Confession time: I am not always easy to live with. A few days ago, I caught myself being grumpy with Sarah and the kids, and it turned out the whole thing was rooted in a frustration at work that had nothing to do with them. That moment of self-awareness led me back to one of the great gems of our Catholic spiritual tradition: the Discernment of Spirits from St. Ignatius of Loyola.

In this chat, I'll share two powerful principles from St. Ignatius that have helped me in my own life and talk about how they directly apply to our marriages. I'll also point you to Fr. Timothy Gallagher, whose work makes these ancient rules incredibly practical for contemporary life. Grab a cup of coffee and let's talk about it.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

📖 The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide for Everyday Living by Fr. Timothy Gallagher

🎙️ Fr. Timothy Gallagher's podcast series on Discernment of Spirits (~20 episodes - apple podcast link)

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Confession time.

I am not always easy to live with.

I used to think that I was.

I used to think that I was better than my wife in various ways.

I used to think that I was pretty even keeled, didn't have a lot of moods.

I was never grumpy or upset or difficult to live with.

Sure, there were a few times here and there, but there were few and far between, really.

Well, I have recently realized the truth of the situation.

I am not always easy to live with.

Just a few days ago, I was really grumpy with my wife and my kids.

I noticed that Sarah was treading very lightly around me, you know, where she kind of tiptoes around and tries to keep the kids from interacting with me in a way that might be irritating, I thought.

And I prayed about this later.

And I realized, you know, what happened, it was all because of a frustration that I had with work.

I actually work full time now, along with Sarah, my wife, in our ministry to support Catholic marriages called Cana Feast.

Holy Desires is a part of Cana Feast dedicated to husbands.

Thank you for being here.

There's a lot of behind the scenes technical details that goes into an online ministry like this, and I was having some trouble with some of it, and it was frustrating.

And I took out that frustration on my wife and on my kids.

And later, just having the awareness that that's what happened, that's where the frustration was coming from, and that I was being pretty difficult to live with, difficult to be around, short tempered, kind of, you know, angry and bristly.

All of that because of something that was completely unrelated to Sarah and completely unrelated to my children.

But I was taking it out on them.

Just having that awareness was enough to diffuse it.

Well, later, I mean, by the next day, I was much better the next day.

I apologized the next day.

And Sarah, of course, was super gracious and very kind.

And all of this really helped me remember something that is so important in our journey as Catholic men, as Catholic husbands.

You know, in a very real way, the hearts of our wives and the hearts of our children are entrusted to us.

Like St. Joseph, right?

He was the head of the Holy Family.

Was he the most holy person in the Holy Family?

No, quite the opposite.

I mean, his son was God incarnate and his wife was the Immaculate Mary, the only other human aside from her divine Son, conceived without sin.

So that's the sort of family that Joseph had to lead, but lead he did.

And, you know, we are called, like Joseph, to be humble.

I used to think that I was Better than Sarah in a lot of ways.

Turns out I have been disabused of that illusion.

And like Joseph, I can, you know, accept with humility that my wife is really a lot better in many, many ways than I am.

And yet I'm still called to be the head of this family.

I'm still called to lead this family in various ways.

It takes a lot of humility.

One of the things that really helped me with this, you know, way back, even before Christianity hit the scene in ancient Greece, right, Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.

It takes self awareness to live life.

Well.

The ancient Greeks knew this, and we know it even more with the divine light of revelation.

Well, Saint Ignatius of Loyola is sort of the king, the master of self awareness and discernment of spirits.

He wrote many things, including the Spiritual Exercises, which is still a masterpiece of spirituality.

And he also provided for us a series of very concrete, very practical rules for how to understand the movement of.

And these things are so incredibly practical.

But he did write them several hundred years ago, and they are very short and pithy.

So, yes, read St. Ignatius of Loyola directly, of course, but I also want to provide a Father Timothy Gallagher.

He has basically dedicated his ministry as a priest to helping spread the.

The Good news of St. Ignatius of Loyola's discernment of spirits and his spiritual insights and making them really practical for contemporary life, Right?

And he unpacks these rules and really helps understand how to apply them, how to understand them, how to, you know, really use them for our own benefit in our own life.

That's the whole point.

He has a great book called the Discernment of Spirits.

He also has a podcast series in which he is interviewed about discerning the entire thing.

It's about 20 episodes or so.

I will link both of those in the show notes.

Because it's so valuable, gentlemen, to have these tools from our spiritual tradition in the Catholic Church and to understand.

How to begin to understand ourselves at a deeper level, maybe in a different way.

How to understand how God is working in us and through us, and how to understand the tensions, the struggles, right, between what I know is good for me and what I am tempted to do.

The tensions between when I, you know, those times I feel really close to God and really happy in my Catholic faith and those other times when I feel very distant from God.

Part of The Consolation of St. Ignatius work is to know that those, you know, vacillations between feeling very close to God and feeling distant from him, that's actually a Normal part of the spiritual life.

It's normal.

The saints also experience these ups and downs, closeness and distance from God.

It's just sort of a universal spiritual reality.

And St. Ignatius is probably the most insightful saint person who has penetrated that reality and laid down for us some very profound principles for how to understand what's going on.

I'm going to share just a couple valuable lessons and principles that have really helped me and my life.

And then I, I do strongly encourage you to go, you know, read or listen to Father Timothy Gallagher and his explanation of the spiritual rules of Saint Ignatius.

So here, here, without further ado, here are a couple of principles that I've learned and then I'm going to talk about how this really applies to marriage specifically.

So first, one, God allows everything, and it's for our benefit.

There is a lesson to be had in everything.

So when those times when we are very close to God and we feel happy, that's consolation.

And it's a beautiful, beautiful gift.

And there's a lesson in that.

There's a lesson about God's love, about God's abundance, about God's generosity, about God, God's mercy, right?

We learn so much about God the Father in those times of consolation.

And it's really a call for us to do likewise, right?

To our own children, to our own wives, to those in our lives.

We too are called to be abundantly generous and merciful and joyful.

That's part of the Christian call.

And these times of consolation are a great strength to us.

And when we are experiencing these times of consolation, we should really make, make note of it in our minds because the memory of consolation can itself be a source of consolation when we are not experiencing it.

And even when we are in a time of desolation.

Desolation is when we feel very distant from God.

Nothing's going well for us spiritually.

And there again, I said God allows everything and it's for our benefit.

There is a lesson in everything.

So I talked about consolation.

Desolation also has lessons.

In times of desolation, we are stretched.

Those are times when it's.

It's like the training ground, right?

God wants us to be strong in our faith.

God wants us to be warriors for him.

God wants us to be able to fight for what is right.

We can't do that if we aren't tested.

We can't be strong if we never face adversity.

And one of the things that a desolation teaches us is strength.

It teaches us how to be strong in Our faith, it teaches us how to have that virtue of fortitude.

When things get hard, when it's not easy to be a good Catholic, when it's not easy to pray in the morning, do I still pray?

Am I still faithful to that?

When it's not easy to be joyful and cheerful with my family, or at least, you know, even keeled, at least not grumpy and even, you know, stronger challenges and crosses that we have to bear.

All of these challenges, crosses, desolation.

And I'm speaking specifically about spiritual desolation here.

They.

Those times have lessons for us.

And God allows those times in our lives so that we can ultimately be closer to him, so that we can ultimately become a better man.

Right, or better, better woman.

Women just have these same, same ups and downs that we do.

Okay, that's number one.

God allows everything and it's for our benefit.

And there is a lesson in all of those things.

It's all gifted.

Okay.

Number two principle is our spiritual life is connected to our everyday life.

So often, and I know this, and you probably know this too, but so often it's so easy to think about our spiritual life as something other than what I'm doing right now.

Like my spiritual life.

Is it really connected to, you know, my work, my.

My everyday 9 to 5 job?

Is it connected to, you know, getting my kids ready in the morning and feeding them breakfast and getting them dressed?

Well, yes.

Yes, it is actually our spiritual life and our everyday life.

We only have one life.

It's all one.

And one of the profound truths of our Catholic faith is that we are created to be integrated.

Body, mind, and spirit.

All of it all together is we are one person.

That's why the resurrection of the body is such an important dogma in the Catholic tradition.

We aren't just souls trapped in this body and then we're freed after death.

I mean, the body and the soul are separated after death, but that is not our ultimate end.

That's temporary until the end of the world when God will renew all things and we will experience the resurrection of the body.

We proclaim that truth every time we recite the Nicene Creed.

Or is it the Apostles Creed?

Well, one of the creeds, they both reference the resurrection.

One of the other references the resurrection of the body specifically.

So, yeah, it's in the creeds specifically.

So our mind, our body and our soul, these are all connected so much.

And, you know, the story that I shared at the beginning is where I was experiencing frustration in my work, and that frustration then came out in my relationships.

And that frustration, of course, had a spiritual impact, a spiritual component.

You know, if I was so distant with my wife and my kids, of course I was probably, you know, I was distant from God too.

Those relationships are all very much connected.

And what, and here is the, the real insight that I have.

I think I've learned this lesson many times in my life, and I continually have to relearn it all the time.

And the lesson is this, that so often some frustration, some negative thing happens in one aspect of my life.

And then I, without even realizing it, completely unconsciously allow that negative, you know, thing in my life to impact the rest of my life, to impact my relationships and those who I love to impact my spiritual life.

And the more I can become self aware of what's happening, the more I can be aware of where that frustration is coming from.

Even if it's just something at work, right?

Maybe I was frustrated trying to fix, you know, for example, my son's bicycle has a kickstand that is broken and I need to fix it.

And that's been a little frustrating because I think I need a new piece and yada, yada.

But, you know, something as simple as that, not being able to fix a kickstand on a bicycle, don't let that ruin a whole day with your wife and your kids, right?

And I know I have done things exactly like that so many times.

So our spiritual life and our, our everyday life, they're so connected.

Having the awareness to know that one part of my life can so affect the other, even unconsciously or subconsciously, bringing that into my awareness is enough to see it and to diffuse it, like I said before, and to, you know, avoid that from that frustration from bleeding into the rest of my life.

You can see, I mean, it's so clear how this is so applicable to our marriage and our family life.

I've said throughout, right?

Don't allow frustration from one part of your life to bleed into other parts of your life, namely your relationships with your wife and your children and also your relationship with our.

With our Lord, with God.

Because frustrations in our life, be it from career, be it from, you know, the garage, from wherever it is, they can so frequently.

Also, if it's true that they can affect our relationships with our wives and our children, you better believe that it can affect our relationship with God too.

And we can start, you know, skipping prayer, we can start.

We can start withdrawing ourselves from God, which can, in fact, cause desolation.

Desolation is not always sort of distancing himself from us.

Sometimes it's us distancing ourselves from God.

And I would say probably more often than not, that is the case.

God is constant.

We are not.

So when we are aware that all of our lives are connected and that we can become more and more aware of these frustrations or, you know, negative things that happen in our lives, we can sort of isolate them more effectively, isolate them through that awareness and through a refusal to let that frustration or negative event sort of bleed over into the rest of our lives.

I hope that you can dive into.

It is my hope that you can dive into the Discernment of Spirits with Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

And I strongly encourage you to use Father Timothy Gallagher as your guide.

This was just barely scratching the surface of some of the great insights that this gem of our Catholic tradition holds for you.

Avail yourself of this tradition.

It is so profound and can significantly improve your.

Your marriage.

It can improve your life.

It can help you draw closer to God.

And that is the goal of this life, right?

So that we can be with God in the next.

I am praying for you.

Please pray for me until next week.

God bless.

Bye.