https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kTtXcLhNf5Y
What’s strange is to realize all of a sudden that we’re on the edge of culture. It’s like I noticing like I’m seeing the type of person that I would that I would have recognized before as being the the punks or the these kind of edge of culture people who can see where it’s going and are making the first first adopters, I guess they call them. That I’m seeing I’m noticing that they’re they’re becoming Christians because are becoming at least more traditional Christians, liturgical Christians because liturgy. They intuitively understand that there’s something about the world which is magical, and that there has to be a ritual form to it there has to be something, you know, there has to be this form that is binding reality together. Sometimes it’s not it’s not explicitly understood. It’s sometimes more intuitive. And then they can see they can see a liturgical life and ritual life as part of that so I don’t know if that’s something that you thought about yourself. Yeah, no, a lot. Actually, I mean, that’s the other thing I discovered with orthodoxy is that the liturgy is so powerful, the central ritual is so powerful and again Western Christianity didn’t have any rituals in it. Well, he does, obviously, but not not that I’d ever seen as being very significant, because the Reformation changes the role of a church from being a center for ritual to being a sort of center for moral teaching. You know, you take out the ritual I mean you still probably do the Eucharist and stuff but it’s a bit, it’s a bit by the by, really what you’re getting is a lecture. And that’s what I always thought Christianity was that it’s a lecturer who tells you what Jesus wants you to do. Yeah, but as soon as you experience a ritual, then you think oh my goodness me this is what it’s supposed to be about gods in the room, you know, this is what’s supposed to be happening here. And again, a lot of the work I’ve done with mythologists and reading of myths from cultures around the world. And culture can’t survive without central rituals. And they’re always rituals which are designed to take people to the divine in some way beyond ourselves. And we haven’t got that and even our Christianity hasn’t had that for a long time in Protestant countries anyway. And so that’s a major loss and it’s one of these things that people don’t even know they’ve lost. Yeah, you know I grew up with not knowing I’d lost this it’s a bit like initiation ceremonies that’s another thing traditional cultures have you know you’d be initiated from childhood in a serious culture we don’t have that and so we’re perpetually in a rested development. You know all the adults are behaving like children. Yeah, aspiration of a 75 year old is to still look like a 30 year old that’s because we haven’t been initiated, though we don’t know we’re missing that either. And you know you mentioned that the sort of work culture thing I often think that social justice is like you say it’s like, it’s like the sermon on the mount, but without love or forgiveness or God. So it’s like all the stuff that you actually need to leaven that strict moral message that you get from Christ is taken out. And once you have once you have a kind of moral teaching without love, or any higher purpose you have a tyranny potentially. But at the heart of it is people trying to make something that they think they need, because they don’t know what they’ve lost. Yeah. And it’s there so there’s so many lost people, you know we’ve all been there floundering about thinking. Something is something is really missing there’s a massive void here. Yeah, but we have no idea how to fill it. And I think that’s where we are. And but like you say this, that’s a lesson that’s given to us. It’s probably a lesson we need to learn. So that’s that’s probably the question isn’t it how do we learn that lesson and what do we draw from it. Because I think a lot of people are going to learn that lesson one way or another, you know, one of the things we saw in 2020 is a return of a liturgical action. You know all the, the George Floyd protests, the fact that they were worldwide which is just, I mean it just insane to think that something like that, cause such a worldwide worldwide phenomena. And it was really because it was a religious action, you know it was based on a, on a, on a sacrifice, which was experiment, which was experienced as a catharsis by people. And, you know, this kind of flowing out of religious feeling and then going out into the street and processing and chanting and and kneeling and doing all these, these religious gestures and so it’s coming back religion is coming back, there’s nothing we can do to stop it right All the, all the new atheists that they they’re wrong, they’re wrong about how reality works. And it’s playing out. And the question is how is it going to play out because the sacred has a very, the sacred or the desire for the sacred has a very dark tendency. You know, and if you read, I was really, I’ve been talking about the back you for some reason, many times recently but you know if you think of the, this kind of this image of the sacred out of control which you see in the back where there’s this ripping apart right This is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the, this kind of insane scapegoating or this kind of destruction of, you know, this ripping apart of the king or whatever it is that goes on in these, in this religious tendency we have, it’s brought into something higher.