The Poco a Poco Podcast with the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal

Episode 196 - Mary: A Real Mom, Series on "Mary and the Interior Life" by Fr. Jeremiah Shryock (Part 1) How important is Mary, Our Lady, in your spiritual life?  Our Lady is a real woman, a real mother to all of us and Mary's intercession is actually more real than we realize.  The gift of Our Lady is that she looks upon us, she knows our hearts, and her gaze can be the first safe and secure place...

Episode 195 - Hope is Personal Do you actually believe and have hope that prayer does something?  Doing things over and over again can lose the awe and wonder of what's going on in our prayer life. There can come a point when we're no longer coming to prayer expecting to hear God's voice or expecting anything at all.  This results in boredom or discouragement—a loss of hope. In this episode, we're...

Episode 194 - The Sweet Way of Love How much focused are you toward yourself? There can be times when we struggle with perfectionism, control, and activism, and this can sometimes rub off on our spiritual life.  Jesus does not demand great actions from us; rather, the invitation is simply to live in surrender and gratitude to Him. At times, we can take a more Pelagian approach where more emphasis...

Episode 193 - C'est la confiance Are you worried for 2024?  Worry is a lack of confidence and we can be worried about a lot of stuff. The invitation from St. Therese and from our Lord is to have confidence in Him. We who run in the way of love shouldn't be thinking of suffering that can take place in the future. That's a lack of confidence. The complete confidence that becomes an abandonment in lo...

Episode 192 - End of Year Identity Check What was Jesus like for you this year? As we end the year, let's do a poverty and identity check and put Jesus in the center as we look back to this past year and look forward to the coming year For this episode, a proposal to reflect on where Jesus has been, how He has been with you, how He loved you, and how He is loving you into this year. The Poco a Poc...

Episode 191 - Little Like Mary (Advent 2023), Series on "Prepare Your Heart" by Fr. Agustino Torres, CFR. (Part 4) How often do you say Yes, without understanding or knowing the outcome?  Sometimes we have to see and understand the plan before we say Yes, that's not our Lady's experience. She didn't understand but she knew what was proposed to him by God, and despite that, she said Yes. She trusts...

Episode 190 - Good St. Joseph (Advent 2023), Series on "Prepare Your Heart" by Fr. Agustino Torres, CFR. (Part 3) What's the best thing you learned from St. Joseph?  Advent teaches us that God has a different way of doing things and St. Joseph is an amazing example and witness of that. Throughout his life, St. Joseph should've had the opportunity to grasp human comfort or control, but instead, he...

Episode 189 - God is Working (Advent 2023), Series on "Prepare Your Heart" by Fr. Agustino Torres, CFR. (Part 2) With what's currently happening in the world, can you believe that God is working?? As exemplified by St. Juan Diego, during this Advent and throughout the year, we are invited to live in relationship with the Lord through Mary, our Mother, our Lady. We can do that by beginning with a h...

Episode 188 - Learning from Nazareth (Advent 2023), Series on "Prepare Your Heart" by Fr. Agustino Torres, CFR. (Part 1) What does Nazareth look like for you and how does it compare to how you encounter Advent?  Nazareth is a place where Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived—a place of beauty, simplicity, and stillness. Meanwhile, Advent is a season of preparation for the coming of Jesus; For most of us,...

Episode 187 - Living Life Not Checking Boxes What is driving your life? What's the reason you do what you do? Life can sometimes become a series of boxes to check-we can tend to do things because we should or we have to as opposed to actually living life and doing things because our hearts want to.  What we are proposing in this episode is for us to be more present in the moment and to particularl...

Episode 186 - Guidance for the Prophet Have you encountered prophets in your life?  Prophets are people who have a profound conviction and clarity about a particular component of the faith and those who practice it. Being a prophet is not about opinions, it is an experience or power that you have, given by God to be a prophetic witness in the world. It's about communicating something about who God...

Episode 185 - Hunger for God Are you HUNGRY for God?  One of the foundational struggles that we have is that we're just not hungry for Him. Part of the path, if not the path, is we're going to have to experience this hunger. A "stepping away" from the noise, distractions, and self-reliance and entering into a place of vulnerability and a sort of dependence on God, and being able to live and pray f...

Episode 184 - (Contemplative) Gains Don't Sleep How can we live and create a space for contemplation, for silence, to be able to hear the voice of God in our lives? God is always there. He's always giving himself to us and always longing to speak to us, but living in the constant influx of noise and immediate gratification profoundly affects our contemplative experience—our ability to sit in praye...

Episode 183 - Contemplative Spaces What stands in your way to go deeper with the Lord?  We believe that growing in silence and our ability to contemplate is of supreme importance, but to actually respond to that is undoubtedly gonna be very very hard as well. So, how do we do this practically?  Today, we're going to talk about how actual behavior change happens and how we can set ourselves up for...

Episode 182 - Recieving Mary's Hospitality Do you wonder about Mary's firsthand memory or experience of God?  We can relive Mary's memory and experience of God through the rosary. Rosary is like experiencing God with Mary—in her heart, her hospitality. Mary is the most perfect Christian, the most perfect woman who's all about Jesus, and on this month of the Rosary, we are invited to take time and...

Episode 181 - The Asceticism of Silence, Series on Silence Vs. Noise (Part 2 of 2) What's the most prevalent voice that you hear in your life? Is it God's or someone's/something else? We long to teach people how to pray and contemplative silence, inner recollection, and interior stillness are ways we can live in a relationship with God. But, there's a silver bullet to make people live in chaos and...

Episode 180 - The Battle, Series on Silence Vs. Noise (Part 1 of 2) How are you able to receive and communicate with God? Silence is the divine language. God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love and communicate in eternal silence and if we want to look at and learn about God, we have to let ourselves be moved by that. However, the world has become a place of radical noise, trying to rob us of th...

Episode 179 - Pray Always Do you set a time in the day to pray? Do you stay in relationship with the Lord throughout the day? Turns out, we should be doing both! We have an opportunity and even an invitation to remain in this relationship with the Lord throughout our day. But to be able to do that, we have to make prayer important, make prayer a priority, and formally make God a part of our lives....

Episode 178 - Perseverence Not Pretty Do you think God is calling us to be perfect or just to be pretty? Personally, I think not. I believe what we're called to is not pretty or perfection but perseverance.  Sometimes it's much easier to have a very happy-looking social media feed than to have a happy heart and home in reality. But we're not going for things to look good, instead what we're going...

Episode 177 - Gratitude vs Greed A person who lives in a place of gratitude usually focuses on what they have. On the other hand, the person who struggles with greed and lives in that place usually focuses on what they don't have.  Both can have or do not have the EXACT same thing but one person can have an experience of fullness and gratefulness while one person, has an experience of emptiness, a...

Episode 176 - Make a Home What is the place of HOME?  It's a place where we are safe, loved, known, and seen—a place where we are well-received and can be ourselves.  Brokeness may significantly affect our experience of home but ideally home is a place of joy and laughter, a place of communion.  In this episode, we'll talk about hospitality, what home is, what it can be, and how we can make it a p...

Episode SEEK - Holiness is Possible What is that SEEK episode, what happened in there?  In the previous episodes, you might have heard that we referenced a SEEK episode a few times. Today's episode is pretty unique—a throwback episode that we wanted to share with you to give you an idea about our SEEK episode but at the same time we're gonna talk about following Jesus. We're gonna talk about what...

Episode 175 - Detest Sin, Love Your Neighbor, Series on Fire Within by Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M. (Part 8 of 8) What happens when we deeply give ourselves to the lives of prayer and the experience of God? The Fire Within series has been quite intense but it's actually the reality of the depths of the gospel truly lived. It goes beyond the ordinary simply because living out the Gospel wholeheartedly is...

Episode 174 - Mind Your Business, Series on Fire Within by Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M. (Part 7 of 8) Solitude is not just quiet time for ourselves. It is not running from people, isolation, nor hiding from or avoiding our problems by going off and being by ourselves. But rather it is avoiding certain behaviors, worldviews, curiosities, and distractions that take our focus on the Lord. According to Fr....

Episode 173 - Humility, Obedience, and Prayer, Series on Fire Within by Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M. (Part 6 of 8) Humility is a lowliness—lowliness not for its own sake but rather a right understanding of who we are and who we are not. It's a place where you know more about what everybody is saying in a room, but don't always have to say anything or don't need to be someone who wants to seem smarter th...