In today's message I share a great insight from Saint Augustine about how every Catholic teacher can cooperate more deeply with God and become a deeper and richer channel of grace.

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Well, Hey everybody.

Jonathan Doyle with you.

Once again, welcome friends to the Catholic teacher.

Pretty much daily podcast.

I do try to get to this as regularly as possible.

Cause it's really important.

You guys are doing incredible work out there in the broad

field of Catholic education.

I know I'm talking to principals, bishops, priests, classroom

teachers, support teachers, custodians janitors, grounds keepers.

People working in the front office, teacher librarians.

I know that, ah, this listenership, it's a beautiful gift of such great

diversity across the whole range of Catholic education on this big, beautiful

planet that we are sharing together.

On the journey towards home.

It's going to be great.

Right.

And finally, get home, get back to the father's house can be so good.

Mansions.

All of that translation power.

We get a mansion who doesn't want to mention, right.

Seriously.

I don't know, maybe some of the desert fathers, you know, and

desert fathers and desert mothers.

They like living in.

Little caves, but I guess I'll just have to accommodate the mansion in the

father's house when they get there.

I digress.

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book me to speak and there should be a link across to the YouTube channel.

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You ready to begin your comfortable?

He is sitting somewhere nice.

Hopefully you don't have headphones in sitting with you.

Feet up on a desk in your classroom where your students bouncing off the walls.

I'm sure you're not doing that, but wherever you are.

Let's begin my friends today.

We're going to talk about a very simple quote from St.

Augustine.

You know, one of the great things about Saint Augustan is that he just reinforces

this wonderful truth that the, the, uh, the gallery of sites, the great panoply

of saints in the heavenly realm is made up of the most extraordinarily wonderfully.

A collectic diverse mix of humans that you can imagine we've got.

Men and women from all sorts of backgrounds and all Gustin as a

scientist, one interesting ones.

He was.

A man of questionable morals, my friends, he was a, he

fathered illegitimate children.

He was a raging party animal.

Until, of course his massive conversion.

Um, When he heard that mystical voice said totally Lego.

Again, take up and read.

And then the words of scripture changed his life and set him

on a completely new path.

Isn't it.

Great.

How the gospels do that?

How the scriptures do that.

Uh, be at rest assured that, um, if someone like Senator Gustin can go from a

life of elicit behaviors to becoming such a great Saint, then there is hope for me.

And there is hope for you.

My friend, Sandy Gustin gives us this beautiful quote.

He says,

He who made you without your cooperation?

Will not save you.

Without your cooperation.

He who made you without your cooperation will not save

you without your cooperation.

It's a very powerful statement.

It's the it's drawing our minds immediately to the one great truth of

existence itself that we didn't choose it.

God, didn't come to us in the celestial realms before we inhabited our body.

And said, Hey, listen, I'm thinking of creating you.

What do you think you're interested?

Yes.

No.

Do you want to just hang out here as a disembodied spirit?

In the celestial realms forever, or do you want to be an embodied

human soul in enfleshed human soul?

We didn't get that choice God in his great wisdom and love will dust into existence

in love, through love and for love.

Uh, our creation and our destiny and love.

So we didn't get to make a choice about that one.

Here we are.

This is where we find ourselves, but there is a choice according to Augusta

that we are going to have to make.

We didn't get to choose if God made us, but we do get to choose

if we would like God to save us.

Well, I guess the first part is the realization that we need to be

saved from what, from ourselves.

From sin itself from original sin from all of the things that

draw us away from relationship.

With a heavenly father.

So we, if we were able to save ourselves, I figured we would have done it by now.

If Adam and Eve had figured out a way to get back into the garden, I'm

sure they would've worked it out.

Uh, but they didn't.

And we that we haven't.

You know, Uh, after my Roman holidays or the family, I do a lot of cycling

and, uh, there's this road right out into the rain forest up on the coast.

And somebody has built this beautiful retreat center.

It's really fancy.

Um, like, I don't know.

It's, it's really impressive.

But, uh, it's got, uh, it's called Eden.

It's got this massive sign at the front, says Eden.

And I remember the first time I sort of like, oh, I've done it.

I've found Eden.

Is, it looks like eight is a beautiful place.

You know, but I'm sure that if I jumped that fence, I wouldn't find

myself back in the aid and that we'd all like to get to some, our point

is that we can't save ourselves.

So, you know, we're invited into this cooperation with God

that if we want to be saved,

That all we have to do is cooperate.

I want to talk about that and its relationship to our Catholic Christian

vocations, particularly for most of my listeners in the education space

that God is trying to do something with you and through you in the world,

you see, God doesn't tend to show up.

In physical manifestation and just transform the planet.

Uh, you know, you know, I often say that audiences that have.

You know, if the Trinity suddenly appeared in full celestial glory in front of you.

It's a good chance your brain would explode.

Right.

But it has, I had, does God act in the world when he acts through us.

He X through us.

You know, if a child is struggling,

It is your pastoral solicitude, your pastoral presence with

them, your conversation, your wisdom, and counsel and guidance.

That is the action of God into the world.

You know, I was talking to some people on a conference call

this morning in the states and.

And I was sort of saying, you know, Catholic schools are

such a unique communities.

They're like ships traveling the great ocean of time.

And on that ship, there are these souls and we can create these

really beautiful communities.

That affect the people in them and affect the wider community.

And you see all we need to do.

Is cooperate.

So, how do we cooperate?

Well, I thank the Lord for this beautiful Catholic church we're members of,

because we have the helps of the faith.

We have the sacraments, we have the magisterium, we have this beautiful

wisdom and teaching that's come down for thousands of years, but most importantly,

of course we have the sacramental life.

We have the life of prayer.

We have the scriptures.

You see, this is how we cooperate.

We make time for God.

We make time for God.

You know, I sit on this conference call today.

You cannot do a supernatural task with only natural resources.

Catholic education is a supernatural task.

It's not temporal.

It's not purely in this realm of existence.

It transcends the boundaries of space, time and reality, because we are

talking about great spiritual truths.

We're talking about revealing the person of Christ.

To young people, to their families and to each other, as colleagues on this journey.

So my friends.

Cooperate.

God, didn't ask us if we wanted to be created, but he is asking

us if we want it to be saved.

If you want to work with him in this role of salvation, his

ministry and mission of salvation.

So just think about it.

Just go, am I cooperating?

How am I cooperating?

And my praying am I getting to mass?

Uh, you know, and it's not ticket box friends, it's not ticket box it's I go

to mass because it's the fount of grace.

It's the source and the summit of the faith.

I go there because that's where the grace is.

I say on stage all the time, I'm not, I'm not fancy.

I just quite Forrest Gump.

I may not be an intelligent man, Jenny, but I know what love is.

I was a really bad American accent story on my American listeners.

I will do better next time.

But you get the point, right?

Like that.

Um, that I just go with the Gracies and the graces at the

holy sacrifice of the mass.

So I go there and that's how I try to cooperate.

And hopefully those graces flow through.

So friends summary.

God is looking for your cooperation.

He's not looking for your perfection.

He's not looking for your brilliance.

He is not there hoping.

Oh, I look at that.

Look at that person.

They're so talented.

If only they cooperate with me, then I'd be hoping to do more.

God's God, he is pure subsistent being.

He requires nothing.

You cannot add anything to God.

He's doing us the favor friends.

It's not the other way.

So, uh, let's go operate.

Let's look for ways to cooperate today, let's be, has to have cooperative

hearts and spirits, generous cooperative hearts and spirits.

All right.

God bless you.

That's it for today.

Get you.

Get the YouTube channel.

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should find me on YouTube.

Click the link.

It's much easier.

All right, everybody.

God bless you.

Um, on Beck speaking, I'm just so pumped.

I'm uh, next week I got a big one in here in Australia with a few hundred teachers.

We're going to, we're going to talk about how to.

Come back from COVID how to rebuild relationships and connections.

And, uh, you know, my heart for teachers, I teach on burnout,

resilience, faith mission.

Uh, and then practical stuff where you really useful tools

of peak performance and personal development that we can use to grow.

As people so that we can love more and contribute more.

So if you'd like me to speak, make sure you click that link and find

out more about how you can book me.

All right friends.

God bless you, everybody.

This has been the Catholic teacher, pretty much daily podcast.

My name's Jonathan Doyle.

And you and I are going to talk again tomorrow.