Episode 210 - Loved and Celebrated, Series on "The Father" by Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR (Part 5) What does it mean to be loved and celebrated? We are favored sons and daughters worthy of celebration—of being served. We are worthy and loved by God and this episode talks about a step in the right direction on what it means to be loved and celebrated. This is a gentle call to conversion and repentance, an invitation to allow ourselves to be loved sacrificially and give God and others permission to lo...
May 01, 2024•56 min
Episode 209 - Made for Freedom, Series on "The Father" by Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR (Part 4) What does it mean to be made for freedom? We are all called to live in freedom as sons and daughters of God. The reality is we are seen, loved, and chosen by God the Father and there's freedom when we experience that. In this episode, we're going through the mechanics of freedom and learn more about how the experience of home and trust can help us understand that a little bit deeper. Here's the link to the...
Apr 24, 2024•49 min
Episode 208 - The Father's Gaze, Series on "The Father" by Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR (Part 3) Can you imagine how you would gaze upon your newborn baby for the first time? This is the way the Father loves everyone. He's constantly looking at us and is constantly delighting in us. The Father always looks at us with the same delight, love, and rejoicing as a father looks at his newborn for the first time. This is how our Heavenly Father looks at us, delights in us, rejoices in us and contemplates us...
Apr 17, 2024•42 min
Episode 207 - The Father's Delight, Series on "The Father" by Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR (Part 2) Do you know how much your heavenly Father delights in you? The part of the heart of the Father is to care for his children in whatever shape or form that would take. It might feel a lot or even tiresome but because of the uncalculated love of the father, the time when he gets to take care of and be with his children in this special way can be the best part of the father's day. In his children's poverty...
Apr 10, 2024•46 min
Episode 206 - The Father and The Father Wound, Series on "The Father" by Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR (Part 1) How are you affected by the wounds you had from your earthly father? The life of St. Francis is a good example of how the wounds we have from our earthly father can be an access point to the heart of God. His wounds led him to embrace the heart of the Father through Jesus Christ. It is a good reminder for all of us that Jesus is the way to the fatherhood of God, He is the interesession betwe...
Apr 03, 2024•48 min
Episode 205 - Holy Week and Total Gift (Lent 2024), Series on The Ascension Lenten Companion by Fr. Mark Toups (Part 7) This holy week, how do you intend to receive Jesus' total gift for you? The fast during Lent is not to show Jesus how tough we are, it's to show him how poor we are. It's to be in the space of utter poverty and to trust that receptivity, that He will come. And what we are celebrating in this holy Triduum, this Holy Week, is Christ, giving himself to us as the bridegroom and esp...
Mar 27, 2024•50 min
Episode 203 - The Rich Man and Lazarus (Lent 2024), Series on The Ascension Lenten Companion by Fr. Mark Toups (Part 5) Does it have to end in just being able to receive God's unconditional love? Like Lazarus, the guy beat up on the side of the road. We who have been loved in such messiness are also invited to go into the mess, and love. This is a sign that God is alive in us. We now have the dignity of His beloved sons and daughters, of not just being the recipients of His unconditional love, b...
Mar 20, 2024•52 min
Episode 204 - Resurrection and the Reproaches (Lent 2024), Series on The Ascension Lenten Companion by Fr. Mark Toups (Part 6) Our expectations and what God is doing can be totally different, so how should we respond to that? In the raising of Lazarus, the response of the Pharisees was to have Jesus killed. This was the tragic response of the heart when they were not open and unable to receive the mysterious and unconditional love of God. We can sometimes share the same humanity as the Pharisees...
Mar 13, 2024•54 min
Episode 202 - The Prodigal Son (Lent 2024), Series on The Ascension Lenten Companion by Fr. Mark Toups (Part 4) If you were the prodigal son would you receive the Father's unconditional love? The conversion that the Father wants us to have is to move on from a conditional, perfectionistic way of experiencing God to a place of just being unconditionally loved by Him. But we can sometimes hold onto shame for security, what is asked of us is to leave behind that shame—let the shame and self-contemp...
Mar 06, 2024•56 min
Episode 201 - The Good Samaritan (Lent 2024), Series on The Ascension Lenten Companion by Fr. Mark Toups (Part 3) Are you familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan? When we're beat up, when we're in this place of difficulty and shame, He's there, at the side of the road looking at us, desiring to pick us up and saying, "Come with me.". That's Jesus for all of us. The invitation of this episode is to allow the Lord to get close into our deepest places of darkness and shame so he can help us...
Feb 28, 2024•59 min
Episode 200 - Christ the Bridegroom (Lent 2024), Series on The Ascension Lenten Companion by Fr. Mark Toups (Part 2) How does a bridegroom love his bride? That is how Jesus loves each one of us. He meets us wherever we are in our life to be our beloved and for us to be His. The Lord meets us in the desert-our place of poverty where He betroths us to Him and He betroths Himself to us. In this way, Jesus as the bridegroom reveals to us a quality of love, the way that God loves. In this episode, ou...
Feb 21, 2024•46 min
Episode 199 - Lent is About Jesus (Ash Wednesday), Series on The Ascension Lenten Companion by Fr. Mark Toups (Part 1) What does Jesus desire for you and Him this Lent? The temptation during Lent is to make the Lenten journey about us, we can do hard things during Lent that are fueled by our own desires and distractions but Lent isn't supposed to be about ourselves. Lent is also not simply about prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Those disciplines help us to focus on what we need to focus on. This...
Feb 14, 2024•59 min
Episode 198 - Remember Like Mary, Series on "Mary and the Interior Life" by Fr. Jeremiah Shryock (Part 3) Do you remember Jesus and what he did? The most consistent word Mary had spoken to Fr. Jeremiah, was "remember". When we don't know what to do or how to act, Mary tells us to remember her son, Jesus' actions, that was the case for Fr. Jeremiah and this is an invitation that extends to all of us. There is a richness and importance that Mary plays, for us not to have her be a part of our spiri...
Feb 07, 2024•46 min
Episode 197 - Marian Posture, Series on "Mary and the Interior Life" by Fr. Jeremiah Shryock (Part 2) Is your prayer and your life two separate realities? Mary gives us a ton of hope that the grace of God and the Holy Spirit meet us in reality. The Marian posture at the core of it is about the reality of the fullness of God. Mary teaches us that The best place to live your spiritual life is in reality—in where you are right now in this moment. It's about living one reality in the presence of God...
Jan 31, 2024•49 min
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 in a world of filled insecurity. At this same moment, Mary wants us to look upon her and it is in thi...
Jan 24, 2024•51 min
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 gonna talk about how we can pray for a supernatural hope as the remedy for discouragement and boredom...
Jan 17, 2024•42 min
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 is given to our efforts, initiatives, and self-improvement—our achievement of holiness rather than th...
Jan 10, 2024•45 min
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 love sets us free from obsessive calculations, constant worry about the future, and fears that take awa...
Jan 03, 2024•51 min
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 Poco podcast happens because of many generous donors, including recurring monthly donations of any amou...
Dec 27, 2023•49 min
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; she surrenders in this whole experience of her life without knowing what's gonna happen. This is th...
Dec 20, 2023•49 min
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 chose to enter into humility, into silence, he didn't overthink, he didn't overtalk, but rather he tr...
Dec 13, 2023•42 min
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 humble Yes. Let's say Yes and allow ourselves to be interrupted by her intercession and have confiden...
Dec 06, 2023•48 min
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, it is usually one of the busiest times of the year. So how can Advent be an experience of Nazareth du...
Nov 29, 2023•45 min
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 particularly live from the Trinity dwelling within our hearts. Today, we're gonna talk about how much are we sup...
Nov 22, 2023•47 min
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 is through ourselves. In this episode, we will talk more about what a prophet is. We're gonna dive i...
Nov 15, 2023•50 min
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 from that place. Today we're going to talk about the change of passions and desires and dive into how ...
Nov 08, 2023•39 min
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 prayer for long periods to wait and sit for God. That is why it's so important to retrain our hearts and ...
Nov 01, 2023•41 min
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 success to truly grow in silence and make our contemplative spaces. The Poco a Poco podcast happens be...
Oct 25, 2023•45 min
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 be with Her more and be able to love Jesus a lot more through her. In this episode, we're gonna dive ...
Oct 18, 2023•44 min
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 noise whether exteriorly or interiorly. Every single day through general media we are bombarded wit...
Oct 11, 2023•43 min
