Your Call to Adventure: Your story of the world changes who you save and serve - like Christ
As men, we've been given a world that is alive with God, and our job is to notice it, work with it, and turn it into something better - because that's what heroes do.
ABOUT THIS SERIES: Chris Mann and Dominic de Souza are two movie-loving young dads, who work fulltime with Heroic Men. The ‘mind of Christ’ is not a sermon for smart people, but a mini-series for men who want more out of life. Get a practical adventure into a heroic identity, a heroic call to action, and a summons to heroic brotherhood. This 3-part conversation challenges you to clear out the stinking thinking between our ears.
By the end of each episode, you’ll be inspired to try the simple prayers we pray, and test out the simple practices we follow. More than survive: we must learn to live as men fully alive. Let’s seek heroism like the saints and stories that matter most, and let’s step up to think and act like Christ.
If a man is “a son of the father,” made for more than he imagines on a Monday at work, then he is called to learn “to think and act like Christ.”
This episode is walking around the idea of a “sacramental imagination,” a phrase Chris Mann calls “kind of the most Catholic phrase that I’ve heard.” We explore it through gamer slang, poetic re-enchantment, ultraviolet light, Spider-Man, grafted fruit trees, wave offerings from Leviticus, and the Hadron Collider.
Reality has more in it than we can see. That’s just science.
Human beings, Dominic says, see only “this tiny sliver of the light spectrum.” In similar fashion, a human body may be only a sliver of what a person is, with soul and spirit extending beyond what can be grasped with our 5 senses.
It’s the same with sacramental life. Water in baptism looks like water. A baby after baptism still looks like the same baby. But, “there is a state change.” Something has happened, even though the senses can’t put it under a microscope.
Many Catholics, Dominic says, can sit through Mass and think, “well, there’s nothing happening.” But think of it like particle physics. Walk into a laboratory searching for neutrinos or high-energy collisions and, to an untrained eye, it may also appear that nothing is happening.
The same logic to sacramental life: grace, soul, liturgy, sanctification. Their wager is that Catholic practice trains perception. It teaches men to stop confusing invisibility with emptiness.
Superhero theology, with grafted branches
They get gleefully nerdy when Dominic frames the sacramental life through superhero origin stories. Peter Parker after the spider bite becomes a kind of parable.
Something new has happened to him.” He has entered a different way of being in the world. Baptism and confirmation, he says, similarly open “new doorways” inside a person. Grace is more than a moral vaccine. It is an infusion, a participation, a changed mode of life.
This richer image, though, comes from agriculture. Medieval monks knew grafting. A branch from one tree can be joined into another so that sap flows between them. That leads him to Christ’s words: “I’m the vine and you’re the branches.” The result is a picture of Christian life less as rule-following than as shared vitality.
Divine life moves through the believer the way sap moves through living wood.
The story a man lives inside
How a man sees the world will govern how he acts in it. A man who believes life is hostile, barren and stacked against him will read every event through that grid. A man who sees the world as radiant with divine meaning will still suffer, still labor, still bleed, though he will inhabit a different story while doing so.
Chris points to St. Francis, who saw creation as “alive with the glory of God.” Having the right story is essential.
That emphasis on story leads into fatherhood, education and masculine formation. Children, they argue, are already absorbing a view of reality through family life, love, correction, celebration and prayer.
Men, too, require formation in order to recover a truer imagination of existence. Their phrase for that recovery is vivid: a man must learn “to think like Christ,” then allow that pattern of seeing to flow into choices, sacrifice and friendship.
The “wave offering” and the child with crayons
Chris references an obscure biblical practice: the “wave offering.” A priest takes the offering and waves it before God. Many readers of Leviticus, one speaker says, encounter that and wonder what on earth it means. It’s similar to daily life for a dad with kids, where a child receives crayons and a coloring book, creates something beautiful, then runs back to show his father.
“That’s what a wave offering is.” It is relational before it is functional. It is a creature receiving a gift, shaping it, then offering it back in love.
A man receives existence, work, weather, children, bread, talent, even suffering. He does something faithful with those materials. Then he offers the result back.
Their tone resists modern productivity culture. God is no manager chasing outputs. “We’re children,” Chris says, “not a factory.”
Glory without performance
“Glory,” Chris says, “means being what you are.” A father playing bingo with his son may glorify God through presence, delight and attention. A man taking a walk may glorify God through creaturely life on “God’s green earth.” The radiance involved is neither ego nor applause. It is the visibility of truth in action, the felt witness of a life aligned with its source.
That’s why the conversation keeps returning to heroes. Men admire figures whose actions create safety, healing, courage and endurance.
Dominic contrasts the bitterness of Batman with the cleaner self-gift of Captain America, pausing over the line, “I could do this all day.” He praises the figure of a man who keeps showing up, keeps serving, keeps spending himself for others without collapsing into cynicism.
That, for Chris and Dominic, is heroic masculinity in a Christian key: strong, sacrificial, grounded, eager for the good.
Gratitude, friendship and the sign of the Cross
God gives, man receives, man works, man offers back. That pattern is sustained by gratitude. Chris quotes gratitude researcher Robert Emmons: “the source of goodness is outside of ourselves.” This idea blocks masculine self-sufficiency from becoming a religion. A man cannot generate his own life. He receives, then responds.
The final image is the sign of the cross. Dominic reads it as a map of reality: heaven to earth, then friend to friend. The man making the sign stands at the crossing point, where divine life and human relation meet and become visible in action.
That is the simplest view of “sacramental imagination.” It is a vision where manhood is neither abstraction nor hustle. It is a way to live in a world alive with God, carried forward through wounds, brotherhood, gratitude and work offered back in love.
The Christian life is neither sterile nor thin. It is charged. It is earthy.
For men who fear they have buried their gifts, receive what has been given, do something good with it, and return it to the Father.