Fr. Mike offers a follow-up to his video on Dr. John Gottman’s “four horsemen of the apocalypse” with this video on Dr. Gottman’s proposed remedy: the Golden Ratio. For every one instance of these four horsemen that signify a relationship is falling apart—which are defensiveness, criticism, stonewalling, and contempt—there should be five instances of the opposite. The four horsemen still rear their heads in the healthy relationships that Dr. Gottman observed, but these relationships have the following interactions five times as often:

If you feel like you’re in a relationship where the four horsemen show up too often, try putting this Golden Ratio into practice.

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Fr. Mike goes all the way back to Genesis to explain why Catholics have a pope. God established the kingdom of Israel with the twelve sons of Jacob. Centuries later, he appointed David as the king who would unite this kingdom. Centuries after that kingdom was divided, Jesus established a new kingdom by appointing the twelve apostles.

To unite this new kingdom, which is the Church, he appointed Peter as his vicar here on earth. Jesus is the king, but he gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter. This means Peter and his successors play the role of the “prime minister”, or the right-hand-man, or the steward of the king while Jesus is gone.

The papacy may be a divisive topic today, but clearly God gave his Church a pope as a sign of unity for all who are a part of the new kingdom Christ established.

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We hear the phrase “in the world but not of it” quite often. But how do we live that out in our everyday lives? Fr. Mike gives a crash course on how to follow Christ in situations where there may be tension between you and someone you’re close to.

Reminding us of Matthew 10:34, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” Fr. Mike explains that Jesus is a cause of division. As followers of Christ, we have to acknowledge and accept the painful reality that following him will cause us to be divided from many people we love.

Once we accept that, allowing God’s love to fill our hearts, we will search for ways to love those who strongly disagree with us.

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When it comes to trying to control God and keep him at a distance in our lives, there are at least two ways that we go about it. Either we lay low and stay out of trouble, or we excel at whatever task we’ve currently been assigned to. Both strategies intend to keep God out of our lives so we can keep doing what we’re doing, because we’re comfortable doing it. Well, if you’re in one of those camps, get ready because God can call you to something different any minute now.

You may not have even noticed yourself slipping into one of these subtle thought processes that so many of us slip into. That’s why it’s important to give our lives to God at least daily. Try doing it first thing in the morning before anything else. That’s how Fr. Mike does it, and it seems to have worked out quite well for him.

“Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” (John 15:2).

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Fr. Mike is honest about why it’s so hard for us to make friends. A necessity for friendship is time, something that many of us simply don’t have. More than that, true friendship requires a painful level of vulnerability and transparency. When asking yourself who you are willing to be friends with, you’re really asking “Who are you willing to give access to your wounds?”

With that in mind, consider what Jesus said:

“No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

How much time do you spend with Jesus? Will you give him access to your wounds? This is afterall what it means to be a friend. Are you a friend of Jesus?

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Fr. Mike asks if the bad things you think you don’t have the capacity to do are actually just things you don’t have the opportunity to do. A friend of Fr. Mike’s was recovering from an addiction, and this friend noticed how he was deceiving himself. He was telling himself “I would never …” when he should have been saying, “I haven’t yet ...” Many times the sins we avoid we have only avoided because we haven’t had the opportunity to commit them. Acknowledging that we may do something regretful if given the opportunity is a great—although difficult—exercise in self-knowledge that could prevent some serious sin in the future.

This week, consider the benefits that come with strengthening your self-discipline. Make an extra attempt to reinforce a virtue that may help you combat the corresponding vice. This will go a long way in increasing your holiness.

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How we spend our time is one of the most valuable decisions we make, because time is one thing we can never get back once it’s gone. Maybe God is calling you to do something more with your time, in this very moment even, but distractions are pulling you in too many different directions to focus. Make no mistake, distractions steal our time, even those we willfully choose. Even worse, as St. Alphonsus Ligouri said, voluntary distraction can steal our soul.

Maybe there’s a dozen different things you know you should be doing, but you can’t choose one, so you choose none. If that’s the case, Fr. Mike says to take solace in the fact that you only have to choose one task, because the reality is that multitasking doesn’t work anyway. Holiness is to choose one thing, namely to say yes to God’s will. So choose your one sacrifice, and say yes to the focused and singular task of holiness.

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For many people, the Catholic Church’s teaching on in vitro fertilization and contraception is a hard one, but it is in concordance with the nature of things. The nature of a thing, as Fr. MIke puts it, is its “what-it’s-for-ness”. Sex is for procreation and the unity of the couple. Equally important is the fact that sex, not in vitro fertilization, is the natural way to bring forth a new life. Contraception and in vitro fertilization violate the nature of not only sex, but also the nature of the person and life itself.

If you feel that this teaching prohibits you from being truly happy, Fr. Mike offers encouragement. It may not seem fair to us at first, but the deep abiding peace we acquire from living by God’s plan is better than anything we could acquire by doing things our way.

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Perhaps you’ve felt the temptation to be a cookie-cutter Catholic, one who does all the Catholic things that other Catholics are doing because they think … well … that’s what makes us Catholic. But comparison is kind of like the cousin of envy, Fr. Mike says. If we only express our faith in certain ways because that’s what other believers around us our doing, we should re-examine our relationship with Christ. After all, he is the only one we should pattern our life after.

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What good does feeling sorry for yourself do? Fr. Mike points out a hard truth in saying—while you have the right to grieve when tragic things happen in your life—you never have the right, or permission, to feel sorry for yourself. All it does is shrink the universe down to the size of you. It blocks out the blessings God gave you that you should be thankful for, and paralyzes you from joyfully giving to others.

When you feel the temptation to feel sorry for yourself coming on, in the words of St. Paul, Fr. Mike recommends:

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful” (Colossians 3:15).

Quote from G.I. Jane:

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself” (Viggo Mortensen as Master Chief John James Urgayle in G.I. Jane, original quote from D.H. Lawrence, 20th century English writer).

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