[00:00:00] hi, everybody. What’s up. Welcome back to another episode of Hear and Now podcast. I’m very excited to be joined by Mr. Bill Donaghy today to talk about theology of the body, beauty, social media, all of that fun stuff.
Why don’t we just get started? Why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience? Tell us who you are, how long you’ve been in TOB. All of that. Sure sure. Essentially, a senior lecturer and educator for the theology of the Body institute, but I’ve been in education. I mean, back into the nineties after college, I was a substitute teacher for a little stretch in public school systems.
I taught Sunday school. Then I taught in the grade school. I taught third grade. After some time in seminary in the early nineties, I discerned out and studied for my master’s in theology. I ended up teaching, uh, Malvern prep a private boys, school in theology, then simultaneously taught at Immaculata University, of course, on Christian marriage and family.
And at that same time, and this is the early two thousands. I started teaching for the Institute. So I’ve been in education for 25 years or [00:01:00] so. And it’s taken me around the world, around our country, specifically breaking open St. John Paul, the second, the whole way, not to exclude any struggles, challenges, and suffering through it all.
But learning about this teaching, which is essentially about being human, what does it mean to be a person, a person called to love? It’s just been an amazing grace. So I feel very blessed to be a part of it. I first discovered theology of the body as a teenager, actually, back in 1986, the first time the books came out of the publications of John Paul, two talks, I was 16 years old and I got struck by it, you know, and I thought, what is this?
And the kind of has haunted me and followed me my whole life. I rediscovered it in the year 2000. Through the work of Christopher West, who’s now become a great friend and a colleague. We worked together at the Institute. Yes. Theology of the body has also been part of my relationship with my wife, Rebecca and I have been married 17 years.
We went to some talks on theology of the body when we were dating and [00:02:00] yeah, engaged. It’s been part of our life as well throughout these years. So happily married 17 years, Rebecca and I have four children ages 12, 10, eight, and five. We’re a fully adoptive family, too. We have a big melting pot of all kinds of ethnicities and colors and it’s beautiful.
And yeah, theology of the body has been for it all, not just teaching its content as we’re going to talk about today, but trying to live it as a husband and a father, what does this mean for me as a person living the gospel? That’s your microwave version. Sophia right there. I switched it into two minutes.
What’s your elevator pitch? Absolutely. And I know you’re good friends with Mr. Owens, who I also had on the show and he gave his elevator pitch right there too. So it’s perfect. But I did want to ask you to kind of focus on more the unknown aspect, I guess, of theology of the body, which is not sexuality, but beauty.
And so what would you define beauty as from the Catholic perspective? Compared to the secular perspective today. [00:03:00] Yeah, let’s back that up a little bit. because it’s so rich. When we talk about beauty, we can all kind of take that in, in a different way. We can think, Oh, that means though, nice sunset or cute puppy or whatever, but for a Catholic, and even in the realm of philosophy, beauty is a capital B.
It’s known as a transcendental. So the transcendentals are truth, beauty. Goodness. Those are the big three people often say unity or oneness being. Is also considered a transcendental. So these things go way back to the ancient Greeks, right? Plato, Socrates, the others they saw in the visible world, the mystery of God, not knowing maybe his name yet, but Plato and Socrates, for sure.
And so many others were moved by truth, beauty, goodness. And so they experienced it in their own life, through the world. And human relationships, and they noticed that it was transcending. It took them out of themselves. So truth, beauty and goodness. As the big three, they take us out of [00:04:00] ourselves. They show us that we’re, we’re not just cog or a consumer, but we’re a human being.
Made for truth, beauty and goodness in our world today, truth is the tragedy. Truth has been relativized. We say stuff like, well, that’s your truth. This is my truth. What’s your truth. As if it’s very malleable, like it’s just whatever it is. And I don’t want to impose my truth on you. So truth has lost its sting.
In some ways, people just like, Hey, you know, Goodness has become a little bit relativistic as well. Like, well, that’s good for you and you do your thing and you do you and I’ll do me, but beauty still rocks our world. People will argue about it. Like it just sneaks under the radar of the intellect, grabs us and makes us do the double-take.
We’re arrested by beauty. So this beauty with a capital B is synonymous with God. He is beauty. I love this story when St. Francis of Assisi was pierced by, uh, Christ crucified the vision of Jesus and his wounds. When you went to Franciscan, I know it’s a fear, right? So you love Francis [00:05:00] when St. Francis was pierced by those wounds, the stigmata, he cried out God, you are beauty.
You are beauty. And that’s interesting. Cause he was being pierced. He was suffering. So beauty isn’t just cute or pretty beauty is infinite. Mysterious. When we see something truly beautiful. What’s the first thing we do. We sort of gasp where we grow, and we’re like, Oh, so Pope Benedict, the 16th talks about beauty as a dark that pierces us, opens us and causes us to ake for something infinite.
Okay. Let’s bring this back down to theology of the body. When John Paul two, who wrote theology of the body in the mid seventies as a book first, before he taught it as Pope, when he was a young seminarian, he. I was rocked by a beauty. He used to write poems, beautiful poems. Maybe I’ll have a chance to open up one of them.
He wrote as a seminarian in this interview. It’s really beautiful. So he said, I fell in love with human love. He called it fairest [00:06:00] love. He was rocked by the beauty of human love and relationships. And so beauty was always the Lodestar for him. It pulled him out of himself. And when he looked at the human person himself and others, he was overwhelmed by it.
In his theology of the body. He talks so much about the sign of human love. He uses these beautiful superlatives it’s astonishing, and I think that’s what we need today. Theology of the body and beauty are synonymous. It’s the one pray, love all the things that we do are truly, they have a beauty to them.
This is important today, Sophia, because I feel like with this pandemic, we’ve been so locked down, mask up. We don’t even hardly see that we need to return to beauty. We need to come back to beauty. Absolutely. And you brought up a lot of good points in that as well, which was beautifully said. And I took metaphysics this semester, that whole aspect of the trends.
And I know it’s something that a lot of people almost overlook or just don’t even think to research until it’s kind of placed in front of you. It’s a core class. I [00:07:00] had to take it, but I ended up loving it so much. There’s just this entire aspect to life to truth. To be in goodness and we just don’t even see.
And so we focused a lot on those three, the big three. I love that truth, beauty and goodness as semester of how much there is just, there’s all other aspect to life of God being truth, being beauty and goodness himself. And so I think that’s a wonderful, wonderful perspective. So do you think beauty has.
Kind of had this redefinition over the years with the prevalence of social media or of just going with the trends of what the culture is today. Yeah. That’s a good question. I think beauty culture in particular and social media, certainly, which has become the channel via duck through it, stuff comes to us with such a visual culture.
Beauty can be reduced in a way to what’s. Beautiful. It’s the cosmopolitan magazine cover. It’s the vanity fair. [00:08:00] It’s the Kardashian family who, I don’t know, personally, maybe they’re wonderful people. I don’t know, but there’s a lot of this sort of surface-y superficial beauty, and there’s magazines that come out where the models are actually airbrush.
I remember years ago, I think it was, gosh, she’s a British actress. I can’t remember her name right now. And when they put her picture on the cover, they airbrushed her to make her look thinner and she literally brought a lawsuit against that. I love myself. I love my body. I am who I am. Please don’t change me.
So, yeah, it’s tricky. True beauty. Look at a picture of, say, a supermodel and then look at a picture of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and sit with those images. One possibly photo-shopped. To remove all blemishes and wrinkles, the other full of wrinkles, right? And then if you sit with those images and then you press in, you encounter real beauty in mother Teresa, you start to look at these wrinkled hands that have served.
You look at these eyes that have gazed our Lord in the Eucharist for countless hours at her smile. [00:09:00] Do you see what I’m saying? It’s bigger than we think. I think, and if we’re fed by flipping through our smartphones and screens and Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter and all these things come at us, but we haven’t put it down and walked out into the clear blue sky, kind of one-off, at least the other is reality.
Beauty is reality. Reality is beauty. It’s back to metaphysics, like you said, Sophia metaphysics is all about the physical, but the meta what’s beyond it as a Catholic, we see the world, but we see through it like a stained glass window. When I encounter a sunset, I’m not just thinking, look at those particles in the atmosphere.
I’m not thinking that way. When I look at my wife’s eyes, I’m not looking at the pigmentation in her cornea. I’m not thinking in this biologically reduced way, something poetic, something beyond something metaphysical is coming at me. It just feels right. I wanna encourage anybody listening to our interview to try this, [00:10:00] go outside and encounter the world and just sit with it.
Don’t rush. Don’t plugin. Don’t stare at a screen, but just let reality at you. Which is what St. John Paul, the second did you’ll sit with it and realize beautiful. I don’t have to filter it, frame it, crop it the right way. I just let it hit me. Don’t get me going, Sophia, on this topic. That’s perfect. I’m sure people will love it over the course of COVID.
And the pandemic, we were kind of almost forced to stop and take things in for what they really were. First of all, we’re experiencing things as they come news, and things are just pounding us, and we’re really kind of forced to analyze what the truth really is and was through all of this. But I also found myself really taking things.
For what they were in the present moment, because I took for granted what we had before being able to go out to shops and seeing people and. Experiencing real life as it is. You’re [00:11:00] missing two thirds of a person’s face right now. And not being able to have that individual relationship with somebody. And so you’re almost forced to say, okay, beautiful person, but you’re actually looking at their souls.
And I always think that’s such an interesting way of looking at somebody. Not always impacted like the physical beauty, like you said about mother Teresa. She’s a beautiful person because she’s a beautiful soul. And so that union of our body and soul is really just what gives beauty life. And so I really think that’s just such a cool concept that a lot of people often neglect that there’s just this whole person inside of us that is not defined by our outer beauty.
And so. I think that social media has kind of had this change, like you said, about the British actress in the cover. I remember that story, and there are still companies out there that are saying we’re giving real beauty, real people, but there’s still airbrushed. They might be different sizes, but their skin is not as smooth as it [00:12:00] really looks on the cover.
So do you think, do you think social media can have both a negative and positive impact on this transcendental aspect of beauty? Yes. Yeah. Let’s qualify that because it’s important. Catholics, sometimes people in the secular ideas, like we’re sort of old fashioned old school, we don’t like science kind of silly cartoons of what Catholicism is when the internet came out, I guess, late nineties, mid nineties, there were already documents.
John Paul two wrote a beautiful letter about the power of the internet and the good that could happen. The church has always on the forefront of that and saying, wow, Good job as a mother mama church, it’s like a parent looking at a kid’s drawing and saying, it’s beautiful. Wow. Let’s put it on the fridge.
She’s so humanized as Facebook, she’s always connecting to the people behind the profile, like cousins or family or friends, or, you know, this person needs prayers. Oh, look at this. Oh, look at this thing. They’re celebrating. And she’ll share that with the kiddos so we can certainly, we need to [00:13:00] humanize the technology.
And it can be a great source for good. It can do great things at the same time though, we have to qualify when you’re in the presence of another person, the phone takes the second run person, always trumps phone. Every time we all feel that visceral reaction when we’re talking to somebody and our story is not stimulating enough and they pull their phone out or we’re trying to tell them something or ask them something and they’re staring at their phone or you go out to a coffee shop or a restaurant, and it’s like, they’re looking at the phone.
So. It’s a means to an end, it’s a tool for communication, but the goal is communion. Our social media is not really good to kind of form communion. It helps us communicate, which is great, but the thing’s supposed to fall off at that point. Right? Well, we actually make a real human connection and encounter real FaceTime is always better than FaceTime.
FaceTime. So you guys just kind of pray through that and figure that out and be intentional. I think about it. I actually jumped off social media a [00:14:00] year ago. This January 1st. I haven’t really, other than that, maybe an event coming up or something. I have not been on social media for almost a year and I feel it was great.
And to be honest, I can’t go back. I don’t think I’ve ever gone back other than the tool for announcing events or something, but. I just feel like it can become a Frankenstein monster a little bit. It can become way bigger than we ever intended. And I think even the film, social dilemma, things that are coming out now, executives who created Facebook and all these things are saying, Ooh, we didn’t realize the possible potential dangerous.
So just be careful, right? Possess your possessions. Don’t let your possessions possess you. And I think at this point, sometimes we allow the possession to possess us, you know, Our humanity is the greatest gift. Outlive the universe, your human nature, your personality, the other stuff falls away in the end.
So it’s about balance. I think insight foresight, absolutely. [00:15:00] During the Christmas season, it’s always such an interesting reflection, at least for me when. Kids get another piece of technology. It’s the only thing that they usually focus on that you could get, you know, $5,000 next to you, but they’d be focusing on the phone.
And so I think during the Christmas season, and my advent reflection was to be really present because these moments are always fleeting and there’s never going to be a December, 2020 when you would see the Bethlehem star or anything like that. You just don’t want to miss that, those moments. But having that heart to search for beauty, I think.
It is something that a lot of people are missing right now only because I think that society has almost just trumped this definition of beauty, that it’s almost hard to get back to what it’s supposed to be. So do you think there is a possibility of it being able to be redefined again to this transcendental aspect of beauty?
Yes, I do. Definitely don’t want to be a naysayer, right? Like, Oh, the [00:16:00] culture has gone to pot. It’s all terrible. You know, although I do pray for a kind of Y2K. You probably don’t remember this, but the year 2000 rolled around computers, it’s all gonna sometimes I’m like, that would be actually cool. But yeah, I think that for us to rediscover.
Capital B beauty, the transcendental that pulls us out of the temporal into the infinite. One of those things is going to have to be an unplugging and intentional unplugging and slowing down, entering into metaphysical realities, entering into ontological reality. So these are big words, but it just means being.
Being present. So just last night sun was going down. It goes down so early, and it’s like four 30 and it’s getting, but I had a few moments to sit on the back deck, watch the sun go down and I’m a big pipe smoker. I love to smoke a pipe. So I sat there and I just sat and watched the sun go down. I fell it’s warmth on my face.
Those pause moments, those pregnant pauses, those moments of stillness [00:17:00] are so enriching because reality starts to speak to us. Pope John Paul, the second used to talk about that, that reality is whispering to us. You will not be unhappy. There is something promised to you and it will come, but for us to get that.
Beautiful truth. We have to look at it. We can’t be restless and agitated. Like I gotta look busy, I gotta do something. What are you doing there? Do something. I remember seeing a billboard once when smartphones started exploding, this was years ago, and it was at a train station and it had two people sitting on a bench and it was a new phone, new, some new smartphone.
And it said 17 minutes to wait for the train. 17 minutes, wait or communicate. Because you can’t just sit there on the bench that would look awkward. You know, you look like you’re, what are you doing? Like sitting on a bench, but what’s wrong with that. W-why, how have you come to this point where it’s just weird, awkward, right.
Awkward silence, mother Theresa [00:18:00] said, silence is the language of God. So beauty can be redefined, rediscovered. We shouldn’t say redefine. It can be rediscovered, but the onus is on us to put out into the deep. Step into the mystery, not be afraid to do some detox. I already shared getting off of social media is great.
I don’t know where I had all the time to do it before. I’m still got my own struggles, but I get a little bit more present to the moment and God comes to us in the present moment. He’s not in the past. He’s not in the future. He’s the eternal now. But if we’re always on something that we’re not in the now, do you see?
So uni can be rediscovered as a portal, away into the mystery. And that’s the coolest thing. It’s all around us, but he said entrances to holiness are, if you were at all times, that’s right. Cool. For a Catholic, this invitation to walk in the way of [00:19:00] beauty means. That God’s communicating to himself right now all the time.
He uses everything in anything. So a walk in the park, a quiet moment, sitting in your chair, opening up the word of God, listening to your neighbor, being attentive to your child. And it’s hard. Sometimes I got stuff to do. I I’m working, but here’s the way of beauty. A nutshell speak, Lord, your servant is listening.
Speak Lord. Your servant is listening where everywhere. Everywhere mother Teresa talks about that. He’s everywhere. He’s in the child. He’s in the sunset. He’s in the sound of that radio. He’s in the sound of that Crow. She once said that stupid Crow. I love that, that he can be an, imagine her in a Holy hour, hearing the Crow.
But that’s the cool thing about the Sacramental vision of a Catholic in this way of beauty is to like speak Lord your servants listening. There’s nothing. That’s not interesting to God. He loves the details. They say the devil’s in the details. God is in the [00:20:00] details. He loves the little things. Amen. Yeah, absolutely.
I think the coolest thing about Catholicism specifically is Catholic. The word Catholic means universal. God is universal. There’s no better way to put that. And I think with this whole. Not to keep bringing it up. But I think with the whole online church and streaming, things like that, and myself being so distracted, I’m just sitting there.
I’m also typing away answering emails, so I’m not fully present. And then I started to realize, what am I doing? I would be in church right now if I wasn’t sitting here experiencing COVID. So just really, really bringing that intentionality back to things I think is a really good point. A lot of us need to hit on.
In this new year, especially I’m sitting through Facebook, scrolling through Facebook. I’m not going to lie. And everybody’s word for the year. This year is being present and being intentional. And so I think it’s almost kind of funny. It’s like this contrary thing where they want to be intentional, but they got to put it out there to say that they are going to be intentional, [00:21:00] no judgment.
It just kind of interesting, you know, I’m taking a break from social media, but everybody needs to know. It’s just a very interesting juxtaposition for people to have there, but do you see any kind of forecasted trends of beauty going into the next few years, finishing out 2020, going into the next few years, do you see any negative or positive trends as you’re teaching and having this kind of authority there?
Yeah, I really do. I mean, one of my favorite lines from the Russian author Dostoevsky is in the end. Beauty will save the world. He said, we need beauty more than we need bread. I mean, that’s amazing. So I have great hope as much as what’s been annoying, the lockdowns and the quarantines. It’s so interesting.
How. We were already addicted to our screens and way too plugged in and not being present to others. Well, you get what you want and now you’re all stuck. And all you’ve got is zoom and Facebook and Netflix. And you can only binge so long. [00:22:00] My hope I think is that we’re just going to get so saturated by it.
I was just going, I hate this thing, this longing for more. Again, intentionality. We gotta be willing to walk away. Step out of the cave. Plato’s allegory of the cave. Step out of the cave and all the little glittering things flashing on the cave wall. Go out into the bright sunshine. I have high hopes. I think that there’s going to be such a distaste for the screens that we’re going to want to just get back to the real.
And that’s part of my mission at the Institute I shared when we were off the mic that starting Sunday, I’ll be teaching a five day. Retreat called the way of beauty theology of the body and art. And we have over 60 people from around the country who are coming out real-time. Face-to-face granted there’ll be masks I’m sure, but we’ll be in a retreat center with blessing sacrament, present.
And I get to give 30 hours of lecture, but it’s not really that we’re walking in beauty. I’m going to open up poetry, [00:23:00] sacred art. We’re going to look at masterpieces. We’re going to pray through poems, just like sit in it. And it’s going to be a return to school of humanity. Right? This is what it means to be a person.
Awake alive, kind of like hands in the soil, but like hearts made for heaven and all that we experienced in our senses again, is a gift, and it lifts us up, transcends us through beauty to God. Once you taste that destroyed for life, I can’t now it’s everywhere. So I have great hope. But the thing is that cables have to crumble down.
We got to get, that’s going to be like, we’re like a little more people coming out into the daylight, like rubbing our eyes. Whoa. Hey, you’re here. Here too. Wow. Hi unrepeatable, Amazing infinite human person. This is amazing. And all that surrounds us in the world can be rediscovered as a gift. That’s John Paul two’s theology of the body.
Everything is a gift. You are a gift and you’re called to become a gift. That’s my hope. We rediscover it. [00:24:00] Absolutely. And I think that’s such a great perspective and I love Plato’s allegory of the cave at the time. I was not very happy about learning it, but now I think it’s such a beautiful perspective on things.
And one of the things I’ve seen as a trend now, too, with COVID is that people are kind of getting tired of the technology and being forced to be online and do Zoom and Facebook and whatnot. That they’re almost like craving that attention. Real-time. And so I think moving into this new year, I think a lot of people we’re going to start to see a lot of people, just almost rebel and be like, I’m done with this and I want to see you and I want to hug you and really be able to experience that true communication with people again.
So what advice do you have for somebody who wants to start understanding or pursuing a heart of beauty with a capital B. Sure. Sure. Great question. Sophia. First off the transcendentals are all synonymous with God and I want to put this out there. We’re kind of drawn to [00:25:00] a unique transcendental all of us.
When I think about my dad, I think truth has been his transcendental. He’s really drawn to it. If I think about my wife, Rebecca, I feel like goodness is her transcendental mark. I met her when she was a Franciscan missionary over their heart for the poor. Since I was a little kid, beauty has been my transcendental.
So first off for your listeners, pray about like, what am I drawn to? Maybe I’m drawn to the truth of the faith. Maybe I’m drawn to the beauty of the liturgy. I don’t know. They all come together because on the, it says you can’t separate these three sisters without some vengeance, it could be an Orthodox Catholic, but miserable.
You also, can’t be like way over there with just beauty without the substance of truth. So they’re all connected, but we kind of lean into one. So pray about that, but recognize they all swirled together to rediscover beauty and its fullness. I would say to your listeners and to us, what moves you? What moves your heart?
What’s the stuff ever [00:26:00] since you were a little kid, when the awakening happened and you realize, Whoa, his world, was it a certain film? Was it a certain band kind of music? Was it a geographical location? Were you haunted by the beauty of the mountains or the ocean? It’s magnet amenity the bigness of it.
What kind of stuff rocked your world and pulled you out of yourself? Is there a poem you read in high school that all of a sudden you’re like, Whoa, Like, I’m not in high school. This poem moves me and sit with it. I have my own way of praying. I’ll pray uniquely, but I want to bring sacred art in. I like the incense, you know, the candles, beeswax candles, real candles.
You can get them Gregorian channel polyphony stuff that moves me. I love to read poetry. This isn’t for everybody, but everybody has to discern, like what moves me? We’re not called to be dutiful Catholics, dutiful, Christians that just follow the law. The law is love. God is a lover. And so he’s asking us, what do you long for?
What moves you? What do you desire? The Bible [00:27:00] says, God will give you the desires of your heart. So it kind of opened that door, and don’t feel like, Oh, I shouldn’t be wasting time on this. Yes, you should. The woman broke the alabaster jar and wasted that perfume on the feet of Jesus. And Jesus said, she’ll be remembered for this forever.
Everyone else was like, she wasted that we could have sold that for 300 days wages. That’s not the way of beauty. That’s the way of utility find what moves you waste time with it. It will enrich you. If you spend your time in what means beautiful and moves your heart every day for a little bit of time, that fullness will overflow into the people around you.
So your family, your friends, your coworkers, your housemates. They’ll start feeling like the radiant power of the beauty that you’ve been spending time with and adoration of. And they’ll be like, wow, this is great. Welcome to life. The only creatures of the universe that have this amazing walk, beauty, the animals don’t experience it this way.
We do therefore press in, become a parcels of beauty. [00:28:00] Let it move you and then let it move the world. There’s so much good stuff. This is a touchpoint of evangelization as well. That you are able to talk about the beautiful with people you can talk about. What’s beautiful with everybody. We can always ask what moves you.
Everybody’s got an answer. And that’s the way we talk about our Lord, because he is the unmoved mover. He’s the one who, yeah, absolutely. I think the thing about faith that is very cool, especially with God, is that it’s very subjective. We have the love, but what moves us is going to be subjective. But you have that common unifier of beauty, everybody’s attracted to the sunset, everybody’s attracted to an attractive person.
And so it just kind of runs through all of us. And I think that’s really cool because you can literally strike up a conversation with anybody and be able to hold one with them. And so I think just. Really taking this time in the next year to be intentional. And if you’re trying to sit with that beauty, whatever you’re missing out on that you think you’re missing out on whether it’s answering emails or during work [00:29:00] that can wait.
That’s all temporal at the end of your life. That’s all going to go away anyway, but taking that time to grow with God anyway, that’s what’s going to carry you into the eternal life anyway. So I think it’s just really putting this perspective back into being in a relationship with God is what’s the most important thing in life, more important than work or anything else.
Okay. Comment to that point, because I think it’s the really solid point at the end of your life. Yeah. You’re not going to be thinking, Oh, I wish I cleaned out my inbox or. Put more money in my 401k. You’re not going to be thinking about any type of stuff you would probably be thinking about the stuff that moves you and what gift it was to breathe and live and exist or momentum or remember death.
So your point about in the end, what are we going to be thinking about is how important this ties into COVID-19 this ties in pandemic. People who are maybe at risk and people that this has created has off the charts and really at the heart of it, you think what? Don’t be afraid of death, but as a [00:30:00] Catholic, we’re not afraid of death.
St. Paul’s is death. Where is your sting? Where is your victory crisis overcome death? So in the end of our life, death is not so much something to be fear. Death is the coach. That’s come to take Cinderella to the ball. It’s the beginning. It’s not the end. And so part of the way of beauty is recognizing that also we need to cultivate comfortability with the Frances called sister death and operates where it all begins.
We’ve lost the art of dying and the ancients used to call it ours more. And the art of dying, the memento Mori is remembered death, not in a creepy morbid way, but just it’s coming, but don’t freak out. Jesus is victorious. Over the grave. And so we don’t have to be afraid. We don’t have to be afraid of 19.
We didn’t have to be afraid of dying in a car accident or to be afraid of getting cancer. Granted, those are crosses, and there’s a really hardships. Absolutely. And people have lost a lot this year and there’s been a lot of depression and shin, [00:31:00] but beauty, I have to open up to let him Pierce into this cloud of fear and darkness and say like in the end, beauty will save the world.
Amen. Absolutely 100%. There’s so many great analogies that you throw it out there. And I don’t even know what else I have to say to that, but I did want to ask on your expertise for that one. So you have a book, right? I wanted to ask you about that real quick. Before we close out the episode, why don’t you just talk about it a little bit?
Sure. I’m a published in the realm of articles. The book is in process. The creation I’ll be starting is called the beauty of this big course. I created the workbook, but the book that’s coming is called the way of wonder. And some of the things we talked about, it’s going to be the big reset. It’s the human person, male, female man woman is a person who wonders and we have to get back.
To rediscover everything. We’ve just talked about the gift of being human and what are the distractions? What are those caves? We get locked [00:32:00] into that obvious scape, put obstacles in the path to wonder we’ve got to cultivate. Silence. We have to cultivate our senses again, plant our feet on the earth, and realize that our hearts are made for heaven, all that stuff.
So I’m really excited about that book coming out. Please pray for that. The way of wonder I want to make it inspiring, but also very practical. And my hope is it’ll be kind of a manual, especially coming out of a quarantine and the pandemic Emmanuel for being a person again for being 100%, we all need that.
I still don’t know how to act in social situations anymore. So totally necessary.
Absolutely. So definitely excited for that. But the last question that I wanted to ask you is an easy one for sure. Is where can people find you and connect with you, especially if you’re not on social media? Yes. I used to use it so much as a way to share. What’s true. Good and beautiful. And again, it can be that, but I’ve jumped off.
[00:33:00] However, I still have a YouTube channel out there and Facebook, Twitter. All that there’s old sharings there, but the best way to go into theology of the body, learn about what we’re doing. And look@myscheduleforcoursesortalksistobinstitute.org, T O B institute.org. We have online courses now because of COVID.
We also have, of course the in-person encounters. We have the five day retreats. We offered them throughout the year. And so I’ll be doing that as well. And we travel and give talks and retreats. God willing next year. We’ll really kick those up again. And we love to have people come out to TOB institute.org and come out to our talks.
It’s such a gift, Sophia, because everything we just had our chat about is what we do. We engage, we engage John Paul’s thought. We look at the thought of the church and the saints and mystics men and women who felt the same ache who had the same longing or desire, deep, intimate relationships with God and others.
That’s what we do. That’s what we talk about. [00:34:00] So thanks for having me on to be able to share some of this too. No, this is wonderful. All of the links for you guys to check out would be in the show notes below. Definitely don’t miss out on any of the courses or opportunities you can check out. It’s definitely worth it, especially if you liked this conversation.
It’s pretty much the same thing, but yes, Mr. Donaghy, thank you so much for joining me today. I had a wonderful time talking to you. My pleasure. God blessed and happy new year. Yes, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. And the episode of here in our podcast, don’t forget to subscribe, and we will talk to you guys next time.
Bye-bye .