https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_mNmF0oRbYg
Can I run an idea by you? It’s something I’ve been thinking about. It’s not worked out in my mind, but I wonder how you would react to it. We were talking about banality and ritual earlier on when we began this conversation. And I’m totally with you that we have to re-ritualize life in order to come back in contact with its extra dimension of depth, meaning and significance. At the same time, and I don’t know whether this is a dichotomy or a paradox, I don’t know. But I also sense that the word spirituality is the worst thing that has ever happened to spirituality because it made it distinct from reality. And sometimes I think that if we use too romantic language to talk about real stuff, the bedrock of existence, if we talk about it in too romantic terms, we create a distance between ourselves and it, because we are moist living beings. We go to the loo every day, even kings, and it doesn’t smell good when that happens. And we have to eat stuff and kill stuff to eat. Even if you’re a vegetarian, you’re killing plants to eat. And the business of life is messy. There is, it’s very bloody. There is a lot of suffering and it’s moist, it’s warm. It’s not a sleek marble statue, if you know what I mean. Yeah, no, I know exactly what you mean. And sometimes I think the romanticized language creates this impassable chasm between lived reality and the treasure buried at the end of the rainbow, if you know what I mean. And we do that in language. So is there something to say about trying to get a little bit rid of some of the romanticizing, talking about these things in more visceral terms? Yeah. You know, if we talk about enlightenment, I always go like, what the heck does that even mean? You know, this business of enlightenment, what does that even mean? But there is something I know, which is suddenly I became a lot more empathic. And it’s a shit show because I suffer over the Ukrainians. I suffer with the mothers and fathers in Texas. I suffer with everybody and it’s a horror show. Is that what we call enlightenment? Maybe that’s what it is. You see what I mean? Yeah, yeah. But I call it a shit show, not enlightenment. And I think there is something to be said about, you know, bringing the language down to our level a little bit so we can relate to this stuff as reality and not a romanticized something that is unachievable. I don’t know. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And people who watch my videos will hear me often say something like go to church. And what I mean by go to church is, yeah, that’s why I don’t talk, that’s why go to church is the most boring, it sounds like the most boring thing you could say to someone. But I’m saying go to church. You go to church, but it could be other types of participation. You go to church, then it’s messy. It’s messy because let’s say something like church, there are people there that you would choose to be with and there are people there that you would not choose to be with. And so all your buttons will be pressed. Everything about you will be challenged. But nonetheless, so there’s something dirty and moist and then smelly about it, but it’s all this dirty, moist, smelly stuff, which is trying to aim higher and transform these aspects of reality into something more. And so you kind of get in my estimation through participation in the things that are immediate to us. For example, like your family, don’t talk to me about enlightenment if you’ve alienated your kids and you hate your wife. And like, okay, I don’t know, cause you can see it, right? You see these kinds of spiritual type people that their lives are completely in shambles, but they’re doing yoga and they’re having mystical experiences. Like, okay, yeah, there’s something off about that. And so I think that engagement is probably better. And so for example, finding a confessor in the Orthodox church, like having someone you go to, you confess to, sometimes they’ll say the worst thing, like your confessor sometimes will say the most damaging thing you could ever hear. But it’s like, you have to kind of understand that that’s the messiness of this community, right? That’s the messiness of this communion as we kind of move awkwardly towards deification, towards transformation. So that’s at least the way that I try to, and I say that, but it’s like, it’s hard for me as much as anybody because we have all this comfort. It’s hard for me as much as anybody to do it, but yeah, at least that’s the way that I’m trying to deal with that stuff. And so I’m trying to really pin down what I’m attempting to say and not really succeeding yet. That’s why symbols are so important. But when I talk about romanticizing, there is a mushy quality to it, a kind of perfection to the goal, like the sumun bonum, like the saint is purely good and it’s all about love and playing the harp on the clouds. I don’t think this is a helpful image, if you know what I mean. Yeah, but do you think that that’s really, so it’s like, if you look at the Christian version of that, you end up with like martyrs and St. Francis of Assisi, like who is poor and the people who live in the desert and so it’s like St. Mary of Egypt. These are the images of our saints. They’re not angels on clouds, like, you know, strumming hearts. You miss the big one. The big one is Jesus’s life. Yeah, of course, the life of Christ himself. That’s the big one. That’s the reality of the thing. That’s the reality of service and a sort of giving up words of yourself. But if you tell people, just go to church, what they think is Rubens’ caribbeans with, you know, plump bottoms playing the harp on clouds and it creates this notion. You see what I mean? What I’m trying to say. No, I know what you mean, exactly. I totally understand what you mean. This stuff is real. How do we help people understand that this stuff is real and it’s so real? It’s not under their noses. It’s behind their noses. It’s as close as anything can possibly be. It’s so close nobody sees it. And there’s nothing romantic about it. It’s tough stuff. Yeah. You see what I’m trying to get? No, I totally agree. You know, I think they, like, but I think the image of the cross is, in that case, that’s the best image and helping people remember what that is, you know. But we romanticized even that. Yeah. Yeah. There’s work to do, that’s for sure. When Jesus was in the Gethsemane and he asked God to take that chalice away from him, how do you think most Christians understand that today? Oh, it was a moment of weakness. It was just the human Jesus that suddenly was there but then went away. No, no, it was not a moment. It’s an ever present reality. Drinking from that chalice is tough stuff. It’s tough to be a real Christian. Yeah. If you know what I mean. No, I told you. It’s not that romantic thing. It’s unbearable, actually. It’s unbearable. Listen, but just reading the words of Christ is unbearable. It’s very difficult. That’s why we read them, but it’s hard to really read what Christ asks of us because it’s really unbearable. I agree. So the challenge is how do we recover the ritual, the sacralization of this world, the ensoulment of this world through ritual without this trap of romanticizing and lyricizing it to a point where it becomes unattainable and it becomes different from reality. It becomes spirituality. You see what I’m struggling with. I can’t even describe the problem, let alone find a solution. That’s the issue right now for me. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that in a proper kind of balanced Christian life, there’s an aspect of the Christian life which is celebratory and that’s important, but there’s also an aspect of the Christian life which is penance and repentance, constant repentance. If you take the prayers that you do every day seriously, it’s like you’re constantly seeing how you’re missing the mark and even unwillingly with, and you’re constantly kind of in that moment of missing. And so those two extremes held in balance, I think are what make it bearable. Because if you just had one, then you have the romantic part. If you just have the other, then you would just collapse. You just collapsed under the weight of what it means. And so I think that having those two, having those two in tension is probably the best. But at the same time, occasionally I do go to church. And it has partly to do with my self-nurture and partly to do with some kind of anthropological project, see what’s happening in the culture. And there is a way in which the different sentence has become cartoonified. It has been turned into a cartoon. And one of the mechanisms I suspect are partly responsible for this is turning religion into a moral recipe alone. So a moral code is no longer a consequence of religious insight. It now is religion. And that’s a way to cartoonify the whole thing. If you do the right thing, my son, you will have eternal life. That’s a cartoonification of the whole thing. And to some extent, it’s been done by the church, this cartoonification. It’s been done by the church, this cartoonification of the whole thing.