If you feed children beauty they grow into a love of beauty and you will find beauty yourself in the things in the people that you look at.

Welcome to the one you feed throughout time great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have

quotes like garbage in garbage out or you are what you think ring true and yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us we tend toward negativity self pity jealousy or fear we see what we don't have instead of what we do we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit but it's not just about thinking our actions matter it takes conscious consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction how they feed their good wolf.

Thanks for joining us on this episode we interview sister Joan Chidister a Benedictine sister of Eury Pennsylvania. She's the author of over 50 books and is the winner of 14 Catholic press association awards.

Sister Joan is an international speaker who inspires both her audiences and readers with her passion for justice equality and peace especially for women in both society and the church.

On this episode Eric and sister Joan discuss her book radical spirit 12 ways to live a free and authentic life.

Hi sister Joan welcome to the show.

Thanks Eric I'm happy to be here it's a real honor to have you on you've written over 50 books we're going to be touching on highlights from some of them but a lot of the time we're going to spend on your most recent book which is called radical spirit 12 ways to live a free and authentic life.

Yes wonderful but before we get into that let's start like we always do with the parable there's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear and the granddaughter stops and thinks about it for a second looks up at her grandmother and she says well grandma is a good wolf.

She says well grandmother which one wins and the grandmother says the one you feed so I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Well in the first place it happens to be one of my favorite parables too I've used it often in public because I consider it both productive and cautionary.

If we don't learn the lesson of this parable we're going to extend where we are and God help us if we do that for instance when you talk about the soul being developed by the part of it that you feed if you feed it beauty if you feed children beauty then they grow into a love of beauty and you will find beauty yourself in the things and the people that you look at.

If you feed those same people if you feed yourself for instance with the kind of crude rude lured language that we're being subjected to now in the name of freeing ourselves from political correctness we will shape our souls into exactly the the contorted diminished attitude toward one another.

On which brink we now stand this this is the lived expression and experience of what we mean when we say words matter experiences matter are neurologists tell us that experience actually shapes the brain and therefore the personality what we're feeding into the airwaves today is going to affect this country this generation of people.

This generation and our own perspective on life ten years to come I frankly don't think that you could start this program with any more important piece of information and if this was all you did it would have such an impact such a gift in this culture that we might really save ourselves from ourselves.

That's beautiful I love that and we're going to do so much more than just that so we've got that great answer and we're going to go into a lot of other things that you've done so but I want to start by saying sometimes different things come together different times which is interesting so I knew I was interviewing you but I knew a little bit about you but I didn't know a lot about you so that put that on on one side and I split my time between Columbus Ohio and Atlanta Georgia and I decided I needed a couple days of silence.

So I went to the monastery of the Holy Spirit which is in Conier's Georgia for a couple days sort of personal retreat which is a Benedictine monastery of which is the same order that you are from and sitting in the drawer of the little desk in my room was the rule of Saint Benedict which is a lot of what your most recent book is about it explores the rule of Saint Benedict and I just was sort of so come back from that and I now

start getting into your work to prepare for the interview and I'm like well be damned there it is so really really interesting confluence for me there the new book really focuses on the idea of humility you say that humility in the rule of Benedict is the spiritual hinge on which the rest of life depends could you expand on that for me yeah I'd love to actually the book is built on chapter seven of this short role

72 small chapters probably one of the smallest spiritual documents in history and but chapter seven is the longest of them all this I take to indicate that this is really Benedictine spirituality as Benedict understood it meaning this is the portion of life that he wants us as people to concentrate on to build our own impact on the world and the world

the world's impact on us this this spirituality interestingly enough hardly uses a single theological term if any it's all built around who you become as a human being and how you can become the human being to be it's it's simplicity is overwhelming

...