https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JhMuNq5qB4M
So, I’m going to start with a statement. I’m going to start with a statement that is, the world is made of stories. I mean, of course the world is made of things as well, but mostly I would say most significantly, the world is held together by stories. You know, as Orthodox Christians, we say, we believe that we can encounter God anywhere and in everything. That in the language of St. Gregory of Palamas, the uncreated divine energies are hiding behind phenomena. We believe in the wonderful frame given to us by St. John the Theologian and expanded by St. Maximus, that the logos of things, everything in the world that’s created has a hidden purpose, has a hidden logos. And all things are connected and they’re united by their logos to each other and ultimately to the divine logos and love. When we hear such phrases, I mean, the first times I started to hear this type of language, I have to admit that it was easy for it to sound like kind of esoteric mumbo jumbo, you know. Has that strange sound. Here’s my first thought. And I can understand that, you know. And sometimes it looks like something so obscure that we, you know, we have to just make that leap of faith to believe it. But really, get rid of that, really beyond the technical wording, this way of seeing the world is simply how the world presents itself to us. In fact, these truths about logos, about divine energies are so close to us that they permeate all our experiences. And it does begin with faith, and not just faith as this mental belief in something, but I would say faith as a commitment to the invisible. And this faith will help us experience how the invisible not only transcends the visible, but it also is the thing that holds the visible world together. So how in the world can the invisible hold the visible together? It can actually be quite simple. And stories are one of the most immediate examples in our daily experience of how the invisible holds the visible together. A story is a series of facts, facts chosen among an indefinite amount of possible facts. These facts are characters, they’re places, they’re objects that all interact in a string of events threaded together in a pattern of meaning. And the pattern of a story is the invisible part of a story. See, a pattern can’t be found in the individual elements of a story, or even the accumulated elements of a story. But it appears as the reason why those things are brought together. And the pattern isn’t arbitrary, it imposes itself on us, to our intuition by how much it is meaningful to us. We know something is a story because it awakens our humanity, because it captures our attention. So imagine a series of events, let’s say this happened this morning. So this morning I got up, I put on one sock, and then I scratched my nose, I breathed three times, and my heart beat about 20 times. Then I put on the other sock. I coughed a little, I blinked a few times, I glanced at the belt on the chair, I breathed another two times, and who’s bored? I mean, although there’s clearly a character in what I just said, and there are events in the description, but that’s not a story. I mean, it’s boring. If I kept going like that, I’d have people walking out of the room. So for your consideration, let me give you another series of events. So last Sunday morning, I got up and we were late for church, so getting ready, I go to put on my socks. But looking into the drawer, I realized that all of them were in the wash. So here I am starting to panic, I’m running around the house trying to find a clean pair of socks, and after another five minutes, I’m at the point of giving up. All hope is lost. And I’m thinking, okay, I’m going to have to dive into the hamper and going to spend the day in dirty socks. Or else I start to wonder, would it be considered cross-dressing if I borrowed my wife’s socks? And so as I’m shamefully sifting through my wife’s socks, looking over my shoulder, hoping she won’t see me, and wondering, am I going to have to confess this? And if I’m going to confess this, is it because I’m cross-dressing, is it because I’m taking some…anyways. So as I’m sifting through my wife’s socks, what do I come upon? A pair of my own socks that were right there, put there by some mischievous elf, some minor miracle. Now that’s more of a story. I mean, of course we could say that it’s a trivial story. It’s a very localized story that could only be understood by modern people. And that’s true. But the pattern of the story, the invisible structure which makes one see that it is actually a story, and not just a random accumulation of facts, well that pattern is something that is truly universal. It’s something which is written in human consciousness. I would say that it’s actually a mode of human consciousness. Now in the little story of socks I just told you, one sees the loss of something important. Socks in this case. Because I come from Quebec, and in the winter you don’t go without socks. It’s not going to happen. But more far-reaching stories will have more significant terms. So what’s lost could be the Holy Grail, or what’s lost could be Sauron’s ring, or it could be the paradise of Adam and Eve. And then comes the panic, all hope is lost, but it’s in the very descent into chaos and inversion that the thing is finally found by some surprise. So for the Grail it’s found in the castle of the wounded Fisher King. For the ring in the dark cave of the riddling monster Gollum, and the lost paradise is recaptured on the cross, where death and derision are transformed into glory. But in my benign missing sock case, the solution came as I’m sifting through my wife’s sock drawer. Which is not chaotic at all by the way, because she’ll be listening to this. So yeah, alright. Of course, there are some stories that don’t follow these patterns very well. And those stories, they just kind of fall to the wayside and they’re forgotten. I mean all of those How My Day Went stories, or the novels that you find in the discount bin, or those TV shows that get cancelled after one season. But those stories that embody universal patterns and in terms that have wider importance, well those stories last. They enter our consciousness and they support our identities. And they become this underlying web of references with which we encounter the world. And that’s really important because we all have this underlying web of references with which we function. And that’s part of what the Bible does. That’s one of the points of all these stories we tell. The creation, the flood, the life of Abraham as descendants, the kings, the prophets, all of that is a giant pattern. And it’s part of this cosmic web of logos that holds the universe together and prevents it from fragmenting into isolated particular events. This fragmentation is a process which leads to chaos. And even the reduction of these particularities into statistical possibility. I mean just look at where particle physics have brought us as they cut up the world into smaller and smaller discrete points. We need to guard our stories. Because the chaos that’s described in Genesis, when it says in the beginning God created heaven and earth, and the earth was empty and void. That primordial chaos which precedes the light and sound of logos, that still lingers. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It still lingers at this bottomless ambiguity under and around the ordered world. Under the pattern that stories give us. This chaos is held at bay by the edifice that logos establishes to hold creation together.