Fr. Gregory Pine

with recollection in the presence of the most high God.

And so the Dominican ideal, it's risky, right?

It's decidedly risky.

And the active life isn't necessarily, yeah, well-established in the church at that point.

So like the Franciscans come from the penitential movement, which is kind of wild and crazy.

And then the Dominicans come from the canonical movement, which is a little more established, but nevertheless, it's kind of rag tag.

It's a risky business, but I think St.

Thomas was attracted by the ideal.

In the sense that he saw the fruit, which was born of doctrinal preaching and teaching, that by dedicating one's life to prayer and study, he himself became, I don't know, like the hope is that he'd become good.

And that he would go forth from his cloister and people would see something about his witness and think like, I want that.

There's something about that.

I think it's like,

i mean you could approach this from any number of advantages but freedom unfolds within bounds and when you tell people that there are no rules they end up miserable you know if you like drop a ball in the midst of people and say like play the game they're like which game according to which rules define for me the field of play because otherwise the strongest is just going to insist on his way it's like when you play card games with individuals who know them really well and continually introduce rules at intervals in a way that profits them you're like oh my gosh

It's just, it's insane.

But when you have a sense of like, okay, these are the bounds that delimit the space in which I can play, then you begin to enjoy it.

Chesterton has this point about like, if you put a bunch of kids on an island with sheer cliffs at the edge and tell them to have fun, they'll huddle at the center of the island.

But if you build a little wall around it, they can explore the whole of it.

So that's not to say that like, we're purposefully limiting ourselves just so that we can get excited about oppression or repression.

But the idea is that our nature entails certain limits.

By virtue of the fact that we're human beings, we ought to treat our teeth in a certain way.