Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

"I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom, for I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ."

You are listening to Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. It's February 8th, 2026, the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today is a special Sunday episode of Scripture for Your Inner outcasts, as we are joined by both Dr. Gerry Crete and Dr. Peter Malinoski, the co-founders of Souls and Hearts. They will be offering a joint reflection on today's readings.

Dr. Gerry, so good to have you back and to be together for these Sunday readings. And so good to have so many of you in our listening audience for Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. Thank you for being here. And thank you, manager parts, for allowing exiles to be here within your systems and to be picking this up. Really grateful for that. And like I said, we're in the Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time and I'm just going to open it up. What strikes you from these readings, especially with regards to something that our Lord might have for our exiled parts?

Yeah, well, here's a thought I had. And it's from the reading of Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians here. And he said, "I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom, for I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ." And he said, "he comes in weakness and fear and much trembling." I think of Saint Paul as not a person who comes in weakness, fear, and trembling. I see him as a person who is pretty wise and probably like would have been mesmerizing to listen to, I might have thought. Maybe I'm wrong. That's my impression. It was really interesting to like, read this and just sort of take it in, because he's pretty much saying, I didn't come with wisdom. I wasn't trying to be flashy or clever. I came with power, you know, and that does sound more like him. But, you know, he came to do something. And then that linked me a little bit to the other readings, like in Isaiah and so on, talking about sharing your bread with the hungry and the homeless. And, you know, last week we had the Beatitudes. And so I'm like going, okay, I feel like the message to my exiles, maybe all exiles, is we don't really need to be clever, smart, flashy, fancy. We do not need to be some kind of, you know, famous speaker or a celebrity. We just need to help the people who need it. We need to help the oppressed. We need to clothe the naked. We need to see who is being rejected, who is in trouble. And we need to act. And that is the impression. And sometimes when I think about exiles too, like it can be hard to get to them, right? And I know we have to do, there's a whole process, and we have to work with our protectors to allow access. We don't just barge in, kind of deal. But there is an importance, right? There should be a fire a little bit in us to go, I do not want to leave this part of me stuck in some dungeon eating stale bread, naked, right? I want to get in there and help. I gotta do something. This is not the time for fancy talk of, you know, the inmost self is beauty and all this stuff. Yeah, that's all great, right? We talk about that. But no, no, we have to actually do it. We need to get in there and feed the hungry because that is making a difference. And it will make a difference to our exiles and our whole system.

And here we have it, right in Isaiah, right at the end, Isaiah 58, verses 9-10. "If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation, and malicious speech, if you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted, then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday." Because that's the other thing, like when our managers oppress or suppress or silence or manhandle our exiles, it's not good for our managers. Often they don't know what else to do because they're desperately trying to maintain some kind of equilibrium, or sometimes they believe that these exiled parts are not acceptable to God. You know, they look at them as the source of sin, or at least impulses toward sin and so forth in the system. And so there's this idea that we need to starve them, that we need to constrain them, and that they will then wither and die, and then we don't have to worry about them anymore, you know. And there's some ascetical literature which can be, I think, twisted to try to give that impression. But the fact is, these parts are part of us. And I'm just so like, thinking about the statement charity begins at home. And most people they interpret that to as, well, we should be charitable to those that are in our immediate vicinity, right? Those we live with, those in our communities. I'm going to take that even further and say charity begins within our own systems, right, in the way that we address ourselves, which is very Thomistic. We've talked about that when we've had Anthony Flood on the podcast and so forth. So yeah, just like if you can remove from your midst. And so this is a call to our protectors, especially our managers, our firefighters to and let's love these exiles and see what happens. See how the light comes in. And I believe those exiles are supposed to be part of the light that shines before men, you know, that the Gospel talks about.

Exactly. Because these are important resources. Our exiles that were maybe starving or maybe neglected are actually, I think what Matthew is saying here, is you are the salt of the earth. It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot if it loses its taste. Well, our exiles haven't lost their taste. Whenever we discover them, usually they're children. Not always. But most of the time these exiles are children. And when they're taken out of these harsh, horrid, arid environments, brought into the light, they're beautiful. They're playful. They're funny, they laugh, they're like joyful. And this is the salt. This is the light of the world. And it needs to be set on a mountain. It's not hidden. Why on earth are we hiding them? If they're under a bushel basket, then no one sees them. We don't even see them. Yeah, this is exciting. Our exiles, we need you, we need to have light, salt.

It's so delightful when my former exiles are able to encounter the exiles of another person, you know, with whom they shared some similarity in the burden or the experience. And it's just there's such a resonance there. And it's so beautiful when I see, you know, either my clients or a lot of times members of the Resilient Catholics Community, allowing the light to come in and allowing those exiles to be a part of them. I'll give you a quick example. Like I struggled with play for a long time, and sometimes I still do. And what my manager parts chose to do is to read about play, to study it. And I read books like by Hugo Rahner. You know, Man at Play. And I read, you know, Josef Pieper's Leisure as the Basis of Culture, and was trying to study my way into learning how to play. This is how my managers. And what needed to happen was that an exile was able to unburden and come into communion, into integration, with the rest of me. And that part just knew how to play, and I could follow that part. And it didn't require me to read these volumes, you know, so you can kind of see it's a very different way of embracing the fullness of being.

I love it.

Listeners can find more content from Dr. Gerry Crete, including a link to his book, The Litanies of the Heart in the description of today's show. Thanks for joining us and we hope to see you again tomorrow.

Let's go ahead and wrap up our reflection here by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.