I Know Your Biggest Problem
Volume XXVIII, Number 6
May 17, 2024
Read the Whole Thing
If there were ever a time to carefully read my entire message, this is the one. It will change your life if you take it to heart.
Ah, my friends. I miss you. My house renovation is turning into a cliché nightmare—and I'm running out of vacation days and moolah. No real worries, though.
In addition to Your Biggest Problem, I have two quotes and a prayer.
Before we begin, I have a simple personal request: please ask Saint Joseph to send me the guidance, resources, and people I need so I can finish up the house and live a normal life again.
I Know Your Biggest Problem
My friends, that headline is not an exaggeration. I do actually know what your biggest problem is. It is my biggest problem, too, and I have been attacking it relentlessly for the past three years.
I've been doing almost all of the renovations in solitude, so I've had a lot of time to think about how to write the following. This has been weighing on me heavily, like carrying a cross. And it came to me gradually, like waiting for the fresh sprouts of grass I planted a few weeks ago to show up.
Your biggest problem will be a little shocking at first, but stay with me, because I will provide an absolutely fool-proof way to end this terrible challenge we all share.
Enough prelude. Drumroll please...
Namely, your problem is that you do not love God with all your heart, mind, and soul. You do not love Him even close to how much you should. (If you do love God completely, skip down to the end!)
In other words, you do not do all things—every minute of every day—for love of Him and in union with Him. And although virtually everyone reading this does love God to some degree, and wants to pray, and does actually pray, you likely do not pray in such a way that perfects your love for Jesus.
In short, you are not a saint, and neither am I. But that ends today.
Although a significant portion of my tens of thousands of readers are young, most of you are not. At what point, exactly, after all these decades of spiritual mediocrity, were you planning to finally get going on being a saint?
Before I started fasting daily a few years ago—not to be holy—but to inspire others to save our country through divine intervention, my own plan, based on my actual behavior, was to tolerate my sinfulness and spiritual malaise until the day I died. After all, I was "a good Catholic."
- Saint Jerome
Oddly, the Big Problem we share is not my personal opinion, but the studied evaluation of the famous exorcist, Father Chad Ripperger. I have heard him teach this in person and on multiple podcasts, especially to draw people away from the distractions caused by the profound corruption in Church leadership and in our godless, death-loving culture.
For the record, I've met Father Chad on two private retreats, and although we share an impish sense of humor, he's not in my circle of friends and we don't correspond with each other. More or less, I'm just like everybody else who listens to his podcasts.
My favorite thing about Father Chad is that the foundation for just about everything he teaches is rarely his own opinion. Rather, he conveys infallible dogmatic truth as divinely revealed by Jesus Christ and His One Holy Catholic Church, often augmented by the teachings of the saints.
As for solving the big problem of lack of love for God, there is no magic formula. I have simply started doing whatever this guy tells me to do, and my entire life as a consecrated son of Immaculate Mary has been transformed.
He recommended praying the Angelus at 6:00 am, noon, and 6:00 pm, so I did it. Everything he promised would happen, did happen.
People—from strangers to my closest friends and relatives—react to me differently. Because I am different. God is changing me.
I completely understand what Father Chad advises because he is eloquent, calm, and direct. After sixty years of failing to come even close to sanctity, I decided to take the attitude of a little boy, and just trust in the wisdom of the Church.
We Cannot Love God by Our Own PowerIt gets worse, or better, depending on perspective, regarding our problem of not loving God. Why? Because we cannot make ourselves love God. I will repeat this:
Even though we have free will, we cannot make ourselves love God.
This is because God is both the source and the cause of our love for Him. This is a profound truth, so simple, easy to believe, and obvious, and yet, it is difficult to grasp.
I have been pondering this for the better part of a year. Really, deeply, truly pondering it.
The answer, of course, is to ask God—to beg Him—for the grace to love Him. Personally, I beg Him for the grace to love Him the way He loves me.
Straight from Father Chad Ripperger: asking God for the grace to love Him, and making acts of love for Him, prepare us to receive such graces as God chooses to grant us.
As a writer, I fear I may have lost you. The evil one is distracting you, so I repeat: God is the source and cause of the power to love Him.
A Gate We Leave Open to EvilI promised you at the beginning of this year that our theme would be prayer and the Eucharist. (Our bishops are taking care of the Eucharist with the unprecedented National Eucharist Pilgrimage which begins in a few days. I hope you join in!).
As for prayer, at the retreat last October, Father Ripperger stressed that a "gate" that good Catholics leave open to demonic entities is not having a disciplined prayer life.
He advised getting up at 6:00 am, praying the Angelus, getting cleaned up, and then praying for at least half an hour—instead of trying to squeeze it in during the rest of the day.
And not just praying, but focused, bonafide meditative prayer in addition to your devotional prayers.
He asserted, in so many words, that virtually all decent Catholics want to pray, and do pray, but they will refuse to engage in meditative prayer on a rigid schedule because real mental prayer is painful (especially at first). To avoid distraction, it requires discipline and mortification.
Face it, that is why many of you will not attempt the simple Three Angelus devotion—because of the non-negotiable 6:00 am requirement. Even my own son, Xavier, avoided it for several months.
Some of you will will not try the Three Angelus Cure even though I promised you—because Father Chad promised—and my son and I personally testified—that it cleans out virtually all demonic activity and serious sin from your life!
During his talk on the unwillingness of even good Catholics to begin the day with meditative prayer, he observed that Americans are especially soft. I felt like he was talking to directly to me.
With the trust of a little boy, I started doing it the very next day at 6:00 am—after a lifetime of sleeping in at every opportunity. It took a couple months, but eventually I stopped wanting to watch television at night and began going to bed earlier because I started wanting to wake up to be with God.
Since that retreat, I have gotten up every single day at 6:00 am and I have prayed—quite poorly, I assure you. I am not bragging. I am just telling you what happened. I never "feel" anything when I pray. I fight distraction. I remain terrible at it, but noticeably less terrible.
I begin with the Daily Prayers to Save America and then spend time contemplating the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Listening.
The thing is, almost immediately, something wonderful happened, no matter how badly I prayed. Just about every day, all day, I never really stop praying, even though it might appear as if I am working or meeting people.
And God has given me a desire to pray. I want to go to bed. I don't want to watch tv or read my phone. Now I want to sleep just so I can get up and pray and then be with God all day, every day.
I am never going to stop. Has my love for God increased? I have no idea. That is up to Him.
"I Am Prayer"
Recently I heard a podcast that mentioned a particular line in Psalm 109. "I am prayer," says David in Hebrew (often mistranslated as "I am in prayer").
My friends, I am prayer, now. Thank you, Father Chad.
Be like a child. Trust Father Ripperger. Be prayer. Be prayer with me, and with the Holy Trinity, from the beginning of every day to its end. For the love of God, whether you "feel" it or not.
This is the truth. To love God you need to pray.
As I have shared with you many times, I have never been much for self-discipline. It is almost hilarious and pathetic to me that I have spent three long years of fasting, self-denial, giving alms, and literally carrying the True Cross with the other Cyrenes for millions of footsteps for God to divinely intervene to save America and impact billions of lives.
Yet I was not willing to really pray.
It no longer bothers me that we are drowning in a cesspool of death and sin and corruption. I care about going to bed early—so I can get up and pray. And then, spend the rest of the day working in union with God, and being with the people I love in union with God, and then doing it all over again the following day.
Mental prayer requires mortification. Mortification means to kill. Father Chad helped me kill the old Bud.
Next time I write to you, I will share Father's all-important advice on how to pray. He has the answer for that one, too.
But don't wait. Get up early and begin tomorrow.
We've Got This
We need saints. Saints change history. Saints love God. Saints pray the right way. You can do it.
Once again, for the "How," Father Chad will refer you to a master teacher, Saint Francis de Sales. He will teach you how to pray—just as he has been teaching me how to pray since last October. Follow his unerring and practical advice, and you will become prayer.
And so... unless your state in life prohibits it, please join me at 6:00 am tomorrow by offering the first of your three Angeluses, whenever and wherever your 6:00 am happens to be.
And then, pray. Ask for the grace to love God. And keep asking.
"Ask and you shall receive."
-Jesus
Therefore and in Conclusion
Hey, let's review. Our biggest problem is a lack of sufficient love for God.
Because God is the source and cause of love for Him, we must ask for this divine power and prepare ourselves to receive this grace if He chooses to give it to us.
The only effective way to do this is to wake up early and begin your day with meditative prayer, even though this practice is often painful because it requires self-mortification.
Please begin tomorrow, like a trusting child, and then, continue every day for the rest of your life.
The best part is that you get to spend your day with the Holy Trinity, and Mary, and the saints.
Frankly, after sixty-one years of being on this mortal coil, I'm weary of having Bud Thoughts in my mind and in my soul. Now, as my close friend Bart from Chicago aptly put it to me (he's also been putting Father Ripperger's advice into action), the whole idea is to have God Thoughts in your mind all day long.
I only wish I could go back to when I was a young man and start over. Oh well. Like in the Peanuts cartoons: *sigh*
Thanks for reading this to the end. Please consider rereading it.
Let Us Pray......tens of thousands of us together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit....
that never was it known that anyone
who fled to thy protection,
implored thy help,
or sought thy intercession,
was left unaided.
Inspired by this confidence I fly unto thee,
O Virgin of virgins, my Mother.
To thee do I come, before thee I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in thy mercy hear and answer me.
Amen.
My team wanted me to remind you that our orders and financial resources have dipped significantly lately. Part of it is seasonal—a kind of post-Lent and Easter holy hangover—and a big part of it, I suspect, is that our supposedly awesome "economy" and inflation are taking a toll on many of you.
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As for this whole how to be a saint thing, the Mary Foundation is just getting started.
Big, big things are coming to your inbox soon.
You guys are the best! Everything is going to be okay.
With the Queen of Victory,
Bud Macfarlane
Founder
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