https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=u5N-Ij3QjZo
In the story of Abraham, which I did talk about a fair bit in my lecture series on Genesis, this is a good story to contemplate. So Abraham, he’s the classic failure-to-launch, immature adolescent adult. In this story, he’s 80, and he still lives in his father’s tent. And his father’s rich, and he has a secure life, Abraham. And he can just lay around all day and eat peeled grapes if he wants, and someone will peel them for him. And a spirit makes itself manifest to him, and I’ll try to explain what that means, that says you have to stop doing this, you have to go out into the world. And so what does that mean? It means, well, imagine that you have a comfortable life as a teenager, or as a young adult, or as a child for that matter. But you know that you’re not destined for comfort. There’s part of you that knows that, whatever that means, part of you that knows whatever that means. And what it means in part is that there’s something calling to you to move past the zone of comfort into the terrible world. And that’s, in the story of Abraham, that’s characterized as the Spirit of God. And it’s a proposition. The Spirit of God is best conceptualized as that which calls you out of comfort to the adventure of your life. And that’s an interesting idea, because you could imagine that you could accept that, and then you would move out past comfort and have the adventure of your life, or you could deny it, in which case you would forestall the adventure and you just settle for the comfort. But there’s no neutrality in that regard, right? You have to do one thing or the other, and so you either put your faith in the Spirit that calls you forward out of comfort, or you put your faith in the reverse. There’s no other options, and so you’re stuck with it, determined, you’re stuck with the acceptance of a kind of faith either way. One would be faith in comfort, the other would be faith in adventure. And the Abrahamic adventure is a very rough one, because as soon as Abraham leaves his father’s, the comfort his father has established, all hell breaks loose, right? He encounters starvation and tyranny and the conspiracy of powerful people to steal his wife, and war and death, and the necessity of sacrificing his… It’s just brutal, it’s just one bloody catastrophe after another. But it’s an adventure, and that’s a very… That’s a very interesting way of conceptualizing things as well, is that we’re not exactly built for comfort, and the Spirit that animates us isn’t one that allows us to be content with mere contentment. We actually want to contend, and that the meaning in life isn’t found in that comfort, and that’s why when people talk about the meaning of life being something like happiness, they often mean something like contentment. Like, yeah… No, not exactly. It doesn’t look like we’re hyper-motivated by the idea of being nothing but a satiated infant, right? All our needs taken care of. That’s what you want. I want all my needs to be taken care of. Really? Is that what you want? Perhaps not. Perhaps you want an adventure. And then you might say, well, how best to undertake an adventure? And the answer might be, in the spirit of voluntary and forthright confrontation with the catastrophe of life, and that there’s nothing better than that. And I also find that quite realistic in some sense, because I don’t buy the contentment argument. I think it’s contemptible in some sense to settle for that, and I don’t think we would settle for that. Anyways, in Dostoevsky’s great book, Notes from Underground, he talks about the problems with the utopian vision of universal contentment. He says, look, that’s not what people are like. We’re kind of fundamentally insane, and if you just offered people the opportunity, he says, to eat cakes and sit in pools of warm bubbling water and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, and that was the paradiso vision, let’s say. The first thing people would do would be to break that into bits, just so that something compelling and adventurous would happen. That’s what we’re like. I think that’s brilliant. It’s brilliant critique of a kind of infantilized utopian vision. That’s not what we’re made for. We’re made for an adventure, and that adventure is found in the voluntary confrontation with that which terrifies you most deeply. And that’s something, man. Maybe that’s what you’re like. And then I’ll close that by pointing out your culture, my culture, the West in general, is predicated on the idea that people have an intrinsic dignity and worth, and that’s the deepest presumption of the idea of the sovereignty of the individual, let’s say, or the dignity of the individual, the intrinsic worth of the individual. And you might say, well, what’s the basis for the presumption that that worth exists? And I think it is something like recognition of the fact that our souls are built for a noble adventure, and that’s the proper description of the core reality of human being. And it is the case that it appears that the most functional cultures in the world are predicated on that idea, and you can make the cynical case that those cultures are successful merely because they’re predatory and exploitative, but all cultures are predatory and exploitative, and very few of them are successful. So that’s worth thinking through, too. For all the faults the West might have, and it has plenty, like all cultures, it also has some real virtues, and one of the virtues seems to be something like the presumption that there’s something of intrinsic worth that characterizes each human being, and if you think about that intrinsic worth as being that part of you that might respond positively to the call to adventure and that part of you that’s brave and forthright enough to actually face the catastrophe of existence and maybe even hell itself, then think, well, something like that maybe is worthy of respect, right? That even sovereigns themselves, kings, have to bow before it, and even the law in some sense has to take all of that into account, and I think that’s a very credible story, and I think it’s true. I think it’s true metaphysically and theologically and scientifically and psychologically and practically, and that’s a lot of different ways for something to be true. I also think it’s heartening because you could say to yourself, you know, if I didn’t shy away, what might happen in my life? And that’s a great question to ask yourself, if I didn’t shy away, what might happen in my life? If I didn’t shrink, if I didn’t avoid, if I didn’t stifle my voice, if I didn’t turn a blind eye to opportunity, instead if I allowed all of that to make itself manifest in my life, what would life be like? And well, the promise of the resurrection in some real sense is that the degree to which you will be revivified is precisely proportionate to the degree to which you have enough faith and courage to confront the catastrophe of existence, and so it’d be delightful if that was the case, and I would say in some real sense that part of what you’re doing in life, part of what you’re called to find out in your life is, is that in fact true? And you’ll spend your whole life figuring that out, one way or another.