https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=c0F9K3BnfVU
So hello everybody. I would like to welcome you to this conversation. I am speaking with Father Stephen Freeman. Father Stephen Freeman is an unorthodox priest. He’s also a blogger. He’s also an author. He’s written a book and he speaks all over the US on different subjects to different churches. And I met Father Stephen a few times. I’ve read his blog and I followed his podcast. Also, he has sometimes a podcast. And I think that a lot of his ideas are close to the types of things that I’m interested in getting all of you to understand about how Christianity is actually talking about reality. And we’re talking about how things lay themselves out, how we connect reality. And when we talk about God, it’s not this arbitrary thing, but it really is something that we can intimate in our experience. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. And so Father Stephen, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you’re a priest, but you’re also an unorthodox convert. Maybe you can tell us just a quick glimpse of what you’re doing, what you’re interested in, and then we can dive right into the subject. Yes, thank you. It’s good to be with you. And for myself, I am a convert. My family and I entered the Orthodox Church in 1998. For about 20 years before that, I served as an Episcopal priest. So if there’s one thing that would tie those two traditions together Anglicanism for a long time had a real feel for beauty, for liturgical things, and some feel for the tradition. My sense for orthodoxy, maybe this is, you could say this connected to reality. Orthodoxy can be kind of messy. It’s got a 2000 year history unbroken. But that’s real. That’s different than getting in arguments about whose church is better, whose ideas are better. I kind of look at this as a given. This is the Christianity that was given, and it has all kinds of complexities and stuff and gets tied up in things. But that’s my life too in your life. I kind of think of it as the real life and not some ideological construct. I think that for most people, I think they find that very strange because liturgy is something that at least the modern mind has to accommodate themselves to. The kind of let’s say this holistic practice of the church here and the hymns of the architecture and the icons and everything, it’s something that seems alien at first to the modern viewer. But maybe you can tell us a little bit about how it is that this experience of the liturgy and the encounter of this holistic beauty, how does it connect to our life and to who we are as human beings? Well, one of the ways I think about it really is under the word tradition, meaning just that which has been handed down to us. To me, tradition is not something made up by people. When people say this is just the ideas of men, tradition is just like my father telling me about how things work. My grandfather was a mechanic. My father was a mechanic. My two brothers are mechanics. How did they learn how to do that? Somebody had to teach them. They didn’t reinvent the notion of machines. In the same way, so many things about our life that are just like that. And liturgy as well. In a sense, liturgy is a very traditional human behavior. I like, for instance, when people come into an Orthodox church, there are some stands with icons, holy pictures on them, and that sort of we kind of connect with that. We’ll traditionally greet them with a kiss or whatever. I built a small little stand, a little short one, with icons on it for the children because about half of my congregation are toddlers. And you can watch a child 18 months to two years old, and this is all the time you see this on a Sunday morning, who come in and literally just sort of lay on the icon stand hugging it and giving it a kiss and go in. And nobody told them to do that. Nobody gave them a theological explanation of the simple connection between a child and this image of something they’re coming to love. It’s just natural. They might do the same thing at home with a favorite stuffed toy. I also would say the most natural thing that children do is play. The theorist Piaget, one of your French buds, Piaget, his theory of learning was that children learn by playing. They act stuff out. You’re going to play house, you’re going to play, we played mechanics when I was a kid, constantly taking our bicycles apart, kind of going through the ritual, because play is actually ritualized behavior. And so I sometimes say to people that a liturgical life in the church is we’re playing heaven. We’re doing something the most natural thing, which is adults engaging in a ritualized behavior in which we’re acting out outwardly, something that is inwardly true. I mean, we do these things all the time. You come home from work, you kiss your spouse. It’s a ritual. Why do you do that? I mean, there’s nothing. It’s just a ritual. You don’t do it and you’re in trouble. No, I agree. I agree. I think that there’s something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while is that the inevitability of ritual. We have so many that we don’t realize. You shake hands, the way we look at people. We have all these matters that we’ve agreed upon of how to act with each other. And so when people talk to me and they say, I don’t like churches that are ritualistic, I don’t like the ritual, I think, okay, that’s odd. You seem to be disconnected with a very important aspect of what it is to be human. I would say that ritual is something like ordered action, just in general. It’s action that is, it’s like hierarchical action that has an order within it and that we all together acting together. You need that. If you’re going to act together, you need there to be some kind of implicit order in which you’re acting together. And in the church, we take that to the next level because we’re also celebrating. It’s a celebration, but at the same time, it’s not a disorderly celebration. It’s an ordered celebration. It’s also everybody looking together in the same direction, everybody singing the same things. And there’s also multiplicity within it. People have their different parts to play, but it all comes together in this great symphony. I always think that this idea of Wagner that he talked about the perfect work of art, and he said that the opera was the perfect work of art because it had narrative, but it also had music and it had visual aspects and everything. And I always thought, no, Wagner’s wrong. The liturgy is the perfect work of art because you’re inside the art. You’re not a spectator in the liturgy. You’re participating in this giant dance that’s going on around you. Well, I think the element of song, poor old Wagner, could go on for hours and he’s still trying to get it. He’s waiting for the fat lady to sing. I think one of the things that works for the church, particularly the tradition of liturgy, is that it’s funny, Protestants technically rejected all of that sort of thing. And then they invented things like masons in which they do highly stylized ritual things in which when you’re doing it, you just feel very, very hokey. And it doesn’t feel authentic. And I think of, liturgy is an extremely natural behavior. And you kind of learn how to do it and you walk within it. It should not be highly stylized. It should not be self-conscious, but actually you’re doing it because, I mean, as a Christian, you’re not just acting in a symbolic manner. You’re doing what you do because you believe what’s going on is real. It’s reality you’re dealing with. And these things, they reveal things to us about who we are, about how the world is, about how to teach things. For instance, I tell parents, you’ve got children coming in the church and typical of an Orthodox church. It’s highly decorated. There’s icons, various things like that. And I say to them, I believe the human soul cannot be whole without the experience of beauty. But oftentimes in our extremely marketable world, beauty is, we build things for utility, practicality. And here in the suburbanized south, frankly, cities are just, are oftentimes ugly, or areas around them are just ugly. And so I think of our kids, it’s coming into church and for a little oasis of time in the space of a week, they’re exposed to beauty and wonder and things that they can’t get anywhere else. Music even, music that they can sing and participate in. And so what do you think, because we talked about beauty, how do you see, because beauty, especially for someone who’s a strict materialist or someone who is really focused on scientific thinking, the beauty becomes almost a subjective idea. It’s like, what I like is what’s beautiful. But I think what you’re talking about, or what you’re bringing us to is something which is more objective, that there is something about beauty which kind of imposes itself on us or surprises us or brings us together. And that this notion of beauty or this aspect of beauty is something that we almost need, that it’s a human need that we have, something that makes us feel human. Yeah. I mean, I think if beauty were purely subjective, there couldn’t be art museums. When people go into art museums, they’re going in to see agreed beauty. And if it was all just subjective, who would pay to go see something beautiful? It’s something within the modern mind, and some of it has to do with various streams we’ve had in our sort of philosophical cultural things, is we’ve lost all confidence in ourselves. The notion that beauty is just subjective means that I don’t really believe it’s beautiful, or that my belief that it’s beautiful is very tenuous and ready to be knocked off its feet because it’s merely subjective. And there can’t be any communion with that because you think it’s only inside you. And part of the experience of beauty, first off, it’s outside you, but then it’s also inside you. It’s an act of communion that you’re reaching out and you are engaging with it, and it’s engaging with you. And that’s a very fundamental human experience. The first primary experience of beauty we have as human beings is of the human face. Mm. It is mother and child nursing in normal circumstances, up until recent years when we were told as mammals that we should not use our mammary glands, like every other animal on planet Earth that’s a mammal. But it’s a face-to-face thing for us. There’s all kinds of psychological studies about the impact of this, that a child is—the mother and child mirror each other’s emotions, and the child has an experience of communion with that. The child smiles at the mother child. It’s an affirmation and an experience of that experience of beauty as they mirror each other. When that’s broken for varieties of reasons, it is just simple fact that the impact is—the negative impact is going to be real. And sometimes, if it’s great enough, can be an impact we experience for all of our lives. That the earliest experience of the world is that I cannot have communion with it. It’s very difficult to learn it and to trust it. So beauty has a sense of wonder. It has a sense, as you described, of order, of hierarchy. The one thing you can—if you go back to cave paintings, one of the things that’s most striking about some of the cave paintings in France, for instance, in Spain, they’re amazingly beautiful. I mean, I couldn’t do them. I don’t have enough artistic talent to draw animals like that. They’re not stick figures. They’ve got a flow and a form. They draw you in. They have a kind of mystery about them. Despite how primitive they are, they work. They’re beautiful. And no doubt the person painting them thought that, experienced that, and taught the next guy, the next woman, how to do that as well. It wasn’t just a cave painter. It was a whole tradition. Of course. But I think there’s something that you brought up, this idea of the human face, I think is really important, especially in the Christian revelation, really then ends up centering on this experience, this kind of immediate experience of the person. Centering beauty and truth, and let’s say this communion in the human face, I think is extremely important. It also reveals us something very important about ourselves, about how we’re connected to the others. And so because in the Orthodox tradition, everything has come now to flow, especially our notion of beauty is so centered around the icon. We are constantly engaged in this relationship, this encounter with a person, this idea that you’re looking into a face which is both a mirror of yourself, but is also completely another person. So you stand, if I look at you, I’m doing it through a screen, there’s still a little bit left. I have this mysterious encounter of communion. I think that’s really one of the most amazing things that I keep telling people that this idea that Christianity, that God is love, that’s really the central element of Christianity, how all of this connects together, which is this encounter with a person, with persons that also reveal how different they are from you, but also reveal how connected they are to you at the same time, this kind of push and pull between two people. Well, I think that’s precisely the, in an Orthodox understanding, when we talk about God, we’re not really talking about an abstraction, a set of ideas, a set of doctrines, or something like that. It’s always grounded. I mean, our notion of salvation that is being changed, becoming whole, becoming fully what we ought to be, is most completely expressed in the phrase of beholding him face to face, that this change. Paul says that beholding Christ face to face were changed from glory to glory, that in that sense we’re being healed, and that which makes it, you are looking outside yourself, but you’re not looking past the human. You’re looking into the face of love, of complete self-giving love in the face of a human being, which we as Christians say is none other than God himself. And so that’s a, and it’s something, as I say, we’ve been doing since the day we were born. I always try to stress when I’ve got newcomers to the faith that the essential act of what we call salvation is also simply becoming truly human. That the wonder is that we were created in the image and likeness of God, and so being truly and fully human is simply being conformed to that which we were always made to be. We discover our true self. So when I look at, say, an icon of Christ, I’m also looking at a reflection of who I am. He’s my mirror. If I were staring at a mirror of myself, I tell people these days as I’m getting older, when I look in the mirror, mostly I see my father, and I see my father as an old man. It’s actually forcing me to love him more. I think that that’s such a key point for me is, you know, when you start to have a kind of, let’s say, intellectual awakening in your 20s, often you meet all these kinds of people who, even if they can believe in God, they have this idea, okay, I believe in God, but I believe God is more like an abstract force. It’s more like something that’s, like you said, something that’s abstract, something that’s an idea, but that is just not our experience of reality because we view the world through our own consciousness, our own human consciousness. We don’t know of any other world besides the one that we can view through this human consciousness, and we encounter, you know, the highest thing we encounter is always other people. You know, the richest thing, the thing that can transform us the most, that can make us, like you said, more human are always other people. And so I always find it strange when people think that the highest aspect, let’s say, the highest ontological aspect, that, you know, the image of the infinite would be something that’s abstract. Like, no, the image of the infinite has to be connected to our experience of the world, which is a personal experience, which is an experience that is through consciousness. So the idea of it, when you start to see it that way, the notion of the divine mind or that God is, you know, the best image of God is Christ, then it makes so much sense in that, you know, it doesn’t seem so strange at all anymore. Well, something I think that’s important is the distinction between the general and the particular. The truth is, is you can’t ever, ever, ever know anything in general. We only encounter anything in a particular. And so, for instance, in the Fathers in teaching about icons, they said you cannot paint an icon of, say, the divine nature. What would that look like? Instead, it’s like, why can we paint an icon of Christ? Because he became a man, not man, because you can’t just sort of paint man. You have to paint a man, a woman, you know, a particular thing. And there’s actually been a drive in certain aspects of modern art to, in fact, try, when we talk about abstraction, to somehow or another capture or express the generalized. And in a way, the more we do that, the people begin to have this sort of cognitive dissonance in which they’re all standing at staring at something that no one knows what it is. And they’re thinking even to themselves, is that art? And what can be things about it? I mean, my youngest daughter is an artist. You know, I appreciate that you can have, you know, I mean, of course, on the other hand, I mean, you know, Picasso can draw a line. And it just has genius about it. And you’d have to look at it and figure out why that is so his lines are better than my lines. But on the other hand, you finally abstraction just fades away into nothing. It is the strange act of communion is that we discover in the particular something that unites us with that which is but beyond it. I like a term that I’ve used in referring to God is calling him the transcendent particular. I mean, he’s actually the ultimate particular because there’s only one of him. There’s not two. There can’t be general God because there’s only a God, one God. And so he’s utterly, he’s so utterly and transcendent particular. And so he makes himself known to us in the God man, Jesus Christ. And in a way, that’s also a revelation to me. I am not humanity. I’m just Stephen. And, you know, and this is how we encounter each other. And I mean, there’s the old saying, I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand. Yeah, exactly. No, you mean that. Oh, you encounter that all the time. It’s like, I love the poor. Yeah. Well, I hear this. I mean, people are going to attack some group that are going to attack black blacks and attack old privileged white men, whatever like that. I’m thinking, well, which one of them? I mean, when we reduce each other to abstractions, that’s actually, first off, you have to generalize anybody in order to kill them. We find it very difficult to kill particular people because particular people are always not quite what you imagine. I have to actually sort of stigmatize you and paint you as something broader that I can just paste my hate on, make you stand as a false symbol for all that’s wrong with your race, your nation, or whatever that way. This is always a ticket to violence. We find love in the particular, we find forgiveness in the particular, we find union and communion with the particular. The other, after a fashion, and I would say this, I’ve written that modernity, that is the modern project, is inherently violent. It wants to manage, control, change. It doesn’t want to be. It doesn’t want to be hold. It doesn’t want communion. It wants to make things be what we want them to be and in doing so, create the better world. It’s a very dangerous slogan. I think that that’s something that, I mean, I think some people are starting to see it some people are trying to try to separate the wheat from the chaff or try to, they want, they don’t want to see the relationship because between, let’s say, the modern project and modern thinking or the enlightenment thinking and the environmental crisis or this kind of the manner in which we treat reality as, you know, Heidegger talked about this idea of the standing reserve that we treat the world as just this reserve of physical potential that we can just take and make whatever we want to make. But I think that it’s an essential relationship and it’s very difficult because it’s hard to see a way out of that. It’s hard, at least socially, it’s hard to see how you’ve gone so far down that road that it’s very difficult to imagine it in political terms. The only way that I can imagine it is in, like you said, in particular terms to say I, you know, I will myself try then to inhabit a different life as much as it’s possible. The first habit of modern thought is to see something that’s wrong and then think about fixing it. And which is like we leap to the political. Yeah, exactly. Because I’m going to make a better world and think no, no, no, that was the problem to start with, a better world, you know, that sort of in the Christian spiritual tradition, if anything, it wants to tell us to slow down, to pay attention to who you are, to where you are, to pay attention to the particular. And of course, when I start talking like that, modern listeners get extremely nervous because they’re afraid if they do that, somehow or another, no one will pay attention to the larger world. Excuse me, I have a dog. All right. That was his greeting of the mill man. There you go. They have a particular relationship. But when we stop and slow down and we’re not going to control the world, the truth is I like to ask people when they go all political about stuff, I kind of want to say, how’s that working for you? When was the last time you thought it actually, you know, changed anything? It mostly just changes and makes you angry. Yeah, and that’s what happens is we feel self righteous, because we can look at the world and see how bad it is and say, well, shouldn’t we change this? Shouldn’t we change that? And we don’t, we’re not looking at our own sins at our own, our own frailties at our own broken, at our own broken relationship. Yeah, one of the benefits of older times of living in a monarchy is you actually knew who you could blame. It is the king. And so sort of one of the illusions of democracy is those who actually have the power have us all convinced that we’re in charge. And I mean, it’s like in the Soviet Union, everybody voted for the same guy, because you only had one candidate, but they were called like the Democratic Republic of so and so. And so, Sultry needs and writes and says basically, refuse to participate in the lie, you know, don’t do things you don’t actually, you know, agree to or whatever, it’s sort of trying calling his fellow citizens back to, to the particular and not being allowed to be abstractions. The I as a Christian, I just don’t know anything about how we change the world. I don’t think that we’re given that as a commandment. But we were given commandments about how to live, how to actually live. And I suppose, you know, you could do the math and say, if we actually live like that, it would add up to a better world. But that’s not my problem. That’s that’s in the hands of God. When I start thinking like that, I’ve exchanged being someone who lives right, to someone who wants to make everybody else live right. And there’s the violence again, of the modern world. And so instead, you slow down, you take a look, you start seeing beauty, you start living truth, you try to do the good thing. And, you know, in doing this in the face of the particularities made known to us, for me as a Christian, made known to us in Christ. This is what it looks like to do that. Yeah, and we have examples in history where we see how it actually changes, it actually does change the world. We, you know, the example of the Christian martyrs is a, I mean, it’s the most glorious example where here are these people basically just saying, no, this is, this is, you know, I’m not, I’m going to stay true to what I believe, stay true to who I am. And I, but I’m not going to fight the social system. I’m going to accept to die, you know, and not protest, and then change, they transformed the Roman Empire, converted the Roman Empire. It’s crazy to, to, you know, to think that that possible, but we’ve seen the Christian story do that. In St. Francis of Assisi is a great example of that where he just said, it’s just me. I just, I’m the, I’m the smallest of all. I am the servant of all. I’m, you know, I’m the, and then he changed Christianity, you know, until today. He transformed the, all, he transformed the Catholic Church by, by not wanting to revolutionize anything, by just wanting to follow Christ and to, to, to, to do these humble things. You know, everything changed. You know, and it may not always work out like that, but a couple of years ago here in the U S and maybe still going on big, big debates about guns and things like that. And I, you know, you get on social media and there’s just, you know, no guns, lots of guns, hate, hate, hate. And I, I posted and just basically said, my response to it is, is I promise I will not kill you. That as a Christian, this is my, this is my promise to the world is I am not going to kill you because I believe in God and because I believe that he’s in charge of history and its outcome. I can tell you that I don’t need to kill you and I won’t kill you. And someone immediately said, but what if you live in a dangerous neighborhood? And I said, well, then I’ll move. I mean, it’s, I mean, I, it’s kind of the response to that isn’t, well, let me get enough guns so that I, I mean, you can’t out gun them. They’ll you know, it’s like, don’t live like that. Don’t live like that. And I, you know, people can argue with that practical. I just, you know, we, all I can say is, you know, bless God, it’s not working out that these things and the arguments are endless. And people are never getting around to just living. And, you know, I think this is a fundamental part of the Christian vision is that we should live. I mean, I think one of the great present tragedies in Christianity is the highly politicized things that are going on that in which many Christians are absolutely convinced that there’s a culture war and that their greatest Christian duty is to be a culture warrior. And, and you can get that from both left and right. Yeah, that’s totally true. And in that frequently, they’re all engaging in generalities. I mean, the culture war is us versus them. And us and them are both generalities. And there’s no, there can be no love in it. And there’s no transformation, you know, if either side won, you still wouldn’t want to live in their world. Yeah. And I think that that’s I mean, but at the same time, it’s true that that’s the hardest thing is the hardest thing is to it’s so much easier to be, you know, I say that because I’m on social media, I’m on YouTube, I’m doing all this. And it’s a lot easier to do that to comment on different posts, then to pay attention to the people who are around you, the people, you know, to your family, to the to your neighbors, to the the community that’s directly around you, and engage with them, see them as people and, and be a, you know, be that particular who’s who, who is manifesting Christ and is seeing Christ and others, you know, to the to the most that they can do. But it’s yeah, we get pulled. I mean, I feel that I feel getting pulled into political sphere, I try to avoid it. People on my YouTube channel know that sometimes I like I go a little bit in and then I like, No, I need to get back. Because it’s a temptation. It’s a great temptation. But you think about Christ and his interactions. There were, you know, in some ways, Israel at the time was a highly politicized thing, you had your groups, you had your Pharisees and Sadducees and other groups. And then you had the, you know, those who were religious and those who were considered the unrighteous, you know, prostitutes and tax collectors and things that way. And he, he not only, you know, they talk about him meeting and eating with prostitutes and tax collectors and these other ne’er-do-wells. But more amazing that than that, I think about it, we know some of their names. I mean, for instance, there’s a short little man in the town of Jericho named Zacchaeus, who was a tax collector and hated by everybody in the town. But the amazing thing is, I mean, how obscure is that? 2000 years ago, some dude named Zacchaeus, and we know his name. Why? Because Jesus called his name out and said, I’m going to go home and eat with you today. He didn’t just sort of say, you know, some general invitation to all local tax collectors come and we’ll have a meal. He goes, Zacchaeus. And it’s interesting. Jesus is walking along, sees this guy in a tree, and he knows his name. And he says, Zacchaeus, come down. Not you and the tree, come down, but Zacchaeus, you come down. And we have this consistently, these encounters that are highly personal and which he sees the person, not for their sin, not for their brokenness, not even for their larger commitments like Pharisee or whatever else. He just sees them. We know the name of a Pharisee, Simon, whose house he ate in and a woman washed Jesus’ feet. We know the name of the Pharisee Nicodemus and of others. We know them by name because this was personal encounters. In the book of Revelation, talk about art, in the book of Revelation, one of the sweetest things in it of the vision of heaven is, I will write a new name on you. I will reveal to you the truth of who you really are. I will tell you your name. And when you hear it, I think the sense would be of at last, the complete revelation of the truth of your being would be made known in the name God speaks to you. That is utterly who you are. And I mean a name is in that sense uniquely personal. You walk into the room, you say, Steven, you have my attention. And so there’s this particular, but the particular isn’t to reduce things. It’s actually the only way we ever have communion with anything. And it has to be. You see it, like I mean, one of my favorite, let’s say, I’m going to paraphrase, but one of my favorite quotes from St. Maxx with the confessor is when he talks about, he says, as the person, even a person who was discovering, let’s say, the spiritual essences of something, and he sees these spiritual essences that they separate from the particulars, he sees that no, there’s no contradiction. They’re not opposed to each other. They’re actually made to be together. That’s the whole key of the incarnation is that we’re not called to this abstract world, but we’re called to encounter the world as an embodied reality. And so, and I think, I mean, it’s very mysterious. It’s very mysterious when you think of it in terms of the totality. We talked about revelation, we think of it in terms of this kind of final revelation when everything comes together. It’s difficult to fathom how this particularity is all going to come together, but we can, you know, in our experience, like we’ve been talking about in our experience, that’s how we experience it. That’s how we experience the world. I mean, you can say that to a degree, the great revolution intellectually, I can say it that way, in Christianity was, I mean, already in Plato, there is a discussion of the transcendentals, that is goodness, truth, and beauty. And there’s a recognition that this is important. This is what we should be talking about. What happens in Christianity is that language gets taken up, but there is a recognition that the transcendentals are in fact to be encountered in the particular, and that becomes the revolution in which, I mean, for instance, the word person, as we know it today, is a Christian invention. Yeah, it used to mean task, you know, and the right word for what we’re talking about. You were just, you had a thing, you were a hellot, you were a slave, you were something, and suddenly you become a name of every person of equal value. I mean, we couldn’t say that all people, all men are created equal without that revolution having occurred. It gave infinite value to the particular, whereas prior to that, there was only infinite value to the infinite. And in a way, you can’t get it in your hands. And in the incarnation, and what that sets in motion in the life of understanding is a drive towards, I mean, when God becomes man, the infinite enters the particular, and the particular, you know, is revealed to have infinite value, and that’s a complete change. But nothing is just dispensable. Everything has infinite value, and that’s, you know, that’s really the drive of Christian ethics, is understanding that a human life is a uniquely particular thing, unrepeatable with infinite value, and worth sacrificing, loving, I mean, sacrificing for loving, doing all of that, and that is only, you know, that without that, I’m only speaking vague generalities. It’s only in the particular that we encounter goodness, truth, and beauty. So that’s really the root of incarnation for us. Yeah, right. And I think that it’s almost as if we haven’t completely understood the ramifications of that until today. You know, we haven’t, it seems when you think about it, it just creates such a jam in your mind, you know, to think about it that way. But it also intuitively, there’s also something very deeply intuitive that makes us, that makes it that it has become the core of our ethical thinking. I mean, like we talk about this all the time, that even now the secular ethics, they are based in this incarnational thinking, even almost without without knowing it. This notion of this, the value in the particular, and this, and the value of the individual is something which has come through the incarnation. But now, you know, in the modern project, we’ve seen also how it has slipped aside when Christianity is completely knocked out of the arena, then all of a sudden that has to go too. And then this crazy collectivism just appears and just takes over. And then human beings become numbers, they become just fodder for whatever ideology you have. GK Chesterton said that when the tradition gets jettisoned, like the Christian tradition, the consensus of earlier times gets jettisoned, he said it’s not that virtue disappears from the world, he said, but what you get is the virtues gone mad. And so, you know, most of the people out there are actually basing whatever they’re thinking on some version of the traditional Christian virtues. But they’ve lost their connection, you know, to one another, and they’re grounding in the particular and these things of life. And they just, you know, they run wild, and kind of drive us crazy. And so you have competing virtues, you have, you know, the love of tribe versus, you know, other kinds of things. And it makes us crazy. I think also, you know, I have great respect for people who don’t believe in God. Father Thomas Hopko of Blessed Memory once said that oftentimes it takes an active grace for someone to become an atheist, meaning that, you know, that they have in fact rejected a false God. And that’s a good thing. And I always say to people who say that they don’t believe in God is tell me about the God you don’t believe in. I’ll bet I don’t believe in that one, too. Exactly. You know, in fact, you know, when I deal with people who are coming into the Orthodox Church, we have a lot of inquirers and people. One of the things we spend a lot of time with is not just me trying to tell them about God, but us working with what is not God. Like we’re rid of a lot of false images and things. And so, I mean, there’s some terrible, terrible things that have been done in the name of Christianity, particularly in the modern period, for God’s sake. I mean, a whole range of the genocide on the American continent was done under some sort of Christian banner that the Indians get to be Canaanites and we get to be the Israelites and we’re going to drive them out of our promised land. Gee, that’s unfair. I mean, and a terrible and tragic thing. So if someone rejects that, if that’s what they take to be Christianity, well, good for them. You should reject that. It’s false. It’s not true. You know, I would say as an Orthodox Christian, though, and I’m not arguing denominations or something, just talking about a different way of doing. Take a look at what happened in Alaska, in which the missionaries from Russia who arrived there in the 1700s were taught that they were to behave as a guest in someone’s home. And they lived like that. And it’s a very peaceful story without genocide, without anything that way, but a settling in and an even an ennobling and acceptance of many things that were native to the peoples that were incorporated into their faith and life and practice, just as it had been for many, many centuries across the world. And so, I mean, on the other hand, you can take anything else that you think of as noble and true and good that human beings have done in practice. And it also has things about it that are ignoble, not true, and not good. And including in my personal life, I have all those things too. And so why should I expect the world to have acted any different than I act? Instead, I have to be about being different and by the grace and wonder of God to show that this is actually possible. And so, one of the things I say is I start by promising not to kill you. It’s a good start. It’s amazing how killing someone can just mess up a conversation. It just messes everything up. Yes. All right, Father Stephen, I think we’ve had a really good conversation and I really appreciate, I was really hoping people could see you, can hear you, could get to know you. And I hope that all the people that are watching this, that you will look at Father Stephen’s blog. It’s called Glory to God for All Things. And you can find his book is Everywhere Present, I think. Is that the? Everywhere Present, Christianity in a One-Story Universe. Yeah. And I think you’re working on a book now. If I’m correct. Yeah, I am. I’m actually, interestingly, it’s tentatively going to be entitled Face to Face, in which I look at shame, the role of shame in human life, the role of shame in our encounter with God, and both its abuse and its proper place. I’ve been working at it for a few years now, and it’s been hard. That’s not a subject that anybody likes to talk about. I was going to say, the worst thing you could put on the title would be shame, because nobody would want to buy it. That’s right, exactly. So I really appreciate you talking to me. And I will put all the links to your website down there, so people can follow through. And when you read Father Stephen’s blog, also, it’s really interesting to go down to the comments and see these amazing conversations that are happening between people who are helping each other understand and who are giving each other advice. So it’s a whole ecology of people trying to help each other to be better people. So thank you for doing that. Thank you. Thank you. And ecology. Wow. So I hope you enjoyed this discussion with Father Stephen Freeman. Please go ahead and check out his blog and check out his book. Also, just to tell you guys, I’ve been looking for ways to thank all my amazing patrons on Patreon. And one of the things I’ve come up with is I’m starting to give early access to patrons. Even if you give just one dollar or more, I’m giving you early access to many of the videos. I’m also doing a monthly Q&A for all the patrons who can, if you join on the live Q&A, you can ask your questions. And if you give a certain amount, you can also ask your questions in advance. And so this is all a way to try to figure out ways to thank all the amazing people that have been supporting me. And don’t forget that my new website is up www.thesymbolicworld.com. So check that out and I will talk to you soon.