Okay, so you gave a variety of, what would you call them, you know, indications or

encouragements for living our spiritual life.

Pet peeves, maybe.

Okay, pet peeves, that's fine.

I'm not against it.

As a way to highlight the ways in which we can be tripped up or are often tripped up.

I think sometimes, like in our conversations about the spiritual life, we're very nervous.

And we're very nervous to kind of put pressure on the individual in saying,

your spiritual life is what you make of it because we want to afford scope for the grace of God.

But then we kind of seesaw back and forth.

It's like, yeah, it's like all grace, but like you should do some stuff. But it's like all grace,

but you should do some stuff. And then we can get ourselves confused and we're like, let's just

eat some cheese puffs and call it a day. So when it comes to that tension, do you find that

there are good ways in which for us as Christians to think well and profitably about God's initiation or God's kind of provocation of this conversion?

Yeah, one of the things that I think has been most important in my Dominican life actually is realizing how a basic structure of life demands a set of virtues,

which you can yourself cultivate, and how that creates the space to recognize God's work in your life.

So when we were novices, right, we lived a very intense and very structured life,

and we get to live that now because we live in a seminary. So when you when you live

in a formation community in religious life, you live a stricter version of religious life.

And that's not hate on the guys here at St. Joseph. They're amazing. It's just to say that when

you live in a seminary, everybody's watching, like all the younglings are watching. You know,

so you have to like like, be a decent

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