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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the dispatchers. My name is Brendan Malone and in this episode we are definitely going to be going a little bit longer than usual. This is another one of those special edition episodes, because last Friday night I had the absolute privilege of being invited to speak at the annual St Thomas Moore Catholic Law Society dinner at the Wellington Club in Wellington. And this is an annual event that is held for lawyers and judges as legal experts and others. And several people who weren't at that event, but who knew that I spoke there, asked me if I could give my notes to them so they could hear what I had to say or read what I had to say. Now, my notes are no good, though, because I actually don't use comprehensive notes when I present. What I do is I just have basic prompts there and I speak off of those and so my notes don't actually tell you much that would be helpful. So what I said to those people was, I'd been thinking about this because quite a few people had actually made the request or to hear about what I'd actually spoken about. So I said, I'm going to actually record this as today's podcast episode. Now, there will be a little bit of fleshing out a few extra bits in today's podcast that I didn't actually have time for in the presentation I gave last Friday night. So you guys are actually getting a bit of a treat here. You're getting the more full and complete version of that presentation. So, without any further ado, let's start today's episode.
At the risk of sounding trite and falling prey to some sort of cheap sloganeering, I was thinking the other day about how I could succinctly sum up the life of St Thomas Moore, the man who resisted the authoritarian overreach of King Henry VI and ultimately paid the price of his life. He was executed for his courage. And when I thought about his life, it seemed to me that he could be quite rightly described. And this is in no way a reflection of the totality of the depth and everything else that makes up his life. But in a nutshell, he could be described as a man of conscience, courage and lived convictions. Now, just like St Thomas More, we also find ourselves today in times of growing tension and social division. And we are in need of people of conscience, courage and lived convictions because the divisions are real and they're very, very serious. There are widespread and serious levels of division, the sort of the breadth and depth of which I can not recall ever having seen it this bad ever in my lifetime before. Now, it's not to say that there haven't been moments of division, but it seems to me, as I said, the breadth and the depth of what's going on is a lot more serious than what I've ever seen and you can pick your poison. Whether it's political divides, socioeconomic divides, racial divides, philosophical and ideological divides, religious divides, it's anywhere and everywhere. Now, I'm definitely not the smartest guy in the country. In fact, I'm smart enough to know not to try and claim that title for myself. But then it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that something has shifted in Western society, including here in New Zealand, in a way that isn't actually good. There have been various attempts and there's still various attempts going on right now to try and diagnose the problem and offer all sorts of suggested cures. But I actually think that most of these attempts are well, they're doomed to failure because they're only seeing and trying to cure symptoms rather than the root cause. They aren't looking deeply enough. Now, for what it's worth, I know you didn't ask, but being a good Irishman, I like Scotch and offering my opinions rather liberally whether they are wanted or not. And so here's my feelings about what is actually happening here. I personally believe that we are experiencing we're in the tail end of Enlightenment liberalism. We are experiencing the collapse of that. Now, liberalism probably kind of makes sense, particularly after World War II. It seemed to be a way forward like you think about in particular what's going on at that time. You've got a group of men and women who have just survived and lived through some of them having seen firsthand up close and personal, some of the most barbaric mechanized warfare, some of the most brutal human suffering, some of the worst industrialized genocide in the history of humanity, a thing that we've never seen before. And after several years of this absolute dark violence that has consumed the whole world, you can see why people would be jaded and would just want to come home and settle down and live a life of peace and liberty in the face of this global authoritarian threat. Now, in concert with that, you also have particular commentators and academics at the time who are making the claim, the absolutely erroneous claim, of course, but nonetheless it was popularly touted that basically the cause of this great evil and all authoritarian evil in the world is repression. And particular Christian repression and particular Christian sexual doctrines around Chastity, et cetera, is the big driving cause of this repression. And this repression led to, for example, Hitler and the Nazis. And so the cure for this repression is more liberty. And if we want to prevent more Nazis arising on the global stage, then the best way to do that is to give people more liberty. And on top of all of that, we also then have this looming specter of Communism. So we go straight out of the World War into the Cold War. And the threat of Communism isn't just an existential threat, it also carries with it the possibility of an apocalyptic end to the world through mutually assured atomic destruction. And so it's very serious. It's a thing we've never seen before. It's like you go from one type of insane darkness and evil the world has never experienced before straight into another insane level of threat and evil that the world has never known before. And so in the face of that authoritarianism and that threat, you can see why people would be very amenable to the idea that we need more liberty. Liberty.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: Liberty.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Liberty is the answer. And liberalism in the west seemed to offer a way forward. It looks like, for all intents and purposes, a negotiated truce of sorts. We would all live harmoniously as free, self choosing individuals who would reason our own way to the truth. We would reason our own way to our own truths. In fact, we would reason our own way to meaning. We'd create that meaning for ourselves. Religion would start to withdraw and take more of a backseat, especially in the public square. And we'd all just agree to disagree. We'd all just get along, right? You know the old adage, don't talk religion or politics at the dinner table. But there's a couple of problems with this approach. The first problem with this approach is that basically liberalism has consistently failed to deliver on its own fundamental promises and doctrines. And you can pick an issue, but this has consistently been a problem. One of the essential components of liberalism is John Stuart Mill's harm principle. And it basically goes like this that an individual should be free to engage in whatever action they want as long as they're not causing harm to another. Now, this principle has been used to justify all sorts of things and all sorts of law changes and liberalizations of the law. But at the same time it's resulted in great harm. It's basically ignored the harm. Because I think part of the problem is liberalism wrongly reduces the human person down just to their own sort of individual personhood and their own individual actions. And it looks solely at the world through that lens. And so it fails to recognize that our individual actions actually ripple out into the community. And so when it's looking for harm, some harm is very easy to identify. If one person hits another person with an axe, we know that's harmful. But what we fail to recognize often is the way in which our actions, as I said, they ripple out like ripples on a pond. And if the harm is happening a bit further away from the actual action, from the actual incident, the act itself that we are liberalizing or maybe it takes a bit more time to really manifest, we fail to actually follow the harm principle. We liberalize things and completely ignore the harm principle. I'll give you some clear examples of this. The legalization of euthanasia is a very, very clear example of this. Now, euthanasia, wherever it is legalized, results in harms. And in fact, some of the most serious harms you can ever have in society, like the wrongful killing of vulnerable people. It's not a matter of if but when. This starts happening wherever euthanasia is legalized, but that harm is completely ignored. It is downplayed. And you even have people like our former Prime Minister John Key in the lead up to the legalization of euthanasia here in New Zealand, who appeared on a public televised debate and just said, well, this is just the reality. Effectively, this is the price of business, that, yeah, there will be some vulnerable people who are affected by that, but this is just the price you pay for freedom. Abortion is another clear example of this. With abortion, what you have is the ending of the life of an innocent human being. And so what you have is a group of people who, in the name of bodily freedom, are deliberately depriving bodily freedom to an unborn human being. It's a complete contradiction. Pornography is another one. And the harm that has done in our society, and it was liberalized and normalized and even glamorized in the name of liberalism. And then, of course, the endless what feels like endless, it's not, but it feels like the endless democracy wars and regime changes that have been enacted ever since the end of World War II, particularly by America. And obviously England's been part of that at different stages and others. And so this Enlightenment liberal belief that if you just throw off the shackles of oppression, so you get rid of the oppressive regime at the end of a gun barrel, or you engage in some sort of regime change, through nefarious means. Then what will happen is the people, in their natural state of freedom will suddenly start reasoning for themselves, and they'll reason their way to the truth of Enlightenment liberalism. And they'll want everything that the west has to offer. But guess what? It consistently hasn't worked. The latest example of this has actually been Afghanistan, an abject failure. Why? Because a lot of those territories, a lot of those countries actually look at the west and they don't necessarily see a shining beacon of goodness and truth. They see societies that don't really value the family, that don't value religion, that do all sorts of harms around pornography and sexualization of children. And they want to resist that kind of stuff. So it's actually not a self evident truth like liberalism tries to claim that people will just suddenly start reasoning their way to liberalism if you take away all the restraints.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: And so the harms that have come.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: On the back of all of this are not good.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: And closer to home, one of the.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: More meaningful harms that really can't be.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: Understated is the economic harms that people have experienced as a result of policies that have flowed out of Enlightenment liberalism. And what happens with this is that you have a system where effectively you've got a large and growing number of people who know something's not right and especially those who really find themselves on the receiving end of the system rather than participants in the system. And whenever they come up against particular issues we often just hear the same old rhetoric repeated over and over again it's just business. This is the best economic system we could come up with.
Just pull yourself up by your bootstrap. Everyone's got an equal opportunity at making.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: It and all the rest of it.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: And what happens is this sort of approach where we're actually not conducting ourselves consistently with virtue in the economic sphere. Effectively we have separated our economics in a lot of cases from virtue. What's happening is that you have a situation where more and more people are becoming disenfranchised and disillusioned and basically they know something's amiss and they know that what we're doing here is continually making the same mistakes or similar mistakes over and over again. And so they start to become more and more disenfranchised. And why this matters is because this makes us very vulnerable. Because along come the Marxists who say things like see, we told you capitalism was bad and here's the answer capitalism will never work. So trust us, follow our scheme and.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: That is a disaster.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: And if it's not that, it is the breeding ground for revolution where people find themselves in a situation where like throughout history we've seen this if economically there is great instability that has a profound impact upon a just stable civil order. If people are struggling just to pay the bills, if they can't feed their family they get more and more desperate and it makes you vulnerable to very bad outcomes. And so what happens, I think is for a lot of people they find themselves just disenfranchised with what's happening in society because effectively Enlightenment liberalism has left us very vulnerable in this regard. And sadly, as a result of this we've forgotten that maybe there is another way to sort of think about the morality and sort of morally critiquing and judging particular ideas because remember, we've sort of disassociated ourself over successive generations from Christianity. And so now what happens is we find ourselves in this situation and we sort of feel trapped because we get stuck in a false dichotomy. We've taken religion off the table. The very thing we need to actually help us navigate through this thing with a certain stability and with a certain hope and with a certain understanding that we can actually produce better outcomes. And so we get stuck in this false dichotomy where people start saying well, it's either the current system or my new revolutionary system that I'm proposing. It's either the current system or we have to have some sort of collectivism.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Some sort of Marxism.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: And desperate people who find themselves disenfranchised from the current system can be very prone to falling prey to that false dichotomy. Whereas what we really need is the ability to actually say, well, we need to have a good moral compass, which Christianity gave to us that we can actually discern and begin to discern claims that are being made by both sides about what is a truly just and virtuous economic policy? And what does authentic freedom look like? And how should we actually manage and handle resources? And what does this mean at a societal level? And what does this mean for individuals? How important is the family? When you talk about economics, we don't really have that conversation now, do we? Because Enlightenment liberalism has basically taught us to view ourselves as radically autonomous, self choosing individuals. And we run our economies along those same lines, basically. And we've failed to understand just how important, for example, in this case, the family is when you start thinking about economics and how healthy families really matter. See, Christianity understands a lot and has a lot to say about this kind of stuff, but we've sort of lost all of that. And then the only fallback position you really have outside of a moral compass is you desperately try and find a technological one. You fall back on some sort of scientism where you try and treat science as the sort of the cure all, the thing that will give us the answers. What about the science of economics?
Where's the data, what's the data showing us? And we sort of fall into utilitarianism. Just try and get the best outcome you can. And it's really failing to see the fullness of the human experience and the human person and in particular, how our human flourishing is found. And so more and more people are being disenfranchised and becoming disillusioned with a system built on the back of Enlightenment liberalism because they are being ostracized. They are, as I said, more and more people have become victims of the system or find themselves on the receiving end of the system rather than participants in the system. And they see the same mistakes being repeated over and over again. And this harm is very, very serious.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: And of course, a big question here is who gets to define harm? Because what liberalism does is it puts the autonomous, self choosing, self reasoning individual at the center of everything. And so the autonomous self reasoning individual will reason for themselves what they think is right and wrong. And so in that situation, in a society that's operating like that, who the heck actually gets to define harm? Harm is a moral principle, ultimately. Harm therefore relies on a prior and transcendent religious level of accountability that Enlightenment liberalism did away with. Another problem with this approach is that Enlightenment liberalism took fundamental ideas from Christianity, and it tried to separate those ideas from religious belief. It thought it could keep essential things that Christianity gave to the world, like human dignity, moral equality, the idea that all human beings are equal because of the fact that we're made in the image of God. Therefore, no one is any more superior to anybody else. Love for neighbor, compassion, the sacredness of human life, moral limits on the power of the state, et cetera, et cetera. And it wanted to keep all of those things, but it wanted to keep the fruit that grows on the tree of Christianity, but it didn't want the tree that the fruit grows on. It thought that it could keep that fruit and not tend to the tree. And so what you end up with is a situation where Enlightenment liberalism takes and builds some of its essential doctrines. It takes directly from Christianity, adds in some what we know now to be incorrect ideas about the human person and the world in which we live. And what it does, though, with those and it really relies on, are those essential Christian components that it's taken directly from Christianity. And what happens is that we're no longer tending to the tree of Christianity, though. So initially, liberalism is actually happening. And it probably seems plausible because of this, because it's happening in a society that is actually still Christian. And so the society at large is still living, the populace is still living and breathing Christianity effectively. And what happens, though, is, over successive generations, we are no longer tending to the tree of Christianity, of religious faith. In fact, not only are we no longer tending to it, but liberalism eventually gives rise to groups that are hostile to the tree of Christianity and who are now regularly and have been for some time taking an axe to the tree and chopping off limbs left, right and center. Now, the problem, as you can see with this, is we need the fruit that comes from that tree, but we have not tended to the so. And by the way, this is Frederick Nietzsche's critique of Enlightenment liberalism as well. He says you guys are talking and the way you speak about these principles of Enlightenment liberalism, you're talking as if God still exists, but he doesn't exist. God is dead. We've killed him. The sun can't be restrained in the sky anymore. It won't rise in one direction and set in another. We've unchained the sun.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: It will do whatever we want it to.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: We are the new gods now. We will create our own meaning. We will create our own morality, our own lived vision of reality. You guys are speaking as if there are these objective truths that come from an objective lawgiver, as if God is still alive, but he's not. He's dead. And so he could see back then that they were heading down a path that didn't really make any sense.
And like I said, over time, what happened was we didn't tend to the tree. And so we forgot our cultural memory got weaker and weaker and weaker until we find ourselves in the situation that we are in now, where we've actually forgotten who we are and where this profoundly good fruit comes from. And we are now grappling with an existential crisis, a crisis of meaning. We want the fruit, but we don't know how to get it and we don't know where to get it. Now, Gustav Marler once said that tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. And sadly, what we've done is we have wrongly come to think of Christianity and religion as the cold ashes of some long dead, defunct past rather than the blazing fire which actually warms the very heart of our society. In a nutshell, you can't actually live absolute liberalism. It doesn't work. Now, I could spend all night unpacking that important point, but I'm not going to. Instead, I want to talk about this model, this example we see of St. Thomas Moore who is a man of conscience, courage and lived convictions in the midst of a culture of great social division. And I want to suggest three possible things that could be helpful for us and how we might be able to imitate his example in the social divisions that we now find ourselves living through. There's an old proverb that says when confronted by the night, you can scream at the darkness or you can light a candle. So tonight what I want to do is I want to share three important lessons that I think bring a little light into the current cultural divisions that we find ourselves grappling with. And last Friday night, when I was speaking to a group of lawyers and judges and legal experts, I told them that I was thinking in particular of the powerful role that they play as pastoral mediators in moments of great crisis and vulnerability for people in our society when the whole world feels like it's coming down upon them. The lawyer in that situation can be a powerful pastoral mediator of goodness and truth in the midst of that. But that is also true for the rest of us as well. And these three principles they would apply to any of us in the way that we live our lives if we want to actually make a positive difference in the current crisis we find ourselves living through. So first of all, Christianity teaches us in fact, it really ingrains into us through the Christian anthropological vision the understanding of what we are as human persons and what reality is that our existence as human beings is always communal. You don't come into existence by yourself. You don't bring yourself into existence. A community of persons, the most important community of all. Your mother and your father brought you into existence. And it's not just that, but you are actually part of a long lineage of communities which have handed on that tradition of bringing new life into the world. As the old joke goes, having children is hereditary. If your parents didn't have any kids, then neither will you. But the point is that all of us are part of and brought into existence by community. Then on top of that, we can't actually survive without community, particularly when we are younger and when we get to the end of our lives where we need the bodies of other people to actually keep us alive. Or maybe if we experience disability or illness or an accident, we need community to actually stay alive. You can't flourish without community. We all need the gift of at least one other authentic friend in our lives that we can give ourselves to and we can receive as a gift into our lives because we need that most basic sort of experience of community to really truly flourish as a human person. And not only that, but our actions always ripple out into the community. Like I said earlier, despite the claims of whatever you do in the privacy of your own home doesn't affect anybody else. That simply isn't true. That would be like me getting on a flight and having the stewardess announce that this flight was a smoking and a non smoking flight. And if you didn't want to smoke or have anything to do with cigarette smoke, you just needed to sit on the right hand side of the plane and on the left hand side of the plane that was where all the smokers were going to be. And as long as you sit on the other side of the plane, you'll be fine. That is just not how that works at all. Our actions do ripple out. Even our smallest of actions can ripple out into the community in very profound ways.
Now, sadly for a lot of people in our country now, community has broken down and this has been one of the direct effects of Enlightenment liberalism and the move towards viewing ourselves as radically autonomous, self choosing individuals. It pulls us away from family. It pulls us away from community. We effectively become a whole lot of little human islands instead of a unified whole, a society, a community and we are now living in the most connected but least communal era of human history. The cell phone that you carry around in your pocket has more computing power than the first NASA mission to the moon and it allows us to connect instantly to people on the other side of the globe if we want to. But at the same time as we're carrying that technology around with us every day, we often don't even know the names of the people who literally live right next door to us. We don't have local community but we have this thing supposedly powerful thing called global connection which actually doesn't do much for our flourishing at all really. Now, on top of this, we know that this crisis is actually having some very serious and tragic outcomes for people. Because the breakdown of community can be a fertile breeding ground for indifference and even hostility towards others. As we sort of separate into our silos, but also for great brokenness and tragedy in the lives of people who basically they end up becoming the victims of the loss of community. In fact, about five or six years ago, our coroner publicly stated that the massively high spike in suicides that we were seeing in New Zealand wasn't simply a mental health crisis, it was a crisis of a loss of community. And interestingly enough, around that same time, we also discovered a brand new suicide hotspot that we hadn't seen before. So traditionally, we'd always known that males aged 40 to 45 were in a danger zone for suicide. It's the midlife crisis, right? You wake up one day and you realize suddenly that your grave and your headstone is now a lot closer to you than what the maternity ward and the nappies were. And sadly for a lot of blokes, they don't survive the struggle and the internal sort of crisis of meaning and legacy and what am I doing in the world and all that kind of stuff. Sadly, a lot of blokes don't come out the other side of that. And so we've known already that was a suicide hotspot, but about five or six years ago, we identified a new hotspot, and that was males aged 20 to 25. That should not exist, that should not be a suicide hotspot. The fact that it is is a damning indictment on our society and the breakdown of community and the loss of meaning and purpose and direction that has resulted in the lives of a lot of people as a direct result of that breakdown. When I was 20 to 25, I thought I was ten foot tall and bulletproof. I wasn't, but I thought I was. That's the way you're supposed to be. And older men are supposed to come along with a bit more wisdom and they're supposed to tell you to pull your head in and they're supposed to help you to grow and become more mature and less self referential, shall we say. But when I was that age, I thought I was the best looking guy in the room. I wasn't. I thought I was. As my dad once wisely said to me, son, look, there are really good looking blokes in the world. And then for men like us, god invented really funny jokes and really good aftershaves. So make sure you got plenty of both. Very wise man, my father. But I also thought that whenever I went to a party, every girl in the room wanted to marry me. Now, they didn't. But I thought that way because you're supposed to have a bit of hubris, a bit of confidence in the world when you are 20 to 25. You are not supposed to be a 20 to 25 year old male who thinks that there is no meaning, no community, no purpose for me here. And I would be better off if I didn't actually exist. But. That's happening to a whole lot of men in our country at a very time in their life when it absolutely shouldn't be happening. And that points to a serious crisis in our culture. So to be able to offer someone authentic friendship and community is a powerful medicine in times such as these. And to be in community with others is absolutely essential in a society that is collapsing under the weight of various ideology.
The second point of light comes to us courtesy of a guy called Alexander Salzenitsen. I'm a huge fan of Salzer Nietsen. He is the famous Russian Christian dissident who wrote The Gulag Archipelago and exposed the full horrors of what was actually going on and the Marxist socialist gulags that were being run by the Communists, the Soviet Communists. And that book is a book that I would highly recommend you read. Now, I remember the first time I read it, and what I was expecting was basically kind of like an evidentiary account of the atrocities that happened in the gulags. Now, there's definitely part of that in the book, but it's so much more than that. In places, it's a profound theological treaties. In other places, it is a profound philosophical exploration of the human condition. And in other places, it is a truly beautiful spiritual reflection. It's really quite a unique work in a lot of ways. If you haven't read it, I would highly recommend that you read it. Now, once he got out of the gulag system, where he had been in prison for many years, alexander Saltsanitsen was exiled to the west. He was sent to America. And the very day that the Russian police come to arrest and take him off to the airport and send him on a plane overseas is the very day that he finishes writing his Live Not by Lies essay. It's a short essay. If you haven't read it, you absolutely should, and you can find it free online. Now, that essay, Live Not by Lies, was actually smuggled out of his apartment. And that's a whole nother story in and of itself, because the lady who protected it initially actually gave her life to keep it safe and ensure that it would be published for the whole world to read. But in that essay, Alexander Salz Nietzsen enunciates a very important principle. He says, you might not always be able to actually stand up against and tear down the great evil that threatens or overwhelms you, but what you can always do is you can always choose to live not by lies. So don't live the lie. That's a power. That's a choice that you always have. Even if you can't stand up and maybe speak out against it or do anything directly to overthrow it, you can choose to live the truth, to live goodness and reject the lie. Don't let the lie live through you, he says. Don't let it live in your household, in your speech. Don't let it live through your behaviors, live not by lies. And in a time such as this, this is a very, very important principle for all of us to embrace. It's something we see in the life of St Thomas Moore. Initially he maintains a silence and then when the silence becomes untenable and potentially could lead into a situation of maybe giving an assent, he actually speaks up. Then it's something we actually also see in the life of the early Christian church whereby you have very vocal people like St Paul and St Peter and St Stephen and they are paying the price for being the vocal advocates of truth and goodness in a hostile culture. But there are also lots of other Christians who are quietly living the truth in those same areas where Paul and Peter and Stephen etc find themselves threatened or even harmed or killed eventually. Because clearly there is a need for people to actually live truth and to live goodness quietly under the great lie. And it's a very, very important principle that I think we need to urgently rediscover for the age that we find ourselves living in. And last, but I think definitely not least of all, is never ever underappreciate the power of the hidden life and in particular hidden virtue. Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Elliott in her famous work Middlemarch. She said this the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. And that is something that we should take great solace and comfort from. Basically what she's saying here is that there is a hidden virtue that is essential to maintaining a stable society and social order. And the fact that our society hasn't collapsed is in no small measure owing to the people who just quietly get on with living that virtue. People who you never know, who you've never heard from, they're not celebrities, they don't write books, they are not known to anybody. And for me I take great comfort in that because even in the midst of these great divisions it's clear to me that there are still a core of people in our society who are living that hidden life of virtue because if they weren't we would be in real trouble and our society would have collapsed by now. My parents are a great example of this. We grew up in some of the poorest suburbs in Christchurch, the eastern suburbs of Christchurch and we were a very poor family. We went from being a working class family to a welfare class family when my father was invalid out of his job at the railways, when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia which he would suffer for for most of his adult life. And so what that meant for us is that we were now on the sickness benefit because my father couldn't actually work due to the effects of his illness and the double whammy of the medication that he took to keep his illness in check. It was neurological based medications and they had a huge impact on his ability to actually function. So he had to actually sleep a lot during the day. That was one of the side effects. And so we were a welfare class, a very poor family. There were times where we didn't know where the next meal was coming from. There were times in fact it was quite regularly an occurrence in our household whereby the toilet paper would run out before we had reached the next welfare payment day. And I'm telling you right now, you haven't really lived until you find yourself sitting in a toilet rubbing newspaper or magazine pages together desperately hoping that somehow they are going to turn into cotton soft toilet paper.
Spoiler alert, they don't. But that's the reality of the life that we grew up in. Now, my parents in the midst of that very simple people, my father who struggled with schizophrenia for most of his adult life, my very poor upbringing. What my parents did in the midst of all of that though was they actually lived a life of hidden virtue and they taught us that virtue as well. And I know that my parents were good people and I know that they were good parents. How do I know that? Because I look at their legacy. I look at the lives of myself, my four brothers and my one sister and I look at the lives that they are leading, what's happening in their lives, what's happening in the lives of their children, my parents, grandchildren. And you can see clearly how that life of hidden virtue from these two people totally unknowns. They weren't celebrities, they didn't write books, they weren't academics, they weren't politicians. They were unknown people who lived a life of hidden virtue and that rippled out into the community. It's what I like to call the 02:00 a.m Christianity or the 02:00 a.m virtue that happens in our household and probably most normal households as well, where it's the early hours of the morning and one of your young children starts screaming out, mum, Mum, dad. Dad, get me something that I actually don't really need in the middle of the night. And I'm also capable of getting myself like a glass of water for example, and being the good husband that I am. I usually lie there in bed as still as I can keep my eyes shut and hope that my wife wakes up and goes to deal with it. And as I'm lying there, I hear that still small voice of the Holy Spirit saying to me brennan, don't be a bum. Yeah, that's right. The Holy Spirit is definitely Irish.
And he says to me, don't be a bum. Get out of bed. Love your wife, love your kids. So I stumble down the hallway and it's the early hours of the morning and I stand on one of Satan's bricks, a piece of Lego that one of my kids has left lying around. And I get into the bedroom and I'm what's going on? It's not flash, it's not glamorous. And my darling, lovely gift from God has gone back to sleep again. And I'm now standing there, sore foot wide awake, knowing that this is really going to hurt tomorrow morning when I get up and try to go to work.
And guess what? Here's the thing about that. It's not glamorous. Nobody sees it. You're not there to witness me in the middle of the night doing that.
It's mundane and it keeps happening time and time again.
No one is going to write a book about that St. Brendan of the hallway. There's no biopic movie that will inspire you that is going to be made about my experiences of fighting the fight to actually be a good and virtuous man, husband, father, rather than just a lazy bum, which, sadly, I do more often than I should, right? I wish it was easier to be a man of virtue, but this is the fight, right? But here's the thing. This is also the most profoundly important and life changing school of love that we can ever participate in. And it's a profoundly important school of love, not just for me, who learns how to love more heroically and more virtuously, and not just for my wife and my children who receive that kind of love, but also for the wider community, because that school of love ripples out into the wider community as well. It is forming a whole new generation of people to go out into the world who hopefully will imitate that same model. So even the most mundane, unglamorous and seemingly thankless acts of virtue in your life, in your daily work, can be making a profound and unseen impact on the world. Our actions ripple out into the community just like our harmful ones do. So does the good that we do. And our society desperately needs us to be people of conscience, courage and lived convictions. This has become more pressing than ever before. And I tell you what, you can't do that without community. You need community around you to really live an authentic life of virtue. You need people who are going to encourage, who are going to call you on, who are going to support you, who you can look across the aisle and recognize that they too are striving to live this same life. We need community to do this. Well, let me finish by saying this. I think there are three things that we need to remember in the current age we find ourselves living in. We must, number one, live goodness and truth. Number two, we must be willing to share goodness and truth when the moments arise when the conversations arise, when the issues are being discussed, we must add our voice to that as well. And number three, we must endure goodness and truth. We must endure and ensure that regardless of how challenging and difficult and whatever challenges and persecutions may come against us, that we endure and continue to run that race. You see, what I'm starting to see more of around me, and I'm starting to experience is that a faithful, even if it's imperfect and for all of us, it will be imperfectly lived, but a faithful dedication to goodness and truth over time has a very, very powerful influence on people. It really does. It is not uncommon for me now to meet people who I met 10, 15, 20 years ago and was having conversations with about particular issues.
And at that time, they disagreed strongly with me. But over time, as they've seen in my family life, the fact that we've strived to live this out, the fact that we are willing to endure and continue to do this, it's like a powerful witness. And it's sort of like the truth starts to take hold for them as well.
One of the worst things that you can see is someone who talks a good game but then fails to deliver. That lack of integrity and authenticity is just an absolute killer. So if we want to actually profoundly change the world, and trust me, it really does, then we need to be willing to live goodness and truth. We need to be willing to share goodness and truth with the world around us. And we need to be willing to endure for the sake of goodness and truth. And I'm going to finish by saying this. I don't know how you can do that without a religious faith, and in particular, a faith in the God of Christianity. I think that's the fundamental difference that really transforms the world, because Christian love is a whole lot harder than ordinary love. It really does call us to things that go well beyond, but it also gives us the tools that we need to actually live that love. Well, even the most loving of people has their limits, but Christianity calls us to go beyond those limits, to fight even harder, to take our life and make of it a truly righteous struggle for the sake of goodness and truth. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget the goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I will see you next time on the Dispatches.
Sam. Sam.
