https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MIQTbymWbJM
I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about attention. It’s something that pops up in your work quite a lot. In a recent discussion on the Psalms, you and your guests discussed the notion of the buffered self and the porous self. So just for people listening, the buffered self is roughly what we have now in modernity or post-modernity, but the porous self is this way in which pre-modern people lived, the world in which Christianity emerged, which is important to remember, where the boundaries between oneself and outside were not hard but were open, so they truly experienced the world. And so my question for you would be, how do Christians in the 21st century experience this enchanted way of being again, or perhaps even people who just yearn to believe? Yeah. I think the first thing is to kind of understand the hierarchy of experience. It’s not that we have to totally deny the technology and screens and all that. They’re good, useful tools. I mean, I use them, we’re using them now. There’s nothing wrong with them per se. The problem is the hierarchy. The problem is that we get our identity now from the screens, and we get our identity from this type of relationship in which we are able to project a very limited aspect of ourselves and receive a very limited aspect of ourselves. And what that does is it definitely hardens that distance. And it’s easy to do that because actually being in a relationship and in contact with people is painful. It’s painful in a transforming way. So I think it might sound boring, but the way to heal that is to just get involved, right? To get involved in your family, to get involved in your parish, to get involved in the… And I say that, but it’s like because of what I do, because of how much I travel. I went to church, to my church last, yesterday, I guess, no, two days ago, and I hadn’t been in my church for five weeks because I’d been traveling so long. So I say that, but I’m a hypocrite because I also… And I’m there and I’m like, why don’t I spend more time? Why don’t I just stop the traveling and just… But that’s the key. There’s no secret. It’s just spending, just kind of being in connection with real people, with real problems. That’s the way. But I think there’s also in terms of the participative element, I think that for sure, liturgy and participative events are helpful. Liturgy, I think, is the top one, but it’s so hard even now to have a meal together with people. But emphasizing that type of conviviality and… I mean, I don’t know, it depends on people, but I don’t know, learn folk dancing, learn to play in a musical instrument, playing music together. There’s all kinds of ways to connect with people in that it doesn’t always… Because we always have this weird idea that one of the aspects of the Buffard self is like the psychological self. And it’s like we think that a deep discussion is talking about our problems, that kind of stuff, where we always think that’s what we should be ultimately doing is sharing our problems with each other and that that would be a connection. But I don’t think that that’s actually the deepest types of connections. Just sitting together, singing together, eating together, being just together physically with people can sometimes be deeper and more participative than the conversation.