https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PYsFwHXTY-Y
So hello everybody, I am here with Frederica Matthews-Green. Many of you probably have heard of her, have seen her. She really is a famous author. She has written several books. She is involved in many causes. She is really a light in the pro-life movement. She has been involved also just as an upstanding Christian woman that has been given ways for women and for people to see how we can live our life as Christians in the modern world. She is also very involved in ancient faith as well, has written many blogs. She’s just all over the place. If you just Google her, you will see that she has done many, many things. And so I’m very happy to have her with us. We’re going to talk a little bit about how it is as people that we can re-engage the world with meaning, that we can kind of rediscover the shining aspect of the world, how we can do that. And I know she’s got great insight about that. So Frederica, this discussion kind of started, it’s almost humorous because someone pointed me to a Facebook post that you made, which was kind of like a little rant about the term re-enchantment and how you didn’t like that term. And it’s true that we’ve been using that term, like myself, Father Andrew, many people have kind of been using that term. And so I thought it was a little, it’s probably a good place to start. Maybe you can tell us a little bit, why does that word bother you? And hopefully that’ll be a springboard for a deeper discussion. Sure, yeah, I think it probably will be. I was just noticing that as much as I sympathize with the goal of re-enchantment, and as much as I was very heartened by you saying that it’s inevitable actually, it’s reality. People have got to return to reality eventually. But I didn’t like the term. I noticed I was avoiding using the term, and I thought why. So yes, I did intend it to be a humorous, not a serious challenge. My objective was that, I think the ultimate objection is it focuses on the world that needs to change rather than we need to change. But the term re-enchantment suggests that God created the world, and then he enchanted it in a separate step. And that somehow it became disenchanted. And now we need to find the power somehow to re-enchant it. I just question almost every step in that range there. Yeah, it’s almost as if it’s our role to kind of put the magic back into the world, rather than, like you suggested in the post, which is to transform ourselves, our own relationship with God, and that the transformation, the change in the way that we perceive the world is almost going to happen on its own, let’s say, once that happens. Yes, I long felt that when the time came that Christians were losing the right to speak in the public square, that we would see a resurgence of miracles. And that also would be very important for each person to know how to tell the story of your own life in Christ and the things you’ve seen God do in your life, because we need to be able to tell our story. You know, 20 or 30 years ago, it was all about having our objective arguments in line, you know, our apologetics, we needed to be able to argue our cause logically. But time is over, and we need to be humble, and we need to rehearse it, give it a try, think through what would your story be if you’re giving an elevator talk to a non-Christian? What story would you tell? Yeah, well, I think, so I’m gonna make my pitch for the word, for the word in general, just to start us off, and then we can go on. But- Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is the pitch that I’m making, okay, is it really is in the meaning of the word, like almost the etymology of the word, which is that one of the aspects of modernity or the modern world has been to make us believe that the world doesn’t have, it’s not a song, that the world is not a pattern, it’s not a poem, that it’s kind of this weird arbitrary, you know, layout of facts that have, you know, like billiard balls that hit each other and that have no meaning to them, and that meaning is actually put back on top of the world. And so in a way, the way that I kind of view the term re-enchantment is almost the opposite of how you described it, which is rather kind of reliving the fact that the world is actually pattern, that it is a song, it’s a dance, it’s a story, and that we need to dive back into stories. And the example you gave about, let’s say, being capable of telling a good story, the good story of your own life, the good story of your own encounter with others and with Christ and with the saints, that’s exactly what I’m talking about in a way. It’s like, and not just tell it, but really kind of live the world as a story rather than, you know, this kind of cold arbitrary world that a lot of the, let’s say the materialists have wanted us to believe the world is. So that’s my pitch for the word. I get now the thing about singing a song because chant in French is literally song. So the world has a song in it. It is within a song, enchanted. And we need to participate in that mostly. That’s what we need to do, to recognize that this is reality and then find a way to sing our part in that song to bring that hymn of worship to life in the world somehow. But I think that the resistance you have is appropriate in the sense of, especially I think some of the images people were posting on the Facebook with posts were the best ones, which is the Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer who is like enchanting the brooms and everything. And I think that’s a perfect image to show the difficulty of how people tend to understand it, which is almost really in the magical, in the bad aspect, which is that we as people have the power to impose a narrative on the world. And this is actually something that we’ve seen happen more and more in social media and just regular media where there’s a kind of wizard aspect where you see people trying to force a story on reality and try to make us believe things, which are actually just this kind of imposed, reorganize things in an actually dishonest way to make us see a pattern forcefully. And I think that that really is the difficulty. And as Christians, we need to really discover the true pattern, the true song, which is there in the world rather than as using human power to just kind of impose these narratives on the world. So that’s kind of how I see it. You know what I think is true is that the real pattern, the true pattern is embedded in reality. We are definitely being threatened and even coerced by stories that are not true. Like in the US, the story that the whole country was founded in order to spread slavery. It’s just not true. It’s a heartbreaking story. Maybe you can tell is a story true or not, is does it create hope? Does it create joy and wonder? Does it make you love other people or does it make you hate them? There’s some really elementary sorts of tests we can use to find out whether or not this is a true story, a true song. Yeah, and also true stories have many sides that say, I would try to help people see that, for example, some of the great epics, like the Trojan, like the epics of the Trojan war, like the Iliad, there’s a way in which you can actually sympathize with all the different sides of the story, even in a conflict. There isn’t just this simple demonizing of the other, but really a way in which the different elements of the story kind of point to something bigger than what they are. And those have always been the great stories. And the simple stories are those where it’s so simple and clear, especially in the modern political narratives. Like, okay, they’re the bad guys. We just need to destroy them and then everything will be fine. Yeah, I was going to ask you if you’ve seen Timothy Patiz’s book, The Ethics of Beauty. And it begins with the story of the Iliad, the Odyssey. And he proposes that what used to happen is soldiers would gather, and over the course of several days, someone would sing this long story to them. And it had the effect of healing trauma, that that really was the kind of therapy to be immersed in the story, where there are good people and bad people and good people do bad things sometimes, and there’s death. It’s a very ultimate story. And hearing this beautiful song was a way to reorient themselves to a reality that had been chaotic and terrifying, and to help them find that place, a kind of an eternal beauty, how their own story fits into an eternal song. So I do recommend the book. It’s Dr. Timothy Patiz’s. Yes, he has been on my channel before. Oh, I have got him. Yeah, and we had a wonderful discussion about beauty as being really the foundation of reality. And I think in the Iliad especially, there are some scenes which do, they really do seem to do exactly that. The meeting with the Trojan king to negotiate the body of his son is such an intense moment of almost, even though it’s said from, told from the Greek side, there is this deep compassion even for your enemy, and it kind of recognizing that he’s still my enemy, and there’s this anger, and all of this is kind of going through, and there’s no justification of the moral decisions that are made. It’s just this participation in the difficult and painful story. And I think I agree that that would definitely be something which, if we understand it that way, that he could play a kind of healing role. And I think that’s what the crucifixion is ultimately really what that leads to. Now, when you look at our services during Holy Week, the intensity of the mourning, but also this idea that we in a way are also those that crucified Christ, but that we’re also mourning him, and that we also wish hope for his resurrection, all of this kind of, this jumble of pain and hope, and even to a certain extent guilt, but it’s all kind of coming together towards this movement where it will be resolved in the resurrection. I wonder why it’s so hard to tell the Christian story in a post-Christian environment, because I think what people, what non-Christians expect the Christian story to be is simplistic and sunny and artificially optimistic, and that the happy ending is already, is pre-assumed before you begin the story. In a way, that is true. We do believe there’s an ultimate happy ending. It’s not in question, but the expectation is that Christianity is a shallow thing. And I don’t really know how we approach that. It is offered as a very shallow thing by Christians in America. I can speak for my own country. It’s been simplified down to just a few words, and how you can be saved. Yeah, and I think that participation is really the only way to experience that. When you go through the services of lamentation, they’re long, and you kind of, you get into this mode of you’re tired, and you’re listening to these amazing songs of lamentation, and then these little glimpses of call to resurrection, like kind of interspersed in the lamentations. And so you really almost do feel like you’re going through a mourning, which is leading to healing at the end. But it’s not like just surfing over the pain, or surfing over the trauma. It really is diving into it, but then giving these little, there’s like punctual hope that keeps growing and growing as we get to Holy Saturday, and then finally kind of explodes into the resurrection. I just learned something too, from people on my Facebook group, that I’d never heard this before, and I wanted to ask if you had, about the crotalis, which is at that Friday night service, people would have little wooden gadgets that would make a clacking or knocking noise, a rattle. Really? Yeah, and they say it’s because in the West, you weren’t allowed to ring any bells between Thursday evening and Saturday morning. So in order to do the things that altar bells would do, they had these little clackers. This is on Holy Friday? Yeah, on Holy Friday. But the thing is that crotalis is a Greek word. And so I think it was brought over from the Orthodox practice. And somebody wrote in and said, he was visiting a Ukrainian Orthodox church in Canada, and they had like a whole box of these little wooden noisemakers that he said, and he thought they were probably a century old. So it’s an interesting way that we bring, not music, but sound. We’re inserting something that may not be a beautiful sound, but we’re amplifying the experience through extra means, through incense, through music, through the light, everything that’s going on. It’s a full body experience. Yeah, but it could be, especially if it’s on Holy Friday, it could actually be about death, because noise is usually related to death. Like if you think of how, or the end, it’s related to the end. You see it in Purim festivals, for example, these noisemakers are used in Purim, and it’s a spinning, like a spinning noise, you know? And it might have to do with a kind of the carnival aspect of the crucifixion, where the crucifixion has everything in it. So there is an aspect of the crucifixion, which is like the end of a world, like this end, and then this kind of moving into a new beginning at the same time. So that could possibly be why, but I’m really surprised to hear that. I’m actually kind of excited to know that that exists. Yeah, and they’re very beautiful. You know, the problems you find, they’re very beautifully carved. So yeah, it’s another train of thought worth exploring. And so a lot of your work has been, I think about this, kind of helping modern Americans, modern Christians, modern, even secular people, try to plunge back into a world of meaning, you know? And so what is some of the advice you give to people to help them reconnect to this meaningful world? There’s always a dilemma, and you know this as a North box Christian, of wanting to offer people the small bits of the, you know, tradition that they are willing to take on and what will be a more complete journey, offering these little things that perhaps they can comprehend even before. They’re totally on board with everything. And yet, you know that by taking a small piece out, you’re giving them something artificial. I always felt that way, even in my Episcopalian days, when I was in Episcopal Seminary in the 70s, all of a sudden there was this new hymn. It was a very ancient hymn. It was used in the early church, and it was like it had been just rediscovered. And the hymn is, “‘Holy God, Holy, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.‘” And as you know, we use this hymn a great deal. Yeah, oh, it’s every day. It’s in every liturgical service and in our daily prayer. But at the time I was like, there’s really something different about that prayer. It sounds more like a chant. It sounds more like an incantation. To spin around on enchant, incantation, as if God is present when you say these words. And my thought was, why haven’t we been using this all along? If we know what the hymns and the prayers of the early church are, the visual arts of the early church, if these things are still known, why were they ever abandoned? And to bring it back in as this little wrapped up box that you can open up, well, that was pleasant, and now we go back. Let me move on to something else. I had the same experience once in my church. God bless him. My pastor had met some Romanian Protestants who were still doing, would still say Christ is risen, Pascha, and then with the answer. And so he tried to get the Baptist church to do that. And it was just like this half thing. And people were like, what is this thing? Like, what is going on? And so, like you said, it didn’t have the kind of integrated or kind of, it ended up being a very superficial part. But what you said about invocation or incantation, I think is a very powerful insight that you have about the difference, the notion, a type of way of seeing the world, you know, this capacity to invoke and to, like in the Jesus prayer, you have the same movement, where you kind of invoke the name, and then there’s this participation in another person by kind of calling them, let’s say. And this is something which is actually so, it’s so intuitively right when we think about it just for a moment, but we’ve completely lost these types of practices. I remember the little book by Father Roman Braga, a transcribed interview called, the interior universe, exploring the interior universe, something like that. But he said at one point, a Jesuit priest asked him, how many times do I have to say the Jesus prayer before I can see the uncreated? Yeah, yeah, you’re missing the point there, my friend. Father Roman said, I told him, do not say that prayer anymore. Oh man, going for the jugular. No, just completely. Yeah, just stop, stop, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You could have a software running that just says it like automatically, and then like it could be on a loop. Then- They’re like prayer spinners they use. Exactly, oh man. Yeah, yeah, just put it on a loop and get enough, up to 5,000, this is great, in a minute now, you know. But I thought too, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way education teaches us to deal in abstractions. And kind of from early childhood, we are taught to think in abstract terms. I’ve been reading this, are you familiar with this book, Cognitive Development? Nope. Or how about, this is the predecessor for many people, Orality and Literacy by Walter Ahn. This is interesting because it’s the results of the work of a neuropsychologist, communist, Soviet neuropsychologist. Really, wow. In the 1930s, so it’s like, woo. But he went to these little towns in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and he interviewed people who were, it was like a spectrum. Some of them had begun to become literate, and most had not. And some were high in the social status, some were low. He just interviewed a lot of people and asked them questions. And when he said, he was going to ask them, he showed them abstract images, just a circle, a square, a triangle, asked what they were. And those who had a little bit of education would say, that’s a circle, that’s a square, that’s a triangle. The people who were illiterate would say, that’s a mirror, that’s a house, moon, that’s a stirrup. They recognized them as friends, innocents, as things they already knew, as things that were part of the story of their lives, that they are participating in a story with all these other people. And they’re enmeshed in all these touchable, tangible things around them. It seemed to me, it did not seem that way to the author, a al-Ruwa, it did not seem to him that this was a good thing. Okay. You know, we have to train them so they’ll think logically and abstractly, and it intrigued me how he missed that they were capable of using abstract categorical thinking. He would show them in four images, there’s a saw, a hatchet, a hammer, and a log. And he’d say, which one doesn’t belong? And of course the right answer to say, the log doesn’t belong. Nobody would say that. They would all say, you have to have the log, or there’s nothing for the saw and the hammer. To do. Hatchet to work on. That’s hilarious. The log, the log is part of the story. And we’d say, you know, a house and a wheelbarrow and a tree and a bird, you know, well, the bird is the only one that’s a living animal. They say, no, you need the bird. The bird will make a nest in the tree. And it will be next to the house. Look, it’s next to the house. And he will sing and people in the house will be happy. They just really resisted reducing things to abstraction. And I think maybe that’s the sickness that we have. And one more thing as he gets further along, he has like nine stages, he takes them through. One of the last things he does is he says, tell me about yourself. What are you like? What kind of a person? Some people are angry. Some people are happy. What kind of a person are you? And they would resist that. And they would say, you have to ask the people who know me, how can I know my own heart? But they know me. They can tell you what I’m like. I think the sense of being enmeshed in a story, in a world where there are people who know you better than you know yourself, you don’t define yourself. You don’t make up your own profile. It is the circle of others around you who really know you. I think this is what people are hungry for but they don’t know it. And we are so heavily conditioned to think in terms of abstractions. Well, one of them was a spectacle, a drinking glass, a water pitcher, and, oh, what was the last one? I don’t remember. But there were one of them that just didn’t fit. Then the man said, you can buy them all in a shop. So, he was capable of thinking in abstract terms, but yeah, but it was real life that mattered. Yeah, they tended when presented with a series of things. They tended rather than try to find the excluded one, try to weave them together into a story. They actually tried to see how they communed with each other rather than the opposite, which is one of the diseases of the modern world. We understand health through disease. We understand things through their exceptions. Things through that we try to, we almost have like an upside down way of understanding the world where we look at things that don’t work in order to understand things that work. And that’s how we tend to analyze reality. And in terms of this idea of self-naming, if there’s any disease that we have, it’s self-naming. The whole individual idea of, we kind of have a caricature of the will to power right now in our society where people can just declare themselves to be whatever they fancy themselves to be and not understand that your identity is actually, like you said, is supposed to be enmeshed within a network of human relations. And if it’s not, then whatever identity you kind of self-proclaim, it’s gonna make you miserable, no matter what it is, because we’re meant for communion. We’re not meant to be these blended individuals in isolation and kind of declaring our identity to others. The temptation of autonomy. And it’s really, that’s the sin. It’s like, that’s the sin of Satan. It’s the sin of Adam. It’s the sin. The main sin is the sin of trying to be autonomous and to kind of be on top of things and not, actually that’s the first sin. And then the other sins kind of come after what we tend to think as sins. You know, one thing I noticed in giving speeches and giving talks, because I don’t always talk about orthodoxy, sometimes I’m talking about social things or sex and sexuality or pro-life, obviously. I noticed that there was one word, if I said it, the audience would stop breathing and they would just freeze. And after a few times I realized it was really consistent and the word was loneliness. That if I mentioned loneliness, it was like people would, and it was like they were thinking, how did she know my secret? Loneliness, yeah, yeah. And you know, I’m always encouraging people, if you’re young, marry young, get married at 18, 19, 20. Start having kids right away. I sure opposed that when my son was 19 and got married. I thought that wasn’t a good idea. They’re expecting their ninth child. His wife always wanted a big family and she’s that one. And it’s just so much healthier than the autonomy that goes on and on and on and you marry at 30 and then you’re trying to have children at 35. And yeah, we have an artificial idea of how possible that is. How biology can be bent, and always be bent to do the things we want. I think the appeal of autonomy when you’re young is almost overwhelming and perhaps it’s natural to some extent. You need to define yourself as separate from mother and father, and you need to set up your own little home. In our modern culture, where youth extends into the middle 30s, what happens is that autonomy can work very well when you’re young and attractive and sexy and not fat. And you know, there’s so many things you have going for you, but everybody gets older. And every year a new crop of 20 year olds is rolling off their belt. Yeah, exactly. And you’re 25 and 30 and 35 and 40. And you’re competing with them too, yeah, exactly. So the world keeps saying, you know, be young and sexy and independent and autonomous, but they don’t show us the ones who are 40 and 50 and 60 and never married and are facing perhaps in their old age being cared for in an old people’s home where the people don’t take jobs there because they love old people. You know, it’s not necessarily a pleasant or even a safe place to end your life. So we’ve seduced, our culture has seduced people by these images of how great it is when you’re young and piggybacking maybe on what is to some extent a natural and healthy desire when you’re young and covering up and hiding from us the loneliness that sets in my drama. Yeah, exactly. Now I think that that’s so right. And I see it myself because I, like we were of those that, you know, I married pretty young. I married at 23 and then, but we started having children later. You know, we waited quite a while. And it’s only when you’re in your 40s and you know, your third child is young and you realize that you don’t have the same energy that you did and you don’t have the same kind of boy-ness that you did and you think, wow, you know, this would have been like all those moments in my 20s that I barely remember. I mean, I remember them, but they don’t have the vibrancy of the time that I spent with my son when he was two. Like they don’t have that vibrancy. And so, I mean, I don’t say, I wouldn’t say that I regret because I don’t like, I don’t kind of like live that way but I can understand why it probably would have been a better idea, you know, to really kind of consolidate that, because now like our family is, it is an amazing microcosm. Like we love being with each other. We love spending time together, you know, when we’re at the dinner table, everything is nice and it’s a nice time, but it’s, you think, oh, well, that could have been, we could have more of that and also longer. So anyway, so yeah, I would encourage people to kind of break the norm and not, don’t let people seduce you thinking, oh, you’re in school. You have to finish your school. You have to get your PhD and then you’re, you know, you’re 26 or whatever. That’s not, that’s a lie. I wrote an essay once that I titled, Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy. That’s amazing. No, I know. It was almost accepted by the New York Times. It just like, you know, just by an inch but it was published in National Review. So, but that was my thesis that it’s good to marry young and to begin having children young. But I said, you have to let go of, there are three things you want and you have to let go of one of them. One is both of you are going to college at the same time. Another is you are living independently of your parents. You might have to live in your parents’ basement for a while. And the third has to do with timing children. But that’s, if you want to live in your own home and go to college at the same time, you’re both in college, then what about having kids? That makes it much more difficult the way our culture is currently. So. Yeah. And there’s something, there’s something about being poor, which people, nobody accepts. Like nobody wants to be poor, but it’s actually, being poor is not that bad if you accept it. I mean, I don’t mean like poor in the sense you don’t have anything to eat, but just being, just living in an, like we were poor for quite, I would say like now we’re doing fine, but we were poor for a very long time. And we just accepted it. And it actually made us free. We could do a lot of things because we didn’t have this thing pressing on us that we kind of need to prove to everybody that we have a new car, that we have a shiny this and shiny that. It’s actually easier to be poor in our world today than maybe it’s ever been in the history of humanity. So I would say to not see that as a, the idea of like making all your money in your 20s and 30s. I don’t see that, that’s not necessary. We did that when I was 21 when we got married. I was just a week out of college and I had our first baby when I was 25 and my husband was 30, now 28, something like that. And we decided that we were gonna live within his income as a junior pastor, which is very small of course. And one of the decisions we made was looking up all the dietetic and nutritional information. We raised our children on powdered milk. Instead of buying a bottle of milk, we would buy powdered milk and mix it with water and big brown pitcher in the kitchen. And they grew up with that, so they accepted it. I remember we would go every week to McDonald’s for lunch with my two friends and their two little daughters and they would go to McDonald’s at the same age when my daughter was a toddler. They would buy dinners or buy lunches for themselves and their children. And I would bring a sandwich and drink water and my daughter would have a plain hamburger and nothing else on the side. This is before Happy Meals. So it’s possible, it’s possible even when your friends have a lot more money, you can live within your budget. But you have to accept it because bitterness can set in if you’re not careful and you’re… If you do it out of kind of resentment and frustration, it’s not gonna work. But if you just accept it, then it’s actually quite free to live that way. I could never have become an icon carver if both my wife and I had not decided that it was totally fine to be poor and to have an old beat up car and to not fix the windows because they should be fixed but they can still survive for another few years. And that kind of stuff, you just accept it and then you’re free to do things that a lot of people wish they could do and then they don’t. I felt like I actually got a kick out of it. I felt like I was up-smarting someone. That’s wonderful. Madison Avenue and all these other things and just looking and looking for the cheapest possible way to do things. And my kids got into the spirit of it. I taught them when they saw advertisements because we used to watch regular broadcast television as a family. When the advertisement came to the end, I would say, and what was the lie? Can you spot the lie? And so I trained them always to look for the lie in any advertising. Were they trying to trick you into doing it? Yeah, were they trying to convince you that if only you had this, then everything would be okay. Would be perfect. So I think we’re talking around the same thing over and over again, but for me, the big thing about orthodoxy is that it has that sense of being embodied and embedded and that we are part of an ancient story. And that me as an individual human, I don’t matter if I’m plucked out of the context and put on another planet or something, that I am part of a community and that I try to help that community. And I get so much help from the community and from their support and their prayers. We are all embedded here altogether. And I know that if I get older and I get dementia and I’m failing in other ways and I’m failing physically, I know there are people who love me. There are people who will take care of me. The next baby will be 15 grandchildren. We had three, our oldest had three, our youngest had three, that one in the middle is, they’re getting their ninth. I feel so embedded in the loving community that I don’t fear death. I know that I belong. And the myth of autonomy, I think, is what’s breaking the heart of our fellow humans in America, many of our fellow Christians as well. When I look at the things that orthodoxy offers, when I look at the things that converts say about what they like about orthodoxy, it’s always, I’m gonna move my eyes over here because I’ve got a document here. I never learned how to share screens. I’ll have to have a grandchild tell me how to do this. But the list of what people say when they become orthodox, you’re thrown in the deep end. You just have to live it. It’s like they can’t describe it. Direct contact, it’s dynamic. You have to come and see firsthand, alive, immediacy. I find that’s the term I use the most. It’s this quality of, it’s just in your face. It’s immediate, it’s right there. You have to be there, organic. Good old Warren Farha, I asked him, what is the one word you’ve used to describe orthodoxy? He said, organic. This sums up so much. Yeah. Body, immersion, you have to experience it. You marinate, it’s active, it involves all the senses. Yeah, but I think that’s also, all these words are good to help people understand too. Like the idea of marinating is good because we are so used to kind of immediate satisfaction that it’s true that some people, at first, when they kind of come to the services, they’re like, what is happening? I don’t know again and again and again and again, and they don’t know where these prayers are going. That seems to be just, like you said, it’s thrown in the deep end where at first, you need time to kind of soak in and kind of acclimatize and just slowly start to see the patterns, but not in a mental way, but really kind of all of a sudden, it’s starting to be inside the pattern. And at some point, sometimes you’re not even thinking about it because you hear the prayers and the prayers do have a pattern. And then you know where it’s going, but you’re not even thinking about it. You kind of know what is happening and what is going. And then it slowly starts to become a background pattern to your perception, but it doesn’t happen immediately. You can’t just like go to a service and all of a sudden, you’re like, oh, okay, I get it. I get it, I get it, I get it. It doesn’t work that way. Oh boy. Yeah, my first reaction to North Duck Service was it was weird and boring and I want to get out of here. You know, just really- And it’s strangely formal and informal at the same time. It looks super organized, but messy, really messy. And there these kids crawling around. And it’s like, it looks sometimes like the priest knows what he’s doing, but sometimes it feels like no one knows what they’re doing, but it’s like, it’s funny, it’s hard to describe that to people. It’s kind of strange sense of formality and informality, which is all happening at the same time. Anytime, that is so true. I’ve tried in talking about tradition, because there’s such a negative picture of what tradition means. This I think instead about Christmas traditions. And now your Christmas traditions, you do them because you like them and because they’re fulfilling somehow and they met the family together. You do them because they work. And the Orthodox traditions work in that sense. They have an effect and you can’t learn them all at once. That if you married into a family that has lots and lots of numbers, lots and lots of Christmas traditions, you wouldn’t get it all the first Christmas. It would take repeating. And I say, imagine they have red and green napkins, they’re now very faded, but they use them every year. And you might notice that last year, grandpa got a red one, but this year he got a green one. You might say, oh, you’ve broken your tradition. What you don’t know is there’s a tradition about the traditions. There’s something that when you’ve marinated in it, you kind of know instinctively where things are little T and where things are big T. It’s, you really can’t learn it except by doing it. So that’s kind of the mystery about Ritvidatsi. People who are in it tend to smile a lot and they’re very happy with it, but it’s because they can feel it going to work on them. They can feel how it’s changing them inside and making them more like the heroes that we have. There’s so many 20th century heroes of the faith that we want to emulate and be like. It’s like having baseball pictures, posters on the walls of your bedroom and just wishing you could be like them or you want to hold the bat the way your hero holds the bat. It’s a wonderful family to be in. You really don’t realize that at first. And there’s something about the causality, which is also sometimes difficult to understand, especially in our kind of psychologized world where let’s say people are struggling with a passion or struggling with a sin or struggling with something. And they’re like, well, how do I fight this? How do I deal with this problem in my life? And they want a direct road where they could just do these simple things and then they’ll get through their problem. But in the kind of the Orthodox tradition and faith, it’s like this whole process where as you improve your prayer life, as you are more involved, as you remind yourself of God during the day, as you do the Jesus prayer in your little moments, all of this is working. And at some point you’re like, oh, you know that passion that I had all of a sudden, it’s like cut in half. Or this thing that I was doing before, this bad habit, it’s like, okay, it’s gone. And I don’t even know where I got the will to do that. It didn’t come from me. It just this kind of this healing process that just kind of flows through you. So yeah, it’s difficult to describe that to modern people because they want the solution. Like I have a problem, give me the pill. This is what I need to take to do this. And it doesn’t work that way. Another part of that illusion, I think, is that they say people who are functioning under a high level of traditions, well, it makes you all be alike. It makes you all be little carbon copy figures. But it’s actually the reverse. When they want that program that will fix them, they want something that might be useful to a million people and they could just get in line and go through the steps and it would fix things. Orthodoxy is more radically individualistic than that. The program that works on you is finding you at your deepest levels, at your most unique level. And it addresses you in a wholly unique way. You’re not one in a line of a million people using a program. You’re one in a line of one. And God knows you so much better than you know yourself. Yeah, and there’s so much. Like I’ve noticed that like sometimes I’ve noticed, for example, like my attachment to certain saints, for example, I can’t completely explain it. I can’t tell you why that I feel closer to this or that saint, but I can see it working in my life. Like I can see that that communion that I’m living with is slowly changing me and transforming me and making me closer to the image of Christ. And so it’s like that for so many things, because even the practices you can have in the church, there’s so many that you, unless you’re like a monk, you can’t do them all. So you end up through your discussion with your spiritual father, through all this, you end up finding something which looks like you or you moving towards God, you could say something like that. We are tiptoeing up to the question of the supernatural, which is simultaneously a very difficult thing to get across, but also something that non-Christian, non-believers, the nones crave, they crave that. And that’s why it’s all about, you know, are there little spells or charms you can cast on people or their potions? Is this a haunted house? They have a lot of what they probably don’t realize is an unhealthy attraction to the supernatural. And they don’t understand that it is a dangerous world and that in Christianity, you can do that safely. And supernatural things do happen. Part of telling our story is to say, wasn’t this incredible? Like the time that we were trying to vote on who our patron saint would be for the women’s group. And Saint Nina kept pushing her way over and over and over again, none of us knew who she was. The one person began reading a short biography, the president of the women’s association of sisterhood began to sob and just run with tears. And she didn’t know why, she didn’t even hear the story. So when we said, well, are we gonna vote now? And my husband, the pastor said, you don’t get to vote. It’s pretty clear. She’s already said that she wants to do this. So give her the job. And so I got up to walk upstairs. I picked up one of the Sunday, this was Saturday, I picked up the Sunday bulletin and it was January 14th. It was the feast of Saint Nina. So things like that happen. And you can just know, you get the awareness of when it’s healthy and when it isn’t. And as you’re drawn on through healthy, why do we call them supernatural, right? What should we call that? Yeah, I don’t like, you don’t like the word re-enchantment. I never use the word supernatural because it has a, there’s something about it, which seems like an arbitrary thing, which is kind of imposed itself on top of reality. You know, I just say, I have my own way. People around what I’m doing, we say symbolism happens. Like the idea that the world is full of meaning and that this meaning is embodied in people, in persons. And so don’t be surprised when the world coalesces into meaning, meaning, because that’s actually how the world exists. And so it’s not that miracles, when miracles happen, you shouldn’t be totally surprised because the world actually exists through these patterns of meaning. And so that’s kind of how I see it. It’s obviously not a traditional term, but- Patterns of meaning, symbolism. Yeah, but you could just say that miracles happen too. Like miracles happen because miracles are not arbitrary, are not arbitrary things that you can’t explain. They’re rather the world coalescing towards meaning and showing the meaning in a bright and surprising way. It’s like as if the pattern of reality appears to you in the shining manner. And so it’s not at all arbitrary. It’s actually the summit of meaning is when miracles happen. So enjoyable and so fun and so awe-inspiring to participate in that. Like God is dropping little clues for you and seeing whether it’s like how we look at children. I think God and the angels look at us and, oh, look, look, she understood that part this time. Oh, look, she prayed for them. That’s an amazing way of seeing it. That’s wonderful. That’s something like we look at a sonogram and we see the baby and the baby has no idea that we’re watching them. Yeah, I think that’s what it’s like with the, I was thinking too though about, I only use the term supernatural when I’m dealing with non-believers because they don’t know what the word means. I definitely wouldn’t use it. But the cautionary tale, I like to tell, Ben Blanking on his name, there was an extremely popular BBC series called Civilization. The first mini series and it was, I guess, late 60s into the 70s. But Sir Something Something, who wrote and who narrated the whole thing. He had a sensitivity to supernatural things. He said when he went to, there was a certain village in Italy that he just felt evil. He just felt horrible and murderous. He went to the island of Iona and he just felt the goodness. He felt the good spiritual presence there. Well, one time he was going to do some filming in a smaller church in Paris, in France anyway. And he said, as soon as we walked through the door, he felt an invitation. He felt that he was being invited to participate in Christian faith. And it lasted for several days, he said, but he vacillated. He realized that if he accepted this invitation, there were things he would have to change in his life. And between the lines, as you read the autobiography, you can sense there was probably a lot of adultery going on. So he knew that he would have to change. And he came to the conclusion that he really didn’t wanna change. So he said, after a couple of months, that invitation just faded away. So, wow. Today, decide who you will serve. Pay attention today when you hear his voice. Exodus, I forget. Today, when you hear his voice, respond to that voice, you may not get another chance. You might be like Sir Richard, whatever. And it would just fade away after the line. It said that on his deathbed at the last minute, he became a Roman Catholic and received it. So he waited till the very end. So did St. Constantine, I guess. I guess it’s not for us. We’ll leave God. We’ll let God parse that out in the end. But he might not have felt this way. I think if we keep choosing against the good over and over and over, we become more numb. I’m less able to hear that invitation. We reach a point where we really don’t want it. We really don’t want God anymore. So you don’t know yourself, really. You don’t know when you might just become so numb. You don’t care. So I think it’s important, and I really should memorize that scripture better about today when you hear his voice. Don’t delay. Run toward him. You may well not get another chance. You may well not care. Next time. Yeah, the next time, exactly. Well, Frederica, thank you so much. This has been really wonderful. For me, sometimes my conversations tend to be kind of cold and intellectual, I have to admit, but I really enjoyed this really heartwarming and also just helping people remember how this is connected to our lives and our choices and the way that we commune with others. So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you, Jonathan. You’re a wonderful interviewer. You’re very easy to talk to. And so if people want to access your writing, if they want to access what you’re doing, what is the best place for them to go? Probably my website, which is on the Ancient Faith website. It’s Frederica, my name, Frederica.com, like Frederick with an A, F-R-E-D-E-R-I-C-A.com. And you will find all my books on Amazon. I have an author page there. All my podcasts going back to 2006 are on Ancient Faith Radio. Pioneer. She’s everywhere, she’s everywhere. I’m not too hard to find, but I’m in the Smoky Mountains. My husband retired from the parish we founded in Baltimore. And here I am at home with grandchildren around me, and I couldn’t be happier. Well, I hope that we have a chance once all of this whole pandemic thing hopefully goes through that we’ll have a chance to meet again in person. That’d be wonderful. I would like that. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you.