So, what’s Sunday morning for, anyway?

Worship at Notre Dame de Paris

In the inevitable dust-up over whether to cancel church on Christmas or not, some strange and interesting things have been said that should make all of us back up a little and say, “So, what’s Sunday morning for, anyway?”

There was this one Twitter thread (that I won’t make you endure) that said some very revealing things about how we imagine the gathering of the ekklesia and how we imagine worship. It was by a pastor of a church that will not be gathering itself together on Christmas morning. The primary reason: Getting everybody together in one building at the same time isn’t the only way to worship God.

We grant that. Of course.

But not all worship is the same sort of thing. This church cancels Sunday services multiple times a year to remind people that this is not the only way to worship. Instead, they could have a barbecue. Or help out the poor in some way. And so forth. There was an equivocation between the praise and worship of the assembled people of God and every act in our lives being done to the glory of God.

This pattern of thought is troubling because if assembling the saints for worship is the same as any other Christian action, why even go on Sunday? Many people with small children find the Sunday morning experience less than pleasant. Out the door on time. Back for lunch/naps. Recover over the afternoon. But if brunch can be worship — hey, presto! Stay home!

But I think everyone knows that what we do on a Sunday morning is, by definition, not the same as other acts of worship (unless they’re the same thing as we do Sunday but on a different day of the week). What do we do on Sunday morning? According to the Book of Common Prayer, “we assemble and meet together”:

• to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands,
• to set forth his most worthy praise,
• to hear his most holy Word, and
• to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.

And, since this is from the preamble to the penitential rite in Morning and Evening Prayer, we also assemble to confess our sins.

First off, then: What we are doing on Sunday morning is objectively different from a barbecue, building houses for the poor, working at a soup kitchen — different even from other explicitly “religious” things, such as a Bible study or theology lecture.

For me, it’s the communal thanks and praise that really shift Sunday away from other things. Worship, adoration, latreia — if we wanna get all historical here, adoratio and latreia imply something specifically, consciously worshipful. Adoratio can sometimes also cover the same ground as proskynesis — getting down on the ground like a dog before the emperor or the Shahanshah (Persian King of Kings). Late Romans even had a special ceremony called adoratio purpurae wherein you got to touch the purple hem of the emperor’s robe.

Your heart can sing as you raise a roof. You can do it to the glory of God. And you can even do it, in a certain sense, as a more pure act of worship than what may be being offered up in your local megachurch discotheque — I mean, Sunday service — or cathedral concert — I mean, choral evensong. But it’s still not. the. same. thing. Literally a different human act from having the Lord open your lips that your mouth may show forth His praise.

And I think that everyone knows this. Opening presents on Christmas morning, when done to the glory of God, still isn’t the same, even if you whisper, “O God, make speed to save me,” when your kid is given more Hotwheels. And, “O Lord, make haste to help me,” as you gaze upon a gift you hate.

If you aren’t at church on Christmas morning, your time of family worship, with Scripture and some carols and prayers, maybe an Advent wreath, is similar to what goes on at church and may even include all the elements listed in the BCP. But it still isn’t the same. Why? The assembly of the saints.

Second, then: The BCP kicks off its list of churchy purpose with “we assemble and meet together.” I’m all for the validity of Lollardy — I mean, private devotion among friends, family, neighbours, without priestly supervision. I think singing hymns and carols around the family piano is even a species of the same thing that goes on at the Lord’s house when we all assemble together.

But do you see what I did there? We all assemble together. It’s good, but it’s still a different thing. When we assemble and meet together at the kyriakon, at the “church”, it is a theological act — it may even be the constitutive act of the church-as-people. I mean, ekklesia means assembly, after all. The entire community is invited and encouraged and exhorted. Some denominations require attendance at this assembly as part of their discipline, even.

And so we assemble and meet together, and those things that we do while there are all consciously Godward — praise, thanksgiving, the scriptures, supplication, repentance (which is a joyful turning from sin towards God who heals us [bad paraphrase of Met. Kallistos Ware {memory eternal!}]).

We are constituted as the body of Christ by being together. And while we are together, we fulfil our telos, which is to glorify God and enjoy him forever (right now being part of forever).

Anything else we do — no matter how worshipful — is literally a different thing.

This is not to bind consciences about Christmas morning. But it is meant as a reminder about why we gather on Sundays in the first place.

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Catholic Anglican thoughts (again)

13th-c mosaic on loggia, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

I think that perhaps one of the great problems with our society is that too many of us spend time thinking about our identities. For me, I spend time thinking about my religious identity. In particular, I often find myself feeling somewhat alone as a catholic Anglican — and not an Anglo-Catholic.

Like the majority tradition of Anglicanism, I embrace the teachings of the Fathers, the 39 Articles, the BCP, and what I’ve read of the Books of Homilies so far. I agree with Richard Hooker so much I wrote an essay recommending him for a real publication (as opposed to just another blog post). Moreover, I cherish the poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Guite, as well as the hymns of Charles Wesley and JM Neale. I recently called Lancelot Andrewes a saint, so there’s that in the mix, too!

Most of this doesn’t really make me much of “catholic”, though, does it? I mean, it mostly makes me an Anglican. I reckon John Wesley liked those things, too, except for the ones from after he died.

But what if I told you, despite spending 8 years as a Presbyterian, the only other church that seemed truly enticing was the Eastern Orthodox Church? That an Orthodox priest (now bishop!) once said that I am Orthodox in all but name? Although this actually isn’t true (I don’t seek saints to intercede for me [filed under: 39 Articles] or believe in tollhouses [filed under: umm…], to grab two really quick examples), I do have enormous respect for the Eastern Church and think that we can learn a lot from them in the West after a few centuries of Enlightenment and Romanticism under our belts.

So, yeah, I read St Sophrony, St Porphyrios, Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Father Andrew Louth, The Way of a Pilgrim, and others in my devotional time. I love the Greek Fathers, and sometimes I think I’m a Palamite. Byzantine chant and Byzantine icons, yes, please. I love the Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints John Chrysostom. Once when I was in a foul mood, I read the Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints Basil the Great just to cheer me up. And it’s beautiful and rich and makes anything from the West post-Vatican II (BAS and Common Worship, I’m looking at you) look like wading in shallow water when God has given us the skills requisite and necessary for surfing (or something like that).

I embrace the ancient and medieval heritage of the church — as interpreted through the 39 Articles and the BCP. Give me St Augustine. Give St Maximus the Confessor. Give me St Anselm and St John of Damascus and the Venerable Bede and St Benedict of Nursia and St Symeon the New Theologian and St Gregory of Nyssa and The Cloud of Unknowing and St John of the Ladder and St John of the Cross and St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Gregory of Nazianzus and St Basil of Caesarea and Origen of Alexander and St Athanasius of Alexandria and St Irenaeus of Lyons and Pope St Leo the Great and Pope St Gregory the Great and St Cyprian of Carthage and St Francis of Assisi and St Bonaventure and Stephen Langton and Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton and Aelfric of Eynsham and Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl and The Dream of the Rood.

Give me the Ruthwell Cross. Give me Mt Athos. Give the Benediktinerstift Sankt Paul im Lavanttal. Give me St Paul’s in London. Give me Durham Cathedral. Give me the Durham Gospels.

Give me these things, clothe them in the music of Tallis or Purcell or Gibbons. I’ll kiss your icons. I once kissed the alleged crozier of St Gregory. Give me the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament. Give me a little incense.

Give me these things, for when I encounter these things, I find Jesus in them.

Most of all, then: give me Jesus.

And I find that Jesus is found in this catholic Anglicanism. I find him there better than elsewhere — whether because of my own temperament or something in the nature of the catholic tradition itself. But Jesus comes to me in the poetry of John Donne and the teachings of the Orthodox monks. He comes when I read Pearl and I am drawn up to him through the architecture of a place like York Minster.

IRL, one finds oneself with almost no Anglicans round about, and few digging deep into this.

But Jesus comes amidst them, anyway — of course.

This is part of the secret of the catholic tradition, that God is always right there waiting for you. If you can cultivate hesychia and find, by grace, some level of purity of heart, you will find Jesus wherever you are, and not just listening to Byzantine chant on Spotify or with fellow catholics on Twitter, but at your own local parish.

Watch out for him. He’s there. Pray the Jesus Prayer. Memorise a poem or two by John Donne. Like St Pachomius, see God wherever He is, especially in your brother in Christ. He’ll be there — he has promised he will.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! This blog bills itself as “patristic, medieval, byzantine, anglican”, so here we go, in reverse order:

From the Book of Common Prayer:

ALMIGHTY God, Father of all mercies, We thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks For all thy goodness and loving-kindness To us and to all men; [* particularly to those who desire now to offer up their praises and thanksgivings.] We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; But above all for thine inestimable love In the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; For the means of grace, And for the hope of glory. And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, That our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, And that we show forth thy praise, Not only with our lips, but in our lives; By giving up ourselves to thy service, And by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; Through Jesus Christ our Lord, To whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

From St Gregory Palamas (14th c):

Prayer changes from entreaty to thanksgiving, and meditation on the divine truths of faith fills the heart with a sense of jubilation and unimpeachable hope. This hope is a foretaste of future blessings, of which the soul even now receives direct experience, and so it comes to know in part the surpassing richness of God’s bounty, in accordance with the Psalmist’s words, ‘Taste and know that the Lord is bountiful’ (Ps. 34:8). For He is the jubilation of the righteous, the joy of the upright, the gladness of the humble, and the solace of those who grieve because of Him.

From St Francis of Assisi (13th c)

Almighty, most holy, most high and supreme God, holy and just Father, Lord, king of heaven and earth, for Thyself we give thanks to Thee 68because by Thy holy will, and by Thine only Son, Thou hast created all things spiritual and corporal in the Holy Ghost and didst place us made to Thine image and likeness in paradise, whence we fell by our own fault. And we give Thee thanks because, as by Thy Son Thou didst create us, so by the true and holy love with which Thou hast loved us, Thou didst cause Him, true God and true man, to be born…. And we give thanks to Thee because Thy Son Himself is to come again in the glory of His Majesty … to say to all who have known Thee and adored Thee, and served Thee in repentance: “Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.” And since all we wretches and sinners are not worthy to name Thee, we humbly beseech Thee, that our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy beloved Son, in whom Thou art well pleased, together with the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, may give thanks to Thee as it is pleasing to Thee and Them, for all. Amen. (Prayers of the Middle Ages, ed. J. Manning Potts, 1956)

From John the Solitary (of Apamea, early 5th c., Syriac):

What is required of us is to give him thanks unceasingly — not indeed to the full extent that befits his gift, for no one is capable of giving him thanks as would be appropriate, for his grace is far greater than the thanksgiving of all peoples; it is enough for us to realize that we have not the ability either to repay him, or even to thank him sufficiently (Letter to Hesychius, trans. Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, pp. 83-83)

Boethius and monks on YouTube

I recently finished off Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and I really felt that he laid out the philosophical foundations for monasticism in the book. So I made this YouTube video. Enjoy!

My brother and I started a podcast

My brother Jonathan and I started a podcast. It’s called “Devotion to Christ: Anglican Spirituality, a Tradition for Today.” Our discussions will be anchored in the Book of Common Prayer to prevent it from ranging everywhere and thus becoming nothing in particular. But we’ll also bring in Scripture and the Anglican divines. That said, using the first episode as evidence, when I talk off the top of my head, I bring in things like Met. Anthony Bloom’s book Living Prayer, St Seraphim of Sarov, and St Theophan the Recluse. (At least, I think I brought in St Theophan.)

Why do a new podcast when about a gazillion (give or take) already exist?

Our combination of shared personal history but differing professional expertise makes for interesting conversations, for one thing. He’s an actual minister who preaches, so he’s good at finding concrete, real life things to say to make a topic relevant. I, on the other hand, am an academic, so I tend to bring us back to the sources (in our first episode, this would be the BCP). I also have a lot of ancient and Orthodox sources informing what I say, whereas he is stronger on the actual Anglican tradition than I am.

Another reason is that people desperately need to know Jesus — they need to know Him better, or even at all. The various things our communities, lives, churches, institutions, are doing aren’t necessarily producing deeper, more, or “better” disciples, which is to say, they aren’t helping people know Jesus. We think the Anglican devotional tradition can help people know Jesus better as his disciples. So maybe, by having people listen to us talk about it for half an hour every two weeks, they’ll be strengthened and encouraged to know Jesus more.

Finally, we’re both fans of the daily office, and even started a dispersed community called The Witness Cloud to promote it — maybe our podcast will help recruit for the Witness Cloud and the daily office as a means of grace.

You can find us on the podcast website, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on Amazon, and elsewhere as I sort out distribution. I’ll also be uploading videos of the episodes to YouTube, as you see below:

My most recent YouTube video: Syriac!

In my most recent upload to YouTube, I give a wee, rough introduction to Syriac. Enjoy!

Books I talk about:

Ancient

Hymns on Paradise by St Ephrem the Syrian, trans. Sebastian Brock

The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, trans. Sebastian Brock

Modern

Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom

Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian

The Desert and my career

I recently made a tongue-in-cheek YouTube video saying that you shouldn’t study the Desert Fathers (not my best video, but here it is) — look at me, after all! I went from being a happy-go-lucky evangelical-charismatic who wanted to study Virgil for his PhD to … whatever it is I am now. Let’s consider this journey briefly…

It all began, as I’ve said before, with Athanasius’ Life of Antony (in Carolinne M White’s volume, Early Christian Lives), alongside the Penguin Classics The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, translated by Sister Benedicta Ward of blessed memory, which had just come out in 2003 when I found it hanging out at the university bookstore. I already had something of an interest in monkish things — in John of the Cross’ poem of The Dark Night of the Soul and in St Francis of Assisi and Brother Cadfael and had read the Rule of St Benedict in history class.

With these texts in hand, it only made sense to take up my friend’s idea while taking a course Pagans and Christians in the Later Roman Empire: “Why not do those crazy guys who moved into the desert for your essay topic?”

So I wrote an essay about the Desert Fathers in third-year undergrad, looking at the “why” of anachoresis, of monastic retreat into the desert, adding the Life of St Simeon the Stylite to my small bundle of primary sources and relying heavily on Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity” and Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert.

I loved it. (Today, I would revisit the sociological reasons given in that paper and lean even more heavily on what I now call the literal-mimetic tradition of scriptural interpretation.)

And so I took the sayings of the Desert Fathers with me to Cyprus when I worked for InterVarsity there. I picked up the Philokalia, too, and visited Byzantine churches and witnessed the divine liturgy of St John Chrysostom and got to know Orthodox priests. All of this made me desire to become more like the Desert Fathers as well as to study them academically some day.

And so, after returning to Canada, when I got around to my MA in Classics, I studied John Cassian and Evagrius Ponticus. And when I did my MTh, I studied monks’ lives by Cyril of Scythopolis and John of Ephesus.

But the Desert Fathers were just my gateway drug. I studied a lot more Late Antiquity and I’ve taught both secular/political history and Christian history now. My PhD was not on a monastic topic (I thought I’d be more likely to get a job that way. Ha!) but on Leo the Great. But the monks have always been there both for personal devotion and academic study.

And now when I look at St Maximus the Confessor, a little bit of whose work I taught as part of my ecumenical councils course, I see the way the Desert tradition as well as the Athanasian-Cyrilline tradition is flowing through him. And when I teach St Athanasius (just finished a whole course on him a couple of weeks ago!), I see the ways in which his thought is part of the same thought-world as the Desert Fathers, even if he is more clothed in the garb of “Greek/philosophical” learning.

These are a few musings. The desert monks have helped me fight against anger, taught me how to pray, challenged my attitude towards food, brought me face-to-face with my failure to live the Scriptures, and reminded me how the entire devotional life of the Christian is undergirded by grace.

I hope they can help you, too.

PS: Today, September 14, is the last day to sign up for my course…

I’m teaching the Desert Fathers this Autumn!

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I love the Desert Fathers. They are my first love in patristics, beginning with Athanasius’ Life of St Antony and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers translated by Sister Benedicta Ward. As I say on the product page where you can sign up:

How do we reach up to God? How can we pray without ceasing? What even is prayer? Are we really meant to sell all our possessions and give to the poor? What is the place of fasting in the Christian life? Questions like these drove a great movement of men and women from the cities, towns, and villages of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, into the wilderness or desert, beginning in the fourth century—a movement so large it was said that these men and women made the desert into a city. These earliest monks of the Christian Church sought to live the Scriptures and fill their lives with prayer, seeking after God with a single-minded, wholehearted devotion. The monastic desert cities of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria became the foundation of the spiritual disciplines as practiced through the long centuries to our own day. Their legacy is found not only in the monasteries of the Middle Ages, not only from Ireland to Iraq, but also in the spirituality of St Thomas à Kempis, whose Imitation of Christ has been read and beloved by Protestants of every generation, and in John Calvin, whose own spirituality bears the mark of St Bernard of Clairvaux.

In this course, we are going to dive into the sands of the desert, moving chronologically from the life and letters of St Antony of Egypt, the reputed “first Christian monk/hermit”, in the early 300s and whose life was recorded by St Athanasius, up to the letters of Sts Barsanuphius and John of Gaza in the mid-500s. Along the way, we shall spend time with the famous sayings of the Desert Fathers—short, pithy quotations or anecdotes with a deep meaning similar to the Proverbs of Scripture—as well as the work of Pachomius who was the first abbot of a community of monks; the lives of various Desert Fathers recorded by Palladius of Aspuna; the ascetic and mystical work of Evagrius Ponticus; and the life of Symeon the Stylite who lived on a pillar in the Syrian desert. I promise that we’ll meet a lot of behaviors and some teachings that are weird to us. I also promise that we’ll be challenged to go deeper in our own devotion to God, our own study of the Scriptures, our own pursuit of pure prayer. To study the Desert Fathers well is not simply to study the history of Christianity but to open up yourself to the transformative power of the same God whom they met in huts and caves on the banks of the Nile, the Jordan, and the Orontes.

So sign up today!

Those medieval mystics!

My own copy of The Cloud of Unknowing

Last Monday, I had the joy and delight of giving a lecture about medieval mysticism, focussing on some foundations (so, Evagrius and Cassian, basically) and then really on the fourteenth-century English mystics — Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Abbey of the Holy Ghost. All of my students were required to read a large chunk of Julian of Norwich, and for-credit students will also have read one of the others for an essay assignment.

One student read The Cloud of Unknowing, Rolle’s Fire of Love, and then The Cloud of Unknowing again while working on the essay, and then Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love for class. She declared that she wanted to become a medieval mystic. Another student admitted to being bitter a lot of the time, but that reading The Cloud and Julian filled him with sweetness.

I, too, am fond of reading medieval mystics. Of those covered for this class, I like best Julian of Norwich and The Cloud of Unknowing. I also have a fondness (almost typed fandom!) for early Cistercians, especially St Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St-Thierry. I have to admit, though, that my exposure to St Hildegard is too shallow, and the promising beginning I made in reading St Catherine of Siena was cut short by other affairs.

As you may guess, the contemplative/mystic types I spend more time with are late antique and Byzantine besides modern Orthodox pray-ers — St Theophan the Recluse, St Porphyrios, St Sophrony, Met. Anthony Bloom, and others.

I must confess, however, that I am very poor mystic/contemplative. Reading about high ideals stirs my heart, makes me want to climb those mountains and put in that hard labour. But acedia sets in. Sloth is easier than asceticism, right?

I recently went through a stretch where I had not been reading any Orthodox elders or late antique monks. One night, I decided to push through a portion of St Silouan the Athonite by St Sophrony (a very dense but powerful book). And I felt my spirits lightened and my resolve quickened by this experience. Reading holy literature is not wasted.

I remind myself of a story from the Egyptian desert about a monk complaining to an old man that he listens to the elders and hears the Scriptures but can’t for the life of him remember the teachings. The old man told him to take two clay pots that were dusty and dirty. Leave one alone, and pour oil into the other. Then pour the oil out. Then repeat several times. “Which is cleaner?” the old man asked. “The one I poured the oil into,” was the response.

Let’s bring this back to the mystics, then. I have expressed my misgivings about us unspiritual meatheads reading The Cloud of Unknowing on this blog. Yet perhaps the story from the desert is telling us that if we have the will or desire for these good things, then even advanced books like that are not lost on us.

So go on reading your medieval mystics, gentle reader. May you be made more pure of heart as a result.

A Form of Medieval Catholicism that Never Existed

A while back, @MilitantThomist announced on the Twitter that he and his wife were going to start attending their local SSPX church (if you don’t know what they are, here’s their site). One of his detractors went on to accuse him of following a form of medieval Catholicism that never existed.

I like that phrasing. As some of you know, a friend of mine once dreamt that I was the priest at a church plant that followed the medieval Roman rite according to the Use of Sarum (you can read about that dream here), which is the liturgy of medieval England. Of course, the Middle Ages are kind of one of my things. So, really, if you were to ask, “What’s your preferred religion?”, the answer would be:

“A form of medieval Catholicism that never existed.”

Why? Well, because there are lots of things I like about the medieval church that we lost with modernity, whether Protestant or Catholic. My post about the Sarum dream mentioned some of these, and how their loss in our wider practice of the faith means that no amount of liturgical reconstruction or study of personal application of medieval spirituality will ever bring us back to the High Middle Ages.

I was going to list the specific things about the Latin Middle Ages and her spiritual world, about my love of Cistercians, of high liturgy, of vernacular preaching rooted in the Fathers, of so on and so forth. And about bringing all of it together into a living, breathing, heaving community of the faithful who love Christ and want to just reach out and touch him and swallow him and live his life.

To whatever extent my description would match any real, single moment of medieval life in Latin Christendom, it would hide the dark underbelly of medieval Catholicism, of criminous clerks, of promoting unfit clerks to high office, of uncatechised lay people, of abuses, of some doctrines being dangerously underdetermined (I am, in the end, still actually a Prot). And that’s part of how it would not be medieval Catholicism as it existed. It would be my favourite bits.

But what do we want when we dig into St Bernard or St Anselm or the Stowe Missal or St Bede or saints’ lives? What are we seeking when we prop up a postcard of a rose window on our bookcase? What is it that drew me into Durham Cathedral day after day after day? What do I think I might meet in Richard Rolle or Julian of Norwich that I won’t meet at St Paul’s Anglican Church on Sunday?

Why do some of us like to get medieval? What drives us to these false medieval catholicisms? The thoughts that follow are not restricted to the Middle Ages, which is part of the point:

I think we are drawn to a bigger, stronger sense of the transcendent.

We are drawn to the idea of a united Latin Christendom, undone in the 1520s and sundered forever.

Some are drawn to the crystalline precision of Scholasticism.

Some are drawn to the vast mystery of Cistercians and Carthusians.

We are drawn to the beauty and drama of now-dead liturgical practices.

We long for a united, believing community not just internationally but locally.

We long for that “inner experience” that the mystics had.

We wish for clear boundaries of “in” and “out” that medieval canon law gave the church.

I tell you the truth: We can meet them today, and the medievals can be our guide. (Even for Prots. Shhh!)

But there is no return to a form of medieval Catholicism that never existed.

Indeed, there there is no return to a form that did exist.

This is basically my life’s goal.