear your story… provided you can string two sentences together.

You might think you yourself, “how can you be a chaplain and not know the bible?”  My answer is that so far, the patients I have sat with mostly want some one to just listen.  Listen to them, listen to their story, listen to their suffering and just be present.  Not to come up with my own fish story or my tall tale that one up’s your story.  And, so far that has been acceptable… but I do have a lot to learn.  Thank you for listening to these last two episodes that have been a bit different than what we’ve had previously.  Hit like, and subscribe and write a glowing review and all the things people don’t want to do when they listen to a podcast.  If fact, you know what?  Skip it, I wouldn’t do it either.  We’ll see you next time… 

A Comparison of Methamphetamine-Induced Psychosis and Schizophrenia: A Review of Positive, Negative, and Cognitive Symptomatology - National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) 

What Is Forgiveness? | Fred Luskin, PhD - YouTube  

God’s Eternal Now | FaithHub - Faithhub.net