I don't think I'm going to say anything that runs directly contrary to anything we've heard,

which might suggest to you that it's contentless, but no.

Just taking a slightly different path, picking up on thoughts about potentiality and actuality and bringing in teleology to help discipline

that thought a little bit. Okay, it's really easy for Thomas to talk about potency and actuality.

We all know that we individuate potencies by actualities. We all know that we individuate potencies by actualities.

We all know that the kind of changes Tomas Nehro Aristotelians love to discuss are changes from potency to act.

And we all know that there are active and passive potencies that correspond roughly to changers and what's changed in any change.

And we have a kind of glib and easy way with this language.

To put it mildly, I developed a stutter around this easy language, and it was a major stutter.

And I am the sort of person whose stutters can be the intellectual equivalent of like an existential crisis.

Okay.

I mean, I'm not proud of it, but it's true.

So, in the very last conversation that I had with Father Lawrence DeWan,

he actually quieted the deep anxiety and helped me get rid of the stutter in

in connection with how we might cope with passive potency by saying two sentences

with a long pause in between them and then telling me a story about soldiers finding a way of using soda pop bottles

and barbed wire and bits of wood to send radio signals in World War II.

The two things that he said were, one, and I have to do, Father Duane saying this. A potency is supposed to be a power. Both fists.

And then after a long pause, human beings see possibilities.

Okay.

Now, there are certain moments when teaching coincides with pastoral care.

This was one of them, for which I was profoundly grateful.

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