https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=S6ulPx6HJ3c
people who watch my videos will see that will know that I really focused a lot on that symbolism, like I tend to go back to the first chapters of Genesis as kind of like the pattern making, you can imagine it almost like as if the Bible has this first part which is really this enunciation of the patterns. It’s almost like a it’s almost like a few, you know, like a back like a back few where you have the theme which is announced at the beginning, then you have like a variation on the themes which appears all through scripture where they’re repeated, you know, set against each other. There’s this interplay of the pattern. It kind of opens up and then at the end in Revelation it’s restated at a higher level where the first image of the garden is now the last image of the garden with the city and this kind of glorious moment where everything comes together and death is destroyed and all the problems that were said about in the first chapter are kind of resolved. That’s so interesting because I’m reading through Echoes of Exodus by Alistair Roberts and he starts out right at the very beginning saying we need to read the scripture musically and he has like his beginning chapter man is just absolutely fantastic where like you said it’s like you take all of these different elements of music and you look at the motif and melody and how those play out and that’s really what’s happening in the written form or a linguistic form in the biblical text. Yeah well the ancients when they use the word music so for example if you look at the the classic the classical curriculum one of the elements was music and so you would think that music just meant singing or it just meant learning to play an instrument but it’s not clear that that’s what it meant it seems to mean a lot more you know when we talk about the music of the spheres for example like in a Pythagorean sense then we’re actually not just talking about sound in the sense of what you hear but it’s actually the perception of pattern and so music that it’s almost like pure pattern that’s what music is you know it’s one of the closest things to a mathematical formula that you can experience is to recognize amongst abstract sounds a pattern you know it’s pretty it’s pretty amazing. The way that Neil said it in our conversation was that music presents reality or it presents that which is beyond our five senses. Yeah that’s what for sure that’s what it does and it does it and there’s something there’s a priority of of sound in scripture and I think that it’s probably not just in scripture it might be a universal thing because sound is invisible and it is it’s experienced the causality of sound is not easy to perceive right so you when you see something you can see it like happening right and so the the causality is there in front of you but sound kind of drops in you know from above let’s say and it’s carried by wind and it’s carried by by spirit basically and it also comes from the person’s mouth so it it and it carries meaning directly and so the idea of of sound and singing let’s say as being the primordial language is something that you find in many cultures you know you find you find that in in there’s a lot of of early kind of mythological type text that we’ll talk about you know singing as the you know the song the world was sung into being or that you know the idea of the language of the angels for example is like the language of the birds and it’s and it’s this uh the singing that comes from that comes from the heavens wow okay so that’s so interesting because what roberts is is laying out in his book echoes of exodus is that you take like certain elements like uh say meter and rhythm and with meter that would phenomenologically or in the course of a regular day that would be like one day after next turns into a week turns into a month it’s very consistent it’s very steady it’s calculated but then you have rhythm where say you have like holidays and birthdays and festivals and thanksgiving and easter and etc and that creates like a rhythm right but then within that whenever we sit down and have a meal or if we have eucharistic communion and we remember we’re tying it it transcends that day meter regular rhythm there excuse me that regular meter and you’re able to tie and connect several generations back 2 000 years back and also know that you’re going to be tying with people in the future so whenever you sit down to thanksgiving you have this remembrance that transcends time at least am i off yeah that’s the whole structure of eschatology in christianity it has a metaphysical function people just think that that it’s all about just what’s going to happen in the future but it that’s not really what’s going on in christian eschatology or an eschatology in general not just christian eschatology because most most religions have an eschatology it’s mostly about what you’re saying it’s about the idea of on the one hand remembering the past but also remembering the future and and we’re not used to thinking of thinking that way but you need to understand memory simply as distance from something so you can have you can have distance and so for example like if i remember my wife it doesn’t mean that she’s still not around it’s not about the past just about distance you know she could be in my house and i can remember her because she’s just not with me at the moment and so you can remember the future as well and so that moment of memory uh the liturgical moment or like you said the eucharistic moment becomes this thing that transcends time or or compresses time into a point of participation which is both remembering let’s say the body of christ which was given you know on the cross but it’s also remembering the the last judgment remembering the final resolution of the whole story when we are all together you know when all has been revealed and everything is in communion you know uh and even in the orthodox liturgy we say that we think it’s it’s interesting because there’s a moment just before very close to the actual communion moment where we thank god for things and we say we thank god for the it’s like the the birth the the life the death the resurrection of the dead the ascending into heaven the sitting on the right hand of the father and the final last and final judgment and we thank god for something as if it’s something that’s happened but we’re thanking him for the for the final judgment which is still to come and so it’s like you said this moment of of not just memory but gratefulness for the things that you know that the things that are before the things that are coming and so that is this amazing possibility of uh of ritual and of of the of communion yeah um it’s like the grand crescendo it’s kind of like yeah exactly so like uh if you look at the deliverance in the stories of exodus and with moses and the people going out of uh egypt and into the promised land eventually you see those being repeated or echoed during the life of christ or in several stories in between but then it’s not like it’s complete there because even at that moment it like you said it points to uh call it the grand overture or the grand conclusion that’s still yet to come and even then that end is still just a beginning of something even grander to come yeah and that’s what it kind of like when it feels like when you read saint gregor of nyssa he really talks about theosis when the way that he talks about deification is not a status we tend to think of of uh of uh let’s say heaven or you know paradise as kind of the static joining you know you it’s like you’re in you see it in the caricature it’s like you sit in sit on a cloud with uh with the harp and it’s like okay you’re there you know what are you going to do now but rather the the image that saint gregory gives and i think something someone like saint lewis uh saint lewis cs lewis hey that’s quite the slip when like cs lewis cs lewis uh says it’s like this it’s actually a kind of infinite entering or an infinite uh dynamic process you know where you you actually join with god and it becomes this kind of infinite dynamic process of of entering into god