The Restless Hearts Podcast

Noting that life is filled with loss and so is also filled with the unpleasant and inconvenient emotion of sadness, this fifth conference invites listeners to take note of losses that have been ungrieved and so unhealed, to see loss as an essential part of life and the emotion of sadness as possibly the most humanizing of our emotions, and the reality that sadness is in direct proportion to how much we have loved who or what we have lost so that to avoid sadness is to deny love.  While the process of grieving is painful and difficult, the courage to enter it is a choice to be more fully human as sadness reveals love which can move us from emptiness of loss to the fullness of gratitude.

The fourth conference of this retreat invites listeners to attend to experiences in life in which our needs and desires are not met and so evoke the emotion of anger and its instinctive drives toward hostility, aggression, and violence as we assert the satisfaction of our needs as paramount to anyone else and so act in a more than human ways as well as the less than human tendency to see ourselves as undeserving and worthless.  The talk suggests that anger properly listened to and understood can be an invitation to the fully human experiences of solidarity with the rest of humanity and its suffering and deprivation as well as a righteous passion to correct harmful and exploitative practices that deprive people of their humanity.

The third conference of this retreat invites listeners to reflect on experiences in life that evoke the emotion of fear and the instinctive responses to fear; namely flight, fight, or learned helplessness may not serve us well in all circumstances (while they may be quite appropriate in others).  It further invites us to consider that experiences that evoke fear may well be invitations to trust and so lead us to growth, courage, and faith.

The second conference of this retreat outlines a method of reflection on our experiences so that we can respond to them in fully human ways rather than reacting instinctively in less than human or more than human ways.  These steps to health and holiness are; first, to tell the truth about our experience without denial or illusion; second, to engage in honest self awareness using our emotions to reveal our needs and values; third, to be conscious of the values that our mission, call, and vocation in life call us to live out; and fourth, to choose a course of action that will be truly life-giving because it is consistent with our vocation to be fully human.

This and the following nine episodes of the Restless Hearts Podcast were recorded between July 9 and 14, 2023 during a retreat for the community of the Motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters of Peace in Columbus, OH.  The title of the retreat is “Our Call to be Human as Jesus was Human.”  This introductory session invites listeners to focus on the humanity that Jesus shares with us and to see our true human vocation in his true and full humanness rather than trying to imitate his divinity.  It points out that being fully human does not come naturally to any of us as being human is hard and filled with anxiety, tension, and unpredictability.  It lays the framework for the rest of the conferences by noting how there are two ways to “sin”, namely to choose to respond to life in ways that are either less than human or more than human, both of which deny our true call to be fully human and describes how Jesus’ responses to life are examples of what fully human choices might be.

This episode of the Restless Hearts Podcast includes the Proclamation of the Gospel and Father Ray's homily from the Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time on June 9, 2024. You can view the full liturgy of the Word for this Sunday under Daily Readings at usccb.org.

This episode of the Restless Hearts Podcast includes the Proclamation of the Gospel and Father Ray's homily from the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity on May 26, 2024. You can view the full liturgy of the Word for this Sunday under Daily Readings at usccb.org.

This episode of the Restless Hearts Podcast includes the Proclamation of the Gospel and Father Ray's homily from the Fifth Sunday of Easter on April 28, 2024. You can view the full liturgy of the Word for this Sunday under Daily Readings at usccb.org.

This episode of the Restless Hearts Podcast includes the Proclamation of the Gospel and Father Ray's homily from the Third Sunday of Easter on April 14, 2024. You can view the full liturgy of the Word for this Sunday under Daily Readings at usccb.org.

This episode of the Restless Hearts Podcast includes the Proclamation of the Gospel and Father Ray's homily from the Second Sunday of Easter on April 7, 2024. You can view the full liturgy of the Word for this Sunday under Daily Readings at usccb.org.