https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CWNLGlcRgYE
I wanted to ask you about one of the symbols that is a little harder for me to grasp, the symbolism of community. I know of a couple of symbols from St. Paul talks about the community being a body, and in the Revelation the community or the church is the bride waiting for Christ to return. But are there any other symbols for community or how do you explain community in symbolic thinking? I think the best way from our angle is to understand the images that are given. St. Paul gives us an image, but understanding it is different. Seeing it and understanding it is different. A way to help you understand the head and the body is to understand that although we have a head and a body, everything that exists has a head and a body. Everything that exists has a place where the identity of that thing culminates into a point. Imagine the body also has a mountain. At the top of the mountain, at the top of the body, you have this origin. Everything has that. The problem we have is the problem is always the problem of why do we think that something is one. That is always the problem which comes out. Why do we think that a chair is one thing? Because a chair has many things. It has many components and colors and aspects. How do we recognize chairs? What is it that we are able to see that is one thing? A lot of people will think it is funny because they think it is obvious because it holds together physically. But we can notice unity in things that don’t hold together physically. We can recognize unity across the chairs as well. You can perceive a unity amongst all the chairs just like you can perceive the unity of a chair. That perception of unity, how do we account for it? That is the same thing for everything that exists in the world. It is the same thing for a community. A community is a negotiation or a breathing in and breathing out between unity and multiplicity. A community needs to have multiple members that are all different from each other who are bound together by something. Which makes you see that they are also one. That unity could be all kinds of things. It could be that we all play hockey together. It could be that we all live in the same place. It could be that we are a family and we have the same father. Ultimately, the church itself shows us the pattern of that. Things move into the head, which is the reason. In the church, it is personified as Christ. That is the image. We, as the body of Christ, are multiple. But we share in the identity of Christ. We do that by loving each other. The idea of love is the understanding of the bond which holds things together but does not fuse them together. There is a difference between love and a regimental imposition of uniformity. The community is not uniform. The community has all different types of members. It has smarter people, dumber people, stronger people, weaker people, people who are more involved, less involved, more central to the community, people who are more on the margin of the community. There is something which binds them together, and that is love. It is the capacity to be together without destroying the multiplicity, without destroying the difference between things. Ultimately, that becomes the image of God himself. That is one of the reasons why Christians have the Trinity, which is the perfection of unity and multiplicity. It is the perfect community. God is the perfect community. Perfectly one, perfectly multiple, and without contradiction. It seems like a paradox. It is funny. It seems like a total paradox. It is a paradox, but it is also the pattern of everything. It is the pattern of all reality. All reality has to find balance between unity and multiplicity, but in God, it is perfectly balanced. It is perfectly balanced in a way where there is even no distinction. There is no contradiction between the two. The difference between community and a group or a collectivity is love? Would you say that? There is love, and there is also the fractal structure that I am telling you about. It is easy to see it. Let’s say you take the traditional Catholic Church the way that it was set up. You could use anything. You have the church as a totality with its leadership, and the people and the parishes, not just the parishes, but the districts and the different dioceses or whatever. But then the diocese functions the same way as the whole church. It has a multiplicity of parishes, and then there is an archbishop, and then there are bishops and priests. But then a parish functions the same way as the whole church too. There is a priest, and there are different people involved. There are deacons, or whatever the way. Deacons are old and new, I guess. But there are deacons in the church, and there are people involved, and there is this multiplicity which manifests itself, and there is a hierarchy of participation within the church itself, just like there is a hierarchy in the diocese. Some churches are more important, some are less, etc. That is how you tell the difference. What it wants to often do is it wants to impose from the top down a kind of uniformity, where there is the state and then there is all of us. There is your French, and then everybody speaks the same language, everybody has the same schooling, and then there is this uniformity. That is not at all how true community manifests itself. True community manifests itself at every level. There is no competition between the family and the church, or family and the village, and the village and the larger nation. There is no competition between these. Whereas in the modern state, there tends to be a kind of top down position and a competition between. A desire to eliminate the intermediaries, to have control of the identity and then uniformity. Does that make sense in terms of the difference between community and the kind of weird perversion of the modern state, you could say? Yeah, I want to ask, does this apply to corporations too? Does corporations try to create a structure like this? I wouldn’t call it a community. A corporation is not a community. No, I don’t think, well, it can be. If they do it right, they can have the right pattern. One of the things that makes some corporations very successful and be able to function is that, let’s say the head of the company, they don’t have the capacity, let’s say, to enforce everything all the way down. They have to have a kind of aristocracy around them, just like a king. They would have a board or they’ll have whatever it is, the structure of the company. And then within the company, you’ll need to have repetitions of the pattern all the way down to the actual worker in the factory or whatever. And so the remainder of ancient community is probably what makes corporations work very well. Compared to states also, corporations tend to work better than states. But in the military, you see something similar, too. You see a well-ordered military, the general will not tell the troops how to dig their trenches. The general will give strategy, and then as the orders come down the line of the hierarchy, then they will become more specific and each troop will have its own cohesion and its own team spirit. But that will not compete with their allegiance to the higher level and to the top. And so that type of structure tends to function really well because it does mimic, let’s say, more closely traditional community. And so let’s say like in an army, if in the smaller troops, there’s no cohesion between the soldiers, if there’s no love, if there’s no bond, the word love might be a bit strong, but you know that in the military, for example, they will do a lot of things to try to get the soldiers to bond together at the level of their, at the smallest level of the guys that are directly around them. And that is the driving force of the whole army, right? This bond of the smaller units. And so you could say the same for a traditional community where the families would be the bond that kind of hold everything together. And then they also have allegiance to their clan, to the higher identities. That’s really cool.