https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mBvLUc9xxmQ
We’re built to hear the higher voice, not just listen to our own little puny voice, but to hear finally the voice of the unconditioned, of God. And what went wrong is that Adam and Eve stopped listening to God, and that’s when all the sundering takes place. And then along comes Abraham, who finally hears the voice. And then watch that theme throughout the Bible, whether it’s Jonah or, you know, people that hear the voice. That’s still the game, it seems to me. You know, the voice coming from heaven is a symbol for this openness to the unconditioned. To the good, the true, and the beautiful that lie beyond the categorical, and that calls out to us, that claims me, and sends me on a mission. I totally get that. That’s exactly the right description of what makes life worth living, right? Well, that’s the part of life that is worth living, beckoning that higher call. But tell me what you think about this. So you talk about, you’re pointing, I suppose, for young people and older people as well, to where they might search for the voice or the appearance of God. And you’re suggesting that one of those places in what’s beautiful, that’s reminiscent for me of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush, which is something that calls to him, which he goes to investigate. That’s a pathway to God. What you see with Elijah is that that pathway to God isn’t so much something that beckons in his situation, it’s more something that imposes transcendent limits. So Elijah is the first prophet who firmly, he engages in combat against Baal, who’s a nature god. You can think of nature, the nature god is very similar to the Gaia that the environmentalists worship, right? It’s the projection of what’s of the highest value into the natural world. And so even if the environmentalists claim that they’re not deistic, it doesn’t matter, they have an implicit deism that associates the highest good with the natural world. And it’s a powerful argument because, and this is what Elijah contends with, because if you’re in a thunderstorm or a hurricane or you experience an earthquake or a volcano or you look up at the heavenly skies, you can feel a sense of awe and you can feel that there’s something beyond you that’s, let’s say, embedded in the mysteries of the world and it’s easy to confuse that with God. Now what Elijah realizes, and this is his famous statement, is that he’s in a cave and he experiences a number of powerful manifestations of the natural world. This is after he’s defeated the prophets of Baal and he hears the still small voice call to him within and that’s really, that’s not even so much the voice that calls to adventure or beauty, which is part of that, it’s conscience per se and this is another place that people can look for God, you know, and it’s a rough search in some ways, you know. God at least in part is the spirit that wakes you up at three in the morning when you’ve violated a higher part of yourself and calls you on your misbehavior. And you might say, well, why would you associate that with a transcendent spirit and let’s say with God and part of the answer to that is try controlling it. Or try convincing it that it doesn’t have a point, which is what you’re going to be doing desperately at three in the morning when you’d rather let yourself off the hook for your stupidity, but something within you absolutely refuses to allow you to do that and it’s something that you can’t control. And so since it calls you on your misbehavior and you can’t control it, I would say that the impetus is on the atheistic types to account for its phenomenology. It’s like, well, it’s a spirit, it has autonomy, it seems to have a voice, it calls you out your misbehavior so it has a moral, it knows you completely even better than you know yourself, right? That’s why John Henry Newman took that as the best argument for God’s existence. He felt that after Hume, the more cosmological arguments were suspect. So he went in the typical modern way inside but found that path. Because I would say it’s the unconditioned good that is summoning you to goodness. Right? And it does that in part by calling you out on your misbehavior too, right? That’s the part of God that’s the judge rather than the invitation. The aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul, Newman calls the conscience. It’s a marvelous description, right? Even before the pope is the vicar of Christ, the conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. So you might ask yourself why would conscience be associated with Christ in the soul? And so you could imagine this. So one of the implicit messages of the story of the Christian passion is that you’re called upon to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of what’s highest. Right? Absolutely everything. Which is why Christ’s Passion is a story of the confrontation with the most miserable possible death and also with the deepest reaches of malevolence. Right? So, and the implication of the story is that despite the existence of those two things that you’re called upon to act in the most positive manner and so then if you’re sinning you’re violating that pattern of action and the conscience is what calls you on the violation of that sacrificial relationship and that’s why there’s an association between the conscience and Christ in the soul. Right? What the conscience tells you is that you are not being sufficiently, what would you say, you’re not being sufficiently religious in your sacrifices. That’s exactly what you’re being called upon and you might think well I don’t want to give that up. It’s like well yeah you don’t want to but that’s not the point. Is that if you’re going to pursue what is truly highest you have to give up everything that’s lowest and if you don’t pursue what’s highest and give up what’s lowest then life will arrange itself against you very rapidly and you can just think about that practically. It’s like if you conducted yourself so that you took the lesser victory over the greater victory and you did that constantly then you would lose. It’s the definition of losing and what your conscience does is inform you when you’re losing even in ways that you would rather not admit. Right? And so there is no difference between that and call to the highest sacrifice. Jonah heard the voice of his conscience and then didn’t follow it. What follows from that is disaster for you and for the people around you. So it’s not just a private thing, oh boy I did something wrong it’s going to really hurt me. It’ll hurt people around you. Worse even maybe. Well I mean if you misbehave when you’re a child, if you misbehave and this might even be true when you’re an adult when your parents are still around, it isn’t obvious at all that your misbehavior hurts you more than it hurts your parents. And in totalitarian states, it’s a good example of this, a totalitarian state is a state where every single person is lying about absolutely everything all the time and so each person lies in the moment to protect themselves against the consequences of the truth, at least momentarily. They pretend to believe things that they don’t, what the Soviets used to joke. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Like yeah that’s a great Russian joke that is and that leads right to unbelievable poverty and misery and you know every person who’s rationalized lying in the system is saying well I have to lie because the consequences of telling the truth will be so great but the cumulative consequence of those individual lies is literally that everyone lives in hell. And so one of the things your conscience tells you and it really tells you this is when you lie you are moving towards hell and not just for you but for everyone around you, everyone you love and all your descendants and like it’s a terrible thing that’s true. But God can swallow up your errant will and spit you out exactly where you’re supposed to be. So the whale there, the fish is not a negative thing, it’s swallowing up this errant will of Jonah and then confining it. So it needed confining, it needed restriction but then it spits him up. It needed the suffering possibly. It needed the suffering right and then spits him up exactly where he’s supposed to be. So how do we read times of depression and times of deep darkness, de profundis, from the depths I cry to you Lord. Well good it might be a depth imposed upon you by God to limit this errant will but then God will take you where you don’t want to go, where he wants you to go. And to what end? I think it goes back in so many ways because he wants you to be like him. Yeah. Because there’s that sense of like okay I’m going to give you these gifts and this burden and why? Because in bearing this burden well you’ll become like me. That’s one of the reasons Jesus says if you want to be my disciple deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me. Do this, do this, whatever the burden, whatever that cross is, I’m not far from you, I’m here, I’m doing something in you and in doing so you become like me even if you have to go through hell. Even though you will have to go through hell. You’ll unleash tremendous good so Jonah becomes the greatest prophet ever. Nineveh is converted from top to bottom and even the cattle put on sackcloth. He’s like the most powerful prophet ever because he finally cooperated with the voice of his conscience. Right well and part of the problem that you have to wrestle with too is a time frame problem. So in the story of Job, Job is punished unjustly and that’s part of the pain of the story like Christ is punished unjustly and that’s part of what we have to wrestle with as we say pass through the world is that there are times when we’ll be called upon to bear suffering for the sake of the good you might say and part of that’s the necessary consequence of things unfolding in their appropriate time and that’s something that perhaps you have to have faith in and it’s a very difficult thing to justify. Part of the reason you want to lie is because you want to get away with what you did right now so that there are no consequences or that you can gain should gain some advantage right that’s what people lie and so then you might say well you’ll pay a price for telling the truth and it’s you know it’s it’s definitely the case that you will. My experience with that is being that if I say something that’s true but that’s unpopular there can be a vicious firestorm in the aftermath but if I stand my ground then that firestorm exhausts itself and the situation reverses so that what were negative consequences to begin with become the consequences that were much better than I could have possibly imagined before that occurred and you see that in the story of Job now it’s tricky because you know you don’t want to justify your suffering by the fact that when you emerge through it things are better because that’s too easily transformed into a post hoc justification of the production of suffering that’s not exactly the point the point is sometimes you have to withstand in order for the higher good to make itself manifest in its proper time and things do have a proper time and part of faith is that what’s good will unfold if it’s given the proper time right and you may be called upon to bear that and then you might ask yourself too is like well why do you have to bear a burden at all in order to develop and maybe that’s a fundamental mystery in its essence but you can ask yourself in your own life it’s like part of the reason sometimes that you have to suffer in order to develop is because you’re so damn stubborn and you won’t give up your foolishness when you could have and so like the Pharaoh you double down and the suffering intensifies but some of the time too you have to think that you wouldn’t be as sophisticated and well developed as you are in your best sense if you wouldn’t have gone through the difficult times that demanded from you that level of development you know and when you’re trying to nurture a child you don’t protect them from everything that challenges them you put them in a in a in a ring of combat let’s say where they’re optimally challenged so the best in them can reveal itself and we none of us know how much challenge we have to be offered in the world in order to be highly motivated enough so the best within us will reveal itself now if you abjured all sin you’d suffer the least amount possible but perhaps that still wouldn’t be none.