https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=cXllaoNQmZY
Bishop Robert Emmett Barron is a US-based prelate of the Roman Catholic Church, serving as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He was a professor of systematic theology at University of St. Mary of the Lake from until 2015, upgraded in 2008 to the inaugural Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture. He founded the Catholic ministry Word on Fire, which employs traditional and digital media to describe the doctrines of Catholicism to the general public. Word on Fire published the 10-part series Catholicism, which was broadcast on PBS in 2011 and which Bishop Barron hosted. He’s published a number of books, including Catholicism, A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, Vibrant Paradoxes, The Both, Slash, and of Catholicism, and very recently, Your Life is Worth Living with Fulton Sheen, published on March 5, 2019. He has a substantive YouTube presence, with a total viewership of 30 million, and is well known on Facebook as well, with 1.5 million followers. Clearly, Bishop Barron is among the rare religious figures managing a substantial public impact in the present world. It’s very nice to see you. I’ve been looking forward to our meeting for quite a long time. Yeah, me too. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, well, people keep writing and saying you have to talk to Bishop Barron, and then they come up to me and they say you have to talk to Bishop Barron. Well, I mean, the same thing from the other side. Everyone’s telling me to talk to you. So it must be in God’s providence. I suppose. At least we can hope that that’s the case. So why do people want us to talk as far as you’re concerned? Yeah, you know, I’m not entirely sure, but I would say I think you’ve opened a lot of doors for people to religion in an era when the new atheists are very influential among young people. And I think you’ve opened doors that legitimize, at least, re-approaching these great issues and questions and texts. So I’m doing it, I suppose, in a more explicit way, but you’re, I think, paving the way for an awful lot of people, at least to reconsider religion. So maybe they find that intriguing. And probably the fact that we’re both coming out of an academic background, but then trying to reach out more widely through the social media. So there’s that in common. But I used to speak for myself. That’s what I see in you that’s been so powerful. In the wake of the new atheist critique, I mean, I just find that so, such a desert opens up for young people. And I deal with young people all the time. And I hear the echoes of Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris all the time. But it’s such a finely bleak view. And religion speaks to these deepest longings of the heart. And I think you’ve, for a lot of people, made that, again, possible, at least to think coherently and rationally about those things. So I found that very uplifting and helpful. And I think a lot of people have, too. Maybe they see a point of contact there between the two of us. Maybe, you know, it’s funny because I’ve received letters from people of different faiths from all over the world, eh? Like a surprising number of people, Catholics and a lot of Orthodox Christians, a lot of Orthodox Jews, a substantial number of Muslims, far more than I would have ever suspected. Protestants and monks and Buddhists and Hindus who are all following the lecture series I did on Genesis back in 2017. And also, you know, a tremendous number of atheists, I would say, they probably outnumber the religious people, surprisingly enough. And they’ve said that the tact that I’ve taken, which is, I would say, kind of a fine balancing line between the religious and the psychological, too. Well, I guess it’s had the same effect on the people that I’ve been talking to that it’s had on me. Like these stories had a profound effect on me. Well, you know, I’ve talked about you actually to the American bishops because I’m on this, I’m the chair of the Evangelization and Catechesis Committee. So the bishops concerned about how we propagate the faith today, you know, and I’ve laid out for them a lot of the grim statistics and they are grim about especially young people leaving the Catholic Church. For every one that joins, six are leaving now. We have the highest rate of people leaving. Anyway, I’ve gone through some of those stats, but then I’ve signaled signs of hope. And you’re one of them. I said, the fact that this gentleman who’s speaking about, I’d say, spiritual things and certainly now about the Bible in a way that is smart and compelling, especially young people, is hopeful. So many might be leaving, you know, official religion, but the religious questions have not left their minds. And I think you’re addressing that in a way that’s very provocative and compelling. And it’s given me a sort of renewed courage to say, well, why can’t we do the same thing? Why have we? It’s our book. I mean, let’s face it, the Bible is the book the churches, you know, produce. It’s the heart of the church’s life. But why isn’t it someone who’s, at least in a formal sense, outside the church doing a better job than we are at explicating it? And so I’ve taken it to be a sign of hope. It’s a mystery. Well, I feel too, that my position outside the church is actually critical to the success of what I’m doing. You know, people have tried to pin me down multiple times with regards to my belief in God. I actually did a two hour lecture in, I guess it was a 70 minute lecture in Australia about that question, because I thought about it a lot and about, I’ve always felt imposed upon I would say and boxed in when people ask me that question. But I finally figured out that I didn’t really feel that I had the moral right to make a claim about belief in God. I mean, that’s not a trivial thing to, to let’s say, proclaim. Yeah. You know, because it’s not merely a matter of stating in some verbal manner that I am willing to agree semantically with a set of doctrines. It means that you have to live, you have to commit to living a certain way. And the demand of that life is so stringent and so all consuming. And you’re so unlikely to live up to it. But to make the claim that you believe, I think is a, to me it’s smacks of a kind of, I mean, I understand why people do it and this isn’t a criticism of people’s statement of faith. But for me, the critical element of belief is action. And the requirements of Christianity are so incredibly demanding that I don’t see how you can proclaim yourself a believer without being terrified of immediately being struck down by lightning or something cosmic. No, there’s a lot to that. I mean, there’s a lot to it. The story that I’ve always loved about origin, the great church father, whom Jung loved, by the way. some of the first great psychologists and origin sermons on Genesis, Exodus are like yours in many ways. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been reading him explicitly, but that sort of psychodynamic and spiritual reading origins all over that. But the story is about this young guy named Gregory who comes to origin to learn the doctrine of the Christians. And origin said to him, first you must come and live our life and then you’ll understand our doctrine. And that young kid, Gregory became St. Gregory Thelma Turgas. He becomes the great saint of the church, but he had to get into the life first. And there’s a lot to that. I think the practices of Christianity, they get into your body before they get into your mind. It’s also true, I think, that when you take away a lot of practices that surround certain doctrines, the doctrine fades from people’s minds. When I was a kid, there was still the practice around the blessed sacrament. People with genuflections and before you entered the pew in church, you would genuflect. In fact, they say that Catholics of my parents’ generation, when they’d come into a movie theater to see a movie in the rows of seats, they would genuflect before they got in the row. But see, that means this thing was so in their bodies, but that practice was communicating to the mind the importance of what’s in front of them. Well, the same is true really of all the doctrines. God in some ways is a function of this manner of life. And so I’ve emphasized that actually a lot in my own work. The postmoderns who have influenced Christianity are very strong in that two practices. My take, Jordan, is that there’s a hundred ways in to the question of God. There’s all kinds of paths, one of them being just that, ritual, the body, the moral life is a way in. To look at the saints and try to be a saint is a great way in. Jared Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet, who was a convert under John Henry Newman, so he himself went through this process of discovering the faith. But someone came to him and said, you know, I’m really wrestling with belief in God. And he said, give alms. He didn’t provide an argument or prove, he said, do something. And of course, if you play the whole thing out, I mean, if God is love, that’s what God is, then performing an act of love gets you closer to God than almost anything else. And so the giving of alms can lead you into that sacred space. Now, the questing mind, I mean, then wants to ask all kinds of questions about it and grounded. So, you know, Fides Queren’s intellectum of Anselm, right, faith seeking understanding, that’s where theology, philosophy will come in. But I think there’s a- Well, you know, I’ve been talking to my audiences practically about certain elements of, let’s say, Judeo-Christian fundamental belief. So, you know, I spent, I think, two and a half hours, the first biblical lecture I did on the first sentence of Genesis, and then tried to take the opening chapters apart in great detail, but some very interesting propositions from a psychological and philosophical perspective in Genesis. I mean, I look at it sort of technically, in some sense, as a statement about the nature of being. What Genesis reveals to me is that there has to be a structure to encounter possibility. Or that there is a structure that encounters possibility. That’s part of, that’s built into reality itself. And that structure is God the Father. That structure uses a process. And the process is the logos. And the logos is something like courageous, truthful communication. It’s the word. But it’s much more than that. And it uses that to encounter this potential. And to generate order. And it seems to me that that’s psychologically akin to what human beings do with their own consciousness. You know, the new atheist types and the materialist scientists tend to consider human beings deterministic organisms. My understanding of neuropsychology is that the only time that we are deterministic organisms is when circuits for specific tasks have been built up through lengthy practice and can be run automatically. Much of the time in our lives, and I talk to my audiences about this, what we do is we wake up in the morning, our consciousness reappears on the plane of being, let’s say. What we face in front of us is an unstructured and potential-filled chaos. And our consciousness determines the manner in which that potential transforms itself into the actuality of order, into the present and the past. And I think everyone understands that. We treat each other that way. We treat ourselves as if we are responsible for what we bring into existence. That’s part of our moral responsibility. We treat each other as if that’s part of what makes us worthwhile as creatures, right? That’s part of our value. We treat ourselves as if the nature of what we bring into being is determined by our choices between good and evil. And we treat other people the same way. You can’t have a friendship with someone if you don’t believe that they have that power of choice and that capacity for morality. You don’t have any respect for them and they won’t interact with you. And so you can’t found a friendship on that and you can’t found a family and you can’t found a society without the fundamental presupposition that individuals… This is another element, of course, of the presuppositions in Genesis, that the individual is somehow made in the image of God. If God is that which confronts potential and generates order and then more, you know, because God says too in Genesis that every time he constructs something that’s new and orderly using the logos, he says, and it was good. And that’s so fascinating to me because it’s repeated so many times because what it implies is that if you confront, if the potential of being is confronted with what’s good and truthful and courageous, then what emerges as a consequence is good. And I also believe that to be the case for individuals. If you confront the world in a matter that’s came like bitter, incapable of making the proper sacrifices, enraged, jealous, outraged at the suffering of existence and its essential unfairness, then you become vengeful and bitter and murderous and genocidal. That seems like no positive way forward. With the new atheist types, you know, they demolish the metaphysics without really thinking it through, I think, and they leave people with nothing. The nothing is so empty that it just produces, it really produces pain for people. I talk to many, many, many people, including atheists, who have been vastly relieved to find some deeper meaning. Every day I deal with that. They feel obligated intellectually to accept the new atheist conclusions, but then their whole soul is rebelling against it, and I would say for obvious reasons. You know what’s very interesting to me, Jordan, is I got a colleague, Chris Kasor, who teaches at LMU. He said, what Peterson is doing is what the Church Fathers would have called the tropological reading of the scriptures, you know, the four senses. You got the literal historical interpretation, you’ve got the allegorical, so it has to do with Jesus. You have the anagogical, having to do with the journey to heaven, but the tropological, they would have seen as the moral sense. So what it has to do about our moral lives, and I think in our category, say maybe the psychological life, etc. And so I think what you just proposed there is a cool, you know, sort of tropological reading of those texts. I mean, without denying it, I’d press on the more metaphysical stuff. Josef Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, did a wonderful meditation on Genesis, saying that to say I believe in God is to say I believe in the primacy of logos over and against mere matter. So over and against a merely materialist view that what’s more metaphysically primordial is logos. And he would stress intelligibility, that the fact that God speaks the world into being means it’s marked in every nook and cranny by something like intelligibility, which in turn would ground anything like the sciences. I mean, any scientist goes out to meet a world that at least he or she assumes is intelligible, you know. So the intelligibility of things, the rational structure within being is coming from the logos. The other thing that I think is really intriguing about the Genesis that opening move is the dethroning of all the false claim as to divinity. So all the things that come forth from God, you know, from sun and moon and the animals and so on and so forth, were all things that were worshiped in various cultures in the ancient world. So the author is saying, no, no, no, no, these things are not themselves ultimate. They’re not the logos from which all things come. But then the cool twist to me, it’s not just a no, because I see Catholics get this because the way that text is structured, it’s liturgically structured. It’s like a liturgical procession. Everything coming forth in this ordered way. At the end of the procession come human beings, right? So at the end of a liturgical procession is the one who will lead the praise. And so the point there, this goes back to Augustine and people like that. The point is, none of these things is God, but all these things belong in a chorus of praise of the true God led by us. So, and there’s the human role is to give proper praise to God. Well, you know, there’s critics, for example, there’s a critic in Canada, a well known environmentalist, David Suzuki, who believes that one of the sins of the Judeo-Christian perspective is that it gave human beings dominion over the world. And the philosopher, the German philosopher, what’s his name? You have to narrow that one down. Yes. The phenomenologist. Husserl? No, his student. Heidegger. Heidegger. Heidegger believed that the Judeo-Christian texts had given us the right to treat the world as if it’s produce. You know, that’s getting exactly backwards, isn’t it? It’s this deep respect for our fellow creatures as part of the chorus of praise and the dominion is not domination. I think it’s that kind of right ordering. And the thing there is, there’s been a lot of interesting studies recently of the temple, and how it was covered inside and out by symbols of the cosmos, you know, animals and plants and planets and stars and so on. The idea being when Israel gathered for right praise, it was the whole universe being gathered for right praise. Now, look at that in the Gothic churches. You go to Notre-Domino that it’s not an anthropocentric thing. You’ve got the planets and stars and astrological signs and animals galore because the cathedral was the successor of the temple, the place of right praise, and it’s drawing creation in. See, I think it’s much more modernity that is rough on nature and rough on the animal kingdom. Thomas Aquinas is not. I mean, go back to the pre-modern Christian thinkers. They’re not anti-nature. On the contrary, because the biblical vision is salvation is a cosmic reality. God’s trying to save all of his creation. That’s the Noah story. The ark is like a floating temple, right? So it’s a little microcosm of the right order of things led by Noah’s family. Yeah, by a family properly ordered. And what are they concerned about? The animals. They’re concerned about life that God created. That’s why the ark becomes a symbol of the church. So all the churches are meant to look like ships. You have a nave, right? The ship, the central aisle of a church. But they’re meant to be a little floating temple where creation is honored and preserved. So I would blame. It’s interesting to note that in the Noah story that there’s a tremendous emphasis on the idea that Noah, who’s someone who, like Adam, before the fall walked with God, was capable because he could act nobly and courageously and truthfully and also put his family together. He was actually capable of shepherding the complex creation of being in its totality period of absolute chaos. And I look at the environmental challenges, let’s say that we face today because of the complexity of the nine billion of us or the nine billion that there will be and the necessity of making sure that everyone has adequate security and shelter and food and freedom. I see that the proper pathway forward to dealing with that is for people to put themselves together and to put their families together and their communities together. And that the consequence of that, the natural consequence of that adoption of ultimate responsibility would be the extension of care beyond the immediate, beyond the social even. And so that everything does depend, I would say, and this is something I learned from Jung, from Jung was that far more than we think depends on the orderly progression and care of the soul. All of it depends on it. And you know, when I talk to my audiences, it’s so interesting. And I think it might be something that the church is missing if I could be so good. Go ahead. Well, you know, I’ve talked to about 150 live audiences now about this sort of thing, independent of all my classroom lectures. And I’ll tell you, I tell people, I suggest to people that the really the ancient idea that life is suffering and that it’s tainted by malevolence, that there’s no more true ideas than that in some base sense. And that that’s something that everyone has to contend with. And if you don’t contend with it properly, then you become embittered and you work to make things worse. And everyone understands that. Everyone knows that’s true. And then I suggest to them that the proper way out of that isn’t the pursuit of material satisfaction or impulse of happiness or rights from the individual perspective, but the adoption of responsibility. And I’ll tell you, every single time I talk about that, you can hear a pin drop in the auditorium. Yeah, I believe that. And I think one of the things that the church has failed to communicate properly is that you need a noble goal in life to buttress yourself against its catastrophe. And I mean, Abel is a good example of that in the Abel and Cain story, because he devotes himself properly to God and things work out for him. Well, more or less, it doesn’t end very well. It doesn’t. But I mean, good is sometimes defeated by evil. But I mean, obviously, he lives a proper and admirable life. And it needs to be communicated to young people. Right. Well, see, I would say the biblical key is always right praise. And that’s I go right back to Genesis 1 is, when we give praise to God, drawing all creation together, then our soul becomes ordered properly. And then around us, a kingdom of right order is built up. In the Catholic mass, we have that wonderful prayer of the Gloria. We say glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace to people of goodwill. And it’s like a formula that if I give God in the highest, then there will be peace around me. That’s like a condensation of the Sermon on the Mount. Yeah, that sermon seems to see that sermon seems to me. And I also believe it to be psychologically true, is that it’s necessary for you to aim at the highest value that you can conceive of, you know, and that has to have something to do with the amelioration of suffering and the constraint of malevolence. It’ll express itself that way naturally. Yeah. As a negative. And then once you concentrate on that and focus on that and decide that that’s your primary aim, then things do start to order themselves around you because well, everything that you see and do directs itself towards that aim. But that’s the I’d say strangely uniquely Christian thing is that we say, OK, the God that we’re worshipping, the God revealed in the Old Testament, but then finally revealed in Jesus Christ. As I’m looking over my computer screen right now, I’m looking at the crucifix of Jesus. Right. to a God who’s entered radically into suffering, not just physical suffering, but the whole brokenness of the world of stupidity and cruelty and injustice and hatred. That’s where God is gone. So the God that I worship is the God who himself is dedicated to the amelioration of suffering or of healing the suffering of the world. But that’s the way it’s going to express itself in a fallen conflictual world. Right. Praise will end up looking like love, looking like love for those who suffer. But I think that’s the mass to me, the master theme of the whole Bible. Israel always goes wrong without exception when its praise goes wrong. It starts praising the wrong things. So the running happens in Exodus when Moses leads the Israelites through the desert. Right. They they’re in the same position. We’re in the modern world where we’ve escaped a tyranny of sorts, let’s say, or we believe we have and entered into this domain of untrammeled freedom. And there’s nothing but false idols calling to us from every direction. And that’s that that’s the diversity idea as far as I’m concerned, because unity is certainly as profound a moral necessity as diversity. There should be diversity within unity. And I fight it all the time, you know, in the church too, because we bought into that ideology. And I said, look, it’s the oldest problem in philosophy, the one of the many. But all we do today is we completely valorize the many we never see at Shadowside. We denigrate the one and never see its positive side. The one is extraordinarily important. Well, that’s part of the death of God. Yeah, I think so. It’s the death of that overarching unity. It’s the same thing that drives constant thoughtless criticisms of hierarchy, even though all the biological evidence suggests you can’t even organize your perception without using an ethical hierarchy, because you have to select from all the things that you can choose to look at those things that you value high enough to attend to. So, yeah, and that’s our point about worship, isn’t it? What’s of highest value to you? Everything else will follow from that. Yes, I’ve you read Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, but he said, all you need to know about a person you can find out by asking one question. What does he worship? And everyone, of course, I mean, Sam Harris worships something, worth ship. What’s of highest worth to you? Then your life will be organized accordingly. The biblical idea, it seems to me, is if it’s other than God, you will disintegrate on the inside and the society around you will disintegrate. Yes, that’s where the idea of the logos has been so helpful. Yeah. As a consequence, we’re reading you like if the logos is that element of being, let’s say that’s aligned in some sense with consciousness that does in fact confront potential and that does cast it into reality as a consequence of ethical choices, then I can’t see how it can be otherwise than that has to be regarded as the ultimate value because it’s the thing that creates continually creates the world anew. And you know, we know perfectly well that, you know, you can take the opposite tack. Let’s say I don’t worship courage and truth in the face of the potential of being and that I worship instead cowardice and deceit and vengefulness. And well, then we know where that goes. You know, we had the entire 20th century as a, as a, as a, it’s the template for that whole thing. And the template from, from, from every perspective, I mean, every it’s obvious, it’s obvious beyond a shadow of arguable doubt that human beings as individuals are capable of generating something around them that is so akin to hell, even metaphysically speaking, that the difference is is is is you have to be, um, pick a you let’s say to quibble about the difference. And I do think there’s something metaphysical about it. I mean, these things that we see on earth, let’s say, seem to me to be reflected continually at deeper and deeper levels of reality. You know, I mean, I don’t tend to talk about specifically religious issues because I think that would in some sense compromise that the approach that I’m attempting to take, you know, which is a conciliatory approach in some sense, those who are possessed by the scientific viewpoint, but curious about the religious point. But if you abandon those initial presuppositions that the sovereignty of the individual, the necessity for courage in the face of being the, the moral imperative to struggle uphill with your cross towards the city of God. I mean, people understand these things if, if they’re explained carefully and they know in their souls that they’re true. Yeah, and they’re all over the culture. That’s been a presupposition of mine doing this work is I tend not to begin with, you know, direct instruction or moral finger wagging, but I tend to begin with something going on in the culture. And you’ve talked about this, you know, the hero myth is in practically every movie you watch, but the Christian themes are every place. One of the most remarkable to me being, I just saw it on TV the other night was the Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. If you want to see the best exemplification, I think in fiction of what the church fathers meant by the meaning of Jesus cross. In other words, a move of self-sacrificing love that exposes evil and liberates those who are under the tyranny of evil. That’s how they read the cross in a very clever way expressed in more mythic language, you know, but the ideas are very powerful and they’re beautifully exemplified in that movie. The move that Eastwood’s character makes at the end. And of course, as he dies, he’s in the figure of the crucified Jesus. Right. It’s so interesting too, because I actually made a video where I used a picture of Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount, I think, and I put it on Eastwood’s face, I superimposed it on top of his, and it was for exactly that reason. It was the reason that it’s exemplified in Gran Torino. Because I mean, Eastwood in that movie is a very harsh character, very very judgmental. He’s like the Christ that comes back in Revelations, right? He’s very, very, very judgmental. And he cuts no one a break, except that he actually does, like he does separate the wheat from the chaff. He’s even, interestingly in that movie, you know, he ends up being more akin to the foreigners who he hypothetically hates, like the, who’s the good Samaritan. It’s the same idea as the good Samaritan. Becomes more family to these people that he hypothetically hates than to his own children, because he regards them as ungrateful and unworthy, whereas these new immigrants are striving to be good people. It’s a very interesting movie. Oh yeah, it is. And it was a good example of a principle one of my professors years ago said, the once integrated Christian vision, let’s say at Reformation and Enlightenment, sort of blew up and the pieces flew every place. And they’re kind of twisted in their chart and everything, and they’ve landed here and there. And so as you go through the cultural landscape, you see them all over the place. There’s a bit of eschatology or there’s Christology or there’s the Trinity and so on. But they’re usually in distorted form. So that’s a good example of there’s the Christus Victor theory, to give it his proper name, the Christ is the victor over sin and death. He’s conquered the dark powers and liberated us in the process. There it is, but it’s in somewhat distorted form, of course. But that’s been the game I played a lot is to try to find these bits. Well, it happens everywhere. It’s so common that it’s it’s it isn’t merely common. It’s universal because you you and this is, of course, one of the reasons that I became so deeply interested in archetypes is that if the story doesn’t have an archetypal foundation, then it’s not a story. I mean, something makes something a story. It’s not just a random collection of statements or images. And so it has an archetypal structure. And, you know, I think what’s happened in the modern world, at least partly, is this fractionation that you’ve described, but also something that a student once made me think deeply through. She came up and asked me after a class, well, if these archetypal stories are the fundamental, the fundamental element, let’s say of psychological reality, then why not just tell the archetypal story over and over again? And I thought, well, first of all, to some degree, that is what cultures did for a long time. They repeated the archetypal story. But in our modern culture, what literature seems to do is to take the archetypal cult story and to bring it closer to the individual. It’s like it’s brought closer to Earth, almost like the Renaissance paintings brought the divine figures closer to Earth, closer to the actual individual, say, than the Baroque paintings did. And so you have this meeting place of the divine, the archetype and the personal that constitutes something like popular culture. And there’s some utility in that because it reopens a doorway to the presence of what’s missing, that’s being closed by whatever has happened to the church over the last, well, what, 150 years, 200 years, and the accelerating degeneration of the church over the last 200 or 150 to 200 years. So I see it as a good thing, although it isn’t obvious that people understand that it’s happening. like the Lion King and Sleeping Beauty and so on to my audiences. They don’t consciously see the Christian symbolism or the Christian symbolism in works like Harry Potter, which is unbelievably deep, symbolic structure. She did that so beautifully. You know this remake of True Grit when the Coen brothers did it, and they beautifully brought out these religious themes that were not in the John Wayne version I saw as a kid. Or even like there was a remake, Kenneth Branagh did, of Cinderella. And you say a charming sentimental story, but it’s a deeply Christological telling. And he got all that and brought that out. I mean, so those are there for sure, I mean, within the Western framework. Well, it seems, does it seem in part, look, like I’ve been accused, let’s say, although I’ve stopped apologizing for it, I should have stopped long ago, of fundamentally speaking to young men. You know, I mean, most people on YouTube are men, so there’s a baseline problem. But you know, it seems to me that partly what I’m suggesting to young men is that there really is an ennobling heroism about the fundamental Christian vision, which is to accept with gratitude your privileges and your limitations. The privileges, those are talents. You have a responsibility to make the most of them. That’s the price you pay for the talents. The obstacles. You’re limited being, and you pay a price for being, and the price is that limitation. And so you have to be grateful in some strange sense for your limitations, maybe the same way that you’re grateful for the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of the people that you love. And then that your task, and it’s an extraordinarily difficult task. There’s no more challenging task than to accept all that, you know, with gratitude and with goodwill toward being and to attempt to work towards making things better than they are, or at least not worse. And people understand that. Oh yeah, no, for sure. Let me press something here, because I think all that’s true from the sort of psychological and human side, the hero’s journey and our call to move toward a transcendent moral good, etc., to give ourselves for the sake of the other. And that’s all there within the Christian and the biblical framework. But see, what I think is really interesting, where the fireworks really start, is that God has gone on a hero’s journey. So it’s not just the story of this human being, Jesus, going heroically to his cross, etc., but that strangely, it’s God going heroically to that place. It’s God going into dysfunction. And whatever heroism we can summon is predicated upon this primordial grace that was given to us, you know, because the danger, you know, look, I’m a Catholic, Catholics like faith and reason. So we like to operate both sides of that divide. So Thomas Aquinas constructing cosmological arguments. Well, good, those are I think they’re fine. But that’s from our side of the equation. We’re kind of moving our way toward God. But the fireworks start when God moves toward us. God acts and grace is operative. I can’t manipulate, I can’t control. It comes as a gift, you know. And so like the cross of Jesus, it is Clint Eastwood. So there’s a human being imitating this great move. And that’s indeed what we’re called to, to become other Christ. But he’s also, if you want to press it, that’s God. That’s what God does. God enters into our weird, dysfunctional, off-kilter world and suppresses evil, awakens our freedom. And that’s when it really gets interesting, you know. It seems to me that this has to do with this theme that I’ve also popularized about rescuing your dead father from the underworld. Yeah. Well, you know, if you take on a heavy burden of responsibility, then that changes you. It calls forth from you things that would never be otherwise called forth. Partly because you encounter new things and learn, but also because the demands, the psychophysiological demands of the confrontation. And we know this biologically, turn on new parts of you that are coded genetically. And it’s, you know, there’s, there’s an immense potential that lurks inside of human beings. It’s a potential of unlimited scope in some sense. And I think that that’s alluded to in the idea that there’s a relationship between logos, Christ and God and man. And that the way that you become closer to God in the literal sense is by adopting that burden because that transforms you into what it is that you could be. And I think that’s, you know, you look, the other thing you said that was really interesting, you talked about the fragmentation of Christianity and you know, in the old Egyptian story, when Osiris is overthrown by Seth, who’s the precursor of Satan, etymologically and conceptually, Osiris is willfully blind and Seth is his evil brother and Seth waits for the opportune moment and he chops Osiris up into pieces and he distributes them all over the kingdom. And so Osiris can’t pull himself back together. Like he’s still there in nascent form because there’s no destroying something that’s divine, not permanently, but you can make it very difficult for it to get attacked together for some period of time, let’s say. And that fragmentation, I think, has occurred in our culture. The death of God, I think Nietzsche is wrong about that. I think it’s the dismemberment of God and not the death. And something that’s dismembered can be remembered. What we need to do is to remember, and we do remember in our literature and our art and our popular culture, that’s all a form of remembering. But we also remember when we act in a way that works in accordance with our conscience and that sets our soul into a configuration of peace. You know, it’s been fascinating. I’ve had hundreds of, and mostly young men, I would say, come and talk to me after my lectures and many of them had been in very, very dark places, you know, addicted, alcoholic, suicidal, chronic pornography users, incapable of settling into a committed relationship, vengeful, nihilistic, cynical, and also possessed by a kind of inertia that made them immobile entering the most vital part of their youth. And, you know, they told me, look, I decided I was going to develop a vision for my life. I was going to imagine what things could be. And then I was going to try to tell the truth and I was going to try to act responsibly and not in a praying in public manner, but in a manner that began with cleaning up my room, say, a fairly humble act. And then comes the kicker, and this is one of the things that’s kept me going through this entire 150 city tour. They all say, and my life is way better. It’s like, I’m healthy. My job is going well. I’ve had three promotions. I’m making twice as much money. I’ve spoken to my father. I haven’t talked to him for 10 years. I’m putting my family together. It’s like things, good things are just happening left, right, and center. And I mean, I hear amazing stories. You’re in touch with the deepest rhythms of reality. It’s an ethical move, but it’s a metaphysical move. As you mentioned, the Sermon on the Mount of the Lord, I mean, that’s how I look at it is it’s not just giving, you know, moving ethical recommendations. It’s trying to get us aligned to the fundamental nonviolence of things. The fundamental move of God as he gives rise to the world. And so of course, your life comes together again, write praise gets you online and knits you back together. That theme to me is really strong in the spiritual tradition of the knitting back together of the splinter itself. That’s why, like, you know, things do you I mean, as a psychotherapist, you deal all the time with this, but like in the scriptures. So you mentioned Satan, you know, Satan is the accuser. And there’s a lot to that. But the other great word for the dark powers, the Diabolos, right, the scatterer, the one that divides and separates. And so the demons always speaking in the plural in the New Testament and Jesus bringing them back to themselves, back to the center. But that’s that’s all of us sinners. I mean, we were all over the place, our mind and will and passions and sexuality and body. They’re all going different directions. And then it’s very disorienting for people. It’s very confusing and anxiety provoking to be going in all those directions at the same time. Right. And that’s what do you want of us? Jesus of Nazareth, have you come to destroy us? You know, and the answer is yes, I have come to destroy this disparate reality and knit you back together. Go back to Nietzsche for a second, because I want to ask you about that. My conviction is atheists, both old and new. So the Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris today, but then go back to the Feuerbachs and Nietzsche’s and company that they’re they’re rebelling quite properly against a false God. What I would characterize as a false God, the God who is posing a threat to our freedom, the God who broods over us in this moralizing and dehumanizing way. The God who I would say is a supreme being among other beings. All of that. I applaud them. I mean, the atheists old and new are rebelling against that. But it’s partially because I think Jung saw this in his own father, right, who was a Calvinist minister, that we got so bad at proclaiming the true God who is not brooding over our freedom in this sort of moralizing and oppressive way. Not competing with our flourishing. But you know, the glory of God’s a human being fully alive, says Irenaeus. That’s the biblical idea. Or the burning bush, the fathers love that, is the bush that’s on fire but not consumed. Well, that’s the way the true God relates to creation. He makes it beautiful and radiant, but doesn’t burn it up. We’re like, if somebody in the Greek and Roman myths, when the gods break in, things have to give way or they’re incinerated or they’re destroyed. But the Bible presents this very unique and humanizing view of God. And then culminating in the incarnation. God becomes one of us without, that’s why it’s so beautiful to me in those seemingly abstract formulas about the two natures that come together in Jesus without mixing, mingling, and confusion. You say, well, that’s a lot of these Greek abstractions, but no, that’s very powerful that God and humanity can meet in such a way that humanity is not overwhelmed and destroyed. That’s what the atheists quite rightly, old and new, are objecting to, is precisely that false understanding of God. But we- Well, and I’ve always thought of Nietzsche as a, it’s a very disturbing analogy, but I’ve always thought of Nietzsche playing the same role as Maggots do, cleaning out a wound. He’s a very sophisticated thinker and to think of Nietzsche simply as an atheist, I think, is a terrible mistake. He certainly had plenty of good things to say about Catholicism, about the fact that Catholicism was an anti-diabolical movement that united Europe under the rubric of a single mode of thought and disciplined the European mind. And he also had wonderful things to say about Christ as a figure. He said, well, Nietzsche believed that the only true Christian was Christ, and his criticism was essentially saved for the dogmatic structure of the church. Now, I actually have more sympathy for Dostoevsky, who I think thought more deeply about this than Nietzsche, which is quite a frightening thing to say because Nietzsche is such a deep thinker. But, you know, in The Grand Inquisitor, when Christ comes back to earth and is then arrested by the grand inquisitor of Seville, during the Spanish Inquisition, you know, the grand inquisitor takes Christ into the cell and tells him why it’s necessary for him to be put to death again. He says, you know, the church has worked diligently to humanize the impossible load that you’ve placed on people and to make it bearable for the common man. And the last thing we need is someone as perfect as you and terrifying as a consequence, as a judge, because something that perfect is a judge coming back to mess up all our work. And, you know, that’s a sympathetic portrayal of Catholicism, I would say, or maybe Orthodox Christianity as well, that it had that merciful element that the demand for perfection was antithetical to. But then, of course, Dostoevsky has the brilliance to, when the grand inquisitor leaves, hypothetically having, having sentenced Christ to death, he leaves the door open. And I’ve often thought that that’s so true of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, Protestantism as well, is that for all their faults and for all the faults that people like Nietzsche and Hitchens and Dawkins, etc., lay at the feet of these traditions, they at least did preserve the tradition and leave the door open. And that’s not an easy thing to do over the course of centuries. I think the institutions deserve a certain amount of sympathy, even though I’m very concerned that they’re degenerating and disintegrating in a manner that doesn’t look easily forestallable. Can I let me ask you a quick question about the Brothers Karamatsov, because, you know, twice in my life, I tried to read it. And I think I just got bogged down with the Russian names and stuff. So I failed both times. I got a little further the second time. But then just about six months ago, I got an audio of it because I’m in the car all the time in California, going back and forth. And I’m just about finished with it. I love it. Love it. It finally just it sang to me as this guy read the thing. You know, yeah, it’s amazing. It’s amazing how powerful it is on audio. It’s wonderful. Wonderful. How do you read, first of all, the silence of Christ in the presence of the inquisitor, but then secondly, the kiss, the kiss on the lips at the end, you know, so he sits in silence as this great accusation is read, but then kisses him full on the lips at the end. Well, I think I think he accepts the accusation. Like one of the things Jung said about Christ in the Gospels, which I thought was it was indescribably brilliant, was that Christ not entirely, but is presented as a figure of mercy. And Jung was wise enough to know that. And and he used religious sources for this idea that God rules with two hands, with mercy and with justice, because if it’s just mercy, then well, all is always forgiven and you have no responsibility and you’re an eternal infant. But if it’s all justice, then look out, because every single transgression you you you commit, you’ll be held to account for in some infinite manner and people are so fallible that well, you kind of see that happening on Twitter now, you know, if you if you make a mistake of any sort at any point in your life, you’re you’re roasted over the open coals for it and no one can stand that because everyone makes mistakes. And so there has to be this balance between mercy and justice. Jung regarded Christ’s return in Revelation as psychologically necessary because any figure of perfection has this element of the judge because any ideal is a judge. Yeah, and so yeah, you can’t bracket that in the name of because the master category is love, right? And not to be sentimental about it. Love means to will the good of the other. So that always has a judgmental dimension. Of course it does because if you have a child or a friend or yourself, it’s like and I felt this when I was a psychotherapist practicing as a psychotherapist. I mean Roger said well, you had to have unconditional love for your client and I thought no, I have unconditional positive regard for the part of my client that’s driving toward the light and I am a co-enemy with that part against the part that’s trying to drag that person down and then I tell you can I tell you that an entire generation of Catholic priests was formed under the Rogerian assumption because that’s what my generation got. Now, I mean I learned things from Rogers and the whole it works in a way when I was doing pastoral ministry and counseling early on as a young priest, you know that whole idea of just kind of mirroring back to someone what they’re saying and giving them the I mean I get it I get it but I agree with you There’s a severe danger in that if that’s all we’re doing with people we’re not moving them in the manner of a spiritual teacher. I had a student years ago said to me what we’re missing from the church is Yoda on our shoulders, you know, he meant Yoda on the shoulders of Luke Skywalker instructing him and pressing him and telling him what he’s doing wrong and how to get going, you know that we were we were all Rogerians we just were unconditionally positive regarding everybody but we were It’s a great compliment see the other thing that it’s made me popular among young people this is so perverse I Have a hard time believing any of it. Really. I mean the first thing that I have a hard time believing is that you know I can attract audiences of 5,000 people and tell them that the problem with their lives is that they’re not bearing nearly enough Responsibility and that’s where they’re gonna find the meaning that sustains. Yeah, it’s a pretty rough message Yeah, and the second thing is especially with young people because the message has been fit for 50 years And this is part of the humanists from the 1960s is well, you’re okay the way you are Yeah, and I think there isn’t anything more damning that you’re a young person right? Well, you’re okay the way you are, especially if they’re suffering and nihilistic Out of well, I want to get out of this state That’s right. They want to crawl right out of their skin. And so you tell them instead no look man You don’t know anything You’re you’re barely beginning your your your your suffering because in a sense because you are steeped in sin to an almost unimaginable degree and I’m saying that Compassionately right judgmentally and that if you want to put your life together You have to start small and you have to be careful and awaken if you do it carefully Then you can eliminate these flaws in your character that no one’s right Celebrating and quite right people light up when you tell them that yes, right so strange It was a real pastoral failure on the part of the church as I was coming of age because we were we were Reacting against maybe a hyper stress on sin. So my parents generation probably got that especially sexual sin So I understand that there was a hyper reaction But that is exactly the problem is you ended up with a generation of Catholics that felt like okay. God is love I’m okay. Everything will be fine So then there’s no energy. There’s no directionality. There’s no sense of purpose. There’s no sense of spiritual struggle Right, there’s no real Situations like Nazi Germany Right right, but no that was a huge pastoral failure one was intellectual as coming of age we became very deeply Anti-intellectual and this problem of a hyper kind of Rogerian Rogerianization of our pastoral practice See I liked like Rogers a lot because one of the things Rogers really taught me to do was to listen. Yeah, right Yeah advice about listening and then Restating to people what you heard Yeah, so the sound like you that that’s unbelievably powerful because it does force you to listen and but Rogers was a seminarian and he did dispense with the idea of evil and the devil Fundamentally and he fell into the trap of Rousseau where you know the idea was that people were basically good and that’s just it’s such a Devaluation of people to say that they’re basically good because it’s it’s clearly the case that people have an unbelievable capacity for Malevolence that and to me that’s that’s heartening, you know Yeah, I can again I can talk to my audiences and I can say look You guys just you just lay sit on the edge of your bed and you think about all the things that you’re doing wrong that You know that you’re doing wrong way that you’re leading yourself and other people astray Those things will come to your mind momentarily and imagine briefly Where that would take you if you allowed your imagination to take you to where it could in its depths? And everyone nods their head because they bloody well know and they say and imagine just for a moment that if you have that capacity for absolute mayhem and malevolence that the opposite is also true because if there is that darkness and that evil then Obviously the opposite also exists and yeah And then it’s also possible to make a case for people to people that they can believe That good has the capability of triumphing over evil, but you don’t do that by minimizing evil you do it by maximizing Evil that’s right I mean I would say part of spiritual direction is helping people see what they’re really capable of and I mean that in the negative sense Help people see that I’m really capable of some really wicked business and if I’m hiding from that all the time I’m suppressing it all the time. That’s not the thing because from now a religious standpoint you want to say Christ goes all the way down now. That’s the descent into hell thing But that happens in us he goes all the way down in me to the bottom of my dysfunction And people like Dostoevsky are really good at showing that to my show But If we don’t do that spiritually then then we’re not understanding the cross right understanding redemption Salvation that were healed by this downward journey of the Son of God, but he goes with us. There’s Dante now There’s the journey downward through all the levels of our dysfunction till you find I think he’s dead right about that you find some originating So the Satan whose wings beat the air and create the you know atmosphere of hell There’s something in me that it’s generating all the different levels of dysfunction Yeah, but until I find that I’m not gonna solve it. I gotta go all the way down No, the don’t inferno is right is that there’s just like there’s a hierarchy of good. There’s a hierarchy evil and right Dante places the betrayers at the bottom with right right Cassius produce a truth because You know one of the fundamental necessities of positive interpersonal existence even with yourself Much less or let alone other people is trust like essential trust yeah, and it’s a form of courage, you know another thing I talked to my audiences about his trust because like We tend in our society worship naive trust by making the claim that people are basically good and the problem with that and this is what entices so many young people into that nihilistic atheism is that They’re taught this idea and then they’re betrayed very badly by themselves or by some other person and that’s the death of innocence and so then they go from naivety to cynicism and Cynicism is actually an improvement over naivety But but it’s not the end and then they don’t know that because the next step is to Trust as a consequence of courage and to say look I’m going to extend my hand once again to myself or to my friend or to my family member despite the fact that I’ve already been betrayed and hurt because by extending that hand again, I allow the person the possibility of redemption and and I open up a space for us to Rekindle a productive relationship, but that’s predicated on courage and not naivety. I know that Yeah, it’s like it’s like stretching out a hand to it to a dog That’s frightened and barking and looks it looking like it’s going to bite. You know, it’s it’s still the best way if you’re careful to To establish peace, let’s say with that animal and and The problem with the betrayers is that they take trust which is the most fundamental necessity for interpersonal relationships and then they violate the very Principle of trust and it undermines everything and so that’s why they’re at the bottom of hell That’s why Cassius and Brutus and Judas are there You know, it reminds me of that story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio Francis It’s like a dream that story Francis reaching out to the animal that’s been that’s been threatening the town, you know and and Frightening everybody but Francis has the trust to reach out to the animal and he tames it and then you know Makes a deal if you feed the animal then he won’t you know harm you and so on but it’s doesn’t you say a lot of dreams or an animal’s function that way of Dementia of ourselves that were kind of it. Well, that’s it That’s a dream for sure because what is that? You know, there’s a part of you that’s ravenous and yeah malevolent Not being fed properly, right and that’s often because you’re not attending to it You’re you’re you’re putting it in a blind corner and it’s it’s acting out because it demands Recognition and like people do this with their own With the power that gives them integrity, you know, I’ve had clients and I would say they were more often female than the male Who had this particular problem, but who had a very acute and judgmental intelligence? very very bright people but they were also Unbelievably agreeable and so their intelligence would report to them something that was not Positive about someone, you know, it would see around the corner. It would see a hidden motivation and reveal a Negative truth and the person temperamentally was so shocked by the revelation that instead of regarding it as a Genuine insight they felt that there was something wrong with them for thinking that way And then that’s the same thing as keeping that ravenous wolf Unfed it’s like the particular client I’m thinking about I spent hours talking to her about what she thought about people because She was a very pleasant person and it caused her a lot of trouble She was far too much mercy and not nearly enough justice and insights into the malevolent motivations of people were unbelievably accurate and deep almost completely incapable of allowing that to be real He either reminds me of we mentioned the Cohen brothers earlier their remake of true grit You remember the young girl in that who’s just she’s seized by justice She wants to get revenge because her father was killed and she just and people people are dying around her corpses are piling up Because she’s just going to get what she wants Then of course, she’s bit by the snake which has a certain archetypal overtone and she loses her arm, you know but she’s carried after the snake by she’s carried in the two arms of Rooster Cogburn, you know who’s a lawman. He’s a man of justice, but you find out that he’s he’s also a man of mercy he’s a man of a deep human connection and The the story is prefaced by the line. There’s only one thing in the world That’s truly free and that’s the grace of God and I just thought it’s that wonderful So the grace of God is not just mercy and not just justice It’s the two arms of it. She ends up she’s all justice. So the one arm is missing Brewster’s got the two arms able to carry her, you know, but I think that’s what we’ve been missing a lot in the church It’s the two arms We become just too much for Mercy Church in a way I don’t that’s what I think like I don’t think that you guys say ask enough of you. Yeah No, you’re you’re not you’re not giving them hell Yeah, no, I think there’s something right about that and that’s the Yoda on your shoulder So he’s there’s someone who’s kind of pushing me and telling me and teaching me and bringing me on that downward journey like The Virgil move that you’re gonna accompany this person all the way down now the importance here’s like Paul Francis is really good because Accompaniment and the church is a field hospital he says for people deeply wounded. That’s really right and We got to accompany people though all the way down My generation got I think a very superficial sort of you know, everything’s okay. God is love and you’ll be fine But that led to a lot of drift and see when my generation came of age and we got hit by life I can testify there’s a lot of my classmate In a heartbeat because we got a very superficial childish one-sided approach but then life hits all of us inevitably and They religion had nothing for them That’s exactly when it’s necessary. Yeah You know love is a terrible thing right? No, if you love your children You you don’t let them get away with it anything right you could love on their trans questions and that’s very I remember, you know this situation with my son when he was about four or five and Not a really good have a really good relationship with my son, but you know, I’ve always assumed that he Had the capability to make intelligent judgments and expected him to do so from a very early age And you know when he was four he was talking to me and I thought he was lying to me and I didn’t know because I couldn’t tell but you know That internal Damon was saying no, there’s something that’s not right here And I wasn’t gonna let him get away with it because I couldn’t let him Learn that it was acceptable to do that or that I would put up with it And so I told him in this weird thing it’s kind of like Pharaoh or it’s kind of like God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. I said look kid Here’s the deal. I think you’re lying to me and We can’t have that but if you’re not I want you to put up like a tremendous fight here to defend yourself Because if you’re being honest, well, then I want to know that but I’m not gonna back off because I don’t believe that what you’re saying is true and so I Went after him, you know for a good long while and it did turn out that he was telling me something that wasn’t true Which hardly came as a relief, you know, I mean children do that and it wasn’t a surprise to me, but That that love is if you really love someone You you can’t tolerate When they’re less than they could be right it hurts and so when someone comes into the church and It’s all forgiveness. Yeah, there’s no care there. It’s like what the hell are you doing? Look at you You’re addicted. You’re yeah, you’re you’re you’re you’re hooked on pornography Cheat on your wife you’re terrible job at work. It’s like you’re you don’t take care of yourself It’s like what the hell’s wrong with you. It’s like where’s the real you? Yeah the person anyone Who is subject to that as long as it’s done with care, you know and not I’m better than you It’s the right thing. It’s like God man you’re You’re nothing like You should be yeah, and if you don’t do that, you’re not willing the good of the other In fact, you’re trying to move into an easy space if I’m nice this person who’ll be nice to me and we’ll all be happy But that’s not At the beginning of the inferno when Dante, you know, he sees the hill with light on it Oh there that’s that’s where I need to go. I know I’m lost. I’m in the wood But that’s where I need to go it off He goes with then he’s blocked by the three animals right that the wolf and the leopard and the lion I think So there’s no easy route. That’s the point. There’s no easy route to that hill You’ve got to go down and all the way down But I think we we probably did tell our people that there was too easy a route, you know, everything’s okay You’re okay. God is love but then everyone is loving and love is nice. Love is harsh and dreadful, right? That’s the Thing but love is harsh and dreadful, right and they’ll find out soon enough that the road is blocked everyone does But then what’s the way forward and there should be spiritual masters in place? That know exactly what to do the Virgil move. I know what we got to do here We got to do a searching moral inventory and go all the way down That’s the descent before the ascent, right? You know, right? That’s a classical full man story It’s the story of Exodus is it’s part of the reason that people aren’t enlightened. It’s that if you’re gonna go up man Every up is predicated by a down of equivalent magnitude Right because look if you’re if you’re gonna improve you’re gonna discover that you’re wrong about something first and then to be wrong about something means you’re going to fragment and It’s going to be painful to recognize the fact of that error to recognize the Consequences of that error across your life to have to reformulate yourself so that that error is no longer Acting out as part of your personality in your life. It’s it’s an unbelievable descent yeah, that’s another thing that that this is part of the reason why for all the respect I have for Joseph Campbell, you know Campbell says follow your bliss And that is certainly not something that young said because young said you search out what you’re most terrified of and what you’re most disgusted by and The place you least want to go where you have to bow the lowest And that’s the place where salvation might be found and that’s like and I believe that’s true and I believe it’s terrifying It’s the the pathway to redemption is through recognition of error not through bliss Right. It’s where Campbell got enamored of a kind of mindless Buddhism Yeah, the only way up is down and that’s that’s in all the spiritual teachers or go back to origin He mentioned Exodus, you know where he says that the Egyptians and the Israelites symbolized the best of us is often enslaved To the worst of us the Egyptians the slave masters represent the worst instincts in us and the most twisted and Dysfunctional aspects of us and the Israelites symbolized he felt in our creativity our intelligence our courage all these good things our friendship Yeah, but the best of us is enslaved to the worst of us and so you got to come to terms with who were the Egyptians in You and they’re making you do two things. He says they’re making you build Fortified cities for them So we take the best of ourselves to build fortifications around the worst of ourselves to protect them and they build Monuments. Hey, look at me So I mean how much of life he says is spent doing those two Dysfunctional things defending the worst of ourselves and then building monuments to the worst of ourselves What if I get free of that and get to the promised land? But I mean he’s he was the original master of all that psychodynamic reading I think of these of these texts Well, it’s also surprising that so few people know What a multiplicity of readings? Yeah Bible has actually Because we got up on this goofy fundamentalism, which is a 20th century phenomenon You know the scopes trial stuff and all that we in America, especially but in the West we got hung up on it You read Augustine who was deeply indebted to origin. You’ve got these very creative Interpretive strategies in place around Genesis, for example, it’s not literalism by any means and that’s we’re talking origin We’re talking the third century right here in a second century Augustine fourth century and these are really early figures and Thinkers right there not hung up on literalism, right? So I yes, we need to recover that I think even as Christians our own biblical interpretive tradition So what are you hoping for in the coming year for you and for what you’re doing My hoping for Yeah, what would you like to see happen as a consequence of what you’re doing? And what what do you think you are doing? I mean you’re on this public. I wouldn’t call it a crusade But you’re you’re engaging with the public, you know in this new way and it seems to be it seems to be quite successful Yeah, what do you think it is that you’re doing right? And what would you like to see happen as a consequence of that? I think what I what I’m doing right is Beginning with the Sermon of Ereby It’s the Church Fathers idea the seeds of the word the seeds of the word are everywhere or that’s the bits of the fragmented Catholicism that are found in the culture. So I tend to begin with the culture and lead from there I think that is more winsome. So I tend not to begin with a lot of preaching or you know A moralizing approach we begin with a cultural approach and I think that’s been more Appealing. I mean you’ve wanted to my ultimate goal is I want to bring people to faith in Christ in the Catholic Church I mean, that’s my ultimate goal. I’m an evangelizer, but I’m using certain methods to try to draw people to that point Realizing that there’s an awful lot of obstacles in the way, you know, I’m trying to kick open some doors I’m trying to part of it is to help people with their intellectual blocks There are so many especially younger people they’re just stuck Because certain intellectual objections have occurred to them and they’ve heard them from their university professors or whatever To clear up some of that to knock over some of those obstacles That’s part of it, but then to open up and I think that’s what you’re doing, too I mean open up the richness of this spiritual tradition because it makes people it’s not just an intellectual Feast it saves your soul, you know, that’s what I want to do I want to help people You know your fellow Canadian Charles Taylor the great Catholic philosopher Talks about the buffered self the self that’s caught in this little space and there’s no sense of a link to the transcendent That’s what I’m trying to do I’m trying to knock holes in the in the buffered self and let in some light from a higher, you know Dimension of reality so I mean ultimately is to bring people to salvation and it’s that’s what I want to do But knock some holes in the buffered self. I want to keep doing that And I said this I was in Rome in October we had this month-long Senate with the Pope on Young people and I was elected to go to that Senate and it was interesting, you know Like what’s our strategy for reaching young people? And I said I think a miracle of Providence right now is we have this massive problem of young people leaving But we have this new tool of the social media, which we didn’t have I mean heck ten years ago We couldn’t do this and now we can reach out to young people into their space Because Catholic we tend to say what programs can we develop? You know lecture series that we can develop well people aren’t coming to our institutions for all kinds of reasons But we can sort of move into their space with the social media So that’s kind of how I see what I’m up to and you know trying to do Be nice to see if something could be done with all those beautiful cathedrals Yeah, well that’s um, I wrote about them years ago I studied in Paris I studied in Paris and I used to give tours at Notre Dame and I was a doctoral student. I was a priest but a doctoral student and we were told by the tour guides now Don’t talk about religion. So we were just meant to talk about you know How tall the building was and what it was built but I used it to sermonize really to talk about the Christian faith and I’ve written a little book on the spirituality of the cathedrals, you know I’d like to I’d like to read that I mean Is there a decent bibliography in that book because I’m no in cathedral architecture No, and I am too the little I wrote this years ago. It’s a little book of kind of spiritual meditation So it wouldn’t be you know with an academic apparatus But I read a lot of those books at the time and and love the cathedrals too because they’re they’re just talk about you know Like moving into a dream space of the archetypal realities are all over the place Chart is my favorite place in the world. Maybe my favorite covered space in the world is Chart Cathedral I don’t think anything is richer. I remember spending a weekend there I went down from Paris on a Friday just got a hotel room and I stayed there till mass on Sunday And I made sure I saw everything in it. I walked all around the outside all over the inside and The my Old Testament imagination was so engaged by chart, you know, because there’s your thing about the the allegorical They read the Old Testament in constant relation to Christ, you know, it’s a fulfillment And the sculpture and God the sculpture is just incomparably beautiful and it’s execution But then the windows there are no better windows and there most of them are real medieval windows from the 13th century Nothing sings to me more just the way it’s situated the topography of it You know, you kind of come up to chart and when you go back behind it you Take the pilgrims route up to it and all of that the pilgrims journey is implicit there but the windows look like They look like diamonds on a black velvet background. They’re like jewels and it’s the it’s the shining jewels of the New Jerusalem so there’s the Antagogical sense it’s all about the journey to heaven and then the the labyrinth which unfortunately has been kind of co-opted by a new agey Spirituality but the original labyrinth that most of the ones we see today imitate is there it’s sharp Yes, I know the labyrinth is an amazing thing. It’s extraordinary I walked it and walked it several times and it’s a very powerful experience Anyway, sure has all of that in it and more, you know Yes, well, it’s such a shame that these These buildings that you know, you see what happened in Europe I don’t understand it is that Europe went through this several hundred years long period of time where beauty was worshipped in a profound way and see the manifested in the construction of these great cathedrals that took centuries to build and They were these people were Well, the brick layer wasn’t just laying bricks the brick layer was building a cathedral to God or God You know, which is how our lives should be right? Yeah, every little thing that we do should be imbued with that higher vision which is possible if you have that higher vision, you know the contribution of that Vision to Europe and to world cultures is absolutely priceless I mean people make pilgrimages from all over the world to view these insanely Beautiful and complex buildings and they were driven by a spirit that was well hopefully unconquerable but certainly of sufficient potency even in a fundamentally atheistic age to pull people in for reasons they don’t even understand just the sheer awe at What at the daring of the architects and it talked about a door or window? Transcendent and that’s the way of punching through the buffered self those cathedrals and don’t get me started on church architecture the last You know like 40 50 years when we largely adopted a kind of brutalist modernism within Catholicism built What vaults are called the great barns, you know These spaces and we wonder you know Well, then why are the young people leaving in droves when the church building itself didn’t sing to them in any way? Which they used to do even though we like imitation Gothic buildings from the from the 1930s But man a young Catholic coming of Asia that time was Surrounded by the imagery of the faith and the whole narrative of salvation and I was just an orbit Incarnation of the stone, you know talked about part of the Goal of salvation Let’s say to bring everything together to have everything come together in a kind of integrity and And right with a kind of integrity and any union and of course music Portrays that better than anything else as far as I’m concerned in those cathedrals were symphonies in stone Absolutely, then they they they portrayed architecturally exactly what music attempts to portray Orally and And and and it works I mean It works. Oh gosh. Yeah, and they’re comparable has no belief right, absolutely and you know, it’s a big of a cliche to say it but the Summa of Aquinas and the and the Divine Comedy of Dante are like that they have that same kind of quality of of integration and like the whole of life being on display and that’s part of what fell apart, you know that we that we we needed the Critique of enlightenment for sure. I mean I get it we needed that in a lot of different ways But sadly often that critique got overstated and we baby bathwater phenomenon and a lot of the the Integrity was compromised How do you keep the critique without throwing out the substance? You know, it’s been one of the struggles And much of the of the theology of the last couple hundred years has been so conditioned by the enlightenment criticism I mean I get it and take it in for sure But don’t so condition your theology by that critique that you lose all this stuff that we’re talking about now That has the soul transforming power. Well, that’s it You know, it seems to me that it’s and then this is so necessary is that it’s there’s something What’s required is a re-emphasis on the potential nobility of the human being and and the moral Responsibility to make that nobility of reality You don’t even talk about words like that like I use the word nobility in my Lectures and it’s such an archaic word. It’s like we should have noble goal It’s like who what child is told that now? Yeah, no We’re built for nobility Well, I mean you’re a psychotherapist obviously It seems to me that we’re so concerned about people’s feelings and that the feelings getting hurt or getting repressed or something That we’re afraid if we use that language of a noble Aspiration or come on you can do better. Okay, you’ve got a serious problem that it’ll awaken such negative feelings leading eventually to you know Self-mutilation or suicide at the limit that we’re so afraid of that that we’re we’re reluctant to use the language of nobility Yes, well we’re we’re afraid of hurting people’s feeling and feelings in the present and willing to absolutely Sacrifice their well-being in the future and that’s the sign of a very immature and unwise culture because The reverse should be the case. Yeah, you know, it’s like look you said already There’s no up without down. Yeah, and that initial conversation When you lay things bare and you put everything out on the table and you discuss what the problems are and Maybe the potential solutions now, that’s a rough conversation Yeah, you know, it’s it’s almost more than people can bear but if it’s a discussion of reality Well, they’re already bearing it and at least yeah placing it on the table indicates that Well that there’s someone who’s willing to listen and that it isn’t so terrible that yeah like Voldemort It can’t be named right now. That’s been exactly my argument I alluded to it earlier that when you say oh we got too much for people to take see But life is gonna force it so on them life will force them into this and then there won’t be any Wisdom or guide to help them with it So if we say look, I’m so concerned about sparing people’s feelings heck life doesn’t care about your feelings your own features I care about your feelings He was very very and I think this is a psychotherapeutic truism is that if you’re going to confront a monster and you most certainly are Yeah, then you do it at a time and place of your choosing Yeah Because otherwise it waits until you’re at your weakest and most vulnerable and then it attacks and so there is no Monster free pathway for no, that’s right to prepare As a knight of Christ, let’s say so that when it comes you’re there or in fact confronting it at its weakest point or you cower and you wait and it devours you and those are your options and we don’t have the Wisdom of the kind of pessimism that enables us to view life that way we think well if we’re careful and we’re quiet Well, the monster will avoid this completely and everyone knows that’s a lie. Yeah. Oh gosh Yeah, do you find this because sometimes when I use this language people say well, yeah, that’s great for the young men But the young ladies don’t respond to it But years ago my niece who’s now she’s what almost 30 I guess when she was about 17 They took her on one of these these nature things You know where they took the kids out into the woods and they had to hike and they had to build their own Campfire and then they had to afford streams and they had you know, it’s one of these really demanding things where they were up against nature And up against life man. Did she come back? Utterly transformed as a human being in a way that religion had never done She was Catholic all her life gone to mass her uncle’s a bishop There’s nothing in in the in our faith that changed her the way that experience clearly changed her Conversation to be had with young women Asked me a question on my Q&A this month. She said that her friends are really down on her because she claims to not be a feminist but even more importantly because she wants to have children and they’re telling her that only an evil and cruel person would bring a child into the world is Terrible and and worse to do the damage to the planet that that child will Do and the people are very serious about this and they’re very hard on young women and like I always think of the paeda you know because I kind of think of it as the as the Christian equivalent of the crucifix, you know, you have Mary there with her broken son in her arms and I think that What the great adventure for women at least in part? This is the maternal adventure is to bring a child into the world knowing full well that the consequences the consequence is a Crucifixion like brokenness yeah, and that it’s still a mark of faith in the possibilities of being to participate in that and Not to hide from it and to say well despite everything I’m going to act out my faith in life and in and in the possibilities of being and I’m going to bring someone into the World who will be a net force for good rather than evil and that’s my moral obligation and I think to present that to young women as a major part of the adventure of their life, which is the truth is something that’s Attractive to far more of them than would be likely to admit it in today’s Time and age. Yeah, I’m glad to use the word faith there because just a couple days ago We had the feast of st. Joseph, you know and Joseph in the New Testament is like Abraham in the Old Testament He’s the paradigmatic person of faith, right? So I was talking to a group of high school kids and I said, okay Listen to me everybody. I know you’re gonna hear this from your professors in college and you probably hear it already that faith means you know being Uncritical and you accept any old nonsense on the basis of no evidence that it’s superstition and Look, we’re against that I speak now as a Catholic faith and reason We don’t want anything sub rational anything that it’s a lie and and you know it that’s irresponsible And it’s stupid and you know, it’s irresponsible to accept it. So that’s not faith, you know But I said what close what you just said faith in the Bible is this willingness to risk Under the providence of God some great adventure. Yeah Here’s Joseph, you know Yeah, no, I think that’s that’s it. And that’s what faith means in the Bible doesn’t mean Oh, I’m an idiot and just tell me any old nonsense and I’ll believe it means no it means that adventure, right? That’s the other thing is that one of the things I really learned from reading the Abrahamic stories is that the fundamental call is To is it called to adventure? Yeah, he’s or the happiness and and even the adventure the part of the relationship with God That’s part of that adventure is wrestling with God Yeah, yeah real itself means is that it’s another aspect of that strange element of belief is like what does it mean to believe? Well, it means to adopt this moral burden, but it also means to wrestle with God right and not to not to blindly accept Preposterous blandishments that knowing with any sense would ever swallow Right, but I think we’ve been again pretty bad at Propagating that if the new atheists have got an awful lot of traction with that idea that religious people are just sort of naive and superstitious And uncritical then we haven’t explained very well what we mean by faith We haven’t explained the element of it that’s associated with courage no, right and but then under the guidance of a spiritual Master that will help you through that and push you toward the edge and help you navigate those waters And that’s Dante got that all of our great spiritual teachers have it but we’ve not been good at that in my judgment, you know Well, maybe we’ll learn before it’s too late I guess I should probably stop we’ve gone Gosh, we have gone a long time It was really a pleasure talking with you. Yeah, I loved it Jordan. Thank you very much. I just delighted I’d like to have another conversation a darker one. I would say I’ve been reading a book Have you read in the closet of the Vatican? Okay, I did. Yeah, I did read it’s a bad book But I mean, well, let’s talk about it I’d be happy to I would like to have a conversation about when I’m more prepared for it because I sure I am prepared for it Yet I did read it because I figured everybody would be talking about it and it’s it’s a bad book in many ways Meaning I think it’s poorly researched and all that but sure let’s talk about it. All right. All right Well, let’s call it a date. All right. All right. Great. Thank you for having me on well, thank you for coming on and and We’ll get this up and out as soon as possible both in YouTube and and audio form and nice and I guess we’ll see what the consequences Are we’ll see you do find out on YouTube pretty quickly you do more power to you as far as I’m concerned and and and Thank you very much for spending the time speaking with me today. Yeah, God bless you. Thanks Bye. Bye. Okay