https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GPfITVjDWYw
One thing that I think that has confused me over the years that I would love to ask you about is God. Would God kind of be like an abstract set of values or would God be a person? So, okay, so the way that Christians understand it is that God is a communion of persons. Right. Okay, so that’s what the idea of the Trinity is, right? And so the idea, so the best way to understand is that God is the infinite source of everything, right? That’s the first thing to understand is that’s what God is. And the second thing to understand is that anything you say about God is always wrong. Everything you say about God is always a compromise, okay? This is something that’s just completely orthodox. Like this is not some new age stuff. This is really what the Church Fathers taught is that God’s being or God’s essence or God’s beyond being is not actually a being, it’s beyond being, is something that you can’t talk about, okay? But nonetheless is the source of everything, right? The infinite source of everything, which is beyond everything. And so, and it manifests, it reveals itself to us as a communion of persons, as this communion of love between beings and they’re not beings in the, like I always say, like if you think that when I say, use the word being, it’s like the same thing as your car or as an apple, then stop, then God doesn’t exist then. I’m totally fine in saying God doesn’t exist. If for you existing just means the things you can see and touch and quantify, right? Sure, sure. But let’s say God is beyond that level. And so that is how God reveals itself though, as a communion of love. And you could say that in Christianity, the infinite itself, right? And the expression of the infinite and the manner in which the infinite expresses itself in the world is all part of God. And so that’s what God is, let’s say, and knowing that even that is a compromise in language. And so you can imagine that all of reality leads up to a point where it stops. So think about any identity, right? And so it’s like an apple, right? I can describe all the elements of the apple, but no matter how many elements I describe, at some point I have to stop and jump up and say, apple. But I have to jump up, I have to emerge out of this quantity, out of this multiplicity and jump up into a single identity. And so it’s like that for every being. Every being has that reality, which is that its identity is above its multiplicity, right? It’s higher than its multiplicity. So now do that for everything. So that everything, so people like to say things like, I pray to the universe, right? And it’s like, there’s something dishonest about that. Because how can you say that the universe is one? Like, what is this unity of the universe? Like, what are you talking about? And so that’s why even that has to jump up into something which is beyond, to something which is completely beyond all ways of naming, of manifesting anything that you can think of or quantify. And that is what the divine is. That is the infinite source of everything, right? The ground of being, you could say. There are different ways of trying to talk about this. And then for Christians especially, it manifests itself as a communion of love. And then that communion of love helps you understand how things exist in the world. So it’s like the fact that you can see that something is one. And you could say, you could go as simple, even an apple, you could say something like, the apple exists through a communion of love. And you’d say, oh, that’s a stupid thing to say, but think about it. It’s like the elements that make me recognize that something has being, they’re all multiple. There’s an indefinite amount of them, right? A chair is even better. Like there are all these elements of the chair, and then somehow they come together and they joined a single purpose, and then they exist as one. And that’s what love is, because it doesn’t also destroy the multiplicity, right? It doesn’t stop the chair from being multiple things at the same time. It’s still legs and a back, and all those things are still there, but somehow they’re able to kind of come together and become one. And that’s how the world exists. That’s how everything exists, basically.