The Warrior Priest Podcast

A starving child is a judgment on the world.Agus sin í an fhírinne ghlan—And that is the plain truth.And that judgment begins with us.As a man, I am sickened. The older I get, the more I understand what strength is for. And it is not for conquest. It is not for domination. It is for standing in the breach. For using your body and your words to protect the weak. To be silent now, when children are being choked slowly by hunger, is to surrender manhood itself.As a father, I am undone. I’ve seen my children sick with fever, weak with flu, curled in sleep after a hard day. And I’ve thanked God every time there was food in the house, clean water to give, arms to hold them. I cannot imagine what it is to watch your child waste away because the trucks won’t come, the borders are shut, and the world has turned its face to something more palatable.As a father—Mar athair—I say this: no cause on earth is worth the death of a hungry child.As a priest, I say this plainly and without apology: To starve a child is to spit in the face of God. And if your gospel cannot name that plainly, if your faith bends in cowardly silence while this goes on, then your gospel is not worth preaching.I do not care what side you’re on. I do not care what name you pray to. If you can justify the slow, mechanical murder of a child by hunger in the name of safety, in the name of strategy, in the name of national pride or religious war or economic leverage, then you have already lost your soul. Tá tú caillte—You are lost.

In this episode, I discuss sitting with sadness, conforming our lives to the big “T” truth, the importance of using story to cover our everyday experiences with higher meaning and purpose, and why it’s worthwhile to comtemplate the size of our souls.

The truth is, modern man — "scientific man,” as he likes to call himself — has disarmed himself. He traded his old strength, his old faith, his old stories, for a spreadsheet and a dopamine hit. He threw out the saints and the warriors and enthroned the technocrats. In doing so, he cast off not just God, but his own courage, his own soul.He fashioned himself into a cold machine, a calculator with shoes. And now he wonders why he no longer knows how to love with fire or stand with honor. He’s forgotten what it means to weep for the right things, to feel the blood rise in his chest when the truth is mocked or the innocent are crushed.Instead, he grazes like a herd animal, restless, obedient, anxious.And in this vacuum, the managers come.With policies. With dashboards. With endless “solutions” that strip the soul bare while telling you they’ve come to make your life easier.

A Thiarna, i mo thuirse, ná tréig mé. (O Lord, in my weariness, do not forsake me.)Tuirse is not only the sag of limbs at the end of a long day. It is deeper than that. It is the hush that gathers behind the eyes when hope has gone too far ahead and no longer waits for you. It is the weight in the chest, like a stone settling, when the sea gives no reply to your longing, and the hills echo back only the sound of your name, and nothing more.Tuirse does not arrive only at nightfall. It can come in the middle of conversation, slipping in silently when your words falter and ache behind the teeth. It lingers in the silence of letters never sent, in the stillness of roads you meant to walk but did not. It waits in the hunger for a face you can no longer name, though your heart still knows the shape of it.And yet, even in tuirse, there is something more.There is a stirring, quiet but sure. A breath that does not come from you, but for you. Not sorrow, but grace. Not heaviness, but a settling—gentle, steady, and given.Pronunciation: TUR-shuh / Uh HEER-nuh, ih muh HUR-shuh, naw trayg may

In the modern West, the hearth has gone cold. The fires that once knit family and village together have been replaced with a different flame—the flickering blue light of the screen. John Michell warned of this in his strange, luminous writings. He saw how the displacement of the hearth led to the displacement of meaning. No longer do we gather around a living fire, telling the old stories, hearing the wisdom passed down in hushed voices. No—we huddle instead around the electric glow of mass-produced stories, sold to us by the same companies who profit from our outrage, our fear, our endless hunger for novelty.Michell said it plainly: once the hearth was the link between heaven and earth. Now, that chain has rusted. The fire we stare into now is cold, sterile, dead.The folk tales are gone. The folk songs are gone. Replaced by noise.And it matters. God help us, it matters. Because without the old songs, without the old myths, without the fire that once drew our gazes upward and outward toward wonder, we become small. Smaller than we were meant to be. Easily led. Easily frightened. Easily bought. It is a short step from forgetting your own songs to singing the songs of your conquerors.And so here we are: divided, outraged, distracted. The paradise of the rich, Victor Hugo said, is built out of the hell of the poor. And our masters know it. They fuel it. They love it. They need it.And we go on, applauding them, fighting each other, shouting ourselves hoarse over scraps.We have forgotten who we are. Forgotten the hearth. Forgotten the brotherhood. Forgotten the great chain that links heaven to earth, earth to hearth, hearth to heart.And unless we remember, unless we kneel, as T.S. Eliot said—not kneel before flags or corporations or the endless cult of Self, but kneel before the living God—unless we kneel, we will continue to slouch. To spectate. To slip away into silence...

But the truth is quieter than that. It moves without slogans. It walks without a flag.It looks like this: a deaf and blind man named Tim, finding his way onto a flight in Boston, one hand stretched out into the dark. And a stranger gives up his seat, and flight attendants allow their faces to be touched so he can know they are there, so he can feel the kindness in the lines of their cheeks. It looks like a fifteen-year-old girl named Clara, spelling words into the palm of a man she’s just met—letter by letter, patience and grace made flesh.This is the revolution the world forgets. The kind that takes no pictures. The kind that doesn’t tweet. The kind that doesn’t need a camera crew to know it mattered.

...when we say, “I am depressed,” we start to believe the sorrow is the whole of us. That it's etched into the skin, like a birthmark. That it's our name now. But when we say, “The sorrow is on me,” we leave room. Room for the truth that this thing might lift. That it might pass. That we are more than what presses us down.There’s a similar pattern in Scots Gaelic, in older English, in Hiberno-English still found in country places. You’ll hear it in the way people used to talk:“The fear came over me.”“A sadness was upon her.”Those turns of phrase weren’t just poetic, they reflected a whole way of understanding the soul. That feelings are visitations. Weather fronts. Shadows that fall, and then pass. Spirits, maybe, fleeting, but strong.In that old world, the self was not an island but a wide field, open to the wind and the Word. And so, what came upon a person—sorrow, joy, fear—was not owned, but witnessed. Not claimed, but endured.

What happened to you is not your identity. The wound you carry, the abuse you suffered, doesn’t get to have the final word. It’s part of your story, yes. It has shaped you, but it cannot define you, because Someone greater has stepped into your pain and claimed you as His own. Jesus knows exactly how it feels to be betrayed, violated, and wounded—He knows it in His flesh and blood. He knows it on a cross. He knows it in the scars He carries still. And what He says to you, right now, is that you belong to Him. And because you belong to Him, that means your wounds belong to Him, too. Your pain is held, seen, and loved—deeply loved—by the One who carries scars of His own. And here’s what makes all the difference: His wounds can heal yours. - D.

We live in an age of collapse. Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, even physically, we are coming undone. The signs are everywhere. The old symbols no longer hold meaning. The words spoken in sacred places ring hollow. Our stories, once full of weight, have been traded for distractions that pass like dust in the air. We were given something rich, something rooted, something deep—and we have spent the last century peeling it away, layer by layer, as if we believed we could stand without the thing that held us up.And now we feel it—the weightlessness, the drift, the growing sense that something is missing, though few can name what it is. -D.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the old way of seeing, the deep sense that a pattern lies beneath all things. Scientific materialists insist we’re nothing more than arrangements of dirt, that our griefs and joys are sparks in a gray swirl of neurons. The Gnostics preach the world is a wicked trap, that matter is a cage for the spirit. But both stray from the bedrock truth. When God spoke the world into being, He called it good. Not flawed, not worthless—good. Yet, wandering in the world we see now—hard ground, hungry eyes, a planet bristling with harm—we wonder what went astray.