‘I Can’t Do This Alone’: How Blindness Led Dean Patterson to Brotherhood (E2)
Dean Patterson traces his journey from self-reliance to surrender, and brotherhood and the sacraments are the answer to a growing crisis among men
Dean Patterson shares how a Protestant family camp jolted him and his wife into reexamining their lukewarm cradle Catholicism, nearly led them out of the Church, and instead drove them into a charismatic parish where the rigor and structure of Catholicism finally made sense.
He walks through the slow-motion shock of a rare genetic disease that stole his central vision over seven years, how that forced him off the path of self-sufficiency and performance, and why handing over his car keys and his career became acts of surrender that brought real peace, not panic.
He talks about prison ministry, three decades of a Friday men’s group, and the Encounter School of Ministry as concrete places where he’s learned that men are not meant to do life alone — and that God keeps using him even when he feels needy, limited, or reluctant.
All the way through, Dean keeps coming back to one thing: if engaged men are listening, they need to pray for a brother or two, invite them back into Mass and brotherhood again and again, and trust that if they give God their “five and two,” He’ll show up in their homes, their friendships, and their parish with a peace that actually holds under fire.
Early in the episode, Patterson returns to a theme he and Hornacek raised in the series’ first show: what he calls the “Catholic man crisis.”
“We know that only 37% of men who proclaim to be Catholic are going to Mass each week. That’s recent research and that’s troubling on a lot of levels,” he says. “I think it’s more of a symptom than a cause that men are not embracing the sacraments. They’re not seeing their role as leaders in their families. If they’re not taking their families to church, where do their children fall?”
Patterson says the podcast is one way he and Hornacek hope to address that slow fade.
“We’re looking at this podcast as a way of addressing that and looking at all the elements of it over time,” he explains. “We’ve decided, Tom and I, you and I have decided this is an important podcast on a lot of levels.”
Hornacek says he wants listeners not just to hear Patterson’s story but to place themselves in it.
“As men, we go to battle together and we have to understand when we hit those difficulties and stumbling blocks in life, how do we deal with it? What do we do? Who do we turn to?” he says. “When you’re listening today to Dean’s story, I encourage you, place yourself in Dean’s spot wherever you are in life and then think about how would I handle this?”
From cradle Catholic to almost leaving the Church
Patterson begins his story with what he calls a very familiar Catholic upbringing.
“I was raised cradle Catholic in Milwaukee, little parish in Greendale with a school and went to Mass every Sunday, great parents,” he recalls. “We really didn’t do much outside of that besides going to Mass every Sunday and weren’t leaning into the Lord.”
When he became an adult, married and moved to Minnesota about 40 years ago, he and his wife began to ask what they really wanted for their family.
“My wife and I started having children and she had gone to a Catholic school. She had a good foundation and formation,” he says. “Together we started to say, what do we really want for our family?”
That question coincided with early-career job changes — “you kind of figure out the highway you’re gonna drive on,” he says — and a surprising invitation.
“Ironically, we ended up at a Protestant family camp through a series of, if you want to call them coincidences, I don’t,” he says.
A work peer had mentioned the camp over coffee. “He said, you know, it’s about a two year waiting list, but I really encourage you to get on it,” Patterson recalls. “A month later, my family was at that camp. God had a spot for us that week. Something opened up and there we were.”
At a “little camp in the middle of Wisconsin,” Patterson says he saw something he had been looking for but didn’t yet have words for.
“Our kids got Bible teaching at their age group. The adults got faith formation from speakers that for the first time showed me how Scripture came to life and how to apply it,” he says. “It’s a great thing, I think, that our Protestant brothers and sisters have that strength in many cases.”
The experience set a new standard.
“It showed me a new level or a new standard and showed me that a real man can be God-fearing, God-facing, and really has a job to lead his family in a way that I wasn’t,” Patterson says.
When they returned home, the couple found themselves wondering if they should leave the Catholic Church.
“We had really debated whether we leave the Catholic faith. A huge question. We really were that close,” he says.
Instead, he says, “by the grace of God” they found a parish about 20 minutes away.
“We knew nothing about charismatic church,” Patterson recalls, “and we’re still there today almost 30 years later… strong pastor, other strong men who were again leading their families. But for the first time I saw the Catholic Church as a solution.
“A lot of the rigor of the Catholic faith and what appeared to be form and structure for no reason had a lot of reasons and a lot of excitement around it,” he says. “And it brought me to a new place.”
The shift was not instant.
“I won’t say it was easy,” Patterson says. “Early on I was looking, trying to pray by myself, read Scriptures by myself, not understanding it, fighting with that, frustrated with that, but God brought me through.”
A radio preacher helped open new doors.
“I remember there’s a Dr. Charles Stanley, was a radio ministry… that really opened up some of the Scriptures to me for the first time by myself,” he says. “And then eventually, you know, beginning to get more involved in my Catholic faith, began to embrace that.”
For men listening, Patterson points to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew as a key lesson.
“What to learn from that, men, if you’re listening to this, is — and I think of Matthew 7:7-8 — knock and the door will be opened, seek and you will find,” he says. “These are promises from God. And it doesn’t happen overnight. We need to keep making the effort.”
He worries that many men are not making that effort.
“I’m concerned about men today not making that effort,” he says. “The men that I talk to and that I see may be going through the routines and the motions, but not truly taking it back and being driven by their own personal mission to grow in their relationship.”
He also points to a second truth.
“We’re made in the image and likeness of God. And in that way, we have a soul. It’s eternal,” Patterson says. “We can pray, we can forgive, we’re something, we’re someone and He wants to relate to us. We’re made for relationship.”
“We’re also made for relationship with others,” he continues. “And if you’re a father and a husband, you’re made for relationship to your family and God’s put in us the role to lead your family and to model for your family. And I needed to come a long, long way and I still do, frankly.”
A rare diagnosis and the slow loss of sight
Hornacek asks Patterson about the invitation to that family camp and how it became the start of a deeper journey.
“And it was answering the call that led you to the journey you’re on,” Hornacek says.
“Up until that point, self-sufficiency was what I was all about,” he says. “If it was to be, it was up to me. I did the Tony Robbins set. I did all the ‘go, set a goal, come on, achieve.’ And I was all about that.”
He had taken a new job as a consulting account manager, blessed with “some great clients,” and did that work for 13 years.
“And it was up to me,” he says.
The week at family camp brought another revelation.
“Right when I was about — in fact, it happened the very week I was at that family camp, you talk about God’s timing — I learned that I’d be losing my eyesight to a medical condition that I knew nothing about prior to that,” Patterson says.
The condition was rare and genetic.
“If you’re a genetic guy, you know from high school biology or whatever that a recessive trait picks up when both your parents are carriers, but it’s even a one in four shot that you’ll manifest anything like that,” he explains. “Turns out I was the first one in any part of my family up and down the family tree to manifest it.”
At the time, he says, “I was seeing just fine physically right then. And for the next seven years, I knew this was hanging over me, but didn’t know when it would come down on me.”
“By the time I hit 40, it began. By the time I was 44, it was game over,” Patterson says. “All my central vision gone, continues to degrade even today, 20 years after that.”
That loss forced a reckoning.
“Suddenly I can’t be dependent on me anymore. And God showed me that and gratefully, he showed me that,” he says.
“What I’ve learned is the more I surrender to his will, the more I know he’s got me,” Patterson adds. “And these are words I never would have said 20 years ago, you know, 30 years ago. It’s completely changed how I think, how I believe. It’s given me confidence and humility at the same time, if that makes sense, because I’m just awed by God’s presence and what’s happened here.”
He says he now lives out a familiar Gospel story in his own way.
“I’m fond of saying I give God my five and two — five loaves and two fishes — and just let it go and watch Him go to work,” Patterson says. “And sometimes that pans out the way I expected to see. A lot of times it pans out even better.”
“Fast forward now all these years and what I would say, in all truth, is that the things that St. Paul talks about promising, the fruits of the Spirit — peace, love, joy — are in my life in ways now that I never saw before,” he says. “I used to be all about competition, performance. I grew up with a performance mentality. If you don’t do, you’re not going to be loved. I compare myself to others. I still fight that a little bit, frankly. Envy is hard. You know, we may not have the life materially that we expected, but at the same time, we have much more.”
“Losing eyesight, yeah, that’s a challenge,” Patterson says. “And by the way, that brings your entire family into this challenge now as well. My wife does all the driving and has for more than 18 years. My children had to drive me around. And so it’s become something that they’ve joined me in, but God has never left it. And for that, I’m grateful.”
“Here I am today, a heroic man,” he adds. “Who’d have thought that I’d even be talking this way, let alone having a perspective that I think really applies to what men are out there doing. Whether or not you have eyesight, you can answer the heroic call. And it might be easier for you, it might be harder to get past your own self-reliance. And what I’ve seen in my life, I guess, is that intersection of where God met me and I could no longer rely on my own physical attributes to accomplish things.”
Choosing not to live as a victim
Hornacek hears in Patterson’s story a critical turning point.
“I’m hearing like you got to a point and there was a crossroad in your life and you had a choice of which direction to go,” he says. “To become a victim and to live as a victim — I’m losing my sight, I’ve lost my sight — or to say, okay, Lord, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I turn to you and I’m just going to trust whatever path you have for the rest of my life.”
He asks Patterson to describe that choice.
Patterson points to one conversation at the family kitchen table.
“I distinctly remember when it was time for me to separate from my employer,” he says. At that point, he was already legally blind. His company had “did a great job of keeping me employed,” including providing a driver when he needed one. “But eventually it became time to separate,” he says.
“My performance had gone down. They deserved somebody in that job that was going to do what they needed to do for the company,” Patterson explains.
He gathered his family.
“I remember sitting down with all our kids,” he says. “One was a teenager at that point, one preteen, and our Sally was probably 12. And we’re all around the kitchen table and I told them, hey, things can change around here. I’m going to be around the house but without a job.”
They had questions.
“Don’t worry. I’m not in any pain,” he told them. “Someone — one of my kids — asked me, does it hurt? No, it doesn’t.”
He and his wife had already been talking.
“My wife and I had had the conversations about, okay, what’s next?” he says. “And she and I also talked about, there’s three little sets of eyes that are watching how I handle adversity. And if I’m ever going to proclaim to have faith, I better put it into practice and I better reflect that in what I do.”
“I better be joyful. I better be faithful because I’m not the center of the universe. God is and I better tune up to this,” Patterson says. “And so it required some personal growth for me to choose.”
In that season, he says, he was struck by how many people showed him practical kindness.
“I still am just confounded by how many people are kind to me, how many people will go out of their way to help me,” he says.
“My wife, number one, has never complained. And certainly her life is so different as a result of this,” Patterson says. “But I think we’re better again together. I hope we are and we’ll continue to work at that.”
He talks about small but concrete acts of charity.
“I continue to see people reach and be kind to me, be very forgiving,” he says. “I’ve got a good buddy that takes me fishing. I love to fish, I love water, being on it, around it. I just get really filled by that. And you know, if I break off, I can’t tie a line. And he does. And other people have taken me fishing too. Just little things, examples like that where people have shown up in my life and it just shows me that, you know, again, it’s not about me.”
His spiritual director helped him see another side of that dependence.
“My spiritual director — by the way, having a spiritual director never even occurred to me either, you know, but now I have one — and he said, you know what, it allows them to serve too,” Patterson says.
“I still fight that idea that I don’t want to be so needy,” he admits. “And maybe I’ll always fight that, but I’ll also surrender it to God and just let that happen if it needs to.”
Those two things — choosing joy in front of his family and accepting help from others — have kept him from bitterness, he says.
“Is it an inconvenience to not see when you used to be able to? Yeah, I know what I’m missing. I can’t see faces, can’t do any forms to fill out, and all that jazz is a daily thing for all of us,” he says. “Yeah, it’s a hassle, you know, but I just thankfully I hope I can shrug it off but always empathize and be grateful to those who are helping me live it.”
Patterson ties that back directly to the sacraments.
“Confession has a lot to do, I think, with getting us righted,” he says. “And so I’d also encourage men to seek the sacraments because there’s power in those.”
“I rarely went to confession before I reverted,” he admits. “And now I try to go — not driving, I don’t go as often as I probably want to or need to — but to seek out the sacraments, to truly embrace the truth of the Church, has nothing to do with my physical manifestation of what I have. It has everything to do with my interior. And then I can conduct my life in a way that’s open to what God calls me to do.”
“I don’t want to paint a rosy picture,” Patterson adds. “It’s not always fun to have to accommodate, but it’s a far cry from where I could have been and was at one point, where I was, you know, all about me.”
“If the number one commandment is love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, the number one commandment I was living out was love Dean with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and go make more money and go have more fun,” he says. “Those are fine, you know, it’s fine to do as long as you keep at number one.”
Handing over the car keys
Hornacek asks Patterson about another concrete moment of surrender: the last time he drove a car.
“What was it like the last time you know you were going to drive a car and you had to turn the car keys over to your wife?” Hornacek asks. “You did have to surrender your independence and your freedom to some point. That was really a total surrender.”
Patterson recalls that day clearly.
“I was driving legally blind and I knew it and I was still working,” he says.
At that point, he had a weekly adoration hour on Fridays at 2 p.m.
“I told the gal that worked for me down in Chicago, I said, never violate that appointment,” he says. “I’m not going to be on a plane on a Friday morning. I want to be home Thursday night.”
One Friday, he was driving home from adoration around 3:10 p.m.
“So what affects me is central vision,” he explains. “I’m driving south on this road away from the church and thinking doo-doo, you know, no other cars on the road at three in the afternoon, right?”
“At the very last minute, a mail carrier is delivering on the side of the road, on the right side of the road where I’m driving,” he says. “And I mean, at the very last minute, it was one of those, you know, dive off to the left to avoid hitting him. And then I knew, you know, you spared me there, Lord. Thank you. And you spared him. I’m sure I would have killed him, killed both of us.”
“And I knew then that I couldn’t keep this up,” Patterson says.
He went home that afternoon and told his wife, Therese, what had happened.
“I had one appointment on Monday in the middle of the day,” he recalls. “And I prayed about it. I said, you know what? Because it’s expensive to get a driver and, you know, a hassle to get all that, I said I’m going to take this one last appointment and then I’m going to let my employer know what’s going on, where I’ve progressed to. We were already in communication about this.”
“So you asked me how I felt,” Patterson says. “Funny, through this whole thing, I think I told you that family camp early on had a lot to do with me coming back to the faith and trusting in God in a new way. Same week I learned about this health condition.”
“I didn’t get rattled at all,” he says. “There just was an odd sense of peace and it’s going to be okay.”
“The same way that next Monday, I did my appointment, gratefully, took extra care to be safe on the road and then handed the keys over that afternoon and said, that’s it, I’m done,” Patterson recalls.
The state eventually caught up.
“The motor vehicle department didn’t catch up with me till that December, you know, three months later,” he says. “I went in and took the test, yep, you’re not going to pass. And they thought the machine was broken because they’re looking at me. And I said, no, I’ve got something going on. And it picked up on that. I frankly don’t want to drive anyway.”
“How did I feel? Peaceful,” Patterson repeats. “I shouldn’t have by all accounts. But I knew it was coming. I had seven years to prepare — an interesting number of years. And I felt peaceful about it.”
“I think God knew that he needed to be that present to me, you know, for me to accept this. He knows me. He knows me better than me,” he says. “But yeah, you know, peaceful, resigned.”
Hornacek turns to listeners.
“What I’m hearing, Dean, is, for if you’re listening out there right now to Dean’s story, is that when you surrender to him, when you turn to him, as difficult as it is — and it is difficult — but then that’s when you open up your heart and you allow him to pour those graces into you and give you that peace of heart and mind,” he says.
“And then whatever happens, okay, Lord,” Hornacek adds. “And I think too, Dean, listening to your story, how many people who knew you at work and family and friends in your parish said, man, look at Dean. I don’t know if I could handle it like he is, but he is faithful, he’s happy, he’s joyful. You’re leading people to Christ through your loss of vision.”
Patterson answers simply: “Boy, I mean, I hope. I mean, that’s our job. That’s our call, is to live out our lives in a way that we put God first and it attracts other people to it. It isn’t me doing that. It’s the Lord’s work, I think.”
Prison ministry, brotherhood and ‘we’re not meant to do this alone’
From there, Patterson turns to two pillars that have shaped his spiritual life: prison ministry and band-of-brothers friendships.
He says he resisted prison ministry at first.
“We talked a little last week too about prison ministry that I’m part of,” he says. “I fought that tooth and nail for a couple of weeks, or a couple of years. Every time the gal would approach me about being in the prison ministry, I thought I’m running from this one. I have no interest in that. I have no compassion. Those guys deserve to be in there. They’ve earned their way in. And what’s a little suburban guy from Milwaukee gonna tell a hardened criminal?”
“But again, not about me,” Patterson adds.
He eventually said yes.
“Who knew? I eventually said yes to it and I’m telling you it is the most powerful thing in my life, I think, in many ways,” he says.
On his first retreat inside the prison, he says, “within the first two hours of the first retreat — and I went in there nervous as a cat — you know, what am I going to say to these guys I’m sitting across from who are in for life?”
“I had, what do I have, six at my table. Four were in for life. They’re lifers and two were going to get sentences and they had release dates,” Patterson says.
“Within two hours, I got a guy that I still know today. I call him a friend. He’s going, ‘Hey Dino, can I get you a cup of coffee? It’s over here if you want me. I’ll walk over there with you,’” he recalls.
“I was blown away by, look, that could just as easily be me in there,” he says. “Decisions I’ve made in my lifetime or choices I could have made. Their souls are just like you and me. And God is in this place and showing me and revealing to me where and how much he needs, you know, the Holy Spirit in there and how much the Holy Spirit already is in there. They’ve taught me so much.”
Patterson then moves to the brotherhood that has surrounded him for decades.
“I think instructive for our podcast and the fact that you and I work for Heroic Men, we really believe we’re not meant to do this life alone,” he tells Hornacek. “And so many guys are. They’re retreating into their man caves, their home offices, overworking, not engaging in bringing their families to Mass and not joining committees at church, leading in their homes, their churches, their communities.”
When he and his wife first found their new parish, the community life was obvious.
“When I found this church, my wife and I found this church 20 minutes away, it’s jammed to the gills every Mass,” he says. “You had just a palpable sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit in there and the praise and worship and the people and the hands raised and just a new way of Catholic worship that I’d never seen.”
“I knew I wanted to be part of it,” he says. “Everyone knew each other. We didn’t know a soul.”
They would go into the parish hall — “the family activity center” — for a cookie after Mass.
“The kids want that and okay, let’s see if we can meet people,” he says. “It wasn’t easy. They all know each other. You can just see them. They’re like one big family and there we are.”
“I prayed for Catholic friends,” Patterson says.
“Within four months, Tom, I had a men’s group that has been meeting weekly for, we think, about 30 years,” he says.
He describes it as “kind of in the mode of Promise Keepers.”
“I’d gone to a Promise Keepers conference. It was back in that mode of men worshiping together,” Patterson says. “And this was a men’s group that was formed up.”
As the years went on, that Friday group became central.
“We have been meeting weekly ever since,” he says. “And as I speak, I’ve got a guy in my house. He’s in the next room on his own webinar and he’s working. He’s staying with us for the night, but we meet every Friday and we are, I would say, the best of friends.”
“We learned the faith together,” he adds. “And you know what we started with? Apologetics. And I still have that saddle-stitched book that we started with and I can look back at it… it’s got highlighted things about the tenets of the faith. And we all had questions about why is the Eucharist, how do we know it’s the Presence, how do we defend that — some of the basic Catholic teaching.”
He turns again to men listening.
“So guys, if you’re listening to this and you don’t have a brotherhood, pray for friends, pray for a group and just see what the Lord does with that,” he says. “I think it’s his will and he will deliver and then bond and commit and go through that together, become a group of friends.”
“You may not hang out together every day, but you will meet every Friday,” Patterson says. “And if you put the Lord in the middle of it, I promise you he’s going to bring you along.”
He says that group has walked with him from lukewarm faith into a deeper embrace of Catholic teaching.
“I was a very lukewarm, I think, Catholic growing up, as I said, and I didn’t really embrace the teachings. I didn’t know why I was Catholic,” he says.
The Protestant men and women they met along the way “pushed us around a lot about why are you Catholic,” he adds.
“Here’s the verse that the Bible says and doesn’t say, and here’s where we think you need to be,” Patterson recalls. “And it really pushed us around and forced us into a corner where it’s like, you know what, let’s learn it. And if it turns out that it’s true, then we’re in, we’re all in on Catholicism. And if it’s not, okay, we’re going to lead our family a different way.”
He summarizes the lesson this way:
“If you pray to God about wanting Catholic friends, if you pray to God about a brotherhood, you need those guys for life,” he says. “We’re not meant to do this alone. And I can lean into these guys, and I do, 30 years later.”
“There are other groups we’re part of and I’m part of, but this one has stood the test of time and this one started within four months of me asking,” Patterson says. “And it turns out there are other men asking too. Eventually we were put together and here we are all these years later, very stable group, amazing. We’ve gone on retreats together, we’ve gone camping together, we’ve done all that. Now we know our families, our grandkids, weddings, funerals. You experience life together as a brotherhood. And these are guys I obviously cherish in my life and we’ve all gone through a lot together.”
Encounter School and a different kind of Catholic formation
Hornacek asks Patterson to share one more piece of his story: how his path led to the Encounter School of Ministry.
“One of the things we say in the prisons — look, it’s one thing to read on the pages of the Bible in yourself about the living God. It’s another thing to really encounter him,” Patterson says. “And that’s what the retreats that we deliver are meant to do.”
“We can encounter him every week,” he adds. “We can encounter the Lord in the Eucharist. We can encounter him in the sacraments, in the brotherhoods, and all these places.”
“The Encounter School of Ministry is, as a Catholic, a school,” he says, explaining that his wife is in her second year locally in the Minneapolis area, while he completed his formation virtually. “It just is powerful because it helps you look into the Scriptures and encounter God in a whole new way.”
“It builds faith. It helps you look into yourself and say, where am I, you know, needing to grow to really answer the call that Jesus has for all of us,” Patterson says. “He’s still doing signs and wonders through us. He left so that we can do the work for him. And so that is a school that skills you up for that. And it helps you step out safely and practice prayer. And we’ve just seen amazing things happen through the Encounter School of Ministry.”
“Whenever I pray for someone, I may not see a miracle in front of me, but they always feel loved by God,” he says. “They always feel closer. They feel seen.”
Patterson sees Encounter as part of a broader renewal in Catholic life.
“It’s one other element of the Catholic faith that we haven’t seen before,” he says. “I think we’ve seen the Catholic faith be all about, look, let’s educate our kids in the Catholic faith. Mass, make sure you get to Mass each week. That’s a powerful thing, even more than once a week if you can.”
“But understand why and now activate the kinds of faith that God is putting in us by laying on hands, praying, signs, wonders,” he continues. “Things happen. And the Holy Spirit’s moving through that Encounter School and I encourage anyone to look into it because they’re growing like crazy and there’s a reason that God is in the middle of it.”
Hornacek briefly shares his own Encounter story, recalling driving two and a half hours each way to attend the first two years the school operated in Brighton, Michigan.
“My wife said, you’re going to drive two and a half hours each way every week from September through May?” he recalls. “And I said, well, I’ll let you know after the first class. And after the first class, I’m driving home and I’m like, yeah, I’m coming back.”
“Gentlemen, if you’re listening out there, this journey that God has you on, this development plan he has you on, is different for each one of you,” Hornacek says. “But if you’re never listening or being taught how to listen to the Spirit and commune with God and talk to him all day long and get words of knowledge and see healing and see prayers answered, that’s what we want to help you with. And it all comes through developing your prayer life.”
Resources for the battle — and a call to invite other men
As the conversation turns toward closing, Hornacek shares one of his favorite resources for men: the American Catholic Daily Reader from CatholicVote.
“It’s 365 days of patriot saints, rogues who shaped America,” he says.
He notes that the day of recording is the anniversary of Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen’s death and reads several of Sheen’s lines, including: “Sometimes the only way the Lord can get into some hearts is to break them. Unless there’s a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday,” and, “If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end up believing as you behave.”
“You must remember to love people and use things rather than to love things and use people,” Hornacek reads. He closes with a longer Sheen quote on what the archbishop called America’s crisis of tolerance.
“These are little things we can learn about our faith to share,” Hornacek says. “So if you’re listening right now, those things are helpful when you’re talking to other men because sometimes when you regionally go to apologetics immediately, it isn’t so successful. So we just want to give you things that are going to help benefit you and help you grow your faith so that you can be an example to others.”
Patterson adds a plug for the Heroic Men platform that he and Hornacek help lead.
“Don’t forget, you know, we have the Heroic Men platform that we encourage every man to go to the Play Store or the App Store and just type in ‘Heroic Men’ and you’ll see devoted teaching and programming for Catholic men,” he says.
“Fill your mind with the stuff that is going to matter eternally,” Patterson adds. “And that’s updated constantly. It’s done at the expense of donors, donor partners who have paid it forward. So you have no reason to not get on there. It’s absolutely no charge to you and go on there and see what men are watching and become part of that, I think, a surge in an area where I feel like there’s a great deal of hope, you know, that we’re going to get men to come back little by little.”
“And then one at a time they invite another man,” he says. “And before you know it, we’re re-engaging in ways that we’re answering the heroic call.”
At the end of the episode, as Hornacek previews that he will share his own story in the next show — one he describes with the words “deliverance” and “heaven is real” — he asks Patterson for a final word.
Patterson turns again to the power of personal invitation.
“You know, if you were listening to this you might have a husband who is lukewarm,” he says. “But more than likely you’re a guy listening to this. You’re probably engaged in the faith.”
“If you are, I want you to pray about whether there’s a brother or two that comes to mind that God brings to your mind that you can personally invite to reengage with either your men’s group or with you,” Patterson says. “Come back to Mass. ‘Hey, we got some things going on at church you might enjoy.’”
“Because personal invitations, about six of them or seven of them is what it takes to get a guy to finally agree to go to pizza and beer on Friday night or whatever the event is,” he adds. “But we have a responsibility in our own, even in our weakness, to reengage with men because so many are out on the sidelines, Tom.”
“And I think whether or not you’re fully able-bodied or maybe like me, God somehow finds a way to use you,” Patterson says. “So if you pray it and if you’re open to it, he will deliver and start using you. And before you know it, you’ll say, you know what, this isn’t of me. And now I’m honored and I’m glorifying God. And I’ve had a lot of blind spots in my life. Prayer helps illuminate that. And humbly, we go forward. We’re never going to be perfect, guys. But if you give the Lord your five and two, I trust he’s going to show up in your life, your family life.”
“He’s going to have — before you know it, you’re going to be leading the prayer at Thanksgiving, you’re going to be leading the prayer at Christmas, you’re going to be showing your kids, your other peers, just that God is active in your life,” Patterson says. “Just understand too that what comes with that is a satisfaction and a peace that surpasses all understanding.”
“I’m not really thrilled with having to sit here and talk about myself,” he says in closing, “but we have learned a lot of lessons and it’s really about the Lord today.”
Hornacek ends the episode with a prayer, asking the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and the Lord to cover listeners and their families with Christ’s protection, “fill them with irresistible grace” and “give them a thirst” for Jesus.
“Join us next week on Men Answering the Heroic Call,” he says.