Fun fact, I got done recording this entire book as like an audiobook with some commentary on it. It's going to be on the Ascension app if you're interested in not just reading it with your eyeballs, but listening to it with your earballs. I'm my name is Father Mike Schmitts, and this is Ascentia Presents. So there's this great book. It's called The I Invitation of Christ by a man named Thomas Akempus. This is the Catholic Classics edition by Ascension. At one point, this was like the second most

popular book, second only to the Bible, in the life of Christians and life of the world

in the Western world. One of the things that Thomas Sikempis talks about, one of the things he

describes when it comes to the way that we're called to live in the imitation of Christ is

this word called detachment.

This word detachment can seem like a kind of a Buddhist principle or a stoic philosophical principle

when it comes to this kind of sense of detachment. So what does that mean? First of all,

it's not exclusive to stoicism. It's not exclusive to Buddhism. In fact, virtually all wise people

have talked about the need we all

have for the attachment. Why? Because it's part of our broken human nature to attach ourselves

to things that are not worthy of ourselves. We're attaching ourselves and getting our identity

from our possessions. Or we're getting our identity from our status. We're getting our identity from what people think about us. We're getting our identity from our possessions. Or we're getting our identity from our status. We're getting our identity from what people think about us.

We're getting our identity from our relationships in life.

Now, those are all good things because we typically don't choose to get our identity from bad

things.

Now, sometimes we do.

Sometimes we can fall into the trap of getting our identity from our shame or from our sins.

Nonetheless, we're called to detach ourselves from those things that we choose to get our identity from, we choose to say, this is where I'm going to get my value.

Because those things are less than you.

First, secondly, those things all pass.

At some point, they can all be taken away. And so

Buddhists would say, like, yeah, hold on to those things loosely. A Stoic would say, hold on to that

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