Cry of the Heart

Hey the core of our humanity is a cry of the heart for infinite fulfilment fear keeps that cry imprisoned Hope sets it free I've been telling my story to audiences around the world since the 1990s but not like this why fear [Music] it was November 1996 Wendy and I were celebrating our first wedding anniversary we are at a gathering with some friends and somebody said so how's the first year of marriage been I said you know a lot of people find the first year of marriage pretty tough but for Wendy and for me it's been

easy years later my wife would tell me that's when I knew you were utterly clueless we had our ups and downs like any married couple but honestly I thought the first 10 years of marriage were great I had a great wife I had great kids I had a great career I was traveling the world as a best-selling author and lecturer and right around the 10-year mark of our marriage I was offered a very lucrative book deal from the biggest publishing house in the world my ship had come in or so I thought little did I

know my ship was taking on water and I would come to learn through various trials that I was wearing a lot of masks in my life and I was looking to my marriage to fill that deep cry of my heart that only the infinite can fill I remember the first time I felt that this cry of the heart this hunger for life I was eight years old I was lying in my bed and Bruce Springsteen came on the radio singing his anthem Born to Run at the end of the song he just opens his ribcage

and lets this cosmic cry come out of his heart whoa hmm oh man I felt it whatever Springsteen wanted I wanted it to it was the cry for something infinite tragedy is in all my years of Catholic schooling nobody ever connected the dots for me between that cry of the heart that I felt so passionately in God I was raised on what you might call the starvation diet gospel the basic message was your desires are bad you need to repress all that but follow all these rules and you'll be a good upstanding citizen I don't

know about you but if that's all the church has to offer no wonder so many people like me leave for what you might call the fast-food gospel which is the secular cultures promise of immediate gratification for the hunger I left in my teen years because the fast food looked a heck of a lot better than starving myself but all the grease and the sodium caught up to me in my college years it was 1988 and I had the tragic experience of witnessing a date rape in a college dorm this experience haunted me and it compelled

me to ask some really big questions about the meaning of life about the meaning of love about what is it in us as human beings that can lead us to treat other human beings as nothing but objects for our selfish pleasure I wasn't guilty of date rape myself but I had to ask myself was i much better in the way I thought about women and the way I fantasized when I was looking at porn when I was in bed with my girlfriend I remember this ragged prayer coming out of my heart I fell on my

knees and I said God in heaven if you exist you better show me and you better show me why you gave me all these desires because they're getting me and everybody I know into a hell of a lot of trouble what is your plan seek and you'll find right I saw it and what I found was the teaching of John Paul the second called the theology of the body this crazy Polish Pope told me that this deep well of desire within me had a name he called it eros now true enough if we follow our

erotic desires only at the surface they lead us to the fast food but I was learning in this theology of the body that if we go to the depths of our erotic longings they'll launch us like a rocket to the stars john paul ii helped me to realize that Christianity is not a starvation diet it's an invitation to a feast of life and love that is literally out of this world this was a revolution for me I knew then that I would spend the rest of my life studying this theology of the body and sharing

it with the world I had the privilege in graduate school of studying the Pope's teaching under a personal friend of John Paul the second an overweight chain-smoking salty tongue disheveled priest named Monsignor Lorenzo Alva SETI I loved this man I pursued a friendship with him and he would become a mentor to me over 20 years he had something I desperately needed freedom this was a man who knew he was loved in all his broken imperfect humanity and he was a man without masks I on the other hand was so bound up I was wearing so

many masks God has a way of revealing our masks to us usually through various storms that come in our lives the first storm hit for me when I told Wendy the title of that book that that big New York publisher wanted me to write it was a book for husbands called loving her rightly should have seen the look on my wife's face when I told her that title I was like what what's the problem she said honey you and I need to talk and it's gonna be long and it's gonna be painful the message was

loud and clear I was in no place to be writing a book for husbands called loving her rightly maybe for the first time in 10 years of married life I received the grace to listen to my wife I didn't pursue that book deal instead over the course of many weeks I let Wendy tell me what it was like to be married to the theology the body guy for the last 10 years she was right it was long and it was painful and I don't want to paint the wrong picture here we're all full of wheat

and weeds right I wasn't crazy to think I had a great marriage there was a lot of wheat in my marriage there are also a lot of weeds and I wasn't looking at him I was too afraid in some ways Wendy was married to a little boy I was stuck in a bunch of lies I had believed as a kid about what made somebody lovable and what made somebody unlovable remember the cool kids growing up I had to be one of them it's all a facade of course that covers up a deep fear of rejection

growing up I lived in constant comparison and judgment and these patterns of thinking and behaving created a toxic perfectionism in me that was wreaking havoc in my marriage the next storm came on an interview I had done for Nightline aired on national television ABC News had put a rather lewd spin on some of my comments and a lot of people took this at face value my critics came out of the woodwork various bishops Cardinals and theologians spoke out strongly in my defense at the same time the public scrutiny took its toll on me the perfectionist

is always worried about having his flaws on display and I had to admit that not everything my critics were saying was unfounded I was a man in crisis I was in a downward spiral and I was taking a lot of people with me I ended up taking a six-month sabbatical to regroup do some deep soul-searching and receive some intensive care for my spiritual director [Laughter] I take a personal retreat each year and on one of these retreats that preset Kristopher prayer is an exercise of desire on this retreat I want to help you get in

touch with your deepest desires oh man I had no idea what was about to happen sure enough following his lead I started getting in touch with some of my deepest desires things I just hadn't looked at for eons they came welling up and with these desires came anger I mean rage at God and I had it out with God I was so angry that God had given me all these desires and just seemed to leave me in them without any hope of fulfillment I said god I get it I get it why people are atheists

I get it why people don't believe in you why do you give us all these desires just to leave us to wait what the beep is that oh man it felt good something just broke open in me this well of desire and rage and man I felt alive I also felt conflicted and I went right back to the priest I said father it's been three hours since my last confession and I told him what I said and I'll never forget his response to me he said good good prayer good prayer he said you just prayed

your own version of Psalm 22 in union with Jesus my God my God why have you abandoned me he said you don't need to confess that you got honest with God you need to confess that you haven't been honest with God you need to confess you've been wearing all these masks now you're taking them off that's prayer prayer is where we get naked before God so he can love us as we really are I thought man if this is prayer it's making me feel pretty raw weak and exposed but that retreat started me on a

whole new journey of learning how to get naked before my maker I was learning that oh so important lesson that really takes us to the heart of the Christian life when I'm weak then I'm strong during my sabbatical when it seemed all my weaknesses were on display to the whole world I felt so unworthy I felt like such a fraud and it seemed almost impossible to me that I could continue doing this work one day my spiritual director spoke right into the problem he says Christopher you think a saint is someone who has somehow overcome

his or her broken humanity nope a saint he said is someone who has all of his or her broken humanity open to the merciful love of the Father you don't need to be perfect to do this work he said no you need to keep all of your imperfections open to God's merciful love and that openness becomes the very riverbed through which God can reach other people through you first your wife then your children then the people you're called to teach and mentor GameChanger [Music] after a few years of taking these life lessons to heart Wendy

and I were out to dinner she said honey something's really good in our relationship lately don't you feel it what do you think it is I thought about it for a moment I said yeah I do feel it and I think I know what it is I said I think I finally realized deep in my heart that you can't satisfy me she's got this huge grin on her face and she said that's exactly it that's what I've been realizing too you can't satisfy me either I'm sure if anyone was overhearing us in the restaurant they

probably thought we were about to get divorced but we never felt closer in all our years of married life why because we were learning to take our heavy hands off one another and accept it in love one another with all our imperfections we were learning that we were lovable warts and all like my chain-smoking disheveled mentor Monsignor Lorenzo Alba city I went to visit Alba City on the first official feast day of his friend and my hero Saint John Paul a second it was the last time I would see him he was in a nursing

home suffering from an extended illness and he died just two days later after his funeral had a dream about Alba Sethi and it was if from beyond the grave he was calling me back to revisit a lesson he had tried to teach me in my classmates 20 years earlier it was three weeks before my wedding and Alba said he was teaching from a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called the birthmark it's about a perfectionistic husband who couldn't love his wife because of what he considered a blemish on her cheek she had always considered a beauty

mark I remember Alba Sethi saying to the class this man does not know how to love his wife and I felt an arrow go flew right through my heart because I knew I was that man I was treating my wife to be in similar ways in a flash I saw this toxic perfectionism in my heart and I had the opportunity to look at it before I got married but out of fear I just shut it down now many years later with Alba Sethi in his grave and with me many steps down the way of my

own journey I went back and read the birthmark again this time I let it expose the darkness in my soul but for so many years had caused my wife so much pain and I trusted this darkness to my wife and her real love for me I exposed it to the light I let her love me in my nakedness and she showed me such a tender mercy sometimes I think back on that experience of shutting down my heart all those years ago in Albus Eddie's classroom and I shudder to think where I would be today if

I had remained crippled by my fear I'd still be crushing the cry of my heart and hiding behind a lot of masks John Paul the second theology of the body is an absolute lifeline in a world that is drowning in confusion about the meaning of life love sexuality and gender but my life has taught me it's not a quick fix it calls us on a long journey of transformation and that takes a leap of faith the more I've made that leap of faith in my own life the more I have journeyed from fear [Music] three-two-one

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