I saw a person picking their nose the other day at a coffee shop...
you know, from across the room I looked up and I’m like, “Oh they're picking their nose.”
And I thought, “Huh. Everyone's got the ‘boogs’ - you gotta get the boogs, gotta get the boogs out.”
‘Boogs’ are short for boogers. Whatever.
It's this slang. It’s what all the kids on the playground are talking about these days.
You know, boogs...
They got ‘ish’... issues? This is the ish?
Boogs happen to everybody. That’s the thing. It's called life.
Hi, my name is father Mike Shmitz and this is Ascention Presents.
So I was recently watching a documentary.
No, it wasn't. It was on YouTube.
But don't judge. Because you can't! ‘Cause you're watching YouTube too.
And it was about interesting homes.
And there was this couple that had built their home — pretty good-sized home — in a greenhouse.
Like, a greenhouse was surrounding their entire house.
And I thought that was really cool, you know, a greenhouse, right?
So they could grow plants year-round even though they were living in some northern climate kind of a thing.
They had an outdoor pool, which actually was an indoor pool because it was in the greenhouse.
But I was just kinda like, “That's a really neat thing.”
And it got me thinking about greenhouses.
Greenhouses are great. They allow you to grow fragile plants in any environment and in any season.
That’s a pretty good deal.
And it protects those fragile plants from the harsh environment.
Got me thinking even more about a number of Christians, Catholics that I know.
It seems like — I notice this more and more —
that a lot of people's faith gets grown in what you might call a greenhouse.
We've done a really good job in the modern world — at least in the west —
of protecting people from suffering, from pain, from death.
Now we haven't eliminated suffering, pain or death,
but what we've done is we've either protected people from that or we’ve distracted people from that.
And there's a thousand ways I could talk about that.
I mean, you think about the reality that, in other parts of the world — other than the Western world —
and in other times of humanity,
if someone got sick they didn't go off to a hospital.
You would take care of them in your home.
If someone died they didn't go to, again, a hospital or a hospice.
They didn't go to a funeral home after they died to be taken care of.
They died in the living room and you took care of them as their family members.
In many parts of the world and throughout history,
you weren't protected from those realities, those harsh realities.
Realities of suffering and of pain and of death.
Now, I know there's people watching this who are like, “Yeah I wasn’t either.
Ever since I can remember I've known pain and I've known death and I've known suffering.”
And I’m praying for you because I know that that's... that's real.
But for many people who are introduced into Christianity with that buffer,
it means they've been introduced to Christianity in a greenhouse.
And that's fine. I get it, right? Look, you want to protect your kids.
You want to protect people from those harsh realities,
just like you want to protect a fragile plant from the harsh environment or harsh seasons.
The problem is once you have some of these people — and I keep experiencing or encountering them —
they've encountered Jesus, they're kept in comfort and then they’re told that “God loves you.”
And they’re like, “Okay yeah, that's what Christianity is; it's comfortable — life’s comfortable and God loves me.”
And then all of a sudden they DO experience the harsh reality of life:
some kind of real suffering, some kind of real death.
And all of a sudden it's like, “Wait a second, wait a second. This doesn’t make any sense.
I thought God loved me! He clearly either doesn't exist or he doesn't love me.”
And that’s because why?
They were raised in a greenhouse, and then they were asked to step out into the harsh environment.
And rather than embracing the truth of Christianity,
it's like, “Well, I don't know, this doesn't seem real anymore.”
Contrast that with people's experience around the world
and people's experience through history.
From an early age you would encounter, as I said before,
you would encounter suffering, you would encounter evil, you would encounter death.
And then someone would say, “You know, actually, God himself entered into your suffering...
in Jesus.”
You'd have a cross in your life — you'd have a cross or a burden — and they'd say
“Actually, the truth of the matter is that God himself died on a cross. He entered into your suffering.
He loves you that much.”
You'd encounter death and say, “What can beat death?”
Then you'd say, “But then Jesus Christ allowed death to overwhelm him
and then he destroyed it so we can say ‘Oh death, where is your sting?’”
Now, what happened back in the day and throughout the world right now:
these people encounter life and then they encounter Jesus.
They have the question and then they're given the answer.
In the greenhouse, you're given the answer amidst all this comfort,
before you even have the question.
And again, that's okay to do.
But what it can create, as I said before, is a fragile faith — a greenhouse faith.
Now what is fragility, right?
So something's fragile if it encounters an obstacle and the obstacle crushes it.
If it encounters the harsh environment and the environment kills it.
So what do you want? We want people — ourselves, right? We want our kids —
we want to be surrounded by people who have... not fragile faith, but maybe resilient faith.
Like, that's awesome.
So if fragility is when you encounter the obstacle and the obstacle crushes it,
resilience is when you encounter the obstacle and you can make it through the obstacle, right?
You can... you can, yeah, tough it out.
You can pass through the obstacle.
No better, no worse. You made it through. That's phenomenal.
And I think that's the kind of faith that a lot of us want to have.
To have a resilient faith that — even in the midst of life's obstacles,
even in the midst of harsh environments — we were able to make it through.
But I think there's something more.
That we're called beyond a fragile faith, right? We’re called beyond a greenhouse faith.
We’re actually even made for something more than just resilience and resilient faith.
And St. James talks about this in his letter — it's written right at the top of the letter, first chapter, first sentence.
St. James says this, he says,
“Consider it...” Well, second sentence. Whatever, sorry, technicality.
James says, “Consider it all joy my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials.”
So St. James says consider it joy when you encounter various trials.
So, those are not simply to be avoided. You're not meant to live in a greenhouse, right?
“Consider it joy when you encounter various trials.” Why?
“For you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.”
Highlight this:
Ecounter various trials, not to crush it [fragile] and not simply make it through [resilience],
He says come to joy when you encounter various trials,
because the testing of your faith produces something.
You actually become stronger.
Now there's a man — he's a writer, a sociologist, I think economist — named Nassim Taleb.
He wrote this book, back in maybe 2012, called ‘Antifragile’.
What he did is he looked around the world at different economic systems and biological systems,
and, kind of, just the world, and he said ‘Yeah, there's things in our world that are fragile.’
Encounter the obstacle, the obstacle crushes it.
There's things that are resilient: encounter the obstacle and make it through.
He said, but there's things that, when they encounter an obstacle,
they don't get crushed and they don't just make it through...they get stronger.
And he looked around the world for a word for that: what’s the opposite of fragile?
Couldn't find one, so he came up with a new term: antifragile.
Antifragility is when you encounter the obstacle and that encounter with the obstacle makes you stronger.
This is, you know, it's the premise behind inoculation, right?
You get a little bit of the disease,
your body adapts and becomes stronger to fight off a lot of the disease.
It's the premise behind sports training, athletic training,
where you work the body to such a point where it actually breaks down the body a bit.
You get more than you can handle — not too much more — more than you can handle,
and the body adapts and becomes even stronger.
So it's not fragile, not resilient, but it's antifragile.
St. James is writing about this in his letter.
Consider it joy when you encounter various trials, when you encounter these challenges.
Because it produces something.
To be living in your faith in a greenhouse,
protected from all trial, protected from all testing, protected from the harsh realities of life...
might be nice,
but it's not where you and I are meant to live as disciples of Jesus.
And it’s also not where the church is supposed to live.
If you want to know what the most antifragile organization in the world is it's the Catholic Church.
There are times when the Church seems protected and seems kind of comfortable
and that's when it becomes fragile.
There's times when the Church is ‘Okay, we're kind of in the world, we don't know who we are.’
(Sometimes people in the Church, right, don't know or remember who they are.)
And maybe we're resilient.
But when the Church experiences testing, when the Church experiences trial?
That's when saints get made.
Because when the church experiences testing and trial, and has to remember,
‘We need to rely upon the grace of Jesus Christ and lean into this,’
that's when saints are made.
Heroic people are raised up all over the world.
The Catholic Church is the most antifragile institution you'll ever see.
And you — my brother, my sister — as you're watching this,
if you lean into Jesus, lean into his grace,
you can have the most antifragile faith the world has ever seen.
Consider it joy to encounter the trial knowing that it produces something.
You can get out of the greenhouse and into the world.
To say that ‘Okay, this challenge will give me an antifragile faith.’
Now this discouragement can give me an antifragile hope.
And this struggle can give me an antifragile love.
You guys, this is just amazing, and it's the encouraging part of being in battle...
The encouraging part of encountering trials, the encouraging part of being a Christian,
and then having to encounter death,
having to encounter suffering, having to encounter sickness —
you recognize that it's not for nothing.
It can't crush you and you don't just make it through or muddle through somehow.
You get through it and you realize that you are stronger than you have ever been.
You have more faith than you ever could.
You have more hope than you ever wished for, and you have more love than the world has ever seen.
Guys, get out of the greenhouse.
Get into the world and have an antifragile faith.
From all of us here at Ascension Presents, my name’s Fr. Mike.
*clicks* God Bless.
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