https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SMpnRqEWx_o
And this is what drives me, what really mystifies me about the reaction to a lot of Christians, unfortunately, and I don’t know if it’s a lot, but it seems to be a lot, based on what I’m coming across with, especially on social media, the reaction that a lot of Christians are having to the closure of churches and how church closure is being supported and defended by even people very high up in the hierarchy as a necessary step towards stemming the, or what is it, the flattening the curve and things like this. Well, I’m thinking, wait a minute, whatever happened to recapitulating the darkness that is around Christ at the moment of his crucifixion so that we can then go down with him into Hades and come back up? It’s not merely recreating, it’s recapitulating, which that’s a word that Iterna of Leon uses a lot, meaning actually reenacting in our lives in a way that would then allow for the grace of God to fulfill the same thing that happened to Christ with us. But this, we’re not even being given the chance. It’s really astounding to me how the necessity for maintaining superficial health is more important than leaning into, as we always have throughout history. How many epidemics have we had, Jonathan? I mean, hundreds and hundreds. I was just reading about St. Philaret of Moscow, who was the Metropolitan of Moscow, the head of the Russian church in the 19th century, who had lived through six, seven, eight cholera epidemics. People, cholera is much worse than COVID-19. I’m sorry. I mean, if you want to die in the worst possible way, I’m not going to get into the details, but just look it up, all right? He never closed churches. He opened hospitals. He sent his monastics to go into those hospitals to minister those people. He kept the churches open at all times. He rang bells at odd moments during the day and the night to remind people of what is ultimately of the most importance. And in the kind of superficial and pathetic and lax lifestyle we live in the West right now, this is the best kind of wake-up call that we could possibly have. And here, the doors are being shut in our faces as soon as we have the opportunity to go and recapitulate Christ’s journey. He is offering it to us, saying, go do it, suffer with me. And they’re telling us, no, that’s not good for you. Yeah. And I think that that’s really in your article, which you kind of suggest, if it’s very powerful, is the idea that the communion we find in church and the communion we find in common story and in common participation in story is when you say it’s better than a vaccine, it means because what it does is it affords us the capacity to be human and to be there to help each other and to be a community, which is the actual thing which will get us through this crisis and not some artificial medication. And the image that we saw happening, I don’t know if it happened like here in Quebec, the scandal was the old people’s homes. It was a scandal. And so here we are all closed off on each other, no church, no community, no nothing. We’re all shut down in our houses watching Netflix and the old people are abandoned in these old people’s homes and they die of thirst because no one is caring for them. They just die on these beds because they’re being abandoned. They’ve just basically been abandoned. It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that because in the state that I’m in, in New York, there was a scandal that started to be uncovered and then it was just shut down. The governor was sending COVID patients into rest homes specifically, into the population that is at the most at risk, the ones that are going to die. And so now the numbers in the US are clear. It’s almost 50% of all the deaths attributed to COVID in the United States have come from nursing homes. It’s totally insane. And so here we are, all these young people sitting at home, getting mad at everyone else for not following protocol, all the protocol of which is designed, whether purposely or not, it doesn’t even matter, to disconnect community in a world that already has no community. I mean, how many people know their next door neighbors? Hardly anybody. And I will tell you, this is one of the most incredible things about living in a rural kind of isolated place right now in the middle of this is because the people around me, for the most part, are being very calm. We talk to each other, we don’t talk to each other over across artificially imposed surfaces. Of course, we’re being careful. Of course, we’re not trying to infect each other on purpose. Goodness gracious. Not everything that we have here has to be seen in black and white categories, except most fairy tales are black and white categories. But so if there’s any hope in all of this, it seems to me like the only way out is the rebirth of small communities in places that aren’t beehives, or anthills full of unpeople going back and forth between their unwork and their unhome, where they try to spend as much time as possible in front of their screens so they don’t have any communication with their unwife and their unchildren. It’s interesting, you mentioning the margin in that context really makes me think about something that’s been going on. One of the arguments that some traditional Orthodox have been giving in support of the closure of churches has been, well, the hermits who lived out in the desert still had access to God’s grace. Or are you saying that God was not able to come to them out there? And like, okay, what you’ve just done is you’ve taken the existence on the margin and you’re trying to make it into the state center. You’ve taken it out of its proper context, because what they’re doing out there is battling demons for God’s sake. That’s their point. They’re winning the war for the entire cosmos out there. As soon as you bring that in here, you’re bringing the chaos together with all of that back into the center. All of that back into the center. The difference between you and the hermit is that the hermit is out there fasting and fighting demons and you’re watching Netflix and the demons are pouring in. It’s like, come on demons, let’s go. I’m up for this. It just drives me off the wall. You have no idea what you’re even saying. Especially when it comes to the argument about not having communion. Like, oh, those hermits, they didn’t have communion. Like, wait, no, they did. They did. Have you not read all those stories about angels coming to them with communion? There’s a lot of them. Those are not occasional stories. They happen all the time. And when those things don’t happen, it’s Saint Mary of Egypt, you know, who’s able to do these incredible things. And the one time she partakes of it, it’s like the apotheosis of the world. She takes communion one time and she’s basically in heaven right there. Because she can’t live anymore. That’s it. Because her whole life has been moving up to that. Yeah. Do you live that way? Do you prepare for communion that way? No, you don’t. Yeah, that’s like, you could say, okay, so if you agree that you want all the churches to be closed, and then us not having communion, then how about this? You fast until you have communion. How about that? That’s right. Don’t eat three loaves in 47 years. Go. Oh, mercy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s crazy times. It’s crazy times.