https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zxltkn90Qag
I am really happy to be back in Saskatoon. I was happy to bring my son as well. We had a great week. It’s such a great community here. The guys that come to the workshops just to discover these big Catholic families and these very vibrant young men. I was inducted into the Bow Tie Society, as you can see, by these fine young men over here. So we’ll see how long that will last. At least while I’m in Saskatoon I will wear a bow tie. So last year when I came I talked about beauty and I talked about the possibility of restoring beauty in a world of ugliness. And so this year I was given the title of the Fool, How the Fool Participates in the Restoration of Culture. And it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. And so hopefully it’s going to be very different because now we’re going to talk about foolish things but hopefully it will all in the end turn back towards this restoration that we hope for. When we look around the world right now we see some very strange things. If we’re attentive we notice that the world seems to be drowning in folly. Drowning in even an aesthetic of kind of an ongoing carnival. This year, or I think it was last year, last year in the Norwich Cathedral in England they put this giant helter-skelter carnival ride in the nave of the church. Yes. What? That’s exactly how you should react to that. And the bishop gave a talk from the top of the helter-skelter and at the end of the talk he slid down the slide and just came down to the end. So another thing that happened this year as well is they put a miniature golf in one of England’s fine cathedrals, one medieval cathedrals, and people could come and play miniature golf inside the cathedral. So what is happening? Why are these things happening? And on the other hand we have something strange happening on the other side. So on the one hand we have what used to be tradition, what used to be formal culture, politics, it’s all becoming very clown-esque and there’s this kind of strange turning that we see but at the same time we see people, we see comedians, we see those who usually play the role of the clown now starting to point out and to flip things around for us. So just a few weeks ago there’s a comedian, his name is Ricky Gervais. He is a staunch atheist. He hates Christianity with a passion. He is very aggressive in his atheism. He’s very mocking of Christianity. But as a comic, as someone who plays the role of poking at the system, what happens when the system is upside down? What does the clown do when the whole world is a carnival? How do you make someone laugh when the entire world is a joke? That’s the world we’re living in. And so what we’re starting to see is we’re starting to see these comedic characters start to point out. And so just a few weeks ago he gave a speech at an award show in Hollywood and in his speech he just ran through these Hollywood characters. He just kept smashing at them, accusing them of all kinds of crazy things, accusing them of being accomplices to the Me Too movement with Weinstein, accusing them of being accomplices of Epstein and his pedophilia. It’s like all of this he was just going right after them and it was just astounding to watch. So now here’s this guy, this atheist, who in one day had 500,000 more followers on Twitter. And they were all conservatives and Christians and all these people. And so here in his, still he’s still a clown, so he says, you probably can’t read it, he says, I’ve noticed a couple of tweets criticizing me for accepting new followers who are opposite of me, Christian, conservative, pro-life, pro-gun, reactionaries. He says, of course I accept them, to err is human, to forgive divine, it’s what Jesus would do. And then he says, dog bless all my followers. So still in the fool’s guise he flips it upside down, right? Because of course we all know that dog is the upside down of God. But nonetheless, he, now this fool, this atheist fool is the one who is pointing out the failings of this clown upside down world that we’re seeing. Another example that has just happened recently, which is completely crazy, Kanye West, who maybe if you don’t know who he is, I’m happy for you, I’m very happy that you don’t know who he is. But if you do, he is a rapper, he’s a very famous performer, and he is known for being very extreme in his behavior. He does very wild things, he speaks, he goes up and talks in front of people when he’s not supposed to, and he said crazy things on TV. And he went insane, he ended up in an asylum just a few years ago. All of this is happening, he married Kim Kardashian, who if you don’t know who she is, even better, I’m really happy you don’t, you probably sadly do know who she is. But he married this very, let’s just say, very loose, very whatever, he married a very strange lady. But now all of a sudden, this guy, in his madness almost, he converts to Christianity. And he completely flips around. And so he is now trying to create these events that are concerts, but they’re not really concerts, it’s almost like church services. It’s very strange, but he’s saying things that no one else can say. He’s criticizing abortion, he’s criticizing premarital sex, like of all people. He’s criticizing, it’s like he’s completely mad. But here it is, here it happened. His album is called Jesus is King, and it’s basically a gospel album. And he said the reason why he called it Jesus is King is so that now everybody on every TV channel and every one of these liberal media outlets, when they talk about his album, they have to say, Jesus is King, they just can’t avoid it. So he’s playing a trick, he’s still acting in the guise of a fool. He’s playing a trick on people, but it’s turning in the other direction. So in order to understand, in order to understand folly, in order to understand the fool, we have to, we have an intuitive grasp of the fool. But we have to look at the shape of the world, we have to look at how things are laid out in the world, in the stories, to understand what is the position of the fool, why do we have this? And so to understand it, we have to think about, we have to go back, we always have to go back into the first story. In the first story, everything is packed into that story of creation and Genesis, everything is there. If we can go back into that story, we find all the keys to understanding it. And so in the first story, we have these people, Adam and Eve, who are in a garden, and traditionally we have to understand the garden as a mountain, very important to understand it as a mountain. In scripture it’s actually described as a mountain, in Ezekiel, and so here they are in this mountain, that’s a garden, and they are innocent, and they are nude, and they’re innocent, but they don’t know that they’re nude. And so the Church Fathers talk about how they are clothed in glory, because of their innocence in their nudity. Then of course they fall, they get chased away from the garden, and they move out, and then they get these garments of skin, right, they get these things that are added to them. And the garments of skin have to be understood as anything that we add to us. I mean it’s not just our clothes, but it’s all civilization. After that there’s cane-built cities, they develop technology, they develop music, all of these things are all these added things that we added to our natures to compensate for this fall, for this loss of innocence. So now we have this sense that we have this structure, this world that is society, civilization, all of this, and to lose your clothing now is shameful. So to be naked is to be shameful. It’s not the same as the nakedness in the garden. So you have the nakedness in the garden, which is clothed in glory, then you have clothing, and then you have this nakedness that is being ashamed, that you find yourself in shame. And we see it in the very story of scripture, we have Adam and Eve, we have the fall, we have the flood, and right after the flood, if everybody remembers their Bible, what happens right after the flood? So Noah gets drunk, disrobes, and then he is shamed for disrobing in his tent. So there’s a structure there, it’s a narrative structure, so you can see the world like that. And so if you look at the drunkenness of Noah, drunkenness is a tag for foolishness. I hope that makes sense, I don’t want to explain it too much, but you can understand that when you drink, what you do, you become foolish. You just act foolish, you start making jokes, you start saying stupid things, you start saying things that don’t make sense, and so the drunkenness and the foolishness are together. So we have this structure. Now the structure is not just in time in the sense of a story, but it’s also in space. So if you understand the medieval map, so I’m going to show you this medieval map. So at the top of the map, like a mountain, you have the Garden of Eden. I don’t know if you can kind of guess where that is. So you see there’s a tree, and there’s Adam and Eve that are there. Can you kind of see it? Alright, everybody can see that? And so then, so that’s the top of the world, and you see these four rivers that are coming down, that’s the center. Then out of that, there’s all civilization, all the world. The world is all there, all the cities, all the countries, all these garments of skin, all these cities and civilizations that are added. And then on the fringe of the map, that’s where you have all the monsters, all the exceptions, all the things that don’t fit, all the freaks, all the things that aren’t what you know. And so the monsters are represented in all kinds of ways, cannibals, men with faces in their chests, men with just one leg, any idiosyncrasy. So you can imagine it as the world of idiosyncrasy. So you have an identity in the top of the garden, and then you have, it plays itself out, and on the edge of that, you have the idiosyncrasies. And that’s a rule, that’s the shape of the world in terms of how the medieval’s understood the world, but it’s the shape of every single identity. So you have, the Greeks had the same vision. They had the idea that they were the Greeks, that they had their identity, and as you moved out from them, you would start to see things that you don’t recognize, and you started to see idiosyncrasies, and you started to see things that don’t fit, and then finally on the edge, you had the monster. And so what do idiosyncrasies make us do? Usually now we’re not allowed to, but traditionally idiosyncrasies made people laugh. Things that are normal, things that are strange, things that are not usual, are one of the aspects of what would make someone laugh. And ultimately too, on the edge of the world, you also have upside down behavior. You have, for example, for the Greeks, you have the Amazons. The Amazons are the upside down world, where the women are the warriors, and the men are not involved in managing society. So it’s like everything is turned upside down, and they live on the edge of the world. Can you kind of see it? You have rule, identity, plays itself out, and then on the edge you have these idiosyncrasies. Now a lot of you are wondering, like, wow, what is this? What is this that’s beautiful? You’ll see. And at the bottom, of course, what we have very outside of the world, we have dragons. So that’s the absolute chaos there on the edge. So you can understand it like this. Understand it as a person, not just as a map or as in time. You can understand it as the idea that you have a highest aspect to you. You could say Christ in you, or you could say your soul, or you could say the highest aspect of you, Christ in your heart, you know, like St. Paul talks about this notion. And then on the outside of that, you have reason, and you have logic, you have knowledge, all these other aspects which are, you know, which we engage the world with, and then that breaks down into foolishness. When knowledge breaks down, when wisdom breaks down, we can see this foolishness. So the same structure in terms of space, in terms of a person, is this idea of an identity, something that makes you you, and then all the things you do, all your activities, all of this, and then on the edge of your being, you have the possibility of this breaking down into a kind of madness or a kind of folly, right? So that’s just how the world works. And on that part that comes right up to madness or to folly is just, it’s like right on the edge of death. And it’s on the edge of death because if you have any identity, the Greeks, for example, the further you go from the Greeks, the less Greek you see, and at some point there’s no Greek left, and then the Greeks are dead. They’re dead in space, there’s no more Greeks, they’re gone, there are more Greeks. So it’s the same for you. You have you, and then you have the possibility of extending into the world, but at some point there’s a limit, and that’s your death. All of these images of the garments of skin, all of these images have to do with this idea of death that is around us. So I hope that makes sense. And it’s important to understand, I know it seems very abstract, but as I start to show you the actual foolish things, you’re going to start to understand why I’m talking about it this way. So it’s the space of a church. It’s the same structure as a church. Church has the same structure. We have the medieval church especially had the altar in the center where only a few could go, only the priest could go. Then you had the nave where all the faithful would gather and all the different types of people would all interact together. And then you had the narthex which was like this transition space, and what do you have on the outside? You have the gargoyles, you have the monsters, you have the idiosyncrasies. And a lot of the gargoyles were exactly idiosyncrasies. They were foolish, they were silly, they were upside down. There’s a lot of gargoyles that I probably couldn’t even show here because there was actually a lot of lewdness in some of these gargoyles. Because that’s it, that’s the folly that’s on the edge. So the shape of the church itself was like that. So now that can help us to understand the… Already we can start to also see the role of the fool in terms of positive. Usually the fool actually has a very negative role, right? Because the fool bothers. The fool will make you laugh. You can imagine a situation where there’s something serious happening, then there’s a fool, someone who makes a joke when they’re not supposed to. It distracts you from work, right? It distracts you from what you’re supposed to do. That’s what laughter does. Laughter is a loss of control. If you can get someone to laugh, it’s usually they didn’t plan on doing it. You catch them, you surprise them, and then they start laughing. And they’ve lost control. It’s a loss of your being in a way. But there’s a way in which the fool can be very positive because sometimes that middle part, that civilization part, sometimes it thinks that it has it all, right? Tower of Babel style. It thinks that it has the whole thing. It’s got it. It’s got it. We’ve got it. We’ve got the rules. We’ve got the structures. We’ve got… This is how it works, and it just plays out, right? But that’s not… The reality doesn’t work that way, right? That’s called pride. And the fool, the positive aspect of the fool is that the fool can disrobe the king, right? The fool will show you the king’s nakedness because the king thinks that his clothing is all powerful. So it is a kind of disrobing, but sometimes the disrobing can be good, sometimes it can be bad. It just depends. And so in our tradition, in Christianity, but also in the Bible, there are inversion festivals. Those are the hardest for people to understand. And a lot of times, people really work hard at trying to eliminate them, even today. There’s something about the desire to eliminate them which probably is part of the bigger story. But the first inversion festival that we see is in the Bible, it’s Purim. It’s the celebration of the deliverance of the Jews in the story of Esther. Everybody knows the story of Esther. Esther is hidden from the public. She’s secretly a Jew, nobody knows. And then she’s married to this foreign king. And the foreign king is being influenced to kill the Jews. And then finally, through her revealing herself as being Jewish to the king and telling him about this plot, then the story flips. And instead of the Jews being killed, it’s the men who are accusing them. It’s a turning, okay? So you have to understand, this is important too. You have to understand this wheel, this world as a giant wheel. And it’s also turning. And on the edge, imagine the world as a big wheel with a spoke in the center. And the further you go out towards the edge, the faster it turns. And that’s why we’ll see, as you notice, all carnival aesthetic, all that is all about turning. Ferris wheels and clowns doing cartwheels or whatever. It’s all about turning, right? The whole thing is about turning. Oh, also I forgot to tell you that medieval manuscripts also had the exact same structure. So medieval manuscripts had the text in the center, and then on the outside of the text there was ornamentation and there was what’s called marginalia, where all the freaky stuff would happen. So in the marginalia you’d have all this stuff, you’d have, you know, like, it’s just nonsense stuff. You’d have rabbits on snails with human heads. And these could be gospels, by the way. These could be book of hours, it could be prayer books. I saw recently, I was shown a 14th century prayer book, and it was an image of the Annunciation and in the border there was some wild stuff going on like that, some crazy inversion, okay? And a lot of it has to do with animals. It has to do with animals taking the role of humans. You see that, you can understand it in terms of the garments of skin too, in terms of this animality that is on the edge of the Garden of Eden and that we add to our nature, right? Upside down world where the animals are human and the human are seen as animals or below the animals, okay? I hope you recognize some of these patterns, because if you look around today, it’s pretty much all we see. The idea that human beings are lower than the animals, it seems to be something, a trope that is really pervasive in our society. Alright, so here’s a contemporary version of Purim. So the Jews still celebrate Purim today, and traditionally there’s a saying that on Purim you are supposed to drink so much that you cannot tell the difference between your left hand and your right hand. This is like a traditional practice. And so traditional practicing Jews who all year are extremely serious and study the Torah on one day a year will wear costumes, will disguise themselves, will get drunk in the street, will be merrymaking and all this stuff is going on. Alright, let’s wait here for now. So in our, in the Catholic tradition, the Western tradition, there used to be a feast called the Feast of Fools. And the Feast of Fools was on January 1st in France and then I was told it was on January 5th in England. So it changed in different times and the Feast of Fools was an upside down feast where they would take a beggar or they would take someone very lowly and they would raise him up and crown him king or make him a bishop and they would make fun of the liturgy, they would make fun of all these things and it’s like, I hope. It’s important that you feel, I see some people feeling very uncomfortable when I say that and you should be, it’s okay, it’s okay to feel uncomfortable about it. But it’s also important to understand that these really were things that were part of the tradition and we still have, people still have that today. We have Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is very similar. Mardi Gras just before Lent, all over the world people wear costumes, they, it’s very gaudy, they do all kinds of merrymaking, noisemaking. Noise is the same example as, do you want to understand the same structure I gave you? You have the notion of a breakdown of logic or a breakdown of order in terms of speaking, what would that be? It would be noise. Noise is the breakdown of order. It’s another version of the same thing. So you have people, ratchets and all kinds of stuff to make a lot of noise. That is also part of the carnival aesthetic. There was also in the West, there was also something called the Feast of the Ass, which was on January 14th and it was on the day that they celebrated the fleeing to Egypt, when Mary and Joseph pleaded to Egypt. And in that celebration they would bring a donkey up to the altar and the donkey would be up at the altar and at the end of Mass, instead of saying Amen, everybody would bray like a donkey. So this is imagery from the Feast of Fools. If you want to see a really good representation of the Feast of Fools in the movie, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Disney version, they have a whole scene in it where they have the Feast of Fools there. Everything in it is perfect in terms of they show these upside down characters, they show a horse with two rear ends, they show a joker and a king that are kind of flipping and one side is the king and one side is the joker. So you have this turning and this turning and this merrymaking and this noise, this chaos and then they take Quasimodo, who is considered to be like a freak in that society, and they elect him king of fools, king of the day of the fools. And so he’s celebrated but then he is humiliated and they strip him, they humiliate him, they bring things back to the order. Now here’s Carnival, everybody seen this Mardi Gras? We still have that today, what’s the last Inversion Festival we have? Can anybody identify it in our society? You know you’re not allowed, you’re my son, you’re not allowed to say. Does anybody recognize the last Inversion Festival that we have? We still celebrate it? Halloween, Halloween is the last one. And so it’s a world of upside down where the monsters are out of the streets and the ghosts are out, all of these marginal characters, all these freaks, all these monsters are all out, everybody’s wearing costumes, everybody’s in disguise, there’s a kind of praise of idiosyncrasy and it’s happening before our very eyes. And so it is really the last Inversion Festival. We also have Carnivals, traveling fairs, all of this stuff which when you have a traveling fair come to your town, where do they set up? They usually set up in a vague area, like a place that’s not, obviously they have to set up in a vague area, a place that isn’t used, that is kind of a useless place or an abandoned place, not abandoned but like a place that’s not functioning so they can access that place. And all the aesthetics of the Carnival are exactly everything of the fair, exactly what I’m talking about. The Miracle Round is the best one because you have animals on the outside that are turning and you have the spoke in the middle and you have this music and it’s all gaudy and it’s all ornaments, all of this, all these ornaments on the outside of the medieval manuscript, here they are in glory in the turning carousel with all these animals on the outside. And we’re writing it and we’re laughing, it’s all there. And of course we have Las Vegas, this town in the middle of nowhere that has no function, that has no purpose except to be a repository for our worst desires, for all our worst passions, all in light and gaudiness and of course the Giant Ferris Wheel has to be there as well. Now, let’s go back over those holidays that I just told you, I need to go back over them because I could see people kind of going, oh my goodness he’s still going to talk, this is our world, we’re drowning in it, we’re so gorge with it, why is he telling us about these crazy fools because our whole world is just like a big fluffy cake that people are gorging on, our entire world is that. So I understand why it’s like you’re like, oh not again, why is he talking about that? Well we have to understand it because that’s our world, we have to understand how it plays out because we are living in a non-stop carnival, right? This is our world, so we need to get it and we need to understand the relationship between carnival and death because it’s right there in all the holidays that I showed you. When’s Mardi Gras? What comes right after Mardi Gras? Next day, Ash Wednesday, what’s Ash Wednesday? It’s exactly that, it’s death, the remembrance of death, the ash from the previous years are brought up and put up on our foreheads and we remember death. In the Orthodox tradition our carnival, our meat fair is on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, the same day. So we have this celebration, this kind of celebration of the flesh, at the same time this judgment that comes and cuts it off. Feast of Fools, do you want to know why Feast of Fools was January 1st? January 1st is the 8th day of Christmas, what happens on the 8th day of Christmas? Circumcision. So cutting off the flesh, it’s the same thing as Mardi Gras, it’s the same thing, same pattern. And the Feast of the Ass is a little harder to understand but it’s also the same because the Feast of the Ass is the going to Egypt and you really, it’s hard if you don’t understand biblical typology it’s going to be harder for you to understand but going to Egypt is always going into death. It’s the land of the foreigner and that’s why Esther marries a foreigner, it’s also the same story. The idea of marrying a foreigner is losing your identity, your identity is moving out and you’re moving out into that. It’s neither good nor bad, sometimes it’s good, you see in the Bible there are places where Moses, his wife was Ethiopian, it’s not a moral question but we have to understand the structure, we have to understand that that’s what’s going on, this idea of moving out of yourself and that is related to death. And Halloween is exactly the same. What comes after Halloween? What is Halloween? It’s the eve of all Hallows and then it’s the eve of all souls, it’s the eve of the celebrations and the remembrance of all the dead. It’s all the same pattern, it just always plays itself out the same. Now the problem today, that all those people that are going to Mardi Gras in Brazil or wherever they are, they’re probably not fasting after that and all the people who celebrate Halloween are not doing the other part. Like I said, our world is, the carnival is the last celebration we have but we have to understand what it leads to. It does lead to death, there’s no way around it, that’s what the carnival leads to, even almost its role is to show us the limit and to show us death. Alright so hopefully now this is making a little bit more sense to you, understanding why I’m talking about this. So this structure is everywhere, once you understand it, once you see it, you’re going to start to see it appear in many places. When you start to understand this relationship. So I’m going to give you an example that you maybe never ever ever have thought of and it’s the last night of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. There’s a joke in that story, did you ever notice there’s a joke in that story? I’ll show you the joke, there is a joke there. So we have a mountain, remember Paradise is a mountain? We have a mountain and then the disciples are down below. Christ goes up to pray, up the mountain, he goes into the Garden of Eden, he’s going up to the tree, he’s going into the garden, he’s going up to pray. And he leaves the disciples below. And what does he tell the disciples? Wake up, say awake, remember, remember. As you’re far away from me, as you’re far away from the center, remember the center, remember the garden, don’t forget the garden. But what do they do? They fall asleep, what is falling asleep? It’s dying, falling asleep is always dying. Falling asleep in Scripture is always dying. Okay? So they die. And Christ comes back down and he’s like, wake up, wake up, what are you doing? You have to remember, you have to remember. And then they don’t and it happens three times and it’s already, I mean, it’s already calling out to something else. And finally, here comes the foreigners. Foreigners come, the Romans come and they’re going to destroy this thing. Here’s Christ, the 12 disciples, they come and they scatter the apostles. Everything’s broken. And while they’re doing that, what happens? Where’s the joke? As one of the disciples is running away, one of the Roman soldiers grabs his clothing and he runs away naked. Right? Okay. Right? That’s it. That’s the same thing, everything that I’ve been telling you, this is the same thing, same structure. Okay? Now, the problem with this, it’s not the helter skelter, it’s not the church. It’s that the helter skelter is in the church, that’s the problem. The problem is not the fact that these things on the edge are there, that’s part of the structure of reality. The problem is where do you put them? Where are they? This does not belong, this belongs in a carnival. Does not belong in a church. We’ve lost our capacity to see the hierarchies of things. One of the problems is that because we don’t understand, let’s say, where this type of thing belongs, then we don’t know how to react when we see it in a church. It’s like, well, you know, God wants us to be happy and wants us to laugh and God wants us to be merry. So why not have a spinning slide down, you know, no snakes and ladders? There’s that snake going down. Basically, there’s an image of the Last Judgment in the Orthodox tradition where there’s a snake which goes all the way down from Christ into hell. And there it is right there, sliding down. All right, sorry, I’m going to stop being sarcastic here for a second. So now, this is all that’s left, right? The carnival is all that’s left in our culture. You can understand it that way too, right? You have white light and it breaks down to many colors. There are many ways to represent the very same structure. And that’s it. So, how do we, how does it flip? How does it, how does the fool play the role? Because a lot of you, a lot of you love English, a lot of you have read Shakespeare. We were talking about this and how in Shakespeare plays and a lot of tropes you have the fool who reveals the truth, the fool who actually reveals the thing, the secret or the thing that other people are hiding, right? But that only happens in, it only happens in an upside down world. Because the fool is turning. The fool is turning and then when things are upside down, he’s not going to stop turning. When things are upside down, he’s just going to, he’s just going to turn them right side up. So we have to watch the fools, especially right now. I always tell people, watch the fools because when you see something like Kanye West, what happened there, it’s like that’s exactly the type of thing that you’re going to see happen more and more. These foolish characters that are going to flip and going to bring back kind of this normal order by doing it. So the key, the key to, to starting to understand this is in the story of King David. King David is the, one of the, the, the clearest places where you see this start to flip. Now this is the secret, right? This is the secret that Christ is ultimately going to reveal to us. Which is that if in the garden, glory was changed into death, right? The nakedness of Adam and Eve was changed into an image of death. Then death can be changed into glory. Right? And that’s, you’ll see, that’s what Christ is doing. Christ is turning the world back, taking the fall, flipping it on its head, right? Taking everything of the fall and bringing it, bringing it in a way that actually works towards our salvation. You start to see that a little bit in the story of King David. A lot of people don’t know the story of King David because it’s so crazy that people actually pretend that they know the story of King David. But it’s a crazy story. The story, it reads the story of King David. Seriously, it is wild. King David is, is the fool who became a king. And you see it in his story. He, there, there’s a scene, there’s a scene in his story where he acts insane. There’s a scene in his story where he pretends to be working for the foreign army. There’s a scene in that story, in his story where, also he marries other people’s wives, right? All his wives are other people’s wives. So he’s marrying the foreign woman, the one that Solomon is warning you not to marry, like David marries those women. But for some reason there’s something about his character that is able to flip that into something else. The wildest story of King David is the one where you can almost, you can see it to clear. And I’m sorry that I’m going to have to talk about this, but we, you did come to a talk that had the word fool in it, so we’re going to have to talk about this. So there is a story where King Saul is on, going on the road and he has to stop. He, he has to stop. He’s got to go. And so, the men are like, what do you do? And so he goes down into a cave. Now what is going down into a cave? I have no idea. It’s like sleeping. Going down into a cave is dying. It’s always dying. Okay. So, so King Saul goes down into this cave to do his business. In the scripture they call it covering his feet. That’s how they call it. I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it too much. But so, turns out David is in the cave. David’s in the cave. And so he sees the king there doing his thing. So he sneaks up behind him and he cuts a part of his cloth. And he just, he cuts a part of the fringe of his vestment and he keeps it. Right? So then King Saul, you know, gets out of the cave and then David brandishes the fringe of his vestment. Okay? Now you really have to understand what this is really trying to show you. He’s brandishing the fringe. He’s brandishing the thing on the edge. And he’s showing it to Saul. And he’s basically disrobing the king. That’s what he’s doing. He’s taking a piece of his clothing. He’s showing, he’s humiliating the king. He’s showing the king’s nakedness to everybody. And Saul finally lets him go. Saul lets him go. And ultimately King David will end up replacing the king. He will rise up and become the king. But you see that structure is right there. I hope you can, can you see it? That it’s the same. There’s the nakedness. There’s this, this shame, you would call it. Right? There’s shame, there’s nakedness. And there’s this moment where he actually takes it and he shows him like, here’s your thing. Right? So like, sorry. So we have the poop emoji, which is everywhere. That’s our world. The poop emoji is our world. We have to understand it. Okay? But you want to understand the poop emoji. Why it would be happening right now and it would be everywhere is because if you understand these stories you can understand why it’s happening. You won’t be surprised. You can see it as a problem in our society. But you won’t be totally surprised that when you come to the edge of the world, one of the things that’s going to happen is going to be scatological references. And those are going to become pervasive in your society. It’s just inevitable. Right? It’s the fringe showing itself. All right. All right. So, all right. So the next story, I’m going to tell you one more story about King David and then we’ll get to something else. The other story of King David, which really, really shows this pattern and how it flips is the story of him and the ark. Everybody knows the story. Right? So David danced before the Lord with all his might and David was wearing an ephod. Do you know what an ephod is? An ephod is a cloth and you don’t know how exactly it was used. It had stones on it but it was used for casting lots. It was a tool of divinization. Like throwing bones. Like you see in the throw bones and read the bones. That’s what the ephod was for. It was a tool of divination, to know the will of God. So he’s wearing a, so you have to understand again, one of the things that the breakdown of order looks like is lots. Because if you get money, usually because you work. There’s a way to break that is to use chance. Go to Las Vegas, give yourself into the wheel of fortune, this turning wheel and then maybe that wheel is going to put you on top. Who knows? You don’t know. It’s lots. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not part of reason. It’s a breakdown of reason. That’s what lots are. And so he’s wearing this ephod and it seems like he’s disrobed somehow. Like he’s maybe just wearing the ephod. We don’t know. It seems like he’s disrobed and he’s dancing. He’s merrymaking in front of the ark. Now people will tell you, Charismatics will use this, you’ve heard it probably, use this verse to justify their thing. But if you know the story, you realize that this is very exceptional. That this is exactly this weird moment of turning when the fool is going to become the king and so you have this turning moment where he acts the fool in front of the ark. He’s wearing this ephod that’s used for casting lots. And so the daughter of Saul says, read the language. Read the language. So she says, how glorious was the king of Israel today, uncovering himself today in the eyes of the maids and his servants, as one of the base fellows shamelessly uncovers himself. So she’s being ironic. She’s saying the opposite of what she’s saying. Now that’s important because that’s a joke. That’s a clown. That’s our world, irony. When order breaks down, one of the things that happens is that when you say something, it’s the opposite and there’s this strange relationship of meaning which is not direct, this kind of indirect upside down turning of what you’re saying. And what is she saying? She’s saying, how glorious was the king? Remember what I told you about Adam and Eve in the garden being naked. What was it for them? It was glory. Now she’s making fun of him. She’s saying, you are making yourself glorious by uncovering yourself, but she’s ultimately saying shame, like a shameless person. You’re full of shame by doing this. But here’s, this is the flip that’s happening. Her irony is actually turning back on itself and it is to his glory. It is to David’s glory that he was doing that. So you’ve got something, she’s turning it upside down and it’s turning back right side up. Can you see it in the statement? Okay. So this is it. This is the thing, turning upside down and then the fool can turn it right side up. This is a perfect example of this. Now ultimately this will lead us to, this story in particular leads us to Christ. Because that’s exactly what happened to Christ. That’s exactly what happened to Christ. Christ was disrobed. He was humiliated. He was ironically declared king. But what happened? Turned back. That crown of thorns became a crown of glory. Turned back. And you have to understand this is very profound because the crown of thorns, that’s the result of the fall. God said to Adam and Eve, when you fall the world will produce thorns. But the very result of their sin was this hostile exterior, this exteriority that has spikes on it that can hurt you. And then Christ turns that, turns the very result of the fall into glory. So everything they said about him, when they said hail the king, when they put that sign above his head to say the king of the Jews, they were, in the end they were actually telling the truth. He was turning upside down twice. Making it ironic and then flipping back right side up. So that’s the ultimate fool. The ultimate role of the fool. And we see Christ embodying that role perfectly. Where the disrobing of shame gets turned into the glory of paradise. And you have to understand so much of our tradition, so much of Christianity is about that. And if we don’t understand it then we look like we, at some point we don’t know what to say when someone tells us like what’s great about some guy getting eaten by a lion in a circus in Rome. Like you think that’s great? That’s not great, that’s stupid. It’s horrible. It’s horrible that you would get eaten by a lion in Rome and get desecrated and humiliated and all that. If we don’t understand how that turn happens then we’re not going to be able to understand our own traditions. Why is it that we think that to be humble and to accept humiliation is good? That’s the game that’s happening. So when you see characters like Saint Francis, and it’s interesting because there’s a trope right now of people wanting to say that he was the troubadour for Christ, that he was the fool for Christ, and you see the same thing. Saint Francis does the same thing. What does Saint Francis do when he embraces his mission? He disrobes himself. The thing that’s really important to understand, it’s really important to understand for us as traditional Christians is also not to confuse those extremes either. Most people who disrobe themselves in public are not holy fools. We really have to be able to tell the difference because seriously we’re in a world that is so mad that people might say that a stripper is like our saints. The world is crazy enough that it can happen. We have to be able to tell the difference between the two. When we look at these figures, these turns, these fools that are now somehow wanting to show us reality or bring back order, we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s going to happen more and more. As the world evolves more and more into this world of mad carnival, it’s actually the fools that are going to turn it back. We need to pay attention to see who are those holy fools and not just regular fools. I think I’ve said enough. I hope that this was food for thought. I think we’re going to do dessert first. If you have some questions, please write them down on the piece of paper that you have in front of you. You can drop them into this bin over here. Hopefully those questions won’t be too difficult for me. Talking about fools is very tricky. Thank you. The first question is, do you intend to wear your bow tie at future speaking engagements? Very curious to where that question comes from. I don’t know. I’m afraid that when I … Things in Saskatoon stay in Saskatoon. I think when I go back home, it’s kind of like Las Vegas, but it’s Saskatoon. I could be convinced though. We’ll see. Who knows? Why do you suggest we should watch for the fools so we can leverage their effect, help them flip things upright again, or only for our interest and enjoyment? I think that in the case that I’m talking about, it’s really so that we can notice the moments where our culture is turning towards … At least ultimately turning towards Christ, turning right side up, so that we can also bolster that, we can encourage that and help that. Because the fool can do it on his own. The fool will just operate the flip, but usually the fool is not the one that’s going to build things afterwards. There are exceptions. Like I said, the greatest fools, that’s what they do. King David is exactly that. He was the fool, but he also brought the ark to Jerusalem and then planned the temple, and St. Francis was told to rebuild the church. There is the possibility, but most of the time we’ll need to get things going around the fools. In 2006, there was a film of Russian language called The Island. It was a modern portrayal of the holy fool. What are your thoughts on the Russian tendency to honor holy fools? Have you seen the film? Yes, I have seen the film. I really recommend it. It’s a great movie. I think you can even find it for free on YouTube. It’s called The Island or Ostrov, I think, in Russian. It is a really wonderful story. You really do see the role that the fool does in shaming people into, let’s say, repentance, something like that. It’s definitely worth seeing. There’s also a book called Loris that was written recently by a Russian author that deals with the story of a holy fool. In that story, if you read the story, you’ll see that the author understands the tropes himself because he’ll talk about these monstrous races on the edge of the world. He talks about Alexander the Great building a wall in the northern world to stop these monsters from coming in. He seems to really understand the relationship between the fool and these other stories and other tropes that are there. It’s called Loris. Do you think that there’s hope we will have more saint fools who will help to turn this crazy world upside down or right that up? I think so. I do think that we’re already seeing it happen. I think it’s going to happen more and more. As the world becomes more and more mad, then the fools will be the ones that will show us a way out. We need to pay attention. We need to be careful because some of the fools are just fools. We have to be really careful because in a world of folly, it is sometimes hard to discern the holy fool. The holy fool is flipping. That’s what he’s doing. He is flipping things. He’s working to the salvation of others. Do you know if anyone has written a theology of humor? If not, have you considered writing one? I don’t know if someone has written a theology of humor. I imagine if they did, it would probably be very subversive, especially in our modern day and age. I don’t think I would write a book like that, but if you want, I have several talks on my YouTube channel that address that. I have a talk called The End of the World and the Purpose of Laughter where I talk about some of the similar things that I talk about here and expand on different aspects of it. Is there a role for us then in being fools to set the system right or critique it? Or is this a specialist role? I would suggest that not play that role because it’s a very dangerous thing to do. It’s very dangerous for your soul and it’s a very dangerous thing. The Holy Fool is a very dangerous character. If you read the book, it’s really worth reading because you really do see this Holy Fool and you see that you don’t want that life. You don’t want to accept being the butt of the joke because that’s the thing. One of the ways maybe you can see the difference between a fool that is useful and a fool that is not useful is the fool that is not useful usually is just making fun of other people and the fool that is useful usually that turns then back on himself. The proper clown will be tricking people, but on the end he slips on his own banana peel and he falls. That’s the proper clown. That’s the clown that actually, the full turn clown. A lot of the foolishness that we see around in the world right now is actually extremely angry foolishness that is wants to accuse the system of being the oppressor, of doing all that and all of this and all this. The real fool or the full fool doesn’t do that, doesn’t accuse the system. He makes fun of it and then he realizes that he can’t avoid being part of it so it turns back on him. There are several cultures like in Native American cultures they have these fools as part of their actual rituals. The fool actually has a function in the desert Native Americans in the US, the desert, the Plain Indians. They had called the Hekoya which was this character that would in rituals would come to the rituals and would pass gas and would start saying stupid things. He was acting in a way to show the limit of the ritual, to say this ritual isn’t all encompassing. So you have that, but they’re not there to destroy the ritual, they’re just there to show the limit of the ritual, to show that it doesn’t encompass everything. Anyways, do you have any advice to help us recognize the holy fool versus the regular fool? That’s a big one in terms of accepting to be humbled is one of the biggest aspects that you’ll see in a holy fool. Like I said, it usually ends up turning things, it’s hard because it’s so popular right now to criticize authority, like everybody does it. It’s become normal to criticize authority. The holy fool would probably end up doing something different, would criticize criticizing authority or something like that and then it would turn. So I don’t know. When I see one I can point you to him. Like I think Kanye West is playing a role that’s clinging close to it, like the way that he’s flipping everything and the way he’s doing it is very kind of funny also because he’s, just the idea of naming his album Jesus is King and knowing what it’s going to do and forcing people to say it. It’s kind of humorous but it does what it does. Alright. King Cyrus was not a believer in the God of Israel, yet he was prophesied 200 years before. He was instrumental in the return of Israel from captivity. Was he a fool? No, I don’t think that in this case he would be considered a fool. There’s a figure in storytelling which is kind of the, how can I say this? There’s not just King Cyrus, even the king in the story of Esther also plays a role similar to the King Cyrus which is the good, it’s like the good foreigner who helps to bring back order but he doesn’t necessarily act in the same way of a fool. It’s a little similar because he’s a foreign king so he’s not part of us. He’s this thing outside and he’s saying, he’s helping to restore that which is inside. In the story of Elijah you have that quite a bit. Elijah does, Elijah is called the stranger. His name, Elijah the Thisbit means Elijah the stranger and he’s coming from, and he’s coming as a stranger in an upside down world. Anyways, but it’s not exactly like the fool. It is similar though. It’s a good insight that you had if you ever wrote that. In Russia they used the term Holy Fool. Wasn’t it just a common mentally deranged person who happened to exist in the community that was referred to? How does this relate? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that it’s just the mentally deranged person that happened to exist. I think that there are tropes about the Holy Fool that might look like that. You see the stories of people pretending to be crazy in the hagiography where they pretend to be crazy and then someone catches them in their house and they’re praying or they’re being completely normal. You have this idea of pretending and playing. Is it possible that someone who is mentally ill could play the same role as a Holy Fool for a community? I think so. I think so because one of the reasons why we have exceptional people, people who are mentally ill or people who are handicapped in certain ways or even mentally handicapped is also to show us the limit of our reason. To show us that we think that being able, being smart, being all this is all but it’s not. Sometimes you see people who are mentally handicapped have this beautiful innocent joy that is just amazing and they’re the ones who are supposed to be lower on the hierarchy but in the end they have this kind of boyish real life in them. I think they can play the role and show us the limits of our work, of our structures because they have this innocence. I think they can play a similar role but it’s not exactly the same. I don’t think so. Is Trump a figure of the Fool? This is related. It’s definitely related. It’s hard not to see that it’s related. to think that the Joker card is the Trump card. It’s not completely unrelated. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. I say the jury is still out on him. Let’s say it that way. Where does Satan fit in all of this? I don’t know. I think Satan is the one who opposes, is the one who divides. You can see Satan as one of the causes of this fall, of this breakdown and everything. Sorry? I was going to say, you mentioned that part about the accuser. They built that a little bit, a different way of the Holy Fool accusing. Then it turns back on him. Exactly. Satan is the accuser but he never turns back on him. That’s a good call, Father. Yes, that’s a good call. For those who didn’t hear, he said what Satan does is he accuses but it never turns back on him. He does play that role of criticizing the authority but he’s not able to see himself also as the butt of the joke. He doesn’t end up playing this role of the Holy Fool. Is not the case that ever since the fall of mankind has been in a state of carnival? In what respect are our times different? No, I don’t think so. I think that there are cycles and that if you read in scripture you see that there are these cycles where God reveals himself and God pulls people together, pulls Israel together and creates this image of the glorious city, a little image of this final possibility of all things coming together. You have these moments where this happens and then it falls apart. You see these cycles in the story where it moves from holy times to broken down times and then these upside down times. You see these cycles. I think that the fact that we integrate the carnival in our, traditionally you would integrate the carnival in the normal liturgy. That’s something that I maybe didn’t explain very well too. The fact that we also have the carnival in the pattern of reality is related to Sabbath somewhat. It’s related to the idea of work and then a day of rest. It’s not exactly the same in the sense that in the holiest version of it we necessarily have this upside down thing. Sabbath is a little image of death. We can’t avoid it. That’s why when we talk about Christ’s day in the tomb we say that it’s the great Sabbath. In the orthodox tradition we have many hymns that talk about that this is the great Sabbath. Christ’s day in the tomb is showing us the glory of the Sabbath, what the Sabbath could be. There is a relationship between this day of rest or this last day that doesn’t work, this residue. All these images, there’s images related to, I always talk about the idea that you have to leave a margin. You see that in scripture all over the place where they talk about the fringe of the vestments. You have to have a fringe on the edge of something. You have to leave it a little bit wild. You have to leave the corners of your field. Don’t plow all the field. You need to leave the corners of your field for the foreigners. It’s all related to this. You have to leave a little bit of space for chaos. If you don’t, if you try to encompass everything, then chaos comes back with a baseball bat. It’s like, wow, we’re done with this. Then the whole world turns into a carnival. One of the reasons why our world has turned into a carnival is because of modernism. It’s because the Enlightenment thought that it could encompass everything. That the world of science thought that it could completely fill up all knowledge and all understanding. But that’s not true. There’s always a buffer. There’s always a margin. There’s always a residue. There’s always a remainder. You can’t get rid of it. Because they pushed so hard to stop this, it flipped back and now everything is remainder. Everything is residue. Everything is carnival. We need to be careful because as traditional Christians, we see these images of these chaotic things. We might feel a little disgusted by it because we’re so surrounded by it that we’re like, no, we’re going to be traditional Christians. We have order. We’re going to have prayer. We’re going to have these hours and everything. We’re going to follow the calendar and all of this. It’s important. But the traditional Christians did celebrate Mardi Gras. The traditional Christians did celebrate these feasts of fools because it’s part of reality. You just need things to be in their proper place and need in their proper measure. That’s how you know that the world is working. You want ornaments on the outside of the church, but you don’t. You want ornaments, but you don’t. You eat something. You can have spice on it, but you don’t eat spice. You don’t just shovel spice into your mouth. You also don’t do the same with ornaments. You have ornaments that decorate a building, but it’s a decoration. The whole building can’t be ornament. It can’t be this French. I think that’s done with those questions. I hope this was useful for people. Thanks for coming. If you enjoy the Symbolic World content, there’s a lot of things you can do to help us out. If you’re not subscribed, please do. Go ahead and share this to all your friends if you can. Get involved in the discussion. We have a Facebook group in which people can talk about these subjects. I will put all those links in the description. 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