Attention, Catholic educators! In this transformative episode, we delve into the essential role of stillness, silence, and prayer in your daily vocational life. Join us as we explore the profound impact these practices can have on your well-being, spirituality, and effectiveness as a teacher.
In the fast-paced and demanding world of education, it’s crucial to carve out moments of sacred stillness. Discover the power of silence as a gateway to deeper reflection, self-awareness, and connection with God. Explore practical techniques and strategies to incorporate moments of silence into your busy schedule, allowing for spiritual rejuvenation and clarity of purpose.
Learn how the intentional practice of stillness, silence, and prayer can enhance your ability to listen, discern, and respond to the unique needs of your students. Discover how it can deepen your relationship with God and allow you to be a channel of His love and grace in the lives of those entrusted to your care.
Through personal anecdotes experiences, I illuminate the transformative power of incorporating moments of stillness, silence, and prayer into your vocational life as a Catholic teacher. Gain practical insights on integrating these practices into your daily routine, creating a sacred space for personal reflection, spiritual growth, and professional excellence.
This episode serves as a reminder that amidst the busyness and noise, the call to be a Catholic educator is grounded in the profound need for stillness, silence, and prayer. Join me in this inspiring journey as we uncover the profound impact these practices can have on your vocation, allowing you to flourish as a teacher and servant of God’s love.
Don’t miss this enlightening episode! Share it with your fellow Catholic teachers, and let’s embrace the transformative power of stillness, silence, and prayer in our daily lives of Catholic education. Together, let’s create a ripple effect of peace, spiritual nourishment, and genuine connection with God for ourselves and our students.
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Transcript
Well, hello there.
Speaker:My friend, Jonathan Doyle with you once again, welcome aboard my
Speaker:friend to the Catholic teacher.
Speaker:Pretty much daily podcast.
Speaker:I'm glad you're here.
Speaker:Uh, I've been enjoying the last couple of days episodes.
Speaker:We talked about vocation.
Speaker:We've talked about.
Speaker:How we help young people deal with the questions around, how do we know
Speaker:Christianity or Catholicism is true.
Speaker:So if you haven't checked those last two episodes, go check them out.
Speaker:The good stuff, please make sure you're subscribed, hit that subscribe button.
Speaker:It doesn't make a difference.
Speaker:And there's also links here.
Speaker:You can find about how to book me to come and speak live.
Speaker:That's what I do.
Speaker:You know, it's the best thing I just love coming to visit.
Speaker:Uh, all over the world, different conferences, events, schools, working
Speaker:with students, staff, parents.
Speaker:So please hit those links and we can shape some content specific to your needs.
Speaker:So I'm going to share with you a great quote from the inimitable.
Speaker:Regular listeners know that that is one of my favorite words, inimitable.
Speaker:I practice it.
Speaker:I can say it fluidly in Nimmitabel it means incapable of being imitated
Speaker:in Nimmitabel the inimitable everyone's got a dead stop place.
Speaker:Like.
Speaker:How many times you going to say that.
Speaker:What kind of do it once more, would you mind.
Speaker:Alright.
Speaker:I.
Speaker:I wait, I'm messing with you now.
Speaker:You're going to be, they're going to come and do it to get over with.
Speaker:No, I won't, I'm not going to be pressured by anybody.
Speaker:So it's from Evelyn Underhill.
Speaker:The great British writer.
Speaker:Who wrote Brideshead revisited and many other fantastic works of prose.
Speaker:Listen to this as your meditation becomes deeper.
Speaker:It will defend you from the perpetual assaults of the outer world.
Speaker:You will hear the busy hum of that world as a distant.
Speaker:Exterior melody.
Speaker:And know yourself to be in some sense, withdrawn from it.
Speaker:You have set a ring of silence between yourself and it.
Speaker:And behold.
Speaker:Within that silence.
Speaker:You.
Speaker:Uh, free.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:I'm going to bang the drum that I often bang.
Speaker:Burnout is real.
Speaker:Exhaustion for Catholic teachers, Israel.
Speaker:Busy-ness and overwhelmed for Catholic teachers, Israel.
Speaker:When I was speaking in Boise, Idaho.
Speaker:There was.
Speaker:I think I got it.
Speaker:I've got a great Bishop, Bishop Peter, and.
Speaker:He said something that stayed with me for many years.
Speaker:Uh, he was doing my introduction.
Speaker:I always get nervous when bishops to introductions because some bishops.
Speaker:This is ironic coming from me.
Speaker:They like to talk.
Speaker:And unlike I'm jacked, I'm ready to get on stage.
Speaker:I'm ready to rip in.
Speaker:And like the Bishop is Bishop being up there.
Speaker:A long time.
Speaker:And that's this that's the bishops, right?
Speaker:It's got a teaching office.
Speaker:So Bishop Peter, God bless him was not one of those bishops.
Speaker:He was super quick, but he said something really beautiful that stayed with me.
Speaker:And I want to share it with you.
Speaker:He said, Hey, he said you Catholic teachers, you've got to stop
Speaker:trying to make Jesus unemployed.
Speaker:You got to stop trying to make Jesus unemployed.
Speaker:Which means what if he's called you into this vocation?
Speaker:It is his job to sustain you in the vocation.
Speaker:If Christ has called you into the vocation, it is his job to
Speaker:sustain you in the vocation.
Speaker:So that's good news, right?
Speaker:And one of the ways that we do this is we cooperate with grace.
Speaker:Remember Saint Augustan said he who saved you without your cooperation.
Speaker:Um, we'll not know.
Speaker:He said, sorry, by bad.
Speaker:He said he who created you without your cooperation will not save
Speaker:you without your cooperation.
Speaker:So we don't get a say in whether we're created, but we do get
Speaker:a same, whether we're saved.
Speaker:W by responding to the gift of grace and salvation, right.
Speaker:We get that.
Speaker:We get that choice.
Speaker:The other choice we get to make is if we want to cooperate with the
Speaker:grace, that's available to us more regularly through the sacraments and
Speaker:in this today's message, this quote.
Speaker:The grace that's made available to us is the grace of meditation,
Speaker:silence and stillness.
Speaker:So friends.
Speaker:What am I going to offer you in?
Speaker:This message is.
Speaker:You've got to make time for stillness and silence and prayer and meditation.
Speaker:It is not an optional it's like I often say to people, kidney
Speaker:dialysis is not optional.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:If you get to the point of kidney failure, you don't get
Speaker:to decide, well, I'm busy today.
Speaker:I'm not going to make it to dialysis.
Speaker:You got to get a choice.
Speaker:I think prayer and meditation and stillness and silence are kind of similar.
Speaker:So I start most days around 4:00 AM.
Speaker:I've just always been a morning person.
Speaker:I'm very disciplined with sleep.
Speaker:But I start super early.
Speaker:I pray the divine office pray the rosary.
Speaker:And then I have about 40 minutes for completely silent meditation.
Speaker:I use high quality headphones.
Speaker:I use a face mask.
Speaker:I know this is gonna make somebody laugh.
Speaker:I use brown noise or rain sounds as I go into that state.
Speaker:And I really spend that time every morning with Christ before kind of about 6:00 AM.
Speaker:Now, it's just me.
Speaker:I'm not telling you to do that.
Speaker:But what I figured out is that if I want to discharge my vocation as a husband,
Speaker:father, communicator, Then I need to make time for that because there's Evelyn
Speaker:under hill says here, this, you know, this upset, this barrage of the outside world,
Speaker:he says, you will hear the busy hum of that world as a distant exterior melody.
Speaker:So isn't it true that so many things grab at us, right?
Speaker:There's.
Speaker:There's our finances, our mortgage, our kids, our parents,
Speaker:our career, our colleagues.
Speaker:The world.
Speaker:You know, conflict and what's in the news cycle, all these different things.
Speaker:But prayer and stillness and silence turns those things into a background.
Speaker:Hum.
Speaker:And Evelyn Underhill says here that we get to sit a ring of silence between
Speaker:ourselves and it, and in that silence.
Speaker:Evelyn Underhill says we are free.
Speaker:So, what I want to do is encourage you.
Speaker:If your school has a chapel, Where else?
Speaker:The carpet, where out the carpet spend some time there every single day.
Speaker:If you've got a place at home, do it every day at home, whatever you need to do.
Speaker:Uh, to make sure that that place is your place.
Speaker:And that you spend time in stillness and silence every day.
Speaker:And it's a discipline.
Speaker:It's like something that you do day after day after day after day.
Speaker:And it transforms you over time.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:So please, if you take one thing from that message make time today.
Speaker:To put that.
Speaker:Wall back around your heart to turn the outside world to a distant hum for
Speaker:awhile and allow Christ to be present to you in the stillness, in the silence.
Speaker:And honestly use headphones because you can be at your school and there
Speaker:still be people making lots of noise.
Speaker:I've got a set of Bose noise, canceling headphones, which are great.
Speaker:I've got a set of, um, apple air pod, max.
Speaker:And for a while, I was like, oh, what did people think?
Speaker:I'm weird.
Speaker:I go.
Speaker:Whatever.
Speaker:Like.
Speaker:You know, I want to, I think it's weird.
Speaker:I think it's weird not to be doing stillness and silence and prayer.
Speaker:I think that's weird.
Speaker:I think we're created for prayer.
Speaker:We are CapEx day.
Speaker:That which has been made with the capacity for God praying and
Speaker:stillness and silence is our nature.
Speaker:It just means because of the noise in the world, we need headphones.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:We just got to use the tools available to us.
Speaker:I want to say, thank you.
Speaker:Thank you for your work.
Speaker:What you're doing every single day.
Speaker:As a Catholic educator, you are making a difference.
Speaker:Rip it up.
Speaker:My friend, get back in there, get back into the space.
Speaker:You are engaged in a cosmic battle for the souls of young people.
Speaker:That is what is happening.
Speaker:The world is shot through with spiritual realities, light and darkness, angels
Speaker:and demons surround us everywhere.
Speaker:And you are in the front lines as John Paul cheese, to say you are engaged
Speaker:in the front lines of a lively battle.
Speaker:For the dignity of man.
Speaker:Dignity of the human person.
Speaker:If you're offended by the gender specific, we can change it to Dom,
Speaker:the original Hebrew, the human person.
Speaker:Frontline's friends.
Speaker:You are God's special forces in the classrooms.
Speaker:Go get it.
Speaker:Please make sure you subscribed, hit the link.
Speaker:If you want to book me to come and speak live my name's Jonathan Doyle.
Speaker:This has been the Catholic teacher daily podcast.
Speaker:You and I are going to talk again.
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