Hi, my name is Father Meg Schmidt and this is Ascension Presents.

So a lot of people will ask me, like, Father, what is Ascension?

How about make something Ascension?

Because you can say, like, didn't hurt anybody.

It didn't seem like anyone was even affected by some sins at all.

That's a great question.

So here's the thing.

I think a lot of times we think of, like, good and evil as like battling it out.

Like, here's good and here's evil and they're just fighting it out.

And that sometimes is how we experience it.

But back in the day, St. Augustine, the 4th, 5th century, he said, he figured this kind

of thing out.

He discerned this.

He said that, you know, evil in and of itself isn't a thing.

It's either the absence of a thing or the distortion of a thing, right?

So the only thing that exists is a good, like, goodness, truth, beauty.

Those are things that exist.

Evil is always going to be an absence of a good or it's the distortion, the willed intentional

distortion of a good.

So as an example, blindness isn't a thing on its own.

You have sight, which is a good.

Blindness is merely the absence of that good.

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