You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hello, welcome to Form Now. My name is Dr. Ben Acres. I'm the executive director of Formed,

and we're in part three of our four-part series on St. Francis DeSales and the character of a Christian.

And my guest today, Dr. Christopher Bloom, is a great friend of St. Francis de Sales.

You can see an episode on St. Francis de Sales on his series called True Reformers, which is found unformed. He's also helped translate the text that we have for you that we're discussing

today. And the virtue we're going to be talking about, the character, the essential trait

of a Christian that we're going to be talking about, the character, the essential trait of a Christian that we're

going to be talking about today is the trait of sincerity. And last time we talked about the importance

of attentiveness and a verse came to mind in our conversation from Psalm 123. And Psalm 123,

To you I lift up my eyes, oh, you who are enthroned in the heavens, behold, as the eyes of

a servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of the maid servant to the hand of her

mistress. So our eyes look to the Lord our God till he has mercy on us. It was a beautiful

scriptural base of that attentiveness, that focus on what we're supposed to do in prayer.

Yeah, we're going to see the same thing today.

You may recall, Ben, then in the first episode, I mentioned that the introduction of

outlife was written at a time in the Renaissance, when there's a lot of self-help literature

out there, okay?

There's a lot of fashioning the self or creating the self or looking in the mirror, right?

And what DeSales is offering in the devout life is just what that verse talks about,

looking at the master rather than looking at the mirror.

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