Roll of the Laity
Jonathan Larson introduced the meeting, discussing community events like Coats for Kids and Toys for Tots at Westwood Mall, and seeking council contributions for a specific cause. Joseph Gruber, the main speaker, focused on the theme of the role of the layperson, using the concept of 'cruft' from MIT to illustrate how some people are perceived as unnecessary. He emphasized the importance of the triad of pray, pay, and obey in a Christian life, highlighting how these practices connect individuals to God, support the church, and provide a moral framework. Gruber concluded by encouraging participants to reflect on these practices and their significance in daily life.
MC: Jonathan Larsen
Presenter: Joseph Gruber
Deacon: Rick Freedberg
Brought to you By: The Knights of Columbus
Audio Trasnscription
participantOne:(140-33680): I'm Jonathan Larson. I'm going to quickly emcee this portion of it and turn it over to Joseph. Our role this month, we're going to be talking about the role of the learning person. Welcome to October. Anyone have any events that we're going to have going on at Maynard? I mentioned that the Coats for Kids thing and the Toys for Tots thing is going very strong with Wendy White over at the...
participantOne:(34419-66580): Westwood Mall. If you want to help out, right now they're doing Toys for Tots, cleaning them, fixing them, etc. Tuesdays and Thursdays during the day. You have to go in through the back side of the mall where Elder Bierman is. Actually, two of the big rooms from Elder Bierman. That's going very strongly. Thanks to all who helped. And they can use more help.
participantOne:(66860-93300): I mentioned that there might be a little different flavor this fall as far as what we do. What I'm asking is if you could take it back to your councils. The Felicia nuns that run the Bennett School, the pay care center, whatever you want to call it, care center for kids and everything here, underclothes,
participantOne:(94679-125520): socks things of that sort so I'm asking that you take it back to your councils if we could come up with $200 a piece for each council $200 from each council that'd be six or eight hundred dollars that would help them tremendously that way it's better than they just purchased the room and stuff what? who what? that was me that's it that's it Brandon that's it
participantOne:(126620-163019): 2.30 to 3.30, light change. Stand for light. All right, please put your hands together for Joseph Gruber. Good morning. How's everybody doing today? Sorry. Sorry. We are here, Jim. All right, Deacon Rick is recovering from eye surgery, so he's not here.
participantOne:(163560-184440): So, shall we begin in prayer? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Direct, O Lord, our actions by thy holy inspiration, and carry them on by thy gracious assistance, that every word and work of ours may begin in thee, and by thee be happily ended. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
participantOne:(184860-212079): Gentlemen, the theme for the month is the role of the layperson, what it is to be part of the laity. And today I want to talk to you about something that I first heard about when I was a missionary at MIT. Some of you know that I was a Catholic missionary for just 13 or so years. In my first three years of being a missionary, I was on the college campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
participantOne:(212580-238780): And at MIT, they had this weird word called cruft. Cruft. And it meant stuff that just sort of lingers. So if somebody were to upgrade their computer, and they put their old computer in the corner of their office, and it just gathers dust, it's cruft. If they got new equipment, but they don't want to get rid of the old equipment, it's cruft.
participantOne:(239040-260560): And so there would be these email service chains where you could sign up to get emails about people wanting to get rid of some of the cruft around. So we got our television that way as missionaries because somebody was getting rid of their TV because we signed up for this email list. But this word was also used to apply.
participantOne:(261020-282600): To all the people who hung out around MIT, who didn't study there or work there, these were also cruft. These were sometimes the alumni. These were sometimes members of the community that just sort of were around. And they kind of gathered dust, and people didn't always know what to do with them. They were the cruft of MIT. Wannabes.
participantOne:(283240-312440): Some of them were wannabes, some of them were trying to relive glory days, and some just really liked the atmosphere of MIT. I understood that. I enjoyed that atmosphere too. And I was at one event, it was a Catholic event on campus, and there was this guy who I think was an alum, and we got to chatting over coffee, and this was I think after the event itself.
participantOne:(313060-339020): And he was telling me about how different it was now than what it was when he was a child. And he said, when I was a kid, we were told to pray, pay, and obey. And I was fascinated by that because he seemed to think that those were three really bad things. Right?
participantOne:(339340-371820): And that was the first time I had ever heard those three things grouped together, pray, pay, and obey. And I was nodding along, and he was just very angry that for so long his life was dominated by people telling him, in his words, to sit down and shut up. He thought that to pray, pay, and obey was reductive. It was reducing him to someone who was merely...
participantOne:(372140-407840): there. He thought it was infantilizing, insulting. Now, I didn't grow up with any of the baggage he was growing up with. I grew up with my own baggage. And I didn't have those associations with those three words. He very clearly did. Have any of you heard these three paired together? Pray, pay, and obey. And that that's the job of the layperson. Few people are raising their hands. Maybe you can understand where this guy is coming from.
participantOne:(408620-438940): But as with many things that are said angrily around me, I think about them from time to time, because they're emotionally charged and seem significant. And so this seemed significant. If this guy was willing to talk to me, a stranger, very forcefully about something, like, okay, I'll think about this. I'll consider it. And I thought, pray, pay, and obey actually sounds like a really good way to live my life.
participantOne:(439500-466460): that if I'm a lay person, or any kind of person, that life actually should consist of at least these three things. My life should not be... It could be more than those three things. It should not be less than these three things. What happens if my life is less than those three things? If I'm not praying, paying, and obeying? I think it's a healthy exercise to say...
participantOne:(466840-500520): What would life be like without these? And then we can consider what life with them could be. What happens if I don't pray? What happens if I think my life does not need prayer? Gentlemen, this is like the lack of communication in a marriage. If I'm married to my wife and we never communicate, that kills our relationship. If you want to kill a relationship, stop talking. So...
participantOne:(501080-533320): If I don't think that prayer is pretty essential to my life, what I'm saying is my relationship with God is something that I want to just wither on the vine. Okay, that might seem obvious to you guys by now. Prayer, we should do it. Paying, and I think this one, because it hits us in the pocketbook, it hits us in the wallet, this maybe needs some figuring out. If we don't pay, what we're doing is saying that our work...
participantOne:(533880-563400): and the fruit of our work is completely divorced from worship. That the workaday world and the life of worship, there's no crossover. We want them to be separate things. I own my work and that's me and I identify as my work and I identify as the owner of, the sole proprietor of all of my work versus worship
participantOne:(563939-596920): which is this other thing that exists off in its own parallel universe. So, divorcing work and worship, personally, that introduces a conflict, a separation that didn't need to be there. But also, gentlemen, if the lay people don't support the church, the church doesn't actually get to do the things that the church does. If we cannot buy the little wafers of bread,
participantOne:(597620-634400): And if we cannot produce wine, we cannot have Mass. If we don't have olives to press into oil, we don't have Confirmation, we don't have Holy Orders. Water is pretty easy to get, we'll still have Baptism. Yeah? Insurance costs. Insurance costs, thank you, Michael. Upkeep, maintenance, repairs, actually adding on to what is already there,
participantOne:(635439-667620): Right? Some people claim that the church has been in maintenance mode for a generation. I've talked with people who work at churches. Some might argue we were not maintaining all that well. So maintenance mode wasn't even a thing. And I don't think it's because of any ill will. I think it's because we didn't actually support the church as we ought to have. So the church, the buildings themselves will crumble.
participantOne:(667880-689360): and our ability to worship God as he asks to be worshipped, we can't do it. Okay, a lack of obedience. If we say, I don't need to obey anyone or anything, what we're saying is we are untaught and unteachable.
participantOne:(693060-729620): Which is a pretty ridiculous thing to say. To say, like, I know all that I need to know right now to live the best possible life. There is no insight. There is no direction. There is no instruction that I can receive that could possibly make a difference in my life. There's no one trustworthy enough for me to listen to. Which is a wild claim to make. That being said, I think you can look around at the world today and say, actually...
participantOne:(730020-764740): The problem hasn't been people saying we need to pray, pay, and obey. The problem right now seems to be most men don't even know that we can pray, pay, and obey. That these are options and what they actually unlock. These three activities are key to a flourishing Christian life. We get to pray. Did you ever think about this? There is a creator of everything. A preexistent creator.
participantOne:(765040-798160): the source of all existence, being the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, that the ancient Greeks said we have no access to. We can worship Zeus and we can worship Apollo, but that unmoved mover, we actually don't have any access to. And then the Christians came and said, actually we do, we do, because he sent his only son.
participantOne:(798380-833140): and we get to have conversations with him as a loving father. Do you know how mind-blowing that is, that we get to talk to our creator? Maybe not. Maybe some of us take that for granted. Not only do we get to talk to our creator, we get to do that alongside fellow believers. Every Sunday when we drive to Mass as a family, I ask the kids, where are we going? And they'll say, Mass. And I say, why are we going there? And they give different answers, usually because Jesus loves us. And it's like, well...
participantOne:(833680-870240): But then why do we need to go to Mass? You know, God is omnipresent. He's everywhere. Why do we need to go there? And that's usually a noodle scratcher for them. So I've been supplying the answer because apparently as a dad, it's my job to teach them something. And one of the reasons we go to Mass is because we get to pray alongside fellow believers. We get to be joined as a body in the worship of God. Do you guys realize how cool that is? That our voices become one? Yeah.
participantOne:(871800-900100): with each other, with the saints, with the angels, with Christ himself, who offers himself perfectly as the act of worship. We get to join in that. It didn't have to be that way. And for many people, they don't even know that that is a way. Also, ridiculously, the prayer book of the church, does anyone know what the prayer book of the church is?
participantOne:(902060-931080): Michael Philpott should because he gave a presentation on it last year. Liturgy of the Hours based fundamentally on the Psalms. The 150 Psalms are the prayer book of the church. Do you know what they are? It's a song book. The church is asking us to sing in prayer, right? Singing is more than just blind recitation. It is much more an act of the whole person
participantOne:(931959-968520): it engages us on so many more levels when we sing it calls more from us than probably we can expect let me let me rephrase that it calls more from us than we have any reason to expect that could come from us from any other source we get to pray we get to pay our work can go towards supporting the mission of the church and the worship of the church like every paycheck we get
participantOne:(969880-991580): We can say this... We can divert funds from this. We can offer them. We can make an offering of our work so that God can be made more manifest, that his glory might be known in the world. Like, every day that we get up to work, we can say, this work...
participantOne:(992400-1013160): can actually be devoted to God. Whether we are doing the most high and noble things, or really lowly things, or anything in between, our work can go to build up the church. That's wild. We get to make an offering.
participantOne:(1015760-1043760): Like, I don't know, at Queen of the Miraculous Medal, Saint, or no, Saint, Father Tim McDonald, I mean, I hope he'll be a saint. I hope all of you will be saints, just in case we're wondering. I hope everybody here is going to be a saint. Father Tim McDonald will hold a basket out at the offertory and all the little kids will run. And we signed up to do electronic donations every month, which is really lame, because the kids want to make an offering.
participantOne:(1044119-1075700): the kids want to participate in the mass and so i'm thinking very uh seriously about stopping that and just doing withdrawals probably not going to do that because the chances of us forgetting go up but but like you can see in the children they want to make an offering okay gentlemen we get to pay we get to obey this is one of the wildest things about our faith
participantOne:(1076180-1105640): The God that we believe in is trustworthy. The God that we believe in is a good father, which is mind-blowing because I think a lot of us know more the opposite, bad fathers. I've been in the book of Proverbs recently, and Proverbs chapter 4 begins, "'Hear, O sons, a father's instruction, and be attentive that you may gain insight.'"
participantOne:(1105920-1131600): For I give you good precepts. Do not forsake my teaching. When I was a son with my father, tender, the only one on the side of my mother, he taught me and said to me, let your heart hold fast my words. Keep my commandments and live. Do not forget and do not turn away from the words of my mouth. Get wisdom, get insight, do not forsake her, and she will keep you. Love her and she will guard you.
participantOne:(1132420-1156240): The beginning of wisdom is this. Get wisdom and whatever you get, get insight. Prize her highly and she will exalt you. She will honor you if you embrace her. She will place on your head a fair garland. She will bestow on you a beautiful crown. The father saying, listen to me, son. I want you to be intimately, intimately embracing wisdom.
participantOne:(1157080-1187740): That's my instruction. That's what I want you to obey. That is what I desire for you. That is why I'm giving you instruction. That you may live, that you may have a life ordered toward glory, ordered toward joy. The beginning of the Psalms, Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight, his delight is in the law of the Lord. And on his law, he meditates day and night.
participantOne:(1190680-1221840): Gentlemen, I didn't mention this because I forgot this earlier, but if we don't obey God, one option is we think we can do it all on our own. But let's be real. Most of us, if we're not obeying God, we're listening to somebody or something else. We're letting the world, the flesh, and the devil whisper whatever they want into our ears or shout into our ears because we're not listening to a loving Father.
participantOne:(1223260-1263080): God has something to reveal to us. We talk about divine revelation. We talk about scripture being inspired. That's because he has something to tell us that we otherwise could not know. And so to be obedient to that, that's really incredible stuff. We get to receive the loving words of our Father. Gentlemen, it is only after we've been praying, paying, and obeying that we have something to offer the world. A world that does not pray
participantOne:(1263520-1302320): A world where toil is meaningless and a world that has no one that is trustworthy to instruct it. We get to be living examples of a Christian in the world if we pray and pay and obey. Gentlemen, we may be called to more than those three things. We are not called to less than those three things. If we are lay people, how blessed it is that we get to pray.
participantOne:(1302980-1334080): and pay and obey. Gentlemen, I'd like to, for a moment, pray the fifth joyful mystery with you. That is the finding of the child Jesus in the temple. After that, it says that Jesus went to dwell with his mother and father, growing in wisdom and maturity. For 30 years, Jesus lived the life of a lay person. His father was in the line of David.
participantOne:(1335160-1371760): By rights, he should have been kingly. His cousin was of the high priestly line, and he was also living the life of a prophet. But for 30 years, Jesus lived in Nazareth the life of a layperson, which was a life where he was intimately conversing with his loving father, where his work was ordered to the glory of God, as he was working in the woodshop with his father, Joseph.
participantOne:(1374440-1403700): and where he was obedient to his mother and father. So, will you join me in praying the fifth joyful mystery? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The fifth joyful mystery is the finding of the child Jesus in the temple. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, Christ's name. Amen.
participantOne:(1404020-1434000): as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. And pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. And pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
participantOne:(1434440-1467320): Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Great for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Great for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, great for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
participantOne:(1467800-1501140): Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. God, pray for us sinners now, at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy God, pray for us sinners now, at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. God, pray for us sinners now, at the hour of our death.
participantOne:(1502040-1531840): Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and for all of our dead. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and for all of our dead. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be, for all without end.
participantOne:(1532260-1545760): O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
participantOne:(1546160-1569740): All right, gentlemen, there are three questions at your table if you want to take a few minutes just for personal reflection. And then when you've done with those, those are just for you. I'm not collecting them. You don't have to share them with anyone. They're just for you to consider. And then afterward, we can break into small groups. Sound good? Great.
