https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7E9vlMnv3go
So hello, everybody. I’m here with Benedict and Talia Sheehan. You have probably seen them on my channel before. And so Benedict is a composer, and Talia is a choir conductor. They are at Saintique Con Seminary. They direct the choir there. But Benedict is also a composer. And recently, in the past two years, he has been kind of this crazy ascending moment. And he is now nominated for a Grammy for his liturgy. And I just wanted to talk about it, because I’ve been really excited to follow Montalcumina to see all the attention that his work is getting. So I’m really looking forward to hearing about how he is able to be a liturgical composer in the contemporary world. This is Jonathan Pageau. Welcome to the symbolic world. So Benedict, please tell us a little bit about what’s going on with your liturgy. I mean, I think it’s not even just your liturgy. There are other things that are… Yeah, so just to be clear, it’s actually not my liturgy that I’m nominated for right now. So, but it’s actually for my work as a chorus master or a choral preparer for the Kostelsky Requiem recording that just came out at the end of August. My liturgy got released in October, which means it’s in the next… It’s in the next year’s round for the Grammy. So it’s too early to know about that one, but I’m hopeful. I mean, it’s gotten great reviews and it’s… It’s also like number one on the classical charts for… It was number… Yeah, it debuted at number two on the Billboard, which was great. I mean, that’s pretty awesome for a thing that is produced by, you know, more or less by St. Tickens, Monastatari. We haven’t ever enjoyed that kind of a spotlight, so it’s pretty awesome. Yeah, to me, it’s like there’s… It’s a testimony to some of the things that I’ve been thinking about. Or I would say it’s a testimony to my own journey, too, or to other people that we know like Andrew and other, I would say people who are really striving for excellence and have felt like the contemporary art scene is stale. And so trying to revivify traditional forms, but not in a just a… Not in a, I would say, not in a kind of nostalgic desire to go back to the past, but in this alive, this form that’s alive and that is connecting to a real community. Yeah, that’s exactly the way I would put it. Wouldn’t you agree? Yeah. Yeah, it’s born out of the sort of, you know… It’s born out of the daily life that worship is here at this place. At this monastery. And partly it was actually that work, the work of… Oh, we’re going to have to edit that out. We actually still have a final plan for no earthly reason that I can come up with. Yeah, no reason at all. Yeah, but I think it’s just nostalgia, actually. There needs to be some physical connection, even though… My wife refuses to have a cell phone, so we have a landline. And it’s the main phone for our house. And she just refuses to have a cell phone, which I admire greatly because I refuse for like… I didn’t have a cell phone until about 2017. And then I was just forced by everything to get one. And since then, I’ve been completely addicted. So, yeah. Which, like, well… It’s a good tool. It’s just the tool starts using us after a while. But yeah, so, I mean, OK. Continue what you were saying. You were saying that it was born out of the prayer life and the worship life of the monastery. Yeah, and to a great extent, there has to be a context for artists. And the more immediate the context is, the more it’s grounded in a daily experience, kind of the more validated the artist. And that’s definitely what’s happened here at St. Ticons, because we have the privilege. It’s also a burden to a certain extent, but the privilege of the worship being exclusively vocal and exclusively, almost exclusively choral and exclusively unaccompanied, which puts artistic constraint on what we do in a way that necessitates creativity. And, you know, if you have to do it every single day, that’s even more intense. You will go insane if you aren’t doing something creative. So the avid here, Father Sergius, is hugely supportive of the work to, you know, to create beautiful worship singing, because, A, it’s just like as frequently as they have to do it and they have to endure the doing of it. Like it had it had better not be awful. Like, please, let’s fix problems. Let’s not just let problems sort of sit. We got to do something about this. But then also to kind of cultivate a vision. And and that’s really what what to say it comes from the life here at the monastery. It really is. It really is that it’s born out of that that vision for what it could be. Yeah, right. And so in some part. I mean, so so the the liturgy that I compose and that we recorded, you know, that’s not the kind of music or this gale of music that we could sing every day in church, like to be clear, it’s not every day kind of, you know, like you get up. It’s 6 a.m. and you go and sing liturgy. It’s not that. Thank goodness. Yes. You know, so it’s like if if you’re. You know, it’s like the difference between, you know, your kind of work outfit that you go to do carpentry and and, you know, a book, a black tie, you know, a black tie out better, a ball game down or something like that. But I do think these things are are are very they’re very integrally connected because you have to be able to to to to look upwards and to look outwards and to see, you know, we we say that the liturgy is an icon of the kingdom of God. A lot of the time, it doesn’t feel like the kingdom of God at all. But but it’s OK, because in a sense, like every now and then you might get it. You might get an inkling of that. And and that and that little glimpse is enough to sustain everything else that you do and to inspire everything else that you do. So I kind of see the the work of trying to create like new great works that arise out of the out of the orthodox context of worship, but are not just aimed at at at it. It is part of in trying to inspire a new a new how can I say it? I knew School of Art. I knew I knew I knew reason to put it to put energy and resources into this. And that’s what the St. Stephen choir was and this performance of the Kostolski Requiem, because that’s obviously not a liturgical work. Anomaly is it not a liturgical work? It incorporates like it’s it’s a it’s an almost an international work. It has Kostolski envisioned it as being representative of of the international, you know, of the international of the allies of the allies in World War One. And so he he envisioned it that way. And then the performance of it almost winds up being like a work of diplomacy, because the forces are so huge. There were three, three ensembles or four or three choirs and four choirs and an orchestra that went into doing this. And it really it felt like talk about symphony, you know, like it felt like it felt like multiple levels of reality coming together to do a thing all to the same purpose. And then, you know, and then the pieces and then then the pieces itself, it weaves together religious music from the traditions of all the allies. So there’s there’s there’s there’s a Russian there’s a Russian Orthodox chant, but there’s but there’s Gorean chant and there’s and there and there and there’s an Episcopal here, he came to an American him to terms, but there but there but there’s also there’s also a Japanese is like it was a Shinto melody in there and there’s and there and there is an Indian and there’s an Vedic him. The idea being that that through this kind of expression of honoring the dead through through song, it brings together all the nations of the world into this one single sound. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful image. And it’s a beautiful piece of music. So that’s that I see that that all of that is connected to this kind of routine work of trying to be in church all the time. Well, the wealth that we take and we offer as worship is necessarily created outside of the worship. The economy that sustains the church is not and it’s not a closed system. So we have to be creating. We have to be creating wealth outside of worship in order to enrich worship. Yeah. And I think that you’re one of the things that kind of hits me as I’m listening to you speak is one of the strength of the way that the Orthodox will envision reality and envision it in terms of a hierarchy instead of envisioning it in terms of opposites or in terms of this is inside. This is outside. This is this is bad. But rather seeing it as this outflowing of a hierarchy. And so when you talked about the idea that, let’s say, you try to aim with your your own composition to something which in a way is not accessible to the everyday choir of every church, but nonetheless becomes an aim. And that’s what hierarchy does, is that you can have an aim. And then the fact that you don’t reach that aim doesn’t mean that you’re going to hell. It just means that you’re that you’re moving, that everything is moving and kind of in this discussion with the higher things and trying to embody them as much as possible in the moment that we’re living today and understanding that we fail all the time and that we’re always kind of not reaching that ideal. And so I think there’s something very powerful about what you said. And Talia, what you talked about, the idea of an economy which is outside the church. I think that that’s that’s really very a very powerful way of understanding it, which is that in a way, liturgical music doesn’t have the it doesn’t have the symphonic aspect, like you said, that something which is outside the church could have. But it’s fed by the simpler patterns that we are, the more pure patterns that we find in liturgy or that we find even in iconography can then boil over. And the funny is that it will sometimes look like the outside works are more complex or more subtle or all of these things. You know, like in the Dostoevsky novel, obviously, it’s more subtle and more complex than the liturgical pattern. But the liturgical pattern has this purity, which then kind of unfold and kind of sprinkles down into all these other works. That’s a really beautiful way to. Yeah, that’s a beautiful way to put that. Sorry, we have we have a that’s OK. We have a the real real life. Yes, it’s the real real life. I’ll take it. Well, what is really I know I’ve learned to have like because I do this every day, I have a door that closes and everybody knows. Well, we did too, but it’s we but it’s not well lit. The room that we we want to use. That’s all right. We have we have we have a lot of kids, kids in a small in a small space. So it’s just part of the it’s part of the for it’s part of the work of it. But I love this idea of identifying identifying patterns. You know, because we have this idea sometimes that like that, that the patterns that you see in church art are somehow are somehow the origin of all the other patterns that you see in in art. But I actually tend to see them as kind of the as kind of the disdilling down of them. They’re not the origin in church church art and the life of the church, of the church, of the church draws on everything, borrows from everything. And well, I understand it, I would say, is the difference between let’s say you could say that it’s the if they’re the origin in the sense that they’re closer to the source or that. But they’re also not the origin in terms of body. The body comes from the right, right? Right. Yeah, the body Christian iconography is based on Roman art. They took all the Roman tropes of art. Yeah. And then they, like you said, exactly distilled them, remove some things, adjusted some things, and then kind of push them towards something, push them toward a very pure language compared to the very sensual and and, you know, chaotic language of late Roman art. Yeah. So the I guess the question has always been for us how to feed this, because we both feel that we’re in a time right now where where church art has become really has become rather poor in terms of both the understanding of it and more importantly, the practice of it. And I think we see it the most clearly, at least for us, we see it the most clearly in how people how people sing in church and the kind of the energy of the difficulty, the difficulty with how you sing in church is that you have to do it over and over and over again. Right. You can’t just like to do it. And then and then it’s all done. It’s like every time you go to church, you have to sing again. And every minute that you’re in church, you have to you have to keep on. Yes. That’s just the right take. Like, that’s a good take. That’s not how it works in church. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. So so in a way, the this is this is standing of music in the church is the work of sustaining the people and the work of sustaining their abilities, the work of sustaining their their their just their ability to be there. And and and unfortunately, sustaining their interests. Right. Exactly. Sustaining their interests, which is to a great extent, I think why a lot of a lot of church singing is suffering from a lack of talent because without a sort of without something of a transcendent vision that kind of gives gives direction to the everyday task of of, you know, the the the clothes that you wear to go do carpentry, then it becomes very drying. And so, you know, in in in education, in teaching people, I like to call it an extended purpose. It’s like that thing that everybody focuses their energy on. That’s a that’s a sort of an intermediate goal. It’s not it’s not the next life. You know, it’s not paradise. They’re too far away. That’s that. Yeah. You can’t you can’t effectively work towards that on an everyday level. You have to have an intermediate goal. And I think to a great extent, we use POSCA as that intermediate goal. But there also has to be artistic intermediate goals. And without working to kind of find that for your average everyday, you know, person participating in worship, it’s really hard to maintain the dryness of of the routine. And so, I mean, I’m curious because I don’t I confess this to you guys and people who watch my videos before that, I don’t understand music. But so I’m curious. So when you write, let’s say you wrote the liturgy. So I listened, I listened to the liturgy. And I have to admit that I did find it. I was trying to be as aware as possible. And I did what I found, like my experience of it was it kept moving me from something, someone who has been to church for several years now, something familiar and then kind of moving me into an unfamiliar space and then kind of bringing me back into a familiar space. And I kept feeling this this tug where all of a sudden I’m like, OK, I know where I am. And then all of a sudden, I’m not so sure anymore. But then there’s a little something that reminds me, you know, it’s as if I didn’t think I had a I didn’t think I had a musical vocabulary for what it means to be in church, but I could kind of feel that happening to me. So I don’t know if that’s the way I go on to something. I have no idea. Well, that’s kind of the experience of development in music. There’s always an establishment of a baseline, and that baseline is kind of like a contract between the listener and the performer or the composer, depending on how you scale the relationship. And and so, you know where you’re starting from. And then there has to be a sort of hero’s journey. And that in musical terms, that’s called development. And that might be, you know, chord changes. It might be texture changes. But there’s always there’s always some sort of of movement away from the initial stability. And this is, of course, the monomyth. And there’s ways of interpreting music, according to this structure, that are pretty, pretty widely used. But that sense of I’m here now, I’ve moved away and it’s uncertain and it’s unstable, but then it gets resolved again is absolutely right. That’s a theme that you were that it goes through all of music on many levels of resolution. Right. Exactly. I mean, that the whole idea of of Sonata form, which is where all the great pennies of the past replied on the idea of a B and then a return of a. And, you know, in some sense, that’s like the history of time, the history of mankind. It’s, you know, in the question world view of beginning from a place of stability, but it’s a but it’s a place of stability that is as yet incomplete. It’s not it’s not fully formed. It’s naive. It’s young. And then it has to fall or depart or go out. It has to leave in some way and experience trial and adversity and change and growth and evolution. And then it’s some point it then and then it returns to that place of stability, but it’s but it’s been made new. It’s transformed. It’s mature. It’s mature. It’s mature. You know, so that’s that’s in a sense, that’s the story of mankind in in in our world view view. But and I think, you know, like you think about, like any pop song is in a sense, a B.A. It’s like, you know, it begins with a production. It builds to the bridge. And then you come back to the beginning again. And it’s the most satisfying thing to be satisfied. It’s a three act. I’ve had familiar content, but with the with the knowledge that you gained or with the perspective that you gained, having traveled away from it. And that’s why the hook brings you back. You know, it’s just like, oh, yes. So I’m glad. So anyway, I’m glad I’m glad to know that you’re kind of experiencing that on a route level as you’re as you’re listening, because I that means like, OK, that means I’m I’m kind of on the right. It helps me know that I’m on the right track in some way, because I mean, I. No, there’s a kind of myth, I think that we have about about about about composers that. You know, I think I think that it could pose very often tend to help perpetuate this this myth themselves. And which is that like, of course, it was all my of course, I planned all this, you know, but really, I would say, I mean, I don’t know what goes through the mind of other composers, but but I suspect the fact that a lot of us don’t really plan anything. I mean, we I mean, there there there’s all kinds of techniques that you use to to kind of organize ideas and to get things to get things to move when they’re when they’re kind of stopped up and and prompt or prompt prompt, you know, like artistic forms are they often act as a good prompt prompt. But when you actually sit down to do the work of like, what is what is the next note? What is the next sound? No, you don’t know what’s going to come out. And and so often then you look then I look back and you’re like, oh, that’s that’s what I was trying to do. But you didn’t know at the time you just kind of you. It’s just like you. And I’m sure that I’m sure there’s an analog to doing visual art. For sure, an analog to doing to writing stories or to telling stories. Yeah, I always felt the people always ask me, oh, I wish I could use the symbolic stuff you’re talking about to write stories. And so and I tell them, stop thinking about symbolism when you’re writing a story. You have to like think about symbolism before. Think about symbolism after. But don’t do that while you’re writing your story. Or else you’re going to not you won’t be able to do anything. Like just go to let it happen. And then after that, you can maybe edit it and maybe, you know, you can notice what you’re doing, like you said, and then adjust some aspects which maybe aren’t totally in line with what it is you’re seeing that’s happening. But don’t while you’re writing, seriously, don’t don’t don’t do that. Yeah, I know exactly. And so I have I have to learn to. I was going to tell a secret. Yeah, that’s the best stuff. I know it’s not that big a secret, but I feel like you kept it a secret from yourself for a long time. He had to learn to actually to forcefully. And it was an act of will ignore the suggestion that arose to to take that kind of a critical perspective on his work as he was working. Yeah. And and, you know, sometimes he tells this this part isn’t a secret that that, you know, for a time, he was a carpenter professionally. And and it was the it was the immediacy of the having to get the job done. It was almost the contractual obligation. And the fact that, you know, this was some place somebody or something needed to live. And it just had to get done. Meant that it was training in how to quiet that how to quiet that sort of insecure voice. And you know, that’s kind of a procedural cognition, right? There’s like rational cognition and procedural cognition. Your body just has to know to do a thing in order for, you know, it’s almost like we have two different brains, the part that thinks and the part that that does. We’re always trying to align them. So, you know, you’re doing you’re composing your carving. It’s like just let the doing part do its thing and you’ll find this incredible complexity and wonder. It’s like trust the procedural brain to train it some to. But yeah, also, training happens by doing it. It’s like there’s some things that especially in carving, for example, there are some things that I’m doing now that I never thought. It’s only when I now that I would take a picture of an old carving and a new carving. And I realize, oh, I’m doing this differently, but I never thought about it. I didn’t plan it out. It just it’s just as you’re doing all of a sudden. Like you said, you your body, you’re in this flow of making and your body realizes that if I do it this way, it’s better and it’s cleaner and it’s nicer. And it just kind of happens. And so for sure, what I’m carving, I’m not thinking about. I’m not thinking about what I’m doing in the same way that if I’m making a video, for example, if I’m talking about a subject. Yeah, that’s why my brain is actually free when I’m carving. When I’m carving, I can listen to I can listen to like seven hours of a podcast because if there’s like my body is doing this, but my mind is actually quite available. Yeah. So this is the this is the the elephant of the rider, which would be an interesting thing to talk about. But I interrupted you. So I know. No, I mean, I had I guess I have a big question coming from someone who doesn’t understand music. Yeah. My my big question is, so you do you write, let’s say, this liturgy? And my question is, what makes it a liturgy? I mean, except for not just the words, obviously, the words we know that that’s the obvious answer. Yeah. But what is it about, let’s say, the way that you approach the music, which makes it a liturgical piece rather than just something that you hear on the radio or whatever other type or another type of music that could be our dancing music or whatever it is. That’s a really, really hard question. It’s possibly a hugely subjective question. Well, I mean, there are certainly things that are not suggestive. Like, you know. Well, I think I think the words are in some way the most the most the most obvious answer, like in the Orthodox tradition. We, you know, over the over the last couple of millennia, we’ve more or less arrived at a point where things like words are kind of sentence to sound so words. And then perhaps if we want to translate the translation, playing is a major issue. Right. Yes. And then and then and then the order in which those words appear in a like, in a sense of like when what he comes after. But that that has certainly been things that has been subject to change in the past, but it hasn’t changed a lot in the last, I don’t know, four or five hundred or five hundred years. But I guess it’s this thing I I would say would start from this thing that we call tradition, that we call tradition, but which is a thing I’m always kind of trying to understand what what what it is, because we we often we tend to use that word to mean an old thing rather than a new thing. And I think that’s not at all what it means. It’s tradition is really a series of new things. It it’s it’s it’s. Maybe a better word is life and and the way in which life is always linear. So like a tree and a plaster tree that dies, a tree keeps on growing, growing, growing, and it keeps on producing new branches and new leaves and new fruits. And the trunk grows tower. Every part of the tree grows. The tree roots go deeper. It produces new trees. And but but all of that growth is, though it’s in a sense, omni-dimensional, it’s still always it’s linear in some way. It’s it’s always connected to what came before. It it it proposed in secret. In sequence. So there’s a continuity. And there’s a continuity in in terms of communal continuity. That is, we’re part of the same community. And there’s continuity in the sense of continuation, which is that I take what those that are there before have handed to me. And now I can deal with that as a that’s complicated by a strange mobility that we have as modern people and by being in the United States and by the United States. Yeah, like, OK, so you and I, Jonathan, we’re both converts. And that’s the kind of mobility that humans really that was inconceivable to the vast majority of humans through the vast majority of human history. Like, why would you separate yourself from your your identity, from the network that has actually borne you and nurtured you and given you any agency that you have? Why would you willingly separate yourself from that in order to follow an individual conviction? First of all, individuals weren’t actually permitted to do anything of the sort for the vast majority. You just die. Like, where are you going to get food from? Forget it. Right. Yeah. So we have this like weird privilege that we can actually make these decisions for ourselves. But what that means, because we can make these decisions for ourselves. And I personally firmly believe that that would have been impossible without Christ, because it was Christ that called us to individual conscience as opposed to group conscience. And so that’s like that was a little revolution in humanity. But we have this weird thing now where we bring to as by just being plugged into this. Suddenly, we bring the places we were before into the tradition, which means that what seemed like worship to people who knew something other than orthodox worship is now now it has to be listened to. It has to it has to actually be somehow at least. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s now part of the church. And that life, we can’t just ignore that life and be, you know, society for creative anachronism and and try and maintain. I am. Which I think is great. I’m not saying we’re not saying anything bad about the S.C.A. It’s really a cool thing. And the church sometimes does feel like the S.C.A. It does. But you know what? Frankly, Black Tie is S.C.A. a little bit. It is, too. And going to the opera is also S.C.A. And if we don’t if we don’t have those things in our lives, it is a very sad life. It’s pretty awesome. Yeah. But his voice as a composer is necessarily influenced by his experience in a culture that is not exclusively Christian or exclusively orthodox. Yeah. I think that one of the things that one of the ways of understanding it in terms of the tree, let’s say, is that we have this strange situation where the tradition, the tree of the orthodox tradition is now being planted in the soil that it doesn’t know. And now all the nutrients that that are there, all the possibilities that are there are not the usual nutrients. And so it’ll cause a transformation in the tree. But there has to be a way for it to be transformed so that we still recognize the tree or else then or else what or else. Why are we not then? Why did we become orthodox in the first place? Because why the tree is whatever, which has become Presbyterian or just become some some other some other thing. And so there’s there’s I think, like you said, it’s like as if there’s a more intense discussion which is happening in America, also because of the mixture of different ethnic groups. Yeah. You know, coming together in this strange land of mixture. So it’s it’s like an accelerated like an accelerated laboratory, something which maybe maybe would have happened over centuries, you know, at the meat of the places where Russia came in contact with other cultures and Georgians were, you know, fighting with Russians, but also in the same church and all this kind of stuff that would infiltrate and transform culture. It’s happening in in like fast forward. Well, as well as is the rate of technological advancement. Yeah. So many things about like so many things about about our lives right now are so much better and effective and easier than they were 15 years ago. Yeah. You know, and and that kind of innovation comes from happening all over. That’s happening all over the world. Right. And that comes from the uncomfortable, like the negotiation between conflicting, conflicting forces. Right. And and I think the liturgy is this incredible. It’s like it’s some people experience it as a war. I was just talking to one of the monks who was like, you know what the liturgy is? It’s it’s fighting. I experienced the other in the other players. He did not mean like, you know, like the idea of spiritual warfare and doing battle with the demons, which I think some people have all kinds of weird ideas about, but now he’s just like he’s like, no, no, no. When I’m serving the choir is the actual enemy. Yeah. You know, the enemy, the altar servers are the enemy. But it’s like it’s like a sport, right? It’s like a game where it’s our voluntary participation in that conflict that actually creates this thing that’s like a positive sum game. Like it’s way more valuable than had we not engaged in that conflict. Yeah. And that’s that’s tantalizing. But it’s about it’s about these things that don’t in a sense go to keep it together and then the work of trying to put them to get to get to get to get to get together. And what else is what else is Chris and Tantanity even about? I mean, you know, the idea of all of your enemies or the idea of God becoming man or the uncreated and the created. I mean, like things that don’t go together, that don’t belong to get together. And yet somehow they have to negotiate and they have to come to get to get to get together. The idea of of love is exactly what that’s what that is. It’s it’s too, in a sense, mutually opposed to reality is having to to unite. So it’s the pattern of it’s just the pattern of everything. I mean, everything is like that. And so the real estate, the distinction between, like you said, a fight and a dance. If you watch two boxers, you’ll realize how close those two reality are. Yeah. The coming into rhythm with the person that in front of you, they’re trying to understand where they’re going, what anticipate the next movement. All of this is part of the of how you do engage in a fight. And so hopefully, hopefully that that fight looks more like a dance in the Christian in the in the Christian world, I think. But I can understand the analogy perfectly. Yeah. Well, right. And so in that in that way, that’s kind of to go back to what you were asking at the beginning, like how do I write of the liturgy? What what what is it that will that will make it a liturgy? I’m in a sense, I’m doing battle with the with the tradition as I’ve received it. It’s this negotiation. Yeah. Or just a straight up battle where it’s like I’ve received the things like, no, this is not going to work for me or it’s not going to work for us. But I still understand you and respect you. So I’m going to come up with a different answer that I think you will agree that that you might agree with or you might accept. It’s not like me trying to assert my own individuality. It’s this sense of how do I unite myself to this thing that so often if you know, is so is seems so alien and so and so other and so remote. It’s like the act of Jacob having to to fight with the angel. You know, it’s like we don’t we don’t. I don’t think the idea of like trying to conform to the will of God is just like, oh, just do do whatever you want. You know, no. I know it’s like we went like for us saying to God, do whatever you want. I don’t think I don’t think that’s how God he I don’t think he God. It created us to be like that. I think we sure hope not. I mean, because I mean, yeah, because because if that’s what you think, if that’s what God will want that, I’m not going to be all right. Yeah. So but but I think you can you there’s so many there’s so many there’s so many arenas in which we can kind of we have to bump up against this this God that we that we believe in. And but a lot of the time it’s like, no, I don’t agree with you. I’m not going to do it like that. And then God is like, well, how about how about this? And like, I mean, like, well, how about this? And he’ll be like, well, OK, but maybe. And then the sense of like having to give and take association. Yeah. We the the avid of St. St. Deacon’s Father Sergius has this great thing about the Orthodox Church. Well, here, I’ll let you say it. Just this idea that it’s for you know, it has everything. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, you know, he’s like, look, can can you imagine how diverse a tradition would have to be in order for it to actually be for everyone? And so that necessarily means that there are some things that are for you and there are some things that are for other people. Right. That in the tradition, even in the liturgy, there are some things which you will have trouble attending to or that won’t necessarily come to to meet you, but that they’re there or that you seem completely like that’s fine. Or the marketplace or that just seem meaningless or even kind of wrong or absurd. It’s like, you know, basically, if it seems that way, do you find it? Yeah, but it’s an interesting idea for you. The way that people understand traditional society, but I said the way the people they portray the Middle Ages is that this monolithic thing with the church as having mass authorities, the church as having authority and just kind of imposing its authority on everybody. But if you actually study the Middle Ages, you realize that it was this flowering, crazy time of like everybody was all in these guilds and in these different societies of this saint and societies of this feast. And they had they had feast nonstop. Like they were constantly celebrating all these odd particular aspects of Christianity that we don’t even can’t understand today, like this idea of celebrating this wound of Christ and having like a feast about that. And so it was it was actually extremely diverse, like you said, because and but the diversity was possible because ultimately was in a hierarchy. Instead of like you said, instead of being this opposite is that we were able to be able to all fix our eyes upon something which transcended this diversity. And therefore the diversity became acceptable because we’re all following Christ here. It’s just that right now, this aspect of of Christ is the one that’s attracting my attention more than right now, the way that you’re looking at it. Well, that’s a really interesting point. You just said it’s attracting my attention. Right. And so the freedom of where to where to focus your attention, where to direct your attention was actually given a little bit more, I think. I mean, maybe this is a modern fantasy, but it was given a little bit more freely that that that you you knew that there was going to be that there was going to be demands on your attention that you could you had agency and you could decide with your community at whatever level you identified, whether it was your family or your town or your region, your nation, that that you all could pay attention to various important things at various important times. And I think right now what we’re really struggling with and it’s basically I think it’s it’s validated by the fact that we call it an attention economy, that what we’re struggling with is the fact that we don’t feel like we have a lot of agency with what we pay attention to. But we do. We just don’t feel so we don’t feel like we do. Partly because and this is the other the other part of our work is is this this company we call the Artifact Institute that is an attempt to talk about that space outside of worship and to talk about how how it can be ideally constructed in order to create the wealth that we then bring into worship and whether that’s cultural wealth or emotional or psychological wealth or actual artistic wealth and that there is a there’s a pulsing, there’s a sequence of attention that is effective in creating a cohesive culture and that that sequence is the common worship, the common work and the common feast. And that those things themselves are kind of how we perceive. We identify a goal, we work towards it and then we get a little hit of dopamine because we’ve attained it. But that applies to individuals in that applies to relationships as well as individuals. Yeah. So so this this idea of knowing where your attention should go and being free to to direct it as you will, is I think directly related to actual like quality of living. And and we get some satisfaction, some relief from the effort of where to direct our attention when we worship. We we see other people directing their attention the same way and we get reinforcement that this directing of our attention is is good and right. And then we can be shaped by the millennia of of the wisdom the church has about about who it is we’re paying attention to exactly because that’s kind of a really big deal. But what you’re saying is so right in terms of attention, because one of the reasons why we talk about the passion is because when we direct our attention towards the passion, we become slaves. We actually don’t have freedom. We feel like we have freedom. Like when someone falls into some some some obsession or whatever in terms of their attention, then they feel like it’s them. But at some point it’s not there. They’re written by this passion and they have to sacrifice to it constantly. Whereas, like you said, the true freedom of attention will rather bring us up together. Right. And so the idea of feasting together or doing something together, a task as a family or as a group or as a church or as a community, that is that is actually the freeing up of attention from these these these slave owners that we have at the bottom of us. Right. No, that’s beautifully put. Yeah, I mean, because we we’re we’re in a time you know, and I like what you said a while ago about we’re we’re kind of we’re trying to come at these at this making of art from a place, not of nostalgia, but but actually of kind of gratitude to to to. I think that’s really important because we were in a time now where we actually although we kind of like it’s a you know, it’s kind of a probe for us to say we’re busy all the time and we don’t have any free time. But that’s that’s nonsense. We actually almost all of our time is free, free, free time, because for so many of us and more people every every year, all over the world, what we spend our time doing is at some point a thing we chose to do. You know, that that was not true for for most people in the past. They didn’t have really any agency in terms of what they did with the great majority of their time, they spent a huge majority of their time just trying to get the food that they would eat that day or or, you know, or just to get under cover from the elements or get water or, you know, or just do the do the raid that they were born into. But now in the modern age, so many of us choose what we choose, what we do with our time. And if there comes a point where we’re like, I don’t think what I’m doing with my time is meaningful or good or productive enough or lucrative enough. A lot of us, even relatively poor people, have some freedom to then say, I’m going to do something else. And then and then even for many of us, if we don’t do that other thing, we still have enough to eat, we still have a place to live. So that’s like, this is a great this is a great thing about our modern age. And so we’re we over the last few years, we’ve been we’ve started to become more and more aware of just the reality that we’re in and how grateful we can we ought to be. However, this has created a new problem because every every solution seems to generate a new problem. We get good at solving the old problem. We we always we always tend to refer to these as as good problems. I like our problems. But one of our big problems right now is how do I meaningfully how do I meaningfully spend my time? Yeah. What do I do with all this with all this new agency and new free time? And some people just long for no agents. Right. So yeah, people do that. I wish I would just be told what to do because because the reality is that going to get water is meaningful. Yeah, of course. That’s one of the difficulties is that as we are able to free ourselves from those kinds of tasks, then we’re actually low on meaning unless we have something to replace. That’s the problem. But it’s not. But but I I don’t pine for the other. I don’t know. Yeah, you know, but we tried that for a while. We did. We did. We did. Actually, I spent our own electricity. I don’t recommend this. I mean, you know, maybe for some people, it’s a great idea. A lot of work, you know, but I’m not sure that the back that the back to the land movement in the in the 70s and the 80s would have worked without the brush funds that a lot of them depend on. So, I mean, it’s like we I don’t pine for the alternative, but I do pine for what to how do I do meaningful work? And so that is in some way what we’re trying to to to answer with our with our project that we call the artifact is to is is to learn from the past, like to see, like, how do people meaningfully meaningfully spend their time? What what is the work that they did? How did they how did they cooperate? How did they overcome their differences to to kind of to come to a common ideal and to work together and celebrate to get together? And then on a, you know, a more a more than on a smaller scale, like just what did they do? What songs did they sing? What dances did they do? How did they set their table? What what did they say in their in their toasts? You know, it’s not because we idealize the past. We don’t. But we can. But we need to learn from it. And then as we learn from it, we try and we try and recreate it or we try and we try and reproduce the patterns that were effective to lose solutions to common problems, and that’s basically what a lot of it is. It’s a it’s a it’s an effective solution to a common problem. And it gets called a law because it’s routinely and reliably effective, not because it’s arbitrarily mandated. And and you have to adhere to the mandate. No, it’s because of its effectiveness. So we look at tradition as though it’s it’s a it’s a set. It’s a set of to a certain extent. And, you know, again, I don’t mean the majority sense of law. So but then once we once we actually enact the law, we need to rely on some serious social reinforcement, so you it has to be common. It has to be common worship. You have to find out what other people think if they value it. It’s like a market. You can’t be a price setter as an individual. You rely on the reinforcement from as many other people as possible. But what you say the value is, is actually, you know, close to what they think the value is, and so that’s where the common part comes. So coaching people through this process is kind of what we’re trying to try to do. I mean, I’ve been following the work you’ve been doing on Artifact for a while and been very fascinated and interested in it and now. But there’s a weird irony of the situation now, which is that is that there’s the common, there is no common and and it’s there was no common before Kobe. But now there seems to be an active desire to dismantle the common in a no with good reason, I guess, like, yeah, it’s not. It’s not like arbitrary, but it is happening nonetheless. And it doesn’t seem to be going away soon, at least like where I am. We’re not allowed to have people at our house and we’re not allowed to have any like church services or 10 people top maximum. Right. And so and so because of that, it’s it’s and it’s not going away soon. It’s going to be right. I mean, it’s not it’s not it’s not going to go away soon, but, you know, it might be six months, it might be twelve, twelve, twelve, twelve months, you know, from now. But at some point it will go. But it’s going to it’s going to change. Well, the nice thing about this and fractals are the most wonderful things because you can rely on the shape at whatever level of resolution you’re looking at. So, you know, it seemed as though what happened, what has happened, at least in our relatively affluent culture, was that people have have turned their common inward. And so what we just we just we just narrowed our focus. And now our community is the people in our immediate physical proximity, whether it’s our bubble or our family, you know, the people we actually live with, or it’s forced people to basically look at the community that is their own self and the kind of feuding identities in in themselves that really, frankly, we can ignore them if we have enough other distracting things outside of ourselves. But that’s the uncomfortable self-awareness that’s come from quarantine. It’s like, oh, Lord, I don’t want to listen to those voices because they don’t get along. Well, you can have you can sit down and force those inner warring voices into a conflict into a conflict resolution process where you come up with a common ideal. You try and articulate what do we actually agree on? Me, who doesn’t want to do this and me who does want to do this and then, OK, we agree on this one thing. Cool. Let’s do it. Did we do it? Yay, we did it. Celebrate us. Let’s have a coffee. Yeah. I think I think you’re right. And I mean, obviously, that’s why people would like go to monasteries and stuff. But most most people won’t do that. It’s really it’s not fun. They won’t do it on their own. Like, let’s just go. No, no. That’s why we have communities because most people. Exactly. We need a pandemic to kind of to cause that. But I also think one of the things that the pandemic has done that we’ve that we’ve observed is it’s made people really see the value in being together. Yeah, in a way that we all just took for a way that we all just just we took it for branches. You don’t know when it’s going to happen again. Right. So that’s really important. That’s the place where all this comes from. And that’s literally the that’s the foundation of what our worship is supposed to be, it’s supposed to be Thanksgiving and we lose sight of the word. And it’s what it means, right? Title of the song, you know. So anything that can help us into that, we can support each other into a relationship of gratitude and sometimes just really actually objectively looking at our just the gifts we actually have. The fact that we have a what a ref that we have a refridger that we have a refridger refridger, right. That’s just like, no, is that the best thing to be fair? Somebody who decides to build a smokehouse and actually preserve their meat, whatever, as in a traditional non electric way, they’re going to probably have a deep end appreciation for that refridgerator. Yes, they will. And that’s that’s an argument for learning these traditional skills, but learning them as as art, right, because it gives you an appreciation for the technology that we enjoy every day. And it’s also it kind of puts that technology into a framework where it can have meaning as opposed to just being something we consume. Right. And so then, like in the same way that like not being able to be together has made us realize that the act of simply being together is like it’s like an experience of worship and and faced all I know and work. So it’s all kind of bound up. You know, it’s the same thing. It’s like, you know, you you do this this old task and it’s something beautiful and something meaningful, and then and then you then you go and you open your refrigerator or you turn on the lights and you’re like, this is this is great. This is so awesome. Wow. Thank you, God. You know, and thank you to mankind for being so smart and collectively. You know, that that’s that’s that’s it’s a beautiful thing. Yeah. You know, we we’ve been liking to say that, you know, the the work of our artifact is to make America grateful again. I might be too soon, I don’t know, too soon, but but you look at, you know, but when you look at where we are now and, you know, we have these two boring sides that are diametrically opposed, you know, and have legitimate pain and legitimate legitimate, you know, our our on both sides. But there’s there’s so much resentment. There’s so much, you know, and fine. We have things that we can that we can say are problems, you know, saying that we need to be grateful is not to say that there aren’t problems, but you cannot. You cannot live in a place of place of resentment. You will die in such a side. Yeah. You will die inside. Well, I think that I think that I find it amazing to see that you’re doing your little part and we all trying to do our little part to to bring some some gratefulness, some magic, some light to the current situation. And so I will definitely like I’ll be watching because the Grammys are wet like next week, is that yeah, yeah, March 14th. So we’ll all be paying attention to thank you. If we don’t win, then you can just say next year. No, exactly. Yeah, because then because then then the liturgy will will I will at least have a chance to be to be nominated. Again, there’s no way to know it’s you know, it’s and it’s not what I work for. I’m not I don’t. I’m already three or four projects in front of them. That’s that’s the old stuff. I think we need to celebrate when some of we need to celebrate when those who are trying to to create art and create culture that is the fine that is that is kind of bringing us together and that is celebratory, we need to we need to we need to be happy and to cast light on that. You know, so that because I think you’re right. Like one of the things that I’ve been doing and I think we’ve all been kind of working together, even if we don’t talk each other a lot, is we really do believe that there’s right now the energy and the interest to create a cultural movement that will that will be a participative cultural movement and you know, and it’s happening. It’s happening from orthodoxy, let’s say, but it has tendrils that move out. It’s it’s not just in orthodoxy either. I something I’m seeing. I’m seeing in a lot of in a lot of other areas that that there’s there’s a sense of kind of where there there are there there there there. I think there is a new a new tide. And I think I think orthodoxy has a part to play in this. But but I think it’s really important that it come from a place of gratitude and from a positive vision of what we can build, you know, because like I because I you know, because there’s this big split now of the rural and the urban divide and we we spent a lot of time over the last 20 years in small town America and rural rural rural rural rural rural and in rural areas, you know, and you can absolutely see the sense of meaninglessness and the pain and the sense of like the world has passed you by and you’ve been forgotten and and the and the and the and the and the and the and the and the elites and the billion layers are off. They’re doing their their thing and they’ve they’ve forgotten us. But, you know, but you can absolutely see how that that would inspire resentment. But, you know, one of the things it sounds really strange and really easy to say, but I think what a lot of people pine for about the past is the sense is those is the times that they imagine that their that their small town was was actually a beautiful place to be and the buildings were were well maintained and they could go to to the county fair or to the town dance or go listen to the town but banned or have a have a party to get together or go to go to go to church to get to get to get together. All of these things are in a sense part of. They’re actually an artistic vision. They’re there and nobody is actually stopping us from being able to do these things. Yeah, I mean, I know, of course, right now, but it’s going to change, it’s going to, you know, so but but it’s like we could we could maintain our small towns. We have a lot of free time and we have more disposable income than we realize. We could start a town band, we could have a town dance, we could go and talk to our to the people next to the people next door. And we would probably find that we actually had a lot in common, you know. And it’s like. Why don’t we why don’t we do these things? Well, you know, it’s it’s the thing that’s getting in the way of it is is is mistrust of the other and resentment. You know, but if you sense and to be fair, you take Jonathan’s perspective, a little anxiety about doing it wrong. Well, that’s true, too. Yeah, there’s that. And I refer to you because because I hear the anxiety about about doing music. Yeah, yeah. So in order to do that, you need a guide and there’s the hierarchical structure again, you just need the person who can walk you through so you don’t fall in a pothole and then you get to enjoy it. Yeah. And you can lean on them a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I really I celebrate the things you’re doing and I just need them in French soon so that I so that I can I can engage with them in a more in my actual surrounding. But well, then then. Fair enough. OK. All right. So we know that’s yeah, let’s figure it out. All right. So I will. So I will. I will. Like I said, I’ll be paying attention to the upcoming awards. And I’m just really happy that you’re that you’re in the church that you’re as you’re being so so active in that, even the videos you’re posting about your family and kind of these moments together, I think is very valuable to help people see what it can be like to just have a good time together because that’s something that it seems difficult for us to do today because of everything that’s going on. So I appreciate that as well. So thanks for thanks for coming on and talking to me today. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. It’ll happen again soon, I’m sure. All right. All right. Awesome.