Jack Beers:
You write in the book that holy moments draw out your potential. I'm sitting here, and there's untapped potential within me. Holy moments is a mechanism by which my potential can be drawn out. So many people want to reach their potential. How do holy moments draw your potential out of you, and what does that look like?
Matthew Kelly:
Yeah. I particularly talked about soul potential, and that concept just sort of came to me as I was working on the book. Because we think about, okay, people have intellectual potential, or physical potential, or career potential, or relationship potential, or all these different types of potential, but what is the core of all of that? What is sort of the sum of all of our potential? It is soul potential. It is spiritual force that is within us that has been placed within us, I think for very specific reasons, to play fairly specific roles in this, just world and in our lives and in other people's lives.
We look at children, we see potential all the time. You just look at little kids and they'll just do a little thing, just a tiniest little thing, and you realize, ooh, there's potential for whatever there. At some point we stopped looking at people and seeing potential. I think that's a really sad thing, as a society. I think at some point we stopped looking at ourselves and seeing potential, because we're grown up now, right? Only we're not really, and there still is this sort of extraordinary, almost infinite potential, but it is soul potential. It's not of this world. It's not, oh, I have potential to be a great golfer, a great basketball player, or a mathematician, or a scientist or whatever. It is something spiritual, which means it affects everything.
Jack Beers:
One of the things that you've said often is that great books walk and talk with you wherever you go. I mean, great as in, maybe effective. It could be a negative book, right? A book that impacts you negatively or positively, what you read, what you consume, it walks and talks with you. I read Life is Messy, and it had walked and talked with me, in that it gave me some things to really seriously consider and ponder on and think about, and really related. This book was so different, and it's different on the topic of potential, because I read it and then it's walking and talking with me and I am... and the concept of holy moments and that there are tons of opportunities throughout my day to either have a holy moment or an unholy moment, it was like the first time that my potential became tangible.
I could just see it now, like going through the day. My wife is tired and I know she's tired, and all of a sudden I've because I've read this book, I'm like, okay, I have options here. I can look at my wife and I can say, "Well, it's too bad. Those dishes are pretty high. Have fun." Now I want to stay married, so I'd never say it like that. I could say, "Well, hey, I'll tag team them with you." That's okay. Or I could do the thing that I could really sense that God was calling me to, which was, "Hey, you've been running around with the kids all day today, go up. I'm going to take care of the dishes tonight, and I'll be up there. So tomorrow you wake up, it's a clean kitchen." It was just like, oh, that's my potential to love. It's right in front of me and I have these different paths to choose. I know, with based off of the enthusiasm that the option is coming to me, what the right one is.
It was just, it's been this very strange experience to see my own potential for goodness, both to say something or not say something, do something or not do something, go the second mile when someone's only asking me to go one. It's really changed the way that the way that I see my every day, and it's brought me to this conclusion that holy moments is actually, it has an unlimited capacity to impact my life. Would you agree with that? Do you think it has this unlimited and lifelong potential to impact literally every single person?
Matthew Kelly:
Yeah, and every situation, and literally every moment. That's why I made the subtitle a handbook for the rest of your life. The concept is so powerful that once you know about it, you can't set it aside. You can't unthink it. You can't unhear it. You are going to see it everywhere you go, in every circumstance. You are going to see opportunities for you to collaborate with God and create holy moments. You're going to see opportunities for other people to collaborate with God and create holy moments. Sometimes it's going to be like watching a car wreck. You're driving along, you can see this car wreck about to happen, and you're going to see that because people are going to either pass up the opportunity to collaborate with God and create a holy moment or worse than that, they're going to go in the other direction and they're going to create an unholy moment.
But what you described, is the essence of what it means to be a human being, is the essence of the crisis in our society today. You are response able. You're capable of making response. You're able to respond to the same situation in many, many different ways, and that dynamic of being response able is the crux. It is, whole lives turn on that, in that moment. Whole society's turn on that, right? And unfortunately we are in the midst of a massive application of personal responsibility. We're essentially saying we are not response able, or we don't want to be response able. That is causing grief, sadness, suffering, both internal and external, on a massive scale in our society.
Matthew Kelly
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