INTERVIEWER: Thank you for agreeing to the interview. And for sitting in on the interview, Caleb. So, The Mike is doing an issue on vanity. Vanity of all sorts and types and sizes. But this is like, it jumped right to mind.

FR. JOHN: Vanity, vanity.

BOTH: All is vanity.

FR. JOHN: Classic words.

INTERVIEWER: And I remember that you preached a homily on it. At St. Basil’s. A few weeks ago now. Maybe in late September.

Tangent on mass.

So, I think that’s where I want to start. Is right [here], opening line of Ecclesiastes. Which, [is a] pretty famous book in the Bible.Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. Which seems like a veryexistential…

FR. JOHN: Sure is

INTEVIEWER: Depressing, negative view…on the world.

FR. JOHN: In some ways.

INTERVIEWER: But does that point to something? When the writer of Ecclesiastes says, all is vanity. Like, what is that pointing to? Is that to mean that everything is simply worthless and meaningless? Or does it point to something deeper?

FR. JOHN: Well, as I said in my homily, it’s a miracle this made it into the Bible. Because he talks about, you know, you work so many years, and your work serves no purpose. You’re on the earth for 70, maybe 80, and then you die. As I said, Ecclesiastes is probably not the guy you’d invite to your dinner party. But, he’s pointing to a fundamental truth, which is life is short. And we’re not on this earth forever, you know. Only a few decades…and so you can respond to that in one of two ways. That can depress you and [you can] think, ‘well what’s the point? Like, all is vanity, then what’s the point of life? What’s the meaning of life?’. Or, you can look at it and say, ‘I only have this much life…I only have one chance on this earth to make a difference’. St. Ignatius of Loyola, one of his reflections is to imagine yourself on a deathbed. If you’re trying to decide between A and B. He’s got many different ways of discerning that, but one of them that I remember that links to your question is: if I were on my deathbed, which option would I wish I had chosen? A or B.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. So it puts it in the wider context of your life.

FR. JOHN: Well…let’s say you’re told, I mean, God forbid, the doctor tells you, you’ve got five years to live, or you’ve got five months to live. A colleague of mine was just diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS. Which is a terrible disease, and so his whole life is upside down. But when you get a diagnosis like that, it forces you to…

Our conversation is interrupted by beautiful piano music.

Our lives are limited, is what Ecclesiastes is saying, and most of us go through life thinking that we’re going to live here forever on this earth. And we’re not. But when you realize that you’re not going to live forever, when a doctor gives you a diagnosis that you’ve got X number of years to live, that really focuses your attention. And yes, if you don’t believe in God, or if you’re a materialist, you think, well, there’s nothing after this. But if you look at it in a positive sense, like my time is limited, that means I have to make the most of each day.Each day is a gift from God. Each day I have to give something back to make the world a better place.

INTERVIEWER: So it’s almost doing the same thing that happens when we get told that we have a diagnosis or something like that. Which is, it’s not shocking. It’s drawing our attention to the fundamental truth that we’re going to die. That’s what the diagnosis is doing. Is that what Ecclesiastes is doing?

FR. JOHN: It’s a wake-up call. It reminds you that you are not here forever. And every culture, every religion, every civilization tries to grapple with that. The Egyptians would build huge pyramids and tombs and [do] embalming, thinking that you could live forever. And when they buried the pharaohs, they buried them with all their material possessions for the afterlife. But that dream of living forever, I think, is deeply implanted in the human soul. And in most religions, like Christianity, we believe that we will live forever, but live with God. And as we just said, we use the prayer from the funeral liturgy, which says, at death, life is changed, not ended. So a lot of people think that death is the end of life. But from the Christian context, it’s not the end of life. You’re suffering death and then resurrection. That’s the gospel message.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. So if Ecclesiastes is then a wake-up call to the people that read it, what follows from that? A wake-up call typically prompts action, right? It pushes you to do something, to make a change. The writer in Ecclesiastes, as I read through it, comes back over and over again to this very interesting phrase that all that we can really do is, as he puts it, “eat bread, drink wine, and rejoice in your labor and toil”. What is the wake-up call pushing us towards?

FR. JOHN: I think it’s different things for different people. When you ask people, if you had a year left to live, what would you do? Some people say, ‘I would just party like there’s no tomorrow. I would eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow, we will die’. That’s kind of like a hedonist answer. Or the Epicureans. Others would say, ‘I would sell all my belongings and go and work with lepers in Africa’. That’s a different response. I think that’s closer to the Christian response, which is, my life is limited, those limits force you to focus on what’s really important. And what’s most important in life are relationships. With God, with each other, and with creation, as you talked about in class today. And so, that’s what my life’s about. My life’s not about possessions. My life’s not about how much you acquire. We think that gives us happiness. That’s what the world says. But Christianity says the opposite. Happiness is what you give away. That’s what makes us happy. You give your love, you give your talents, you give your concern, your energy. It’s not what you acquire for yourself that makes you happy. It’s what you give away.

INTERVIEWER: Which is interesting, because in Ecclesiastes, there’s a section on the value of a friend, and the value of friendship, and how two are better than one. When one falls, there’s no one to pick him back up. I forget the exact line in it here, but I’m sure I can find it. Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. Is that idea also maybe hidden in the “eat bread, drink wine, and be merry”? The value of that communal fellowship?

FR. JOHN: I think so. We’re stronger together. I remember once, in a previous job, one of the students in our residence was Muslim. He told me that he would always pray with another Muslim friend in his room. I said, why do you pray with another person? Why don’t you just pray on your own? He said, “because our prayers are more powerful when we pray together”. I thought, wow. That’s coming from a Muslim tradition, but I think Christians can say the same thing. You cannot be a solitary Christian. We gather together to pray to show that our prayers are stronger together. We’re here to help each other.

INTERVIEWER: That’s what we gather for here today. We’re celebrating…

FR. JOHN: All souls, all the ones who have passed on.

INTERVIEWER: The dead. Which ties very perfectly to…

FR. JOHN: Yes, this topic.

INTERVIEWER: Like you said, it really does bring to mind death. I’m just seeing a line right here. “I thought the dead who have already died are more fortunate than the living who are still alive.” Why? That seems like a very bold statement.

FR. JOHN: It is.

INTERVIEWER: We place a lot of emphasis on celebrating and praying for and remembering the dead. Where does that fit into all of this?

FR. JOHN: I think death, which is real, forces us to choose our priorities. What are our priorities? Are our priorities wealth and riches and material goods? If they are, eventually you’re going to lose them all. You can’t take them with you into the next life. If your priorities are just having a great time and not thinking, well, that will end too. But if our priorities are relationships, relationships with God, with each other, then we believe you do take those with you into the next life through the communion of the saints. The communion of the saints are not just for the canonized saints of the Church. The communion of the saints are all of our loved ones who are with God and are with us in a special way, especially when we gather for Eucharist.

Piano music makes a reappearance.

FR. JOHN: So death, nobody wants to talk about death. Most people spend their life running away from it. But I think we have to confront it. (11:15) The ancients talked about memento mori. They would actually pray with a skull. And that skull would remind them that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Do you remember that scene from Dead Poets Society?Have you ever seen that film?

INTERVIEWER: I’ve not, no, but I’ve heard fantastic things.

FR. JOHN: Where the teacher takes all these young guys, shows them pictures of all the former graduates, shows them a picture of all these students who were at that school a hundred years earlier, and he says, “guess what? They are all dead. What they were, you are. What they are, you will become”. In a hundred years, we’ll be a picture on someone’s wall. We will. So that’s a sobering thought. It doesn’t have to be a morbid thought. It can be. You can say, oh well, we’re all going to die, what’s the point? Or you could say, I’m going to die someday. So the call to action is, I’m going to make the most of what I have. And when I work with the elderly, it’s so nice to meet elderly people like that, who realize, “I may have cancer, I may be painful all over, but I woke up today and I saw the sun”. Yesterday I spent the day with my mother who’s gotAlzheimer’s. The high point of her day was [me] being with her and looking at leaves. She was admiring how one leaf was red, one was yellow, one was brown. Things that we would never even notice half the time.

INTERVIEWER: We just let them pass right by.

FR. JOHN: Because we think… it’s not important, we’ve got other things to do. Whereas if you’re in an old age home and you have not much to do all day, leaves changing color or time spent with a loved one is precious. So they can teach us what the real priorities are. We get distracted in our lives thinking that money is important, or a job is important, or, you know, to be busy. I think a lot of us are busy all the time so that we don’t have to think about these things. But once we’re laid low through an illness or an accident, then it totally upends our world when we have to think of what actually is important. The founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, was a soldier, and he lived a life of chivalry and adventure and war and all that, until the day he got injured in battle. A cannonball broke his leg and he spent a few months convalescing, recuperating. And it’s in those moments where you start to wonder, what’s my life about? What’s my life about when I can no longer be active or produce or do the things that I used to enjoy? What is my life? So we have to listen to …the elders, the handicapped, the poor, those people who—children see this—like children delight in small things. This joy of being alive. But the rest of us are so busy, so distracted, so worried. We either are worried about the mistakes of the past, or we’re worried about what is to come in the future. But very few of us can do what my mother did and just live in the present and enjoy God’s presence in the moment. It’s very difficult.

INTERVIEWER: And what kind of steps can we take to let go of those worries? I agree with you that I myself, I find myself worrying a lot about the past. And also now that I’m here at school, a little bit about the future as well.

FR. JOHN: Right, that’s normal. It gets kind of consuming, right? It stops your ability to appreciate the present moment, what’s happening right now. It can even paralyze you. I’ve talked to people who are so worried about the past, or so regretful of something they did in the past, or so fearful of the future, that they’re actually paralyzed by fear. And fear stifles the spiritual life. And so that’s why we need to pray. Pray connects us to a deeper reality, a deeper time, God’s time, not our time. The Greeks had two words for time: Kairos and Kronos. Kronos is the time you can measure—like minutes and seconds, days, months, years—and Kairos is the eternal time of transformation. That’s more like God’s time, and when you’re having a Kairos moment, you totally forget about Kronos. So let’s say you are with a loved one, or you see a beautiful sunset, or you’re in the mass, beautiful liturgy. You’re in Kairos. We have that expression in English, I lost track of time. Or time flew by. Whenever you’re thinking that, you’re in Kairos. And to kill Kairos, it’s very easy, all you have to do is look at your watch and you’re all of a sudden back in Kronos.

INTERVIEWER: So when you sit down with a friend you haven’t seen in a while,and all of a sudden you’ve been there for hours.That’s Kairos. You’re getting involved, you’re enraptured in a good book. It almost seems like a fundamentally better way to live life.

FR. JOHN: It does.

INTERVIEWER: Than to measure everything, to always be like, “okay, I’m going to portion out 30 minutes for this, an hour for this”. Time management is good.

FR. JOHN: Oh yeah, we need more time management. You need to allot time to appropriate things. That’s what I learned from the indigenous. They have a different sense of time than we do. When I would go to the reserve to do funerals or whatever ceremonies, I would take my watch off. Because I realized you don’t measure this time when you’re with them. It’s just, things start when everyone gets there, and they end when everyone leaves. So at a funeral, they last for four days and four nights. There’s no time. They take the time to grieve the person. As one of the elders said to me, he says, “your people might have the watches, but we’ve got the time”…Ecclesiastes is reminding us that all the stuff we’re running after, so much of it is vanity. It doesn’t mean anything.

INTERVIEWER: That phrase keeps coming back.

FR. JOHN: Vanity meaning emptiness. It doesn’t have any meaning. Emptiness. It’s empty. And sometimes I wonder, as I reflect on AI and the latest technology, is more information, more access to information, is it going to make us happier? Is it going to make us more human? Is it going to make us more fulfilled? I’m not so sure. I don’t think so, actually. More wisdom will make us more sure. But there’s a big difference between knowledge and wisdom, (18:13) as we talked about today in class. Ecclesiastes, vanitas. What are we running after? What are our priorities? What really is important? And sometimes you have to have those cannonball moments, where you’re just…you’ve been injured, you’re sick, you’ve had a brush with death, or a loved one has,  and you start to wonder what your life is all about. What’s life really all about? What’s your purpose? That’s where we get fulfillment. What’s my purpose on this earth?

INTERVIEWER: Ecclesiastes talks a lot about wisdom, and the pursuit of wisdom, and it does prefer wisdom over foolishness, but it does make it seem that it’s a bit pointless. It’s one of those things that’s vain, and you mentioned also before, riches and wealth and success and fame. Here we’re at the University of Toronto. We’ve got probably over 100,000 students that come here from around the world for the prestige of the academics, to get a good job, to make money, or even to learn to the best of their ability from the best people, pursuing the fame and the wealth and the knowledge. It’s a fantastic university, but what would you say to students like myself and Caleb, or any student at U of T who’s coming for those things, to put those goals in their right place?

FR. JOHN: Those goals you mentioned, there’s nothing wrong with them. To have great professors, to have a great career, a great education. Those are amazing blessings. Nothing wrong with them. But we always have to ask ourselves, why? For what purpose? What are we going to do with that, you know? If you’re here at a university at U of T, you’re incredibly privileged to be here. Most of the world’s population can’t be here. Many of them won’t get past, you know, elementary school. But with that comes great responsibility to give something back to your society. To take that knowledge, to take that training, that education, and use it to improve society, to serve God, to make the world a better place. There’s a giving back that will happen later in your life. You’re accumulating stuff now at this point in your life. You’re accumulating knowledge and experience and wisdom. But that’s so that you can pay it back as you get older.

INTERVIEWER: So there is a goal in mind. And the goal isn’t the attainment of the knowledgeor the wealth itself. Which I think for a lot of people it might be.

FR. JOHN: They think so now, but as they get older they realize it’s got to be for a bigger purpose. Because anything else is vanity. So, yeah, that’s fascinating. There’s a good book by David Brooks in the New York Times called The Second Mountain. And he says we spend most of the early part of our life climbing a mountain. We’re accumulating education, degrees, experience. We meet our life partner. We start a family. It’s climbing the mountain. It’s very hard work. Progressing step by step. We’re climbing upwards. And then by the time you’re 30 or 40 or 50 or however [old], you reach the top of the mountain. You say, “wow, I’ve made it now.

I’ve got my education. I’ve got my work experience. I’ve met my wife. I’ve had my children. What next?” And you look and you realize there’s a second mountain that you’ve got to climb.

So the first mountain [is] what he calls your resume virtues. The things you put on your CV. The second one he calls your eulogy virtues. The things they’ll say about you when you die. When you die, they’re not going to care what school you went to. They’re not going to care how much money you made. They won’t care about any of that. What’s going to matter is how you treatedpeople. What kind of person you were. What your values are. Those are your eulogy virtues. Your character. And that’s what ultimately matters. The first stuff is important too because we all need careers. We all need money. But they’re not ends in themselves. They’re means to this greater end.

INTERVIEWER: And that ties right back to the theme of death. Those eulogy virtues. At the end of your life, like you said before, that image of being on your deathbed. When you look back, what’s your life about? What was that decision that you made? How did you form yourself? Your money doesn’t…

FR. JOHN: Another thing you can do. This sounds kind of morbid too, but it isn’t morbid, iswrite your own obituary. So no matter if your life is long or short, what would you like people to remember about you? Which is another way of saying who are you really? Who are you and who would you like to be and who are you called to be? And that goes back. That connects with vocation. We’re only on this planet for a limited period of time. So what is our purpose? What is our vocation? What is God calling us to do that he didn’t call someone else to do? He’s calling you to do it. (3:57) Only you can do this. What is it? Who is that person? And that’s such a fulfilling purpose.

INTERVIEWER: I think maybe we get too loosey-goosey when we’re talking about purpose. Like, “oh, my purpose is to do this thing that a lot of people do”. No, you have a specific purpose. That doesn’t matter. For you specifically. Only you can do it. Not just like, there’s a thing that needs to be done. A bunch of people can do it. But I’m the one that’s doing it, and that’s my purpose. No, like…it’s tailor-made for you.

FR. JOHN: And St. John Henry Newman has a beautiful prayer about I have my mission in life.

I may not know it, but I will be told it in the next [life]. A mission is a bond and a chain, a connection between persons. To serve the Lord. If I’m in sickness, my sickness will serve the Lord. If I’m in good health, my health will serve the Lord. The bigger purpose is that we’re on this earth for a reason. God has made each one of us with a vocation. And our vocation is not what we do. It’s who we are. Your vocation is to figure out who Julien is and be Julien as best you can be. And his is to be Caleb as best he can be. And everything else, you know, is that… I do think that is in you, even before you’re born, in your mother’s womb. That God has knit that in you. Psalm 139: “Lord, you know me, you knit me together in my mother’s womb, for I am beautifully and wonderfully made”. I think the verb is you knit me, you sewed me together in my mother’s womb.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, and it’s like a fundamental part of who you are. It’s not an external thing that you take upon yourself. It is like a part of your being.

FR. JOHN: I don’t want to say your program, but it’s in there. And the rest of your life, it’s that coming to fruition, whatever that is.

INTERVIEWER: So how can we keep that in mind? Because I feel like it’s easy to lose sight of that.

FR. JOHN: It is.

INTERVIEWER: It’s easy to lose sight of that and get so obsessed with, “I need to make enough money, I need to have a good career, I need to do this, to get obsessed with those resume virtues, like you said.

FR. JOHN: Well, you need to survive in the world, and you have to have a resume, and you have to get a job, and all the rest of it. But I think what makes a lot of people unhappy these days is comparing themselves to other people. I get a lot of students coming in saying they feel that they’re not as good as someone else, or someone else has a better life than they do, and I ask them, “why do you say that”? And they say, “well, they’re going on all these exciting trips, and they’re doing this. This is what they posted on Facebook”. I’m like, well, with social media, that’s a very curated image of you.You’re not going to put on Facebook that they were just dumped by their girlfriend. You’re not going to put bad things about yourself on Facebook. You’re only going to put the good things. And when you compare and despair, there’s always going to be someone better than you, smarter than you, whatever. But when you stop comparing and just look at who you are and who God is calling you to be, where you find fulfillment, as soon as we compare ourselves to someone else, we become unhappy and ungrateful. Because someone else has something that you want and you don’t have. And you lose sight of the things that you do have. Because you’re so focused on what you do not have. What am I lacking? How can I be different, be better? But you’re looking at someone else. Except you’ve been poured out like so many gifts.

We have the ability to wake up and see the sun. Right. And to sit here and have conversation and be at this beautiful school. So when I’m dealing with people who are going through, not depression because I’m not a psychologist, but let’s just say they’re not all that happy. I try to get them to work on their gratitude. What are you grateful for? So think about what you have, not what you don’t have. And when you do that, you cultivate this attitude of gratitude, as they say.

And you cannot be unhappy and grateful at the same time. It’s impossible. Those two things can’t coexist. So the more you think about what you’re grateful for, the happier you are. The more fulfilled you are. Humility is like that too. The happiest people I know are humble people. It’s not all about them. They’re humble. They can joke about themselves. They can, if they have a failure, they have a failure. They don’t worry about it. They don’t expect, they don’t feel entitled to something.

INTERVIEWER: Is that because of the, does the humility come from the gratitude?

FR. JOHN: I think the two are linked.

INTERVIEWER: I think they might, like it appears that they would be because if you’re grateful, you can’t be grateful to yourself. Right? Gratitude has to be directed.

FR. JOHN: Well, as I say, there are two paths to humility. One is gratitude, the other is humiliation. So there are some people who are just very proud. And the only way they’re going to be, find humility is if they’re humbled. And that’s painful. So pick gratitude before…

INTERVIEWER: The humiliation comes for you. Because in that gratitude, you recognize that your life and all the things in it are a gift. They’re not self-achieved. They’re not…It’s all a gift.

It’s not merited. It’s not for your own exaltation. It’s for something else.

FR. JOHN: Everything we have in this life is a gift. We may think we’ve accomplished it.

We may buy into that myth of the self-made man and self-made woman. But it’s a myth. It’s not real. You’re not here today just because of what you accomplished. You’re here today because of the talents God gave you, the family that supported you, the friends, all those things you’ve been blessed with, your health. And you didn’t really accomplish any of those things on your own. Those were all gifts.

INTERVIEWER: And that comes back to what you said before about kind of the core part of life being giving. Because if everything has been given to you. You give it back. That almost gives you a duty to give it back.

FR. JOHN: A duty or a desire. When we realize how much God’s given us or how much God has loved us, I think it instills in us this amazing sense of gratitude that God has been so generous to us in creating this world, giving us our bodies, our health, our families, our friends, all that stuff. And so we’re just so generous. We do gratitude. And that leads us to be generous because you realize, well, if God’s been this generous to me, then I should be generous to God and to others. And that’s where we find happiness is by giving this back.

INTERVIEWER: It builds up those obituary virtues.

FR. JOHN: And I think the point about Ecclesiastes is, again, you can look at that, say, the shortness of life. I’m going to be depressed. I’m going to die. Well, hello, we’re all going to die. Or you can take that knowledge and that limit forces you to make the most of life, to participate fully in life, to be grateful for life, to be generous as a person, to make  a difference in this world. Leo talks about it in the encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, when he gets into transhumanism, this idea that with technology we can live forever. You know, we can put it, hook our brains up to some database or we can have body parts that are…like never dying. That never die and will live forever. That is the classic human dream, like going back to the Egyptian pharaohs, let’s live together forever.

INTERVIEWER: It’s our modern culture’s way of achieving that.

FR. JOHN: Let’s freeze our brains cryogenically, so that someday they can, but he’s saying it here, I forget where he says it exactly, but we need limits. Limits are what make us human.

The fact that we are not going to be on this earth forever forces us to choose, forces us to come up with our priorities for life. If we had no limits, then it would be like we had no more purpose. Heaven is eternity, right?When we get to heaven, that’s eternity. This is not eternity. It’s preparation for it. It’s a beautiful one too. But our time here is limited. Our days are limited. You know, at some point our health will decline. We will age. We will, you know, you see that. It’s the progression of all things. And you can lament that and say, oh gosh, how can we fix that and correct that? Or you can just say, that is the way God works. That’s the way nature works. I think the Indigenous have a good sense of that with the medicine, you know, the four directions. The first one is youth and childhood and what you need to do at that stage. Then you move to adult life. Then you eventually reach old age and what you’re supposed to do at that stage of life. And then it’s over, you pass on to the next life, the next stage of life. And that’s very beautiful and that gives [our] life meaning. So the limits are there to help us. And the limits also are there to bring out our compassion. There’s another eulogy virtue. We live in a world of imperfection. And our technology wants us to come up with a perfect world, a perfect child. We want to dictate when we come into the world, when we leave the world. That’s what our technology is trying to invite us to, which I think is a myth. Whereas [in] the real world, we have people who are born with deformities. We have people who are born with handicaps. We have people who [have] all sorts of illnesses. We have people of old age…we have homeless people. We have people who are vulnerable and they make us uncomfortable because they remind us of our own vulnerability. But those limits, again, we can see that, oh, let’s just get rid of all those imperfections. That’s what they try to do with eugenics. Whereas the Christian response is finding God in those imperfections. Those imperfections bring out the goodness in us and the compassion in us.

Like I remember, I’ll just finish with this story. I’m talking with a group of Indigenous people who came down to Regina because their community was on fire, forest fires. There was a young mother in her 20s and she had a severely disabled daughter who was paralyzed from the neck down. And I said to her, oh, I forget how I said it, “it must have been challenging having a child like that”. And she’s smiling. She goes, “no”. She goes, “we believe children with handicaps are a gift from the Creator”. I said, “why do you think that”? She said, “Well, the Creator sends us people with disabilities to teach us how to love”. Yeah. If we were all perfect, living in a perfect society, we wouldn’t really need compassion. These are the virtues that come out because…the Good Samaritan story, somebody’s in the ditch and has been beaten up and needs our help. They invite us out of ourselves to show compassion.

INTERVIEWER: And we have ample opportunities, especially in this year in Toronto. To treat people like that. We come across so many different people each day at different points. Some are struggling. Some are homeless. Some are addicts. Some seem to be doing fine but really aren’t.

Maybe we waste those opportunities when we rush by on our way to class.

FR. JOHN: Well, Matthew 25, “what you did to the least of these brothers and sisters, you did it to me. When did you see me hungry? When did you see me naked? When did you see me in prison or sick? So what you did to those people, you did it to me…” That was Mother Teresa’s favorite passage.

INTERVIEWER: It might be mine as well. It’s one of the best. It’s such a stark reminder. It provokes action. Just like Ecclesiastes does. It provokes action.

FR. JOHN: Yeah, Ecclesiastes provokes action. It’s a wake-up call. It wakes you out of your numbness. We’re numbing ourselves these days with distractions and addictions. The world is such a scary place. We just want to forget about it all. But that’s not the Christian response. The Christian response is to wake up. See where the needs are. As Mother Teresa said, she couldn’t solve world poverty.  She’s only one person. She can just help that one person on the street. And then after that, you help the next person on the street. You help them with joy and love. You know the story about the guy on the shore with the starfish? He’s walking along the shore and there are thousands of starfish that have washed up on the beach. And so he bends down, picks one up, and throws it in the water. And then he bends down, picks up another one, and throws it in the water. And it doesn’t do anything. And this guy comes up and says, “Buddy, what are you doing here? You’re wasting your time. What are you trying to do?” He says, “I’m trying to save these starfish.” He says, “you’ll never save them all. There are thousands of them. You’re wasting your time. You’ll never make a difference.” And he just doesn’t answer. He bends down, picks one up, and throws it into the water. He said, “well, I made a difference to [that on]”. So I think that is the Christian life. We’re not going to solve all of those problems. But we can solve one person’s. We can bring joy to one person today. That’s all we need. If we do that every day, if everyone does that, the world will be a different place.

INTERVIEWER: Fantastic.

FR. JOHN: So thanks for getting me to reflect on Ecclesiastes.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you so much. That was amazing.