Jim Towey 2006

Jim Toohey has dedicated his life to serving others. He has worked at various levels, including founding a nonprofit organization to help families plan for care during serious illness, serving as legal counsel for Mother Teresa, and now working as the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He emphasizes the importance of faith and values in today's culture, which he believes is highly sexualized and lacking in morals. He encourages the audience to take stock of their own lives and priorities and to strive to live fearlessly, like John Paul II. Jim Toohey has dedicated his life to serving others. After receiving his law degree from Florida State University, he began his career of helping others less fortunate than him. Before being chosen as the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Jim contributed at all levels, from local to national. Early on, he founded and ran Aging with Dignity. It's a nonprofit organization that helps families plan for care during times of serious illness. Broadening his influence to the state level, he ran Florida's Health and Social Services Agency. Jim balanced these high-level talents, skills, and experience with a humble, people-serving view of his role in life when he worked with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. On the one hand, he served as her legal counsel for 12 years. Undoubtedly, this job had global implications. But his humility and desire to serve others had him work for a year as a full-time volunteer in Mother Teresa's Washington, D.C., home for people with AIDS. All of this prepared Jim for his current role, in which he reports directly to President Bush. His office works with faith-based organizations, and as we saw just a few minutes ago, many of you volunteer in such groups. Gentlemen, please welcome our first speaker of the day, Mr. Jim Toohey. Thanks, Gus. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Gus, for that beautiful introduction that I wrote. I want to thank Gus and Steve and Kevin and Father Ken, all the officers and the organizers, the Catholic Men's Fellowship of Greater Cincinnati Conference that's being put on today, and all of you that organized this in your parishes. This is phenomenal. I don't kid myself. I know why I've been invited to be your speaker. It's because of my friendship and long-standing working relationship with a modern-day saint, President Bush. Just was checking to see if you were listening, but I want to greet all of you. I know some of you came great distances to be here this morning, and you're in for a very exciting day. You've got a great program ahead of you, some very great speakers. Met them last night, wonderful men. And, of course, you'll have inspired music from the Romans, and Father Ken and others leading you, and many priests here during confession, and, of course, Mass with your bishops and others. And I want to extend a special greeting to our priests that are here today. Where are our priests if they'd stand up? I want to thank them if they're in the hall. God bless you for your vocation. I have to tell you, you're looking at a very happy man. My wife and I, Mary, have been blessed with five children. We have four boys that are 13, 11, 9, and 6, and we have a little girl, Marie, who just turned 3. And on Saturday mornings, right around this time, you know, the kids are waking up. The boys are fighting. The dishes are still in the sink from last night. They don't want to do their chores. Marie's out of bed now, needs her diaper changed. It is great to be here in Cincinnati. Now, I don't want you guys to think, you know, after hearing I've got these four boys, you know, and then I got the little girl. I'm going to spoil her. I mean, many of you probably have daughters, and you know the drill. And, you know, after we had the boys, we didn't think we'd have a little girl. Then God gave us Marie, and I just want to assure you, you know, I'm going to treat her the same as I treat, you know, the rest of the gang. Here's a picture of Marie. I asked my friend Kevin Lynch and Gus, you know, how long should I talk here? And they said, you've got to understand something. This is our twelfth conference, and these are men of God. And you should follow the Holy Spirit and go wherever the Holy Spirit leads you. But just know one thing, God wants you to keep to the schedule today. So they told me, they were showing me beforehand, they have these signs, and one says ten minutes, and then they'll hold up a sign to warn me that says five minutes, and then one that says one minute. And then they have an orange sign that's held up that says stop. And then the last sign is black, and that says excommunicated. So I'm going to make sure that I follow the rules here. In all seriousness, and I think it's good that we share some laughs together, because we're also going to share some very solemn moments, some holy moments. It's a privilege for me to come to be with you this morning. I mean that for my own spiritual life and journey. I can't tell you the encouragement that I get to look around this hall and see so many people here who've come from so far to be together. This is the first conference that's been held since the time when a real lion of a man, a great man, John Paul II, went home to God. He was a man's man if ever there was such a man. I find it hard to believe that we are approaching, within the month, the one-year anniversary of his passing. And so I know he's praying for us this morning, and I hold out at the beginning of my talk as a model, a model of how to live fearlessly, to be true, to be human. I have to say, Mary and I love him very much. In fact, one time, once when Mary was pregnant, we decided we wanted to name one of our children after him. But that posed a little bit of a problem because my last name is Toohey, and that would have made our son John Paul Toohey. So we figured he'd end up fighting in the schoolyard the rest of his life. So we went with John Mariano. When you look at John Paul II's life, and of course we see this in our new Pope, Pope Benedict XVI, you see what it is to be a man, what it is to be true. There was no question where John Paul II stood. He stood for Jesus Christ, the love of his life, the purpose of his life, the gift of his life. Today you're going to have the opportunity at this conference to do a little soul searching, a little examination inside, to go inside a little bit and to look at your priorities and to look at your life and to look at your life's joys and your life's disappointments and to take some inventory of where you are, what your values are, what you stand for, what are your dreams, what are your hopes. And of course this conference is organized that when you leave this room, you come out with a moral compass, a spiritual compass, to live much like John Paul II lived. Our world today, of course, everything's hurried. We have the Blackberries and the cell phones and the e-mails and the faxes and the internet and it just accelerates the pace of life. And there's so much stress often and pressure. You men know this. You're providers. And you know what it's like to have to provide for yourself and for others and to work. Or if you're retired, you know what it's like with the aches and pains. You know life's difficulties. And in our culture, of course, we have to take stock of what it is that we find that surrounds us and pressures us. I heard Father Ken in his opening prayer. Talk about our culture. Because if we don't examine our culture and the environment in which we live in, we drift. We drift. Because these atmospherics and the climate often form and shape our spiritual and moral lives. When I take my boys... I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. And I used to go down to the ocean when I was a kid, so whenever I can get to the ocean with my children, I love to go there. Mary and I will set up shop there on the shore. But before I let the boys go into the water, I point out into the water out on the horizon. It might be a raft or kids playing floating somewhere, a ball. And I'll say, take a look at that ball right there. And over a little bit of time, you see that it's moved. We haven't moved. But the ball moved or the raft moved. And I use this to explain to the kids how currents work. The kids playing out on the water, they're not aware of the currents. They're not aware of these pressures that are moving them along. They're playing and having a great time. Of course, I'm doing it for the guys because I want them to fight the current and stay in front of us so that Mary and I don't have to scream out there when they're drowning each other. You know, have them play in front of us and right when they're drowning, I'll go out and help. So you guys know the drill. But that's how currents work. And often we're not aware of them. And I think before I get into the talk, I just want to, I think we have to have a shared sense of what is the culture in which we live today? Because John Paul II often warned us that in cultures where there is no God, there is no moral life. So Stayefsky, when he wrote, said that if there is no God, everything is permitted. And when we look at our culture, I think we see that there is a sense that everything is permitted. We look at cloning on the horizon. We look at euthanasia, which is also on the horizon. A culture which is anti-life, which is highly sexualized. I mean, we gather in the city of Jerry Springer, who decided to put a pedestal there and place on the pedestal broken and deeply wounded people and hold them up as entertainment, a systematic degradation of human dignity. Tomorrow night, one of our culture's premier festivals will take place, the Oscars. And what will they hold up for us as movies worthy of acclaim? Movies which celebrate values that are the antithesis of what John Paul II stood for. Movies which denigrate marriage. Movies which are hyper-violent, showing strangers having sex, marriages discarded. I don't want to sound like church lady here, but I think it's important that we look at, in our culture, how Hollywood often tries to shape our values and our attitudes. Movies that are godless. I took my boys recently to go see Eight Below, and I don't want to criticize the movie. It's actually a very good movie. It's a good family movie. But there was one scene where a fellow had fallen through the ice and was up to his neck in frozen ice and water there. And the person that was there with him was a hundred feet away. And of course, the body's going to freeze very quickly. And in the movie, all he was sitting there was calling out for a rope. Sure, we'd all call out for a rope. But you didn't think for a second that the movie would ever direct you to say a prayer. You might be going home to God right now. But that's not how movies work. That's not how Hollywood works. In Hollywood, there is no God in these movies, typically. And I think that if they made a movie about a married couple that worked through their differences in their marriage, that forgave each other and often went to bed maybe a little angry, but then they would be reconciled, and that raised their kids and struggled through job displacements and illness and difficulty. If Hollywood made a movie like that, it would be a horror flick by their standards. Wouldn't it? And I will make a prediction that next year, set your watch on this. The great movie will be The Da Vinci Code. It comes out in May. That will be the one that's going to get the Oscars next year. An anti-Catholic flick that passes off fiction as fact. But of course, that's considered entertainment. So we know that in our culture, there are these pressures. There are cultural commandments that say that the interests of adults are ahead of the interests of children, and that the strong's interests are more important than the weak's, so that the elderly and the poor and the handicapped, they have no place, no value. And that is why we come together today, to challenge these forces, to recognize them, and to ask ourselves, how is my life being shaped by the culture in which I live? Because those are the field conditions. Go to a football game and you see the players looking at which way the wind's blowing. The quarterback wants to know, does he have a wind in his face or behind him? Those are the field conditions in which we live our lives today. And if you ignore them, you do so at your own peril, and you'll drift. And you'll forget the reason why you're on this earth. And you'll lose sight of the divine dimension of our lives, and of course, our potential. And you'll be pulled, often into dangerous undertoes, into pornography, and into alcohol, and into adultery, and into addictions, and into just simply losing and squandering the gift of life that you've been given. But having said all of that, I have to tell you, I'm brimming with hope. I'm excited about life. Because while we swim in dangerous waters, we don't swim alone. We have the Lord with us. We have the church with us. And we have each other. And that's why it's so important that we gather here together today. And of course, the height of today will be Holy Mass, that you'll celebrate today together. And the church's wisdom in providing us on this first Saturday, the first week of Lent. The Gospel reading from Luke 6. Very beautiful words of Jesus. Very encouraging words of Jesus. Where He says, The healthy do not need a doctor. Sick people do. I've not come to invite the self-righteous to a change of heart, but sinners. Powerful words of Jesus Christ. That He came for sick people. Twenty years ago, I had no idea how sick I was. I thought I was pretty healthy. I was living the typically American life. Kind of drifting in the currents and splashing around and having a lot of fun. But of course, my life was full of illusions, self-deception, lies. Because, you know, I didn't think I was sick. And I didn't think I needed a doctor. Those words of Jesus wouldn't have rung true to me. I would have thought of it either as a medical phrase, or as for someone that was depraved. But I was sick. And then the Lord allowed me to meet Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The most spectacular person that I'd ever met on earth. I was working for a U.S. Senator at the time, when I had that chance to go overseas. And on the way back, I thought, well, you know, I'm going to stop in Calcutta. Because I always wanted to meet her. And I have to say, where I was at that point in my life, it was interesting, and don't get me wrong. I mean, I had a great childhood. And I wasn't too different from most people. Maybe not too different from you. I had four siblings. I was raised pretty much by my mother. And my mother is alive today. She's going to be 88 next month. And she raised us. And my dad was a great man. Very smart man. Very strong man. He was Irish. And unfortunately, like many who are Irish, he struggled with alcohol his whole life. And when I listened to his life story, that at age eight, his father died. And then he was drinking at that age. And went through life. He was never fathered. And so he didn't know how to father. He was a broken man in some ways. But he was a beautiful man. And I think from my own standpoint, as I was growing up, I have a great gratitude to the priests and the coaches and others that were father figures to me. To help me. Because when you don't have a presence of that father in the home often, you don't have a good male identity. And I didn't. And it didn't help that I was very short. Not that I'm exactly towering now. But when I entered high school, I was four foot ten. And I was the smallest kid in the school. And of course, I have this... I've been waiting for puberty to give me a deep voice. It never came. So I had a lot of high points in my childhood. We used to come to Cincinnati because my mom was from here. And when we'd visit her parents, I'd go take in a Reds game at Crosley Field. I remember the last season at Crosley. The first season at Riverfront. A lot of fun I had in Cincinnati. But there was also, of course, turmoil. Because you know, marriage is difficult in best situations. And when parents start to separate, which they did do, and then divorce, it can be hard sometimes on the children. It's difficult. And I think that there are a lot of children like me that know that journey. And in that home, I discovered, of course, that I had to kind of make my life work. But I didn't really have that father presence to kind of direct me into values. And I hope that you assert that important role you have in your life. To be a leader. And when you don't measure up to the standards that the church asks of you, that you confess it. And you also share it with your kids. That you show them that you're aspiring to that. And that you're seeking God's help to live that virtuous life. But when you don't have it, you often can become lost. And I was lost. I was sick. I was going to church on Sundays, but I wasn't alive in the church. I was hedging my bets. Church was great because it diversified my personality portfolio. There were little sports, little entertainment, little church. I was balanced, I thought. And so when I moved to Washington and got up there and started making more money than I had ever had and opportunities to do whatever I want, I, again, was doing what Pascal described. Blaise Pascal when he said, he described sinning as licking the earth. Those powerful words, licking the earth. That's how he described sin. And I had licked the earth. So I was sick and I was in need of a doctor and there I was on my way to Calcutta after visiting overseas in Southeast Asia. And I was going to drop in there for one day because the senator that I worked for knew Mother Teresa and I thought, well, that's great. Since he knows Mother Teresa, I have entree and I can meet her because the great thing about being a hypocrite is that you can spot hypocrisy everywhere. I was a professional hypocrite. Am. And so I could spot it everywhere and I'd look at the church and I'd go, look at that. Look at all these big churches and there's the poor and they're all hypocrites. It was just great. I was sitting there in judgment of others. And but there was that Mother Teresa and I saw her and I thought, wow, now there's someone living the faith and I wanted to meet her. And because the senator knew her, I thought, here's my chance. And so I talked myself into it because I didn't want to go into Calcutta because I didn't want to be around the poor. Very hard to go to Calcutta and not be around the poor. So the way I talk myself into it is I'll go into Calcutta for one day and meet Mother and on the way back to the United States, I'll go to Hawaii for five days. And that's how I kind of screwed up my courage to go into Calcutta. And so on August 20th, 1985, I met Mother Teresa. The most lovely person on earth. Little tiny woman about this tall. Big hands. Big soft hands. The week I met her, she had turned 75. Very alive. And I met her and in that moment, I recognized she was everything, everything that I wasn't. She was focused. She was prayerful. Christ was alive in her life. It wasn't a concept. It was a person. Because she prayed. And because she served. And she asked me, have you been to my home for the dying yet? And I said no. And she said, well, why don't you go there this afternoon and ask for Sister Luke? And I thought, I don't have anything to do today. No Cineplex here. So I'll go. So I show up at the home for the dying. And I walk in there in my starched shirt and the embassy driver drops me off there and I walk up and I say, Sister Luke here. And this nun says, yeah, I'm Sister Luke. I said, hi, I was with Mother Teresa this morning. I love dropping that name. Yeah, I was with Mother Teresa. And never done it before. Felt great. And she told me to come by here. And Sister Luke said, that's great, you know. Here's some cotton. And here's some medicine. And go and clean this fella in bed 46 that has scabies. So my face is like this. Bed 46. Inside I'm like, I'm here for the tour. I didn't come here to touch anybody. Scabies. And that's why I can tell you, men, it is the work of mercy. It was nothing I did. Nothing I did. Because there wasn't the tiniest bit of me that wanted to go back to bed 46. The reason I went back to bed 46 was very simple. I was too proud to admit to this nun that I didn't want to touch that guy. I was too proud. So I went back to bed 46. And I proceeded to sit down right on this guy's leg. It was hot. And so I'm off to a great start as I sit on his leg. And I ask a volunteer that walked by and I said, sister told me to, she told me to come back here and clean this guy. He has scabies. And the guy says, yeah, he does have scabies. And I said, I don't know what they look like. He said, well, it's a little red raising of the skin and it itches terribly and he doesn't want to pain from it. And I said, where are his scabies? And he said, they're right around his anus. I went, that's just great. This day is just getting better and better. But I have to tell you, dear brothers in Christ, that there waiting for me in bed 46 through His mercy was Jesus Christ. And what Mother Teresa described as Jesus in His distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor. I thought I was going to touch this man and put this medicine on him, but in fact, Jesus touched me back. Bells didn't go off. There wasn't heavenly music playing. But I came to discover after I'd left Calcutta that something had changed in me. That Jesus had touched me. So I stand here, I can tell you by the mercy of God, as a sinner, that when I didn't sin gravely, it wasn't because I didn't want to. It was because either I couldn't or I was too afraid. I didn't have the chance. But through His mercy, a good doctor touched me. The sick that I was and am. So I want to share very briefly with you, and I'm not going to go over my time a lot, but just a few quick lessons that Mother passed on to me that I want to pass on to you because there's no doubt in mind I was so unworthy to have met Mother Teresa or to work for her for 12 years. President Bush always likes to joke and say, you know, he was Mother Teresa's lawyer. What kind of a world do we live in when even she has to have a lawyer? How many people know this? Mother Teresa liked to sue people though. No, I'm kidding. But lessons I learned from this woman that was alive in Jesus Christ. Alive in Christ. He was her companion. He was her constant journey. And the first lesson that she told me and taught me was about prayer. She said that if you're too busy to pray, you're too busy. We kid ourselves if we think we can have a walk with Jesus Christ if we do not find time for prayer. I asked her one time, Mother, how do you pray? I wanted her to teach me how to pray. She said the only way to learn how to pray is to pray. In our world, of course, we don't often have time to pray. We have a lot of pressures on our lives. But when we do find time to pray and to retreat into the silence of our hearts, we have the opportunity to hear the words of Christ, that You are my Beloved. You are my Beloved Son. To hear the words of the Father. The words that Isaiah wrote about how God carves us in the palm of His hand, that we're precious, that our lives are valuable, that we're not measured by our success or our wealth or our prestige or our celebrity. Because we have inherent human dignity as a child of God. This is the lesson that's learned through prayer. You can't go it alone. And prayer reminds us that we have to pray together. That's why the little groups that meet after these fellowship conferences are so important. To come together with other men to pray. Because we need the doctor. We need the doctor. Prayer also reminds us that we're sick. That we sin. We need the doctor. And we need each other. The second lesson was our need for the sacraments. You know, she hungered for the Eucharist. She would get up every morning at 4.40 and go and be in adoration to be alone with Jesus in the Eucharist. And then they would have Mass in the morning at 6.30 or 6 o'clock. And she would long and hunger for that Eucharist because she said, if I did not encounter Jesus in the Eucharist, hidden in the bread, I cannot find Jesus hidden in the poor. And therefore, her work wasn't social work. It was an encounter with Christ. You did it to me. She used to take my hand on the five fingers. You did it to me. That when I was hungry, you gave me to eat. And of course, in Calcutta, there was hunger everywhere. People on the pavement that were starving for food. Starving for food. In America, there's a different hunger. Of course, there is material hunger and it's a scandal. In a country with so much affluence. But there's also a tremendous hunger that people have for affection and forgiveness. For understanding. The bread of friendship. You must know people and they're often in our own homes. A child that we've withheld forgiveness from. A spouse that we're holding against them a past mistake. Or we withhold forgiveness from ourselves. We won't receive Christ's forgiveness. We mull over the past sins that we've made. Yet we hunger to be reconciled in Christ. The sacraments provide us this nourishment. This hope. This opportunity to receive through the church this sanctifying grace that gives us the supernatural strength we need. To be men of Christ. To be true men. To live our vocations. It's very difficult sometimes to be forgiving in marriage. And Mary and I trying to have an honest marriage and the reality is sometimes there's friction. I've come to discover after only 14 years that marriage wasn't meant to be easy. You know, when you read Jesus' words about picking up your cross and following me, He didn't say pick up your pillow. Life is not meant to be easy. There are moments of comfort and consolation. But the reality is if there isn't a cross there near us or on us, we often aren't living an authentic Christian life. And so our call to be children of the sacraments, men of the sacraments, that hunger for it, where it's a priority in our life. Third is the invitation to be a shepherd. The invitation to be a shepherd. A beautiful invitation from the examples of John Paul II and Mother Teresa. They were shepherds. They were shepherds. They loved their flock. They were shepherds. They laid down their lives for others. We see this in our priests. We see Father Ken, his beautiful spirit, his ministry, his life is for others. In a culture which wants you to focus on yourself, there's the invitation. And the reality is there's great joy in the life of a shepherd. There's great joy in that life. We think of St. Joseph, you know. In Scripture, I kind of feel sorry in a way for St. Joseph, for the husband I say, because how would you like to be married to Mary and have Jesus as your son? You know, Scripture never has, records him ever saying anything. But you can just, you know, Jesus spills his goat's milk. What's he going to do? You know, Mary burns the lamb. It's the Blessed Mother. You know, what's he going to say? No wonder he doesn't talk in Scripture. But St. Joseph teaches us how to live with Jesus and Mary. How to live in their company. How to sacrifice for them. For them. You did it to me. When we do that act of sacrifice for our spouse, for our child, you did it to me. To pray the work. Mother Tricia used to always say, pray the work. It was a conscious awareness that we were dwelling in the company of friends gathered here, but also with the angels and the saints. And it's a call that the church constantly reminds us to do because one day we will go home to God and it will matter how we lived our life. So everyone expresses his paternity differently. You may not have natural children or grandchildren, but we're called to be shepherds and assume the responsibility for others, particularly for the poor. I've known some very powerful people in my life. I now work in the White House. You know, I park right there on the side of the West Wing at my 2001 Honda Civic. And I pulled up the first day and said, you know, don't park in these two spaces. These are where the Vice President's limousines park. I'm like, I'm not going to park in his parking space. You know, they won't just tow my car. They'll blow it up. You know. But I've come to recognize that the poor are the most powerful people I know because they have the power to unleash in your life mercy and love. That poor person in bed 46 was Jesus himself touching me back and calling me to a true life that had integrity, to at least desire it if I wasn't living it, but to desire it and to seek it. So I think that we, we're called to be shepherds. We're called to lay down and for those sacrifices we make to have value. When I lived in the AIDS home and I'd change the diaper at two in the morning of a man dying, I felt like St. Francis of Assisi to be doing that work. But when you're changing the diaper of your child at two in the morning, now it's no different if it's done for him and to him and with him. That conscious awareness of Jesus. Fourth is the lesson about being devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mother Teresa was the most Mary-like person since Mary. She was virgin and mother to the world and she had an enormous devotion to the Blessed Mother. That's why you saw the blue stripes on her sari. She was never separated from a rosary. She often prayed with this rosary in her hands when I'd be driving her. I remember one time on a plane. We were on this little plane. A person had made available to her this small plane so she could get to three cities in one day easily. And there were about five of us on the plane. And we got on this little plane and we were barely off the ground before we just started hitting wicked turbulence. And the plane is just rocking like this in the air. And I'm looking over at Mother and she's just there in the seat of the plane just kind of looking her head. Her hands were folded. She had her rosary in her hand praying. And of course inside I'm like, this plane's going to crash and I'm going to die. Sure, she's ready. And I was getting a little anxious, you know. But then I thought for a second. I thought, you know, if this plane goes down and I get to St. Peter, I'm going to go, I'm with her. Party of six. But Mother Teresa had such a simple and profound devotion to the Blessed Mother. Her theology was very simple. No Mary, no Jesus. That was her theology. And she was always in prayer with Mary to pray the rosary, to think of Mary. There was a drunk once that hated God and hated man. His life had been difficult. But every night he would put the sign of an M on his forehead at night. Because no matter how mad he was at God, he never could forget Mary. We shouldn't either. Jesus needed Mary on the cross. You see that beautiful scene in the Passion of the Christ that Jesus looked for. We should be looking for Mary too. In a culture which dehumanizes women, sexualizes women, there stands the Virgin Mary calling and attracting our eyes away from all of the pornography, away from the filth, and toward her, and toward her purity. Men should be men that recognize that beautiful purity. That we look at our wives and know others any other way. This is a call to us in an age of impurity to seek Our Lady and finally challenges us, Mother challenges us to make our career goal to get to heaven. A career goal to get to heaven. Because often we spend our lives furiously climbing up a ladder and when we get near the top we find it's on the wrong wall. A lot of times we spend these are our goals, these are our desires, they never satisfy. They never satisfy. I want to tell a story in closing. When Mary was pregnant with our third child, Mother Teresa was coming to America. We didn't think we'd ever see her again. She was coming to Washington. We were living in Florida and so we left the beautiful angels of God with my mom. Mary and I jumped on a plane just to fly up there to see her for a second because we wanted her to bless the baby and we wanted her blessing. When we walked into the Gift of Peace home, Mother came out of the foyer and she's like, Mary, you're pregnant. You know, when are you doing? Mary said, well, I'm due August 8th but I think I'm going to be early because we just had a baby. Mother Teresa said no. She said you're going to have this baby on my birthday and I said, Mother, I hope not because your birthday is August 26th and if Mary's 18 days late my life's going to be a living heck. So to make a long story short, on the night of August 25th, Mary goes into labor and midnight strikes at 1.20 in the morning and of course Mary and I are just praying and we're like, oh my God, Mother predicted this. We're going to have a little girl. We're going to name her Teresa. Midnight strikes August 26th and then at 1.20 in the morning the baby comes out and the doctor says, congratulations. You have a little boy. And Mary, God knows my wife, goes, are you sure? And the doctor says, here's how we tell, you know. While Mary was still in the hospital the next day, the sisters called me from Calcutta because as you'll recall, a year before Mother Teresa died, she was gravely ill and almost died and the sisters called me and they said, you know, if you want to, you may want to get back here because we don't think Mother's going to make it. And so I talked to Mary and she said, let's take a picture of little Maximilian, our son, and take it to Mother. And so a friend of mine, who was very close to Mother, Sandy McMurtry, and I flew back to Calcutta. When we arrived in Calcutta, the sisters that greeted us at the airport said, we need to go straight to the hospital. Mother's back on oxygen. And we went straight to the hospital. And we got to the anteroom of the intensive care section where Mother was and the sisters were all abuzz. And I said, what's up? And they said, Mother was laying there on the bed right there and she was pointing up from her bed and just looking straight up. And the sisters thought, was she having a vision or was there a bug or what was she pointing at? Mother, seeing their confusion, took the oxygen mask off of her mouth and she said, I'm going home. I'm going home to God. I'll tell you, no one at the end of their life regrets that they prayed. No one ever says, I wish I hadn't gone to daily Mass. I wish I hadn't prayed the Rosary. I wish I hadn't frequented the Sacraments and Reconciliation. I wish I hadn't loved and forgiven and given and sacrificed. This is the great calling that we have as men to be shepherds, to be men of the Sacraments, to be men of prayer. I hope today I've given you some encouragement from Mother Teresa to live joyful lives of service, to place Jesus Christ in the center of your life and to go out and love Him and serve Him. God bless you and I hope you have a great day. Thank you very much.