Fr. Gregory Pine

I do think that, so Christians hold it to be true that we're born in a state of original sin.

And I think that's a really liberating doctrine.

Sometimes people see it as a negative doctrine, but I take it as a positive doctrine because at a certain point, you're gonna have to contend with the fact that everything that you touch, you kind of ruin.

And if it's just you ruining those things, well, that's devastating.

But if God endowed us with this original gift that we since lost and now come into the world, left to ourselves, feeling a nostalgia for what was and a yearning that it might be reconstituted.

And then we make a mess of things like, okay, I can make more sense of that.

And so I take it that like,

Yeah, so yes, we are lustful, we are wrathful, we are prideful, all those things are true.

I just don't think it matters too terribly much what hand you've been dealt in the sense that you might come into this world with a certain temperament or a certain constitution, and you might recognize that as not that good.

What matters is how you play the hand.

And I think the best way in which to play the hand is to address that hand to the one who dealt it and say like, what do you have in mind for this?

You know, cause it's not a mere matter of chance.

He knows the cards that he gives and they're the deliverance of love.

They're not the deliverance of like chance or whimsy or caprice.

Like God wants, like if it is true, what Christians say that God is a provident father, then this is the issue of love.

And so that being the case, then how do you choose to play it?

And I think the idea is, you know, like a lot of people are here saying to themselves, like my real life is elsewhere.

I'm being kept from my real life.

People are holding me back.

People are oppressing, whatever it is.