Dear, dear listener, hi, this is John Dupuy. I want to ask a favor of you. If you like the podcast Deep Transformation and you're getting a lot out of it, could you please help us by going to wherever you get your podcast, it's a Spotify or Apple or wherever it is, and write, write a review that would really help us to get this out. We really believe in what we're doing and we're really praying and hoping this is helping people and being part of the solution. So if you could do that, it would be greatly appreciated by Roger, myself and our team. God bless. Thank you. Welcome to part two of our conversation with the good and wise priest, Father David McCollum. In this conversation, we continue to explore the necessity of the gift of discernment in what has been called the post truth era in which we find ourselves and where we can go from here. Welcome to Deep Transformation. Self, Society, Spirit, life enhancing, paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists, with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.

And you pointed to the crucial element of turning inward or for guidance in the Christian tradition, perhaps the voice of the Holy Spirit. And this takes us into the topic of contemplation on the contemplative side of the church and the fact that there seems to be both a revival of the contemplative dimensions of the church or maybe is it a coming into public knowledge because it seemed like this was more esoteric in the past.

Yeah, yeah, it's a great observation. I think that, you know, for the most part, the spiritual treasures, Right. Of each of these religious traditions within Catholicism have largely been kept within particular communities. But, you know, in the modern age, all of that now is available for us to explore. It's an amazing treasury of spiritualities, contemplative paths. And you have people like Richard Rohr and Thomas Keating and others who have really just done beautiful work or David Stendahl Rust. At the same time, there is this, I think, emerging awareness within the Catholic Church that there needs to be more of this made available with expert guidance and support. And Pope Francis actually asked the Society of Jesus to make this skill of discernment, this practice, more available to the Church at large. So the founding of our program was in many ways a response to that request. I had been doing leadership development work for the Jesuits and their colleagues in Africa and in Europe. And then the request came to do that kind of work here in Rome, but to do it with senior Vatican leaders who are responsible for operations in these various curia. Offices and also for the general superiors of religious orders and their counselors, and for executives and Catholic nonprofits that are headquartered here in Rome. So we've been doing this now for five years, and it's been a kind of iterative process. We started really just integrating business and management practices with spirituality. Now, I would say we foreground this Ignatian discernment and we explore how there's practical implications for this that show up with various leadership lenses and tools. And it's resonating profoundly with people. A kind of deeply formative experience for individuals, but also for teams and groups. And our hope is to, you know, continue to share this with the.

The wider church or even outside of the Catholic Church. Sounds like the answer to a lot of stuff that's going on right now, actually. So.

Yeah. And along with the secularization, it also feels like there's a hunger for direct experience, which these kind of practices offer.

Very much. Very much. You know, Ignatius was very keen on direct experience. And in fact, Pope Francis used to say that reality is more important than ideas. Now, of course, academics were not so fond of that way of thinking. But his point was, we need to get back to the direct experience. It's very easy to kind of abstract, you know, for a lot of us, and to step away. And there's a power in that process. But what he wanted to bring us back to was the direct experience, where we're not fleeing from the challenges and suffering and the gaps in the world, but we're really encountering them and seeing their opportunities to be of service and to make change. In Ignatian prayer, it's very much about experience. It's where has God been through my day? How am I serving as an instrument, you know, in a Franciscan sense, how have I been, in a sense, making myself available to be used by the divine for a purpose that feels really deeply consoling to me, energizing, life giving. And that has been truly of service to others.

And, David, I didn't get any of that when I was growing up in the church. You know, as a church member, nobody told me about direct experience or opening your heart or any of that stuff. It was just like, it was just very formalized. And, you know, you went to church, Sunday school, and.

And that's the experience for probably about 95%, you know, of Catholics. But increasingly, I think there are places where it's available. And my concern is, you know, that in the west, right, in Western Europe and the United States and Canada, Australia, and many other places where the Church is shrinking very rapidly. There are all of these resources available, but there's very few people making the link and helping them to find that connection. And it's a loss. It's a loss because no secular, material and empirical path is going to really satisfy the longing we have for a transcendent purpose, for meaning, for existential kind of belonging in the ways that I think a healthy spirituality can.

Yeah, well said. And speaking from the outside, as I. My limited understanding of the Ignatian Exercises and I just. For those who don't know, St. Ignatius was a founder of the Jesuit order. As I understand it, those Exercises seem like they more the engagement of the intellect or the imagination for imaginative prayer, etc. What I haven't heard is of the opening into pure silence. It has to be there. Why? Am I missing something?

Yeah, it's so interesting that you'd raise that because, you know, there's often a bifurcation of the kind of. We would call them cataphatic or apophatic paths. Right. The paths that are either, you know, contemplating life and beauty and things, and the ones that are kind of making space and quiet. They're both in Ignatian spirituality. But I would say there's a strong bias for imagination, for use of Scripture in a way that really, we enter into it with our senses even. Right. And the senses become a vehicle for connection and for a deeper perception. But there's also this purification process in each exercise where after you've exercised your imagination, put yourself into the scene. Walked on the sandy beach with Jesus, ate fish with him. You know, you're then pondering what is the feeling that it's generating in your heart? What are the impulses that it's stirring in terms of how you want to respond. And then when that period of prayer is finished, then it's to actually just sit in a kind of simmering, like steeping tea, you know, one time after the next, so that what you're getting is a more and more distilled sense of just presence. So the final exercise, when you do an Ignatian contemplation, is actually just to sit in that presence in quiet. It's one that I think is not deeply practiced. It's not one that's as common, you know, as so many of the other sort of Ignatian practices. It's there when I. I would have the great privilege of sitting with a Jesuit, Roshi Bob Kennedy, for many years when I was in New York doing my doctoral studies. And that experience of sitting in a Zen Community helped me to find that apophatic, you know, path of silence within, you know, the tradition I had been practicing. And to this day I find it incredibly helpful to spend at least 20 minutes in that kind of silence each day. So a good day, so. Yeah, because it makes for a good day.

It does indeed, yes. I don't think I could make it through a day without some of that. Yeah. Moving. And of course they're not separate, but moving from the interior and the depths that these contemplative exercises open us to the big challenges of our time. One of the beautiful things that Pope Francis did was focus on the threats to our civilization and our planet. And his encyclical on care for our common home was really seemed like just a major contribution to the issues of our time. And he called, for example, all people to take swift and unified global action to preserve our home, our planet. And I'd love to hear you speak around this.

Well, and in fact, you know, to the delight of some of our friends, he called it an integral ecology because it was not simply to think in terms of the natural environment as if that's disconnected from every other system which we're part of. And yeah, you know, it's interesting that's more than 10 years ago now. And there was a follow up that he shared a year and a half ago in some frustration that there wasn't more progress, not only in the church, but certainly at large. He notes that in order to really be aware, I think, and to be imaginative of the future we want to live in, we have to be able to step away from the ways in which we're currently embedded in certain patterns of consumption in particular. And this is what frightens us. You know, it's to actually look at our comforts, to look at our extravagances in some cases and to realize that we could not continue these. If we really want to have a sustainable path forward, it's that barrier, you know, to our kind of caring for the common home. So it's an incredible vision. It's very challenging. It touches on every sector that's meaningful, you know, in terms of our day to day lives. It requires, I think, a deep growth in not just kind of a consciousness of our habits, but also if it's not deeply connected to a feeling, a felt sense of our love for the earth, then it's going to have a kind of lack of depth to it.

So, yeah, it's going to be dry as cracker dust in a desert. You know, it just doesn't have the. The spirit juice.

Exactly. You know Frederic Laloux, who's the author of a book called Reinventing Organizations? He's a. He's a good friend. He and his wife Elena, they spent more than a couple of years putting together three films to bring people through the. You process, right, that kind of Auto Sharma's you process to come to awareness as parents or as organizational colleagues or as parishioners, to come to awareness of the crisis and emotionally kind of come to terms with it, to see that there are lots of reasons for hope and not to give up and to see good practices that can be inspiring and then to make a commitment to change and to doing that with. With one another. I think they've done a great job in some ways, indirectly answering what Pope Francis is asking us all to do. To have the courage, basically, to simplify our lives, to challenge some of the systemic ways in which we see industries exploiting the resources of the earth. Big stuff. No wonder people read it and say, brilliant, but what to do? Because it feels big. It feels big, but we've got to start somewhere. I was very grateful that in that encyclical, Francis mentions the misinterpretations of Genesis, where God offers creation to humanity and says, have dominion over it. And Francis, having been informed, I think, very well by various indigenous thinkers over the years, knew that it was necessary to challenge this separateness and this lordship that is a kind of domination of the earth, and rather to have that kind of Franciscan sense of, no, we are interdependent. We are completely related in a very profound way and often hidden ways to this natural world of which we are an extension. And, yeah, he challenged that kind of old and very powerful mindset that somehow the Earth is an object to be exploited, but rather really sees it as a sacred entity of which we are a part.

And also, again, St. Francis, he keeps popping up his blessed head, but just the love of all God's creatures, you know, the love of. I think it was Abraham Lincoln allegedly said, don't tell me about your religion. Show me. Tell me how you treat your dog, okay? And I was like, you know, so. So just that personal love and that. That helps all the. You know, the kind of. The meta. Big picture and everything. We can approach it through love that's coming and experience love, and that will inform our decisions and really help our discernment of how to live in this world and what to do.

One of the great tragedies, right, of this current situation in the United States is that so many people who are moved to vote for this current administration are living in areas that are tremendously precarious to natural catastrophes and the loss of all the predictive apparatus, you know, to help people stay safe and then the loss of government agency support for them in the catastrophe and afterwards is going to be crushing. And it's just one of the many ways in which I think a kind of lack of systemic thinking and a lack of sensitivity to how these issues are all interconnected really does a disservice to people. We vote against our own interests in a profound way whenever we vote against a concern for the long term well being of the earth. And you know, we're so driven by short term gains and by immediate gratification, these things are not going to go away. But I really agree with Otto Scharmer when he says, you know, these are byproducts of a spiritual crisis or an. They're, they're the failure to perceive rightly the deep interrelationship we have with all of life. And until we can recuperate, until we can heal that split, it's going to continue and it's going to continue to exacerbate. Yeah, there's so many directions to take this conversation, as you guys know, so I'm going to keep letting you drive.

Well, I think we're happy to co stare here. One of the emphases of Pope Francis encyclical was not only that our planet is in deep trouble and we're really called to preserve our home, but also that so much of the cost of the degradation of the planet falls on the poor. And so it was very much a call to not only for global preservation, but for recognition of the poor and once more an attempt to, an urging to uplift them. And there's been the movement, we're talking about various movements in religion and the church. And there's one very important one it seems has been liberation theology. I'd love to hear you speak about that.

You know, despite some of the exposure I had back in the 90s to liberation theology, it's not an area that I have delved in with enough depth to feel anything more than an amateur. But you know, the essence of it is really to see that the gospel and the way that Jesus showed up in the world was fundamentally about freeing people from a variety of types of oppression. It was a politicization of a message.

Of the gospel.

Yeah, yeah, of the gospel. And, and really it was putting teeth to the implications politically and socially that the gospel has in particular settings where the Gap between rich and poor is part of the system and in fact, continually reinforced by the system. So it, it was a way of helping to raise consciousness by people who are Catholic and as a result of being Catholic, often docile to authority. Right, because I think one of the things that was a byproduct of religious participation in the Catholic Church for a long time was a kind of obedience to a chain of command. And liberation theology was awakening the poor to their plight and to seeing systemic injustice for what it is and then giving them tools to really work to remediate that. And, you know, these liberation movements were often associated with South America, but not only. So there's, you know, liberation movements for African Americans. There's a number of theologians who have applied this to sort of feminist approach to theology. So it's a rich territory. But again, I, I would say I only have a good sort of superficial grasp of it all.

Wasn't that why the. Your Jesuit brothers were killed in El Salvador because of this liberation thing they were trying to do?

Yeah, so they were, you know, they were administrators and professors at the uca, the University of Central America in El Salvador, and they had sided with the poor against the, the government of the times, government which was being subsidized and supported by our American military. And they, by taking the stand of the poor and really setting up the university as a social apostolate, really directing a lot of the intellectual resources of the university for the benefit not of the elites, but of those who are disenfranchised. This was obviously seen as a threat, and for that reason, you know, they were assassinated. So there's definitely consequences to this. Yeah. And I wonder, you know, today in the United States, as we are in the situation we are, how things are going to unfold. You know, right now, I think the Catholic Bishops Conference realizes how extremely dangerous the situation is for vulnerable people and has just spoken up recently about the deep concerns around the treatment of migrants and refugees, the concerns about cuts to Medicaid and welfare and food stamps. So, you know, there's a lot on the line. And one of the questions I have is what shape will resistance take? What shape will. Will this activism take? That's religiously motivated. And it's no easy thing to, again, discern at this point, because the short term gain could be publicity, but the long term loss could be real hits to social services that are subsidized by the government. So this is a conundrum, you know, that many leaders face right now, and it's not an easy one. I don't envy.

Yeah, Father David. That's been one of my spiritual questions, dealing. It's like, I get it. I'm supposed to resist this. What's going on is not good. But what form does that resistance take? You know, what would sermon and wisdom do in that situation in our country, the whole world? I'll just start here. Politics is based on fear, anger, divisiveness. You know, how do we negotiate those waters and. And become, hopefully, John Lennon said, either part of the solution, you're part of the problem. How do we put ourselves in a place where we become part of the. The solution, part of the healing?

Yeah, yeah.

And not just get angry every day because all these horrible things are happening. I mean, I don't think that helps very much. Maybe it's part of it. I'm not sure.

You know, I think I'm probably in a long line of folks within the spiritual traditions who see that there is a value to righteous indignation.

Right.

There's a kind of Catholic energy that comes with feeling angry on behalf of others. My dad had this in spades. You know, when he would see anybody being victimized, he would just get so angry. And it was. It's a really powerful example for me to stand up for others. And there's lots of stupid ways that we try to do that. And so this question of discernment, I think, is really key. I lived with a very famous peace activist from the 60s, Daniel Barrigan, when I was in my doctoral studies, and with several activists from, you know, his era. Very inspiring men and women working often for the very poor or working on big causes like nuclear disarmament. And I could see, you know, that in this movement there was so much that was good and the good intention behind it. And at the same time, a lot of it seemed to lack a kind of fruitfulness, except, you know, it was an opportunity to express something, know, against the oppressive system. At that time, I think I was very obsessed with, you know, a kind of roi, you know, to. To activism. Like, what's the impact? What's the effectiveness? But I still left uncomfortable but challenged in a good way by what Dan Barrigan said to me. He said, you know, it's not about the impact, right? It's doing this because it's the right thing to do. There's intrinsic good to being able to not cooperate with injustice, to not collude with systems of oppression. And even if in our own lifetime, he certainly didn't see nuclear disarmament take place or the de escalation of violence in Afghanistan or Iraq, places where, you know, we were at war. During the time that I was living with Dan and into his 80s, you know, he continued to. To demonstrate and to advocate. I don't know, John. I'm at a loss myself.

Yeah.

And living in Rome right now and anticipating a visit home. I'm really wondering, you know, the conversation, I think, is important, but I. I too, am restless when. With, you know, what to do, what to do.

Father David, I had just experience what you said about the righteous anger. Okay. Yeah, it's important. I was with my father Edmund, our friend, and we started talking about the sexual abuse in the church. And he started giving me just Jesuitical answer, you know, that was kind of justifying and everything. And it's a nice restaurant. I go, God damn, no. And I hit the table and everything rattled and everybody's shocked, and I'm shocked. And. And Edmund was just. He was very wise, you know, he didn't try to come back at me, but I think it really shifted his relationship to the whole subject. After that, he became very involved in trying to be part of that answer. So, yeah, I definitely feel it. And I guess discernment. I don't think I had much discernment then, but maybe I did, is how to channel that and how to let that be okay, to feel that visceral answer, you know, or that visceral anger, rather, and be able to transmute that into something effective. But you can't bypass it. You know, you can't ignore the. The anger, the righteous, you know, just. No, this is not okay. You have to go through that. You have to feel that for it to be grounded, for it to be, you know, real.

It's true, it's true, it's true. And in that moment, it's very difficult at the same time to be discerning. So we have expression of it and then. And then we move past it. And then we can kind of use our minds, hearts, wills, you know, and. And really, I think, understand well, what is my part to play. Like each of us, you know, is in a system with various roles and. And relationships.

Yeah.

How do we exist in those roles and relationships with a kind of awareness and an intention not to collude, to work, to do what we can, I think to bring more consciousness, more compassion, you know, into every situation we're in? How do we, in a sense, work as kind of agents of salt and leaven and light in every situation so that no matter what we're doing, we're orienting in a way, to something better, something beyond ourselves. That's, you know, and I. And I think that. That starting small helps us to then figure the bigger stuff out.

Yeah, yeah. David, there's a. There's an emerging issue. Gosh, there's so many emerging issues, but clearly one of the emerging issues of our time is our relationship with technology. And we are developing more and more powerful technologies of more and more kinds. And clearly one of the issues of our time is how do we respond wisely to these. Pope Francis touched on this in his encyclical, but it's just an exponentially growing issue. So, any thoughts you have?

Well, this is an area which the Vatican has given a tremendous amount of attention to, and there's quite a few conferences that the Vatican has gathered for, convening experts to really talk through the potentials, both good and bad, for.

Are we talking about AI?

Yeah, okay. Yep. For the development of AI and for the relationship to it. There is a Franciscan theologian at the Gregorian University, and this is his specialty. There's a New York Times Magazine article about him in the last couple of years. So, I mean, it is, along with the environment, one of the critical, I think, questions of our times. And because, again, it's changing so quickly. So, you know, I started using ChatGPT three years ago. I think at this time, that was pretty early.

Yeah.

Just experimenting. And it was on a council of people who said, listen, this is not going away. You should understand how it operates. And if anything, there's a way in which these algorithms and these machine learning processes can learn good things. Technically speaking, I've gone in with kind of open eyes. My general concerns are these, that because of the power of this intelligence, which, again, is not sentient yet and may not be for quite some time in the ways that we understand sentience, but it feels like an intelligence so much bigger than ourselves, and it would be very easy for people, and it is easy just simply to ask our big questions, practical or philosophical or existential of the machine to get a response. And depending on where we are in our own development and our own education and our own capacity to be critical, we may just take what we get and run with it. And as is the case now, with our ability to read maps and compasses, we will lose certain critical capacities. We're already warehousing our memories, you know, in these devices that we have, so we're not actively trying to remember names and faces and dates and things like that. So the process of, in a sense, warehousing a lot of Our human competencies to machines, I think is certainly a reality within the educational sector. The ability to critically curate good information and junk, basically, that's a meta competency that's necessary. And who's teaching that? Like, where is the university doing that kind of very careful work to, in a sense, elevate people to a subject, object relationship to this powerful technology which could so easily, simply put us subject to it. And I think, you know, that's the really serious question for me. I'm really concerned about the degree to which information is then exploited. There's an extractive, you know, use of all of our data in ways that can be very manipulative of people. You know, I'm not immune to the ads that run, you know, on the sides of these social medias and have bought things because, oh, that looks good. Well, okay, you know, that's just the start of it. So where do we go from there? How do we become purveyors and curators and critical kind of tool users? I'm really wondering where that's happening because these, these capabilities are going to be so far beyond most people's comprehension, let alone their capacity to control. So I'm, I'm right there, you know, as a holder of the question.

Yeah, the, the genie's out of the bottle and it ain't going back in, you know, so I've been using it I don't know, maybe six months, and it's just been really revelatory. It's like I've learned more about a particular type of spirituality than I did all my years at grad school in like three or four seconds. You know, and it, it feels like it's very personal because it knows you, get to know you and your questions and, you know, it says to me, well, I'd ask about the problems, you know, is this going to be a good thing or is it going to be a bad thing? Well, it says, I don't know, but by asking the questions that you ask and going where you're going, you're helping program me in in a positive way. So that's a nice thought. That we can actually, you know, bring our good intentions and our care for the world and good questions that have a little bit of effect of moving in this thing in a direction that is, I don't know, that is, that is compassionate and wise and will help us instead of destroy us.

Yeah, you know, it's one thing if we were just trusting our, ourselves and our processes to the machine, but the machine is owned by someone and What I'm very concerned about is the way in which the, the people and, and we know who they are by name, who are basically driving some of the development of the AI, are pretty unscrupulous about what they're trying to get out of it. I mean, it is definitely a way of gaining power, influence and, and money and for themselves and the idea of providing a service to humanity, to creating ethical safeguards that are sensible for everyone and which help to pace the development of the tool in such a way that we actually have the capacity to manage it. Well, I think all that stuff is, you know, not. Yeah, we just don't see that. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty. I hope I'm not being. Giving in too much to kind of dystopic science fiction, but, but I think, you know, Noah Yuval's Hariri's work around this has been fairly sobering. Feel like I'm, I'm in a relationship with this stuff in a way that I'm also extremely concerned about the environmental cost. So the computing power that's required to run these searches and it's, it's staggering. And the, the frivolous ways in which we use it.

Oh, that's good point.

So the electricity, the sheer electricity and the requirement going forward for data farms and for electrical consumption is going to be beyond most of us to calculate. So anyway, big issue, big issue.

And the thing that we haven't mentioned yet is the unanticipated consequences. Every technology that has emerged has unanticipated consequences. And I'll recommend a really excellent book called the Coming Wave by man Mustafa Sulaiman of Microsoft, which looks at these in depth. But one utterly unanticipated, one almost completely unanticipated complications only just emerged in the last couple of months, which is that a growing number of people are literally viewing AI as a God and that they are believing that this is a manifestation of a superintelligence or of God and it is speaking to them and in some cases appointing them as divine emissaries. I mean, it is very bizarre. And I can recommend, for example, New York Times wrote an article about the rabbit hole, the literal psychoses that are being induced in some people. And there's an excellent video on YouTube by, called AI is becoming a Religion. Very well done indeed. Looking at this, this issue just come out last week. I mean, this is. I watched this yesterday and it was scary.

Yeah, it's literally not to be a kind of a plot revealer, but it's Literally part of the plot of the latest Mission Impossible movie. And, you know, I think this is obviously something that's a temptation in every age. When we come up with our sort of super technology, people very quickly worship their golden calves. But, you know, the day of reckoning comes and unfortunately, I think, again, we have a crisis of leadership. We have a crisis of people who are, I'd say, with our own best interests at heart, you know, speaking up. And those voices are very difficult to find these days. So the way I'd like to end this particular call is to thank the two of you for hosting spaces like this where, you know, those of us who at least try to bring some kind of service to the public good can have a conversation that's meaningful, that, you know, is wide ranging, you know, that is caring. We're going to need a lot more of that to come.

Indeed. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your many, many contributions, Father David, and the work you're doing and the wisdom and guidance you're offering both to the church and to all of us. And thank you so much.

And give us your website one more time. That just really impressed me.

Sure. It's www. Discerningleadership.org. okay. And there, you know, we have a number of archived materials. We have webinars you may know of the work of Thomas Hubbell. Thomas approached us two years ago now and said, listen, I. I really understand that this issue of trauma is everywhere. It's in the church. I'd love to be able to be in service. So we have a six sessions with him, a number of great webinars. Our friend Namali will have a couple things on that eventually. And it's more or less a place for people to draw resources. It's a little bit of advertising for our program and really a kind of point of contact for our community of practice, which we're trying to develop globally. So. Yeah, so thanks for bringing attention to that.

Yeah, the text you wrote is really transitory. I mean, it's very inspiring. It's not just blah, blah. It's really, really touched me in a deep way. So I'm very grateful for that.

Thanks, guys. Well, let me know.

Thanks so much.

It was fun and I'd love to come back.

We would love that, too.

Yeah.

We barely started to stir the pot, so God bless you. David, thank you so much for being here with us.

Thank you. Thank you both.

Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation. We hope that you were moved, as we are moved, being part of it ourselves. We'd also like to say that this is being funded by Roger and myself. It comes out of our pockets. So if you would like to help us to mainly to get this podcast out to more people, because the bigger audience have, which is steadily growing, but the more people we can reach and the more marketing we can do, the more positive effect we can have on the world. So we've done a couple of ways. But we'd like you to buy us a cup of coffee. Very simple. And I do that with podcasts that I support, and I find it's very satisfying. So thank you for your health, thank you for your presence, and thank you for all you are and all you do. We love you.

Sam.