#705 I Wonder What Sort of Tale We've Fallen Into?

Feeling whiplash from a culture that calls chaos freedom and opinion truth? We step back and ask the question that reframes the noise: what sort of tale have we fallen into? 

From the first lines of Genesis to the streets of our cities, we trace how order leads to freedom, how evil only distorts what is good, and why the human heart is the primary battleground. Along the way, we confront the early wounds of porn, the pull of relativism, and the emptiness of use, then chart a concrete path toward healing and purpose.

We lean into the wisdom of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, exploring why life is a love story set in a real conflict between good and evil. Y

If you’re tired of drifting with the spirit of the age and ready to live on purpose, this conversation offers a map: order over chaos, communion over isolation, self-gift over self-grasping. 

Grab the Claymore battle plan and start the Claymore 10-minute morning ritual! Share this episode with a friend who needs hope. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what tale do you think we’ve fallen into?

Discussion Questions

• How does the “dictatorship of moral relativism” appear in your own life, and how can Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body help you recover meaning and direction?

• What experiences of awe or beauty have stirred your heart, and how might they be leading you toward God’s love story? (John 1:38–39)

• In what concrete ways can you step back from the world’s noise, including social media and pornography, in order to hear Christ’s invitation, “Come and see”? (See the Claymore Battle Plan Outline and Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2709)

Transcript

Asking The Right Question

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Claymore Become Who You Are podcast, the production of the John Paul Two Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggrich, your host. I am really happy to be with you. I just spoke to a number of young men this past week, and it was really awesome. You know, it's amazing this toxic culture you guys are growing up in, and you're asking, there's got to be something more. So, so one of the questions, a couple questions like this, which saying, Jack, you know, we see this chaos in the streets uh in Minneapolis and all over protesting these ICE agents. They said, you know, it's it happened right in the street in Chicago where uh where I'm from and where where I was speaking. And uh and now we even see the kids are activists, you know, going out of their schools and doing this. Some guys had kids that were actually in these protests, little kids, and you wonder, you know, what is going on? So I said, I know what you're asking is, you're and you're asking the right questions. You're asking, I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into, what kind of story are we in right now? And and this goes back to the Lord of the Rings series. Remember the Lord of the Rings? Fellowship of the Rings is one of them, where uh Fodar and his faithful servant and friend Sam Gamgee, they're they're on this arduous journey. They're about halfway through with another half to go. And Sam Gamgee just wonders out loud, I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into. See, that's the right question. What kind of story? And it has two parts, guys. It's in your heart, the interior battle that's going on, the interior story, and it has an exterior story. And so when you're trying to make sense, you're trying to make sense of your own heart, anxiety, depression, a lot, you know, even crazy suicidal thoughts today. And it's because the the craziness is you look out and you've got nothing to base it on in your own heart to make sense of the story that you're seeing. So I that's a great question. That's what we want to talk about today. I wonder what kind of tale you've fallen into. And it's always an attack on the human heart. And it's always creating disorder on the inside and disorder on the outside. And God Himself, you have to remember that you know when we step back into the story, God is a God of order. What's true, what's good, what's beautiful in the world. And so I said, hey, somebody grab me a Bible. Somebody came up with a Bible. I said, let's read right from the very beginning. Betishit is how this, how the whole Bible starts out in Genesis, right? Right away from verse one. Betishit, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light. God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. Thus evening came and morning followed the first day. Then God said, Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters to separate one body of water from another. So it happened. He's separating the water. And then he's got the mountains over here, and you know, it goes on and on and on. It's so beautiful. This is a god of order. It's not chaos, not all dark, it's not all flooding with water or just one big high mountain we on. No, there's places. Everything's got its order. And you have this beautiful yin and gang. You know, when when when how it is on the beach, it's so cool, right? When it comes up and the waves are coming in and coming out, and you have this where it where it meets, and this is a this is a place that just gets you thinking about things, right? So this is a God of order. And so what happens with Satan? Satan doesn't have his own clay. So Satan's going to take what God has made good and twist and distort it. He starts doing that in the human heart. And then you see the the uh chaos outside. Why is that? Because you have basically two groups of people that are cooperating with Satan, those that do it on purpose and understand it, those are those the elite, huh? The ones that are looking for power, money, sex, etc. And they want to be at the top, uh, they want to be like gods from Genesis 3. You know, I'll call evil good and good evil. Now, what do they need to succeed? They need a lot, a lot, a lot of people underneath them. They know the communists would call all those people, those sheep, useful idiots. They'll use you until they don't need you anymore. And we need a lot of those. So that's what we do today in the American education system, public education system out in the culture. We dumb everybody down and we dumb all these kids down. You see this this chaos. So that's that's really what it is. I want to play a clip of a woman. She's a little edgy, she's a little angry. She has a right to be, but I just give you a little warning up front, and she's just describing uh these kids in the schools. Let me just share this with you.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

It's a new national trend among leftists who want you to think that ICE are the Nazis, pulling children as young as kindergarten out of school to force them to march in political protests in the street. Teachers in San Francisco pulled elementary school students as young as five out of class and marched them through the city holding anti-ICE signs. Kids in Atlanta used the opportunity to trash their school field and break laptops at a school that is only 15% proficient at math. At another school in Oakland, California, students stood in an intersection yelling F Donald Trump while holding misspelled signs upside down. Students from a Georgia high school almost got hit by a car while partying protesting in the street. These are children whose parents sent them to school to learn. They're not politically active. They just want an opportunity to get out of class. Some of them are too young to understand what they're being pulled out of class for. So if you're still wondering whether the communists think they own your children, they do.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

So there you go. And uh so so you start to understand this indoctrinations going down all the way into the schools. They've purposely dumbed that down. You know the proficiency levels in math in the government schools and reading, writing. I have a granddaughter in high school that never they never taught her cursive writing. So you either got to be a uh at a computer using a device to type out, or I guess I guess you can print it, you know. Um, it's amazing what they've done. And then take your mind and indoctrinate it and all kinds of things. I want to show you, just to bring some humor in, I want to show you Josh uh Seedler. He's an activist. He's so he's so funny, though, the way he does this. And he just brings out these points. What happens when these kids grow up? And this is the the the mindset when you have these ice protesters all over. So I'll I'll bring this clip in and and let Josh make a point on this.

SPEAKER_02 7:00

I'm Finn, and I'm with the Migrants for Equal Rights or the MFers, and we're just going around trying to collect some signatures.

SPEAKER_03 7:08

I'm not sure if you're aware, but ICE has been going around terrorizing a lot of people in the community. Terrible. So there's a lot of people that are locked up right now, and we're just trying to get them released. So is that something you might be willing to lend your signature to?

SPEAKER_04 7:23

Yeah, sure.

School Protests And Indoctrination

SPEAKER_03 7:25

Awesome. If you could just sign right there where it says MFers. Yeah, I do. So we're actually a foundation that was created by Billy Eilish. Um, and that's why I'm documenting this today, because we're gonna make a film about it. Um so eventually these people, once they're released, they will need a place to go. Um obviously they can't go to Billy's neighborhood because it's gated and they have rules there. So usually we just bust them to middle to low income neighborhoods. So I just wanted to confirm with you it was alright if we bring them all here once they're released.

SPEAKER_04 8:04

No, no. Um I don't think that would be a good idea.

SPEAKER_03 8:07

Why why wouldn't it? Well, I I can't make those kind of decisions, but we have an HOA and Oh, do you have rules with an HOA?

SPEAKER_04 8:15

I'm sure they wouldn't be okay with that.

SPEAKER_03 8:17

But don't we have rules at the border?

SPEAKER_04 8:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:20

So you're okay with them just flooding over the border and ignoring those rules, but you want them to obey your HOA's rules?

SPEAKER_04 8:27

Well, I mean, I I just can't make those decisions, but I don't think that's true.

SPEAKER_03 8:30

But you can make a decision to abolish ice and to release all these people like you're just about to do? Doesn't that seem a little hypocritical?

SPEAKER_04 8:39

Yeah, yeah, I guess it does.

SPEAKER_03 8:40

So you you don't want rules or you do want rules for these people?

SPEAKER_04 8:45

I'm just saying I can't make that decision.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

Okay, so maybe they shouldn't break rules, period. Is that something we can agree on? And maybe it's disrespectful to legal immigrants that are trying to do it the right way. Yeah, you're you're right. Okay, can I get you to take those signs down that you have with the no ice in the FDT?

SPEAKER_04 9:04

Uh sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 9:06

Yeah. I mean, obviously you don't believe it, so thank you. I appreciate that. Hey, I have one last question for you. What does an ICE agent say when you ask how their job's going? What? Pretty good.

Satire Exposes Rule Hypocrisy

Grace, Freedom, And First Principles

Stolen Innocence And Pornography’s Wound

The Claymore Battle Plan And Prayer

Thoreau, Noise, And Relativism

Stats On Teen Despair And Hope

Why A Handbook And Big Questions

SPEAKER_00 9:34

So there there you have it. We grew up as these useful idiots. We don't really even think about it. We're just gonna go along. And and you see what happens, you know, that default position of a body and soul of a person, and this is so sad, really, without grace, without God, without that order, the default position is sin and death. That's it. You just aimlessly go through this life, you know, before you you you know it, you're an adult, you've got a little uh, you know, what, for 30, 40 years, and that's it. And people never figured it out. It's so sad. On the other hand, when you have a God of order comes in, you have a body-soul with grace, and that grace gives you the potential for human freedom, the potential for human flourishing. And how do you how do you bring that potential out, make it efficacious? You you you you are you go from a cut flower to uh like a uh a branch back on the vine. So I'm receiving that grace, and my reason is now reasonable, seeking the truth. What is the truth of things? I use my intellect to you and and then my free will says, okay, well, what's true, what's good, what's beautiful? And then I use my free will like a motor to choose the good. This is this is how we live our lives, right? But when you live with a um in in in this kind of a blank, useful idiot disconnection, you just get blown around by the spirit of the age. It's like that that darkness and that abyss from Genesis. So the it's a great question, right? What kind of tale have we fallen into? So let me just bring you, invite you into a story because so many of you uh young men, uh, their innocence has been stolen early on from uh pornography, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, when I'm speaking uh to these young guys, I ask them a question. I said, What did you do first? Did you hold a young girl's hand first, or did you see hardcore pornography first? And unfortunately, nobody says that they've held a young girl's hand first before they viewed hardcore pornography. And how sad is that? They've stolen your innocence, they've attacked your heart early, and you can never get that back, unfortunately, totally, that innocence. You know, there's always something gnawing at you. So again, I want to invite you into the story. What sort of tale have we fallen into to begin to make sense of this? This is what Claymore is all about, walking into this story. And I'll just give you a uh a little heads up that you can download this Claymore battle plan, this outline. I'll have it in the show notes. Make sure you do that because one way you get your heart back, you have to get into prayer. You have to unite again, you have to get the branch back on the vine. How do I do that? I have to open my heart up. So look open that uh Claymore battle plan. I'll give you an outline of everything that we're doing and go under formation and get that 10-minute Claymore morning ritual down. Get that down. It's so, so important before you look at that phone in the morning to connect again my heart to God Himself so I can make sense out of the rest of this, so I'll know what type of tale have I fallen into. So I I want to uh I'm gonna start out with a quote here from uh Henry David Throw. I wonder what sort of tale I've fallen into. I went to the woods, he said. I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. For the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, as Henry uh David Thoreau is one of my favorites. Let's start out this way, right? Let's just speak plainly. You're living in a world that's loud, chaotic, confusing. Social media influencers are after you, advertisers, schools, even the government itself, they're all competing for your attention. Each tells you what to think, what to buy, what to fear, and who you're supposed to be. The noise is constant and it leaves many of you disoriented and exhausted. Pope Benedict XVI described our age as the dictatorship of moral relativism, a culture in which the truth is reduced to preference and feelings that replace reality. Isn't this what you see on the streets? Isn't that what you saw with Josh's clip? Truth is reduced to a preference, it's just a feeling when I'm told, and it replaces the reality. What is the truth of things? It should come as no surprise then that so many people are struggling. The statistics don't lie. 57% of teen girls today report feeling persistently sad or hopeless, but they're just wrapped up in the emotion and they can't get out of it. Forty percent of teens struggle to function normally because of depression today. 30% of teen girls have seriously considered uh suicide. This is right from the CDC. I figure that's increased by 60% in just the past decade. Uh, among the LBGTQ plus teens, 52% report ongoing mental health struggles. And let's be honest, almost every young man today has been exposed to hardcore pornography at a young age, like I said, robbing you of your innocence, distorting your moral imaginations. Your compass is off, right? Suicide and overdoses continue to claim far too many lives. And as Henry David Thoreau observed long ago, the mass of men today live lead lives of quiet desperation. Yet this is not the whole story, and you're not alone, and you're not doomed. I've seen many young men beginning to wake up sensing that something is deeply wrong and refusing to accept shallow answers. You're hungry for meaning, for truth, and for a life that matters. Too often what you are offered instead are empty slogans, expert opinions, right, detached from the reality of good and evil, and so you just accept them. So this is why I picked up a pen to write this handbook. And again, the handbook should be coming out for you in probably three or four weeks, it'll be available. And so this is bringing us to all of this story, inviting you into a story. What kind of story have you fallen into? So do you need another book? Perhaps not, but you need guidance, right? You need a battle plan that helps you confront the burning questions in your heart. These are the big questions that we stopped asking. And we all need to ask it. These are human questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? Why were we created male and female? What does authentic love even look like? What where can lasting happiness be found? See, this is Claymore Militus Christie. This is where we enter the story. This is where we're walking with and journeying with each other. Because what began as a framework shared among brothers of us, you know, when we were first developing Claymore Militas Christie, this whole, I hate to call it a program because it's just this beautiful walking into awe and wonder. What sort of tale have we fallen into? And but this is where Claymore came about. And as we as we were speaking to young men about John Paul's message and how it had transformed our lives, I watched the young men lean in, asking us honest questions in these talks, sharing their own struggles. And it became clear that this vision of John Paul II needed to be handed on in a way that could be lived, not merely studied. So this handbook that's coming out was born from that realization. And at the heart of St. John Paul II's theology of the body is simple but demanding truth. Life is a love story. Let me say that again. Life is a love story. And you say, well, this is chaos. Yeah, chaos out there because God is love. The God of order is the God of love. When Satan gets a hold of your heart, you know you get twisted and distorted and create chaos around you, including love, including truth and goodness and beauty. But you were created to receive love and to give love. This is the whole idea. God's divine life and love comes into us. That's why that morning prayer is so important to open to this love story and to become a person of love, to have this flow with God so that I can go out into the world and have this flow with other people that I meet. So your role is to make God's love visible in the world through how? Through a gift of yourself, not grasping and taking, not a pornographic culture. You know, the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love, which would be self-giving, is grasping, taking. The opposite of love then is things like pornography. Right? That truth that's been stirring, stirring in your heart, it's been stirring in the her in the human heart from the beginning, Badasheet from the very beginning, when God created us. It reminds me of a childhood story in my own life. I was born on the south side of Chicago, the oldest of five boys. And when I was in second grade, my family moved into the upper floor of my grandparents' two flat. Behind that building was a small yard, and that small yard opened up into an alley. And that alley was my brothers and I, our main artery to adventure and freedom. So if you live in the city, these alleys that run between houses, you know, so it would be a house here and a house on this side, and then there's these little alleys that run in between. That is those alleys connected to the bigger streets, et cetera, et cetera. So those were our artery to adventure, to freedom. And it was we were going out one day, I was leading my brothers out, and it was it was in that alley that my brothers and I first awakened to three themes written into the very heart of every man. Life is going to be an adventure. We sense this, don't we? Life is a battle. We sense this too. And the meaning behind it all, it's beauty, especially the beauty of love. One day, armed with rubber band pistols and wooden swords, that's where the Claymore sword idea came from. I just remember this as a young man, as a child, really, second grade, and I remember that we're always ready for battle. So we we were armed one day. We go out with our rubber band pistols that my dad uh showed us how to make wooden swords, and we opened that gate and stepped out into the alley. As we were just stepping out, suddenly I stopped. Voices floated through the air, and I looked up and I saw them. Twin girls, perhaps in fourth or fifth grade, but to my second grade heart, ooh, they carried a beauty which I could not name. You just feel that inside, right? See, this is this is that importance to get this back. This is why I'm telling you the story, because this is what Satan wants to take and the culture wants to take for you, because I felt for the first time that mysterious power that the beauty of a woman has to draw a man out of himself. Even my younger brother sensed something significant was happening, and no one pushed past me. One even offered a shy wave to the girls, and they looked at us, smiled politely, and disappeared down the alley, unaware of the effect they had on us. We soon learned where they lived, and from that point on every adventure took us in that direction, and their building became a castle now, ruled by an evil knight, and rescuing those princess twins became our sworn duty, because now they were holed up by an evil knight there. So we would storm the stairwells, we we fought imaginary battles and saved them again and again throughout the summer. The tragedy is that they never knew they were being rescued, chivalry at its finest. At the same time, I wanted to be a missionary priest, and I wrote letters to religious orders in those days, to distant lands, snail male in those days, right? We had no internet and places filled with mystery and danger. Even then, especially at the Mass, when I was going to mass, I sensed that this too was part of an adventure, a battle, and a beauty that was sacred. Somehow, without knowing even the language for it, I held these two longings together. There was no conflict in my second grade mind between that attraction to that feminine beauty that I saw from those twins and my attraction to the sacred. Both awakened awe, desire, and wonder. Later I would discover that I've been touching the very structure of the biblical love story, which can be summarized in five words. God wants to marry us. God wants to marry us. The story is written in our hearts, it's inscribed in our bodies, so that it can be made visible in the world. St. John Paul II taught the body, listen to this, the body, your body, my body, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of this world, that invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial and to be a sign of it. What is that mystery hidden in God from time immemorial? God is an eternal exchange of love. And we're created in love, by love, and for love to express that in the world. And we do that through our bodies. We're embodied souls, right? And our and our souls filled with grace is expressed through our body actions, huh? That we bring good into the world. Think about it. The Bible opens with where? In the beginning, in that first uh book of Genesis, with the marriage of Adam and Eve in an earthly paradise. And it closes where? In the wedding feast of Christ in the church, in the heavenly one, in the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. And Christ reveals himself as the bridegroom. The church is his bride. We're all part of the church, and that bride is not an abstraction. She's you and me called into communion with him. St. Paul says or writes in Ephesians chapter five, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. And he goes, This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church. See, the deepest desire of the human heart is to love and be loved. And the deepest desire of the divine heart, you can see this in the divine mercy there with blood and water coming out from the that was from the crucifixion when Jesus got hit with the lance. And so that desire to be a person of love, to pour himself out to us in love, is the same in the divine heart. This is where we get this from. In Jesus Christ, these desires meet, huh? This desire to love and be loved, these desires, don't forget the human and the divine meet right in Jesus' heart. And he says, This is my body given for you, for his bride, for us. This is why mourning prayer, huh? To take this in. So our longing for love and communion between a man and a woman points beyond itself. It points to the Eucharist and God's desire to be in union and communion with you. The love story written into your heart and body finds its echo in Christ's final words on the cross. I thirst, I thirst. And he would bow his head and die. I thirst for you. My desire is for you. If you listen in the silence of your heart, and you will hear him say to you, I thirst for you. Listen to that first thing in the morning. He said, Abide in my love, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. That's from John 15. That's the promise, joy, fullness, meaning. Isn't that what we're looking for? The world's trying to pull you apart, brothers. Pornography, hookup culture, moral relativism promise freedom, but they never deliver it. They deliver emptiness. You're part of a larger story. You did not write. And like Sam Gamge, you may be finding yourself asking this, what sort of tale have we fallen into? The answer is this it's a love story, a battle between good and evil, and you have a role to play in that. These acts from the Claymore battle plan handbook that we're gonna share back and forth with each other. I can't wait to get this published. Hopefully, again, we can do this in the next three weeks or so, maybe three to four weeks, and get this get this out and make it available to everybody so that every man is sharing this with uh other men. I'll put some um I'm gonna put some discussion questions in the show notes because these acts are gonna show you how to fight to awe, adventure, prayer, truth. And I'll look at those uh discussion questions. And there's some references in there. You could look up, go in the show notes, pick out the uh the the uh link to the Claymore battle plan outline. You can load that down for free for our website. Go to formation, which is number three, read the whole thing. It's only seven or eight pages, but go in there and and make sure you make a um you make a ritual out of that 10 morning claymore ritual. It's a lifesaver because again, you're connecting these stories together again. What kind of tale have I come into? It's a love story, but I gotta make a connection. I can't live like a cut flower, otherwise, chaos rules my heart. Hey, God bless you. Good to be with you guys. Talk to you again soon. Bye bye.