Transcript of S2 EP12 Episode: Accepting God’s Love as a Turning Point (with fr. Mike Manning)
Tajci:
Today I’m coming to you from WordNet studios in San Bernardino, California to bring to you one of my favorite bearers of light and joy in our world. A Catholic priest, a good friend, Father Mike Manning. Father Mike has been, through his television programming, mending bridges between denominations and religions, advocating for the poor and bringing up really great down-to-earth perspective on all kinds of life issues always with a big smile on his face and love and compassion in his heart.
BUMPER:
I’m Tajci. At 19 I was a superstar and I was lost inside. I left it all behind, switched continents and started all over. Years later I found myself lost again, this time in the American Dream. This is a story about awakening. About living the life you were created for. About going inward and discovering the joyous and purposeful person you and I are both meant to be. This is Waking Up in America.
Tajci: Father Mike, thank you so much.
Mike: My honor to be with you. And here we are in my own digs.
Tajci: Yes. I dreamt about this moment that someday I would have you on my show.
Mike: Oh, it’s an honor doing it with you my dear friend. We’ve been friends for many good years.
Tajci: Yes, yes. And you’ve had me on your show.
Mike: Yes.
Tajci: Which has been running for how many years?
Mike: Gosh. I don’t know. I started back doing television actually in 1972. Long time ago. And so it’s been since then just trying to preach the gospel as best as I can.
Tajci: Yes. And I love, you know, when I first met you I was in a very, very difficult place in my life. And I remember just how much joy you brought to me and how, you know, I felt I dealt with a lot of judgment—self-judgment mostly and you… this comes out in every episode and on your iGod app. You know, just this non-judgmental, embracing, really loving message.
Mike: That’s what I think God is all about. In the first place God has created us all and so we have that reality of God, loving every creation that He’s made, you know, whether what their religion, from what country they are, what language they speak, He loves all people. Then we come to Jesus and we come to this experience that you and I have had of loving Jesus very much and wanting to do it. And I think the fire of Jesus’ love is to try to get people to come to His Father. So when I see a Jew or a Muslim loving the Father, I know that Jesus is very relaxed with that. You know, He’s a lover.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: And He’s not gonna be jealous or something like this and it’s going to be that spirit of openness and acceptance that is a very important.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: Non-judgmental. Letting God take care of the relationship.
Tajci: Yes. And that’s why I love you and I love what you do and I love who you are. And my audience is, many of my audience are non-believers and you know, you’re my actually first Catholic priest
Mike: Oh really? Okay.
Tajci: On this show. It’s a special episode because of that. But let’s go from the beginning. You know, a lot of people, we don’t understand why anybody would go to become a priest. You know, it’s a lonely life. You can’t get married. You belong to a big structure, big institution that many people are, you know, have a hard time with.
Mike: Yes.
Tajci: Tell me about your beginnings.
Mike: Well, I wanted to be a priest all my life. There was a young priest, Father Bob Fusselman back in Monsey, Indiana, where I was born. He was very deeply loved by my family. And just growing up I saw Father Bob and I saw the beauty of even sitting as a three or four-year-old watching that. And I was very much inflamed with the idea of following in those steps. I think we follow somebody we admire very much and we move on to that. So I just moved in that direction. Is it difficult? Yeah, sure it’s difficult. But at the same time I really believe deep in my heart that this is what God wants me to do. And because of that I’m able to go through some of the valleys and the mountains in order to try to come to the understanding of how I can use the gift that God has given me to share to others.
Tajci: So it was always your dream.
Mike: For a while I wanted to play first base with the Chicago White Sox.
Tajci: Okay.
Mike: But that was a very, very wishful thinking thing. But no, the priesthood, I went to the seminary when I was 14 and just loved it ever since. So I was ordained when I was 28, which means that I spent half my life in the seminary. And my life as a priest has been one of great fulfillment in many ways, granted that there is not the thing like you have with your three boys. I don’t have the biological children that I do. And I don’t have a wife. You might have met Matthew with your spouse. But I have been really able to reach out in a sense of freedom to try to serve the people of God as best I can and believing this is what God has called me to.
Tajci: Right.
Mike: And then going to try to become as available as I can to the people that may be needing help—whether it’s celebrating mass, or preaching, or just sitting down and talking with people a number of times. Yesterday I spent a couple hours at the jail here in San Bernardino. And I’ve been doing that for all my ministry as a priest. Great, great joy, for me, being in those situations. They are very tough.
Tajci: Yes, and you were obviously able to offer healing, which is a huge part of who you are. And really all of our purpose. All of us, I think we share the common purpose to bring healing, love and joy into the world. So you know, in this show we talk about being stuck in somebody else’s dream or having to speak somebody else’s words. A lot of people go into careers that you know, look good on paper, or you know, promised a great, secure future. Maybe it’s your father’s dream for you.
Mike: Sure.
Tajci: So being a priest I would think that, did you ever experienced that you were not so free to really be who you are meant to be but you had to be, you know?
Mike: Of course, yes. There’s regulations in the church. For example, falling in love with a woman, you know, very much was a reality of my life. And then it came a moment of decision of should I get married or should I not get married? Should I choose this priesthood or not? And with much prayer and also working with the woman to come to a clarity of saying, “I think I need to move in the direction of continuing as a priest,” you know. Tough. Very tough, you know. Very touch to love someone and then being able to say, “I’m gonna step away from that.” But I think that’s what has strengthened me in terms of being a priest. Is it easy? No. Is it fulfilling? Yes. And it’s allowing me, I think in very many ways, with the pain of what I’m experiencing to perhaps be a little bit more accessible to people in some of the things that they’re going through because I can relate to that in a good way, you know.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: In a good way. And I hope the love that I experience—and I say experience because it isn’t something that you cut off—allows me to be able to love other people with the richness and the greatness that I didn’t have before. Does that make sense?
Tajci: It does. And that exactly is what draws me to you—that honestly, that willingness to go deep and deal with all of these parts of your journey which are parts of everyone’s journey.
Mike: Well, it’s the church in which I’m acknowledging this is one of the realities. And I love the church. I love the church in many ways. Not necessarily the institutional church but I love the church that I celebrate with on Sunday and the seven-years-olds that come up for first confession and being able to love them and care for them, or sitting down with a young couple that are planning to get married and sharing with them some of my own experiences but also the experiences of some of the struggling marriages that I’ve had to deal with in others, hopefully giving them, that becomes the church.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: Rather than the bunch of men walking around in skirts and you know, with fancy clothes and whatnot that sometimes can seem very distant. But it’s the hurting living people that Pope Francis is talking about.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: It’s the sheep that we’re supposed to smell like.
Tajci: That’s right. Great point. We’ll talk more about that when we come back. I’m talking to Father Mike Manning, Catholic priest who is just a bearer of joy and love in our world.
This is so wonderful and this is your set.
Mike: This is our set in doing the show. We do about 40 shows a year. Half of them are interviews and half of them are things I do on my own.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: And I just had to share mainly with a Bible theme I try when I do my own, trying to do this. I did, a year before, I did a series on women of the Old Testament.
Tajci: I remember that.
Mike: That was a lot of fun.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: And a little bit of a shock too because I read the Bible but when you bring all 15 of the one I did, holy mackerel, what are they doing in the Bible that it kind of throws you out on a kilter. But what’s really fun is that these very extraordinary and sometimes questionable lives are things that can be related to today, by the way.
Tajci: Tell me about that.
Mike: Well, stories of prostitutes, you know, and one woman, who, because her father-in-law would not give her a husband from the family, decides to seduce him. And so, hello? And then you try to say, “We’ll see how I could bring this into our own lives.” That’s the challenge.
Tajci: Yes. How do you live that in your life?
Mike: Well, the life of the Bible you mean?
Tajci: Yes, the reaching out to the prostitute and reaching out to those disenfranchised?
Mike: It’s interesting. I mentioned to you I have a ministry in prison and a great number of women I deal with are drug addicts and whatnot. One of the things too that I enjoy with this television ministry through the years is I can invite someone to come in. Just recently we had a lady by the name of Kim Carter who was one of the CNN’s heroes that came in, who was a prostitute. A prostitute and a drug addict. And this is kinda my connection, if you will, I’m able to bring these people in and sit them down and let them tell their story.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: And I think that there is a sense of openness and blessing.
Tajci: Well, it really helps us to see them as humans, as beautiful God’s creatures who have gone through a terrible suffering in their lives. I just recently did a show with the Thistle Farms community that restores lives of victims of sex trafficking and prostitution and addictions. And there’s one lady that said, “You know, I don’t know any lady that woke up one day when she was a kid and say, ‘When I grow up I want to be a prostitute.’ “
Mike: Yes.
Tajci: And really, Becca Stevens was the founder of it. She says that this is one profession that reports 100% child rape or child trauma.
Mike: That’s right.
Tajci: So thank you for that work because it really does bring the awareness of, and not just in that area, but any kind of people who make wrong choices.
Mike: Well, it’s interesting. One of the biggest problems that Jesus had was that he hung around with prostitutes too much.
Tajci: Why do you call that a problem, what do you mean?
Mike: Because the people, they wanted to kill Him because He was doing all of the things that a religious man should not do.
Tajci: The good people, the righteous, yes.
Mike: This is where He found himself and this is why they were persecuting Him. “You’re hanging around with sinners. You’re not obeying the laws, the regulations that we set up.” And Jesus was continually moving to those people nobody else cared for, whether they were poor, whether they were sinners or whether were crippled. In the times of Jesus if a person was sick that was because God didn’t love them. 13:25
Tajci: Right. So Christ for us believers is obviously a huge turning point in history of the world. It’s more than a turning point.
Mike: Right. Very much so.
Tajci: But secularly, which I can say that Christ is a symbol of that turning point or the shift that we’re all called to make where we wake up to that love and compassion that Christ really calls us to. Did you have a turning point in your life that shifted, that had that shift and really made it real for you?
Mike: When you say a shifting point a lot of times people are wanting me to give this day this hour and minute of what happened. And I have to say that a lot of times that isn’t what has happened in my life. When I look back it’s sometimes the moments of deep love that I’ve experienced with another person. It’s also the experiences of deep failure in my life. For example, not being able to pass a test in theater that I’d studied a whole year for. And it was at the Catholic University. Wow. And then the failure in my life of when I was first ordained I was sent to Watts to teach high school, something that I wanted to do. I was a terrible failure at that. I was not a good disciplinarian and the kids were walking all over me. And it was diarrhea and nervousness each morning. But I came after two years of just trying to do it and coming to the realization that I was a failure.
And there was a deep experience of Jesus accepting me even in the midst of failure. And I found that in the Gospel of Mark, especially that the Jesus that I love, He experienced failure too. He had failure with His family. He had failure with His apostles. He had failures with the crowds. And even from the cross get this, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” And it’s in that moment of my complete failure in what I was doing and then realizing that there was a relationship with Christ who became very real to me in that moment. Is that what you’re talking about?
Tajci: Yes. Absolutely. And when we come back I wanna talk a little bit more about that. What does that mean when you say Jesus helped you to turn that failure into growth?
Mike: The turning point.
Tajci: Yes. And I want to point out that you know, I had several guests on the show that were brought to the same point, a similar point that this shifting is a process rather than a turning point, which sometimes it is.
Mike: It can be one moment. It can be one moment. I don’t deny it. But with me I like to look at the progressive way that Jesus is drawing me to Himself.
Tajci: Yes. We’re talking to Father Mike Manning in his studio here in WordNet Productions studios in San Bernardino, California.
If you feel stuck in your life right now and would like to create your own turning point, learn how these episodes and the stories of guests featured here can help you. In my book, “Turning Points”, I break it all down for you. And I offer some guidance in the interactive sections at the end of each chapter. Visit wakinguprevolution.com to purchase a signed copy or download an e-book at Amazon.com.
This is Waking Up in America on the set of Father Mike Manning’s show. How awesome is that?
Mike: It’s awesome to be with you, lovely lady.
Tajci: Yes. In reverse roles.
Mike: Yes, it is.
Tajci: I’m even sitting in your chair.
Mike: Yes, yes. My throne after all.
Tajci: Your throne.
Mike: Yes, yes.
Tajci: So help be bring this closer to my audience who might not be religious. You know, when you say Jesus helped you to turn the failures into victories and shift you into the life of even more service and reaching out and living a life with purpose.
Mike: Well, the failure that, for example, the failure that I experienced in teaching. I could have taken the road of saying, “Whoop, well, that’s all over.” I could have given up the priesthood, I could have given up whatever. But then as I tried to work with healing I came across reading. And it was interesting at the summer at the end, the priest said, “Would you give us a retreat?” And so I was giving a retreat to about four priests and I based it on the Gospel of Mark and I looked at that thought of failure of Jesus. And I felt the healing in that. Once we face our failures, once we face our brokenness we touch the heart of who we are. We get to a depth of who we are that allows us then, as you’re saying, to make a turn because we’re not just dealing with the superficial wheel. We’re dealing with ourselves. And what I found is I found that Jesus was there. I believe and of course by faith I believe that Jesus is God and I believe that God has come and He has lived in our world and He’s even experienced the failure that I experienced. And I saw, I found a bond with God that has become a real source of strength in my life.
Tajci: So does that, with God coming to earth sending His Son Christ to dwell among us
Mike: To become one of us
Tajci: One of us. And then as we believers receive the body of Christ, right?
Mike: Yes.
Tajci: And through the Holy Spirit we are connected to the Trinity.
Mike: Yes.
Tajci: So He dwells within us.
Mike: Very much so.
Tajci: So that encounter, that Jesus helping us to turn the failures, it really is that encounter deep within. What you just mentioned.
Mike: Well, what happens is this. This is the heart of it all. And it goes back to something that is even more.. was previous to that. My mom was an alcoholic. I suffered deeply with that. This was a very tough thing. My two sisters died of cirrhosis of the liver and so alcohol was a very traumatic and difficult thing in my life. But what I reverted to was believing that I was the cause of their drinking. So I moved into a thing called scrupulosity in which I tried to be perfect so that mom wouldn’t have a reason for drinking anymore. Well, it doesn’t work. You can’t become perfect because I’m too much of a sinner.
Tajci: But this is something that so many people struggle with, yeah.
Mike: Oh yeah, we do this. Well, what happened was I started in the strictness of trying to be perfect. I moved into a relationship with God which was very, very distant. God was the judge. God was the overseer. And He was trying with the least little failure to snatch me and throw me into hell. Well, I went through terrible, terrible pain with that even to a pain of bargaining with God. And this sounds terrible but if He would give me a piece of cancer on this arm I would take the cancer rather than the mental prison I was in with the scrupulosity, and the fear, and the distance from God. God opened doors for me. And it happened in an instant very strongly when I was reading a book by a man by the name of Paul Tillich, a Lutheran theologian. And at the end of a chapter on the title, “You Are Accepted”, he wrote a little paragraph. And in the paragraph which was italicized it said, “You are accepted. You are accepted by a power greater than yourself. The name of which you do not have to know. You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to do anything. All you have to do is accept the fact that you are accepted.” Bodabang, it was like this big brick hitting me in the side of the head. And I experienced the heart of what it means to have a relationship with God, with Jesus is.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: That no matter how much sin I have, no matter how much brokenness I had, how much failure, Jesus loves me. And I accepted that fact. And that has become the foundation of my life and the foundation of the drive to try to do a TV show, try to preach and try to come and do whatever I can because I know in my brokenness I’ve been loved by God and it’s true. And that’s my peace.
Tajci: And that is what you do and that’s what you gave me even though at that time when I met you I wasn’t able to really hear that, as you said, I am accepted. To me, I wanted to know that I am enough the way I am created. That I am in my brokenness, I am whole and loved.
Mike: And God has a big, He thinks of you and He’s got this big smile on His face.
Tajci: And for every one of our viewers, my viewers, your viewers, and every one on this planet. And I thank you so much for the lives you’ve changed and touched and moved and for showing up. And I think that was kind a big turning point, what we just talked about. And I want to encourage all of the viewers to watch Father Mike’s show and you know, really not be afraid to open your heart and accept that love because it is there for you. And it says, you matter. You are enough. I love you. I want the best for you. And then when we do, we can help and serve those who need us.
Mike: We’re driven. We’re driven to use everything God has given to us.
Tajci: Yes.
Mike: To share that love because that’s the most important thing we’ll ever do in our life.
Tajci: Thank you for saying that.
Mike: Amen.
Tajci: When we come back we’ll finish the show with music.
Mike: God bless.
Tajci: Thank you.
Ad: Are you planning a live event looking to bring inspiration and a fresh approach to wake up your community or organization? Tajci’s keynote concerts are transformational experiences that lead your audience to a life of joy, authenticity, courage, and purpose. Book Tajci for your next even now by visiting wakinguprevolution.com.
Tajci: Music is so powerful in inspiring us and bringing us close to God. What is music to you?
Mike: Music is the touch of the emotion that sometimes that we can spend our whole life being intellectual and whatnot. And I play the piano. Nothing for anybody in public. But every day I pull out a book of Chopin and I’ll play a little Chopin. And it allows me to be able to reach a dimension of depth of my feelings and my spirit that words cannot give. Music is something that opens a deep rich door into our lives. Does that make sense?
Tajci: Yes. Absolutely. And I’m going to sing a song that I wrote when I first met you. And it talks a lot about what we are, what we touched on here.
Mike: Excellent.
Tajci: Thank you so much.
Mike: Thank you.
Tajci: (Song)
So I failed again, stumbled in the dark
No it was on the jagged path
I can’t blame anyone.
The fault is all mine.
I turned away from Your light.
I don’t even know the reason why
I feel too ashamed to cry.
You were there all the time when I tried to hide.
You were there next to me all the while
You heard me cry and You cried with me
When I finally looked up I saw You smile
And heard You say, “I love you, My child.”
So I’m lost again in my own fear and pain
I betrayed myself once more
It’s me, not You, who can’t forget.
I’ll never understand,
I thought I better speak out loud.
Yet You showed me silently,
How to live and how to love.
You were there all the time when I tried to hide.
You were there next to me all the while.
You heard me cry and You cried with me.
When I finally looked up I saw You smile,
And heard You say, “I love you, My child.”
I heard You say, “I love you.”
I heard You say, “I love you, My child.”
I heard You say.
Tajci: To replay and share this episode please go visit wakingupinamerica.net. And do check out Father Mike Manning’s programs. Links of which we’ll have at wakingupinamerica.net. See you next time. And thank you for being with us.
