Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

"But as it is written, what eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him, this God has revealed to us through the Spirit."

Welcome back to Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. It's Sunday, February 15th, 2026, the Sixth 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.

Well, it is so good to be back with all of you listeners, and especially this podcast is for all of you exiled parts. And we are back for this Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time. So good to be with you, Dr. Gerry. Here we are.

Yes. Good to be with you.

And we were just discussing really briefly. This is an interesting set of readings, and I'm really curious to know, like what you've got cooking for us today inside.

There's a lot of behavior going on, right, in Sirach, as well as in the Gospel. I believe it's Matthew, right? But I'm zooming in on Saint Paul and First Corinthians, if that's okay. Because here's what I hear in this. He says, "We speak a wisdom to those who are mature, not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age. Rather, we speak God's wisdom, mysterious and hidden." I think he's speaking to exiles here.

Okay.

He's not speaking to rulers and high level people and people in command. He's speaking a wisdom that is different from what the age or what, you know, society tends to think. And he says, you know, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. I think he's relating here exiles to Christ himself. And I think if there's a message here, it is that as an exile, you are being called to unite yourself with Christ, Christ the exile. And it says, "But as it is written, what eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him, this God has revealed to us through the Spirit." I think he's speaking to the exiles and to their hearts, to the sense that like they are loved by God, but also that exiles have this amazing capacity to love God back. And so there's this unity that's almost natural between God and an exile, you know, our own exiles, which then can be this natural love that we would have, like our own inmost self, has for our own exiles when we actually encounter them. When we truly encounter them heart to heart, we discover that they're so lovable and that they are so wanting to give love. And so that's what I got from today's readings.

Okay, well, this is really interesting because I keyed in on the same thing here. "What eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him." But then I jumped down to the Alleluia verse, which is right after this. It says, "Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, whom you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the kingdom." And so this is what really caught my attention. "You revealed to little ones." And again, we connect this back with the rest of the Gospel. This is Matthew 11, verse 25. It started from there. But yeah, he's always talking about, you know, "Let the little children come to me, do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God is made up of such as these." I think in order to be small, we have to be connected with our exiles. It can't just be our spiritual management team. You know, our Catholic standard bearers and the ones that go out and do all the spiritual things. But like we have to have that childlike position toward God, that receptivity, that awe, that wonder. But I also think that, "what has not entered the human heart," so I think it's something that the exiles don't have yet, but that they have a greater potential for taking in because he's talking about what has not entered the human heart and the exiles are in our human heart. We've got this diagram that you made on page 59 of your book. You know, so I think there's something here about not necessarily having the relationship with God, but the potentiality of the relationship with God. You know, like there is something in loving God wholeheartedly that we are to receive, that's to come in from Saint Paul, and that our exiles are going to help us take in, that it's not just something that the innermost self is going to do.

No, I think you're right. And I think that context that we've just laid out makes Matthew 5:17 to 37, the actual Gospel reading here, it provides a whole new way of looking at it. Because when I look at this like there's a lot of, you know, if you've heard about you shall not kill, but if you have anger against your brother, it's basically the same thing. You've heard about adultery, but if you, you know, have any lust in your heart, you've committed adultery. And people take that so harshly and people get afraid. And I get it because it does sound kind of harsh.

Yeah, absolutely.

But if you actually listen to what Paul is saying and you listen to that passage you highlighted in Matthew 11, that's in the Alleluia. Like all of a sudden you go, wait a second, what the Gospel writer here is saying, what Jesus is saying is, no, when you actually get this in your heart, just like exiles get it, in a way, more naturally, the way children naturally get it, it will make sense. You won't want to hold on to anger. You won't want to hold on to lust. You won't want to hold on to these things. It's not just because you're told you shouldn't do this, which is the most severe thing. Like don't like commit adultery. Those are the biggies. But he's actually saying no, no, no. The truth of this is that in your heart of hearts, you should want good. You shouldn't have to be told the Ten Commandments, as if that's the basic thing. No, that's the highest standard, obviously. Like, but it is the minimum in a way.

I look at it this way. Jesus, he's not looking primarily for compliance to the Law. He's looking for an intimate relationship with all of our being, not just the bits that our managers think are presentable enough to be offered to God, but a relationship with the entirety of our being. And so I think this is one of those cases in which parts that have been outcast, parts that have been condemned because they were the most sensitive ones, they were the most vulnerable ones. They were the ones that were willing to leap in the breach and take on burdens. You know, that there is something really noble about that, and there's something really so important to our identity that's lost when parts like that are exiled. And so this is a clear message from our Lord that that's not how it's supposed to be. And it's a message to you as exiles. It's a message to your managers. It's a message to your innermost self. It's a message to your firefighters. It's message to all of you, to all of us, to say, yes, this interior integration is really critical, and that these little ones are essential in us being able to experience the mysteries of the kingdom. So, you know, and this all does fit together. Like, I mean, it's remarkable this the way these things fit together.

But then there's also a receptivity and openness, that it's not all there. This is where we differ from Richard Schwartz, perhaps, who might argue that it's already all there. You know, it's already all within our system. You know, we've got a little chip of the divine, you know, in the way that he would understand it, possibly. I could be misrepresenting that, but I don't really know. But yet I'm thinking about, like, what has not yet entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him and who love him with our hearts, not just acts of the will, you know, not just the intellect, but the entirety of our hearts, the entirety of our beings and our little ones. Our exiles are so important. You are so important in that. And so can we have a little flexibility here? Can we maybe make a little resolution here? Can we get a little openness, managers, to like thinking that there's something really important about these exiles? They're not just to be silenced. They're not just to be cast away. Can we find a way, in this time of exploration, to maybe come together as a whole in this adventure of tolerating being loved and of loving?

Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes our managers, as good as they are, God bless them, can be legalistic, right. And this is telling us, oddly enough, because it sounds so harsh in the Gospel readings, but it's actually telling us that we need to be deeper and go deeper than the lawyers. We need to go deeper than the Law and what the Law says. We actually need to listen sometimes to our exiles, like, because they actually sometimes get it. They understand the heart of it. And there's a beauty in that, actually.

So it's a both-and because here in the Gospel, you know, in Matthew five, I think it's verse 18, maybe 19, he says, "Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law until all these things have taken place." So it's a both-and. It's not that we just discard the Ten Commandments, you know, or the teachings of the Church. We go deeper. Yeah, and to embrace the entirety of it. But in relationship with God, you know, in relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ, God who became man to allow us to partake of his divine nature. And I would say of his human nature too. You know, like, so this is awesome. It's another time where we actually kind of zeroed in on some central things together, but then brought in some more of the readings. It's just delightful to do that with you, Dr. Gerry.

Yeah, and it's fun that we don't plan it in advance.

The Resilient Catholics Community is open to new applications for our latest cohort, the Saint Luke cohort, for the entire month of February. Listeners are invited to apply by visiting soulsandhearts.com/rcc.

Well, with that, let's draw this to a close 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.