https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Dws9AolK6SI
So, hello everybody. Who was here yesterday? First question. So, most people, hopefully, were here yesterday. Because tonight is going to be the continuation of what we talked about yesterday. For those who weren’t there, I’m going to give you a 30 second rundown. We basically talked about the Garden of Eden in the work of St. Ephraim and St. Gregor of Nyssa especially, and how the Garden of Eden is this ontological hierarchy. It’s a hierarchy of being, a hierarchy of virtue, a hierarchy of being, and it flows out into the world. It’s basically the virtues of the Garden go out into the world, and the farther you are from the tree, the further you are from the glory of God, and that’s the fall of Adam and Eve that move out. So that’s the shape of everything, the shape of a church, the shape of Mount Sinai when Moses goes up, the shape of the tabernacle in the Old Testament, of the temple, all these have the same kind of shape. But today I want to talk a little bit about what happens on the edge. And the reason why I want to talk about that is because usually when I talk about this subject, if I talk about it with people that aren’t familiar with Christianity, that aren’t in the church, usually I start at the edge because in our world today it’s a lot easier to understand the edge. But with you guys I decided to start with the middle and then we’re going to move out and I’m going to talk a little bit about what it looks like when you come to the edge of things. Now in order to understand it, I’m going to revisit the story just a little bit, revisit the basic story and I’m going to show you how it relates to other structures as well. Now if you think again about the Garden of Eden and you think about the fall, the way to understand it is if you understand it spatially, you have to understand the mountain going all the way, you could say down, down, down until they reach the flood. So Adam and Eve and their descendants, there’s this tumble and they fall, Cain and Abel, Cain kills Abel, there’s another fall and then Cain goes out, builds cities, builds weapons and the world becomes more and more corrupted until God sends the flood. What happens before the flood? There’s that strange verse in the Bible, right? The strange verse that says that the sons of God had children with the daughters of men and it produced giants, produced monsters. So on the edge of the world we find the monsters. Now if you think about going backwards, if you think about when the Israelites leave Egypt and they go back towards the Holy Land, a way to understand it is you can look at this story backwards. So Adam and Eve fall, they tumble, they move away from the Holy Place and now they’re actually going back to the Holy Place. So what are the things that they encounter? They encounter a flood, right? They cross the waters and then when they come to the Holy Land, what do they encounter? Giants. You’ve got to beat the giants. After you beat the giants, then you, they have several crossings in the story where they keep crossing these bodies of water to show you this moving back, you know, crossing these transitions and moving back towards the Holy Land. Now the ancients in other cultures, in Greek culture, Roman culture, in other cultures, they understood the world pretty much exactly like that. So you have your, usually they would have their own middle, their own center. In Greece they had the belly button of the world, right? The omphalos. They had this idea that they had the belly button of the world and the more you moved from the belly button, the more you had encountered things that you, that aren’t like you, you start to encounter barbarians and remember that the word barbarian most certainly probably comes from the notion of barking like a dog. So bar, bar, bar. When you listen to someone you don’t understand, you just hear noise, right? Have barbarians and then on the edge of the world, what do you have? Monsters. Yes, thank you. On the edge of the world you have monsters. If you look at ancient maps, you know, even medieval maps, that’s how they would show it. They would show Jerusalem in the center and then they would show the world and on the edge of the world there would be monsters. And monsters represented all kinds of different ways. People with their faces in their stomach, people with one foot, you know, people who had dog heads and cannibals, all these monsters that live on the edge of the world. Now it’s very difficult for people to think like that today, but like I said, this is just the shape of reality. This is how we encounter things. This is how everything unfolds. And so it’s difficult for us to think of it in that kind of large way, but you can think about it in terms of anything. So imagine you have, I can take any object, a chair, right? You have a chair and there’s something about it that makes it a chair. There’s a chaireness of the chair, right? Something that makes it that you know that it’s a chair. Then you see different variations of chairs, right? And they will, let’s say they’ll congregate to the notion of chair. And slowly as you move away, you could start to have, you could have some weird chairs, right? You could have a chair maybe with three legs. Is that still a chair? Maybe, I don’t know, could be. What about a chair that doesn’t have a back? Or maybe you have another category like a couch. And somewhere in between there’s this weird thing that you see in someone’s living room and someone asks you what it was, you would say it’s a chair, it’s a couch, I don’t know, it’s a mixture. It’s a mixture between two things. You’re not quite sure how it fits in terms of its category. And so that’s what monsters are. Monsters are just things that don’t fit in the category, right? They’re usually either too much of something, they’re too big, too small, or they’re a mixture with animals or else they have something about them which is off, right? One leg, too many arms, you can just keep going. You can imagine all kinds of, they have many eyes, they have no eyes, they have whatever. Like anything you can continue to, there’s an indefinite amount of possible monsters. There’s an indefinite amount of exceptions between the chair and the couch. It could be a little bit more on this side, a little bit more on that side. If you look at traditional monsters, if you look at a dragon for example, even in the icon on St. George, if you look carefully you will see that a dragon is really just a mixture of different animals. Usually the dragon in the icon on St. George will have the head of a lizard, it’ll have hairy legs often, and it’ll have wings, and this is an animal that cannot exist. It cannot exist because it is undefined. It defies categories, okay? And so you can understand that that’s, let’s say, how the world works. And so once you understand that, then there’s a lot of things about the way that traditional imagery or the way that the traditional world lays itself out. We talked yesterday about the notion of the narthex and the fact that they would put the Greek sages in the narthex. And you could say that those Greek sages are something like monsters. Monsters aren’t always negative by the way. Monster just means not sure. Not sure what it is, not sure how it fits. It’s not properly integrated. So you have these thinkers, you have Plato, you have Aristotle, and the church uses a lot of the language of Plato and Aristotle. You have some fathers that say like St. Justin Martyr who says that they are Christians before Christ, and you have other fathers who say what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? Are they in? Are they out? Well, they’re kind of like in between. So what do we do? Put them on the edge. Put them in the narthex. Neither inside nor outside. We can’t totally put them outside. Because if you put them outside, we’ll have a serious problem because a lot of the words we use actually, we take them from these people. Can’t totally put them inside because obviously they weren’t part of the story of the incarnation. They didn’t receive the Holy Spirit the way that we receive the Holy Spirit as we enter into the church. And so we have this buffer, this buffer in between. Now that buffer repeats itself at all the layers too. Okay? And so, and you come into the temple, and if you come into the tabernacle, and you want to go into the Holy of Holies, what do you see? You see a cherub. Now in Indiana Jones, when they show the cherubs on the ark, they show these nice angels with wings that kind of bowed and they’re very pretty. But if you read a description of a cherub in the Bible, that’s a little different. It’s a mix of an ox, a lion, an eagle, a man, and different descriptions in different parts of the different places in the text. Talks about God riding the cherub across the sky like a mount. You can imagine this creature with like the legs of an ox and the wings of a, with wings and the head of a bull or the head of an eagle. You have this wild image of this hybrid creature that God is riding. And honestly, like the cherub in the temple probably looked a lot more like a sphinx or like the Babylonian images you see of the bulls with the wings probably looked a lot more like that than the pretty kind of image that we’ve come to see, especially in the 19th century or the little babies, those little babies in the paintings. There’s nothing to do with cherubs. Very little to do with cherubs. There is an image of a cherub in one of the monasteries in Meteora, I think somewhere in one of the monasteries where they really do show this warrior standing with four wings and four heads, you know, this really intense figure of a defender, right? The cherub is defending the holy place. So you encounter these monsters going out. You can also encounter them in every transition in those places where it’s not sure there’s this little transition space, you know, then if you, if you, once you realize that a lot of stories are going to start to make sense to you, a lot of stories that are not even in the Bible, like why is it that a leprechaun guards a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? Why does a garden, why do dragons guard treasures? Why do monsters guard treasures? Because that’s also part of it. Moving in or moving out, you’ll find this buffer of in between, okay? And so that’s why in the West, especially, that’s why, what do we have on the outside of churches in the Middle Ages? We have gargoyles. I like that one because it looks like the Joker. Don’t you think it looks like the Joker? To understand the gargoyles, you really do have to understand the function of this intermediary space, right? Because the gargoyles, most of the gargoyles actually had a architectural function, right? They’re water spouts. And so if you leave water accumulate next to a building, what’s going to happen? It’s going to destroy the building. If you leave the flood, come right up to the gate, it’s going to start to eat at the gate. What you do, you put a monster at the gate. And then the monster chases the water away, keeps the water at bay, okay? So a way to understand it, a way to understand it is to understand it, you could understand it as a… Once you reach a certain level, you have a bunch of series of monsters, you could say, like different layers of monsters. So the first monster is, in the traditional way of understanding, the first monster is the person you don’t know, right? You encounter some culture you’ve never met, like you see someone, a culture of something that you’ve never seen. You can’t recognize them, you can’t recognize them as part of your world. But behind them, there’s another thing that you know even less. And behind that there’s a thing you know even less. And that keeps being represented as stranger and stranger, stranger and stranger and bigger and bigger monsters until you reach the Leviathan, you know, that’s at the bottom of the ocean, that is there to devour the world. You know, the snake, that’s the snake around the world that you see in the ancient northern imagery or whatever, this final monster, right, that’s at the edge. And so in the Middle Ages, for example, they would have these gargoyles on the edge of buildings, but they would also have these exceptions, these strangeness, they would also have it in manuscripts. And so the way that medieval manuscripts were set up is that in the center you would have a text. And then on the outside of the text you would have ornamentation and then you would have what we call marginalia. And marginalia is exactly that, it’s a bunch of strange monsters. So here is some example of medieval marginalia. And so in the marginalia there are hybrids, you saw them, strange creatures, mix of animal and man, inversions, or animals, often an animal will be riding some, like will be riding a man, or you have men fighting animals, or you’ll have this figure, the standing donkey who’s standing like a man but is a donkey, right. So all of these things happen on the edge. So on the edge of the manuscript, on the edge of the church, you would have this marginalia. And in the marginalia I’m not going to show you some of the images because I reminded myself that we were still in the temple. But there’s in medieval marginalia there’s some pretty raucous imagery. There’s a lot of, there’s some hint of obscenity, there’s potty humor, all that stuff, like it’s all there in the marginalia. And so there’s also humor, right. That’s also part of the margins is funny because none of you laughed when you saw that, but you have to admit that in a world, imagine in a medieval world of monks, and you open this book and there we saw today, it was kind of funny to see that, you see this image of the Annunciation and then under the image of the Annunciation you have like some weird hybrid creature that’s fighting another weird hybrid creature. And so it has that little, okay, it’s kind of surprising, you know, and I think, I mean, seems to me that it was supposed to somehow bring about a little bit of laughter. And so that’s why I want to talk a little bit more about laughter. Because if I tell you about these monsters on the edge of the world and I showed this It’s pretty easy to understand it. We can, it’s kind of intuitively make sense. We understand it because we can have that experience. I always tell people you can have that experience. It’s harder today to have that experience in terms of seeing something, but you can have it in terms of hearing. Because if I, as a, let’s say, French English speaker, if I hear Spanish, it’s kind of familiar, right. It’s not the same. It’s not familiar from what I know. It kind of make out some words, not everything. If I hear Russian, I don’t understand the words, but I can kind of follow the rhythm, let’s say, or the intentions. I get the sense there’s some, can find some similarity. But if I hear like Vietnamese, I don’t know, it’s just noise. I just hear noise. I cannot make out even the intentions in the, so it is, it presents itself to me as chaos. And of course, in their experience, it’s not chaos. We’re talking about, we’re talking about this idea of this experience that we have, that we have with the world. They probably have the same experience with me. They hear me and they just hear chaos. But that is a real experience of how we encounter these layers, let’s say, of knowledge and moving out towards this kind of chaotic fringe on the edge. And so, laughter is part of that. Now, so there is a tradition. St. John Chrysostom, he has a few homilies where he goes right after laughter. And he tells us that Christ never laughed. And that laughter, we have to be careful of laughter because it’s dangerous, you know, where it leads us. And I remember the first time I read that, I was a bit shocked. He does go on to say that laughter is not evil in itself. Like he’s careful to say that. He says laughter is not evil in itself. It’s dangerous when it takes over. So when you laugh uncontrollably. And so that is how we need to, at least as we look at the world moving out towards its edge, that’s how we have to understand laughter. Laughter is an involuntary reaction in general. You can laugh if you want. But in general, laughter is an involuntary reaction to something. Something that presents itself to you. And usually what it is, it’s something which is, what do we, if you think of the basic things that we laugh at, what are the, think of, not anything sophisticated, right? Think of the most basic things that people laugh at. What do we laugh at? What’s the basic one? Falling, right? That’s the first. Falling is the first thing that makes you laugh. What’s the second? Accidents in general, including bodily accidents. Those are the, those are the primary source of basic laughter. Falling and bodily accidents, things that don’t fit, things that are off, right? Things that don’t, are upside down, you could say, right? And so it is this, it is this encounter with the edge. It’s exactly that. Right on the edge are all these things that don’t fit. All these things that are a little bit off. And this joining yourself with them, you know, will bring about that, that laughter. Right? And so I think that that’s probably why there is, in St. John Chrysostom, for example, this desire to tell us to be careful of laughter. Because if you think of the wheel that I told you about yesterday, think of it as the, when I talked about it as being the human person, as being the soul, as being the image of the human soul. You start with the noose, then you have the soul in terms of the thoughts, the will, all of that, and then you move out towards things that become involuntary, you would say, or that go beyond your will, your passions, pull you out of yourself, pull you away from yourself. And laughter is, you could say, the ultimate example of that. Because something happens and makes you laugh. And you don’t totally control it. Now I don’t think there’s anything, I don’t think laughter is wrong. But I think it’s interesting, it’s very important to think about that. Because if you think about our world, so Abba, Abba, I forget how to pronounce his name, but Abba Poemon says that distraction is the root of all evil. Yesterday we talked about attention, we talked about remembering God, this notion of keeping attention in the heart, remembering God. And laughter is exactly that little moment of forgetting, that little moment where you humble into the outside, you could say. And if you look at the monstrous aspect or the strangeness, it presents itself as funny first, but it always is on the danger of tipping into something else. I always tell people just think of clowns. Here’s a question, are clowns funny or are clowns scary? Not sure which one. Not sure people can really tell me, because they seem to be both at the same time for some reason. They seem to kind of move into, move into one, moving into the other. And in our cultural representations as well, they seem to kind of move in one into the other. So obviously when you come to the ultimate edge, you get this image of the devil too. This image, especially in the West, the image of the devil is exactly that image of the strange mixture of a man with horns and a tail and hooves and all this chaotic representation of a figure. I’m not going to leave it on there too long. Now, if you look at this edge, you could say, you come to this moment of distraction, of laughter, all of that. We, hopefully you can see that in general, this is pretty much where we are right now. Our society is obsessed with distraction. We are basically, our whole world is focused on distraction, on entertainment. All our cultural forms have become entertainment. And that’s really hard for people to understand that there was a time when cultural forms were not entertainment. When folk dancing was there to bring communities together. When music was there for you to participate in, in order, you know, like we do in the liturgy but even out in the world. There was a way for people to come together and participate in a common language, in a common expression. All of this was what cultural manifestations were doing. Festivals, you know, different celebrations, all of that. That’s what cultural manifestations were. We have pretty much not completely eliminated those but we’re getting very close to eliminating those and all that is left of what we call culture is entertainment. Right? Movies, just the type of music. The idea of sitting somewhere and listening to music alone, that is something that the ancients could never even have imagined. Why would you listen to music alone? Music is there to bring us together. So I want to be careful. I’m not saying, and it’s important, I am not saying that there’s anything wrong with any of these cultural expressions. I watch movies, I listen to music, but I do think that it’s important to understand as a whole this moment in culture and to be able to speak to it because it is this, we have come to the edge, right? We have come to the edge where we are obsessed with distraction. When you see something like attention deficit disorder become a disease and, you know, even 40 years ago, 30 years ago, no one had ever heard of that. Didn’t even exist. And all of a sudden, everybody has attention deficit disorder. That is because we are lacking in attention. We have a social incapacity for attention. We have a social proficiency towards distraction. And everything around us is there to bring us along that road towards distraction. So the question is, how do we deal with that? How do we deal with the upside down world? How do we deal with this world at the edge? And I think there are many ways to deal with it, but I think that it is also possible to see it through the lens of laughter a little bit. I’m going to show you, I’m going to try to give you some examples to maybe help you see how we can get to it. It’s interesting, St. John Chrysostom, if you read his homily, he has a homily in Matthew and a homily in Hebrews where he really goes after laughter and he basically says, right, nowhere in the Bible do people laugh. The only places where people laugh in the Bible is when Sarah laughs that she was told she would have a child. And so laughter is incredulity and Christ says, you know, woe to those that laugh or you will weep. And so he really lays it on. I think that there is actually, there are in the Bible moments where there is laughter and I want to show you some of those moments so that you can see how it fits in the system, you could say, in this image. In order to understand this story, you have to understand, you could say, the two sides of, I’m already going to reveal what I’m going towards, but I still have to say it or else you won’t understand. You have to understand the two sides of nakedness. There are, you could say there’s two removing of the garments. Talked about this idea of removing the garments. There’s a removing the garments moving towards the, let’s say, moving towards the center, towards the tree, towards the garden, but there’s another removing of the garments, right, which is this peeking into the scandal. Right. Seeing the scandal. That’s one of the things that makes people laugh. If I show you the scandal, then that’s part of the laughter. It can also be part of the anger too. But you know when Christ says everything will be revealed, he was also including this notion that all the scandals will be revealed as well. And so this notion of being shown to be naked, like in the story of the king, who the king, how do you call that story in English? The emperor with no clothes. Right. There’s an image of someone who is disrobed in a manner which exposes his stupidity, which exposes his, the fact that he’s not worthy of being king. So he’s being disrobed. And that’s the, by the way, that is the function of the jester, right? That’s always been the function of the court jester. So the court clown was there to disrobe the king a little bit, to keep him humble, right? To expose some truths about him, some unfortunate truths about the king that would expose him a little bit so that he’d never thought that he was everything. And that was the role of the clown at the edge. In general, that’s maybe the positive role of all clowns. That’s kind of what the positive role that they can play, is to be able to show that the emperor has no clothes, to reveal the scandal. So this is the story of Christ in the garden. And this is the story, this image follows the same image as what I told you yesterday. The mountain, the garden of Eden, memory, attention, it’s all there. So what happens? Christ comes to the Mount of Olives and he tells his disciples to stay down there. And what does he tell them to do? Tells them to stay awake, stay awake, stay attentive, remember. And Christ goes up on the mountain. Christ comes back down. What does he find? Finds them asleep. They’ve forgotten. They’ve lost attention and sleep, if you want to get a beautiful image, what is sleep akin to in our tradition? Death. So forgetting, losing attention and dying. So there they are, they’re falling, right? Adam and Eve, right there, falling at the bottom of the mountain. Christ does it three times. And he tells them, be attentive, stay awake. They can’t, fall asleep. And then comes the flood. Right there comes the flood. So the betrayer comes, the foreigners come, the army comes to get Christ. And they pull everybody and everybody scatters. Think about the wheel again. Think about the wheel. Here’s Christ that descent goes up to the top of the mountain, right? And he encounters an angel. He links up with the higher levels. He brings it all together. And then going back down, everything scatters and everybody runs in their own direction. And in that moment, what happens? In the Gospel of St. Mark, probably the text nobody likes to cite. It doesn’t say who, some people think it’s St. Mark, because it might be St. Mark, but Roman soldier grabs the tunic, St. Mark runs away naked. There’s a joke in that story. It’s a joke. I’m sorry. I hate to tell you. That’s a joke. Right? That is a joke. It’s a little joke in the most intense, one of the most intense moments in the entire New Testament. There’s this little strange moment where someone grabs the disciples clothing and he runs out naked in the scandal of his abandoning his Lord. Okay? So you can see this structure, this pattern. Okay? Now, in our, in the Gospel, there’s also another, in the Old Testament, we see some examples of that. This example of what happens when we come to the edge and things turn upside down. Right? And how does laughter participate in that? The best version is in the story of Elijah. In the story of Elijah, we have an upside down world. People of God, king, married a foreign queen, and this foreign queen brings with her foreign gods, and all of a sudden, the prophets of God, they’re the ones being marginalized. They’re the ones being persecuted. They’re the ones who have to hide in a cave. What upside down world? And Elijah, the thesbit, you know what thesbit means? He’s the stranger. Here’s this upside down world where all of a sudden, the prophet of God goes to Israel, but he is, appears as the stranger. Topsy turvy. Everything is upside down. How does Elijah deal with that? How does he manage that? He uses laughter. That’s how he does it. He mocks the prophets of God. He’s one of them because he sees how upside down everything is. And so all of a sudden, Elijah becomes the clown. It’s weird to think of him that way, but just imagine the scene. Imagine that scene when he’s standing there with the prophets of Baal, you know, and he’s pouring water over his thing and he’s like, oh yeah, he’s pouring water. And then the prophets of Baal are there trying to call up, call the fire and then trying to get it to burn. It’s not going. And Elijah just calls the fire down. I mean, that’s funny. It’s a funny moment in the Bible. All right. Yeah, it’s a funny, it’s a funny moment in the, it’s a funny moment in the Bible. And that I think is the possibility. I think, and I’m saying this with a little bit of trembling as I tell you, but I think that that possibly is the role of laughter in our time right now, in our, in our situation. And you see the same thing with some of the martyrs. You see the same thing with some of the martyrs where you know this, the story of St. Lawrence. Does people know the story of St. Lawrence? St. Lawrence was tortured, tortured, and he was put on the grill. And when they came to see that he was dead, he said, you should turn me over. That’s right. That’s humor. And so coming up to the edge, I think this is, this is the place I, this is something I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time. This is the place where possibly that laughter can be useful or can help us in the situation we are today. And if you don’t see that we are living in an upside down world right now, I’m not going to explain it to you. Let someone else explain it to you. But it seems pretty sure that we are in that moment at this time. So I’m going to tell you one last story that I like a lot. It’s, some of you who watch my videos have heard the story. It’s the story of silence. The story of silence is not from the Bible. It is an Arthurian romance. It’s a little known Arthurian romance, which is kind of been rediscovered. And I think it can help us understand this role. So in the story of silence, this young woman is born in a world, in the medieval world, where the king has declared that women are not allowed to inherit. And so silence, silence’s father who wants his child to inherit, tells silence, I’m going to raise you as a boy. So I’m going to raise you as a boy and you have to be quiet about it. Don’t tell anybody. So silence is raised as a boy. And in the story it’s really, really fascinating because these two allegorical characters appear. There’s nature and nurture. And people didn’t know what they were talking about. And there’s a debate between nature and nurture, whether or not silence is acting the way that silence is. And nature is telling silence, this is a fraud, this is a scam. You’re joking with yourself. This isn’t, this is impossible. And nurture is telling silence, no, you’re doing fine. You’re doing okay. You’re, look at, look at the way you’re dressed. Look at the way you’re acting. You’re fine. Okay. So silence grows up and silence actually becomes a night. It was a pretty valiant night actually. Because silence is such a valiant night, he, I’ll say he, because in the story they actually use the male pronoun for silence while he’s acting as a man. Silence is called to the king’s court. And when silence arrived in the king’s court, the wife of the king sees silence and becomes completely enamored with silence and falls in love with love, falls in lust with silence, tries to seduce silence. But silence of course refuses the advances of the queen. And so the queen gets very angry. So what does she do? You know the story. You know the story of Joseph, right? Same story. So she tells her husband that silence tried to rape her. And so the husband is so angry. But the problem is that silence is such a great night and is so beloved by the court that the king doesn’t know what to do. He’s not sure how to deal with this situation. So he, the queen says, well, there’s this, there’s a legend that says that Merlin has become wild. He’s become a wild man. And he lives out in the forest, very far away. And no one can catch him. No man can catch him. No man is able to catch him. Only a woman could catch him. So send silence out to get Merlin. That way you get rid of silence. He won’t be able to accomplish the task. So he will be too ashamed to come back. Problem settled. So the king sends silence out to find Merlin in the forest. Merlin has become a total wild man. He is hairy all over his body. He lives in the forest and he eats roots and grass. And he lives with the animals. The queen now has to try to catch him. And she sets traps for him. First of all, she puts, I forget the order of it. Yes, the first thing she does is she puts a jar of honey. And then, no, she puts some meat out, sorry. She puts some meat out. And so Merlin eats the meat because he gives into his human, he wasn’t eating meat, he was just eating grass until then. So he eats the meat and then she puts a jar of honey because she knows he will be thirsty after he has eaten the meat. So he chugs this jar of honey. But obviously, and then after that she puts a jar of milk. So he takes a jar of milk but that doesn’t help. He is drinking honey, drinking milk. And then she puts a jug of wine. He chugs the wine and then she has got him. Merlin is obviously confused and he is like, how is it that a man could ever catch me? This is it. And then he looks at silence. And he starts to snicker. He kind of starts to snicker. And so silence is like, I am going to bring you back, I need to bring you back to the king’s court. So he starts to drag Merlin back to the king’s court. And on the way, they see a man whose child has died. And there is a priest who is sensing the tomb and the man is there. And so Merlin is coming by and starts to laugh. And he is just laughing and laughing. And silence is like, this is completely unacceptable. How can you laugh as you see this horrible situation? And then Merlin continues, comes to a place where there is beggars who are begging for something to eat. And just begging for something to eat. And then Merlin just starts laughing and laughing and laughing. And he is just laughing. And so that continues on and they bring Merlin all the way back. There is a third one and now for some reason I can’t remember it. So they bring Merlin back to the castle. And then when Merlin comes in, he sees the king and he starts laughing. He just can’t prevent himself. And the queen is offended and she sends this nun that is her guardian, this nun that is with her. And the nun comes to Merlin to chastise him. And he looks at the nun and then he loses it. He is just on the ground and he can’t stop. And then the wife is also extremely angry. But then he laughs at the wife. So he is laughing at the king. He is laughing at silence. He is laughing at the wife. And he is laughing at this nun. And everybody is saying, what is going on? So the king tells Merlin, you have to tell us what is going on. Why is it that you laughed so much? This is completely unacceptable. First of all, why did you laugh at the beggars? They were begging for food. And Merlin says, I laughed because they thought they had to beg for food. They thought that there was nothing. But what they didn’t know, they thought that everything was scarce. What they didn’t know is that right under their feet there is a treasure that is buried there. They don’t even know that the treasure is buried there. So the king sends his guards and they dig up, they find the treasure. Alright, so Merlin was right. Then he says, why did you laugh at that poor man who lost his son? Merlin says, well, if the man only knew that that wasn’t his son, and it was in fact the son of the priest, maybe he would have been laughing as well. So then they go and they check and they find out and they discover that in fact that is the exact situation. But then the question is, why did you laugh at us? Why did you laugh at all of us? And so Merlin says, well, I laughed at, and he laughed at himself too. Merlin was laughing at himself. He said, I laughed at you, king, and I laughed at myself because both of us had been tricked. And I laughed at silence and I laughed at your wife and the nun because there are some also that are tricking. The king says, you have to be clear, you have to tell me. Merlin says, you sure? What do you want me to tell you? So Merlin tells it. He says, first of all, he says silence is a woman. And so because silence is a woman, the story about how she treated your wife is not possible. So the king is shocked and he can’t believe it. And he says, you know what else? The nun is a man. And so everything falls into place. And then silence takes on her role, takes on her position as a woman because the king declares that because of all this chaos, because of all this, then he will let women inherit and so he lets silence inherit and it gets even better because he marries her, she becomes the queen, and of course, I won’t tell you what the punishment is for the others, but it’s very medieval. And so that story to me, there are so many parallels to what is happening today. There are so many parallels about this topsy-turvy world and the possibility, maybe, of laughter to point out the madness that we are surrounded by, to point out the incongruities, the upside downness of the world. And so I want to just show you one thing. I honestly, I try in my life to avoid politics, but I want to show you a tweet from someone, someone I don’t even follow. I want to show you the tweet and I want to just read it and you’ll see the possibilities of what we’re doing. So this is Matt Walsh, he’s a Catholic blogger. So Matt Walsh says, gender is a social contract, but I am a woman, hear me war. But anybody can be a woman, but no uterus, no opinion, but trans women are women, but I demand women’s rights, but men are women, but men are scum, but drag queens are beautiful, but appropriation is evil. So in the upside down world, in the fragmented world, what happens is that things that don’t make sense, don’t make sense. They don’t fit together. That’s the whole idea of something which is a monster, something that’s on the edge, something that is on the fragmented fringe. They don’t fit together. All the gargoyles are different. They don’t form a community of gargoyles. There’s no community of gargoyles. And so as we look at the world and its upside downness and its madness, it is possible to show how those things don’t fit together. And light hardness and let’s say a joyful laughter can help us because the other option is to become cynical. The other option is to become, to hide in a cave like the prophets in the story of Elijah. The other option is for us to pretend like we are not living in this mad world. And so this is just a hint. At least you can, hopefully at least from my talk, you can understand and see the relationship between this hierarchy and the world of distraction, the world of entertainment, and also the world of, you could call it the tyranny of exceptions, the tyranny of the fragments. And that’s an image of the passions for our own self. That’s exactly what happened. We have all these things on our fringe and when we give into our passion, we give into the tyranny of our fringe, you could say. That’s a way to put it. And so that is what I had to present for you tonight. And so hopefully people have questions or if you’re angry, that’s okay too. You can express that if you want. Yes, Father. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. You can’t just say, I’m angry. I think that the solution is a proper engagement with hierarchy. That’s what I think. I think that, and I’ve expressed this before in other talks, I think that we need to keep the altar pure. We need to keep the holy things holy. We need to elevate that which needs to be elevated. And then we also need to leave room in the narthex to understand that in a world of madness and exceptions, if you can’t shut it out completely, you have to engage in that world. So if you’re able to do both at the same time, and I know it’s very difficult, I think that that seems to be the solution. One of the problems we’ve seen, and I think in the Orthodox Church, in America, is we’ve seen the two extremes, you could say, where some people want to shut it out completely, where some people want to shut it down. It’s like, this is us. We’re the people of God. We’re the pure. We are the, we close ourselves off in order to remain pure and to have that. And I can understand that. And then there’s also another tendency, which is, let’s open it all up. Let’s have no more veils. Take them all out because we want everybody, everybody can come in, and everybody can see everything, and there’s no, we’ve eliminated the mystery out of this desire to kind of, let’s say, preach to the world, you could say. And I think that the solution is to have the middle ground. I think that that’s the solution. I mean, I don’t know in practice what that looks like, but I think that, like for example, Father, some of the things that you’re doing, if you’re doing these mission movements out into poor areas where you’re working with people that are involved in drugs and crime and you’re connecting with them, you’re not trying to shut yourself off. Like Christ didn’t shut himself off. Christ was hanging out with prostitutes and publicans and people of bad lives, but he didn’t, the thing is that people use that excuse now, where people say that when they want us to just accept everything, they say, oh, well Christ hung out with prostitutes, and well Christ told prostitutes to stop sinning too. He did it with love. He did it by caring for them, by being with them, and by not rejecting them, but he wouldn’t have taken them into the Holy of Holies. He wasn’t going to do that. So I think that that’s the balance we need to find. Does that make sense? Just thinking that curiosity and adventure to go out is part of our human experience too, but I can’t help it when I think that, like, for sure the common Green Lantern, they have to, there’s the source, you have to take the part of the center out, and you’ve got to come back to the source to recharge, to be able to go back out, because if the light goes out, then you could be lost out there in darkness. So it’s the idea to go to the source, the light, and you bring the center with you out. I think, and I think that that’s the movement of Pentecost, that really seems to be what it is. The movement of Pentecost, if you look at the icon of Pentecost, it starts above, do you have an icon of Pentecost? There. So it starts above, right, and then separates into 12, and then it moves outside into the darkness. It’s one of the only icons where we’ll put usually black in the door, because it is that outer, it’s the outer darkness, right, and then everybody hears the Gospel in their own language. But it’s, they do so, it has to remain connected to the one source at the same time, right, so you have that fire that moves into Christ’s edge, right, I’ll be with you until the end of the age, and I always say, he’ll be with us also until the ends of the earth. He goes all the way, Christ moves all the way down into Hades, he goes all the way to the edge of everything, you know, but he brings life there, he brings life, he’s able to, instead of not being taken in by what’s there, he rather brings light into it. Yes, Bob? I think there’s something about what strikes me about this type of discussion, and that is that people tend to talk about the commission of evangelism as something that the program can do outside, but if I’m part of a fractal, right, then I need to missionize and evangelize myself. Right, you need to evangelize your own narthex, you’ve got a narthex too, you know. Right, it’s interesting to me because I never really hear people, that’s some of these lost in the shuffle, where we start to think about the outside world, but it all starts with my own ezequia, my own relationship with God, my own discipline, right, and to me the beauty of the faith is that it offers me a chance to move towards the center, so that can flow. Yeah, and the idea really, I think in our tradition, is not only that, but if you move towards the center, then you’ll carry, people will be carried in your wake, it’s a whole idea of acquire the spirit of peace, and Saint-Sépher-Moussarov talks about this, and a thousand will be saved, you know, and so this idea that the saints are the pillars of the world, they hold the world together, they’re the connection, they’re part of this connection between heaven and earth, so if you become, if you go into the garden, then you’ll be carrying also people with you, there’s no way out of it. I just think it’s interesting, because it seems like the impulse is also well, and Father Jason, you need a program to get out there and start, and it’s like, no, no, you need a program for you, you need a program, you know, but I don’t know, somehow that… No, I agree, and people are, everybody is attracted to authenticity, everybody, everybody likes to meet people who are living what they say, you know, and I think that, I think a lot of the draw of even evangelism and other parishes, sometimes that’s also what it is, you see, you know, your life is a mess, see someone who’s got their act together, and that they love their neighbors, and they take care of the people around them, and they’re like, yeah, that’s what I want, I want that, that’s being the salt of the earth, right, that’s being the light of the world. Yes? So you talked about the margin of having million layers with increasingly strange monsters, with increasingly dangerous monsters. And funny monsters, funny and dangerous, you know, gogos together. I talked about the topic, but I was just thinking about the motion backwards through those layers, do you see a connection to spiritual toll houses? You can’t bring the toll houses, are you? I think we agreed that we’re not going to talk about toll houses today. I think I heard something, you know, with the priest, the priest, someone said about not talking about toll houses. No, I think that, I think that, I think the best, okay, how about this, I think that the best version of the imagery of the toll houses, I think that that’s what it is, that’s the best version of it. Then there’s darker, weirder versions of it. It’s very similar imagery in Egyptian mythology, of like the layers of gates that you travel through, so it just seems like the right image without the image. Yeah, well that’s what the temple has these gates to, it has different gates, the church has different gates, and so I think that for sure, I think the best version of it is right. That’s all I’ll say for toll houses. And I will read David Bentley Hart’s article as well and see what he said. Yes? Well it depends, the hero doesn’t always kill the monster, the hero can also tame the monster. Even in the story of St. George, there are actually different versions of the story. We often, people don’t realize that there are some versions of the story of St. George where St. George tames the dragon, and he brings it into the city and then he’s like a pet dog, and so there are different versions of the monster. Sometimes the monster also becomes human, right? So there are versions of the story of St. Christopher for example, where he’s this giant or he’s this dog-headed man, and then when he crosses the river with Christ, he finds that he’s become a man, right? And you see the same story with the princess and the frog. There are many stories of this idea of a monster that is integrated into the world, you could say, that is able to find their way. And I mean it can be an image of, so you could see it as a being that has these dark things on their edge, and you kill the thing in order to move in, right? Remove the layer, we talked about that, removing the garments, so that’s killing the monster. But then you can also see it as a taming of the monster, as making it participate in your life in a proper manner. Because we don’t believe that anything is evil in itself, right? That things that are indefinite are not necessarily evil, but they can be dangerous if they pull you out. Does that make sense? I’m just thinking of the computer for the story. Okay. Yeah, there’s plenty of stories where, the story of Gilgamesh is a great story, where Enkidu is tamed, and he comes and then he joins himself with the king, so you have the high and the low joining together and becoming the perfect pair. There are several stories like that, where you have this joining or this taming of the monster. Doesn’t the monster mean to show, like, monstrosity is a big gaudy show. Yeah. So the derivative of the word is to show. Yeah. And the monster, I mean, one of the reasons, too, I think, that monster meant to show is that I think that the monster is meant to, it’s like a sign, a sign that there’s something going on, like something happening. When a monster appears, it’s like things aren’t going well. There’s something you need to pay attention to. Obviously in our life, that’s true. And then in the story, the cosmic story, that’s true as well. Yes, Father? Yeah, go ahead. Describe the center as being Christ. The margins being monsters, which are kind of everything, all that place. Does it move closer to Christ? Is it the superficial? What is that, and what is the Christ? The thing about Christ is that Christ, it’s hard to talk about Christ, because Christ is more than the center. Christ is the center. Christ is everything. Christ is all in all. And so Christ actually has that, too. Right, Christ has, Christ goes to the edge, right, and Christ becomes the snake. St. Gregory of Mesa says it literally. He says, Christ has become the snake for us. Christ travels the whole thing. He contains it all. And so, although I do agree that it’s right to say that Christ is at the center, that’s a really good way to see it, but we have to be careful, too, because it’s so much the center that it’s actually that which contains everything in it. And so, you know, it’s that image that I told you about where St. Gregory of Mesa goes up the mountain, and he kind of enters into the divine darkness, you know, he encounters the chikin of the glory, and then he receives the plan of the tabernacle, and he realizes that the plan of the tabernacle is the whole thing, the whole journey from the beginning that he’s been on. And all the garments of skin are part of that whole thing. So, and he says, and he even says, he says, the tabernacle, which is Christ, he actually says the tabernacle is Christ, which contains everything, he even says that Christ contains all of creation within him. And so, I think that that’s why we, and that’s when we talked about communion yesterday, that’s why communion is so hard to understand, because it’s not just the center in the sense of purity, but it’s that, but also has everything on the outside brought in, you know. Because wine is a funny thing, you know, wine is just, wine is death turned against itself, that’s what wine is, right? It’s fermentation which is turned against, which is used, flipped on itself. So wine is a funny thing, the fact that we have that in our sacred, in our sacred, the highest, our most sacred sacrament is a funny thing. It’s the blood that flows out, the body and the blood that flows out, all of it, brought back. Anyways, I’m not supposed to talk about communion, I said that yesterday, not good to talk about that. Yeah. I’m going back to laughter, is it like a positive side of laughter that helps you remember? I don’t understand, does it help you remember your place? I think the positive side of laughter is the necessary need to sometimes point at the insufficiency of things, to point at the presumption. So, did I tell you to talk about the, I didn’t talk about that. So, St. Maximus the Confessor, I always, those who listen to my videos have heard this a million times. So, St. Maximus the Confessor talks about right hand sins and left hand sins. So he says, you know yesterday we talked about the right eye and the left eye, St. Maximus says that left hand sins are drunkenness, sexual sins, all that, sins of dissipation he calls them. But right hand sins are sins of self sufficiency, pride, that’s the right hand sin. So I think that laughter can sometimes be a way to slap the right hand sin once in a while. That’s what the gesture does, that’s what the holy fool does too. The best of the holy fool is to point at the hypocrisy, point at the insufficiency of people who think they’ve got it all and that they’re holy. So the holy fool will scratch at your holiness because he wants to see if it’s real or if it’s just a show. Let’s see what’s behind this first cover here, let’s see what comes out. So yeah, I think that’s the positive side of what laughter can do. I think that laughter reacts to something that’s just not right. It’s like a reaction to something which is upside down or something which is naked, right? Something which is accidental, it’s all that, something which is not intended. That’s what the basis of laughter seems to be, right? Laugh at the fall, there you go. Well yeah, there’s an example where she’s wrong to laugh because she thinks she’s unmasking something that’s not true. That’s what she thinks when she laughs. She’s being told something, she doesn’t believe it, she thinks it’s not right, it’s not possible, it’s not right that an old woman would have a child. And in the normal world she would have been right to laugh but she didn’t understand the situation. She didn’t realize that God was making this happen like it was going to happen. But you can understand why she laughed. I mean, can you imagine that situation today? You went up to a 90 year old woman and you tell her that she’s going to have a child, what do you think her reaction would be? Hopefully she would laugh, I mean I would laugh if that happened. So it was natural because it doesn’t make sense, laugh at something that doesn’t make sense. But in this case it was God had promised that it would happen so it’s not like it was out of the blue. God had said that this was going to happen so she should have known that God doesn’t lie. Alright? So, thank you. I’ll see you next time.