https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NjDE1RBZevI
Are there any other figures like Saint Christopher? Bishop Barron talked about the donkey. Jesus rode a, Jesus rode as a Christopher. Okay, no, so Bishop Barron talked about the donkey Jesus rode as a Christopher or Christ carrier. Bearer of Christ to the world, thoughts. And then he says, seems like Mary would be another example of a Saint Christopher and John the Baptist. Am I losing it? And then a laughing face. Yes, that’s not the same. That’s not the same. So, well, it’s not totally, it’s not totally, completely separate, right? So the donkey that carries Christ, Bishop Barron is very smart to notice that that is definitely a Christopher and very much so. One of the images of Christ that the church fathers saw in the Old Testament was the Barlem’s ass. If you guys know the story, Barlem was a sorcerer who was going to curse the people of Israel, was going to curse the chosen people. And as he was going to curse the chosen people, an angel appeared on the road with a sword, you know, I don’t remember if in the story it says he has a sword, but then angel appeared and was gonna cut him down. And then his ass starts to move to the side, veer to the side, and Barlem is like beating it so that it gets back onto the path. And then it starts to veer again to the side and he’s like beating it to get it to the path, you know? And then at some point the ass lays down and Barlem is like beating his donkey, like, what are you doing? Why aren’t you moving and everything? And then the donkey speaks and tells him, you know, that he saved his life and that he saved him from the judgment of this angel. And so that has always been an image that the church fathers used for Christ. And so really is this notion, the possibility of the animal aspect to carry the logos. And so that ass is an extension of your body, right? Just like you ride your body, you know, you can also extend that into a car or a horse or a donkey or whatever. Like, you know, you extend your power to direct yourself with these. And so the ass becomes an image of that, and especially an image of that because the donkey is an impure animal as well. And so there’s also this idea of the foreigner in the notion of the ass as well. Just like Christopher was a Canaanite, just like Christopher was a foreigner, the ass is also related to the foreigner. It’d be difficult to go into all the reasons why, but one of the reasons is that he’s impure. Another reason is some of the characters in the Old Testament, like Hamor, who was a different characters who were foreigners and who are like the red donkey, kind of helping you understand this notion of the foreigner as the, and Jews until today, they interpret the donkey as the foreign nations, you know? And so you have this sense that when Christ is riding the donkey, he’s riding the foreign nations. So you can imagine, for example, the Roman Empire converting, that’s like St. Christopher transformation where St. Christopher converts to Christianity. Carries Christ further out. Where in terms of the mother of God, it’s different. It’s similar in the sense that in a way, the mother of God represents this potentiality that receives the logos. But there’s really a difference between the wild, like the animal foreigner, a prostitute, should do the other hand, left hand, warrior, like the foreigner, prostitute, donkey, impure, all that stuff. And then the pure, the notion of potentiality as this pure, untouched, virgin state in which the logos finds the proper house. So you really have to separate those two because they do end up being important in the West. That’s why you really do have this, you have the Mary, they have Mary the mother of God, and then you have Mary Magdalene. And so those two opposites represent two aspects of the church and two aspects of the incarnation. In the East, we don’t have Mary Magdalene the way she is in the West, but we have St. Mary of Egypt. So Mary of Egypt is everything. She’s a prostitute, she’s a foreigner, she lives on the other side of the Jordan. She has all the elements about that wild aspect, which is then can also receive Christ and be tamed by Christ. And so we have to be able to really differentiate the two. One we could call it the inner mystery of the pure heart which receives the logos, which descends into it and manifests itself. And the other is the garments of skin, you could say, that can be transformed into garments of glory, something like that. Hopefully that makes sense, guys.