Heart's Desire & Social Change, Part 1: What is the Heart's Desire?

Host Fr. Dan Groody discusses his vision for the podcast with Dan Allen, the ‎Associate Director of Spirituality and Service at the Notre Dame Alumni Association and host of of the Everyday Holiness Podcast.

Together they explore Fr. Dan’s story and what led him to this work. They also discuss what the “Heart’s Desire” is and the undergraduate course that inspired the podcast.

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Transcript

Dan Allen 1:35

Welcome everyone to the first episode of the Hearts Desire and Social Change podcast. My name is Dan Allen and I serve as the Associate Director of Spirituality and Service. at the Notre Dame Alumni Association. And I'm pleased to join Father Dan Groody, who will be often leading you through other episodes of this podcast. For this first one, though, Father Dan invited me to be a part of this conversation, just to introduce him to you and as well as the course to give everyone a sense of exactly what we're after and what we're doing. So thanks so much for having me, Father Dan.

Fr Dan Groody 2:13

Thanks for being with us, Dan. It's great to have this chance to talk about some of these themes in these courses that we've been teaching after the last number of years. And we've been trying to really address the issue of how do you have conversations about things that matter in our lives. And so we've been teaching this course as well with our undergraduate students, but also with folks who come here for a post career opportunity to learn about the meaning and the mission of their lives. And so there's a lot of different themes we want to address in this podcast, and we really want to take some time to explore the deeper river and the deeper currents of our lives and say, how do we live this in our own times?

Dan Allen 2:48

It sounds like an exciting endeavor. Could you give us a bit of an introduction into your background and your experiences that have led you to this work?

Fr Dan Groody 2:57

Well, a lot of this experience is built on my own interests. And especially when I was an exchange student in Uruguay years ago, I remember just disengaging from the world and living in a new culture and trying to really listen to what was happening inside. Uh, one way I. I didn't know the language and I didn't know the people. And so it was the first time that I really remember going on an inner journey. That led me to come to NerdAim to study. And during that time, I learned more about my faith. And while I learned about my faith, I also realized that there were social challenges in the world that I need to pay attention to as well. In the whole kind of process of trying to understand what does God call me to do? Who am I? What is my responsibility to my neighbor in need? All these got woven together. And I wish I actually had this course when I was an undergrad, but there are themes that have stayed with me. They stayed with me through my formation as a priest, but also in my years in ministry. Now my years in teaching and research, they've been very important to me, but they're human questions. They're human issues. There are issues that really deal with our relationships and issues that deal with the things that matter and endure. So those are some of the things that really led us, led me into this and it's what's one of the reasons why we wanted to share more broadly with other people who we know are interested in these common themes.

Dan Allen 4:08

Mm hmm. So there's a common human element and in the true point to all this, but it's also accentuated by conversations surrounding faith.

Fr Dan Groody 4:18

That's right. And when we have this inspired leadership initiative here as well, so people who have already, if you will, on the post career part of their lives, they've already raised a family or they've had a career, and now they come back to the university and say, what's next? And what is my life about? And we've had a chance to sort of gather people over the last couple of years to really reflect on what they've learned from their lives, And what matters to them and what they want to do from this point forward. As we were working with them and working with undergraduates, we recognized that there's a lot of common themes that young people have, middle aged people have, and older people have. And to have the space to talk about those themes is one of the reasons why we wanted to go into this material.

Dan Allen 5:00

So, you talked about your own life. I'm interested, just a little bit, as you think to the different decision points in your life and In your own background, what sticks out to you as some really valuable things that helped you discern what those transition points were and what next steps you were going to take?

Fr Dan Groody 5:20

Well, I grew up in a family of people who worked for the phone company. My dad worked for the phone company, my mother worked for the phone company, my brother and sister and I. We lived in an area where there were phone company jobs and we moved around a lot. I actually worked with cellular when it first started. So I was in charge of the first cellular database. And they were about 286 customers. So that is now Verizon Mobile with millions of users. So it's amazing how this technology has changed over time. And in many different ways, I, I didn't stay in the technical phone business, but I never left the communication business. And in this sense, I'm, I'm part of the wireless communication over time, and I realized that my vocation was tied into how do we really tune into the Spirit, and how do we really listen to how God's communicating to us, and even how do we communicate to ourselves, and how do we really speak about the things that really matter to us. Those are really important themes that over time that have, that have, um, been instilled in me, and yet they've taken different forms and different shapes since then.

Dan Allen 6:20

And so we get to the point of, of having this course, what

Fr Dan Groody 6:24

specifically is the class about? Well, the course is really founded on three different elements. One is self awareness, the second is self development, and the third is self gift. A lot of this is about growing in authenticity and integration and admission. And I can remember when I was in graduate school, this is around 1999. I remember very well, there was a story about a Mars climate orbiter that they'd sent into outer space and NASA had spent about 125 million on this particular mission. And for about two years, this orbiter went into, uh, to the, to outer space. And as it's approaching, approaching the Martian orbit. Scientists kind of gathered around all of the, the, uh, data that they had, and they were kind of anxiously waiting for this to descend and make its way down into the Martian atmosphere, where it was going to circulate for a couple of years to basically study the, the weather pattern within the Martian, within Mars. But as it got close to its descent and as it got close to the, the specified altitude that they were aiming for, the whole mission blew apart

Dan Allen 7:31

and

Fr Dan Groody 7:33

this was just sent to all the engineers scrambling, like all the calculations somehow got messed up and they couldn't figure out why. And so they went back to the drawing board, they recognized that there were two sets of engineers that were working on this project. One was from Lockheed Martin and they had calculated the trajectory. in the spacecraft's thrust in pounds, which was an English unit, whereas NASA scientists actually use the metric measurements of Newtons. So in a journey of about 416 million miles, this difference was only about 60 miles. Huh. But those 60 miles are what caused the spacecraft to blow apart. So I never forget that story because it really was a question of measurements and how we measure the trajectory of our lives and how we measure ultimately the effectiveness of the mission that God has entrusted to us. And so when I was growing up, I suspect for me that was just being successful. It was kind of making money. It was kind of having a standard of living. But as I went deeper into the issues of my life, I realized that my life demanded of me and God demanded of me more than just self fulfillment, that there was indeed something of giving my life away that, um, was a more, more exciting adventure, but a different set of measurements. And so really recalibrating those measurements, really. Re identifying those measurements and really measuring my life in different ways was part of that journey. And I think helping students measure their lives, ultimately, in light of their true selves, not just the self that they think they should be or others want them to be. That's a big part of the course.

Dan Allen 9:04

Yeah, because from the outside looking in, uh, two lives can look very similar for a long time and yet has I do remember that Mars Orbiter episode now that you mentioned it, and uh, the difference between true success and real catastrophe isn't that far apart. And it seems like what you're saying is, uh, it's, you know, about the very meticulous measurement, the way that we do the measurement that's so important.

Fr Dan Groody 9:31

You know, I just recently saw the movie. And Elton John was a big hero growing up. I loved listening to his music. I kind of was always tuned into him as I was growing up years. And it's striking to just see someone who sold, you know, five out of every hundred albums in the world was really the best artist sort of his time. And yet, when you really see on some sense, he had all these external measurements that we would consider as successful, but inside he was totally imploding and he was falling apart. And so how do we differentiate between this outer notion of success that the culture really affirms in us? As opposed to this inner guided sense of what we're, what our lives are about, and that takes time. And that really calls forth a different sort of navigation system.

Dan Allen 10:17

So it's amazing to me, just, we talked about the technology and the proliferation of it, and we think back to early cellular to now. Smartphones and just the ever intrusive nature of technology and social media. How do you help students who are in this modern digital age, how do you help them navigate and, and kind of quiet some of those things that are asking for their attention and really focus on how they can measure what is their true self?

Fr Dan Groody 10:47

It's a good question. I am a space buff in the end, not just with Rocketman, but I always love Listening and learning about the stories of what it took to take, you know, astronauts to the moon and back again. And it's strikingly enough that when they actually first did that in 69, they had only one megabyte worth of computing power to take them from the earth to the moon. Alright, when you think about that. Today's iPhone has over 3, 000 times the power of the original computer on the lunar module. And it's amazing that we, you know, had this tremendous success of going into outer space, but it seems like we're less successful going into inner space. And we, this inner space is largely unexplored. And one of the things that we're really keyed in on here at the university, but more broadly, I think, in the country, is the mental health crisis is going on. Why is that going on? I think there's a lot of reasons why, and I think there's a lot of things we can reflect on, but I wonder whether some of it is that we're so literally wired today that we just don't take time to listen to what's going on on the inside. I mean, we're treating, Our beings and our hearts as if we're computers that can be just programmed to work 24

Dan Allen 11:54

7.

Fr Dan Groody 11:54

There's no time for leisure, no time for rest, and no time to listen in silence. So in the Course, one of the first classes is really on silence and solitude, is how to disengage And to actually just pay attention. I remember when I first started teaching here, I experimented with my students and one of the classes, I just said, you know, we're going to have a very important class coming up next week. I said, you don't have to prepare, but it's going to be one of the most interesting classes of the semester. When they came in and I said, we're just going to be quiet for an hour. And students just got so fidgety. They didn't know what to do with this. What do we do with silence? And, but the question is that how can we know what our heart's desire is if we really don't pay attention to listen to our hearts? And I think part of the mental health crisis is related to literally our heart screaming for attention.

Dan Allen 12:45

Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. Are there any other topics or activities that have been really successful or remarkable in terms of the course as you've developed it over the time?

Fr Dan Groody 12:57

Well, you know, we haven't built this out of thin air. We've actually tried to ask first, what are the questions that people are asking? This course emerged first from students coming to me and saying, look, this, these are questions that we want to deal with. And can you help us really work on, you know, how we ask the question of who am I? What is my identity? How do I know what I'm called to do? Uh, how do I, what do I deal, how do I deal with suffering? What's the meaning of life? What happens when I die? Am I forgiven? So, uh, these are the questions I think that every human being faces. One of the things we say is, is if we don't deal with these questions, these questions will deal with us. And so how do we actually face these questions as hard as they may be? In order to live a more free and integrated and wholesome life. And a lot of times, too, we have people coming in the later years who are saying, gosh, I feel like I've just defaulted into life, but I haven't really consciously chosen to live it. So how do you really start off with that to say, what is it that I desire? And who is it that I want to be? So what we try to do is first name the questions, then from those questions, say, how do we identify the themes that are related to those questions? And then what are the teaching practices and pedagogies that we can create that help people get into those themes? And then what are the courses and programs that can help people get into some of that, those teachings? And so it's very reflective, and what we're really trying to do is create reflective leaders. And the first text of the course is really your own life. So you have to study your life, your experiences, your relationships, your successes, your failures. This is a big piece as well, is, is, You know, Notre Dame, you don't dare kind of say that you've actually failed at something. You know, it doesn't, you know, you, you have to present all your successes when you get in the door. But what we find is this sort of behind that curtain, there is a deep anxiety. Mm-Hmm. my students, my biggest surprises here is teaching here for 20 years now is how many students feel like they're not enough. Yeah. You know, to say, okay, we've got classmates who are gold medalists, or, you know. Football players or whatever, they're athletes on some level, or they're very smart or they're very good at this. But deep down people just almost compare other person's best to their worst and then feel like I never measured. Yeah. So how do you be the person that you are not just the person you're supposed to be? And part of that is accepting, uh, the shadow and our failures and our weaknesses and our need for forgiveness. That's actually very liberating, but it's very scary at the same time.

Dan Allen 15:31

Yeah, that imposter syndrome, or you think about social media and how people present their best selves, or, you know, that, that window of their life, and yet, uh, you know, we spend our entire lives with ourselves, and so to have to do some of that introspection, I'm sure, can be scary. What has been the student feedback when you've taken through the, taken them through some of those exercises that bring out those more uncomfortable moments?

Fr Dan Groody 15:55

Well, the first part of the course is students have to do a long journey into themselves. And then after that, they have to begin to layer that out a little further by talking to what we call a clearness committee. And that clearness committee is to have a conversation with them about how they come across to others. And they can design this any way they want. And we offer some suggested questions, but there's some as well that we said that these might be useful to you. One of these came from a student and it said, what's something that you think I should know, but may be difficult for you to say, but it's important for me to hear. This is, this is really, and I think a lot of people sort of feel very shaky when that happens, but they often feel it's very liberating at the same time that people can call them out on their truths and still stay with them in the relationship. So for example, one person said that, Well, you know, some people say I'm a gifted speaker, uh, and, but then they said, but at the same time, this same gift that makes you a gifted speaker makes you want to be the center of attention at other times. And so the person really reflected on that and said, you know, that's right. My greatest strength is also my greatest weakness. And. Versa versa, my greatest weakness is also it opens a space for me to relate to other people and can be my greatest strength. So instead of judging it, it's just trying to become aware of it, but then also recognizing that I don't have to be the perfect person and that part of being human is being real and being real with my weaknesses and vulnerabilities. So getting into a space of vulnerability is Also, an important kind of growing point in the class, but I must say with the older group when we first rolled this out, I wasn't intending on teaching this material with them at all. We were doing a great book seminar with them, and at one point we rolled, they said, no, we want this material because a couple of them were in this Heart's Desire class, and we said, no, we think this is what people want.

Dan Allen 17:52

Yes.

Fr Dan Groody 17:53

So I said, look, I'm in the service industry, so I'm just going to roll out what we do. And, you know, as soon as I started talking about vulnerability, they said, you don't want us to talk about this stuff with others, do you?

Dan Allen 18:03

And

Fr Dan Groody 18:03

they said, well, you know, part of heart's desire is connecting with others. And, you know, we don't do that with everybody, but I think we have to do that with somebody.

Dan Allen 18:11

Do you notice any differences between younger people and some of these folks who have, you know, come to, you know, what it looks like from the outside, very successful careers. And yet, you know, they still have some things. Any, any contrast between the two groups?

Fr Dan Groody 18:25

It's an interesting question. On some level, the themes are the same and people approach it in different ways and circle back to it in different ways. Maybe age old questions. When you've gone through a career, you have less illusions about what's in front of you in terms of, you know, what life is going to give in terms of a career or even, you know, beautiful kind of elements like a family or a spouse. You know, people really sometimes have more of a realism about what that is. At the same time, there, uh, there's a hunger underneath, you know, all of it where people are still searching. No matter what age they are. And I think the younger and it's like, you know, someday I'm going to be out there and, you know, make money and have a family. And, you know, sometimes you're, and you look, you're adding this up and you say, you know, I'm going to have all this X, Y, and Z. And you say, well, at this rate, if you're working that hard, you probably won't have, but I think as you get older, you say, yeah, I spent a lot of time working, but I realized that in the end, these are the things that matter, you know? So I, but I think underneath. Both of them is really, it's the question of how much time do we spend, not just having experiences, but reflecting on those experiences, and what are we learning from those experiences, and if we don't take time to learn from those experiences, we actually don't go deeper with our lives.

Dan Allen 19:40

Now, you are a Holy Cross priest and religious. Is there anything from that formation and training that has helped you craft some of these things for, for your students?

Fr Dan Groody 19:51

I think one of the great gifts of being a Holy Cross religious and certainly being a priest in the community is having the time, the initial formation that we had to really learn about myself and God and others and ministry, mission, and, Really taking time to unpack and unravel all the stuff that's there. The congregation spends a lot of resources to really form you. I think they also realize that if they actually don't spend time, it can be more costly. The aftermath. There's a practice the church recognizes that you got to take time to form priests because if you don't take time to form them, I think the impact can be very negative. Devastating, yeah. So you have to spend time going through your own issues. One of my favorite years was in the novitiate, which is a year on the mountain, prayer. And then I think at three different points in my life as a, as a religious, I've done Ignatius's long 30 day retreat. And that to me also is a space to, when you're, when you're 30 days in silence, you learn a lot about yourself.

Dan Allen 20:50

Yeah.

Fr Dan Groody 20:51

And you learn a lot about what stirs within you. And you begin to learn about God. You never, you never get to the top of the mountain. But so all that time of reflecting, processing, all that growth in the spiritual life is runs through this, this course with me.

Dan Allen 21:11

And one aspect of, about. Discernment and vocation, I think, can be very challenging and I, I see this sometimes in interacting with students is there's so much potential in all of them and you know when they come in the door, obviously, like you said, they're very high achievers, they've done tons of different activities in high school, all that kind of thing, or in their early undergraduate days, but at some point, people have to start making decisions about this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to go through this door, and that means inherently I'm not going through a number of these other doors. How do you help students have the courage to, to take that step instead of trying to be everything to everybody at all times?

Fr Dan Groody 21:49

We just had a class on this yesterday on discernment and decision making and I think that's one of the classes in particular that I wish I would have had more of when I was, you know, at my senior year. And they're weighty decisions. When you come to your senior year, you know, which path you take right out of college can affect a lot about the path you take down the road. And even if it's not a final path in terms of your career or other things, the decisions you make in your 20s affect the rest of your life. They can very much shape the rest of your life. So making decisions is important. I remember part of my formation, I lived in Santiago, Chile. And at breakfast, we had two kinds of bread, maracata and ajusia. Those were the two kinds of bread and we had one type of jam. So that was just it. That was breakfast. Two types of bread, one type of jam. That was it. When I was there for a year and a half, when I came back, I'll never forget, I, I flew back through the airport and I remember stopping in a newsstand and they had, uh, kind of 21 kinds of bubble gum to choose from and I just, I just like, I, I melted down. Like, I just didn't know how to Choose between bubblicious grape, bubblicious regular, or whether it wanted, you know, spearmint or peppermint or whatever it was. And so I think right now students have so many choices in front of them that they often don't know what to choose at all. But that's why we say first you have to build this on the foundation of self knowledge. You've got to know who you are first. So instead of asking what you want to do, the focus of this class is, say, who do you want to be? Then out of who you want to be, how do you find a flow between your inner life and your outer world? So that's part of what we're trying to do, and we're trying to build on psychology and spirituality and sociology and other disciplines, and anthropology, to try to say, how do you really, Connect with, um, what, that, so that what you do actually comes out of who you are.

Dan Allen 23:36

And for the older population, how does that play out when they've had more experiences, but maybe gotten to the point where, you know, I've accomplished what I thought I would accomplish, and yet I still have life to live. What do I do now? How do you, how do you walk them through some of those decisions?

Fr Dan Groody 23:55

Whether you're older or younger, sometimes where I see people go as a deer into headlights, it's really along the questions of what if everything that I thought I was supposed to be is not everything that I feel like I really want to be and what do I do with that? And sometimes it's some remorse of saying, gosh, what did I do? Other times it's like, what if I actually don't do what other people are saying I should do? Or what if I kind of, I really have quite a bit of currency going on the idea that I'm going to be a doctor.

Dan Allen 24:29

Right.

Fr Dan Groody 24:29

And people have lauded me and affirmed that, and maybe I am called to be a doctor, but maybe I'm doing that because I think I should do that, or maybe I'm doing that because other people want me to do that or they've affirmed that that's a cool thing to do. But then you hate blood and you know, you really aren't good at science and you know, you really begin to say, Hey, this, this doesn't feel like there's a flow here at all. So how do you really distinguish that? And, and, and that's where people are like, Oh my gosh. The other issue that, um, puts people kind of on a, on a hold and a stall is we spend some time going through. And we really spent some time working through where do the areas where I need to be forgiven. And who is it that I need to forgive? And that's one area where we just become so busy that we don't, that's the stuff we want to avoid thinking about because sometimes the pain is so great that we don't even want to open that space. But again, if we don't open it, it festers and it begins to contaminate the groundwater of our soul. And so really going through the hard process of letting go and being forgiven and forgiving. This is so critical to getting deeper into the heart. And without that, it just simply affects us from behind and can really affect us in a negative way.

Dan Allen 25:47

And obviously people come from very different experiences. Really wholesome families other people broken backgrounds and experiences other others have experienced Unimaginable trauma different points in their lives. What are some techniques to? as as an as a group to get people Past some some very difficult things and and be at that that more peaceful place of having Receive forgiveness and given it as well.

Fr Dan Groody 26:17

It's a good question. The buddhists have an expression about the beginner's mind and always approach life and its tasks, you know, as if you're learning it for the first time. And I think every class is different and every person is unique. Some people have gone through unimaginable tragedies and find a way of rising above it. Other people who've been given everything and the slightest things derail them and it's really hard to know but suffering goes through all of it and how we deal with suffering is really important and we often say that if, if, uh, it, suffering can either make you better or it can make you bitter and if you, we, we also, uh, quote something from Richard Rorowitz, I think is a powerful line. That is, if we don't allow our suffering to be transformed, we'll transmit it. And so we have to really kind of go into those deeper spaces and try to find ways of sometimes sitting with that suffering, sometimes surrendering that suffering, and also recognizing that there are, there's a need maybe for more sustained psychological or spiritual care that can really try to bring healing to some of those painful places.

Dan Allen 27:27

And I think what we realize in encountering stories of others suffering is that they're, it's not the same story, but we all experience to be human is to suffer. And obviously 2020 has been a challenging year on a number of fronts and not that, uh, it's unique that we're suffering, but we're suffering in a way that, that we couldn't have thought. And yet we also described this Uh, technology and the proliferation of it, it can be a challenge, but it also can, we can communicate with so many people, uh, in an amazing way. So, I kind of have a question here for you, if, if you had a text message, if you could send a text message to the entire world, what do you think it would be and why would you say that?

Fr Dan Groody 28:11

For me, the search for the heart's desire in many ways came to deeper clarity in a spiritual way and in a Christological way. In many ways as I began to look at the raw data of my own heart, in time I really looked at Christ's heart and I really recognized that something of what I really wanted in the depths of my being could only be answered in the person of Christ and can only be answered in the depths of Christ. And the heart of Christ spoke to me as the gateway into the deepest part of who God is. So if I had to send one text message to the world, It would be everything to his heart for 30 years. That insight came to me 30 years and for 30 years every day and every night, the first act and the last act of the day is making my vows and it's really about renewing my consecration to the heart of Christ and to really praying that his heart be mine and my heart be his. So, to me, that, it all flows out of that. Everything, all of desire really flows out of the heart and the well of God's depth and mercy.

Dan Allen 29:19

And with your students, I mean, are you able to reflect on that with them, what it means to have Christ come and experience our suffering and share in that?

Fr Dan Groody 29:29

You know, I, on one level, I, I try not to indoctrinate the students in ways that kind of just causes people to sort of have a knee jerk reaction to it. I think we, we have to find creative ways in which we discover what evangelization is all about. Certainly as a priest. As a Christian, as a Catholic, as a human being, you know, these themes are deeply important to me and they're deeply important because I'm convicted by them and I'm convinced of their power and their truth. But, at the same time, people have to discover these truths for themselves, and, you know, but I do think these are enduring truths, so I have no problem putting them out there. But I think the way in is not just by preaching at them, or just kind of giving them doctrine. It's trying to see, uh, what's the truth of your life as you've understood it and experienced that. And then, the theological task is making the connection between those deep truths, and And the truth that come forth through our religious traditions. So that critical correlation between the depths of the heart and, uh, what religion brings to us as cumulative wisdom

Dan Allen 30:32

is really the task. But there's, uh, we stand on the shoulders, right, of so many who have come before us and You don't have to

Fr Dan Groody 30:37

reinvent the wheel.

Dan Allen 30:38

Right. So as this course and content moves forward, uh, where do you see it going? What are some of your goals for it? You

Fr Dan Groody 30:47

Well, today I was just speaking with a group from the UN. I've been working with Jeff Sachs at the UN and one of their sustainable development organizations there. And we have a series of online courses that we've been doing through this program called Ethics in Action. So for a couple of years we were meeting in the Vatican with people from different religions. We're trying to ask how can the religions of the world help in developing the world? So how can the religious traditions and their ethics really help us get better traction in terms of making the world a better place? So I think we've gotten a lot of ground that we've really, um, tilled through, uh, outer development that we haven't really done as much with inner development. So even today we were talking with them about doing more courses on inner development.

Dan Allen 31:33

Yeah.

Fr Dan Groody 31:34

And you know, that Pope Francis puts it this way. He said, the outer deserts of the world are increasing because the inner deserts of the world are increasing. So for us, I think it's, it's saying, how can we make this more available? Uh, Carl Rogers, psychologist, once said that what is most personal to us is also most universal. And I think in this sense, we've been teaching this course at Notre Dame for the last number of years. Some students have found some value in it in terms of being more authentic and free to live out the lives that they're called to live out. Can we make it more available to other people? Can we scale this in ways that, That it could be, uh, available to other people and can, can Notre Dame also be a place that can help foster and advance thinking and reflection on important human questions and spiritual questions?

Dan Allen 32:22

Yeah, I think that would be wonderful. I find myself thinking, Oh, I, as you said, you wish you'd had this course. I wish I would have had this course. You know, there, there were, there are moments in all of our lives where boy, that was really a struggle and it would have helped to have some of these resources. So, I, I think that is. That's a wonderful thing if that could happen. As I was looking through the site and some of the content, there was this term, rewirements, that I thought was really interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and how that plays into the course?

Fr Dan Groody 32:52

Working with John Grodin on this course, John's been terrific. He was a teacher himself in ACE, and he's helping me a lot with the course design. He spent a lot of time doing some benchmarking and looking at other places and there's a very popular course many know about taught at Yale on happiness is one of the most popular courses and we credit them for really coming up with this term rewirement and rewirement really is a way of how you how do you really go through this process of. Reconfiguring your, your life and its patterns and the way you go about it in such a way that you can find a path to freedom. I mean, one of my favorite themes in the course really is, is on that freedom and conversion. And so we take time to watch the movie Groundhog Day and Groundhog Day is a great sort of reflection on really what this course is about. You just wake up each day and you, you live it differently each day based on what you learned the previous day. And it's all about a person trying to understand his search for the heart's desire. And he has to rewire a lot of stuff that he really that that word was wired differently the day before. So we have these practical exercises, you know, about gratitude or about forgiveness or about silence, you know, and others where they actually have to put into practice the information that they learn.

Dan Allen 34:06

Yeah, I think it's been a somewhat common experience of this pandemic that we feel like we're living Bill Murray's, you know, his character's life in Groundhog Day as we kind of go through the monotony. In talking with your students and their experience of the pandemic, has that helped them in some way in the practical elements of this course that their life is simplified in some way that they can go through some of these activities?

Fr Dan Groody 34:37

In Chinese, the word for crisis is a combination of two words. The first is danger and the second is opportunity. ThinkND. And I think the COVID crisis has really kind of presented to us both a danger and an opportunity. I think it's a danger because it's really threatened the world that we were comfortable or maybe knew of before this time, but it's an opportunity. I mean, for example, people have had to go about work very differently. But for some, it's been a chance to spend more time with their family or to engage in some of these reflective questions or to really ask, is the path I'm on really the one that I want to be on? And I think that's, that's an important question. And how we respond in crisis really shapes and determines who we become. It's easy to sort of go about life when things are going well, but really the crisis actually reveals something important to us. So I think we're all feeling on some level, uh, kind of a COVID fatigue and, uh, but you know, and in some sense. But I think the longer term effects, I mean, we're really keyed on in getting a vaccine and really keyed in on finding a better way. But I think at the same time, the longer issues of COVID are going to be about the mental health issues and to some extent the issues of the soul that are much more enduring and how we actually Deal with those is going to be important if we're going to have a peaceful society.

Dan Allen 36:02

Yeah, sometimes our own busyness prior to this allowed us to block out some of those things, or not even Probe those questions. I'm interested in, in your own life, uh, we're all, as you say, we're all on the way, all works in progress, some of these rewirements, what, what do you still work on yourself? What do you think is most important for you, you know, in your life at this time?

Fr Dan Groody 36:24

I think rewiring trust, uh, really even concrete instances where I can say, yeah, Lord, I don't know what to do here. Uh, yeah, Lord, this is bigger than my own strength here. And, and really just sitting, uh, in prayer in the morning and say, Actually Jesus, I trust you, and I really trust you to help me work this out. This is very simple. But Pope Francis, I'm very inspired and challenged by the fact that he gets up at 4. 30 in the morning, every morning, and he prays until 7. And then he has mass from 7 to 7. 30. And then after dinner in the evening, he takes another hour before the Blessed Sacrament. And I've learned that, boy, that kind of presence, that kind of centeredness is so important to keep the rudder steady amidst the challenges and the vicissitudes of everyday life. Even working here, it's like being in a centrifuge sometimes. There's so many things that can throw you in so many different directions. But if I lose that center, then I lose everything else. The other piece is gratitude. I think John's done a great job on this and really helping students write gratitude letters to people who really have influenced our lives and shaped it in such a positive way. But to really, instead of just saying, Oh, I got this issue, I got that issue, you know, but really focusing on the things that I'm grateful for. These are just small requirements, but even taking time to give thanks or to thank others. I think really pays immense dividends, not just for us, but in relationships.

Dan Allen 37:50

Yeah, sometimes you hear tragedies of people on their deathbed or unexpected deaths that, you know, they never got the chance to say this or that to the people that mattered. And it seems like a really important thing to just say, to be intentional about every day being a gift and, uh, and, and to, to say those important things while we have the opportunity to do so.

Fr Dan Groody 38:13

One of the things we do at the end of the class is we go out to the cemetery, and we take some time to just look at the different tombstones, and we ask, what do you learn about what people wrote on their tombstones? Then they have to ask, what would they want to put on their tombstone? Then they have to write their obituary. And then they have to really reflect on the difference between what David Brooks calls resume virtues versus eulogy virtues. So, it's rather striking sometime, uh, recently students, um, coming back to school, they said, you know, uh, they were criticized in the administration. They said, do you want us to write our obituaries?

Dan Allen 38:45

Right.

Fr Dan Groody 38:46

And, uh, actually I'd say, yes, we do want you to write your obituaries. We very much want you to think about, you know, what in the end do you want your life to be about? And when the last chapter of your life is written, how do you want to be remembered? So what we're aiming for is wisdom. Ultimately, how do we live these lives well?

Dan Allen 39:03

Yeah, it's so important that that dash between the two dates, there's so, there's so much contained in there and, uh, and so much impact that So if people are interested in finding more about this course, where can they go? What can they do?

Fr Dan Groody 39:17

Well, we have a website. I think right now you can talk to John Grodin because he's dealing with a lot of these details. I actually don't know where they go at this point. So we'll have to, we'll have to figure out actually what we say in this podcast to figure out where we go next. But I think what we're trying to do is to gather the material. What we're really working on right now is to develop the methods and the practices and the, and the, Learning exercises that get people into these themes. As we get that more calibrated, I think we're going to scale out to other, other spaces and places, but, uh, we, uh, we do have a website and, uh, we can, we can, uh, fold in that website, actually another point, another point, but it's hdsc. nd. edu, I believe is where that is. But I think these podcasts are a way of, uh, kind of moving, moving, uh, the ball forward. And I think we're also looking at creative ways in which we can engage video, uh, as well as other partners in other spaces to reflect on this. It would be really exciting if we could, through this UN initiative, to get people from other countries as well reflecting on these issues.

Dan Allen 40:19

If people are interested in priming themselves, so to speak, as this content is coming out, any recommendations for what people could do to kind of ready their own hearts for some of this material?

Fr Dan Groody 40:32

When we begin the class, sometimes we'll just ask students to say, what are the major questions that you're dealing with right now? And what are the decisions you're facing in light of these questions? And how do you go about making those decisions? I think sometimes just naming those questions are really important in terms of trying to find a path forward. The Irish writer John Donoghue has a beautiful quote where he says, The question holds the lantern. The question holds the lantern. And sometimes just the question alone by naming it can actually give us some light and some guidance. And there's also a difference between sort of this need for certainty and this quest for understanding. So what we're about is not just defining the answer. What we're about is kind of naming a question that can allow us to explore in deeper ways some pathways for meaning. And for understanding who we are deep down and who we are in relationship and ultimately who we are before God.

Dan Allen 41:35

Yeah, it's such weighty important things and and what a gift, uh that you this course I'm sure has been to so many people and it's really exciting to hear where it might go and be a gift to so many others, so no of our best wishes for uh for that me certainly and I don't want to speak on behalf of the whole university or something, but, um, just know of, uh, my best wishes that, uh, this goes well. Anything else that we want to

Fr Dan Groody 42:02

do? Oh, I'd like to just, uh, thank you, Dan, for, uh, Having the conversation today, and if this is a theme that you're interested in, we'd like to invite others to join us in the future. We want to spend some time talking about these themes. I'll be joined by Richard Leiter as well, who's done a lot of work on meaning and purpose in the future. And, uh, we'll be looking at both how, how we grow and how we grow old and, and also how we grow wiser. And so if any of these themes strike a chord with you, our hope is that we can open up some doors and spaces to have conversations that matter. So thank you for joining us today on this Heart's Desire and Social Change podcast. My name is Dan Grudy and I'm here as well with John Grodin and Lauren Fox who are helping us in this podcast, as well as Nick Lamson, who is Helped us with some of the music for this series, and I'd like to say again, thank you to Dan Allen for joining us. It

Dan Allen 42:55

was a pleasure. Thanks so much, Father.