#720 Commissioned For Battle! The Importance of Spiritual Formation...ACT Three

Evil doesn’t usually kick down the door. It slips in while we’re busy, distracted, and telling ourselves we’ll think about the big questions later. We talk about why so many men don’t choose evil outright, but still end up cooperating with it through drift, silence, and “just doing my job.”

We use the idea of the banality of evil to name what’s happening, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s reporting on Adolf Eichmann and the unnerving truth that massive harm can be carried out by ordinary, morally numb people. From there we widen the lens to the mystery of evil as spiritual warfare, not just politics or psychology, and we ask what it means to live in a culture that normalizes sin, denies objective truth, and fractures the family through addictions, abortion, and confusion about identity and love.

Then we get practical: knees before screens, The Claymore 10-minute morning ritual that includes praying through temptation, followed by a simple 5-minute evening plan through the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook designed to form men fast over 52 days. 

Find everything here! ClaymoremilitesChristi.com Where you can view the brief Claymore Battle Plan Outline or download it for free. Also order the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook from the website or on Amazon! While there sign up and meet other men already in the Battle. 

If you’re ready to stop drifting and start choosing the good with intention, listen, share this with a brother, and then leave a review and subscribe so more men can find a clear path to spiritual strength.

Transcript

Welcome And Act Three Preview

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Become Who You Are podcast, the production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggert, your host. So good to be with you. Grab your coffee, grab your favorite beverage. We are going to be talking about right here from the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. This is Act Three, Commission for Battle, the importance of spiritual formation. This is so important. You've got through the first couple of acts, and now we're going to back up a little bit. You've seen what kind of tail we've fallen into, the beauty awakened by beauty, and now we just touched you with those things. And now what are we going to do? We're going to just step back a little bit, talk about the importance of spiritual formation. Because as we go forward, we're not only filling in what is the truth of things, what kind of tail have we fallen into and filling in this context, but we're also getting our hearts back on a vertical level, huh? We've got that spiritual formation going. So you go vertical, it's not brain surgery, right? Be filled with divine life and love. And then be that out into the world. So I it's a little heavyweight to start, but that's okay because you guys are part of the Claymore A team, huh? The Claymore Militus Christian Soldiers for Christ A Team. So I can go a little fast, I think, with you guys. So I'm going to start this way, brothers. Most men don't initially become evil because they choose it. They become evil and ultimately dangerous to themselves and others because they never chose anything at all. When I think about COVID and all this crazy breakout of evil, I think of BLM and Antifa. I think of you guys that are struggling with porn or drug uh drug addictions, etc. You weren't born evil, men weren't born evil, I wasn't born evil, but we could get there. And how do we get there? Slowly we become lukewarm. We had no idea that the world that we were born into, it's not neutral, it's not some kumbaya. It's a world with an intense battle taking place. For what? For the souls of men, men and women, when I say that, of course. Satan finds his job today to destroy men, capture their souls for eternity. Easy. Because most men, let's talk about the young men that I'm meeting today, they just drift. And the older guys, how did they get to this evil part in their life? They just drift. They then they just they learn to comply. They don't think they're complying. They think I'm rebelling against whatever I see in the world, we become rebellious, but we don't have a game plan. That's where the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook comes in and the Claymore Battle Plan outline. And while we're doing this, while we're journeying with you, there's nothing better than to journey with one another to the truth, right? When we start asking, what is the truth of things? What is love? We have to feel ourselves. But if you drift, you start to comply, you don't realize it. But Satan is very intelligent using this culture to get to you. You stop thinking. And by the time we realize it, we're already part of something that you would have that you would have once resisted if you understood the truth of things. Brothers, this is a battle for your soul. Almost everyone who thinks at awe senses something very sinister is taking place in the world today. But you guys were born in this. Like, you know, the proverbial frog, sitting with the proverbial frog. As an example of this, I want to play you a short clip of an interview on a Tucker Carlson show with evolutionary biologist Brent Weinstein, who I believe is agnostic, I'm almost 100% sure. And they're talking about this uh banality of evil, this normalization of evil. So before we step into the act three here, I'm gonna play this little clip and I'm gonna just go through that banality of evil, this mystery of evil that we find ourselves in. So hold on one second. Let me let me fire that up.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

All you need to understand is there are people who seem close to you who feel that exact way about you. You might as well be an animal on a feedlot somewhere as far as they're concerned, right? You are a source of wealth or meat or whatever. And you know, once you get that, once you just make eye contact with that thought, it is not hard to understand how how pharma works, right? Yeah. So, you know, okay. Would somebody really withhold the cure to some disease that worries us all because if that cure comes out, they're gonna lose billions of dollars. Aaron Powell Yeah, there are people who would do that. And you you'll never guess where you'll find them, right? So, you know, I guess the point is, look, uh we need there aren't very many adults. Maybe there are none. Some of us are struggling to be adult in a world that that misinforms us and misleads us and tries to infantilize us. But we uh are trapped in a system in which uh other people's the slice of the pie that they have access to is their full-time preoccupation. They're trying to enlarge their slice of the pie. The way that's supposed to work, if our system functioned really well, you would increase your slice of the pie by increasing the overall size of the pie. Right? That's that's what it says effectively on the brochure of free market democracy. Right? If you create wealth, you get rich. Nothing wrong with that. I want to live in that system. I want people who figure out how to make us all wealthier to live in really good places and enjoy you know the finer things in life. That that's something that makes us all better off. But there's this other way to do it. You can increase your slice of the pie by destroying wealth. And if you don't find a way to systematically rule that out, then that's what you're gonna see, because it's vastly easier to do that. It's vastly easier to get wealthy at the expense of everyone else than it is to figure out how to make the pie that we all enjoy bigger. So we are suffering because a lot of people are behaving in their narrow self-interest completely indifferent to our well-being. And that now extends deeply into the political. It is a decidedly economic version of the banality of evil.

The Mystery Of Evil Explained

Eichmann And The Ordinary Face

Formation Beats Passive Compliance

The Two Asks And 10-5

Download The Plan And Read Matthew

A Four Step Battle Plan

Final Charge And Email Invite

SPEAKER_00 6:30

So here we are, we're gonna step into act three, but I want to set up what I just saw there today. It meditate on that, you know, that they're discussing this evil that they see around us, but they don't really have the full context either. This is what Claymore Militas Christie does. It sets up that lens so we could see this. So let me go a little bit further. You need to understand something about the nature of evil in our time. It is clearly in an accelerating phrase, phase. It's out in the open. It's often easy to identify if you understand the truth of things. Without getting on the weeds of this, Brett, knowingly or not, is talking about the Mysterium menacitatis. That's Latin for the mystery of evil. He's describing the spiritual battle that originates in the human heart when evil comes in and it's played out in our actions in the world. You know, most of the evil that you and I experience in this world is brought about by people, by persons who cooperate with evil, whether they know it or not. The phrase banality of evil comes from the philosopher Hannah Arndt. She coined it while observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organizers of the Holocaust. When something is banality, what does that mean? It's dull, ordinary, unremarkable, it's ordinary stuff. It's when you sat in that proverbial pot of a culture that's filled with the normalization of sin. So what he's saying, the banality of evil, this it just becomes everyday normal stuff. Evil does here, right? We sat with that proverbial frog, and evil slowly seeps into every pore in our body without us even understanding it. I begin to I begin to accept evil, then I do evil. I become evil in my actions. John Paul would say, then you can say to yourself, I am evil. Think about the banality of abortion, same-sex marriage today, we're trans and kids, destruction of so many marriages, children raised without a father and a mother in the home. How do we get here? Slowly at first, then like an economy of scale having seeped into so many human hearts, weakened the family, it captures all of the institutions. And how does it capture the institutions? Because of those people. Just like Eichmann that I'm going to describe here, we slowly go along with evil and we just slowly get into it and we bring this into the world with without even knowing it, really. That's where the global uh world order is now. You hear the global world order, huh? Well, how do we get here? Evil in the hearts of far too many people, including the church shepherds who should be there explaining everything to us. But unfortunately, uh they become confused because too many of them are lukewarm. Not all of them, of course. And don't forget, we we separate, you know, those twisted, distorted church shepherds, those weak need, pathetic uh human beings really that were called by God to be something great, huh? To bring his the gospel down to all of us. And they're supposed to be here today to unpack some of these things for us, but too many of them are compromised. So it's important to know, but it's important to separate this from the actual church that Christ established. Here's Jesus, the head and the body are all of us in the church. So go find a good priest, a good pastor, because we need this. We need the Eucharist, we need the sacraments, we need prayer, and it's there. God will always provide this for us, even with weak leaders. I mean, the the best thing you can do right now in so many ways is just kind of turn off the noise coming from, say, the Vatican. You know, unfortunately, even for some of your bishops, you know, not all of them. Some of them are very, very good. Uh Bishop Strickland is very good, but he he was taken out, of course, by Pope Francis, who didn't want him to what? Speak about the truth of things. Okay, now this matters. So let's get back to the phrase of banality of evil. And again, it comes from the philosopher Hannah Art. She coined it while observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organizers of the Holy Cost, and everybody knows the Holocaust, huh? This incredible destruction of human life. Let me remind you that this was a recent, this was recent history in the lifetime of people still alive today, like my dad who fought in World War II. He's still alive. He's a hundred years old, or almost a hundred years old. And I tell the story uh in in the handbook of Dr. Wander Petroska, John Paul II, Padre Peel, who also experienced this mysterium inequitatis in our day, Latin for the mystery of evil. Now here's the important thing. Eichmann sat in that with that proverbial frog. He was not a soldier on the battlefield. He was a bureaucrat, a pencil pusher after World War II. He fled and hidden Argentina for years before being captured and then brought to trial in Jerusalem. The world watched, and they expected to see a monster, the face of evil itself. But what Hannah Arn, who was reporting on this, saw was something far more unsettling. What did she see? An ordinary man. Not wild, not crazed, not visibly hateful, just ordinary. He organized the transport of millions of Jews to their deaths, not with a weapon in his hand, but with paperwork, schedules, obedience. He spoke, spoke in cliches. He followed orders. He advanced his career. This is where the deep state we talk about and the deep church comes from. These pencil pushers, these bureaucrats, John Paul II, when he became Pope, he said I could have stayed here with these bureaucrats, with these pencil pushers in the Vatican, or I can go out and proclaim the truth. This is why people say, well, why didn't he just stay there and try to fix the Vatican? He said he could have, but he said it would have taken all of my energy. And he felt very strongly God was calling him to do what? To go out and preach the gospel so that we all knew what to do and how to do it, huh? To follow Jesus Christ, to encounter Christ. This is what we do with Claymore Militus Christi. We don't we don't say we have to wait for anybody. But we have to be filled in in Christ's church, his pure, beautiful church. And we have to be filled with the sacraments. We have to encounter Christ Himself, and then we have to go out. Well, these bureaucrats just slowly suffocate all of the institutions. And so what did Eichmann do? He never truly stopped to think about what he was doing. Art called this the banality of evil. Not because the evil was small, but because it was carried out by someone who had become spiritually and morally numb. This is the danger. Evil does not always appear as an open rebellion of dramatic hatred. More often it appears as passivity. This is what the culture wants you to become. Just routine. I don't think about these things. I just become comfortable in my little actions and addictions, right? As I'm just doing my job. Evil thrives when a man stops thinking, when he stops examining his actions, when he hands over his conscience to the system. And this did not end in Nazi Germany, did it? It's alive and well today. Men drift into systems that reward profit over people. They follow incentives instead of truth. They stay silent when they should speak up. They look away when they should act. Not because they set out initially to do evil, but because they never chose to fight for the good. Every morning, this Claymore 10-minute morning ritual, so important. Download the Claymore battle plan outline. You get it for free. It's only six pages. Gives you this whole uh plan that we're in. And of course, the handbook, you need to have the handbook right next to it. Just have these two documents here. You can download this or email me, and I'll send it to you in the mail, along with a Claymore wristband that says on there, Claymore Militus Christi, be not afraid. And then you fill it in with the Claymore Battle Plan handbook, right? It's because why? We have to know the truth of things. Because we didn't set out to do evil. But if we don't fight for the good, evil will take over us. It's very powerful. Satan's way smarter than us. So, brothers, hear this clearly. The greatest danger is not that you would just become a villain overnight. Or let me just say it this way: the greatest danger is that you become passive and then you start to be sit with that proverbial frog. Then if you live without reflection, this is what happens to us, right? Without discipline, without formation, hmm. Claymore Battle Plan Handbook and Claymore Militus Christie is about formation. It's all about formation. If you follow this, if you go on this, you're going to be formed so you can discern what's true and what's not true. The world wants you to slowly conform to a world that does what? Denies the truth, distorts love, weakens your soul. This is why spiritual formation, it's not optional. If you do not intentionally form your mind, your heart, your habits, the world will form them for you. You think you're free. And it will not form you in the truth, will it? It will form you for comfort, distraction, division, self-interest. This is why Saint Paul commands us in Ephesians 6, put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For you're not contending against mere flesh and blood, he says, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness. Who's the orchestra leader? Satan himself. See, we're not entering into uh just merely theoretical discussions here, right? We're stepping into a battlefield. And the first step is this we got to wake up, we gotta think. Then we can start to put on this lens that John Paul gives us to see clearly. So to refuse the quiet drift into mediocracy, the quiet drift into moral compromise, because the battle is for your soul and for the soul of the whole culture. And it will be lost unless we step up and understand this evil, right? It will be lost by who? By ordinary men who never chose to become who they were meant to be. That's why Claymore, become who you are, meant to be. That's the name of our podcast. Now, brothers, you've been awakened by beauty, right? You know what kind of battle you stepped into from the first two acts, and it's time to be formed for battle. So let's talk about that a little bit. So this is act three. Hopefully you have that in front of you. I'm going to basically just read that right now for you. Commission for battle, the importance of spiritual formation. And we're reviewing the battle plan. And there's only two asked. So let's just simplify this. And this is what we always ask. And if you're meeting new guys, just say, look at guys, all you do is there's just two asked. That before you look at that phone in the morning, you fall to your knees and you practice that 10-minute uh Claymore morning ritual, which includes praying with temptations. You can jump ahead to Act 11. They actually gives you the prayer for that praying of temptation. So that's it. 10 minutes in the morning. And then the next ask is to read one act out of this uh Claymore Millet uh Claymore Battle Plan Handbook so you understand the spiritual battle. But more than that, we're filling ourselves up. We know the story. We ask initially, just read one of these acts a week and to discuss it, meditate on it, discuss it with a friend. But, but, but let me say this clearly. You're on the Claymore Militus Christi A team, right? So this is a 10-5 program. Again, very simple. 10 minutes on your knees in the morning and read one of these acts a day for 52 days. There's 52 acts, one for each week of the year, but we're going to do it in the accelerator program for 52 days. That means before summer even starts, June 11th or 12th, 13th, 15th, whatever it is, you'll be 52 days and you'll have read the whole handbook. You'll have this whole spiritual formation. And before that 52 days is up, you already start to share the gospel. You will go out to change the culture. And your heart will continue to change as you go out. So put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Remember again, we're not contending against mere flesh and blood. You're fighting against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present age. So, brothers, again, you felt an awakening and you felt the power of beauty. Now it's time to prepare for the fight. Life is an adventure, but it's also a battle and it's for beauty. And you're not a passive observer in this story. You're called to be a warrior. That's why the Claymore sword. Saint John Paul II taught that you were created in the image of God, with a heart ordered toward love and a mission to help build a culture of life, and that you were created good. But there's an enemy who was opposed to who is opposed to that mission, and then our mission since the beginning. Genesis tells the story plainly. Satan deceived Adam and Eve, and they chose lies over truth. From that rupture flowed the culture of death, a pattern of rejection, blame, disorder that continues to shape the world today. It reaches you today through pornography, division, all this racial division, all of the stuff put on us. And the lie, this is so important, that you are not enough. You are enough. But you're not enough alone. It's only when we're yoked to Christ. But it was always supposed to be that way, right? To be filled with divine life and love. You're living in a story and in a world that you exploded into the day you were born. And just like Sam Gamgee from Act One, you may find yourself asking, what sort of tale have I fallen into? And it's a love story. It doesn't always feel like it, right? Because since the fall, it's also been a war. Jesus enters this battle with a heart that thirsts. He cries from the cross, I thirst. He longs for you to join him in his mission of redemption, and he wants to first pour himself out to you so that you're filled with him. Satan, by contrast, works to keep you trapped, promoting a culture of lies that fractures families. Just look around you, distorts desire, twists and distorts it, weakens souls. We live in an age of moral relativism where objective truth is denied and it's replaced by what? Preference. My opinion, your opinion, what I like, what you like. This is not freedom. It's a trap. St. John Paul II saw this clearly. He taught that the family where love and life are first received and given is the heart of this whole culture. When the family is attacked, twisted, and destroyed, everything begins to disintegrate. Society begins to disintegrate. The nation does, the world does. And this assault takes many forms. Just think about this abortion again, redefinition of marriage, confusion about our sexual identity. Satan doesn't have his own clay, he's going to twist and distort what God created good. And these are not isolated issues. Together they form what John Paul II called an anti creation, an attempt to erase the very meaning of the Bible. Body as a sign of God's image and likeness in the world. But you and I are not powerless. We're commissioned by Christ to stand for the truth. When Jesus said in the first chapter of John, come and see, he was inviting his disciples into formation, into intimacy, and ultimately into mission. Read the first chapter of John, like you know, starting in verse 30, somewhere around there, and move up. You'll see this. Jesus inviting the disciples into the story. Come and see. Your body, your choices, your prayer, and your moral discipline, they're not incidental to who you are. They're the very means by which God's love is made visible in the world. At this point, you should have downloaded the Claymore Battle Soldiers for Christ Battle Plan outline. You should have bought the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. If you did not, go do so right now. Go to our website, Claymore Militas Christi.com. Take time to review it. And then here's another thing for you to do this week. Read the parable of the weeds among the wheat. This is from Matthew chapter 13. Go do this. It's in the discussion and uh right in your handbook. It's in the discussion and review questions. That might be the best thing you can do right now because Jesus puts it in the context, what's happening, and meditate on that parable. These parables reveal the necessity of spiritual formation so that the seed of truth can take place in good soil. See, we're opening when we go this way, we're opening and plant, putting good soil, fertilizing our hearts, and then we can go out. So here's the battle plan in brief. First, know your enemy. Your neighbor is not the enemy. Satan is the enemy. Now he might have got to your neighbor and he uses your neighbor to bring evil in the world, but always remember who's behind this. And Satan's tactics have not changed. After the fall, right away. Adam blamed Eve and God. Eve then goes and blames the serpent, right? And responsibility dissolves into accusation. Today the same pattern continues. Cultural Marxism, other ace atheistic visions of the human person fuel what? Division, setting men against women, rich against poor, race against rage, race, fear, resentment, pornography, drugs, etc. They're an outrage that used to keep you distracted and divided. Social media amplifies the strategy with relentless efficiency. That's why in the morning, before you look at the phone, you fall to your knees. Second, you gotta arm yourself with that prayer that we're talking about here. Saint Paul exhorts us, put on the whole armor of God. Saint John Paul II called prayer the lifeline that makes the Son of God present among us. So we receive and we go out. Daily prayer, especially that morning, the Claymore morning ritual is how you remain vigilant and rooted in the truth. Knees before the screens, always. Third, you got to choose to become a man of love. That's why in the Claymore morning ritual, the final thing when we get up off our knees is what? To go love the next person you see, to confront the evil around us is to become a person of love in the truth. Scripture teaches that love of God and love of neighbor fulfill the law. Live this concretely. Practice being a self-gift to each other. Protect the weak, feed the hungry, honor every woman you see as a sister in Christ. This is not emotion or sentimentality, it's spiritual warfare grounded in charity. Fourth, fight for the truth and do so in love. See, truth without love becomes harsh. Love without truth becomes empty. Speak up when necessary. I have a school board meeting uh to tonight. So this is just local. I go to a school board meeting. I try to to help my little part, huh? To keep the the education system. It's been culturally uh captured, the the government schools. So I can do these little things. I s I I'm a part of a grassroots effort of Christians who try to bring the truth into here. So we have to go out into the culture too. Pray in the public square. Refuse to allow lies to go unchallenge. You're not fighting only for yourself, even though it's a win-win. You win your soul, and you also win uh the souls of your brothers and sisters who you journey with and the culture that you change so that these young people aren't just bombarded by this toxic culture. And then you're participating at the same time in God's larger story. All of creation is on a journey toward fulfillment, and you have a role to play. You're called to help build the city of God rather than the city of man. Every choice you make, love over lust, truth over lies, shapes both your heart and the culture around you. And John Paul II's command stands today, be not afraid. Claymore wristband. On the back of it's that phrase uh from the Gospel of Mark, be not afraid. Yet that be not afraid is throughout the whole Bible. It's the phrase that you use more than any others. Why? Because we know we're in a battle. You're a warrior, brothers. You'll be commissioned for battle. The next acts that we explore will turn more deeply toward the family, the struggle for truth. So prepare yourself. The fight continues. Remember those two acts, right? Claim more morning ritual because you're on the A team, read one of these every single day and meditate on it. It will build it out. It'll build it out. And in 52 days, you'll say, ooh, wow, my heart has changed. And I've made little changes in the world around me for the good. Hey, God love you. Thanks you so much for joining me. Talk to you again soon, everybody. Don't forget my email is uh in the show notes. Email questions, comments, etc. And we'll bring them up on future podcasts. Bye bye, everyone.