https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kgDOSG-6FHs
You talked about Eve earlier, you talked about Mary or the two Marys, and then you also had this cool thing where you’re talking about the architecture of the church and how Mary is a part of the positionality of that. And then of course, most recently getting into the symbolism of sex and the union of male and female. So I’m wondering how would you tie those things together in the light of procreation? What is this all producing in the Christian story, ultimately? So I mean, in the Christian story, you have a joining of all the elements together. It’s always that. That’s always what Christianity is doing. And so there is an aspect of, let’s say, the joining of Christ and his bride and the joining of the male and female, which is the creating of a body. So it’s a family, you can imagine it like that. So you’re united to your wife and then you extend your body. You have kids and then you become bigger. You have more body. And so you can also see that as fruit. So there’s this fruitfulness, which is there. And at the same time, there’s also the ecstasy or the ecstatic transformation of the person. And so then there’s mystical discussion of being one body, of being one with your spouse, of transcending your duality in union with her. And so that transcending of your duality is the ecstatic jump. It’s an ecstatic jump from the multiple to the unity. It’s emergence. It’s this jump from multiplicity to one. It’s like this mysterious thing. And it happens as an ecstasy. And it happens as this. So there’s a productive aspect to it. There’s also an ecstatic aspect to it. And it is an image of the mystical union and the mystical transformation of the person. So we have to be careful that we also have to see things in the right order. And so it’s an image. It ends up being a way to participate in the pattern, but it has to lead higher. And so the ultimate image of sexuality is the image of the person united with God. That is the highest version. And our sexuality should be an image of that and aim towards that. There’s actually a trope in Orthodox life, which is that people who are married, in their love for each other and in their sexual union, they end up moving towards what they call a white marriage, which is actually an abstinent marriage. Interesting. They actually end up becoming monks in their marriage after they’ve had kids and after they procreated. They become a monastic union where their sexual union is happening vertically with Christ or with God. So the idea is that sexuality ultimately leads to this union. For a lot of people, it can seem like it’s almost counterintuitive. It’s like, OK, so sexuality leads to abstinence? OK, I don’t understand. But it’s about fulfilling and directing. So it’s like this union of man and female and man and woman and then ultimately directing your gaze up and then moving in that direction. It’s kind of like the image of the kung fu master who is such a good fighter that he never fights. He doesn’t have to fight anymore. He’s actually such a good fighter that he lives in a place of peace where he doesn’t need to fight. And so the purpose of kung fu is actually not to fight, is actually to transcend fighting. And so it’s like there’s something about that in the way that Christian sexuality manifests itself in its story. I’m not saying I’m not there. Be careful. I’m not necessarily using myself as an example. But I see stories of these luminous couples. And it’s impressive. But I don’t know if a lot of us are able to get there. Did you ever watch the movie about Gandhi? No. OK, so Gandhi and his wife, they did perhaps the Indian or Hindu version of that. And it’s just kind of funny because after Gandhi is assassinated, or excuse me, no, the wife actually passes first. So right before the wife passes, she says, oh, yeah, so we took part in this tradition, although we didn’t always do the best job of it, where they were intended to have a waning sexual life and a rising spiritual union, you could call it. They didn’t. He wasn’t always the best at that. Yeah, just to draw upon his profound spirit and his in combination of his humanity as well. Yeah, there’s some of that in kind of Orthodox lingo. There’s some funny jokes that appear in the Orthodox world about that. And so there’s a joke that I was told by someone one time to kind of help you understand this reality, which is that it’s a young couple that are going to get married. And so they meet with this babushka, who’s this older lady who’s going to kind of tell them how it is, how it works in the church and how it has to be. Oh, how interesting. Right. And so the babushka tells them that so when it is that they can have sexual intercourse. Her parents will start telling her to agree to this very simply from the perspective of the Fray-Vaughan-Vuit Fuarquick. And so she locked herNotatoshka into someone else’s infatuation world, even though she married another normally married woman. right? And so you can’t do it on, so and then it was like there’s reason for every, so you can’t do it on Sunday because Sunday is the Holy Communion, not Sunday is the liturgy and you can’t do it on Saturday because it’s the day before communion and then you also, and so then the couple are like, oh so we can do it on Monday and then the Babusha says yeah yeah but there’s an old tradition according to which you know Monday is dedicated to the holy angels so it’s like a bodyless day so you can’t do it on Monday and so the kids are like okay so like oh they’re like oh like what are we getting into? Right and so they ask the Babushka so like is that what you did with your like with your own husband? Like when you got married she’s like nah not at all like we didn’t know about any of this stuff right so it’s like it’s like yeah yeah this is it but then people are gonna do what they’re gonna do you know. Right right. You know I have to say like in my inquiry of orthodoxy I’m pretty impressed with like the highest trends, how to say it, the highest levels of divinity within the practicality of humanity and it’s like there’s a place for all of it. Yeah yeah yeah I think you’re right like when you visit an orthodox church you’re always surprised at how both extremely let’s say liturgical it is but also how weirdly informal it always ends up being at the same time like the strange like moment it’s like there’s kids like roaming around and there’s like you know there’s always this kind of organic informality but because also there’s if there’s no seats especially because then there’s like people kind of shuffling and standing and coming in and lighting candles and right right so it’s like during the whole it’s like this whole thing that’s going on but at the same time it still has a kind of a kind of dance to it.