https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yqlLHFS_5fE
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re not going to begin our panel discussion. Although you’ve heard from all of these individuals before, we’re going to go ahead and go down the line and reintroduce them to ourselves. You’re welcome to give a round of applause for each one. So on the very far left of our panel we have Dr. John Patrick, who is president and professor of Augustan College. To his left is the professor of psychology at University of Toronto, Professor Jordan Peterson. Second from the right is Dr. Lynn Bissanette Petrie, who is a psychiatrist, scholar and iconographer. And last but certainly not least is Mr. Jonathan Peugeot, who is also an iconographer and also a literature designer. So please welcome him. So we’re going to begin our discussion today with a question that is for each one of you. And that question is, what three resources would you recommend to high school or university students who would like to pursue a career in your field? And we’ll begin on the left with Dr. Patrick. It’s very important because medicine is extremely demanding and very destructive of your faith. So the first resources they must have are these three people that they call every week when they get to primary school. People who know and love the Lord, usually inversely related to the level of education. And they are to call and ask, have you managed to read the Bible this week? Have you managed to pray this week? Have you just lied to me? Because that’s medicine. Many of you in this room may not know this, but doctors, most Christian doctors have gone for a period of usually, certainly months, usually years, in which they had no subjective response to any act of Christian duty. And they never talk about it because you wouldn’t understand it. The second thing that I would suggest would be a couple of books. Leslie Newbegin’s Foolishness to the Greeks. They will find it very helpful over due course. And Peter Kraiss’ book on making sense out of suffering. That’s probably enough. So I’m just going to speak about this practically and I’ll speak about it becoming a political psychologist that’s associated in some ways with becoming a professor. That will do the trick. You have to take a bachelor’s degree, likely in a science oriented field. I would recommend, especially if you’re going to university now, to stick very close to the disciplines that have at least one foot in science. That would include psychology generally, although there are more scientific subdomains of psychology, less scientific subdomains. If the people that you are being educated by have to know something about the brain or about biology, it tends to discipline quite nicely. So that keeps them from falling too far astray into the more cult-like elements of the modern university. You have to do exceptionally well in your last two years of your undergraduate degree to have a chance to become a clinical psychologist. You need an A average, really without exception. You have to do extremely well on your graduate record exam, which is a general purpose entrance exam. So it’s very competitive. And so that’s the practical issue. And then there’s another practical thing to consider, which is that if you want to become a clinical psychologist, you don’t get to pick the school you’re going to go to unless you are unbelievably well educated. If you want to get into a clinical psychology program, you have to apply to like 30, including places you think you’d never go. Because you can always say no if someone says, do you want to come? And you have a couple of choices. Well, lucky you. If you only have one choice, well, and it’s not a school that you would normally consider, it might be a lot better than nothing, especially because you educate yourself in many regards. And then having said that, so those are the practical issues. I would say read the great clinicians. There’s a very large number of them that were stretched across the 20th century. I put a number of books of that sort on the reading list on my website. And you can go wrong by reading Freud and by reading Jung and Adler and Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow and the people who established clinical psychology as a discipline. And the behaviorists as well, who have very many extraordinarily intelligent things to say about the way that human beings and animals as well learn. And then the other thing I would say is if you’re going to be a clinical psychologist, what do you need to be like temperamentally? You have to be interested in people. And you have to be interested enough to really listen to the people. And that is a huge part of what you do as a clinical therapist. And this is also true of physicians, by the way. The data on this is quite clear, is that you listen to people. And by doing so, you might ask them questions when you can’t understand what they’re telling you. But a lot of what you’re doing as a listener is helping people sort themselves out. You know, like you just can’t believe how many people have no one to talk to. And so, and people, most people think by talking, it’s actually really hard to think because to think properly you have to be like three people in your own head because you have to have an argument. All of those different little avatars of yourself have to be well armed and ready to have a battle and you have to be able to tolerate that. It’s a really difficult technical exercise. It’s not like everyone knows how to do it. And just because something pops into your mind doesn’t mean you’re thinking. It’s the testing that pops into your mind that’s the thinking. And so the way that people do that when they don’t think, which is really almost all the time, is that they talk to someone else. And then the thinking is watching how the other person reacts to what they’re saying, you know, with the lift of the eyebrows or maybe, you know, the person dozes off, which is not generally a good sign. You know, you’re getting feedback from the other person constantly about what you’re saying. And you also listen to yourself and that can clue you into what because you’ll end up saying, if someone’s listening to you, you’ll end up saying things that you don’t necessarily agree with. And you won’t even notice that until you put them out on the table. And so the other thing, if you want to be a clinician, is like there’s nothing better. And if you want to be a good partner yourself, for that matter, there’s absolutely nothing better that you can do than listen. So that was my two cents, I suppose. To be a psychiatrist, you really do need to know yourself. And so you want to do as much as you can to learn about yourself. And I think this practice starts with your parents and the best way to help a child to become a psychiatrist, if they want to become a psychiatrist, is to every night get them to reflect on the day. And we know that this develops a sense of self and a sense of emotional intelligence. You pattern for them when they’re really little before they’re even verbal. Well, how did your day go? And OK, this is what happened. And then you had a fight with your brother and you took his toy away from him and he got mad and cried. And so what did we learn from that? And then you go on from there and the rest of the day. So that they get a sense of sequencing their day, not just as events, but the emotional aspect of it, the relational aspect of it, how their behavior affected other people. And how other people’s behavior affected them. So that creates this sense of emotional intelligence. And of course, if your parents didn’t do that for you, you could still become a psychiatrist. You just have to do it for yourself. You have to at some point really learn self-reflectiveness to be able to pay attention to yourself. Because that comes up in the clinical relationship. I mean, every minute. How are you responding? How are you meeting the other person? And as Dr. Peterson said, we have to be able to really listen. Listen not just to the other, but to ourselves. What’s going on inside of ourselves? Why am I feeling this sense of disgust right now? What’s going on that I would have this reaction to this? Why am I just feeling this sense of anxiety? This person looks perfectly peaceful, but they walked into my presence and I’m suddenly anxious. It’s not me. It’s not me. I wasn’t anxious before they walked into my presence. Something’s happened here. Is this person bringing anxiety into my office? And they might seem perfectly composed, which people who are having panic attacks, people who are anxious, are often extremely composed because they’re working so hard to control themselves. So you become an observer of yourself, you become an observer of another person. And then, of course, you have to go to medical school to become a psychiatrist. So I think that it’s really important to study the sciences and really understand biology and microbiology and all of those things. I think it gives you a way of thinking and it gives you a way of reasoning that are tremendously helpful for you when you get to medical school. Because medical school is really, it’s more an experience. I think it’s a real experiential four years in medical school. You’re having relationships with people. And it’s interesting, when I told some of my friends that I wanted to go to medical school, they said, oh, no, you’re too sensitive. You can’t go to medical school. Because they were thinking that a person who was a doctor needed to have emotional distance. And they knew me. I wasn’t very good at having emotional distance. I felt what people felt. I was pretty able to experience what other people were experiencing. So they said, you’re too sensitive. Well, yeah, I think they’re right. I think they’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t go. But that was something else that I had to learn was to get this sense of emotional distance so that I wasn’t crying every time someone told me their story. And I’ll never forget, my very first patient was on the GI floor. And the poor man was probably 75 years old. And he told me his story. And he was connected to a GI tube. And I could see the gastric fluid coming out of the GI tube as I asked him questions. He was obviously having a reaction, emotional reaction. And he was telling his story. And he was crying. And it was truly not coming to see him anymore. And it was just a disaster. So I started crying. And I thought, oh, dear, I can’t really do this. I can’t cry when I’m trying to help a patient. But there I was crying. So I had to really be able to experience people’s pain and at the same time get a certain distance so that I could be able to think at the same time that I’m having the emotional reaction. And that’s a real three-dimensional, five-dimensional experience. But you have to somehow learn, be prepared for that kind of thing, for medical school, and then learn it as you go. And the third thing I would say is you have to know. For me, I had to have a very deep relationship with Jesus and knowledge of the scripture. And that saved me because there is so much that’s taught that is so wrong and that’s so false. And you have to have a filter. For me, that filter was my relationship with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit as my filter, and with the knowledge of the scriptures. And that keeps you in an ethical realm. It keeps you in a very moral, ethical realm, which is critical for the practice of medicine. And that’s one of the problems, of course, we face is the practice of medicine has become very off-track in terms of morality. Well, I would say if you want to become an artist, I would say don’t. It’s really not a good idea. There are too many artists that we don’t need anymore, so that’s the first thing. So, if after I’ve said that, you still really want to be an artist, I would say for any art you make, I would say draw. Learn to draw from observation, copy the masters, and then learn to draw from the structures, from the inner structures. Learn proportion, learn about how to lay things out, composition, all those things. That’s really, that you can do, you can do that on your own. You can do that, you can take life drawing workshops, you can do all that kind of thing. The second thing I would say is to make sure you have people around you that are ruthless, and that will not try to make you feel good. That’s one of the things, like I really dislike art school for the kind of postmodern ideology that was taught there, one of the things that you do learn, even today in art school, is that you learn to be criticized. You learn to have people around you that are looking at your work and are just going to go at it with a hacksaw. And you have to take it, because when you’re making art for yourself and you’re making art for your family, and it’s all nice and cozy, that’s all good, but if you really have the idea of doing it professionally, you have to have people around you that aren’t there to make you feel good about yourself, and they’re going to rip your things apart. So I think that’s really important. And in terms I would say of being a liturgical artist, because that’s what I do, of becoming an iconographer, that’s really the hardest part, because ideally you would have to find a teacher, and there aren’t really that many teachers around. And so if you want to become an iconographer, first of all I would say again, don’t. Because there are too many iconographers. It’s the same thing. But if you really want to do it, I would say you need to find a teacher. If you can’t find a teacher, luckily online now we have, there are people, like I was lucky, I didn’t have a teacher. And when I started to learn to carve, I told you that story yesterday, I was lucky to have some really good icon carvers that were willing to be ruthless with me, and just look at my things and just hack at it and take it down so that I could become better. And so I know that iconographers, they love iconography. And so if they see someone who is really dedicated, who’s putting in the work, who’s doing the drawings, who’s going full at it, they will be happy to give you criticisms of your work. And if they see that, and to kind of help you along, because artists are actually really excited to see other people that are coming and that are doing great things. So that would be my basic advice. Thanks. Dr. Bissonnette-Petrie, the answer that you just gave, you talked about emotional health, daily reflection, responses to events, anxiety, and emotional distance. So with the great deal of experience that you have, we’re going to start with you for this next question, which is what daily practices would you suggest to help navigate grief from tragedy, and specifically how to better cultivate emotional wellness and strength? I would recommend the study of the ancient monastic tradition of Plexio Divina, the Leargy of the Hours, daily mask, Chastity of the eyes, Chastity of the ears. What I would like to point out to you, what I mean by that is, the Chastity of the ears is that you pay very close attention to what you’re listening to all day long, and that you discern whether this is helping you to grow in virtues or not. And so you begin to drop the sounds that are not helping you to grow in virtue. I moved into Gregorian chant, that’s what I sing, Gregorian chant, because Gregorian chant is a very unique type of music which does not have a repetitive melody, it doesn’t have a repetitive beat, and because of that it’s always going somewhere. It actually pulls us into that part of our brain that’s able to participate in the present moment, and the present moment is so critical because that’s where we have our relationships, that’s where we have our encounter with God, that’s where we can listen to God, that’s where we can listen to other people, is in the present moment, when we’re really focused in that present moment. And the Gregorian chant pulls us into that present moment. So I chant every day, I chant the sacred scriptures, and that’s what the Gregorian chant is, the sacred scriptures, so I chant the sacred scriptures, and I find that it really, as the studies have shown, it really is so calming. And so that’s the one thing, so the chastity of the ears should be very, very careful about what I listen to, and that includes what we call gossip, you know, you just don’t listen to it, you don’t get along with it. It also meant that I really have developed the practice of turning off the radio, because I used to listen to the radio all the time when I was in the car, just turn it on. Well, why am I doing that? So I practiced turning it off, which was hard, but I did. And so I really, I could spend my time in the car thinking or praying or meditating. So that’s the chastity of the ears, which the ancient monastic tradition teaches us about. And then the chastity of the eyes is the other thing that I practice, which is what you’re looking at. And what I wanted to do was to learn as the monastic tradition to look at those things which help us to be elevated into the presence of the other, the great absolute at all times. So because the goal is to be recollected to the presence of God at all times. It’s a practice that I have worked on for decades, being in the presence of God at all times. So the chastity of the eyes helps with that. So what am I looking at? And so I don’t watch movies. I never watch movies. I mean, once in a while I’ll watch a documentary, but I just never watch movies. I never watch television. I’m very careful about what I look at on my cell phone. And that drew me into icons and into iconography because the icons are in the face of God, in the saint, the face of God himself, and the face of God in the events of his life. And so iconography becomes what you take into your visual memory. And so those images are always in front of me. So if I’m in a very stressful situation, the image of our Lord can come right back to me because I practice, practice, practice looking at it. And I pray with icons. So those are two things that I do every day. And obviously the lexio divina, which is reading scriptures and then meditating on the scriptures and listening, listening in the moment for God to help me understand what the scriptures mean. And then the practice every day of holy liturgy because God gave us the holy liturgy to have an encounter with him. It’s the very place where we have the experience of his holy presence. And it’s been set up that way. I mean, that’s been given to us with holy icons. We’re very enchanted with beautiful, beautiful processions. And it is all set up to bring us into that moment, which John talked about, the pillar of Christ’s suffering, which is the center of the universe on the cross. And we’re lifted into that place of suffering with him. And we are, you know, we just, we go into that space and for a period of time, we’re lifted out of the moment. I mean, we’re lifted out of our daily life. We can forget ourself. We can forget what we’re worried about. We can forget our, everything that’s going on. We’re just lifted into a different space, which is just so transforming. And so I feel very upset if I can’t get to daily mass because it is, it nurtures me. And I know that it’s moving me into a direction of greater and greater understanding and virtue. So we just discussed coping with grief and tragedy and things of that nature. Keeping in that realm, Dr. Patrick, a question for you next. Do warriors of a warrior culture, for example, Vikings, gods, etc., experience PTSD? Experience post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m not an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, that’s the first thing to say. So in many ways, I’m not fit to answer that question. I do know a bit about what happens in tragedy, I know of. Mostly in being with my wife. In 1994, we were in, I had a program running on the borders of Rwanda for some 10 years, basically trying to understand why children are now nourished in the presence of food. And we were actually doing a 10-day walk through the Nuitombi Mountains because I’d flown over them and seen no roads but quite a lot of people. So in this overpopulated world, we did that walk and two nights we slept out at the porch, there was no village. But we did take a shortwave radio with us and found out that horrible things were happening in Rwanda. My wife was on board a boat ready to Canada, so she went up to see what was happening. As soon as we got back to our base. So she was in Goma before the UN arrived or anybody else. Morris was the first person there other than the two groups, only two groups of people could stand working through those first two weeks of refugee work. And you know who they are. Roman Catholic priests and nuns and the evangelical Protestants. The UN workers could do three days, then they had to go back to Nairobi for the rest of the suscitation. If you don’t have divine support, you can’t have it. It’s just what my… it gets really bad. So thousands of people died in those first few days of horror. There was nothing going on. Now that was the year that our youngest son went to university and I realized my wife was not coming back in the end of September. She always came back a month later. She said it took that long to clear up my mess. Really what she meant is she liked Africa. But there were seven-year-olds trying to get four or five-year-olds on the streets. And she was all the way from Chile. So as she ended up, the UN realized they’d got somebody on their hands. It was extraordinary. And they gave her four or five refugee camps to look after. She was the only person in those camps who actually cared about the dignity of the country. The UN would drive in with their trucks, push food and medicines and stuff. They treated them like animals. And they told their workers not to stay in the camps overnight. Sally, of course, did not obey that. And she started doing microeconomic development projects in the camps. They were beautiful. My favorite is a lovely one of a little boy, aged about 11. These things help to change the trajectory. And he came to Sally and said, I want to borrow 10, I can walk to Bukharmon and buy matches and come back and sell them in the camps to help my mother. He was planning to walk 80 kilometers, aged about 10. And she said, but the soldiers will take the money from you. And he said, I’m little. I’ll go through the bushes. They won’t stop. And he did it. Extraordinary. And I could go on then talking about the kinds of little things that make such huge differences. But on the other side, there was absolutely horrendous things happening. Climbing over roadblocks made out of human bodies. Seeing people murdered in front of your eyes without having any power to do anything about it. And the only thing that kept her going was the knowledge of the scriptures. But there was only one text in the Bible that she could use in that period. Why, oh Lord, do you vaguely look upon injustice? But that book, of course, has at the end of it one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible. When there is no fruit on the vine, no flock in the store, you make my feet my parents feet. Joy can be felt under those circumstances. Sally didn’t have much joy. And she’s been coping with the consequences of that ever since. It’s completing the sufferings of Christ, and it is a cross. When you’ve been through things like that, you are different. And it’s no use pretending you’re not. And so one of the most important things when talking to anybody with tragedy is the goodness say, don’t say you understand. That is just the most stupid thing to say. The first thing to say is, I don’t know. What is that? I don’t know how you’re coping. What can I do? Now, I was very much an academic, ambitious, all the nasty things you can think of. I was turned around by several events. There was certainly one of them, but back here, another one that many of you were related to more recently, and I’m told it’s actually, I’m talking about this on YouTube somewhere. But when I got back to Canada, I was wanting some projects here, and I found out that children with cystic fibrosis were technically malnourished when they died. There’s certainly some people in this room who have a family who had cystic fibrosis. Well, 30 years ago, all of them pretty well were malnourished technically when they died. They didn’t look like it, so it wasn’t noticed. You had to make some measurements to realize this was really the case. So I wanted to see whether, A, I could reverse it, and B, whether it was worth doing. I went through the usual hoops to get that to happen. The first volunteer was a 15-year-old boy with a body mass of an 11-year-old. I mean, to talk about informed consent under those circumstances, you have to be a very astute academic. He would do anything to get some muscle. He wasn’t far, necessarily. He couldn’t even lift a small bough. He went ahead and barmed a cough. So he volunteered immediately. And I said to him, Stephen, you don’t even know what I want you to do yet, and you vomited. He said, I don’t care what it is, I’ll do it. And of course, at that stage, the only way I could get the amount of food in that I wanted to see when it would work was through a laser gastric tube. But he had a chronic cough. And I said to him, look, I need a month. And that tube will probably come up 200 times in a month and have to be put back. Can you handle that? And he said yes. And he never complained. About halfway through the month, we’d become friends. We both thought Monty Python was funny, so we had something in common. And he needed an ironic sense of humour. And the nurses called on a Sunday. Now, by this time in my life, I was back in church. And it was the middle of the day on a Sunday, and they called and said, we’ve got so many admissions. And Steve was just coughed up his tube again. We weren’t going to be back until seven o’clock tonight, so if you want your protocol followed, you’ve got to come for it yourself. I said, yes, fine. I drove in. I got to his bed. I was wearing a suit. He was a smart lad. He said, oh, you’ve been to church. I said, yes. Did you go to church? And he did. It turned out he was Catholic. I was Protestant. And I was so well trained in a liberal, dominating society, I said no more. I put the tube in and went home. Six weeks, his mother is a saint that’s going to lose three children to CF. She didn’t have a normal one. But she stopped me in the corridor and said, you had an opportunity to talk to Stephen about faith on Sunday. You should have used it. You couldn’t do that very well. She had no evidence for that statement that I’m a wearer. And of course, I took no notice. For Stephen, the experiment didn’t work. We got 600 grams, not six kilos. I could see that it was going to work, but things didn’t adjust. And to cut a long story short, we put the first permanent feeding tube into a CF trial some 30 years ago. It’s a routine procedure. If you go to a decent CF clinic anywhere in the world, Mr. Sherwood was a bit of a wimp. He looks like a bump of plastic, but he’s actually the entrance to a tube going into the gut. And he transforms their lives. It’s been incredibly successful. But I didn’t visit Stephen whenever I knew he was in hospital after that. Four years later, if I knew he was in, I’d missed him frequently. But four years later, I was called in the middle of the day. When I got to his room, he was clearly dying. His mum was sitting right in bed. He hadn’t said anything for a couple of hours or more. Fairly normal way of dying. He had the best rate of CO2 going up and oxygen down. But he hadn’t said anything for a while. But when I walked in, he said, good, I want to see you, Mr. Downing. I’m past the usual doctor-patient relationship. I said, Stephen, I’m sorry you’re so sick. What can I do? And he said, it says in the Bible, if you ask anything in my name, I’ll give it to you. I’m 19 and I’m dying and I don’t want to. What do you say? No, I don’t think any of you would stand up and volunteer for that. I wanted to get out of there, but I couldn’t. He was a friend. So I played the time. I tried the professorial escape route. Stephen, that’s a difficult question. It will take a little while. And I got a lovely Monty Python answer just to whisper this one. And I had a little while. Both he and I knew his life was measured in hours at that time. So I had to go through the Apostle’s Creed. I knew that. He knew it. Of course, he believed every sentence in the Apostle’s Creed. But it wasn’t helping. He was not ready to die. And I was praying. I mean, you pray in hot towels and you pray in situations like this. And that lovely prayer that you were stalling, you’d strained for me help. It’s almost invariably answered. And it was. Into my head, God inserted, and he delivered all people. Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek, a footnote it turned out later. Oh yes, God will provide for all your needs, but do read the small print. He decides what your needs are, not you. And I knew what to say. I’d already pointed out to Stephen that by this time, there were children who could run on that board who wouldn’t have had the energy to walk without his courage. Little Canadian boys still had enough energy to get a minute skating when they went at the weekend. To them, midi league. In fact, the second guy I could put a tube into, his hockey coach called me and said, What have you done today? I used to let him put his skates on and stand on the ice and told them none of them under any circumstances to touch it. But give him a lip-up. He skated tonight. It was working. And I knew what to say and I said to Stephen, I think what God is saying to you is something like this. Stephen, you have done all that I want you to do. You’ve coughed enough. It’s time to come home. Both you and I know that unless there is a miracle, you will die in the next hour or two. Because God is allowing this, can you also believe that this must, in some very deep sense, be the best thing for you? Now, I’ve never enjoyed a smile more in my life. As he smiled and said, Thank you. That helps. I think I can. And he died very peacefully a few hours later. I was not there. But the tailpiece is even more beautiful in a way. His wonderful mother had not finished with me. About two months ago, the letter she wrote to me dropped out of her book. It began, It was ironic you were not allowed to give Stephen food for his body. But thank God you were there when he needed food for his soul. He’d been asking his priest, his doctor, his family. They all pushed it away. Saying, Oh, you’re not dying. You don’t need to talk about that, Stephen. He knew he was. But it wasn’t for him, was it? Their experience was for his mother and for me. I mean, Stephen was in God’s presence in a couple of hours. There’s no problem at that point. But his mother had to go through this three times. It was very important that the first one be a good experience. And for me, I hadn’t had a conversation like that for over 20 years. I had a huge guilt. I had to repent. And I had to realize that unless a professor of my seniority said, It’s bad medicine not to do that, not the other way around. It wouldn’t happen. And I’ve been doing it ever since. So I don’t know if that’s an answer, except that when God puts you in absolutely awful situations, you learn that he knows what he’s doing, even though you may pay a price for the rest of your life. Dr. Peterson, this next question is for you. Is deconstructionism and gender theory the final phase of the iconoclasm of heresy? I don’t know if I understand that question. I don’t have to answer it to tell you the truth. Because I don’t know enough about the iconoclasm of heresy. So can you define it? Do you want me to do it? So the iconoclastic controversy was a moment in the time of the church where they began to doubt whether or not it was possible to represent Christ in an image. And the idea, of course, is coming back to the Old Testament, that this idea of a transcendent God which we can’t represent. And the final argument given by the church is that, no, indeed when God becomes man, when God takes an image, then we represent him as man in that image. And it’s become this notion that God manifests himself through image and in the world, has become the cornerstone of Christian tradition. When they said that, they called it the last ecumenical council. It’s like the last moment where the whole church agreed on something was that the images that went to be part of the church are like a seal that said, yes, God does manifest himself in the world and those things can be countered and engaged. And so I think that the person asking that question is asking whether or not postmodernism is a continuation of this idea of iconoclasm, where forms, where structures, where images cannot contain sparks of divinity, can’t contain actual meaning. So how do you think that’s related to the idea of gender studies, let’s say? Well, the idea… Or gender studies. Any idea… Well, so far you’re doing a good job. Good job. The problem with the new gender theory, it does indeed have to do with iconoclasm controversy because the idea is that there is no relationship between, let’s say, there is no necessary relationship between the idea of male and the manifestation of masculinity. And so they’re divided. And so you can either see that either as an iconoclast, as a continuation of the iconoclastic controversy, which in a way is all in really pursuing of the Gnostic heresy, which is to believe that what’s really important is what’s these abstract things, ideas up there. And the world… There is no direct connection between the two. So with that thinking, you can say, well, masculinity is just an idea. And so if you want to be masculine, you can. There is no necessary connection between, let’s say, your body and masculinity. They’re separate. Okay, and so the people who are promoting this theory describe people who believe… The scientists, for example, who believe in a direct connection between that as biological essentialists, and they regard that as a form of intellectual fascism. So that’s how that’s reflected in the secular world. And postmodernism has that as well. It’s the idea that all forms are equal, like any form will do. And so you can make a painting of the most insane thing, and it’s equal to an icon of Christ, because there is no necessary hierarchy, there’s no necessary relationship in form between the ideas and their manifestation. Whereas the liturgical idea and really the traditional Christian idea is that liturgy, is that Christian life is the union of those two things together. And that appears as the cross. It doesn’t mean it appears only as this glorious golden thing. It does, but it also appears as a dime. There’s an aspect which is true in that when the divine appears in the world, it can appear as sacrifice, so that the form can be sacrificed than to be resurrected in the glorious form, whatever that means. There is a relationship, I think, between iconoclasm and the postmodernism, which is mostly a neo-Nazism, I think. It’s probably the better way to see it, this idea that our spirits and our bodies don’t matter, and we can kind of make our bodies fit whatever imaginary spirit that we have, but that’s not the image of the person in the Christian tradition. The idea of the person is really this union of having an earth and a Jew and a Jew and a being. So just a bit of comment on that. One of the things that has astounded me to some degree about the idea of the divinity of the body is that that seems to be an idea that’s very hard for materialists who may have a spiritual ban to accept. They tend to think of the soul as something that’s completely disembodied. And the problem with that is that it doesn’t address the problem precisely, because the problem, or it makes the body into a problem that has to be solved without having a body, and that’s actually not much of a solution. It’s actually a denial of the utility or the divinity of the body. And so that’s another danger in separating the spiritual too much from, or the ideation too much from its body. It’s an escape from the embodiment, or an escape from incarnation, or something like that. And that might be equivalent to the denial of biological reality or something like that. Anyways, definitely a Jonathan to answer that question better. So in that answer, both of you discussed the concept of postmodernism. So any of you could speak on this topic, but would you say that there is any hope for postmodernism? Well, there’s something right about it. What’s correct is that there is a very large number of ways of interpreting any small set of phenomena. And it’s actually in some ways a testament to the possibility that’s embodied even in a determinant of actuality. Like, I mean, this is a water bottle, but it could be a rather ineffectual weapon. There’s all sorts of possibility in every situation. And the postmodernists made that diagnosis correctly in some sense. And it was discovered at the same time in all sorts of other fields. So I mean, the people who were first building artificial intelligence systems, who were influenced by the behaviourists, more or less thought of the world as we see it. They don’t determine the objects with defined words that were actually there in some real sense, independent of us. And so they thought of figuring out how to act in the world was going to be the difficult problem for artificial intelligence. But what they learned very rapidly was that the difficult problem was seeing the world because the boundaries that are so obvious to us are not so obvious out there in the external world. You know, Jonathan made an allusion to that today when he talked about grouping things to go to the gym. He was like, why are those things in your gym bag? Well, it’s a category. Things that go in my gym bag. What kind of category is that? Well, it’s defined by body purpose. And this is actually quite well understood in cognitive psychology. So, for example, there’s a guy named Kurt Gigerentzer, who’s quite a brilliant psychologist. He talked about our ability to generate categories on the fly. His favourite example is things to take out of your apartment when it’s on fire. While you think about the things you take out, they bear no objective similarity to one another. They’re united by something like purpose. So, the postmodernist claim is that there’s a very wide variety of ways to interpret the world. And that turns out to be exactly right in a very, very deep sense. But where they go wrong, and completely and utterly wrong, is to assume that, and Jonathan also alluded to this, that all the solutions to the problem of perception are equally valid. And that’s just wrong. And the way they gerrymander that is in a sense by denying the reality of the objective world. So there’s lots of ways of looking at this situation, but there are only a set number of ways that will get me through that door without causing conflict with all of you. Like if I walk to that door and I just push you all out of the way or hit you, then the probability is that that’s one way of getting out, you know, it really is. It’s one of the many ways I can get out of here. But the problem is that you would likely object to that. And so it’s a perceptual possibility, but there’s no way of instantiating that in actuality. And so here’s the problem with postmodernism. I think Jean Piaget had this figured out a very long time ago, is that out of that infinite number of possible perceptual, out of that infinite array of perceptual possibilities, you have to extract out that tiny set of solutions that not only fulfills your aim in the actual world, but fulfills it in the actual world and the social world at the same time in a way that doesn’t interfere with you doing it again in the future, and in a way that if you do it really well, that also facilitates what other people are doing at the same time. And man, that’s a serious number of constraints, right? And it’s sort of akin to the child who’s playing a sport as a good sport who gets invited to play again. And so you have to organize your behavior as a consequence of your perception so that it actually not only lays itself out in the world in the manner that you intend and desire, but so that it does it in a manner that everyone else is happy with and that propagates itself properly across time as you play iterated games. And there’s a very small number of solutions to that problem. We even know some of them. So we talked a little yesterday about dominance hierarchies, which was a term that I objected to, but let’s call them hierarchies of competence for the sake of further discussion. I mean, I mentioned that hierarchies of that sort are at least a third of a billion years old, and virtually every animal, even if they’re not social animals, even asocial songbirds, have hierarchies in the distributed social community. And the reason for that is that there just aren’t that many solutions to the problem of how to get along in the world when other creatures are trying to do the same thing. And so the postmodernists are correct in that they make an allusion to the complexity of the world. They’re correct in saying, well, there’s a very large number of ways to interpret Shakespeare, and how do you know which one is right? It’s like a stupid question in some sense, because… Interpretations of Shakespeare that get you killed aren’t practical. There’s a simple way of talking about it. So they don’t take into account the constraint systems that are part and parcel of being, and they gerrymander that away with this intellectual slight panic, which is something like, well, the objective world doesn’t really exist anyway, and society is infinitely maleable, and it’s like, no, that’s just not right. So I don’t think there’s much hope for that anyway, because that’s wrong, and we know it’s wrong. I just want to add something about postmodernism. For myself, I have more sympathy for postmodernism than maybe I show at first glance. Reading some of the postmodern authors are what helped to shake the certainty of modern absolutes, let’s say. What’s interesting to know is that a lot of the postmoderns, a lot of those that created the idea of polysemy, which is this notion that there’s multiple interpretations of text, that texts say multiple things, they were actually reading medievalists. They were reading authors that were interpreting traditional Christian text, or traditional rabbinical text, because in the traditional world, in the Middle Ages, let’s say, no one had a problem with the fact that text had multiple meanings. It was just a given. Everybody knew that the text had multiple meanings. Everybody knew that the Bible had multiple meanings, that the myths had multiple meanings, that the different traditions had multiple meanings. It was not a problem. The problem is when there’s no hierarchy. So the medieval Christians, they would say that texts have multiple meanings, but then they would immediately structure those multiple meanings into a hierarchy. Metaphysical meaning, spiritual meaning, social meaning, personal meaning. And then those would be lined up. So then you see a structure in a text, you can apply it at different levels of reality. So what the postmoderns did is they just took the polysemy and they got rid of the hierarchy. And then they started to show that there are patterns in the text which are not there at first glance. If you look into it, these other patterns emerge, and it’s often these counter patterns. Because if you say something, you’re always secretly saying the opposite. You have to. There’s no way around that. Because to declare something is to secretly declare its opposite as a buffer. If you want, and that’s what the postmoderns do, they go into the text and they find that line of opposite, the string of things that show the countertext, and they bring it up and they flip the world upside down. And they say, well, why don’t we put the countertext on top, let’s say, and say they can make text say the opposite of what we always have thought that they would say. And it’s possible to do that. And sometimes it’s actually perfectly coherent. But what they’re missing, it’s exactly what Jordan is saying, is that the countertext is a marginal thing. And it’s a marginal thing for a reason. For all the reasons that I talked about today, or that I talked in my other talks about. The margin has a function and it has to be on the edges of our perception. If you put it in the middle, the world falls apart. So there’s something valuable. I actually read Jacques Derrida, I read Jacques Derrida quite a bit when I was in college. And I realized that if you read Jacques Derrida, you can actually just tap him back. And he flips back on his feet. You can do the same thing that he does to the text you can do to him. You can use his arguments and you can just twist them so that a traditional world comes back into being. That’s really the post-postmodernism. You can do that. What’s happening right now is exactly that. What we talked about yesterday, this whole idea of these gestures that are acting as a kind of double turn where the clowns are bringing the world back on their feet. We’re seeing it happen before our very eyes. So I would say everybody pay attention. It’s going to be a very interesting time for the next few years. Because you’re going to see a lot of things come back, even in a traditional way, you’re going to see it happen. And it’s going to be these wild people like Jordan who are going to… Sorry, you’re not that wild. It’s going to be these outliers who are going to act as a… The wheel of fate turns upside down and then it comes back. You really see that with violent actors. What the hell is up with him? He’s an impossible person. There’s an article… He did an interview for this super liberal Catholic… I don’t know a lot about the Catholic politics, but he did an interview with his extremely liberal Catholic magazine. They thought they were going to get what they wanted from him. They thought they were going to get exactly what they wanted from him. So they did this long interview and then they did it and published it. Because he had a whole interview he criticized homosexuality. He had a whole interview. So they just did publish it. He was like, how great, how did that work? That doesn’t make any sense. So yeah, I joke, this is really a joke, but my constant joke is that I never thought the end of the world would be so funny. I hope you’ve noticed nobody wants a post-partum surgeon. Dr. Bisodet Petrie, in his answer to that last question, Dr. Peterson used the word wrong several times describing different beliefs or assertions in the books of modernism. That’s a phrase that we used yesterday as well, so our next question is about that. In your lecture yesterday you mentioned that René Descartes was wrong in reference to his quote, I think, therefore I am. However, I believe that this is one of the most logically airtight arguments. In what way do you believe that he was wrong? Well, I would let somebody else answer that question, but I’ll just first say that we are embodied and we are our body. And that’s the way I hope you add that we are our body, and therefore if I’m just a thinker and I’m not engaged in my body, then I can think all kinds of things that are not really grounded in my body. And I really can’t separate myself from my body. I am my body. Continuing that idea with you and Dr. Peterson, in the varieties of religious experience William James spoke of the religious temperament. Do you see any correlation between innate temperament and personality and religious experience? Oh yeah, we’ve done some studies on that. If you imagine that a religious system has two elements, let’s call it the dogmatic element and the mystical element. The mystics are the liberals and the ones who are more concerned with the dogmatic element are the conservatives. And I’m not saying that one of those is preferable to the other, by the way, because one is about structure and its maintenance and the other is about change and dynamism. You need both of those things. They feed into one another mutually. If you let the mystics get the upper hand, then everything dissolves into a chaotic confusion. And if you let the dogmatists get the upper hand, then everything stagnates and turns into a tyranny. So you need to have the dynamic going. It’s the same in the political realm essentially. And I think the basic personality difference is that the liberal types, so the people who are liberal lean to the left, are high in trait openness, which is the proclivity for divergent thinking and lateral thinking and creativity essentially, and low in trait conscientiousness. And the conservative types are low in openness and high in conscientiousness. So there’s a bunch of practical implications of that. One is that it’s the liberal types who start businesses, but it’s the conservative types who run them. And so that doesn’t take much thinking to figure out that that’s a pretty good deal. The entrepreneurial types are definitely creative types. They tend to flip from project to project. They’re interested in what’s novel and what’s radical and what’s transformative, but they’re not interested in tracking things and ordering them and putting them forward in the sequence and doing their duty. That’s for more conservative types of people. And the liberals, when you look at what they regard as, you know, lots of liberal types, say, well, I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual. And really what they mean is that, well, I have a hard time adhering to tradition, and I’m not necessarily very disciplined, but I certainly have the capacity to experience awe, let’s say, or aesthetic experience. And those things, you really need to know that those things are deeply grounded in temperament. It’s important to know that because you tend to think that the differences between, say, liberals and conservatives are matters of opinion. But they’re not. They’re deeper than that by a lot. There are really differences in the manner in which the world presents itself to them because the very template that governs their perceptions is not the same. And it’s deep. These are very, very deep differences. They’re neurologically different. They’re parachrologically different. And there’s also, all those different personalities have their niches as well, so they’re necessary. Part of the way that, well, I know here’s another way of looking at it, is that liberals don’t like borders and conservatives do. And it’s not just borders between states or countries. It’s borders, period. The liberals think, geez, we should have borders between things because that delimits them. And it does. And the conservatives say, no, no, we need to have borders between things because that keeps them properly separate and distinct. It’s like, well, the problem is that both of those are right. And it depends on the situation to some degree. I’m not arguing for moral relativity at all. I’m saying that in order to determine which of those principles applies in the particular situation that obtains in the moment, you have to have a dialogue between the different temperamental types to come up with a consensus that hopefully does something like approximate current reality. And that’s really what a democratic system does. That’s why I’m such an advocate for free speech. We have different viewpoints and different religious viewpoints for that matter. And the way that we stay oriented as a consequence of those genuine differences is by communicating with one another constantly. Because the alternative is swinging far in one direction or the other, or you start to go at each other’s throats. Unless that’s what you want, that’s not a very good idea. Speaking of the importance of communicating with each other, one of the ways that obviously one does that is through art. And Mr. Pizhio, that is your specialty. So this next question is for you as well as Dr. Peterson or others. Is contemporary art, including commercial art such as Disney, Nintendo, or DC Comics, a route out of night and day for today’s lost boys? Well, that’s one of the bets that I’ve started making, especially with these YouTube videos that I’ve been doing. There’s an interesting thing that’s happened, let’s say since the 90s maybe more explicitly started happening before that. There’s been a deliberate attempt to include within popular culture religious and mythological motifs. And it’s really deliberate. It comes from Joseph Campbell a lot, but then other ideas. And it’s really a practical thing. For them it’s a practical thing. They realize, oh, there are these stories, these patterns that underlie our experience. If we put them in the stories, people will come see them, they’ll make a lot of money, everybody’s happy. So it’s not like they’re wanting to create illumined beings, let’s say. But there is this growing tendency to put those in there. And sometimes it appears in dark and twisted ways. I’m not trying to defend what’s there. But what it’s done, and I’m seeing that it’s happening, is that it’s opened up a space that maybe wasn’t there a little while ago. It’s opened up a space, a perception that wasn’t there. And I think it is possible to enter into that space, show people, I hope, show people those patterns. And then say, okay, does that get you excited? And a lot of people are like, yeah, that’s exciting. And they say, well, that’s nothing compared to what’s in the Bible. It’s like dust on a… I mean, the patterns are there, they’re real, and they’re powerful. But if you really want to see how beautiful the world is, if you really want to see how amazing structures can exist in human society, it’s like, look here instead. And so I think so. And we’re seeing it, it’s really weird, this gamer game thing. It’s really weird to see what’s happening. It’s as if gaming was the last hiding place for men. There’s nothing left in society except for when they’re… because they’re not allowed to express their aggressive behavior, not allowed to be aggressive in any way, they’re no warriors, we don’t celebrate warriors, we don’t celebrate honor and courage and all those things. But only in video games do we still do. And so it’s like this last refuge, and then all of a sudden this weird gamer game thing, there’s this whole group of gamers that all of a sudden became social commentators. And are on YouTube, you know, they’re not even talking about gaming anymore. They’re basically engaging the world and talking about politics and a little group of those. And a part of those they discovered Jordan and now they’re saying, oh, there’s also this spiritual aspect to this, it’s not just politics, it’s like they’re moving and moving. And so, yeah, it’s weird. I wouldn’t have predicted it, but I can see it happening, that’s for sure. Oh, that’s good, that’s good. Believe it or not. So the next question is for Dr. Patrick, the follow-up for Dr. Bisson and Petrie. How would a scientist talk about breaks erupting into a person’s life? That’s for Dr. Patrick. Thank you. The same as anyone else, except that the areas where it pops up are getting the difference. And there’s plenty of examples within the scientific history. We don’t know, you see. I mentioned this morning very briefly that both Einstein and Kepler and the guy in this city who picked up the double reframe, they all insisted, they didn’t look that out, they saw it. The gift is there. In my own way, I can point to that sort of thing as well. Science is not this cold, predictive thing that it’s presented to be. There’s a huge amount of intuition involved in it. At any given time, there are hundreds of thousands of experiments you could do. The art form of science is to do the right experiment at the right time. I say to Christians, you’ve got to start on that one, pray about what you do next. That’s worth praying about. And it also changes the way that you look at things, Grace, because I might see me as one paper that, I mean, I’m 20 years out from publishing, I get emails every week about a book I did 20 years ago. That’s very, very rare in science. And one of them ought to have my mother’s name on it. It saved a lot of lives over the years. And I don’t understand it to this day. I went to Jamaica to try and understand Mother Earth’s children, and I’ve been fortunate to invent a new technique so that I can get at cells and look at the behavior of one of the major transport systems as they come. Because the problem with a malnourished child is not that it’s sick, but that it is already dead. All that standards, that child would have died months ago, but it’s not. It’s alive. So the major question to begin with was, how is that done? And when you looked at the amount, they’re about 30% more efficient than any other child. But they purchased that efficiency at a price. And there are only really, if you think of yourself as a bloated cell, there are really only two systems that can give that amount of energy savings. One is protein synthesis, and the other is membrane transport. And I happened to be fortunate to be the only one to get at membrane transport at that point. Very much a surrogate, but nevertheless a real one. So I had a very simple hypothesis that it would be turned down. And after about a year or so, I managed to get enough studies done that it was most looking at the data. And sure enough, I was right. But when I looked at the data, and I still plotted dates by hand, people lose a lot by sticking the data in your computer and having it print out. Things happen in your head when you do it by hand, so when you’re doing something new, it’s good to do it by hand. And there were about five outlines. Now there were well over five standard deviations from the others. And the standard scientific procedure is just to dump them, something went wrong, don’t know where it is, don’t know where anyway. But my mother imprinted on my backside when I was quite small, quite a hard addiction to truth telling. And I didn’t know any reason why I should have got a different result. So at least I had to look at them. Now by this time we got to a stage where we were saving almost every child that we got through the first 12 hours. But there were a little group of about five percent that died late when we tried to feed them, and we had no idea why. They died very quickly and we didn’t pay any attention. A long time ago when I went and got out the notes of these outlines, they were the children who died late. And to cut a long story short, that led to an intuition about how you might treat that and then it worked. I would never, most people would never have looked at that data. I only looked at it because of all that history behind it. And that’s the way it works. Things go on for years and years and years and then somebody realizes, we first had microscopic looks at bacteria in the late 1600s, early 1700s. And yet we didn’t get to microbes in medicine until 1860. Why didn’t we spend 150 years not doing anything about it? Because we were locked in a mindset that medicine was about letting blood out and making you puke. And doctors made money, so why would they challenge it? That’s the way it is. The world doesn’t work in this cold, predictive way. There’s all sorts of things going on that you need to be willing to be humble about. And you learn that particularly after. Dr. Bisson, I’d like to follow up to that question about grace for you. Is grace something like the right brain being granted reentry after a prolonged exile? Oh yeah, probably. It’s one way to look at it. Grace is the way in which heaven and earth come together. And that’s through the divine spirit of God. And the divine spirit of God dwells within the human person. And it’s like ripples that we have no idea how the presence of the divine within our being is affecting other people. We do know that the presence of the divine is transforming us into virtues. We can look at that and reflect on that. We can look at other people and we can see that they’re moving towards virtues. And then we have to say that, well, where did these virtues come from? Well, the person was working very hard on themselves. But there’s another level of it, and that is that we have an infinite effect upon other people. And the presence of the divine has enormous effect for the good. The opposite is true also. And I don’t think we have really any idea just how much of an effect that presence of the divine has within us. I know that it was explained to me by one priest that said that, you know, we know that we, in the Catholic faith, we are a combination of body and spirit. And they’re just so united. They only split at the time of death. And then we believe, of course, that this spirit then lives on. But they’re not split. So we have an enormous effect on each other’s spirit. And that’s what we can’t really measure. But we do have an enormous effect upon each other’s spirit that we can. And we don’t really perceive. But when you’re in the presence of someone who is really good, really holy, who has the presence of the divine spirit within them and really manifesting itself interiorly, you don’t know that. But you feel peaceful. You feel good in the presence. You feel safe. You feel good. And we perceive that. And the opposite is true too. When we’re in the presence of somebody who is really very angry and hostile, we feel that too. We know that we’re having an effect upon each other. And we don’t really even know how to describe it. I mean, some of the modern psychiatrists are talking about this reverberative energy that’s going back and forth between people because they know there’s something that’s going on. We don’t really know how to put it into words. But I would say that when the human person is really infused with the presence of the holy spirit of God, that’s grace. And then that grace goes forth through that person to other people. So I’m going to try to make an answer to that. It’s very concrete, but none of that serves the purpose. So as we discussed just a bit ago, there’s a very large number of ways of looking at a set of phenomena. And so then the question is, well, what determines what you see? And the answer is what you aim at. And this isn’t a metaphor. This is exactly how perception works. So for example, if I look at that door, now my eyes are looking back and forth very rapidly, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see at all. And most of what I see is very low resolution. So for example, if I’m looking at the door, I can only see you people over there as vague shapes unless you move, and then I can see a little bit more clearly. And you people right in the way of me, I can more or less see your faces, including your noses, but you people over here, I can’t get your facial features at all. And so my aim determines the manner in which the world manifests itself to me. And there’s almost nothing that you can understand that’s more important than that. And so now then you’ve got to think about that, because then you’ve got to think about what are you aiming at exactly. Now imagine you’re a scientist and you’re looking at a set of data, and the data can be handled in very many ways. Like statistics isn’t this process whereby you’re feeding a bunch of numbers and you get out the answer. Like that’s not how statistics works. It’s more like a set of surgical tools where you’re cutting apart something and say they’re complex, and if you’re very fortunate you might find something that’s… So statistical analysis is actually dependent on a very large number of ethical decisions, like maybe a thousand ethical decisions or ten thousand ethical decisions. And how you make those decisions determines no small part what answer is going to reveal itself. So for example, let’s say you’re reading career oriented and you have an experiment that you really want to publish because it’ll move your career ahead. And the data’s a bit sketchy and you have to make some decisions about outliers. That might be an example. About which statistical technique you’re going to use or which part of the story about the experiment you’re going to tell because you’re not going to tell the whole story because you can’t write a thousand pages. You have to condensate. So it’s kind of a post-hoc story. And you try to make that represent the truth, but then the question is what’s the truth? Now, if you’re the sort of scientist, say, that has decided that the truth is going to rule above all, including your career’s age, then you’re going to come up with both different experiments and interpretations of someone who’s like 30% at the mixture of insane careerists and 20% narcissists and maybe 10% truth seeker. And everything is like that. So then imagine you live inside a hierarchy of values that determine your age and you do. That’s how it works. Because if you stop a kid in university and say, well, why are you in this class? Well, they’ll say, well, I need, you know, they might say I’m interested in it, but they might say, well, I need this class to, I need to, why are you studying? Well, I need to get a good grade. Why do you need a good grade? Well, because if I don’t get a good grade, then I won’t get my degree anymore. Why do you want your degree? Well, I want my degree because I need to have a job. Then you ask them why you have a job and then they have some rationale about the job. And you ask them why they believe in that rationale. Like, about four questions in, they’re annoyed at you because they’re out of answers. But the thing is, is that every single thing you do is nested within a hierarchy of morality. And at the very extremes of that hierarchy, so the highest ends, there’s this decision between good and evil, essentially. It’s part and parcel of every decision you make because the fundamental question to some degree is something like, are you aiming at making the world a better place or are you aiming at making the world a worse place? Every decision you take is a choice between good and evil in that sense. And so part of the way that you might say that God’s grace operates, if you want to be mechanistic about it, is that if you’re oriented towards the highest good, then the things that come to you as your perceptions orient themselves around your aim are going to serve that purpose. And that’s actually, there’s not a single element of that that’s metaphorical. That’s actually how your perceptions work. And then your motivations and your emotions line up around that and so do your actions. And so it is the case that the manner in which the world presents itself to you depends on your ethical aim. That’s how it works. And so if you’re really trying to make the world a better place, let’s say, and the more deeply that’s the case, then the more likely it is that the manner in which you might traverse that pathway is going to reveal itself out of the infinite number of possibilities that are arrayed in front of you. So it’s very, very, we actually really understand how this works. It’s not metaphorical. It’s not even, in some sense, it’s not even spiritual. It’s just actually real. And maybe that’s the best of all possible worlds when that’s the case. So here’s an example, and I don’t think you’ll like this question. I’d say you’re having a dispute with your wife. What do you want out of that dispute? Do you want to win? Well then she loses. Well then you have a loser on your hands. Maybe you want to be married to the loser. Maybe that’s part of what you’re aiming at, because then you get to be the good person in the relationship. And she gets to be the bad person. Well then you can have all the joys of martyrdom. That’s pretty entertaining. And you’ve got moral virtue at the fingertips because if you defeat her a hundred times in a row, then she’s going to be bitterly hating you and really playing the martyr and being the superior person. And all of that’s going on when you have the discussion. And maybe what you want instead is peace. You actually want peace and tranquility. So you think, well I’m going to listen because maybe I’m even going to help her make her argument against me just on the off chance that she might be right. Because actually what I want is peace. And that determines the course of the dispute. And it determines whether it’s a battle for victory or a battle for the solution of the problem so that you both move ahead in union, which is what you’re supposed to do. And that’s another example of how your ethical aim determines the manner in which the world reveals itself and unfolds itself. None of this is metaphor. None of this is absolutely concrete reality. It’s how it works. It’s how you perceive. And so there, the grace of God is manifest when you aim at the highest possible good. It’s like aiming at the cross on the church that Jonathan talked about today. You have to be oriented all the time to create the sort of world that you would want to bring into being. You have to decide what sort of world that would be. And then everything falls into alignment behind that, either for good or for evil. Can I make a follow up comment? I should have done this before. Grace in a slightly different way. Some years ago I had a call from a professor in Minnesota and he said, I want you to write down your faith story, to which I replied, no, I don’t do that. And he said, well, I said, I’m not interested in a sentimental project. And then he made me explain, he said, look, you, how soon do you teach? And I said, never before fourth year. Why would I? He said, you ought to. I did. But the point of the matter is for you who send your children, your grandchildren to university, especially in a research university, they’re not going to meet a tenured professor in the first two or three years in most cases. That we talk by people much lower down the order. And he said, that means they won’t hear a positive comment about Christianity from their teacher, from the elector, because if you declare yourself to be a Christian in a Western university, you lower your chances of getting tenure dramatically. So he said, I’m trying to find tenured professors who’ve done something people know about and getting them to write their faith stories down. And in the end I did. And he published a book with 22 professors in it. It’s called Professors Who Believe. I think it’s still in print, published by IVP. I was worried about it, but when I got it I couldn’t put it down because he really was great. I think my favorite one, I forgot his name at the moment, he was a biophysicist at Princeton, a geophysicist at Princeton. He was a complete naturalist. He worked hard at his work and he was a scientist the first, second, third and fourth. He used to go in on Sunday morning, because that was the only time when there were graduate students around to break his work. But then he got the Augustine syndrome. You all know the end of the first paragraph of the Confessions. Our hearts are restless until they find their rescue. But he had the restless heart, he couldn’t settle down. So he started going to Princeton Chapel where there are a few vestiges of literature remaining, but enough for a smart man to realize that there’s something in here that I don’t know about and perhaps I should. And after a few weeks a woman was preaching on Sunday morning and she said, you guys out there in the congregation, you only respect the opinion of other people with respect to your work, probably only ten people in the world you care about. But when it comes to Christianity your knowledge is roughly at kindergarten level. And he was smart enough to say, my goodness, she’s right, I’ve never even read the Bible. And he says, so I start to read it and he doesn’t tell you anymore because he doesn’t know what happened to him in a way that he can describe. And yet his life is picked up and turned around and faced in the opposite direction. Grace like that happens and I love it. It’s the one thing that really gets to me in this world as I travel. I had a very good friend who died two or three years back who said to me, I had meningitis so that he could become a Christian. Amazing, at the beginning of my PhD. I don’t know, nine months into it I didn’t have a single result, nothing was working. I knew what I wanted to do but it wasn’t working. And then I got meningitis. I’d done infectious diseases in the two previous years and never got sick. And then I was with a fairly serious disease which took me off work for three months. David moved in next door to us in our little apartment in London. And he, like me, came from a blue collar background. And his dad had told him, David get out and earn some brass at age 15. But his teacher said, David you’re smart, go to night school. He got an external degree in mathematics in no time, less than three years from London University. He was working for Rolls, an apprentice electrician, but they’re a good company, they realized this wasn’t an apprentice electrician. So they promoted it. Shortly he was running the E-Plux analysis division for Rolls Royce in their nuclear engines division with just an undergraduate degree. And of course Americans would come and visit and they’d say this is wonderful work. Dr. Dawson and he would say Mr. Dawson. Rolls was embarrassed and said please get a PhD, we’ll pay for it. He said, what the hell do I want a PhD for? I have to teach those guys what to do. And he wouldn’t do it. Eventually he persuaded him to do a one year master’s course at Greenwich Naval College in nuclear engineering. So he agreed to do that and have a year in London. And he moved in next door to us. What I didn’t know was that this man, for whom everything that he touched was turning to gold, was so sad inside, there was no meaning in his life. He could do anything. He built his own house, he never bought a new car, he got a couple of scrap bonds and built a new one out of that. The course was boring him so he came home early and we started playing chess since we got up. And you know you get headaches after meningitis one afternoon. I had to leave the chess. I said, I’ve got to go in the high-down. He said fine. The next day when he came back from British Naval College he said, have you got any more books like that? I said, oh that’s where he went. And I don’t know anybody else in the world who was converted in two days by reading a commentary on the book of Haber-Cuck. But he didn’t. Because it spoke to his soul when he came back from the school. He said, have you got any more? I said, loses me of Christianity on Sunday. He said, can I come to church with you? And his life, his perception of the world was totally transformed. He went back to Derby, to his village. He said, I’ve been there a dozen years. He never noticed that the kids didn’t have a youth group so he started one. And he started looking at his research group and he said, I realised they’ve got problems I could help with. And I’d never done anything about it. So he started doing it before long. He was personnel director for the whole of Rolls Royce. That’s great. That’s how it works. So if you’re sending a grandchild or a son or daughter to university, think about getting that book and putting it on the shelf. Because there’s some 22 professors in there covering a pretty good range. I’ll tell you one you might know, Tim Nockham, Lawson College. They’ve done wonderful stuff. The place is real. We need to bear witness. So for Jonathan, just a moment ago in his answer, Dr. Peterson used the analogy of the pathway. And that was an analogy you also used this morning when you opened your lecture with him. So the question for you is about the other analogy that you used and that was of a pillar or a point of reference to orient yourself from and to find a sense of direction. You also mentioned how this pillar is made from people binding together and having a sense of community. How could one apply this idea to the lifestyles of great thinkers and artists like Rilke and Nietzsche who spent most of their time in solitude and who even argue that being in solitude is a key factor in making art? Well, the thing about that image of the pillar is that it’s the shape of everything. That’s kind of how you have to see it. It’s the shape of the cosmos. It’s the shape of the community. It’s the shape of the family. It’s the shape of a person. And so a person has a center, has a heart. I’m going to really use orthodox mystical language here. So a person has a heart and the idea in traditional mysticism is to gather your thoughts and to gather yourself and enter into your heart. And when you enter into your heart, your heart is like the cup on the altar. It’s the same thing. It’s there. Your heart is the same thing as the cup on the altar. And once you gather yourself within yourself into your heart, then you become a locus of divinity as much as it’s possible for a human being to be united to the divine. So that’s why Christianity also has a monastic tradition because the same reality that, let’s say, a normal Catholic or a normal orthodox or a normal Christian community would encounter, the Angerite will go through that very, you know, in his cave on his own. It is a possibility. But the idea is that even if someone is alone and is doing that as, I mean, I don’t know, I’m not, by the way, this is not experience. This is all theory. I haven’t done this. But if you read the fathers and if you read the Vila Cali and if you read the mystical teachings, what they tell you is that once you enter into the heart, you find the whole universe is there and the whole church is there as well. And so even though that monk is alone in their cave and is, you know, spending their whole day in meditation and prayer, once they enter into that divine spark that is in the center of themselves, they find that they’re in communion with the entire universe and they’re in communion with the entire church at the same time. And so even for, let’s say, the monastic approach of solitude, the trip is the same as the community who moves in towards communion. So yeah, I don’t know about Rikkei and Ichi, but that’s at least the monastic tradition. I wanted to make a comment on the pathway. I’m kind of tired today so I might get this both wrong, but Christ said that he was the way and the path and the major thing. Yes, okay, the way is the part that I’m particularly, and no one comes to the quadrant except for one being, right? So when I use this idea of the path, you know, people are path-taking creatures, that’s what we like, the direction of creatures. And so the question is, like, if you’re walking out of the door, well, why are you walking out of the door? And re-emphasizing this idea of this nested sequence of hierarchical values, like, are you going, what’s your purpose of going out through the door? What are you going to do out there? And that purpose can be, like, if the purpose is the highest of purposes, then that purpose imbues everything you do with divine significance. That’s actually correct. I try not to be metaphysical about things if I can possibly avoid it because it adds a level of complexity that isn’t strictly necessary. Well, I know, I know, but I’m not denying that at all, but it helps to make things simple as well. It is the case that you have a reason for walking out the door. The question is, what’s the reason? And you might say, well, it’s a general reason, some positive or negative. Well, that’s true because you’re not this united thing that Jonathan was talking about, right? I mean, Carl Jung certainly believed that the united human psyche was roughly equivalent to the self and that Christ was, he called the image of Christ, that image of the self, the united self. So the idea that the integrated human being is, in some sense, in relationship with the ideal human being is a profound psychological idea. Like when you’re walking out the door, the question is what path are you on? And that is actually the question. It’s like you have fixed motives, let’s say. Some of you is dark and some of you is light. Well, get rid of the darkness. And then when you walk out the door, you’re on the path of light. And then the question is, well, what will happen to you if you’re on the path of light? And the answer to that is quite straightforward. And that is the best that can happen to you, whatever that is. It might not be easy. It isn’t going to be easy. Easy and best aren’t the same thing somehow. You don’t want your child’s life to be so easy that they just lay on the couch and have a machine draw grapes into their mouth every 30 seconds, right? That isn’t what you want. You want something like optimal challenge or heroic struggle or worthwhile engagement or something like that. It’s not just the absence of effort and like a kind of neutral being. It’s a call to adventure and to great things. And so you can have it so that everything that you do partakes in that to the degree that you’re willing to work to make that possible. And then everything that you do is imbued with this sense of meaning because it’s related intelligently to the highest of goals. You know, and I always use the often in this sort of discussion, use the example of Gepetto in the Pinocchio movie. You know, when he makes Pinocchio, who’s just a puppet whose strings are manipulated by forces beyond his control, like that’s a person, that’s a human being. That’s what we’re like. And Gepetto, who’s a good father, prays. He looks, he lifts his eyes up above the horizon to the highest point that you can see them. That’s the star that glimmers in the darkness, right? If you watch the movie carefully, you also see that that’s the star that signifies Pinocchio’s birth. And like the meaning of that should be relatively obvious, you know? And I mean, it’s an activity seen as clear as can possibly be portrayed. And Gepetto lifts his eyes up above the daily concerns and leans at the highest good that he can conceive and then wishes for that for his puppet. And that’s what starts the transformative process that turns the puppet into a real human being. Really, that’s what you’re trying to do in your life and with the people that you love. It’s like, okay, well, sit and meditate and think, okay, well, what’s the highest possible good that I can aim at? It’s like, well, I’d like my life to be in order and then I’d like it to be in order so that everyone else’s life is in order. Maybe even the people that I consider enemies, maybe even their life could be in order if I live my life properly. And you don’t know that that’s not possible. Maybe you’re terrified that it is possible. I think that’s the most fundamental terror, that that might be possible. And then maybe you’re ashamed because you’re not living up to that. And I would certainly say that was the case. So the pathway idea is an extraordinarily profound idea. And it’s also one of the things that statement of Christ in the New Testament is one of those things that just strikes you because you think, well, what sort of creature would say something like that? It’s such a, you’re either completely out of your mind to say something like this. You can’t even explain it that way. And people try. They talk about messianic delusion or that sort of thing. But it’s a statement that has such an unbelievably deep meaning that you can hardly imagine that anyone could say it. And that’s, well, you can take that as evidence for whatever you think it might be evidence for. But it is really an unbelievably deep truth. And it’s something. And one more thing about that. You see, you might say, well, what is that ideal path? And how is that symbolized by the ideal of the crucifixion? See, what Christ did in part is to accept the terrible burden of being voluntarily. And that’s a really hard thing to do because the burden of being is terrible. Tragedy and evil. Those are terrible things. And you can decide that you’re going to be responsible for that. That’s the highest of all possible moral goods is to take one responsibility for suffering and evil. And I don’t see how that’s deniable. I mean, I can’t see how you can think of something that would be better than that. So by definition, nothing can be better than taking responsibility for that because what you’re trying to do is ameliorate suffering and reduce evil. Well, how is that not sort of self-evident? And then that can imbue everything you do, even this simple job of taking a pathway. And you’re always on a pathway. So decide where you’re headed. And then your life has a sort of meaning that justifies it in some sense. And that way you can have your cake and eat it too. So that’s a pretty good deal if you can pull it off. So Dr. Peterson, you just went into depth into the idea of the pathway, an analogy used by both you and Mr. Peugeot. But the other analogy, another image that has been used, was that of a pillar in his lecture today. And that was an image that he just described as, among other things, the center of the family. And the family is something that you’ve also provided commentary on over the years. So the next question is from an audience member who says to Dr. Peterson, I have heard you speak on the pathological family. And having the misfortune of being born into such a structure, my question is, how does the innocent child within me forgive my family without excusing their evil and at the same time avoid the seductive temptation of the power that comes with the innocent victim card that many play? I think more importantly in some sense that forgiveness is a very complicated thing. You just don’t distribute that randomly. There are preconditions that are, as far as I can tell, that have to be in place before you can forgive someone. If someone has done something terrible to you, you don’t want to carry that as a burden anymore than is necessary because it just propagates in your own life. So there’s a psychological necessity to forgive and that you need to move beyond that. But for someone to be forgiven, I believe they have to recognize what it is that they’ve done and then they have to repent, which is to say that they know it’s wrong and that they have to change their actions so that they won’t do it again because otherwise there isn’t much difference from forgiveness, between forgiveness and ignoring something terrible that’s continuing. But you do have to lighten your own soul to some degree. I would say that your goal is to do what you can to sew together the tattered fabric of being that you’ve inherited so that you don’t propagate that forward in your own family. And that is definitely something people are afraid of. So here’s an interesting statistic. So many people who abused their children were abused as children. So you might think, well, there’s a causal pathway. If you’re abused as a child, then you abuse your children. But that’s actually not how the statistic works because if you take the total population of people who were abused as children, most of them do not abuse their children. So you know what I mean? You’re looking at it from two different perspectives. If you take only the abusive population, then you’re tracing back the child with abuse. If you take the entire population who were abused, most of them dampen that down. You can think about that mathematically very easily because if it was any other way, let’s say a person has four children and abuses them all, and then all four of those children have four children and abuse them all, and then in ten generations everybody’s beat to death all the time. And that is what happens. What happens is that it tends to dampen them across time, which is nothing short of a miracle. I’ve seen lots of people in my clinical practice who have pretty miserable childhoods, you know, where they were punished for the virtues, which is really the way to make someone miserable. You don’t punish someone for doing something wrong. That’s amateur stuff. You punish them for doing something right. You really want to hurt them. But they grew up and they had children and they didn’t carry that forward. They decided, they learned from what had happened to them not to do it, instead of learning to do it. So, did I answer the question? That’s a good question. I think what you do is you decide what you want. That’s the other thing, is that you do a decent analysis of what’s happened to you and the costs, and maybe you try to figure out what the, and to see the elements are so that you can see it from your parent’s perspective to the degree that that’s possible, and then you relate it to some way, in some way, and someone to talk to that’s rather wise can help you with this, you relate it to the suffering and the evil in the world at large, and try not to take it as personally as you might, and then you do what you can to move forward without carrying it in any more burdensome way than you absolutely have to, you know, and swear in some sense that you won’t do the same thing. That’s about the best you can do with the situation. I’d like to add one thing to that. We say the Lord’s Prayer frequently, but we ought to take a little bit more notice of the verse that follows the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on Mount, which is, if you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven. The basic sort, I think, is that we are all fallen creatures, and to that degree we are all capable of any evil that we can imagine. It’s only by the grace of God that that is not the case. And so what Christ is doing in Sermon on the Mount, as I understand it, is he’s asking you to develop a way of living day by day, thinking your way through the sequence, which makes you not just a mere believer, but a disciple, and it’s incredibly wise. He says, first of all, the first thing you have to do is you’ve got to practice seeing the truth about your own soul, blessed are the poor in spirit, because if you get down on your knees and say to God, show me what I look like to you, I guarantee it will never be good news at first sight. We are all in trouble. But Jesus says the moment you become that honest, you are on the way to the Kingdom. He says you’ve got it, you don’t know it yet, but he knows it because he is the truth. So if you pursue truth, you get to him. But that isn’t enough. He says now you must repent, lest there are those that mourn, because they are the ones who are comforted. Lewis puts it in the screw tape, not in mere Christianity like this, he says, God does not demand repentance of you. Repentance is simply a description of what happens when you come to God. Coming to God is repentance, because he’s helping you. And that’s when you receive comfort. What that does is it changes your approach to life at an higher level, which is blessed are the meek. The word that’s translated meek is used to describe a horse that’s been broken in and trained to ride into battle. You are meek when you wake up in the morning and you realize you are forgiven for no reason except grace, and the person who gave that grace is going to ride you into battle today, if you’ll let me. Isn’t that a wonderful metaphor? And it’s so releasing, isn’t it? The horse doesn’t have to have any meek hands for the day, just a bay. This can take anything nasty that’s been done to you. You put it through this process and you come out the other end, you are now really caring about the person who did harm. It’s an astonishing thing, because the next thing that happens, of course, because it’s working you start hungry and thirsty for righteousness, which Jordanians are doing very well. I mean, he can hardly open his mouth without hungry and thirsty for righteousness. The promise is he’s going to be satisfied. That’s what Jesus says in this. That makes you, in turn, the one that we probably need in our society as much as any particularly in church, he said, now, blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. This is, if you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven. If you can’t be merciful to somebody else, it’s because you haven’t seen what you are really capable of. So if you’re in trouble with not being able to forgive, you’ve got to go back to the beginning. That’s the way it works, to literally loop. And I was going to show you what’s this hanging on to this doing to my soul. Show me how I can release myself, be released from this. And that will happen. Then you move on to the next one, which is, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, which is the kicker God pretty beautifully, is to will one thing. A life that is only concerned with thy will be done. It’s very hard to injure you. People can’t hurt you. It’s amazing. Because the moment they try, that secret kicks in and you start praying for them. I’ve seen it happen because the university is a very nasty place. And that’s my response. I’m praying silently, of course, but I watch people and wonder what’s happening to them. I know what’s happening. And then you go on to the next one, which is you become a peacemaker. Because academic snips go on for years. And sometimes it gets so bad, they want somebody to calm it down for a bit. So it has to be somebody who’s transparent and both sides trust. And then they both give God. Nothing serious in our world, really. But that’s how it works. So, whoever asked that question, here’s an experiment for you to do. Read the Seminole on the Mount every day for the next month. And work your way through that sequence every day. I think you’ll be a different person at the end of the month. I have one more comment about that, I guess. I was thinking, there’s images from my mind here during this discussion. I remember the trick that my wife and I learned when we were trying to figure out how to settle disputes. If you’re not having a dispute with the person you’re living with, you’re not living with them. Because you’re different people and you face very complex situations. So there has to be disputes because if there isn’t, you’re not communicating. Because life is very hard and you’re not the same. And so then the question is, what do you do about a dispute? Well, you’re tempted to win, as I said earlier, especially if you get angry. Because anger wants to defeat, especially if it’s not integrated property. One of the things we learned to do was to, if we grabbed loggerheads and we couldn’t figure out how to advance, separate, go into different rooms. And then the rule was you had to go in there and, I suppose it was a form of meditation. You had to sit there until you thought of something stupid you did within the last six months or so. It increased the probability that this idiotic fight would occur. And it’s really annoying. I think it’s a form of prayer. It’s really annoying because you’re just not done the right thing. You make mistakes all the time. And so if you sit down and you think, okay, how am I stupid? It’s like, believe me, you’re going to figure out a whole bunch of ways that you’re stupid. And one of them will rise up above the rest. It’ll say, well, you know, here’s something wrong with you that’s making this more probable. And then you have to go tell the other person what that is and they have to do the same thing. And you know, you’re both humbled by that, I would say. Because you’re not arrogant enough to think you deserve to win anymore. You think, yeah, well, I’m an idiot. And the other person says, well, hey, I’m also an idiot. And you think, well, the hostility and the desire for victory goes up and then you can talk again. So with regards to being misused, you know, one of the ways also to get out of that in some sense, I’m not saying, let’s say, not if it’s ongoing because that’s a different story, if it’s in the past. I mean, it is really useful. Solzhenitsyn, when he was in the prison camps in Russia, he was having a pretty damn rough time. There’s no doubt about that. And I mean, he was there basically because of Stalin and Hitler, roughly speaking. And so he had every reason not to, you know, to feel that he was victimized. And in some sense he was. But what he learned in the prison camp was that he had participated in the process that had imprisoned him. He was a staunch communist at one point in his life and he was an arrogant intellectual. And he learned often from watching people who had very deep religious convictions, as it turned out, which he didn’t have at that time, that it was possible to act honorably even under very difficult conditions and that he hadn’t done that in many places and times in his life. And so he said he went over his life to find two common, tried to figure out everything that he had done wrong by his own admission, you know, not according to some other person’s moral standards, but when he could remember through his life when he decided to do something he knew to be wrong. And then he tried to do everything he could to fix that in the moment, whatever that was. He sort of asked himself in some sense, if he asked his higher self, I don’t care how you think of it precisely, but then he tried to do everything he could to rectify that in the present. And the consequence of that was the writing of the Uwe Berg-Pelagog, which basically took an axe to the trunk of the Soviet system, so it was a pretty big deal that he managed this. But the thing is that you can’t really concentrate too much on the evil that other people do to you, because there isn’t much that you can do about that in some sense. Like, you’re not in control of it, but what you are in control of, if you want to be, is the evil that you do to others and to yourself. And then you might say, well, why don’t you just concentrate on that? Because you could actually do something about that, and then what you find is that the more you concentrate on that, the stronger you get. Maybe if you get strong enough, then the things that happen to you that weren’t so good, you understand them much better, you forgive them more, and they run off your back like water off a duck’s back, and away you go. And the alternative is misery and resentment and hostility and the desire for revenge and all of that, and that’s just a kind of hell, unless that’s what you want. Well, you know, people want that, that’s the thing. And it’s something we can’t forget, is that people do want that, because they’re angry, they’re very angry, they’re angry at me, and they’re willing to walk down a destructive pathway, that’s for sure. But if you can’t see that about yourself, then you’re not paying attention. So our last question dealt with the topic of the family, and in Dr. Pearson’s final answer, he discussed an example of something that he had learned throughout his marriage, marriage of course being the sacramental basis and foundation of the family. The next question is, nowadays many people are waiting longer to get married and have kids. Do you think this is positive for women, as it allows them to develop more of a sense of self, apart from children before committing themselves to motherhood? And this is for anybody, but that’s it, it’s about women, and perhaps we’ll begin with Dr. Bisson at the end. Well, there’s lots of ways to look at that, and my current bias is that, you know, it’s not good for women. And it has to do with what is the individual woman’s goal, and I believe that most women have a very deep, deep desire that comes not from, you know, any conscious part of themselves, but very, very deep to be a mother. And so it’s really in the current culture, which I mentioned in my talk yesterday, that prior to contraception there was a very big pool of men and women, and there was one man to one woman, and you had many choices, and you were very likely to meet up with a suitable partner and have a very good marriage. What happened after contraception was that the pool of men and women, which had been one on one, one man, one woman, divided into what’s called a pleasure pool and a marriage pool. So in the pleasure pool, we all know what that is, you just are not interested in really getting married, you’re not interested in having children, you’re interested in pleasure, and how many women, how many men are in that pleasure pool? It turns out that there’s one woman to six men. In the marriage pool, those who want to get married, there are six women to one man. Now, this has created a lot of difficulty for women because as they, well, how do they meet and marry a suitable partner? It’s more and more difficult. So what we see is that there are fewer and fewer marriages, and there are more and more divorces because people are marrying people that are not suitable to them. Now, women have tried to cope with this by investing in their own capital, and by that we mean that they go to school, they become nurses, they become doctors, they become lawyers, they become, you know, they’re trying to invest in their capital to make themselves more interesting, more, and because they feel motivated to do that, and of course our culture has encouraged that immensely, which is just fine, but then they end up finishing their education and, you know, they’re 30, and it’s very difficult to find a suitable partner, a man, at that point, and then their biological clock is ticking, and are they going to be able to have the best for girls, a career, children, a marriage, and children? And I have talked with a lot of women in medical school now. When I went to medical school, it was one woman in my class besides myself. It was just, we were not, and my father had actually said to me, women should not be doctors. You should be a teacher. Prepare yourself for marriage and children. And I, my mother was not really happy as a mother, and that influences you. Well, why would I want to be a mother? My mother’s not happy being a mother. So I took this other path of, and I’ve been encouraged to do that, because if you have a brain that does well on tests, then they encourage you, especially if you’re good in science, they want women to move forward, back in the 60s. So I ended up going into my career because that was the path that, unfortunately I was able to marry and have children and do the whole thing. But I came to the point where I realized that there was a deep, deep longing inside of me to have children. And I was about 27 years old, and I was still in my training because training takes forever. So we went ahead and had children. And I tell you that I had never experienced the wonder of life until I had a baby. And it was like, this is what I was created for. And I fell in love with that baby like I had never loved any other creature in the whole world. And I thought, why didn’t I know this? Why didn’t somebody tell me? And it’s one of those things that, that if you grow up with a mother who isn’t really happy being a mother, you just kind of think, well gee, that’s kind of the way it is. But this is the most wonderful experience of my entire life. I don’t care about being a doctor anymore. I just want to stay home with this baby. And so I worked everything out because if you’re a psychiatrist, when I went into practice, you were able to set your own hours. So I was able to work for 10 hours a week. And then when they went to school, I went longer. So I was able to work it all out together. But I don’t think that women have that privilege, have that many opportunities to do that today just because the practice of medicine has become so industrialized that you can’t be in a private practice and you can’t set your own hours. You have to work for an institution that’s going to tell you the hours you’re going to work. So I really am concerned about the current situation with women. And there are many, many women in medical school. And when this is told to them that there are six women to one man in the marriage, well they go, well yeah. And you haven’t even experienced this. This is reality. But they’ve invested in their capital by making something of themselves. So I asked a young psychiatrist who was in training, a young man, and I said, well, you know, when… Oh yeah, so one thing before I get to that. So a young woman who finished her training in gerontology and has a practice and is working as a physician fell in love and she was really happy and she was telling me all about this through the email. So I saw her at a conference in September and I said, I understand you’re engaged. This is wonderful. You know, we broke up. And I said, well, what happened? And she said, well, you know, he was really a wonderful Catholic man, but he wanted me to stay home with the children. And I just couldn’t possibly stay home with the children. And I felt really sad for her because, you know, I think that it’s not… I’m not the only woman who says, wow, this is the most wonderful experience of my life when you have a baby. I think men feel the same way. But how do you tell somebody that before they have the experience? And so basically I just said, you really have to try to look at things from many, many perspectives and try to figure out what your goals are. And I just backed off because she was really adamant that she was telling the right thing, that she made the decision not to marry this wonderful man because he wanted her to stay home with the children. And of course you can see it from his perspective. I mean, children are much, much better if one or the other parent is with them. So, you know, I think that the culture has changed so much that, you know, I think it is really important for women to take a look at what the culture is dictating to them. They don’t want to, you know, maybe they don’t want to stay in the pleasure pool. They want to move into the marriage pool. And women do move into that marriage pool sooner than men. Then how many choices do you have? And of course the younger you are, the more choices you do have. So, and then if you want to have children, you’ve got to think about that in your biological plot. So does that answer your question? I’ll say something about that. I guess I’m not going to give advice to women because it’s no use giving advice to women. Period. Because they have to figure out their own pathway. But I do think that one of the things I’m not very happy about in relationship to our culture is the way that you think about children and the way they’re also represented. My experience has been that once I had kids, it’s like I would rather be with my kids than with any other people. Now, you know, you have to understand kids. If you want to go to a restaurant with your wife and you have a two-year-old, it’s like you go out for 45 minutes. That’s it. That’s about as long as a kid, even if they’re very well-behaved and managing. So you’ve got to kind of clue in and watch. But it’s wonderful to have kids because one of the things they do for you, apart from the fact that they really like you, is that, which is not a trivial thing, it’s a big deal to have someone want you around that much. They’re really funny. They’re ridiculously funny and comical and amusing. They’re always doing crazy things and so they’re very clowny. So that’s really fun. And the other thing that’s really cool about kids is that as you get older, and we know this neurologically, you stop seeing the world, and what you do is you see more and more of your memory. So if I’m walking down the street, I’m 55. I don’t look at houses. I just have an icon of a house in my mind. I’ve seen like 50,000 houses. I don’t have to look at a house, you know? And so I’m sort of walking down the street and it’s full of these icons that are drawn from my memory. And there’s a dead thing that goes along with that because you replace the rich reality of what’s in front of you with the simplified representation that’s functional. And it’s efficient and all that. It really is, but it’s not rich. But then when you have it around a kid, especially a little kid, well that just changes because you can see through the kid’s eyes and then all these things that you take for granted get revitalized. It’s like living with a little artist, you know, because artists do that for you too. They revitalize your perceptions. And I found being with little kids was just an absolute pleasure. And I mean you have to have enough sense to discipline them properly, you know? And that’s hard for more people because they’re really guilty about it. Even about the idea of discipline sounds like some sort of Nazi tiger with big stick. That isn’t the discipline that’s in that at all. It’s trying to help your children behave in a way that helps other people like them, you know, which is an act of love, that’s for sure. So I think we do a very bad job of selling children to our children because we say, well, your youth is over and now you have to take on this responsibility and all the fun has gone out of your life. And it’s like, well, you know, your life just wasn’t that fun when you were single. You don’t remember that exactly. And then what about all the joy that you have with your family? Is there something wrong with that? Is that not the central fact of life? You know, and you have to have a hell of a career before it’s better than having a family. And maybe even then it doesn’t work. You know, for me, I haven’t really, I would say, I’ve had a career that would be as good a career as you could hope for, let’s put it that way. And still, you know, coming home to my family was always a relief and something extraordinarily positive. And then as I’ve got older, now I have a grandchild, as I’ve got older, the relative importance of my family has just grown and grown. And I think that’s inevitable as you get older. And so I think we do a really bad job, especially in relationship to young women, because we teach them a pack of lies about what the world is like. And we don’t inform, for example, about the phenomenon that you just described, which is, you know, someone else’s baby, that’s a baby of your baby. That’s like a whole new human being. That’s like part of your family. It’s this extension of this sort of magical relationship you have with hardly anyone else in the world. And all of a sudden you have another relationship like that. It’s like this is really like the image of Mary and the Christ child is a sacred image for a reason, right? It’s there for a reason. Societies that don’t honor that die. And we don’t honor that. And that’s a big mistake. And it’s a moral mistake. You know, exactly. It’s just a big mistake. And we need to figure out how to organize our society so that women who want to have kids can figure out how to do that without working themselves to death on a parallel career and taking care of kids. It’s really a hard thing to do. And this is one of the things that I really dislike about modern feminism is that feminists don’t ever see any work for other infants. They’re not oriented towards that. And that’s a big problem because that is what most women who have any sense want. They want other things as well. But, you know, it’s a big issue. It’s a big issue. And it would have helped if we could at least stop lying about what children are like. So that would be a good start. I didn’t think as a Protestant that I would have anything to say about this to Catholics. But apparently there’s lots to say. First thing of course is grandchildren are better than children. And you can’t get there without having children. They keep you even younger. So that’s wonderful. But one of the most joyful things in my life has been to become Catholic on this issue. Because my first two children are standard Protestants who got married and they’ve got families, but they did it. They decided that they wanted another child. And during that process I came across Janet Smith, or I presume all of you know who she is. I mean, if you’ve never listened to Contraception, why not? I mean, there must be half a million copies of that talk circulating now. It’s hilariously funny and very, very clever. And absolutely true. And I started talking about this to evangelical audiences about ten years ago. I thought that would be the end of my career in this respect, but not at all. And all places it started out of death. You remember about ten years ago there was a horrible massacre at Virginia Tech, in which a student shot about 30 other students. Well the week before that happened my wife said to me, this time of year you’re normally away every week, but next week is clear. I wonder if there’s any significance to that. The day after the shooting I got a call from Virginia Tech and a guy on the line, who I knew very well, the doctor there said, we’re being invaded by grief counselors and they’re not up to this. They’re not saying anything useful. You’ve been in all sorts of tragedies. Are you free? And I said I am. He said, will you get up and explain? And I did. So I went down there and I gave a talk every evening and I was talking to people most of the time. But one thing happened there that I don’t actually clearly remember. I know I did some talks with medical students. But about three years later I was asked to go again and it was the same doctor. He said, I have a special group of medical students who meet with them in my house every week and they want you to come. I said, what’s special about them? He said, you come and you’ll see. Well, I got there. I’ve never met a group of students quite like this. When I got to the house there were six couples, I think it was, seven. I think there were six babies there and they held all baby students. And they held me responsible, philosophically of course, for all babies. Because I said to them, look, medicine is so uncivilized that you won’t have a baby until you’re semi-fertile. And by the time your son is old enough to want to go canoeing with you, you’ll be on an old age pension and having your joints replaced. It’s all wrong. When you meet your spouse, marry and have children, it’ll put medicine into perspective. Medicine is not a difficult subject, it’s just a long one. And they bring it into perspective. When you come home from a bad day, the first time somebody dies because of your incompetence, that’s a very bad day but it wasn’t your fault. If you come home with a two-year-old jumps from six foot above your head and says, daddy, catch! I mean, that day’s gone as if you’re in a new world. We’re meant to be like that. It’s absolutely true. And so nowadays, I can sit in the audience, I’m doing a dinner talk and there’s a couple with a young baby for a medical group. I know they’re going to come and say thank you because of this. It happens at least every other month. We need to get back to recognizing there aren’t any joys quite like a family. We need more of it, not matters. We had our 50th wedding anniversary last year and I looked at the photos and realized over 50 people there, 21 children and not a single divorce. That’s true. So, in the answers to that question that we just heard, Dr. Bisson and Petrie, you mentioned that your father encouraged you to become a teacher rather than a doctor. Dr. Peterson, you talked about the importance of how society views children. And Dr. Patrick, you also mentioned the importance of family life and university life in Virginia Tech. So, since education has been something we’ve been dancing around for the last several answers, let’s confront it with this last question before our final one. And this is for the two professors. To what extent is the educational system, kindergarten for graduate school, the cause of society’s problems? You want to start? I mean, it’s what I do now. I’m hugely responsible. That’s why I’m still working and teaching every week at my age. 25 years ago, the six of us at Ottawa U had been watching students arrive at University with a faith and do part with that one. That faith was taken away by professors who were outrageously unethical in what they did. And we didn’t know what to do about it. So, we started reading. We read everything we could find for about five years, starting with the Greeks and ending with ours and Magna Tau. It was the best seminar I ever went to. No advertising. We counted, I think it was 19 languages around the table one day, one time. And there would be about 20 people there every week. We were even headhunted by the Chinese government 25 years ago because they knew that corruption was a problem and not having enough children and not properly educated. The teaching ethics to 23-year-olds took a waste of time. It’s too late. Because the problem is not ignorance. It’s the problem of the will. And the will has got to be properly trained in a lot of other things. We didn’t know how to do it, but slowly it became clear to us that almost all of your children don’t know who they are. And they don’t know they’re heroes, that they should know. Now, to truncate it a lot of argument, I’m turning to my favourite way of teaching anyway, as Jesus said, a story, but a true one. In the next 90 seconds I’m going to tell you a story of a man whose name you should all know. Raise your hand, it would be interesting for me to watch when you recognise who it is. He was born in London to a very poor family. His father was a blacksmith. What education he had was in the church where he would be two or three times a week. He was smart, but by the time he was 11 or so, he was an apprentice bookbinder. Fortunately he had a smart boss who realised he was a smart boy and said you can read some of these books you know. So he started reading the books he was binding and on and on he goes up. He loved the science, so he started going to the three public lectures in the Royal Society and the Royal Institute. He took excellent notes, which he still have. By the time he was 15 or so, he knew he did not want to spend his life binding books. What he wanted to be was the lab tech who set up the experiments to go with the talks at the Royal Institute. So he bound his treasure notes beautifully and trusted them to the post and sent them to the president. Unfortunately he was a good man and he read these notes and was impressed. To cut the story short, he got the job in June Corpse and very shortly he became indispensable. The boss started taking him around to meet the great scientists of the day. So all around the world they knew that there was a very smart young man in London who had never been to high school. Eventually he became president of the Royal Institute. He turned down the Royal Society twice and said he was too busy. He was known to stop the Royal Institute’s committee meetings so that he could get to his prayer meeting and only two of you put your hand up to say you know who he is. Yes, who is it? That’s right, Michael Farah. Deeply committed Christian. We need to know these things. So when you start teaching it, how students go away, they’re proud about history. We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of compared to everybody else. We’ve got everything to be proud of and to emulate. What have these people got in common? Just to take one student, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Clark Maxwell, Eddington, every single one of them believed seriously. If you take the 17th century, the golden age of science and take the top 200 scientists, only three of them were skeptical. The rest all believed and 50% of them devoured me. There’s no war between science and faith. We’ve lost our educational process because we don’t have enough motivation. We’ve reduced it to mere information. T.S. Eliot saw it coming. He wrote in Choruses from the Rock in the 1930s. Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we’ve lost in information? I usually add my own coupling. Information is a medical student, useless. Knowledge is a resident, dangerous. What you want when you die is wisdom. That’s a guy who knows that he shouldn’t be fiddling with you too much at this stage. But we now pride ourselves in our university and having an information-rich environment. It’s wisdom-winning. Education has lost its way completely. But what we’ve been doing over the last 20 years, it works. You talk to the ones who have had the ratio hands. Those of you who see them, they’re back there. They’ll tell you what it’s like first-hand so you don’t think, I think it’s not. I’m absolutely amazed at what can be done and it’s got to be done otherwise we’ve lost. Well, I’m a practical person. I don’t teach things that I don’t think are useful. And that’s not the same as impartial facts because there’s, as the postmodernists would point out, there’s an infinite number of interpretable facts. So it’s necessary to help people figure out how to apply the facts and to what. I suppose to some degree that’s wisdom. And one thing that I’ve learned over my entire teaching career, because I’ve always been teaching that way, but especially in the last years, there’s an unbelievable hunger for that. It’s just absolutely beyond belief. And no wonder, because it doesn’t happen. When people don’t have direction, they don’t even believe that direction is possible, which is worse than not having direction, right? That’s bad enough, but then to think that direction is impossible, that’s death. And so it’s wrong. And so I don’t know why the humanities precisely have lost their way. I mean, that and Nietzsche’s ideas are half-hearted, but it is associated with the death of God, so to speak. I think that’s the correct diagnosis. I spent 30 years, I suppose, delving into deep stories, trying to reestablish something like a foundation, I suppose, for me at least, and I suppose to people who are listening to me thinking. And well, maybe the time has come for us to work towards transforming our institutions back in the direction of wisdom and characterological development. I mean, that’s education, right? Education is the development of character, and so character is what you use in life. And again, that’s not moralistic hyperbole. It’s just the barest statement of the most self-evident fact. Life is difficult, and you better be awake and attentive and tough and courageous and truthful and forthright and articulate to manage it properly, to stop it from turning into hell. And that’s the purpose of education, is to produce people who are like that. It’s a noble enterprise, and the universities have let it go in many ways, and I don’t understand why exactly. And well, hopefully something can be done about it. It would be good for us to all try to do something about it, and maybe then it’ll happen. So I think it happened to some degree at this conference. So, hooray for that. So at this conference, we’ve certainly gotten a picture of how each one of you is trying to use your skills to make the world a better place. With respect to that, in your efforts to do that, to make the world a better place, could you give us a brief snapshot of what’s going to be your next step? Well, I have to say, I’ve been taking the young hurricane whirlwind and it’s all just a ball of gray. I mean, this last year, since Jordan, I met Jordan in 2015, so before all of this kind of happened, what happened to him, and since we did this little interview, and it wasn’t even supposed to be related to what was going on with him, we did this interview online, and since then things have strangely tumbled for me. And so I am just, in one way I’m amazed and I’m excited and I’m exhausted, and I’m just like, okay, what’s the next thing, and I just keep going one step at a time. So I really have no idea where this is going in terms of my own participation in it. All I know is that I have seen and I’ve heard and I’ve read and people are sending me messages every few days, and there’s something that’s happening, and there’s people that are changing, and I can’t not do it. I mean, I can’t. I have to, or else I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life. And so, yeah, I started these YouTube videos because people kept writing me and saying they wanted to hear me talk about things, so okay, let’s do YouTube videos, and then people start asking me to come speak, and so okay, let’s go and speak. And now next week, for the first time, it’s always been in religious situations, and now for the next week for the first time it’s like a political group, like a secular political group, who’s asking me to come talk to them, and I’m like, okay, what am I going to tell them? I don’t know. I have no idea. So it’s just like a lint step at a time, but all I can say is I feel like there is something rising up, that there’s something, and young men in their 20s, 30s, up to maybe 40, like you said, there is a group of them that are waking up and starting to ask the right questions and moving in the right directions, and all I hope for is that there’s going to be a sufficient mass of those so that when things start getting really wacky, there’ll be some anchor that can hold the center and that can give us hope for something better to come out of this. So that’s all I can say. Thank you. Well, starting with the premise that, and the belief that I have that the experience of the transcendent is absolutely essential for us to be transformed into virtuous people, and that means, in my way of looking at it, an encounter with the living Lord. What I am doing is creating sacred liturgy conferences because that is where we have the opportunity given to us by the Lord himself to encounter the living Jesus, and the way that the liturgy is constructed when it’s done well, when it’s completely sung, and in the ancient Gregorian chant, when there are sacred icons present, the liturgy is really an opportunity, opens the window to God, and many, many, many people experience that and come into a real awakening into what it’s like to encounter Jesus, and from that they feel transformed in the direction of virtue. So I have these sacred liturgy conferences which are both experiential and didactic. To understand our faith, we have, and what the liturgy really is, we have experts come and speak to us on what is the sacred liturgy, what does it mean, why should it be sung, why is it the ancient chants, and why do we want to have iconography, why do we need to have sacred space and sacred architecture, why is all of that affecting us in such a way that we can actually experience Jesus and encounter him, and so we have lectures on that and then we have four absolutely beautiful liturgies, so it’s both experiential and didactic, so that’s what I’m doing. Well, so I’ve been trying to figure out for a whole year what I’m doing, but some things have become clear. As many of you know, or some of you at least, I’ve been doing a series of lectures on the psychological significance of the biblical stories, and I’m going to keep doing that until I can’t do it anymore, and by then maybe I’ll get through Exodus or something. So, and I’m learning a tremendous amount doing that, and it’s stretching me, stretching my intellectual horizons constantly, having the deadlines in place is very useful for that, and so there’s something about that that seems to be of fundamental importance, and so I’m going to do that, and then I have a book coming out in January called 12 Rules for Life, and my published it says I have to tell you that it’s available on Amazon, so I was supposed to bring out some flyers, but I forgot who it was, so I’ll likely be going around talking about that, and I might do a tour of American universities next year, I’ve been talking to some people about that, and that might be ridiculously amusing and entertaining, and I’m thinking about that, and then I’ve talked about an online university, and that’s a tougher one, that’s a majorly project, and I’m not sure I’m up to it, maybe if my health has been so unshaken in the last while, it seems to be improving, if that improves and I have the normal levels of energy that I have, then I can probably manage that, I’ve talked to lots of people in Silicon Valley already about how something like that might be structured, and I have a plan sort of laid out in my mind that I’ve talked about by the number of people, and so that would be really exciting because I think that it might be possible to give people a very high quality humanities education, and also teach them to write, and also teach them to speak online for very little money, and in a very efficient way, and so that would be, I’ve learned how powerful the online video technology is, it’s a Guttberg revolution, it’s a second Guttberg revolution, we certainly aren’t taking advantage of the technology to the degree that it will be possible, so that would be really something exciting to do, and so, and then as Jonathan pointed out, when things change around you in a tumultuous way, in a chaotic way, which is certainly in the condition of my life for the last year, I do also just sort of keep up with what happens day to day, people write me and they ask me to do this and that, and I try to figure out what I should be doing, and then I go do it, and I do pay a lot of attention to each day, and I guess it’s a way of managing this, so I’m going to continue to do that. My wife helps me, she’s here with me, Tammy, and she helps me very much with that, and so it’s useful for everyone to know that. But… I guess what I’m doing in part, and this is with regards to mostly the young men by the appearance, by all appearances, is to fight against this pervasive cynicism and nihilism that’s an anti-masculine spirit that’s invaded our culture, which I think is going to kill us. It’s a terrible thing. And one of the things that’s been very gratifying about what’s been happening recently is that wherever I go, young men in particular come up and say that, you know, their lives were a mess, and they were living a chaotic lifestyle, a desperate and useless, all of those things, and that they figured out that that’s not right, and that there was better things to do, and they’re doing it, and that’s so great to come out to places and have people come up and tell you that. It’s just like… You couldn’t ask for anything better than that. That’s just absolutely amazing. So I’ll try to make sure more of that happens, because that’s a really good thing, and you know, like I said, you can’t ask for anything better than that. So I’m trying to figure out how to do that most effectively. I guess statistically I’m the one least likely to make it through another year, but… But it’s been such a joy to stumble on a pattern of teaching which works. One of the things that I have mentioned, and it’s also present here, is that the students who come have roughly a 10% probability they’re going to find their spouse. And that is… You don’t mind if I tell the story, do you? Oh, correct. The two at the back, for instance. Led you and baby in March. I met them at opposite ends of the country. Steve was in the Fraser Valley, and I went to give a lecture in apologetics in Abbotsford. I thought there’d be 50 people there, and there were 1,500. He was in the audience, so I didn’t meet him at that point, but he was listening and decided… He was one of those young men. He wasn’t out of control, but he said, I need more. And he decided to come. The other end of the country, I was doing a session with Rabbi Zacharias in Toronto, and the other lady back there was with Rabbi Zacharias’ organizing secretary for Canada. At the end of the session, she said, oh, come and do your course. And I said, I dare you, you’re not going to leave for Abbey to come to us. But she did. And the next bit seemed more beautiful. My story might need a little bit of adjustment, but there was real love for her honour. We designed it for people coming from high school to get them into university, able to answer the questions that their wretched professors would pose. But from the beginning, we had students who were in university coming and saying, we’ve been abused. We need this course. So the oldest student to take the course so far was a 40-year-old Australian. And we had this tiny little tin-plop college with no property. It had students from Norway and Finland and Australia, West Africa, and all over this continent, from Florida to California to Vancouver Island to Newfoundland, the points in between. It’s astonishing. We’re no advertising whatsoever, and no money has been done. You couldn’t write a business plan. Every time, we didn’t want to do it. So we wrote into the initial document that when we went into the red, we closed. We thought two years, we were out of this because we were not keen. We had to be bullied. But I know what happens now, about five years in, we were going to go bankrupt. And two of the guys said, good, it’s over. We’ve done our stuff. And they left on the spot. The rest of them said, we ought to pray about it. So we thought that was reasonable. So we said our prayers. And then I think it was the next week, a guy called me and said, how’s your college going? And I said, well, pedagogically, it’s been wonderful. Financially, it’s a disaster. We’re probably going to close in June. And he said, well, would 20,000? But it would help. And he laughed, and he said, my favorite aunt has just died. And I’m her executor. And when I lost her, she said, I love this bit. There’s a young man in Ottawa that I really like what he’s trying to do. Call him and see how they’re getting on. And if he needs money, give it to him. And I now know that we’re not going to go bankrupt. I don’t even bother about fundraising. What is going to come, because what we’re doing works. And we have a network that’s going to grow. What I want to see happen, I think it can happen in every single one of us. Every single university town in the world, because you only need four basic teachers. You don’t have any costs because you can work out of a church basement and they won’t charge you too much for a decent church. And you will produce students who can handle themselves in the world and do good things. I know where 90% of them are and what they’re doing. They’re raising families. That’s tremendous. We’ve got our first professor. We’ve got about 20% of them. The students have taken the course and have a high degree. It’s incredible. It’s the rebirth of the Christian university in a very small, microcosm way. We just need to do it everywhere. I think it’s going to happen. Cape Town is where I want to go next after Blacksburg, Virginia. Virginia Tech should open in 2018. I hope Cape Town a couple of years later. Thank you all for sharing your experiences with us. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking the panel for their efforts. When you’ve now been sitting, you may now rise. Please stand. With the two long-suffering spouses, we’re definitely… Everett, please come up. Thank you. I was remiss in not recognizing them because their contributions are immense. Their sacrifices are great. Obviously, in absentia, this is happening. So we’ll step up here. Step up to the curtain and we’ll get a photo here. Yes, please. Thank you. To all who are taking a photo, I want to thank everybody for coming. The energy is just amazing. I think that Jordan was talking about this. We all talked about this, about this. There’s this moment that’s occurring that we’re seeing. I see so many young people, young students and others, that it’s fantastic to see the energy in the room and see the openness to the truth and these animating things that are so powerful. I think that one of the things we’re going to do here in a moment, just to talk about, we’re going to actually clear an attempt to make. We’re going to have divine liturgy. Now, this is something that’s… We’re visiting Catholics. We’re going to practice. We have the abbot here. We have a deacon. We’re going to turn this humble thing into, as much as we can, a sacred space. So if some can volunteer to move tables, we’ll organize it. We’re going to put chairs. We’re going to make a little mini church here. We’re going to create an altar. You’re welcome to stay. In fact, I encourage you to stay. I know we’re going to leave, but this is an opportunity to experience something. You don’t have to do anything. G.K. Shashkentz once said, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Or poorly, probably. Correct me if I’m wrong. And I can tell you, I’ve been an Eastern visiting Catholic for 24, 25 years, and I can’t even make sense of this half the time. But I’m going to attempt to do something. I’m going to read something to you from the Fast World Liturgy, and this is one of the greatest. And then John Pat’s fond of quoting people, Quainus and others. I’m going to quote one of my favorites, if not, and I’m sure that Pagel and others are familiar with it, which is St. Ephraim of Syria. Considered the greatest hymnist and poet potentially ever. And this is chanted or sung often in what’s called the Fast World Liturgy. The liturgical day, it comes from the Jews, starts at dusk on Saturday and goes through Sunday. So this is liturgically speaking, this is now Sunday, which we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, Conqueror of the Dead. You see things on icons that say, Ixos Christo Nica, Jesus Christ, Conqueror. So he says, Oh Lord and Master of my life, keep me from the spirit of indifference and discouragement, lust of power and idle chatter. Instead, grant me your servant, the spirit of wholeness of being, humble mindedness, patience and love. Oh Lord and King, grant me the grace to be aware of my sins and not to judge my brother, for you are blessed now and ever and forever. Amen. I think that everyone on the panel, regardless of where they stand in sectarian divide, would see that there’s something there for everyone, and everybody’s touched on that. So that being said, thank you all for coming. Please make sure that you get us your email. We want your feedback on how this conference went. I don’t know that we’re going to do surveys. Maybe we’ll do a survey monkey thing online. But we definitely want your feedback. We want to do more. We want to try and do some mini conferences and something bigger next year. And perhaps, I don’t know, we’ll get some of all these gentlemen here to come. Just a quick thing on this. If you’re going to stay, we do have books. Okay, we’re going to do part of the first Vesper part. Just follow along. And then part of that, there’s these things, which are the different prayers that are sung for the particular day. This is a calendar. We always celebrate different saints, different events. And then we’ll switch to Divine Liturgy. Anybody who’s a Catholic, in a good state, and you know what that means if you’re Catholic, he’s welcome to come and meet you and others. I encourage you just to experience it. It’s one thing to go and it’s something to experience. You maybe never have and may never again have an opportunity. And you don’t have to have the courage to go, screw up the courage to go into a church and encounter strangers. I think we’re all to an extent friends here. And so you’re among friends. So I encourage you to stay. And thank you. Amen. Applause Yeah. I would let them know that I’d like to start packing up now. What would you do with the table? What would I do with the table? They saw it last Friday. They did take it. But now we’re anyway. Just take the tables over to this corner. Just pick them. Don’t untrack them, please. Pick them up. Pick them up. And then we’ll sort of stack some here. Yeah, I would do a John. Honestly, this is super easy going. Are you Sean? I am Sean. I will find my. We’re not getting recorded. Oh, yeah. I’m Sean. So I’ll look in my mind and have a picture.